Along the broad swath of land with the platform were two other paths. One was a sturdy stone bridge crossing the chasm between two land masses. The bridge was impressive and old, so old he could feel the ache of time in his bones just by standing nearby.
He had taken the other trail, the arm of rock that climbed up to the raised land mass nearly overhanging the further north one with the Warrens.
Fenix was exploring so he could grow his knowledge of the terrain and the area, developing a sense for how big the Prison really was, and how it was made up. The strong sense of drive had not left him; if anything it pushed him to explore more, to go even further.
He couldn’t just run around, traveling had to be done carefully, or he ran the risk of encountering things he didn’t understand.
Like these land crab creatures with the underbelly mouths that wanted to chew through him, meat and bone.
He had followed the well-worn trail of the larger one on top of this plateau, heading north so he could see what the Warrens looked like from above. The first land crab he saw came sidling right out in front of him, as bold as daylight. It immediately struck him as a distraction, a creature baiting the trap.
If he hadn’t been so aware and started to look about for the attack, it would have had him.
As it was, the three that fell on him from above had just about enough surprise on their side.
His quick reactions and the blows of his staff resulted in the first three dying quickly, but then dozens of the things had started out of the underbrush at him. So he ran, not in a panic, not because he was afraid, but because he recognized a situation that was beyond his current capabilities.
They followed, probably able to smell the blood from where one of those first three had bit through his skin with its pinprick teeth, cutting right into the muscle.
It was a good thing they weren’t poisonous or venomous, or he might have had it. In general, the critters probably ate small bites that sustained them from a more substantial meal for a group. But here in the Prison, it needed to get his Vitae, and for that, it would have to kill him.
He leaped through a gathering of bushes and ran down the slight hill on the other side, aware of the land crabs jumping from tree to tree or scurrying along beside him in the tall grass.
They made rustles as they moved, not caring at this point that he knew they were there. Numbers were on their side.
Small twigs and leaves brushed against him while he pushed through, keeping the dense foliage between him and the loudest groups of noise, doing his best to evade and obstruct their approach.
They brought with them a strangely sugary smell as if someone had steamed meat for a long while and it had turned almost caramel inside the fat.
The smell along with the sounds told him where they grouped, but in the absence of noise, he suddenly caught the scent of them from ahead. They were waiting quietly, likely several of them who had run on ahead.
Amazing how they communicated so quickly, that must also be down to whatever magic had created them. Their coordination was superior, he could acknowledge that.
Their numbers aside, they weren’t very dangerous. He thought quickly and took the chance; from a run, he went into an all-out sprint. Opening some distance between himself and the ones on his flanks, he rushed into the next clearing where every tree was covered in the things.
They clung like limpets, claws dug into the bark of the trunk and limbs of the trees. Fleshy growths as if tumors or boils formed from the trees themselves, except these moved about in strange patterns.
Fenix knew he had to make good use of the gap, and his staff whirled through the air, cleanly cutting the first land crabs down as they went for him. He gracefully stepped across the clearing, all poise and elegance as the wooden bough spun in his hands.
Each end flickered around and sliced or stabbed one of the things, and each died quickly, falling to the grassy soil as gelatinous muck.
**
Back in the Warrens, with his newfound wealth, it hadn’t taken long to find a shop with some of the implements he would find useful.
When necessary for survival, he could craft just about anything he would need with a few necessary implements. The older looking humanoid woman who ran the store with its sturdy log walls and the iron-shod door was pleased to help him.
Her own source of Vitae depended on her customers, after all.
She kept a well-stocked set of shelves with various implements and goods in a room probably large enough to serve as a lounge in a typical home. He could see that for her, it was house and store in one, a small cot with a mattress made from hides stood upright in a corner, ready to comfortably lay down on the floor at night.
Some cupboards in the same corner probably had her various implements, since food and water were not necessary in the Prison.
Fenix had chosen her store mainly because it was not superior to others he had seen, with their gleaming metal weapons, other implements and greedy looking owners. Neither was it a poor store, one just barely getting along which would have stock of only what they were allowed to hold on to.
She was not going to be caught out that easily; he noticed her intense stare on him the entire time he was inside.
A few of the knives she had were not necessary for him, the skinning knife would do for the short term. He had chosen a sturdier steel dagger, one with a good heft to it and a wide blade. He would be able to sharpen it many times before it became too fragile to use.
It wasn’t meant as a weapon, he needed it to work, carving, gutting, slicing meat and bone, that sort of thing. He would make whatever weapons he needed, or make do with what he had.
One concession, though, was the short bow.
That she even had a well-made one had surprised Fenix, and he took advantage of it quickly. A leather sewn backpack, some necessary flint, a few arrows to start him off, some gut and leather thongs were all added to the collection. In total, the whole lot consumed half of the Vitae Fenix had collected.
He wasn’t sure how much that really was in the greater scheme of things, but the shop owner had been elated to get it, although she hid it well.
He had allowed her the obvious, to him, increase in price. He was still avoiding undue attention and being good at barter would have made him more memorable to her in other ways. Fleecing a customer for more than things were worth would have him remembered as a sucker, which suited him just fine.
The more they underestimated him, the better.
He had however voiced one thought that occurred to him.
“So how do you keep all of your stock from being stolen?” he had asked.
He recalled that she gave him a bright gap-toothed smile.
“I was only caught for six of the people I killed before they sent me here.”
“Ah, yes. I see,” was all Fenix had said in reply.
That night he rested and dreamed of memories, recollections brought on by risking his life, surviving the Lthon and the unusual desire to purchase the bow.
**
It was becoming all too clear that these land crabs acted with keen intelligence, something predatory was organizing them.
The group in the clearing, although considerably thinned by his surprise attack on their ambush, were too many for him to escape through, at least in the direction he had originally intended. That gave him insight into their organization, they were preventing his escape back to the main path.
It said a lot that what were essentially muscle sacks with claws and teeth were able to hem him in and cut off his avenue of escape.
They were probably also quite desperate if they were willing to go to such lengths to stop him. He had killed dozens of them so far, or he overestimated the cost of each one to the controlling intelligence.
If they were easy to summon or make, then he was merely delaying the inevitable.
He would be damned if he didn’t make his life as costly as possible to whomever, or whatever wanted him dead. It seemed
a fundamental facet of his personality.
If he could not get away this way, he had to try an alternative approach, and hopefully one that would give him more advantage than this foliage riddled landscape that gave opening on all sides.
The land crabs could hide and surprise him from almost any place, their small size allowed them to sneak among the plants with ease. That there were so many of them allowed them to hide the sound of their passage in the general cacophony.
One of them landed against his shoulder, where it latched on, and its claws easily clinging to the thin clothes he now wore. Liberated from the convict’s orange, the sackcloth was all he had for protection, and the land crab proceeded to chew through it and into him with an avaricious appetite.
To be inured to pain one had to remember the techniques for dealing with it, or have the memory of pain to help buoy the sensation when experienced with ongoing survival.
The amnesia caused by the arrival in the Prison made everyone equal in that respect, as well. Although Fenix knew he had experience with pain and suffering, without memories, his capacity to tolerate, it was also lost.
He could only imagine that every prisoner received all sensations anew in the Prison, like newborn babes.
It was most unpleasant to feel the spindly little teeth rend and tear into his shoulder.
The distraction proved costly.
His misstep due to pain and the necessity of using a hand to grab and rip off the small being meant he was unable to keep up the defense he had crafted. While the imposing land crab burst with a firm squeeze, oozing gray fluid through his fingers, the others made good on the opening.
Four more managed to latch onto his leg, chest, and backpack all at once.
A certain kind of luck was with him, though. The ones that got to his leg and chest immediately began their boring into his body with painful and bloody results. His backpack took the brunt of the other pair.
Terrible chewing and ripping sounded from the hide bag, but Fenix was spared their appetite for the moment. With more of the things ready to fling themselves at him from the trees, he knew that to hesitate would be to die.
So he ran, due north, and in a great hurry. There was no shame in it, he did not run from fear or cowardice.
The act was thought out and precise, despite the pain threatening to jumble his thoughts Fenix could feel more in-depth skills coming to the fore. His mind teemed with vagrant thoughts as it sorted out this encounter with others from his past, still hidden, but caught as glimpses.
No wonder survival meant the return of memory if this was any indication, the flood of experience was brought on by near death.
And, no wonder very few could speak of it, near death would not be a metaphor in the Prison. He tugged the land crab off his leg while running, too much damage there and he would lose maneuverability, which would mean death in short order.
He flung the ectoplasmic remnants away after a quick squeeze ended the existence of that problem and then tore the other from his chest, where it was already grating its teeth on his breast bone. His wounds bled, the crimson staining the sackcloth that absorbed it quickly. Even with his metabolism, the wounds were severe.
Clotting started on the unmoving parts of his body, but he couldn’t stop to bind the others just yet.
Perhaps he should have tried the area over the stone bridge instead, despite the misgivings he felt about the land mass on the other side.
He wanted this journey to be shorter than it was turning out to be, and that drive within pushed him still.
**
What would seem like an eon ago, according to most any living and sentient being in the multiverse, but was a lot closer to forty millennia ago, the Prison had been created.
Bored out of the transdimensional rift between planes and wrapped up in an impenetrable barrier made from the same stuff it had been hollowed out of. All done by beings who predated the current council of elder deities and magnificently vivid creatures now inhabiting the cosmos by so many eons that even their original names would be twisted by time.
Perhaps the only being still living who could claim some relationship with these primordial keepers of law and order was the Warden.
Genderless and willing to give up its existence in the outside cosmos, the Warden took up permanent residence along with the creature upon which the Prison now rode. Magical means ensured that the ageless effect that kept the prisoners alive, barring being killed, also held the massive entity carrying the land masses from dying of old age.
The Warden, of course, was either the source of the ageless effect or ageless itself.
The original forces which had hollowed out this space between realms had brought the creature in while it was still young and small. At the time, it had been only as big as a modest house.
But it was a hatchling in its lifecycle. The creature was allowed to grow and age while they began construction of what would later become the conglomerate of landscapes forming the multiple regions of the Prison.
First, they formed the land itself, multiple layers attached to the humongous hairs on the creature’s back. Two of these land masses were situated by the creature’s head, where its hard snout was maneuvered into accepting the roots and tendrils of the Primal Tree and the nearby endlessly falling water of the Great Lake.
Those two sections of the Prison were created solely for providing sustenance to the creature.
Its main body floated in the interdimensional space, a big round ball of brown skin and very long, full hair. Fully grown, each hair was bigger than the creature had been at first. As such, its very size required a lot of nourishment.
The Primal Tree had grown to cover the many square miles of its own landmass, hundreds of roots and fibers entwined among the creature’s flat herbivorous teeth to supply nutrients.
Map of the Prison
The Prison was provided with a sun, though of course not as big as an actual sun, firstly because that wasn’t needed and secondly because the creature would not grow quite that big. It was the size of a moon with the attached land masses, and would not be orbiting around any sun placed in the same space.
Too much heat and energy to deal with. Instead, this sun revolved around the creature and served a second function, as well.
Every Prison morning, the sun would rise off to the left of the creature’s massive head. It would then turn to follow the sun while it rose up over its own head to set off to its right near its back.
This meant that the creature itself exercised by being in constant motion and was always turning in a slow circle, thus keeping it within the space carved out between realms for the Prison.
In the relative eastern direction from which the sun rose, they created the water-filled land masses, and in the northeast the coldest, covered in snow regularly, iced over and frigid.
Where the sun set, there was designed a hot land mass, in those areas there would be more heat, dust, and desolation, with little life. As the sun poured heat onto the Prison from east to west, so too did the extreme cold and heat create currents that shifted the air flow and formed regular weather patterns.
From this elaborate design on an awesome scale came the ability for plant life to form and grow, from steppes and plains of various kinds to forestation and arid terrain on the floating chunks of rock, which cracked and broke naturally with the weather and gravitational tides.
Aside from the magical means of connecting all the pieces into a coherent whole that floated along, or was attached to, the creature, the rest of the environment began to form a natural climate. The different areas, hotter and colder, grew vegetation, composed rivers, and streams, or stayed desolate, all in a completely natural order.
For Fenix, millennia later, the inevitable erosion and evolution of the landscapes meant the place was far removed from how it had started, except for select areas like the Giant Lake and Primal Tree that were preserved through supernatural means.
The designers intended result was to
create significantly different environments within the relatively small space they had created. Enough differing zones for prisoners of all kinds to find a place to live.
Of course, live was a relative term.
They did add in the Emerald palace within which the Warden resided to that day. The prisoners were ensured adequate locales for their needs, within which to create their own homes and best capacity for survival.
The intention was that competition for survival would be from other inmates, not the environment. That many of the inmates were creatures who were predatory was considered an acceptable consequence.
The Prison areas were roughly shaped around the creature’s body in an oval, with the narrower ends near its nose and, arching back along both sides, to meet in the rear. The covering of land over its body close to the head was called the collar, where the magic was sunk deep into the earth and the matted hair around its neck.
Behind that was the creature’s back, where some enterprising prisoners had set up home, and behind that the cracked and raised tundra where the Warden had placed the Emerald palace at their highest point.
Fenix had arrived in the area reserved for humanoids on the far northwestern tip of the various pieces of land that collectively made up the Prison. With easy access to the nearby terrain that made up that quadrant of the land masses.
Closest to that area was a plateau with wild grasses and streams, the path that led to the central mountains in the north and their mines, and southward to the barren lands and volcanic area, which provided the climate’s heat.
There was no direct route from the arrivals area to the broken tundra and the Emerald palace, and that was by design. To get there, a humanoid would have to traverse the mountain range that was now filled with tunnels from mines, and then travel further west through the swamps and bogs without, of course, going to the north and the ice-covered land masses.
Convict Fenix Page 9