Colors took shape in the darkness around me. The bright, rich hues of ornate, abstract tapestries swaying in a breeze: the inside of Princess’s ballroom.
Ah. I’d fallen asleep. Well, that was the best news I’d heard in what felt like a long time.
In front of me, a series of elegant archways opened toward a city of criss-crossed walkways and flowering vines. Leaves and roofs and lines of silken webs shimmered with iridescence beneath the warm sun.
A furry warmth touched my side, and I smiled as I took Princess’s arm, feeling her beside me before I detected her there. Well, I took her fore-limb, after she lifted herself upright on her rear limbs. We strolled outside together, as if I was escorting her into a fancy restaurant. In the light of her dream realm, her green eyes glowed like gemstones. The purple and blue and orange patterns on her abdomen seemed to mirror the colors of the forest stretching in front of us. She was positively shining with the breathtaking beauty of the most deadly things.
We didn’t speak for a time, we just ambled along the balcony beneath the golden sun. Then she slowed, so I turned to face her. And she looked worried. Well, she didn’t look worried. She looked like a giant spider. But I still felt her worry.
“I’ve been keeping a secret from you,” she said.
“You’re an amnesiac spider queen from Dimension X,” I said. “Of course you’ve been keeping secrets.”
“This is one that you asked me to keep.”
“What? When? No I didn’t.”
“You did, my sweet dewdrop. That’s part of the secret. Do you want to hear it now?”
“If you promise to never call me ‘dewdrop’ again.”
She gave me a seriously, spidery look. “Alex, this is important.”
“Fine.” I sighed. “Yeah, I want to hear it now.”
Her big head tilted, and she started to speak, but didn’t. She just squeezed my arm instead.
“What?” I said. “Wait. Why are you telling me now?”
“Well, it’s about time, isn’t it?”
“Because we almost died? Is that why? We’ve almost died a dozen times.”
She gave a shudder. “Not like this.”
“That really is why you’re telling me?”
“It would be wrong of me to take this secret to the grave, my heroic human hammerstrike,” she said, “and we just spent quite an extended interval with four feet inside it. The grave. Four feet in the grave. Well, for you I suppose the idiom would be one foot in the grave, though you must admit that sounds ridiculous.”
“Furlong ridiculous,” I agreed.
“There,” she said, and focused behind me. “But brace yourself before you look.”
I didn’t know what that mean, so I just turned and--
The gaze of a terrible, killing intelligence swept past me.
An overpowering strength. A hellish, endless malice.
I couldn’t inhale, I couldn’t move. Death sniffed my face. I couldn’t see anything, but I felt its hot panting breath.
Panic paralyzed me.
I felt something watching.
INTUIT: ANGUISH LEVEL RAVENOUS PREDATOR LEVEL 88 SURRENDER PLAGUE HORROR FLEE FLEE FLEE LEVEL 88
A creature loomed over the sunlit forest of Princess’s dream real, which was suddenly an city on the coast of an island. The creature was bony and bipedal and so skeletal that the interior hollows inside its body--mutated rib cages and bizarre bony pockets--were as big as caves. In place I could see through it completely. The creature’s thigh bones branched into dozens of serrated calves and even more spear-like feet.
Feet that stabbed into the coastal city and impaled the panicked, fleeing crowd.
The creature’s six arms branched, each one thicker than school bus, and flaps of rotting skin shed from it, splatted to the ground, then formed into cockroaches the size of horses, which feasted on the fleeing people.
The creature didn’t have a face, it didn’t have a front and a back, it just slaughtered in all directions, unstoppable, merciless, absolutely unassailable.
Yet a dozen--more than a dozen--people fought back. Gemmed. Gifted. Some from rooftops, some from the destroyed streets, some from within the bony creature’s body.
Yet despite them, the creature roared in hunger and pleasure, and continued to rampage.
Hundreds of people died. Thousands.
“Holy shit,” I said, back on the balcony.
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The image faded into nothingness, but the beauty of Princess’s dream real looked artificial now.
“Unholy,” she corrected. “But other than that, I cannot disagree.”
“That’s a Plague.”
“Yes.”
“That’s what we’re supposed to fight?”
“Apparently. Eventually.”
“It saw us? I felt it see us.”
“I don’t think so. I think that it, or, er, something worse ... swept the islands, and we merely felt the passing of its gaze.”
“Something worse?”
Her claw-hand tightened on my arm. “Yes. Perhaps a more-powerful Plague, surveying the possibilities. But I’m not certain about that. Perhaps that’s merely the feeling that all Plagues produce.”
“We can’t beat a kobold village,” I said. “We can’t beat a quarter of a kobold village.”
“We’re level nine. That thing is level eighty-eight. There is a long road ahead of us, my ... “ She paused. “... raindrop.”
I smiled, just like she intended. “That’s almost as bad as dewdrop.”
“How about ‘snowflake?’”
“Worse.”
“Spiderling?”
“Oh, yes, absolutely. I’ve always wanted to be called spiderling.”
She squeezed my arm again. “There’s nothing we can do at the moment, except put one foot in front of the others.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess step one is, get out of this hole.”
“That’s step two,” she told me. “Step one is, heal.”
“I ate like ten pearl beads.”
“And to my great pleasure and relief, those will help heal your body. Come, my bipedal prince.”
“That’s worse than ‘spiderling,’” I muttered as I followed her back into the ballroom.
She had me sit in the center of the room, in the middle of the parquetry pattern that suddenly looked a great deal like a spider web. Then she rose toward the ceiling on a thread of silk. She hung there, balanced perfectly, like some kind of alien aerialist
“We need to heal your mind as well, Alex, and your heart. You’ve been through a great deal. Too much. This world is so strange and violent ... “ Her face couldn’t smile, but I felt the warmth anyway. “We need to tend to those parts of you that matter more than your physical self. To sooth and strengthen your mind, to ease and encourage your heart. Close your eyes and find your balance.”
When I looked away from her, the floor was gone. Instead, I was sitting on a circular web that was hanging high above the forest. I was in the very center, like the hub of a wheel. Strands radiated out in every direction. The web swayed gently, like a dock back home when the ocean was calm.
I closed my eyes and Princess spoke to me. She told me to open my webtouched senses. She told me to feel the connections. She told me that everything connected. Everything was individual and discrete yet also connected by the radial and viscid threads, by the frame threads and mooring lines and anchor points, which themselves bridges to other webs ...
Every tremor carried information. Every twitch possessed meaning.
She spoke to me in her soothing voice and my mind ranged across the web, my mind touched everything that surrounded me--everything I’d seen and done, everything I’d lost and won--and then released it.
* * *
My meditation ushered me into wakefulness. The cavern was still dark but I felt stronger, steadier. My webtouch spread more easily to reveal my surroundings. The water still tricked, the giant snail still crawled across the wall, without hurling fireballs.
The cool air stunk a little, though.
Health: 45/57
Mana: 24/24
Okay. Time to leave.
I stood and stretched in the darkness, then crossed to the wall beside the trickling water. The stone was too smooth to climb more than a few feet, so I sent my senses higher and yeah, there was a sort of curved aqueduct thirty feet above me. It jutted into this cavern and then turned at like a sixty-degree angle and vanished into another wall. I must’ve tumbled off that sharp corner.
“Here goes nothing,” I told the giant snail.
Then I jumped. With a 12 strength, I was approaching the absolute human maximum for Earth. So imagine the thighs on a four hundred pound powerlifter who can squat a literal ton. Now imagine he only weighed two hundred pounds. That boy could jump.
I must’ve cleared four feet before I turned to smoke.
I pushed myself higher, afraid of running out of mana and falling on my ass, but by the time I curled a tendril of smoke onto the aqueduct I was only down to 15.
I returned to my body with one hand gripping the edge of the stone aqueduct. Dangling there in the darkness, my arm easily holding my weight. I threw myself higher, and a moment later was straddling the fast rush of water. The current frothed three feet below me in the scooped-out bit of the aqueduct, raising a cool breeze that brushed against my face. I rested there for a second, giving webtouch a moment to catch up, then with one hand and foot on either side of the aqueduct, I crawled upward against the current, toward the hole in the wall where it entered the chamber.
And I realized it wasn’t an actual aqueduct, it was a wide roof gutter on an ancient, half-toppled building. Huh. Mist touched my cheeks as I straddle-crawled through the wall, following the current back toward however I’d entered these lower levels.
And the wall wasn’t, like, just two feet of wall. It was more like thirty feet of stony passage through a collapsed building. And not very roomy, so I ended up with my boots in the rushing water, tugging myself along through the cramped pitch blackness.
Zero stars. I do not recommend.
Eventually I emerged on a clear patch of rooftop. Webtouch seemed to indicate a twenty yard triangle of sloped shingles. Most of them were intact, too. To my right, the darkness dropped off, following the side of the abandoned building toward the street level below, but to my left the slate was solid and welcoming.
I flopped down and caught my breath, then drank my fill from a waterskin in my domain--I didn’t quite trust the Old City runoff. And now that I’d gotten some distance from the shredded corpse, my appetite returned. So I ate my fill of lamb in kumquat jelly, then I washed again, even more thoroughly, and finally I went through Kathina’s satchel and pouch.
Her pouch must’ve held her beads, which I’d already looted, because all that remained there were hairpins and a comb and what must’ve been fantasy-land makeup--lip paint and eye-kohl--and assorted buttons and papers that I couldn’t read in the darkness. I rifled through the stuff and then on a whim I stuck a jeweled clasp in hair, to keep my bangs out of my face.
I huffed a laugh as she nattered about spiderlings, then grabbed Kathina’s almost-entirely-empty satchel from my domain. The fabric felt rough and stiff, like treated canvas.
I explored the inside of the satchel by touch. It felt like she’d dumped everything out, except for a spare knife and sparkstick, a waterskin, and a few dozen pebbles in a little tin that turned out to be hard mints.
I popped one in my mouth. Yum. Refreshing.
Then I lay back and tried to scan the ceiling with my webby senses. I extended them upward, straining. I needed to find the spot where I’d fallen through, then I’d smoke-waft my way back to the surface, one level at a time.
Except my senses barely brushed the ceiling of this extremely high chamber. I vaguely sensed a surface above me, but couldn’t make out any details. The space was too large. Huh. So I crunched the mint then pulled a lantern and sparkstick from my domain. I’d used all my extra lamp oil when I’d started that fire in the skin bear den, but the lantern had a bit sloshing around in its reservoir.
I raised a spark and moved to light the wick--
SUCCESS! You saved Usim! Well, you helped, in a mission-critical way.
REWARD: Expoi.
REWARD: Choose one gift.
The Gift of the Dark
The Gift of the Deep
The Gift of the Dream