As you could tell from the finely-pulverized layer of everything covering the floor—sharded metal, chips of wood and bone, and some scraps of animal skins—the goblins’ cavern was thoroughly wrecked. Were it not for the handful of goblin hovels squashed against the walls that had only just managed to avoid getting ground to a pulp by the terrorworm queen, you would have thought that nothing but refuse had ever been here at all.

With the Precursor door now a ruin crumpled against the wall and unable to obstruct us any further, we carefully and quietly continued through the tunnel, with Brand having used a cantrip to summon a comforting ball of radiance to shine the way forward.

Past the broken doorway lay the eye monster’s lair. Though the place was by no means empty, it was difficult for me to have much interest in it, given that I was still panting with exhaustion from all the spells I’d expended to heal us after the battle. Brand and no trouble going into sleep mode, and Yuta and I soon followed. It wasn’t until we awoke several hours later—fully rested—that any of us were able to take stock of what had happened or where we really were.

As I’d drifted off to sleep, I’d been wondering if the eye monster was a creation of Wyrmsoft 2.0’s procedural generation algorithms, or if it was a piece of an alien memory brought in by the Incursion. Once we were up and about, answering that question was a piece of cake. As it turned out were right there in the fiend’s lair; all it took was a little exploring on our part, the results were rather amusing, to say the least.

Using his ability, Brand confirmed that everything around us was, in fact, procedurally generated. As a particularly fun (or, if you prefer, terrifying) detail, he noted that the procedural generation hadn’t worked properly, in all likelihood as a result of the Incursion’s interference. This made for a strangely incomplete gaming scenario.

The Plasmic Eyes, as we learned the monster was called, was a relic of the Precursor era; a mental collective of slave laborers the Precursors had transmogrified into a bunch of eyes floating among neurogenic plasma. Unsurprisingly, this was a very unpleasant form of existence, and over the many millennia the Plasmic Eyes spent wandering these caves, pain and hate drove it mad. Plasmic Eyes’ plan had been to use the goblins to abduct the nearby townsfolk and subject them to gruesome experiments, in the hopes of finding a way to reverse-engineer what the Precursors had done to it. All-in-all, though it was a really nice story with a sympathetic monster antagonist, it suffered from two fatal flaws: the Plasmic Eyes knew that the transmogrification was irreversible, and the nearest towns(folk) were on the other side of the desert, forever out of its reach.

Honestly, I felt bad for them; I’d give them an A for effort.

The lair itself was a really grizzly place, filled with the bodies of the Eyes’ victims—villagers, abducted from non-existent villages. In its attempts to recreate the Precursors’ magics, the Eyes had warped the abductees into bloated, hyper-ocularized monstrosities. The corpses’ aortas grew out from their chests like trees. Colored fog fumed from the branches where they reached up to the ceiling. Live, pumping hearts hung from the aorta trees like fruits, and, by the looks of the half-made clockwork ants we found on the workstations, the Eyes had been using the hearts as power sources for the ants, and for the many other clockwork creations it had been developing. We saw mantises, centipedes, velvet worms, and many others, though I guess, so far, only the ants had made it out the prototype phase.

Honestly, though, once we saw what was there we got out of there as quickly as we could. To this day, the fact that I slept there still leaves me feeling… unclean.

As we left the Eyes’ lair through a still-operational Precursor door, I found myself wondering what sort of settings Brand or I had unwittingly put in place to get the wyrmware to fill Lantor with such awful, awful things. As I thought about it, another possibility occurred to me: the macabre details might have been the product of another wyrm’s psyche, or even my own subconscious, leaching into my mind-world. Andalon had said that wyrms could communicate to one another through their songs, and there was certainly a lot of wyrmsong going on, both inside the self-help group and in the outside world.

The exit opened onto another nondescript tunnel, indistinguishable from any of the others we’d used so far, but for one exception: unlike all the others, this tunnel angled up.

We’d all gotten Level Up prompts after the battle, Yuta getting the most .After leaving the Plasmic Eyes’ lair, we sat down on the tunnel and took care of the necessary micromanagement. We helped Yuta with his level-up choices before dealing with our own. Brand chose a very impressive-sounding spell: . He said it would be his new trump card.

As for me, I finally unlocked the perk; Giant Pangolin Genneth could now cast spells.

Brand used his staff as a walking stick, planting its petrified wood in the rocky rise as we hiked up the path.

“How long do you think it will take for us to reach the surface,” I asked him.

At the moment, Yuta was atop a person-sized ledge ahead of us, bent over as he helped pull me up with his arms. I managed to get the rest of the way up, myself, pushing off the tunnel wall behind me with my tail.

Yuta and I worked together to help Brand up.

“Honestly,” Brand replied, after he’d climbed up and dusted himself off, “I have no idea. The standard deviation of the lengths of these trips has been massive.”

“Well, at least we’re making progress,” I said.

I felt something bubble up inside me as we walked along the tunnel’s rising path, like a fist rapping at a door. It was only after we’d stopped to catch our breath that it crystallized in my mind.

“Wait,” I said.

“You’ve figured it out?” Brand asked.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

I’d asked for a breather in part because I’d wanted to understand the feeling and what it meant.

“This feeling of mine,” I said, glancing at Yuta, “it matches what I felt when I was searching my spirits for someone to join us.”

“What is it?” Yuta asked.

“Hmmm…” I ran a claw-tip along my scaly chin. “I wonder…”

“Yes?” Brand asked.

“Would you mind for any nearby enemies?” I said.

“No problem.”. A moment later, his face was a radar display once more. There were just three green dots on the screen—the three of us.

“Zoom out,” I said.

“Out-zooming.”

The three green dots shrank toward the central point as the view expanded, but no red dots appeared.

“For the time being,” Brand said, “we’re in the clear.”

“Good.” I nodded and then closed my eyes. “I want to try something.”

Yuta haori’s sleeves drooped in front of Brand’s orb of as he crossed his arms, casting shadows on the tunnel wall.

I focused and then spoke the words: “.” Opening my eyes, I nodded in approval at the sight of a familiar-looking window:

Party Management

Switch

Recruit

Dismiss

I smirked. “I was right!”

“About?” Yuta asked.

“In most of the games that Greg used as a basis for his Wyrmsoft RPG system,” I explained, “you could manage your party at any time, except during combat and certain special events or encounters. I hadn’t thought of using Party Management until I’d seen it on the save point menu.” I scratched the back of my neck. “I guess we could have gotten your help earlier, Yuta.”

The bubbling feeling inside me got stronger the more I focused on the Recruit option. It was like there was a little Norm on my shoulder, egging me on to select it.

Then, insight struck me like lightning, and I sighed.

“It’s Geoffrey,” I said

“The knight?” Yuta asked.

I nodded. “The one and only. He wants to come out. He’s…” I chuckled nervously. “…definitely angry with me, and well,” I looked Yuta in the eyes, “Yuta, he’s none too pleased to see you, either.”

Yuta’s expression turned dour. “The feeling is mutual.”

The tunnel got steeper as we pressed on.

But then, Yuta stepped forward and pointed ahead.

“Look, light.”

He was right. A pale radiance trickled down from around the tunnel’s next bend.

The possibility of an exit put a spring in my step. I rushed around the bend.

For a second, it looked like the Moon hung mid-air, surrounded by the tunnel’s depths. But it wasn’t the Moon: it was opening to the surface, giving us a view of a platinum sky. Moisture particles wafted down from the opening.

“We made it,” I said.

Brand and Yuta came up behind me a moment later. We shared looks and then ran up the slope and out of the tunnel.

The platinum color wasn’t sky, it was mist.

Moss and fine-haired grass furred the moist earth.

Brand planted the tip of petrified wood staff onto the ground. “Well,” he said, “this is… unexpected.”

The winding caverns opened onto a forest shrouded in mist. Steep cliffs bordered the forest, trapping the mist in a valley, beneath an overcast sky. And though the clouds in that sky looked like any other, the forest below them did not.

Yuta took a step forward. “What is this place?”

“Memories of another world,” I said.

There weren’t names for the things I saw. The things I would have called “trees” were more like giant herbs: thick, fleshy, green-trunked plants whose long, reed-like leaves towered over us, casting shadows on the mist where they drooped away from the stem. The plants were topped with spectacular inflorescences that branched out into trees of flowers, like irises crossed with foxgloves, with petals as red as blood. Strange shells grew on the branches and stems like barnacles, and were held in place by tangles of fine, orange threads. Slender tendrils stuck out from the shells, tipped with blue, bioluminescent bulbs that bobbed in the air.

Smaller, tree-like plants and shrubs grew around the red-crowned giants. Clusters of woody nodules rose off from the ground like chains of oak galls. Thin, green leaves grew in from the clusters’ amorphous, bumpy branches in dewy sprigs. Everywhere I looked, the ground blossomed with ornate flowers with shapes unlike anything I’d ever seen before.

“It’s beautiful…” Brand said.

It was the kind of place that made you whisper. It was also deathly quiet.

“Come on,” I said, in a soft voice.

We made our way through the alien flora, winding around the giant stalks.

“There’s a clearing up ahead,” Yuta said.

We followed him and, soon enough, we stepped out of the forest.

I made the Bond-sign. “Angel’s breath.”

Brand just looked up and stared.

The forest gave way to clearing that funneled into a narrow canyon. Above the canyon’s cliffs, I could see structures sticking up through the fog, like haunted masts in a graveyard at sea. Their tops were rounded shapes, like mushrooms.

I spent a moment leaning against the canyon wall, panting heavily as I caught my breath.

“C’mon!” Brand said, beckoning us with a wave of his hand.

He walked into the narrow canyon, and we followed him, taking a curving path that, perhaps a minute later, emerged into an expansive, mossy plain. Forest flanked the plain on either side, and the moss dreamed beneath the misty tides.

Shapes in the fog hinted at buildings and roads.

We walked away from the canyon and the woods.

“Brand, is there anything you can do about the fog?”

He paused for a moment, and then nodded. “Good idea. Yes, I have a cantrip for that.” He raised a hand and muttered an incantation.

“Ventume ghéran.”

A wind soughed through the alien trees to our west, fluttering my overcoat, Yuta’s sleeves, and Brand’s emerald cloak. The breeze carved wispy-edged pathways into the fog, and then scattered the surrounding mist, revealing a city.

At least, that’s what I thought it was.

We stood on a road of solid stone that curled around austere, manicured gardens as it wove to and around buildings of uncanny design—and there were a lot of them. The gardens bore trees with turquoise bubbles for leaves, surrounded by small bunches of flowers, among which I recognized miniature versions of the forests’ giant herbs. With the fog cleared, I could see that the pale green somethings covering the ground weren’t grass or moss, but rather something in between.

The cantrip continued to work as we stepped forward. More and more of the city came into view with each passing moment.

And the buildings…

“Incredible…” Yuta muttered.

The buildings were wider than they were tall, shaped like cups half a skyscraper high, planted bottoms-up on the face of the earth. I recognized their domed roofs as the mushroom-like things I’d seen peeking out over the canyons and the fog. Egg-shaped structures encrusted the buildings’ sides, along with ramps and winding platforms. The eggs had windows in them, and at least one of their entrances seemed to be located atop their glass and metal ceilings.

Were they some kind of housing units?

Brand’s cantrip blew its last breaths. Figures emerged from the mist.

Yuta tensed at the sight, adopting a defensive posture. He immediately reached for his kanakatana.

What I saw made my tail stick out stiff. I muttered in confusion: “Hummingbirds?”