The five corpses stumbled into her light and Lilijoy knew just what to do.
She ran.
There was simply no reason to stay and fight, and she didn’t think she could learn any more about the spirits manipulating the Rotted Land, not until they calmed down again anyway. She had theories, too many theories really, about what was going on, and she needed a chance to think, perhaps talk things over with Anda. Her current environment was not conducive to either of those things.
Fortunately, the decaying bodies had all appeared from roughly the same direction, so it wasn’t hard for her to know where to go. She knew there were probably two more lurking in the dark, but she trusted her echolocation to give her warning if they had gotten around her. She turned and began to run, the light from her palm dancing wildly on the jagged looking rocks that would soon crumble beneath her feet.
At first, she left them behind, and she began to curve her path around in the hope she would eventually connect to the large swath of trampled landscape left by the band of orcs. Then, without warning, they were right behind her again, their presence announced by a tortured squeal. This startled her so much she squeaked and nearly stumbled, and she could only give thanks that her system prevented any accidents of biology in her Outside body.
Holy crap. Teleporting zombies? Just what I need, was her first thought. Now zombies come in three speeds, slow, fast and instant.
After another moment, when her pumping legs managed to put a few more feet between her and the sound of their shambling feet dragging through the ground, the smell wafting from behind, she reconsidered.
No. Not teleporting. They sped up. A lot. That squeal was the sound of their movement right before they slowed down.
She dared a quick glance over her shoulder. Now there were only four. Relief only had a millisecond to settle before it was rudely booted by alarm.
If they can move that fast, then it could be anywhere. It could be…
She dove to the side and rolled under the grasping arms, felt dangling ribbons of skin caress the back of her neck, the screeching sound of its arrival warning her just in time to keep her own momentum from bringing her into a rotting embrace. She stumbled to her feet on a new course, missing her Flash about as badly as she had ever missed anything. Her fast thoughts gave her time to perceive the threat, and even more time to watch herself barely avoid it.
She jogged ahead on her new course, careful not to go too fast in case another zombie appeared in front of her. She was in no hurry to find out what would happen if they caught hold of her.
I need to understand the rules for this place. Or the rules for the rules anyway. Time seems fickle, but otherwise things work close to the way they do on the Outside, which I’m sure the zombies would be happy to prove to me. I think I’m protected by my… reach bubble. Domain, maybe? Which is why the zombies can’t just grab me; they hit the boundary and slow down to my time. That still doesn’t explain why they don’t just come in from all sides.
There was a haphazard quality to everything that had occurred in the Rotted Land, and Lilijoy couldn’t tell if she was missing underlying principles, or if it really was just that chaotic. It was probably some of both, she figured.
She could hear the zombies behind her, slowly falling behind. There seemed to be five again, though her echolocation was working horribly and she couldn’t say for sure. Their shuffling footsteps shushed in a constant background of pursuit. She slowed a bit more, happy to keep them where they couldn’t hurt her, but not so far away she might miss if they zoomed off into some other time stream that could deliver them… anywhere. That there were still two missing bothered her a lot.
It occurred to her then, and why only then she couldn’t say, that perhaps the reason Anda hadn’t replied was because he, and all the others, had already fallen victim to whatever was going on here, that the Maasai revenants had some way of attacking across the worlds, that the zombies, that everything she was experiencing was merely symbolic of the true danger.
That’s just paranoia, she decided.
Still, she stirred her Outside body and went to look in on Anda, just in case.
***
It had been a long time since Anda felt something resembling genuine fear on the Inside. At some point in his early twenties he became inured to the sense of bodily peril presented in combat there. Even when the stakes were raised significantly during his brief stint in Purgatory, he was never afraid. There was surprise, shock even, along with healthy amounts of suspense and occasional regret, but the visceral, instinctive fear was gone, worn away a little more every time he logged out and went about his day with no real consequences, no matter what the Inside would have him believe. It was never that strong to begin with after all. He had faced true mortal peril dozens of times, had endured the painful adulthood rites of his people. After that, nothing much could phase him.
Or so he had thought. The addition of the Insiders into the equation, his inability to help them and his desire to protect Lilijoy’s friend had disturbed his equilibrium and opened the door to the irrational. He didn’t understand the stakes and consequences, and the possibility that the situation had already passed into irredeemable loss, that there was literally nothing he could do, whispered words of defeat into his mind. If there was one thing Anda feared, it was ignorance, a lack of information with which he could make rational decisions.
The shrieking sounds abated as he moved away from the orcs, Skria still clinging to his shoulders. He jumped a bit when she spoke in his ear and her voice was almost normal.
“We have to go back,” she said. “We have to find Jess.”
Her tone was calm and resolute, and he was relieved to find that she had a core of toughness underneath her volatile exterior.
“I would do that,” he replied, “if I had any idea where to look. I’m sure you saw the tracks went off in all directions. I think our best course is to find Lilijoy.”
There was a brief silence, and it was almost a silence in truth, as the wailing was now little more than a persistent ringing in his ears. He could hear his steps once more, a gentle shushing in the pitch dark.
“Why did it stop?” Skria said at last.
He had been wondering that as well. “Perhaps because we’re not trying to leave,” he offered.
“Then why...” Skria’s voice contained more than a hint of exasperation. “Why scare us in the first place and then punish us for running?”
Anda didn’t shrug. His shoulders were narrow despite his height, and Skria barely fit as it was. “I think this is a place of madness,” he said. “Looking for reason will only drive us mad too. How far can you see?” he added, changing the subject.
“I don’t know. Maybe ten, fifteen feet? There must be some kind of light here, weak as it is, and I don’t think it’s consistent. Sometimes I can see a bit farther, but it’s just shapes at best.”
He filed that away and checked his system clock. He had jogged for a couple minutes, before he decided that the potential dangers from behind were outweighed by the uncertainty ahead. Since then, he had walked at an easy pace. Overall it hadn’t even been five minutes. Time and distance didn’t seem to correlate terribly well in the Rotted Land, but he hoped they weren’t entirely broken, that if he kept walking, eventually he would get somewhere. Hopefully back to Lilijoy.
They walked in dark and silence for another minute before Skria spoke again.
Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
“Anda, tell me something about where you come from. Lilijoy said you used to be a ‘Maasai’, whatever that is.”
He felt a twinge of annoyance that she would be so careless as to speak into the silence. Then he felt her trembling, and remembered she was a child, really. Insiders, the tempered ones anyway, grew up fast. They suffered and died and returned, and it was easy to take the young ones for full blooded warriors, for they had often experienced more than most Outsiders their age.
“My people, and they are still my people, no matter what the clan may say, no matter what skin I wear, are not like most of the other Outsiders you might meet,” he started. “We never lost our connection to the earth, and this sets us apart. We kept our traditions when the cultures around us were swept away, and in the end our traditions saved us during the hardest times in our world.”
The words were almost a recitation from his childhood, but he still believed them in his heart. They had stood the test of time against his scrutiny of his own biases, as much survivors as those they described. As he spoke them, he felt that tiny swell of pride that had never completely left and with that feeling came an idea, or perhaps he realized something he had already known.
“Let me tell you some of our stories,” he said, speaking his mother tongue.
***
Looking at Anda’s still form on the Outside, Lilijoy was tempted to try and communicate with him directly, perhaps by using her own flowers to create a direct channel to his brain. In the end though, she decided such an intervention should only be used in a dire emergency, and she didn’t think that was the case now.
She sat down with a sigh, and turned her attention fully to the strange race she in which she was an unwilling participant. The zombies chased her silently and she could neither go too fast nor too slow. That left the other problem, which was determining exactly where this unfortunate processional was going. She had given up on finding the tracks of the band, at least on purpose, after the third time her internal map led her astray, and the light from her palm revealed only more corroded and gray landscape ahead, full of rocks just waiting to give up their form beneath her feet.
It was enough to make her wonder if this just might go on forever, at least until she finally grew so tired of the endless chase that she allowed the dead orcs to catch her. To entertain herself, she led them in ever smaller circles for a while, just to see if they would display any sign of planning or coordination. They did not, which led her to wonder if anyone was actually minding the store, so to speak. She still felt it most likely that they were closer to puppets than anything autonomous. The whole environment spoke to an inability to create, that the minds here were only able to manipulate existing materials. It reminded her a bit of her earth magic, which could only draw on what materials were on hand to build its walls.
She suspected that went for the higher levels of function as well, that there was nothing going on here that wasn’t derived from the rules in the Garden. She could almost imagine a Maasai revenant as a child pulling switches and knobs at random on some cosmic control panel, sometimes getting the desired result and other times being just as surprised as any unfortunate witness trapped in their domain. It was pure speculation, of course, but as a theory, it went some of the way toward explaining why her experiences to this point had been so incoherent.
That’s just it, she realized. This whole place is incoherent. Nothing sticks together. Even the zombies are falling apart quickly.
Every time she looked there were more bits and pieces hanging from her pursuers. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, she thought. This isn’t malignance, it’s desperation. This is the widening gyre for the revenants’ cycles of consciousness. They are clinging to existence, grasping at anything solid, while the cycles that perpetuate their selfhood fly apart.
This wasn’t a battle, she realized. It was a rescue mission.
***
Anda spoke the stories of his people, while Skria listened from his shoulder, his audience, but perhaps not his only audience. He spoke of devils with lion’s heads and stone bodies, of the black god who brought the rains and the red god who wished to stop him. He told the stories of the hare and the elephant, of warriors cowardly and brave, and the woman who gained the children she had always wanted by harvesting the fruit from the sycamore tree. Skria gasped at the tale’s conclusion, where the woman, who had lost the children when she chastised them, climbed into the tree and all the fruit turned to look at her with accusatory eyes.
While he spoke, he could feel it, the attention of the land, or those that dwelled within it, if there was any distinction, and he raised his voice to project into the darkness. He sang the songs of the warriors before battle, and told the tales of the last great herd, the salvation of the Maasai when the world fell into darkness.
At one point Skria gasped again, not because of the words he brought forth, but on account of the figure of gray ash that walked beside them in the night. Anda did his best to ignore it, a difficult prospect, for it held itself just in the corner of what little vision he had, its indistinct form almost perfectly blended to the darkness. If not for Skria’s none-too-subtle gesturing and pointing, he might have mistaken it for a trick of his eyes, a half-glimpsed ghostly figment of the type familiar to any who spent time in the true dark of night.
Instead he told the story of the first man, of Le-eyo, who cursed mankind to die and never return. The Beginner of the Earth had given him a simple chant to say over the body of the dead.
Man, die and come back again. Moon, die and remain away.
And yet Le-eyo was selfish, for when the first child of another died, he said Man, die and remain away. Moon, die and come back again. It was only when his own child died that he said the chant correctly, but then discovered that it was too late to reverse.
“Why would he do that?” Skria asked. “What an idiot!”
Anda kept his peripheral vision on the barely discernible human shape, afraid it would take offense, but instead it almost seemed to lean in, as if waiting for his reply.
“It’s a beautiful truth though,” he replied, “We only have one moon on the Outside, and when it vanished the night was at its darkest and most dangerous. I always wondered if Le-eyo had a deeper understanding, that the moon’s eternal cycle was more important for mankind, or that if everyone who died returned, people would become locusts upon the world. Or perhaps it serves as a warning about man’s essential nature, that we like to put our own interests first by focusing on the short term. Then, when we finally have a motive to do the right thing, it is too late. Perhaps if the world had learned that lesson, the moon would still be visible in our sky at night.”
The ghostly figure seemed almost to nod.
“I don’t understand your world,” said Skria.
“Neither do we,” Anda replied.
***
Lilijoy’s insight, assuming it was even correct, did little to help her with the immediate problem. It brought to mind the contagious peril of rescuing someone who was drowning. Unfortunately, she was already in over her head.
Still it gave her a different angle to consider, that the revenants were thrashing wildly, looking for something to give them stability, some kind of anchor to slow their dissolution. Or perhaps a lifeline would be a better analogy than metaphorically giving an anchor to a drowning victim? However she looked at it, she wasn’t sure how she could help. There was a real sense of tragedy here, that whatever the revenants touched rotted, that everything they owned became corrupted. They had possessed the orc scouts and gained so little, other than a chance to chase after her.
She imagined that her presence must be a temptation they couldn’t resist, that if the orc zombies ever caught her they would attempt to own her, to incorporate her and in so doing gain just a little bit of-- what?-- solidity? It seemed that very bad things happened when the process of conscious identity was removed from a familiar context. The Maasai children had been given their systems very young, raised on the Inside as much as possible. Somehow that had enabled them to persist when their Outside bodies died, leaving them neither Insider nor Outsider. They must have been terrified, she thought, and had struggled to follow the most basic program of life, to survive, to continue being.
She couldn’t help but wonder if that was her ultimate fate. Perhaps her system and the knowledge and experience she was gaining would allow her to escape their sad condition. Perhaps. Maybe that was what a Child of the Great Mind was, or was supposed to be, and that was why Echelon was still out there, somewhere, the only Child to survive the process? But then, what did she have to offer to the Maasai revenants?
Wait a second. This was never about me. This is Anda’s deal, the whole reason he was allowed to rejoin the Inside as a half-orc. Whatever they need, it’s something only he can give. He carries their culture. Is that it, or is there something deeper?
She recalled Sarah’s letter, of her visions of conversations where the words were the gods themselves. We are just too small to see the second-order emergence of our collected thoughts, too small and too ephemeral. Yet we interact with it every day and call it culture, or religion, or mythology.
The thought seemed, as such thoughts do, to be both true and false. When pinned down it made as much sense as implying a grand design to the growth patterns of slime molds and cities. Human culture sprawled, writhed and metastasized. And yet. There were forms, attractors and patterns within the chaos. Archetypes, commonalities of experience, and always that hint of something just beyond the mundane, the ineffable that responded to the grasping mind by rotting away just as quickly as the lands all around her.
Well, she thought, whatever it is, I hope Anda’s got it. I’m getting really tired of jogging.
***
Anda slowed his stride and turned to the figure at his side. It had grown more solid throughout their aimless journey, and if he strained, he could just make out the features of a young man, a boy really, his head not even shorn.
“Endasopai,” Anda proclaimed reaching out his hand, “Greetings.”
The boy moved his mouth, and Anda read the traditional response there. “Hepa.”
The boy took his hand.
Anda reached deep within to the buried capabilities of his system and activated Two Minds One Self.
.
.
.