Undermind Book 5, Chapter 3: Humps (Rough)

Saskia stared at the dome-shaped ruins standing alone amidst the featureless expanse of red sand. She spent several seconds trying to find words to adequately describe the depths of her frustration. Unable to think of anything appropriately witty to say in her frazzled state, she gave up and went with her fallback option.

“This sucks.”

Ruhildi made soothingly agreeable noises in her mind, while Saskia elaborated.

“We’ve been heading north this entire time. So how the hell did we wind up right back here where we started…? My minimap is supposed to prevent crap like this. This sucks.”

“Methinks there’s magic afoot,” said Ruhildi.

“That’s not an answer!” Saskia spoke a bit more forcefully than she intended. “Magic is just a catch-all label for weird crap we don’t understand.”

Never mind that Saskia herself had fallen back on the old ‘magic did it’ non-explanation on many an occasion. Ruhildi knew this, of course, but she had the decency not to point it out to Saskia’s face while she was in such obvious distress. No doubt she’d save that for later. Ruhildi was a better friend than she deserved.

“’Tis misfortunate we can’t ask our new ‘guide’ why this has happened,” said Ruhildi. “Och, no ’tisn’t. I don’t want that little shite sharing our bond.”

Saskia gave a morbid chuckle. The connection she’d inadvertently forged with Nine seemed to have damaged its combined soul. Afterwards, it had retreated into a withered cocoon hanging from one of the branches of Saskia’s soul-tree. This hadn’t been like a normal vassal bond, and the process hadn’t gone as smoothly as the soul-joining she and Ruhildi had experienced back on Arbor Mundi. Nine may be an annoying creep, but Saskia hoped she hadn’t given it some kind of…soul lobotomy or something. If that was what had happened, it would have been kinder just to eat the soul and be done with it.

Regardless, there was little she could do for Nine right now. Ruhildi had crawled out of a similar cocoon shortly after they arrived on this world, but hers had looked more…alive than Nine’s dried-up husk. There were other cocoons in her soul-space, hanging from other branches; who or what they might contain, she had no idea, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Maybe in time, Nine would claw its way out of its cocoon. Maybe it wouldn’t. Unless and until that happened, she had other things to worry about, such as figuring out how the hell she’d come full-circle without ever straying from her northwards path.

“Okay,” she breathed. “Okay, okay. Something must be messing with the compass on my minimap. If we can’t rely on that, how can we hope to find our way out of here?”

“You could try using our stonesense,” suggested Ruhildi.

“What? I can’t…huh. I suppose I can now, thanks to you.”

It hadn’t even occurred to her to try that. Her oracle senses were usually so much more useful than Ruhildi’s short-range stonesense that there would be little point. But if something was fooling one set of supernatural senses, it couldn’t hurt to check the other.

“So how do I do this?” asked Saskia. “When I used your stoneshaping magic, I could sense something. Like I knew the position and composition of every particle around me. Is that stonesense? It’s not like I could see a map or anything.”

“Aye, you have the right of it. My stonesense were always with me, but methinks you’ll have to consciously draw upon it.”

“Okay, well here goes…”

She opened up the now-familiar channel of magic between Ruhildi and herself. And just like that, she was feeling her surroundings in a way quite different from her oracle senses. She could tell there were cracks in some of the temple’s stonework that weren’t visible to the naked eye. All it would take was a bit of pressure to a certain spot, and most of the dome would come tumbling down.

When Saskia flew lower to the ground, she didn’t notice especially out of the ordinary, except…

She’d had this vague feeling when she’d fended off the sandstorm, but now it was more than that. There was something toxic about the red sand of the desert. Exposure to it was damaging her, but at a rate far outpaced by the regenerative powers she’d inherited from her troll body. If it weren’t for that, she might have dissolved into a puddle by now.

“Is…is this sand…radioactive?” she wondered aloud.

Ruhildi shook her head. “’Tis magic doing this. It feels…a bit like a ward, but not quite the same. I can’t sense its source.”

Her stonesense must be feeding them both the same information, but she trusted Ruhildi’s interpretation a lot more than her own. Her friend was a master stoneshaper, whereas she wasn’t even at the level of a novice. “Some kind of region-wide enchantment then?”

“Mayhap,” said Ruhildi. “That may be why nothing grows here. Nothing can survive…”

“Except me.”

“’Cept you.”

“Fantasinating though this may be, it doesn’t seem like our stonesense will help us navigate this desert,” said Saskia. “I don’t feel any…magnetic anomalies, or anything that would screw up the compass.” Actually, she was pretty sure her supernatural direction sense didn’t rely on magnetism to do its thing, but whatever. “I’m gonna just keep flying. We should keep a close eye on the minimap. If we see any rock formations rotate in a weird way, we can correct for it.”

This time, she headed east. As the day wore on, she did begin to see…oddities. It happened slowly, and the effect was so subtle it was barely noticeable, but objects were moving in unexpected directions relative to one another, not just relative to her. Sometimes they would move slightly closer together, sometimes slightly further apart.

“I wonder…” said Saskia. “What if nothing’s messing with our map? What if there’s some spacey-wacey weirdness happening? As in space itself warping around us.”

“You’ve seen this happen afore?”

“Only in games and movies and such. It’s a pretty common fantasy trope to have impossible mazes that constantly realign, where you can keep going in a straight line and end up right back where you started.”

“Your fantasies are fair odd, Sashki,” said Ruhildi. “I prefer the ones you have about humping a legion of big, sweaty tr—”

Saskia let out a strangled sound, cutting off her friend. “You know, just because we’re carpooling in this body doesn’t mean we should share everything…”

“Och, but I wouldn’t want to miss the good bits. Too long has it been since I had a good hump.”

“Can we stop talking about…” Saskia trailed off as the terrain beneath her began to shift and deform. “Humps!”

Indeed, a previously flat expanse of sand was now covered in mounds and hills of various sizes. But that wasn’t all. As she watched, the more distant terrain shifted into mountains and canyons. Further still, and it began to get really weird. The land rose up and around, curling back in on itself in impossible ways. Rippling sand dunes clung to vertical cliffs and overhanging arches, while rocky mountains had been squashed down into wide, flat rocky piles. But it wasn’t just impossible in the sense that it was laughing in the face of gravity. She’d lived on a tree the size of a planet, so those kinds of oddities were old hat for her. No, it was also impossible in the same way as optical illusions like Penrose triangles and Mobius strips—shapes that shouldn’t be able to exist in three-dimensional space.

This actually wasn’t the first time she’d seen impossible shapes made manifest. Whenever she herself emerged from the six-dimensional non-space of the between, her body briefly underwent an impossible-seeming transformation before it settled into a stable shape such as a human or troll or imp. She’d seen her own emergence through her vassals’ eyes, and it was truly disturbing.

But what she was seeing now was on an altogether different scale. Hundreds of kilometres warped into pure chaos.

“Mayhap your humps look like that,” said Ruhildi, sounding uncharacteristically shaken. “We flatlanders prefer the regular kind.”

Flatlanders: a word for ordinary denizens of three-dimensional worlds. Somehow that word no longer seemed to apply to her friend.

“You haven’t been a flatlander since you got your new mouthlet on Earth,” said Saskia. “Now you’re practically as eldritch as I am.”

Experimentally, she flew a few kilometres up and around one of the smaller loops. She didn’t have to go far before it became apparent that gravity was pulling her towards the surface of the loop no matter its orientation. From her perspective, it was the rest of the world tilting, not her. Yet somehow the sky and the moon and Ixathi’s immense form didn’t seem to shift, even as the ground turned around her.

Saskia also discovered she could shift back and forth at will between her old view of a largely flat desert, and the new crazy-making up-is-down and in-is-out world. This confirmed that it wasn’t the world itself that was changing, but her perception of it. She’d unlocked a new oracle sense that could peek behind the curtain of reality.

Though she couldn’t wrap her conscious mind around the impossible geometry, she was already intuitively looking for paths through the air that avoided looping back the way she’d come, as most of them did. Only a few paths avoided retreading old ground, and the number of viable paths dwindled with distance. This really was a kind of maze, but instead of her passage being blocked by walls, it was constrained by mind-bending distortions in space itself.

It took her two days to weave her way between the most egregious spatial distortions and find her way to the one and only exit from this arid hellscape. She immediately recognised the exit for what it was, because…well, it looked like a Stargate.

Her mundane vision perceived the gate as a stone circle, standing in a wide, flat valley. To her oracle crazovision, the gate lay at the end of a long tunnel formed by a powerful distortion that had twisted the ground into a tight loop. There was no way around the gate. The only way out was through.

“Careful, Sashki,” warned Ruhildi. “It may be a trap.”

Saskia looked at the bones piled high around the arch. “Oh, you think?”

Four powerful demon souls stood between her and the gate, looming larger and burned brighter than any she’d encountered thus far—aside from the Serpent King, of course. She could only assume they’d grown to such power by consuming the souls of their fellows.

“Boss fight,” muttered Saskia.

“Huh?” said Ruhildi.

“This is obviously the final boss encounter before we clear the level—oh never mind.”

“Well well, what have we here?” spoke a deep, gravelly voice. The speaker had taken the form of a giant, heavily-armoured dread knight. Whether that was his original form, she had no idea, but it was awfully intimidating.

“I see you, little impeheheheheheh!” cackled a grotesque, bulbous cacodemon soul, waving stubby little arms at her.

“She live!” hissed an absurdly voluptuous succubus soul. “How she sneak past us? How she survive desiccation?”

“How, how, how—I care not how,” said a second, smaller dread knight. “I care only that a meal has delivered herself to us. Now whose turn is it this time?”

Like an obese caterpillar, the cacodemon undulated towards Saskia, giggling maniacally. “Mine! Tiny impy soul is mineheheheh!”

Scowling, the larger dread knight grabbed hold of the bloated demon’s spectral hide, holding him back. “Nice try, Gorblarg. You went last time. This one is mine.”

The succubus pouted at him. “You got spicy imp last time! We only got bland, boring human soul. So unfair!”

“Um…don’t I get a say in this?” said Saskia.

“No!” said three voices at once.

“That’s too bad,” said Saskia. “Because I’m gonna speak anyway. The last few times someone tried to devour my soul…well, it didn’t go so well for them.” She rubbed her belly. “I’m not as defenceless as I look.”

The succubus tittered. “You? You think you eat us? How adorable!” She turned to the larger dread knight and waggled her hips seductively. “Oh please please please I have this one? I make it…worth your while.”

The dread knight licked his lips. “Four by four nights as my concubine.”

“Wait, can ghosts even do…each other?” wondered Saskia aloud. “Actually, on second thought, I don’t wanna know.”

“Two by two,” said the succubus, ignoring her.

“Three by three, and that’s my final offer,” said the dread knight.

“Deal,” said the succubus. She slid her hand down behind the plates guarding his crotch and…well, it wasn’t his hand she shook.

“Lilene!” he gasped, reaching for her with hungry hands.

The succubus, Lilene, batted his hands away. “After. First, I feed.”

“Well this has been fun,” said Saskia. “But I need to get to the gate. Out of my way. Now.”

“Get to gate…? Oh you silly thing.” Lilene let out a musical chuckle. “There is no going back. If it is oblivion you seek, there is worse place to be than inside me…”

“Thanks but no thanks,” said Saskia. “I’ll take my chances with the gate.”

Smirking, the succubus advanced on Saskia, walking with slow, seductive steps that nevertheless seemed to close the intervening distance with frightening speed. “There is no escape, my tasty treat,” she purred. “Come to me and it be over quick. No more pain. Come. Blightland is no place for living.”

Lilene was faster than Saskia, even though Saskia could fly. Saskia darted out of reach—or tried to. The succubus’s spectral visage expanded, almost filling the space from floor to…the other floor. A gigantic toothy mouth loomed.

“Aaand that’s a nope,” said Saskia.

Gritting her teeth, she pulled Lilene into her soul-space. She left her there, writhing in the grip of several tree-tendrils, while in the real world Saskia hovered in place, glaring at the other demons.

Dead silence filled the air, broken a moment later by a shocked voice. “It…it ate her!”

Not yet, I haven’t, thought Saskia. But what she said was: “So what if I did? I need to get to the gate. Either get out of my way, or share her fate. Your choice.”

Saskia flew forwards, doing her best to look calm and in control. Gorblarg the cacodemon undulated his way up the side of the tunnel, eager to escape, but the two dread knights stood their ground. Only a slight shifting of their feet betrayed their sense of unease.

She was halfway to them when there came a blinding flash from the direction of the gate. Silhouetted against the fading light, a woman came tumbling into view, before sprawling onto the sand beside the gate—on the side that looked like a ceiling in Saskia’s modified weirdovision.

She was human. A living human.

The woman was on her knees, gasping and retching. Her body shook. She glanced around wildly, barely taking in her surroundings before she lurched back towards the gate.

The three demon souls wheeled on the new arrival, but they were too far from the gate to reach her before…

Another bright flash lit up the tunnel of sand. The woman fell back from the gate, stiff as a board. But that was just her body. Her soul flailed against the blinding surface of the portal. Staring into the light, Saskia could just make out…faces. Innumerable bloated and deformed faces, screaming in silent horror as they tugged the succubus’s soul inside to join them.

“What the hell was that?” whispered Saskia. As soon as she spoke those words, she felt as if she’d just answered her own question. It had indeed looked like hell.

“The spirits of the sea,” murmured Ruhildi.

“What?”

“Och nothing,” said Ruhildi. “It just reminded me of something, is all.”

“What a waste,” said the bigger dread knight. “Better to feed us than to feed the gate.”

“That’s no gate,” said Saskia, unable to keep her voice from wavering. “That’s a deathtrap.”

“It is a gate,” said the dread knight. “But souls may only go through it once. It let us into the Blightland, but if we try to leave…” He glanced pointedly at the woman’s corpse.

Saskia felt her eyebrows shoot up. “So which is it? We can only go through the gate once? Or we can enter this…Blightland, but not leave? It’s a very important distinction.”

“How so?”

She shrugged. “Because I’ve never been through that gate.”

His spectral eyes bored into her. “You…what? Impossible! There is no other way into the Blightland.”

“For you, maybe…”

“The imp’s wits have clearly fled,” said the other dread knight. “Stop talking to it, little brother.”

His younger brother (who was by far the bigger of the two) shot him a guilty look. “But if she knows another way out…” He turned to Saskia. “You must show us!”

“Oh I must, must I?” said Saskia. “After your succubus friend tried to eat my soul—after all the other souls you’ve no doubt devoured—why would I do anything to help you?”

“You do not understand!” he said, with an edge of desperation creeping into his voice. “We have been trapped for so long in this place. It was devour or be devoured. Taking their souls was a mercy. Many more would have thrown themselves back into the gate, had we not been here to claim them.”

Saskia shuddered inwardly at the memory of what had just happened to the woman who had come through the gate. Being devoured by a demon might indeed be preferable to the hell that awaited her now.

“Brother…I warn you, do not be swayed by witless words,” said the other dread knight. “The imp is food, nothing more. We need not justify our actions to our food.”

“But what if—”

“Do not make me say it again, little brother.” The dread knight shifted his stance, raising a ghostly greatsword menacingly.

The bigger dread knight whipped out his own blade. “Do not threaten me, elder brother. I am stronger by far, and I have the bigger sword.”

“Insolent whelp!” The smaller demon swelled until he was half again as big as his brother, with blade to match. “It is I who is stronger.”

“You embarrass yourself. If you fight me, you will lose.” The first dread knight grew so tall his head almost bumped into the other side of the spatially warped tunnel. He awkwardly straddled the two sides, while struggling to hold his oversized blade in one hand. In her unmodified vision, she could see only his legs.

Ruhildi snickered. Saskia had a hankering for popcorn.

“Enough!” said the elder demon. “You cannot defeat—oof.” Not to be outdone by his younger brother, he’d expanded until his shoulders were pressing against the other side, his head bowed, and his legs were forced into a crouch. And now he was quite stuck. How a ghost could get stuck, she had no idea. He should be able to pass through solid matter, and that included the ground on both sides of the tunnel. Then again, if he allowed himself to sink into the ground, he might fall endlessly…

Ruhildi, meanwhile, was laughing uncontrollably. “We should make our escape while they’re comparing pecker sizes.”

“Maybe,” whispered Saskia as she fluttered towards the gate. “But now I feel kinda bad about leaving these idiots trapped here for all eternity. At least one of them seems amenable to cooperating with us.”

Ruhildi sighed. “These spirits are dangerous predators, not pets to be collected like…like Pacman.”

“You mean Pokemon?” said Saskia. Ruhildi was passingly familiar with popular culture from the months she’d spent with Saskia’s human mouthlet on Earth, as well as certain Earth-obsessed oracles on Arbor Mundi. More often than not, she got it hilariously wrong.

“Aye. Poke-men.”

“Close enough.”

While the dread knights faced off against each other in their ludicrous game of one-upmanship, Saskia had made it to the gate. Now she hovered there, still torn on what to do.

There were just so many unknowns. She didn’t know what awaited her on the other side. She still didn’t know if she could go through safely—and if the gate swallowed her up…she didn’t want to think about what that would mean for a creature like her. Maybe she should just wait for the cooldown to expire on her tentacular teleportation trick, and try to use that instead? Then again, if she couldn’t visualise her destination, she could end up anywhere. It would be up to her undermind to pick a destination, and that usually got her into trouble.

If the gate did allow her and Ruhildi safe passage, what would happen to her other passengers, Nine and Lilene? They must have gone through the gate once before already, so ordinarily the gate would swallow them. But would being tucked away inside her soul-space protect them? Would it put her own soul in danger?

And last, but not least, what was she going to do about those two morons?

She looked up to see them both staring at her. They were back to their original sizes, and looking none too happy that she’d snuck past them.

Drawing in a deep breath, Saskia made her decision.

“If you’re done being stupidiots, I’ll offer you one chance. You may enter my soul-space, not as food but as passengers. If you do this, you might be able to withstand the passage through this gate with me. Might. There’s also a chance you could end up…like her.” She eyed the woman’s corpse—her flesh already beginning to sag and peel away, exposing muscles and tendons beneath. “Whether you believe me, and whether you want to chance it, is up to you.”

The two demons looked at each other, and back at her. Finally the younger brother spoke. “I will join you.”

“Brother…” said the elder of the two.

The younger held up his hand. “I have decided. You cannot stop me. If I become food for the gate, then so be it. I tire of this pointless existence anyway.”

“But…I do not want to be alone,” said the elder, his plaintive voice at odds with his monstrous visage.

“Then join me, brother! Whatever happens, we will be together.” His spectral form shimmered, and strode towards Saskia without a backwards glance.

The elder watched his brother go for a long moment, then threw up his hands, and raced after him.

A shadow from above caught Saskia’s eye. She looked up just in time to see Gorblarg the cacodemon dropping down on her from who-knew-where. “Don’t forget meeeheheheheh!” he cackled.

She kinda had forgotten. Dogramit, now she was gonna have to carry that inside her. Ew. Still, she didn’t hesitate before dragging him—it—whatever—into her soul-space. A moment later the two dread knights were also safely bound by her branch-tendrils.

Glancing down the length of her soul-tree, she found Nine’s cocoon still hanging just as she’d left it—limp, withered, but still in some indefinable way, alive.

Further down, Lilene thrashed in a tangle of tendrils, moaning loudly as she—oh.

“Lilene!” hissed Saskia. “That’s not what my tendrils are for!”

Lilene was apparently too preoccupied to respond. With a sigh, Saskia left the succubus to her…entertainment.

“Screw it,” she said to Ruhildi, who had doubled over in a fit of mirth several branches above the succubus. “If the gate takes her soul, at least she’ll go out with a bang.”

In the physical world, Saskia turned back to the gate, closed her eyes and whispered a silent prayer to whatever benevolent gods may be listening. She released a long, steadying breath, and dove forwards into the unknown.

Even behind closed eyelids, the flash was blinding.