The locket clicked open in Commander Zideo’s hands. Auspicious light shone on him, casting his pink and aqua blue locks of hair in gold. Then it was gone.

He shuddered. “That felt like an upgrade,” he said. “Tingly, like the air dash. Like my legs fell asleep.” He worked his ankles and did a couple of body weight squats. “Like they’ve always been asleep.”

“What has it done?” asked Helmgarth.

“Dunno.”

“Okay so okay,” began the ghost of Bailey Blastoff. “The thing with it is that it’s a wall jump. So like so you should be able to get upwards if you ever see any like, platforms that alternate sides or if you have to go up a shaft, kind of thing. Like if you need to get up there, use wall jump to jump right up that shaft.”

“Could you stop saying that?” Zideo looked pained.

“The thing though is you don’t want to be just like completely breaking it out for the first time when you need it so you should kind of sort of test it out, just like give it a dry run.”

“Smart,” said Zideo. Helmgarth and I followed him to the nearest cave wall with the broadest, flattest and most vertical surface. The specter of the boy-alien floated, the laces of his untied tennis shoes not so much dragging on the cave floor as dipping past into it, unaffected by its physicality. Zideo got a running start, and leaped toward the wall as though to kick it. To my astonishment, both of his feet stuck, and one hand.

He turned his head back to us with a victorious grin, and was able to get out the words “How long-” before dropping to the cave floor. I tended to him in the only way dogs know how to treat the injured, but he pushed me away, standing and rubbing his coccyx. “Answer: Not long. Ow.”

He tried again, kneeling sideways as it were against the wall, and immediately jumped, clearing the heads of his onlookers and landing behind Helmgarth easily. “Wow!” he said. “That’s actually just fun. I wanna do that some more.”

Addrion admonished him for wasting time, and Helmgarth agreed. The specter told us that he would follow us as far as he could, and try to retrace the steps toward the purple light. “Does anyone like want my football helmet?” he asked. Helmgarth placed it in his backpack, although I think he was humoring him.

It almost sounds like a conventional beginning of a human joke: A streamer, a space exterminator, a boyfriend with a backpack, a dog and a ghost went spelunking. But the mood of the party was far from humorous as we left behind the remains of Bailey Blastoff and the incomparable hill of piled and undecayed corpses. We conducted our business not in silence, but with the stingy exchange of laconic syllables, mostly directions and hesitations. After some time, Bailey began to ramble. His patter became, for me, an oddly reassuring white noise, carrying little real meaning but chasing off the sense of immediate danger.

The gaps between his soliloquies seemed vulnerable, and I felt inexplicably that whatever was out there was undefended against in silence. The scalloped lichens and ersatz starlight guided us when the intangible critical path was uncertain.

Before too long, a slight violet hue was visible in the edges of stones, the pools of mineral-infused water filled by dripping stalactites. There was light somewhere, although like the light above Platformia, its source was unclear to me.

Another change came over our proceedings, and one that I do not think the humans perceived. A scent entered the mix of the air, something unrecognizable to me but which conjured up images of wild swamp beasts with dripping scales, halitotic gusts from gaping maws, the rancid eye crust of scavengers whose hibernation is interrupted. The vision circled and harried me like a bat with nowhere to land. I kept my other senses as sharp as I could in the oppressive dark of the so-called Blunderworld.

“Look,” said Helmgarth, pointing toward a cave that felt very much like an exit. Purple light streamed through its aperture. With much trouble, we made our way across paths between paths, terrain that was not meant to be crossed. I had noticed this growing resistance, as though the cave system itself were firmly warning us off. Could the critical path have been sending us a message in the only language it spoke?

“Ermff,” said Bailey Blastoff. He leaned forward against an invisible force, very much like the unseen book which had once dragged Helmgarth against his own will. The rest of us turned to see him stuck. “So I’m guessing based on what I’m seeing here that this is like my limit.”

Helmgarth drew cryptic symbols in the air and wished the boy-alien a formal farewell. He blessed him earnestly in the words of his people. Then he took a great liberty in inducting him posthumously into the Game Fellows. “Ugh, you guys have a new secret club and it has like even a NAME? That’s so totally just my luck, I cannot believe I missed out on that. Anyway, I’m not going anywhere. I’m sitting right here. I have literally, literally nothing better to do.” His ghost sat down on the floor, although judging by the way his clothes and skin wandered through the threshold of the stone, it seemed to me that he was coincident with the rock rather than standing on it like we were.

“Thanks for everything, bruh,” said Zideo. He tried a salute like Helmgarth’s but wasn’t sure what to do, and after a few confusing and meaningless gestures settled on a thumbs-up.

As is so often the case, the bright violet light was not so blinding on the other side of the aperture. An underground expanse like nothing I have ever seen swept out before us, a far cry from even the great mere chamber in which I had been deposited.

I say expanse, but it was nothing like an abstract plane, rather a jagged and irregular ground as might have been drawn by a seismograph during an earthquake. It emitted the sonic equivalent of shivers on a spine, a tintinnabulation like jingle bells heard through a wall. In the far end of the great hollow shone the Purple Radian, the room awash in its indigo-spectrum rays. Beneath it, gleaming and backlit, stood a frozen man, identical to one of the corpses I had seen in the tremendous mound of bodies–the man with the beard and the sandals.

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Zideo turned back and thrust his head back through the stone aperture. “Hey, Bailey,” he called. “He’s right here.”

“Figures,” said the ghost. “So then like just go sort of get the Radian, I guess? And be sure you don’t wake the horde?”

“Cool,” said Zideo, and nearly went back to his work. “The what?”

“The horde?” repeated Bailey. “It’s like this massive stampede of every creature and mob that’s ever been included in an underworld or cave setting in a platformer game? And they all joined a huge giant supermassive blob of death or whatever? They’re like the advance guard for Sourgorge, the Scourging Bane of the-”

“Bane of the Corpse Garden,” interrupted Zideo. “Yeah, we got it. Thanks bud.”

We shuffled and heaved, twisted and slid through the gnarled and swollen terrain. I saw no sign of the aforementioned horde of Blunderworlders, but the monstrous stench loitered in my nostrils. A bouquet of towering rocks resembling pillars, but surely stalagtites that drooped until they had joined their stalactite opposites, sprouted between so-called ceiling and (even more dubiously) so-called floor. One of these turned out to be a drawbridge, and at its base a deep black raced down into the heart of the Shard. Even abysses have abysses.

It became clear that the plateau on which Nereus the frozen man stood was not at all connected to our side of the cavern, but another of the floating chunks of rock fixed by unseen forces, however sturdily, in the air above the possibly endless cavity below.

If the corpse mountain had been the macabre results of myriad attempts to cross a gap, then what horrific sights lie at the bottom of these even more obscure depths?

Zideo stood at the edge and seemed to be thinking the same thing. We all were, even Addrion, who ribbed my human about it. “Hey Zideo,” she said, “think the body you lost in the B.O.P.O.D. is sitting in one of these pits?”

He did not rise to the obvious bait, because my human is nothing if not a bastion of patience, a redoubt of reserve, an alcazar of aplomb. She did not stop, though.

“Take a crack at it. You’ve got air dash and wall jump right? Just get some height on one of these rock pillars, and dash across.” She was smiling, not sincere, but I could tell he was seriously considering it.

“It… still looks too far. Probably. Right?” Then he answered himself. “Yeah, definitely.”

“I’m just fucking with you,” said Addrion. “Look.” She pointed up, where an oversized latch was wedged into the groin between two of the rough, rock pillars. I could not see any mechanism tying it to the drawbridge, but the logic seemed to add up for the humans.

“Who does that?” asked Zideo. “If I could get up there, I wouldn’t need a way across.”

“You can,” said Addrion. “See how it’s pinned between these two things?” She slapped her palm against the pillar. Dust swirled and dirt fell. I was not sure, but it seemed to me that a shudder in the stone called to other stone, which echoed further off.

“Don’t wake the horde, love,” said Helmgarth.

“Yeah,” said Zideo, reproachfully. “Could you not do that?”

She was unperturbed. “And I strongly recommend you use your wall jump on the way down, too. Unless you want to be a little red stain in a purple cave.”

He snapped his head toward her. “Do you think there’s falling damage?”

She shrugged, and gestured acidly toward him. “You’re the g-word-Player.”

“I mean, it’s a coin flip in Platformers, right?” he speculated to himself, then, hearing no reply, looked to Helmgarth. “Right?”

Helmgarth shook his head. “Even if I knew the answer, I wouldn’t know the answer for you.”

Zideo got to work climbing the pillars. It took a couple tries, and he took Addrion’s advice and practiced using the wall-jump not only on the ascent, but also on the descent. He found that although he couldn't stick indefinitely, if he concentrated on sticking to the wall he would slide slowly downward as long as he wanted–from which he could launch yet another jump. He was able to snag the latch and a hideously deep click cracked through the cave before the bridge slammed down across to the floating land-chunk. I made sure not to look over the edge as we made our way across.

Nereus looked like a jolly old philosopher, cartoonishly rotund and endearingly argumentative. He looked mildly annoyed to have been turned to crystal and/or ice, having come this far only to be found out by the enemy with his goal almost within reach.

“Okay, Player,” prodded Addrion. “Please do the honors.” Zideo jumped in the air, and couldn’t reach the Radian. He tried again, wall-jumping and got a little closer, but it was still out of his reach.

“That’s not what I meant,” said Addrion. “Unfreeze our compatriot here, if you please.”

Zideo looked at her, and at Nereus, and back to gleaming point of purple light. Wordlessly, he tried again to jump up and grab it, though it was still too much distance for him to reach.

“What are you doing?” asked Addrion, the green of her armor swirling with pearlescence against the complementary purple hues.

“Trying to grab it,” he said, and lunged once more with the same results.

“Just unfreeze Nereus. He’s an experienced platformer lead. He can get it and give it to you.”

“I don’t want him to get it and give it to me,” said Zideo. “I want to grab it and give it to myself.”

As they bickered, the echoes of echoes of echoes perked up my ears. There was movement, vibration, somewhere in chambers adjacent to the cavern. A rushing like rain on a roof, or pebbles down a cliffside.

I attempted a hurf to alert the humans, but they were too engrossed in their debate about who would get the Radian. Soon, it would be too late. I barked, the sound echoing hideously, but thankfully getting everyone’s attention. They turned to me, and instantly to something else, the far off sound getting closer.

“Cormac,” said Zideo. “Did you wake the horde?”

A horrifying implication, but an understandable mistake. Whoever they were, they were coming. Addrion grabbed Zideo by the shirt. “Listen to me. We have hostiles inbound. Un. Freeze. Nereus.”

His purple countenance fell, and he sighed, but did it. The crackling of ice sounded, and the pudgy old man cracked his knuckles. He looked at each one of us in the eye, levelly, and exclaimed “Πανέμορφη Αντριάνα! Χαίρομαι πολύ που σε ξαναβλέπω!”

The echoing shuffle from the adjoining caves became a rush of feet, and the howling of a monstrous pack of… who knew what?

“Τι στο διάολο συμβαίνει?”