by R. Atlas
He could see everyone’s fears in these waters, the energy released by their fears, and the parasites that fed hungrily on their minds as they slept. He felt his imagination, his mind, being chewed up and devoured; he could even feel its digestion. But what he hadn’t realized before, that he could finally see in these waters, was that the mushroom creatures were only tributary symbiotes, that the true parasites were the fears themselves — the terrors that hid underneath the skin of his consciousness, exposing his mind to obliteration over and over again. They were tiny leeches that infected his spirit with an impartible amnesia, a sickness that crawled into his thoughts and made him forget all there was to live for.
He could see it there — when he was thirteen and so paralyzed right before his entrance exam for Crest Academy that he did not perform at his peak. He could see it here — when he was ten and so contorted with terror after a nightmare that he needed Raven to sleep next to him for the rest of the month. Curious to know how far back that incredible narcosis went, he swam to the first memory he had of being gripped by fear. Something told him that he had to. He was three years old and a strange man clad in dark attire entered the orphanage asking for him. The bladed man, this is where he had seen him before. The mad did not have a blade for an arm, not here, not yet. He looked normal, if abnormally gaunt and queer in manner. He had a deep voice that resonated with the room, dark eyes that extended into a cruel darkness, and a tall, slim frame.
The man asked him several questions about where he was from, what he liked to do for fun, if he liked the orphanage, and then told him a story that frightened him. It was the first time the feeling had ever touched him — the first time its toxicity ever planted itself in his head like a nest of poisonous thoughts. The story was about an evil eye that possessed people, giving them sight of a terrible, loathsome world beyond this one and then slowly dragged them there. This is where I first heard of it he thought to himself, a memory so early that he could not consciously recall it. The man then asked Red if the eye sounded familiar, and curiously, Red replied yes, and that he found it frightening because he had seen the eye before, in a nightmare. He had seen himself use it before. Odd Red thought to himself, he could not remember this now; yet his younger version seemed sure of it. His response stunned the man, as if he had just heard something too good to be true, something he had been waiting to hear all his life, and then he began asking Red a series of questions related to his nightmares.
“Could you be the one?” The man whispered before getting up to leave. “The eye is locked away,” he said as he passed the entrance of Red’s room. “But it will not be for long. Soon, it will come for you, if you are the one.” He could tell that his younger version was not fond of this man. Before he left through the door, he turned around and asked Red, “What is your name, your true name?” A glint in his eye betrayed how much hung on the thread of this single question.
“Red,” his younger self replied, a lie. He had just recently been taught the colors at the orphanage and what each one represented. He had fallen in love with the color red almost immediately and the word came to him easily.
“That is your true name?” the man asked, raising an eyebrow. He could not hide the disappointment in his tone.
“Yes,” his younger version lied again, somehow knowing that he had to lie to protect himself. A child’s intuition Red thought in his current state, wishing that he hadn’t lost his.
He almost wished that he had told the truth, just so he could now hear what his true name was. How did he forget it? He alway thought that Red was his name. But no, the orphanage did not assign names to children who came there too early, it only gave them identification codes and then let them choose their own names when they became older. But he did have a name, his true name as this man referred to it. A name from a life that he could no longer remember. But he knew it as a child, he could see it on the face of his younger self.
Red suddenly knew what he had to do next, it seemed so obvious that he was shocked he had not thought of it before. He had to swim to his nightmare, the one that had been haunting him for as far back as he could remember, and travel through the entirety of it in these waters. He had never gone through the entire nightmare, he always woke up midway, overwhelmed with terror, and unable to grasp most of what he had seen. The nightmare followed no litany of events, it was simply a collection of seemingly random visions that he saw one by one. Visions of the past? Visions of the future? He did not know, he had never seen them clearly. But here in these waters, he could travel through his dreams as he pleased, he could swim through the entire span of his consciousness if he wanted to. But the end of the nightmare was so deep below, and hid something so terrifying, that he knew there was a risk he may not be able to make it back up to the surface. Would it be worth it? He asked himself. For a single glimpse, would it be worth the risk of being trapped in here forever?
“No,” a voice said above him, Raven’s voice. He wasn’t sure if it was actually Raven or if it was just her presence in his own mind. But then again, the two could be the same thing in these waters. “It wouldn’t be worth it,” she said.
“You discovered something” Red replied. He could feel it, something had changed about her. She had let go of something, of a piece of her that had always been there since Takis.
“I spent days swimming through here to find you. I finally saw it, why I was trapped in here, in this dream.”
“But you’re not going to tell me until a time long into the future,” he said. He knew it already; they shared the thought together.
“You’re going to see it for yourself one day, you’re going to have to let go of it too, and then I will tell you,” she smiled back.
“I have to go,” Red said, looking back down at the depths of the water. “I have to go and see what’s down there. It’s always been calling me.”
“Let me go,” she replied. He looked at her curiously, not understanding what she was proposing. “You’re not supposed to go — you’re not supposed to see it, Red.”
“You can’t see the nightmare without the eye anyways,” he replied. How do I know this he thought ruefully. “At least not the entire thing. I can only see the parts I’ve already seen, the visions. I only want to be able to see them clearly.”
“You won’t be able to come back up if you go that far in.”
“How will you come back up then?”
“I already overcame the reason I’m here. Hold my hand,” she said. She reached out some part of her conscience, the part of a person’s mind that you felt whenever you held their hand in the physical world, and when Red grabbed it, he suddenly felt lighter than air, like he had been wrapped in a bubble that could carry him to the surface of these waters without any effort. “See? I’m not trapped here any longer. I can leave no matter how deep I go.”
“Will you tell me what you see afterwards? How will you remember it?”
“You’re not incapable of remembering what you see in your nightmares, Red, you just choose to forget them on purpose. These aren’t my nightmares, I can look in without needing to forget them.”
“When will you tell me what you see? I won’t even remember to ask you.”
“I will tell you. You have to trust me.”
“What should I do?”
“I’ll count down from three and then plunge in and come back out as fast as I can. Keep your eyes closed, don’t look. And hold onto me as tight as you can, we can’t be separated or I don’t know if you’ll be with me when I leave.”
“This didn’t work out last time…” he replied, referring to the whirlpool.
“True,” she laughed. “But if it doesn’t this time, I’ll come back for you, as many times as I need to.”
“Where’s everyone else?”
“They’ve already awoken, and so will you. We just need to get to the surface.”
“Ok, fine. Whenever you’re ready.” he said, trying to calm himself. He knew he’d have the urge to open his eye
s as they plunged into his nightmare, and he knew he’d have to control it.
“Three.”
He shut his eyes as hard as he could. He had no physical eyes, what he was closing was his vision, his openness to the world. His perception of the universe around him. He had to make sure he saw nothing.
“Two.”
He had to keep them closed, no matter how much he wanted to open them. “You know, the last time someone counted down like this, I got shot in the face.”
“One!” she half shouted and laughed. She’d hear it. When she went deep enough, she would hear that voice. Someone else would finally hear it, he thought to himself. Someone else would finally hear that terrible voice, that terrible voice, that terrible voice in the darkness.
The crisp impression of the physical world around him told him that he had come back to the world as he knew it. The marine scent of the flazb, the squishiness of the substance pressing against his body, and the sound of something clawing against a wall nearby — all of it flooded his senses, telling him that it was safe to open his eyes. The scenery had turned back into the dim outlay of the caverns. The flazb had now grown all over his body, housing him in a protective shell of sorts. Someone was right outside, clawing him out with a viscous impatience. His first thought was that it must have been one of his team members, desperate to finally escape from here, but the long outline of a blade and the shadow of a narrow body told him differently.
Stay calm. Think clearly. At times like these, when he talked to himself, it would be through Raven’s voice, giving him clear and concise directions on what to do. When he hit a wall, it would be Butz’ voice that he heard, cracking some sadistic joke about how he’d die soon. His intention was to grip his right hand into a fist to summon a cast, but in trying to do so, a sudden emptiness at the edge of his sleeve reminded him that his hand was gone — cut off by the thing in front of him. He felt a sudden surge of anger, of hatred, the perfect emotion to get me ready to fight he thought to himself. Without missing a beat, he switched channelling his cast to his left hand. This was going to be powerful, he could feel it. The flazb had not only revitalized his energy, but the dream sequence he had gone through had somehow improved his mental landscape, made him more familiar with his mind, more lethal in the art of utilizing it.
There was much from the dream that he had forgotten, much that he knew he would have to try and remember later, but now was not the time to think about all of that. Now he had to fight. Now he had to struggle in combat, he had to grind. He loved this, he remembered. Had he forgotten how much he loved it? Fighting, summoning casts, drowning things in flames — these were the urges that he breathed for when he was younger. Somehow he had forgotten how much he loved it as he had trained through Academy. Controlled sparring and reading from books had pacified him, dimmed the ambition that once drove him. Winning practice match after practice match by having Raven on his team had satisfied his desire to win. Victory had defeated him, elevated him beyond the primal senses that he needed to survive in combat. But the dreamscape had let him reach down and remember the hunger he once had as a child. It let him touch that fire, let it burn him. What was there to be scared of? He thought to himself. Why had he stood there in the desert petrified in fear when he knew that he was in danger, why had he let himself lose part of his arm? His left hand began to glow red as adrenaline coursed through his body. His hand trembled from the amount of energy he focused into it. The flames would fill the entire caverns, he would burn everything from the mushrooms, to their spires, to the chambers that connected above and below. He would douse their entire city in rings of fire.
The bladed man cut an outline through the flazb and began peeling the shell away from the top. I dare him to, Red thought, feeling like the moment couldn’t come any sooner. A feline figure shot out from the top of his view and tackled the man, both of them falling off the spire. Linx. He heard a popping noise from above him, someone jumping out of their shell — and then another one soon after. He punched his own shell from the inside as hard he could, ripping right through the center of the flazb as he pushed himself out. A moment later he saw Butz running vertically down the spire, towards Linx, who was hanging on to a ledge several levels below them while swinging his body left and right to dodge swipes from the enormous blade. He saw S run past him, following a few feet behind Butz.
He knew what he wanted to do, although he had never practiced the technique before. He had seen a fire elementalist do it once, a cast that wrapped its user in flames and launch him towards a target like a meteor. The energy from the flames protected the caster upon impact, and focused his energy onto the target when the two bodies collided. The cast could be used both to damage an entire area, or a single target. Even if he hadn’t practiced it before, he knew he could do it now, simply because of how large his mana pool was. His body felt like an endless source of energy. It would be sloppy and wasteful, but that would be a good thing, he wanted to let out as much energy as he could, he wanted to see everything here burn.
He aimed towards the bladed man, who now noticed Butz and S running towards him and styled himself in a defensive posture, covering the front of his body with the giant sword. Pointless thought Red, you can’t block this. He heard two more popping noises right before he launched himself from the spire. The flames were so concentrated around him that they had turned blue. There were three levels of flames that elementalists could summon. Starting from orange, flames turned blue, and then white depending on how densely concentrated the energy was. Flames of other colors, like green or purple, resulted from enchanted substances like flashdust and banefire.
The air around him scorched in heat as he shot towards his target. He zoomed past S and Butz, almost coming close enough to set them on fire as well. He didn’t realize how much control he would lose over his trajectory after launching, and hoped that his initial aim was enough to rely on. He hit the bladed man with a silent thud, and then plunged with him towards the floor of the cavern in a cone of flames. Half way to the floor, he was swept with a nervous thought, that he may have miscalculated the amount of energy he needed to survive the impact. But the rush of the drop wiped his senses clean and all he could feel was the velocity of the moment as his thoughts blended into nothingness. The impact felt like an explosion of energy — it was an explosion of energy — and he nearly missed the entire scene by having his eyes closed. Forcing them open a few seconds after he had landed on the floor, he saw the depth of the crater he had created and a wave of flames moving outwards towards the sides of the caverns. They died down before reaching the ends, but he was sure he had done more than enough damage. He had transformed the place into an inferno. But as the smoke cleared, he saw him again; the lidless eye peered back at him through the haze as the bladed man slowly struggled to get back on his feet at the bottom of the crater.
Impossible thought Red.
He had burned away most of the mushrooms, but thousands still remained. They began converging towards Red and the bladed man at the center of the impact, swimming through the mounds of cauterized flazb and fungus as fast as they could. But their movement stopped abruptly as the floor of the cavern began to quake, and they turned around to swim in the opposite direction just as fast as they had converged. From above, Red could see his team racing towards him in vertical strides.
“Go back, go back!” he screamed towards Butz who was almost at the bottom of the spire. A cleft began to emerge at the pit of the crater, quickly developing into a fissure that sliced the floor of the cavern from one end to the other. The hint of a tremor followed, but instead of the roar of a seism, an invasive slithering began crawling up from deep below the surface — an unhinging noise mixed with the sound of slime skidding across a rocky surface. The toadstool creatures had by now, vanished into the walls of their city, squeezing themselves through the cracks of various rocks to disappear behind a bed of flazb. Wish we could do that Red though sullenly.
“Hurry up! The floor is breakin
g!” Butz screamed back at him. The fissure had now grown from a single crack to a web of broken terrain. Steaming umbriel poured in through the gaps of the fault to pad the air with a brown mist, heating the bottom of the cavern with a searing humidity. When Red finally got to the spire, he had to leap over a growing gap to grab on to its base. He looked to see if the bladed man was chasing him, but saw that he was still at the center of the crater, recovering from the collision. At least I did enough damage to slow him down thought Red. He began climbing as fast as he could, skipping every other step by throwing himself upwards with only his left hand. He looked back down — the bladed man was running towards the spire. But something else caught his attention; a thin, sickly green ooze began seeping in through the gaps on the floor.
Now what Red thought unwelcomingly.
“Don’t stop climbing!” Butz screamed as Red became too distracted by the ooze. The amount of the substance was increasing rapidly and soon it flooded the entire crater, beginning to leak across the floor of the cavern. The bladed man ran from its touch and grabbed onto the spire they were on, climbing behind Red in staggering leaps by using his sword to anchor his momentum. Both Red and Butz gave a short yelp as they doubled their paces. The goo continued to rise, quicker and quicker every second. Its capacity soon filled the entire bottom of the cavern.