Deep, cold water surged and frothed, churned up by the sudden emergence of a Cthulian nightmare in its midst. Exploding. Imploding. Solidifying. Reforming.
And then, finally, she was herself again.
Except this time, something was different. Something was very wrong.
She’d been in Ivan’s car, speeding away from the convention centre. There had been…a phone call. A gun to Fergus’s head. She had to stop him. Had to…
No, wait, that wasn’t right. She’d been running from the troll queen’s guards, leaping off the edge of Pinnacle, towards the waiting arms of her friends. And then…falling. Plunging through the clouds.
Both of those things were true. And yet…they couldn’t be, could they? How could she be both Saskia the troll and Saskia the human—in two different worlds at the same time?
She broke the surface, spluttering and gasping, arms and legs paddling frantically to keep her afloat. Long, muscular arms and legs. Fingers tipped in long claws. Yup, definitely a troll now. Were the human memories fake, then? The recent ones, at least. The memories beginning with her…her re-emergence on the side of Mount Sesayung. Re-emergence after…
Oh frock. Oh frock! What the frocking frock!?
Both sets of memories were real. Both Saskias. Her mind hadn’t been transported into a new body. It had been cloned. She was a copy. And now, somehow, she’d just received a fresh memory download from the real Saskia, who had recently resurfaced on Earth.
Her head spun, and she went under, swallowing a mouthful of salt water. It was enough to jolt her out of her stupor. Survival instincts took over, and she shoved thoughts of alternate Saskias aside. She was in a sea or salty lake, nowhere near the spurs of the Cloudtop Queendom. The shore of a very peculiar island loomed just a few hundred metres away. Atop a high peak, a giant crystalline structure, amber in colour and wreathed in light, unfolded into the sky like a crystal flower.
Normally, something like that would attract her curiosity, but right now, she was just grateful the undermind hadn’t deposited her far out to sea. She just had make it to those nearby rocks.
A large shape flitted about in the water below. Circling. Rising. Her minimap confirmed it. That thing was definitely not friendly.
Okay, better get a move on.
Human Saskia had never been a strong swimmer. But as a troll, it seemed to come naturally to her. Just as well, because she weighed a tonne. This body was not only bigger, but also much denser than that of a human. She had to work harder just to keep from sinking. The corollary was that these muscles could do things human muscles never could. Swift, powerful strokes drove her toward the shore, even as the angry red dot on her map closed in.
She wasn’t going to make it.
Something big loomed behind her. Big for a troll was pretty damn big! She glimpsed a large maw, opening wide, with far too many sharp teeth lining its insides. They seemed to go all the way down its throat. What was the point of that? Wouldn’t it just bite its own tongue? If it even had a tongue.
Saskia twisted sideways, spinning in the water, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw the jaws clamp shut around empty air. That was too close. If she didn’t do something, the beast would come around for another go at her, and next time, she might not be nimble enough to evade it.
Reaching out with clawed hands, she spun back around and latched onto the monster’s back as it crested the surface. She sucked in a deep breath. The creature let out a groaning rumble, and plunged down into the depths—carrying her with it.
This thing was no shark; that much was certain. Its back was hard, and lined with chitinous spikes that dug into her belly. It had stubby paddles for legs, and a long, slender tail, tipped in spiky fins. There was something else that drew her attention though—more than its horrifically deadly form.
A faint glow emanated from beneath the sea monster’s armoured, scaly hide. An amber glow.
Straddling its back, tearing aside the thick scales, she found what she was looking for. Wispy tendrils of the stuff, weaving its way deep into the creature’s body. Yup. That was arlium, alright.
She pressed the palm of her hand against it.
A shiver swept over her. Oh that felt good.
The monster groaned, and thrashed from side to side beneath her. Its flesh sagged. Blood clouded the water. One last shuddering groan, and it was over. Releasing her hold on the depleted husk, she kicked toward the surface, feeling a combination of horror over what she’d just done, and a lingering sense of…satisfaction. As if she’d just eaten a really good meal. Except this was a hunger that was not so easily sated. She wanted more.
Saskia swam the remainder of the distance to the shore unmolested. She hauled herself up onto the rocks, and lay there, feeling the wonderful touch of warm sunlight against her skin.
This was not a particularly large island. She could see the entirety of it on her minimap. It was high and craggy; a twisted finger, black and gold and sickly green. Gnarled, misshapen trees hunched over windswept rocks. Grasses and ferns clung to shadowy cracks. Raucous, screechy birds nested in the cliffs and branches, and flapped overhead.
The shining structure atop the island…now that was something she hadn’t seen before. It looked grown rather than made. Of course, so did most elven buildings, so she couldn’t be positive. But its colour was what really got her attention. Was that…arlium? It sure looked like arlium. And the fact that the aquatic predator’s body had contained arlium…
Maybe this was the source.
The arlium flower was one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen. Beautiful and mysterious. Was it a worldseed? And if so, the seed of…what?
Fantasinating though it was, not even this oddity could hold a spot in the forefront of her mind right now. With the immediate danger out of the way, her thoughts once again turned inward. Examining her diverging memory strands, she tried to make sense of the chaos.
Her most recent memories from Earth seemed…shorter than those from Arbor Mundi. She—the other Saskia—had been back on Earth for about three and a half months before she went to EXP. Meanwhile, four or five months had passed on Arbor Mundi since the showdown at Spindle—the point at which their memories diverged.
And yet, that didn’t jive with the fact that time seemed to have progressed at roughly the same rate on the two worlds, prior to the split. Her time on Arbor Mundi before the Spindle incident had matched the time that had passed on Earth during her absence, give or take a few days.
Could there have been a long delay between Spindle and her re-emergence on Earth? A time her Earth counterpart couldn’t remember?
Her oracle clock seemed to disagree with that notion. It had been present on both worlds, and it had shown no such time-skip. In fact…
A quick check of her clock confirmed her suspicions. Just over a month had passed since EXP. The missing time came after her memories of Earth ended. And those memories had ended just as she’d been about to take another plunge into the between.
Human Saskia had entered the between before her. When she—troll Saskia—had followed, she’d received these new memories up to the time of her doppelgänger’s last entry. If her hunch was correct, their memories would transfer each time they entered the between, but unless they entered at the same time, they wouldn’t be perfectly in sync. One would always lag the other. That being the case, her human self wouldn’t learn about this split until the next time she went into the between, and received a fresh download of trollish memories.
There had, of course, been the dreams as well. Dreams she now knew to be real memories, leaking between worlds. But the dreams were intermittent, unreliable. The bandwidth of their everyday link to the between—to their shared undermind—was too low, it seemed, for a full sync-up every time they slept.
This was all very strange, but what did it mean for her, here on Arbor Mundi? Well, nothing in the short term. But in the long term, there were…possibilities.
Hey there, other me, she thought. If you remember this, how about you see if the Internet, or our nerdy friends, can come up with a solution to the problem of plugging arlium volcanos. And rooting out invisible assassins. And defeating gods. And getting elves and dwarves to stop hating each other. And…well, you know as well as I do what problems I—we—face. Thanks in advance!
It would probably be many months before she received an answer, if she ever did. And by then, things might have changed, rendering any newfound knowledge obsolete. Still, there was no harm in trying. Her Earthly counterpart had plenty of problems of her own to deal with, especially after this latest incident at the convention centre, but hopefully she and her friends could spare an hour or two for a bit of research.
“Sashki, are you alive? Can you hear me?” It was Ruhildi, contacting her through the oracle voice link.
Saskia jumped into Ruhildi’s head, and saw a group of concerned-looking faces gazing out through the dragon’s ribcage. They were circling around at the base of Pinnacle, flying low over herds of long-legged, bushy-tailed beasts grazing in a field, being tended by a pair of grey-skinned trolls. The trolls looked up at the dragon, open-mouthed.
Presumably, her friends were searching the place Saskia would have landed if she hadn’t tentaported away.
“Yeah, I’m okay,” she said. “I did that…thing again. The weird teleportation thing. And now I’m on an island who-knows-where. By the way, tell that donkhole, Rover Dog, thanks for nothing! He almost got both of us killed!”
Kveld, who was also in on the conversation, sagged in visible relief. Zarie, who had never seen Saskia teleport, just looked confused. Meanwhile, Ruhildi snorted, and relayed the message to Rover Dog.
“Princess had fun,” said Rover Dog. “I could tell.”
Though she hated to admit it, their escapades had been fun. Ridiculous, destructive fun. On the other hand, they’d just incurred the wrath of Queen Atka, and by extension, the whole of Cloudtop—not to mention possibly causing the deaths of some innocent trolls when the airship came crashing down. And now here she was, stuck on this island with nothing but her own skin. It had not been worth it.
They soon located her gear, which had fallen to the ground without her. That was something, at least. It would have been a shame to lose Jarnbjorn and its matching gauntlet. The wormhide armour had also been through a lot with her.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
After that, the discussion turned to how the hell they were going to find her. After she described the island and the strange arlium structure atop it, Rover Dog’s eyes filled with recognition.
“Fireflower Isle,” he said. “Deep in Silver Sea.”
Saskia let out a sigh of relief. “So you know where it is then? How far is it?”
“Day of hard flying,” said Rover Dog, after Ruhildi had relayed her message.
“Assuming you don’t have to fight off angry flying trows on the way,” she said.
An unearthly screech rang out from above, and Saskia drew in a breath at the sight of a swarm of angry red dots on her minimap, spiralling down toward them.
“I just had to go and say that, didn’t I?” she said. “Get out of there! You’ve got company.”
Before she even finished speaking, Zarie was doing just that. They shot away on a stream of wind and lightning, skimming through a wide green valley with five angry roptir-riders on their tail. Word had gotten around already, it seemed, and now it wasn’t just the Pinnacle flyers in pursuit.
Once they had gotten a decent lead, they rose back up into the cover of the clouds and changed direction. The roptirs dispersed, and Saskia felt as if she could breathe again. The dragon began its long journey north, to Fireflower Isle.
“Fly safe, guys,” she told them. “I’ll be waiting.”
Making sure they still had access to her minimap, she did the oracle equivalent of minimising that window, and returned her full attention to what her own eyes and ears were perceiving.
There was nothing for her to do now but explore this island. She was hardly going to just lie here and twiddle her thumbs. Besides, she needed to find food and fresh water, and hopefully shelter too.
Rising from her warm perch on the rocks, she began to scramble up the nearby cliffside. At the top of the cliff was a long gully running between two vertical walls of rock. She was halfway through the gully when she came to a halt, her eyes drawn to several streaks of amber running down the flaky, crumbling walls of dirt and rock. The veins gave off a faint, but unmistakeable glow.
Reaching for the arlium with hungry hands, she let out a gasp. She could feel the stuff sliding through her pores like liquid fire. This was…this was too much. And yet she couldn’t stop. A violent shudder swept over her. And not just her. The rock wall was vibrating, rumbling, cracking, popping. A patter of dirt and stones rained from above. And a dark orange glow suffused the ground at her feet, reddening with each passing moment.
Oh. Crap. That new light isn’t arlium…
Drawing on every bit of willpower she had, she released her hold on this delicious source of light and magic, and stumbled out of the gully, her whole body quivering; yearning. She weaved her way between falling rocks, amidst a hail of stones, a shroud of billowing dust, and a cacophony of thunderous crashes.
Emerging into the light, she sprawled in the dirt, coughing and sneezing, and gazed up in dazed bewilderment as one side of the gully sagged like a deflating balloon, filling up the gap with fallen rocks and detritus.
A part of her railed against her own stupidity. Great job, Einstein. You almost brought a wall of rock down on your own head! The vein must have run deep. What if it went all the way down? An absurd image flashed into her mind: of herself hoovering an entire branch worth of arlium into her body; most of it hotter than molten lava.
As the dust cleared, and her tremors subsided, she began to take in her surroundings. She was in a verdant green jungle, resembling the lost islands of her imagination, save for one crucial difference. No, two differences. First, there were no dinosaurs. And second, there was arlium.
Arlium everywhere.
Crystalline chunks of faintly glowing amber littered the ground. It lined streambeds and threaded its way through rocks. And not just rocks, but the things that grew on and around them too; the roots and leaves—even a little rodent scurrying underfoot.
Pushing through the dense undergrowth, she made her way up a steep slope. With each step she took—each leaf or vine or branch she touched—she could feel it seeping into her. She burned. She shivered. Sometimes she fell in a gasping, sweating heap, waiting for the shaking to stop. Then she’d pick herself up and continue on her way, and it would begin all over again.
This shouldn’t be possible. She’d absorbed so much arlium that her body should be bursting at the seams. Her size should have tripled. And yet the only visible sign that anything had changed was the amber light leaking through her thick rocky shell. So where had the stuff gone?
Saskia wasn’t the only big, hungry thing on this island. If the growls and rustles and thumps weren’t enough to tell her that, the angry dots on her minimap gave the game away. The biggest and noisiest predators resembled squid-headed elephants, with several tentacles instead of one big trunk. They used these appendages to snatch prey out of trees and shove them into their beaked mouths. She’d call them tentaphants.
No sooner had she taken note of them than one came at her, tentacles flailing.
Saskia looked at the amber glow emanating from the veins beneath its rubbery hide, and tried not to drool. Quick as a blink, she snatched up one of the writhing appendages. Her claws tore into the rubbery flesh, exposing veins of liquid fire beneath. In an instant, they had flowed into her, and the bleeding became a torrent.
The tentaphant’s raspy growl became a roar, then a screech of pain. It lunged forward, attempting to crush her beneath wide, flat hooves. Releasing the tentacle, she rolled aside. Perhaps realising it wasn’t at the top of the food chain in this instance, the beast gave up its assault and galloped away, smashing through the underbrush, sending trees swaying in its wake. Reluctantly, she let it go. There were more easily accessible sources of arlium right here in front of her. No need to kill for it.
For a while, she lost track of time. She ate, drank, answered the call of nature. She slept. But mostly she climbed. She absorbed.
Then she crested the highest hill, near the base of the arlium flower, and stared up in awe—and hunger. She stumbled forward, arms outstretched. It would be so easy…
Oh don’t you dare, warned a rational inner voice. If absorbing a few small veins of arlium nearly brought tonnes of rock down on your head, what do you think will happen if you touch this!?
But it looked so tasty…
At the last moment, she pulled back, gasping, as she struggled to restrain herself. She needed to get away from here. She turned—
And froze. A sickening feeling crept into her bones. Something slithered up the hill toward her. A map marker the darkest shade of violet she’d ever seen.
No, not just one. There were three of them, approaching from different sides. And they were almost upon her.
She stood in horrified confusion. Something was very wrong—something other than the fact that she was about to be eaten. How had she not noticed them earlier? Her minimap had been right there the whole time, and could see for kilometres in every direction. It made no sense!
An awful hoicking, slurping sound filled her ears. In that moment, she knew what she faced, however impossible it seemed.
Not again, she wailed inwardly. I don’t wanna be worm food again.
She scrambled backward in the dirt, every muscle urging her to get away from the looming horrors and their vile, toothless, gaping mouths.
Her back pressed against something smooth and bright. Amber bright. It flowed around her; so warm; so soft—and slid into the rocky pores of her skin.
The violet map markers were gone. As was the sound; the terror. In a moment of crystal clarity, she realised there had been no deepworms coming to eat her. It had been a ruse, to get her to…
All thoughts fled.
For a timeless eternity, she squirmed and thrashed, gasping, revelling in the feeling of this warmth and light pouring into her. A distant voice pleaded with her to get a hold of herself. Was that her own voice, or someone else’s?
Sometimes, she didn’t just feel. She saw. Saw things that only vaguely registered to her blissed out brain, but which she knew to be important.
In her fevered visions, a column of white fire poured from the mouth of a volcanic island, billowing outward as it rose. Dark ash blotted out the sun, and chunks of searing amber rained down into the churning, boiling sea.
The vision shifted. A dragon careened toward the volcano, its wingbeats laboured. Sitting astride its spiny back was a troll, covered head to toe in grey armour. Attached to one arm was an enormous curved shield with a mirrored finish, which he held toward the fire, protecting him from the worst of the radiant heat. In the crook of his other arm sat a tiny figure, clad in the same armour as he.
Something struck the dragon’s wing, searing a hole straight through it. Roaring and flailing, the creature splashed down into the water—where it began to boil alive. Scales fell away from its flank, revealing angry red flesh beneath, darkening even as she watched. Its struggles subsided.
The troll scrambled down the dying dragon’s neck, wavered in indecision for a moment, then lowered his massive shield into the water, using it as a makeshift raft. Tucking his small companion behind him, the troll paddled with great gauntleted hands, bringing them ever closer to the shores of the island.
Soon, his efforts too, grew feeble, and he began to slump forward. His companion—a woman, she realised—grabbed hold of his back with uncanny strength, keeping him from tipping into the water.
They drifted forward for several agonising seconds, until they bumped into the black shores of the tiny island. Stone ruins dotted its steep slopes, amidst rivers of molten lava. Dragging the enormous troll behind one of the ruins, the woman sat there for a long moment, breathing heavily.
Then she took up his shield—holding the oversized thing over her head like an umbrella—and began to climb the steep slope.
The vision shifted again. Now the woman stood before a wall of fire atop the island. She cast the shield aside.
Her armour crumbled away, and she stood naked and wreathed in flames. Her body appeared human, yet divine in its perfection—until her flesh began to char.
She raised a blackened hand skyward.
Again the scene shifted, returning to the base of the island. The column of fire had cooled, and as it cooled, it had gone from searing white to warm amber, solidifying into…
Into a crystal flower.
Behind the stone ruins, the troll began to stir. Rising on unsteady legs, he tore off his helmet, revealing a mass of charred and blistered flesh beneath. Scarlet slitted eyes blinked about in confusion.
There was something about those eyes…
Saskia came back to herself slowly; thoughts meandering toward coherence. She was lying on her back, gazing up at the long tendril of another branch in the sky. It wasn’t Ciendil, but from this distance, she couldn’t have told the difference. She wondered how Baldreg and Garrain and the others were doing back there.
Then she sat bolt upright. What the hell am I doing!?
She lay on the lip of a wide, deep crater. At the base of the crater was a smooth, flat expanse of glowing arlium. For the first time in…well, ever, she felt no urge to absorb that arlium. Overhead, the crystal flower was nowhere to be seen.
“Saskia? Are you there?” This time, the voice pinging her was Kveld’s.
“I…I’m here,” she said. “I think. How long was I…uh, distracted? How close are you now?”
“Rover Dog says we’re nearly there,” said Kveld. “But something’s wrong. We’re all—Ruhildi and Zarie and I—our magic is… And Ruhildi…”
He was silent for a long time, so she prompted him. “Ruhildi…?”
“She’s hurt, Saskia. I don’t ken how much longer she can…”
“What!? Hurt how?”
She leapt into Kveld’s head, and through his eyes, watched as the bone dragon lurched violently from side to side, buffeted by a howling gale. Lightning crackled all around them, arcing from battered wingtips down to the churning sea. Zarie clutched the edges of her seat, eyes wide. Her hair stood on end. Sparks shivered across her skin.
Kveld’s hand, gripping one of the dragon’s ribs, had a black, glossy finish, like polished obsidian. It was obsidian, she realised, or some kind of dark rock. He’d cast the same spell that Mangorn had used in the battle outside Spindle. That was some seriously high-level magic. How had he done that? Why had he done that?
These questions evaporated from her mind the moment Kveld’s gaze turned to Ruhildi. Her friend sat in a rigid pose, clutching her chest and gasping for breath. Her face was ashen; her eyes bloodshot.
Saskia felt suddenly ill. Whatever was happening to Ruhildi—to all of them—it was her fault. The arlium…she couldn’t have absorbed that much arlium without consequences.
Examining her friend via Kveld’s eyes with her medical overlay, she saw that it was even worse than she’d feared. Tendrils of arlium now ran all way through Ruhildi’s body, from head to toe, much as it did in Saskia’s. But unlike Saskia, the dwarf lacked the regenerative ability needed to repair the damage. And unlike the creatures of this island, it hadn’t accumulated slowly. It was tearing her apart from the inside.
She waited anxiously as the dragon soared down from the sky, bringing the dark clouds of a swirling thunderstorm with it as it came in for a rough landing on the rim of the crater. Stepping up to the great bone beast, heart in her throat, she all but tore open its rib cage in her haste to get inside.
They huddled around her friend—even the adorribles, peeking out from an overhead compartment.
“Sashki,” whispered Ruhildi. She swallowed, and a shudder ran through her. “I’m so glad…” Her eyes drooped shut.
The floor trembled, and with a groaning clatter, the dragon sagged and went still.