"Of course, it can be a bit startling for people on the ground to see that island hanging overhead, but it's nothing to be afraid of, just the Skyler at her work, keeping the heavens clean and beautiful for us all."
– from the tales of Atheron the Storyteller
The last crumbs fell from his clothes and vanished in mid-air as Geste stood and calmly stepped off the platform.
Bredon started, then reached out tentatively and discovered that the surrounding bubble had vanished. The air was still almost motionless, but he realized it no longer felt quite as dead and trapped. An unfamiliar scent reached him, a curious mixture of flowers and spice. They had landed somewhere, some place so dark that the stars did not show above them.
Then light sprang up on all sides in soft pastel colors, like the light of an early dawn, accompanied by soft, plaintive music.
“Welcome to my home,” Geste said, gesturing at the vast chamber that surrounded them. “Welcome to Arcade."
Bredon stared silently for several seconds.
The platform rested on the floor of a great hall, a dozen times bigger than the village feasting hall, bigger than the lounge he had seen at Autumn House. The ceiling was fifteen or twenty meters high, and the nearest wall more than a dozen meters away.
Both ceiling and wall were, for as far as he could see, of some white, porous substance, almost, but not quite, like bone. The walls curved over to become the ceiling, and were divided by vertical columns that looked not so much like pillars as like ribs, which continued up across onto the ceiling, where they became a web of elaborate tracery.
Green and blue-green vines criss-crossed the walls, and seemed to be quivering. To one side the walls were hidden by a grove of strange trees. Bredon marvelled, wondering how vines and trees could grow inside the chamber, where the sun and rain could not reach them.
These trees seemed to be doing just fine, but they were like none Bredon had ever seen. Their branches grew in symmetrical patterns, and their trunks were all a peculiar ashy grey color. The leaves were green on one side, like any other leaves, but their undersides were colored a thousand subtly different hues.
Some of the trees seemed to bear fruit, but whatever they produced was nearly hidden amid the foliage, so that Bredon could not make out its nature. The scent he had noticed upon arrival seemed to come from the fruit trees.
Small creatures peered down at him from the treetops, but whenever he looked at one directly it would take fright and vanish into the leaves, so that he could make out nothing of them except wide golden eyes and flashes of soft brown fur.
Bredon had seen nothing of any of this as they approached, since he and Geste had been enclosed in the protective bubble. He looked for an opening they could have entered by, but could find none. There were no doors, no windows, no visible openings of any sort in the white walls. Even the gaps between the trees appeared too narrow to allow the platform passage. For all he could see the platform had had to pass directly through the wall.
He saw no furniture, either. Except for the enchanted forest, the room was simply a huge, ornate, empty box. And he could not figure out where the soft, even light was coming from.
Geste was grinning at him, and Bredon remembered just whose home he was in-if it was really anyone's home. He stepped down from the platform, but moved with extreme caution, half-expecting to bang his shins against an invisible chair or table, or his nose against a wall.
Nothing happened. He did not collide with anything invisible, nor did any of the creatures from the grove leap out at him. He took a few steps and stood uncertainly.
“Make yourself at home,” Geste said, waving an arm in invitation.
Bredon eyed him warily. He tried to think of some response that would cleverly express his growing weariness, annoyance, and impatience, but could think of nothing that would not have sounded simply petulant. He looked around at the bare floor, the vine-striped walls, and the alien trees.
Geste said nothing to help him.
“Thank you,” Bredon said at last. “I will.” He lowered himself cautiously and sat cross-legged on the floor.
Although he knew it was still dark outside, the air in the room was warm, its scent pleasant and relaxing, and he had had an impossibly long and eventful wake. He slipped off his vest, folded it into a makeshift pillow, then started to settle down for a nap. This, after all, was a sleeping dark, not a mid-wake dark, and he had been awake far too long.
Geste watched for a minute, then shrugged in acceptance of a minor defeat. Bredon was obviously not going to do anything amusing. “I'm being a poor host,” he said. “Gamesmaster, we need proper accommodations."
“Yes, master,” a disembodied voice, much like that of the housekeeper at Autumn House, replied. “Whatever you say, boss. You want it, you got it. Right away, you bet. Ask and ye shall receive."
The slick grey floor to one side suddenly bulged upward into an immense bubble, four or five meters in diameter, almost touching Bredon; startled, he rolled away without thinking and came to his feet in a fighting crouch, a dagger in his hand.
The bubble burst with a loud pop. The fragments dissolved into air, with a sizzle and a smell like frying batter. Where the bubble had been stood a soft, richly blue mass with several oddly-shaped appendages.
“I think,” Geste said, “that something a little more primitive is in order. Our guest is a native of Denner's Wreck."
“I got you, boss."
The blue mass sank into itself, melting away like butter over a hot fire, and then hardened into a new shape.
It had become a bed. Four of the appendages had transformed into bedposts; the rest had vanished. The blue stuff, whatever it might actually be, now looked like fine fur.
Bredon relaxed, tucked the knife back out of sight, and carefully approached the bed.
It was, as far as he could determine, just a bed. Except for its color, the blue fur that adorned it was an ordinary fur coverlet, with a texture much like good-quality rabbit. The pillow and mattress were also blue, but felt like ordinary down-filled linen. Both the spiced-flower smell and the frying odor were gone, now, replaced by a cool, clean, inviting fragrance that reminded him of freshly-washed linen hung out in a spring breeze.
With a shrug, Bredon dropped his vest and climbed into the bed.
The room vanished; the bed seemed to be floating in a soft black void. He could no longer hear the music.
Bredon had seen too many wonders to be much disturbed by this, and he was utterly exhausted. He rolled over and went to sleep.
Outside the illusionary void, Geste settled back into a floating seat that popped silently up out of the floor when he first began to bend his knees. A feelie vine slithered up silently to caress his ankles, and a messenger weasel jumped down from the forest and stood alert at his side, ready to run any errand its master might care to give it. Food trees ripened a variety of tasty products, prepared to drop them on an instant's notice, and certain other trees, the cousins of the feelie vines, pumped lubricious sap into erectile tissue and stood ready. Soothing scents spilled into the air. The music transformed itself from nondescript background noise to one of Geste's favorite suites, a piece slightly over a thousand years old that Bredon would not have recognized as music at all.
The Trickster paid no attention to his obedient creatures. He watched, amused, as Bredon slept. “Resilient, isn't he? He's just taking it all in stride,” he said.