The Red Liquid
For the record, Sage Seer had always jumped head-first into things like this. To the average observer, she might seem generally frightened and overly cautious, but she was, to the initiated, quite impulsive when it counted. She had stared for a moment, the Red Liquid reflecting the blacklight into her green eyes, and then swallowed it whole.
You might have tried the Red Liquid before, in which case I don't have to tell you that the taste is a real kick in the teeth. It tastes so bad that it crosses a synesthetic threshold into pain. It tastes so bad that you swear it has not just an aftertaste, but a beforetaste. And it is not an acquired taste, but a disacquired taste. That is to say, the more times you have it, the worse it gets.
Being her first time with the Red Liquid, she gagged slightly, caught herself, and then gagged harder. Just when she thought she was done, her friend Theodicy Graft reached out a hand holding a small trash can, and Sage blew a fire hose of chunks into it (the trash can, not the hand).
At this point, if you've had Red Liquid, you also know what happens: the riiiiiiiiiising feeling, like going up on a roller coaster; the spots in your eyes that aren't spots but a rapidly shifting, ever convoluting, marbleized harlequin pattern; the way things warp and bend out of your way until you are elsewhere, elsewhen, etc. All this more or less occurred.
The Hauntologic Hallway
The elsewhere-and-when that Sage found herself in was a grand hallway stretching as far in either direction as her eyes could see. You may know this as the place Red Liquid fans on the indranet call "The Hauntologic Hallway." Sage had read about this too. Fascinated, she took it all in, a hallway of endless arches, more hallways branching off at odd angles. Doors showed up in the strangest places here. You might find one on the ceiling and another at a downward slant at the end of an upward-slanting hallway. She knew that the thing to do your first time was to just pick a door and go through. Opinions differed on whether there was a rhyme or reason to how one picked their path. She decided that since she couldn't remember any of the complicated rituals that the more particular users laid out, she would do what the most adventurous users suggested. She closed her eyes, spun around several times, and dove in a direction.
It was quite a bit longer before she touched ground than she expected. Truth be told she thought she had jumped into a bottomless pit. People talked about how the Outer Maw lurked in strange corners of the hallway and swallowed up unsuspecting victims. The claim, considered outlandish by many and gospel by others, was that some people took the Red Liquid one day, accidentally encountered the Outer Maw, and were swallowed up forever. The stories ranged from believable-ish to absolutely absurd. You have probably seen one or two of the stories even if you aren't an aficianado. Sometimes the point of the stories is to play up the cool factor, the thrill seeker's dangerplex that is the Red Liquid. Other times the person posting the story is trying to scare people off of the stuff. They're both propagandists, after all, both expressing a normative preference. They are fabulists (fabalists) even if they aren't fabulists (fibulists). They want you to join their side, be pro or anti. A bunch of moralists if you ask me... don't you hate when stories have morals?
But let's not get side-tracked. It turns out Sage had not fallen into the Outer Maw and had her mind swallowed up, being rendered a drooling mass in "the Real World" like the stories talked about. What she had fallen into was a branching hallway so steep that it might as well have been a hall-shaped-hole. She had landed with a painful thud on a shining golden door. The goldness of the door was, in fact, the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes. She adjusted the crumpled heap of her body into a less pretzeled position and sat up on the golden door. Wait, the golden door? The Golden Door? At the end of the Pitch-Black Hallway? She looked around. Yes, this hallway was definitely of the pitch-black variety and this door was of a brilliant luminescent gold. She had landed, painfully, on the great dream of so many Cartographers of the Hauntologic Hallway. The Golden Door led somewhere very special. She pushed her back against the pitch-black wall and put her feet against the other so she could shimmy up just enough to be off the Golden Door but still be able to reach it. She opened the door and dropped through.
The Television Spoke to Her
Sage fell through magenta, hot pink, lavender, and purple glowing clouds in the mint-colored sky. She wondered if the incredible distance she was falling was going to kill her. Ultimately, she had time to decide that she wasn't even sure if the places the Red Liquid took you were real places you went. A lot of people said it was just your average hallucination, if a rather vivid one. She had to admit that the pain of falling on the Golden Door had been pretty real. Then again the distance she had fallen down the Pitch-Black Hallway, she figured, would have been enough to kill her in the Real World. So yes, she was cautiously optimistic that the ground she saw quickly approaching even though it still seemed so far away, would not make mashed potatoes of her.
The clouds around her began to rain. The raindrops were tiny blue flames slicing the air. This is not a metaphor. That is literally what the raindrops were. She heard thunder that sounded even more than usually like the roar of a giant creature. She was getting close to the ground and she saw the place she was to end up: The High Court of Thelemuria.
It was a place shrouded in mystery amongst Cartographers of the Hauntologic Hallway. It was known that The High Court existed. It was known that this place was the Regency of a being known as the Jackal of H(e)arts. But those few who claimed to have been there were rather tight-lipped about it. People who had met the Jackal of H(e)arts talked mysteriously about It. Sage knew that they always spoke of "It" with that pronoun and that they always capitalized the "I." They would not describe what It looked like other than to say it was "beautiful" and "royal looking." And they all said, "if you ever see it, you will know why we call it the Jackal of H(e)arts." They spoke of It with reverence and, Sage thought, not a little fear. She recalled the admonition from that old religious text from before the Grey War that said to "fear Gaud." She had read something about what that meant and she figured this was the way those who had met It spoke of the Jackal. They seemed almost a cult within the Cartographer community. They sometimes called themselves the Knights of the Jackal, and in the more grounded corners of the Cartographer community, they were often referred to, sometimes with ribbing affection and sometimes with snide derision, as Jackal-Offs.
This whole time Sage had been thinking about all this and suddenly she realized that she was not falling anymore. She was standing atop what the Knights called the Terracotta Castle. She saw the minarets towering above her and wondered when she had touched down. She knew where she had ended up precisely because it was the home of The High Court of Thelemuria and also because "Terracotta Castle" was a pretty accurate description. "Ginormous" would also have been a good description. The flat roof she stood upon now stretched for what looked like miles in every direction, and the many, many minarets she saw all around seemed to stretch up for miles themselves. On top of that, she could tell from the view that she was actually still quite high up.
As she wondered what to do now, in the distance she saw rolling toward her what looked like an ancient tube television. When it go close enough she realized that her initial perception seemed... correct? On the screen was an olive green background and three green-white lines, two shorter left and right ones for eyes above longer centered one for a mouth. The television spoke to her, introducing itself as Cathode Ray, attendant of the High Court of Thelemuria. As he spoke in his buzzing, static-tinged voice, the larger line that formed his mouth made little waveforms. He had two simple mechanical arms, each ending in a prong-like hand shaped like a tuning fork. He held one out to her and said, mouth representation waveforming, "If you will come with me, madam. You are expected." Sage took Ray's hand and they teleported in a burst of television static. She found herself...
In the High Court of Thelemuria, Regency of the Jackal of H(e)arts
"Welcome," said a voice that made the inside of Sage's skull tingle, that vibrated her bones and prickled on her skin.
Ray's staticky voice spoke up: "May I present Sage Seer of Helvetica Province, first time partaker of the Gaudsblood, daughter of Dr. and Mr. Seer, aspiring musician, longtime reader of the Cartographer's Forum."
"I know who she is Ray," the voice excited Sage's electrons, "honestly, always so formal. You'd think I was a higher being," the voice actually winked.
"But... You are, sire," Ray buzzed and the voice replied in a groan that split comprehension.
"I swear he has a sense of humor," the voice shook Sage's being. She realized she had been closing her eyes since she arrived in the High Court, part instinctively avoiding looking upon something she couldn't unsee and partially because the voice she was hearing made her wince. It wasn't all bad really. It was simply intense... an intense pleasure and pain with every sound, resonant in the secret places in her soul and terror-inducing to those secrets.
"Open your eyes," the voice commanded and Sage opened her eyes without hesitation, even though she wanted to hesitate.
Before her she saw the thing they called the Jackal of H(e)arts. Atop an enormous twisted throne of bone, ivory, rebar, and gold, coiled what looked like a giant millipede out of which bloomed and million petaled flower. From the flower sprung a thousand tentacles, half of which ended in eyes, half of which ended in black insectoid pincers, and from the center of the flower stood an enormous human-like spine from which sprung a giant backward rib cage. The inside of the rib cage was filled with a beating, bleeding, flaming heart criss-crossed with black iron chains. On top of the rib cage stood the head of a jackal with ever-branching antlers the end of which could not be seen.
All of Its eyes looked at Sage, and she smoldered like a snuffed star.
She was still smoldering as she sat there again in the red swivel chair in Theodicy's room, bits of vomit at the corners of her mouth.