“No, I cannot stop using the lightstone because then I can’t see anything. In case you haven’t gotten it, we are inside a mountain deep below the crushing weight of the ocean!” Arne screamed at Dia and angrily called the lightstone to his hand, plunging them into complete and utter darkness in the endless, open plain of cave they found themselves in.

Again, he quickly threw the stone into the air as far in front of him as he could, whispering the activation word, and again, the stone hovered above their heads and cast its bluish light over the desolate, utterly empty landscape around them. They had left the guard post on the Maze side of the gap behind a while ago and now trudged along in the bleak expanse. How it earned the name of Maze was beyond him. Everything seemed flat and open, covered with a fine coating of dark brown dust that whirled up under their footsteps.

They had followed a line of footfalls in the dust for a while, doubtlessly a dwarven patrol route, and when it seemed it would double back to the gap leading to Uldran Underwaves, they diverged and made their own path into the unknown darkness.

Sharp, low rocks jutted at intervals from the rock floor and the absolute silence that surrounded them felt like a physical presence with weight, poor opinions on them, and an animosity towards being scattered by the lightstone.

“Pa-thetic! You should have been elves! You could have been useful!” Dia sneered.

“Well, if I’d had a CHOICE!” Arne screamed, little girl voice high-pitched and furious. He grabbed one of his long, smooth, copper-red braids to point up at Dia. “I didn’t, because The Vampire was so focussed on making me squirm—” Arne’s breath caught in his throat.

The twins.

The two very young girls, identical in every way …except that for a while one of them had a head that would have been able to see what was behind her if it had not also killed her in the process. And that young woman and her sister looked exactly like Arne assumed he would look in a few years. Pale skin, lovely pink lips, long, silky hair flowing like molten copper.

That look of horror at the agony and death to come, the helplessness he had seen in her eyes, which haunted him freely whenever he let his mental guard down… But was she a her? Had those two perfectly identical women been something else? Someone? Someone who also didn’t get a choice?

When he had been changed, The Vampire had just lounged around on the bed and changed his body with nothing but a wave of her hand. It had seemingly cost her nothing and he had not even felt it. She had simply erased his old body and given him a new shape. A shape which she used no particular thought or power on because she had changed people into it so many times? The other two took deliberation and some mumbled words. With Arne, she had simply waved her hand.

The breath in his small breast had grown faster and faster and he just stood there, still pointing a braid up at Dia’s tall, slender form, unable to control the look of horror he knew was painted all over his cute little girl face.

The dresses. The unbearable dresses. They were not just threatening responses to the things he sent her with his reports. She was making him aware of his frail little body. Making him aware that the delicate little frame he now resided in was shaped by her to eat at a later point. That the second he could fill a white slutty dress, he was ripe for eating.

“Did Arne just break?” Toog asked slowly, coming back a few paces to stand next to Dia who was just staring at him, exasperated.

A thin, horrified laugh escaped Arne’s throat. He had broken. All the little breaks that had happened inside of him since seeing The Vampire eat, since that night in the desert when he realised his people were gone, had now added up into a fracture, he had no way to bridge. There were tears in his eyes and he had no control over them. His hands were shaking enough to pull his braid slightly and breathing was difficult since his throat had almost closed. “No, no, no,” he muttered thinly, drawing his small knife from his gnomish weapon belt.

“Ehm…” Toog said. “What’s Baby Snugglepoops doing? Should we stop him?”

“No,” Dia said calmly. “I’m having fun.”

“She’s seasoning me,” Arne said, voice shaky, as he desperately tried to gulp down the tears and catch his breath as he began to saw at his braids and locks of wild hair, nicking his scalp a few times but only feeling it on the tickle of blood down his neck. Somehow the pain didn’t register. The hair, smooth and silky, kept sliding under his fingers, making the process difficult.

“…Seasoning?” Toog asked. “Like a campaign? Seasoned fighters sort of thing? Who is? I’m not sure why we are here anymore if you suddenly–“

“The Vampire. I saw her eat. She’s turning me into a snack, but I won’t look like she thinks. I refuse!” he swore, desperation surging through his tiny body in waves. The knowledge that she could just change him again haunted the back of his mind, but he gave it no room because then he would really break under the weight of the helplessness.

“Well, this one is your problem,” Dia said, crossing her arms.

“Why the everliving Hells is this not happening to you! Why! Why did you not lose anything!” Arne screamed, still cutting his hair frantically.

“I did,” Toog said, quietly, almost hurt. “I panicked and killed all my rats.”

“Ehm…” Dia looked up into the vast darkness above the lightstone, her gaze tracking something above. Then she looked into the darkness and made a disgusted face.

“Dia just runs around pointlessly murdering, and you lost a couple of rats?” A thin laugh escaped Arne, and his fingers began slipping with the blood on the small knife handle.

“You’re right. I’ll just let you handle this,” Dia stated, turning back to them.

“Handle what!” Arne screamed, a sudden spike of fury cutting through the horror.

“For the record, they just changed shape…” Dia said. “Have fun charming them.”

Arne looked over at Toog who stared into the darkness now and abruptly froze, a weird look of disbelief colouring the handsome, bearded features.

Gasping for breath, Arne lowered his hands from his hair and followed their gazes.

The he stopped dead, unable to do anything but stare as he tried to process the madness he witnessed in the cold light of the lightstone. Four …Arnes were walking calmly towards them out of the darkness from four sides. Not small girls, but his previous self as he remembered himself from Arabesk. It only fully dawned on him who the man was when he saw the narrow scar on his cheek that had come from a fight two years in the past when a deal had soured, and he hadn’t bothered with a healer in time. The scar was still light enough on his tan skin to stand out.

“I…” he said, not knowing where he was going. But he had to have somehow ended up drugged again though he had no idea how. “I…” he repeated, as the Arnes came closer, oddly blank-faced now that he could pick up details better. They were all dressed in his work outfit; tightfitting dark clothes, soft boots and dark hair braided firmly back so there was nothing loose for an opponent to grab onto. Even the two short swords he wore on his belt and his various knives were comfortably strapped to him so as not to make noises or be in the way in case he had to get out of a scrape quietly and fast. All of it systems that had clear origins and had served him well until they didn’t.

“I'm very handsome…” he said slowly, voice thin and shaky, as the strange, blank iterations of his former self walked into their midst with unnerving calm, ignoring Dia and Toog. They stood looking down at him at an arm’s length distance – one of them made a slow, complicated gesture with its arm and then seemed to have to redo it. Arne just stared up at the being, heart pounding so furiously in his chest that it almost rocked his small body back and forth.

Another Arne opened its mouth and an odd clicking sound was heard but the sounds appeared to come from somewhere undefined in the face region.

*You called us*

Arne heard the statement in his mind or feelings, he didn’t know exactly where the impression sat. His gaze flickered to Dia and Toog for a moment, but they were both in the process of slowly inching away from the four strange identical men staring down at a small girl. Dia could apparently see in the darkness, fine. But Toog probably wouldn’t get far. At least he had that satisfaction.

“How did I call you?” Arne whispered through numb lips. Dia had said they changed shape, and he vividly remembered the enormous beetle spider monstrosity in the hall of statues in Hilden’s temple.

*Death feelings* came the response from a bizarrely clicking Arne. *Like when the duty people die*

Arne gave a small, involuntary laugh that sounded grotesquely girly to his own ears. “Oh, horror and despair? I didn’t mean to call you, I meant to…” A fresh wave of anguish and breakage threatened to hit him, and he bit his lip until he tasted blood, and breathed in. The grown Arnes stood still, staring down at him, waiting. “I meant to put myself in my right mind,” he finally said. Then he very slowly reached out to the Arne that had produced the sounds and tentatively touched its hand. It was cold and had a texture that reminded him of acid-etched glass, the kind that let light in but which you couldn’t see through; strangely caught somewhere between rough and soft.

Slowly, Arne turned the hand over. The scar on the palm should have been rather faded as it was in reality but on this mirror Arne it stood out in white clarity, the white afterimage of the many narrow but deep wounds from the lovers’ reed plant he had tied up in a knot with his closest friend just a few years after he had escaped as a child. They had been so young and scared and angry. So determined to stop being helpless. The thorny but pliable plant was knotted by lovers – the more blood, the truer the love, as the saying went – and the tighter the knot, the more conviction was behind it. They were never lovers, but Taw was the last time Arne had someone he trusted, honestly and completely. They had built their little gang up as children and gotten more and more of a reputation because of the violence Arne had supplied. Every time he looked at his scarred palms, he wondered where Taw was now. If he was still alive. The crisscrossing net of scar tissue was powerfully familiar to him.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

That was yet another thing The Vampire had taken from him. The memories and stories connected to his body.

But the strange mirror image of himself showed the scar prominently. More so than Arne thought it stood out in real life.

“So, I called you with my death feelings,” Arne said slowly. “Then what?”

*You are taken to the space-place-gathering-site-where-Four-or-Three-meet-in-pure-unison-understanding*

The last word made its way into his consciousness almost painfully in a rush of insistence that it was an understandable word without being so.

“Fine. Consent is very important,” Arne said. That was really one of those sentences you should be able to speak without manic laughter.

o-0-o

“So, we are all aware that they are going to murder us, right?” Toog said as they made their way into the city. The trip there had been confusing. Their four guides had seemed to take …shortcuts in reality, calmly walking into previously unseen folds in the vast emptiness of the plain they found themselves on, as if there had always been doorways there but they had just not noticed them. The same way the horrible creature that hunted them in Arabesk before Dia brought several houses down on it had occupied that part of your vision that didn’t notice it. When they did so, they had instructed the two-legged people to hold on to one of them and each other.

Now they stood with the vastness of the Maze behind them and the towering, dark sense of a city in front, barely illuminated by the lightstone.

“Can you send your imp in and scout?” Arne asked Dia.

“I already did,” Dia said from behind him where she walked along. Nothing further was supplied on the subject.

“And?” Arne finally snapped, calling the lightstone to plunge them into a second’s absolute darkness before throwing it into the air ahead of them to illuminate the scenery again.

Dia just gestured at the huge, dark structures around them. “It’s a city, obviously!”

The buildings towered matte and black above them as if made in the same dust that covered the surrounding plains. The structures were massive, smooth, and unadorned by any kinds of architectural details and from the enormous doorways with no actual doors in it, monstrous citizens came into the street to walk behind them as per unheard agreement. They were enormous. The hulking, many legged creatures that went into the street with them did so silently, their hairy mandibles twitching.

As they walked, the four human mirror images flanking the nine-year-old girl, human man and elven woman, the crowd gathered in their wake like a silent serpent winding down the broad, unadorned street. None of the perfectly rectangular window holes in the buildings had lights in them and the buzz of conversation you’d normally hear in a city was wholly and eerily absent.

The clicking thumps of many, many legs on dusty plain and an occasional rustle of carapace when they brushed against each other in the crowd were the only sounds heard.

“So, what do we do about the whole murder us-thing that you could have maybe mentioned before?” Arne said at a whisper.

“Sorry, I thought that was pretty obvious,” Toog mused.

“We tell them about our plan for how to grind the dwarves’ stupid, twerpy faces into the dirt. They help us. We leave,” Dia said with grim finality. “Imp’s idea. I'm in favour. Toog agrees. Arne!”

“Toog agrees,” Arne stated. “Good, then charm is irrelevant, and I will just relax and let you handle it.”

“They already like you for some reason!” Dia snapped loudly. “You do it!”

“Look! Look!” Toog interrupted, clearly not having followed the conversation, and pointed to a group of carapaced monstrosities that had just emerged from a dwelling directly ahead of them in the glow from the lightstone.

Arne looked, not seeing anything to raise any enthusiasm on any front.

“The one on the right just did this,” Toog lifted an arm a slight bit out to the side, “with its second from upper set of arm-legs and the other three, who had been turned away from it, turned towards it. I think that must be something about their scent secretion points where they literally secrete communication. Like when a kittle feels pressure in the sand while burrowing. A kind of communication that we have absolutely no way of translating, even with magic, at this point, because nobody has had the chance to dissect them to figure out how they work exactly. Exciting! Right?”

“Yes, wonderful,” Arne nodded. “A murder-crowd is hauling us along and we know for a fact that a large portion of what they say is going to be utterly incomprehensible. What a great day.”

Toog just smiled and nodded, still absorbed in staring at the mess of shiny carapaces around them.

They came to an open space where many streets seemed to meet. The plaza was unadorned except for a tall block of dust-coated, matte stone in the middle, like an austere stage. The four people shaped like Arne walked them up to the platform and then seemingly had to rethink how to make their arms haul them up there. Arne had to jump there. On the platform, the four creatures shaped like Arne took up position in each of the four corners of the stage, while Arne looked around frantically for some means of murdering them in one or more unpleasant ways, but the platform was empty.

Everyone in the silent crowd, the Arnes included, suddenly turned to face a street that shot out from the central plaza and extended into darkness. They stood in complete silence for long enough that Arne looked sideways at the others. Toog was clearly fascinated, observing everyone, and Dia looked up to presumably keep an eye on Imp. Her long fingers were twitching, Arne noted. It would actually be unlikely that the strange shapeshifting beetle spider crab people would be the ones to kill him. Dia would probably decide to ignore the ropes of Justice and whatever else bound her from murdering and that in turn would probably kill him. Then again, she didn’t seem to kill herself that much, so maybe if he just hugged her while she murdered…

A distant flash of red flame in the darkness marked a faraway horizon down the street everyone looked to. The light blazed like a desert sunrise for a moment and then died down into a smouldering glow. All around them, the edder began vibrating the gossamer wings hidden below their carapaces and the air was filled with a high-pitched droning sound. A moment later, the far horizon went dark again, and the crowd fell silent.

One of the people wearing Arne’s shape lifted its arms and then stood for a while in silence. *The people with no words have come here again* its strange voice buzzed.

“Hey, I have a word-hole!” Dia interjected indignantly.

“And we are here to help you kill the duty people. We have a means of doing it,” Arne said, lifting his arms like the false Arne who had spoken, and hoping it would make sense to the crowd. “You want your territory back, right?”

The silent weight of a plaza full of monstrous creatures’ attention settled on him. Heart pounding furiously, Arne said: “They took your land. They killed your leader. I have seen him. They call him Aiquix the Devourer.” A very slight droning sound, the equivalent of a crowd murmuring in surprise, Arne thought, was heard. Arne continued; there was nothing else for it. “Aiquix the Devourer is turned to stone and displayed in their temple like a trophy. The duty people look at him and think him defeated.”

The drone rose a little and at the back of his mind, Arne fervently prayed to any deity who might rule ‘cheating your way through things you weren’t certain of’ to protect him and make this the right choice of words.

“We can destabilise the duty people’s forces. We can draw their attention away from the wards and the checkpoints. We know where to tunnel to where they won’t expect an attack.”

*The Three of Aiquix will deliberate* the Arne closest to him said. Then it turned outward again towards the crowd and spoke, *The Four of Grzz have brought the few-arm people here. They speak death to the duty people*

The crowd droned, and then a path was made as three enormous beetle-spiders made their way up to the stage.

They looked to the one who had just spoken and a strange ripple to their appearance happened as all three of them changed into slightly smaller edder. Arne could almost feel the excitement radiating off Toog when it happened. And then the entire crowd, the shiny ocean of black surrounding them in the glow of the lightstone above, shifted, every crowd member turning into a slightly larger edder when the three newcomers on the stage raised their arms to speak.

*The Three of Aiquix agree. They-we-I-unit-three-that-should-be-four must be made whole. The land-territory-kiln-home must be made whole. The Four of Few-Arm-People will not die right now. They will explain*

Wait… Arne thought. Who is the fourth? Are they seeing Imp? …And they are fine with that?

They turned towards Arne and again, the three shifted their shape, but not to look like him. The person they changed into was human but with very long, thin fingers tapering rather horribly into different kinds of implements, scalpel, pen, scroll, needle, hook – all kinds of awful instruments that Toog had used when Arne had witnessed the torture of the Family priestess back in Arabesk what felt like a lifetime ago. The figure was thin and swathed in long, baggy clothes in dulled colours, draped, voluminous cape obscuring any gender features and wrapping around the face which was blank except for two round, wholly inhuman, staring eyes, observing everything, devouring the world around it into their colourless depths.

Arne stared in horror, his mouth hanging open, and for a moment, he couldn’t summon the wits to do anything about it. Perhaps it was not only despair that called the edder and compelled them to change shape. Any kind of strong emotion would feasibly do, and by all accounts, Toog must be awfully, terribly excited to be here. Enough so for a trio of monsters to shape themselves after the self-image hiding under the torturer’s surface.

The three stood on the stage, dressed as Toog’s horrific self, and waited, eyes devouring, and finally Arne realised they had called for an explanation. He quietly took a deep breath and held up his hands to speak. “We will go back to the city of the duty people. There, we will call forth a being from beyond this reality that will begin to destroy the city. It will make its way to the temple and break the walls down so Aiquix can be freed. All the duty people will run to the monster and leave the gap into your lands unguarded. Then you will strike, either through there or through the tunnels they dig into the rock, far enough that their magic cannot reach,” he stated and waved the arm that still wore the bracelet. “And you can do what you wish when you are in the city. As long as we are free to leave for the surface afterwards.”

*The speech is ill informed. We-us-three-four-I-people do not need distraction* said one of the Toogs. *The need is transport inside their wards. We cannot enter. But now we can. Inside the shell of skin*

Arne’s heart picked up the pace at the horror of this statement. “That will be inefficient. You are too big. You will not fit inside our skin. And your changing of shape does not look like us as we see each other. You cannot trick the dwarves like that.”

*Size and trust are malleable* the Three of Aiquix said in eerie unison.

“Can you control your size too?” Toog asked, even more excited. Arne turned to look and was instantly unsettled by the smile that seemed to not take offence at the representation the carapaced monsters were displaying. “So you can make yourself tiny, hide in our skin and we help you across the border? Then what? Can you tear the magic down from inside?”

*The speech is correct. But trust is yet unaddressed*

“No problem,” Dia said with a sweet little smile. “Do you know what a hostage is?”

*A one of Three-Four. Un-losable*

“Exactly!” Dia smiled. “We will leave that here with you,” she pointed to Arne. “Then we,” she gestured to Toog and herself, “will take you across the border into the city. Then we will bring the monster forth, and you will bring down the wards. Then everything goes to absolute flying brick inferno, and we all get what we want. The end. Let’s get to it!” she demanded.

“Wai–“ Arne began.

*Acceptable to the Three of Aiquix*

*Acceptable to the Four of Grzz*

*Acceptable to the Four of Skff*

*Acceptable to the Four of Enaster*

*Acceptable to the Three of Umo*

*Acceptable to the Four of Dakss*

The crowd kept speaking its approval, and Arne turned on Dia, staring at her with the promise of retribution in his eyes.