by Ramy Vance
Roy ran over to Alex and scooped her up in his arms before taking cover behind the car. He darted out and took three shots at the creature shuffling toward them.
The bullets ripped through the baby creature, but it only paused for a moment, then continued its slow, jerky movements.
Roy shook Alex hard. “You need to get it together. I can’t do as much damage in your head as I can in mine, even less when you’re in this state. He’s messing with your mind. This isn’t real. It’s not true, not in the way he’s showing it.”
Alex shook her head as she fought back tears. “I don’t know what’s true. I don’t know.”
“Alex, if you don’t sort this out, Vardis is going to win. I need you.”
Alex covered her face with her hands. She couldn’t hear Roy. She couldn’t hear anything. She couldn’t see anything. “Oh, my God, I can’t see! Roy, I can’t see.”
Roy popped out and fired again. “What do you mean, you can’t see?”
Tears rolled down Alex’s face as she held her hand out in front of her. She was back in the blackness, or maybe she’d never left. “I’m blind.”
Then the ground fell out from under them as the air filled with the wailing of the creature in the darkness.
Chapter Nine
Time is meaningless without context. A minute does not matter without the seconds preceding it. There is an environment in which time must exist. Darkness is not that environment, nor is silence.
It was here that Alex found herself. She wasn’t aware of how long she’d been here or how long it had taken her to go gibbering into madness, but somewhere long ago, she had forgotten who she was. She sat in the darkness, ruminating on her life. At times she stood and tried to find her way back, but she did not know what to return to.
The descent was gradual. If she had been aware, she would have tried to hold onto sanity longer, but unfortunately, she clung to the wrong thing.
The last thing Alex saw was her parents screaming as the chubby abomination Vardis had created limped toward her.
Alex could see now that it had been a trap, but she couldn’t figure out how to escape it. The more she thought, the more disgusted she was with her parents. With their voices in the car. With the way they had stood mute and dumb around her, too covered in their own shit to have the wherewithal to have called an ambulance.
She probably wouldn’t have lost her sight if they had.
She descended into the darkness. Reaching a depth she had never seen before.
At the bottom of this darkness was a fire that cast no light. Alex only knew it was there because of the heat. She found it one night, and she huddled next to it, shivering since the fire was not enough to fight the cold wind that cut through her body like the blades her parents had shouted at each other.
Near the fire, Alex screamed. She screamed for someone to save her, but she could not remember any names. By the time she thought to call for help, she hardly remembered her own.
Near primordial in her existence, she hunched over the flames and forgot how to speak, only able to remember language as a rudimentary instrument that did not give her the tools necessary to convey what existed within her.
Yet even in the darkness, something began to change. She did not need words for it, nor did she need her eyes.
As the flames flickered, she whispered to herself, guttural sounds that could have come from an animal. She knew they were not the sounds of a human, much like she knew the mud and gunk that clung to her skin wasn’t hers. Nor was this an extended period of time without food. If it was, a person would have died.
This deduction brought forth the next.
People didn’t live forever, but she could not be dead. Her last memory was watching herself with serious but not deadly injuries. But there was more: vague outlines that shimmered like constellations in the night sky. Then there came the first inkling of light. Hardly noticeable, pulsing as if it had a heartbeat.
Alex turned from the black flames, resting her back against them, staring up at these skeletons of memories. She thought long and deep in the place with no words and overlaid muscle and flesh on the bones floating above her.
She had lived in the darkness most of her life. There she had built worlds and carved her memories of what she’d heard into neat, precise instruments. She listened to each one.
As she recalled to her mother’s voice on her fifth birthday as her father helped her cut a cake, she trickled the images of her mother and father that she had from after she received her eye implants. She imagined what they would look like, talking to each other.
Then she forced herself to remember the crash. Compared the faces. One set looked weaker than the other, the faces shifting and changing, the voices contorting.
Above, the sky brightened.
For the first time in what felt like decades, Alex looked down at her hands. Her fingers were thick and knobby, dirt under her nails.
Whatever this place was, Alex realized she was not a prisoner, or not in the sense that someone could keep her here. She’d been keeping herself here.
“Where are you?”
Alex turned to the flames warming her body. Then, for reasons she could not understand, she flung her arm into the fire.
The pain was immediate and then vanished. Alex looked down at her hand. It wasn’t made of flesh. It was bionic.
If you’re ever in a dream, pinch yourself to wake up.
Someone had told her that at some time. A long time ago.
“Roy, where are you?”
Alex stood and walked away from the flames, following the faint light cast by the fleshed-out constellations above. As she wandered away from the fire, the world around her got brighter.
The feeling inside Alex, nameless and hateful, grew stronger, but it was not directed at her parents. That had been a lie. She couldn’t prove it, but she knew it was. No, this feeling was directed at whoever had told her the lie.
Vardis had planted a seed, and it had taken root for too long. Alex didn’t know how much time she’d lost, but she was going to find him and make him pay.
There was another reason Alex needed to find Vardis. She wasn’t sure about it, but it was more important than cramming his stupid face up his ass, and it was far beyond her as a person. She’d find it when she did.
“Roy, where the hell are you!”
Alex reached into what was left of the darkness and tore it apart, ripping it as if it were a silk veil. Then there was light.
She could see Roy.
The man was old, older than Alex had assumed he was. His hair and beard were gray, and he had a cane. He was leaning against a pile of red mud.
As Alex stepped into the light, she started to be able to make sense of the world around her.
The world she looked upon was Vardis’ home, but it was different than the vision of his world in his dream.
There were mountains of red mud. Lakes of it, as far as the eye could see. An entire world of clay.
Alex ran over to Roy and helped him sit up. His eyes were gray and glaucous. He murmured under his breath as Alex tried to get him to his feet, “Who are you?”
“It’s me, Alex.”
“I can’t see anything. I can’t see anything. I think I’m dying. Finally. This time it’s the real thing.”
Alex looked around. She had no idea what to do. Digging herself out of wherever the hell she had been was one thing. Getting Roy out was another problem altogether. “It isn’t real, Roy. None of this is real. That’s what you told me. It’s all in our heads. Or in Vardis’. But it isn’t real.”
Roy slumped to the side, knocking his cane over. “What is real? These aren’t my memories. I’ve never been blind. Been this old but never been this blind before.”
“Are you going to get up or just sit here moping?”
Roy rested his head on the clay behind him and chuckled. “You’re one to talk. I’m pretty sure you’ve been in the shit as long as I have. How the hell did you get out?
“
Alex looked down at her bionic arm. “You pinch yourself when you’re dreaming.”
“What?”
Alex drew Roy’s gun from its holster, then took his hand and wrapped his fingers around the butt. “You pinch yourself when you’re dreaming.”
Roy looked at Alex, his eyes milky. “When you’re dreaming?”
Alex pressed the muzzle of the pistol to Roy’s leg. “Yeah. When you’re dreaming.”
Roy pulled the trigger.
The pistol blasted a hole the size of an apple. He screamed in pain and cupped the wound with his hand, trying to keep the blood from flowing.
As Roy swore under his breath, the cloudiness in his eyes started to fade. He continued to swear, finally taking a deep breath and grabbing his cane. “Would have thought you went to PsyOps after pulling a stunt like that.”
Roy tried to stand, and Alex gave him a hand. They both took some time to gaze upon the red world, its red suns hanging above them like a promise of hell. “So, this is what the bastard is capable of when he’s awake.”
“How bad was it for you?”
As Roy answered, his body got younger. “Pretty bad. Ain’t proud to say it, but I was lost in there for a while. In myself. Or him. I don’t know the difference. But he broke me. You?”
Alex watched the red suns above her. “Almost. But I wouldn’t be here if he had, would I?”
Roy reached into his pocket and pulled out two cigars. He handed one to Alex. “Don’t light it,” he said. “That one’s just herbs and crap, but it’ll help ground you. Kinda like pinching yourself over and over.”
Alex accepted the fake cigar and gnawed on it. The thing tasted like chocolate and rosemary. “Now what?”
“We break out of the attack. Vardis probably assumes we’re done, but he’s at a disadvantage. He’s been keeping up two worlds, or maybe even three. He’s stretched himself pretty thin. There’s no way he’ll know we’ve broken free. He’s too busy concentrating on keeping everything running smoothly. Now we take the fight to him.”
“How are we going to do that? We were hardly able to tell the difference between reality and this?”
Roy lit his cigar and shook his head. “Not true. We both knew it wasn’t real, if only on a subconscious level. Or at least you did.”
One of the clay mountains exploded into fire. The smoke rose to the sky, obscuring something that had been lurking there. She pointed at it and Roy followed her finger, jumping in fear when he got a glimpse of what was behind the smoke. “What the hell is that?”
Millions of eyes peered out from behind the smoke as lightning crackled through the clouds. “That’s what’s in the shard,” Alex explained. “They found a way to trap it thousands of years ago. This is what the kin are made out of—some kind of elder god.”
Roy was looking at his pistol. “I swear, there’s a new elder god every twenty years or so. This ain’t anything special. Just means something is old enough to remember before there was anything. But we need to go on the offensive. The longer we stay docile, the faster he’ll find us.”
Alex turned away from the eyes that were peering at her. “Fine. We take this to Vardis. I haven’t done PsyOps before. What do they tell you to do in situations like this?”
Roy kicked at the clay next to him. “They tell us to go deep. Deeper than the person attacking us would go, and I think we’ve already been that deep in ourselves. This could be what’s deep for Vardis. This place. Let’s take it deeper.”
Alex thought it was a good idea. The alien had delved into her deeps. Why not give him the same experience? “Okay, but hold on. I want to see if we can get reinforcements.”
She focused and brought her thoughts under control, strangling the wild ideas and concepts that were whirling in her head. After she had at least partially accomplished her goal, she reached out to Chine, but the most she was able to utter was a bestial cry for help.
What came back was something she had not experienced or expected: full and unadulterated rage from Chine. It was not directed at her, but at whoever had hurt her. I am coming, Dustling. I am coming.
Alex grabbed Roy and dragged him to a pool of mud that was a couple of yards away from them. “Chine is coming,” she said. “I don’t know when he’s going to get here, but we aren’t waiting. If we’re going to bring the fight to Vardis, then we are.”
The mud was shallow, hardly coming up to Alex’s knees. “We find him now, no matter what.”
Alex dropped to her knees and started digging into the mud, splashing it up as she crawled deeper and deeper into the wet red earth. She let out a psychic blast that carved into the ground as she pulled out her scythe, then she began cutting into the earth, ripping away mud and flinging it to the side as she continued to blast it.
Roy followed suit, dropping to his knees and digging with his hands, trying to get to whatever Alex was burrowing toward.
The two of them were going to get to Vardis no matter what.
Chapter Ten
The two dug into the earth, Alex feeling the wet clay on her hands. She was reminded of when she and her parents had spent hours in their garden, digging up weeds to tend plants her parents thought were worthwhile.
“Here we are.”
Alex pulled back, uncertain of what she was retreating from.
Neither she nor Roy was in the red clay world anymore. This was a new place, blood and bone born from a life Alex could not understand.
The bones cried out for vengeance. They cried out for absolution.
For what, Alex could not know.
Roy was beside her, covered in the red gunk just as she was, trying to make sense of what they were experiencing. “This is his mind. Whatever he remembers.”
Alex had not stopped excavating. “It doesn’t matter. We’re getting to the bottom of it.”
Roy stepped back, watching Alex work. He pulled a cigar from his pocket and started chomping on it, muttering under his breath before flinging himself to the mud once more and digging as best as he could. “We’ll get to the bottom of this. We’ll get to the bottom of it all.”
Alex lost herself to the digging, to flinging mud and clay over her shoulders, tossing it aside, trying to find what was buried beneath all of the red earth.
Lo and behold, in the tiny bits of clay were creatures, small worms with faces. Their eyes seemed to peer into Alex’s, asking questions that could not be answered or even given words. They leered, and Alex managed to return their gazes.
Worms forced themselves out of the ground. Massive things, their bodies nearly the size of a human’s, pushed themselves out of the clay, writhing, their invisible mouths grasping for what could not be seen.
Up above, the heavens were covered in red clouds, lightning flashing, the red bleeding into the sky. Eyes opened all around her, watching, scheming, and understanding. “Don’t look at the eyes,” Alex shouted. “You can’t look at the eyes.”
Both of them, as if she had understood her own warnings, looked away from the sky of many winking eyes. They ignored it and dug deeper, their hands and nails filled with what could not be ignored.
Then there was thunder, a voice calling out. It was reminiscent of ancient days and voices that had come before words existed, a time when all that could be communicated was the raw feeling of existence.
Roy pulled back from it, trying to hide as well as he could.
Alex did not try to hide. She did not try to fight, merely accepted that there was hardly any control in this place, only what she took.
Chine! Chine, where are you?
In the millions of twinkling eyes above, Alex watched Vardis’ face take shape. He looked down upon the two humans, smirking as his voice thundered throughout the psychic plane. It reminded Alex of when she had been in the comet, listening to the voice of the Dark One.
They were one and the same, Vardis and the Dark One.
Alex focused on reaching out to her dragon. Please, you have to hear me. Please. I need you
.
The sky ripped itself apart, lightning streaking and thunder booming.
And then there was silence. No answer came. Chine’s voice could not be heard.
Alex understood.
Chine was not coming. He couldn’t hear her, and as long as she thought she needed him to save her from what she was experiencing, that was going to be her existence. She would always need someone to save her.
But she hadn’t needed Roy. She hadn’t needed the rest of Boundless. She hadn’t needed Chine. None of them could help her make sense of what existed in her mind, and as long as she kept calling for them, she was never going to get anywhere.
Alex focused her intention on her hand. She felt energy welling around it, her knuckles swelling with power. Then she leaped into the air and drove her hand into the red earth as she landed, shattering it.
The world around her broke apart, the pieces trying to cling to each other but unable to hold on as the power of Alex’s psychic blast reverberated throughout the dreamscape.
Alex let loose a scream of rage and pain, her body bursting into flame as she plowed through the earth, the draconic fluid in her igniting, surging through her, and bolstering her powers, sending her telepathic reach farther than she could ever have imagined.
The world around her started to dissolve, Vardis’ screams echoing.
Suddenly, her dragon’s head burst through the dream, looking as if he had just come tumbling through a wall. Alex, Child of Dust!
Alex ran up to him and threw her arms around his neck. I’m here. Oh, thank God, you’re here!
Chine unleashed a torrent of ether fire.
Alex felt it burning in her as well, the flames on her body changing from yellow to black, mimicking the ones coming from her dragon.
Alex and Roy drew as close to Chine as they could while he burned everything near him.
The earth Alex had been burrowing into collapsed and the three of them dropped into a cavern.
