The crimson witch

and the dragon called Kaliglia, waiting for the perfect opportunity…

Chapter Three: THE RITUAL OF PASSING
        
        Jake leaned against the saddle of the dragon's shoulders and watched the ravine slide by them, steam hissing up like great ghost snakes, the roar of water-to-steam, steam-to-water dying behind them. The mammoth beast was only lumbering at what was, for it, an easy pace (being none too anxious to pass into the kingdom of Lelar where its stories would no longer be stories but fragments of a reality). Even so, they were moving, because of the monster's stride, faster than a stout and healthy man could run. As darkness drifted upon the land, what little light there was now screened by the thick storm clouds, the bridge lay only a half an hour ahead. They could reach it easily enough tonight and move tomorrow into the evil kingdom with the six-hundred-year-old-potentate watching over them.
        He shook his head, listened to his walnut shell necklace rattle. He needed that sound, that familiar clacking that was a touch with reality. None of this seemed real. The Sorceress Kell popped into his mind; he could see her dressed in burlap and cotton, a gypsy band about her head to hold her gray hair out of her eyes. She did not seem real. She was more like something dredged out of a childhood fairy tale. Then Kell was gone, followed by an image of the dragon he now rode. A talking dragon. An intelligent dragon. His slim hold on reality was broken altogether. Surely a talking dragon had been something he had seen on television, something in a cartoon one Saturday morning that now stuck with him and showed up here in his fantasy. Then the dragon was gone, too, replaced now by the crimson-robed witch, the girl he had borne to the ground back there. She was like something in an erotic novel. Her legs were lovely, perhaps the best-shaped legs he had ever seen. Her belly was flat, unadorned by an ounce of fat, as solid as the stomach of a young boy. Her breasts were very womanly, however, handfuls of soft, resilient flesh that trembled like jelly in his hands but looked like finely carved marble to his eyes. And her face… Cherub's face… Yes, it was all too pat. Most likely, he had been in an accident on his scooter and was now suffering a brain concussion, strapped into some hospital bed somewhere with anxious friends crowded around waiting for signs of life…
        No. No use deluding himself. It wasn't like that at all. There had been no accident. He was alive, well, conscious. He could remember very clearly how he had gotten here. He could remember who he had been and what had happened that night before he had run into the Sorceress Kell.
        The jogging of the dragon's step was hypnotic, threading his mind back through itself, bringing him memories of that other world, that other rime line, that last night before he had left his world and stepped into this one…
        He was Jake Turnet, twenty-one years of age, a child now grown to be a man.
        He was the son of Arnold Turnet, the founder and developer of Turnet Munitions, Incorporated.
        And he was a drop-out.
        His father had shepherded him successfully through high school. His father had chosen his curriculum for him, had chosen his activities, had chosen his friends. His father, indeed, had even decided what girls were social equals, establishing a list of those Jake Turnet could date and those he could not. His father had corralled him into thinking that, more than anything else, he wanted to pick up the reins of the family industry, that he wanted to supervise the making of bombs and bullets and napalm and mustard gas. His dreams were of death, and his conversation was one of kill ratios and death statistics.
        His father took him often to look down upon the main plant from their private heliocopter. They would soar high, taking in the entire complex. It covered well over two hundred acres and employed some four thousand hustling souls. “This will all be yours one day,” his father would say. And he would look and nod and smile.
        But down inside somewhere, buried beneath his calloused emotions, there was a part of him that was not smiling-that could not smile. There was a part of him that screamed out that he wouldn't take over Turnet Munitions, Incorporated, would never be a part of it. But he studiously repressed that voice, thinking it the common reactionary force that all young men harbor