While I hold this aspect of unfathomable design, this strange series of vertically scrolling vertical lines, I glare at the Teuila near the vault. Trying to keep myself from breaking down, I lean into rage. Though I struggle to not go full on wrath-mode, because I’m fairly certain that it’d be just as devastating to my psyche, leaving me trapped within wrath until this body perishes.
Gritting my teeth, I snarl out, “Who are you!? Why are you wearing her face!?”
The Teuila across the way from me looks shocked, saddened, and like she’s about to run off to hide tears that are forming. The emotive expressions match everything I know and love about Teuila, and it hits like a punch in the gut. I nearly cave. I nearly collapse under the thought that I just hurt Teuila just now by doubting her. But that’s not Teuila. It can’t be.
I know what I’m holding looks like some low budget stock sci-fi videogame particle special FX, but I’m almost positive it’s Teuila. No. No. I am positive. Don’t doubt. Don’t doubt even for a second. Lumps catch in my throat, and I pray to everything holy that I can keep myself from swallowing my emotions, because if I swallow them, I’ll be introduced to all new horrors of flavor.
Phooph. Did you ever think that—brain? Just don’t even bother. No, of course I never thought anything remotely like this situation could ever possibly have occurred. I’d never have imagined anything in the remote vicinity of something like all this. Hell, nothing in the same realm as all this. All I need from you right now is cold, hard, logic, sussing out how to settle things back into normal reality for me and the actual Teuila. If it’s as simple as leaving, then we’ll just try to do our rescue mission under the duress of absolute insanity, and leave.
The false Teuila, the one near the vault door looks different somehow. She’s shimmery, but sobbing, and rubbing her eyes. She looks regretful, and starts to apologize, in several different voices and shimmers, “We are sorry. We are here to be—we are not here. We’re to birth—to save—to live—to be saved—to die. Please. Please help us. Only from one, to another—yes only one to another—we are moved—seldom—near never—this one is the worst.”
Wait. Wait. Slow down. Oh no. Realmways. Tears in reality. Temporal zones. Ow, oh crap. Blood is running out my ears and eyes. My brain is hemorrhaging. These are things I can’t learn about without Luni present. If I don’t have her to guide my thoughts, my brain might nuke itself, blow up for some reason. Okay, so, we have to somehow not know, and not hear, the things we need to hear to help out. Grawrgh! This is more frustrating than the cosmically awful horror of tasting with my eyeballs! No wonder Nala is so surly, and so disquieted by her trauma.
Okay, think Reggie. Pan-dimensional wombs. Not just inter, but pan. Across all? Oh no. Oh no. I had a vague concept that it might be something like this, but, but if I’m right, the reality of it—I struggle to not vomit at the realization of the possible depths of Terrorzin’s depraved methods and ideologies. I’d been trying to deny it, trying to not think about it. It sounds more and more like those silent guesses to myself, guesses that I never wanted to voice aloud, guesses that I never even wanted to subvocalize, were right.
They… they can’t be moved. Teuila was right. We can’t move them unless we have another tear to move them to. One that’s set up to receive them. This is them. The thing wearing the face of Teuila, standing at a distance, never aggressing me, is a, or rather the, conjoined broodmothers. They weren’t trying to trick me or hurt me. They know the absolute horror of this realm intimately. They wanted to be a gentle guide while begging for my help. They were offering familiarity, trying to be kind, stable against this realm’s cruelty and random insanity.
My stomach roils and burbles. Finally, I loose up sick just outside this pre-vault room. My passengers—the unruly dancing flavors that work their darndest to turn every cell in my body to a tastebud—seem to enjoy the ride as they leave my system, whooping with joy like they were spending a day at the water-park.
Sadly, the deportation of the alien invaders isn’t enough to get my eyeballs and every other part of my body to stop tasting my surroundings. But it’s a start at least. I know the shimmer-Teuila isn’t doing this to me, or at least, not on purpose. The pan-dimensionalness of their bodies, trapped between realms, is letting a horrific version of the non-‘Twixt, the space between realms, leak into Rayileklia. As I surmised earlier, banishing the effects is likely as easy as simply leaving its radius. Probably the radius of the guards who give this place a wide-as-hell berth.
But these women, these dragons, from all across the Rayileklia’s history, being ageless dragons, have been subjected to some kind of depraved experimental mutation and ritual. I’m terrified to see what the inside of the vault looks like. The series of flowing lines in my arms, the completely incongruous anthropomorphized event, is shaking. It’s a mix of sadness, sobs, and fear. But the fear isn’t for herself. No. She’s afraid we can’t rescue any of them.
This weird display of two dimensional white lines is absolutely, one hundred percent Teuila. It’s how she appears to my twisted, distorted perceptions, within this realm. Her body is likely normal, but I might look the same, or worse to her. She still knew me though. She rocketed into my embrace, as soon as she spotted me, her fear at being unable to save anyone palpable from the moment of impact. Without any shred of doubt, that absolute heroism, that empathy, it could only belong to one of the Onyx Dawn. Foremost amongst them would be Kinzul, Teuila, Prinrin, Luni, and I could go on and on.
Ideas are beginning to percolate, possibilities, strategies, solutions. But only the very smallest bud of sprouting growth. Pieces fitting together naturally, slowly, so that I don’t risk exploding my own brain. Nodding towards the shimmer-Teuila, or rather, the conjoined broodmothers wearing a loving, familiar face, I agree, we’re here to help, to save if we can.
She opens the vault, and within is exactly as horrible as you could imagine it, and somehow a thousand times worse. I pray that this is simply a hallucination of the torn-open realmspace between realms bleeding through. This eldritch unknowable space, somehow simultaneously close, yet farther than the farthest reaches of the universe.
Somehow, somehow I doubt we’re that lucky. Come on Te, let’s, let’s try something. I don’t know what I look like to Teuila, but she knows it’s me. Do I dare doff the psi-blocking aegis circlet? Could things take an even darker turn for the worse if psionics from this far realm begin bleeding into my mind? I fear that the answer to both of those questions is the same. Yes. I need to be able to talk to Te, to hear her voice in my mind.
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
Reaching up to doff my circlet, I realize it’s already askew. Right, I hit my head, and because I don’t remember my horns, the circlet probably got stuck on the outcropping a bit along with them. So things have been partially bleeding in, and the damage is done. We might as well fully commit to this insanity then. As soon as I doff it, I can feel Teuila riding my mindscape and listening for every word. Also in my mindscape, and hers, are a series of unending whispers, whispers that I can’t understand, yet know what they mean.
They translate to something like, “The way is shut. The dead keep it.”
I feel like I’ve heard it or seen it somewhere before. Telepathically, we struggle to manifest our avatars in our thinkspace realm, and seemingly fail. We’ll keep trying, but for now, at least we can communicate. Where do I even start? I don’t want to subject Teuila to the horrors of what I went through. So I may as well not share my journey here. Sorry Te. I know you could handle it, I just don’t want to throw extra load your way for no reason.
The false Teuila, the conjoined broodmothers in illusory shape, free to move about, to act, and speak, unlike their true bodies, fidgets nervously. She mutters, in several voices, “We didn’t mean to—we intend not distress—we’re glad you’re here—no one should be here—we are cursed—this place is a curse—trapped—trapped—trapped. You are free to leave—you are not trapped—only we. Trapped across realms—trapped in space—trapped in time—stuck.”
The collection of moving lines sighs across our telepathic bond, and I feel her arms about my shoulders as she nestles and nuzzles my face. She starts, “Airhead, it’s, it’s crazy in here. We have to do something, we just have to.”
Nodding, my response is predictable, “No argument from me Te, I’m with you a hundred percent. What that something is though is a complete mystery at the moment. This is about what I’d feared it might be, and simultaneously impossibly many times worse. I’m pretty sure the whole brainmelting whispers thing going on around us in our heads isn’t going to help matters though. We need Nyssa’s opinion. Jatrisiahl is their mate.”
Agreeing, Teuila, well, this collection of vertically scrolling lines fishes about for the portable hole. With bated breath, I await as she unfolds it and sets it up. This is going to be hard to explain. If Nyssa’Lina didn’t know how bad this was, couldn’t give us a heads up, then they might very well be floored, or incapacitated by this realm, or the news. When the high commander peeks their head up from the portable hole, there’s an audible gasp, and they clutch their head before screaming.
My lower jaw quivers and I clench my eyes tightly to fight back tears that begin to roll. Nyssa’Lina clambers out of the portable hole, and rushes to one of the distorted figures, trapped inbetween realms. They cradle her, this once-woman Jatrisiahl, now conjoined broodmother. Minutes pass by, as we let the two reunite, as much as one can reunite, in a fashion such as this.
There’s constant muttering of how this can’t be real, how they need to wake up, how they’re unconscious in Vieriss Valley, taken out by some tiny upstart. I almost wish I could confirm that for them, that I decimated them in Vieriss Valley, but left them alive with bruised brainpan. That this was all just some nightmare to wake up from. My body shudders in revulsion at the cruelty on display. Not by Nissa, not by the broodmothers, not by Teuila, not by me, but by Terrorzin, through what he’s done here, to them.
The tears of shock and denial give way to tears of rage as Nyssa claims, “I’ll kill him! We were never allowed to see. I’d have, I’d have—I wouldn’t have stood for this! I’m only lucky enough to not be a broodmother because I’m barren, intersex, whelped and raised a man. I thought, I thought if I gained enough standing, I might request one boon. We thought, we all thought, just concubines, locked away for his greedy, sick, twisted pleasures. That’s all they were supposed to be! I wanted to rescue her from that! To beg one boon, that being it!”
Almost as an aside, Nyssa rants, mumblingly, “When rumors started circulating, about mutations, we thought, perhaps controlling their shapeshifting, the joke was his taste was for enormous posteriors, and that he didn’t want to explain it, or lie to his commanders, and had their shapeshifting growing larger and larger in the rear proportions. To lock their shapeshifting in some mockery of proportions, but nothing like this. Nothing ever like this. I only ever wanted to earn one thing, one thing!”
There’s a pause before Nyssa’Lina’s fury builds towards a crescendo, “One single boon! To have Jatrisiahl released to be with me. I rose from the very dregs, hated and detested for what I am, my birth, my sex or lack thereof. I rose to his highest commander! Our tyrant king, our lord, the Ice of Rage, shall perish under the fury of my lightning!”
Knowing the kind of rage, the kind of grief that Nyssa is going through, I say nothing as they stalk about the vault, alternatingly clenching their fists and tugging at their temples. The realm continues to play tricks on us, to worsen our conditions, but somehow, somehow it takes a back seat to witnessing, and possibly participating in, Nyssa’Lina’s grief. However, when it looks like Nyssa has decided on a course of action, a course of action that leads right into Terrorzin’s deadly ice aura, I step in front of the exit of the vault, with sadness in my eyes.
Nyssa doesn’t hesitate to backhand me hard enough that it feels like they might nearly snap my neck, trying to remove me from their path. I don’t budge, as I stand in the vault entrance with my arms wide. Growling with fury, they charge their breath weapon, and unleash it upon me.
Letting the lightning wash through and over me provides me with temporary clarity. I’m actually centered, and feeling more sane from the pain. The scent of ozone, the crackle, the fritzing, frenetic energy jumping about my nerves. It’s all familiar. It’s real. It’s sane.
Lightning’s something I can deal with. I could have guided it around me, with my EM field organ, but I didn’t want to. I want to give Nyssa a target for their fury that won’t instantly kill them in reprisal. And so I take it when they backhand me again, and again. They work up the nerve to demand of me to get out of the way. I just shake my head sadly, my arms still wide.
Between alternating screaming at me, slapping at me, and starting feeble charges of their breath weapon, charges even I can tell aren’t meant to harm me, their fury begins to falter, not entirely, not at first. Their eyes puffy, their nose dripping, they simply begin pounding on my chest. Roughly, intensely at first, the strength of an ancient dragon after all, packed into human form.
The strength behind each slam, each pound, fades, and fades, as they beg, “Please… just please…” eventually admitting, “Please let me face him. Let me face the Ice of Rage, and my death.”
They slowly slump to the ground, sobbing, pounding weakly, feebly on my knees, begging for a cure, a solution, or to be let free on a suicide mission. Despite this being one of Terrorzin’s high commanders, despite this being someone who probably caused untold suffering throughout the ages, I drop to my knees with my arms still spread wide.
Minutes pass. The pounding becomes yet more feeble, nearly microscopic motions, the sobs near silent, barely a raise of the sternum. Eventually, their limbs leaden, their arms droop to their side as they lean forward, falling into my embrace.
Their voice is hoarse, raspy, weak, as they make another plea, “Please, please free them from this, in mercy. End their misery. I, I can’t bring myself to, to even try. Please, whatever it takes. If you require my dragonforce, I’ll open myself and let you drink of it freely. Anything to end her suffering.”
Shaking my head, tears in my eyes, I gulp back a sob, and try not to grimace as I’m greeted with another passenger whose flavor I can’t even begin to describe without falling into madness. My response is, “It won’t come to that. Somehow, somehow I’ll find some way. I’ll find a way to free them, if I have to break reality itself.”