A foot on a string swung gently in the subtle-hued air, slowly rotating through colors cast from the flowing patterns of the walls.
It was not a human foot, of that much Lilijoy was certain. Five clawed toes spread broadly from the sole, their length and spacing hinting at uses beyond mere ambulation. The skin, beneath filth and blood, glittered softly, catching the surrounding pastels in imbricated lines.
The little group looked at one another, words trapped within their surprise. Eventually, Skria extended a long index finger and gestured to the dangling appendage.
“That’s a foot,” she revealed.
As if responding to her identification, the foot, or rather the cord to which it was attached, jerked and lowered several feet, until it was gently resting on the slope between Lilijoy and Jess. The local wildlife was a bit shy at first, but soon smaller insects discovered the treat. The girls just stood, leaning against the slope that was approaching a wall, watching as more and more insects began to cover the foot, crawling over one another to scavenge from the manna that had fallen from their sky.
“You don’t think…” Skria began. She was interrupted by another limb, this time a forearm and hand, which fell next to Lilijoy, smacking into the slope with enough force to stimulate a ripple of fuzzy pink to emanate in all directions. From far above, there was a faint hooting sound.
“I think someone’s fishing,” said Lilijoy. A silence followed as they all considered the theory.
“Should I fly up there?” Skria asked, as a large centipede wrapped itself around the newest arrival.
Lilijoy glanced at the foot, which was completely covered in a blob of writhing bodies. “I think we should climb in stealth. At least the two of us,” she said. “Sorry, Jess. I think you’ll need to wait for a rope.”
The foot began to rise, bobbing elastically under the weight of its passengers. Several times it knocked against the former ceiling, dislodging small showers of squirm onto the girls, before eventually disappearing from sight. Jess grunted in resignation, which Lilijoy thought was an entirely appropriate reaction. Skria was a bit less resigned to the bug drizzle. She jumped to the slope and began climbing immediately, muttering under her breath.
Lilijoy followed behind. Within a minute, the steepness of the slope allowed her to use her Climbing skill, and from there the progress was much easier. The magi portion of the skill allowed her to channel mana to her hands and feet and to read the climbing surface, showing her the most secure placements. Since the walls of the now-shaft were still thickly encrusted with the relatively tough fungus, the climbing circumstances were particularly easy. Her only fear was that the entire area of fungus to which she was clinging might peel off.
Skria, who had grown up in the heights of trees, could move around on the surface almost as if she was walking on all fours. She scampered on ahead, before returning, head downwards to whisper to Lilijoy.
“I heard voices, but it gets darker up there. No more glowing stuff.”
Lilijoy extended her stealth mana to cover their whispers, a trick she had learned a few days before. “Could you tell what they were saying?”
“It just sounded like grunts and hisses to me.”
There was nothing to say to that. Lilijoy could only imagine that whatever people-type creatures had somehow persisted down here for a century or so must have a fascinating lifestyle. Hopefully they wouldn’t be forced to fight them.
She followed Skria for a bit longer, and could see where the fungal mat ended in a straight line on all four sides of the shaft. It was clearly an artificial end, and when they reached it, there was an unpleasant surprise.
“It’s greasy!” Skria exclaimed under her breath.
The wall had been oiled, or from the rancid smell of it, fat had been dripped down along the walls.
They really don’t want anything coming up. That’s a good sign.
It meant to her that the inhabitants above were afraid of, or at least inconvenienced by, the creatures they had already passed, the olms most likely. It also meant that Skria would need to finish the expedition on her own. There was no way Lilijoy’s climbing ability would get her past at least fifty feet of slick, vertical stone. They had another brief conversation to plan out a few possibilities, and then Skria began to slowly make her way up the slick surface.
Whoever they are, they’re really good at making rope. Maybe they’ll have something strong enough for Jess.
That would be plan B, or maybe C. Lilijoy still had plenty of rope, though they had left behind a good chunk of her stock at the first big drop. Skria just needed to drop a rope down for her, then she could help Jessila up. Assuming the people above weren’t intent on turning them into bug bait.
The grizzly fishing lines had dropped and risen several times as they climbed, and now Lilijoy was close enough to hear the other end of the process, which involved a lot of pounding and grunting. She assumed they were making sure their catch of the day didn’t scuttle off, and then did her best not to think further on the matter. Instead she followed Skria’s progress up the wall with her infrared vision, overriding her friend’s stealth with her own.
They had agreed that getting a foothold on the top without alerting the locals was the top priority, so Skria was moving slowly and keeping a low profile. Both of them were worried there might be nets, or other impediments at the very top, past the range of Lilijoy’s echolocation, so flight was to be reserved for emergencies. After many tense minutes, Skria finally made it to the top, and disappeared from Lilijoy’s vision.
Only a minute later, a rope, Skria’s rope, fell to Lilijoy’s level. When she looked up, she could barely see the red glow of her friend’s head looking over the edge of the shaft and a waving hand beckoning her to climb up.
At the top, she found her friend standing over two bodies not much bigger than she was.
"I can't see anything at all," Skria said. "I just gassed everything and hoped for the best."
A quick Scan of one body told Lilijoy much of what she wanted to know.
----------------------------------------
Labyrinthian: Level 8
H.P. 52
Damage Abatement: 5-12
Disposition: Unconscious
----------------------------------------
It was difficult to see any details with the senses available to her. The Labyrinthians before her were humanoid, naked, with small bodies and thin limbs. What she could make out of their faces was a bit confusing, bulging eyes and some ridge-like structures, with no nose to speak of. The main thing was that they were no particular threat at the moment, so she could focus on finding a suitable anchor for the heavy rope she would lower for Jessila.
Taking in her surroundings, Lilijoy saw that she was in a fairly narrow chamber with a high ceiling. The opening of the shaft took up the back half of the floor, with only a narrow ledge around the far three edges. The wall farthest from the shaft looked to be some kind of lattice structure made from hundreds of sharpened sticks crossing at all angles, a thorny, defensive barrier. She could see several long cords tied on to it, two of them running into the pit, the others piled haphazardly. On the floor were many small bowls, several filled with what she surmised was mashed bug goo and several blunt hand tools.
“I can keep knocking them out,” Skria whispered. “But I heard some other voices. We need to hurry.”
Lilijoy walked over to the lattice-like wall and tugged on it, carefully avoiding the sharpened points. These are bones, she realized. Hundreds, no thousands of sharpened bones, bound together with sinew. The wall stretched from floor to ceiling, and she could see that it had considerable depth as well. When she pulled on it an unpleasant creaking sound distributed itself across dozens of bone intersections, but it seemed reasonable solid. Whether it would bear Jessila’s weight remained to be seen.
Working as fast as she could, she threaded her longest remaining rope through the bones, trying to distribute the force to come as well as she could and then heaved the rest of the rope to the edge of the pit and let it drop, doing her best to keep it from contacting the greasy sides of the shaft.
“How long will they stay out?” she stealth whispered to Skria.
“Not long. I need to keep gassing them every couple minutes, or just maintain the spell to be safe. I’ll see if I can tie them.”
“Okay. I’ll guard the entrance, you keep an eye on them. Hopefully Jess saw the rope.”
She found the entrance about the same time Jess found the rope. At least, she hoped it was Jess. The bone barrier was a chaotic jumble of protrusions and junctions, which helped to disguise the somewhat small recess, almost a crawl space, that seemed like it led through and beyond. It was angled in such a way that Lilijoy couldn’t sense what lay beyond, but she could hear voices and the sounds of movement from the other side.
It was quite obvious when Jess began her ascent. The bone barrier groaned, creaked and bulged where the rope pulled on it. After a few seconds, Lilijoy heard cries of alarm from the other side and the sound of feet slapping stone.
“Well, that’s done it,” she hissed to Skria. “Be ready with something nasty, in case they get past me.”
The two Labyrinthians they had already subdued were weak enough that Lilijoy wasn’t overly worried, though she thought it reasonable to assume the bug fishers weren’t typical of the fighting strength of whatever society had managed to survive so many years. Her hope was that they could pass this tribe, or whatever it was, without needing to murder their way through it, so she switched out the evil knife for her ironwood cudgel and prepared to deal with whoever came through the entrance.
The entrance came to her instead. With a groaning shriek of bone on stone, the entire edifice lurched forward about a foot. Lilijoy jumped back from bone spikes that were inches from her nose and began thinking fast.
What can I pull from the Trial Space? A big rock? Many big rocks?
The problem was, she hadn’t yet figured out how to control exactly where the things she pulled forth emerged. There was also the small detail that what she brought out needed to be… graspable on some level. It wasn’t a size limitation per se, but more that she needed to be able to pull with a decent amount of force to bring an object over, regardless of the size of the object, or being, in question.
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Tree. Small tree.
She backed up a couple more feet, in case of more sudden lurches on the part of the bone structure, and dove into the Trial Space. Pulling the diamond loop to her eye, she zoomed out of her current view, the cavern she was using for her long-term inventory. She cycled her soul energy as her vision passed through the absolute dark of solid rock, making sure she moved only up. She had discovered it was possible to get lost in solid materials while scrying, and she had no wish for that to happen at this particular moment.
When she burst out of the ground into the forest that covered much of the cave system, she cast about for fallen logs or anything else that might serve as a brace. It only took her a moment to find a mossy log that looked long enough. She zoomed up to it, grabbed the stub of a long dead branch, and pulled, trying her best to visualize exactly how it would be oriented. As always, she tried to follow the emergence of the objects she pulled through, witnessing the thin envelope of diamond mana that captured the shape of the log grow from a speck to full size in an instant, as if bringing the it from a great distance in the blink of an eye.
Since the blink of an eye was actually a decent amount of time to Lilijoy, subjectively a few seconds, the process of orthogonal transition, which is what she was privately calling the transference from her Trial Space, was fascinating to watch. The log really was coming from a great distance, she thought, just a distance that was ninety degrees to all the normal dimensions. Or perhaps the distance was short, but the perspective was affected somehow. She had spent the better part of an afternoon trying to figure it out, fueling the process with her own excitement about learning the secrets of her ability.
The log emerged a foot off the ground and fell with a dull crash. It perched semi-precariously across the void in the floor, running diagonally from one wall to another. She could see where the dappled sun of the forest had warmed it. Skria jumped several feet into the air, squeaking in surprise and stayed there, hovering over the still forms of the two Labyrinthians.
“What was that!?” she screeched. “Is this place collapsing?”
“Just bracing the… you know what, I’ll explain later. It’s all good now,” Lilijoy called back. At that moment, the bone barrier lurched forward with another grinding shriek, catching on the log and splintering several bone junctions. Now there were excited yells from the other side, and within seconds a small Labyrinthian head came falling into view through the twisting entrance, propelled as if kicked from behind.
I guess this is the sacrificial lamb, Lilijoy thought. She felt a little sorry for the creature, who was only level two and ‘terrified’ according to her quick Scan. On impulse, she grabbed it by the arm and hauled it the rest of the way through, then summoned a rotted tree stump to block the entrance. She could feel it, or upon further observation, him, shaking uncontrollably as he tried to escape her grip.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said. Probably.
He looked at her, wide-eyed, then reeled off a string of broken gibberish. A piece of sharpened bone he had been holding dropped to the floor with a clatter.
“What’s going on?” Skria called.
“Uhhh… I’ll explain in a minute.”
The boy, if that’s what he was, let off another stream of noises. Lilijoy had already set her system to capture and analyze the sounds. Whatever happened to the Inside translating everything? she wondered. Or was that just for Outsiders talking to each other? I don’t remember anyone needing to learn Elvish or Goblin or anything like that. Then again, they weren’t isolated for a century.
Leaving the mysteries of Inside linguistics aside for the moment. Lilijoy did her best to calm him down. She smiled, in case he could see, and did her best to assure him she was friendly by dropping her club. He seemed to calm down a bit, and he reacted when Lilijoy waved her hand in front of his bulbous pale eyes, so she decided to go with the classic.
“Lily,” she said, pointing at herself.
He stared at her blankly. So she tried again. After several repetitions he nodded and pointed to himself. “Lily,” he said.
Oh boy. That’s not how this is supposed to go.
She had noticed him looking over at Skria several times so she pointed over to her. “Skria.”
“Yes?” her friend replied.
He mimicked her gesture. “Skria,” he repeated
“What? Is there something wrong with your voice?”
Lilijoy nodded. This was going well. In the back of her mind, she wondered if this really made any sense at all as a course of action. The commotion outside the bone barrier had only grown, with several loud voices shouting, at one another, she presumed.
She pointed at him, and didn’t say anything, hoping he would supply the missing information. He pointed back at her. When she put her hand to her forehead, he did the same.
At least he’s good at copying.
“Any ideas?” she called over to Skria.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” her friend complained. “Did you just say my name for some reason?”
At that point, Jessila hauled herself out of the pit, groaning as she pulled herself upright. The Labyrinthian boy took one look at her and began to run around the room, waving his arms and making a high pitched squealing noise.
“That you, Skria?” Jess asked.
The sounded ended abruptly as the boy tripped over one of the unconscious Labyrinthians and nearly fell into the pit.
“I don’t know what’s happening. What was that weird sound?” asked Skria.
“I thought it was you,” said Jess as she pulled out the glow-moss vial. “It would have been nice to know it got dark up top before I started climbing.”
The dim blue light of the glow-moss filled the room, revealing several new details. The young Labyrinthian was sprawled on the floor, either stunned or pretending to be. He, like the others, was naked, but where the others were a dark gray, he was covered in fine white scales, with a dark ridge running up his spine, splitting into three as it crossed his neck onto his large round head. Oddly, he had patches of long matted hair sticking out of the sides of his head, almost like pig-tails.
The other Labyrinthians were finely scaled as well, and had the same ridges running over their limbs and faces, though the distribution varied. They didn’t have any hair that Lilijoy could see.
“Where’d that one come from?” Skria asked.
“He got in before I blocked the entrance. I was trying to communicate with him, but he’s a little freaked out.” Lilijoy looked over at the quivering form. “Or not very bright. Or both.”
Jess was examining a basket, almost a hamper, that sat off to the side, near the shaft opening. “It’s full of parts,” she said. Lilijoy couldn’t see the contents, for which she was thankful, but she noted the construction; sides of interlaced rib bones connected to supports fashioned from femurs.
“It’s their only crafting material,” she said under her breath.
“What did you say?” asked Skria. The noises occurring on the other side of the bone wall had subsided to a low murmur, with some scuffling thrown in for good measure.
“They only have their bodies to make things.” As she said this, she realized that the bowls, now scattered around the room, were made from skulls. Also, many of them were full of mashed bugs.
How many generations were necessary to build this wall? she wondered. What kind of society could they have developed?
Her thoughts were disrupted by a sharp percussive sound from the other side of the wall. Then another one. Within a few seconds it became clear that some type of organized musical effort was underway. The drums were joined by shrill whistles in microtonal cacophony and the nasal drone of many voices holding one note in unison.
Oh goody. Now we get a concert.
The sound was unsettling, eerie and irritating in equal measure. Lilijoy nonetheless felt chills run down her back, from the music, but also from the sense of.. reality that pervaded the moment. The beings on the other side of the bones had their own intelligence, had lived within the confines of the Labyrinth their entire lives. Even if they were only Tier Seven subsets running in Guardian’s vast reality construct, they each had histories, lived experience of surviving in such a grim setting.
I wonder if any of them are tempered? What do they even make of that?
“What do we do now?” Skria asked, her voice raised and fearful. “Why are they doing that?”
“They’re probably afraid of us,” Lilijoy half-yelled. “Afraid of the unknown.”
A number of possible strategies were running in her head, but she kept circling back to a very real consequence. If they underestimated this tribe and ended up respawning there was no way they would be able to get up the shaft a second time, not if it was actively defended.
She looked over at Jess, who was testing the bone barrier and trying to peer through to the other side, and then at Skria, who was still keeping the two captives unconscious with periodic applications of gas. She walked over so she wouldn’t need to shout.
“Skria, could you summon enough gas to cover the area on the other side of the bones?”
“Probably? I doubt it would be as easy as what I did with these two though. Some of them must be tougher, and many would be able to run.”
“I don’t suppose you have anything that could make them happy and relaxed?”
“No, my only new one is the bug killing gas. The hallucination one might work though.”
Lilijoy thought for a moment. “I keep coming back to that idea too. Maybe we should try communicating with the ones in here first, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll go with that.”
With a backup plan in place, the girls gathered around the captive Labyrinthians. Jess made sure the two gatherer’s hands were tied while they waited for them to wake, while Lilijoy tried to get the boy to stop playing dead. When she rolled him onto his back, she saw he had his eyes squeezed shut, but tears were rolling down the sides of his face.
The sight brought back memories of her own first encounter with beings from outside her tribe, when the giants talked over her head using words she had never heard.
This could be me, she thought. Growing up in total isolation and ignorance. He’s never seen the sky, never met anyone from outside his group. Is he really any less self aware than I was at that time? I wonder if he has anyone who would miss him? It’s obvious the majority of the tribe didn’t care whether he lived or died.
Without quite knowing why she did, she reached out with one hand and traced the dark ridges of his face. Two wrapped around over his ears and traced his brow line, while one fell directly through his forehead, joining with the others between his eyes.
It almost looks like glasses, she thought. Glasses and pigtails on a bald goblin-lizard kid.
His facial features did remind her of the goblins she had, well, killed in her Trial, though his eyes were larger and protruded from his face. He had a button nose, and a wide, triangular mouth with a slightly recessed jaw. Narrow pointed ears lay flat against his head, almost wrapping around to the back of his skull.
What an awkward looking creature, she thought. I can relate.
Almost without intention, she dropped into Two Minds One Self.
We know fear. We know hunger and pain and dark. We know the sounds of sleep, when we feel safe from the big ones. We know the pit of life and death and fear and hunger and pain and fear and fear. We are afraid. We are terrified and only when the sounds of sleep come can we breath.
His mind was stronger than she had expected, and for a moment the intensity of his fear spread through her being, connecting to her soul vortex and the small, terrified being that still lived within, had never left, would never leave, and fear was a color of sour tarnish. But it was only a moment, for his mind was also small, and while his fear was a concentrate unlike any she had experienced, it was diluted into the relative vastness of her experience. Her soul vortex spun and flowed, absorbing and acknowledging his fear, attempting to understand.
We are afraid, and fear is endless. It never leaves and its grip is tight and frozen. And yet. We persist. Why? To grow, for our body is too small to be useful, and we must persist so that when the fear, and all else ends our bones and flesh can join with those who came before.
The corner of Lilijoy’s mind that could observe understood with dull horror that while the boy was like her, he was not her, and his experience was undiluted, a hard foundation of terror that fed upon itself unending, the knowledge that his only worth was in the materials of his body, and for the first time, she almost lost the state of Two Minds One Self, almost rejected the harsh realities of his simple existence that resonated with the worst parts of her, not only the traumas of her past, but the feeling that the meaning of her existence was as a thing to be used.
But she knew better. She answered unending terror with acceptance.
Yes, and there is more. Our fear is endless, and it is not alone, and it never leaves, and it is not alone. We are not alone and fear is not alone. We feel anger and sorrow and fear is not alone. We feel pride and envy and surprise and fear is not alone. We feel warmth and safety and fullness and fear is not alone.
We feel hope and fear is not alone.
There were no words in their shared journey, but with each emotion her soul vortex spun and reached to his foundation, pulling forth the tattered shreds of memories of times when fear was not alone. And if fear was not alone, then it was not infinite, and together they understood that fear’s power was not in itself, but in its presence relative to its company. Within this understanding blossomed hope, for fear had many companions, competitor and ally alike, and with their growth its presence would diminish.
Slowly she receded from the connection, back into the sounds of shrill whistles and brittle pounding drums. Her hand was still on his brow, and she stroked it tenderly, wondering if this was the first time he had been touched in such a way. His eyes were wide and staring, his lips quivering, drool running down the side of his face, but his hand reached up to where her hand touched his face.
“Lily,” he said.
It was a start.