by Demi Harper
Once again came the paranoid suspicion that his patron could be summoned by his thoughts. He shook off the urge to look over his shoulder and tried to think positively.
Finally, here were the instructions he’d been waiting for.
But first…
Shooing Limpit away from the mess on the floor, Varnell drew on the dark font of his power – which was, reassuringly, as physically distant as ever – and channeled a sliver of magic. It was barely even a trickle; his patron wouldn’t notice. Which was more than could be said for the spilled ink and smashed glass were he to leave it there in plain sight.
His patron definitely wouldn’t detect such a minor use of his magic. Would he?
Varnell hesitated, then sighed and let go of the magic. It slithered back to its source like a silverfish retreating from sunlight. Heart beating frantically against the burning amulet, he hurriedly dragged a nearby antique rug over and dropped it down over the spillage, broken glass and all. There was a chance the ink would soak through and ruin the red-and-gold design on the rug’s surface, but he wouldn’t grieve for it. He hated that rug.
Finally, he made sure to roll his sleeve down over the half-finished tattoo. Satisfied that the evidence was now hidden, he hurried into the next room – his private study – and over to the far wall behind the desk, where a heavy velvet curtain was draped over something large and rectangular. Varnell tugged the corner of the curtain free from the mirror’s face and stepped back.
It was an ugly thing. Its gothic frame was hideously ornate and tarnished, and the whole fixture was far too large for the wall of his small study. Like the rug, though, it had belonged to his predecessor, and Varnell had ever clung to the notion that he was more likely to be accepted in his current role were he to adopt the same aesthetic choices of the previous (though regretfully tasteless) Guildmaster.
Varnell glared at himself in the glass, one hand still clutching the velvet cloth, the other fingering the now-fading source of heat on his chest. His reflection glared back at him, dark brows drawn together in a scowl. Slightly pointed eartips peeked rebelliously out from underneath his hair – not quite angular enough to mark him as a full elf, but enough to distinguish him as other than human. Enough for him to be looked down upon by the members of both races.
He pulled at his hair in a futile attempt to cover the offending sight, then winced when it revealed a hint of silver at his temples. Ninety-two years old and already my body is failing me. Pathetic.
His eyes slid away from his hated reflection to stare at the wall instead. But he didn’t see red brickwork. Instead he saw the broken shards of the crimson Core, now colorless and empty and scattered across the floor of some deep, godsforsaken cavern. He saw the three whelps who’d returned to him under suspicious circumstances, their party leaders mysteriously vanished underground; saw the warrior’s confusion and the other two’s outrage as Varnell commanded them to leave Grimrock for him to “deal with”; saw their cocky strides after they disobeyed his direct orders and meddled in affairs they did not and could never understand.
And he saw their greatest betrayal of all: the purple Core, whose existence they’d kept from him even as he looked each of them in the eye and asked if they’d anything else to tell him.
Those little—
The tower’s chimes struck the hour, breaking his furious reverie, and Varnell forced his gaze once more to the mirror. A shiver snaked from the back of his neck to the base of his spine when he saw a pair of violet eyes staring coldly back at him.
“Hello there, little warlock.”
The umbral face in the mirror smirked as Varnell instinctively shot a terrified glance at the doorway behind him. Of course nobody was there to eavesdrop – the wards he’d placed around this entire floor would take care of that, as would the numerous bolts and padlocks on the elderwood main door – but still. If just one person heard the word warlock… if just one of them learned his secret…
“Master. Greetings.” Varnell bowed his head to the mirror. When he straightened, he caught another shadowy glimpse of his reflection, obscured as it was by his patron’s visage, and once more habitually covered his ears with his hair.
Scorn radiated from the looking glass.
“I see shame still smolders within your heart,” said the voice coldly. “Interesting; your former elven clan shunned your very existence from the day of your conception, yet still you persist in aping their ancestral rituals with your own clumsy attempts at trophy-mark scarification.” There was a dangerous pause. "Is that a new one I see?"
What?
Oh. Oh, damn. He’d covered the tattoo-in-progress with his sleeve, but watery blood and ink had begun to soak through the grass-green fabric. Ice trickled through his veins as he fought to maintain his composure – and conceal his guilt.
"Curious," the entity murmured. Its voice was glacial, riming the very air with deadly threat. "I was sure I ordered you to report to me any time you so much as located a new Core – and for you not to take any action without first consulting me."
From the adjoining room, he heard Limpit gulp.
Oh, damn. Think, think!
He forced a tight smile and waved a hand at his leaking forearm and ruined sleeve. "This? No, no, not a new one. No new Cores. No new tattoos. Just touching up the older ones, is all. Limpit was—”
“I could not possibly care less about the extracurricular activities of either you or your absurd familiar. However, you might consider making more prudent use of your spare time. When last we communicated, your servant had failed to return from the investigation of a promising new tunnel network. However, her expendable yet unexpectedly resilient traveling companions reported sighting a new God Core – or so you informed me.”
A bead of sweat trickled down the back of Varnell’s neck as he cursed himself yet again for his over-eagerness in reporting to his patron. The pressure had been on him to locate more Cores, and he was desperate to send word of any kind of progress. But when he took the time to properly read the adventurers’ debriefing notes, it was obvious he’d made a grievous error. The Core they’d found was obviously Grimrock: Varnell’s secret ally – and his patron’s thrall.
The entity was still awaiting his response. Varnell wiped his sweaty palms on his robes and tried not to hyperventilate.
“My lord, there was no Core.”
There was a dangerously heavy pause. Then: “No? But you seemed quite certain of their conviction at the time.”
“Conviction is no substitute for actuality. I’m afraid they were mistaken.”
“I thought experience had taught you how I feel about mistakes.”
The threat in the voice seemed to coalesce into something physical, a fist-like pressure around Varnell’s heart.
“Remember that I can cause you agony beyond reckoning with the merest twitch of my finger. Remember, too, that you owe me – for your life, and for the vengeance I enabled you to enact when first you found me. And remember that any more failures on your part will result in the forcible removal of your free will.”
A horrible sensation of being pulled by invisible strings like a puppet. His limbs twitched involuntarily, then a moment later released him. “Consider yourself fortunate you remain my servant, and not my thrall. For now.”
The amulet against his chest seared, and the invisible fist tightened. He gasped for breath.
“My lord!” he gasped. “I have only ever served you—”
“Then serve me now!” snarled the voice. “I do not ask for miracles. Yet here you are, another member of my flock too incompetent to fulfill my commands.”
“Master, I—"
“I tire of this conversation. One of my oldest thralls appears to have slipped my grasp. When I find him – and I will find him – his punishment will be an example. I trust his disappearance is unrelated to your mistake. If it emerges that any of my servants had a hand in his release, those found guilty will suffer the full extent of my displeasure. And when I am
once again whole—”
The voice cut off abruptly, as though the entity had said something he hadn’t intended to. Something – a long-held suspicion in the back of Varnell’s mind – clicked, but he would have to follow the thought up later.
“When next we speak,” his patron was saying now, “I expect to hear that you and your incompetent underlings have managed to locate at least one new Core.”
‘When next we speak.’ And when will that be, I wonder? Their meetings had always been entirely at his patron’s whim. Days, weeks, even months could pass between them without pattern, leaving Varnell in a state of nervous tension at nearly every hour of the day and night, anticipating the telltale burning against his chest that heralded the coming of his so-called master.
As if that wasn’t pressure enough, his patron’s parting words chilled him to the marrow: “And for your sake, there had better not be any more mistakes.”
With a dark swirl in the mirror the presence was gone. The heaviness in the air – like that before a thunderstorm – immediately began to dissipate, but Varnell could not so easily relax.
Someday, that tension would not dissipate but rather come to a head like a clashing of elemental forces. The day was coming; he knew it. But knowing doesn’t give me much of an advantage if I can’t find a way to make it count.
He rolled his shoulders, the tenseness of his muscles making his neck ache, and threw the cloth back over the hated mirror before retreating into the central solar once more.
Limpit stood just inside the doorway, cringing and looking as though it wished to disappear into the wall it was pressed against. Varnell could sympathize; he felt much the same way, though he couldn’t show it lest he risk his patron’s disgust.
Limpit’s huge black eyes – all four of them – stared piteously up at Varnell, who sighed, nodded and wearily held out his half-tattooed arm. With a whimper, the familiar reached for it. As it did, the creature’s waist-high bipedal body shifted. Its limbs retracted, sliding smoothly away into a shrinking torso which instead began to sprout short spiky legs from either side of its segmented centipede-like body.
Now barely two feet long, Limpit skittered up Varnell’s outstretched arm and curled around his neck like a peculiar scarf.
Varnell was long past being repulsed by the creature’s odd combination of fur and chitinous scales – on the contrary, the scolodrake’s gentle weight on his shoulders was reassuring. He even found it pleasing to feel the number of legs that scritched against his skin and caught on the fabric of his robes. There were many more pairs of the little limbs than when he’d first found Limpit as a grub; the creature had been through many molts in the decades they’d been together, and come out of each stronger and larger than ever.
But Melakor reduced it – reduced both of them, Varnell thought bitterly – to a shivering terrified mess. And while there had never been much that Varnell could do against him, he knew the time was coming where he’d no longer be able to stand his current existence. Whether or not he’d truly found the means to weaken his “master” and break free of his influence, he had to try. After all, what did he have to lose?
One thing is certain above all, thought Varnell, gently stroking Limpit’s quivering form.
The purple Core must be destroyed.
One
Double Sight
Corey
The tunnel stank.
Sour and filthy and… ugh. Just ugh.
The musk of my enemies was foul beyond words. It was as though a thousand stink-badgers had sharted into a blanket then left it in the sun to ferment. Now we’d come along and unwittingly trampled it, releasing its skunky effluent to crawl up into my sensitive nostrils to sting my sinuses and make my eyes water. Or at least it would have, if the body I was currently borrowing had been in possession of tear ducts.
“How is it that you always manage to find a way to complain about everything?” came the disembodied and sleepy-sounding voice of Ket, my sprite.
I’d left her watching over things back in the Grotto. The sun was setting; the skylight in the ceiling was limned with its hazy orange-red light, the evening shadows were long and deep, and the fireflies were just beginning to kindle. Ket was a morning person – the relentless and annoying kind, because of course she was – and this time of day always made her drowsy, yet she still managed to not only detect my emotions from a distance but also berate me for them.
“Always look on the bright side, Corey,” she added with a yawn. “And take care of Ris’kin, all right? That resurrection ritual is still on cooldown and will be for a while yet.”
Seemingly satisfied that she’d sufficiently irritated me, she withdrew her presence, returning once more to whatever she’d been doing. Surveilling my gem for even the slightest change in color that signaled my mood, apparently.
I rolled my eyes at her advice, though I could hardly argue with its soundness. And, truth be told, it was easier to focus on the positives these days.
There might be limitations to this form – through no fault of its owner, I hastened to add in response to the flash of disgruntlement from my gracious corporeal host – but it sure beats being a floating chunk of invisible nothing. Or a rock.
It was true; at least I had a body, for the time being anyway, and it came complete with all five senses and the capacity to once again experience the wonder that was gravity. And it was glorious.
Well, mostly.
Muzzle wrinkled against the tunnel’s odor, I padded along the passageway, claws sheathed so that my feet made no sound on the rough stone.
In the days after I first learned the Double Sight ability – which allowed me to view the world through the eyes of my forrel avatar, Ris’kin – I’d made use of it as much as possible, taking great delight in not only seeing the world outside my Sphere of Influence but also smelling, tasting, hearing and touching it too. Even better, this method of travel did not drain my mana like some of my insidiously dangerous other abilities did.
After many hours of its extended use, my Augmentary had dinged with the most delightful notification I’d had in days: my bond with Ris’kin had leveled up, unlocking a new feature called Double Insight. This gave my avatar access to my Insight capabilities so long as the two of us were sensorially connected via Double Sight.
I’d squealed almost as loudly as Ket, and immediately taken my avatar out beyond my Sphere of Influence again to try out this new combined ability (though not too far; neither of us wanted to leave my denizens alone for too long so soon after the battle that destroyed much of their home). Sure enough, any living creature or plant to fall under mine and Ris’kin’s combined scrutiny offered up the fundamental secrets of its biology, and the flowing lines and symbols that represented their genetic makeup were permanently added to my Augmentary as blueprints ready for the Creation process.
Weeks ago, when I’d first awoken as a God Core and begun Ascending in god tiers and expanding my SOI, I’d focused mainly on collecting blueprints for bugs and beasties I could combine to create into god-born defenders for my Grotto. Now that I was no longer being hounded by a megalomaniacal enemy Core and its army of stunted lizard-people, I was starting to pay attention to the subtler aspects of my environment, and it turned out nature could be pretty neat.
Being situated so close to the surface, the Grotto and its immediate surroundings were primarily adorned with sun-loving species of plant life, like ferns and photosynthetic mosses. Down here, though, not so much.
I let my gaze sweep over the rocky surfaces, taking in the subterranean flora that adorned the tunnel walls. Spiky hook-moss and gnarly nailwort clawed the air at ankle-height, while garlands of ghoul’s beard hung from the ceiling like – well, like ghoulish beards. (Fun fact: ghoul’s beard had psychedelic properties when ingested. Even funner fact: it could emit spores that caused paralysis in small mammals, and subsisted by feeding on bats foolish enough to roost near it.)
Lurking among the ghoul’s beard was a sprig of dead
ly black amaranth (also carnivorous), its heart-shaped leaves leaking dark fluid. To my left, a patch of messiah moss rearranged itself into a wonky eight-legged shape, exhibiting its bizarre tendency to take the form of whatever it thought its audience wanted most to see. I paused for a moment to examine it critically. This particular specimen’s composition skills were in dire need of refinement. Or maybe it was just going through a cubist phase.
I shook my head and moved on. Yes, fine, they were just mosses and liverworts. Not the most exciting things I’d encountered beneath the earth – not even in the top hundred – and even pre-noon Ket had to fight back a yawn whenever I tried to share my fun facts about them, but these nuances of the underground ecosystem were something I was finally beginning to appreciate.
Being the god of a society of (allegedly) intelligent beings was fine and all (though I’d still rather be able to set things on fire at will), but there was just something about being able to feel the flora’s soft dampness, smell its wholesomely earthy scent, and hear the whispering of air through the dangling fronds of ceiling plants as we passed beneath them.
The only reason we weren’t spending hours admiring it all was my avatar. Ris’kin was as indifferent to her surroundings as she was toward me and my new-found wonderment. She never lingered, simply assessing, cataloging, and moving on, her senses constantly alert for signs of danger. Though I was slightly miffed to have my sightseeing curtailed, it was probably for the best, considering we were meant to be scouting for signs of whatever creature was responsible for my missing gatherer.
A scuffling sound echoed from the darkness, sending our pointed ears twitching to locate the source. The fingers of our hand-like forepaws tightened around the haft of our weapon – a kobold spear, a jagged thing of flint and obsidian snatched up during the heat of battle and retained as a trophy of victory – then relaxed when we realized the noise had come from the small band of gnomes creeping along behind us.