JET 8.3: NO WAY OUT
“They are who they are, while your identity floats in an unfixed state of being. Is it so surprising that they fail to recognise you for what you are not? Believe me, you were not born for this world! The World awaits!”
– from ‘The Book of Kultemeren’, 2:213-217
For every space, there was a corresponding location in each immaterial plane – or perhaps the scholars were wrong, and if there was no cavern already present in Infernum that mirrored the Inceryad’s chamber, one would create itself now for us, in anticipation of our arrival, accommodating our earthly flesh with open arms. Many sorcerers of years gone by had catalogued the features of the various dimensional realms, from the singing orchards and rainbow palaces of Hiriel, the hewn-down mountains and silver seas of Aedervaen, to the plague lakes and bone-glass towers of Abyssinion, the silent deserts and bloody waters of Inner Nethernum. However, we were technically within the bounds of Mund, which was, according to those same scholars, no special place in the other worlds. Any fey lord, demon lord, undead lord – any powerful entity seeking to settle in the area would’ve long-since been moved on by the incessant intrusions of the city’s archmages. It was something of a wasteland, all things considered. Yet Materium had rules it had to follow, locked into a delicate equilibrium by the gods, whose abilities to act were in turn bound by their myriad compromises. The other planes followed other rules, slanted more towards certain gods than their counterparts. Or, in Infernum’s case, very few rules. I didn’t know what to expect here.
The mizelikon’s crimson flame deposited us on the floor of a vast, empty cathedral, carved from what looked like sandstone. Even as we coalesced on the other side of the gateway, I felt the power stutter and die – the oily creature collapsed in on itself and I looked down at it. Draped over my legs there was only a crusty black substance, crispy on top, wet beneath.
The remains of the mizelikon. Slowly, flakes started to drift away, lighter than whatever passed for air in the Twelve Hells. And as the fire died, so did the light. We were plunged into darkness.
I’d drained it dry, and now its corpse was the only thing keeping me alive, keeping me from bleeding out all over the place.
“Kas?” Rathal didn’t sound worried so much as frustrated.
I breathed deeply of the reeking infernal air and shook my head. The three of us were a mess, but we were still numbered amongst the living. That was all that mattered.
Careful to ensure Temcar was still propped up against me, I moved Rath’s hand to my shoulder and then gestured for Avaelar.
Green sparks danced on the air, but they wouldn’t resolve themselves into the curtain of emerald energy I needed.
“You can do it,” Rath said. “You will do it. I know it.”
Eight tries. It took eight tries, and I was almost spent – I almost wept with relief when at last the green fire answered.
“See,” the seer said quietly.
I brought Avaelar through very close-by, and I was touching him on the toned, bronze knee as he entered. The tall sylph immediately bent, putting his fingertips on my shoulder.
“Master – Feychilde!” he sobbed. “I had thought thee forever barred from the outer planes! I consulted with diverse entities, whose counsel brought me to the conclu-”
“Avaelar, please,” I said in Etheric. I was struggling to move my lips; it was a small mercy he wasn’t wasting time complaining about being brought to Infernum, and into a puddle of mizelikon remains for that matter. “Breathe on me. Don’t let me pass out. And… keep touching me. I… I don’t think I can bring you through twice.”
The honeyed breath emanating from the sylph’s lips was a balm unlike anything I could’ve hoped for, sweeter by far than memory painted it. I sensed the lacerations about my hands and midriff sealing closed, the worse ones about my legs knitting themselves together again – but the pain relief was something else entirely. I felt like I was floating on the honey he breathed over me, bathing in a slow-moving river of the sweet stuff, covering me head to toes in a tingling sensation.
The external injuries, those were dealt with almost instantly, but the internal ones – the pulped foot, damaged backbone, snapped elbow, missing teeth – not so much. He couldn’t actually regenerate any body-parts – arch-druidry would be required for that kind of task, or at least very advanced druidry – but it didn’t matter much to me right now. I could breathe again, talk properly again without feeling like I was juggling tomatoes inside my mouth.
Within seconds I felt immeasurably better, but I waited a minute or two before letting him work on the others – it wasn’t selfish, really, so much as it was practical. If I faded now, we all went back, and with no second helping of eldritch-juice we would be doomed to Zyger forever. So Rath, Tem and I sat there back-to-back as Avaelar went between us, healing each of us in turn, moving around and around the little triangle we made of our bodies, his hand fixed to the crown of my head.
After a little while, I summoned up the strength to call Zabalam, and the little gremlin sat snugly in my lap, getting far too comfortable for my liking. He used his glamour to light our surroundings, and by the clear white radiance he created we could see that the stone upon which we were sitting was, overall, pus-yellow. It seemed to be mottled with other shades: brownish speckles; orangey chunks; a fine film of grey dust over the top of it all. When I raised my fingertips from the floor to my nostrils I got that scent from the dust: acrid, bile or excrement – disgusting. And it was everywhere, great clouds of the filthy stuff entering our lungs with every inhalation – the whole cuboid space was that same off-orange hue, the cursed particles covering everything.
When Tem suddenly woke up, violently attempting to get to his feet out of sheer instinct, Avaelar was on hand to push him back into place before he broke contact with me.
“You’re in Infernum,” I called. The three of us were facing outward, so I couldn’t see him, but I knew he could hear me. “If you stop touching me you’ll be sent back to the Inceryad chamber. You want to go there, be my guest.”
“What the hell!” Tem cried back. “What is this thing? A demon?”
“I,” Avaelar infused the single syllable with such haughtiness that I couldn’t help but smile, “am a sylph.”
“And hell’s the right word for it,” I followed up. “Infernum, or Materium. Your choice. But I think we can get back from here, if I understand right. We can escape. You both have your powers back?”
Rath grunted again, sounding distracted. Small wonder he wasn’t talking much right now – if the future-paths were opening up to him again, it might take him a while to get his head back in the present.
Temcar had wonder in his voice as he responded: “Oh – oh yes. I can see your thoughts, Feychilde! And yours… oh… oh gods, D-Duskdown…”
“Stay out of my head,” Rath grated.
“Y-y-yeah, yes sir,” the enchanter confirmed with a shudder.
“The way I understand it,” Rath said, changing the topic, “we need your seal to stick around, Kas.”
“I don’t really fancy cutting into your flesh with infernal rock, to be fair.”
“Ha. You may have a point.”
“What do we do if you fall asleep?” Tem asked.
I shook my head. “I’ve read up on this stuff. We can’t stay here that long – I can’t sleep here. Something to do with how dreaming works, and the transportation of souls, blah blah blah… Apparently just shutting my eyes and doing nothing will reenergise me when I’m in another dimension, but I’d be ‘tapping the plane’ or whatever, and who knows what I’d end up seeing, or hearing –“
“I’m starting to see routes out,” Rath said tersely. “Give me a few minutes.”
“Fantastic.” I sighed in relief. “Besides, if you guys stayed too long you’d be stuck here. We need to keep moving. A few minutes… and we’ll head off. I just… I can’t believe we made it.”
“We escaped Zyger.” Rath said it in a matter-of-fact tone. “We escaped Magicrux Zyger.”
“It just doesn’t, doesn’t seem feasible.” I closed my eyes, thinking it through. “Is it possible we’re under some kind of enchantment?”
Both of them replied in the negative.
Unless they’re both illusions, I reminded myself. Such a thing was possible, wasn’t it?
Yet, for an enchanter to so closely replicate the sensations of using my sorcerous powers…
It wasn’t like I had much choice, was it? I had to continue. I had to act as though I were free, even if at the back of my mind there’d always be this little sliver of doubt.
“So this really is Infernum?” Tem sounded less scared now, more optimistic. “It doesn’t look so bad, does it?”
The vile, mottled stone upon which we sat was everywhere, a flat expanse stretching off beyond the light. We were in the centre of a space like a great hall of men, almost a hundred feet across – Zab’s light was only just splashing up the right angles of the walls on either side of us. And the light only touched the two opposing walls. It was entirely possible that, rather than being in a box, we were in some kind of trench. A huge, perfectly-smoothed trench.
All in all, Temcar was right – it didn’t look so bad. Certainly it was nothing like I’d imagined it – this was no fire-pit filled with tortured souls and demonic gaolers, even if such places did exist on other parts of the plane. The scent was charcoal and dust, not necessarily that of roasted flesh.
But for whatever reason, once he said those words I felt an ominous presence, something weighing on my mind.
There were things out there, in the darkness, I suspected. Things out of reach of the fey-light – things above us, looking down, watching.
I stretched out with my senses like I’d never done with demons until the last Incursion, trying to touch the fiends up there beyond Zab’s radiance with sorcerous fingertips.
As I’d previous experienced, demons were too chaotic in nature for me to recognise anything but stature, an overall assessment of potency. Perhaps that was how demons so different in apparent strength had been so efficiently ranked by my predecessors.
I knew at a single brush that the thing up there was stronger than anything I’d ever touched before.
Not things. Just thing.
I had demons I could summon – tough ones, like Khikiriaz, Mr. and Mrs. Cuddlesticks, and maybe even some kind of octopus if memory served… But this behemoth was at least ten times bigger than all of them put together. Two or three times the size of the smikelliol I’d watched Leafcloak chomp down on at my first Incursion.
I couldn’t summon – I couldn’t afford to waste my energies. I could feel the power, slowly accumulating within me. I was like a cup, water constantly flowing in, overflowing until I used my abilities, the spells and eldritches that depleted my reserves – the Inceryad had emptied the cup faster than it could be filled, draining it dry, but I was recovering quickly.
Perhaps not quickly-enough…
“Just to mention –“
“Don’t, Kas,” Rath said wearily. “Please, just don’t.”
I closed my mouth.
“What?” Tem asked. “What is it?”
“Better left unsaid,” the diviner replied with a note of finality.
“I – okay, R-Rath… Hey, can anyone else hear that?”
Now that he mentioned it, I could.
“I feel it too,” I said, putting my least-damaged hand on the ground beside me. The floor itself was starting to vibrate, the dust puffing up, tickling my skin like tiny hairs.
There was a sound, far-off: a dull, deep rumble. Coming closer.
“Okay.” Rath sounded resolved. “Take both our shoulders and we’ll help you walk. Gremlin in front, sylph behind, we head to the wall. Stand together. This way.”
Even as the diviner slowly helped us get to our feet without breaking contact with one another, without me putting weight on my pulverised foot or jarring my bad elbow, the enchanter started asking again what was happening, what the sound was.
We’d only covered about half the distance to the wall – I could still feel flakes of mizelikon drifting off my legs when he grumbled, “Look, if you don’t want me to check inside your minds –“
“Mr. Cossoran. Please.”
It wasn’t Rath asking anymore – it was Duskdown’s all-knowing voice, its threat barely hidden.
Temcar didn’t speak again for a while and when he did, it wasn’t to ask questions.
Following the seer’s directions, we put our backs to the wall of the box, trench, cathedral – wherever the hell we were – and sat down again.
We waited, as the sound increased in volume, doubling and redoubling, so loud that it didn’t even seem possible –
But we were in Infernum. Anything was possible.
Fifteen minutes, at least. Fifteen minutes, and for the last three we couldn’t even talk, could barely even sit still as the floor shook, shook like a bed-sheet in the breeze, jaws filled with a million iron teeth grinding down on a million mail-clad warriors. Grinding closer, closer.
I trust Rath, I realised. I wasn’t looking for other avenues of escape. I was content to let him guide us.
If we die here, it’s possible our souls stay here forever. No one really knows for sure.
I was glad to be alone with my thoughts, my terror; I would’ve thanked Yune that Temcar didn’t think of creating a link, but I very much doubted she’d hear me from here.
When the mountainous object approached around what must’ve been a bend, I thought I was seeing things. Suddenly the darkness looming over us on our left was two-tone, something glinting there, a silver-blackness coming closer, lit by some source of light I couldn’t perceive – it was as though the darkness was rolling towards us and falling, always falling, like a metallic waterfall of shadow –
It was a wheel. A metal wheel. More metal in a single object than should’ve been contained in a hundred mountains. It was facing us, oncoming, spinning right at us.
It had to be over a thousand feet high. This trench would only hold its very base, I imagined.
The ground didn’t tremble – it quaked. The sound was intolerable.
“Hold on!” I thought I heard Rath scream.
Surprisingly, it was my sylph’s hand that trembled the most, it seemed, clutching at me with a desperate strength to match his shaking.
Then we were all screaming. The wheel was so huge that its curve hung over us for seconds – then it cut off the world in front of us like a dizzying wall, giving us less than a foot of breathing room as it rolled on past us. In the one instant Zab’s light was bleeding out into the emptiness – then suddenly it illuminated the side of the unfathomably-huge metal disc. The off-black metal surface was a whirlpool of night, gleaming like a dark mirror.
We were being tossed about so we gripped each other tightly, and it was only by virtue of the fact we had to hold onto one another that one or more of us weren’t pulled in to touch the thing. Touching it would surely shave away the offending limb, at least…
Was it the wheel of some yet-vaster cart, with us simply being in the rut of its tracks? Or was it a tool of some kind, fixed to a central gear and set to trundle around a – what? – several-mile-long groove?
I had no idea, could hardly imagine such immense machinery…
Nor the creatures who might put such inventions to use.
Yet, perhaps it was just a demon – a very strange demon that didn’t even register on my scales. There were apparently thirty-three ranks… and the eolastyr had only been a twentieth-rank fiend. Well, according to a lying liar I used to know, at least.
Then it had passed us by, the dark wall vanishing off to my right, Zab’s light flooding once more across the emptiness. The dust-clouds stirred to and fro even more-violently in its wake.
The clamour quietened more quickly than it had built, but the ringing in my ears was so complete that only one thing was coming through.
“Avvie! You can stop screaming now!”
“Aaaiiaaaaiiiaaaiaaiiaiaaaa…!”
“Essel majhar! Nevae ma!”
By the time I got him to shut up, my ears were hurting more from his incessant shrilling than the remembered pain of the metal wheel.
“Sweet Nentheleme, man,” I complained, “have you been practising your yodelling or something? That was insane – what’s wrong with you?”
“I – am – not – comfortable here, Feychilde!” The sylph sounded far more distraught than I’d thought him, even given his shakiness. “I was not made for this!”
“I think I might need healing again, after that,” Temcar muttered, and poked at one of the several ugly bruises hanging out on his chin.
I tongued the empty spaces in my mouth, the newly-sealed gums. “So what’s the plan now?” I asked Rath, trying to ignore the enchanter. “I could do with finding an arch-druid and getting fixed up before too long.”
“It’s Fangmoon you want to see –“
“Fang? Are you certain?”
He paused for a moment, then started over, as though he were speaking to a child. I tried not to gulp the fetid air while he ran through our options. I’d forgotten what it was like to listen to an arch-diviner when their abilities were flowing.
“Its Fangmoon you want to see for your healing. Spiritwhisper won’t enter her head for anything pertinent for a minimum of fifty-seven days, and in all likelihood never will. However, I can’t see into Etherium or Nethernum, which is troubling. I don’t know if that’s because planar travel is too dangerous, or if it’s just a quirk of the future-sight tripping over the dimensional boundaries… I have never plotted a course that led to such places before. In this it is revealed that I am no sorcerer in spite of my knowledge, and I would defer to your wisdom, but I see you have no idea either… ha. And so to other considerations.
“You have at your disposal a diverse array of demons, capable of travel within Infernum; capable, moreover, of conveying us upwards. You have far fewer fey of note – you do disappoint, Master Feychilde – but if our luck holds and Etherium also has an open means of ascent, well… Etherium is the more appealing notion, obviously. Nethernum is the worst of both worlds, given the comparative strengths of your eldritches, the relative danger of each world…”
“In other words, you don’t know what I should do,” I grated. “I don’t know how long it’ll take me to get the power together to create a portal big enough for the lot of us – it might be I have enough already, enough for ten goes! But I won’t know till I try and if I try and I fail…”
I tipped my head back, shuddering, remembering the feeling of the huge beast up there, looming over the trench, the track, whatever the cursed pit we’d found ourselves in was designed for…
I tipped my head back, looking directly upwards.
I managed to choke the strangled words out even as I started putting together green sparks. “Y-y-you couldn’t s-see that?”
I sensed it as the others also looked up.
“No,” Rath breathed. “No, I could not.”
Any notion of scale I might have once possessed was thrown off. A pair of colossal red eyes were gazing down at us, glowing of their own eerie light, and even if as I’d fancied at first that the walls of the trench were only a hundred feet high – even then these eyes would describe a monster capable of crushing Ord Ylon underfoot. But I suspected – I suspected I had it all wrong: that the trench walls were far higher; that this thing loomed so far above us, we were ants on a table before it.
Thousands of times bigger than Ord Ylon. Eyes alone bigger than Leafcloak at top size.
I brought up a wide green seam of ethereal energy to consume us, and, as I did so, the two vast eyes blinked. It almost felt as though the creature up there were recognising me, somehow, like dipping your hat or touching your hood.
Then the verdant wave receded, and we were sitting on a bed of glowing white mushrooms and softly-stirring moss. The gremlin-lit air was musty with warm scents, like a harvest breeze in autumn. The living lichen of Etherium crawled slowly about the cavern’s rocks, itinerant pillows of waxlike vegetation ambling here and there, trailing their colourless gossamer webs. The ceiling was covered in the same creatures, save for where shafts of pale crystal jutted through the rock, descending like stalactites. Or was it stalagmites? I could never remember. I’d never actually been in a cave, not until I woke up beneath Zadhal.
This was far nicer. Other than the cavern’s current shambling occupants, we appeared to be alone.
My sylph immediately spread his wings and beat them experimentally in the air, a perfect shining smile on his perfect bronze face. Zabalam, who’d seemed less bothered by Infernum, started hunting a particularly fast lump of lichen around. Rath took a few seconds to locate a suitably-sharp rock which Avaelar retrieved for us; once the diviner had speedily sharpened it on the stone about us, I got to work on my fellow-escapees’ arms, providing them with the seal of an arch-sorcerer. Tem was remarkably calm, given where he’d just been.
Once I was done Rath helped me stand, and, between him and Avaelar, I was able to hobble along. The sylph was forced to carry me at times when it proved impractical for the pair of them to hoist me between them, but I did my best to keep on my own two feet as much as I could, even if one of them was useless now.
We traversed a narrow span across a chasm, made slightly more tolerable for the three of us weary plane-walkers by virtue of the fact my sylph could’ve easily caught anyone who fell. We washed ourselves in the crystal-clear waterfalls, avoiding those streaked with fluorescent pink light. We renewed the sorcerer’s-marks regularly. And we clambered up steep inclines of stone – twice, Avaelar had to leave me on an outcropping and go back for Temcar. Rathal made each ascent seemingly without effort, often appearing early at the crest of the climb, awaiting my arrival seated in a bed of phosphorescent fungi.
“What’s there to eat around here?” Temcar eyed the mushrooms as we sat down for a rest after a particularly sheer slope.
“Eternal condemnation to the plane, for a kick off,” I said. “Drink, but don’t eat, unless you want to become part of the furniture.”
“Now that just doesn’t make any sense.” My fellow Sticktowner was clearly struggling with the concept. “How does the plane know the difference?”
“Does drinking fill you up?” I asked rhetorically.
“Sort of…” he answered, still staring at the weird, incandescent mushrooms. “You keep cutting us with ethereal stone, don’t you? I really fancy… just a few…”
“Come on, Avvie, before Tem turns into a mushroom-goblin.” I lifted my arms to the sylph, who dutifully bent, hefted me up. “The only thing that’s going to fill me up is up there.” I flicked my eyes to the ceiling, high above the quartz-speckled galleries.
When we get high enough, I’ll bring an imp through and mark it. Send it back and forth, look for a way up and out… check that we’re far from Zyger…
If I remembered correctly, sorcerer’s marks were almost unaffected by most druidic healing. A quirk of the type of wound. An imp’s natural regeneration was unlikely to affect it too quickly… It could get several trips off a single seal, I was certain.
And then… the thing that would fill me up better than a basket of Hontor’s pastries, better than a high-lord’s banquet table.
Seeing the twins again.
* * *
“Why do I fear you’re going to be disappointed.” Rath folded his arms across his chest, looking down at me as I sat on the mossy boulder.
“You’d do best to tell me yourself,” I replied, then winced as I felt a twinge in my damaged elbow. “What’s going to be the result?”
“I can’t.” The diviner clenched a fist. “I just…”
“You’re really worried, aren’t you?” Tem asked suddenly, coming up behind Rath with a little malice twinkling in his eyes.
The diviner sighed. “You do realise that the futures in which you –“
“Keep annoying you end in my death…” Temcar smiled nervously at him, then looked at me. “Is threatening to kill you the way he tries to make friends?”
I laughed. “Did you get that from my head? Five, man, that’s not far off it, really…”
“Kas.”
I smiled at Rathal. “What? You want me to go ahead, all of a sudden, do you?”
He sighed again.
“Sorry. Okay, okay. Here goes.”
I waved my hand and panicked.
Red fire flickered, but no imp reached through for my grasp.
“I… I don’t know what’s happening…”
Rath just grunted.
“How is – how could this be –” I vomited the words. Beads of sweat almost instantly sprang out on my brow –
I can feel it! I can feel the power! What is…?
Had I somehow lost it again? Had I lost control?
I dismissed the flame and brought up the green waves of a portal back to Materium – but the opening wouldn’t accept me when I moved it over my arm; its substance was like jelly, non-responsive, unchanging. So I dispelled it and, quivering, raised a blue circle –
The shape went shuddering into being, coming together hardly any slower than when I was in peak condition.
There was nothing wrong with me, and yet –
“My dear companions!”
The male voice was somewhat childlike; jovial in tone, friendly… Overly so. It came from every direction, loud and echoing, speaking in a very natural Mundic accent.
I could tell it was no child. I could tell Mundic was not its native tongue.
The hair raised on the back of my neck, and I looked at the others. The diviner was glaring at the enchanter, whose own eyes wandered about the stone walls. Zabalam leapt at Avaelar’s leg in fright, and the sylph kicked the gremlin off, irritation on the flawless face.
“My dear companions, it has amused me to watch you climb, listen to your lovely chatter! How delightful each of you are! You especially, Rathal Overlorn. Now now, don’t get mad – I can read your mind, that’s all.”
I saw Rath’s eyes narrow on Temcar.
“It’s not him. Haha! Do you think he’d be so stupid? He’s smarter than he looks.”
The enchanter didn’t look particularly pleased to be complimented by the ethereal voice – his eyes were wide-open and he seemed more scared of our rocky surroundings than the arch-diviner threatening him with instantaneous death. As Rath looked at him with violence in mind, the Sticktowner was backing towards Rath for protection. He hadn’t understood the context at all.
“No, Rathal. What tickles me the most is the enchantment placed on your mind. What was her name? Ah, Alandrica! Did you know what she put under your skin? Oh – oh my. It’s still there! You know the accident wasn’t your uncle, don’t you? You know what really happened to dear little Ruthi?”
“Don’t listen, Rath,” I grated. Inside my mind, even the quite ordinary danger-sense possessed by all mortals was blaring, signal-fires racing, compelling me to change the topic immediately. “What do you want?” I cried out, spinning around, looking for someone, anything to direct my words at. “Why are you watching us, and why are you stopping me open my gateways?”
“Did you think escape from… ‘Magicrux Zyger’ would be so simple, young sorcerer? Hahahahahaha!”
He was properly laughing. Whoever he was, he was truly delighted.
I looked at my eldritches, but they looked just as bewildered as the rest of us.
“But I’m in Etherium!” I yelled back at the voice. “We are here! I felt it, I can feel the power… I can see the…”
I can see the shields… but is that because he wants me to?
No. That can’t be what he means. He reacted when I raised the shields. He can’t get in like that…
The youthful, disembodied voice seemed to share my scepticism.
“I don’t want to control you. I want to watch you. The way I see it, you’ve got three choices now. You can either open a portal back to Infernum for this dastardly plane-walking trio – I’ll let you go back and face the big guy, if you want to… Or you can test your luck in Nethernum – I wish your souls well, I really do.”
“And for the third?” I called, still looking off at one of the most-distant walls, trying to avoid Rath’s contorted face and withering gaze.
“Why, stay here with me, of course! There’s better food and drink here than in either of those two sorry places, believe me. And I’m by far the kindest guardian of the ways.”
“Guardian of the ways?”
“Oh, come on, find an eldritch that gives you some imagination powers already! We prevent unauthorised access to and fro in these places. You’ll find no one more devoted to the task than I.”
I mulled it over. Unauthorised… access… Then what about the mizelikon?
“I can’t answer that one for you, but I can guess, if you want.”
“Huh?” Tem muttered.
“I… I wondered how the mizelikon… the shadow-demon whose power let us get free… how it got into Zyger if the other planes are being watched –“
“You did indeed. Do you want to know my suspicion? It’s rather funny, really.”
I wanted to shrug, remain nonchalant, but I was genuinely curious.
“Go on, then.”
“Haha! How long do you fancy your ‘Inceryad’ has been there, being used like this?”
How… long…
The question itself didn’t matter. It was the insinuation beneath.
It was just like the Magisterium. They never gave up, their infinite immoral ineptitudes.
“A long time?” Temcar muttered.
I met the enchanter’s eyes. “He means they’ve forgotten him.”
“Yes! Do you think your current crop of ‘magisters’ know I’m here? Oh no – I doubt they even know eldritches can enter this Zyger place through the cracks below the wards. Zyger… Zyger… Funny word. Anyway, they certainly don’t know there’s a spirit bound to the place, as its sentinel! No, I’m afraid you’re my first visitors in what you’d call seven hundred years.”
There was a pause, while this sank in.
“Yes, Kastyr Mortenn. I know where you’re going with this. He took our names with him, I’m afraid.
“Maybe, T-Temcar Cossoran. Maybe I’ll let you go.
“And no, Rathal Overlorn. Never. Is that really the death with which you’d choose to thread your soul, stitch the straitjacket tight? There is no escape from yourself that way. Don’t anchor your spirit to the darkness. You can’t imagine what it is, to descend forever.
“It’s funny, isn’t it? Hahahaha!”
I flinched, cringing, as the voice went on endlessly.
“You thought you were freeing yourselves from the Thirsty Tree, but now you’re going to have to sit here with me for eternity. Oh yes, time’s reins are in my fist! Hahahahahahahahaha! Could you even imagine it – please, look at each other – look at the looks on each others’ faces! Even with all my gifts, I couldn’t feign that sincerity! The purity of the horror you feel! Oh, you’ll come to love it here, my dear companions. Let’s take a look now, take a look in your heads and see… oooh… oh, my…”
We stood there in abject terror, and when the realisation came over me I reacted instantly, reaching for the only thing I thought might have a chance, a sliver of a possibility of getting through –
“No! What are you doing? Don’t –“
He wasn’t able to stop me exerting my power. He wasn’t an enchanter, exactly – just a telepath. Either that, or he wasn’t getting through my shield – if he had any sense, Tem would also be covering us from psychic invasion.
All we knew for sure was that this ethereal stranger with the child’s voice could stop the imps from entering. He possessed a barrier, of sorts, against interplanar travel. Something like a film, a valve I couldn’t penetrate with my power.
Maybe it could be punched-through. What I needed was an ethereal eldritch, to be my fist. The interaction with the alternate plane would be minimal. The barrier-film at its thinnest.
I channelled the jadeway, and when my most powerful fey appeared it was a swirling sheet of burning malachite that birthed her. I heard Avaelar gasp at the sight as she stepped clear.
The corrupted unicorn was taller than I remembered, black as midnight, the dark trident-horn atop her head sputtering with shadows. When she entered the cave, the ground under her hooves broke asunder in vast pieces. The wall behind her toppled as her portal melted, revealing nothing behind it – no stone, no passages or caverns.
Nothingness. The space between stars.
The whole illusion went snapping away into chasms, the ground crumbling under our feet, consuming us – and we fell down without moving, until everything joined with the emptiness around and above us. Zabalam held out a wavering light, now successfully clinging to Avaelar’s leg.
We stood, on the very surface of the void. Looking down, I felt like I’d stepped off a cliff in a time-lock, waiting for the irresistible downwards impulse to grip me. Yet there was nothing, no loss of control: if anything it was the opposite. I could even balance on the destroyed left foot.
What is this non-space?
‘You can’t imagine what it is, to descend forever.’
The gremlin’s dim radiance didn’t touch Gilaela – she could only be seen in this absolute, impenetrable blackness by the whites of her eyes, shining like ivory, and the yet-deeper darkness of the unlight flickering between the splintered spurs of her horn.
“You did well to call on me, Master,” she said, her voice far sweeter than normal. Just as I’d expected, there was something severely off with her. “This is a particularly dangerous creature, and we are within it. I can sense its madness.” A tremor of rage entered the honeyed cadence, breaking through her facade: “I will very much enjoy watching it die.”
“Within it?” Tem cried. “What do you mean, ‘within it’?”
“Can you get us out of here?” I asked her directly. I had the same fears as Tem, but –
“No, I cannot,” she said – but then she lowered her head at Temcar. “He can.”
We all looked at him, but then I looked back at the horned horse.
How does she know what he is?
Her baleful eyes seemed to be fixed on him, like all the others’.
“Why didn’t you sense this, enchanter?” Then she bent her neck. “Or you, gremlin? You almost caused our master’s downfall!”
Zab lowered his face in shame, and his light dimmed yet further.
“No!” I stepped towards her, raising a hand to stroke her neck. “It’s not anyone’s fault. Let’s not start that.” I let the inky fur slip between my fingers, felt the taut muscles like boulders beneath her skin. “So, how do we proceed?”
Tem shrugged his shoulders, looking around blankly.
“Rath?”
The arch-diviner wouldn’t even meet my eyes.
But then I noticed that Zabalam had a devious expression slowly spreading across his piggy face. When I raised an eyebrow at him he hissed in glee.
“I understand it!” came the gremlin’s thin, reedy voice. “At least, I think I do. I can see the shape of its thoughts now. Urgh! It’s asleep? Thanks, Princess!”
Gilaela laughed amiably, and, for a second or two, I got the impression everything was going to turn out alright.
Then Zabalam reached for Temcar’s hand and focussed his fey-magic on the darkness about us.
This mad eldritch slumbered, and like a fool I’d unknowingly led everyone into its dream. Now the courtyard of its ancient mind unfolded, visible for the first time as the infinite-seeming darkness gave way, cracking apart as though it had been nothing more than a sphere of flawless black stone surrounding us, sealing us in all along.
The dream moved, and we moved with it.
We stood under ethereal twilight in an untended garden. Its high hedges crept with vines, silhouettes against a purple sky. The huge fountains were silent, still. Quiet but insistent winds pressed at my torn prisoner-clothing, guiding my torn prisoner-body, making me stagger and shake even as Avaelar took my weight to steady me.
And strewn all about the creature’s courtyard, its nightmare-garden, were anguished statues of silvery stone. Men and women naked, carved in their moment of ultimate distress. The creatures depicted were of varying species, size, recognisability… the crudeness of their shaping only lent to their inhuman plight. Each one had its hands upraised in supplication to the purple sunset sky, or clasped in agony over some grim wound. Their lips were parted in unending screams.
A memento, and a warning: this wasn’t a garden, was it? It was more like a graveyard.
Do these statues represent the parts of its consciousness that died?
There was no time to really think it over. Even as our psychics broke the seal of darkness and let us into the cursed landscape, the statues started to awaken, diorite sinews stretching, dry eyes shifting to sightlessly behold us.
Then they hopped down from their pedestals, leaden joints squealing as they headed towards us with eerie speed. They didn’t run, but walked methodically, surprising suppleness in their motions.
We were surrounded, outnumbered, dozens of formidable-looking foes surging in to confront us directly. They might’ve been fantastical constructions, more imagined than real, but they were no less real than we were right now, travelling as we were through the plane’s interpretation of the guardian’s madness, subject to the domain’s laws like all else to be found here.
It didn’t matter. I was pleased.
At last, I thought. Finally, something I’m used to.
Something I can fight.
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