“Are you sure you want to do this?” Anna asked.

Ulric nodded uncertainly, pushing his glasses back up the bridge of his nose.

“That thing has been there for over a year,” she pointed out. “Why go now?”

“I need to see it,” he answered . “I need to understand it.”

Brushing loose tresses of long blond hair back off her face she frowned: “The King has had dozens of his wisest philosophers studying it for an entire year. What can you hope to do?”

Ulric seemed to be considering how to respond and stalled a moment by busying himself with the packing of his belongings.

“The King’s philosophers are a bit, um, narrow in their examinations,” he said, his voice stuttering a little. “You have read their books. Everything they write and do is wrought with assumptions that they do not even bother checking. To them the world is nothing but the work of angels and demons. They will examine this thing – this Obelisk – with blinders over their eyes.”

“First of all,” Anna told him, “you’d best not let a philosopher hear you talk like that.”

“Oh, indeed not.”

“Secondly,” she added. “You think that you can do better than they?”

“Certainly,” Ulric said in a moment of confidence which quickly faded. “Well, maybe, at least. We’ll see.”

Anna sighed, shaking her head.

“Let me get my things.”

“You’re coming?”

“Yes, yes. I’m coming.”

“Good. I’d hoped so. It’s rather easier with you along.”

“You mean you’d forget something important without me,” she said. “Like food. Or clothing.”

Ulric smiled and scratched his head as he looked aside.

“Yes. Something like that.”

xxxxx

While Ulric could forget personal details like food and clothing as if they were dust off the side of his pants, Anna had to admit that he handled larger matters quite well. By the time he’d started packing and mentioned his journey to her, he had already secured a Writ from the King to travel to and investigate the Obelisk.

Without a Writ, they would have been stopped miles away from the thing. With the Writ, they traveled with a caravan in a horse drawn carriage.

That caravan had stopped for the night at a mountain pass. There was a small inn there, perfectly situated to look down upon the valley. The inn was under the maintenance of a pensioned veteran who kept the place for the pleasure of the King’s approved travellers.

It was nothing fancy. It was, in fact, in a state of disrepair. The small tower that should have allowed the innkeeper to watch over the road in both directions was a mess of shattered wooden beams at its top.

The innkeeper was, regardless, well prepared. Seeing the sigils attached to Ulric’s Writ, and knowing him to be the King’s librarian by his clothing, he showed Ulric to the largest of the rooms. Anna, as his companion and clearly unmarried, was offered the second finest room.

“I’ll be happy to share a room with my librarian,” she had told the man with a smile. “Less trouble for you I imagine.”

If any of the other travelers noticed that there were none of the usual decorations of marriage, they didn’t feel it pertinent to point out. Anna’s kindness meant, among other things, that every one of them would have at least a bed to him or herself and no one would be sleeping in a cot in the common room where they ate.

Ulric now sat in a very fine bed in that very large room, reading by candlelight.

“Do you really have to read your books now?” she asked as she unlaced the waist level ties on her dress.

He looked up as she breathed a sigh of relief.

“I’m looking for some indication of previous visits of this Obelisk,” he told her. “There are various vague references to such things.”

“And you couldn’t read about this before?”

“I have spent the last year trying to find every historical record I can about this area,” he said. “I’ve brought the best with me, but it’s very slow.”

“Slow?” she asked, wiggling out of her dress and laying it aside. “You taught me how to read. How can you be slow?”

“These are very old books,” he explained. “Language changes. Even the way letters are written changes. The people who wrote this book -“, he wrinkled his nose, “- had the most deplorable grammar.”

She climbed up onto the bed, still wearing the off white shift that covered her from chest to knee, and took the book from his hands.

“Let’s put the book down for now.”

Ulric saw the look in her eyes.

“Now?” he asked. “I have much to -”

“Now,” she insisted. “Once we’re at whatever little enclave the philosophers have set up, we’ll have the worst time being together.”

“Prudes,” Ulric remarked absently.

“Yes, prudes.”

She pulled her shift over her head, stilling all thoughts in Ulric’s head. No matter how many times he’d seen her do that, it always took his breath away. Such a gentle body with such fair skin. The flickering candle flames did wonderful things with the waves of shining yellow hair that spilled off her head and the patch of hair between her legs.

Closing her eyes, she put her hands on the headboard against which he rested, placing her chest near his mouth.

Ulric had yet to figure out why Anna stayed with him. He was certain he was a boring person. Such a quality had been mentioned to him by a great number of people. And Anna was certainly both beautiful and intelligent, which ought to have given her any number of choices – men with far greater means than a King’s Librarian.

Whenever he asked, all she said was that he had taught her how to read, which seemed ridiculous to him. If she was able to learn to read, why not teach her? Why such action should be remarkable, he had no idea.

Nevertheless, he had taught her to read, and she had spent hours every day in the library pouring over any book she wished, occasionally asking him some question about this ancient word or that obsolete turn of speech. And somehow that led to this, a woman gently teasing his lips with first one, then the other of her tiny, pink nipples.

Ulric wasn’t a particularly religious man. He supposed that there was probably some kind of thing that had made the world, but he doubted very much that such a being would have anything to do with the arcane rituals of the prudish philosophers who frequently tried to interfere in the affairs of the King’s Library.

Anna, on the other hand, made him quite certain that some kind of deity existed and – furthermore – that he, Ulric, had done something wonderful for that deity. How else to explain the great deal of pleasure she gave him? It wasn’t anything he could remember doing.

“How is my librarian today?” she asked as she pulled her breast away from his lips.

“Quite well,” he replied with a breath.

She pushed aside the material of his night robe and murmured approvingly of the erection that sprouted toward her.

“And ready,” she remarked.

“For you?” he said. “Always.”

She moved her hips to rub against the head of his erection, greasing the tip with the fluids that leaked from between her lips.

“How long will we be with those philosophers?”

“I can’t be sure,” he said. “Though I think the object will be gone before winter.”

She pouted.

“Winter? Last chance for a while, then?”

She closed her eyes and Ulric smiled. Anna always closed her eyes at the moment of penetration. He loved to watch the desperate look on her face when they first started to make love.

He felt her pushing down, felt the head of his erection ploughing past her warm, wet folds of skin. Down and down she went until she enveloped him completely.

“I’m going to miss this.”

“Me, too,” he said, blinking his eyes as the candles in the room flickered.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Candles,” he muttered with a shake of his head.

She craned her head to look at the dresser behind her.

“There’s no draft,” she noted.

“No matter,” he shrugged.

Candles weren’t really important. Love making didn’t really need light once two bodies had found each other.

Anna began rotating her hips, shifting him around, prodding at her insides.

“Oh, that’s nice,” she said.

The candles flickered again and Anna stopped.

“I saw that,” she told him.

“Me, too.”

She shook her head and went back to her gyrations, speeding up.

“Feels so good,” she murmured. “I’m going to miss this.”

Ulric tensed his stomach, holding back his orgasm as best he could.

“Don’t come,” she warned through gritted teeth. “Bad timing.”

‘Bad timing’ was the phrase she used to mean she was fertile. She’d started fascinating herself with biology textbooks from her first tentative steps into literacy. One of the first books she’d read taught her rather thoroughly about female anatomy and how, as the scholars had written, “to get a woman pregnant”. Anna had reasoned that, if one wanted to avoid getting pregnant, one should do the opposite.

It was all about timing, she would tell him.

“I know,” he grunted back, holding his breath.

If there was a draft coming through the room, neither of them could feel it. And yet as Anna approached orgasm, the light flickered madly, sometimes leaving them in complete darkness. It was as if a gale force wind was blowing through.

Anna twisted her hips, bending Ulric inside her almost to the point of pain, and a muffled cry issued from her lips.

She held that pose, her body frozen right up to the muscles of her face, for several seconds before her features softened.

“Oh, dear librarian,” she sighed appreciatively, “you held on.”

“You came quickly,” he panted back to her.

She nodded and gently lifted her body away from him, unsheathing his manhood.

“That was unusual,” she agreed. “Must have been the bumpy ride.”

Turning her body, she lay on her side across his lap and took his erection in hand.

“By the time we go back home,” she promised, “you’ll be able to come inside me again. Until then -”

Her tongue met the tip of his erection, dancing along the underside. There had been books on this as well, if one knew where to look. Some of them had illustrations. None of them met with the approval of the philosophers.

“Oh, you’re quick, too!” she exclaimed.

“Yes.”

The candles were flickering again. Ulric took a moment to glance up at the dresser. Anna had been blocking his view, but now that she had lain down he could see them clearly.

Darkness.

Then light again.

The candles hadn’t moved. Their flames were perfectly steady. Yet one moment the room was lit and next it was in complete darkness.

Ulric could pay it no more attention. Whether it was the bumpy ride or some particular technique that Anna was using, he was feeling as quick as she had been.

Semen spat out onto her sweet, pouting lips as she stroked at his pulsing member. She turned it against her neck.

“Because I never want any jewelry from you,” she would tell him, on some occasions. “Give me these pearls about my neck.”

A torrent of white fluid slid easily from the tip of his manhood, leaving streak after streak across her neck.

Ulric was barely able to remain conscious through to the end of his orgasm. He fell into a deep, uneasy sleep.

xxxxx

There were nightmares that night. That wasn’t terribly new.

Nightmares had been happening lately. He was glad that Anna would be there when he woke up.

He was trapped in a dark, cold prison cell. There was a horrifying screech, the grating sound of metal scraping endlessly against metal, that permeated the entire length of the dream.

Trapped.

Crying for help.

Cold.

Alone.

Hurt.

As bad as the nightmare was, he could never wake from it. Even knowing that it wasn’t real, he could only wait until it ended and hope it didn’t happen more than once per night.

The nightmares were getting worse.

xxxxx

When he woke, it wasn’t even sunrise.

Anna was still lying in his lap with her shift in a bunch about her neck. She had probably been wiping herself clean with it when she’d fallen asleep. That she was cold he could tell from the sharp projection of her nipples, faintly seen in the pale moonlight. He pulled the heaviest blanket over her naked body, causing her to stir a bit but not waken.

Then he fell asleep once more.

There were no more nightmares.

xxxxx

“Sorry we have to eat so crowded,” the innkeeper remarked in the morning. “Ain’ the same with the leaks coming through from the tower.”

Half of the common room was blocked off, water still dripping down from a rainstorm two nights before.

“Is it likely to get fixed soon?” Ulric asked.

“Been that way for over a year,” the innkeeper said while his wife doled out breakfast. “I was hopin’ the King’s carpenters might get out here, but now they’re all busy with that infernal thing down in the valley.”

“Doesn’t matter,” his wife admonished him. “We can still get you all well fed and on your way. And don’t be calling that thing ‘infernal’. Even the philosophers haven’t made up their mind on that yet.”

“I know demon-kind when I see it, woman,” he lectured his wife.

His wife harrumphed and turned on her heel towards the kitchen.

The innkeeper frowned at her back.

“Isn’t right, y’see?” he told his guests. “Having the King’s guests at the inn when it’s in a state like this. Not proper.”

“What happened to the tower?” Ulric asked, trying to be polite.

“’bout a year and a half ago,” the innkeeper said. “Big storm came through and lightning hit us. Burned the wood off the tower before we even knew what was happening.”

A portly man spoke up at this.

“No one’s been by to fix it?” he asked. “There are plenty of us who could, no?”

“Not since that thing showed up,” the innkeeper said, avoiding his preferred adjective with a deferential look towards the kitchen. “Came a few weeks after the storm and every engineer and carpenter come through here since is requisitioned to work for His Wisdom.”

Ulric frowned.

“And His Wisdom hasn’t seen fit to send anyone your way?”

“No, sir.”

“I shall speak to him and see if I can get you any help.”

“I’d appreciate that greatly, sir.”

xxxxx

It was a faster ride down into the valley. The horses, though tired from their march up to the peak of the pass, made much better time going downhill.

By evening, they came around a curve in the road. From the windows on the side of the carriage, the passengers could see soldiers in the peaked hats and dark red jackets of the King’s livery, all standing at attention. A guard captain, distinguishable from the others by the feather in his hat, came forward and waved them to a halt.

Around the front of the carriage and out of view of the windows, they heard him speak to the driver.

“Your Writ, sir.”

“All in order, captain,” the driver replied. There was a rustling of paper.

“Aye,” the captain confirmed.

The captain came back around the side of the carriage and popped open the small door. His eyes scanned the passengers and paused at Anna.

“Sorry, ma’am”, he said with pursed lips. “No women past the guard post.”

Anna was taken aback for a moment, but shortly began to rear up indignantly.

“Pardon me, captain?” Ulric asked, trying to keep his voice steady as he put a gentle hand on Anna’s forearm.

“Orders of His Wisdom, sir,” he replied with a wince. “Begging your pardon, sir.”

Ulric unfolded his personal Writ from the inside pocket of his jacket.

“This is from the King’s hand,” he told the captain. “It gives me permission to bring a companion of my choosing.”

Anna tilted her head at Ulric. She’d known he had a Writ but it had never occurred to her to ask to see it. Had he intended to have her company all along?

“Aye, it does,” the captain said, angling his head thoughtfully and scratching his head under the side of his hat. “Can’t say as I know what to do, sir.”

It was the chubby carpenter’s chance to jump in.

“The King against a philosopher – even a great philosopher?” he wondered aloud.

“Aye, sir, seems easy enough, doesn’t it?” the captain replied. “But His Wisdom seemed to think it was a matter of safety. Evil spirits and such, y’see. Not safe for folk so fair as your, um, companion, sir. Ejected the women out of the site just a few weeks back.”

Ulric and Anna exchanged looks. His said, “See? They do need me.” Hers said, “Yes, they do.”

“What if you let me take it up with His Wisdom?” Ulric suggested. “I’ll tell him that you made every attempt to stop me, but I insisted.”

“Supposing that’s the best, sir,” the captain nodded gratefully and handed back Ulric’s Writ. “Safe journey, sirs, madam.”

xxxxx

“It must be ten meters high,” Ulric remarked.

“It is twelve meters, forty-five centimeters high, near as the King’s Engineers can tell,” the philosopher remarked coldly. “But it – er – hovers sixty centimeters above the ground.”

“Yes, yes it does.”

Ulric got down on his hands and knees. The bottom of this rough, charcoal colored thing they were calling the Obelisk tapered down to a generally circular cross section about half a meter in diameter at its lowest point. And, indeed, it hovered just off the ground. The bottom face, smoother than the rest, was a perfect black, as a man could never see in real life.

Even if I closed my eyes, Ulric thought, and buried my head in dirt, I will still see a hint of color on the inside of my eyelids. Nothing could ever be as black as this.

The philosopher stood with a sardonic eyebrow raised. Such a man as him, in his fine, ankle length robes, would never be caught kneeling in the dirt.

“The question is,” the philosopher asked, “what is the King’s Librarian doing here?”

Ulric twitched.

“I’d heard that nothing so far has been learned from the Obelisk,” Ulric remarked. “So I came to see what knowledge I could apply.”

The philosopher took a breath and rose up to his full height.

“Much has been learned,” he said defiantly. “It is 12 meters, 45 centimeters tall. It hovers 60 centimeters above the ground. It widens out in it’s middle to approximately three meters in size and tapers back down to a point at its top. Except for the bottom-most part of it, every part we have touched is rough to the point that it could tear skin.”

“Yes, yes,” Ulric said, not even looking at the philosopher. “But how does it hover?”

He waved his hand in the space underneath the Obelisk.

Anna gave a start.

“Don’t be doing that,” she warned. “You’re likely to knock the thing over.”

“It’s been here over a year,” Ulric reminded her.

The philosopher merely pursed his lips. The leader of the Order of philosophers, His Wisdom Reginald, had not deigned to speak with Ulric. Apparently, the advent of Ulric’s defying of his ban on feminine presences was something of a problem. Such had been made clear.

“What have you attempted?” Ulric asked.

“Attempted?”

“Water, fire, dust, cutting tools. That sort of thing.”

The philosopher was aghast.

“We have attempted no such thing,” he replied, raising his voice. “This may be a holy relic sent down from the heavens. You would defile it in such a manner?”

Ulric hummed noncommittally and the philosopher turned away in a huff.

“I don’t think he’s happy with you,” Anna said.

“He wasn’t going to be anyway,” Ulric replied, frowning as he touched the underside of the Obelisk. “As long as I have my Writ, we’re safe.”

“As you long as you don’t poke that thing and make it fall on your head.”

“Safe from the philosophers, I meant.”

He glanced over his shoulder at the departing minion.

“Imagine,” he said. “They’ve been here an entire year and done nothing.”

“They pray quite a bit.”

Indeed, at a distance that Ulric would bet was at least thirteen meters, there was a circular fence around the Obelisk. Outside of that were numerous prayer stands – places where philosophers could prostrate themselves and read their incantations.

“As I said,” Ulric repeated with a disapproving frown at those kneeling in the distance. “Nothing.”

Anna relaxed a little when Ulric started to step slowly away from the Obelisk and surveyed it thoughtfully.

“They should have talked to masons,” Ulric said.

“The masons?”

Ulric nodded.

“Very obvious, then.”

“What’s very obvious?” she asked. “Putting aside the fact that a philosopher is even less likely to ask the advice of a mason than a librarian.”

Ulric scratched his head and looked around. It was rare to Ulric to take any care about his surroundings, but he gave a wary look to the philosophers at their prayers.

He opened his mouth to speak, but one of them approached, announcing that the evening meal would be served shortly.

“Later,” Ulric mouthed to Anna, and took her hand as they went off to dinner.

xxxxx

It was a minor inconvenience for the philosophers to allow two more people to dine around the table that the King’s cooks and the King’s servants had set for them. Ulric had a letter from the King anyway, if they really wanted to fight about it. As there was no need to fight, they sat with a handful of philosophers at a rather simple outdoor table and dined upon exquisitely spiced chicken and rice with seasonal vegetables that had been brought in from who knew where. The pens for the live chickens they could see – there was a booming business for lumberjacks and carpenters in addition to cooks – but the vegetables must have been carried in from elsewhere.

“Have you done any searching in the area around here?” Ulric asked, waving to the distant forests?

The philosophers glanced at each other before looking to their leader. His Wisdom Reginald stroked his long, iron grey beard in an irritatingly pompous fashion.

“Not particularly,” he said, adjusting the collar of his indigo cloak. “The object is here, after all.”

“But the lumberjacks,” Ulric said. “They must go out to the forest?”

“Indeed.”

“And they have seen nothing odd?”

“Nothing they have mentioned to us,” he replied. “Should they have?”

Ulric shrugged.

“I wondered if the object might have some effects on things nearby.”

“We have seen no sign of such things,” Reginald answered. “Good or evil.”

Ulric nodded and returned to his food. It was going to be a very awkward, quiet dinner.

“One wonders if you are aware of the dangers to your young lady friend,” Reginald remarked after a bit of silence.

“Dangerous to me, Your Wisdom?” she asked. “But not you?”

“Such frail flesh,” the leader of philosophers said, ignoring her comment and speaking only to Ulric. “Without the strength to resist the temptations.”

“What – what do you mean?” Ulric stammered.

“Things in the night,” Reginald said. “Demons, perhaps, invading their dreams. It’s why I sent the women away. Too frail. Much too frail.”

“Dreams?” Ulric gave a start. “They were having dreams?”

Reginald stroked his beard again, happy to lord this information over Ulric.

“Yes, most terrible,” Reginald said, eyeing Anna. “Screaming in the night. Unable to waken. Most terrible. Most terrible.”

Anna gulped.

xxxxx

“Are they serious?” Anna asked after dinner.

“Philosophers, my dearest,” he replied regretfully. “My Writ only goes so far. They can still throw us out of the camp for violating their rules. You knew this last night, did you not?”

Anna pursed her lips.

“I suppose I did,” she surrendered.

The philosophers’ disapproval of premarital companionship was so well known that Ulric and Anna had brought two tents with them in full expectation that they would be separated. Anna’s tent, the philosophers had since decided, would be pitched at the farthest end of the encampment – and this only after she had refused the offer of living under the roof of the house constructed for His Wisdom.

“It would be a nicer bed than a camp roll,” Ulric had pointed out.

“Not from his hand,” she’d said.

Dinner had been enough to set her against them. She was determined that she would survive whatever night terrors had sent the other women away.

The rules of civilized society would be enforced as long as the philosophers were in charge. The punctuation of their authority was one of their number standing a polite distance away, well within earshot, waiting to escort Anna to her tent.

xxxxx

It was the middle of the night when he was woken by a familiar body slipping alongside him.

“Is this wise?” he asked groggily.

Shivering, she curled up next to him.

“Tell me what you know,” she demanded in a whisper.

“What?”

“What could you possibly know that a mason would know?” she asked.

“Oh,” he yawned. “That.”

“That what?”

“Well,” Ulric said. “That it’s broken.”

“Broken?”

Ulric squinted at her and bobbed his head bob side to side.

“That’s the thing about being a librarian,” he explained. “You know a lot about language and a little bit about everything else.”

“And you know about masonry?”

Ulric nodded again.

“Enough to see that the bottom tip of the Obelisk has been broken off. I mean, look -”

He sat up and began drawing on the dirt floor with his finger.

“Here’s the top of obelisk.” He poked a hole in the dirt.

“Here are the sides.” He drew two lines that went downward from the tip, spreading out from each other and curving back together.

“And this is the spot where it stops.”

He drew another line horizontally, stopping the paths of the other two lines before they met at a second point.

“But these two sides should meet at another point, right at the ground.”

Anna raised her eyebrows.

“Right at the ground?” she asked.

“Well, look at it,” he said, pointing out the gap in his tent’s entrance at the actual Obelisk behind her.

She turned and parted the flaps of the tent just wide enough to look. From this distance, in the moonlight, it did look as if the thing were meant to taper to a point at the bottom.

“Okay, you’re right,” she said. “It looks like the bottom tip broke off. That doesn’t tell us much, though.”

“Doesn’t it?” he asked and stood up beside her.

“Well, shouldn’t it maybe – I don’t know – fall to the ground?”

“Apparently not,” Ulric said with a distant frown. “It’s not that sort of thing.”

“What sort of thing?”

“Well,” he said, “the sort of thing that falls down, I suppose.”

Anna blew her breath up into her bangs.

“I mean,” Ulric said, “that this is exactly the place the thing should be if the tip were there, holding if off the ground.”

“But the tip’s not there, so oughtn’t it to fall?” Anna asked.

“Maybe we could get a mason out here to look at it,” Ulric added.

“Ulric, the philosophers hope it’s a sign from one of their gods,” she explained to him patiently. “Since the King gave it to the philosophers to examine, they won’t be letting a mason within sight of it.”

Ulric’s frown deepened.

“What could the masons tell you anyway?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s rather the point, though, isn’t it? The philosophers should have consulted a mason and they didn’t. Do I know everything that masons know? Of course not. What else could a mason tell me?”

“How to fix it, I suppose,” Anna said, looking at the Obelisk.

“Doubtful, but you never know,” Ulric replied.

They stared at it together for a while as various thoughts went through their heads.

“Do you think it could fall down?” Anna asked. “Eventually, I mean.”

“It’s been here for over a year without falling,” Ulric said. “And it really shouldn’t be here this long at all anyway.”

There was a short silence in which Anna parsed his last sentence.

“Why shouldn’t it be here?”

“The books I’ve read,” he explained. “They describe things like this. Very old books, though, with faded drawings and faded words. But what they tell is that a thing like this arrives, stays for half of a year, and leaves. This visit has been near on a year longer than any other on record.”

She let the flap of the tent close and curled up with him on his roll.

“Do the books say anything about nightmares?” she asked.

“You believed His Wisdom about that?” he replied.

“You did,” she pointed out. “I saw the look on your face.”

He paused and frowned.

“I’ve had some nightmares myself, but I’ve been very far from the Obelisk.”

“His Wisdom says that they affect only women? Why?”

“I haven’t a clue. But the philosophers have issues with women in general.”

She hummed softly in his ear.

“Yes,” she whispered as her hand slid down between their bodies. “Especially the ones who can read.”

“Is this wise?” he asked. “They can kick us out of the camp just for being in the same tent. Writ or no Writ.”

“Then we’ll have to be quick,” she said.

Ulric heaved a sigh, feeling his body reacting without paying any heed to the reluctance in his mind. Danger had always been a powerful aphrodisiac for Anna.

Under the heavy fur blankets, he wore nothing but a light pair of pants. It was nothing for Anna to slide her hand along the fabric, teasing the length of his growing manhood and curving under his testicles.

Feeling him harden, she sighed. “There’s my Librarian.”

She always managed to say the word with a degree of admiration that exceeded every other accolade he’d ever received.

Her lips met his and he embraced her. She still wore the thick robe she had covered herself with to reach his tent. Soft thing, it felt wonderful against the bare skin of his arms. Her hand found it’s way to the ties of his pants and soon her fingers were tracing along the bare skin of stomach and down under his pants.

A sigh came from his mouth when she reached the shortest hairs under his testicles. She pushed there, at the base of his penis and he felt a surge of blood enhance his rigidity.

“Good,” she murmured into his mouth as she stroked the length of his erection.

The coolness of her naked thigh slid over his legs as she straddled him. Apparently, Anna had come prepared for this encounter by wearing nothing under her cloak.

“Two nights in a row,” he noted. “Unusual.”

She acknowledged this with a nod. “Don’t know what’s come over me.”

Her body fell down up his, her robe now parted so her naked chest could press against his. She bit his ear as his arms wrapped around her waist.

“Lying there alone in my tent”, she murmured into his ear. Her hair was gently scratching at his penis as she rubbed herself against him. “Just had to come to see you.”

He inhaled, breathing in the scent of jasmine and lilac that always permeated her hair. She must have doused herself in perfume just before coming

“Indeed,” he breathed in to the sweet smelling hair around the nape of her neck.

She moaned her appreciation into his ear.

Ulric lamented the darkness. One of the best parts of making love to Anna was watching the expression on her face as she forced herself down on him. In the darkness, there was nothing to see and only things to feel.

He felt her moist, tender skin enveloping the head of his penis. He felt her teeth sinking into his ear lobe as she used his pillow to muffle the cry that forced its way up from her throat.

Deeper and deeper he plunged into the welcoming tunnel.

Startlingly, he stifled a yawn.

Goodness, it must be late. It wasn’t normal for him to be tired when they were making love. His heart would always race and manage to find the energy somewhere. It must be very late in the night for him to actually feel lightheaded.

Nevertheless, he would hold on for her. There was nothing better than this.

He hoped that his dreams would be peaceful.

xxxxx

“Odd, isn’t it?” Anna asked, staring at the Obelisk.

“Which part?” Ulric replied.

“Such a quiet thing.”

“Quiet?”

“Yes,” she said, squinting her eyes downward as if her own words were confusing. “Very still.”

Ulric gave the obelisk a once over.

“Look,” he said, pointing to its top.

Against the dark sky, a faint blue glow could be seen shining up in to the sky. Anna took a few steps back for a better look.

“Jellyfish,” she said.

“Jellyfish?”

“There was a book on aquatic animals I read once,” she explained. “The tendrils of the jellyfish looked just like that, except here they’re all bunched together like a rope.”

The rope, as she called it, extended far up into the sky, beyond the limits of their vision.

“We should tell the philosophers,” Ulric remarked. “Why aren’t any of them awake yet?”

“Too early, I suppose,” Anna said. “Still dark, after all.”

Ulric mumbled acknowledgement and continued staring at the rope in the sky, trying to peer through the clouds to see where it went. It seemed like there had to be something up there …

“Shouldn’t they be up making breakfast, though?” Ulric asked.

He had a vague notion that cooks and bakers and the like rose before most other people.

“At least they didn’t catch us,” Anna noted, smiling at the sky.

Ulric thought about this for a moment.

“Did you get back to your tent?”

It was Anna’s turn to think. She turned her eyes from the sky very slowly and looked at him.

“I don’t remember,” she said. “I don’t even remember waking up.”

“Me neither,” Ulric agreed. “Also: you’re naked.”

This gave Anna a bit of a start. She looked down at her body: breasts, stomach, thighs with a little patch of hair between, shins, feet. Yes. Naked.

“Shouldn’t I feel cold?”

Ulric eyed her nipples. “Apparently not,” he said. “I don’t feel cold.”

Anna shrugged. She hadn’t even noticed his body. His penis looked funny when it wasn’t erect. She wasn’t used to seeing it like that, like one of those diagrams in the medical textbooks.

My Librarian, she thought possessively of his thin body. How straight you stand.

The earth shook beneath their feet and a humming sound pervaded their ears, as if someone had struck a tremendously large drum.

They turned their attention from each other and back to the Obelisk.

The thrumming came at them again and the Obelisk seemed to pulse at them like a giant, beating heart.

[Help.]

It didn’t seem odd that they could understand it.

“You need help?” Ulric asked it.

It thrummed again, at a higher pitch. It seemed almost joyful.

[Help. Old Friend. Know you. Help. Help.]

“What can we do?” Anna asked.

It thrummed at them again, this time it was a screeching horror that Ulric recognized from his dreams. He shrank away in a panic as an icy coldness enveloped him. Anna attached herself to him in an attempt to conserve their heat. There were goosebumps on her skin. He felt his testicles shrinking away and one of her nipples stiffening where it touched his shoulder.

A moment later and the coldness was gone.

[New Friend. Help.]

“How can we help?” Anna asked.

[Broken.]

Ulric took a breath, wondering if it was really a breath he was taking. This encounter seemed entirely fantastical.

“As we surmised.”

[Cold,] it thrummed at them sadly.

“How can we fix you?” Anna pleaded. “Tell us.”

[Broken,] it thrummed back. [Very sorry.]

“We’re sorry, too,” Anna said.

[No. We sorry.]

“Why are you sorry?” Ulric asked. “You have no need to apologize.”

[Yours broken. Ours broken. Very sorry.]

Ulric thought about this for a moment.

“How long have you been trying to talk to people?”

It thrummed at them in a very weird way that put pictures in their heads.

Anna grunted in protest.

“What was that?”

“It was showing us a length of time in terms of the earth going around the sun … or possibly the moon going around the earth.”

“Oh.”

“I think it meant it’s been trying since it got stuck here.”

[Open minds. Many tries.]

Another dizzying moment of cosmological time references.

“You needed open minds but couldn’t find them?” Anna asked.

[Found some. Afraid. Gone]

“It managed to reach the women, but scared them away,” Ulric concluded. “That screeching cold feeling is very frightening.”

[Sorry. Broken.]

“You’ve been reaching me for a long time, though, haven’t you?”

[Special. Far away talk. Very open. Old Friend.]

“You scared me, too.”

[Sorry. Broken.]

“You couldn’t talk to any of these people here?” Anna asked.

[Closed.]

“Yeah,” Anna muttered. “I’m with you there.”

Another blast of cold washed over them. They tried to curl up together whilst covering their ears against the screeching at the same time. Nothing was effective though. The screeching was inside their heads and the sense of being frozen permeated their bodies, even where their bodies touched.

When it was over at last, the Obelisk thrummed at them again.

[Broken. Dying. Hurry.]

Ulric gulped.

“How can we help?”

[Find broken. Fix.]

“Find what’s broken?”

[Fix.]

Ulric shook his head. He was starting to lose the thread of what was going on around him. Anna clung to him desperately as her knees weakened..

“How?” she wondered aloud. “How do we fix you?”

[Find broken.]

“But -”

[Closing. Find broken. Fix]

“Closing? What’s closing?” Ulric shouted, losing his balance and stumbling backwards with Anna falling on top of him.

[You. Mind closing. Nearing end.]

He closed his eyes as he fell, feeling Anna’s weight as she crumbled on top of him.

[Old Friend. New Friend. Fix broken. Free us.]

xxxxx

The transition back was not nearly as smooth. There was a violence of change as they both realized that they were still, in fact, having sex. She was grinding her hips around in circles and he was holding his hips up in the air to get the best penetration.

It was the same position they’d been when she’d first impaled herself on him. How long ago was that?

Ulric panicked. It wasn’t just that they were having sex. The unsteadiness in his mind was caused by the fact that the Obelisk had released them from its imposed carefree state into the throes of orgasm.

The head of his erection had already swelled, locking it inside his lover’s wet embrace. Mindless with her own passion and therefore heedless of the danger, Anna pushed down, dropping her weight on to him.

“No!” he grunted.

But it was too late. Anna wasn’t even aware enough to notice his protests. Her own orgasm was pulsing at his manhood as he let loose inside her belly. He could picture it, as he had pictured it many times before: semen spilling out of his swollen erection, the pressure forcing it into every crevice inside her. It would slip up into her insides, the sperm swimming around, looking for an egg. Anna had been fascinated once to actually put his seed under a microscope and watch the little tails wiggling around.

Bad timing. Very bad timing.

But there was nothing for that now.

xxxxx

“Are you leaving so soon?”

Sincerity was clearly absent in His Wisdom’s lament.

“But you arrived so recently. Did the demons, perhaps, bother your lady last night?”

Ulric ignored this irritating probe.

“We should be back within a day or two.”

“Oh, indeed?” the philosopher asked.

“Indeed,” Ulric answered.

They hadn’t even taken their tent down. Ulric had wolfed down his breakfast and packed his rucksack in haste.

“Why the hurry?” Anna had asked.

“I’ll explain on the road.”

The carriage had been waiting, its driver explaining that he wanted at least a day of rest for the horses. Ulric waved his Writ at the man.

“I need you to get me back up the hill.”

“Back to the capital?” he asked.

“No,” Ulric said. “Short trip.”

“Aye,” the man said.

xxxxx

“Can you tell me now?” Anna asked when they were safely away and out of earshot of the philosophers.

“I think we can fix it,” Ulric said.

“Fix it?”

“A piece of it is missing, right?”

“Yes.”

“So we find the piece.”

“Fix broken,” Anna intoned softly.

“Yes. Fix the broken piece.”

Anna paused a moment.

“Where do you expect to find it?”

“I think I know where,” Ulric said. “The trick is getting back quickly. I don’t think that there’s much time left.”

xxxxx

It was nightfall when they reached the mountain pass.

“The horses need rest now,” the driver told him. “We’re going no further until morning, Writ or no Writ.”

“I understand,” Ulric agreed. “And I’m sorry for your horses.”

The driver grumbled as they pulled a meager fraction of their belongings from the carriage.

“Is it obvious now?” Ulric asked, looking up at the tower.

“The tower was damaged in a storm just a short while before the Obelisk was discovered,” Anna said with a nod.

“If the records are right,” Ulric explained, “then the Obelisk has been doing this for hundreds of years, maybe longer.”

“So it comes along this mountain pass and,” Anna turned around to face the valley, “sticks itself in the ground down there.”

“It worked every other time for who knows how long,” Ulric said.

“Until we built a tower here, right in its path,” Anna nodded in understanding. “Ours broken. Yours broken.”

xxxxx

It had only taken an hour of searching in the morning light to find the black chunk of rock. It had been half buried in dirt, but the furrow it had dug upon crashing had been plain enough. With the help of both the carriage driver and the innkeeper, they managed to load it on to the back of the carriage.

“That was a steep ride up yesterday,” the driver warned. “I’d be pleased to give the horses another day.”

“That may be a day we don’t have.”

The driver frowned.

“It’d be nice to wait out the storm, too.”

“Storm? I don’t remember seeing storm clouds.”

The driver nodded towards the valley. Ulric followed his gaze.

“Me, neither. But I’ve been seeing lightning all night.”

Ulric peered down the winding road and, in a few moments, saw a faint bolt of lightning stretch from the ground to the sky.

He waited.

Another bolt at the exact same spot.

“I don’t hear any thunder,” he said.

The driver thought about that for a moment.

“No,” he said. “No thunder all night long. Just the lightning.”

Ulric took a breath.

“We need to go now. Discard anything you don’t need. Just us and the rock.”

Anna was standing by.

“Should I pack -?”

“No,” Ulric said. “You’re staying.”

There was a firmness in his voice that he had never used with her before, an authority she didn’t even recognize as belonging to him.

“No, my dear Librarian,” she said, just as firmly. “You might need me.”

Ulric took a breath and pointed down into the valley.

“We’re going there,” he said.

Anna stared.

“It looks like lightning,” she said. “But it doesn’t stop.”

“What?”

Ulric turned to look now and, indeed, there was a solid, twitching bolt of lightning hitting the valley floor.

“We leave now,” he told the driver.

He and Anna leaped aboard.

xxxxx

It was the least pleasant ride any of them had ever taken.

At least the driver understood the need for urgency. Through the small port in the front of the carriage, Ulric and Anna could see that the bolt of lightning had turned into multiple streams of some kind of vibrating, glowing, blue cable. It appeared to have torn a hole in the sky where black clouds were swirling around. The wind was at their backs, pulling them in towards the Obelisk, but traveling much faster than they were.

With the wind trying to whip his words away, the driver shouted back at Ulric, “Shouldn’t we running away from this?”

“No,” Ulric yelled back. “If we don’t fix it, it will only get worse. There’s no telling how many lives are at stake.”

Bouncing around inside the carriage, Anna pulled on his arm.

“How do you know it will get worse?”

“Something I saw,” he told her with a grimace. “When we were talking to it.”

“The planet going around the sun?”

“Yes,” he replied. “They’ve been here a year and a half.”

Anna thought about it, recalling the images that had crowded her mind. Astronomy hadn’t been a real draw for her, but she had picked up the basics. The image they had shown her had looked very much like one of the drawings of the solar system.

“Right. I saw the planet making one and a half trips around the sun. So?”

“Think back. Do you remember seeing the Obelisk in the images?”

“Not really,” she said, trying to remember details of the planet. “Just a little blue line sticking out on one side.”

Ulric pointed out the front window as the carriage gave another jolt.

“Blue line,” he said. “I think it’s like an anchor. There’s a ship up there, one that can sail from planet to planet, or maybe star to star.”

“Fantastical!” Anna accused. “There’s no air up there. How could it sail? How would people breathe?”

“Maybe sailing is a bad word,” he admitted. “But that’s the image in my head. A ship made of metal all around, holding air inside it perhaps, anchored to that thing the philosophers have decided to call an Obelisk.”

“Then what’s going on now?”

“Every historical record I have,” Ulric said, “tells of this Obelisk, this ‘anchor’ coming for six months and leaving. It comes by our planet, anchors itself to us, does whatever it does, and leaves when the planet is on the other side of the sun.”

Ulric looked at Anna, waiting for her to understand. The carriage bounced over a hole in the road.

“On the other side of the sun,” he emphasized. “When the planet is going the other way?”

Comprehension lit her eyes and she made a small half circle in the air with her finger.

“They use the anchor to tie themselves to the planet,” she said with realization, “and use the planet to turn themselves around.”

“I believe so,” Ulric said. “It makes sense at least. Perhaps they do other things from up above the sky. Watch us. Study the planet. Maybe they can even take things.”

He shrugged.

“But the anchor broke and now it’s stuck – they’re stuck,” Anna said. “And we have to fix it.”

“They’ve waited an entire year,” Ulric said. “They’ve done an extra rotation and now they’re pointing in the right direction again.”

“And they’re going to try to escape, rip their anchor out of the ground? And damn the consequences to us?” Anna asked.

“Possibly,” Ulric said. “They are, apparently, dying. Perhaps keeping the air inside a metal ship is a difficult thing.”

“They were cold,” Anna remembered. “They said that.”

“One imagines a quite impossible furnace.”

Anna’s eyes widened, thinking of that.

The driver’s voice shouted back to them.

“We’re close to the guard post!”

What would the guards think of this? Would they let the carriage by? What were the philosophers doing? What orders had been given?

“What do you see?” Ulric shouted back.

The small window he had to look out the front of the carriage didn’t let him see the guard post.

“No one’s coming out to meet us,” the driver declared as the carriage slowed.

“What?”

Ulric leaped out through the small door as the carriage came to a halt at the simple gate that blocked the road.

“Where are they?” Ulric asked no one in particular. “If they all left in a panic, we ought to have passed some of them on the road.”

“There are other roads -” the driver remarked, but was interrupted when a young soldier came running out the gatehouse.

“My lords,” he called out. “You can not go this way.”

“We need to reach the Obelisk,” Ulric said. “Get the gate open.”

“No, my lord,” the soldier bowed. “His Wisdom has ordered an evacuation. Demons are haunting the Obelisk -”

“Stop bowing to me,” Ulric chastised the boy. “I’m a librarian.”

“My Lord Librarian,” he replied. “I really can’t -”

“There are no demons,” Ulric told him with a roll of his eyes. “We’re the only ones who can stop this nonsense. Now lift that gate or we’ll lift it ourselves.”

“Yes, my Lord,” the terrified soldier said.

“I’m not a lord,” Ulric said as he turned on his heel. “Get that gate open.”

Anna had stepped out of the carriage and was looking at him in wide eyed surprise.

“Yes?” he asked her.

“Nothing,” she said with a shake of her head. “I’ve just never – well, just so.”

She stepped back into the carriage with Ulric jumping in after her.

“Let’s move!” he shouted at the driver.

“Into the storm?”

“Into the storm,” Ulric confirmed.

In a moment, they were away and through the gate.

“Honestly,” Ulric eyed Anna in frustration. “Demons!”

Anna nodded, a surprised look still on her face.

“Ridiculous people,” she agreed, and linked her arm around his elbow.

The carriage jostled sideways as a gust of wind hit it.

“It’s getting worse,” Anna remarked.

“But no rain yet,” Ulric pointed out. “Imagine what this ride would be like if he couldn’t see the road.”

Her face flushed with what Ulric took for some kind of nausea, she nodded in agreement. She curled up next to him as the carriage bounced down the road and sloshed side to side in the buffeting winds.

Conversation became impossible and they were forced to bare out the rest of the ride in a terrified silence.

The carriage came to sudden and dangerous stop as the horses skidded to a halt.

“Almighty God!” the driver called in to the relative silence.

Glad to be done with riding for the time being, Ulric and Anna got out of the carriage as quickly as they could. They found themselves at the edge of the clearing where the philosophers had built their village.

In the center of that clearing was a vision out of hell itself.

The Obelisk was still there, hovering in place as it had always been. But now it seemed to vibrate, tearing and shaking the earth around it. A rope that appeared to be made of twisting strands of blue lightning extended from the top of the Obelisk into the swirling black clouds that covered the sky from horizon to horizon.

Those clouds were crackling with red fire.

“The horses won’t go no closer!” the driver warned them.

“We need to carry the rock there,” Ulric said, pointing at the Obelisk.

“Grab a wheelbarrow!” the driver yelled at him while he tried to calm his horses.

Ulric had yet to spare a glance for the little village the philosophers had built. There seemed to be people scurrying everywhere. What were they doing? There were a few soldiers trying to gather people together, but no one seemed to be listening to them.

“Why have you returned!” someone shouted at him.

His Wisdom Reginald, his expensive, indigo cloak billowing out behind him in tatters, was stalking towards Ulric. The man seemed at first to be angry. But the closer he got, the more Ulric realized that the man had gone pale white with fear. The small amount of grey hair he had was in wind blown disarray.

“I ordered an evacuation!” Reginald screeched at him. “We must escape this demonic device.”

Treat the man fairly, Ulric thought, the sight of fiery red clouds in the sky would have sent to his knees any man with the faintest tinge of religion in him.

“I’m here to make it stop,” Ulric told him firmly. “I can get rid of -“, he frowned a moment, ” – the demons – if you let me.”

Reginald’s disciples, apparently having nothing else to do despite the situation, were beginning to gather around him. Terrified and obedient, they formed a disturbing wall behind their leader.

“What skill do you have -?” Reginald began his demand.

Anna, her blonde, lightning-lit hair blowing in front of her face, stepped up beside Ulric to interrupt the philosopher.

“We know what we’re doing,” she told him. “Get out of our way.”

Reginald’s eyes bulged.

“You’re dead here,” she pointed out. “Look at the bunch of you. You have no idea where to go and you know you couldn’t get far enough way from whatever is about to happen.”

“Get out of our way,” she repeated.

Shaking, the old man turned away from them and wandered away.

“Wheelbarrow,” Ulric said aloud, scanning his surroundings. It was a construction site, after all. There had to be – there!

It took only a moment for Ulric and Anna to dump the cone of rock into the wheelbarrow and haul it across to the circle of wooden debris where the altars and fences of the philosophers had once stood. The wind absolutely howled this close to the Obelisk, pulling at their clothes and causing Anna’s hair to fly upward and swirl about her head.

“Now what?” Anna asked.

“Now we put it back in place.”

The wheelbarrow could only do so much. They dumped the cone of rock on to the ground and began the laborious process of rotating it to find out how it fit. There was a moment, half way around, where it made a satisfying clicking sound and resisted further rotation.

“That’s where it goes,” Ulric said. “But it won’t stay.”

Tired, they dropped it to the ground and fell down next to each other.

“Any ideas?” he shouted in Anna’s ear.

Anna shook her head.

“Are they saying anything to you?” she yelled back hopefully. “Remember? They said that you were the only one they could reach.”

He closed his eyes and tried to relax, hoping that that would let them in. It wasn’t working. The wind was pulsing at them and his heart was pounding. He leaned over to speak directly into Anna’s ear.

“Only when I’m asleep,” he told her. “I’ve only ever heard from them in my dreams. Unless you want to knock me out and hope I wake up in time to do something useful.”

“There’s only one thing to do, then,” Anna said.

He pulled away far enough to look at her and found her averting her gaze with her lips pursed.

“What?”

“The only way we’ve been able to talk to them … really talk to them …”

“You’re kidding. Here?” he asked. “I’m not even -”

“Well, I am.”

“You are?”

“The carriage ride,” she pointed out, “was very bumpy.”

“But I -”

“You will never get another chance to make love in a place like this,” she said as she pushed on his shoulders. “Now lie down.”

The wind surged, pulling her hair up in to the sky as she undid the laces on his pants. At the very least, he could hope that his cloak would protect his backside from the rough ground underneath it.

“You really aren’t ready,” she remarked as she straddled him.

“No, I’m not,” he admitted ruefully.

He felt the softness of her hair brushing against his flaccid member.

“No underwear?” he asked her?

“I saw this coming,” she said. “Left some clothes back in the carriage.”

“A gift for our driver?”

She stuck her chin out defiantly and smiled.

“He can keep it if he wants,” she said as she threw her head back and laughed.

It put a picture in his mind that he would never forget. Anna in her very fine dress, her head thrown back, her hair backlit by lightning and framed by clouds burning with red and orange flames. He would carry that picture every day he lived. He would take up painting to try to commit the flailing blonde hair and the lightning bolts that lit it to canvas. He would hire an artist to try to capture the exact color of the flames. But no sculptor, no painter, would ever do justice to the fine chin and nose, turned up to the fiery sky in ecstatic joy.

‘There I was’, he would later write, ‘perhaps at the end of the world with the gates of heaven and the furnaces of hell all around and above us. And all I could think was that there was no place I would rather be.’

Anna, unsatisfied with the progression of her Librarian’s arousal, began opening the front of her dress, tearing at the toggles that fortified her clothing. When she reached her navel, the layers of fabric folded back to reveal her breasts, squeezed and lifted by the clothing that remained.

Ulric, radiating in the aura of her enthusiasm and the sheer beauty of her body, reached up to cup those magnificent orbs in his hands.

“Oh!” she screamed as his wind chilled hands touched her flesh.

He caught her nipples between his middle and pointer fingers, feeling those little nubs extend sharply against his knuckles.

“There’s my Librarian,” she murmured in appreciation – of his hands or his growing erection he couldn’t say for sure.

He began to feel a wetness over the length of his shaft as her gentle grinding pushed him between her lips and let slip the juices inside. She hadn’t been kidding about the carriage ride – she really was ready to go.

“Close enough,” she yelled at him.

He nodded.

“This had better work,” he said, adding silently, ‘or we’ll look quite the fools …’

She leaned her body forward, breasts hovering over his face, and shifted her hips. In a moment, she slid herself down, taking him inside her.

xxxxx

[Old friends. New friend.]

A cold calmness pervaded once more.

The storm had stopped. They were no longer being pelted by dust and small pieces of debris. They were standing, as before, in front of an Obelisk that was a quiet, humming chunk of rock with a peaceful blue rope of light ascending from its peak to the heavens.

Serene, but cold. It was much less pleasant than the last time.

“Yes, we’re here,” Ulric announced with a shiver.

Anna clung to him, trying to keep warm. He felt her naked thigh pressed against his, her breasts against his shoulder.

[Fix broken?]

“Yes, we found it,” Anna explained. “But we can’t fix it.”

[No fix.]

“We don’t know how,” Ulric said. “It won’t stay.”

[Need this.]

“Need what?”

The Obelisk began thrumming very loudly. Pictures began forming in their heads – pictures that made no sense to Ulric.

“What was that?” Anna asked.

“I think it was trying to tell us what it needed,” Ulric said thoughtfully.

“All I saw were some weird solar systems and then three balls stuck together at a weird angle,” she said.

“It doesn’t know how to name things,” Ulric pointed out. “It’s not really talking to us.”

[Need. Everywhere.]

“What you need is everywhere?”

[Yes.]

Anna stumbled suddenly, falling to her knees. Ulric came to the ground to support her as she leaned into his embrace.

“What’s wrong?” he asked her.

Her eyes were bleary and her head began to roll around on her neck. A faint mewling sound escaped her lips and she collapsed in his arms.

“What happened to her!” Ulric shouted, cradling her motionless body.

Her bare chest showed no sign of breath.

[Closing. Old friend closed.]

“What are you talking about!”

[Help. Fix Broken.]

“What about her!”

With a sudden start, Anna drew a spasmodic breath. Her eyes fluttered open and she grabbed Ulric’s arm.

“I’m okay,” she gasped. “It’s okay. I’m okay.”

“What happened?”

She shook her head.

“It’s not important.”

“The hell it isn’t -”

“It was just, um,” she looked aside as she stood up.

“Um?”

“An orgasm,” she shrugged.

Ulric’s eyebrows lowered. Anna shrugged again. Both turned to the Obelisk.

“How do we fix you?”

[Needed thing everywhere.]

“We’ve been over that,” Ulric sighed. “What do you need?”

Thrumming again. It was trying to relate something to them that wasn’t an abstract concept. “Broken” and “Fix” and “Friend” were easy concepts to shove into their heads. This was not.

A picture of the planet appeared in their heads.

[Everywhere thing.]

The planet spun dizzyingly to the far side where there were no continents.

[Everywhere thing.]

Ulric pulled at his hair.

“I don’t understand,” he begged.

[Dying. Cold. No Time.]

“Do you need food?” he asked. “Are you out of fuel for your furnace? Is that why you’re dying.”

[No Hunger.]

The thrumming increased suddenly, vibrating the ground all around them.

[Thirst!]

“You’re thirsty?”

[Thirst,] it announced with what they could only deduce was a sense of triumph.

“Water!” Anna shouted. “They need water.”

[Yes. Broken thirsts!]

“We just have to go back. Send us back,” Ulric said in a rush.

[Go back. Close mind.]

Anna embraced Ulric, face to face. They both felt themselves disconnecting, stumbling back towards reality.

[Goodbye Old Friends. Will return for New Friend.]

“New friend?” Ulric called back as he fell to the ground – quiet painlessly – beneath Anna.

[New Friend will be Different.]

“What … what?”

But the moment was gone.

Hard rock was underneath his body, along with no small number of bruises. His erection was already twitching, impatiently releasing his fluid into the warm belly of the woman whose breasts were currently under his crushing grip.

Around them, wind swirled and thunder cracked once more.

“Water,” Anna declared, carelessly dislodging him from her insides. “We need to find some water.”

Ulric nodded as he watched her refasten the single undamaged toggle on her dress. It made her presentable, if a bit scandalous. He ruthlessly laced his pants back up.

“Where?”

Their eyes scanned the grounds around them. No small number of philosophers were standing at them, ghostly white faces topping bodies that appeared stunned into utter limpness.

“A trough!” Anna shouted over the wind, pointing towards a horse corral.

They set off together.

“What’s with them?” Ulric wondered of the philosophers.

Shielding her face against the wind that tried to pull them back to the Obelisk, Anna spoke as she trudged.

“When we’re talking to the Obelisk,” she explained. “We’re surrounded by this … this sphere of lightning. No telling what those idiots thought of it.”

“So we might be hailed as godsends?”

“Or tortured for demons.”

One side of Ulric’s mouth twitched.

They reached the trough and found a bucket suitable for the purpose.

“Think that’s enough?” she asked him.

“Hope so.”

Running with the wind at their backs they arrived quickly at the center of the storm. Ulric lifted the cone so that the flat side of it was level with the ground.

“Save some of the water,” he warned.

Anna nodded and emptied half of the bucket over the surface. Together they slid the cone underneath the Obelisk and fitted it into place. Not only did it give a satisfying click, but it began hissing and didn’t fall back down when they let go of it.

“Here,” Ulric pointed, noticing a seam between the broken piece and the main body.

Anna splashed some water on the crack and watched as, with a hiss and a flash of blue light, the crack sealed. She went around the perimeter of the cone, splashing water wherever she saw a gap.

“That’s it!” she declared. “Let’s get out of here.”

The two of them took off at a run, waving at the spellbound philosophers to clear off. Dumbfounded, they obeyed. At about sixty paces, they collapsed to their knees, utterly exhausted.

Heaving in a way that threatened the single toggle that held her dress together across her cleavage, Anna remarked, “If this isn’t far enough, nothing is.”

Ulric put his arms around her.

“It will have to do,” he agreed.

They turned back towards the Obelisk as the winds began to calm. The effect was anything but reassuring. The lightning rope still flickered, but emitted not a single crack of thunder. The fire laden clouds in the sky still burned, but without the snapping of a proper fire.

There was a moment of complete silence in which the Librarian and his lover tore their eyes away from the Obelisk to share a quick glance.

When they looked back, the black rock had risen infinitesimally off the ground. It bobbed there for a moment and then, with a crack, shot off into the sky like the homesick piece of of the heavens that it was.

The fires in the sky began to smooth out, losing their luster. The black clouds began to dissipate. Maybe it would rain soot for a few days. Who could say?

“We did it, then?” Anna wondered.

“I think so.”

“What do you think it meant?” Anna asked, looking down at that last, heroic toggle between her breasts.

“It was thirsty.”

“No,” she clarified without looking up. “I mean the bit about returning for its new friend.”

“Didn’t it mean you?”

“No. It called me an old friend, like you.”

Ulric thought a moment.

“I don’t know.”

Anna gulped.

“I think I do.”

It was then that Ulric realized that Anna hadn’t been looking at her breasts, but her belly.

Timing. It was all about timing.

The new friend would be different.

THE END