Snow So White: Urban Magick & Folklore by C. Gockel

Author:C. Gockel [Gockel, C.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2022-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

Cursing, Jack frantically dragged his hand through the snow drift, sculpting towers nearly as tall as him, and shorter buildings, trees, and parklands.

Solien could not bring Cherie to his prison—Jack was at the heart of downtown, surrounded by iron and steel, but even if that weren’t the case, Chicago wasn’t some small town with a single dominating mythos. It had been—was—a sprawling metropolis with distinct ethnic enclaves—not every portal opened to Fairy.

Unbidden, one of his professors from University and a former officer from the Magickal Corp sprang into existence. The two men, who had never met in real life, spoke in unison in the dream. “We’re not sure if it is the collective consciousness of humans that summons their respective mythologies and portal intersections, or if the barriers between the worlds of their respective mythos were weak in places to begin with, and their mythos bled through and summoned human believers to them.” Finishing that remedial lecture, the officer casually stepped on a tower Jack had built. The professor sat on another.

“I know!” Jack shouted. “Begone.” He blasted them with snow, and they vanished.

Solien would have to have taken Cherie to a place where the barrier between Fairy and the human world was weak enough to open a portal, and it would be in a place where the local humans had experience with the Fae. There were the German enclaves on the North Side and the Swedish in Andersonville. There were also the Irish neighborhoods. He’d read that Lakeview to the north had the largest number of Irish residents. But you couldn’t say “Irish in Chicago” without mentioning the smaller communities of the “Southside Irish.” They’d been in Mt. Greenwood, Morgan Park, and Beverly. He seized on Beverly, mostly because his brain immediately recognized the rhyming potential. There was a park near there, the Dan Ryan Woods. He’d only driven past and mostly knew the area as a vaguely hatchet-shaped slab of green on a map, but he frantically began shaping snow into rolling hills and trees. He chanted … “Cherie, Cherie, you must be in Beverly …”

But was she? How much time had passed in her world? He was asleep, and time passed strangely in sleep. The “Somer house” he’d built had ordered his mind, kept him more reliably to a schedule that mirrored the real world, but now he was lost in the endless snowscape of dreamtime. He hadn’t realized he’d been asleep for nearly two centuries until he’d found his way to Somer. As much time could have passed again. And it could take days for Solien to reach Chicago from the portal that he’d opened in Pennsylvania. Or not. The worlds did not lie upon one another like neatly stacked sheets of paper; they were more like—

The professor and the officer reappeared. “—like loose piles of blankets.”

The officer continued, “Which is why order is so important in our own world. If this world is disorganized, the chaos is even greater.”

That had been the official position of the military, his stepmother … him.

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