JADE 2.5: NEW BLOOD
“PEDHELIORPH [proposed derivation: tempest of darkness]
(pu-DEL-i-orf)
Rank: 13(-)
Classification: Beguiler
Side-class (if any): Destroyer
Unbound danger rating: Extreme (mode: hunter)
Bound danger rating: Moderate (mode: placid)
Portals: Self-only
Explicit intelligence: Nil
Appearance: Spacevoid, avian, small (typical wingspan: seventeen inches)
Unique capabilities: Trails/emits a cloud of condensed infernal energy similar in form (though entirely unrelated) to nethermist. A form of enchanter (see footnote entries hypnotics (p.110), psychic tyrants (p.186)), and capable of breathing/screaming a cone of force (infernal, medium range), this demon has a propensity for crushing all blood from its victims without the victims becoming aware of their predicament.
Suggested countermeasures: Immediate egress; Anti-enchantments (5th degree+); Wards (3rd degree+ (breath-weapon only, ineffective vs. hypnosis-effect)).”
– from ‘The Eldritch Index’ (19th edition)
So how does this work?
“It’s similar to what happened with your new vampire friend,” she replied.
As I walked towards the Shrine of Yune at the southern end of Helbert’s Bend I’d explained the prayer and the visitation, and shared the meagre knowledge I’d gained. Back out on the street, hooded robe and mask shielding me from the drizzle of the post-midnight cloud-blanket, glowing blue lines shielding me from danger, at first I felt better.
But now I was almost there, and I was getting a bit nervous.
How do you mean, similar?
“Well, there are two ways for you to leave Materium. Your mind has to go, but your body can stay, if you’re projecting yourself, like when you prayed.”
Ahhh – that’s what happens to you when I ask you to go to sleep.
“Very good, Kas. But it’s not your home-plane – if you want to be able to use your powers when you’re there, you’re going to need the full package. You have to physically step into another plane.”
Doesn’t that mean I’ll be more vulnerable?
“Yes, but only insofar as you were barely vulnerable at all when it was just your mind that’d taken the trip. Open to influence, perhaps, and the most crude forms of psychic attacks, but nothing that could cause serious harm – unless you went bothering, you know… ancient liches, fey-lords… kings of hell, actual gods… that kind of thing.”
But this is going to be different. Not exactly being reassuring here, O faerie queen.
“Not exactly trying to be. You’ll be safe there, but only if you’re being cautious. You have to keep your shields up, your wits about you, and be ready to step back out to Materium at a moment’s notice.”
Okay. That doesn’t sound impossible. That’s enough by way of precautions?
“What else did you have in mind?”
I was hoping you’d suggest something, really.
She mind-sighed.
Fine, fine, I get it. Shields up, eyes open, and… this ‘step back out’ business. I guess that’s where I need to start, right? ‘Stepping in’?
“Sometimes the planes align, and you can see the seams, but for an arch-sorcerer you can just open a rupture at will. It costs you a little strength, but nothing you’re not used to.”
Oh?
“Well, it’s the same thing as when you summon Olbru and Glodb and Gradagh. Only for them, it’s less taxing on you to send them back than it is for you to call them through, providing they aren’t resisting, of course. For you, it’ll be reversed. You’re a native of this plane, they’re native to the otherworld.”
Taxing? I considered it for a moment. I’ve never really noticed anything.
“Like I said, only a little strength, soon to return. Try doing it to a hundred eldritches at once – or ten potent ones – then you’ll feel it, I imagine. Anyway, I’ll show you when we get there. We’re almost there.”
I do realise. It’s my legs doing all the walking, you know.
“Oh, quit complaining – if I had a stride like yours there’s nowhere I wouldn’t walk. Do you have any idea how annoying it is to have to sit here and listen to you harp on about it like it’s a chore?”
I let her have her moment, looking across at the trees as the houses ended and the chest-high wooden barrier that fenced the graveyard off from the roadway took over.
So why are we here, exactly? Isn’t Etherium, well, everywhere? This place…
“This place is strongly tied to Nethernum, yes, but I want to show you a natural seam first, if I can, and we need a bit of wilderness for that. Plus, strange things happen to the places where there’s no plant-life. Space compresses. You could walk right out of Mund, if you went the wrong way.”
I’m not even going to pretend to understand… But I’d have thought a graveyard –
“Yes, Kas. Gods know there’s probably tons of seams to Nethernum here too, but I can’t see them.”
You’re strictly an Etherium-only girl.
“Har-har. I do hope you’re going to take this seriously. Planes aren’t like places, they aren’t material.”
But I’m material, right?
“Your power lets you sustain form when you’re in another plane, but, without your constant touch or your seal in their flesh, anyone from Materium you took with you would simply snap straight back out – using your power, the power that first brought them through. Here – over the fence.”
I halted, glancing over the wooden barrier, then I simply vaulted over the rail, plunging into the undergrowth. It didn’t look like we were going towards my parents’ graves, which relieved me – we were headed closer to the spot where Lord Obsolete had run into a fledgling new arch-sorcerer.
So if you went to, say, Infernum –
“I’d need your hand or seal to go with you, yes. I can’t take form there – my mind doesn’t exist there, do you see? – and I can only remain joined with you in Materium. If you leapt through right now I’d get left behind. Not that I know exactly how you managed to send Olbru to Infernum that time…”
I slogged through a tough patch of thorny bushes and, pulling my robe free, got to relatively-clear ground, covered in long, wet grass.
Then I stopped again, realising what she meant.
So in the otherworld, we’ll be separated?
“Of course. I’ll stay by your side, though. I’ll even ride in your hood, if you’ll have me.”
I chuckled, then resumed our course.
It’ll be like nothing’s changed.
“Except everything will be different, Kas. You won’t have my regeneration –“
If something hurts me in there, it can kill me?
“Kill you, eat you, drop you right back out.”
Nice.
“But more importantly, you won’t have my perception filters… The landscapes of all the immaterial realms are made from… you’re probably best thinking of it as psychic energy. Etherium is almost pure, uneclipsed joy… on the surface at least. You won’t be able to summon fey while you’re there – that’s for an advanced class. You’re really going to have to try your hardest to keep your wits about you and not get distracted, at least the first time.”
I promise to keep a lid on my enthusiasm.
It was her turn to chuckle. “Just you wait.” And then a moment later: “Stop here. Look. Can you see it? Feel it?”
I couldn’t see anything. We were in a copse of leafless trees between two rows of graves. The ground was a brown twig-scattered mulch, smelling of dirt and decay, a few stray nettle-bushes the only real greenery in my immediate vicinity. Somewhere far off I could hear a night-crew digging graves so they’d be ready for the morning – complaining too loudly to be robbers.
No, I couldn’t see anything, but I had a sudden urge to put out my hand – and when I waved it in the air, the air rippled away from my touch in every direction – every dimension – every plane.
There was something there, clinging to the air and slowly drifting, a – what had she called it? – a seam. A faint green glimmer, like a single luminous hair, twisting and coiling. Something wrong that I felt I could fix, or exacerbate, by a simple touch of my hand.
“We fairies call it the jadeway. You’ll need to stretch it to open it enough to step through. Use it to get there and then you can use it to come back, to get some experience, before we have you open your own gate.”
I drew a breath.
I guess this is it.
I used gestures to simulate peeling open this seam between worlds, moving my hands in a rough approximation of what I was trying to do, fingers curled as if grasping at the very fabric of reality – yet I could see it responding smoothly, not to my cumbersome hands, but to my will, my mind, imagination. It opened, like a distended disc of green, shimmering foam – not fiery or coursing with waves as with the Autumn Door, but a surface of bubbling, popping luminescence.
Once it was big enough to step through, I raised my right foot, then leaned into it, submerging myself into the jadeway, bringing my weight forwards and down onto my foot –
Before the sole of my boot reached the ground of this other plane to which I’d committed myself, the foam washed over my face, and I could see.
I had plunged into a dream-world – I was all the way through, reinforced circle bobbing around me.
I stood as if in the midst of a vast forest, not a mere graveyard in the centre of a city.
A pink-orange sky streaked with dark grey clouds, the time of day indeterminate, perhaps indeterminable. Trees which weren’t forced to endure the death-curse of seasonal cycles loomed, strong and strange – the branches were thick with green leaves raised as if by individual winds, tendrils reaching up to caress that weird but strangely heart-warming sky. Holes in their bark were spilling forth rivers of sap, shining silver-gold, and small animals and birds and other creatures I didn’t recognise congregated without conflict to drink the nectar.
Glimmering sparks, soft to the touch as they passed over my skin, streamed this way and that in the air, playing one moment in the open and then darting off in the next to light the shadowy eaves of the trees, like clouds of electric insects that possessed no substance, no will other than to roll about in the breeze. And the breeze itself – each gust brought an overpowering scent of peaches, with the odour of moss replacing it in its wake as it passed.
“Well?” came Zel’s voice, familiar and yet not so. It was probably always going to be odd, listening to her with my actual ears instead of via the telepathic communication. Well, my right ear, to be specific – it seemed she’d come free of our joining and stayed silent within the cowl for a minute, allowing me to get my bearings before piping up.
“Sweet Nentheleme, this place…” My eyes wide, I turned slowly on the spot.
I raised my slackened, slightly-ajar lower jaw with a ‘clomp’ sound.
“She lives here, you know. Well, part of her, at least.”
“Wha- who?”
“Nentheleme.”
Surprising that the Goddess of Freedom, Pleasure and Art would hang around with the fey? Not so much. But it was exhilarating to think that I might actually meet a god in person… During my visitation to the shadowland and Mortiforn’s vampire servitor, it was entirely possible that Lord Suffering himself had just been in the next room over…
I was glad I was here rather than there, suddenly.
“Do you… get to see much of her?”
Zel laughed. “Nentheleme? She’s usually away in the outer dimensions, the borderlands, galloping across the timeless fields of the Thousand Marches. You wouldn’t meet her unless she wanted to meet you.”
Nentheleme, the Unbroken Unicorn.
“Did you ever meet her?”
She ignored my digression. “Come on, turn around; let’s get you back.”
The seam wasn’t immediately visible to me, yet it was easier to find it the second time, and easier to stretch it.
But Materium was just so mundane.
After three times there and back using the seam, she stopped me.
“A seam will fade over time,” she said from her place in my hood, not bothering to rejoin with me due to the inevitable separation soon to occur again, “though the more you use it the stronger its connection will become, and the likelier it will open on the same place in the otherworld next time it appears. We’d better stop now, or it’ll soon become an actual portal, and swallow up random passers-by from time to time, as well as spit out goblins.”
“Twelve Hells,” I muttered. That sounded bad.
“Inappropriate, but I take your point. Let’s move aside a little, and you can rupture your own way through.”
It was a lot darker without the visual assistance I took from her when we were joined – though I did appreciate the fact I could no longer smell the aroma of death I’d been subject to with her onboard.
Despite the darkness I didn’t want to appear like a cripple without her, and set off at a brisk pace –
I only got about fifteen paces before she stopped me again.
“Okay, here. This time, you’re tearing the hole with your own power. You want to do the same as when you were stretching the seam, but this time, you create the seam, hold it in your mind.”
It was hard – or, it was weird. It felt like clawing at a bubble but the bubble was made of a material too thick for my fingers to get purchase, something that would be glistening and glossy if I could only see it, but it wasn’t there, it wasn’t anything but empty air –
“It’s not something you can’t do. You do it all the time. You crack open planes like eggs for Flood Boy and the Mummifiers. This is no different. Don’t you get it? You’re no different to them. To us. You can bring yourself there just like you can bring us here. You just… press… pull… distort the ripple where the gate is sealed and then unlock it from there, swing it open – yes, you’re doing it…”
I had no idea why her words helped, what she really meant by them, why her steady tone was so reassuring.
“It’s like you’ve done this before,” I said.
“It’s like you’ve done this before,” she retorted; “oh wait, you have. You clod…”
I looked into the ‘rupture’ I’d cut into reality, hanging there, awaiting me, a mass of sizzling greenness no different to the seams I’d just been using for the last few minutes.
I’d created that wrongness, that chasm in realities.
“Come on, I doubt you want to take all day at this,” she muttered, but I could hear her own anticipation. She liked being home.
“Alright, alright.”
I went ahead, back through to the otherworld.
One of the clouds of glowing firefly-like things passed by me again in a waft of citrus-tinged breeze, the fluttering lights tickling my hands before shooting off to hover thirty feet away.
What would it be like here with Zel’s senses? I wondered.
I’d landed in a puddle of sap, disturbing some three-tailed, curly-horned squirrels, sending them promptly fleeing up the nearest tree – a tree which seemed to acknowledge their presence with a new gush of sap flooding out from high-up, where they could feel safe from me.
Weird.
“Kas.”
I glanced about – what was weirder, I was only about five paces from where I’d been when I’d used the seam.
“Kas?” She tutted – I felt movement as she walked around my head and, hand on my cheek, leaned around to look me in the eye; it was startling to see the little blonde-haired fairy right there, huge in my vision all of a sudden. “I don’t like not being able to hear your thoughts.”
“Never a less-creepy sentence uttered. No, it’s just, I’m confused about the relationship between the planes… Fifteen paces there is five here?”
“Sounds about right,” she replied in a thoughtful tone. “Interesting that you came up with that so quickly – I mean, I thought you were being all distracted-Kas, while you were being all insightful-Kas. You’ll be a proper professional sorcerer in no time, at this rate.” She patted my cheek then resumed her previous position.
‘Proper professional sorcerer’, I grumbled internally, thankful she couldn’t hear my thoughts. That was about the tenth time in the past week she’d patronised me like that.
“Which way do we go?” I asked, looking around again.
“Pick one.”
“Erm – alright, this way.” I stepped out of the puddle and set off on what looked like the most-even ground. “So I can’t use these gates, these ruptures, to get places quickly? You talked about walking right out of Mund.”
“It’s unreliable – it changes with the tides, the same as time.”
“Time!”
“Don’t worry, it’ll even out. You’ll get a feel for it eventually.”
I entered a wide clearing of lush, lime-green grass, wet with dew, glistening like glass. The area was dotted with obelisks of jade rock, each about twice my height and jagged along the top. About each obelisk a single red tendril was wrapped, a shoot no thicker than my finger but wound about the jade pillar a hundred or more times, right up to the ragged, toothy tips.
A representation of the gravestones back in Materium?
I sighed as I strode. “I was hoping I’d learn how to teleport. I wondered if you could use it to fly, flying’s so useful…”
“Ehhhh…” I heard her frustrated exhalation.
“It was the twins’ idea,” I said in my defence.
“Really.”
“It was!”
“I’m not saying you can’t open a gate in the air, but… Look, if you want to fly, you take a flying creature, and you join with it. If you want to teleport you find a teleporter, but the ones you can join with are pretty damn rare – that, or you access –”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Wait – ‘join’? Like I join with you?”
“Well, basically, yes, but you couldn’t use my wings unless you received a very strange twist on my powers; I’m tiny. You find the right creature, and just put it into yourself, or put yourself into it – whatever. It’s as easy as opening a portal for you, trust me.”
“But then I’d have to listen to it all the time – oh, wait –“
“Yeeeessss…?”
“– I turn them off, don’t I? But keep their powers, just like I keep your perception, your healing… Oh, wow…”
None of this had ever really occurred to me before; even seeing Dustbringer using his spectral ‘chariots’ of Nethermist hadn’t clued me in. I’d just assumed he’d had to pay some price for his transportation. If it was as simple as ‘hey, you’re mine, make me fly, now go to sleep’…
I exited the clearing, entered another wooded patch, picking my way amongst the moss-blanketed roots; some of the mosses weren’t green but bright vibrant yellow, or even soft pinks and lilacs.
“But – how many can I join with?”
“Well, that depends.”
“On their power?”
“And yours. In any case, far fewer than you can simply command. I don’t know how many you’ll be able to handle at once, but I suspect you can fit another one or two in there with me, if you’re just desperate to fly.”
I started ticking off my shopping list. “Fly. Heal. Two types of blastiness: lethal for the monsters and non-lethal for the people. Walk through walls –”
“Walk through walls? The chances are slim; it’s more an undead or demonic deal. A ghost for sure – almost all of them will offer you that power – or a mizelikon, maybe… I really couldn’t say. Unless you’re willing to take a trip to a different dimension, I think you’re out of luck.”
I considered her answer. “Soooo… you’re saying the other things on that list aren’t out of the question?”
I heard her sigh. “Let’s just – oh, interesting.”
“What is it now?”
“Shh!” she hissed, way louder in my ear than she needed to be.
I halted, and then out of pure instinct I crouched and slunk slowly towards the nearest tree, restricting the different possible angles of attack and making myself a smaller target – not that it was likely to matter, in a place such as this. Either my star-and-circle shield would work and I’d be fine, or my shield would fail and I’d die – there’d be no middle ground.
I started running through the rupture-creation procedure again in my head. It’d be easier going back. Easier to tear a hole in the planes going home than to get here.
I couldn’t see a seam, but I could imagine where to make one, picture the green crease hanging in the air before me.
I felt safe enough, but Zel still wasn’t talking.
“What is it?” I asked in appropriately-hushed tones.
“It’s hard to get a read on, even for me,” she replied. “Possible illusions.”
Illusions. Didn’t even put that on the list.
“I’m not saying no to a pet illusionist,” I murmured.
“You’re not saying no to a proficient illusionist either – that’s what I’m afraid of. Give me a minute and get ready to go home if I say.”
“Yes sir.”
I held myself poised, ready to open the rupture at a moment’s notice.
Then I heard her let out a breath in my ear, and the tinkle of her soft laughter.
“Ah, don’t be worried. It’s just a gremlin. Go forward.”
I didn’t move. “Gremlin? What should I be expecting?”
“They can’t make anything solid to the touch, but their apparitions are said to be convincing by those who don’t have eyes like mine.” I detected a note of pride in her voice there. “They can get a general read on their victims – they can’t pick through your thoughts, but they can get a sense of your overall emotional state, which helps them decide how best to get your guard down.”
“And once your guard’s down?”
“They approach invisibly and take all your stuff, usually. It’s not often they do it, but they can drink your brain right out of your ear if you get on their bad side.”
I couldn’t help but pause a moment, before uttering a slightly less confident-sounding, “Nice…”
“No way it’s getting through your shield. Go grab it, the same as you got the goblins. You can use that shield trick to trap it.”
I stopped crouching and, smoothing down my robe, continued on my way, moving perhaps just a trace more cautiously than before, eyes peeled for the first sign of a disturbance…
The goblins had been creating a disturbance for the locals in Lord’s Knuckle, and when I got to the place Zel pointed me to they’d been sewing the pelts of the local wild cats they’d been eating into what looked like the world’s most-repulsive blanket. Flood Boy blocked the exits, and a few choice words had made them the latest additions to Team Feychilde.
Now I was going to expand that roster.
Before I’d gone thirty yards, a voice rang out from somewhere in the trees in front of me:
“Hello? Hello, is someone there? Can you help me? I think I’m stuck!”
It was the voice of a human-sounding woman, tinged with a thread of terror, and there was a very realistic note of self-deprecation mixed in there. The voice of someone who’d got themselves into a bit of a tricky situation, and hadn’t quite lost their nerve yet.
I made my way another twenty yards, skipping across a glittering sap-filled dip in the earth between two trees – and then I could see her, her foot trapped in a snarl of roots.
She wore a diamond-inlaid choker about her neck, and a tunic of fine, gold-trimmed leather above a knee-length skirt that looked to be woven of leaves. A scabbard hung at her side, the cross-guard and pommel of her sword inlaid with rubies. She wasn’t human – she was elven, metallic-red hair tied in long tresses that exposed the curved ears. Her face held the refined beauty possessed by all elvenkind, but her eyes in particular were striking – green like mine only deeper, like wells of meaning, surmounted by long, red-tinged lashes.
The moment the elf-maiden spotted me, those eyes were turned imploringly to my face, hidden beneath my mask.
“Oh, praise be to Nentheleme!” she cried joyously. “Praised be the Horned One! Good sir, might you spare a moment of your time to aid a fellow traveller in dire need?”
“Where is it, exactly?” I muttered to Zel, ignoring the illusion.
There was no response from the fairy. That meant it was either hiding my voice from her, or hers from me.
I’ll have to remember that trick, once you’re mine, gremlin.
“Sir?” The elf’s voice had just the right note of incredulity, the hopefulness melting out of her. “Will you not lend me your assistance? Please!” More of the terror now. “I’ll do anything.”
I decided to come at this at a whole different angle.
“You’re laying it on a bit thick by this point,” I called out loud. “No running away. Come before me and present yourself.”
The elf pouted, beating her lashes at me one last time before suddenly freezing, as if time had stopped for her; then in the next moment I could see where she was coming apart, drifting into wisps of mist or smoke clinging to the air.
And the next moment, the frozen image of the elf erupted as a gigantic freaking wolf leapt right through her, jaws wide, snarling.
It didn’t even trigger the shield, and, with that bolstering my resolve, I held my ground, even stepping into it slightly.
The moment the wolf touched me it too became mist.
“Seriously, this is all you can do? I’ve half a mind to just leave you here. Come on out.”
Stillness was my only answer. Silence. Not even the rustling of leaves.
Sighing, I spread out more shields.
When I made my pentagon I felt it, a pressure – weak, vanishingly weak – on the edge behind me.
This time it was even easier to form the trap, loop it around and tie it behind the invisible presence I’d sensed.
“Serenel;” the thing swore in Etheric, a thin, reedy voice coming from within the diamond-shaped fencing of blue lines.
I turned, keeping my eyes on the ground, and adopted a shocked expression. “Please, there’re ladies present,” I chided it. I gestured to my shoulder, and felt Zel lean against the side of my head, sticking an arm out of my hood and waving. “Now, be a good gremlin, give me your name and swear to serve me in heart and mind and deed, indefinitely, and with all your undying loyalty.”
Without that shortcut I’d be forced to glare in his general direction, and none of us wanted that.
Zel’s miniscule nails dug like pins into my neck in anticipation.
The gremlin gave forth a noise that was something like a hiss, but I got the impression it was sighing, a protracted, almost resigned-seeming sound.
In the same moment its name entered my mind, like a long-forgotten, suddenly-remembered fact –
“Zabalam,” it croaked at last in its thin, querulous voice. “I swear to serve as you say.” It let out another hiss, disappointment in the low sound. “Failed again.”
I could sense the bond when I put my hand out in its direction. “Zabalam – let my friend speak to me,” I said, wanting to test the waters before I dropped the diamond-shaped barrier.
“Thank you,” Zel said snarkily.
“My pleasure,” Zabalam snarked back.
I let the diamond-lines fade out. “Be visible,” I commanded.
There was a shimmering, glimmering on the air, a mist which swiftly coalesced into a funny-looking little chap.
The gremlin, Zabalam, was about two feet tall and entirely hairless. His long-fingered hands were tucked into the pockets of his tiny, form-fitting breeches, leaving only the long sharp-nailed thumbs exposed. He wore a loose white vest over his skinny upper half, and his feet were housed in bright red, stretched-looking felt shoes with curly tips. His skin was pink but mottled with green like mould in patches here and there. His overlarge, bald head would’ve resembled a pig’s, complete with its beady eyes (gleaming the same as the illusory elf’s had been, deep-green and uncanny). That said, the snout and ears were pointed, curling down like a goblin’s, and his sharp, randomly-oriented little teeth were protruding from between his lips.
He looked so upset.
“Don’t be having performance anxiety.” I tried a conciliatory smile. “To be fair, I had help.”
“She told you what was coming?” he hissed, actual anger in it this time.
“You’d do the same, now, wouldn’t you?”
Then the resigned-sounding hiss again, his almost-glowing eyes lowered. “I suppose – yes – master.”
“I don’t need any of that ‘master’ nonsense,” I replied. “Just… do as I say, and you’ll be the best-treated gremlin in the whole of Materium.”
“As you say,” the gremlin said glumly.
Mission accomplished.
“Do you want to come along?” I asked.
“Oh, drop it,” Zel said, irate.
The gremlin’s face had perked up at my question.
“Come along?” he asked. “You mean… I can go with you?”
“Why not?”
He smiled, showing several full sets of spiky little teeth – and trotted towards me in his bright-red pointy shoes, entering the circle-shield without being fazed in the slightest.
I heard Zel voice a tinny little growl, and I smiled too.
Disgruntled-sounding fairy on my shoulder, eager-looking gremlin at my side, I set off again, heading deeper into the fey wood.
* * *
“What on earth is that?” I said, trying to keep the awe from my voice and failing miserably.
“Is he always like this?” Zab asked Zel.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time.”
“How do you put up with it?”
“Can’t give away a secret like that for free, when I could sell it you,” Zel said with a grin.
Zab hissed in his sighing manner.
In the twenty minutes (or what felt like twenty minutes, anyway – who knew how long it’d actually been, given where we were) since we met Zab, the fairy and gremlin had already developed the foundation of what I was sure would soon become a good working relationship. They had moved on from threatening to kill each other (a topic of conversation henceforth barred, by their master’s decree, for fear of one of them actually finding a way to get around my commands and literally do it), to threatening to merely torture each other (another topic of conversation henceforth banned, if only to stop the increasingly-nauseating descriptions of flaying parboiled flesh). After sufficient cajoling and topic-banning on my behalf, it transpired that my two minions had absolutely nothing in common – aside from the fact I was being a continual pain in both their necks. And so they were choosing to bond, like any good employees, over the incompetence of their management.
“No, seriously, what is it?”
I couldn’t take my eyes off the creature.
We’d halted on the edge of a cliff, in a patch of tall grass Zel called ‘treegrass’ – huge green blades taller than me, never mind my companions – and pushed our way through, keeping low to the ground, to overlook the little tree-dotted valley in which our quarry was situated without being spotted.
“A sylph, Feychilde,” Zel replied.
It was a man sitting upon a horizontal section of the curliest tree’s trunk, cupping the silver-gold sap flowing freely from his seat and drinking it, washing in it. He would stand seven feet tall, his hair straight and glossy like a sheet of pure black jet; and he was beautiful. Not handsome, beautiful: it was like a sculptor had crafted him out of bronze, and if I’d been otherwise-inclined I’d have probably thought a gremlin with even poorer taste than Zab was at work. His skin was burnished; despite the shadows of the branches and the dim, unchanging pink-orange sky, his rippling muscles shone from the sap. He was what I could only describe as scantily clad, a single strip of white linen dangling about his waistline to protect his modesty.
It was just normal-length grass down there in the valley, even if the area was dotted with multicoloured fluorescent flowers and bushes that walked, meandering slowly across the landscape. I could get into range of the sylph pretty easily.
“What does he do?”
“First two things on your list checked off in one. Pretty durable too.”
Flies… and heals?
“Can he heal other people, or just regenerate himself like you?”
“It’s pointless asking, Feychilde.” (I got the impression she was using my name this regularly so as to drum it into Zab, who was watching our exchange quietly, observing us with those little green eyes.) “For the record he should be able to do both, but you’ll have to test the powers once you’re joined. You can manifest them in different ways to him, though it’s usually to some lesser degree.”
I took a second absorbing that.
“Don’t go into this thinking you’re getting the healing potential of a druid,” she continued, “because you’re going to be disappointed.”
“Right. So a different fey – not this sylph, I get that, but another one – might be able to only heal itself, but I might be able to heal others with its power – even if it’s slower, not as… healy?”
“Right, Feychilde. Not as healy.”
“Come on, your highness,” two can play that game, “I’m under a lot of pressure here. This is my first time in the otherworld, remember?”
“You might not even get that power. Or much at all. It’s not like you can draw things out of the air like I can, when we’re joined, is it?”
“True. So how strong is he?”
Zel shrugged, dainty pale-blue dress swishing. “You’ll have to test him – it depends on his age and experience, his Wellspring of power. If he won’t give you his name or meet your gaze we can always fight him until he starts following orders, but if he starts breaking your inner shields it might be time to call it a day. We can come back in another spot, or –“
“I follow,” I said. “I want his powers.”
Now Zab hissed in an approving-sounding way – a rising, warbling sound – grinning horribly all the while in a too-many-toothed leer.
Fine, flying was something of a luxury item – one I’d gotten so used to over the last couple of days that I couldn’t help but want it. I knew its utility. Without flight I’d have never been able to get to the centre of the crowd in Firenight Square anything like as quickly, and hundreds more lives would’ve been lost – there was no guarantee I’d have Em at my side to use her aeromancy on me next time I needed it.
Healing…
Before the otherworld and the arch-diviner and the vampire, the real reason I hadn’t been able to sleep – the carnage, the bloodshed, the mayhem of the evening…
There were times, plenty of times as that catastrophe was unfolding last night that I found myself standing there, floating there, doing nothing, having nothing to do – if I could’ve spent that time putting right just one life that’d been ruined, wouldn’t that have made a difference? If I could’ve tended the injured, mended wounds…
‘Especially the children.’
I shuddered in remembrance.
“Let’s get him,” I said.
We circled around to a spot where the cliff was less steep, and then I made my way out onto the slope, moving at a great loping run. Zab would follow along at his own pace.
I just had to get in range of the sylph’s hearing, start throwing out commands, before he managed to flee.
As I sprinted I worked with my hands, spreading the shields I’d already begun up on the crest – I was getting better at it, faster.
“Do not flee!” I cried.
I saw as the sylph looked up, then spun around from his seat to face me, getting to his feet as he did so. His stature was now suddenly imposing, his bronze-sculpted musculature looking like a form of weaponry all on its own, tendons carved in relief that rippled as he moved.
The outer edge of my twelfth shield struck him and buckled inwards instead of pushing him back, then the eleventh, the tenth –
I still kept on coming. When the seven-sided shape hit him the others outside burst, and suddenly he was leaning into the dome of force pressing against him, thrusting against my power in a futile show of exertion. However hard he tried, straining against my defences, he was being pushed back, his sinewy legs braced, dragging grooves into the grass where his feet were planted.
I halted on the next footfall and drew out a diamond again, just to be on the safe side, then took a moment to recover my breath. I felt Zel release the hair at the nape of my neck where she’d taken refuge in the bottom of my hood, and step back around to my shoulder.
The trapped sylph didn’t take long to discover his imprisonment. He lunged at the walls I’d created, again and again, making the barriers shiver but nothing more – not yet.
It was then that he spread his wings, and they were just as beautiful as he, somehow completing the picture of him that I hadn’t quite realised before was missing something.
They came out from his shoulders and central and lower back – three of them on either side. The wings were strong-looking, thick things, covered in dark-blue feathers, the rich colour of the night sky in the first hour of darkness; the broadest spanned ten feet, wide enough that their tips curled in at the sorcerous barrier.
He didn’t seem to care, though, and he used the edges of his wings like blades, retracting and whirling them alongside his other attacks, cutting away at my four lines of force surrounding him.
I froze the seventh shield, then walked forwards, closing the distance. When forty-nine feet became thirty-three, Shield Six met it and took over the duty of maintaining the diamond fixed on the perimeter.
Each shield farther from me was weaker than the next one closer to me; I didn’t want the diamond to break and, while this guy didn’t match up to the twelfth-rank hag-thing the Cannibal Six had thrown at me on Fullday night, he was strong.
I approached to twenty-one feet, almost within the shadow of the tree’s branches, the pentagonal Shield Four taking over anchoring the diamond.
The sylph definitely looked flustered; his perfect sheet of black hair was tossed, some hanging in his face. I could now perceive that the shining quality of his flesh was not purely from his use of the gleaming sap to wash his body; he really was bronze, metallic-looking up close, despite the fluidity of his movements.
As I halted again, he ceased his attempts to pierce my barriers with blows of his fists and feet and wings; he turned his face towards me while keeping his shining gold eyes on the ground in front of my feet.
“Cast not thy gaze upon me, wicked sorcerer,” the sylph cried in Etheric, in a youthful, arrogant, forthright-sounding voice. “Set me free, and I shall grant thee a boon; entrap me longer, and it shall only be toward thy demise.”
He managed to sound like he was doing me a favour and threatening me… all at the same time as he inadvertently reminded me of the usefulness of the most atrocious weapon in my arsenal, made for just this situation.
Pain-gaze.
It won’t come to that.
“It is not my intention to entrap you, noble sylph,” I said. Noble sylph, or essel majhar, just seemed to flow naturally in Etheric. “Yet I seek more than a mere boon.”
“Begone, foul sorcerer!” he snarled, bronze features contorted even as his glare was fixed on the grass before me. “This dale hath been mine abode these years ten score and five, a realm of peace amidst the tumult. How now thou durst think to sully its gentle grass with thine arts of blackest magic, I knowest not, and stand wildered – I know only that it shall be to thy perishment.”
“Look at me.” I saw the second-by-second struggle, the anger-fuelled resistance, as his eyes were pulled, inch by exhausting inch, to meet my own –
The moment he did, I lowered my own face, and looked at the grass at his feet.
“I do not use my arts for, erm, black magic, noble sylph.” I couldn’t tell if my words and actions were having any effect as I wouldn’t look into his face, but his posture still seemed tense from my peripheral view of his lower body. “Indeed, I am a champion of Mund, and have entered your realm without your permission. For this, I apologise, and would offer reparations –“
“Not without limit!” Zel said urgently, right into my ear.
“– such as we might agree after more discussion,” I continued as smoothly as I could, “if that would help alleviate your doubts.”
“What wouldst thou of me?” he asked, the imperious tone softened somewhat, though I couldn’t now betray his trust by looking into his eyes. If he still bore me ill-will, and I stared into them, would it hurt him straight away, or would it take time to build up?
“Your name, noble sylph. Swear to serve me, in heart and mind and deed.”
There was a pause before he spoke: “Avaelar, in honour of the Keeper of the Keys.”
His fealty had already passed to me – I could feel it.
Then immediately he pressed on: “And thou, O sorcerer? Hast thou a name fit for mine ear?”
“They call me Feychilde.”
“A scapegrace,” I heard him mutter, “a baseborn scapegrace.”
A… what? A… lowborn… rascal? That was what he thought of me?
I was starting to get sick of pandering to him – he hadn’t budged one iota in his stance, physically or conversationally. At the same time, I was basically enslaving him… which was hardly ethical in the first place. It wasn’t like I could blame him for being intractable. Would I have gone along with it, if some extra-planar being popped into my reality and demanded my everlasting servitude? Yeah, probably not.
Still, his stuck-up, holier-than-thou attitude grated on me.
“And as to your oath?”
His voice was quiet, almost disbelieving: “Verily do I so swear.”
I gave it a moment, then raised my eyes to his, and said, “I think you can move around, now.”
He stretched his wings out, and they extended through the diamond.
His will was mine.
I let the shields fall (except the reinforced circle, of course) and watched as Avaelar took my words literally, pushing himself up into the air with a single powerful stroke of his six wings working together in unison.
“Only upon sufferance shall I attend thee,” he called, “Master Feychilde.”
I felt a chill run through me.
He beat at the air again, rising beyond the tree’s branches with a grace and speed that could only be the result of some inherent magic – he had to weigh too much for those things to get him around so quickly without there being some deeper explanation. For a moment I considered stopping him, commanding him to land and chat about things, tell him I didn’t want to be his ‘master’… then I had second thoughts.
Did I really want to put myself through more intolerable conversation with this otherworldly idiot? And did I really want to force him to stay in my presence, me, the one who’d entered his blissful domain and heinously stripped him of his freedom of choice in around about two minutes flat? His tongue had been bound, his mind bound, to speak and think only of my betterment – but, before that point, he had twice essentially sworn to see me dead. I could say I wasn’t his master till I was blue in the face, try to have a friendly relationship with him as I tried with all my minions – but it was no less true for all my pitiful pleading to the contrary, was it?
I was his master now, like it or not.
I let him fly away, Avaelar, the sylph, my newest recruit, with a slightly nauseated feeling in my belly.
Then a yawn gripped me, unreasonably satisfying.
Zab had only caught up right at the end, and craned his head back to look at me. “Did it go well, Feychilde? Do you have his powers too?”
I nodded, my eyes suddenly turned bleary.
“I think it might be time for bed, Zel,” I murmured.
“Let’s go home, then. You can’t sleep here. Things get weird if you try. You’re definitely not ready for that yet – few mortals are ever ready.”
Zab looked slightly crestfallen when I nodded my agreement.
“There’ll be plenty more opportunities to play, Zab,” I said.
I held out my hands, feeling, looking for the edges of the planar linkage, the weak points, the best place to pull it apart.
Then there it was, easier than before, just like she’d said.
A portal home.
I looked sidelong at the gremlin.
“Do you want to come along?” I asked him again.
So it was that I left behind the citrus breeze and warm, dim skies of the otherworld. The three of us crossed through, into the grounds of the Shrine of Yune.
We came out near a bunch of gravestones, and I staggered on the slightly-uneven ground the gate gave us for a landing.
I barely felt it as Zel slid into the side of my head, but I noticed the sudden flood of perceptual enhancements.
Ah, the sweet smell of death.
I looked around, getting my bearings.
“So… we’re still here?” I said, a bit of unavoidable wonderment in my voice. “But how? We walked – I don’t know how far –“
The sky, too – it was predawn light I could see as a purple-grey tint through the clouds.
“Three hours, give or take – that’s nowhere near the worst trade-off in time-flow you could’ve got.”
Zab hissed at my side, and I looked down at the mottled little gremlin. He held up his creepy, long-fingered hands, and three glimmering trees made out of nothing more substantial than light appeared in the air between his palms, little depictions floating there like puppets on strings. “The wild places extend.” He spread his hands, and the trees multiplied to thirty or more. “The places of civilisation contract.”
Suddenly the dozens of trees were dozens of little buildings, complete with roofs and candles in the windows – then he brought his hands together again, reducing the buildings to three houses.
“Impressive,” I said, more at the casual display of illusion than the content of the lore he’d shared.
“We should get out of here. There’s a couple of people heading this way.”
People?
“Mourners. Crying. Nothing to worry about, but people who might get worried just seeing you here. Sorcerers, graveyards; you know the drill.”
I was still looking down at Zab. So I can join with him? I just ask –
“You don’t have to ask, Kas. Just do it, and let’s go.”
I shook my head, and said, “Will you let me join with you?”
Zab bowed his head in a dutiful nod, and actually managed to sound distinctly happy when he replied in his reedy voice, “Of course, ma- Feychilde.”
I reached out, placing my hand on a mouldy patch right in the centre of his bald head.
And I crouched, pressed down.
Like pressing the wooden cup full of air down into a well of water; trapping the air there, pinning it somehow and withdrawing my arm –
I stood straight again. He was gone.
“Hello, Zel.” The thin and mischievous masculine voice.
“Hello, Zab.” The hard but cordial feminine voice.
I knew whereabouts I was, and now Zel had mentioned them I could pick out the voices of a couple of women, getting slowly closer as they followed one of the trodden-down paths. I headed back into the nearest copse of trees through the knee-high grass, picking a course that’d keep me out of theirs yet get me back to the fence and on my way home as swiftly as possible. I was almost battling my exhaustion as I moved, truly feeling my lack of energy reserves for the first time.
You two can’t, like, see each other in there, can you?
“No, Feychilde,” Zel replied, “but it’ll be better when you put him to sleep. Right?”
I carefully held my thoughts still, stretching out the moment.
“Right, Feychilde?”
Zab mind-tittered, and Zel mind-groaned.
Within thirty seconds they were bickering over the relative merits of scrying and illusion, a topic delving deep into the philosophical that occupied them for at least five minutes. It was pleasant, actually; neither of them were actually being nasty, and it gave me something to listen to, to help keep me awake, as I made my way back to Mud Lane. There was more to the divide between divination and enchantment than I’d considered, really – they were arguing over the meanings of truth and falsity, the hidden forms of sensation and the power of perceptual filters.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow I would test Zab’s powers, and – something about which I felt almost trepidation – Avaelar’s too.
It didn’t matter if I was the master. It didn’t matter if I’d done something horrendous to the uppity sylph and would bear his enmity till my dying day.
I was going to bed and I was going to be able to sleep now because I knew, I knew that the next time something happened, the next time a massacre, a nightmare occurred before my waking eyes – I would be prepared – I would be ready – and I’d just taken my first real, self-directed step on that path.
It didn’t matter what justifications the heretics offered up, which gods they served. It didn’t matter how a dark archmage might seek to excuse his actions, the threats he might make.
I was going to be able to sleep because I wasn’t going to let them all die like that again.