I should have guessed that there was some sort of trickery afoot when the others walked off the cliff in such a carefree way, but I wasn’t expecting to transition to some dark space where gravity didn’t exist.
What exactly did I mean by that? Well I meant it in a very literal manner. Letting the wind whip by me as I fell slowly gaining speed with seemingly no upper limit, the stone around me slowly shifted to a lighter colour before abruptly changing to be made of a clear, milky white crystalline material.
Shards of the crystal jutted out at random intervals as if to reach out and grab anything falling by, easily letting me imagine what would happen if I were to hit one at these speeds. Yet almost as abruptly as the walls had shifted, my vision hazed around my peripheries before consuming my sight entirely as I fell unconscious.
Trying to nudge the worry I felt at not being awake to somehow catch myself if I hit something, I realise that while I was dragged into my own mind, I was weirdly lucid and still able to ‘move’. Glancing around the strangely liminal space surrounding me, my attention lands on my emotions and what I was feeling. My surprise but vague understanding was a mixed bag as I realised that I wasn’t stressed, as if I was used to this kind of space. Which in all truth, wasn’t entirely wrong.
Having experienced similar situations before, I wait expectantly for something to happen, assuming that if I was in some sort of mindscape or in between like this one it was for a specific reason.
And yet nothing seemed to happen. No strange god came to welcome me to someplace, no ferryman popping up somewhere to chastise me, and no weird tree commanding me to find something. It was just silence.
The kind of overbearing emptiness that you only ever feel right after or before something happens. The kind that even though you know that there is nothing to think or worry about, it feels as if something is screaming for your attention.
And just like that, I almost sense a proverbial gear clicking into place as I wrench my body from the unnerving calmness and spin around to gaze into the emptiness behind me. Doing so seems to send a cascade of events tumbling down into some endless place as I could almost see a pair of eyes quickly disappear as if trying to run away after being caught doing something.
“-Erja?” Rayner calls out. Snapping back to reality, I jolt awake and quickly jump back towards the nearest wall, placing my back to it so I couldn’t be stabbed from behind again.
“Are you okay?” He asks, a look of concern adorning his face. I’d seen plenty of people try to put up and act, make you think that they aren’t trying to hide something from you, trying to deceive you. There was no way I would fall for that trick again.
Crouching low, I prepare to be caught up in a fight, slightly angling my body to be able to take advantage of my size so I could-
Why was I on guard? Nothing happened, so why am I acting as if I was about to be attacked. Blinking a few times, I straighten up a bit while still keeping my back to the wall, looking to Rayner and glancing at the other two at the same time.
Seeing them also on guard with a hand on their weapons, I realise that even if I was the one to initiate things, there very well could have been a fight had I not collected my thoughts. “What happened.” I ask, posing it as a question while very intentionally saying it like a demand.
“We probably should have warned you about that, so I’ll take the blame for that, but you were knocked out by the warp.” Rayner says.
Warp? As in teleport? I understand that there are vastly different universal laws here given the fact magic exists, but for some reason wrapping my head around teleportation just doesn’t seem feasible.
“It’s one of the quirks with this crypt in particular” Atkin speaks up seeing my confusion. “I’m not much of a scholar, so I doubt I could describe how it truly works, but a number of areas down here are connected by rifts in space like this one.” He says gesturing to the hole in the ceiling far above us that looks as if there's no end to it.
Speaking of the area around us, it's just more caves, but instead made up of that white translucent crystal that gives off a low glow from the recess of their cores, making the light bounce around the cave and illuminate far more than should be possible.
Standing up properly, I feel a slight trickling tickle on my left arm around the runes, looking down at them I see them shifting and moving at rapid speeds. Holding my arm up to take a closer look, my brain catches up with the rest of my body a bit too slowly as I realise that the others are also looking at the runes.
“Would you demand an explanation? Or are we going to chalk it up to just being one of those things we don’t talk about.” I ask, silently praying for the latter to be the case.
The three of them share a glance with each other for a few moments before Malcolm opens his mouth to talk first, “Do ya’ think it’s gonna be a problem for us?”
“I doubt it, no.”
“Then all's good. Just make sure to let us know if anythin’ comes up.”
Ten seconds of silence to pray thanks to whatever gods exist in this world for that answer…
Letting jokes fall to the wayside, I give a nod in thanks to him, ”You mentioned before that combat is a safe guess to say guaranteed, correct? If so, do we need to immediately be on guard or do we have a bit?” I turn to Atkin and ask.
“We should have a few moments, but there isn’t any particular area that's safer than another aside from the few strongholds.”
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Giving another nod and a bit more idle chatter to take the edge off, we begin our trek to find anything of value once more, preferably without any more adventures in my mindscape.
Taking a moment to sort through my thoughts, I notice a pattern that would have a bit of worth to consider. That being that whenever I moved ‘through’ something, or have a particularly powerful mind blast, something of note happens that wouldn’t or couldn’t if I wasn’t in that ‘limbo’.
The first one? When I initially died I was lost in the weird nothing space that felt oddly comforting before being brought to another weird place where I met that first god. I say god because what else could it be, but in hindsight I don’t truly have a definitive answer for who or what that was.
The second one was when I first got my eyes. I blacked out for a while after being stabbed by that strange glass and then woke up in a pile spitting out blood. An unnerving part of that is the fact that whenever I try to think back to that time, I feel as if I’m missing something. Forgetting a piece of information that should be my immediate concern…
But there's nothing I can do about that but try and piece this puzzle together.
The third time was obviously my second death. That moment just after Norsin killed me where I felt as if the world flipped over several times before righting itself and giving me that unsettling feeling of bliss, and of course the following time in that weird void for a moment before meeting Kharon.
The fourth being the tree, the fifth being my third death at the hands of that body's father where the world did that strange somersaulting feeling again. The in between lives void again, and then the most recent being just now with that fall.
I’m not counting the blood visions on this list because they were, even if slightly under duress, of my own intention. That and they feel slightly disconnected from the puzzle unfolding before me, like they don’t fit and belonged somewhere else.
Where is that somewhere? Good question because I have no goddamn clue.
Circling back to just now, I focus on the feeling I felt while I was falling. The strange sense of ignorance before it broke and revealed that there was something else in there. Could it be some new being that I have to worry about, somehow related to the tree, the gods from Reldrav, some other random force, the blood…
It could have been the blood in all truth. It didn’t quite feel right, but it also felt like it was somewhere down that lane of thought. Maybe not exactly, but something close.
Shaking my head to try and dissuade my overthinking, I tab back into the real world and glance around at the caves surrounding us. Still made up of the faintly glowing white crystal, I notice a few patches where it looks as if something broke apart the parts protruding from the walls floor and ceiling. Turning to Rayner, I ask him to bestow upon me some of his infinite wisdom in the form of telling me what might have caused them.
“Probably from bigger fights between the creatures living here, it happens quite a lot.” And now a follow up question, “What kind of things exist here? More things like the wolf from before or entirely different creatures?” I ask.
“Anything really. Some things like certain areas more than others, so you can oftentimes guess what the more common monsters are, but the majority of it is a coin toss. This area probably has more elemental and golem-like creatures, though there could also be spider-like creatures because of all the little nooks and crevices.” He says
“That and we’ve been ‘ere before. So definitely spiders.” Malcolm pipes up from behind us given our formation of Atkin as the vanguard, me and Rayner in the middle and Malcolm in the back.
“Aw, I wanted to surprise him. Why’d you go and spoil it!” Rayner snaps back at him, before long they were back to sibling squabbling. If I didn’t know any better I would have guessed they were related by now. Only reason I’d think otherwise is the difference in appearance, and the fact that Malcolm is practically a mountain, even if he is still shorter than me, and Rayner looks like he works part time at a coffee shop.
Letting the two fight with each other, Atkin gestures me over to him as we continue walking. “Excuse them. They look like they hate each other, but in truth they’re both just stubborn.” He says. “We heard that!” Rayner calls from the back as their fighting had a momentary pause. It didn’t last for long though, I’d say there was a good three seconds of cease fire before they were back at it.
Smirking a bit at they’re squabbling reminds me of when I would chat with Martin. We didn’t quite go at it like those two, but we definitely tested each other's patience from time to time as debates would devolve into arguing.
Those were nice times…
Taking a deep breath, I center myself back in the present as I turn to Atkin, “You loosely said before that I should just work on getting my bearings, but is there anything you’d need me to do if we got into a fight?”
“Not yet. For now we should be able to hold our own quite well, but do be on standby in case something does happen. Fighting can quickly take a turn for the worst even with perfectly laid out plans.” He says.
Chatting a bit more with him, we make good progress on distance before my hearing perks up at a sound in the distance. Freezing in place, I shoot my hand up into a hold stance as I close my eyes to try and pinpoint the sound.
Straining my hearing to its peak, I try and push my ears to pick up the specific sound I had heard as I-
“Loosen your senses. You aren’t wrestling for control of something, you are piercing through the sounds with a fine tooth comb. Let the sounds come to you, and once you find what you’re looking for, pay attention to it.” Atkin whispers from beside me.
Doing as he said, I take a couple seconds to bring myself to a resting point instead of being tense.
Seconds tick by as I steady my breathing, hoping that the sound would pass by again. Just as I start to doubt myself, I hear it again. A faint tip-tapping sound, as if someone was tapping toothpicks across the crystal floor.
At first it was random, slight tapping from time to time as if slowly moving forward in a wide sweep, all the while feeding the sounds I heard back to Atkin as he had more experience than me.
After a few minutes of this repeating itself, the sound abruptly stops for a moment before quickly speeding up to a constant click clacking across the floor, “Weapons ready.” Atkin says, sending the other two into action as Malcolm moves up to us and takes my place, unsheathing his sword from his back as Atkin does the same.
Moving to beside Rayner, he starts to weave his hands together as he mutters indescribable words under his breath.
Waiting in a tense silence as the now faint clicking slowly grows in intensity, I take a few deep breaths as my first true fight excluding the serpent from Reldrav draws closer to me. Unsure what to do, and feeling anxious not having a weapon in my hand to calm my nerves, I try to steel myself as the sound reaches its peak.
Peeking from around a cutaway slightly to our left, two grey almost blade like appendages stick around the edge and feel their way out into the open as they click along the wall. Now, how did I know they were appendages aside from the fact that I couldn’t pin them as anything else? Because they were promptly followed by the body they were attached to and six more of them.
What did that mean?
It meant spiders. And judging by the sounds, more than one.