The enormous marble wolf was loud. The sound it made was a mixture of the low tones of shifting gravel with a background of the wet, almost squeaky noise of rock grinding against rock. It loomed so tall over us that it probably weighed as much as a house, given it was denser than one.
With the chaos of the dream to our backs, there wasn’t really much space for us to maneuver. I was determined not to make this a problem, so I went invisible. The Knife Thrower threw a disbelieving look at the empty air where I had just been standing.
“You had better not be ditching me,” he threatened, and very proactively threw a knife at one of the things eyes. Big and tough it may be, the knife still sank in hilt-deep. The Knife Thrower was good at hurting things, even more so than just throwing knives.
The beast ran straight for him, and he dashed away parallel to the chaotic boundary line. The thing really wasn’t able to make the tight turn right against the wall, its stop was so badly done that its snout even went through the curtain of chaos. If Djibrak wasn’t magically observing us already he had definitely seen part of the wolf’s head peek into his domain.
I was on the side with the wolf’s new bad eye and I took the opportunity to poke it with the blade that Jarqual had given me. The one that was said to cut the dream itself. The white stone might as well have been whipped cream for all the blade cared, the black line that trailed after the strike cut most of the way across its leg. It tried to turn to face me, but with its leg now hobbled it didn’t meet with much success. A volley of knives hit it from the other side. Flanked and with reduced mobility , the poor thing couldn’t decide which way it should turn.
It didn’t really matter much, since that was when The Clown teleported back in with a sledgehammer and started wailing on its defenseless backside. The first strike snapped the leg that I had weakened clean off. The second broke off a chunk of its midsection and tipped it to one side. The rest reduced it to rubble bit by bit. It twitched its front legs pathetically as he did so.
“Good job, team,” smirked The Clown.
The Knife Thrower definitely didn’t appreciate being left alone in the line of fire, but he was practical minded enough to know that it was really for the best. We didn’t usually take any time to work on our teamwork, and it showed. That being said, Teamwork wasn’t really necessary or helpful for most of what we did. The kind of teamwork that involved combat, at any rate.
“Now that the immediate danger has passed,” started The Knife Thrower, “any ideas for our next steps?”
“We’re meant to do some scouting and clear the area, if possible,” I chimed in. “I say we kill the rest of the big marble things.”
“They’re really bad at turning around, so only we can turn the tide of battle” added The Clown.
With The Knife Thrower’s silent agreement on the matter we got to work. The marble beasts were fairly spread out, and they didn’t really seem to show any signs of cooperation or camaraderie. The first beast had caught us unprepared, and had still fallen fairly easily, outnumbered.
The Knife Thrower would harass them from a distance, I would hobble them with my shiny new blade and invisibility, and once they were unable to mount a sufficient defense, The Clown would finish them off with his sledgehammer. The first one had fallen that way, and so would all the others.
As we worked our way through the beasts one by one, I began to notice something. Wounds left by my blade were not normal. The black trail that marked my strikes on the marble beasts seemed to cut deeper than the blade itself. Other thin black lines slowly joined the main one too, almost as if it made the marble of the beasts crack. I had already connected the black line that seemed to be left in the air by the blade to the black archway as they were made of the same raw material used to forge the weapon, but why it spread on the beasts’ flesh was still a mystery.
The last beast fell the same as the first, but as I walked up to it to examine the wound, I got complacent. Its leg twitched, and then kicked the shit out of me. I was sent flying and as I tumbled back down to earth, my body slid headfirst into one of the archways, almost a fifth of the way through.
My head was floating upside down in the air, dangling from nothing. Though I could still feel the lower part of my body, there was nothing there except for some air, and then a metallic ceiling. Visually it was like I’d been sliced in two, I wondered if you would be able to see my organs from the other side.
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“Orekl! Orek!” came a voice from below.
Monkey people working on an assembly line. I had no idea what they were making, but this was definitely a factory.
On second thought there were clear differences between these people and monkeys. For starters they were fully upright, and their proportions made them look like regular humans with monkey-like fur. The fur covered most of their bodies in a thick sheet, which explained the lack of clothes. One of them was looking up at me, pointing and shouting.
“Orek! Orek!” the others joined the shouting. One of them ran off to get something.
Their faces creeped me out. As hairless as those on a human, They were like a living edge case. As if someone had started with a face of some strange mountain tribe I had never met and then distorted it, such that a face that would already be unfamiliar for me arrived at the very border between human and inhuman. Their jaws were just slightly too square for a human, and their eyes far too far apart.
One of the furry people came back with a stepladder. They might as well, the only thing that was keeping me up there was the friction of the rest of my body on the other side of the portal. It was really an experience, having gravity act in two different directions on two different parts of your body. I was just glad that there was enough friction that I didn’t drop straight down. Hurray for rough ground.
I waved at the one on the step ladder. “Hello.”
It seemed appropriately surprised about communicating with another species. I think. Maybe their facial expressions were totally different and this was just another Tuesday for the guy, as boring as all the rest.
That was when I felt a tug on both my legs, and I was pulled back through the portal— by The Clown.
“What happened?” asked The Knife Thrower.
“It's a portal to somewhere with monkey people. It sure as hell isn’t anywhere on earth.”
The Knife Thrower smirked. “That means I win, Clown.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way kid, but I had money riding on the black stuff being a magical meat grinder and was hoping your top half was atomized.”
I wasn’t about to respond to that.
“I’m going to make the bold assumption that at least one of these leads to Earth.” said The Clown, as he made way for one of the portals.
“No!” I shouted. He stopped. “There’s no portal on the other side, I don't think you can come back if you’re all the way through. Not to mention that any of these might lead straight into an actual meat grinder.”
The Clown looked at the portal he was about to go through with suspicion. He waved his finger at it, as if to chastise it for trying to trick him.
“I'm going to go and fetch some cameras from Djibrak. He's bound to have some.” he said, still giving the portal some side-eye.
“Ask him for some boomerangs too!” I added, enthusiastically.
The others stared at me.
“To check if things can come back through!’
Turns out Djibrak did have boomerangs. Lots of them. Apparently there was a boomerang related dream somewhere in his castle. I knew I was the one that had asked for them but I found myself as surprised as the other on that one. He also had the cameras. They were the classic handheld cameras, nothing professional grade.
“First order of business,” said The Knife Thrower, “is seeing if I can throw a boomerang.”
He threw the boomerang. It came back. Then he dug into the box and started throwing and catching boomerangs from every direction. Multiple at the same time. It was a nice trick.
I picked up a boomerang and threw it. It wasn't as neat a throw as The Knife Throwers but it came back. I even made a few illusory ones to throw around like him.
When I turned back around he was looking at me smugly. He had picked up on my not so subtle jealousy.
“I'm always up for clowning around. But don't we have a job to do?”
He was right, we did, but the lack of any more opposition really made the whole thing not terribly urgent.
Still, we stopped playing around.
The Clown was the brave soul willing to hold the camera while standing next to a portal.
We all huddled around him, looking at the tiny, flip-phone like screen of the camera. On the other side of the portal there was a field of mold. Every inch of the ground was covered in mold of various colors, mostly white but with dottings of green and black here and there. There was nothing else there except the mold.
The Knife thrower threw the boomerang through the portal. It whirled into the POV of the camera, turned back, and then went straight through the air where the portal was supposed to be.
The Clown pulled the camera back out and I looked around counting the portals. I gave up pretty quickly. They must have numbered in the high double-digits, and the way they were positioned made it difficult to count them.
“I think it’s going to take a while for us to find one that leads to earth.”
The others were no happier about this than I was.
The next portal we tried led to a large body of water. The featureless mass of water left no ready way to tell whether or not the portal led to Earth. How could we possibly know? Satellites? Checking for GPS signals? It was a frustrating.
At that point, we sent the Clown back to Djibrak again to fetch a notebook or two. There was really no point to doing this without a detailed log.
The next portal sucked the camera in along with half The Clowns right hand before we managed to pull him away. All he was left with was a bleeding stump.
“Fuuuuck!” he screamed. I was in agreement.
“And that’s why I chose not to hold the camera,” said The Knife Thrower. “You should demanifest before you lose more blood. The healing will be faster that way.”
The advantage of having a physical body to dream you was that you could demanifest at any time and your own dreaming would fix you right up. The disadvantage was that taking enough damage at once would kill you, even this much was sure to give The Clown some cognitive issues, but you could come back from anything less than a complete death. Jarqual could even come back from complete destruction, as long as the dreamers still dreamed of him. In theory at least, keeping them dreaming was tricky when you had no body to speak off
“I’ll be seeing you two little shits later. I might even have to postpone the thing in Africa.”
He demanifested. The space he was in rippled with the characteristic multi-colored chaos of the dream which swiftly morphed back into this place’s usual landscape.
“Clang!”
The Knife Thrower was thrown to the ground in front of me. I turned around.
“Woof, blocking my sneak attacks is
no fair, knife guy,” said Roderick Wulfman. On the bright side, at least I wouldn’t be the only one that’s seen him anymore.