by Ramy Vance
Brath, on the other hand, had chosen a rough suit of dwarfish chainmail armor. He explained that it was mostly ceremonial. His father had passed it on to him, and his father before him. It had never seen battle, which was good since the armor was old enough to fall apart under the weakest of plasma blasts.
Jollies hadn’t worn anything special but whispered to Alex that pixies as well as fairies attended all major social events in the nude. She had thought it better to ask Alex ahead of time and joked, “It’s not hard to dress down.”
Once everyone had changed into something more comfortable, Boundless headed out to meet Alex’s parents.
For the first time in months, Alex stood at her front door. The last time she’d been here was when Manny and Myrddin had come to recruit her. Now she was about to knock with a host of other races in tow. Hopefully, her parents wouldn’t freak out too much.
The door was opened almost instantly. Her mother and father crowded the threshold. Liza and George were all smiles, both of them trying to blink back tears. George leaned forward, scooped Alex up in his arms, and squeezed her tightly. “It’s so good to finally see you again, kiddo.” He laughed as he tightened his grip.
Alex managed a weak hello with the little bit of air she had in her lungs before her father dropped her. She gave her mom a kiss, and Liza promptly burst into tears and rushed to wipe them away.
George stepped back, motioning for the rest of the guests to come in. “Please, don’t stand outside. It’s time we got to know each other.”
Alex walked into the house, surprised her parents weren’t caught off guard by a gnome, a dark elf, and a pixie. Why her parents didn’t notice the alien standing at the rear was beyond Alex’s understanding. Even Jim seemed to think it was weird. He leaned over and said, “My parents would be losing their minds right now.”
George and Liza stood in the living room as the rest of the group awkwardly glanced at Alex, waiting for her to take the lead on the introductions.
After the introductions were over, she asked, “So, you guys aren’t weirded out by this?”
Liza laughed as she waved away Alex’s question. “Of course not, honey. After you left, your dad and I decided we had to check out Middang3ard VR. It didn’t make sense to be completely in the dark about what you were getting involved in. We each got our own set. Spending date nights in Middang3ard has made them a lot more interesting.”
George took a seat in his recliner. “Not to toot our own horns too loudly, but we’ve become kind of a big deal in there,” he said lazily, trying to downplay how happy he was with himself.
Jollies flitted over to Alex’s shoulder and whispered, “Your parents seem really cool.”
Alex wasn’t expecting that to be her friends’ reaction. “Wait until they talk more.”
George, who hadn’t heard Alex, leaned forward in his chair and said, “You might have heard of us. KillerStud313 and HotMammaBlood.”
Jollies’ skin shifted from its formerly calming blue to bright, excited pink. “Wait! That’s you guys? Oh, my gods! You guys are legends!”
Alex couldn’t believe what she was hearing come out of Jollies’ mouth. “Are you serious?”
Jollies flew in front of Alex’s face and grabbed her by the cheeks. “These two single-handedly beat the end-game raid that takes eighteen people to finish! The only party to ever finish it faster was the Mundanes, and we all know how good they are.”
Alex stared at her parents. Liza didn’t seem to think it was a big deal, but George was smiling smugly, obviously proud of himself. “Well, I mean, we hold other records,” he said as well. “But we can talk about that over dinner. Now, which of you is giving me a hand in the kitchen? Gill? Fancy helping me butcher a hog?”
Gill’s eyes lit up in a way Alex had only seen once before. “Oh yes, I would like that a lot,” he blurted excitedly.
Gill and George rushed off. Jim, Brath, and Vardis continued standing in the living room, looking at their hands and trying to figure out what they should do. Alex said, “You guys should go help in the kitchen too.”
Liza walked over to the huddle of boys, threw her arms around them, and exclaimed, “We’re all helping. I can rustle up something for you to do.”
As Liza ushered the boys into the back, Jollies flitted around her, begging Liza to tell her stories about her and her husband’s exploits in VR. Liza laughed as she started to delegate tasks to the team, promising Jollies she would tell her all about them.
Alex watched as her two worlds blended seamlessly together. Chine probably would have fit in nicely as well if he could have fit into the house.
Liza and George instructed Alex’s team and Vardis on how to set the table. Dinner hadn’t taken too long to cook due to the many hands at work. Alex even offered a little bit of help, even though she was a terrible cook. Setting the table was something she knew like the back of her hand. She’d spent years doing it blind.
Once the table was set, she helped her family and her team cart the food out. She hadn’t had human food cooked by human hands in a long time, and she had forgotten how much she loved her parents’ cooking.
When they were all seated, Liza proposed a toast. She raised her glass of wine and said, “To new friends and new adventures. To the people who keep my daughter safe!”
Alex couldn’t help smiling and looking at Jim. The night was going better than she could have imagined.
Across the table, Vardis reached for the pumpkin pie.
George clicked his tongue playfully as he passed the pie to Vardis. “You know, most places on Earth, you have to save dessert for last. Not in the Bound household, though.”
Vardis smiled politely and nodded. “I greatly appreciate your hospitality. The last planets I have visited have not been…” He looked at Alex, who mouthed the word “normal.”
“What I mean to say,” Vardis continued, “is that this is a beautiful meal. Thank you.”
Vardis cut a piece of pie and placed it on his plate. He watched everyone eating for a second before grabbing his fork and cutting himself a bite. He tossed the pie into his mouth and chewed slowly. “Oh, that is delicious.”
Suddenly, he screamed. His body convulsed, and his screams grew shriller.
Alex stood to go to Vardis when her head erupted in searing pain. She grabbed the back of her head as she lost her balance and fell to the floor. Whatever had happened to Vardis was happening to her as well.
Chapter Four
Alex couldn’t see anything but red. The pain she felt was beyond anything she’d ever experienced. It felt like someone was slicing her open, starting at the spine, dragging the knife, taking their time, carving up her nerves until they got to her brain.
When Alex opened her eyes, she saw her family and friends crowding around her and Vardis, who was still screaming. She wanted to reach out, ask for their help, but she couldn’t speak. Her jaw was clamped so tight she thought she was going to crack her teeth.
Another wave of pain wracked her, her back rigid as her hands clenched, frozen as if she were trying to hold onto something.
More pain, and still more. Her vision was starting to blur, the world around her fading. But not into darkness—into something more troubling and confusing. She watched herself on the floor, convulsing.
If Alex chose to look away, which she felt the strong urge to do, she could see stars flashing behind her as if they were rushing to be someplace. There were suns and moons, and they watched as Alex turned away from the small girl on the floor, quivering in agony.
Instead of staying, Alex walked through the cosmos, looking at whatever caught her attention. She was aware that the girl was still on the floor. So was the alien, but it didn’t matter. The stars were more interesting.
Alex continued to wander, stopping here and there at an interesting planet, wondering what scurried across its surface or if it had life at all.
Then without warning, the universe went cold. It hadn’t been warm before, but now it was
freezing. Her bones ached from the sudden temperature drop. She hoped the girl she’d left behind was going to be safe.
She headed in the direction of the vicious breeze.
It was not long until Alex found what she was looking for. There was a small boy, pale as the whitest snow, wearing a fox-skin robe that reached his bare feet and a mask made from a deer’s skull. The cold was not coming from the boy, though. It emanated from what he was staring at.
Ahead of him was something like a planet but nothing like one at the same time. It had mass, but the surface swirled and moved as if the skin were revolting against itself. Occasionally tendrils of the black skin-like substance shot out from the planet as if it were grasping for something around it.
The cold came from the thing.
As Alex watched the living black planet, she saw it shudder and expand. The expansion was slight, and as it grew larger, everything around it grew colder for a second as if it were sucking out the life of all that surrounded it.
Alex did not know why, but she wanted to reach out to the black planet, wanted to touch its slippery skin. She knew what would happen if they were to touch. It was a visceral knowledge, something that had been within her since birth and perhaps existed in all sentient beings.
Whatever that thing was, it would kill Alex if she touched it like it was killing that planet. One touch was all it would need. The black wasn’t part of the planet, it was the thing that was killing it, and it could spread easily.
While Alex was drawn to the planet, she was also disgusted. Whatever had caused this to happen was unnatural. It disturbed her on a primal level. If she’d had a body, she probably would have been sick to her stomach. Oh yeah, my body, she thought absentmindedly, looking over her shoulder as if she would see it trailing behind her.
The little boy ahead turned to face Alex, his eyes glowing white-hot behind his mask. “What are you doing here? I didn’t think I would see you again.”
Alex heard the boy, but she had no idea what he was talking about. She stared at him blankly, wondering if that was his body or if he was like her—something outside of a body, floating about, trying to make sense of the universe in which it was merely a speck. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’m not sure what I’m doing here, either.”
The boy pointed to the planet being swallowed up by a darkness vast and perverse. “That’s what he does. That’s how he eats them, and he wants to eat them all.”
“The Eater of Worlds.” Vardis had used that phrase to describe the Dark One. She had thought he was speaking metaphorically. He had explained how the Dark One took a planet’s resources. Alex hadn’t realized he meant the Dark One quite literally devoured planets from the inside.
What exactly was the Dark One? How could something that inhuman be able to control armies or create technology? What Alex was looking at right now didn’t seem to have any more intelligence than lichen or a fungus.
Then something changed on the planet’s surface. The earth broke apart, swirling as if caving in on itself, and something forced itself from the opening rent. Teeth lined the gash as something like a fetus forced itself out of the planet’s wound, its body frail and skeletal, its head encased in a shroud of some sort as clouds gathered, covering the thing’s obscene nakedness.
An eye opened in the caul. It was large and angry, and it turned its cyclopean gaze upon Alex.
The thing knew she was there. It had seen her. She was terrified.
The thing snarled, its tendrils pulsing as they caressed the surface. Another blast of cold hit them as the planet grew larger.
A voice called to Alex from the darkness far behind her, back where the body of the girl and the strange alien were laying. Alex! it shouted. Alex, come back!
Alex recognized the voice. It was Chine. What was he doing out here? Dragons couldn’t survive in space. Not without special equipment. She realized she couldn’t survive in space without special equipment either. How the hell was she out here?
Come back, Alex! Come back now!
Alex didn’t know if she should listen to the voice. Even though she was afraid of the thing clawing its way out of the tendril-filled planet, she knew it wouldn’t hurt her. Or at least, she thought it wouldn’t hurt her. She wasn’t like the rest of space. She was like the pale boy. Where had he gone?
Then without warning, Alex felt hands on her back. They pulled her hard, and she fell back into the body of the girl who was lying on the floor. Her eyes had rolled back, and she was as rigid as a corpse.
Alex, back in her body, bolted upright fast enough to make everyone in the living room jump. Blood was pouring from her nose and her ears, and she felt sick to her stomach. When she tried to move, she fell over and coughed up a bloody black mass of something she would have preferred not to look at. Then she passed out.
When Alex woke up, she was bundled in a blanket on the living room couch. Vardis was also wrapped in a blanket in her dad’s chair on the other side of the room. Liza and Gill were in the room, both of them looking worriedly at the rider. “What happened?” she groggily mumbled.
Liza rushed over and covered Alex’s forehead with kisses. “I didn’t think my pumpkin pie was that bad,” she managed to joke.
Alex laughed, but her stomach clenched, cutting her laughter off abruptly. “Your pie could never be bad enough to do that.”
Across the room, Vardis was staring at Alex with his deep, dark eyes. Gill was doing the same, but his gaze was much softer and worried as well. “It was an attack,” the alien said. “By the Dark One.”
Alex tried to sit up. Her body ached less, and she felt like she needed to start moving to ease her muscles’ cramps. “Why the hell would he attack me like that?” she asked. “He shouldn’t even know I’m here.”
“The attack was not on you, it was on me. As I told you before, we are linked psychically. I did not know that if someone invaded my mind to inflict harm on me, it would also affect you.”
Alex rubbed her head as she tried to focus. Everything still felt very fuzzy. “Wait, are you saying the Dark One knows you’re here?”
Vardis shook his head as he made a futile attempt to stand. “No, he does not. The Dark One is a powerful psychic. He does not need to know where I am to find me. All he needs to do is search out my mind. Usually, there are defenses up. Unfortunately, the meal provided to me was so delicious that I let my guard fall. It will not happen again.”
There were still things that didn’t make sense to Alex. “How come it stopped? If he caught you off-guard and I can’t defend myself, why did we all of a sudden stop being attacked?”
Vardis glanced at Gill, who was crouched in a chair, watching Alex closely. “Your friend did something he has yet to inform me about.”
When Gill spoke, it was with the measured attention to detail and pronunciation that Alex had started to realize stemmed from a lack of trust. “I connected your mind to Chine’s,” the drow said, “using my own. I amplified the telepathic link between you and the dragon until he was able to help you.”
Alex knew Chine had the ability to sense when she was in danger, but that was only good up to a certain amount of distance, and she was far beyond it. “Wait, are you saying you’re psychic too?” Alex asked, suddenly realizing what Gill was implying. She could see why he would have wanted to keep that a secret.
Gill tapped the side of his head as he slowly shook it. “No, I am not. There are some abilities that drow possess that I have, and one of them is the ability to increase the innate abilities of those around me.”
Liza’s face brightened as she realized there was something she understood. “Kind of like buffs in VR, right?”
“Exactly. All I did was amplify the connection you and Chine already have. It’s something I unconsciously do all the time, making Jollies more charming, Jim more adventurous, things like that. This was the first time I’ve tried to direct it, though.”
Alex half-wondered what Gill was amplifying about her when she was aroun
d, but that could wait for another time. “So, that was Chine who pulled me out of there?”
“Exactly.”
Alex looked around the room as she tried to hold everything together in her head. Her mind was still swimming. “Okay, now we know the Dark One can attack Vardis from anywhere. What do we do about it?”
Gill came over and sat next to Alex. “We move the plan up. We find this weapon and end this once and for all.”
Alex looked at her mom, trying to force a smile. “Sorry dinner got ruined, but we’ll have another one once this mission over. The next time, I won’t get attacked by a psychic planet.”
Liza hugged Alex, holding her tightly as she ran her hands through her daughter’s hair. “Be safe, sweetie. If that thing can hurt you like that here, you need to get rid of it as fast as possible. I’m so proud of you.”
Alex managed to pry herself away from her mom and stood. “Gill, get everyone ready. Time to put in an end to this.”
Chapter Five
Team Boundless arrived at the base before nightfall. They were all tense. No one had spoken much about what had happened at Alex’s home. There wasn’t much to say. It made her uncomfortable.
An explanation outside of Vardis’ would have been appreciated. It wasn’t that Alex didn’t trust the alien, she thought. Instead, it was that she was used to having information fed to her by Myrddin and Roy. She had to admit she’d been caught up in the chain of command. Having to think for herself in this situation was more than she’d expected.
That was not to say she was bitter about it. Initially, taking orders had been difficult for Alex. She’d have preferred to think for herself. Now she had to admit that there was a lot of comfort in knowing Myrddin usually had the answers.
