1: A Demon can Fly

It's amazing, I sometimes think, just how fast events can spiral out of control... one little patch of ice leads to a car spinning out of control and causing a major pile-up... one little match in the wrong place at a petrol station leads to a major fireball... and trying to help a friend with her nightmares leads to a confrontation with a majorly nasty Archetype.

That last one may not be a common occurrence, but it happened to me once, and that was one time too many. It also lead me to find out what the answer is to the question: Can you kill an Archetype? And, in the best traditions of magic and philosophy, the answer is both No and Yes.

It all started when a friend of mine told me she had been having recurring nightmares, and was beginning to dread going to sleep at night. She didn't know anything about my Astral wanderings, just mentioned it in passing. But as soon as she mentioned it, I decided to see if there was anything I could do. After all, dreams take place in the Astral, and I spent every night there, so if I was able to track down her dreaming self, maybe I could prevent the nightmares, or at least learn their cause.

So, that night, I left my body as usual. Since messing around in nightmares means going to some rather nasty Planes, I decided to leave a more substantial ward around my body this time. Usually, I just create a circle of white light around it, which will block any negative influences. This time, I put in the white circle, but patrolling it, I put some very large, nasty-looking wolves, which I was fairly sure no-one would want to come near. Heck, they even made ME nervous, and I was the one they were guarding.

Having assured that my body was well-protected, I sent enough Etheric energy back to it to cause my consciousness to shift to my Astral body, and so moved to the Planes. I found myself, as I often do, in the Between, the Plane that is located outside every other Plane. There were, as ever, thousands of large, multicoloured spheres surrounding me, like giant soap bubbles. Each of them represented a specific Plane, and presumably one of them was, therefore, the plane where my friend's nightmares were taking place.

There are some people who claim that dreamwalking is not possible: they say that as huge and varied as the Planes are, there is no way you could find one specific person within them. They are, of course, wrong, as they have failed to take into account the fact that you can use magic to FIND these people, without having to look for them throughout the millions of planes.

My personal preference is to simply create a Key Figure in the shape of a door, with the name of the person you want to find written on it. Then, simply step through the door, and there you are, wherever that person happens to be. So, I conjured up the door, stepped through it, and nothing happened.

I was surprised at this, and a little embarrassed, since it seemed to prove the point of all those people who said that finding people's dreams could not be done. But it had worked before. Why had it gone wrong now? Was there some sinister force keeping me locked out? Had my powers faded? Or, the thought came to me, was it something as simple as the fact that I was trying to get to her dreams, and she wasn't dreaming yet?

Easily answered; I conjured up a sphere of light, and ordered it to show me where my friend was. Immediately, I saw her. In fact, I saw two of her. It's a known fact that when you sleep, your Astral body is loosened from your body; that is, after all, how dreams happen. But it's less well-known that even when you are NOT dreaming, your Astral self is outside of you. When you first fall asleep, your Astral body is released, and simply floats above your body for a while, waiting for you to completely fall asleep, and enter the first dream of the night.

Anyway, my friend was currently in that state, with her Astral form floating above her sleeping body. I enlarged the sphere, drew some Etheric energy to me from my own body, and walked into her room.

After watching for a few moments, I concluded that she wasn't about to enter a dream state for a while, and I couldn't really be bothered to wait around all night just watching her sleep, so I traced a circle around her with my hand, leaving a trail of smoke. I told it to come and get me when she started to dream, then I stepped back through the sphere that I had come here through, sending back the Etheric energy as I did so, and was back in the Between.

That done, I decided to go have some fun. The spheres in the Between are strange things. Sometimes, they collide. When they do, sometimes they merge, sometimes they pass through each other as if they were ghosts, sometimes they bounce off. It's the bouncing-off properties that can be fun to an AP'er. Consider it: You're in an endless place filled with bouncy spheres where you can fly. It's quite fun, bouncing from sphere to sphere, especially knowing that when you get fast enough, you'll punch through the bubble and into the Plane within it rather than bouncing off it. Some of the most interesting Planes are the ones you wind up in when you travel randomly.

As it happened, though, I didn't wind up in any weird and wonderful Planes this time: I kept rebounding off the bubbles, and before I could break into one, a glowing cloud came rushing towards me. As soon as we met, it seeped into me, and the events my Key Figure had witnessed were immediately a part of me: My friend had entered a dream, and it was not a pleasant one. I immediately called up a Door to her dream, and went through it. On the other side was... well, it wasn't pretty. I didn't even bother trying to overcome the negative aspects of the nightmare, I simply created a Doorway to a Happiness plane, and shoved my friend through it, then closed it behind her. I stayed in the nightmare, to see what would happen now.

The man who had been causing my friend such distress turned to face me. He looked monochrome, like someone out of a black and white movie. He was wearing a dark grey trench coat, and looked in desperate need of a bath.

"You shouldn't have interfered" he hissed, and his voice made me feel cold.

"You should have left my friend alone" I said, not quite as confidently as I would have liked.

At this point, he drew an evil looking knife, with an astonishingly bright, shiny blade that it was hard to draw your eyes away from. "She was my prey. Now you are" he said it that harsh whispery voice of his.

"Not if you think you can harm me with a knife I'm not" I retorted.

"Harm you? No. Hurt you? Oh, I can hurt you VERY badly!" and he leapt forward, slashing at me with his gleaming blade. It had happened too fast for me to react in any way but instinct: I tried to use my arms to ward off the blade. So it was my forearms that got a deep gash carved in them, not my head. And man, did it hurt! He brought the blade back for a second attack, but this time I used a blast of magic to knock him away from me. In the few seconds I had, I concentrated on my arms, willing the cuts to fade away. They did, but it was a lot harder than it should have been.

Healed, I leapt into the air: When it comes to Astral matters, it never hurts to be in the air. I looked down at him, just in time to see him take to the air after me.

This was NOT working the way it should! He was a nightmare human, he shouldn't have been able to do anything out-of-keeping with a normal human image.

I flew away from him, but then he gave me another surprise: He raised his knife, even though I was well out of reach, and called out “Stop there”. And, entirely against my will, I did. Somehow, just raising his knife had made his command almost impossible to disobey.

"What ARE you?" I yelled at him.

An evil smile on his face, he replied "I am the Grey Man." And that's when I got SERIOUSLY worried.

There are Archetypes that embody pretty much every human thought, feeling, and state of mind. There really is a Cupid, and a Santa Claus, and a Lady Luck.

There is also the Grey Man, who coalesced from the thoughts and dreams of people afraid of rape. Any time a woman walks nervously down a dark street, or gets mugged, or worse still, is actually raped, her feelings of fear find their way through the Planes to him, and empower him.

This explained why I had found it impossible to keep flying when he raised his knife and told me to stop: A rapist forces his victims to do as he says by threatening them, often with some kind of weapon. As a result, all the Grey Man had to do was raise his weapon and give an order, and however far away he was, it would be as hard to resist obeying him as it would be for you to refuse someone standing right in front of you with a deadly weapon aimed at you.

And personally, a powerful spirit who came into being in the Planes and owes his entire existence to magic, is not someone I want to tangle with. Especially when it's a spirit made up purely of evil.

I don't usually travel from place to place in the Planes in the "Star Trek transporter" way of vanishing in one place and appearing in another: I prefer to create Doorways. I decided to make this an exception, and Blinked back to the Between. I figured that my friend was safe from nightmares for the immediate future, and it should be possible to provide a Warding for her dreams to keep the Grey Man out of them in future. The episode was over.

Sadly, the Grey Man had other ideas. He appeared suddenly in front of me. This was even more worry than his ability to fly: Usually, a spirit is confined to whatever Plane it was created in. Apparently, though, the Grey Man was powerful and sophisticated enough to travel freely. Without stopping to think, I fired a beam of light at him. He dodged it, moving amazingly fast, and responded with a beam of pure black, which sent me reeling.

Luckily, all the times I had gone bouncing around the Between had given me enough skill to turn my uncontrolled momentum into a head start on ricocheting around the spheres. Maybe I could loose him in the endless sphere-filled void?

Nope. When I chanced a look behind me, he was following only a little behind me.

I decided to try surprise: When I hit the next sphere, I didn't bounce away, I bounced straight back the way I'd come, towards Grey. And as I reached him, I released dozens of small flying balls of light, which started circling him, firing painful beams of light at him. They moved very fast, changing direction unpredictably, and were almost impossible to catch. They had worked in the past to keep someone totally off balance, I felt fairly confident they would do the same for him.

However, he didn't try to catch the spheres, or run away from them. Instead, a thick, dark grey mist started to swirl around him, and whenever any light hit the fog, be it beam or ball, it simply vanished. In seconds, he was free of attackers. Then the cloud around him rushed towards me, and I was engulfed in blinding, choking smoke.

Totally disorientated, I had no warning at all of his knife. This time, it scored directly across my chest. The pain was so sudden and unexpected, it jolted me clear out of the planes, and back to my body. For a moment, I was afraid that the cut had come back with me, but the soreness faded quickly away.

Refusing to admit defeat, I closed my eyes, and relaxed, taking myself into the trance state from which I would Project. Then, I started to leave my body. As I did, I saw that I was surrounded by a dark grey cloud, stopping only at the white circle I had created as a ward when I previously left. But where were the dogs I had also created?

They were all lying on the ground, right beside me, whining. I had forgotten the one disadvantage of creating a 'living' ward: Because they have a degree of intelligence, they can be intimidated, though it takes something seriously nasty to do it. Fortunately, I had left the white circle in place, which being pure light, was not susceptible to fear.

Before I could take any action to remove the cloud, the Grey Man leapt out of the haze, his knife aimed at my face, and with a start of fear, I snapped out of my trance and into my body.

That was the start of a rather unhappy time for me. Every time I tried to Project, he was there, attacking me with his gleaming blade. Every time I fell asleep, the dreams I had were... let's just say they were distinctly unpleasant. I'd never had a nightmare before this, and now I was having them every time I slept. A week later, I was exhausted from the lack of sleep I'd been getting, and I'd given up on even trying to Project. And to top it all off, my friend was still having HER nightmares.

It was about ten days after the whole incident that matters came to a head. I had just woken up (again) from a nightmare, but this time, instead of feeling afraid, or frustrated, I was angry. In fact, I was furious. I was utterly sick of the dreams, the lack of Projecting, and of the Grey Man himself. I had had enough of him, and everything about him. Climbing out of bed, I went and sat in the centre of the room. I knew that my ward of white light was still there, and that the Grey Man's influence still couldn't enter it. I closed my eyes, and relaxed into a trance.

Normally, I wouldn't have been able to do it very easily, as I was too filled with emotion, but my tiredness from lack of sleep overcame it, and I was in a trance in moments. However, I didn't try to Project: I knew that if I did, he would simply attack me again, and whilst I knew he couldn't enter the circle and hurt me, it was still too much of a distraction to me while I was in the delicate between-bodies state.

Instead, still inside the protection of the ward, I scanned my room. It was still full of thick, dark grey fog, including the area my bed was in. Only the small area around me was free of it. Still from within my body, I expanded the circle, forming an opaque dome of white light all around me. Hidden from the sight of the Grey Man, I generated a Key Figure, as powerful as I could make it. Then I sent it directly to the Astral Planes.

This done, I returned to my bed, and went back to sleep. And, of course, I had hardly closed my eyes when the nightmare started. I was walking down a dark, narrow alleyway. It was a bad place to be, I knew that, but I had had to come through it. And there was a tall, thin man ahead of me. The sight of him sent chills down my spine, and I turned away, to run, but I knew he would be faster than I was.

And then, from out of nowhere, a ball of blazing white light struck me and knocked me back towards the Grey Man. Instantly, I turned to face him, and a hundred bolts of lightning leapt from my fingers, filling the alleyway with crackling light. Unable to dodge, the Grey Man was caught by first one, then another, and another.

Though the lightnings roved all over the alleyway, as soon as one touched him, it stayed connected to him, and each one burned him like fire. The Key Figure I had created before returning to sleep had done it's job: It had found my dream-self, and brought with it the knowledge that it WAS a dream, and the power to raise my mind from the dream state to fully-aware Projector. And, created as it had been behind the opaque ward, the Grey Man had been taken totally by surprise.

But somehow, I found it hard to feel sorry for him. He didn't have it too bad though; he called up that dark grey fog again, and as it had with the light spheres before, it drained the light that was attacking him, and stopped him being hurt by it.

This time, though, it was what I had been expecting him to do. In fact, what I had been HOPING he would do. As soon as I saw it, I stopped the lightning, and sent a dozen balls of light at him. These were slightly different from the ones I had used before, in just one respect: When they encountered the grey cloud, they didn't vanish into it. They exploded into a dozen new globes, each of which continued to attack him. In seconds, he was surrounded by hundreds of the globes, and they were striking at unprotected parts of him far too much for his liking. So he called up more of the smoke, until he was completely obscured behind it.

Exactly as planned.

It's a trite old saying, but a true one, that says that all the darkness in the world can be banished by a single candle. Wrapped up in his cloud, the Grey Man was far from a universe-worth of darkness, and when all those spheres made one concerted attack, it was a hell of a lot more than one candleworth of light. The cloud was blown into fragments, the Grey Man still trapped inside the fragmented wisps.

This bought me several precious seconds, while Grey was trying to pull himself back into a coherent shape. I trapped each wisp of fog in a bubble of light. Then I sent them to a rather nasty Plane: One made up of thoughts of pain.

Sadly, Key Figures remain a part of you, however far from you they may be, so when all those containment spheres I sent there arrived, I developed a sudden sharp headache. I immediately caused the spheres to burst open, and return to me, leaving the Grey Man to try and pull himself together while his whole body was being bombarded with pain energy.

He managed it fairly fast, too. I think it only took him about five minutes to get out of the Pain Plane and come hunting me down. I was still in the Between, and when he came after me, I started ricocheting off the spheres, forcing him to chase me. After quite a few rebounds, though, instead of bouncing off the sphere I was aimed at, I flew round it, in a tight curve.

The sudden change in direction was neither an attempt to throw the Grey Man off my trail, nor was it a random change in direction. I was heading to a very specific Plane, but didn’t want Grey to know that.

To make sure he didn’t realise where we were headed, I gave him a little distraction: I started to leave bubbles in my trail. They didn’t attack Grey, they simply went pop with a loud “Bang” and a bright flash when he got near to them. Totally harmless, but they made him concentrate solely on me, rather than on where we were.

As a result, when I finally burst into a Plane, he followed me without thinking about where we were. His mistake.

The Plane I had brought us to was the only one I could think of where he would have no power over the occupants: A plane made up of, and populated by, the thought energy of male fantasies. I had visited it once or twice before. It was populated solely by very attractive women, all of whom would make a nymphomaniac human look like a nun. There was NOTHING they wouldn’t do for fun.

The absolute LAST kind of women the embodiment of Rape wants to me, as there was nothing he could do to them they wouldn’t thoroughly enjoy.

As I had predicted, they all immediately leapt on him, the way they always do when a male enters their Plane. They would have done the same to me, but as soon as I had entered the Plane, I had changed shape to be a tiny spark of light, which they weren’t interested in. The Grey Man was not so lucky, and he was swamped by a group of lustful women. Most men would have enjoyed that, but his entire reason to exist was to inflict pain on others, and he couldn’t do that to these women. He was powerless.

While the women were distracting him, I sneaked up close, and changing quickly back to my own shape, I wrenched his knife away from him, and threw it as far away as I possibly could. Then I changed back to a spark again, barely fast enough to avoid the ladies’ attention.

Having robbed him of one of his major powers, and weakened him with the various strategies of blowing him up, sending him to a place of torture, tricking him into a Plane where he was powerless, and separating him from a major part of his Self, I decided it was time to end the matter once and for all.

This was a bit of a problem though: You can’t actually kill an Archetype. After all, they are all focus points for a certain aspect of human thought, and humans will not stop thinking those thoughts just because you beat up their Archetype. So how could I get rid of the Grey Man?

There was only one way had been able to think of, and it wasn’t a very nice one. But, it should solve all the problems. I scattered all the women in the area away from us, and created a light barrier to keep them out. To give myself the greatest possible advantage, I had to keep the Grey Man in that Plane, so I pinned him down with magical ropes.

“You shouldn’t have pushed it, Grey. All you had to do was leave my friend alone, and none of this would have happened.” I said. He just snarled at me. “I could just leave you here like this, you know. You aren’t strong enough here to break free.”

He sneered “You’d never have a moments peace, knowing I was here. I know what you’re planning to do.”

“Oh really? What would that be?”

“You know there’s only one way to get rid of my kind: By absorbing our essence, and hoping you’re strong enough to contain it without damage.”

He was right. That WAS the only way to remove him permanently. In theory, when you forcibly draw an Astral being into yourself, it should be ‘diluted’ enough to not affect you very much. It also means that you gain quite a bit of the power that that being possessed. It’s not something I’ve ever really wanted to put to the test.

“That’s right. Goodbye, Grey.” I raised my hand, and punched my fist through his chest. A grim, pained smile crossed his face, and I knew what he was thinking: He planned to let me do it, believing that he was powerful enough to overcome my own nature with his own.

Who knows, he may even have been right. We’ll never know, because when I pulled my arm free, hundreds of huge black spiders poured out of the hole in his chest.

This had been my plan from the very start, right up to making Grey believe I was going to draw him into myself. Poised as he was to be drawn into me, the sudden change of situation was too much for him to deal with. The spiders were creatures I had transported here from an Arachnophobic Plane: They were manifestations of human’s fear of spiders. As such, they had a lot in common with the Grey Man. Enough so that by consuming him, they would grow in size and power. And they set to with amazing speed; the Grey Man’s frenzied struggles did him no good at all. He was gone in less than a minute.

When they had finished their meal, the spiders were noticeably bigger and nastier-looking than before. Some had, naturally, become bigger than others, and they immediately started to attack the smaller members of their swarm.

Since this presented a danger of all of the Grey Man’s essence being concentrated into one spider, allowing him to return, I transported the spiders back to their own Plane, each to a different part of it. I imagine that they started eating all the other, smaller spiders, which would have diluted Grey’s essence even more. He was gone. My friend and I could both sleep easily again.

A happy ending all round, other than for Grey himself. But who cares what spider food thinks?