This is part eleven of this story. Chapters one through ten can be found at the Tears of the Gods table of contents page, along with important disclaimers and whatnot. I know it's been a long time since the last update; sorry about that. Enjoy!
***
Previously in "Tears of the Gods"
The small room—what had the servitor called it? The elevator?—bore Gormin and his new "friends" away from the maze of pipes and the raging bellowheart, back to the Arechive and presumed safety.
YimouZha narrated their adventures to Lady Isla: the arena, the chronal feeders, the sudden appearance of Tempus, the Krai. Isla hung on his every word, gasping at the dangers they'd faced and beaming and clapping at their triumphs.
Off in the distance, a large, wriggling globe rolled off the edge of the Hub platform. Gormin squinted at it. It was a ball of captured people, just as Frater Neymich had described.
The rest of the group was up and fighting by now, but the huge purple wasps were harrying them, keeping them away from the tunneler that continued to slam itself against one of the building's spine-like pillars, which crunched worryingly in response to the abuse.
Tempus wrapped a cloth around the cut on his hand. With a hint of sadness, he noted that not all of his companions had been in the future that he'd seen, and some of those he'd seen in the future were not present in the present—Syrus and Kiraz both seemed to be missing. His eyes came to rest finally on Tlecha, the white-haired ultraterrestrial being who'd been pressed into service by Eighth Worlders and escaped by traveling countless millions of years into her future.
A varjellen approached, trying to get him to pay shins to fight a jiraskar supposedly contained in his tent. Tempus ignored him.
***
Date: 9th Vaen in the 402nd Year of the Founding
Tlecha
The temperature in the atrium was dropping noticeably. The huge hole in the glass ceiling Tempus had made was rapidly letting out the building's stored-up greenhouse warmth.
Tlecha sighed and sniffed a vividly red-and-pink summer flower. All these will likely be dead in a matter of hours, she mused.
She shook her head to clear it and continued searching for... what, exactly? Gormin and Tempus' reasons for breaking into the closed silster factory were vague at best. She explored the rows of exotic flowers and plants, drifting away from the rest of the group.
She could hear Gormin and Tempus speculating as to the purpose of the flowers a couple of rows over. "The flowers are very colorful," Gormin was saying. "Perhaps fabric dye is made from them for the silster, in case someone wants, say, a chequered red and gold silster garment. I've never owned a piece of silster, and have no idea how well it takes dye. More likely the flowers are for some illegal purpose unrelated to the silster, since the factory is closed for silster-production but these flowers are still being taken care of. Or they were, until 'someone' opened the greenhouse roof to the winter sky." She heard Gormin chuckling at his own odd humour.
Voloidion made a discovery and called the rest of the group over. It was a sliding metal mesh gate at the far end of the atrium. Through the slats in the gate could be seen a smallish square cubicle with a metal pull handle on the far wall.
Jilly came up next to them, bearing a pouch of pollen extracted from the atrium's flowers. "I think I’ve seen something like this before. I think it’s a lift box, for traveling vertical-like." She slid open the gate.
Gormin nodded. "Aye, the misnamed Order of Truth had one like this in their cursed Arechive. They called it an elevator." He stepped into the box. "Let's see where it goes. I am starting to suspect that the circus outside is just a cover to loot this 'closed' factory. Which, given that flowers don't normally bloom in mid-winter without human intervention, is evidently not as closed as it is made to appear. It's not really our business, but it is interesting enough to take a look."
"Yeah," said Jilly. "Personally, I want to know what kind of activity the Pieriant is masking at this facility." She entered the elevator and raised an eyebrow at Tlecha. "Coming down with me?"
Tlecha bowed her head. "I shall accompany you," she answered.
***
Syrus
"A good effort," said the purple-skinned varjellen carnie. "You scored well, but not the main prize. Here, accept this medallion as a memento." The varjellen handed Syrus a gold-tinted strongglass medallion on a rawhide lanyard. On the glass medal was inscribed I fought a jiraskar and lived.
Syrus, feeling a little disappointed, took the medal and put it around his neck. Fighting the simulated jiraskar had brought him back to his youth and some of the fun times he'd had in a simulator owned by a family friend back home.
He hopped down from the wagon that bore the "jiraskar" tent with its varjellen barker and looked around for his friends. After a few moments, he caught a glimpse of YimouZha disappearing down an alley beside an abandoned factory of some kind. He followed.
Guards were halfheartedly watching the factory's main entrance, but Syrus managed to slip into the side alley without being noticed. The alley was a dead-end except for a side door into the factory, standing open. The door had nails through it as if it had been nailed shut and subsequently pried back open. YimouZha must've gone this way, he thought. With a quick backward glance, he entered the factory and quietly pulled the door to.
He found himself in what appeared to be a reception room or office. A chalkboard on the wall read "Welcome to Dezantis Silster!" Syrus frowned. Why does Dezantis Silster sound familiar? A desk and several padded chairs were arrayed around the room, under a thick layer of dust. One of the chairs was overturned. On the desk were several scraps of advertising scrip with prices and services offered for bespoke tailoring of silster, either as complete garments or trim for armor and such. Curious, Syrus flipped through the pile of leathery scrip. The most recent advertisement bearing a date was dated 397 YF, about five years old. A door-less passage lead out east, wood-paneled and hung with pictures. There was also a closed, pentagon-shaped door to the west.
Syrus guessed that YimouZha had gone down the passage. As he passed, he glanced at the pictures on the wall; they appeared to be drawings and paintings of people wearing golden silster garments of various styles.
At the other end of the passage was a spacious atrium packed with row upon row of brightly colored flowers, grown high enough to obscure his view of the other side of the room. A breath of cold air made him shiver. He looked up. Someone had knocked a ragged hole in the atrium's glass ceiling. Since the flowers did not yet appear to be dead, it must have been recent. Syrus made his way between two rows of flowers, taking care to avoid stepping on the fragments of broken glass.
He heard a female voice ahead and off to the left. Tlecha? He wasn't sure. He advanced cautiously. Just before he rounded the corner at the end of the row, he heard some kind of machinery crank into action. He peered out cautiously from behind the flowers. Beyond a mesh gate, he glimpsed the group packed into an elevator, descending quickly out of sight.
"W- wait!" he called. But it was too late; he had just missed them.
***
Tlecha
The elevator banged to a halt at the bottom of the shaft. Tlecha tried raising the lever that controlled the elevator to go back for Syrus, but it was no use. The elevator was stuck.
"Probably power," Jilly speculated aloud. "Going up takes more power than going down. The installation's power reserves are probably low."
Gormin grunted. "Well, no use staying here." He slid aside the elevator's gate and drew his sword.
Narrow beams of flickering purple light crisscrossed the octagonal room beyond. There were five waist-high domes set in the floor. Gormin stepped forward, allowing the light to play over him.
"Ah," said Jilly, too late. "Those might be..."
Two of the domes split open and retracted into the floor. Floating metal spheres, each with a single reddish electric eye, began surging from the open domes.
"...security beams."
Tlecha began to sweat as the spheres scanned the group with their baleful red eyes. An unpleasant memory was making itself felt just beyond the edge of her awareness. She frowned. Have I seen these things before?
She realized with horror she had. "No," she breathed. She sank to her knees, shaking. "But how? How? No one knew! No one..."
***
Date: IX ides of Tludusp in the 11,074,608th Year Prior to the Founding
Tlecha considered the device. The brain-spike.
Mlikix sighed. "Are you having second thoughts? Once we break in, we're committed. There'll be no going back."
Tlecha set her jaw and shook her head, saying nothing. The two of them exited the hovercar. It was a nice day in the capital. Indeed, every day in the capital was as equally nice as any other.
The operation went smoothly, at first. It was obvious to most that Tlecha and Mlikix, though generally very human-like, had an ineffable otherness about them that marked them as ultraterrestrials, beings from another dimension. Few humans were bold enough to challenge an ultra, to ask them what are you doing here? Of course, Tlecha and Mlikix had identicards, but these were forgeries, and their claimed authorization from the Omnicognate would not have passed a routine double-check.
Nonetheless, they were waved through checkpoint after checkpoint on the way to Dimensional Transfer Node 4QL. No one ordered the pair to be brain-scanned. No one was willing to risk being seen as second-guessing the Omnicognate.
The Dimensional Transfer Nodes were one of the key technologies that allowed the Eightfold Worldline Omni-unity to sprawl like a cancer from universe to universe, piercing the veil of any reality, para-reality, or spacetime-line. But there were said to be at least a few dimensions that still held out against the Omnicognate's tyranny.
It was to one of these that Tlecha and Mlikix wished to go, to the fabled free galaxies of Ghenivupt. Dimensional Transfer Node 4QL could get them there.
The technician configuring the Transfer Node was frowning and taking an inordinate time to adjust the settings that would send them on their way. Tlecha bit her lip. Does he suspect?
The transfer platform was within a transparent cylinder that shielded bystanders from the Node's colossal blasts of energy. The cylinder split open. Tlecha looked at the technician. He nodded and gestured for them to enter. He was sweating.
She turned to Mlikix and opened her mouth to speak, but before she could say anything, the alarms went off. Bright orange warning lights flared as klaxons pierced Tlecha's eardrums.
Mlikix pushed her towards the cylinder. "Go! And don't forget the spike!"
Tlecha stumbled into the cylinder. She withdrew the brain-spike from a hidden pocket and considered it again. It was a fail-safe. By scrambling her memories and other mental architecture, she could beat any brain-scan that tried to identify her as Tlecha. More importantly now, perhaps, it would protect the friends who had risked much to help them get this far.
Tlecha gripped the spike in her fist. It was time to use it, but she was afraid.
Eyes of the Omnicognate, floating metal spheres each with a glowing red lens set in it like the pupil of a demonic eye, began streaming into the room from recesses in the walls and ceiling. They whirled about the room, scanning everything in sight.
Mlikix struggled with the Node technician. The Eyes began firing energy bolts at them. A bolt struck the tech in the back, and he went sprawling over the Transfer Node's control panel.
A deep, thrumming vibration below Tlecha's feet began and quickly built up in pitch and intensity...
***
Date: 9th Vaen in the 402nd Year of the Founding
Syrus
Syrus waited a few minutes for the elevator to return, but it did not. He wasn't sure if the others had even seen him. He decided to search the ground floor of the factory, seeking an alternate way down.
He found himself in what appeared to be an abandoned conference room or dining hall. The room was dominated by a long, dusty table with heavy benches along the sides of it. Piles of books and loose sheets of aged leathery scrip covered much the table, and more of the same were piled haphazardly on shelves built into the wall. Tube-shaped glow-lamps, presumably electrically powered, lined the walls as well, but these were dark. The only illumination was from the skylights above, letting in the halfhearted light of the overcast day. The room had a musty, unpleasantly sweet smell. In the opposite corner of the room from Syrus was a wooden ale cask with a leather satchel sitting on top of it.
Syrus crossed to the other side. As he came around the corner of the table, he spied a skeleton curled up in the corner beside the ale cask. The skeleton was clothed in scraps of what had once been hide armour; a notched and rust-pitted short-sword lay on the floor next to it. The skeleton's neck looked as if had been bitten through or perhaps hacked through with a dull axe. Syrus reckoned the unfortunate skeleton had been moldering in here for a year at least.
Syrus stepped up to the leather satchel sitting on the ale cask. The satchel looked relatively new and dust-free. Curious, Syrus reached out to open it. He let out a yelp of surprise when it bit his hand.
***
Tlecha
"Mlikix," Tlecha whimpered. She was curled up in a ball in the corner.
A part of Tlecha remembered why she had fled from that time and place. It cried for her to remember.
Why she had demanded to keep her own self. Why she had revolted against her every move, every action, even every thought being monitored, categorized, and judged. Being pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, and numbered. Every day, every hour, every minute, every second. Why she had refused to submit to the Omnicognate. And why she had ultimately fled beyond the walls of reality itself.
"No!" she grunted through clenched teeth. That was the past. She had to stay in the present. She removed her hands from in front of her face.
Gormin was standing over her, glowering. "You need to pull yourself together," he growled. "These gazers aren't anything to be frightened of, but we are likely to run into far worse before the day is out. That's the way it is, poking around prior-world facilities. We'll need everyone to fight next time and not cower in a corner." He stalked off down a passage to the left.
Strewn about the floor were pieces of the Eyes of the Omnicognate. Gazers, Gormin had called them. Dimly, Tlecha could recall the sounds of her friends battling the Eyes through her vivid flashback.
She shuddered and picked a broken capacitor out of the scattered remains of the Eyes. She whispered to it in Low Universal, once the most widely spoken tongue in every universe, now an obscure dead language known only to those whose calling it was to delve into the ancient past. "Ah, Omnicognate. So-called All-Thing, you were not so ultimate as you portrayed yourself, were you? Time came even for you."
She wondered for a moment what had finally brought the Omnicognate and the Eighth World to an end, shrugged, and discarded the capacitor. The others were moving to follow Gormin down the passageway. Tlecha stood and turned to join them.
***
Syrus
Syrus stumbled back a step, yanking his hand away from the unexpected teeth. The "leather satchel" he'd been poking at unfolded itself into its true form. It was a drebil-- an ugly, toothy, vaguely reptilian creature that could ambush the unwary by disguising itself as a common household object.
He uncoiled his whip with his uninjured hand and gave the drebil a vicious lash. It squawked in protest and gathered itself up to make an attack.
From the corner of his eye, Syrus spied what he'd thought was a pile of moldering books and papers unfold itself into a second drebil. He gave it a lash as well.
The first drebil launched itself at Syrus, but Syrus swayed out of the way and kicked at it awkwardly.
These are not worth killing, Syrus decided. He circled round the long table, giving the creatures a way of escape and roared at the top of his lungs.
As he'd hoped, this spooked the drebils. They sprouted stubby, leathery wings from their mutable bodies and flapped their way out the passage Syrus had entered by.
Syrus looked around the room carefully for any additional creatures emerging from hiding. Nothing moved. Satisfied that he was safe for now, he attended to the bite on his hand, wrapping it up with some yellowish gauze. Hopefully it won't get infected, he thought. Drebils probably don't keep their mouths very clean.
Just then, he remembered why the name "Dezantis Silster" had seemed familiar. His dad had occasionally sold rolls of silster, that ridiculously expensive shimmering golden cloth. He and his sister had been forbidden from even touching it. Dezantis had been their only supplier of the stuff.
Suddenly curious as to what had befallen his father's former associate, Syrus flipped through some of the books and papers on the conference table.
What he found was that the factory was owned by Imon Dezantis and had once made—according to Imon—the finest silster in the whole of the Steadfast. His secret was that the silster came from the larvae of caffa wasps nurtured in decomposing human flesh. This gave the silster a supposedly higher quality. To supply this need, the family had had an arrangement with the city's criminal underworld. As with many criminal arrangements, however, the deals were subject to change without notice. A new mayor had cracked down on the illicit trade in human cadavers, the supply of bodies dried up, and the factory went out of business five years ago.
All of that was interesting information though not immediately useful. Syrus found a rawhide-bound book that turned out to be a sort of journal of meeting notes for the factory's managers. He flipped to the end. Imon Dezantis and his management team had discussed relocating the factory to somewhere more accommodating, but Imon had refused, stating that the Shrine Portal's power source was needed to power the factory's gigantic automated looms, and that this power source, located far underground below layers of prior-world ruins, could not be feasibly moved. If there were further meetings after that, they were not recorded in the journal. The phrase Shrine Portal caught Syrus' attention. Now here might be something interesting.
Unfortunately, the book had no index, but Syrus was in no hurry. He flipped the pages, scanning for further references to a shrine or a portal. He wasn't disappointed. One of the first recorded meetings had actually occurred prior to the factory being built at Auspar. An adventurer had traded Imon the location of a portal to the Shrine of the Winged God in exchange for a fringed silster cape. The portal was underground, in a long-forgotten tunnel far beneath the city of Auspar. Imon had determined that the portal's energy source could be repurposed to power vast industrial looms—he'd then pulled strings to buy a building close enough to the portal that he could tunnel his way to it.
Syrus closed the book. Evidently, Imon Dezantis' business plan had worked for a while before it all unraveled. That meant that the portal to the Shrine of the Winged God wasn't just a tall tale some adventurer had made up to scam Imon out of a silster cape—it was real, and it was nearby. Finally they had a lead on it after all these months. He had to find a way to get back to his friends. He put the meeting journal in his backpack and left the conference room.
***
Tlecha
A heavy vault door barred the group's way. It looked too sturdy to break down, but Jilly had pointed out that the wall around it was weak. It should be possible to chip enough of the wall away to get at the vault door's hinges and remove the door altogether. Tlecha volunteered to help with this, hoping to make up for her earlier lapse.
The others were discussing the tunneling creatures from the vision of the future.
"If someone is breeding those things down here," asked Jilly, "do you think we can stop them now? They killed us before."
Gormin sniffed, "Well, I mean to. No one kills Gormin and gets away with it if old Gormin has something to say about it!" He chuckled at his own gallows humor. Gormin was holding a glowglobe, currently their only source of light.
Tlecha said nothing, focused on helping Jilly open the door.
It was hard work, but after half an hour or so they managed to get the door off its hinges. The room beyond was long, narrow and low-ceilinged. The illumination from Gormin's glowglobe did not reach to the far end. Tlecha had expected the room to be vault-like because of the vault door, but instead it was more like a natural cave.
Natural, that is, except for the series of strongglass domes set in the floor. The domes were faintly lit from within.
The group moved to investigate. Gormin held his glowglobe close to the nearest dome to help get a better look.
The insides of the domes were smeared with some kind of organic green substance, possibly a kind of algae or mold. Through the gaps in the algae could be dimly glimpsed a writhing grey mass. It wasn't clear where the light was coming from. Possibly bioluminescence from some creature trapped in there, Tlecha mused. She shuddered.
A sound like frying strips of meat startled everyone.
"That sound," said Tempus. "From the vision."
The sound seemed to be coming from above them. There was a low thump, and dust rained from the ceiling.
Gormin handed the glowglobe to Tempus and drew his sword and shield, but after a few moments, the sound died away.
YimouZha peered at the ceiling with his enormous eye. "If the creatures are above us, perhaps we are safe down here? What do you think, friend Tempus?"
Before Tempus could answer, the sound returned, louder than before. Another muffled thump, and the ceiling partially collapsed. A heavy chunk of rock smashed a dome on the far side of the room. From the breach poured the stench of festering decay, the unmistakable odour of rotting human flesh—and the writhing grey mass was pouring forth as well.
"Light," said YimouZha. "Scatter the darkness." He cast a ball of golden light over the grey mass, illuminating it.
The mass was countless grey, finger-length larvae, with huge sucking maws.
"Caffa larvae," said Gormin. But Tlecha barely heard. The stench of death had awakened another memory from the darkest recesses of Thecla's forgotten past. The Plague Prisons.
No, not forgotten. Deliberately vanished. Beaten down. Crushed into the past. Erased by the brain-spike's neurophage enzymes which had guaranteed the destruction of protein matrix memories. Or so she thought. So she thought.
Thecla clutched her hands to her head. "No! I've got to keep it together!"
Her hands shook. What have I done? She remembered. Oh, how in her fearless youth, she had resolutely, sometimes violently, defended the honor of her work for the Omnicognate. Of course, if one would curry the favor of the All-Thing, one must do its bidding, no matter how distasteful that might be.
Tlecha sat on the ground. On some level she knew Gormin would be angry at her loss of control, but there was nothing for that now. Her thoughts came in a rush of pieces.
How had Tlecha learned to escape the all encompassing clutches of the All-Thing? By her years of being a guardian of the Thought-Pits. The Plague of the Mind.
Those who displeased the Omnicognate were sometimes deliberately infected with the Mind Plague and dropped into the Pit, to live out the remainder of their lives in a permanent, inescapable nightmare. The Plague was distilled from some psychedelic algae from another world.
The Thought Pit. The Plague Prisons. It was all coming back now. The darkness and total aloneness, and smell. Oh, the smell. The smell of the prisoners who'd died in their nightmares and simply been left to fester. It was this smell that triggered the memory.
Being sentenced to the Thought Pit was literally the worst thing imaginable. Prisoners served every moment of their brief sentence, both waking and sleeping, facing that which terrified them most. She'd known friends of hers who would beg to be sent to the slave worlds rather than be sent to the Thought-Pit once they had earned the ire of the Omnicognate.
She shook her head again and again and again. "I'm going insane!"
Oh, how she'd laughed! And you didn't have to do anything to be a guard of the Thought-Pit! Just plug in and concentrate! If a prisoner tried to escape from the Isolation, she'd just push them down again, down into the screaming darkness, just using the power of her own ultraterrestrial mind. And if a prisoner proved too strong, she'd just unplug and call the attendant for another injection of Mind Plague into the prisoner. Easy work, if you don't mind being a soulless monster.
And the Plague had also been the way out when things became too much. The Mind Plague could be genetically altered to erase memories. That's what Mlikix had said, at least. But it would seem that memories are more robust than she and Mlikix had thought.
"I have to stop! This has to stop! I must forget again!"
Tlecha rocked back and forth on the floor, hugging herself, wrapped up in the horror of her past.
To be continued...
***
Previously in "Tears of the Gods"
The small room—what had the servitor called it? The elevator?—bore Gormin and his new "friends" away from the maze of pipes and the raging bellowheart, back to the Arechive and presumed safety.
YimouZha narrated their adventures to Lady Isla: the arena, the chronal feeders, the sudden appearance of Tempus, the Krai. Isla hung on his every word, gasping at the dangers they'd faced and beaming and clapping at their triumphs.
Off in the distance, a large, wriggling globe rolled off the edge of the Hub platform. Gormin squinted at it. It was a ball of captured people, just as Frater Neymich had described.
The rest of the group was up and fighting by now, but the huge purple wasps were harrying them, keeping them away from the tunneler that continued to slam itself against one of the building's spine-like pillars, which crunched worryingly in response to the abuse.
Tempus wrapped a cloth around the cut on his hand. With a hint of sadness, he noted that not all of his companions had been in the future that he'd seen, and some of those he'd seen in the future were not present in the present—Syrus and Kiraz both seemed to be missing. His eyes came to rest finally on Tlecha, the white-haired ultraterrestrial being who'd been pressed into service by Eighth Worlders and escaped by traveling countless millions of years into her future.
A varjellen approached, trying to get him to pay shins to fight a jiraskar supposedly contained in his tent. Tempus ignored him.
***
Date: 9th Vaen in the 402nd Year of the Founding
Tlecha
The temperature in the atrium was dropping noticeably. The huge hole in the glass ceiling Tempus had made was rapidly letting out the building's stored-up greenhouse warmth.
Tlecha sighed and sniffed a vividly red-and-pink summer flower. All these will likely be dead in a matter of hours, she mused.
She shook her head to clear it and continued searching for... what, exactly? Gormin and Tempus' reasons for breaking into the closed silster factory were vague at best. She explored the rows of exotic flowers and plants, drifting away from the rest of the group.
She could hear Gormin and Tempus speculating as to the purpose of the flowers a couple of rows over. "The flowers are very colorful," Gormin was saying. "Perhaps fabric dye is made from them for the silster, in case someone wants, say, a chequered red and gold silster garment. I've never owned a piece of silster, and have no idea how well it takes dye. More likely the flowers are for some illegal purpose unrelated to the silster, since the factory is closed for silster-production but these flowers are still being taken care of. Or they were, until 'someone' opened the greenhouse roof to the winter sky." She heard Gormin chuckling at his own odd humour.
Voloidion made a discovery and called the rest of the group over. It was a sliding metal mesh gate at the far end of the atrium. Through the slats in the gate could be seen a smallish square cubicle with a metal pull handle on the far wall.
Jilly came up next to them, bearing a pouch of pollen extracted from the atrium's flowers. "I think I’ve seen something like this before. I think it’s a lift box, for traveling vertical-like." She slid open the gate.
Gormin nodded. "Aye, the misnamed Order of Truth had one like this in their cursed Arechive. They called it an elevator." He stepped into the box. "Let's see where it goes. I am starting to suspect that the circus outside is just a cover to loot this 'closed' factory. Which, given that flowers don't normally bloom in mid-winter without human intervention, is evidently not as closed as it is made to appear. It's not really our business, but it is interesting enough to take a look."
"Yeah," said Jilly. "Personally, I want to know what kind of activity the Pieriant is masking at this facility." She entered the elevator and raised an eyebrow at Tlecha. "Coming down with me?"
Tlecha bowed her head. "I shall accompany you," she answered.
***
Syrus
"A good effort," said the purple-skinned varjellen carnie. "You scored well, but not the main prize. Here, accept this medallion as a memento." The varjellen handed Syrus a gold-tinted strongglass medallion on a rawhide lanyard. On the glass medal was inscribed I fought a jiraskar and lived.
Syrus, feeling a little disappointed, took the medal and put it around his neck. Fighting the simulated jiraskar had brought him back to his youth and some of the fun times he'd had in a simulator owned by a family friend back home.
He hopped down from the wagon that bore the "jiraskar" tent with its varjellen barker and looked around for his friends. After a few moments, he caught a glimpse of YimouZha disappearing down an alley beside an abandoned factory of some kind. He followed.
Guards were halfheartedly watching the factory's main entrance, but Syrus managed to slip into the side alley without being noticed. The alley was a dead-end except for a side door into the factory, standing open. The door had nails through it as if it had been nailed shut and subsequently pried back open. YimouZha must've gone this way, he thought. With a quick backward glance, he entered the factory and quietly pulled the door to.
He found himself in what appeared to be a reception room or office. A chalkboard on the wall read "Welcome to Dezantis Silster!" Syrus frowned. Why does Dezantis Silster sound familiar? A desk and several padded chairs were arrayed around the room, under a thick layer of dust. One of the chairs was overturned. On the desk were several scraps of advertising scrip with prices and services offered for bespoke tailoring of silster, either as complete garments or trim for armor and such. Curious, Syrus flipped through the pile of leathery scrip. The most recent advertisement bearing a date was dated 397 YF, about five years old. A door-less passage lead out east, wood-paneled and hung with pictures. There was also a closed, pentagon-shaped door to the west.
Syrus guessed that YimouZha had gone down the passage. As he passed, he glanced at the pictures on the wall; they appeared to be drawings and paintings of people wearing golden silster garments of various styles.
At the other end of the passage was a spacious atrium packed with row upon row of brightly colored flowers, grown high enough to obscure his view of the other side of the room. A breath of cold air made him shiver. He looked up. Someone had knocked a ragged hole in the atrium's glass ceiling. Since the flowers did not yet appear to be dead, it must have been recent. Syrus made his way between two rows of flowers, taking care to avoid stepping on the fragments of broken glass.
He heard a female voice ahead and off to the left. Tlecha? He wasn't sure. He advanced cautiously. Just before he rounded the corner at the end of the row, he heard some kind of machinery crank into action. He peered out cautiously from behind the flowers. Beyond a mesh gate, he glimpsed the group packed into an elevator, descending quickly out of sight.
"W- wait!" he called. But it was too late; he had just missed them.
***
Tlecha
The elevator banged to a halt at the bottom of the shaft. Tlecha tried raising the lever that controlled the elevator to go back for Syrus, but it was no use. The elevator was stuck.
"Probably power," Jilly speculated aloud. "Going up takes more power than going down. The installation's power reserves are probably low."
Gormin grunted. "Well, no use staying here." He slid aside the elevator's gate and drew his sword.
Narrow beams of flickering purple light crisscrossed the octagonal room beyond. There were five waist-high domes set in the floor. Gormin stepped forward, allowing the light to play over him.
"Ah," said Jilly, too late. "Those might be..."
Two of the domes split open and retracted into the floor. Floating metal spheres, each with a single reddish electric eye, began surging from the open domes.
"...security beams."
Tlecha began to sweat as the spheres scanned the group with their baleful red eyes. An unpleasant memory was making itself felt just beyond the edge of her awareness. She frowned. Have I seen these things before?
She realized with horror she had. "No," she breathed. She sank to her knees, shaking. "But how? How? No one knew! No one..."
***
Date: IX ides of Tludusp in the 11,074,608th Year Prior to the Founding
Tlecha considered the device. The brain-spike.
Mlikix sighed. "Are you having second thoughts? Once we break in, we're committed. There'll be no going back."
Tlecha set her jaw and shook her head, saying nothing. The two of them exited the hovercar. It was a nice day in the capital. Indeed, every day in the capital was as equally nice as any other.
The operation went smoothly, at first. It was obvious to most that Tlecha and Mlikix, though generally very human-like, had an ineffable otherness about them that marked them as ultraterrestrials, beings from another dimension. Few humans were bold enough to challenge an ultra, to ask them what are you doing here? Of course, Tlecha and Mlikix had identicards, but these were forgeries, and their claimed authorization from the Omnicognate would not have passed a routine double-check.
Nonetheless, they were waved through checkpoint after checkpoint on the way to Dimensional Transfer Node 4QL. No one ordered the pair to be brain-scanned. No one was willing to risk being seen as second-guessing the Omnicognate.
The Dimensional Transfer Nodes were one of the key technologies that allowed the Eightfold Worldline Omni-unity to sprawl like a cancer from universe to universe, piercing the veil of any reality, para-reality, or spacetime-line. But there were said to be at least a few dimensions that still held out against the Omnicognate's tyranny.
It was to one of these that Tlecha and Mlikix wished to go, to the fabled free galaxies of Ghenivupt. Dimensional Transfer Node 4QL could get them there.
The technician configuring the Transfer Node was frowning and taking an inordinate time to adjust the settings that would send them on their way. Tlecha bit her lip. Does he suspect?
The transfer platform was within a transparent cylinder that shielded bystanders from the Node's colossal blasts of energy. The cylinder split open. Tlecha looked at the technician. He nodded and gestured for them to enter. He was sweating.
She turned to Mlikix and opened her mouth to speak, but before she could say anything, the alarms went off. Bright orange warning lights flared as klaxons pierced Tlecha's eardrums.
Mlikix pushed her towards the cylinder. "Go! And don't forget the spike!"
Tlecha stumbled into the cylinder. She withdrew the brain-spike from a hidden pocket and considered it again. It was a fail-safe. By scrambling her memories and other mental architecture, she could beat any brain-scan that tried to identify her as Tlecha. More importantly now, perhaps, it would protect the friends who had risked much to help them get this far.
Tlecha gripped the spike in her fist. It was time to use it, but she was afraid.
Eyes of the Omnicognate, floating metal spheres each with a glowing red lens set in it like the pupil of a demonic eye, began streaming into the room from recesses in the walls and ceiling. They whirled about the room, scanning everything in sight.
Mlikix struggled with the Node technician. The Eyes began firing energy bolts at them. A bolt struck the tech in the back, and he went sprawling over the Transfer Node's control panel.
A deep, thrumming vibration below Tlecha's feet began and quickly built up in pitch and intensity...
***
Date: 9th Vaen in the 402nd Year of the Founding
Syrus
Syrus waited a few minutes for the elevator to return, but it did not. He wasn't sure if the others had even seen him. He decided to search the ground floor of the factory, seeking an alternate way down.
He found himself in what appeared to be an abandoned conference room or dining hall. The room was dominated by a long, dusty table with heavy benches along the sides of it. Piles of books and loose sheets of aged leathery scrip covered much the table, and more of the same were piled haphazardly on shelves built into the wall. Tube-shaped glow-lamps, presumably electrically powered, lined the walls as well, but these were dark. The only illumination was from the skylights above, letting in the halfhearted light of the overcast day. The room had a musty, unpleasantly sweet smell. In the opposite corner of the room from Syrus was a wooden ale cask with a leather satchel sitting on top of it.
Syrus crossed to the other side. As he came around the corner of the table, he spied a skeleton curled up in the corner beside the ale cask. The skeleton was clothed in scraps of what had once been hide armour; a notched and rust-pitted short-sword lay on the floor next to it. The skeleton's neck looked as if had been bitten through or perhaps hacked through with a dull axe. Syrus reckoned the unfortunate skeleton had been moldering in here for a year at least.
Syrus stepped up to the leather satchel sitting on the ale cask. The satchel looked relatively new and dust-free. Curious, Syrus reached out to open it. He let out a yelp of surprise when it bit his hand.
***
Tlecha
"Mlikix," Tlecha whimpered. She was curled up in a ball in the corner.
A part of Tlecha remembered why she had fled from that time and place. It cried for her to remember.
Why she had demanded to keep her own self. Why she had revolted against her every move, every action, even every thought being monitored, categorized, and judged. Being pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, and numbered. Every day, every hour, every minute, every second. Why she had refused to submit to the Omnicognate. And why she had ultimately fled beyond the walls of reality itself.
"No!" she grunted through clenched teeth. That was the past. She had to stay in the present. She removed her hands from in front of her face.
Gormin was standing over her, glowering. "You need to pull yourself together," he growled. "These gazers aren't anything to be frightened of, but we are likely to run into far worse before the day is out. That's the way it is, poking around prior-world facilities. We'll need everyone to fight next time and not cower in a corner." He stalked off down a passage to the left.
Strewn about the floor were pieces of the Eyes of the Omnicognate. Gazers, Gormin had called them. Dimly, Tlecha could recall the sounds of her friends battling the Eyes through her vivid flashback.
She shuddered and picked a broken capacitor out of the scattered remains of the Eyes. She whispered to it in Low Universal, once the most widely spoken tongue in every universe, now an obscure dead language known only to those whose calling it was to delve into the ancient past. "Ah, Omnicognate. So-called All-Thing, you were not so ultimate as you portrayed yourself, were you? Time came even for you."
She wondered for a moment what had finally brought the Omnicognate and the Eighth World to an end, shrugged, and discarded the capacitor. The others were moving to follow Gormin down the passageway. Tlecha stood and turned to join them.
***
Syrus
Syrus stumbled back a step, yanking his hand away from the unexpected teeth. The "leather satchel" he'd been poking at unfolded itself into its true form. It was a drebil-- an ugly, toothy, vaguely reptilian creature that could ambush the unwary by disguising itself as a common household object.
He uncoiled his whip with his uninjured hand and gave the drebil a vicious lash. It squawked in protest and gathered itself up to make an attack.
From the corner of his eye, Syrus spied what he'd thought was a pile of moldering books and papers unfold itself into a second drebil. He gave it a lash as well.
The first drebil launched itself at Syrus, but Syrus swayed out of the way and kicked at it awkwardly.
These are not worth killing, Syrus decided. He circled round the long table, giving the creatures a way of escape and roared at the top of his lungs.
As he'd hoped, this spooked the drebils. They sprouted stubby, leathery wings from their mutable bodies and flapped their way out the passage Syrus had entered by.
Syrus looked around the room carefully for any additional creatures emerging from hiding. Nothing moved. Satisfied that he was safe for now, he attended to the bite on his hand, wrapping it up with some yellowish gauze. Hopefully it won't get infected, he thought. Drebils probably don't keep their mouths very clean.
Just then, he remembered why the name "Dezantis Silster" had seemed familiar. His dad had occasionally sold rolls of silster, that ridiculously expensive shimmering golden cloth. He and his sister had been forbidden from even touching it. Dezantis had been their only supplier of the stuff.
Suddenly curious as to what had befallen his father's former associate, Syrus flipped through some of the books and papers on the conference table.
What he found was that the factory was owned by Imon Dezantis and had once made—according to Imon—the finest silster in the whole of the Steadfast. His secret was that the silster came from the larvae of caffa wasps nurtured in decomposing human flesh. This gave the silster a supposedly higher quality. To supply this need, the family had had an arrangement with the city's criminal underworld. As with many criminal arrangements, however, the deals were subject to change without notice. A new mayor had cracked down on the illicit trade in human cadavers, the supply of bodies dried up, and the factory went out of business five years ago.
All of that was interesting information though not immediately useful. Syrus found a rawhide-bound book that turned out to be a sort of journal of meeting notes for the factory's managers. He flipped to the end. Imon Dezantis and his management team had discussed relocating the factory to somewhere more accommodating, but Imon had refused, stating that the Shrine Portal's power source was needed to power the factory's gigantic automated looms, and that this power source, located far underground below layers of prior-world ruins, could not be feasibly moved. If there were further meetings after that, they were not recorded in the journal. The phrase Shrine Portal caught Syrus' attention. Now here might be something interesting.
Unfortunately, the book had no index, but Syrus was in no hurry. He flipped the pages, scanning for further references to a shrine or a portal. He wasn't disappointed. One of the first recorded meetings had actually occurred prior to the factory being built at Auspar. An adventurer had traded Imon the location of a portal to the Shrine of the Winged God in exchange for a fringed silster cape. The portal was underground, in a long-forgotten tunnel far beneath the city of Auspar. Imon had determined that the portal's energy source could be repurposed to power vast industrial looms—he'd then pulled strings to buy a building close enough to the portal that he could tunnel his way to it.
Syrus closed the book. Evidently, Imon Dezantis' business plan had worked for a while before it all unraveled. That meant that the portal to the Shrine of the Winged God wasn't just a tall tale some adventurer had made up to scam Imon out of a silster cape—it was real, and it was nearby. Finally they had a lead on it after all these months. He had to find a way to get back to his friends. He put the meeting journal in his backpack and left the conference room.
***
Tlecha
A heavy vault door barred the group's way. It looked too sturdy to break down, but Jilly had pointed out that the wall around it was weak. It should be possible to chip enough of the wall away to get at the vault door's hinges and remove the door altogether. Tlecha volunteered to help with this, hoping to make up for her earlier lapse.
The others were discussing the tunneling creatures from the vision of the future.
"If someone is breeding those things down here," asked Jilly, "do you think we can stop them now? They killed us before."
Gormin sniffed, "Well, I mean to. No one kills Gormin and gets away with it if old Gormin has something to say about it!" He chuckled at his own gallows humor. Gormin was holding a glowglobe, currently their only source of light.
Tlecha said nothing, focused on helping Jilly open the door.
It was hard work, but after half an hour or so they managed to get the door off its hinges. The room beyond was long, narrow and low-ceilinged. The illumination from Gormin's glowglobe did not reach to the far end. Tlecha had expected the room to be vault-like because of the vault door, but instead it was more like a natural cave.
Natural, that is, except for the series of strongglass domes set in the floor. The domes were faintly lit from within.
The group moved to investigate. Gormin held his glowglobe close to the nearest dome to help get a better look.
The insides of the domes were smeared with some kind of organic green substance, possibly a kind of algae or mold. Through the gaps in the algae could be dimly glimpsed a writhing grey mass. It wasn't clear where the light was coming from. Possibly bioluminescence from some creature trapped in there, Tlecha mused. She shuddered.
A sound like frying strips of meat startled everyone.
"That sound," said Tempus. "From the vision."
The sound seemed to be coming from above them. There was a low thump, and dust rained from the ceiling.
Gormin handed the glowglobe to Tempus and drew his sword and shield, but after a few moments, the sound died away.
YimouZha peered at the ceiling with his enormous eye. "If the creatures are above us, perhaps we are safe down here? What do you think, friend Tempus?"
Before Tempus could answer, the sound returned, louder than before. Another muffled thump, and the ceiling partially collapsed. A heavy chunk of rock smashed a dome on the far side of the room. From the breach poured the stench of festering decay, the unmistakable odour of rotting human flesh—and the writhing grey mass was pouring forth as well.
"Light," said YimouZha. "Scatter the darkness." He cast a ball of golden light over the grey mass, illuminating it.
The mass was countless grey, finger-length larvae, with huge sucking maws.
"Caffa larvae," said Gormin. But Tlecha barely heard. The stench of death had awakened another memory from the darkest recesses of Thecla's forgotten past. The Plague Prisons.
No, not forgotten. Deliberately vanished. Beaten down. Crushed into the past. Erased by the brain-spike's neurophage enzymes which had guaranteed the destruction of protein matrix memories. Or so she thought. So she thought.
Thecla clutched her hands to her head. "No! I've got to keep it together!"
Her hands shook. What have I done? She remembered. Oh, how in her fearless youth, she had resolutely, sometimes violently, defended the honor of her work for the Omnicognate. Of course, if one would curry the favor of the All-Thing, one must do its bidding, no matter how distasteful that might be.
Tlecha sat on the ground. On some level she knew Gormin would be angry at her loss of control, but there was nothing for that now. Her thoughts came in a rush of pieces.
How had Tlecha learned to escape the all encompassing clutches of the All-Thing? By her years of being a guardian of the Thought-Pits. The Plague of the Mind.
Those who displeased the Omnicognate were sometimes deliberately infected with the Mind Plague and dropped into the Pit, to live out the remainder of their lives in a permanent, inescapable nightmare. The Plague was distilled from some psychedelic algae from another world.
The Thought Pit. The Plague Prisons. It was all coming back now. The darkness and total aloneness, and smell. Oh, the smell. The smell of the prisoners who'd died in their nightmares and simply been left to fester. It was this smell that triggered the memory.
Being sentenced to the Thought Pit was literally the worst thing imaginable. Prisoners served every moment of their brief sentence, both waking and sleeping, facing that which terrified them most. She'd known friends of hers who would beg to be sent to the slave worlds rather than be sent to the Thought-Pit once they had earned the ire of the Omnicognate.
She shook her head again and again and again. "I'm going insane!"
Oh, how she'd laughed! And you didn't have to do anything to be a guard of the Thought-Pit! Just plug in and concentrate! If a prisoner tried to escape from the Isolation, she'd just push them down again, down into the screaming darkness, just using the power of her own ultraterrestrial mind. And if a prisoner proved too strong, she'd just unplug and call the attendant for another injection of Mind Plague into the prisoner. Easy work, if you don't mind being a soulless monster.
And the Plague had also been the way out when things became too much. The Mind Plague could be genetically altered to erase memories. That's what Mlikix had said, at least. But it would seem that memories are more robust than she and Mlikix had thought.
"I have to stop! This has to stop! I must forget again!"
Tlecha rocked back and forth on the floor, hugging herself, wrapped up in the horror of her past.
To be continued...
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