by Azalea Ellis
The guard grabbed Gregor’s arm and lowered him safely to the ground. “Err, Godkiller, this is not—that is—I did not—”
Gregor rolled his eyes and huffed. “She’s not going to get upset at you, doofus. I don’t know why everyone’s so scared of her.” He turned to me. “We were playing. And Bobbus here was guarding us, while facilitating our…stress relief. Right?”
Kris nodded. “Yes. Stress relief.”
I raised my eyebrows high, fighting against laughter. “That makes sense. Have you seen Birch?”
No sooner had the words left my mouth than the ceiling tile above us blew away in a sudden gust of wind. The tailos burst out from the opening, roaring, his wings spread open wide as he swooped for Kris.
Bobbus ducked, and Birch overshot, zooming into the hallway behind them.
“Oh, there he is,” Gregor said, pointing needlessly. I could hear the quaver of suppressed laughter in his voice.
I turned to Kris. “You’d better run. It seems like you’re outnumbered.” I nodded at Bobbus. “Carry on, mighty steed.”
The next few days passed in a rush of satisfying work and semi-permanent happy exhaustion. The Estreyan Shortcut engineers believed they had successfully created an anchor point on Earth. After some small tests, the first group was coming to help us and be healed by us. I felt that everything was coming together nicely.
I rode out to meet them and make sure Earth’s customs and import operations went smoothly. I lay in the armored back of a pod while a human soldier drove and an Estreyan guard rode in the passenger seat. The Estreyans would be coming back to the base for processing and healing once the initial security checks were completed. I laid my head back and closed my eyes, knowing I would need all my energy for the healing ahead.
I slipped into another dream.
The pain woke me. I jerked half upright, gasping as the cold mud I’d been half-submerged in resisted my attempts at movement. I was lying at the edge of a lake. Mud completely covered my lower body, and I’d been buried with not much more than my face exposed.
I lurched against it till I tore myself free, most concerned with figuring out what hurt so bad. I cursed when I reached for Wraith and nothing came. I shoved at the mud on my arms, searching for cuts or broken bones.
Instead, I found white-rimmed craters in my skin, oozing pus and moving, my skin wriggling along with fresh agony as it tore. I watched as a pale, fleshy worm crawled past one of the craters, its body passing along underneath my skin, forcing more pus out.
For one second, then two, I stared in unbelieving horror. Then it overcame me, and I scrambled uselessly, my body jerking, spasming free of my control as I instinctively tried to get away from the bugs. But they were inside me. I felt them everywhere, all over my body. Some bit at me, some scratched and stung, and some burrowed within me.
I screamed.
The shrieks of horror burned down to whimpers and moans, but I regained some control of my body and tore at my clothing and my skin. I reached my forefinger and thumb into one of the holes in my opposite wrist, pinching a fat worm and drawing it out of myself. I smashed it to pulp against the ground and kept going. I clawed at my shoulders, raking away at the group of bugs biting my skin.
I threw up from pain and revulsion, and maggots spilled out, writhing helplessly in my stomach acid as it pooled and mixed with the soft mud.
I dug into the holes they’d created, ripping and tearing at myself when I felt them move out of my reach, hiding under my skin. I was sobbing, screeching anew at each fresh wave of terror and disgust, heedless of the scene I was making.
Finally, some spark of reason made its way into my consciousness, and I unleashed Chaos. It tore at me haphazardly, at first, and then I pressed its smoky tendrils into flames, and burned away the infestation within me. My skin melted off and turned to ash almost as quickly, and my abdomen writhed as the bugs attempted to escape the cleansing flame.
I stopped, when I was sure that all I felt was pain, and no more movement. I fell forward against the burnt patch of ground underneath me, my bloody hands screaming as muscles and tendons contracted and pressed against the dirt, only half-protected by patches of melted skin.
I gasped for breath dizzily, my body trembling. Tears stung my cheeks. It hurt, so badly.
It was worth it, for the bugs to be gone. At least the pain was my own.
I took a moment to compose myself, and then reached for Chaos again, this time trying to regrow what patches of skin still remained into a whole, uncompromised organ. I would never have been able to do this in real life, but this was a dream. I was in my mind. “I control everything,” I mouthed.
Some of the organs in my abdomen were a little worse for wear, but none were completely gone. With concentration, I was able to fix what was missing by replicating what was still intact. More or less.
My skin felt stiff and stretched too tight around my joints when I moved to stand, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. I stood, naked, in front of the lake that I only realized at that point was filled with blood instead of water. I clenched my fists and screamed at the sprawling mansion before me. I felt my face twist into a snarl of absolute rage. “No. More.” I said, my voice sounding alien to my own ears as it grated out of my throat.
I moved to the edge of the coagulated, stinking lake, and scooped up a handful of rusty mud. I made sure there were no bugs, no worms wriggling within it, then smeared it on my arm. I didn’t have any open wounds, but Chaos still responded to my call, burning at the mud and leaving behind a crude vambrace of metal. I repeated the process again and again, till I wore crude plate armor over my whole body, then plunged my hands into the ground. I pulled them back with sharp metal claws attached to my hands by gauntlets.
Chaos was all I needed, if I used it correctly. “No more,” I whispered again. Then I screamed, “Come out! It’s time for you to face me and die!”
Something in the center of the lake caught my eye, a slight brightness that looked like light shining beneath the surface of the blood, almost completely obscured. The lake rippled outward from that point, and a hand rose out from the blood. It slapped flat on the edge of the surface like it was solid and pulled, a body climbing out of the stinking liquid. The thing that wore my face stood, dripping, and below her the blood froze, spreading outward till a solid pane of crystalized blood-red ice covered the lake.
The wind blew, fluttering a few strands of loose hair around my face as it pressed against my back and on toward her. I let out a few filament-fine strands of condensed Chaos, and from their tips, I created a fine powder that floated away easily. I was exceedingly careful not to get any of it near my own body. “How are you getting in my head?” I called, my words bouncing strangely off the surface of the frozen lake. If the wall hadn’t kept her out, the ash tree grove around the inside of the wall should have.
She laughed. “I never leave!” She attacked first, using an explosively fast cord of condensed Chaos, faster and stronger than my own version. It smashed into my armored arm and knocked me away. The whip of woven Chaos bounced back from the force of the attack and fell apart.
I hit the ground and rolled, then threw myself back to my feet. I shook out my left arm, which had gone numb from the impact, and felt a grim satisfaction when I saw the armor was undented.
She raised an impressed eyebrow. “I meant to cut off your arm. I hope this means you’re getting better.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to kill you. This is my dream, my mind. I can create mithril here if I want. And if I say mithril is an unbreakable metal that returns kinetic energy, then that’s what it is.” It wasn’t perfect, obviously, or my arm wouldn’t be numb and I wouldn’t have been tossed to the ground, but it was proof of concept.
She smiled widely, bouncing on her toes a little. “Good girl. Why don’t you show me what else you’ve got?”
I stepped forward onto the surface of the lake, growing more thin cords woven from filaments of co
ndensed Chaos, till they waved around my body like an obscuring aura of darkness. “You’re going to a lot of trouble to get me to kill you,” I said. “What is it you’re so desperate to teach me?” The thin branches of darkness snapped out with a loud crack, spreading through the air around her even as my power bent itself to producing heat, turning them into a weave of white-hot tendrils. They danced in a fractal pattern that gave her no room to evade, no place to escape to without facing heat strong enough to melt a line right through her body.
The ice around her cracked as it melted with abnormal speed.
She pulsed out a shell of Chaos and, as it touched my cords, it negated them. “I’m trying to teach you how to win,” she snarled.
Even as she spoke, I sent more corded tendrils at her, this time going for density instead of heat.
She waved a nonchalant arm at them, and her shield of Chaos exploded outward once more. This time, it wasn’t enough.
I grimaced and bore down harder, pushing power into Chaos till its filaments were tighter than lead, packed so tightly their weight grew beyond what real-world elements could match. I crushed down on her, but before I could squeeze her to a pulp, the weakened ice beneath her cracked, and she shot down into the lake of blood.
I took a moment to breathe. There was no way that would actually kill her. I kept an eye on the lake around me, ready for her to crawl back through the collapsed area, or even burst through the ice somewhere else.
Only a faint glimpse of light warned me.
I spun around to find her behind me, a couple tiny motes of light like white fireflies disappearing so quick I almost could have believed I imagined them.
She was no longer covered in blood like she should have been. She had also, for the first time, lost some of her resemblance to me. Her face had grown more angular, the eyes sinking inward as her jaw widened. Her mouth stretched wider across her face, like a carnivore, allowing greater range of motion.
I threw myself back, jumping meters across the pond in a move Jacky would have been proud of. “Teach me to win against what?” I called, watching her for any hint of an attack.
She grinned, her lips pulling much too wide across her face. “You really are just so stupid. Is my purpose not obvious? Did you really believe I could simply remove your consciousness and use your body to end all this? If the gods could have done that, they would have long ago. I exist to teach you who and what you are, so that you might have some chance of winning the great war.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You’re…a piece of the God of Knowledge?” For what other reason could she have access to the light motes that were his Seed core?
Her mouth stretched even wider. “Did you think the Fear Trial was so easy to conquer? Your terror runs deeper than that, and my larger self could but postpone its true cost to allow you to receive the promised rewards. After all, at this point, you’re our only hope. Unfortunately, you’re useless.”
“I already found the God of Shaping and—” my words cut off, as the wind picked me up and threw me, slamming me down on the ice.
I lashed out with Chaos, a veritable tsunami of power rushing out from me and crashing toward her.
The air shimmered strangely, like a mirage, or a distortion not so dissimilar to the one that had taken us to the god’s realm. Between one moment and the next, she’d avoided the rush of Chaos, and stood before me again.
She pointed. The air shimmered again, this time in the shape of a dark sphere around me. It looked like a bubble made of black oil.
The not-Eve’s expression was somber, for once.
The bubble darkened, and the world inside it began to distort. It wasn’t a twisting or tearing, but an erasure. I didn’t know what it was, but I felt instinctually that it was very, very bad.
Now barely visible through the bubble, a tear slipped down my counterpart’s face.
“No!” I said. The word bursting from my mouth like a gunshot. It was a refusal. A command. A statement.
The bubble popped.
The not-Eve laughed, swaying on her feet. “What did you do?” Her voice slurred a little as her features grew even more angular and inhuman. She swiped at me with her claws, but I stepped back and avoided the attack easily.
“The humans have created a synthetic opioid called carfentanil. I can’t create it in the real world, but here… It was the first thing I did, as soon as the wind started blowing toward you. I wanted to inject it directly, but I never managed to land a penetrating blow. Still, it looks like the dust was enough. It’s lethal in very small doses.” I watched her with morbid fascination. The feeling of bugs crawling under my skin flashed in my mind, and I shuddered, pushing it away again. She had to die.
She jumped toward me with sudden speed, her jaw swinging open wider and wider. She slammed into me, one clawed hand grabbing my wrist and crushing it, as if the armor was made of potato chips.
The other hand reached for my throat, but a cord of Chaos grabbed her wrist and ground down till bone snapped and blood spurted.
The creature straddling me didn’t even seem to care. She leaned forward, maw opening as wide as my skull as she tried to engulf my head.
I strained backward and thrust my free hand upward, slamming her jaw closed so hard her head snapped backward. I kept pushing, then lunged forward and bit down on my counterpart’s throat, sinking my blunt human teeth into her flesh with sheer force.
The skin vibrated as she attempted to speak. “You’re—”
I jerked my head back, tearing the flesh. Blood sprayed.
She disintegrated, along with the world around me.
I blinked, and when my lids opened again, I found myself looking at the smoking wreck of the pod I’d been riding in.
Chapter 38
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
— William Ernest Henley
“Eve-Redding, are you well?” my guard asked, hurtling over to me and slipping her hand under my shoulder to help me sit up. She was missing three of the fingers on her left hand, and the stumps seemed to have been cauterized.
I looked around, eyes widening.
I sat in a crater a couple meters deep. A group of soldiers and a few Players surrounded me, guns trained on me and Skills primed for attack. The pod I’d arrived in looked like someone had taken a giant potato-peeler to it and then set off a bomb inside. The human driver who’d been chauffeuring us lay on the ground a few meters away, his tongue bulging out grotesquely and his skin blue as if from suffocation. He was quite dead.
YOUR CHARISMA HAS INCREASED!
Rather than please me, the notification made me shudder. “What happened?” I croaked.
“You went fucking crazy!” one of the Players said.
My guard glared at him. “You seemed to be sleeping,” she said, “but you used your blood-borne abilities to attack. I realized something had gone wrong when your human driver fell asleep and then suffocated to death. I believe someone may have been attempting to assassinate you, Godkiller. These humans wished to kill you to stop you from causing further damage or harm while you fought in your sleep.”
Damn it. How was I supposed to explain this? And what if it happened again? The other Eve may have been killed, but I knew from experience that didn’t necessarily mean anything in the dream world. What if I hurt even more people next time? With our disrupted, chaotic sleep schedules and the absence of more dreams, my teammates had gradually stopped bothering to guard me while I slept, which might have been a good thing. We’d even optimistically wondered if the dreams were somehow caused by the Sickness, which seemed to be supported by the fact that Torliam’s Tracker Skill led him to me when he tried to find the person who’d attacked me in my dreams. Obviously, we’d been wrong. I climbed to my feet. “I’m fine,” I reassured my guard. “Sorry about that!” I called out to the wary people surrounding us. “Someone att
acked with a long-distance Skill that put me into a coma. I was fighting off their control, but I had no idea my attacks were manifesting outside my body. I’m sorry for your colleague’s death.”
I knew that wouldn’t be the end of it, but there was no way the humans could do anything antagonistic to me right now without offending the Estreyans, a whole ship of whom were about to teleport into the air less than a mile away.
As if the thought was a trigger, the Shortcut anchor, a tower shaped like a double helix which glowed faintly even to my physical eyes, brightened. A ship appeared beside it, and the air rippled outward from its form, kicking up dust and buffeting my body as it rushed past.
The ship swung around the tower, moving fast. It wobbled, then jerked.
Dread welled up in my chest. That wasn’t normal. Either the Shortcut had been calibrated incorrectly and caused a malfunction, or something had gone wrong with the passengers inside.
The ship’s nose dipped and its stingray-like form hurtled toward the ground. It jerked again before hitting, leveling out for a skidding crash-landing rather than total head-on collision with the ground.
I took a step toward it, but a vice-like grip on my arm yanked me to a stop. I turned to my guard. “People are probably hurt—”
She squeezed harder, as if trying to break my arm, and her eyes rolled around wildly as her eyelids fluttered. Black veins crept up the side of her neck, even as her skin paled and thinned. Her lips grew a tint of red at their creases, as if she’d bitten her tongue and blood was filling her mouth.
She opened her mouth to let out a choked sound, putrid breath spilling out around suddenly blackened and bleeding gums. She squeezed harder.
I let out a stifled scream and pushed Chaos out from my arm, disintegrating her hand even as I yanked away.
She didn’t even cry out in pain, simply drawing her staff from its sheath on her back and swinging it at me. The bright red glow of her power surrounded it. If I hadn’t ducked, it probably would have decapitated me.