The air shimmered, refracting the red sliver of sun on the horizon. It carried a faint smell of putrefaction, adding an oily underpinning to the sulfurous stench of the Boiling Plains.
The border of the Rotting Land was clear to see, alarmingly so. The sharp-edged rocks, hardy lichens and occasional sprawling vine gave way, in the span of tens of feet, to crumbling, porous rubble, requiring no more than a footstep to create a sandy ash that billowed underfoot. Each footfall was an unsatisfying encounter with a sensation of indeterminate sinking lacking crunch or resistance, like pulling on a knuckle already cracked. If there was any life to be found, it was well hidden.
Lilijoy watched the orc scouts move in a precise fanned formation a hundred feet in front of her, their Stealth utterly ineffective in the terrain. Her party, Anda included, were surrounded by two dozen more orcs, a combination of support for Anda and honor guard for Jessila. The Matrons did not believe in sheltering or coddling their newest Maid, but it was clear they intended her to be well equipped, both in weapons and personnel. The bulk of the forces were twelve mighty Orsurs, and a more even mix of the other totems, each fulfilling its own specialized role, not unlike the members of a well organized adventuring party.
The Orsurs were the bulwarks, the Orusks the savage, charging offense, the Urkulps the scouts and sentries, the Urkaen the utility, trappers and looters, and the Urglah… pretty much did whatever they wanted. They were cat-types after all.
The Rotted Land had not always been as it was now, though it had always been a particularly treacherous piece of the Boiling Plains, known for toxic fumes and unreliable ground filled with voids and sinkholes that could collapse without warning. Something had changed over the past decades though, according to those that remembered. Corrosion had taken the land, as if the destructive effects of time had accelerated, the weathering and erosion of millennia compressed into scant years. There was no doubt in Lilijoy’s mind that this was somehow related to the Maasai revenants, though she had no clue what possible mechanism could be at work.
The sun finished its descent as the band moved forward and the land turned gray as her Low Light Vision kicked in. The only sound was the soft swish of their feet and the sporadic yips of the scouts as they communicated. The darkness closed around them, pressed on them, and it wasn’t long before Skria’s nerves began to show.
“I don’t like this,” she whispered into Jessila’s ear. “It’s too dark.”
Skria being nervous in such situations wasn’t really a new phenomenon, but Lilijoy had to agree. It really was too dark. The sun had barely set, and already her senses were picking up no more than they had in the utter black of the Labyrinth. She had lost track of the scouts, even in the infrared spectrum, and couldn’t tell if they had been hidden by some vague contour of the land or swallowed by the night in some other, more ominous way.
“When’s the last time you heard a scout?” she whispered up to Anda.
“A minute ago,” he replied. She could see him swiveling his head, straining to see past the edge of their group. “Something’s wrong.”
He loped over to one of the Urkulps who had stayed closer in to the group. “Why are the scouts silent?” Lilijoy heard him ask.
“Danger.” She could just barely make out the orc shaking his head. “Don’t alert the enemy. Only...” he shrugged, “one should return.”
An uncomfortable feeling washed over Lilijoy, as if she was exposed somehow, a mouse in the middle of the kitchen floor, caught out when the lights came on. Word was quickly passed through the band, and they came to a halt, straining with all available senses to process their environment. It was then that Lilijoy realized an ominous detail. The land surrounding them was utterly void of mana. She searched her memories for when, exactly, this had happened, scouring her unconscious awareness for details, but it had been a gradual fading, an incremental change that began as they entered the Rotted Land.
Another unpleasant possibility occurred to her, and she surveyed the rest of the band with her senses. Everything seemed washed out and faded, as if the darkness was leeching from them. It wasn’t just her mana sense either. Across every spectrum, from light to heat to mana, her companions were dark, and getting darker, little more than silhouettes.
All around her, the orcs were muttering, looking around uneasily and holding their weapons at the ready.
She put aside the implications for a moment. “Skria, can you conjure up a breeze?”
She had learned the hard way that earth magic should only be used in emergencies on the Boiling Plains. Although attracting a Regional Lord had been disproportionate, the orcs, or more specifically the Matrons, only used earth magic when they absolutely had to, due to the fact that it attracted more trouble than it was generally worth.
After a few moments, Skria turned to her, her face barely visible now, even though she was only a few feet away. Lilijoy could just make out her wide eyes and trembling lips.
“No,” she whispered. “What’s happening? We need to leave. Now.”
Her voice had an edge of panic.
That was when the screams began.
At first Lilijoy thought it was the wind, though the air was still. Her ears were tricked by the sound, the shrieking high pitch that warbled at the edges of her perception and sounded like no human voice. The sound came from all around, muffled and distant, yet also immediate, as if it originated just behind her. Though her Inside abilities were gone, her system was just fine, and she immediately accelerated her thoughts. As she did, the high pitched shriek slowed, subjectively, until she could hear dozens of voices crying out in anguish, a continuous expression of soul-rending pain. She estimated that they were sounding three or four times faster than they should, and wasn’t quite sure what to make of that.
All around her the others were reacting, molasses movements of readiness and defense. Weapons were rising, knees were bending. Her echolocation was still working well enough to show her that, though she couldn’t make out the expressions on their faces. A quick inventory of her internal mana came up empty, though her Soul Vortex was still humming along.
I hope that means I can use Nandi’s Boon if I need to, she thought. Without a far better understanding of what was happening, she was reluctant to test that just yet though. Somewhere, lurking in the back of her mind, was the fear that opening a passage to her Trial Space might be a very bad choice, like opening a window on a submarine.
While she awaited his reply, she analyzed the data her system was receiving. It did seem to have a distinctly different… flavor, or perhaps format from what she was used to Inside. She wasn’t terribly afraid for herself; the fact the she could look out over the rubble of Guayaquil through the late afternoon haze with her Outside eyes kept her grounded. But on behalf of her Inside friends, she was alternating between concerned and genuinely terrified. This place they were in was already breaking the rules of the Garden. Who was to say that Skria and Jess would respawn normally?
Don’t get ahead of yourself. No catastrophizing, she admonished herself. It was hard not to speculate while she waited for Anda’s reply though. Perhaps the reason the Archon hadn’t taken care of this issue was because he literally could not. There was a corruption here, and she suspected that the Maasai revenants had found a way to sustain themselves within the mind of Guardian that was distinctly parasitic.
They were only kids, she reminded herself. Not some kind of evil spirit. Right?
Finally, Anda’s reply came.
She fully endorsed that idea. The screams were still growing in volume, the raw sound a high squeal like feedback growing out of control. Skria was in the process of moving her hands to her ears, and the orcs’ shoulders hunched in discomfort, though none were relinquishing their grips on spears and clubs to cover their ears just yet.
Over the next seconds, Anda began to rouse the orcs into motion, slapping arms and chests and gesturing his directions. Jess, following his lead, began to do the same. Lilijoy felt bad about the scouts. Abandoning self-aware beings to an unknown fate didn’t sit right with her, not when she was also sitting on a South American rooftop in relative comfort. There were times when she missed the complete immersion of an undivided attention, but this was not one of them.
Running over rocks that crumbled at the merest touch was worse than running through fine sand, especially since there was no easy way to guess just how far one's foot was about to sink before gathering enough resistance to push into the next step. The endeavor carried all the charm and grace of running through a swamp, and felt like a diabolic punishment for her fast moving perceptions. She had traveled all of ten feet before Anda’s reply came.
She couldn’t argue with that. Using Two Minds One Self to teach Two Minds One Self to Anda had been, to exactly no one’s surprise, quite the odd experience. Performing the ability on a fellow Tao System user had produced a mixture of magic and technology, of system messages about ‘communication protocol negotiations’ and ‘quantum key distributions’ somehow packaged into mystical unity, at least for the sliver of overlapping Venn diagrams that contained their shared purpose.
In hindsight, it was clear that Two Minds One Self had origins more practical than magical, that Lilijoy had stumbled on something akin to a utility those many months ago when she reached out to the tiny lizard biting her toe. That the Inside system had receptors for her transmission, a lock for her key, had its own implications, a reinforcement of the essential compatibility between the Tao System and Guardian. It was no surprise, not in light of all she had learned, but it was a noteworthy narrowing of the parameters for the relationship, a clarification pointing to closer kinship.
Exactly why the Tao System had a mechanism for sharing bits of narrative consciousness was an interesting subject for future contemplation. As was the experience itself, for somewhere in that brief merger of conscious intent, that unification of message, Lilijoy felt like she had encountered something bigger than both of them, a higher level of awareness that was the sea that contained their thoughts, a medium that was both the substance of consciousness and its container.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Perhaps it was simply that Sarah’s letter had primed her, turned her brain’s vast capacity for pattern recognition toward cosmic pareidolia, but she felt the experience of entraining the symbolic substance of her internal narrative with another Outsider, another discrete biological entity, had given her a glimpse of something that might relate to her and Anda in much the same way Guardian related to Skria and Jess. Was it God? A god? Or, as Sarah had said, was it a collective unconscious that was, in a way she didn’t, perhaps couldn’t understand, conscious itself?
Oddly the notion that kept returning to her was from her conversation with Starcoil, the uncomfortable dichotomy between processing speed and intelligence. If a human mind was a subset of something larger, still a big ‘if’ in her opinion, then that larger collective would necessarily think no faster than humans could share information among themselves. Like Starcoil’s hypothetical thinking rocks, the thoughts, however profound, would occur on a wholly different time scale than human experience. And yet, those thoughts would have been accelerating over time, as every generation of communications technology enhanced the speed, the coupling of one mind to another. It struck her that her ability, this utility for removing the division of thoughts between individuals, would have finally brought such a hypothetical human Great Mind into a time scale accessible to regular individual experience.
All that had been stopped cold by the rise of Guardian. Not that things had been going particularly well before then. If there was some type of encompassing mind spanning, or perhaps emergent from, all humanity, the poor thing had definitely been having some kind of nervous breakdown, as far as Lilijoy could guess.
What does it mean when a god becomes psychotic? she wondered, pushing her glacial legs against the flocculant earth. What would that look like for Guardian? Minds are made of parts, and those parts compete and cooperate, merge and battle. They develop specialties, functions and malfunctions, are reinforced and pruned. Already I can have multiple independent entities within myself. According to Nandi, someday I can have an entire world. Would ‘I’ somehow be distinct from that, or would it be me? Would it be a possession or a component of my identity? Is that even a valid distinction?
The sounds of her friends’ and the orcs’ retreat were barely audible over the howling screams she had shunted to the back of her awareness, but they were slowly growing more distant. Her feet grew heavier with every stride, the soft, ashy material deeper. The dark and the noise pressed on her from all sides, and she began to wonder if she was even moving forward at all. Nonetheless, she pressed on, following the barely perceptible rise and fall of the land.
She found the first body after several endless minutes, stumbled over it, half buried in the ashy ground. Her vision was almost worthless by this point, but the smell of rot came to her nose as she half fell atop the fetid thing.
This can’t be one of the scouts. Whoever it is has been dead for days, at least.
The flesh beneath her squished between her fingers as she tried to push herself up, and she turned her efforts into a roll, just to get away from the hideous sensation, wiping her finger as best she could on what passed for earth.
Then she felt the hand grab onto her ankle.
***
“Everything moves in circles,” said Lord Josho. “From the heavens to the smallest atom. All things have a center to which they fall unless they spin. Understand this if you wish to act correctly in the world. Always ask ‘where is the center?’. Always attempt to understand what force impels you as you orbit. Only then can you choose whether to contract or expand.”
This was about the tenth of Lord Josho’s teaching sessions Magpie had attended. At first, they had been a way to make a public display of her respect for the leader of the clan, while conveniently reminding the others in attendance that she was, somehow, important enough to be invited. The sessions were a mix of philosophy, physical training and meditation, and while her motives for attending had not been especially pure at the outset, she had come to realize that underneath the seeming platitudes there was… something. Wisdom, maybe, though she wasn’t sure she would recognize true wisdom if it slapped her in the face.
Whatever it was, she liked it. It made her feel included in something, even if she wasn’t entirely sure what that something was.
“When your opponent moves toward you, they become a system with you, with its own center. Learn to recognize this center. It moves with you, with them, or rather you both move around it, and it only seems to move. When they charge you, recognize how you fall toward it. When they attack, your center must finish the journey, until your center and the center of the system are the same. Then you will have complete control over their movement.”
And the prize for most use of the word ‘center’ goes to…. she thought.
It didn’t matter if she understood, or that when they moved from philosophy to practice, her own years of training inevitably took over any notions of hypothetical centers. What mattered was that she could pretend, for at least a few more days, that she belonged. The Josho clan was just as political and petty as she had imagined such an organization would be, just as predictably… human, and yet it was also full of people striving for a common good, led by this man who was nothing like she might have imagined.
Lord Josho summoned her, as he often did, for tea after the early morning ritual of teaching and training. As was also typical, they made polite small talk. In the form of him asking innocuous questions and her replying without feeling the need to analyze or dissemble. It was unlike any relationship she had had in her life, and she could almost imagine this was what it would have been like to have a grandfather. That the powerful and wise Lord, for whom thousands would sacrifice their comfort, safety and even lives, chose to spend even a portion of his day with a Filipina street rat turned rogue no longer threw her as it had. Her distrust and cynicism seemed to have lifted, leaving her free to float through the skies.
“And what of your plans for the afternoon, Magpie? Still tied up with that unpleasant business in Stonebridge?”
Magpie had never left that seemingly quaint city straddling the Southfall River, despite the Sea’s siren call. Instead, she had found herself drawn in to the life of the city. The clan presence was light there, as the environs of the city had little in the way of special resources or challenges of the type Outsiders coveted. Wood, fruit and barrel upon barrel of cider were what drove the economy. Once, several generations ago, the city’s relative proximity to the Great Grass Sea had led to occasional incursions from bands of orc warriors, but now of course, that was only a distant memory, ancient history for most of the Insiders who lived there.
“I got the orphans settled, and managed to… persuade the Malay clan nobility to stop using them as free labor.” She felt a stirring of pride at the accomplishment, another relatively new sensation in her emotional life. It felt good to relate her accomplishments to Lord Josho, strange as it was that he liked to hear about them.
“Good,” he nodded. “I don’t think I ever mentioned it to you, but that city was where I first arrived on the Inside. Many of the first generation of Outsiders did. I still have a certain nostalgia for that time. 2083, if you can believe it. Outside of the city, there’s a natural standing stone where we used to carve our names as we arrived. I’m not sure who started the tradition, but you should look for it if you’re ever bored.”
It truly was difficult for Magpie to wrap her head around Lord Josho’s lifespan.
“How many of you are left?” she asked, daring to ask a question. “Are you all clan heads now?”
He shook his head slowly, his eyes sorrowful. “Oh no. Most of us died long before the Earth became stable once more. It took years, decades, before the alchemists, and the odd engineer,” he said with a gesture to himself, “learned how to make use of the resources of the Inside to improve life in the real world.”
Magpie smiled, internally of course, at his old-fashioned language.
“There were no clans for even longer, at least not in the way we have them today. That all came when some of us stumbled upon… the next realm. It was a… necessary compromise, one we still live with today, for better and worse.”
History wasn’t a great interest of Magpie’s. The ancients, she knew, had prized it; the internet archive was replete with the most trivial details from bygone eras, and endless discussion and bickering over what it all meant. It seemed to her that they treated it like some type of magic, that if they just knew more, just understood a little better, somehow they might gain power to control the present. That was wishful thinking of the type she had been trained to avoid. The power of information wasn’t lost on her, of course, but it seemed to her that such knowledge had a certain expiration date, beyond which it became clutter.
But she really enjoyed it when Lord Josho talked about the old times. Perhaps it was, she mused, because it was from a living person, and thus relevant by definition.
“I never knew the clans came from the Inside,” she said.
His expression tightened; for a moment she worried she had crossed some invisible line of offense. It would hardly be the first time.
“That, young Magpie, is a difficult subject. Dangerous even. The Inside has changed, is changing, the very social fabric of humanity. Of course it would, everything in our environment acts upon us individual and collective alike. But there is a purposeful quality to this. Perhaps it is my training as an engineer, but I can see that we are being maneuvered, machined and manipulated as a society, finely tooled to fit together in ways that suit an unknown purpose. Have you ever thought about how your brain produces your self?”
She nodded, then shook her head, not sure if she really had, or if it was just the kind of thing one should have done, and thus pretended to.
He quirked an eyebrow and continued. “It emerges, appears out of the collective activity of billions of neurons. It is a topic that lends itself to philosophy and mysticism, but viewed dispassionately, it isn’t all that mysterious. The world is replete with similar phenomena. The self is a layer, a construct. The Buddha had it right in calling it an illusion. But it begs the question. Why is it that we assume the self is the only thing that emerges from the brain?” He shook his head. “But I ramble. Perhaps in some years, you will return with a better understanding of such things. Your time with us is coming to an end after all.”
It was surprisingly hard to hear him say it. Being on Kuroudonain had made her realize just how big a hole leaving the Flock had left within her, and some part of her wanted to stay, to float among the clouds, disconnected from the world and all its problems. It was hard to admit to herself, but she had even held out a small hope that she might be asked to join the Josho clan, to belong.
I could place my loyalty with Lord Josho, she mused, thinking of Raven’s lecture to her on the subject. I really could. But he doesn’t need it. He probably doesn’t even want it.
She sat back on her heels and sipped her tea. “Why?” she finally asked. “Why have you been so good to me?”
Lord Josho looked at her directly, and once again she almost felt she could see a faint golden aura surrounding him, an artifact of the paper lanterns behind his head, she decided. The air filled with an odd sense of granularity and her ears filled with a gentle rushing sound.
“It is my way,” he replied, “my path, to build up, to nurture. The Inside changed me, connected me to the wisdom of the best of us, and so burdened me with impossibilities. My clan is my garden, my haven from the demands of the world upon my path, and when I found something new growing there, I had to choose. Would I remove it as an unwanted weed, purge it as a foreign intrusion on my design, or would I attempt to nurture it and bring it into balance with its, with her, surroundings? I have learned that such occurrences offer us a glimpse of that which emerges, of a larger meaning we participate in and generate without awareness.”
He brought his cup up to his mouth, cupped gently between two hands that could crush steel. “Also,” he said. “It’s really nice to talk to someone who hasn’t heard all of my stories a hundred times.”
***
Lilijoy kicked against the clasping fingers before they had fully closed, one advantage of thinking fast enough to perceive and act upon the faintest stimulus. It’s probably just one of the scouts, she thought, or Anda decided to follow me. And grab my ankle.
The disadvantage of thinking fast was that she had to wait for her head to finish turning, had time to process the implications of nothing new registering on her poorly functioning echolocation. She had a subjective eternity to ruminate and consider the fact that, in all likelihood, a decomposing corpse had just grabbed her ankle, that her senses were barely functional, that her abilities were gone and her skills mundane. In short, she was an entirely normal, very small girl, the monsters of the night were coming for her, and they smelled really, really bad.
If it starts saying ‘braaaaains’, I am so out of here, she decided.
All too soon, she had completed the process of swiveling her head, of turning her body to begin a crab walk through the thick ashy ground, and could see the rotted body she had stumbled over was indeed reaching out, its fingertips still closing in the space her ankle had just vacated. The screams intensified, their origin diffuse but encompassing, emanating from the air all around her. Her emotions pressed on her as well, not the external fields of emotional intent she had encountered in her Trial Space, but the genuine, homegrown article. Fear, helplessness and disgust warred for supremacy, each doing their best to take away the voice of her thoughts.
She fought back, but not with her system, or at least not with the biological manipulation her system could provide. Instead, she absorbed them into her Soul Vortex, recorded and weighed them, spinning out her diamond mana to add clarity and context. This was not an occasion for joy and anticipation; those negative feelings were entirely appropriate, but the addition of the positive gave her a sense of purpose. and proportion. She felt helpless because her powers had been stripped away, fear because she did not understand her situation, disgust because… well, because decay was really gross. In some ways, that was the most primordial biological mandate of all, for humans anyway.
She was sure a vulture would be quite happy with that part of the situation.
That’s the biggest issue with zombie movies, she decided, still scrambling away. Not enough scavengers.
Already, she could barely make out the slowly moving form of the mostly dead body that had grabbed her. She was still reluctant to use Nandi’s boon to grab a torch or something, but she immediately realized she wouldn’t need to. Instead she spun just enough diamond mana out to her palm and raised her palm, urging the boon to glow ever brighter.
Built in flashlight. Not bad.
The light revealed what she had feared, but not what she had expected. The corpse moved, writhed, its arm thrusting toward her, not in aggression but in supplication. It was the gesture of a man reaching for salvation, desperate to clasp, to grab anything thing that might slow an inevitable descent. And it wasn’t a man, or not a human man, but an orc.
She realized with horror that she had indeed found one of the scouts.
.
.