“Beyond this place of wrath and tears,
looms but the horror of the shade.” ~ William Henley
Aloram stepped through the door. It closed behind him with a thud of grim finality, and he stared into the gloomy hallway—a proper hallway. Low-burning torches were set into iron sconces just above head height on the stone walls, and the floor was perfectly flat.
The air smelled dank and musty, but Aloram didn’t mind. For all the Necromancer’s arrogance, his hallway, at least, wasn’t much to look at. In a word, it was dingy. The torches didn’t burn, he realized, but rather glowed a faint blue. After a moment, he recognized why the hue was familiar—it was the same blue as the moss that grew throughout the cave, low, persistent, and alluring.
Approaching a sconce, he took out the torch inside. It was little more than a bundle of gnarled branches bound with string and holding a glass orb atop it, with a thin sheet of moss suspended inside. He placed it back in the sconce. Relying on his own low light vision suited him well enough, and carried with it the added benefit of not giving himself away in the hall’s gloom.
Several yards in front of Aloram, on his left, was a small wooden door, the only one he could see in the entire hall. It was six feet tall at most and arched at the top like the one from before, set into the cave’s wall. Wrapping his hand around the iron ring that was its handle, he pulled it open.
Despite his expectations, it came open easily, the wooden base hovering a few centimeters from the stone floor below and pivoting on well-oiled hinges. Aloram thumbed the inside of his finger, feeling the silver ring there. It was old, worn, and knurled, and it felt good against his skin. Something about it felt important, and while wearing it, he felt ridges on the inside that weren’t apparent from his initial cursory inspection.
What other surprises did the mage have in his hideout? A part of him thought it a pity that he hadn’t attempted to glean some information about the world from the man, but a greater part of him didn’t care. He had been an obstacle, and he had been dealt with.
Stooping under the low door frame, Aloram found himself in what he thought might be best described as a mix between three very different rooms: a study, a torturer’s den, and an autopsy lab. Admittedly, the latter two weren’t all that different, he supposed—especially if he were to understand that the dead in this world could live again.
The room was rectangular and neither particularly large nor small, but with the clutter, it felt cramped and suffocating. Books, some of which fit the bill of tomes, though most were simply old, littered the space. They were scattered about like litter, occupying every inch of the room. A bed was shoved into one corner, nothing more than four short posts and a ratty mattress; this too was covered in books, though these were lying open.
There was a desk and a chair, both nearly unserviceable in their aged decrepitude, and a cauldron suspended over a tripod of iron rods. Aloram wondered how the carbon monoxide from the fire didn’t kill the necromancer, then he noticed that there was no evidence of a fire ever being lit beneath it, only a circle of rusty red chalk markings outlined with precise, intricate linework.
Magic. Runes? But I don’t use runes, and neither did he. Not that I could see, at least. His thoughts turned to the raised embossing on the inside of his ring. Set perpendicularly against the wall to his left, opposite the bed, was a stone slab. The bench was set at an incline, with iron manacles chained to it in several—too many, Aloram thought—locations. There were at least ten i-rings with chains and metal manacles to match embedded at various places on the bench, and he struggled to imagine what would require such a large number of restraints.
Beside the assortment of scalpels, brands, spikes, pliers, and other implements laid out on a stool beside the bench, the necromancer didn’t keep many possessions in the room besides the books. Some cooking implements, a pan, a pair of thick boots layered in dark fur, and an assortment of stones. The stones, some of them clearly precious gems, and other minerals whose worth Aloram couldn’t determine, were arrayed haphazardly on the desk. The boots were several sizes too small for his own feet.
There were some other oblong blocks of what might’ve been chalk lying on the ground as well, but Aloram ignored them. Leaning against the bed, he found a small leather daypack. It was empty, and he filled it with the books he determined to be most valuable. He could not read a single word of any of them, and their rei signatures were all markedly less substantial than the tome he’d looted from the necromancer himself, but perhaps they would prove useful in the future. In addition to these, Aloram took all of the gemstones and other rocks, then threw in a crude three-pronged fork for good measure.
Aloram wondered why there had been so few personal possessions in the room. As he walked down the seemingly endless hallway, no other doors presented themselves, and he eventually concluded that it was the sole habit of the necromancer. So why were there only books and loose stones?
Sure that he was missing something obvious, Aloram continued walking and tried not to think about it. I should’ve taken Max up on his anime recommendations; maybe then I’d have been more prepared to be transported to another world with magic and necromancy.
Thinking of his old training partner reinvigorated him; now the skills he’d spent the better part of his life honing would have a better use than a shitty MMA career and a failed relationship. Mike had warned him against dating clients, and he should’ve listened. But it wouldn’t be like me to listen, so, Amanda.
Aloram pushed the thoughts from his mind. This is why I hate long walks. Not enough distraction. The time to reminisce about his past would come, but it wasn’t now. This was the time to explore a brand new world. A brand new me.
He broke into a run.
The distance between moss-torches became greater and greater, but his improved vision barely registered the change in lighting. The robes didn’t get in the way of his legs, and as he ran, the changes to his body became evident. Aloram was sure he was hauling ass; he could feel the stale air parting before him, his hair flowing steadily behind him, and when there were torches, they approached rapidly. But he was hardly breathing, and he could feel the beating of his heart.
Aloram counted. It was 24 beats per minute, and he was able to take six second inhales, hold at the top, and exhale all for the same count. His calves didn’t feel a thing, and the weight of the pack on his back felt so light that it might as well not have been there. Whatever changes his body had undergone, they extended far beyond better hair and more muscle. He felt like a machine, and he flew down the hallway fast enough that the stone began to blur in his peripheral vision.
Something else coursed through his veins too. Rei, he thought, and knew that it came from his core. Cold and black, it rose from his chest and spread through every inch of him, augmenting him. The air tasted, and he knew that he was sensing the ambient rei in the hallway; it changed when he approached a torch, and every so often he could detect a glimmer of unique rei here and there in the walls, and he knew them to be the distant, barely detectable auras of other living entities sequestered away, deep among the stone.
As he ran, his mind drifted further and further into the rei-sight, and he analyzed the items he carried. The backpack was the least interesting. The leather had traces of the rei of some once-living creature, but now it was dead and dormant. This applied to the stone walls of the cave too, he realized, and he noted that when he’d first awoken from the lake, his ability to discern rei wasn’t nearly this precise. At some point between then and now, his perception had grown exponentially without him ever consciously realizing it.
The books inside the backpack were slightly more noteworthy, each exuding a close, low-level aura with unique feelings, like signatures or serial numbers. The skinbound tome, the robe, his ring, and the medallion each had a highly unique, highly concentrated rei. They felt dense and profoundly complicated, far beyond the limits of his understanding. The gems each felt different in flavor but similar in texture: rough and unrefined.
His ring in particular exuded a dense and impenetrably complex aura, like a ball of intricately woven yarn. He knew instinctively that each item served a purpose, had some function beyond its apparent nature, but he failed to grasp whatever those functions might be. The robes certainly didn’t bunch, though, no matter how his legs moved, and he chalked it up to one of the hidden properties of whatever magic had been woven into them.
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In an instant, the familiar landscape, both physically and in the astral-like plane of rei vision that his consciousness had been inhabiting, changed. His perception of “beyond himself," or what lay further ahead, past the limits of his vision, told him that in less than three hundred yards, the cave would end, the tight corridors of stone replaced by an open expanse of void. Returning his attention to himself, Aloram realized that he was running up an incline and had no idea for how long he had been doing so.
The air hadn’t changed much, but he thought that must be due to a door or some other blockage sealing the hallway’s entrance. After running a little longer, he discovered that he was correct. The inside of the door was covered in the same tight, intricate linework as was under the cauldron. The markings glowed a faint yellow, and he touched his hand to the stone’s cool surface.
Aloram felt his eyes shifting, adjusting to the light. Before him, the world spread out in an endless expanse of windblown plains blanketed by crisp, sparkling snow. Above, the sky was bright and grey, and a brisk wind pinched at his cheeks, visibly scouring the white snow drafts as it dragged flakes through the air and cut patterns into the barren banks of powdery white. His pupils must’ve shrunk to pinpricks, because he was sure that without shades, the blistering white light reflecting off of the snow should’ve blinded him.
Before he could think better of it, he took a step out of the cave and into the hostile world. The stone door boomed shut behind him, the sound quickly carried off by the ravenous wind, and somehow he knew that he wouldn’t have been able to open it again even if he’d pounded away at it for days. In seconds, the door, its grey stone the single exception to the endless expanse of white, was covered by the falling snow.
It came down in blankets, thick and soft, coating everything. Aloram took a step away from the bulging doorway, which was now little more than a misshapen lump in the snow, and began walking in his bare feet. Within the space of a few strides, they were aching with the cold. His face blistered with it, and his skin began to dry and crack, turned red by the merciless whipping of wind against his pale and unprotected skin.
The snow never paused in its downfall. It flecked his black hair with flakes of white and slowly filled in his tracks, even as he made them. His legs were sunk up to the middle of his thighs, and with every trudging step, he felt his stamina waning. Not a fucking chance in hell I’m going to die out here. But the biting cold ate at him like a parasite, and for all his blustering confidence, he was just one man in the vice grip of nature’s cruel and uncaring hand.
He channeled rei through his body, and it warmed him, heating his bare skin until his feet melted the snow in a radius of several inches and the falling snow evaporated before it touched his naked chest. This restored a modicum of vitality, and he redoubled his pace. There was nothing in sight but the endless white sheet of the land, so he looked to the sky. North is a good direction. I’ll find the sun,orient myself, then put my head down and walk until I either find shelter or die.
Aloram searched for the sun. And found that there were three of them. He stopped, raised a hand to cover his eyes against the blinding light, and checked again. When his initial discovery was confirmed, a high, wild chuckle grew in his belly. Why it struck him as funny, he did not know, but there were three suns, and he laughed. When the tundra chill began to gnaw at him again, he set off once more, reinvigorated. Three suns. If I had any doubts... but he hadn’t.
Then his eyes detected movement. A black dot and two more above it stood in stark contrast with the infinite whiteness surrounding him. Whatever the thing was, it was moved again, and Aloram’s vision shifted, the thing coming into focus. A snout and two coal-black eyes, and yes, now the brown line of gums and a yellow row of thick, spearlike teeth.
Aloram smirked. He’d missed the chance to take his revenge on the black cave bear, so he imagined that it and this polar bear-like creature were distant cousins. It reared up on its hind legs, sniffing the air. Its left ear, a tuft of white fur, twitched. Clouds of mist formed and vanished when it breathed, the black flaps of its wet nostrils expanding and contracting like bellows, and its mouth opened in slow motion.
It began to roar and didn’t stop as it dropped back down to all fours, its forelegs landing in bombshell explosions of snow. Aloram smiled, made his hands into fists, and raised them in front of his face.
I’ve been needing a coat.
This time, Aloram didn’t wait for the bear to make the first move.
Rei boiled inside his veins, and the surface of his bare skin grew lined with thin, snaking black ribbons of inky power. Snow crunched softly underfoot as his steps became lighter, his feet whispering against the surface of the powdery substance as he ran with blistering speed atop it, not sinking more than a centimeter with each step. Accelerating rapidly, Aloram leapt from the snow and hurtled through the air towards the bear.
His arms outstretched, Aloram’s body was a flying spear; wind cracked and whipped around his head, whisping black streaks of tangible rei trailing behind and around him like undulating vines of sinister energy. His flight devoured the distance between them, and in an instant, Aloram was upon the colossal bear.
A white and black paw cleaved through the falling snow towards his head, and Aloram, still rocketing through the air parallel to the ground, batted it aside with a flame-cloaked hand. The bear’s arm was flung backward, the huge cudgel of a paw at its end exploding in a mist of red droplets and protruding bone.
The bear let out an enraged roar of pain and fury as its eyes began to shine a ferocious white. It snapped down at Aloram, the great head descending upon him like a boulder of white fur, deadly fangs, and steaming breath. He stuck a landing in the snow below it, then twisted his momentum into a spinning high kick, his rising foot colliding with the bear's descending lower jaw with the force of an industrial piston.
The jaw was torn from the bear’s head with the gruesome sound of ripping flesh and bone, then flew through the air, streaming hot blood behind it in a trail, and vanished in a snowbank fifty feet away. Gobs of wet flesh dripped onto Aloram’s head and shoulders and streaked down his bare chest in thick, hot lines of red from the bear’s mangled head above.
The bear’s gore coated his body, warming him with a blanket of saliva, blood, and gummy flesh. Above him, the massive bear swayed, its head a ruined mess of broken teeth and spouting fountains of blood, steaming in the frigid air and painting the snow crimson.
It sat heavily on its hind legs, collapsing into the snow in a defeated slump. Aloram wasted no time and plunged his hands into the soft fur of the bear's belly, tearing it apart and rending the bear’s flesh open with his fingers. Its guts spilled out, steaming entrails pouring onto the snow at his feet, forming a veritable pool of hot blood.
Aloram sank his hands deeper into the messy warmth of the bear’s intestines, questing for bone. His sticky-slick fingers found what he thought was a rib, and closing them around it, he pulled hard. It cracked, then snapped and came free; its end fractured into a jagged point.
With his makeshift knife, Aloram began to skin the bear. Slowly, he let his rei seep from him and return to his core, only cycling it as necessary to maintain a survivable degree of warmth in the tundra’s freezing embrace. After nearly two hours, he’d skinned the bear’s fur completely, leaving only a pile of bloody skeletal remains.
Not the most expertly crafted bear-skin cloak, but unquestionably authentic. Aloram had been forced to cut the cloak to nearly a quarter of its original size; the bear was so large that, laid flat, it measured nearly fifteen feet from its rear to its neck. That resulted in a huge excess of fur, and so Aloram fashioned a cloak from its head and the surrounding coat, then made a large blanket and a pair of roughshod moccasins from the rest.
The blanket was far too large to fit into the backpack, so he rolled it into a cylindrical bundle and tied it to the bottom of the pack with some stringy bits of gut from the remainder of the bear’s corpse. Aloram also removed and stored several of the bear’s fangs, then cut four large slabs of meat, wrapped them in a few sheets of torn looseleaf from the blank pages at the beginning and end of some of the books he’d liberated from the necromancer’s room, and placed them beside the fangs in the top of his pack.
After trying to cook with his black rei fire resulted in the flames simply consuming and incinerating whatever he tried to heat with it, Aloram concluded that he’d need to find a way to make a normal fire if he didn’t want to eat raw bearflesh. He was no survival expert, but that sounded like an easy way to die from a bacterial infection or some sort of parasite. His rei and enhanced bodily functions might protect him, but the risk wasn’t worth it. Despite the fight and the exertion of walking through the snow, he was hardly hungry.
Peeking out from the heaping pile of steaming entrails was a single, glowing stone. Amber and perfectly round, it shone softly from inside, with a slow pulsing that illuminated the glassy gemstone. It was the size of a pool ball, warm and heavy in his hand. What do I do with this? Clearly, it's powerful; it feels like its heart... or its soul. Should I eat it? But he didn’t want to choke on the thing, and if he shattered it, would it lose its power?
With the heavy bearskin cloak draped atop his shoulders and back and the slain bear’s upper jaw and head covering his own, the bracing wind could only chill his face and a vertical sliver of skin from his waist to his neck, where the sides of the cloak ended and didn’t cover. As he stood there, cold-cracked lips pursed at the glowing stone, Aloram felt the weight of a thousand mountains descend upon him.
A single finger fell gently upon his shoulder from behind, and Aloram collapsed to his knees with a forcefulness that shattered every bone in his legs. Pain rose screaming from his limbs, then faded, his vision turning from white to black as he lost consciousness, falling forward into the snow’s cold embrace.