Undermind

Light filled the deep. Light from her own flesh, and those around her. Amidst the multitudes of indistinct forms floating nearby, two had more substance than the rest. The two with whom she felt the most immediate kinship.

The younger of the two figures had evolved considerably since last she saw her. In place of a foetus was a young creature of decidedly inhuman cast, yet retaining girlish features that were recognisably her own. Light shone from beneath gleaming scales the colour of flickering flames. Two small nubs protruded from her forehead, and from behind her shoulder-blades jutted a pair of slender spines, bent back on themselves, with a hint of leathery flesh furled between them. A long sinuous tail coiled up and around the tiny body as she slept.

The other doppelgänger, the scarred woman, remained as she had ever been; a forlorn husk of her former self, hanging limply in the void, trailing a thicket of tendrils. The light emanating from within this one had dimmed to a pale glimmer.

If she didn’t do something, that light would go out. But what?

Maybe…maybe she could give this one some of her own light?

Drawing closer to the broken woman, she bit down on her wrist until her fangs broke through the hardened flesh. Light and heat spilled into the water from a wound already beginning to close. With no time to lose, she shoved her wrist to her doppelgänger’s lips. The mouth quivered, then drew in a deep draught of liquid light. She held her wrist in place until the flow ceased, then bit into her other wrist and began the process anew.

Slowly but surely, her light suffused the woman’s body, passing through arteries and blood vessels, into organs long dormant. Her chest heaved and her limbs stirred, but she did not awaken. The grey, sunken skin took on a healthy pink hue. Perhaps even her scars would heal, in time.

“Huh, so she’s not done yet, after all.”

Calburn’s voice jolted her to full awareness. She remembered where she was. Who she was. What she was.

“I don’t know why I did that, but it seems to have helped,” said Saskia.

“Yes, I see that. It’s just as well you did. If your first mouthlet were destroyed, you could never go back. Thanks to your efforts, she’ll survive. With luck, she may even recover enough to return as something other than a drooling vegetable.”

“So I didn’t die then, when I left Earth? It sure felt like I was dying. The seizures…”

“Ah yes, the seizures,” said Calburn’s disembodied voice. “That’s probably not the best word for them, you know. They weren’t so much seizures as failed translocations—an unfortunate consequence of your maturation in a world innately hostile to ones such as us.”

“Ones such as us,” she said. “You mean transdimensional vine-tentacle monsters.”

He laughed. “Such an imagination. But you know those tentacles are mostly metaphorical. Mostly. Your surface mind can’t visualise what it’s really like to exist within the six-dimensional manifold that is the between, so it comes up with this…abstraction.”

“My mind has certainly been tying itself in knots this past month—six-dimensional or otherwise.”

“Best not to think about it too hard. You’ll wake up with a headache.”

Saskia stalked down the hallway, nursing a pounding headache. It wasn’t the first time. Probably wouldn’t be the last.

Over the past month since her arrival in the Stone Bastion, she’d been communing with her wayward father almost every night. She remembered only fragments of those dreams, but what she did remember was often headache-inducing. Discussions about six-dimensional manifolds and mostly-metaphorical tentacles were only the tip of an iceberg that reached between dimensions.

And if Calburn’s ghost was to be believed, so did she.

She’d suspected as much since the day she heard Ruhildi’s account of their plunge down the waterfall. The Lovecraftian creature she’d dreamt about was, in a very real sense, as much a part of her as this body in which she now resided, or the human body she’d been born with. Only it, like everything else in the deep place—the between, as her father called it—was just a metaphor for something stranger.

Her surface mind—the one she’d always thought of as herself—could only make sense of worlds with at least some semblance to the one she’d grown up in. The between was not such a place. Technically, it wasn’t even a place. It would take a different kind of mind to make heads or tails of the between.

The part of herself that dwelt there was just such a mind. This deep mind, or undermind, as she’d taken to calling it, could no more understand her surface mind than she—this part of her—could understand it. But together, they formed a complete being, apparently.

It was no surprise that in attempting to visualise an alien part of herself that dwelt in the void between universes, her subconscious had turned to Cthulu for inspiration. So…tentacles. Why vines as well? No clue. Maybe there was something plant-like in the way it behaved or developed.

And this body? This was just an avatar. A fleshy puppet extruded into this world from the between.

Her previous avatar had been seriously damaged by her transmigration to this world. Or perhaps the damage had triggered some kind of failsafe, causing this troll avatar to emerge on a different world. Either way, her human body was now on the mend, if last night’s dream was to be believed. Someday soon, she might be able to go back.

But did she want to?

Much as she missed her mum and her friends on Earth, she couldn’t stomach the thought of leaving Ruhildi and the other dwarves, and Rover Dog—and even Garrain and Nuille—to their fates. She couldn’t abandon them now. Not while they were still in danger.

From a chamber up ahead came the sound of grunting and growling, thuds and the scritching of something sharp tearing into something unyielding. She sighed. What was he up to this time?

Peeking through a doorway, she let out another, louder sigh. There he was, a naked troll, laying into one of the golems with his claws. The golem was making a fairly respectable showing of itself, evading some of his strikes and getting a couple of jackhammer blows against his rock-hard shoulder and abs. It wasn’t fast, but it possessed an impressive economy of motion, and almost seemed to be predicting where the troll would move before he moved. Rover Dog grunted under the force of those blows, but they didn’t seem to have dented him. Meanwhile, each jab of his claws was scattering chunks of his opponent across the floor.

Saskia cleared her throat, and he looked at her without the slightest sign of remorse. “Rover Dog, do you have any idea how hard it is to repair those stone guardians?”

“Good fight,” said the troll, brushing sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “Squishies too squishy to challenge without squishing. Stone guardians can take hits.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Er, Caesitor,” said Kveld, stepping out from behind the wall, where he’d been taking shelter. His eyes shifted nervously between the two trolls and the golem. “I…asked him to do this.”

She glared at the giant dwarf. “And why would you do that?”

“Well…er, you see, we’re teaching them to fight better,” said Kveld.

She raised her eyebrows. “You’re teaching them. But they’re just magical lumps of rock.”

“Magical lumps of rock that can larn, Caesitor,” said Kveld.

“I told you to stop Caesitoring me,” she said.

“Sorry,” said Kveld, eyeing the floor. “What I mean is, the more they do something, the better they…aye. What one of them learns, they all…even if separated. So I got to thinking and…”

She waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, she prompted, “And?”

“What? Och aye. And this is what I came up with. A combat lesson. I tried giving the lesson myself and, well…” Kveld pulled up his vest. Saskia drew in a breath. His torso looked like one big bruise. “Rover Dog offered to help, and so…” He spread his arms wide, wincing slightly as the movement clearly pained him.

“You’re hurt!” she exclaimed. “Why didn’t you say something? I can fix that.”

“I…didn’t want to bother you, Caes—er, aye,” he said, looking away sheepishly.

“Bog that!” she said, reaching for her satchel of arlithite. “Next time, you tell me, okay?” She turned to Rover Dog. “I suppose you can keep going then. For science. But do try to keep the damage to a minimum. Ruhildi’s not gonna like this…”

“What am I not going to like, Sashki?”

Saskia turned to see her friend standing behind her, frowning. Kveld gave a nervous cough.

A short while later, she’d healed Kveld and calmed down Ruhildi to the point where she no longer wanted to throttle the other two.

“I’ve something to show you,” said Ruhildi, taking Saskia by the hand. Shooting the golem-wreckers a final glare, she led Saskia to the foundry.

Ruhildi’s workshop was stacked high with tools and weapons, golem parts and pieces of metal and bone. Two huge furnaces burned night and day. Even now, the dwarf’s productivity amazed and delighted her. Most of her time had been spent restoring damaged and run-down golems to working order, but she’d somehow also found the time to forge shiny new armour and equipment for her friends. Now it appeared she’d been saving her best work for last.

“It’s…stunning,” whispered Saskia, admiring the gleaming metal gauntlet that awaited her on the benchtop. Unlike the chunky things Ruhildi had made for her in the Dead Sanctum, this was the work of considerable time and painstaking attention to detail. She put it on, finding it fitted her hand like…well, a glove. A metal glove made for a monstrous hand, with tapered tips that hugged the base of her claws. Though not decorated to the same degree as high-end armour found in games, this gauntlet was a remarkably complex piece of equipment, assembled from interlocking plates that allowed her to flex her fingers freely. It was made out of a strange, pale metal that she’d only seen once before: in Garrain’s glaive, Trowbane.

When she pointed this out, Ruhildi nodded and said, “Aye ’tis a bone alloy, though not of the wivorn bone I used to forge his weapon. Instead of creating a burning edge, this gauntlet will protect your flesh against heat and cold and sword and spell. But that is not its true purpose.”

Straining, Ruhildi lifted an axe with a large, curved blade. Saskia took the weapon, perplexed. It was breathtakingly beautiful. The handle fit her hand perfectly. Clearly a lot of love had gone into its forging. But it didn’t look like a troll weapon. It was much smaller than her old hammer, Mjölnir—small enough for the average dwarf to wield.

“This is no ordinary axe,” said Ruhildi. “Your claws are more than enough to deal with most foes that get close. This weapon—”

“Jarnbjorn.”

Ruhildi smirked at her. “Naming it already, Sashki? Alright, Jarnbjorn it is. As I were saying, this weapon is not only for hacking at foes up close. I ken how bad you are with bows, and a crossbow didn’t seem like a weapon fit for a trow. So I came up with this.”

“A throwing axe? I don’t know, Ruhildi. I’ve tried throwing daggers before.”

“Och I ken. ’Twere fair amusing. But if you’ll just try tossing Jarnbjorn at that target over there, methinks you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

Saskia did so—and to her shock, the weapon landed blade-first in the target dummy’s chest.

“No, you haven’t suddenly gotten better,” said Ruhildi. At Saskia’s frown, she added, “Though you will, I’m sure. But for this axe, using some things I found lying around in here, and with a fair bit of help from Kveldi, I added a little something to make the blade fly true. And something else as well, though I amn’t sure about this one. ’Tis something that normally only a stoneshaper could do. But seeing as you can talk to the keystone, mayhap you can do this too.”

“Do what?”

“See if you can talk to the gauntlet, Sashki.”

“Okay…”

Anything you can show me? she asked her oracle interface.

Slowly, something faded into view on the bottom of her interface: a button labelled with the ghostly image of an axe. She reached out with her mind and pressed the button—

And yelped as Jarnbjorn leapt across the intervening distance, landing snugly in her hand.

“Oh wow, that’s really…” Her eyes drifted downward, and she saw that her intestines were spilling out of a deep gash the axe had carved across her abdomen on its path to her hand. “…ow.”

“Sashki!” shouted Ruhildi, rushing toward her.

“It’s…okay,” gasped Saskia. “I just took some arlithite earlier. It’ll heal in…no time. Though I’d better put my…” She giggled hysterically. “…guts back in first.”

Watching the gory wound seal shut a few minutes later, she said, “Note to self: hold out hand toward axe before calling it back.”

“I didn’t ken that would happen, Sashki, I swear!” said Ruhildi.

“Not your fault,” said Saskia. “I should have been more careful. The movies always make it look so easy. At least now we know. Better it happened to me than one of the dwarves. Still, this is a fantabulous set of gear, Ruhildi. Thank you.”

She was just standing up when the room began to sway. “Whoa, is it just me or…?” The swaying became a violent shudder. Tools fell from shelves, and Ruhildi clutched at her leg for support. “Not just me then.”

The earthquakes had been getting steadily worse in the weeks following the destruction of Elcianor. Those stupidiot stoneshapers had only managed to trigger half of an apocalypse, but that was bad enough. The fact that she could feel the effects all the way down here didn’t bode well for the rest of Ciendil.

Time to pay another visit to Garrain and Nuille, her favourite pair of elven fugitives. It was late morning, so there was a relatively low risk of catching them doing something X-rated. She never could be certain with those two though. They were like rabbits. Not that she could begrudge them seeking a little joy in what might be their final days. Or, well, a lot of joy.

The first thing she saw on her arrival in Garrain’s head was his legs and—holy crap, he really was turning into a tree. Ent? Dryad? Whatever he was, there were leaves all over the place. How odd it must be for Nuille to…well, touch wood. If anything, his transformation seemed to have turned the girl on even more, if their constant bumpity-bumping was anything to go by. The dwarves were more right than they knew when they called the elves tree-humpers.

The second thing she saw was a thick brown haze shrouding the forest. Never a good sign. Someone coughed nearby. Nuille, looking gaunt and weary.

“You guys okay?” asked Saskia. “I hope the fire hasn’t spread to your neck of the woods.”

“It hasn’t,” said Garrain. “This happens whenever there’s a southbound wind. It carries the fumes across the sea from the scorched lands.”

The volcanic wasteland stretched across much of the central portion of Ciendil, and the conflagration was still spreading. It seemed the dwarves had slightly miscalculated the devastation their artificial volcano would unleash upon the world. When Garrain glanced northward, Saskia could see the plume of white-hot arlium still spilling into the sky, dispersing into the upper atmosphere. Nearly a month had passed since fire swallowed the city of Elcianor, and it showed no sign of letting up.

“Oh, your demon’s back, is she?” said Nuille, tilting her head up toward the canopy in the elven equivalent of an eye-roll.

“She’s not my demon, my light,” said Garrain.

“My mistake,” said Nuille. “She’s not yours, but you are hers.”

Nuille didn’t like it when Saskia showed up. Not a huge fan of demons, it seemed. Or maybe the elf girl’s resentment all stemmed from that one time Garrain had hissed Saskia’s name while engaged in some of those aforementioned X-rated activities. Poor guy had suffered a black eye and a night out in the cold after that.

Garrain sighed. “You know that’s not how it is.”

“I think she may be jealous, ardonis. Perhaps your demon mistress should find a nice trow to fuck her into sweet oblivion. Perhaps then she’d stop bothering us.”

“For your information, I have found a nice trow and—” Saskia halted, realising what she was saying. In that moment, an image popped into her head: Rover Dog bending her over a rock, with his giant barbed thing sticking—nope. Nope nope nope. She struggled to banish the image, feeling warmth rush to her cheeks. The cheeks of her face, not her…

Dogramit!

…and now even my perfectly clean alternative swear words are being corrupted into filthy puns in my head. Fan-frocking-tabulous.

She coughed. “I’m not here to perv on the two of you. You know why I’m here. Sorry about this, but I need to borrow your eyes again.”

Before he could reply, she called up her minimap, looking for any clusters of markers that might represent an elven army. Last time, she’d watched them amassing by their thousands outside cities and towns and villages. Now there were none to be seen.

Her map could only see so far though, so she jumped into the head of one of the mer in a fishing village on its western edge. An intake of breath from Garrain told her that he was along for the ride, as usual.

She found herself in the body of what must be a child, judging from her height. The only other villagers she could see looked elderly or crippled. Also naked, but that was normal for the mer.

She hopped to another coastal village, then into the mer city to the west, with its white stone structures and hanging gardens and fountains everywhere. Another ghost town. Well okay, there was a little bit of activity here, and some lonely-looking guards standing about, but a good portion of its population were nowhere to be seen. And most of those she did see were very young, very old, or clearly not of sound body or mind.

She pinged back across the map to Wengarlen, and found the place likewise emptied of most of its able-bodied males, though there were plenty of females moping about. Unlike the mer, these elves didn’t want their women to fight, it seemed.

“You know where they’ve all gone,” said Garrain between retches. Whoops. Motion sickness must be a thing for elves too.

“Yeah,” she said. “Sorry about that. I just had to be sure. I guess I’ll be seeing them soon enough.”

“Indeed,” said Garrain. “I suggest you take your friends and get out of the Underneath while you still can.”

“Aw shucks, I didn’t think you cared.”

“I may have tried to kill you once or twice, but that was before…everything. Now, I’d rather you continue to live. I wouldn’t want to have to go down there and dig my focus out of your corpse.”

“Don’t even think about it, ardonis,” said Nuille.

“Save yourself, Saskia,” said Garrain. “Because there’s no surviving what’s coming for the dwarrows.”

“We’ll see,” said Saskia non-committally. “Stay safe, both of you.” She cut the link.

That afternoon, she found Ruhildi and Kveld leading one of the golems out into the crypts above.

Guess that answers the question of whether they can climb stairs, she thought. Then she did a double take. “Wait…what are you doing? I thought the stone guardians couldn’t be moved outside the Bastion’s domain of influence.”

“That were true, until…” said Kveld.

“Until?”

“Come see, Sashki,” called out Ruhildi. Around a corner, her friend pointed to a rough stone tablet on the wall, with a single rune carved into it.

Saskia frowned. “What is that?”

Ruhildi looked at the other dwarf. “Mayhap you should explain. ’Tis your invention, Kveldi.”

“Aye, I suppose,” said Kveld. “This thing is akin to the control nodes in the Bastion. Much simpler, but…”

“So you can control the stone guardians near the rune thingy,” guessed Saskia. “Does it even need to be fixed to a wall? Can you carry it anywhere?”

“Aye—no,” said Kveld. “Well we could carry one across the city, but ’twould do us no good. This node doesn’t generate a control field. Only expands the existing one.”

“So an expansion node then?” said Saskia. “It only works if placed close enough to the Bastion to extend its domain of influence. Still sounds pretty useful. Can they be chained together? Build a kind of control highway leading throughout the city?”

“Aye, she’s getting it,” said Ruhildi, exchanging a glance with Kveld.

“What’s the range on these things?” asked Saskia.

“Tis what we’re about to find out, Sashki,” said Ruhildi.

The control range, it turned out, was over a hundred metres. Beyond that, the golems slowed, and eventually refused to budge. Kveld assured her that solid rock didn’t block the control field, and it was shaped like a bubble centred on the expansion node, extending outward in all directions. That meant any nodes they placed in the crypts could also be used to control golems on the streets above.

“How many of these expansion nodes do you have?” asked Saskia.

“Just two more,” said Ruhildi. “But I can make the rune tablets fair quick, and Kveldi can inscribe the nodes even quicker.”

“Superb work, both of you,” said Saskia. “We should start churning them out as fast as we can. I’ve a feeling our golems will be needed up there in the coming days…”

Referring to her minimap, Saskia helped Kveld position the remaining expansion nodes to maximise coverage up on the surface, while Ruhildi set to work creating more tablets.

By the end of the day, the control highway was over a kilometre long, with five nodes placed. Tomorrow, it would cover the entirety of their hidden section of the crypts, with tendrils reaching out across dozens of streets and alleys on the western side of the city. Any expansion beyond that would have to be done on the surface, or in parts of the crypts that were well-travelled by other dwarves. That would be a much riskier prospect, because there was always a chance a stoneshaper might discover one of the runes, glean its purpose and follow it back to the source. Still, it was a risk they’d have to take.

Joining Rover Dog and the dwarves for dinner, Saskia listened as Myrna and Baldreg and Freygi lamented over what they’d seen that morning when they ventured out into the city.

“’Tis worse than ever up there,” said Baldreg. “The shapers have the run of the city, and they have the watch bowing to their every whim. Mangorn is now Grand Chancellor in all but name. No-one dares oppose him—not with the support he garnered after their ‘victory’ over the leaf-ears. The shapers are acting as if their grand project were a complete success. And the people believe them.”

“This is a poor showing for evening meal today,” said Myrna, dolling out bread to the dwarves, and a slightly larger helping to the trolls. “I couldn’t buy a decent longback haunch at the terrace this morn. Even flour is being rationed out. I could only get half of what I needed, and that took some doing.”

“You mean lying,” said Saskia.

“Aye,” said Myrna. “I couldn’t tell the watch I’m trying to feed a pair of hungry trows now, could I?”

“It’s going to get worse,” said Freygi. “Farmers and foragers from here to Southgate have been pulling their families back behind city walls. I can hardly blame them. Anyone foolish enough to stay out there will be first to fall when the leaf-ears break through.”

Baldreg frowned. “When? Not if?”

“Aye, when,” said Freygi.

“Methinks you’re being a wee bit pessimistic, bonnie,” said Baldreg.

“No she’s not,” said Ruhildi. “We can’t hold against the combined might of the leaf-ears clans and enclaves—and the Chosen himself—all of them, to the last alvar, burning for vengeance.”

“Ruhi kens a thing or two about vengeance,” pointed out Freygi.

“Mayhap we can’t,” said Baldreg. “If that is what we face. But we don’t ken how many there may be.”

“We can make a pretty good guess,” said Saskia. “I’ve got a set of eyes up on Ciendil, remember? Over the past few weeks, I saw them gathering in the thousands. And now they’re all gone. The nearby cities have been practically emptied of all combat-capable alvari. That can mean only one thing.”

“They’re on their way here,” said Ruhildi.

Saskia glanced at each of the tense faces around the room. “They’re coming. So the question is, what are we going to do about it?”