Death's Dreaming
SEASONS CHANGED with the ocean's tide; rain, sleet, and snow fell in harmony with the positions of the stars, moons, and arches dancing across the sky. Clouds the shape of legendary ancestors rode forth to battle when the sun rose and clashed amid a backdrop of champagne overcast when the sun set. Over all this the Mountain In The Stars hung, unmoving in the phase of war and conquest, The Sword planted atop it.
The stars above shone with perfect clarity, unhidden by a skyless atmosphere. The closer of them seemed to move like clouds of mist, the farther with the swiftness of the tide striking a beach. As he looked on, a notion unfolded in his mind like a whale breaching the ocean’s surface: the distant constellations were entire stars and planets, moving through space and time at eons in mere moments; stars and planets formed, gods materialized from the outer planes and beings rose from primeval slime. They climbed long roads and slow paths to culture, to wisdom; and gradually consumed themselves, consumed others, some falling with dying worlds, others sailing to new frontiers on unimaginable craft. Life and death continued their weave as the stars danced.
The ocean beach was full of hagstones, hills and mountains bore natural holes that sang dirges as the wind blew and through the eyes he saw worlds even stranger than this. Here and there every manner of strange, immense beast flew through the portals and out over the water towards distant mountains that pierced the sky, the height of the shortest greater than the width of the widest. Things too immense to fly sailed through the air with relaxed ease and creatures of titanic proportions grazed beside hills made from the shells of immense crustaceans.
Plants withered and died as he walked; behind him, they sprouted and flowered. Dried grass he felt crunch beneath feet neither bare nor shod sprang to new life in his footsteps behind him.
Far ahead, a squat mountain rotated in place: an immense flat-bodied crab, faded as mountains are by sheer distance, casually eating an eldtree like a sprig of seaweed, it's carapace covered with whole trees and its own high-altitude biome. The creature paused and cast its eyes in his direction--but for the distance and scale of the biome on its shell, it seemed no bigger than he, who still felt the sensation it gazed directly on him, despite being the size of a sand-grain by comparison. He saw it's mouth move.
Seconds later the trees and creatures rustled with a breeze, and heard the almost subsonic ululation of the giant crab as it turned away, nimbus clouds brushed aside. Fantastic creature, plant, and even the ocean seemed to move away from the apex crab, and a path of somber familiarity opened before him: the mossy rocks and dark soil a home forgotten but for this sight. Walking this dew-chilled path took him in the direction of the crab and The Mountain and The Sword.
EVERYTHING ELSE faded into the chilly grey mist until all he saw were mossy rocks of every size on that dark soil. The whole world wore a grey funeral shroud for the setting sun. Far ahead, against a sterile white light in the mist, the silhouette of the god-crab trembling the earth with its ponderous stride, to either side the shadows of squat serrated mountains tearing clouds, and behind him past the horizon a hagstone that dwarfed mountains, its eye a portal to strange planets and stars. Above him and on the horizon were sky-islands hanging black, deep in the clouds and moving like alien beasts. He needed to move ahead, but his guarded stance, sword-arm and leg forward, hunched ready to roll out of danger, required a slowed pace.
The great crab dipped below the horizon in a final placid lowing and he saw it: the celestial constellation looming in its place, far ahead but even then hanging over everything like a terrestrial mountain of unfathomable size, covered in the lights of a great humming fortress of celestial proportion, the great sword-like tower a ward against the terrors of the night and the cosmos. The lights danced in place with the activity of purpose, and even this far away an industrious tumult echoed like the wind over the rocks and moss as he closed the distance.
He felt obliged to pay respect to this edifice: the mountain-fortress the work of honored ancestors, the stars above the potential of cherished progeny, and the sword-tower--the sword-tower the deeds of heroes, leaders, men of desitny and of will. Not stopping, he stepped forward to salute this vision of a thing men only ever saw as a distant celestial body, and as he raised his arm--he fell into the gulf of eternity.
WIND AND RAIN whipped by, chilling him so he drew his limbs into the folds of his great kilt. Floating mountains and crags patiently waited as he sailed down. Unmoving, dark, silent with indifference they hung in the air as if waiting for some inscrutable purpose. The constellation ascended upwards on an impenetrable dais of mist as wide as all creation.
The sensation of the wind faded into a strong breeze, then a mere cool breath, as if he hung motionless in the air by the ocean. A mote of light far below him pierced the island-speckled grey haze. It split into multiple motes, gradually rising--or was he still falling? A few motes became dozens, became orbs of light and orbits of glowing dust; they became hundreds, of every size--and it dawned on him he now fell among the very stars he saw in the sky above the beach and through the hag-mountain's eye. As he fell through their domain, nebulae and solar groups weaved their messages for mortals.
Someone was ahead of him, falling as he fell. He reached an arm out to grasp them, he close his hand around a shoulder--
AND FELT THE FLESH of a neck collapsed in his grip, a deformed creature gurgling a high-pitched scream. Out of instinct he struck the creature's head with his free hand, knocking a leather war-mask off. Feeble hands grasped at him as he sat up and tossed the thing aside. He rose to his feet, the weight of armor like the weight of centuries. Shoulders rolled and head gimbaled, through eye-slits of a helm he saw a large room of unworked stones; here and there were those recently slain in a mad skirmish.
Picking up his caman, he followed the mongrel past a waist-height ledge beside low stairs; the miserable thing crawled away over another such ledge, and he jumped down after it. The creature coughed as it turned to face him--and pealed again as he held it against a large column.
This creature was deformed; as the absolute worst of men were, but also in, tangibly for him, its very soul, in a way that made the physical even worse to gaze upon. What little of the Sidonian was left in this creature he barely recognized, so diluted it was from many clans. He dropped the creature, it's neck breaking under his foot. He looked back down--dirty clothes, inadequate leather and ringmail armor scavenged from worn sets--were those copper and brass rings where it was mended? It bore a crude and crooked prybar--almost useless as a weapon. He took in the room and the carnage.
Walls of cut stones, their uncut sides thrusting into the chamber like arrows, made countless ledges for mosses and other fauna. Those plants that glowed only offset a strange light that suffused the air. The chamber was diamond-shaped, one side tapered at right-angles to the exit. Opposite the exit was the apex of a large layered platform where the deformed-one snapped him out of his reverie and he snapped its neck; he stood midway down column-lined steps leading to the chamber entrance. On either side of this platform were pools, fed by some mysterious source cascading from the walls. In both pools floated other mongrels face-down. The pools fed channels that ran along the walls, followed the right angles, and lined the corridor leading out. At the base of the stairs against a column laid one of several bodies in blue. He stepped over other dead-and-deformed for a close look.
He reeled his head at the sight of the dead soldier: he looked like an Arcadian, fine and young, jagged wounds on one side of his face and neck. A hand paused to close the boy's eyes, and for the moment he put himself in this boy's shoes, he seemed to feel what it was like to die here far more than the purview of the imagination; he took the extra moment to put the boy in a dignified position, arms crossed, tam under his head as a cushion. He knew he was underground from the air pressure, temperature, and trace mosses, fungi, and lichens. To die here, deep underground in the cold earth far from the sun and stars--this foreign lad deserved better, he remorsed.
A dull grey breastplate, on which strange letters were stenciled, under the sash of a belted plaid in a tartan he could not place; nothing produced a blue like that in any place he knew of where men wore kilts--and besides which, a pattern as blue as this bore nigh-zero value as camouflage. Curious to learn whether he would find the dead lad's weapon in the hands of a deformed mongrel, he moved on--eagerly so, because as the young man laid in state, the lad simultaneously sat against a column, staring meaningfully at him.
Something moved in the wall as he purposefully strode the length--an alcove with a knee-high basin and behind it a mirror. The sight of this man bade him pause. This aura--it was not his exact color. And he could tell it was not his… as if he were to see it through a sunstone that lightens and darkens with its angle to the sun… it was not his polarity? This armor he had not worn in a long time, this kilt a russet and brown plaid he had not laid eyes on even longer. Slate-grey plates beehived with a smith's hammer-marks, last he recalled all mounted on a rack--where? A helm with a narrow Y-shaped eye-mouth slit and downswept horns that almost reached the cheekguards' bottom edges--a ceremonial affair he recalled as gathering dust on a fireplace mantle… somewhere.
His unease grew the closer he stepped over the water culvert and leaned in; he imagined himself reaching out through the mirror to his own reflection to turn it over in his hands; and felt the grip close over the gap in his vambrace and his hand. Realization of what was happening fell back to the image of an army of bone and shadow behind his reflection, and something seemed to take root in the back of his mind, like a system of ideas suddenly there without years of natural contemplation that comes with the gradual changing of a mind. Yet amid his disquiet, he perceived something--and rushed ahead as the air took on the oily sheen of significance.
The channeled water running aside the short corridor out of that stone hall first sounded like murmurs, then the rumor of a crowd, then a din over which he strained to pick out any particular voice; some bore the humdrum of confusion, others hysteria, and many bore stalwart calm in the face of death. He looked ahead--and felt voices carried along the underground air currents, carrying on like spectators of some great arena.
THE WATER-SIDED CORRIDOR opened up to a grand cistern, the channels cascading off a wide ledge. Along the back wall of the ledge other corridors delivering water opened like shadowed hoods around the wan light of a dark ritual. Opposite him, a narrow opening into a natural cavern the entire height of the drum-shaped chamber misted forth in the hues of glowing fauna like a possessed thaumaturge. He crossed the ledge in five long strides and looked down, bristling at the sight before him: seven mongrels of the type he encountered before, facing two men in blue kilts and breastplates. The mongrels bore patchwork armor and two clumsily held longswords of the same type as the two men in blue, who were backed up into a large fallen piece of the roof. The eddies of iridescent significance suffusing the air among them told him where he needed to be.
But it was the moose with branching human arms for antlers and a jaw, like an apparition out of an insane artist's nightmare, that seized his attention. He knew a demon when he saw one, and his inhuman growl grew to a grizzled roar, catching the attention of all. His hands moved on their own: a lead ball the size of a child's fist hung in the air for a moment. His club spun around the next, and there stood only six mongrels the last moment. The lead bullet wetly rolled away from the prone seventh's cranium, and the demon screamed like a man with the implanted vocal cords of a ruminant and moved about; the remains of an Arcadian in its appendages it further rendered apart, facing him while the two remaining carefully backed away.
A race to see who could cover the most of a staircase circling the cistern wall: him, or the demon's six deformed underlings. His hand made another cycle into his wardrobe and out again, another bullet hanging in the air, moving as he began the stairs. His club wheeled more arcs, the flat of it sending the bullet into the knee of the sixth. More steps down, another bullet launched on the backswing, and the fifth fell from a strike to the head, tripping the fourth. The third was struck in the knee also, and fell from its spot on the stairs, neck broken.
The second and the first screamed under their leather masks as they met him halfway down the stairs and he seemingly backed away. Emboldened, they pursued him up--and overcommitted to walking over his remaining discarded bullets. One stepped on a bullet and fell over the edge wholesale, the other stopped in its place and met with a backswing, collapsing against the wall. He effortlessly flicked up a bullet with his club and struck it into the mongrel's trachea.
The demon crouched and screamed through barnacle-like ducts lining it's spine, jaw-arms flexing and antler-arms honing two swords against one another. He saw the two Arcadians moving for the cavern opening and pointed his club at them.
And flicked up another lead bullet, and leapt.
The demon was following him, not the movement of his arms or the missile in front of him. A quick backhand sped it to the base of the demon's right antler-appendage, sending the monster reeling. The ground shook where he landed--not just from gravity, but sympathy. The demon recovered--too slowly. The shoulder-like base of the appendage cracked over his foreswing and he was caught by the other appendage wheeling the sword around, so he followed through, pushing himself to the demon's hind and swinging into the crook of a hind-leg, buckling it. He ducked: the demon spun and the sword this time only grazed his shoulder-guard and helmet. But it left its sole arm exposed with that reckless spin: he grit his teeth, haft twisting in his two-fisted grip, and swung a king's blow. The sword fell to the stone floor, the demon's remaining antler-arm broken like the first.
As he grabbed the demon's neck where the jaw-arms fused with the skull, it recovered, those very appendages lashing out for purchase to bite and grind. Wounded, it was still the size of a moose; he kept his space, but it backed him up to the massive fallen stone. He climbed the rock until he was eye-level with it, it's head and forelegs thrashing about while he returned in kind with his club, striking at its eyes and cranium, flinging rancid-smelling brown and ochre fluid all over.
Farther up the fallen, sloped stone he retreated, club-arm bloodying it's face, grasping-arm buckling under the pressure, the demon's maw and grasping appendages drawing closer to him. It lunged it's body upwards, hands reaching out to grab his helmet, teeth rending iron. One hand batted his club down, and he was down to his elbow keeping it's maw away from him.
Then it seized and screamed. Over the slackened creature's black coat, he saw the two Arcadians had found their spirits--they worked with their swords on the creature's hindlegs. Bracing both arms under its slickened head, he hefted it to one side, quickly following with one wood-splitting swing after another, a dry rattling roar shaking loose dust and water drops in the cistern.
THEY WITHDREW IN SHOCK at the sight of him, because the demon's jaw-arms wrenched off his horned helmet. On the low plinth of the stone's base, he turned to face the two Arcadians, saw their eyes wide, brows furrowed in shocked confusion. For they looked at him, clad in ancient armor and a kilt dyed with things long extinct. Skin green like glacial lichen, the desiccated rictus of graves, eyes aglow with icy blue light; and he spoke with the voice of death.