Book 2: Dirt Diver’s Dance
Someone Had To Lose Ch: 30
As newcomers, Ignis, the Volcano spirit and Gemma the Jewel Crab had been swept up in events and carried along into the progressive faction of divines, by the ebb and flow of events in the pantheon. Once they had decided that the climate on that side of the growing religious divide suited them fine, they had settled in among the others and made themselves at home.
Ignis was a jolly and warm character, filled with zest for new experiences, after so long in enforced isolation. Gemma had an even more sparkling outlook, her enthusiasm for her new world and the strange half-real moon realm was infectious, to an alarming degree.
“Let’s have an evening scuttle down by the tidepools, my love… The mortal world is beautiful tonight…” She bubbled, as crabs do.
“We can watch the mortal world spin for a while, just you and I…” She made cute little pinchy clacks with her claws, throwing sparks of scintillating light across the twilit beach.
“How could I say no to tha…” Both spiritual beings paused and looked over at the distant, physical world, dangling in the void. “That felt weird.” Ignis muttered at last, when the moon stopped trembling and shimmying like a beached jellyfish.
“I had assumed that planes of reality were more stable than that…” Gemma clattered her nervous laughter through her chitinous mouthparts, despite the way her saliva glands were suddenly running dry.
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“Ok… Someone should check on that…” Marduk complained weakly, when the jiggly sensation slowly subsided and ‘reality’ was once more in place.
“I was there for the thing, there’s no problem. Everybody relax.” Ward grumbled as he struggled to appear more completely in the secluded garden, high above the sea. “That was just Gary, having an adverse reaction to a Mana overcharge… while under the influence of a divine aura.” The Death god chuckled wryly and sighed, when his form stabilized.
“I bet the other divines are super nervous right now. Though, I suppose most of them are more worried about losing their new playground, than any silly matters of ‘right or wrong’.” The tall god hid his dissatisfaction poorly, speaking with an icy demeanor.
The little volcano being sputtered a fiery raspberry at the collected divines. “I keep hearing about this terrifying ‘Gary Ward’ being... His kids were a delight, yet so many immortals are dreadfully upset by him. They know he’s mortal, right?” Ignis demanded. “If we just wait a few scant centuries it will all be cleared up naturally.” He grumbled.
“That’s my whole point!” Eponna huffed. “As much as my sweet Ducky dotes on the boy, even he acknowledges that in a wink, he’ll be gone.”
“That so many divines are even aware that he exists is more troubling than his actual existence!” Beast murmured around a crisp and refreshing stalk of parsley. The tiny jackalope hopped and ambled through the garden below the abandoned inn yard, nibbling on the overgrown herbs when something struck his fancy.
“The stress of even a single divine gaze… Even one as gentle and benign as sweet lady Thirp’s, should be too much for a normal mortal to withstand for a prolonged… What do they call that relative temporal effect?”
He paused and snacked on a carrot top that was almost gone to seed, while the divine essence of all animate life, considered.
“Time! That’s it!” He sighed happily, now that the issue of now and later was cleared up.
“Time is a little screwy, here. It makes things more complicated and I have trouble focusing on such tiny details to begin with…” The little animal mumbled and nattered on, while he finished off a nice bit of butter lettuce.
“That’s my work, I‘m afraid.” Marduk admitted, digging the toe of his golden sandal into the lawn in embarrassment.
“I got fully snookered by a few sneaky divine plotters, a few dozen centuries ago. They tricked me into helping them lock our world in a fixed temporal relationship with humanity’s homeworld…” He smiled down at the herbivorous little deity and chuckled.
“The humans managed to access a terrifying power with purely mundane methods; converting physical matter into energy, in an explosive and chaotic state… That impossibility is what fractured the veil over the entire planetary system and for several hundred years into the past and future, relative to the events.”
Ward’s mouth flapped open a little, as the small, golden god spoke. “Ducky, baby… When you said, ‘physical matter’ and ‘explosively converted into energy’... Did you mean nuclear weapons?”
“Yes, exactly! A horrifying and ultimately, foolish misadventure…” Ducky agreed merrily. “Thankfully, your species managed to avoid burning their homeworld to cinders; but you did manage to fuck around with the nature of the universe… just a little.”
“Uh, thanks?” Ward mumbled, once more confused and a little lost.
“You lunatics worked for centuries to unlock some of the fundamental secrets of the universe… and you promptly used them to kill each other.” Beast complained. “Not even for good clean cannibalism, either! You were just blasting holes in reality, opening fissures into the ether, all willy-nilly!”
“We were all very relieved when your race outgrew that self-destructive behavior.” Ipet sighed, shaking her hippo head in dismay at the idea.
“In any case, those fractures in the veil of your world allowed me to anchor our realm to yours, spiritually.” Marduk explained to Ward.
“Our worlds still remain temporally locked in a closed system; one I initially designed to exclude outsiders and to allow humans to transmigrate here naturally.”
“So how did demons start sneaking in?” Ward asked, finding renewed interest in the obscure topic. “Did you leave the door open?”
“No, Ward, I didn’t ‘leave the door open! Someone spent a lot of time and effort teaching humanity how to open gates into the eternal; using human sacrifice, Will and obscene arts, they called them in!” He complained more fiercely, showing a bit of divine ire.
“It was that sneaky Morrigan at first, plotting and scheming with her outside allies. Then the other divines fell for her lies, one after the other… Even me.”
Marduk fell silent, contemplating something dark and unpleasant for a while.
“So, time seems to be an issue…” Ward prompted the little god gently, after a little while.
“Oh, yes, sorry.” Marduk mumbled, with Eponna’s nose buried in his golden curls, providing moral support to the little deity. “Events that can crack the etheric veil around a physical realm are rare, energetic and always highly disruptive… They leave echoes and fractures all around and through the veil, in space and time.” Marduk paused significantly, letting the last word linger.
“Time is a commodity, to the immortal and divine; we can use it for things, in the places between worlds… Don’t think about it too much, Ward. You and the other dryads are still far too mortal and linear in your perspective to try and understand.” Marduk smiled sadly up at the young, dark god who towered over him.
“You will probably be unable to fully grasp the nature of the larger universe for some while, my friend. I see you still struggle with your own multifarious existence.” Marduk’s smile broadened as he spoke. “Go on. I’ll explain the rest later. Go be with the others fully.”
Ward found himself falling away, back into the mortal realm and once again into his mostly real body in Gary’s garden. He woke face down on the lawn on a grassy lawn, soaked by his own free flowing drool puddle.
“...Ward just kinda zoned out a few seconds after the last ritual shattered.” Amy explained to Becky, over the slowly stirring god of Death. “I assume he’ll wake up soon and start being silly again.”
“I’m fine… I just suck at being in two places at once.” Ward grumbled, once the grass was out of his mouth. “How’s Gary?”
“Out cold still. What happened?” Becky asked, helping the deity up from the lawn.
“I felt my spells overcharge and fail, rather than grounding out the excess energy… I’ve experimented with this array on me and it worked just fine.” She complained softly.
“His etheric void isn’t that much more energetic than mine…”
She closed her eyes for a few long moments, feeling for the endless flood of potent energies that was constantly blowing outward from her body in a steady rush.
Once she had her aura relaxed and blowing freely in that eldritch wind of unheralded magical radiation, she reached her senses out for her unconscious brother’s own occult outflow.
“He emits about double my energy output, but that’s consistent with him being twice my size…” She produced a notebook and began jotting down her thoughts in a crisp shorthand of her own devising.
“Becky, do you remember how many of him there were up there, on the moon?” Ward asked gently. “Did you ever try to count them?”
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“Of course not, they were practically infinite.” She grumbled at her weird uncle. “Each one was a fragment of him with its own unique… Wait.” Becky’s eyes closed for a moment, then shot wide open again.
“That’s right, Becks. You always wondered why he had that aura of spookiness and menace…” Ward whispered.
“So many times you asked why the children of Beast fear him, yet the simple life of the forest finds him compelling. He’s linked not to one void in reality, but hundreds, perhaps thousands, all welded unnaturally into fissures and scars in his very soul.”
“Don’t be silly, Ward. That would be impossible… No mortal soul could survive being linked with even two etheric voids! What you’re talking about would spin him off into endless… Oh right.” Becky frowned and kicked a loose rock into the woods.
“I suspect that the ultimate goal was to transform him into a doorway that would allow outsiders to enter this world with their full powers.” Ward whispered softly.
“As things stand, outsiders can only use the magic of this world, regardless of what powers they possess elsewhere. A gate created by rituals on our side, only allows a demon access to our world. They can’t truly interact with the physical world without mortal assistance of some kind.”
“Wait…” Becky and Harry both asked at once. The priestess shot her nephew with a deadly look, before she spoke again, without a backup singer.
“Transform him into a door? Like the way he let the gods and spirits back into this world?”
“Close…” Ward grumbled. “When he let the rest of the pantheon and the spirits ‘back in’ he used the same potentials and abilities that our mysterious plotters were trying to manipulate, to do what they were trying to do. Except, he willingly created a gate into his own soul and chose who to allow passage. They were trying to use his soul to open a wound into our reality that they could squeeze through freely; a process he, or rather we, would not have enjoyed even a little.”
“Dark stuff, Ward.” Gary croaked from the lawn, as he rolled over. “Hardly the kind of thing to bandy about on a fine summer afternoon.”
“Oh, wow, he’s moving already… Should I sting him again?” Kree asked the group in general. “He shouldn’t be awake for a couple hours yet.”
“Hold it right there, missy!” Gary ordered sharply, bringing his buzzing and excitable familiar up short. “This is the part of the evening where I stay awake.”
The nearly helpless musician rolled over twice more, until he bumped into a granite bench and began the laborious process of climbing into a sitting position on the seat. Gary flopped around bonelessly for a few long seconds, while he figured out how all the parts of a human body worked.
“Is all of that true?” Harry asked, while his dad was getting his various limbs to play nicely together.
“I can’t confirm or deny any of my brother’s well researched suppositions. His carefully thought out theories and evidence based conclusions are entirely his own.” The brown haired man yawned and swayed on his seat, barely avoiding an embarrassing tumble to the lawn.
“Subtle wordplay, papa.” Amy grumbled. “So what’s our next step?”
“Wilf and Harry have some interesting experiments running and I can’t really leave that god-gnad just hanging out there…” He stroked his chin sleepily and yawned again. “...need a giant pair of boxer shorts.” The big musician’s eyes rolled back into his head and he gave a little wheeze, before sagging back onto the lawn, snoring loudly.
“That’s all we’ll be getting out of him today.” Becky announced firmly. “Boys, drag your father into the grotto and toss him in the pool, please.”
“I have a whole pantheon of panicky divines to soothe and cajole; see you kids later.” Ward called cheerfully, before ducking back into the willow tree he’d emerged from a few minutes before.
Deep in the night the little family finished cleaning up their experiments and tidying the yard, amid soft conversations.
“We’ve been getting hints and clues our whole lives, but no one could really explain this stuff before now.” Barry murmured to Lindsey, Maya, Frank and Benny, seated by the fireplace in the main house.
Mariah’s tree crackled and burned merrily on the hearth, giving off a pleasantly sweet and spicy aroma. The tiny dryad girl lounged on a branch, smoldering sleepily and not paying attention to their discussions at all.
“I’m not sure we want to start our careers off with a scavenger hunt for a giant dick and balls relic… However magical it might be.” Maya grumbled, drawing a silent, but firm assent from Benny.
“I dunno, love. It sounds like fun, think of all the dick jokes…” Frankie urged the scout, smiling eagerly at her elaborate and well practiced eye roll.
“That would be a lot of fun…” Benny rumbled, a smile crossing his face.
“Hey!” Maya complained at her wavering ally. “Stay strong, Ben! Don’t be swayed by a few cheap puns and easy comedy… you’re better than that!”
“I’m really not.” Benny sighed, joining the rest of the Ragamuffins on team ‘find the missing marble member’.
“Gods… You guys are a bunch of idiots.” She complained, while her flute began to greet the stars, as they shyly peeked out from behind purple curtains of scudding clouds.
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The delve team got a late start for home, since Otho insisted on being unsummoned before entering the passage through the void. Ivy needed a private ritual space and a bit of time to stash her familiar safely under her skin, as a red gold tattoo of the furry mutt on her arm.
Dannyl, Liam and Audrey led the way, with the rest of the team roped together, strung out behind them. The team was halfway through the rift headed for home; when everything began to shake and jiggle, even things that didn’t exist properly.
The airless void began to curdle and gel around the human interlopers, before relaxing away into whatever it was ordinarily… If anything in the strange, non-place between worlds could be called ordinary.
When things and nothings stopped shimmying, or when the group became accustomed to the ongoing shaking… that was still unclear; Liam and Danyl took a careful head count. They double and triple checked each other’s findings before moving on, since things could get a little abstract and fuzzy out in the nowhere.
Satisfied with the results, they continued on, carefully following the lightless and impossibly empty stretch of cave they were passing through.
Things moved in the endless darkness, unseen and unfelt, almost beyond human perceptions…. almost.
“Relax, something has disturbed the local area.” Dannyl’s calm and measured voice came over their comms earrings, soothing frayed nerves. “Just keep walking and we’ll be on the other side in a few… whatever.”
‘Walking’ in the strange place the group found themselves, had more to do with deciding to walk in a direction, rather than any physical act. By the same token, ‘directions’ meant little as well.
“These kinds of things happen from time to time. Magical effects and disruptions can make these things get a little screwy.” The young explorer’s confident voice soothed the nervous team as they slowly began to feel something like ground under their feet again.
With the tangible, but still invisible ground they walked on, a palpable sensation of clinging, trailing something passed over the travelers, bringing to mind the sensation of a cold, wet shower curtain brushing against each Adventurer’s bare skin.
In this case however, the ‘curtain’ was a clammy, slick, mystery that felt super disturbing as it brushed against… not their bodies, but their souls in some uncomfortably intimate ways.
Finally, light appeared ahead of the group, as they passed through a granite walled rift and out, above a wide valley, emerging high up on a hillside, beneath a distinctive, triangular peak.
The valley floor was a symmetrical quilt of green farm fields and croplands, orchards and pastures, spread out beneath a tall white city on the far slope of the valley. The city walls rose high and white, resplendent in immaculate plaster and flying vast golden sunburst pennants from slender spires that seemed impossibly tall.
Canals and waterways spread in a wide flung network, plied by too many boats, canoes and barges to count, doubtless carrying people, livestock and crops all around the splendid place.
If the valley floor was pastoral perfection, the foothills were a wild tangle of untrammeled forest, without roads or signs of habitation, beyond the lowest rise of the land.
“Uh, that’s not Foresthome…” Count Liam mumbled in embarrassment. “I’m feeling a little turned around, Dannyl.”
“Aw, shit.” The explorer sighed a moment later.
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Gandree disliked Port City pretty intensely, mostly because of the smell. Open sewers led to filth clogged waterways, which dumped into the harbor’s murky and reed choked banks. The stench wafted up with the breeze, even on the upper cone of the volcano, things only got worse as they descended a long,narrow trail into the town.
On the lower slopes, small houses of volcanic stone with palm thatch roofs looked out over narrow, trash choked lanes or winding staircases leading to the harbor. On the waterside, the homes were wood, bamboo and palm frond constructs, or repurposed ship timber and cladding, still flecked with barnacles here and there.
Squalor, filth and poverty seemed to dominate the city, while a scattering of grand plantation houses stood on the plain, keeping a discreet distance from the towns and port.
A dwarf dressed in a long canvas coat, three giant wolfhounds and a well dressed goblin girl in her crisp uniform walked down the trail, drawing curious glances, rather than any surprise or alarm.
“My sisters and I come here from time to time… They don’t know what goblins are here, since no goblin man has ever come here before.” Daisybelle murmured happily, as they walked in the warm sunshine.
“They think I’m just a green girl from far away. It’s nice to pass unnoticed.”
She waved her arm to take in the town, spread out before them and swarming with people of every description. Lizard men, serpent folk, furry beastkin of all kinds and kiths were mingling freely with humans and other beings that were more difficult to identify. Trade and barter swirled all around them, once inside the city proper; shops, stalls, handcarts, people carrying trays of goods and peddlers with overstuffed packs haggled and called their wares all around.
Dirty, crowded, stinky… the place was deeply upsetting to the dwarf’s sensibilities. Perhaps it was the generally rickety impermanence of the place that was the worst of all.
“Are you sure this place is safe?” He asked quietly as they neared the bustling mercantile center of the city.
“Not safe at all, so be wary.” The green skinned girl smiled at him and patted her mount’s saddlebags.
“Stay close close, we come here to trade, a quick errand, then we depart…” Daisybelle grumbled just a little darkly. “I feel unfriendly eyes on us.”
Three massive wargs and the oddly militant appearance of Daisybelle created a gap in the throng as they moved through the city’s crowded streets, though not as much space as the nervous dwarf would prefer. Within a few blocks, Gandree felt a slight tug at his hip and his small purse of homespun cloth was gone, vanished into the crowd, his pursestrings neatly cut.
“Stop, thief!” He cried out, scanning the throng for the fleeing sneak. No one reacted or even looked around at his call, continuing their business without pause, all around.
“See? Many rogues and scoundrels in this town.” Daisybelle sighed at her lad and smiled wickedly. “Tie another purse of toys to your belt and come on.”
She giggled at the thought of the disappointed thief, when they discovered their loot was a small collection of flat clay disks with rude words and images inscribed on them… The dwarf boy had no clue what a cutpurse was and had been shocked at the very idea of pickpockets and thieves roaming the streets of their destination…
“Clever and wicked boy of mine.” Daisybelle murmured sweetly in his ear, while he tied a new purse of insults to his belt. “This is why I love you, silly Gandree.”
He blushed bright red and grinned, shivering at the sensation of her breath on his ear. She and Gandree had spent a lazy, sexy afternoon shaping and inscribing the silly, fake coins in the workshop, giggling together beside the warmth of his kiln.
They continued on through the busy town, finally stopping four purses of clay coin later at a small, stone building on the edge of the harbour district. Moss and vines festooned the low, thatch roofed house, set behind a bamboo fence with no gate, just two long poles standing beside a gap in the fence.
Three yellow painted coconuts danged from one of the long poles, clacking softly together in the gentle breeze coming from the sea.
Fortunately, the wind flowed in from the open sea, rather than the stinky, leaden harbor nearby. The wargs settled down under a mango tree by the gate and waited patiently for their mistress and her new pet to unburden them.
“This is the place. Help me with the goods… you may wish to buy or sell here as well. Uncle Ace has many interesting things… He buys at fair prices.”
Together, they briskly unburdened her doggies, removing several saddlebags from their harnesses in the shady front yard, beneath the sheltering mangroves. “Uncle Ace is another of king papa’s brothers. The doggies don’t like his smell, so they will wait here.”
As they worked, Gandree’s eyes kept drifting back to the shore, just visible through the trees, a few down yards away. Something about the rhythmic wash and roar of the waves called to him, deep inside.
“Come come, we make our trades and then, later we can go play on the beach… There is a place nearby where we can be alone.” The goblin lass murmured in her distracted partner’s ear. “Too close to human town, there is too much filth in the water.”
“Beach…” He murmured happily at the almost familiar word. “Is that what you call that sandy bit where the water and land meet? Cause that’s where I wanna go.”
Her hand fell on the grinning dwarf’s collar, as she began dragging him inside, giggling and sighing at his silliness.
“We trade first, I mislike the feel of this town today.”
A bell mounted above the sturdy bamboo door jingled merrily over her words, as they jostled and goofed their way inside. The sharp, coppery scent of blood, mixed with the bitter salt tang of the sea chilled the mood, before the door finished swinging closed behind them.
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