Fragments of Alchemy: The Code Keeper

The Fourth Dimension

Thea followed her parents downstairs and back outside, her noctos close behind. She turned to look at the ranch house, wondering if this would be the last time she saw it. She couldn’t help but think about all her childhood memories in this amazing place. Would she ever come back? “So how do we get to Blackthorn and Burtree?” Thea asked, trying not to show how heavy her heart felt.

“I thought we’d Dimension Walk,” Aunt Fanella said, as though she had suggested they take an airplane instead of drive a car.

“Dimension what?” Thea said.

“You’ll just have to wait and see, Thea,” Aunt Fanella said with a big grin. Thea was starting to wonder if her aunt took enjoyment in giving her a hard time.

“This is as good a spot as any,” Aunt Fanella said when they reached the fenced in yard, so they all set their things down in the buffalo grass. Her father performed another Reduction Conversion to shrink Thea’s noctos to fit in the palm of her hand.

Thea flattened herself out on her belly and stared. “Wow,” she muttered as the tiny Chimaera pranced around, still dragging her overly large wings in the dirt. She carefully held out her hand, and the Chimaera jumped up onto her palm and lay down with her legs tucked underneath herself. She pulled her wings up and folded them down against her back, and she closed her eyes so it looked like she was asleep.

Thea carefully stood up with her Chimaera cupped in her hand like a little fluffy cotton ball. Using a knife, Aunt Fanella had carved a large Conversion Circle in the grass. A circle within a circle with a six-point star inside and in the center, a curious Symbol that looked like a backwards S over a riverbed. With careful precision, she sprinkled a white powder into the grooves in the grass, redrawing the Circle with the sparkling dust. From a pocket, she pulled a large natural diamond in the shape of an octahedron; she held it in front of her Symbol and said, “Spatium!”

And before Thea’s eyes there opened a portal to another dimension.

The portal flashed translucent-white, a large white circle on the ground, which gave off a beautiful pillar of light that shot up toward the sky. The pillar seemed to bend inward slightly about fifteen feet up, and then it flared outward again and faded into the sky. It reminded Thea of a tree trunk. “Is this like teleporting?!” Thea exclaimed.

Her father laughed. “In a way. Dimension Walking uses the Teleportation Conversion, but it’s not quite like teleporting. You know, Recreants have science fiction novels with teleportation in them. It’s an interesting concept for them, since their science has proven that matter cannot travel faster than the speed of light, because when matter reaches the speed of light, time stops.”

“Science?” Thea asked, really looking at her father. “I thought this was magic, not science.”

“It’s neither science nor magic. Alchemy is the natural order of things, and at its very essence, science attempts to explain and manipulate the natural order of things.” He sat down in the yard and gestured for Thea to join him. Thea knelt next to her father and prepared herself for a lesson. This closely resembled Thea’s typical schooling experience. “Allie, we have studied science all these years, because of how accurately it represents the universe we live in.”

“What does science have to do with Dimension Walking?” Thea asked.

“Plenty. Our perception of this world is in three dimensions. Height, width, and depth.” As he explained, he drew the top, face, and side of a cube in a nearby patch of dirt. “But science has known for a while now that there is a fourth dimension, which is time. Now, to us, this fourth dimension behaves like a straight line.” He drew a line moving away from his cube in the dirt. “And that’s because we can only perceive the present manifestation of time, and we can only look back on our timeline without manipulating it, and we cannot see our own future because that line hasn’t been drawn yet, so to speak. But we know because of science that this understanding of time as a line is limited.”

“Are you talking about time travel or alternate dimensions or something?” Thea asked skeptically. She knew about this because along with all her fantasy novels, she had a decent collection of science fiction novels stashed away in her rucksack. Thea had learned how to write her own stories from devouring these treasured books.

“Alas, no,” he said. “We who have traveled to the fourth dimension know that only those who are from the fourth dimension can travel through time and manipulate alternate dimensions. But from that dimensional vantage point we can glimpse past and future by looking inward into our own depths and outward into our own expanses. That is what astral protection is all about, but don’t get me sidetracked with that.”

Thea smiled at her father.

“Now, before we step into Time-Space, I must prepare you. Allie, will you explain to us how the human eye works.”

Thea cleared her throat, making her aunt snicker, though she seemed very interested to hear what Thea would say. “Our eyes are like a camera,” Thea began. “The lens focuses images that enter our eyes through the pupil, and the retina catches the images, kind of like film, and sends the signals to the brain where we interpret them.”

“What is necessary in order for images to be focused on the retina?” he asked.

Thea furrowed her brow. “Um … light, I guess? Without light, we couldn’t see anything.”

“Very true,” he said. “Now then, we are three-dimensional beings, but have you ever thought about what dimension we see in?”

“We see in—” Thea stopped herself before she said that the eye could see in three dimensions, because she realized that wasn’t necessarily true. “I guess … we can perceive in three dimensions, but just like a camera, what we see is still pretty much flat, because of the shape of our retinas, right?”

“Precisely! We might see in two dimensions but we use spatial reasoning to comprehend our three-dimensional world.” Her father was excited now. “So imagine a being from the fourth dimension, who can see not in flat two dimensions, but in three dimensions. That being could perceive any solid three-dimensional object completely.” He finished drawing his cube in the dirt, so that all sides were now visible, revealing those faces of the cube that should have been out of sight, blocked by the front and side of the cube. “It’s as if they perceive the internal structure of everything. True three-dimensional sight!”

Thea let out a huff of air, truly enthralled by the thought.

“Allie, that is what it’s like in the fourth dimension. When we step into that portal, we will see everything completely. Gifted Alchemists can even glimpse the past and future, but it is impossibly hard to decipher. Imagine a camera fixed on a single place for all time, with the lens opened eternally, capturing all images that have ever happened and will ever happen in that one place.”

Thea whistled in amazement.

“If you do glimpse Infinimages, as we have come to call them, it’s best to ignore them before they enthrall you, and focus instead on staying with the three-dimensional travelers you have brought along your journey, especially on your first excursion through time.”

Thea nodded as she committed all this information to memory.

“Don’t you think this is a bit too much information?” Aunt Fanella asked. “How in High Heaven will she remember it all?”

“Thea has a perfect memory,” her mother said. “She can remember moments from when she was three years old, and not just big significant moments. Everyday occurrences, random facts, trivial information. No matter what it is, Thea can always remember, given enough time for recollection. Our daughter is gifted in many ways.” She flashed a proud smile.

When her mother said that, she sounded like she believed her daughter was perfect. The thought made Thea uncomfortable. Being a perfect person was impossible, but her mother had always treated Thea this way. It was an awful lot of pressure to live under, day in and day out.

Her parents had always treated her so differently in this regard. On the one hand, Thea’s father was always critiquing Thea’s every move. She felt she had to always get a little bit better at everything when she was around her father, and her mistakes were always harshly criticized. Thea knew that her father was well aware of how much pressure this put on Thea. He told her all the time that this pressure would help her fix her mistakes. So, for example, the next whirlwind kick would land, because she learned from her mistake.

Her mother, on the other hand, seemed oblivious to how much pressure she put on her daughter. In a completely different way, her mother had always put even more pressure on Thea. She was constantly praising Thea for all the marvelous things she was always doing, as though she was amazed at how simply perfect her daughter was. This sort of talk certainly came with a different kind of pressure. She might feel motivated to avoid making mistakes around her father, knowing that she would need to show improvement day in and day out. But around her mother, Thea felt like she had to be absolutely perfect. Mistakes were simply out of the question.

Thea always tried hard not to show how tiring it was to live under all this pressure. Now, after hearing those words from her mother, Thea only forced herself to smile and said, “I remember everything you said about the Crystal Dimension. Is there anything else I need to know?”

“If you say so; I’ll tell you the most important thing to remember,” Aunt Fanella said. “We must do our best to travel through the fourth dimension quickly, so as to spend as little Eternitime as possible there.”

“Eternitime?” Thea asked, raising her eyebrows.

“Eternitime, yes,” Aunt Fanella said. “Because the fourth dimension is literally three dimensions of space locked in one moment of eternal time, it is difficult to grasp our experiences in that realm. So much of our lives are colored with our perceptions of time and space and distance and speed. Our ability to perceive these aspects of our lives, and even how far we have to travel, will all be skewed by Eternitime.

“In the eternity of the Crystal Dimension, there is no such thing as a passage of time or a speed of travel. Hence, the concept of Eternitime. We must will our brains to perceive time passing even though it is literally impossible for time to pass while in the fourth dimension. And we must will our minds to perceive speed as we move through space.”

“Okay…” Thea said, feeling completely and utterly confused. “So, we can’t spend too much time—I mean Eternitime—in the fourth dimension because…?”

“We will literally go insane if we lose track of the flow of Eternitime,” Aunt Fanella explained.

Thea gulped. Given all the rules and dangers, she simply couldn’t comprehend why anyone would choose to Dimension Walk.

“Oh, and one more important point,” her dad added. “In order to travel with someone through the fourth dimension, you must enter at the exact same point in time, because once you enter, time will no longer behave as we perceive it here in the third dimension. I liken it to missing your flight or getting on the wrong bus. We must travel to the exact same moment in time or we will be lost from each other. The best way is to join hands around the portal and walk into it on the count of three.”

“Shall we be off, then?” her mother said. Thea hesitantly got to her feet, brushing the dirt off her knees. She gulped and nodded.

Fanella smiled at them. “I remember my first Dimension Walk,” she said. “Brace yourself; it’s a wild ride.”

Thea squared her shoulders and jutted her chin up. Then she carefully slipped her noctos into her jacket pocket and hitched her rucksack up onto her shoulders. Finally, she reached out for her parents’ hands. With his large trunk under one arm, her father could only hold on with one hand, so he took Thea’s left, then her mother took Thea’s right hand, and with her other she held onto Fanella, who had grabbed the duffle bag with her spare hand. Together they formed a semicircle around the circle of light on the ground. Thea took a deep breath as Aunt Fanella counted, “One, two!” And on three, they walked into the light.