The Tiurna Mountains.
Such a wonderful, dangerous, place. In the history of the world it is said that only one person ever managed to climb to their top, one legendary [Mountaineer] who desired to speak to the gods and ask them a question. Did he succeed? Did he meet the gods and get a satisfying answer? Nobody but him knows. What can be said for certain is that, from that day, the entirety of the [Mountaineers] living in those mountains changed in some strange, subtle, way. Nobody ever noticed though, for they were always strange to begin with! After all, who in their right mind would choose to live their entire life in such an inhospitable place where nightmarish creatures could hide behind every trunk? Only madmen! So, really, what was a bit more strangeness?
Still, there is a simple truth the world never found out, a truth regarding the origin of the Tiurna Mountains.
The truth?
They were a prison.
The gods raised them from the ground one day, lifting the earth itself, leaving a giant, gaping, hole underneath them.
And, in that hole, they threw the one thing they knew not how to deal with: Shadows.
When the gods made Creation they chose to connect every sentient living being’s shadow to their bad deeds so that, when the time came for them to be judged on whether to go to Airm or Larnos, all that would be needed was for the Judges to observe their shadow: the blacker it was, the greater the sins. For a long while it worked.
And then, as usual, humanity found a way around the problem. A Class capable of interacting with shadows, changing, reshaping, or even exchanging them. They were the [Shadowers] and they’d been founded by one of history’s greatest [Rogues].
The gods changed their way of judging people’s souls, but the shadows were left behind and, since they were no longer of use – and hard to dispose of –, they were just… thrown away. Down, underneath the Tiurna Mountains, to forever exist in a dark place where they wouldn’t cause trouble.
Until now.
Now, the shadow of a young girl waltzed on the surface again during a moonless night. Snow didn’t crunch under her feet, for she didn’t have a physical body that had weight or… anything, really. She was pure will in the form of a shadow. An ancient shadow even by this world’s standards. A wandering shadow from a long gone Era.
A step behind her walked a being that had a physical body… sort of. Shadows and mass didn’t work together, but this world had a cute little thing called System, a small god that was as powerful if not downright more powerful than most gods she’d had the displeasure of having to deal with. A god bound by oh so many chains in the form of rules, a god that was giving her the power to do everything she was doing now thanks to these Skills and Levels. So now thanks to her commander’s hard work he had a Skill that granted him a body.
He did leave footprints behind, each and every one of them turning the snow black as ink as he played around with his beloved Aura.
“We’re close, Hat Man!” she said joyfully.
They were walking high up in the Tiurna Mountains, higher than the last of the [Mountaineers]’ villages, lower than the lost cities of the Mountains.
An in-between where many of the creatures brought here by the Traveler found their homes.
She was looking for one in particular. An immortal just like her, one that had terrorized the place she had come from more than others.
The trees parted into a small clearing that led to a cave. The opening was lit by a warm fire that revitalized her: light, in the right amounts, could strengthen her, and this was just the right amount. As if whoever had lit them had been waiting for her.
A step closer.
The flames flickered, the shadows they cast looming closer, reaching out for her, their Queen, and her companion, their Commander.
Behind those flames stood a grizzled old man. He didn’t look up as they came closer, his eyes fixed on something near the base of the flame, something that made a sizzling sound and smelled delicious. Oh the wonders of smell: she had spent millenia smelling the same unchanging, dusty, still, air, and now everything was just so good!
Into the light she stepped and only then did the old man look up from his fire.
“Good evening,” he said, and turned to look back down.
She ‘sat’ on the other side of the flame, the Hat Man standing behind her.
“Good evening, Old Man Jedediah.”
Silence.
Then: “It has been a while,” he said, “Not that you were much missed, Hate.”
“Come now Jedediah, you know better than to act like that with me.”
The old man looked up from his campfire, right at her, his eyes sharp, sharper than she’d known them to be from back before her imprisonment. And then the sharpness was gone, his eyes becoming dull anew, losing that light, letting out the ever-hungry darkness within.
He smiled: “Go away, little girlie, shadows make bad meatballs.”
He turned slightly, his eyes alighting on the towering figure of the Hat Man, his smile becoming creepily large: “Although the big fella there, now thatta be a nice hearty meal.”
The Hat Man didn’t move an inch, but his hat did tip forward ever so slightly, a sign that he was ready for anything that could happen.
The girl, Hate as Jedediah had called her, raised a hand and shook her head, not-hair billowing around her with the motion.
“You will not eat my Commander,” she said, her voice so cold it could’ve frozen over an entire river.
The old man, the very old cannibal who had lost himself in his hunger to the point where the hunger itself had eaten him, smiled brightly: “Why not? He looks tasty. Surely he could spare an arm or both. He’s shadow, he can grow it back! Hmmm, never tried black meatballs, I wonder how they taste!”
The girl smiled at that. The thing about beings like Old Man Jedediah was, it was easy to barter with them. All you had to do was give them exactly what they wanted.
“I can help sate your Hunger if you join me in my war. There will be the entire world to eat for you.”
And at that the madman seemed to stop and… think? Yes, think. A part of his ancient lucidity seemed to rear its ugly head back up.
But, as fast as it got there, it was gone.
And he started shaking his head: “Can’t. Can’t. CAN’T! CAN’T!!! Promise! Made a promise! Word given! Deal made! The Toybox, upon the Toybox I swore! Upon the heart of the pines! Can’t! Can’t eat! Can’t, can’t, can’t, cantcantcantcantcantcantCANTCANTCANT!!!”
He kept on shaking his head harder and harder and harder and harder, and then he started smashing it against the rock of the cave wall vehemently. On the first strike his skull caved in, the bone forming an indent. On the second the indent became a hole from which blood poured out copiously, the brains behind exposed to the warm air. On the third the rest of his face met the rock, his nose breaking apart into paste, his lips splitting, his teeth shattering, his eyes turning to mush that mixed in with the blood.
And still he kept going, more and more and more until Hate was nearly certain that his head would fall off.
Then, just as suddenly as he had started, Jedediah stopped. His body froze in place, his head now more a concave red opening than a head, but slowly, right before her eyes, it started to fix itself. Flesh reknit over bone that slowly regrew, forming the outline of a skull that was then covered in muscles. A glimmer of white began to shine inside the eye holes as two new eyes formed, their corneas darker than the deepest black in the depths of the sea.
His mouth was last to reform and, the moment the teeth grew back, he ravenously began eating the meatballs the old cannibal had been cooking up until a moment ago. Most of them were still raw or only half cooked, but he cared not, the Hunger cared not.
When he was done he sighed in relief, his eyes, now lucid again, settling on her.
“No. I won’t follow you. I swore to the Mountaineer, on the day of his union with his beloved, that I would never let the Hunger win me. I will keep that promise. I will hunt animals and monsters alike in these damned woods and I will make meatballs out of them for the rest of existence until Nothing eats us all, but I will not let the Hunger win.
“Now leave before I try to figure out a way to eat you.”
The girl, Hate, sneered, although the expression wasn’t visible on her face, and got up from the snow, turning to leave.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“You will regret not choosing my side.”
Old Man Jedediah laughed as, slowly, his eyes began glazing over again: “And you will regret ever leaving your little prison. The Toybox was destroyed and I ate the things inside, the Skinwalkers made a deal with a hatless witch to be kind, the others are too scared of you and the mountains, or, they have cravings worse than mine.”
He started laughing again and, this time, didn’t stop as the two shadows disappeared into the darkness beyond his fire.
He laughed and laughed and laughed.
And then there was silence. It was time to hunt.
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The word Grandmaster meant many things.
It was, first and foremost, a job: the man working it had to deal with any and all troubles that ended up in the College’s lap, making sure they were solved in the best way possible. They also had to work with the churches to progress the gods’ plans, although in the last few thousand years that had seemed to become more and more ‘do war against this dude’ or ‘go fight off that specific temple’. Gone were the days when grand Quests were started by the gods in an attempt to help humanity progress. The current Grandmaster had noticed this strange trend, together with the fact that average Levels all over the world had gone down both in numbers and quality.
Grandmaster was also a Class, and there is little to be said about that, for oftentimes Classes and Jobs align. The one thing worth noting is that the Class allowed the person a certain amount of control over the House of Memories’ layout and workings, together with any Memories – or their evolved cousins – inside the walls.
Finally, Grandmaster was also a name. His name, now. The man (or woman) who took on that great burden also gave up their names, forever sealing them in an item that was then thrown in the Basement. Why? Because names held power, and a person’s true, original, name held the greatest amount of it. That was why, whenever a Grandmaster chose someone to be their successor, they forced everyone to call them Assistant: so that the people would forget their name sooner or later.
But then, if Grandmaster is a name, then wouldn’t it have as much power? That’s what you’re all wondering, right? Well, you wouldn’t be completely wrong, alas, for all that Grandmaster was their name, it was always, first and foremost, a title, therefore holding less power. Don’t get me wrong, a good [Witch] could most probably cast a hex on them just as well, but it would probably be repelled by all the defenses around them.
Because that was another thing: the moment someone became the Grandmaster they were no longer allowed to leave the House. For their own safety, mostly: there were many people out there in the world who’d jump at any chance to kill one.
That was the reason why the current Grandmaster of the College was sitting on the floor of his room, his head in his hands, having completely forgotten about the level of safety the House granted him and all those inside. His mind kept circling back to the memory of Armando and his group of traitors: what if there were others out there, wandering those corridors? What if they hadn’t caught all of them? And then there was also the boy trapped in dreams, Diego: he was certainly still alive and, for all that he was alone, he still knew how the original plan should’ve gone. He could still cause them – no, him – trouble.
His mind then went back to one thing he had read back when he’d still been the Assistant: the time an arachne had managed to enter the House and liberate two Traditions. He didn’t know why his mind went back to that single chapter in the dozens of books he had perused during his time as the Assistant, but he didn’t care. It was there and, with it, it brought back another memory: the last Grandmaster’s letter. The one where he had admitted to the existence of a Tradition, among the arachne, that allowed at least one of them to always survive no matter what happened.
And at that his fear skyrocketed.
One arachne was still alive and, recently, he’d received notice that she had been found in the city of Tedam, in Irevia. If she’d been there she had probably found someone to mate with, and considering how fast the arachne could breed, well…
His mind kept spiraling that way for a long while, certainly for hours, maybe even days, or maybe just a few minutes. Time had never made sense in the House, especially near that Door, the one they had never managed to open, no matter how hard they tried. Once they’d bought the services of the greatest [Rogue] in the world to attempt to break it open; all he could do was peep through the lock with Skill enhanced vision and see one thing: a painting hanging by a thread that disappeared in an eternal darkness above. The subject had been fuzzy but he’d said it showed a small, red, spider.
Anyways: in the end the Grandmaster’s eyes grew heavy and he felt sleep calling him. He didn’t want to but he had yet to obtain the same Skills the old one had that allowed him to stay awake for months on end.
So he crawled up from the floor and onto his soft, comfortable, bed.
He was asleep before his head could even hit the cushion.
----------------------------------------
Darkness greeted him.
As it always did.
There were means to ward one against the Land of Dreams, to keep it out, to make one’s dreams their own. To the rest of the world it made no difference: dreams were dreams and most didn’t even know that they were a place they could visit. But he, like all Grandmasters, knew better. He knew that, once upon a time, before the Traveler, before the arrival of the God of Dreams and Impossibilities, dreams had been just constructs of a person’s mind. Upon those had the foundations of the Land of Dreams been laid. And it was in those that his mind rested right now.
Dark dreams, dreams that hadn’t seen the light of false stars for so long that they had forgotten the meaning of it, that they had forgotten themselves.
What happens when a dream forgets itself? Well, normally, it disappears. That’s how these things go. But… the God of Impossibilities, Soma, had to… change things up. Because, for something impossible, even something as ‘unreal’ as the Land of Dreams, to exist without consequence, sacrifices had to be made. Those dreams were the sacrifices.
Black, empty, forgotten, dreams that nobody would’ve missed, that nobody should’ve found again.
And, even if someone did actually find them, there would be no reason to stay, for there was nothing to be seen or felt. They were no eternal prison for some great evil, no repository of forgotten or inexistent knowledge (although he had been tempted to put the ‘Book of Jokes’ in one of them, an infinite book that promised one that, at its end, they’d find the ‘oldest trick in the book’). There was absolutely, totally, incontrovertibly and provably, nothing.
That had been his honest mistake.
Because where there is nothing, Nothing thrives.
So, really, putting that Book of Jokes would’ve been a damn good idea. Or even just any random rock taken from Creation. Or a blade of grass. Anything would’ve done.
Alas, for all his experience, even Soma hadn’t considered something like this could’ve happened. Why? Because it wasn’t impossible! Just highly unlikely.
The Grandmaster opened his eyes in that darkness, his mind attempting to latch onto the nothingness within to start the ancient, rusted, wheels of that mechanism of dreams. Tendrils of dreamstuff reached out.
And were eaten by Nothing.
For they were not Nothing, and therefore should become Nothing.
There was something else here, something that wasn’t Nothing, so Nothing tried to turn it into Nothing, absorb it into Nothing, for that was the destiny of Everything.
Nothing reached out in this place that was both Something and Nothing, a Paradox, something impossible, but since this had been a place of dreams, a place of impossibilities, it was acceptable, it allowed Nothing to be here in a limited amount.
Nothing touched the being that wasn’t Nothing.
And couldn’t.
If Nothing could’ve screamed it would’ve, for Nothing could feel the presence of its exact opposite. Not Everything, that was just food, no, it was the House. The House of Memories, in one of its many, endless, forms, and it was there, protecting this not-Nothing. The House, the living personification of Everything as it had been and as it was, but not as it could be. The House remembered and remembered alone. The Rose saw what could be.
Nothing raged, but since it was Nothing nobody could hear or feel it.
After a while of this Nothing looked down at the little thing. It had consciousness, it could tell as much from the constant intrusions of dreamstuff trying to make something in Nothing.
And since the House protected this one, Nothing couldn’t consume it.
But Nothing didn’t want to leave such a morsel alone. Maybe there was something to be done, something that could help Nothing. Maybe a way to open up a doorway for it to start consuming the little bit of Everything this being came from.
Yes, that could be done.
But how to do this? The House protected this one after all, and the only cases Nothing had ever managed to breach inside one was when it had devoured the entire universe a House existed in, leaving Nothing for it to anchor itself to.
That was when it noticed it: one of the tendrils of dreamstuff. It was red. Which, in itself, meant nothing: dreamstuff came in all colors one could imagine and then an infinite amount of others that one couldn’t. No, the thing that attracted the Nothing to this one was the scent of its progeny: the Blood. Beings that had been born out of Nothing eating a world in which someone had made a deal with it. The process to describe the birth of the Blood was complex and would drive most
gods or ancient chthonian entities mad – and trust me, none of you want to know what happens when the equivalent of Ctulhu (because yes, he exists) goes insane – and the less said of it the better.
What mattered was that the Blood was there.
And that, Nothing could use.
Nothing reached out to the Blood, which happily greeted its father. The sole fact that a creature like that could feel happiness outside of when it was causing incredible harm to other living beings would probably be enough to drive some weak-minded people insane.
Then the Nothing was in the being’s mind.
Nothing learned that its, no, his name was Grandmaster. Nothing also learned the reason why the Blood was haunting this man, for all that it had been reduced in power thanks to some kind of outside influence. Nothing considered this image of the Death of Warriors and, after a moment, turned it into Nothing of consequence.
And then Nothing reached the core of the Grandmaster’s mind.
Planting an idea.
A means to achieve what Nothing had seen he desired most: ridding himself of the arachne. It was an idea so complex, so outside of his understanding, that it would probably drive him insane, but the knowledge that this idea would bring an end to all his problems would turn into an obsession that would keep him going no matter what.
When Nothing finished its task it left, letting the Blood run rampant as it should. It would probably help the man understand the seed of knowledge.
Then Nothing did something it never did: it left, leaving behind a lesser nothing, one that could be exploited by the slowly corrupting dreamstuff.
That night the Grandmaster dreamed of something otherworldly and completely nonsensical, something made of lines and words and meanings that no longer existed, or rather, had never existed (now). The last thing he saw before waking up was a spider walking onto… that, whatever that was, and disappearing.
He woke up.
He smiled.
And he began to work, not thinking much of that strange dream, but still very much happier for some reason.
[Condition – Horror of Death Removed!]
[ERROR! ERROR! Conditions for Removal Not Met!]
[Observing… Observing… Cause of Removal Not Found!]
[Reinstating Condition!]
[Reinstating Failed!]
The System attempted multiple times to give back to the Grandmaster his Condition and, every time, It failed. So, instead, It decided to stop and leave the man be: there was no reason to waste so much important brain power on a single human, after all.