Mekanax
Prelude: Men of Letters
(Drawn from the collected letters of Henry Dobbins, Head of the London Traveller Publishing Company, author of Publishing Guaranteed Hits, Managing Authors, and Other Functional Impossibilities)
To Mr. Victor Carlyle, Our Esteemed Contributor:
It is with the utmost apologies that we write to you today. We have reviewed your newest manuscript, A Guide to Irish Coastal Fauna, with great interest. The descriptive exactitude of your text is as prevalent as ever, such that Miss Connolly (my wonderfully patient and forgiving secretary) even commented on its revival of memories from her parents' home on the northern shores, and it seems your wit has only been sharpened by your years spent here at home in the Isles. It is truly a definitive work on the subject of Irish seafowl, and yet contains fragments which might also interest those with absolutely no interest in that truthfully limited subject.
Unfortunately, the meeting between myself and the other board members has concluded that we cannot publish your work at this time. There are many reasons for this which have been put forward in the aforementioned discussion, but the one I wish to make clear is that this publishing house is simply not in the business of selling scientific journals. We have had this discussion before, Mr. Carlyle, and so I am certain you are aware of this. While I am acutely aware of the history behind this work, and the modest success of your prior Guide before coming to our firm, I needn't remind you that our bread and butter in this industry is hardly built on the albatross. We publish travel stories, Mr. Carlyle - tales of adventure for those individuals living next to the seafowl to read, so that they may dream of adventure themselves. Our publishing house thus does not traffic in the mundane, which I believe even you yourself can admit that this manuscript falls firmly into the realm of.
I would urge you to remember, should you wish to see print once more, that you established yourself with our business through just such an adventure tale. The reading public has no interest in the morphology of things they can see outside their bedroom window. They wish to read of individuals doing things they will likely never do themselves, things which you yourself have indeed done in the past. I know of your oft-stated opinion regarding your first work from our presses, but Mr. Carlyle - it sold. It sold well enough that we have chosen to overlook your subsequent adventures in garden maintainance, Scottish highland flora, and this recent submission. Despite the complaints of our accountant Mr. Ulrich. For your own sake, you should feel glad we did not aquiesce to his request to allow him to author this reply.
If you wish to continue receiving a writer's stipend from our house, however, you will need to follow up on your prior success by actually writing something we can publish. I understand and sympathize with your desire to spend some time at home following the troubles of the ill-fated Oriental expedition, the account of which has become one of our best works, but after five years our patience is truthfully wearing rather thin. We must insist that you at least attempt to produce another manuscript of that form and quality, detailing some interesting adventure you have had, lest we cease all contact with you. An adventure in a foreign land, Mr. Carlyle, is what we and our readership pay to receive.
Our relationship with you, nonetheless, is of significant value to us; we do wish to maintain it, so long as we get the return from it which we desire. I thus wish to offer a concilliatory gift to you, both as recompense for the unpleasantries contained in this letter and as a starting push in the direction we wish to guide you towards regarding your next writing venture. A certain Lord Percival Breckenridge, having recently come into the title after a lengthy stint in The Queen's Armed Forces, has decided to lead an expedition to the Asian Subcontinent for the purpose of more thoroughly exploring Her Royal Highness's new lands following their acquisition from the disastrous bungling of the East India Company. He has significant experience with both the land and its myriad peoples, yet is looking for individuals here with scientific experience who might be interested in doing a significant survey of the land.
We have taken the liberty of contacting Lord Breckenridge on your behalf, and have contributed to his expeditionary funding with the understanding that this will be a safe and yet exciting journey about which you should be able to write at length. You will be surrounded by individuals with strict military training and experience in the region, so there should be no need to worry about any potential disasters along the lines of the Pacific Rim venture this time. Instead there will be travel, experience with interesting cultures and unusual events, and other assorted items that should inder your practiced hand have the London coffee houses buzzing with excitement.
This is a significant investment, mind you, Mr. Carlyle. We are expecting a return. Your ship will be sailing in a month - I expect you should be able to bring any remaining affairs to their completion by that point, and if not I will personally handle them for you. You will be boarding that vessel if I must escort you aboard myself.
We hope to hear exciting news from the Subcontinent. We indeed presume to receive very exciting manuscript material from the Subcontinent, proceeding from the first moment you step foot upon it. Your place here depends upon such an event, Mr. Carlyle, so I do hope you take this into account before sending us any more descriptions of waterfowl.
Yours as Ever,
Henry Dobbins
London Traveller Publishing
(Drawn from the collected letters of Lord Percival Breckenridge, Former Captain in Her Royal Majesty's Armed Forces, and "Venturer into Lands Upon Which Others Dare Tread")
To Henry Dobbins, or Whom it May Concern RE: London Traveller Expedition
This letter denotes our third day in Ceylon, our fifth month in Asia for this expedition, the beginning of April, and the end of my patience with Mr. Victor Carlyle. Herding this craven little milksop around the world is, frankly, not worth even the significant sum you have paid me to put up with his presence here. It is only the knowledge that we truly cannot finish our worthy work here without your funding that is preventing me from shoving him bodily onto the first steamer to Europe.
At this point I would not care if it went to London or St. Petersburg, so long as I was rid of him. You had to have known, sir, what you were getting me into when you made this charade of a scientific role part of our contract. If not then, the prior weeks of communication should have made it clear to you that Mr. Carlyle is unfit for even the simple task of following us around and taking notes. Yet you still do not heed my request to allow me to send him home before he gets someone killed. Someone who may not even be his own self. I am thus forced to renumerate my grievances once more, in the hope that this time you will understand and respond to the troubles I have had regarding his conduct on this expedition.
From the first moment I met your "adventurous explorer as capable of making discoveries as cataloguing them" I have been impressed by how little either his supposedly-autobiographical work or your description of him fits his actual demeanor. The man is a gaunt, weedy little insect of a human being whose actual physical ability is so dire in its absence that I suspect I could push him over with a single extended fingertip. Where even the local native youths we have hired as guides can manage handily to hack through the underbrush should it be necessary, Mr. Carlyle seems to consider it a good day if he can uproot a weed from under his tent (he refuses to use the machete we provided him, citing the "barbarity" of such a device - this despite his written claims to having decapitated a man with one).
Compounding his lack of physical ability for such expected tasks as climbing and making camp is his absolute lack of anything remotely resembling a spine. Your "intrepid man of word and deed" would have been bad enough if he was simply a cowardly sniveling worm, but no - he's active in his cowardice. His level of fearful incompetence is self-fulfilling, specifically leading to the problems that inevitably produce that mind-scarring high-pitched scream of his, like the previously-related incident in which he was so scared of "vicious creatures" getting into the camp that he slept with his rations in his tent and forced us to put down a beautiful representative of the big cats simply to save him from his own foolishness.
Yet it would all be okay if it weren't for the man's ego. For someone so incapable of performing even adequately under these less than challenging circumstances, there is hardly a man so vocal about what skills he does posess as Mr. Victor Carlyle. While I will admit that he does have the skills required to perform admirably in his invented position as a record-keeper and documenter of interesting findings, it is simply astonishing how over-inflated this ability's importance becomes in the strange world of his mind. He simply refuses to understand that he is not the most important member of this expedition - a belief I am relatively certain you are at least partially responsible for fostering in him. Needless to say, he is not. This venture's success is in no way dependent upon his presence; indeed, I believe it is safe to say he is far more of a hinderance than a boon.
My only consolation in this matter is that there is absolutely no way on God's green earth that this "adventurer" of yours is going to give you your desired return. As we are now back at a coastal base camp, I have suggested to him that it might perhaps be time to send an update of his collected notes and "experiences" your way. I do this with the distinct foreknowledge that Mr. Carlyle has spent the entirety of the last several months staring at rocks, birds, and insects all day every day. He proclaims himself a naturalist, and he does seem to do an adequate job along that avenue - I have seen his sketches - but there is nothing in a rock that can possibly lead to adventure. It is my fond hope that, seeing what the man has done thus far with your investment, you will take my advice and bring him home before he wastes any more of our time or your own.
We have valid work to be doing out here, surveying the people of this land for the Queen to help understand the last rebellion and prevent another uprising within the Subcontinent. The amount of time we spend babysitting your golden boy is severely hindering us in accomplishing that purpose. Please, for the sake of Queen and Country, take Victor Carlyle home. Let us get on with our actual duties. He is not going to produce an adventure for you. He is not an adventurer. He is a cowardly, irritating, burdensome stick of a man.
I am at your mercy. Relieve us of this weight on all our shoulders.
-Lord Percival Breckenridge
Chapter One: Detours
"Hm. Yet another outlander." "They are becoming far too common." "Is it... alive?" Victor awoke with a start, voices ricocheting around within his pounding head. He opened his eyes, and small fuzzy sparkles swam laps around the field of black that comprised his vision. His first concern was that his glasses were missing. His second concern was that he seemed to be completely blind. Brief flashes of color danced in his eyes, but he couldn't see anything - not even the people who were apparently hovering around him, their measured voices discussing his condition with almost clinical impassivity. Had he been unconscious long? Was he back at camp? Had those missionaries found him? He couldn't recognize the speakers.
"It is awake." Another antiseptic tone rebounded in his skull, leaving him wincing. The headache, at least, made sense. "It simply does not respond." The sparkles danced in his vision as he rolled over with a groan and groped around for something to cover his ears. Why must they talk so loud?! Patient with a head injury here... These physicians had the worst bedside manner imaginable.
"Another boring one. It does not converse." A chorus of disappointed harumphing enveloped Victor's thoughts as his hand closed on wet, cold stone. This was cause for concern. He was confused, sore, possibly going mad, isolated from anyone he truly knew, and surrounded by people who he was presently failing to entertain. It was like visiting his publisher. Well, if his publisher lived in a dank hole in the Asian subcontinent. The dank hole was a possibility, but he was relatively sure it would still be in London. Mr. Dobbins wasn't fond of travel.
"I'm not an it." Victor found his voice, scratchy though it may have been, and thrust it unwillingly back into service as he sat up. "I have a name, and I should be addressed with it. It's Victor. Where am I?"
"Victor Where-am-I. Strange name." Another voice broke in, "Though not one of the strangest. And be quiet. They can hear you." All he could do in response was groan, rubbing his temples between two fingertips. Muttered agreement surrounded him once more, pounding in his head, and he was about to ask them to take their own advice when he realized - they were. All he could hear was the soft wheeze of his breath, some distant plinks of dripping water, and devouring silence. His voice had echoed. The others... the others didn't. It was at this point Victor decided he had gone mad. Might as well play along, he thought to himself. It was far more convenient than trying to explain his immediate circumstances any other way.
'Right,' he thought, silently mouthing words. 'Okay, voices in my head, my name is Victor Carlyle. I was asking where I am, though now that seems like a silly question. I don't know, so I don't see why you would.' Sparkles filled his vision again, and dry chuckling poured into his head.
"It is indeed making a poor inquiry. We know exactly where it is. It is here. With us." A long sigh summoned more shushing, and Victor pressed his aching head into his hands. Weren't head injuries supposed to make the world more fun? He was expecting shiny velvet bunnies in rainbow shades, or tea with the Queen and a couple Galapagos tortoises in regal garb. Darkness and sarcasm was just irritating. Though, he supposed, at least it was in pattern. It would make sense for his hallucinations to make fun of him. Most everyone else did.
'And I don't suppose you know why I'm here?' Silence. Hah, I've stumped them. It was a small accomplishment, but it still cheered him greatly; Victor didn't like having disembodied voices in his head that were cleverer than he was. He ran his hands tentatively over his body in a search for obvious injuries. Well, other obvious injuries. It didn't hurt to breathe or stretch... no broken bones apparently. His joints seemed to be fine as well. No inexplicably-missing bits either. A concussion was it, then. His pack must have lessened the impact. His pack! Slinging it off his shoulders, he rummaged by feel through the rugged canvas bag while silently praying for a lack of broken glass. Everything seemed to be intact, amazingly enough - for once, something had gone his way. Smiling to himself, he pulled a small metal cylinder from his collected belongings. 'Well, I'll tell you why I'm here. I was touring the stupas of pre-Colonial Ceylon, and my expedition guide neglected to inform me of a weakness in the floor. I was obviously knocked unconscious by the fall, and am in some underground antechamber of the funeral complex. I always suspected there was some connection between the temple-caverns of this area and the burial mounds scattered across the island, and as soon as my compatriots find me I'll be able to show up those ingrates at the Royal Society for all their condescension!' A grin spread across his face as he found his flint and struck a spark. 'All I need is to get some attention.' A tiny flame sprung onto the well-oiled wick of the brass lantern in his hands, lapping hungrily at the fuel as it grew strong enough to light the area.
It was, as he expected, a cavern - though not like any cavern he had ever seen. Swirled carvings were etched into every visible surface: deep spirals in stone that meshed and interwove into each other, producing an altogether dizzying effect that forced Victor's eyes downward to the rough, pebble-coated floor. He found himself in the middle of a ring of stones, arrayed in ascending dimension from a tiny fist-sized sphere on one side to an immense hulking boulder on the other. These were smooth, midnight-black in tone, and seemed entirely alien to the natural rock of the cave. Victor frowned. This isn't right at all. Such formations weren't anywhere near Ceylonese in design; indeed, they resembled decorations found in the barrow mounds back in England more than those of the Indian subcontinent. That he'd find something like this here was beyond strange. Stranger still, there was no hole in the ceiling to mark his fall. Had a stream deposited him here? The ground didn't seem moist enough to support that level of running water. It was all very odd indeed.
It was at this point that the oddness decided it should emphasize itself. The dark stones of the ring flashed brightly, each with a different pale shade, but combined as one they overwhelmed the flickering light of the small lantern in a powerful unearthly glow. The slick cuts of the spiral carvings reflected this light, or perhaps even simply emitted some of their own in reply - tendrils of unnatural luminosity scintillating wildly over the walls. Simultaneously, a chorus of voices screamed in abject horror within Victor's head: "NO!" He shrieked, hurling his miniscule light backwards, and as it shattered on the far wall the room was mercifully shrouded in darkness once more. Echoes of his scream careened wildly around the cavern walls as Victor skittered backwards from his seat on the floor, knocking members of the carefully-aligned stone ring wildly across the chamber in a vicious display of archaeological delinquency, and huddled against one of the larger-sized regular boulders that lay scattered on its edge. Syllables fell from his trembling lips, barely succeeding in the formation of words, as he tried desperately to comprehend what had just happened. "W-Who are... Why- how am I... What... you... huh." He slouched, face in his hands, and sighed. Sentences were apparently an impossibility. They seemed to be unwelcome anyways, as sparkles emanated briefly from the scattered stones and frantic shushing flooded into his mind - only to be cut off by a bright red light from the largest of the monoliths and a deep, powerful voice that overpowered the others.
"The time for that has passed. If they did not see, they heard. If they did not hear, they saw. The Harvesters come." Worried voices babbled in Victor's head, swelling over and mingling amongst one another in a cacophony of disjointed thoughts. "We do not have long." "We will be taken!" "We should hide." "How?! It has disrupted the circle!" "I knew talking to it was a bad idea!" "Maybe they will take it instead." "Why would they? It has been nothing but trouble since it got here!" "We must prepare." "We are doomed!" "It would not listen to us." "It is rude!" "It is sitting on me!" This last comment caught his attention. Reaching down, the confused young man plucked a large stone from the ground and tried to pierce the darkness with a questioning stare. It didn't work. Instead, he shook his head. When in... wherever-the-hell-I-am...
'Sorry,' he thought at the rock. It glowed a soft, sickened green, and a sad voice flowed into Victor's mind. "It says 'sorry.' We all shall cease to be, and it manages 'sorry.'" It reminded him of his old Cambridge lecturers really - tired, world-weary, yet still possessing just enough energy to be royally pissed off at him. The voice had the same effect, too; swallowing hard, he scrambled up onto his feet and rapped his knuckles against his forehead. There had to be a solution. There always was, when someone used that tone on him. But how could he solve the problem when he didn't even know what comprised it? It was like trying to solve a riddle when he didn't even know the language it was written in! He sighed. Okay, calm down. You've run into problems like this before. Remember the Egyptian expedition? The 'mummy' they were trying to sell to you as an authentic 'historical fake?' You just need answers to get the answers you need. Ask for them.
'Right. I'd like to help, but I need to know if and how I can. If these Harvester things were hunting you before, how did you defend yourselves before? Can I drive them off?' Soft green light again, glinting off the stones below. "Is it a god?" 'Er... no, not really.' A scoff... Wait, are those my glasses? "Then it does not want to draw The Devouring's attention. Attacking its Harvesters? That would." Victor dove into the loose pebbles, groping blindly for a moment. He needed light again. He also needed more answers. 'Don't I already have its attention?'
"It has raised the curiosity of The Devouring's servants. That will pass, though not soon enough to save us. It may still flee. If it gained attention... it could not flee. It could never flee." Victor thrust his spectacles triumphantly into the air, before slipping them on and sighing in relief. He was safe - and, at the very least, next time the world was illuminated he'd be able to see it clearly. Only... it was illuminated. Far off, in a passage to the right, a dim light was slowly building. An air of dread seemed to pour from the stones. One sparked briefly, a pale yellow. "They will sense us. We will be taken..." Another then, in mournful blue. "We shall be harvested!" Victor squeezed his eyes shut. He felt horrible. He wanted to run away, leave these inexplicable visions behind, and hope the next thing he came across in the darkness wasn't a talking inanimate object. But he had to help. At least he'd try to help. It was his fault, what was happening. Granted, they were rocks, but they were rocks in trouble - and he'd brought whatever this doom was upon them.
"You cannot aid us, outlander. This was... inevitable." The large red stone spoke once more. "The Devouring will consume. Such is the fate for all in this world. It was only a matter of time." Sobs echoed in Victor's head, and the stones all lit at once. "How can we resist?" "We cannot let the Cairn fall." "I will not willingly face oblivion!" He noticed only a few stones sitting outside their circle arrangement, and nodded to himself. 'You said you could do something if you were back in the circle, right? Keep talking, all of you. I can help.'
"It can help?" "It cannot help!" "It will face The Devouring?" "It must be mad." "The Harvesters approach!" "They will hear us." "We must be silent!" "But it said speak." "It does not understand." "But it is doing something!" "Probably looking for where to run." "Pebblemind!" "Must you sully our loss with insults?" "Yipe!" Placing the small green-shining stone back into its approximate place within the circle, Victor hefted the largest of the scattered stones into his arms... before groaning under the weight as he staggered forwards and dropped it a few feet from its position. Woefully underwhelming for a supposed doer of daring deeds... One more heave-and-shove had it in place, but at a cost of time - the light was growing ever brighter, the babbled voices in the would-be adventurer's mind growing ever more desperate. "I little more left to say, outlander..." Two... three... three! Three were still out of place. They looked small enough. Grabbing two, Victor rested them in his arms and-
"AIEEEEEE!" At the instant the paired stones touched, each screamed in absolute terror - their solid shapes softening at the point of contact. Their colors slowly blended as, without a moment's resistance, the two rocks flowed inexplicably into each other as seamlessly as two blobs of mercury. Victor dropped them to squeeze a hand to his forehead, trying to block out the reverberations of their howls, and when he finally peeked through his fingers there was only one remaining where two had been before. "This is most unfortunate," it said flatly, an unidentified new voice among the chorus. "Now we will all be lost."
This made even less sense than the things making no sense before, and still the light grew stronger down the distant tunnel. Small high-pitched clicks echoed his way, the sound of metal striking firmly against the mineral floor of the caverns, while around him the circled stones babbled in fright. "No!" "They merged!" "It forced me to." "We must have another!" "We are doomed!" "Doomed!" "I do not wish harvesting." "It has destroyed us all!" The voices shouted anger, fear, and condemnation in Victor's head. The light was stronger than his lantern had been now, and was yet still building as the ceaseless march of metal came towards him. He knew what he needed to do. He needed to calm the... whatever they were. He needed to find out if there was another way to help, and quickly. He needed to work around the setback to make things right.
Instead he grabbed the smallest of the talking stones from the circle, slipping it into his pocket before managing a hurried formal bow. "I apologize from the bottom of my heart for the trouble I have caused you. Good luck in your future endeavours. I hope you survive." Then, spinning on his heels, Victor ran blindly away from the oncoming threat into the darkness of the cavern tunnels behind him. Cries of anguish echoed in his mind, turning into sudden screams... and then - at long last - silence, as the tunnels curved away from him and the light dimmed away in the distance. Still he charged on, hands stretched blindly forwards as he retreated into the comfortingly-serene emptiness that seemed to stretch infinitely onwards before his unseeing eyes. Whether it was tens or hundreds of meters he couldn't begin to tell; all he wanted was to get away, away from the unpleasant scene of before. He hoped to burst into some light, sit up into the now-comparatively-comfortable confines of his tent, and find out it was all last night's curry come back for vengeance.
Falling over a stalagmite pounded about a half-dozen dampers onto those hopes. Victor threw his hands out as he toppled forwards, barely preventing him from landing face-first on the scattered stone. Instead he slid roughly across the loose pebbles, skidding to a stop a few feet away with aching legs and bleeding palms, before pushing himself backwards against the solid object which had stopped him. It was real. It was cool, smooth firmness at his back in an ocean of void. It was an anchor in oblivion. Pressing his arms across his chest, Victor squeezed his shoulders with his hands and shook from the sudden knowledge of cold as gasps from his exertions shook him. How long had he run? Where was he? He had managed to lose himself even further. Chill and fear raised goosebumps on his neck, the rough fabric of his overcoat growing damp and warm under his touch as he rubbed his upper arms. He shivered at the realization: blood. The darkness hid it, yet he still paled from the merest thought. Fears and phobias conspired in the dark to swallow him whole. Then, from the back of his mind...
But it's a wool coat - blood'll never come out of there! The thought was so uncalled for, so utterly beyond the pale, that Victor found himself giggling. Laundry, that's what concerned him. No light, no heat, little food or water, and it was his clothing that had him worried. He laughed out loud now. He would be found, dead from exposure, in wherever-the-hell-this-was, and his immediate impulse was how there'd be splotches on his coat. Throwing his head back, he lost himself in great shaking howls of fevered mirth - howls that abruptly turned into miserable sobs as he curled up against the cold stone lump behind him. Some great explorer he'd turned out to be. Laundry, for god's sake!
"It could have helped." A sad, cautious tone whispered softly into his mind, as if wary of disturbing him further. Victor looked up and around... then, remembering, he looked down at the soft glow emanating from his pocket and frowned. 'I could've done a lot of things,' he thought bitterly towards the stone. 'I could have stayed. I should have stayed. But instead I ran, okay?! Ran off into the middle of nowhere like a craven bloody coward!'
"No..." it replied, before pausing. "It... it - oh word, word... It may have helped?" This was strange. Well, stranger. The stone didn't sound the same. All the other ones had sounded so certain; even their queries had the inherent tone of already knowing the answer. This one, in contrast, seemed to be wrestling with the very basics of language, and Victor wasn't quite sure who was winning. 'How so?' A sigh echoed in his mind, followed by long silence. The darkness swallowed him once more, and after a minute he wondered if he'd managed to kill this one too. Had that circle been sustaining them? He swallowed nervously.
Finally, to his relief, his pocket shone once more. "To work special... special-thing hide, we need... odd." Well, you're certainly in bountiful posession of that. "It made even, but then... with me back not there... odd again? If others... came to know... were made to know? Oh, word..." Victor racked his brains, looking for some vocabulary capable of transforming the stream of gibberish into something marginally coherent. 'Erm... made to know... teach? Show? Realize?' "Yes! If others were realize, they may have made to hide. Could have been time-having."
'So they may have been able to hide, since I took you?' "Um... think... yes-no?" That completely failed to make sense. Victor frowned. Talking to this stone was worse than pantomiming trade with the natives. After all, there weren't even hand-gestures or expressions for him to work from. He massaged his temples. 'Do you mean maybe?'
"Yes!" It flashed brightly enough to make Victor's jacket resemble a suddenly-haunted garment for a moment or two. "Maybe! They maybe hide!" 'But you can't be sure.' "No... when it take, I lose talk with others. Past-time yes, but... now lose lots." Indeed. A trifle more than just 'lots,' really.
'You can't talk to the other stones. Is that because of distance, or because they've been... harvested, or whatever you called it back there?' "Maybe." He gritted his teeth, squeezing his hand into a fist for a brief second, before sighing. 'I'm going to assume that means you don't know.' "Nope. But may have fixed!" The rock seemed to be trying to cheer Victor up. It wasn't much succeeding. 'Great... so we don't have the first clue if any of them made it, if they realized they could hide in time, or if they were found regardless. We have no idea whether I managed to fix my own mistake, or whether I actually did doom a bunch of... what are you, anyways?'
The response was instant and mysterious. "We are the Children of Stone, descendants of the sleeping god, keepers of the one true history." A pulse of throbbing brilliance burst from Victor's pocket, before fading away slowly to darkness. He pulled the stone out, staring down at it in confusion - quite the feat, given the all-consuming blackness that shrouded down over the cave once again. 'Okay... how did you just go from single syllables to sounding like Dante?' A pause. "Dahn... teh?" Victor groaned; attempting to convey the deeper background of Florentine medieval poetry to a conscious rock of questionable intelligence was not how he wished to spend the next several hours. 'Forget it. Just... why did you suddenly start speaking much better again?'
A palpable aura of disbelief pulsed from the smooth stone, and this time it addressed him as if trying to explain the meaning of life to a toddler. "All children keep past. Is we do." Finally - the promise of some answers hung before him. 'Okay...' he thought slowly while rummaging in his pack. 'Can you tell this true history to me?' There was a long, dark pause. In Victor's slowly-sharpening senses, all that could be heard through the silence was the soft dripping of water... and, far off in the distance, the rythymic snapping of metal on stone.
"I will tell it. It may end... end as all still here of us. But first, it must go safe."
"Right right right right right! Straight straight straight straight straight straight! Yes! Go! Straight straight straight... Left left left left left left left!" The stone merrily burbled endless directions, a demented drill sergeant swinging gleefully back and forth in Victor's roughly-bandaged hand as he struggled around the increasingly steep slopes and low ceilings while trying desperately to retain some grip on his rapidly-dwindling sanity. "It safe here... Almost! Straight straight straight up up straight up up!" Now *why* didn't I just lay down in the dark and wait for death again? The only available light for navigation was the glow from the small rock itself, requiring it to continually 'speak' for its transportation to see; this was, unfortunately, a situation it took to without a moment's hesitation. After an hour of constant badly-composed sing-song directions comprised almost entirely of prepositions floating through his mind, Victor was beginning to contemplate that perhaps, if he had done the others in, it was more a public service than anything.
'I don't get it,' he thought at the minstrel in his hand - more to obtain a moment's respite from the guiding melody than anything. 'All the stones back in the circle spoke very fluently and intelligently. You... you don't.' The singing stopped as this statement was contemplated, leaving Victor stumbling through darkness into a smooth cave wall. He should've known better than to interrupt his lightsource, but at least it was a brief rest. Soon the pale yellow glow appeared once more.
"Left-straight to safe here!" Then, directions presented, it jumped instantly into a reply. "And we take-give think. More children, as big children, more think us. Straight straight up straight straight!" Victor wrestled with the near-vertical incline he was being pointed over, scrambling between stalagmite footholds as he tried to climb with one hand occupied by its immensely-distracting occupant. Even his thoughts came in wheezing gasps as he forced his way slowly upwards. 'So... you're like one... big... shared intelligence... but you can... only share... when touching?' The ceiling was very nearly meeting the floor now, and for once since he started it seemed having a big rock in-hand was going to be useful - Victor swung it through the collected pebbles coating the ground, scattering them enough for him to manage a squeeze through the space. His coat was going to be beyond resuscitation after this, but he couldn't take off his pack while at this angle and at least it would hold together enough to keep him warm. The cave itself seemed to swallow heat as if starved of it.
"No touch!" the stone shouted as Victor stretched out for a stalactite ahead to pull himself forwards, leaving him flailing in midair for a brief moment before gravity carried through with the opportunity provided it by the sudden lack of support. He tumbled inelegantly through the tight hole, rolling headfirst down a slope strangely softer than he was anticipating. That wasn't to say an awkward landing from somersaulting unexpectedly down a random slope was painless, but as he straightened himself from the impact and sat up in the dark pile that broke his landing he noted that at least he hadn't lost his glasses again. They would have been impossible to find in the loose, scattered... dirt? It was indeed. Clusters of small white ball-caps poked their heads up through the soil around him, which crumbled eagerly through his fingertips as he clawed himself out of the indention his fall had pressed into the yielding loam. At least I won't starve - there are no markings, but the shape and size indicates they're not poisonous. Hopefully. This is strange, though...
"Touch bad!" The stone continued unhesistatingly. "Children touch, both children lost. Past stay - self gone! Smart big, yes... yes! But we like self. Self better than before self... after self! So we try near, where thought-us big but stay self. Safe-almost! Left left left left left!" Victor groaned, struggling to his feet, and followed the commands of his tiny companion - yet still his gaze was locked down at the rich black soil beneath his feet. 'Okay okay, that's one mystery at least explained then. You're speaking like... well, like you're speaking because I pulled you away from the circle. The current mystery is more immediately-important at the moment, though - where did this topsoil come from? Is there more?'
"We are too! Keep no touch past!" the stone complained, before sighing. "It keep past, yes? But dirt came trees. Mean safe more almost than past... yes! More with. Left left. Safe trees. Maybe. Straight straight straight!" Trees?! Talking to rocks and fleeing unseen metal monsters was one thing, but that was just patently impossible. Victor's internal scientist scoffed from the back of his head, and he followed suit. 'Trees underground? That's madness! Trees can't live underground!'
The answer was quick. "Trees don't. Think do, don't. All dead trees. Dead. Poor trees. Straight straight." The loam was as thick as ever, but for some reason the mushrooms had begun to thin in number. Those that remained all bent back towards the path Victor had come from, though he could feel no breeze and indeed could not explain why one would exist in the first place. Water maybe? But that would have washed the soil away... It was all too mysterious - yet, practically, this was a problem. He stuffed his pockets with plucked mushrooms as he walked, tentatively nibbling the edge of one as if he expected it to detonate in answer to his impudence. It didn't taste deadly. Then again, it didn't taste necessarily nutritious either. 'I need to eat sometime soon, but I have no food with me. Can I eat the mushrooms?' There was a long pause, and darkness fell once more. Victor's eyes caught a glimpse of dim light reflecting off the slick walls of the path before him, and he froze. More harvesters? No... this light was different - a pale, pulsing blue, like some members of the circle, that was swallowed in the yellow burst from the stone in his hand as its voice spoke into the head of its carrier once more.
"Past says - here yes... yes, take-eat. With trees no. No take from trees. Trees like not. Safe here almost almost! Straight straight!" 'I saw a light ahead while you were thinking - are you taking me to more... more stonechildren?' An instant response stunned him: "No! Light trees. Children here, no, unless need-safe. Trees voice loud, sad, alone. Eat think, after long-past. But safe. Harvesters come no since past. Straight straight up!" Victor swallowed nervously, before popping another mushroom quickly. This was sounding less and less 'safe,' but...
Cresting the slope before him, he found himself on an upraised platform crowned with a light dusting of soil and a half-dozen huge splintered chunks of wood. An overturned stump leaned awkwardly against the entrance to the passage he'd just left, its roots erupting up into the air as if crying for help. The entire scene reminded Victor of nothing more than the aftermath of a sudden timber explosion. Strange as it was, though, it was absolutely normal compared to what the high stone platform overlooked.
Below, down a long set of precisely-carved steps that curved around the massive cavern he found himself in, was a forest. An entire, sprawling, gigantic forest, backlit through its woven mesh of bare black branches by an eerie pulse of pale blue light. The stone squealed in happiness. "Safe here! It safe, we safe, now." And at that moment, more than ever before, Victor doubted its intelligence.
First Fragment: "Unannounced Arrival"
(Drawn from the journal fragments reputed to be the basis for Deus est Machina: Travels in the Land of Living Stone, by Victor Carlyle)
April 5, 1872
April? 1872 - Exact Date Unknown
Exact Location Also Unknown
For That Matter, Pretty Much Everything Unknown
It is safe to say at this point that the Ceylon expedition has officially taken a turn for the worse. More specifically, I am no longer in Ceylon. I may be under it, but at this point I am leaning towards the simple statement that I am outside of anything that might be dubbed "normalcy" altogether. To drive this particular point home, I am presently writing this entry using the light provided me by the continual socio-historical lecture of a talking rock whose companions I may well have doomed to destruction at the hands of some form of metallic terror it simply calls "The Devouring."
To say I am currently out of my depth is to say that the ocean has a touch of damp about it in the winter months. I cannot begin to describe how patently odd and terrifying my day has been. Actually, I may - I am not sure if it is, in fact, a day at all. I am merely aware that I have been here for some hours, and during that time I have managed to find every possible avenue for displaying my incompetence. I ran off into an unknown cave system out of simple fear, and only sheer unthinking luck saved me from blundering through the darkness until cold and thirst claimed my body. Yet that unthinking act means I have functionally kidnapped, and severely handicapped, my only companion - who is the reason I may still survive this, I might add. I may have even been the direct cause of the deaths of its half-dozen... well, inanimate objects. But they were talking inanimate objects, and they were its cohorts, so I personally feel that counts. My experiences on the Asian subcontinent were going so well that I'd almost forgotten how utterly terrible I am at being an actual "adventurer."
My only solace in this is that I remain decent in keeping records and cataloguing observations, and I have been presented with an opportunity to both report upon the most interesting naturalistic and sociological circumstance I have ever come across and, in doing so, compensate at least in some small way for my prior incompetence. Allow me to relate to you the history of the Stonechildren, as spoken by one of its own.
...
The English language seems to be having some small issues with accomodating the current circumstances I find myself in. I am normally firmly against the desecration of the Queen's Own Tongue by those unwilling to find alternate routes of expression, but hearing voices in my head emitted by sentient minerals seems to be one of those circumstances even the most dedicated of linguists couldn't find an adequate description for. I thus must take some liberties. I do hope the language forgives me - I contort it enough without making conscious efforts to do so.
First off, the stone isn't actually speaking. It communicates, as I hope you've grasped by now, but there is no noise involved. As it... well, "says," the Children of Stone simply "make think, then think go out and think come in." This would be what I was referring to with my statement that I have severely handicapped it. It was capable of constructing a full sentence before, when it was with others of its kind. Nevertheless, rather than be forced into increasingly-awkward attempts to describe its method of communication, I'm going to simply resort to the writer's convenience of saying that it speaks. Please just remember that it does so silently.
Furthermore, I'm afraid it will be a tad confusing even for myself if I am continually driven by circumstance to refer to each and every member of the Stonechildren as "it." I am told they do not bother with names, being as they live an existence that rather redefines collectivism (and, really, a group of rocks do not have much in the way of distinguishing characteristics anyways), but this makes documenting them very tough indeed. I have thus decided, and my companion has agreed (with the characteristic glee it has demonstrated interminably over the last several hours), that a naming is very much called for - if only for the future readability of this journal. From this point, therefore, his name will be Homer and he will be male.
...I have asked. They have no genders, and do not reproduce. Frankly, I am relatively relieved; trying to envision any sort of reproductive behaviour coming from a rock made me cringe for a multitude of reasons. Nevertheless, Homer will be referred to as a male for the simple convenience of being able to discern him from the others I might discuss (who, unless I somehow wind up in posession of them, will remain in the comfortable realm of the neutral gender).
I wish I could say that there was some witty comparison made here between Homer, the devoid-of-sensory-apparatus stone who is telling me the grand history of his race, and Homer, the blind poet, but in truth the name derives from the African Grey my uncle Percival came into posession of during his last trip to the dark continent, and in turn from the financier of his expedition's youngest son after which the parrot was named. Under ordinary circumstances the Homer I have as my present companion has, sadly, about the same level of vocabulary as the bird. I do hope you can understand how taxing this becomes, but - in truth - it is my fault he is so limited.
You see, from what Homer has told me the Children of Stone believe their collective moniker is literal. Their lore has them existing in the distant past as a singular entity, a giant sleeping "godstone" that comprised a unified consciousness of every Stonechild combined as one. According to their legend, it dreamed dreams continuously for eons - dark, terrifying, and burdensome dreams (which, from the fragments I have heard via Homer's history, I can fully agree with the descriptors for) that piled ever greater onto the godstone's mind until, slowly, the collected weight of its dreams began to break it apart. The godstone shattered, and its fragments awoke into their underground home - newly created, incapable of moving, sometimes entirely isolated, and utterly unaware of their place in the world.
Such was their life for a long period of time. I know I, at the very least, would have gone entirely out of my skull after week one - and, apparently, there are indeed some quite mad Stonechildren out there - but the vast majority of their kind slowly learned how to reach out and talk to one-another, figure out their surroundings, and craft ways to occupy their time. Apparently they are very, very fond of storytelling, abstract philosophy, and the creation of complex patterned "light-song" using the brief dim glow created whenever they communicate over distance. Or, to be more specific, they are fond of such things when they have the collected intelligence necessary to formulate and conduct them.
You see... like most cultures, the creation stories of the Children of Stone work as a way of explaining their existence in a manner that covers their own unexplained peculiarities. (As legions of young churchgoers have learned, however, your own particular creation story may not cover all aspects of your being - the question of Adam's belly button will plague the clergy from now until the Judgement Day, I'm sure.) In this particular case, the idea of the Stonechildren at one point being a unified being is not extraordinarily outlandish. I myself have witnessed what happens when two of their kind come in accidental physical contact; they merge into a singular entity, with memories and recollections from both prior members but with a new personality "born" from the instant of incorporation. Homer also informs me that these combined, larger Children are as intelligent as the sum of their predecessors... a fact that has apparently led to whispered tales of less-savoury individuals amongst their number seeking out as many others as they can find to meld with in a search for enough wisdom to comprehend the current mysteries of their world. Thankfully, the majority of Stonechildren are less predatory and more cooperative. With the aid of more-recent arrivals to this land, they have constructed what my mind translates as "cairns" - piles of stones, yes, but also something more. The cairns are a way for these surprising-fragile-for-living-rock beings to combine their experience and mental acumen towards their mutual defense without losing their individuality.
The Children of Stone seem to treasure their consciousness above all else. When I asked why they didn't just combine themselves to try and discover a way to combat their troubles, the response I received from Homer was about the same as if I had suggested we cut off someone's head to cure their headcold. Individuality and the self are the paramount values of his culture. They consider its occurrance among them to be an accident, actually, a grand fluke of the universe that just happened to result in individualism and sapience among them. I'm not inclined to disagree with this assessment, honestly, given how easily it seems they lose it. Many Stonechildren, I am told, believe that they are all fated to eventually have the treasure they mistakenly came into posession of taken from them once more. Hence "The Devouring" - both a physical threat they fight with every trick they can manage and a philosophical entity I can only describe as their version of the Grim Reaper, representing their loss of self and individuality to the whole once again.
I have already, indirectly, been threatened by the physical Devouring. It is unfortunate for the sake of this record that I cannot provide anything nearing a description of either it itself or its servants, the "Harvesters" as the Stonechildren call them, but frankly - I believe it is far more fortunate in the end for me and the chance (however slim) that I might be able to convey this tale back to... well, reality. Nevertheless, all I have to go on are the observations I have from their approach and the semi-coherent language, filtered through ages of legend and cultural perception, that Homer can provide me. My best interpretation of the two is as follows:
The Devouring was not physical until a short while ago, on the scale of the Stonechildren lifespan, when something in their world changed. Other creatures started appearing around them, creatures that could move things and move themselves - the "outlanders." As far as I can tell, the generic title applies to anything motile or sentient that isn't a Stonechild; they believe themselves to be the first and only true inhabitants of this land, and all others to be guests or intruders (depending on intent and behaviour). Nevertheless, the arrival of the outlanders somehow allowed The Devouring to step through into the world. Until that point, the only losses the Stonechildren ever faced were some scattered mishaps involving rockfalls and cave-ins (both being almost certainly an obvious problem when you can't move to escape a slowly-crumbling cavern chamber); now they were capable of being moved by outlanders, and thus could be accidentally or purposefully melded by them for any number of reasons.
...
I now feel even more terrible about my prior actions in this land. It seems a foregone conclusion that I will wind up breaking a social taboo within the bounds of any culture I come in contact with, but it seems that to the Stonechildren I have functionally committed the principal sin of my kind. Despite Homer's assurances that I am doing far better than most new arrivals to their world, I still feel like I have inadvertantly pidgeon-holed myself into the position of just another blundering foreigner not knowing right from barbarism.
It'd be less depressing, I'm afraid, if I wasn't so used to being in that role. I take a small amount of solace in the dumbfounded response I got upon asking if I were a Harvester - it seems, at least, that the phrase is a true classification of threat and not simply a synonym for the "baka gaijin" I was constantly exposed to back in my Pacific Rim voyages. Nevertheless, it seems outlanders are perceived to be one of the most pervasive symptoms of a sickness spreading through the Stonechildren's realm; to many among them, they are witnessing their own Armageddon... the great battle that will bring forth the end of their world.
This is apparently not too far from the factual truth, according to Homer (though, with his characteristic unflagging optimism, he personally states "Devouring big, all-big not" - which, I can only assume, means he doesn't believe it is impossible to fight the fate that looms over them). While the whole of their known world has greatly expanded since the arrival of outlanders to carry them around, it has never grown beyond the great maze of caverns this seems to be... and as of now The Devouring and its minions controls nearly a third of their identified realm and continually works to expand its grasp outwards.
Thankfully for me and my little mineral companion, Homer is right in that this antagonistic force is not "all-big." It has gaps in its control through which people can slip. Various outlander groups have devised ways to fight The Devouring to a standstill, or otherwise prevent its attentions from turning towards them. The cairns themselves have learned how to divide their thoughts unevenly among their number, confusing the Harvesters enough to hide in plain sight as regular non-sentient stone. From those positions they observe the world, aiding in the fight as best they can... but mostly just acting as lorekeepers and historians, filing their experiences and gathered information away in the communal memory the Children of Stone apparently share between any others they are in proximity to.
This memory is seemingly photographic, never lost, and never disrupted - even though Homer is separated from other Stonechildren, and as he is quite small this renders him unable to manage much in the way of language, the history he is conveying to me is quite literally a perfect cultural epic. You can specifically tell where one individual stone experienced something and added it into the story; some spots are freeverse poety, some are recorded in startlingly well-crafted iambic hexameter, and still others are simply flat recitations of prose. This story is the purpose to which they have dedicated their lives, it seems. Their cultural beliefs and present circumstances have led them to the recognition that eventually they will cease to be, and thus... the tale is their legacy. They want others to know that they were, that this place was their home, and that they accomplished many things before The Devouring consumed them.
Homer, it seems, has done his job well. He certainly seems happy with himself, having a chance to get his race's history down in a way that I can carry it on. This, of course, assumes that I am able to get out of here.
...
I will admit, I was hoping up until now that I might just randomly wake up in my tent and find out it was all a dream. I would've even accepted waking up in the medical tent to discover that it was all a traumatic headwound, which would have been the more likely scenario - the gauze wrapped over my palms is slowly fading to crimson as I write this, I'm afraid, and I sincerely doubt that their sting wouldn't wake me unless there was something truly grievous keeping me unconscious.
Now, however, having heard and recorded this story... I do not wish to suddenly wake up and find myself back in what I can only call reality. For one thing, I vaguely suspect that if I did then the next time I opened this volume I'd find this entry sitting there to mock me for all time. For another... well, I may well have doomed Homer's cairn to destruction within the first hour of my arrival here. He may be the only survivor, and thus the only one capable of remembering the experiences of his little stone community. A lot has happened to them, apparently - they found themselves hiding deep in enemy territory, giving guidance to bewildered newcomers (myself included, I'm sure, had I not been such an arrogant fool), and trying to do what they could to make their corrupted, hostile land somewhat better once more.
I have to get him to somewhere safe, so his stories can be shared. Somewhere safer than his own definitions of safe, anyways. We are currently in his definition of a "safe" place, and well...
I have witnessed a man tied to a cannon and whipped until near death. I have watched the natives of Papua New Guinea cook and eat one of their deceased tribesmen. I have been there to observe the Ratha Yatra procession come unhinged as the Juggernaut chariot of Krishna broke free of control and literally crushed a man under its wheels. Yet this is still the most disturbing thing I have ever come across.
I am in a dead forest, a full massive fragment of nature at its most brilliant... just entirely uprooted, tossed into this cavern and shut away to wither and die. The trees are long-departed, their bark slowly peeling away from the bare ivory bones of underwood - yet their leaves coat every inch of the black soil as pristine as if they'd just fallen. As we walked to this location, deep enough in this crypt for Mother Nature that Homer felt the Harvesters would not follow, I found myself having to dodge the clean white bones of songbirds and even a full spiral-horned skeletal stag, unlike any species I can identify, that lay in a pile by the path. On the other side of the rock upon which I am writing this, a hollow shell of an ancient carrion beetle still clings tenaciously to the pitted stone surface. It seems even the decomposers have died from starvation, succumbing to the mummifying preservation of this place.
All that remains alive are the termites, huge pale blobs which seem to crawl over every surface imaginable. In the pale light I am provided they blend seamlessly into the denuded wood, making every tree seem to pulse and shift around me, and their mating flights fill the air with tiny wings that drift and dance on the wind. The wind truly unnerves me, for there seems to be no source for it. We're in a bloody cave - every scientific instinct I have says there should not be atmospheric shifts enough to produce this effect - yet still every now and again the branches sway and the long-fallen leaves swirl off across the forest floor.
That is nowhere near as creepy as the translucent mushrooms, however. Where the wind is merely unusual for the situation, the things I have taken to calling "ghostcaps" are absolutely alien. They spring from the earth in scattered patches, looking for all the world like a blown glass mimickry of a real mushroom... yet they are soft to the touch, yielding with a sticky resistance to my fingertip, and more importantly they glow. The fungus slowly pulses with an inner light that seems to originate from the center of their translucent fruiting bodies for no reason whatsoever, a pale mournful blue which pervades all parts of the forest and blankets it in shadows and strange backlit patterns. I have never seen such random design and behaviour from a plant before, and that is even granting fungi the inherent oddities they display within the world of vegetation. It is as if they were created for the specific intent of making me ill at ease. If that was the reasoning... well good show, whoever you are. It is working.
So here I find myself - separated from my expedition, in an entirely unknown realm I am neither suited nor adapted to survive in for any length of time. My lantern is broken, my only lightsource is a rock who must be constantly talking to glow, and I have half a day's food and water plus a pocketfull of mushrooms with which to sustain myself. My only current safety is in an immensely disturbing land of the dead, and outside it I may run once more into the hostile forces of an entity that apparently consumes anything which attracts its attention. I cannot for the life of me see a way out of this - some way to get Homer to a truly safe locale (he says we cannot stay here long without falling victim to something he can only describe as "loud thought") and get me back to the comparative comfort of Ceylon or the true comfort of home.
Dear lord I want to go home.
...At least Mr. Dobbins should be happy. This is, most decidedly, an adventure.
Chapter Two: Oddities New and Old
Victor had not anticipated that he would be capable of managing sleep at that point. For one, he wasn't certain whether it was night or not - in the back of his mind, this still mattered. You didn't fall asleep at noon unless you were an opium addict or some other class of reprobate. For another, nothing seemed comfortable. The soil was soft enough, sure, but leaves and dead insects kept crunching under his body with each movement. Plus his hands still stung, as if nagging him that writing after falling onto rocks palms-first was not one of his better ideas. Beyond this... the ghostcaps kept glowing, ignoring his pleas for them to turn themselves off for a bit so that he might stop seeing shadows move and shift in the distant forest. Sleep was tough when you were vaguely expecting sudden and horrible death to come swooping out of the woods to swallow you whole.
It was thus a complete surprise to him when he found himself awakening to the frantic thoughts of Homer flooding into his head. "New here! It must help! Trees may not-sleep if new here not know!" Victor's eyes shot open, and he sat up... to find himself clawing upwards through a massive blanket of dead leaves that had congregated around his body. As he burst into the open air he saw his companion sitting exactly where it had been left, shining brightly as it repeated its alert once more. "Must help! New here!" Sleep still covered the majority of his mind, leaving him staggering around in an attempt at frantic movement that wound up more resembling the interpretive dance for "and now, a seal in a sawmill" than any sort of constructive act.
"Mmhhhwhatnow? Huh?" Language seemed to be having as much trouble coming to him as it did to Homer, which was not going to make the next few moments easy. Indeed, there was a long pause - and the stone faded back to its shiny black normalcy - before a response came tentatively into his head. "No-get. Say more?" Victor plucked his journal from the large stone that had been his desk and repurposed it as a seat, slumping down with a sigh while he tried to repack his belongings in as short a time as possible. Like always, he vaguely suspected they grew larger with each exposure to open air - his coat pockets wound up carrying his ink jars, and his canteen was slung over his shoulder, by the time he'd managed to get himself collected enough to produce something approaching English. "Another run? But I thought you said the Harvesters wouldn't come into the forest." The would-be explorer rubbed his forehead as he swung to his feet, pushing off the fog of slumber in readiness for the flight he expected, but the answer he received was not quite what he was busy predicting.
"No Harvesters - trees. Trees safe-here for it, I, but we do trees well. Outlander, not-it, here now! New! New here may do trees well not. Bad for new here, bad it, bad I. We find must, teach new here past it make bad." Victor frowned. This made even less sense than Homer usually did, which was saying a lot. Nevertheless... the stone hadn't steered him wrong yet.
"Alright, you sensed this newcomer - where should I go to find him?" The instant Victor had spoken it he realized what a bad idea such an invitation was, but it was already too late. Homer burst into rapidfire directions once more: "Left left left left left left left straight straight straight straight straight straight..." There was no song to these. Victor almost winced as the thoughts streamed into his head, a staccato beat that simply did not end. The stone was in a hurry. It was worried.
The potential of being caught by the Harvesters while separated from the cairn hadn't worried it. This did. Victor swallowed nervously as he picked up his pace, weaving between the slowly-crumbling trees in a rapid march along the lines set by Homer's drill-call. "Why the rush? Is the forest really that dangerous?"
"Can. Is bad, past trees, times. Trees sad. Very, very sad. Poor trees. Sad turn mad easy, if turn wrong. Mad bad for all in tree-here. Make here-safe not safe. Straight fast! Straight straight straight!" Victor couldn't make heads or tails of this, but decided if a rock could talk then the long-dead trees could indeed be mad if they damn well wanted to be. The important thing right now was keeping them from deciding to be mad, and if that meant charging blindly into low-hanging branches and being bombarded by the flights of breeding termites then so be it. He was already surrounded by ominous creepiness. "Antagonistic" was not an adjective he wanted to add to the mix.
In fact, Victor was hurrying so much in his attempts to prevent such an occurrance that the momentum very nearly carried him in a full 360° flip once Homer's directions were cut off with a horrified command of "STOP!" Instead, he found out that when his body obeyed with a full stop then his legs continued forwards for a little ways - leaving him kicking wildly in midair as he flew upwards along the rotational axis of his hips and fell backwards into the dirt. At least it is soft dirt, he mused as he brushed himself off. "I thought we were in a hurry..."
"Yes, it-is-I-am! But no at Harvester. Left, right, is it. New here is here very almost. But straight no more. Harvester." If Victor hadn't already been told specifically by Homer that its kind couldn't move themselves, he would have sworn that the stone actually pressed itself deeper into his pocket. Under any other circumstances, in fact, Victor would've been happy to join it in there had he been capable of shoving himself into a tiny scrap of cloth; it was primarily annoyance that prompted him to disregard those well-trained self preservation instincts. There weren't supposed to be Harvesters here. Homer had said so... but then here he was warning of one ahead. He specifically used the singular, too. Slinging his pack to the ground, the novice explorer drew a lengthy revolver from its side pouch and replaced it with the stone. He could take one of these things, couldn't he? All the training he'd done before the trip to the Subcontinent had to account for something, after all, and he'd seen firsthand that the use of armor was fully outdated when compared to the force of a lead slug. It was time to prove himself the hero of his story to come. Time to see what all the fuss is about...
'Stay here,' Victor thought to his mineral companion. 'I shall deal with this thing.' Homer attempted something akin to a warning, but it trailed off into nothingness as the young adventurer stalked forwards with his pistol readied in an iron grip. He was going to face this demon and vanquish it, and nothing was going to stand in his way: not metal armor, not his own common sense, and certainly not helpful advice from a friendly source. If he stopped he'd start thinking, and thinking would lead to him doing such improper things as avoiding confrontation and running the hell away from the threatening force. No, this time he was going to live the adventure - and that meant doing profoundly stupid things for no justifiable reason other than the sheer thrill of it. He'd take this enemy on, and thrash it soundly, and then write about how he'd thrashed it, using colorful metaphors for the bullet's flight and the sprays of blood and... oh god, blood... Victor paled noticably, the revolver suddenly trembling in his grip, and he remembered to slide his hand off the trigger lest he shoot someone in the foot. Again.
C'mon, Victor, you can do this! He gritted his teeth, managing to continue his forward march, but the reckless confidence was gone. Nevertheless, the would-be hero was already committed. He tried haltingly to coax the dauntless certainty of success back out from its hiding place. There's nothing to be worried about... you have six shots, you are ready for it... you can beat this menace. You've seen the porters take down full-grown tigers with one of these things. Just point and click. And if it's still moving afterwards, click again. Repeat until it stops the moving. Should be easy... Ah, and the self-confidence was slowly peeking out behind the wall of massive gut-wrenching terror again.
"That's it..." Victor muttered to himself. "Just pop out, pop it, and pop back. Heck, how dangerous can these things be if the stone keeps saying their main advantage is numbers? One by itself can't possibly do much against a seasoned traveller of the earth's four corners, armed with Samuel Colt's finest. I mean, after six shots if it's still moving I can probably take it the rest of the way down by hand." He found himself grinning. "And that's if I don't decide to take it down by hand just for fun, right? I picked up a few tricks from the Pacific Rim, didn't I? Of course I did. I doubt these things know how to... t-to... Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. B-blessed art thou..."
It wasn't just a guy in armor, that was for sure. It wasn't even something close to a guy in armor. Victor hadn't seen anything like it outside of drawings by DaVinci. As far as he could tell, the thing was the armor - a massive solid hemisphere of what must have been polished bronze, joined with strange hinged connectors to wide insectoid legs that still managed to gleam with menace long-past. A land-based ironclad! Granted, there were no cannon, but the long solid edges of the legs were quite dangerous enough. Had it managed a single blow, its would-be opponent could not have had the beginnings of a chance. Luckily for him, it was dead. Victor wasn't technically sure if it had ever been truly alive, but defining it as dead was easy - the huge metal shell was rent asunder, the long shining legs twisted in contortions that steel was never meant to attain. Vast gaping holes shot clear through its body, and the roots of the nearby trees crept through and wound around its shattered form. Green tarnish dripped across its shell like tears for the fallen. It must have lain there for years...
Yet still motion could be seen within the ruptured Harvester. As Victor cautiously approached, it became clear what comprised the armor's interior - machinery! Broken, corroded gears enmeshed with fingers of winding roots, lit in eerie pulses by a solitary ghostcap sprouting up within the mechanism itself. Somehow, though, despite all the destruction, a fragment of the formidible construct still functioned; deep within the scattered mess, the broken-toothed cogs and dislocated timing springs, a small set of gears kept turning. Leaning against the rust-coated hull of the beast, Victor could hear an irregular muffled clicking coming from inside. It didn't sound like just the last disjointed ticks of a broken clock... in fact, as best he could identify, it more resembled the semi-random patterns of Morse code.
As Victor stretched closer to one of the fractured openings, listening intently for the pattern in an attempt to try and decipher it, an owl called from the distance. Its voice was long and low, almost mournful, and yet was certainly loud enough to overwhelm the soft metallic sound from inside the Harvester's body. Another call, from a different direction, and the young explorer began to get annoyed. Why on earth did these bloody birds choose right now to start being noisy? I haven't heard a single damn...
There were no birds. They were all dead. Victor had seen the skeletons himself, stepping over them on the hike in. The trees were dead too. They had to have died almost immediately, being in the absolutely lightless cavern like this. There was no chance for them to grow significantly without any incoming energy. And from what Homer had said, the Harvesters existed underground before the dead forest did. So why were there roots entwining the thing's broken shell? Suddenly, Victor had a strong desire to leave the area. The forest had obviously been angry, back at the point this carnage occurred. He didn't want to dredge up unpleasant memories for it.
As Victor sprinted back along the route to his pack and the comfort of a second individual as small and vulnerable as he was feeling, he decided it would be a good idea to listen to Homer from now on. Homer was experienced. Homer knew the area. If Homer was more worried about the forest than the Harvesters, there was a bloody good reason.
Sighting the rough canvas of his satchel drove the young explorer to an involuntary sigh of relief. The run back seemed to take infinitely longer than the walk there, and he had been beginning to suspect there was a greater force at play than the simple, all-too-familiar time dilation of mortal fear. Thank god... just adrenaline... not the trees. Even Victor's thoughts were coming in short gasps from the extent of his run by the time he finally stumbled back and slumped against the large stone upon which his pack was resting. Not even several months on a ship and weeks in the wilds of the Asian Subcontinent had managed to cure the simple unavoidable fact of him being a soft-skinned twiggy bookworm. He sighed between pants.
"I try-past tell it," the stone softly intoned into his mind. "Harvester not harm. Trees harm Harvester, past, when mad both." Though Homer may have been the kind to crow over being proven right - the other, more intelligent Stonechildren certainly seemed the sort - it didn't even pause in its commentary before resuming directions: "It must left-right. New here very here almost." Unfortunately, the protracted run left Victor in no condition to even stand, much less get back to moving so soon afterwards. "I... could really... use a... moment..."
"Moment have not, maybe! Trees for new here stir." That did not sound good. Victor had seen first-hand what this place was capable of. If it was able to split metal, there was no telling what it could do to flesh and bone. Well, there was some telling, but Victor didn't want to contemplate it. Contemplating it made goosebumps appear where goosebumps were never meant to be. Instead he shoved his revolver back where Homer had been, donned his pack once more, and struggled to his feet again. "I don't... get it... If the Harvester's dead... why do you care about approaching it? Will... will the forest get angry over it again?"
"No... no-yes... maybe?" Came the hesitant reply. "Reason not but. Children think go in-out. No want think-Harvester in. Left-right... left-right..." This puzzled Victor to no end. But... the Harvesters are mechanical automatons! Does everything have sentience here?! He managed a few staggering steps, arbitrarily picking left as his chosen direction, and was off again in a stumbling jog. "I saw... inside it, Homer... Harvesters are made of metal... metal and gears. I... I know I'm asking a thinking rock... but... how can they have anything nearing free thought?"
"Is not!" Homer snapped, and its courier winced mid-stride - nearly running into a low-hanging branch. This was the first time he'd heard the stone actually angry. As if sensing this, its tone softened to a remorseful sadness. "Harvester think... not free. The Devouring all-think eat. Harvester-think now Devouring think. No of Child left. Sad. So sad. So sad, sad..." That was certainly a new development, at least for the travelling Brit. Victor was left fumbling for the words necessary to compose his desired sentences; thankfully, punctuation was still very much plentiful in his mind.
"A... child? A... a Child of Stone?! The Harvesters are made from you?! But... but... you can't move! And the metal! The gears, the cogs! That... that... how?!" His mouth continued moving open and shut for a few moments longer as he blundered through the cadaverous woodland, but no words managed to come through. That was okay - there weren't any good ones trying to come out anyways. Victor swallowed the torrent of unbelieving profanity (and possibly a mating termite or two), its downward descent burning his dry throat like hot absinthe, and stumbled slowly on. It was amazing how much of this world he utterly failed to understand. Homer seemed to share the sentiment, its reply tinged with irritated disbelief. "Outlanders bad. Outlanders bring bad energy. Make think move, friendstones bad. They bring The Devouring." It began to occur to the would-be explorer that he was treading on a sensitive subject. The Children of Stone lived with perfect memories of every event that happened to any other Stonechild as long as they came into near proximity of one-another to share those past experiences. They could conceivably remember every single loss from among their kind.
"Sorry." Victor wasn't sure what, exactly, he was apologizing for. Bringing up the subject? His prior actions? Outlanders as a whole? A simple apology couldn't fix any of them. Nevertheless... it just seemed the right thing to do, given the circumstances. Thankfully, Homer apparently agreed. What sounded like a sigh - a thought sigh? - echoed in the adventurer's mind. "It is bad not. No. Friendstone loss just sad. So sad, so sad... Right! Right right right." Victor snapped out of his reverie, realizing he'd been listing off to the left for quite some time, and corrected his path. Yet still his thoughts were consumed by curiosity. How were the stones made to move? Why? How did their movement drive the clockwork horror he'd seen not a hundred yards away? For that matter, why did the forest destroy it? How did the forest destroy it? His internal naturalist-sense was fidgeting. Anyone with the remotest of scientific experience should find answers to these questions, you know. This sort of thing could revolutionize the very foundations of the known principles of nearly every field there is!
Still, though... Homer dwelled heavily in Victor's pocket, clanging rhythmically against his canteen as he marched through the decaying forest. The stone had feelings, as difficult as it may have been to fully anthropomorphize a chunk of rock, and it was consistantly helpful. Curiosity or not, scientific progress or not, there was no proper way to pop out with "so, can you describe your genocide in greater detail for me?" And if there was, Victor didn't want to be the one to experiment enough to find it. He treaded as lightly as he could manage upon the shifting sand of the conversation at hand. "You said you can hear them, though... the Harvesters. You can hear their thoughts. Can't you communicate with them, especially since they're also Stonechildren? When they go on their... their hunts, I guess - do they say anything to you? Can you ask them, convince them to stop?"
The response was quick, from another ancient voice that emanated from Homer's collected memories. "The Harvesters can communicate. They speak to those they take away. They speak with a hundred gibbering voices, saying nothing and everything at once. I have heard them, for a brief moment, and it is only my immediate rescue that leaves me able to relate this message to you at all - for any longer, and The Devouring would have claimed me as well. The Harvesters speak nonsense, dozens of voices shouting emptiness simultaneously, yet the babble reveals a path of dark twisting fates so disturbing that I refuse to relate the merest fragments of them lest the very thought consume me. And... and... they share their memories, with those who can see them. How such thoughts, such actions, such histories can exist is a concept beyond my ability comprehend. The Harvesters remember a million different pasts, a hundred futures, an existence beyond any reckoning. The terrible dreams of the progenitor were nothing compared to what lies in the shattered minds of fallen friendstones. They exist, but The Devouring has consumed them in its madness... as it will consume us all, with armies of our own fellow Children."
Victor shivered. Such a statement was, to put it mildly, creepy as fuck. He opened his mouth to say something - words of comfort, expressions of fear, the one about the Catholic and the Buddhist in the fisherman's dinghy, something to cut through the foreboding silence - but his voice died in his throat as a distant sobbing floated over the inexplicable winds. Leaves circled up around his legs before whipping away into the dim palisade of trees lit by pulsing blue. It was as if the forest wished to continually assert just how inherently disturbing it was. It really doesn't need to do that - I'm already convinced... Yet still the sobbing continued. The forest? Or...
"New here!" Homer exclaimed into Victor's head. "Straight straight straight!" It sounded relieved to have the original concern back on its thoughts again. All things considered, Victor himself couldn't disagree. Potential concrete problems, like a newcomer to the area, were far preferable to the intangible menace of the dead forest or the consuming horrors of the Harvesters. The young adventurer picked up his pace, his blundering weave through the skeletal trees growing ever more purposeful (yet no less blundering) the closer he came to the immediate goal. He expected to find someone sitting morosely on the soft forest floor, sobbing for about the same reason he had been doing the same thing the night before.
He wasn't expecting to run through a massive spiderweb, strung between two wide-spread trees, and stumble bodily into a small clearing stuffed with ghostcaps and stringy dead grasses. Victor performed the traditional "webs on my face" dance, hopping wildly from one foot to another while wildly batting at his body with his hands and muttering "god!" over and over again as if he expected the Almighty to appear before him with a feather-duster and a cup of tea for the annoyance. A dignified forerunner to a polite meeting with the new arrival this was not. Finally sliding his hand down his face enough to clear it of the sticky silk, the thin young Brit looked around him in amazement. This was the first true clearing he'd come across since the last... he'd call it an evening. Since the last evening, when he'd entered the woods, it had consisted of nothing but uninterrupted forest. Here grasses had grown tall, and the trees were forced back into an irregular circle around a few bare-boned individuals he could best classify from their gnarled twists of branching as likely fruit-bearers. Normal forests, or even abnormal forests, really didn't develop clearings like this just at random. In fact, this reminded Victor more of - yes, there it was. Remnants of civilization...
Over on the far edge of the clearing, near the trees and yet safely divided from the forest, a pile of cleanly-cut timber lay slumped on its side against a sudden unusual rise that continued up in what seemed to be a tumor on the clean lines of the woodland scene. From below the soil it pressed up underneathe, leaving the entire area distorted; trees leaned at angles they could not have possibly grown into, the clean lines of the clearing bulged oddly, and what seemed to have at one time been a small cabin must have managed to catch the protrusion at the exact wrong place. It had entirely collapsed. Victor vaguely suspected that the entire forest had all but fallen onto the cavern opening, and the hump was some cavern structure buried by the sudden appearance of an entire hunk of countryside thrown on top of it. That would've explained the widely-scattered topsoil and broken trees on the landing, at the very least.
So that was one mystery solved. The next mystery was, where the bloody hell had all these spiderwebs come from?! They were everywhere: blankets of sheer glimmering white that draped across and over nearly every available surface over knee height, hanging loosely from long skeletal branches to flutter in the phantom winds like a vast copse of scintillating willows. The pulsing blue of the ghostcaps shot through the webs and scattered in all directions, a scene that would be almost beautiful - a snowfall of silk - if there wasn't such misery permeating every inch of it. Victor still couldn't discover where the pervasive sobbing was originating from. It was as if it was coming from the silk itself... but then... perhaps it was. Was there someone trapped in there?
"Er... erm..." Finally, he just found a sentence and ran with it. "Hello? Where are you? Are you alright?" In retrospect, asking someone who was presently sobbing if they were okay had not been one of Victor's brighter moments. It did, at least, manage to obtain what he was looking for: a response of some kind. There, up in the boughs of the dead fruit trees, man-sized eyes peered out from behind the waves of silk, blinking in surprise as whoever-it-was managed to drag themselves out of their reverie. Victor blinked in surprise, too - an understandable reaction, as they were eight eyes. The hair on the back of his neck shot upwards. The fight-or-flight instinct section of his mind tried to figure out which was the better option, couldn't decide, and left him stuck frozen in place while it argued with itself. Somewhere in the back of his head, a voice piped up with oh, that'd explain the giant spider webs - a giant spider. Makes sense. He was going to die. A giant spider was going to liquefy his insides and drink him for sustenance. But hey, at least his oncoming death made sense.
For some reason, though, nothing happened. As the fear slowly died down, and the fight-or-flight battle gave way to scientific reasoning, Victor felt profoundly stupid for being so instantly consumed by fright. The web he'd walked through had not been anywhere near strong enough to secure a being his size, signifying that the chosen prey for its species was not even close to man-sized. Indeed, now that he was looking closer, he recognized the reasoning for the masses of silk sprayed across every surface - they were speckled with the tiny black bodies of breeding termite flights. It looked like hundreds of them upon every sticky surface, a veritable entomological buffet for anyone with a taste in such things. Victor guessed the spider had just such a palate. His original greeting hadn't been too friendly, either, what with the freezing in absolute terror and all. Time to try again.
"Oh, umm... Hello there, Mr. Arachnid, my name's Victor, and-" He was cut off by the sudden appearance of a speartip, followed without pause by the rest of the spear as it burst from the concealment of silk-draped branches and hurtled towards the young explorer. Apparently he was no longer the one who'd given out the least-friendly welcome. This would've been vaguely reassuring if the unfriendly welcome wasn't barbed, injurious, and heading his way at an astounding velocity. For once in the course of the last two days, Victor felt almost at home; angry beings he'd had no prior association with were hurling native weaponry his way. It was nearly common by this point.
With practiced ease, the limber Brit slid aside as the spear plunged firmly into the earth a little ways behind him. It made the tell-tale "thwack" of stone meeting stone, popped up, and went merrily tumbling a few feet further before coming to rest. That had been one solid, powerful, on-target throw. Victor had seen some tribal hunters not manage such feats. He considered applauding, decided that was probably the worst of all possible responses, and instead raised his hands in the best demonstration of non-threatening posture he could manage. He'd had a lot of experience with it, after all. "Hold on, hold on! No one's trying to-" He was cut off by a sound from the trees that sounded uncannily like a tea kettle being strangled.
"K'kreeex'z'xk! Xerx'k'zeeereee! EeeeEeeezk keeerx'kah!" Ah, of course. No English. He honestly should have expected it, but then, there was always no telling how far the missionaries had managed to travel. It truly astounded him sometimes how often he'd be in the middle of the most inhospitable of nowheres when some random native would pipe up with "Cheerio, good sir, and how are you?"
Then again, this whole experience had entirely reset his functional definition for an inhospitable nowhere. Victor sighed, and thought down at the stone in his pocket. 'Alrighty then... Homer, I am relatively certain you can think in any language. Can you perhaps convince this fellow to come down and stop trying to kill me? Not necessarily in that order, mind you.'
"I try, past," came the reply. "I try think out at it. It then sharp throw at it. It like I not, think." Wonderful. The huge... spider... thing? ...Whatever it was, it just wasn't cooperating. Back to mime it was then. Victor crept slowly and non-threateningly back towards the spear, leaning down to pick it up in a fully-outstretched arm. He could feel the near-dozen eyes boring into him, watching his every action with a dangerous intensity. Holding the spear in a position he calculated as being thoroughly and obviously impossible to attack from, the would-be explorer ambled cautiously forward and bent down to place it gingerly upon a large stone near the tree's base...
Thus occupied, it was only Victor's well-trained sense of pessimism that drove him to look up in time to dodge the second spear. As he scrambled backwards, this new weapon drove into the soft earth and held fast... before being yanked back up into the tree by a long silken rope firmly attached to its wooden haft. It apparently learned quickly, this spider-beast. Intelligence and sentience having been thus established, Victor was left with "major cultural disconnect" and "sheer malice" as potential explanations for such behaviour.
He didn't want to go with malice quite yet. Too many people assumed malice in others when the real answer lay squarely at the feet of sheer incompetence, often in the self. He probably was just doing something the spider assumed to be threatening. Something like living... quiet you. Victor shushed himself, and tried again with speaking. An apologetic tone this time - maybe that'd work. "I'm terribly sorry, but it seems we've gotten off on the wrong foot. I am truly not intending to demonstrate any hostile intentions toward y-"
This time the point brushed back the would-be adventurer's shaggy hair, nearly taking off his ear. Victor fell backwards to avoid sudden skull aeration, his patience dropping quickly away as his antagonist's aim sharpened. He pulled open the side pocket of his pack, quickly whipped out his Navy Colt, and fired a single shot into the air. He then winced, wishing he'd covered at least an ear beforehand. The crack of gunpowder echoed back to his ears. Was it the cavern, or the volume? He couldn't tell. All he knew was, that had to have made quite the impression. There were no further spears coming, at least, even as he picked himself out of the dirt and dead grasses and brushed himself off. There. You want hostile intentions, you get hostile intentions. At least now we're both on level ground.
Unfortunately, it was the level ground of being armed with and willing to use deadly weapons. This was making diplomacy a tad difficult, especially for Victor. He was familiar with the basic concept of "negotiations at the point of a sword," but usually he was the one the sword was pointed at. And even then, the metaphor somewhat failed when both sides had swords at the same time. Nonetheless, he had the certainty of having the better sword... projectile... armament? Whatever his revolver counted as, his remaining five shots could kill far more thoroughly than a spear could. When faced with the prospect of death, sometimes it's those simple things that matter.
"Alright," Victor muttered as he pulled Homer from his pocket with his remaining free hand, "I would like you to convey a message to this arachnid fellow here. He obviously understood you enough to fling a spear our way last time, so you can at least tell him things." There was a reluctant pause, and then the stone lit up softly. "But... past, it is mad I." The would-be explorer sighed with irritation, gesturing with his pistol as he spoke between clenched teeth.
"Yes, Homer, it is mad. Frankly, at this point, I don't care. Let it be furious if it bloody well wants to be. My main concern at this point is that it come out of the tree, walk out into the open where I can keep a watch on all its limbs, and stop hurling instruments of death at me. I'm willing to take the chance of irritating it if that'll get it to at least consider the possibility of not getting us into a fight to the death right now." Silence once more, and then another muted light from the stone: "Okay. What I think it?"
Hm. This was actually a problem. Homer, for all his abilities, had the functional eloquence of... well, a rock. Anything Victor might have come up with to ease hostilities wouldn't likely survive translation into the semi-coherency the Stonechild was currently in posession of. Still... hold on, I think I've got it! Victor found himself having to hide the beginnings of a smile, lest he give the exact wrong idea to the creature he was about to attempt negotiations with. "Okay, Homer, you can repeat the histories of the Stonechildren from your memory in absolute verbatim. Can you repeat the things I say that way?"
Almost instantly the smooth stone lit up with a bright gleam. "Yes! I it-say think!" Victor suspected it was thinking the same plan through that he was. That certainly made things easier. A moment's contemplation, and he had it. Slowly, cautiously, and while keeping the Colt plus an eye pointed vaguely in the direction any weaponry might emerge from, the exasperated Brit carefully addressed Homer with his phrase.
"Okay, I want you to tell me exactly what the spider's response is if you get one. Right now, though, I want you to tell it this, word for word. 'Look here, I know you're intelligent. I know you can understand this. And so I'm asking you now to stop attacking me. I don't want to hurt you, but I am prepared to kill you if you keep threatening my life. You can stop this. Come down, respond, and we won't be stuck with such unpleasant options.' Got it?"
The stone lit up with a powerful glow, conveying the message, and after a moment the spear launched from the treetops once more in reply. This time, however, it was a half-hearted throw that stuck in the ground several feet from Victor's position and sat there, reverberating in the earth. He didn't even contemplate moving on that one, and the spider-thing didn't retreive it. His words must have had some effect. There were the high-pitched clips of possible language once more - then Homer shone softly, and an unfamiliar voice fell sadly into the would-be explorer's head. This was expected, and relatively welcome. Less expected was the fact that it was an unfamiliar female voice.
"Go on, then, you monsters! Do what you've gone to such horrid lengths to accomplish. Kill me. Kill me with this terrible power you've brought upon us, like you've killed the others... like you've killed our world! Send me back to the Great Web, and claim this broken land of yours that even the stars have foresaken!" Sobbing was heard from the treetops once more, and Victor's mouth fell open. Great lord above. She thinks that this is... and then since this place is dead... oh my, she must think... dear me! Suddenly the would-be adventurer was falling all over himself to correct the myriad errors which had led to this moment. There were full books of social rules in place specifically to prevent the over-traumatization of the female gender, after all, and here he was threatening to shoot a member of it while she was in the middle of unimaginable distress. For the sake of common decency, he had to find a way to help. Gentlemen did such things for ladies.
Yes, he had to remind himself, even the ones that have thrown pointy stabby things at you. Self-defense may be a necessity, but chivalry is a virtue. A virtue that was, admittedly, being rather strained by the present course of events - but still, as long as the spider... as long as the creature... as long as the lady was in distress, and not immediately threatening his life, the course of action was clear. Calm and collect the scattered senses, render assistance, and... well, there probably wasn't any laudanum on hand nearby, but the first two could still manage wonders.
Lifting Homer to eye level, Victor gazed into the shiny surface of the stone and quickly threw directions at it. "Same thing as before, tell her what I say - 'Please, madam, I am not sure who I or my companion seem to be to you... but you are not where you think you are, and we are not conquerors. We are merely also trapped underground, as you are. Please come down, so we can explain.'" A pause, and then in the back of the young Brit's mind: "I trap not. Land of us is good to us. I stay!"
Victor went to massage his temple, before realizing he had a solid hunk of rock in one hand and a cocked pistol in the other. That was not effective stress relief - or, really, that was potentially too effective stress relief. He quickly he slid the pistol back into his pack, just to be on the safe side. "Homer, we can quibble about exactitudes once everyone is on equal, non-murderous footing. Just repeat to her what I said." Another period of yellow-lit silence, as the message was relayed, and then... nothing. Still more nothing followed without hesitation.
After a moment, Homer lit up again. Had the spider creature not received the message? Had she not listened? By the third time the stone glowed mutely at the arachnid without giving any response back to Victor, he was beginning to lose patience. Still, though, there was no need to go screwing this up now. Things were not currently being hurled at his head, and he wanted to keep it that way. He focused on the rock, and thought at it. 'Well, I don't think she's going to give us an answer. I don't get it, though. She should have realized by now that we could-'
Homer's voice popped into Victor's head with a soft glow. "Hold. Busy!" This was simply beyond the pale. They were talking together and ignoring him! Granted, he was used to such disrespect from the porters... and the ex-military "wilderness professionals" for that matter... and okay, the other British expedition members too. But a rock and a spider?! There were only so many indignities he could tolerate, and as high as that quantity was this was still a step over the line. "Now wait just one minute..." he muttered, mostly to himself.
The stone's reply was instantaneous: "Yes!" This left Victor feeling both irritated and stupid. Being pointedly reminded that the entity he was snubbed by happened to be an inanimate lump the size of his fist with exceedingly-questionable conversational ability did nothing to help soothe his building frustration. He can't even make a full sentence! How can they be just merrily chatting away without me?! The would-be explorer found himself squeezing Homer tightly between his hands, an act that would've strangled or squashed almost anything that didn't happen to be, say, made out of rock. Yet still there was silence, and it was simply uncalled for to interrupt a conversation in progress without being invited into it. Others could be rude, others would be rude, but the only way polite society could exist was for someone to grin and bear it. Victor was generally that someone.
Defeated once more by his own sense of courtesy, the lanky Brit slumped down into the dirt and waited. The only sound to break the silence was his own breathing, and the rustle of leaves in distant winds. Now that the sense of isolation had washed back over him, he felt even more profoundly tired than before. Here were two sentient beings within yards of him, one entirely in his hands, and yet one had just tried to kill him while the other was completely ignoring the fact that he still might be in danger. The spear loomed mere feet away, still attached to its silken cord. Perhaps they're conspiring together. It wouldn't have been the first time.
Shaking his head to drive that thought away, Victor forced himself to his feet. He placed Homer next to the spear he'd offered up previously, then wandered off to leave the others comfortably in their conversation. There was the collapsed structure waiting to be examined, and as always it helped the would-be explorer's mood to bury himself in his work. Archaeology was thus the order of the moment.
Interestingly enough, however, there was little to be done within the structure which could be called archaeology at all. A closer approximation would have been to call it "remembering Grandfather Carlyle's house," as for all intents and purposes it was little different from the small cottage of Victor's ancestor if it happened to have been hit by an earthquake. There were the same wattle-and-daub construction techniques, as the crumbled fragments of whitewashed clay perfectly demonstrated, and the same hammered-peg methodology for securing the framework itself as well. Granted, there were some peculiarities - odd brushed designs were evident in the larger bits of remaining plaster, and the apparent arches in the doorway were more reminiscent of Spanish adobe or lowland cob houses than anything (not to mention that they required some particular persistance to manage creation of from wooden planks). Overall, though, it was some place Victor himself could've quite possibly sat down next to in the English countryside without ever once giving it a single questioning glance.
That was to say, if Victor had been capable of sitting next to it without accidentally sitting on it. The entire structure was, frankly, miniscule. The doorframes, such as he could tell from the rubble, went up only to his stomach. The remnants of the front steps were such that he could have climbed onto the porch by lifting his leg to the knee. It was as if the entire structure had been rendered to the scale necessary to house a large dog.
People, however, had obviously resided within. For one thing, there was a well-used, charcoal-coated hearth stone residing in the center of the common room. For another, ssmall versions of everything from utinsels to books were scattered liberally around the space. Victor couldn't help but open one up, finding palm-sized tri-fold pages wrapped in leather bindings and coated in small squiggly text that resembled Egyptian Hieratic blended with Biblical Aramaic and rendered by an epileptic. There were obvious patterns, however, sentence structures and parallel forms that demonstrated a full language bound within the little squiggly lines.
Then, of course, there were the bodies. There were two - completely skeletal, as everything else in the forest seemed to have been reduced to, but also human in form and structure. Or, at least, humanish. Victor's first impulse was to say they were pygmies like the fabled Mbuti, but... well, they were shorter than any pygmy peoples reliably recorded outside the works of Jonathan Swift. As best the young Brit could approximate, they only came up to his waist. Children? No, their proportions would've been all wrong. Or at least, if their developmental proportions were similar to that of people...
Victor shrugged. When there is no sufficient immediate evidence, resort to the surroundings. There weren't any items signifying the presence of children around, and waist-height entities would be perfectly suited for a chest-height doorway. So yes, they were full-grown creatures that just happened to be half his height, who had apparently died when their house fell in on them at the same time the entire forest dropped into the cavernous underground. The bones had several fractures, some in pointedly vital places. A sigh found its way to the young explorer's lips - this was like watching an accident happen in reverse, knowing that it had already happened and there was no way to intercede. He only hoped it had been quick.
His moment of mourning for strangers over with, Victor began to scavenge the area for interesting artifacts to prove his find. The books were first - the prospect of a new script to decipher was just too tantalizing for the amateur linguist. Next was a small hand-carved wooden cane, about the size of his femur, with excellent detailing and the head of... well, some sort of big cat on the gripping end. Adding to the haul was a decorative brass lantern, embossed with tiny hand-tapped spiral markings across its outer surfaces. It was apparently intended as a hanging lamp of some sort, being far too large for either of the former inhabitants to easily hold or walk with, but this in turn made it perfect for Victor's travelling needs. Finally he'd have a light that didn't require conversation, and it was dual-purposed as an artifact he could return home with to prove his strange experiences!
The would-be adventurer was indeed so busy making sure that the lantern would function for him that he completely fell outside awareness of what was going on around him. He thus very nearly screamed when a cold, stiff touch closed onto his shoulder. Instead he merely levitated instantaneously off the ground, attempted a 180° spin that wound up being somewhere closer to 720°, and collapsed in a heap amidst the splintered wood and soft loamy soil. As he untangled himself slowly from the mess and the floating sparkly pain cleared from his vision, he began to remember that he was not alone. Homer was back near the tree, and could not move itself, so this meant... uh-oh.
Lifting his head slowly, Victor gasped - but not out of mortal fear. It was, instead, an exclamation of pure astonishment. Stood next to him was, for some reason, something other than a spider. It was a lady, yes, but certainly not a lady spider. Beyond this simple statement, the young Brit had absolutely no clue how to classify what he was seeing. An albino? A mythical being pulled straight from the fables of Greece? She simply defied easy description.
The albino description would have fit easily enough, if that were all there was to her. Her skin was pale enough that Victor's thoughts were driven back to how utterly, insanely jealous some of the women of London high society would have been in his place. He might have sworn she was anemic if it weren't for her build, a lean muscular athleticism which certainly would've eased the concerns of the coffee-house parliaments; their views of the ideal figure required the involvement of whale-bone, lacings, a second person to pull the lacings, layers upon layers upon layers of cloth, possible permanent disfigurement, and underneathe it all a body that was withered to just the right stage of frailty by the judicious doing of absolutely nothing. The individual before him, in contrast, looked like she hadn't spent a day doing nothing in the entirety of her young life. Her skin may have resembled that of the upper class. Her hair, for that matter, may have resembled the silken wigs of nobility as of only a few brief decades ago; Victor himself couldn't say for certain whether her hair was silk, even with it pulled into a tight braid, as pure shining white as it was. The body of this girl, however, screamed of an active existence far removed from the salons of Victorian Europe.
It also screamed of a moral code far removed from anything even resembling Victorian Europe, considering how devoid of clothing she was. The entirety of her dress consisted of less than the undergarments of most civilized peoples. Victor felt the familiar creep of warmth onto his cheek, his gaze falling squarely back to the dirt as he blushed profusely. As often as he'd been exposed to cultures entirely eschewing the concept of clothing altogether, he could still never quite manage the feat of actually getting used to it. He thus spent much of his anthropological study time staring guiltily at the floor and wishing all those courses in Cambridge had included a segment on "what to do if the tribe refuses to abide by basic standards of decency." Sometimes it took improvising to get his work done, like the time he'd conducted every interview with that tribe in Indonesia from behind a bamboo screen. They may have come off thinking he was a leper of some fashion, but at least he'd not had the building urge to throw a shirt at them the whole time.
Victor's train of thought was derailed by a sudden pressure on his head and a voice in his mind: "Weakling! Coward! You left your friend behind." The disdain was obvious. "You left him with me, who has already attacked you thrice. You turned your back on an enemy you could not see, who you only assumed was unarmed. You didn't even notice when I walked up to you, and when you did your actions only made you more vulnerable. I could have killed you, at least twenty times by now, in twenty different ways... and you would have never even known it."
It was the same voice as before. Victor sighed. So the spider wasn't a spider. He was vaguely bothered by the fact that this renewed the mystery of where the silk came from. Swallowing his annoyance, the young Brit managed a quick reply. "Homer, if you could, please inform this lady that, as I said, I have no interest in conflict with-"
"You could just tell me. And you still don't know if I have any interest in conflict with you." This thought was jarring in his skull. How could she... This time Victor remained silent. 'Homer, how did she directly understand my words and reply to them? Unless she's a telepath, which seems highly unlikely, there's no reason-' Again he was cut off. It was quite jarring to have your thoughts cut off by someone else's. "Do you not know? The stone told me. Direct contact lets it work as a conduit instead of a courier, and your friend is on your head. You would know that if you had faced the threat, coward." So that explained the solid touch of biting chill. And here Victor was just thinking this lady was just physically as cold and hard as she was putting on the show of.
'His name is Homer, and no - he didn't tell me this. I've only known him for a day, so I haven't quite learned all the rules of this sanitarium of a world yet.' Squeezing his eyes shut, he shot his head upwards and opened them to stare piercingly into those of his accuser. She didn't have eight of them... but she did have two sets - one thinner than the other, set above it like a more useful form of eyebrow. Both were deep crimson, without irises, and had the thin vertical slits of a predator's gaze. Thankfully for his attempt at composure, this was not the strangest thing he'd seen in the last fourty-eight hours. She, on the other hand, blinked in wide-eyed surprise (quite a display, all things considered) as he addressed her mind directly. 'And you have no interest in harming me because it is beneathe you. If I were prey for you, you wouldn't have pressed the attack against me once I was aware and capable of defending myself. If you were from a xenophobic tribe, you would never have replied to either of us. And as you've never met us before, no other form of society would have reason to press an attack against something with no challenge or hostility. You'd have killed a weakling, a coward as you put it, and as I said - that is beneathe you.' The girl was speechless. Victor, on the other hand, was doing a mental jig in his mind. Three cheers for anthropological awareness! Hip hip, hooray! Hip hip, hooray! Hip hip... hoo, boy... She'd brought a perfectly-chipped flint knife against his throat faster than he could follow, fangs showing through her grim smirk. So much for the social sciences.
"Your mind games will not work on me! I've seen first-hand the end to your duplicities, and I shall not be such an easy kill." She thrust her knife tighter against Victor's throat, and he could feel the sting of its edge upon his skin. "Your rank, your flight, and directions to your camp. Now!" The first drops of blood rolled down the blade, and... Oh dear... Blood... my blood for that matter... That's not good... He felt his limbs go slack, moments before his brain mercifully rolled down the curtain.
Devi Windspinner, Strider of the Ninth Strand, had been absolutely certain this was some sort of Greyflight deception. They were good at that sort of thing - some of their kind were absolutely masterful crafters of implanted thoughts, and used that power well in battle. She had decided as soon as this... thing tried to get her to surrender, that it had to be what was going on. Especially after it revealed its intelligence.
Admittedly, the plan could have been better thought out. Taking the shape of a deformed Aranae, speaking in gibberish while excusing the flyer's inborn telepathy with a rock of all things... she had suspected that this delusionist had been a talented novice, a skilled-yet-inexperienced newcomer to the war who'd found her alone in the forest and decided to toy with his prize. And toy with her he did, leaving her trapped in a dead and desolate mindscape for what seemed like an eternity. It was real enough to leave her believing in the destruction. He'd made her cry before even attempting contact. She desperately wanted to make him pay for that.
Unfortunately, he'd fainted dead away at the first sign of... well... she could only assume it was supposed to be blood. This put a significant kink into her assumptions. This freakish being may have been dreamed up as a disguise by a novice among the Night Horde, but even the most green of wetwings didn't pass out upon first contact with the enemy. Beyond that, unconsciousness should have started dissolving whatever implants it had made into her psyche. Instead she remained stuck in this waste of decay - this terrible, horrid, dreadful...
Come on, soldier, get a grip. Remember your training. Devi shut her eyes, focusing her attention inwards... onto her consciousness itself. "Weaver bind the thoughts that lie... Weaver bind the thoughts that lie... Weaver bind the thoughts that lie..." She blanked her mind, shutting out all stimuli - true or false - and then slowly cracked her eyelids once more.
Yet still the ghastly surroundings persisted, even as the creature's blood felt hot and wet on her fingertips, and nothing wavered or faded save the constant pulses of light from those... those damnable mushrooms! Winding up, she kicked one with all her force and sent its scattered pieces tumbling wildly through the long dead grass.
"It no must," a cautioning voice intoned into her head. It was the rock, still talking despite its carrier's unconsciousness. Devi frowned. It was right, nonetheless - undirected anger didn't accomplish anything, and now her foot was all sticky.
...Wait...
Leaping forwards, she planted said foot firmly onto the stone and ground it into the soil. Nothing happened. She pressed harder, expecting some choking noises (or, depending on the flyer's self control, some pops of tendon and bone) to come to her ears. Still nothing. After a moment, the stone's voice piped up again within her mind. This time it sounded honestly curious. "Why it this do?"
"Because. If. You. Die. I! Go! Back! Home!" She caught herself literally jumping up and down in desperation on the hunk of rock, and stepped off it with an embarrassed frown as it answered her: "That go no home." This was looking less and less like a delusionist's implant, and more and more like something very much worse.
"But... but... I want to go home..." Devi sank to her knees as the crushing weight of reality pressed down upon her. This couldn't be real - it had to be an illusion. It must! Prying the trampled stone out of the dirt, she looked it over frantically for something on its surface that she could push, pull, or stab to make it bring her back to reality. Unfortunately it was a stone, and thus devoid of such characteristics. There was, however, still one thing she could do...
Shaking the small mineral lump rapidly in her hands, the disoriented girl barked words at her presumed captor. "Strider Windspinner! Ninth-Strand! Scouting mission! Determining weak points for a counter-assault! We attack your flank at sunrise! I'll tell you everything! Just let me out of here!" More silence, and then with a soft, sad light from the stone... "Can't." The way it spoke, so sorrowful and filled with remorse, left Devi believing it. Unfortunately, she would probably have preferred to think that it was lying. The girl broke down into sobs once more.
"So I'm stuck here... Stuck in this dead mockery of my home forever." It all just seemed too horrible. Her Strand-mother would have slapped her upside the head for such behaviour, then dragged her into the court-martial herself before the moon had returned to slumber, but... what else was there to do in such a horrid place? It was everything Devi had ever known, only dead and rotting before her. Only the termites and those hideous fungal growths survived, their presence a further show of contempt for the trees' demise. A voice answered her plaintive cries, floating into her head. "Is not stuck. Can move. Move good."
Well, there was also the talking rock... and that thing over there. Was the stone trying to cheer her up? She supposed that movement was an enviable talent from the viewpoint of an inanimate object. Sighing, Devi looked down at the lump in her lap and thought into it as before. 'The creature said your name was Homer.'
"Yes. It I give name, past. Homer is I." The stone blinked with light as it "spoke," flashing on and off slowly between sentences. She vaguely wondered if that was an indicator of its thoughts. If it was, that would explain why it spoke so very... well, like it spoke.
'Well then, Homer, I suppose I should ask - why am I here, in this horrible place? Did I do something wrong? Did I anger the Weaver?' More slow, repetitive flashing... "Know no. Outlanders come, past. Outlanders come, now. Why, know no." Devi idly wished she hadn't rendered the other creature unconscious. His useful knowledge may have been limited, but at least he could be conversed with on a level that didn't make her brain ache.
This thought made her pause. 'Hey, that... that thing over there said it hadn't known you for longer than a day. Is it one of these "outlanders" as well?' A brief pause, yet more pulses of light, and then: "Yes." It apparently took a lot of thinking for that one-word response. Rather than tax the poor stone further, Devi turned to examine the one who'd carried it to her.
Her first impression was that the poor thing looked like a childhood burn victim. Every portion of its visible skin was the odd pale-wooden tone of scar tissue, blotched at random with small discolorations of brown, and the creature's near-eyes were entirely missing; in their place were small blobs of fuzzy hair... fused eyelashes perhaps? Whatever the cause for such deformity, it left a wide swath of wasted flesh between the being's remaining eyes and the dark black waves of its hair that was geniunely disconcerting. The shaggy locks mostly hid its ears, at least, which Devi supposed was the purpose for its odd, neck-length style: the unfortunate creature must've been so ashamed, having lost its tips to the injury which had so disfigured its body. Only short rounded nubs remained to denote where they had been, barely enough to support a frame of wire and crystal that wrapped around the front of the poor soul's face. She could only guess at what it did, but with the small round shards centered over its far-eyes the contraption almost certainly had something to do with compensating for the loss of the near.
It's a shame, really, she mused solemnly. No one should have to live trapped in such a monstrous body. There was no wonder it covered itself so thoroughly in all those layers of concealing... hm. As Devi rubbed the fabric, she frowned. It wasn't silk... she wasn't sure what it was, actually, aside from the fact that it was rough to the touch and seemed quite poorly-woven. It was so thick. Was this sad unfortunate unable to spin?
Devi found herself shaking her head in empathy. Here she was, sobbing over her placement in this dead land, when it could be so much worse for her. She could be stuck in more than a twisted world - she could be stuck in that twisted body, rendered unable to even spin silk. No wonder it was on its own... A male that could not even perform simple crafts was nothing but a burden to any who would be forced to provide for it. And she'd tried to kill the poor thing. Were she in its position, she wasn't sure she'd have even bothered dodging the spear. Its spirit must be strong, she contemplated. I don't think I could live like that.
At that moment, its eyelids flicked open and the same strange white orbs stared up at her from behind the small circles of glass that covered them. Wide, unnaturally-rounded pupils were surrounded by pools of blood-grey that pierced into her soul, seeming to grow as their gaze passed through the crystal shards and a hand wrapped in an insane number of appendages reached up towards her. Oh, Weaver of fate... There was no conceivable way any injury, any disfigurement could create that monstrosity. It wasn't an unfortunate deformed Aranae... it wasn't an Aranae at all! Reddish patches were visible where wounds had seeped through the bandages wrapped around its palms... it was simply not the right shade for any creature she knew. It was an impossible corruption of aranic form, and she was trapped in this dead world with it...
The twisted parody of a hand closed around her forearm, and her screams echoed through the forest crypt.
Victor had been so hopeful, too. He'd thought over to Homer as soon as he'd woken back up from the fainting spell, and since that point the stone had been faithfully relaying the girl's statements to him. It gave him the information he needed to know to try and make peace with her - she was military, she had believed an enemy was deceiving her with a dead forest when she apparently hailed from a live one, and she'd now at least seemingly accepted that this place was real. When she approached him this time, he thus had a perfect statement readied to drive the point of his non-aggression home.
Unfortunately, the second he'd tried to give this message to her she'd shrieked and stabbed him in the left arm with her flint blade. In retrospect, he considered as he pulled another bandage tight around this fresh wound, it was merely lucky for him that the girl had been acting on sheer panicked desperation at that moment instead of the calm methodical strategy of military training. The "professional explorers" of the expedition always stated and restated from their drills: if the need or desire to use force arises, never intentionally make any non-killing blow. Victor had often wondered about that "desire to use force" bit, and how it got added to the statement, but he knew better than to ask.
He wished he had known better than to try and talk when the strange four-eyed girl was all but hovering over him. It seemed the important survival lesson of "do not startle the armed" continued to elude him. Meanwhile, he was pretty effectively down an arm himself... and the lady he'd been trying to calm for the last half an hour or so was at that moment standing wide-eyed on a rock keeping a spear pointed permanently in his direction. Every movement Victor tried to make was met with a startled jump from her direction and a thrust from the dire-looking weapon; something that would have been more threatening to his safety if he weren't several yards away from her and sitting down comfortably away from her reach.
As far as he could tell, she no longer wanted to kill him. She was just utterly petrified of him, and wanted to keep him as far away as possible. It was tough to say whether this was an improvement, but looking at the new makeshift bandage as it soaked quickly through with crimson... the ventured guess would be that it was about the same in potential end results. It had been a deep blow, and Victor's only hope was that the pressure managed to clot it shut before an infection set in. There was only so much strips of cloth could do, and that was limited to "mostly nothing." He was running out of them, too. ...Are there any doctors down here? He decided he didn't want to have to find out, just in case the answer was a negative.
In the meantime, though, he was stuck staring at this strange lady who was busy staring at him, as well as the spear that separated him. She was just as terrified as he had been upon his arrival, wanting more than anything to find a way home while lashing out at the strangeness all around. Victor couldn't just leave her. Given this forest, she'd be dead soon enough and he'd have that blood on his hands for the rest of his days. That just wasn't what adventurers did. That wasn't what gentlemen did.
Then again, the thought popped unbidden into his mind, most gentlemen don't face the chance of being run through with a spear all that often nowadays... quiet you. This was all nothing but a big misunderstanding. If he could just clear it up, they could all get on their way before the forest awoke to do far more damage to the lot of them than a simple spear could dream of. First, though, he had to get the lady to listen... a task that was proving far more difficult than it had any right to be.
"Okay, Homer, can you-" That was all he managed to speak before being cut off by a yell. "Kxxt'eeek! Kazxt'keekak!" There was no telling how such sounds were capable of coming out of that girl; Victor tried experimentally to replicate the vowel-consonant pairings, and found that he might have been able to manage it had he been stabbed in the voice box instead of his arm. This made him feel marginally better, however. Since he couldn't physically speak the language, he wouldn't have to hear it quite so much. It had all the flow and elegance of a flight of cicadas being fed into a meat grinder. 'Okay, Homer,' he tried again - this time silently. 'What did the lady who stabbed me just say?'
A pause, and then a soft glow from where the stone lay - it seemed worried about getting into the midst of the events of the moment. Truthfully, it probably had every right to be. "It say 'Monster! Stay back!'" Glorious, Victor sighed. His arm hurt. His neck hurt, too, though at least it hadn't been cut enough to require bandaging. Above all, his head hurt. He wanted to go lie down with a book and some tea, yet he couldn't read the books he had for their alien language and there was no fire from which to brew anything nearing a potable pot of Earl Grey. Besides, he was nearly out of water entirely. The girl didn't seem to have anything on her but weaponry; Victor couldn't figure out where she'd put anything else, for that matter, though contemplating that thought for any length of time was impossible without nigh-infinite amounts of toe-shuffling. They were both in danger from simple deprivation if they stayed here for much longer.
She must be thirsty. The realization was an absolute bolt from the blue... but the more the young Brit thought about it, the more true it seemed. She'd apparently been here for at least the duration of his hike to this location, she'd been active non-stop since that time, and there was no source of moisture around. More importantly, this suggested a course of action that might actually produce some results. For once. He unslung his canteen, took the last sip he'd probably get from it, and returned the cap... before tossing it over towards the terrified lady and addressing Homer. 'If you wouldn't mind too much, please let the lady know that there is water in that container and she's free to have some if she wants.'
The stone seemed to eagerly grasp the chance to convey a peace offering, instantly lighting up with a shining brilliance. After a moment, however, it glowed once more... this time with a subdued tone, to match its soft - almost hurt - manner. "It say, 'I will not take your poison, beast.'" Victor groaned.
"Well fine then. I drank some of it, and I know she saw me because she's been watching every single thing I've done for the last ten minutes - I don't think she even has to blink, apparently - but if she thinks I'm out to poison her for no bloody reason (though I am beginning to develop some decent ones), tell her to just throw the water back over here and I'll finish it off." Homer glowed for a tiny clip of a moment, before going dark once more... and then shining again... and then yet again. Good. At least she's talking... well, "talking" to him.
Finally, the stone returned to Victor's mind again. "It say, 'If I die from this, I will kill you.'" The strange girl had already leapt upon the canteen and was draining it dry. For some reason, though he could not for the life of him figure out how, he suspected she was entirely capable of carrying out her threat. The puzzled Brit pondered the possibilities until a hollow clang of metal rung out from near his seat, drawing his focus back towards the lady and her spear while he slipped the empty container back over his shoulder. He watched her watch him for several seconds, before sighing. "Homer, tell her 'it wouldn't hurt to say thank you.'" They may have been stuck in absolute desolation, surrounded by dead and yet nonetheless possibly hostile wilderness, and she may have significantly wounded him for no damn good reason, but that was still no reason to go abandoning the basic concepts of courtesy.
A brief light, a screeching cacophany of reply, and he had his answer. "It say, 'Thank you. That was a kind act for such an abomination.'" Abomination?! Victor leapt to his feet. "Abomination?! I'm the abomination?! Have you ever seen a mirror?! You've got four eyes! Four! Red! Eyes!" He was flailing his hands in full-on rant now. "Not to mention the fact that your hair is silk, your hands are missing fingers, and apparently you've got bloody fangs! Yet I am the abomination here?! I know some people who would've shot you dead on sight as a demon!"
Silence. Darkness from Homer. The stone apparently knew better than to pass that message along unbidden. Unfortunately, the sounds of anger in Victor's voice had to have piqued the curiosity of the lady keeping him at spearpoint - a soft "Kreee?" prompted a long burst of light from the mineral lump. A burst long enough to convey every single word he'd said. Traitor, the would-be explorer thought in annoyance. He'd probably be dodging spears again in a moment.
But no. Instead, something like a cough came from the girl's direction. Then another. At that point she simply gave up and fell backwards, strange sounds like an ungreased axle pouring out of her twitching body.
"Rrreexeexeexeexeee! Eexeexeexeexee!" Victor stared in absolute stupefaction, wondering if he had somehow poisoned her. That didn't sound natural at all. It took several long moments to realize she was laughing. Uproariously. At him. He might have bothered to feel indignant about it, if it weren't infinitely better than the other alternatives thus far presented to him. The young Brit would've broken out in Vaudeville acts at this point if he thought it could help. Unfortunately, his comic timing was nearly nil. Instead he merely silently addressed Homer once again: 'Once she calms down, could you please ask her what is so funny?'
He hoped it wouldn't be anything too embarrassing, but sheer curiosity over it was driving him nuts. I'm probably doing the over-gesturing thing again... or... Did I say something wrong? Maybe I got mad when 'abomination' is one of their compliments. It might make sense, considering their appearance. Oh, I hate these cultural disconnects... Thankfully he didn't have too long to berate himself - the girl's riotous laughter was running out of steam, her squealing exclamations of mirth giving way to gasps for air as the spasms finally took their toll and rendered her out of breath. By the time Homer had delivered his question and received an answer, she was lying back on the rock panting between sparse giggles that sounded oddly like castanets.
"'Oh, Weaver... This is just too weird! It's worse than if the Molted Ones tapped me on the shoulder and told me it disturbed them that I wasn't hollow. Does it also bother you that I breathe air?'" More giggling ensued, and Victor felt vaguely unnerved by the entire affair. It was like watching Frankenstein's monster fall into hyster... oh. No wonder this was so funny to her - in her eyes, he had to be the freakishly different one. And here he was insisting upon his normality, calling her the creature.
The comedy of errors, the entire course of madness they had been through in the last hour or so, finally became clear. Victor caught the giggles, and this set the girl off again. This in turn drove Victor into further hysterics, and so it went until the both of them were collapsed breathlessly in the dirt. After a long, quiet moment, Homer spoke into the would-be adventurer's mind. "It say it sorry." He sighed. 'Tell her that it's okay. I've mostly come to expect it by now.'
Now that the pain-relieving effects of massive infectious laughter were dissipating, everything hurt again. Only this time the count included his chest, thanks to all the spasms of mirth. Victor let his head fall back into the soft earth, closed his eyes, and breathed deep, slow breaths. He could feel the wound in his arm pulse with pain on every heartbeat. The cloth of the bandage was utterly soaked through with blood - the sticky chill was obvious even with his eyes shut. Not a good sign... The wound was costing him both blood and moisture, and they were now officially out of anything to drink. He almost certainly needed to get to some sort of water source within the next day. He had to assume there were at least some springs - Homer had talked about outlanders enough to imply that they had the ability to survive down in this place, so obviously the necessities could be found somehow. He just had to get to them.
That would probably be harder than a simple sentence of seven single-syllable words made it seem.
Victor had already lost count of the number of times he had contemplated the possibility that he might very well wind up dead somewhere among the inexplicable corridors of the underground labyrinth he found himself trapped within... but, well, that moment added to it. He swallowed nervously, and tried to gather the energy necessary to sit up.
"No no," the lady's thoughts intervened as a weight landed on his hand and she curled his fingers around it. Homer was apparently back in his grasp. "You stay still." A pause, and then an incredulous scoff echoed into Victor's mind. "Not much of a healer, are you? Your bandage can't do anything but hide this sort of wound." The would-be adventurer frowned at this critique, pressing his eyes shut and clenching his jaw as he felt the wet cloth being stripped away. The girl's fingers were cool, almost cold to the touch, and seemed to know exactly what they were doing as they ran testingly over the skin near his wound.
'I am a naturalist. Not a physician. The teachings are about the same, internals and externals and body structures, but I don't normally have to put that sort of thing into immediate practice. Besides, I wasn't honestly expecting to end the day in posession of a stab wound.' He felt the lady's hands freeze for a brief moment. Bad time for black comedy. 'Sorry.'
"Sorry? Sorry?! Oh, Weaver reprieve us - the person I attacked is apologizing to me about it." Victor felt his face flush in sheepish embarrassment, and sighed. He was then grabbed firmly by his collar and hauled a few inches off the dirt. "Alright, you, look at me." He cracked an eyelid, and then immediately sent his gaze skyward. The lady was straddling him, leaning down to look him in the face. He was now blushing for multiple reasons. Why did the natives always have to clothe themselves in things that insulted the very concept of clothing?
This train of thought was thrown entirely off the rails when Victor was shaken by his shirt, and the girl's thoughts repeated: "Hey! I said look at me." He gulped nervously. Oh dear. Closing his eyes for a brief second, he tilted his head forward and focused a tunnel-vision gaze on her eyes. Her, well, upper eyes. Less opportunity for temptation that way. For her part, she looked like this entire situation was as awkward to her as it was to him. At least they shared that in common.
"I attacked you, okay? I was alone in a strange place, and you're- well, you look very unusual, and... and alright, I was afraid too. But I could have killed you, and according to this stone you were only trying to help me. I must be the one to ask if you will mend the heartweb with me. Not the other way around. I must... I must at least try to correct this." The girl was blinking a lot, Victor noticed - it was something easy to catch after spending minutes in a staring contest where she never blinked once. It almost looked like... well, like she was about to cry. Wait, could she cry?
A voice spoke up from the back of Victor's head: Does it matter? In retrospect, it didn't... well, not really anyways. If she was upset, it was back to the original idea - calm, collect, offer assistance. He'd apparently circled all the way around the alphabet and was back to Plan A, but at least he was familiar with this one. First things first, though. 'Er... Well, if that was your way of offering up an apology, then I accept it.' He paused. '...That was an apology, was it not?' Victor regretted that question the moment he asked it, as the girl looked at him with visible annoyance and let his body drop back onto the dirt. He was glad it was soft dirt. "What, does your kind apologize so rarely that you have trouble recognizing it?"
The young Brit felt compelled to come to the defense of his species. 'No no, it's not that. I do appreciate the gesture. I am just not used to hearing such... er... symbolic ways of offering up the simple word of sorry. Usually we just say it, the other person accepts it, and everything is back to normal. The pomp and circumstance is unnecessary.'
"The pomp... and... what, exactly?" Victor sighed. 'It's from Shakespeare's Othello. Pride, pomp, and circumstance...' The Bard was one of his favourite subjects, almost as full of quotables as Cicero, and - bother. "Shake... spear? Othello?" The lady's annoyance had given way to absolute puzzlement. That was no surprise - quoted literature from centuries past even confused some of his own fellow expedition members, and here he was spouting it off to... well, whatever this girl happened to be. But how to put this simply? Or rather, how to put this simply without offending her again? 'Um... well... Allow me to try again. We don't normally use such... formality? Normally people say they're sorry, ask for forgiveness, are given it, and the world goes on.'
That clarified little for her. She seemed stunned by the very nature of the statement, actually. "Your race makes the wronged responsible for mending? How... strange... No wonder you were apologizing to me." The lady paused in contemplation, then quickly shook her head. "Well, I'm still going to do this the right way." She was already nearly holding Victor's hand, a necessity of conversing through the stone resting in their palms... but now she sat back upon his legs, lifted up his remaining good arm, and entwined his fingers in her own. The young Brit went red - such a thing was entirely in violation of any sense of moral propriety. You didn't just hold hands with a random lady... spider... girl... thing... Not without very good reason, anyways. And you certainly didn't let her sit on you.
Then again, it wasn't like he had much in the way of choice. Under the gentle touch of this lady was a manacle grip - Victor figured he would not have been able to move if he'd tried. And that was under the best of conditions, with an uninjured... well, everything that was injured. The would-be adventurer thus decided that, given the circumstances, it was okay to let himself remain in this position. As long as no one else was around, anyways, and he didn't let himself get dragged any further into this tribal vulgarity. Alright. Just keep the eyes straight, let her do... whatever this is, and then get back to doing things the proper way as soon as possible. Part and parcel of dealing with hysteria was handling the irrationalities, right? Surely he could manage it.
Confidence thus restored, Victor watched events unfold with an impassive observer's eye... for about two seconds. It was at that point that the girl closed her eyes and kissed his hand. Victor winced. Either she was going to bite him with those fangs he'd noticed earlier or, worse, she wasn't. He had a response for the first possibility, as unpleasant as it would be, but the alternative left him dumbfounded as to appropriate reactions.
She went with the latter. Victor bit his lip almost to the point of bleeding, and blushed deeply enough that he thought he might bruise. Oh dear oh my oh goodness oh sweet holy lord... How on earth was he supposed to respond to this?! He could only assume it was part of some ritual, from what she'd said to him, but, well... he wasn't supposed to kiss her back, at least. He wasn't... certainly not... right? Mercifully for the flustered Brit, she didn't pause beyond a second before continuing. "With word and deed I shall mend what I have broken." The lady then let his arm fall loosely onto his chest, standing up off him, and Victor remembered that he was really supposed to breathe. That was important.
Unfortunately for him, that realization of the necessity of respiration only lasted until Homer spoke up in his mind. "It tell I say, would it feel I please?" Victor's mind blanked entirely, trying in vain to process the ramifications of that question while his jaw hung open in preparation for the response he could only hope to eventually come up with. The lady was sitting somewhat impatiently by his side, waiting for something approximating an answer, while he stumbled over single syllable fragments of language.
"Bu- but... er... you... uh... well... that is... um..." She looked at the stone, and it glimmered slightly - leading her to wave a hand impatiently in front of Victor's face. If anything, this made him stammer worse. She sighed, slapping Homer into the hand on his injured arm, and looked him in the eyes.
"Okay, we'll do it this way. Close your hand around the rock as tightly as you can." A weight was lifted from the mortified Brit's mind, and he snapped back to reality. 'My goodness, that is what he was trying to say? Oh thank god.' Victor gave the stone a vengeful squeeze, while beside him the girl tilted her head and gave him an inquisitive glance. "And what exactly did it ask instead?"
There was no elegant way to answer that question. The only solution was to deflect it. "Er... It really made no sense, honestly. Speaking of which: why the stone-squashiiaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAGH!" Victor's body tensed as a wave of firey pain coursed through his arm from the location of his wound. What is she doing?! He couldn't look to see - his head was thrown back in agony, sparkles and flashes of light dancing in his vision as he fought to stay conscious. It was a battle that was quickly being lost, but thankfully within a moment the pain was gone.
The girl leaned back, licking her lips, as Victor finally managed to clear the shroud of pain enough to catch sight of her actions. He still felt faint. Great, and she talked earlier about how I was going to poison her. The fuzzy-headed Brit managed to muster the energy necessary to sit up, through much effort and gritting of teeth, and the first thing he saw was the smug grin on the lady beside him. The next thing he saw was the wound on his arm, which coated in a thick blob of bubbly white foam. Victor turned pale... or, really, paler. What is that?! He reached for the strange coating, only to be stopped by a lightning-quick grab of his wrist.
"No no, don't disturb it until it sets and don't release the stone. Otherwise it won't seal properly." The liquid was, in fact, solidifying even as he looked at it. 'But... but what is it? What does it do? It hurt a whole bloody lot, you know.' The lady merely shook her head in disbelief.
"My, you poor thing - you really can't spin, can you?" A raised eyebrow from Victor prompted her to continue. "You know... spin silk? Make webs? It also works well for sealing wounds in the field, though you are right - it stings quite a bit. Unfortunately, the medics aren't around to provide more pain-free options."
'Silk. You make... silk.' The girl answered with a bemused smile. "I guess you need to see for yourself. Check your right hand." And there, on the back of Victor's wrist, was a set of tiny glistening strands in the shape of her lips. He found himself blushing once more, and so quickly diverted into a scientific mindframe. So that's what all that web-mending talk was about. I guess when you can do that so easily, it becomes a part of your cultural outlook. Though I wonder why they don't make more detailed clothing, given that they have the raw materials for it themselves... It must be a climate thing. Tropical perhaps? But then you'd still ex-
His thoughts were shut down by a cold hand on his cheek. "You still feel very hot, though. I just cannot understand that - you aren't shaking, you aren't breathing quickly, yet... every part of you is far warmer than it has any right to be. And your color patterns are all wrong, too. How do you do that?" Victor fliched, trying unsuccessfully to suppress his blush. This girl was apparently not going to stop poking and prodding him every chance she got. Even knowing this was supposedly an examination to make sure she hadn't hurt him too badly, it was undeniably awkward. No wonder some women died of ailments rather than go see a doctor about it. He shuddered. There has to be some way to make this less... ah!
'Erm... Victor.' The strange lady dropped her hand, looking curiously at her apparent patient. "Huh? Victor? In what? Did you win the ability to turn red?" The young Brit blushed again. Good lord... Between her and Homer, getting out of the woods with sanity and dignity intact was going to be a challenge.
'No no. My name. My name is Victor. Victor Carlyle. I figured as long as you are going to insist upon touching me, we should at least be on a first name basis.' It didn't fully excuse such behaviour, but at least it made it somewhat less inexcusable. The girl, for her part, looked utterly befuddled for a few seconds... but at least she did not press herself against him any more. Instead she smiled and nodded.
"I am Devi of the Windspinners. It is a pleasant fate to have met you." Victor wondered how much of a platitude that was... and wondered as well whether it was in any way truthful.
Second Fragment: "Discoveries"
April 1872 - Exact Date Still Unknown
The Dead Forest
It has been a long day, but I believe that it has perhaps ended better than it started. I have acquired a minutely expanded understanding of this place, as well as a new travelling... well, not a travelling companion, really, but still someone with whom I am travelling. To clarify this statement: I have also acquired a nasty wound on my left forearm (thankfully for this writing and my own capabilities in this realm, not my dominant arm) due to the actions of said individual. I still think Miss Windspinner nonetheless managed to handle her first day here better than I was able to; she may have attacked and injured me, but she didn't run off to let others potentially die. Once it was made clear what was going on, I even had her assistance in sealing the wound.
...
Alright, she sealed the wound for me. I can tell you that her strike pierced into one of my extensor muscles, thankfully missing the bone or any truly major arteries, but I cannot begin to explain how to heal such a wound. All I know is that I should not flex it, lest I pop the makeshift adhesive that has helped slow the bleeding.
It should be noted here that portable sterile adhesives might make for a marvelous method of binding injuries, were someone to discover a way to create an adhesive that was both sterile and capable of becoming secure quickly enough to seal a wound. That is, obviously, a major obstacle to such a concept, but for right now at least I have a source in the newcomer to our group. This is because she has the ability to secrete silk. To say that Devi Windspinner is not quite human is an understatement of the sort which is so misleading that it might very well be illegal in some areas. It is, indeed, tough to say within the bounds of the written word exactly how distinctly inhuman her species is.
I am vaguely comforted by this fact, actually, now that I am no longer in immediate fear for my mortal existence and thus have the luxury of reflection upon it. While it would have been perhaps healthier for me had I met another human being in this mad underground realm, as the mutual fear myself and Miss Windspinner had for each others' differences upon first meetings was what led to my injury, it is nonetheless far better in the long run for the course of this adventure that she is comfortably inhuman. For one, she is sleeping out on a tree branch less than ten yards from where I write this; it is a necessity for the general requirement of self-preservation, this land being as dangerous as it is, but were I accompanied by another person then such an arrangement would obviously be impossible.
...Not to imply that Miss Windspinner is not a person. Goodness me, certainly not. She is just not human. Once more, it seems I am constrained by the limits of my language in describing the exact situation. It would be easier to correct this problem if I had something akin to a working knowledge of her species, but as traumatic as my own first day was in this land I personally thought it best to suggest she sleep instead of pestering her regarding the minutiae of her origins. Homer seems to be asleep as well, though I am not entirely certain if he truly does sleep - it may just be that he is keeping watch, as he managed to wake me at the beginning of this day with the notice of our new addition's arrival almost as soon as she came into this land. I am still not quite certain how he knew of Miss Windspinner's appearance, but just in case he is asleep I am hesitant to ask. It is entirely possible he simply does not know how, as well, as it seems the Children of Stone are at a loss to explain the reason behind the outlander influx in the first place.
Homer's silence is somewhere between dearly welcomed and worrisome, to tell the truth. While I have discovered a replacement for my lost lantern in the ruins of a building within this desolate landscape, and thus do not require the light of his constant speech to conduct my record-keeping, it seems that he has been happy to leave his own thoughts and statements silent for much of this day. Ever since we came across the destroyed Harvester, an event that cemented in my mind the danger inherent in this place, Homer has made his own voice heard very rarely indeed. I cannot help but wonder whether his thoughts, limited as they may be, are dwelling upon that event. In the consuming silence of this place, with the others still enough to slip from the mind's focus, I know that my own have done so repeatedly.
The Harvesters are massive, apparently, a size to easily compete with elephants. It is no wonder we went through so many miniscule corridors and passages to escape them yesterday, though I would surmise from their construction that they could easily force their way through some of those areas should the need arise. Furthermore, they are indeed constructed - vast shells of metal, filled with cogs and springs. Though I have no idea how they function, being as they seem to have no visible boiler and yet even the long-ruined specimen I was able to examine is still at least partially running, it seems their components somehow involve a Child of Stone and... well, magic. I would ordinarily be inclined to scoff at such a statement, even though it has come from the generally reliable source of Homer himself, save for the fact that everything here happens in such an inexplicably odd manner that "magic" seems as good a way to write off the reasonings behind it as anything else. I hope to eventually find something more definitive as far as rules of Harvester functioning go, however, if only because I'd really like to have some clue on how to bend those rules in my favour should I be forced to defend myself against those mechanical monstrosities.
As of right now, I have no doubt that I would lose such an encounter. Samuel Colt's genius in firearms does not extend to beating elephant-sized clockwork beasts with bodies of solid metal at least an inch thick. Indeed, the only reason I can give for why the Harvester I was able to examine was inanimate seems to be because the forest in which I find myself apparently took the defeat of it into its own hands.
I recognize how utterly strange that sounds, but there seems to be no alternative explanation. There is no way this forest could be alive, or indeed could have ever survived to grow down here, and yet roots were entwining the body of the Harvester. There is something exceedingly wrong about this place. The underground world, certainly, but even moreso the woodland in which I find myself. Every tree oozing with termites, every phantom birdcall in an otherwise still silence, every damnable mushroom glowing for no bloody reason... it all just exudes the most powerfully unspeakable wrongness I have ever felt. The sense of grand cosmic error pervades straight to your bones.
Homer called this place "loud," and I am inclined to agree. The quiet is deafening. I suspect that, more than anything, is the reason for the phantom birdcalls - in a forest filled with the sounds of nothing, it is similar to the hallucinatory effect produced by staring blankly into a mirror for hours on end. Eventually, for want of stimulation, the mind must fill in something to occupy itself. With a mirror, it is the image of someone else. In a dead woodland, it is birds who are not there.
At the very least, I hope that is a satisfactory explanation. Though it still fails to cover the strange destruction of the Harvester...
...
In an effort to avoid contemplating such things further, I will digress significantly back to Miss Devi Windspinner. As I stated, she is not human. The opportunity given to me by her unconsciousness to review her differences from humanity makes this even more clear than before - though I will admit, having at least another biped around right this moment is more comforting than it has any right to be.
It seems that our commonalities with her species ends at a bipedal structure, however. While I tend to agree with Darwin's statements regarding man having an ape-like origin, there is nothing in Miss Windspinner's construction to indicate that this origin is shared. If anything, it seems as if her kind derives from insects of some sort - clearly a violation of the Darwinian perception of the development of more complex forms, but I cannot posssibly conceive of any other multi-eyed, silk-spinning, fang-posessing creature from which something like her kind could evolve. Yet she posesses all of these characteristics. Taking the opportunity presented by her unconsciousness to observe her more closely...
...for scientific purposes. Honestly, some people...
Anyways, having taken a closer look at her more unusual characteristics, I must reaffirm the insectoid nature of her differences. Though, given that something like her exists, it could indeed be possible that there are mammals (or indeed, any other sort of animal) with insectoid characteristics in the area where she originated from as well. I have given up trying to figure out where that might be, to tell the truth - it could be some obscure South American valley or the moon, for all the oddities her kind displays that I have never before been witness to in all my travels.
First and most obviously, she has four eyes. Not human eyes, mind you - these have a closer resemblance to a feline, or perhaps a serpent, with tall thin pupils and pure red surfaces lacking anything near to an iris. They are positioned in what I can only assume to be two pairs, one at the approximate level of human eyes and one more above that in nearly the same position as our eyebrows. This second pair is smaller, about half the size of the others, though I can't even manage a guess as to its actual purpose. Unless it has something to do with the apparent forest home of her kind, there seems no logical reason for them to maintain such a superfluous number of visual apparatii.
The silk seems to have a more identifiably-practical purpose, especially if her species is principally insectivore (an assumption on my part, admittedly, but given the sticky webbing strewn around this location and the termite flights caught within it seems not too drastic a leap of logic to make). Less practical is its origin, apparently in the mouth - as evidenced by the small strands of stickiness from where she kissed me that I am still feeling on my hand with each writing motion regardless of how many times I attempt to brush it off.
...
It was apparently a native ritual. I did not initiate it. It frankly rather unnerved me, considering how Miss Windspinner is not human. Just in case you are wondering about that. Not my idea.
Nonetheless, it puzzles me to no end why any creature's silk production would be located in such a maddening place as the mouth. What purpose does it serve? I cannot imagine a constructive reason for such a placement - everything I can imagine seems almost specifically designed to be utterly ludicrous. How does she eat?
...Using the fangs prominently visible in her smile, obviously enough. Perhaps the better question is, how does she chew? Or swallow, for that matter. With silk in one's mouth, that must indeed be a feat. Not necessarily one I'd like to observe, either. Then again, there's nothing to say her throat works like that of human beings. Perhaps, like the arachnids she shares similarities with, she simply drinks her food? It is as plausible as having silk production in the mouth, that is for certain.
The more consideration I give this matter, the less recognizably human-ish Miss Windspinner truly is. Her skin color isn't even a recognizably-human shade, and that comes from someone who has spent time among individuals with just about every human shade there is. Her skin is almost exactly porcelain in tone - and I am indeed speaking of the ceramics, not a fancy descriptive metaphor. While the London teatime parliaments might kill to obtain such a look, I have never truly seen it on anyone who had not lost exceedingly dire quantities of blood. Miss Devi Windspinner is so pale as to be a pallid grey.
Perhaps the only similarity she has is her figure, which is recognizable in its similarity to human form. She has two legs, two arms, shoulders, a neck, a torso, and all the other obvious signifiers of a biped... but really, that doesn't do the commonalities justice. A chimpanzee also has all of those. I should instead say that her only specifically and obviously alien bodily characteristics are her appendages, which only have three fingers or toes apiece, and her aforementioned extra eyes. Were these hidden or ignored, with her body structure she could pass as any noblewoman in the houses of Europe. Although it is more likely that she would have to lay claim to Eastern European heritage; her skin has the appropriate pallor, obviously, but there is musculature and strength there which clearly speaks for a life spent in significant activity. Not like the salons of London, certainly, where it seems the ladies of suitable means are content to use it doing absolutely nothing all day in the search for a phantom beauty that apparently lies cloaked in atrophy.
...
I have apparently digressed. To wit: Miss Windspinner's appendages, eyes, and teeth differentiate her from human beings. There may be other oddities about, but if they do exist they are cloaked in the appallingly-miniscule amount of cover she provides for herself. Considering that she can make her own clothes, I must consider teaching her something of modesty should I find myself trapped here for any significant period of time. This examination would not be so quite so awkward an experience if I didn't have to constantly avert my eyes from her - even being not a human, she is still a lady and deserving of the respect and consideration that entails. It would certainly involve less staring at the ceiling if she could be convinced to clothe herself in something more... fitting to the situation. It is a wonder she isn't shivering, lying out on a branch like that.
Come to think of it, though, she mentioned in her examination that my skin felt very warm to her. Misplaced perceptions of heat are one of the signs of first-stage hypothermia...
I shall certainly write more later. This world and its inhabitants are too strange not to do so. But right now I have duties to attend. The fallen creatures that used to inhabit this clearing, from which I have obtained the lantern whose light I am using to write this, need a decent Christian burial. Their bodies have lain exposed for far too long.
And, well, I should make sure Miss Windspinner has the proper covering to make it through the night. It is rather cold down here...
Chapter Three: Troubles, Troubles, Always Troubles
Devi Windspinner stirred slowly in her sleep, the sort of practiced careful restlessness that only those with a lifetime's experience of sleeping in trees can manage. Something felt wrong. Her body burned with the heat of mid-day, calling her to action, yet dawn hadn't even yet burst into day. Indeed, only the palest threads of light managed to touch her skin - nowhere near enough to signal consciousness. Instead she grumbled in half-waking topor, muttering softly as she turned and shifted on her branch.
"Xkrrrrrrrr..." she growled. "No... dun wanna... can't... can't make it... no... home... no... live... dark... live... Victor..." Even in the half-conscious state of almost-waking, that last utterance seemed off. Her brain screeched to a halt, throwing her involuntarily into harse awareness, as it tried to process what part of it had just managed to create. Who was Victor?
She seemed to remember someone by that name. She couldn't figure out why she remembered someone by that name, but apparently she seemed to. Who would take the name "Victor" anyways? Unless they were one, in something important, it seemed there was no reason for anyone to break tradition for something so absolutely ego-centric. Yet... the Victor she remembered, vaguely, through the haze, didn't seem the sort to be victorious in... well, much of anything.
But where did she remember him from? She was still far too warm. Had it been a dream? Some sort of fevered product of her imagination? That would explain why she remembered him so strangely. Two eyes?! It must be a product of the heat. But why was it so warm? And why was this strange, rough weight pressing down on her... this felt nothing like silk, but she remembered having felt something like... Oh, Weaver reprieve us...
Snapping her eyes open, Devi struggled valiantly with the wool garment thrown over her body... and lost. Disoriented and annoyed, she flailed about under the confining tentacles of sleeves and draped coattails before twisting one small amount too far and sending herself tumbling off the branch on which she lay and into a wide cushion of dead grass and hanging silken sheets. The low branch had been a good idea, it seemed.
Slowly untangling herself from the draping webs, the pale lady rubbed her eyes in a vague attempt to drive the sleep away. So it wasn't all just a fevered dream then. Yet it still in no way explained the coat. Devi stood slowly amidst the stumbling non-coordination of the rudely awakened, turning to gaze quizzically at the random article of clothing that hung loosely in the sticky threads surrounding the tree. There was no need or reasoning for it to be on her - truly, there was no need or reasoning for something that heat-trapping to be on anyone either, outside of battle when the heat-fury was a necessary evil.
...That couldn't be it. Victor seemed everything but the warrior type. Besides, he called himself a "naturalist." Whatever that was. Where was he, anyways?
Devi found her current companion lying out in the open amidst the grasses, curled into a ball and shaking between breaths. He was asleep, amazingly, but it wasn't the sort that seemed anywhere close to restful. It wasn't cold, though... it seemed like this place stayed at a constant perfection in temperature, actually, now that she thought about it. Yet there he was nonetheless, huddled up against the nonexistant freezing temperatures and... well, quivering, for some reason.
Frowning, she pressed her palm against the strange man's cheek once more. He still felt far too warm. There was no explaining it - heat absolutely radiated off of his body, as if... wait, did he produce heat? Was his kind that alien, to have some sort of internal fire? Did he need the heat? If so... well, no wonder he was having problems then. He'd given away his heat-trapper! Mad little... whatever you are. She draped the coat over the strange beings body, shaking her head sadly. No wonder he seemed so puzzled by her comments earlier. It might also explain why he'd stuck her with such a charge of warmth overnight, leaving her burning every fire the whole time. Even now she buzzed with excess energy, her hands fidgeting as she sought a way to get rid of it. Such heat always left her twitchy.
"Talk about trying to weave someone else's web..." she muttered, pacing around the clearing with building irritation. Obviously if they were going to be spending much time working to get out of here, she'd have to teach him some manners.
...How long were they going to be here, anyways? She really hadn't been able to find out. Victor hadn't said, and seemed like he didn't know - and anyways, he was sleeping. That left the rock. She really didn't get the talking rock. She didn't get much else here, either, so at least it all made no sense equally. At least it seemed to understand the area more than anyone else in the immediate location.
If only she could find it. A tiny lump of stone was much harder to locate than Victor, who had at least stopped quivering now that his covering had been returned to him. Devi stalked around with growing speed, the feeling of persistant energy not yet leaving her body, as she searched high and low for the rock who might could explain how she could get home. She needed to get home - she had duties to attend, and besides that... she was hungry.
Pulling a sheet of drifting threads off her makeshift bed, the pale lady wadded it up into a tiny silken ball and popped it in her mouth. The crunch was satisfying, but it was still just a tiny snack when she needed a meal. The termites just weren't doing enough, now that her metabolism had been running full-tilt all night long. There had to be something more. And where was that stone?!
With her mind flitting wildly back and forth between disjointed thoughts, Devi nearly tripped over the small markers in the ground before she noticed them. Well now, these are new... Roughly-constructed daggers were rammed into the earth near two patches of roughly-turned earth lying next to one-another. A short distance away, a soil coated board lay in a pile of leaves. The pale lady frowned at this. What was the point? Some sort of ritual? I hope he didn't aggravate his injury with this mess. No wonder he didn't look to be feeling well, lying out after giving away his heat-trapping articles and doing labor that seemed obviously unusual to him, given his body type.
At least his shaking had stopped, now that he had that big heavy... whatever it was back. Devi crouched next to her apparent companion, observing him closer now that she had the opportunity. He was so strange. His skin had a constant reddish tone, he apparently produced his own heat... was he a fire creature of some sort? That would explain how he'd made that light and sound, that crack like thunder, when she was attacking him. If so, that must be why he was so utterly defenseless otherwise. He didn't even have proper fangs, only tiny nubs which any Aranae would have been utterly ashamed of. How did he eat?
The truly weird part, she mused, was that if it weren't for the missing eyes, stubby fangs, odd skin, and extra appendages he could easily pass for one of her species. Wrapping his hands and legs and wearing one of those eye-shawls that were so fashionable among the Treestriders, he could get anyone to simply dismiss him as someone who'd wound up caught in the full sun's rage for too long. There was no telling what else he was hiding under all those bulky layers of covering, of course - perhaps he had a second mouth on his chest or something - but the similarities were unnerving.
It didn't help matters that, were he to be an Aranae, he'd have been rather attractive. Devi paused, shook her head, and dismissed this thought as an artifact of the heat-derived morning scatterbrain effect. She wasn't here to find a mate. She was here to check on the thing and make sure his wound hadn't reopened from performing his strange dirt ceremony. Then she was going to find Homer, try to get some information, and perhaps reconstruct her netting to try and catch enough termites to make a meal. She only needed to look at his arm for the first part of that. Was he bleeding again? No, not significantly - it seemed he had been careful. Good... moving on. Unfortunately, she still couldn't find that annoyingly-hidden little chunk of stone. She hoped he wasn't asleep.
'Homer, are you awake?' A brief pause, then: "Yes. Ever awake." So the thing didn't sleep. But then, what had it been doing the last several hours if it hadn't been sleeping? That was vaguely disturbing to contemplate... especially since the thing hadn't really spoken much directly, so much as it was being spoken through. Had it just been listening to everyone's thoughts all day and night? That, at the very least, needed an answer. 'What have you been doing all this time?'
"I hear trees." Devi growled. That was not exactly what she could call a satisfactory answer. 'What? You... hear trees. For ages on end. The trees are dead!' She looked around to see if she could find the light identifying Homer's presence, only to freeze at its reply. "Trees dead, yes. Poor trees. Yes, poor sad trees. Yet trees think trees live. Should live. Act as live. Live. Trees think loud, yes? All think same, think loud, live. All trees think same think. Live. Live. Live. Live. Loud. Loud live. Loud over I think, live. Make listen. Live. Live. Live." The voice in her head sounded odd, for certain, but it sounded even more odd than it did last night. The stone sounded almost... sleepy, for something that apparently never slept. More worryingly, it was repeating something she herself had not even a handful of moments prior. Devi was not what most individuals would call a hardcore skeptic, but any small doubts she had were quickly swept away by that realization. When she had thought upon arrival that something was dreadfully wrong with this landscape, there had been.
They were in the middle of a revenant wood. She had heard the stories before, of forests which had died before their time, slain by powers great and terrible. She had even seen it happen, on the small scale, through the military support of a pair of arboremancers when the Greyflight tried to conduct their barren earth campaign on sacred land. Only this time, the undead forest had no master but itself. And they were in the middle of it. This... was bad. Bad on a level that defied modifiers. She had to wake Victor, so they could get out of this place as quickly as possible. But how to tell him? She needed Homer in her hand. 'Homer! Pay attention to me, not the trees. I need your help to get us out of here. Where are you right now?'
"...In it." Well, that was helpful. Devi ran her palm down her face in aggravation, before trying again. 'Yes, we are all in the forest. A little more direction would be more useful to me.'
The reply sounded somewhere between tired and annoyed this time, like the quartermaster's voice at the end of any of his shifts. "Not in trees. In it. Name..." A pause, and then Victor's tone of thought spilled into her head. "...my name is Victor Carlyle." It sounded like an echo, somehow, from far off in the distance. Devi jolted in astonishment. Did the stone say that? I know it can relay thoughts, but... is that a memory, for it? It raised far more questions than it answered. As great as her curiosity was, however, more important matters came first. The young soldier thrust her hands into her strange companion's myriad coverings, looking for the smooth cold lump that signified Homer's presence.
Victor had been having a good dream. A wonderful dream, in fact. A dream where he was somewhere far away. In the wonderful world of dreaming, where sense was not a requirement to be met, he had neither known nor cared about the exact location. More interesting was what had been at that location with him: a hot springs, a pot of tea, and a soft chamber quartet playing something both beautiful and unidentifiable. The tea had been a perfect Earl Grey blend.
Devi and Homer had been there too, off in the distance, relaxing as best a rock and spider-thing could; Homer had been mid-polishing, and Miss Windspinner had been reclining on an improbable chaise lounge perched on a large rock overlooking the hot spring fence. This had managed to be at least somewhat disconcerting, but as she had been buried in a book and dressed in London's finest of fineries Victor had managed to consider it just the nature of the dream letting him see that she was safe. It wasn't like she had been looking down into his hot spring bath, anyways.
Until she hopped down from her perch and started running her hands over his body, anyways. This was very disconcerting. Victor blushed even in his dream, trying to push her away, trying to shield his modestry, trying to flail wildly - trying to do something to make this stop. Yet he couldn't move, no matter how hard he tried. Devi's clothes sank into the heated spring water, drawing up moisture and clinging tightly to her body as she straddled his supine form, leaning down over him and brushing her strange three-fingered hands over his bare chest. Her silken white hair dripped with steaming liquid as she gazed down at the flabbergasted Brit, her four crimson-red eyes utterly impassive... yet her hands still drifted down Victor's waist, onto his naked hips, caressing them with her touch as she moved still closer and-
Victor shot awake, sitting upwards with a gasp. He was clothed. Thank god. Devi was no longer in a clinging wet black dress gown. Thank god! She had her hands in his pants. Oh dear god... The strange lady blinked in shock and alarm at her target's sudden consciousness, a cry of "K'zaaak x'k'xaan!" falling from her lips as she struggled to get free of Victor's pants-pockets, failed, lost her balance in the process, and fell bodily forward on top of him. It was at this point that the startled Brit realized he was awake and able to move. Unfortunately, his movement options were limited almost entirely to "flailing wildly in a desperate attempt to get free of your entanglement with a strange lady who is trapped in your pants." It was thus, obviously, not very productive. The two wound up laying on the ground, out of breath, entwined bodily in each others' grasp.
Victor was deep red. Devi, on the other hand, seemed to fade entirely out of existence. The would-be explorer gaped unbelievingly at this occurrance, shaking his head slowly. Was he actually still dreaming? The weight was still on his body however, and within moments four red eyes stared out of nothing at nothing - they pointed down and away towards distant earth. It was at that point that Homer's voice invaded Victor's thoughts: "It say it sorry. It need you wake, past, need I for wake think." Of course... she was looking for Homer... It didn't make things any less awkward, but at least it gave them a less problematic reason for the current circumstances.
Victor reached for the sentient stone, only to brush his hand across the invisible arm of the strange girl lying on top of him. He blushed an even deeper red; she remained somehow invisible. It seemed impossible, or at least intensely odd, but no - the four red eyes were still there, her shock-accelerated breaths were still quite audible, and still her body was capable of being felt... obviously so as well, as the flustered Brit kept bumping into her as he stretched for his lower side pocket where Homer presently resided. Finally, at long last, with a half-dozen false starts and a goodly number of apologies to his name, he reached and retrieved the stone. Immediately slapping it to the first solid Windspinner-like surface his touch found, Victor verified his contact by the gasp Devi produced and poured a myriad of mixed questions through into the girl's mind. 'Where are you? Can you get off me? Can you at least turn visible, so I can get you off me? Why did you not just tap me on the shoulder? Why aren't you answering me?'
There was a pause, and the hovering eyes disappeared as well for a brief moment while a long sigh brushed Victor's cheek. Then came a few slow, deliberately calm, and fully measured replies. "I am here... on top of you. Not without possibly hurting you, since you are wrapped around me. I can not manage that right now. I wanted to tell you something specific. And it is somewhat hard to come up with immediate replies when you are pressing a stone to my inner thigh."
This time it was Victor's turn to gasp. After a brief, startled-rabbit pause he shot his hand downwards as quickly and carefully as he could manage and this time simply held the stone outwards at his side. A few moments later, a trio of thick fingers closed around his hand. "This is better. Thank you."
'Oh dear me, sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry a million times sorry!' The young Brit thought his face would bruise. And here he had been chiding her inappropriately forward actions. He was fully prepared to follow through with the million apologies, had the hidden lady not sighed once more while slowly returning back to the world of the visible. She was still translucent, but at least her determined frown and twisted limbs were capable of being seen and maneuvered around as the two tried to untangle themselves from each other. "It is okay. You did not know." A moment longer saw the two collasing in relief onto their backs in the soft earth and dead rustling grasses - still hand in hand, but at least no longer arm in arm. Devi slowly faded back to opacity, shaking her head slowly. "That... was embarrassing. I apologize. I should have done something else."
Victor managed a weak nod. 'Indeed. Next time just wake me up, and then talk to me once we are both awake. Though from now on I won't be keeping Homer on my body. I did not think that you might want to see him.' There was a brief pause, in which both individuals attempted to regain something akin to composure, and then Devi found a suitable reply. "At least... at least it seems you enjoyed the call to consciousness." The young Brit spluttered. But... but... but but... but but but... but but no! Every properly-Victorian instinct he had cried out at once in shame severe enough to etch metal as he gazed in wide-eyed horror at the girl lying next to him. If he hadn't been forced to hold her hand to communicate, he would have been yards away at this point and continuing to back as far off as sight would allow. 'How on earth did you... did you decide that?'
The strange lady paused, turning see-through once more for a few short moments. "Well... you did not fade. You did not try to hide yourself from me, as I tried to hide from you." Another pause. "It is not that I mind, mind you, that you did not find it as embarrassing as I did. We are from different places, and obviously your culture does not consider physical conduct to be-" Victor cut her off. This had to be fixed, and fixed now.
'My culture considers public physical touching to be immensely immoral, and it is only the fact that you are not considered an actual person which renders even our... present contact right now anything other than inherently repugnant. We can't turn invisible, but I assure you - I am quite suitably mortified to even be out in the middle of nowhere doing this. Hence all the blushing.' There. A little blunter than I had anticipated, but the message should be made clear that this is absolutely a matter of necessity and not- This time it was Victor's thoughts being cut short, as Devi sat up and slapped him. The startled Brit stared up at the strange girl, cradling his cheek, as she huffed angrily.
"Consider this your warning. If you ever say again that I am not a person, I will do far worse than that. Now come on - we are in a revenant wood and I don't want to die." The strange lady pulled Victor up by his hand in her own, and looked him in the eye. "Gather your things, don that heat-trapper of yours, and let us go."
First Digression: "Ethical Necromancy"
Victor was so absorbed in the strange character of the city itself that the people residing within it seemed to blend wholly into a single unified urban organism - a hundred thousand cells of a massive creature which lived and breathed around him. The place was a subterranean London, a land of distinct individual lives entertwining in innumerable ways for the single cooperative act of survival. And, like London, it was entirely overwhelming for the poor young Brit. His head spun in slow circles as he tried vainly to observe all the sights available to be seen, all the strange creatures and entities going about their daily business around him. Victor what so consumed in the single-minded mania of motion surrounding his consciousness that he didn't even notice the cloak-wrapped, hump-backed individual who was scurrying up towards him until a warped, discolored hand shot out from the black fabric and managed a surprisingly-strong press against the would-be adventurer's chest - stopping him cold. Literally, in fact, as a chill shot down his spine.
Looking up at the startled Brit was a twisted husk of a man, a withered collection of frail bones and loose, leathery skin that seemed to be almost a size too large for the body beneathe it. Layers of billowing black burlap were draped and wrapped around him, hiding the worst of his disfigurement, leaving him resembling from a distance nothing more than a shambling pile of poorly-dyed beggar's laundry. With the proximity Victor was forced into, however, the strange thing's face jutted awkwardly from underneathe a fold the would-be explorer estimated as being a more likely place for its chest to be. Instead a pale and wrinkled face gazed out at him, one glossy cataract eye peering awkwardly off in random directions as the other pierced straight to Victor's soul. The thing's teeth were yellow and marred with dark ribboned brown striations as it managed a friendly-seeming smile.
"Greetings, newcomer, to our humble city of Lost. My name is Reinholt, and I will be happy to serve as your guide to aid you in getting acquainted with the many wonders and necessities available in our manifold districts and quarters. With my assistance I am certain you will be able to fit right in soon enough, find your niche, and survive within the trying times in which we all find ourselves." Then, without missing a beat or awaiting anything approximating a response, he continued. "Nonetheless, in case the unfortunate should come to pass or you accidentally trouble the goblins, have you ever considered the positive discoveries and accomplishments that may be achieved through donating your body to the cause of magical research?"
Victor was taken aback. "No no, I really can't say I have." He noted a distinctly self-preservationist desire hovering in the back of his mind, telling him to run screaming from the strange little man in front of him, but the sheer oddity of the question presented to him and his momentary pause to consider what it meant was enough to deny him the chance. Reinholt closed his deceptively-strong fingers around the stunned Brit's wrist and began dragging him bodily along through the streets. Devi followed close behind, her face obvious in its disbelief.
"Really now? Well that's a shame. As a licensed Guild representative, I would like to enumerate the constructive benefits which just such a gift could potentially bestow upon our fair metropolis. There are numerous reasons to consider donation as a suitable post-existence contribution to those of us who continue on in the land of the living. Plus, we're getting ever closer to the breakthrough that will make that aforementioned demise only a temporary inconvenience! It is just a matter of getting the mystic forces balanced now. Well, for the most part in any case. You are in the Runic Quarter, by the way; take a look to your right, above those storefronts? That tower... or, well, part of a tower up there is a section of the Spire of Arcanos. It has become the main research center and meeting hall for the Unified Mage Order. You can't see where the Guild meets from here, I'm afraid - that's in the basement - but it makes a very good navigational reference for the area. Plus, if you agree to our humble request, I'll give you a personal tour myself while you are getting your reanimation notification badge! Now, if you'll look over down that alleyway to your immediate left, that is the Journeyman Square where all the silly people who would rather hire out their limited skills than seek to advance them further sell minor mystic services to the wholly untrained or unable. I feel rather embarrassed for such individuals, personally, but I am told many people are sadly-"
Victor locked his knees, yet was still being pulled by the arm across the dirt and pebble streets - his dragging heels kicking up a cloud of dust behind him as he tried in vain to squeeze his hand out of the iron grip of his "guide" and stammered in a mix of fright and outrage. "R-re... reanimation?! What kind of guild is this?" The strange and twisted little man did not even pause, turning to bend his already-bent body still further with a flourish of one hand while still maintaining a tight hold on Victor's arm with the other.
"My apologies dear sir! I have not given you an appropriate introduction. My name is Brother Reinholt Blood, Licensed Fellow of the Guild of Ethical Necromancy, and I shall serve as your guide this day. Well, as much of a 'day' as there can be, anyways." He was then off on his quick force-march once more, pulling the now-even-less-interested Brit along as he continued speaking without a single pause. Victor vaguely wondered if he ever breathed. "As I am sure you are aware by now, hopefully at least, the entire plane is devoid of anything you'd call a day or night cycle - mostly due to the lack of sky access. I personally consider this to be a beneficial occurrance, myself, since it means no more 'melting' issues like we used to have to deal with, but your experiences may vary. Oh look, there's the public house! Most likely you'll be staying there your first few months, at least until you manage to get yourself situated enough to be self-sustaining. There are a handful of them scattered about, but personally I think we in the Order have funded the best among them. We just ask that you remember what we have done to ease the acclimation of newcomers when you consider our simple requests for something you're certainly not going to have any further use for, after all."
He lurched to a stop in front of the large building, releasing Victor's hand, and looked up at him with expectancy in his milky white eyes. The anxious Brit realized that Reinholt had stark black hair, hidden under his myriad burlap folds; there wasn't a hint of even peppered white in it. "So, my good man, what do you think? Would you aid us in ushering forth a new era of discovery, rather than simply tossing your discarded shell of a corpse in the nearest hole? We turn all our leftover organic bits over to the Cyclers, anyways, so the maximum positive gain is achieved from each and every donated body." Victor shuddered at the merest thought of what the "leftover organic bits" might be. He wanted nothing more at that moment than to be far, far away from this solicitor of death and decay.
Said solicitor seemed to have absolutely no recognition of this fact. He waited with a yellowed smile and clasped talon hands as the subject of his question nervously shifted from one foot to the other and looked anxiously for a way out. In the end this was provided by Devi, who swooped up behind him and closed her hand over his, pulling him away from the disturbing little man. "No. Victor, come." Reinholt's expectant grin fell, his body inexplicably seeming to slump still further as the others moved away from him. Within moments he had collected himself, however, and scurried after them.
"Wait, hold on, at least let me get you a welcoming drink! It is not my intention to pressure you into doing anything, and I do respect your decision, but we among the Guild still wish to do what we can to make your arrival a pleasant one. It is our little way of combatting all the horrible misconceptions many newcomers seem to have regarding the nature of the Guild's work." After a moment's contemplation, Victor figured he could use a drink after this particular occurrance wound up piled on top of all the other recent events in his life. Just so long as it was amongst a significant number of other individuals.
"Look," Reinholt spoke between long draws upon a frothy mug of something unidentifiably blue, "I am truly not trying to coerce you. I am just trying to look out for your best interests here, and as a new arrival I must let you know that it is decidedly in your best interests to align yourself as quickly as you can manage to one of the powers in the city. You've got to find yourself a protector, or else you go unprotected - and there are a lot of people here who spring at the chance to take advantage of anyone who isn't a named resident of at least one district. You'd get sold to the Gnomes within the week without someone watching your back. It just isn't safe out there if you try to go it alone, and it isn't like we're the Thieves' Guild or anything; we're not asking for tribute, we don't expect you to fight for us or even serve us while you're alive. We just want your body rights. It's the easiest way to have the Order interested in guarding your interests, because you are the interest of one of its Guilds."
Victor gazed with apparent disdain at the carved horn filled with steaming black goo which apparently shared the same common name with wine and yet shared no other common attributes. "So basically you are telling me that you don't want to force me into doing what you say, yet I have no choice in the matter anyways." At least that sounded like a relatively common theme in the dejected Brit's interactions with others. "Is there at least something I can do to satisfy this requirement of yours that doesn't involve desecrating my remains?"
Reinholt scoffed, gesturing in the air with his long claw-like fingers. "My good sir! The most thorough way possible to desecrate your remains is to waste them. It isn't like your body is going to last long once you cast it off, anyways, should you choose not to agree to reanimation. The Cyclers aren't about to let such a rich source of organic matter lay about when it could be brought back into the service of the community, and once you're dead you can't really speak up to complain about it. We just make sure that your posthumous service means more than being mulched and composted. And besides, you really do not want to try and petition for protection from any of the other guilds. They have focuses on things that deal primarily with magic used on and for live targets, so they insist on live experimental subjects. Believe you me, there's no good reason for you to subject your living, conscious self to the possibility of a catastrophic supernatural cascade." He took another sip of his drink before shaking his head sadly. "At least when you're dead you don't have to worry about that. Or at least being around to feel the effects of it."
"That's the second time you have mentioned these 'Cyclers,'" Victor commented in a desperate attempt to change the topic of conversation, "but you haven't explained them yet. Or, for that matter, anything at all about this city other than your Guild and that I should join it." At this Reinholt sighed.
"Yes yes, 'tis true... please forgive the vigorous nature of my self-promotion. We necromancers are just stuck with something of a bad reputation, which very few of us deserve, and as a member of the Guild of Ethical Necromancers it is a part of my duties to work at correcting the perceptions thrust upon us all by the selfish acts of a few pointedly-unethical individuals." Victor stared at him blankly, and he hurried along in his speech. "But if it'll help... the city of Lost only exists because we all don't really have any choice in the matter. The guilds and districts help, and generally you do meet some interesting people in your time here, but there are very few of us who truly want to be in this place. I don't really find it as terrible as some people do (you should hear the angels bitch) but-"
"Hold on, wait just a moment here - angels? The winged servants and heralds of the One True God Almighty?" Victor was fully prepared to accept most things with nary a flinch by this point, but that was just utterly beyond the pale. Reinholt, for his part, merely chuckled.
"You sound almost as perturbed by it as they do. And it isn't really 'One True God,' though if you're ever talking to one of 'em you didn't hear me say that. There are heralds of a hundred different deities and demons down here, mostly all busy hating one another, though they still cooperate well enough when hunger comes calling or the Mad Machine wants to play." He leaned his head back at an unnatural angle, draining the rest of his strange beverage, before continuing. "That's the thing there; this city would have annihilated itself entirely a million times over by now if we didn't all need each other to survive. The Order needs the Thieves' Guild to 'find' things out in the tunnels that we can't make ourselves, the Cyclers need the Order to shape their fields, the Thieves' Guild needs the Cyclers to have anything nearing food, and we all need the Goblins to survive another damn seige. More indigo please." The bartender, a large hovering ovoid thing covered in eyes and arms, was happy to oblige with another mug of foamy blue liquid. When in Rome... Victor tried his "wine," found it cloyingly sweet, and wound up feeling vaguely reassured by his disgust with the alien goo.
"Yeah, it really isn't anything like a good Port, now is it? The indigo is decent however - I'd suggest you give it a try." The astonished Brit gaped at this commentary while Reinholt grinned his crooked little grin. "What, how else did you think I knew your language? I hail from Pennsylvania, and I'm guessing you're a Limey from that accent of yours." Victor simply shook his head and sighed in disbelief at this; he'd gone halfway around the world, marched into the jungles, and fallen into an alien world... and yet nevertheless here he was being accosted by a Yank. The rumors of their omnipresence were obviously not overstated. This did, however, raise a very interesting question: "How many human beings are there around here, then?"
"Thirty or so. But if you're talking humans from Earth, though, the number drops to six. Well, six that I know of anyways. Counting you." Reinholt took another long draw from his glass. "Sometimes people lie about where they're from, if they have reasons for it. You'd be surprised how many wanted men are down here. Something to do with how you get here, I'd guess - seems that the passage to this place always involves being chucked into a dank hole of some sort or other. Prisons work pretty well for that. Nevertheless... the Cyclers have two Spaniards, apparently from some merchant vessel originally, there's a Chinaman in the Thieves' Guild, and there's Armando the healer from Venice. Then there's you an' me. It's good to see a friendly face around, mark my words. Talking through stones to things with oozing skin is simply not what I would call a pleasant time. Throwing a few back with a friendly face, and one that has all its proper bits in all the proper places? Much better." The twisted man threw a long, warped arm around Victor's shoulders - leaving him to wince involuntarily - and smiled that same yellowed grin at him. "Just trust your friend Reinholt to get you set up in this place, give me something positive I can report back to the Guild, and we can do this any time you want."
Victor didn't want to have to admit that his optimal schedule for drinks with the death-wizard was set firmly at never, and so diverted the conversation once more. "So, uh... I somewhat doubt you were a necromancer in the rolling hills of Amish country. What happened?" He was answered with a laugh that closer-resembled a cackle.
"Why, the same thing that happens to everyone down here: I found myself a niche. Our kind may hail from a null-magic world, but that doesn't mean we are incapable of it. I thought so at first, of course - spent my first year doing field work for the Cyclers - but after the Guild gave me my legs back I realized I could be doing much better and more constructive work down here than simply turning compost heaps all day." Reinholt emphasized his statement by lifting a fold of his burlap garment, and Victor nearly threw up on the bartop at the sight of what lay underneathe. Crushed, split flesh loosely-stitched together with hempen thread stuck forth, connected to a webbed foot whose skin was chartreuse in color - it was impossible to tell whether that was due to the appendage's origin or the rot which was obvious upon its surface. At points the bone itself was visible, both within the thing itself through gaps in the flesh and where it was joined back into the necromancer's mutilated leg. Victor Frankenstein himself would have called it a step too far.
"Got caught in the path of one of the loam-spreaders, and the momentum carried it right up on over me before they could get it stopped. The healers, the angels, even the Shapers told me I'd never walk again - yet the Guild came and offered me some new feet, and they got me back up and outta my bed within a day's time!" Reinholt slapped his roughly-shaped calf in emphasis, and Victor turned a pale green as he watched it ripple from the impact. Mercifully the mangled limb was quickly hidden by fabric once more as the strange and twisted man turned back to his drink. "They're miracle workers, that's what they are. Doin' things no one else even thinks possible, to give people back their lives. So I asked if I could learn how to help people too, and discovered an aptitude for this sorta thing. Order says I could've been a 'prodigy' in whatever field I chose, whatever that is, but I wanted to give back to the folks that gave to me. B'sides, I needed to figure out how to keep this here foot free of decay. Can't heal dead flesh after all."
Reinholt reached up, pulling a coin-sized gold necklace medallion from its hiding place within his black baggy folds and holding it up for Victor to observe. It was roughly stamped with the imprint of a skull that somehow managed to be smiling warmly. "Been a reanimation volunteer for almost four years now, and a licensed Guildie for three. That's why I'm still doing streetcorner work; haven't made it anywhere up the seniority ladder yet. Course this bein' a group o' necros, I'm never going to get on up where some folks are in the tree, but I do my part still - been the top recruiter ever since I joined up!" The would-be adventurer was beginning to understand why. For all his disgust with the concept, he could not begin to fault the strange man's stunningly infectious enthusiasm. Indeed, he found himself questioning exactly why he was so disgusted with something that was obviously such a positive contributor to this man's life. Sure, of course, there was the death and decay and the unnatural resurrection of the dead through probably dark forces... but Reinholt made it all sound like shop talk, the sort of unpleasant business dealings that any group doing distasteful-yet-decent work might do. You could probably get similarly disgusting conversational quips out of the workers in a sausage factory, and Victor had no particular issues with sausage.
"Alright," the would-be adventurer nodded. "Consider me willing to hear more. That isn't an agreement - not yet - but I'll take the tour and hear what you have to say. Could it wait until tomorrow though? We've been through a lot getting here, and frankly I need a nice bed, sleep, and some hot tea more than anything."
Second Digression: The Ship of Air
"What's all this about the goblins, then? You haven't pointed out their territory yet." Everyone Victor had conversed with in Lost seemed to talk about them with a combination of reverence and horror. The answer he recieved was a mute upraised finger - a reply he was going to return in kind until Reinholt turned and filled in the details. "Look up. This whole city is their territory, and the sad thing is they know it."
The would-be explorer turned his gaze skyward, looking up towards the far-distant cavern ceiling. The scope of this place was amazing, he realized - a cavern dome of the sort only found in the most immense of underground tunnel complexes. Yet that really wasn't was caught Victor's eye. It was, instead, the glowing metal thing sitting fixed in the sky for no identifiable reason. He flinched, expecting it to come crashing down upon them all, but the shiny silver cigar-shaped object did not shift or move one single foot in a full minute of terrified observation.
"How does it stay up there?" The young Brit finally asked in absolute (though somewhat relieved) befuddlement. Reinholt cocked an eyebrow higher than it had any physical right to go, and then shook his head.
"That's the question we all want answered, yet no one can tell anyone anything about. Not even the goblins know exactly how that thing works, I think, only that it sits in the air and Mekanax doesn't have the first clue what to do about it sitting there." He turned back, the momentum leaving his back to swing and snap like a Spanish dancer as he resumed walking. "Supposedly they found it empty. Supposedly they killed everyone on board. Supposedly also they got it in a trade with the Mad Machine for the blood of virgins. Alls I know is, they aren't in the habit of sharing. Sure, they'll take their favored souls aboard if the Machine's coming with yet another army, but it's never a good idea to try and ask questions about them. That's a good way to end up on the slab a little too soon, if you get my drift."
Victor gulped nervously. That was clear enough. "So they're an overclass? Figuratively, I mean." The literal was blatant.
"Overclass? Dunno if they fit the definition of that fancy phrase, but the Sky Patrollers are something like the law around here. As much as there is one, anyways. They need us as much as we need them, for food at the very least, so when things really go to pot 'round here they'll step in and remind folks that being civil is a lot more pleasant than being... well, exploded." That made sense.
Third Digression: A Stitch in Time
When the Chuuas had mentioned "The Stitch Man," Victor's mind had filled in the details. He was going there to receive healing. The man was probably a doctor. Failing that, given the rat-peoples' obvious lack of sophistication, it might be a medicine man or even, as ships and distant outposts resorted to, a barber or tailor with a slightly-above-average aptitude for treating minor injuries and a steady hand. In short, Victor expected that the rats hustling along with him carried uselessly above their heads were transporting him to someone or something that would help him.
What he didn't expect was to be set down in a tiny unoccupied square chamber less than ten feet from wall to wall and then utterly abandoned in the empty little room. There was nothing in it with him save for a carved table, a few bolts of cloth, a pincushion, and some scattered balls of rough thread. Home of a clothier, obviously, though it seemed he wasn't home. All that remained were his tools and a strange little doll lying limp against one of the bolts of cloth near the stone slab of a workspace. Clasping the burning sensation of his wound in his palm, Victor could only hope he would return soon. A tailor's stitches were still better than bloodloss and infection. Though hopefully they would not be made with such thick hempen thread as that lying around...
"Well, what are you waiting for? Hop on the table." The voice startled the would-be adventurer. It was odd in tone, English if spoken through molasses, and posessed an overtone of what Victor could only conceptualize as an insult to French accents everywhere. It was also coming from no direction in particular aside from "down." As he had nothing better to do than bleed everywhere, he looked down. The doll he'd noted earlier, a patchwork quilt of cloth made by a mad grandmother and then sewed into a vaguely-humanoid shape by someone with a vague third-hand description of humanoids and epilepsy, was tugging on his pant leg.
It surprised him how little this surprised him. Victor obeyed the tiny little figure - because really, what else was he going to do? The Chuuas had said this thing would heal them, and though he didn't put a massive misunderstanding past them he couldn't exactly stumble out into the cavern wilderness once more in the hope to find a random hospital-to-nowhere before he bled to death or succumbed to his fever. The roughly-sewn line representing the thing's mouth twisted into a smile as it scrambled up onto the flat stone next to him.
"Yes, good! A patient who does what he is asked. You are good for a newcomer." The doll hopped onto the would-be explorer's chest, looking over the landscape of his charge with a short stubby arm raised to its nonexistant chin in appraisal. "Hm... but not that good. Look at you, covered in old wounds that haven't even begun healing before you get new ones! This is no way to treat a body, you know, and no way to treat your healer either." It shook its head sadly, and Victor noted silently how much it resembled a gingerbread man made from cloth. "But still, it must be done. All right - for this I shall need hair, a small sheet of cloth, and some sawdust. Then we can begin."
Victor gaped. Suddenly a death by fever and bloodloss seemed far preferrable to getting "healed." At least that way he'd go out giddy, as opposed to... whatever this thing was planning to do with that mess. The young Brit sat quickly upwards, tossing the doll into his lap, and slung his legs over the side of the table. "I'm sorry, I seem to have misplaced my sawdust today and so it seems we're going to have to postpone this treatment in a most-likely indefinite manner my apologies good day." He thrust himself quickly to his feet, leaving the doll hanging from his shirt-tail and shaking his other stub of an arm wildly about.
"Would you please sit down?! That wasn't your treatment, that was my payment!" The small thing beat its nonexistant fist against Victor's thigh, prompting him back onto the table, and climbed shakily down onto its flat stone surface. "My word. You simply have no faith whatsoever in my abilities, do you?"
"I was only told you'd help me. Those big rats aren't-" Victor was cut off by a harumph.
"So the Chuuas brought you here, eh? You should trust their wisdom. That is a nasty wound you've got, and I wouldn't go stumbling about Allstone with it if I were you. Just sit back, close your eyes, open your spirit, and let me work. Since you seem so squeamish about it, we can deal in payment afterwards." Victor sighed, letting his head thud back against the cold smooth stone, and closed his eyes. After a few moments he was about to say that he had no clue how to open his spirit using anything other than a hot mug of Earl Grey, but that same odd voice intervened. "Okay, done."
He hadn't felt a single thing - a single pinprick, the burning sensation of alcohol, anything whatsoever aside from the slight in-out of his own breathing. He cracked an eyelid experimentally, and then raised an eyebrow. The doll looked significantly worse for wear, given the ten seconds or so it had been out of his sight, and apparently seemed to feel it; it slumped onto the table awkwardly, holding one stubby appendage to the other to prevent the sand inside it from fully running out the sudden hole in its... whoa. Victor looked down, flexing his forearm tentatively, and felt nothing. He pulled off the rough, bloody silken patch over where it should have been and found nothing but smooth white skin. In fact, the only pain was from where the hardened silk fibers took his arm hair with them - a significant pain, obviously, but not the sort he had been expecting.
"Yeah, good as new... mostly. Little help?" The little doll was struggling to hold in its sand innards, managing the best grimace of frustration it could while still using two buttons and a sewn line to emote with. Victor grabbed the figure's leaking arm in his hand, squeezing it tightly between two fingertips, and waited. After the two frowned at each other for a few seconds he sighed and lifted the tiny thing into his hand. It just about fit, in a sitting position at the very least.
"Okay, now what?"
"Now you pick up that pincushion and some string so I can sew myself back together before I go limp. And do please hurry." Victor hurried, as much as he could manage anyways, and even helpfully strung the finest thread he could find in a half-second's search before placing the needle in the doll's miniaturized lap.
Fourth Digression: Chasing the Lost
"Do you have anything to heal infections?" Victor's arm still felt hot, and pulsed in a disturbing manner following the beat of his heart whenever he made a fist; an event that he thus did regularly, hoping that it helped matters instead of worsening them. Unfortunately for him, Reinhart simply shook his head.
"Sorry to disappoint, but the Guild deals in the dead - not the living. We can't kill things with magic, and I'm sure you don't want any other guilds tryin' their hands at it either. Circumstance has left most of us with far more effective skills in buildin' stuff or destroying things than purging infections. For that sorta thing, ya gotta visit the Shapers."
Victor paused. There didn't seem to be any continuation forthcoming. "And...?"
"And they'll purge the infection. Those Shaper Stones of theirs are great for healing. It's what lets 'em survive on their own in this place." He kept walking. Obviously more directed inquiry was necessary.
"Where are they, though, and how do I get an appointment? I doubt I can just stroll in and go 'hi there, heal me.'" Reinholt merely laughed in reply to this statement.
"They're in the temple quarter, and in fact that is exactly what you should do. Though I can show you to a friend I've got over there to make things easier for ya. Name's Xerxes, and he's one o' them. Should be happy to help ya out. It'll have to be after the Guild meetin' though, so you can get your badge an' all. Guild's very strict about the meetin' times, to keep from pulling people away from their experiments or other duties." Victor nodded, and the date was set.
Bright and early the next morning, Victor was awakened by a pounding at his door.
Fifth Digression: The Hall of Palindromes & Other Minor Fragments
Never odd or even
Madam, I'm Adam
Rise to vote, sir
Rats live on no evil star
Won't lovers revolt now
No devil lived on
O stone, be not so
Borrow or rob
Cain, a maniac
Dammit, I'm mad
Devil never even lived
Do go to God
Dogma - I am God
Don't nod
Doom an evil deed, liven a mood
Dr. Awkward
Egad, a base life defiles a bad age
He did, eh?
He lived as a devil, eh?
Is it I? It is I!
Live not on evil
Madam... in Eden, I'm Adam
Name no one man
Now Eve, we're here; we've won
Now, Sir, a war is won!
Was it a rat I saw?
"We can't publish this!" Dobbins cried in exasperation. "Mr. Carlyle, we paid for your expedition to Ceylon under the express understanding that you would go out, have a nice adventure, and come back with a nice, tidy journal we could put out as a sequel to your Oriental explorations. Some exaggeration would be fine - that's almost what we were looking for, honestly - but this... this isn't even marginally non-fiction! You have dead gods! Underground nations! Angels and demons living together! Mr. Carlyle, should we publish this as a true account the Church will call for our heads on a pike and our investors will give it to them!"
Victor frowned. "So do you honestly mean to tell me that you carved things out of sentients?!"
"Of course," came the Gnomish reply. "It was necessary for the sake of scientific progress."
"Normally where I'm from, 'scientific progress' comes with the caveat that we don't go dissecting anything capable of asking us not to." This merely earned a scoff and a slow shake of the head.
"M'boy, you must come from a magic-dead world. Here, everything can have a voice with the right persuasion. Give a cow speech and it'll tell you steak is barbarism. Give it to a butterfly, and entymologists are mass-murderers. And, of course, when rocks can talk they'll argue against sculpture. If we listened to these things, we'd never get anywhere in our studies."
The words started out normally enough, markings of time and acknowledgements of presence or pithy little slogans (or, as far as Victor could discern, other cultures' equivalents of those same pithy little slogans - "stated individual is of questionable sexual orientation/prowess" seemed to be as universal an idea between worlds as "greetings," "look out," and "care for steeped vegetation in hot water?"). As the corridor stretched on, however, it seemed as if the vandals had begun running low on synonyms or sanity midway through their defacement. The phrases grew shorter, more random, and in some cases flew in from another line of thinking entirely; "Tord We Junta, 124/92/3X6" gave way to "Peace and Love for all" and finally to such random bits and pieces as "no matter" or, inexplicably near the ceiling, "sandwich!" By the end of the hall, the writing was a hodge-podge of complete gibberish. Even the bits capable of being recognized as Phoenecian-Greek alphabetical compositions threw their consonants and vowels together in absolute disregard for meaning, compositional structure, or the annoyance it caused a barely-competent linguist as he tried and failed to make any sense out of the mess. Soon even those fell apart into absolute formless scribbling - chalk, charcoal, and chisles arcing randomly in a record of absolute nonsensical nothing... that slowly faded, bit by bit and scribble by scribble, into a uniform ruddy brown as Victor finally came near the far door.
He had his hand on the wide stone ring set solidly in its face before he realized it was dried blood coating the walls around him.
The thing looked suspiciously like the illegitimate offspring of a lamp post and an ancient oak, to be honest; low gnarled branches spread laboriously outwards, drooping down or twisting upwards seemingly at random, yet none of it was actually wood. Instead Victor found it constructed entirely of wrought iron pipes, connected with angle-joints and solder in ways that would make the London Public Works surveyors turn shades of color that didn't yet have a name attached to them. It had apparently been around for ages - the moisture had worked it over with a heavy hand, coating the thing in loose drips and rough blooms of rust. A few pipes had been corroded straight through, and others appeared to have broken off at some time following the thing's... creation? The would-be adventurer could only assume it was created, but then - that was always hard to clearly define in this place. If it had grown, in any case, the seed must have been something intensely interesting to see.
Hanging beneathe the spreading metal limbs was a dozen or so gaslights which Victor could only describe as the strange tree's "fruit." They weren't really hanging, though - curling disjointed pipes jutted downwards, capped with the inexplicably-burning inverted lanterns in an apparently patternless spread below the twisted spirals above. Even the appropriate crossbars sat below the gleaming iron lights... well, "below," given the inversion. There was nothing else to give the thing significance; no plaque, no symbols, and only a few loose flames from broken pipes or seams floating on the top side of the curling tangle of pipes. Yet it seemed that not even all the pipes had a purpose. Some dead-ended in sealed caps that apparently never even bothered once holding something to give them a reason to exist, and numerous fractures in the rusted metal showed no release of gas or indeed anything else. The entire composition was something that could have come out of an asylum for civil service engineers.
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.