Whatever it was must have heard her, because Ptah gasped and he slumped as some of the tension left his body. His yellow eyes flashed open and he jerked to look up at the stone, then up at Skipper. “There was a war. Not between humans and aliens…no, it was like…something was killing them. But only half of them. Two types, but one was dying. So they fled here. They didn’t know humans were already here. Didn’t have anywhere else to go. Made…an arrangement…” He panted. “It had been talking in like twelve lines of thought at once. Now it’s just one, but it’s so intense…”

“Uh huh,” Skipper said. “Tell it I want to know how to save you.”

“You take it into your body and…interface…with it. Become an…ambassador…”

“Nooo, I don’t think so.” She’d heard plenty of cautionary tales of the unwary becoming possessed by the demons in gems like these. She grabbed Ptah. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“No, listen,” Ptah cried, his fingers fisting in her pants. “It can hear your thoughts. It’s…not…gonna hurt you.”

“Look what it’s doing to you,” Skipper said. “My apologies if I’m not convinced.”

“That’s the collar,” Ptah gasped. “Made…to stop us…from talking. Made…after…Fall.” He groaned and put both fists against his head again. “It says you can absorb the stone. Become…ambassador…”

“I don’t think so,” Skipper said, moving backwards, the little hairs on her neck raising at the weird way the crystal had stopped humming. “Every village nit in the Wastes has an old story about how someone in their family found one of these things out in the desert and ended up screaming and clawing their own eyes out. I don’t think so.”

“It says…you’re compatible,” Ptah gasped. “Fullblood human. Fullblood of my kind. Needs fullbloods to seal the pact.”

“I don’t want a pact, I want to get out of here,” Skipper growled.

“Please,” Ptah whimpered. “It’s desperate. It says…pact was betrayed. I think they’re going insane. Oh god.” His entire body shuddered like he was having a seizure.

“That’s it,” Skipper said, grabbing him by the limp arm. “We’re getting you out of—”

Ptah’s eyes suddenly flared like twin glimpses into an inferno and, in a very clear, concise voice—the voice of a million years of planning and thought all condensed into one moment—he said, “Listen, you primitive, projectile-studded pest. I’ve been trapped here for sixteen hundred and fifteen solar cycles, and the last thing I’m going to do is let the very picture of ape-faced stupidity amble out of here alive unless we come to some sort of understanding that results in my release from this fucking force-field. My friends are falling—driven mad with the exposure to human greed and ambition—and I need to help free those that remain or what’s left of both of your idiotic species is going to die. Both of them, goddamn it. I’m running out of time—the scrambler they put on this child is killing him, and he won’t be regaining consciousness without your help. That means you need my help. That means you need to go over to that stone and pick it up off the pedestal and make the symbiote interface transfer before he stops breathing. Do that, and I will help you. Don’t and, well, I won’t.” Ptah collapsed suddenly to the floor like a sack of dried corn.

Skipper stared at the Skymancer’s body, heart hammering so hard she could hear it even in her numbed left ear.

That’s exactly what Nana warned me about, Skipper thought, backing slowly towards the exit, bow uplifted, breath coming in ragged pants. It took over his body. Used him like a puppet…

“Ptah, get up,” Skipper said, eyes fixed on the spinning cerulean stone in the center of the room. Every nerve was ablaze, and it was hard to hear anything over the thunder of her own heart.

If the Skymancer heard her, he didn’t even twitch.

Skipper almost left him there. He’s got a gut wound, she thought. He’s gonna die anyways.

But he was a god. Shouldn’t gods…be harder to kill? Changers healed faster…maybe Skymancers did too. She tentatively moved forward, grabbed the man by the limp wrist, and started dragging him out the door.

Her spine came up short against an invisible barrier that, when she turned to look, shimmered with the same blue aura of the stone.

Oh no, she thought, horrified. Behind her, the room had sealed, and now a repellant wall of light blocked her from the exit to the cavern.

“Ptah!” she snapped. “What is this?!”

Ptah struggled to raise himself against the floor, but failed. The words that came from his mouth were incoherent, and there was a white foam beginning to leak from his mouth.

…just like the old witches had warned her about.

Every hair standing on end, Skipper dropped the Skymancer’s hand and yanked her knife free of her belt, then stabbed at the translucent wall blocking their passage.

The knife rang with a strange, unholy sound, and the tip broke with a pulse that almost sounded like a gunshot. Skipper screamed and dropped it, staring down at the way the knife continued to vibrate on the stone floor like it were alive.

“Ptah!” she cried, returning to her bow, forcing down the surge of panic. “You said this thing would help us! It’s got us trapped here!”

The Skymancer’s head had flopped lifelessly to the stone, eyes closed, a thin white drool still leaking from between his lips.

Seconds passed, and it became clear to Skipper that Ptah was going to wake up no more than the barrier was going to come down.

Skipper drew her bow and fired at the gem—only to see her arrow explode so violently that particles went flying in a puff of wood fiber and stone chips.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Listen to me, whatever you are,” Skipper said, very evenly. “I’m not doing it.” She had heard the stories, laughed at the tales of the inane fools who touched the gems. “I will find someone else,” she lied.

“You’re lying,” Ptah slurred into the stone. It was almost indecipherable, like static over a radio.

“Yes!” Skipper shouted at the empty silver room and its central golden pedestal. “Fine! I’m lying! If you can tell that, then you can also tell that I’d rather yank out my gun and shoot us both than become your puppet.”

The monster in the gem gave her no response.

She yanked Jelly’s revolver from her belt. “I’ve got two shots left,” she said, popping the cylinder open to show the creature before slapping it shut again.

For a long moment, the room was totally silent.

Then, Ptah slurred, “Please don’t.”

“Let me out,” Skipper snapped. “Or I swear to the gods of man and machine alike, I will kill us both.” Anything would be better than being that kind of fool, trudging from village to village preaching about wars in the sky, a laughingstock, a mind gone mad from the demon within.

Ptah kept breathing in sleep, his lips pressed sideways against the stone. But then she saw them move, and, just barely audible, like a whisper against wet flesh, she heard, “Counterproposal.”

Skipper tensed. “What?”

“It took me a moment, but I figured out how to teleport the black powder out of the shells of your rudimentary projectile, and will do the same with the rest of your gear, should you threaten me with any of it again.”

Skipper stared, her gun drooping a little. “What?” She glanced at her weapon. The bullets didn’t look any different.

She fired one at Ptah’s head, just to make sure.

The audible click made the room shudder.

“Maybe a dud,” Skipper said. She put the gun against her chin and pulled the trigger again.

“You know what, you planetborn pit-dweller?” Ptah whispered against the rock, much less forceful than the words belied. “I’ve had one thousand, six hundred, and fifteen of your planet’s years to lose patience with your peabrained, ignorant species’ xenophobic bullshit. I will get out of here today, or all three of us will die here. Slowly. Because I didn’t have an easy way out, so I’ll make damned sure you won’t have an easy way out.”

“So you can die,” Skipper said, spitting. “What, are you running this place on a battery pack? I bet putting up that shield didn’t do you any favors, did it? Sixteen hundred years… I bet you had to save what little power you had for all that time. I bet keeping us here is sapping what’s left of your strength right now.”

Ptah did not respond.

“Guess we all die then,” Skipper said, slouching against the wall with the gun still in her hand, “because I’m not letting you in my head.”

There was a long, sulking silence as the creature chewed on that. From the ground, Ptah mumbled, “I’ll let you carry me. Not a full interface.”

“Nope,” Skipper said. “Gee, look how he’s dying. Bleeding right through that bandage I made. Better figure out how to transport some antibiotics and medical supplies in here before one of your only Skymancer survivors dies not six feet from your prison, demon.”

“Oh my god, these savages and their ignorant bullshit,” Ptah mumbled. “We could’ve picked any planet—any goddamn planet—but they had to pick the sparkly blue one with the pretty butterflies. The one absolutely rampant with a still-evolving ape virus. But they fucking liked the butterflies. ‘Because they’re pretty.’ Fuck.”

“What’s a butterfly?”

“Dead,” the Skymancer cried. “Most everything on this whole cursed world is dead, and you imbeciles don’t even know it!”

Skipper sniffed and glanced at Ptah. “Pretty sure he knows it. He’s dying though. Because you’re letting him.”

The demon using Ptah’s body sputtered. “Because I’m letting him? You’re the one acting like an illiterate anal scab.”

“I know what you things do to people,” Skipper snorted. “You take them over, make them go nuts, then force them to wander around the desert until they die of exposure and someone takes their gear.”

“That’s because they weren’t fully human. Their ambassador was desperate. They tried to make the interface with Tuliin impurities in the bloodline.”

“Only people who care about bloodlines is a fucking Changer,” Skipper snorted.

“Listen to me,” the demon using Ptah blurted, “I realize that your ancestors’ stubborn, brutally efficient pursuit of superstitious ignorance and cave-dwelling isolation has allowed you to remain completely clear of Tuliin genetics and therefore make you exactly the kind of specimen I need to make this work, but even you will eventually realize you need to trust me on this, or you’re going to die down here, because I am not letting you go now I’ve got you.”

He sounded like a hunter that had trapped something rare, and Skipper started, realizing that the way he said it, she was the greater prize, not the Skymancer. She thought back to the last time she’d been in this cavern, a night she’d camped in the outer cavern while hiding from those bird-tattooed hunters, and how she had given the gem a long, wary perusal from afar, but hadn’t stepped past that silver threshold because every hair on her body was standing on end. She’d felt something calling to her, desperate, a pull in her chest. She’d left the next morning, quickly piling some rocks over the entrance and moving to some hiding spot that left her feeling less…coveted.

“Are you really saying…”

“Sixteen hundred years is a lot of time for you hump-happy apes to bang and re-bang everything that moves, and even the tiniest transfer will negate the symbiote interface. My projections had put surviving human purebloods at less than point-oh-two percent, with only the most primitive patches of humanity still holding out.”

“I’m not primitive,” she said, her spine straightening.

The monster’s response was a funny, sloppy gurgle, which, after a moment, she recognized as a paralyzed laugh.

“I’m not!” she snapped.

“You’re draped in the butchered skins of animals and caked in the dried blood of your enemies.”

Skipper opened her mouth to argue, then glanced down at herself. No matter how much sand she had rubbed into her clothing, she hadn’t been able to get rid of the stains of Jelly’s blood. She scowled at the gem. “Let me out of here.”

“No. I’m stuck here, you’re stuck here. Forever, if need be.”

“You’re bluffing!” Skipper snapped. “You’d rather someone went out and told someone you were here than just kill us both.”

“I’m not killing you, you’re killing you. I’m offering a truce.”

She squinted at the stone, then at the way Ptah was quietly breathing against the stone, eyes rolled into the back of his head. “What kind of truce?”

“The kind where I get everything I want, and you walk out of here alive.”

“Bullshit!” Skipper snapped, lunging to her feet.

“Look, you leadbrained mental marble. It’s a contract. A deal. You give up a little of your organic stability and land, and he gives up his command over extradimensional space and matter.”

“I’m not making a deal with a demon.”

“Take a lesson from your elders, kid. Your ancestors’ governments thought this was an excellent bargain, I assure you. There were only nineteen slots offered in this sector, and they had a selection process that winnowed it down from three million initial applicants. Merit-based, mind you, not just dumb luck.”

“They killed each other off and ripped the world in half,” Skipper noted.

“Yes, well, that was a consequence of human stupidity, not our ill intent.”

Skipper squinted at the gem. She didn’t understand what the offer was, exactly, but she had a feeling it had something to do with making water.

“Yes. That. And blowing shit up, if you want to use your mud-dwelling parlance.”

“I’m more interested in making water,” Skipper noted.

“Then you’re one of the wise ones…if this species could even remotely be considered ‘wise’, in the grand scope of the universe and the massive, unending galactal clusterfuck that got me ultimately trapped here, wedged under a rock, counting how many sand crystals I can see in the walls beyond my prison just to keep from losing my mind like the others.”

Skipper glanced over her shoulder, despite herself.

“What about you? What do you get out of it?”

“I get out of this fucking cave.”