by Arthur Stone
I’ll never be doing that again.
Not for anything in this world.
If I found myself back on that stony sandbar before it all began, I would stay there.
All my life long, until old age took me.
What’s that? The water level you say? Pfft! I’ll climb atop the boulder and wait it out. After all, the largest rock jutted at least ten feet above the water’s surface.
It would have been a happy life, full of fish and friendship and fearlessness. Much better than rushing down a rain drainage pipe in the middle of a tropical storm.
As my mind recovered its ability to perceive the world, I realized with some horror that our torment had not yet concluded. The river was still squeezed tightly by the walls on either side, and somewhere further downriver, the water once again roared.
This roar was louder than before. I knew that what we had just experienced had only been a warmup.
We rounded a corner, and my heart skipped a beat. A waterfall descended from the vertical cliff lining the right bank. It was the rumble of its meeting the river that had so terrified me.
We were heading straight for the waterfall. No paddles remained to us to stop this movement. Our makeshift scooping net oar had been swept away.
Halfway, though, the currents of the river took pity on us and pushed us away from the plummeting torrent. Then, in an instant, we were shrouded in fog. We could see only a few feet ahead of us, and all sounds were fatally distorted. Or perhaps the waterfall had us spinning so quickly that they seemed to be coming from all directions at once.
“You didn’t mention that, Beko,” I complained.
“Mention what?”
“The waterfall.”
“Oh, I forgot. It’s not even called the waterfall. It’s called Shelves’ End.”
“So that’s the end of the rapids?”
“Should be. That means we’re past it.”
“Great. But in fog this thick, we’ll be all the way to Redriver before we can get our bearings.”
Beko shook his head. “This isn’t fog. This is bad. We’ve arrived in the swampways.”
“Swampways?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never been here. I’ve only heard about it. The waterfall dumps into the river and runs to another big waterfall. That second fall, of course, is on Blackriver itself. There’s no way past it except to go ashore and carry the boats. From the first waterfall, you have to keep to the right. If you go left, you encounter the swampways. A labyrinth of them. I don’t know whether getting out of the swampways is hard or not.”
This prospect of a maze of waterways didn’t scare me. “Let’s find the shore. Is there a decent shore along these ‘swampways’?”
“The shore is right there,” Beko pointed to the left.
I could barely make out an outline through the white mists.
It was of a huge, flat-topped stone covered in rich moss. Attempting to mount it on foot plunged our legs into sticky mud, nearly to our knees. Thankfully, we were barefoot and had rolled up our pant legs.
We parked the raft in the shallows, collected our scarce belongings, and attempted to find a decent stretch of land.
Wherever we went, we encountered only puddles and mud. The mossy mounds were the only islands of dry. But they could not hold our weight—immediately giving way, they plunged us back into the muck.
There were no landmarks to help us orient ourselves. The fog was a little thinner, but there was still no way of seeing beyond twenty paces. Trying to move with the waterfall’s sound at our back was unproductive. Here, sound bounced around and was absorbed in odd patterns, and we could once again hear everything from all directions at once. No acoustic beacon would come to our rescue.
In the end, we returned to the raft. That familiar flat stone was the only solid object here in the kingdom of mud, moss, and muck. We were glad to see it at first, but immediately saddened by the realization that we had just wasted hours wandering in circles.
Not to mention the energy we had burned.
Beko sat on the edge of the raft and stared up in melancholy. “I doubt we’ll ever see the sun here. This is an evil fog. Unnatural. It smells something like the slag in a forge.”
“You’re right. Have you heard anything about this swamp before?”
The ghoul shook his head. “Here, the Grove runs on the left bank, and on the right bank, too. It runs all the way to the big waterfall. The land beyond is dangerous, too. If we survive this swamp, we’ll be eaten further down.”
“Eaten? By whom?”
“I don’t know. This is the Grove. There’s always someone here waiting to eat you.”
“I’d like to see them try. We’re the winners here, after all.”
“Ged, we cannot find our way out of this swamp. We’re not winners. We’re lost.”
“Lost? We’ll see about that.”
“How?”
“I bet you I can get us out of here right now.”
“How?”
“I have an idea. I hope it works.”
Chapter 36
The Breath of Chaos
Degrees of Enlightenment: 0 (347/888)
Shadow: 347
Attributes:
Stamina: level 7, 350 points
Strength: level 4, 200 points
Agility: level 5, 250 points
Perception: level 3, 150 points
Spirit: level 2, 100 points
Energy:
Warrior Energy: 150 points
Mage Energy: 100 points
Talents:
Extreme Boatman (tier 3): 10/10
Fishing Connoisseur (tier 3): 10/10
Cure Wounds (tier 3): 10/10
Throwing Knives (tier 3): 10/10
Apprentice Navigator (tier 3): 10/10
Free Talents:
Spinning Rod Master (tier 3): 10/10
States:
Equilibrium (15.21): level 15
Enhanced Enlightenment (0.50): level 0
Shadow of Chi (0.50): level 0
Measure of Order (3.00): level 3
I was wrong to doubt my idea. It worked even better than I had hoped. Or at least I thought so at first.
A vague memory from eons back, in my past life, reminded me of a way to make a compass in the wild. A steel hand from a watch, or a paper clip, or a nail was enough to pull it off. After gently placing the item on a leaf that was floating on the water, you could watch it spin—and then align with the Earth’s magnetic field. One point should be magnetic north, the other magnetic south.
I was only a child then, and I remember asking how to distinguish the north from the south, if there was no information available other than the nail. The adults I asked had been confused, unable to answer.
I was not about to waste time making a water compass. After all, this world might not have even had a magnetic field.
Perhaps it wasn’t even a planet, in the usual meaning. My mother, a very educated woman here, had never mentioned anything about the world being spherical in shape. I did know that it was considered gigantic—and not hanging in space, but anchored to some axis that the higher powers held in place in the great void. That’s all I remembered from her lessons.
I would try the compass another time. Perhaps I’d make a great navigational discovery that would be rewarded by the ORDER.
This time, though, I asked for the ORDER’s help directly. I activated all of the talent marks for Orientation and used reward drops to boost it to levels 2 and 3. To achieve the chi necessary, I had to melt down some attribute marks, which was of course regrettable. But worth it.
The third specialization level of the Orientation talent was Apprentice Navigator. Now, I could find my way in the world without a compass, and even call up a very rough map of the places I had visited since I activated the talent. I could even pin up to ten markers to this map. At any time, I could determine which direction they were in. That was a useful function, and it was unfortunate that no more pins could be a
dded.
Now, this swamp would no longer keep us lost. Yet when I tried, I realized that the talent worked poorly, or was affected by the fog.
I told Beko about this. “This is the Grove,” he said.
“Chaos itself once passed through here. This may not even be fog, but the very breath of Chaos himself. That can have a powerful negative effect on the ORDER. Your pathfinding skill is from the ORDER, you know, so it is also affect—wait, look! Dry land! A solid plot of it!”
“You call that solid?”
“At least it’s not filled with water,” the ghoul replied, realizing that his rejoicing had been premature.
It was, indeed, land. Damp, but without any puddles or mud pits. There, our feet finally found some support. I even found it odd, having grown accustomed to the ground attempting to swallow my leg.
The ground was an unnatural shade of red. As if spray-painted. There was no vegetation—even the omnipresent moss had no desire to settle such soil.
Something else was here, though.
I didn’t even know what to call it. They looked like hollow columns, with walls of thin, flexible, translucent plastic. Inside, suspended in muddy liquid, we could see complicated, branching structures among which ghastly blobs glided. The pillars ranged in diameter from one to five feet, and they were either vertical or slightly slanted. They rose to vanish into the fog, their upper ends invisible. This meant they were at least seventy feet tall.
“Those aren’t trees,” I said anxiously.
My instinct said that anything living in such a place must be carnivorous and dangerous.
“Those must be cystos,” Beko wavered.
“Cystos?”
“I’ve only heard of them. See those blobs inside? They burn your skin if you touch them. The liquid inside makes the soil red. Like this.”
“What is holding those pillars up?”
“I don’t know. Something in the fog, I guess,” the ghoul answered.
“Can we walk through there?”
“Yes, but it’s dangerous. Where the cystos live, so do the wisps.”
“Another nonsense word. Wisps?”
“They’re the spawn of Chaos and ORDER both. But more of Chaos. Small, malicious creatures who could kill us easily. It’s best if we don’t go that way.”
“Alright,” I agreed without a hint of protest.
* * *
All attempts to skirt around the disgusting forest failed. To the left, we stumbled into a quagmire which we barely escaped and which left us caked in mud from head to toe. To the right, we made good progress at first, but then ran into an impassible cliff. It ran south to the river, becoming there the precipitous bank. If you followed it north, it took you to the cystos.
There was no safe passage. Either we had to try moving through the red lands, or we had to return to Blackriver and embrace our admittedly unknown prospects of finding a better place to land. My attempts to ascertain from Beko whether or not there were good landings further downriver had led to no success. He kept repeating that no one ever said anything good about the riverlands beyond the shelf.
We had little choice. The red lands were the last place on Rock that we wanted to be, but they were our best option. Beko had remembered that cystos only grew in barren, foggy lowlands. If we could ascend, we would find lands without them.
I tried studying the cliff from every angle, aiming to somehow ascend it without needing to enter the red lands. But it was a smooth wall of granite, sixty or more feet tall. The only way up for us would be to build stairs or a ladder. Not that we had any materials. There were no decent trees in this biome, and river-rotted deadwood was not the best building material. And what would we use to hold such a tall structure together, anyway? I discarded the option.
We had to go directly north. I hoped that was the shortest path out of the red swamp. It couldn’t continue forever. We rested and ate the last of our fish before moving out, so we were still fresh.
Thankfully the ground was solid enough to allow a good speed. It was dry and tamped, like a well-trodden path. Walking it was almost a pleasure.
We’d clear a mile in twenty minutes at this pace No shrubs, no underbrush, and not a single fallen tree impeded our progress. The slimy columns were not numerous enough to interfere, either.
I felt the difficulty of the walk increase. We were beginning to ascend. Soon, we would rise above the level of the fog, and hopefully bid it farewell forever.
* * *
Beko stopped abruptly, as if he had run headlong into a wall.
His voice was tense. “Can you hear that?”
Despite the plethora of noises around us, I knew what he meant. “Yeah, I do. Sounds like buzzing. It’s stronger to our left, and weaker to our right. Hard to tell whether it’s directly ahead of us or not. Are those the wisps?”
“I don’t know. It’s not like I’ve seen them before.”
“But you’ve heard of them.”
“Just a little bit. Hunters tell a lot of stupid stories. O, Chaos! Ged! They’re coming!”
“Hide,” I ordered, crouching down behind the nearest cystos.
The blobs flowing inside the column grouped together on one side, right in front of me. As if they were watching me—and with nasty intentions. I tried not to think about them.
This place was bad enough without tiny amoebic spies.
As usual, we could hardly perceive anything. I estimated the time at noon, but the farthest I could see was about 25 yards. And that was only in tiny places where the fog thinned out.
I saw the wisp at the very last moment. It nearly crashed into me.
I realized Beko knew nothing about these creatures.
Wisps didn’t walk, they flew.
Nor did they glow; this one looked like an all-black soccer ball, hastily patched together from cheap materials. Someone had glued a dozen tiny eyes, borrowed from dolls of various sizes, atop the front of the ball. Underneath them were two spider-like legs hanging towards the ground, and to top it all off, an appendage of a poisonous orange color and the shape of a scorpion’s tail. The creature was kept aloft by a pair of rapidly fluttering bumblebee wings.
Of course, I had never seen a bumblebee grow to such a size.
The creature surged out of the mist, right between me and Beko, at about the speed of a bicycle. Then, it stopped and turned.
It had clearly noticed us but been unable to slow down immediately.
I acted without thinking. My hand plunged into my sheath belt, pulled out the topmost knife, and threw it. As fast as I was, the wisp wasn’t waiting around. It took off straight at me. That was better, though. My target’s speed was added to the speed of my weapon, and with it coming right towards me I did not have to lead the target.
The knife hit right in the center of the eyes, down to the hilt.
The wisp whistled like a punctured tire. It tried to corkscrew down to the ground, but it wasn’t high enough to complete even one turn. It skittered along the red earth and came to a halt. The creature really was like a soccer ball, adorned with cheap accessories.
You have dealt significant damage to the wisp. You have dealt fatal damage to the wisp. The wisp is dead. You have defeated the wisp. This creature is part Chaos (Chaos Power 3).
You receive:
Lesser Chaos mark x7
Lesser Attribute Power x1
Lesser Concentrated Warrior Energy x1
Personal Chaos Talent Mark: Monster Connoisseur x1
Lesser Universal Chaos Talent Mark x1
Lesser Enhanced Enlightenment State x1
Lesser Primal Essence x1
Lesser Standard Universal State x1
The wisp is a part Chaos creature.
You receive Emblem of Valor x1
I had never seen such odd trophies before. Many of them I hadn’t even known existed. But the situation was not conducive to contemplation: more buzzing was growing louder in our ears.
“Beko, crossbow!” I whispered loudl
y to warn the ghoul.
He was clearly panicking at the idea of fighting a pack of wisps. The ghoul had listened to hordes of haunted tales from hunters and was scared nearly to the point of passing out. For some reason, he had sat down and put his palms on the ground. As if he was collecting something. But when I spoke, he jumped into action, hurrying to prepare his crossbow for battle. It was a primitive weapon, not suitable against armored opponents. But buzzing balls were excellent targets. They could be deflated with a single hit of a throwing knife.
A second wisp flew out of the mist. It was obviously excited—jerking and spinning every which way—and so my first throw missed. But that gave up my location, coaxing the creature to come straight at me.
