Monk Punk and Shadow of the Unknown Omnibus

by Aaron French

  “The seal!” Ohbrill hissed and stalked forward.

  “Is this your remnant?” asked Barale.

  “Beyond the ward, in with the second initiation pit.” He came to the plug and stared at it. “When I founded this cloister, I discovered some kind of Serafage device here. I had a True Speaker craft this ward for me.”

  Serafages. Mind-takers. Brain eaters. Lunakis shuddered. He hadn’t known what was beyond the plug, besides the second initiation pit. “You didn’t destroy it?”

  “Curiosity,” said Ohbrill. He stared at the plug. “Why are you glowing?” he asked, and touched it.

  His face went slack, and then he screamed. He shrieked and jerked, but his hands stayed fixed to the plug like they were nailed there.

  Barale and Lunakis yanked him away from the plug and he fell, twitching and gibbering.

  Lunakis froze as something touched his mind. Nothing like speech. Just symbols and thoughts, but he translated the concepts immediately.

  You are too late.

  ***

  Barale spoke a word and swung. Her hammer sparked and clanged against the plug. She yelled in frustration when she saw that it was, again, unharmed. Lunakis watched as she assailed it, and the rock surrounding it, to no effect.

  “No use,” Lunakis said and stood up. Ohbrill lay at his feet, wide-eyed and drooling.

  “What?” snapped Barale. She wiped her forehead. “My hammering or whatever you’re doing?”

  “You don’t know the words to undo that ward, and I can’t rouse Ohbrill.” His voice dropped. “Something broke his mind, Barale. That should be impossible for a second initiate.”

  You cannot break the broken, Ohbrill had once told him.

  “So what do we do?” asked Barale.

  Lunakis went over and examined the plug. The runes were dull again. He touched it with his eyes, tried to look past it, but there was only the same blackness. When he turned his mystical senses to the plug itself, he perceived a riot of impressions.

  “There was something here until recently... an effect, a trap for the first person to touch the ward. But it’s discharged now. And it’s still locked.”

  He expanded his mind into the mystical ward. It accepted his presence, and he filled it with himself. There was a thought key that would open it, but what was it? Ohbrill would know.

  Lunakis plumbed deeper, expanding his senses along the axis of time. The plug had been opened recently, had been touched by a strange mind and polluted with an alien mental trap. Whatever had done this was already inside.

  He voiced his suspicions to Barale.

  “We need to get inside and kill whatever did this,” she said.

  “It might be a Serafage,” said Lunakis. “They’re powerful mentalists. One could take us easily.”

  “I don’t fear its mind magic. You can protect us from that.” Barale hefted her hammer and grinned at him. “In body, I’ve heard they’re not so impressive.”

  He smiled at her misplaced faith in him. But she was right. They needed to get past the plug, and there was only one way to do that.

  “Ohbrill knows the thought key,” said Lunakis. He sat down and put the man’s head in his lap. “We don’t have time for him to recover. I’m going inside his mind.”

  “Wasn’t it just scrambled by whatever it was that hit him?”

  He nodded. “His mind is probably a dangerous place to be right now.” Lunakis sighed. “But we’ve got no choice.”

  Barale sat down next to him. “If you start twitching or screaming, I’m knocking you out of your trance.”

  Her hands rested on her hammer. He put his smaller, but no less calloused or rope-scarred, hand over hers. They kissed, and Lunakis put his hand on Ohbrill’s forehead.

  ***

  The mindscape that appeared was a smooth tunnel, utterly lightless, although Lunakis could still see. A faint coating of rancid smelling oil covered the tunnel walls. He also smelled vinegar and brine, the smell of the healing draught.

  A voice, dark and cold, echoed from the depths.

  “I am the caverns. Endless and deep. Even those who find what they seek cannot return.”

  “I am the stream,” said Lunakis. “I go from sky to sea.” His now watery form collapsed and flowed down the tunnel.

  It wasn’t long before he stopped flowing. His water body gently lifted itself to float motionless in the center of the tunnel. The walls melted on both sides, trapping him.

  Creatures emerged from the rock, stone mockeries of Ohbrill with eyes and nails of glittering gems. They leaped and slashed at Lunakis and fell through him. Where they had touched him their rough features were now worn smooth.

  “I can’t be touched,” said Lunakis.

  The cave voice rumbled, and the tunnel collapsed. The rocks battered Lunakis, battered his mind. Confusion and fear filled him, his water body solidified, he couldn’t breathe. Lunakis heard the cave voice. “I am solid. I am full. There is nothing I cannot smash and smother.”

  Sea and Sky, Lunakis thought, rebuke your daughter Earth.

  He didn’t believe in the First Titans, even though his parents had been priests. But he knew their canticles, and as he recited one, he calmed and let the cave collapse. He was wind and surf again. It could not hurt him.

  “I am your mother and father.” His voice carried through lightless earth. “I flow through all. Nothing stops me for long. I wear it away.”

  He trickled down through the cracks in the rock. His body slipped down side channels and dead ends. He was spread thin, awareness stretched to the limit. If he lost focus the dark earth would trap him.

  Lunakis managed his rising panic, waited, and began to flow through even the dead ends.

  The roots of Ohbrill’s mind were near. A tendril of himself worked through a small capillary in the rock and shock went through Lunakis. He had found the elder Xenocyte’s deepest knowledge lying inside his mind like a dark lake. Lunakis mingled his sea foam with Ohbrill’s mineralized pool and found the thought key.

  The earth rumbled. Lunakis quickly learned the key and tried to flow back the way he’d come, but his essence was still trickling into Ohbrill’s depths.

  “No river goes uphill,” laughed the cave.

  The rumbling was getting closer, and Lunakis realized this was no earthquake. Something was digging through the rock. He suddenly understood... the smooth tunnel, covered in slime.

  There was something in Ohbrill’s mind.

  I know where you are. You’ve shown me the way.

  A light flared in Lunakis’s perceptions. He saw the trail he’d been exuding ever since entering Ohbrill’s mind. A lavender slime leaked from his body.

  The thing that was coming lashed at his mind and he screamed.

  ***

  Lunakis’s head dangled over empty air. Barale ran towards him, and he realized she had yanked him away so violently that he’d almost fallen into one of the initiation pits.

  “What happened?” she asked as she hauled him up.

  “I don’t know,” Lunakis said, clutching at his head. “But I’ve got the key, so let’s go!”

  Barale supported him as he stumbled over to the plug. She readied herself to leap in. Lunakis put his hands on the plug and supplied the thought key.

  The runes glowed, first in the center and then along the spiral path. The plug drew itself behind the symbols as they lit up, like a scroll being furled.

  Lunakis’s light globe revealed the yawning chasm of the second initiation pit, and behind that something like a large bathtub congealed out of bile and mucous–undoubtedly the Serafage device. But there was nobody inside.

  They advanced and looked around. No one was in the disgusting tub. Lunakis peered into the pit. It was smooth walled but etched with abstract patterns. Nothing hid in it.

  Lunakis was about to say so when Barale shushed him and whispered, “Listen.”

  They heard soft footsteps, and turned to see blank-faced, gray-robed men and women descending fr
om the tunnels. “It’s the prospectives,” said Lunakis. “Thank goodness you’re alive,” he called. “Where have you be-”

  My deepest thanks to you, Lunakis. You have done what I could not.

  “His head was so hard,” continued Ohbrill. Two prospectives helped him to his feet. “I couldn’t get the key out, but you did. Well done.”

  Lunakis looked at Ohbrill’s calculating eyes. And now he could see how the prospectives moved like sleepwalkers. The mental control was obvious, even without touching their minds.

  “You’re not Ohbrill.”

  “Oh but I am, or perhaps I should say I’m not just Ohbrill.” Something wriggled under the elder Xenocyte’s headband, and Ohbrill pushed the third eye up to reveal a gory hole in his forehead. A grub-like thing poked its head out before retreating back into the skull.

  “This body has been useful, as have been Ohbrill’s powers. But I will be glad to regain a true Serafage body.”

  Barale cocked her head at the tub behind her. “Is that what it does?”

  Ohbrill smiled. “It is a body transmuter. It reshapes our hosts into the forms you so know and fear.”

  “Good to know.” Barale turned and ran for the transmuter, her hammer ready. Lunakis broke out of his shock at seeing Ohbrill’s body desecrated and whirled to help her.

  But before Barale could swing at the transmuter, she dropped her hammer. Both of them clapped hands to their ears. The shrieking drone of a million insects and carrion birds filled Lunakis’s mind. It lasted for a few seconds and then vanished.

  His head ached. That worried him. Even as a first initiate he should be able to weather that kind of psychic attack.

  Lunakis turned to Ohbrill and reached into the air for lightning. Before he loosed a bolt something slammed into him from behind. Barale’s arms tightened like a vice.

  “No!” he shouted, and reached into her mind to rend the monster’s control, but he was slapped back. A claw settled over his own mind and squeezed.

  “None of that now,” said Ohbrill, stepping into the room with the prospectives bringing up the rear. “Wondering why you’re so susceptible to my attacks? That healing draught from earlier contained some of my secretions. It also meant you had no chance of resisting the illusions I put in your mind.”

  “There never was a trap,” said Lunakis. He felt sick. “You’d never been past the plug either. Why’d you need to trick me, Serafage?”

  “Unfortunately, when I infested Ohbrill he’d already installed the ward. And for some reason the thought key was inaccessible.” Ohbrill sneered and looked at himself. “He was stubborn.”

  “That he was,” said Lunakis. Sweat was pouring down his face as he grit his teeth.

  Ohbrill looked at him. “I could dominate you, but it would take time and effort. You Xenocytes are difficult to master without eating select portions of your brains.”

  The claw gripping his mind squeezed. Lunakis screamed, writhing in Barale’s arms. She held him fast as Ohbrill tore through his mind, shattering memories and pulling up fears. He couldn’t think, couldn’t remember, all he could do was feel pain.

  “Throw him in.”

  Barale hurled him into the pit. His head hit rock and his vision swam and went black.

  ***

  I.

  I am.

  I am Lunakis.

  He held on to those thoughts, held on despite the agony in his body and mind. Both were broken, shattered. But he wasn’t dead. Couldn’t die yet, he had a reason.

  He heard a cool voice, felt the gentle touch of a hand that could shatter rock, kissed chapped lips.

  Barale, but where is she?

  A gory hole, dead eyes that once shined with life, a merry voice that had instructed him. “You cannot break the broken.”

  Ohbrill. Had those words truly been his? How long had he been corrupted?

  Lunakis had to get out. That monster was planning something. It had Barale. He reached into the future for an answer, and drew back as if stung.

  Forget yourself, forget everything, forget your hopes and dreams.

  No, I have a purpose. I must do something.

  He probed for other minds and found none, but his senses could reach only so far. With a snap of lightning he illuminated the pit and saw that Ohbrill had sealed it. He shot a bolt of lightning in the narrow confines. The deafening boom in the pit made him cry out, and only fragments fell from the rock sealing him in.

  Lunakis sank into grief and tried but failed to think of some way out. He’d failed, so why not do as the future said and let go?

  He cleared his mind and let it flow.

  First his own pulsing husk. He went further, probed into the stale air and the heavy rock. Tiny thoughts overlooked earlier were now known to him, the minds of worms and insects and other things that lived beneath the earth. He stretched his awareness thinner. If he kept going, he wasn’t sure he could gather himself again.

  Lunakis stretched further.

  His memories, his thoughts, they were becoming so transparent. Consciousness was going. His name was forgotten.

  I... I... I... I...

  Shrieking wind and lightning, a coming storm, coming down on the island. Malefic will radiated in alien waves. Injured minds cried out for relief from fear and despair.

  Something filled him; his awareness pulsed and grew in strength. Wind and lightning and salt spray crashed through his perceptions. He drew strength from it. Amid fear and terror he found flickers of resolve locked inside enslaved wills and drew from them as well.

  Lunakis opened eyes that were not his own and saw the atrium of the cloister. Through the thick stone he could hear the pounding storm.

  He was sensing through one of the prospectives clustered around the body transmuter, which was now filled with a disgusting liquid the color of bloody pus. Wormy things swam feebly in it.

  Ohbrill soaked in the vile fluid. His skin was sloughing off in places to reveal a bristle-haired carapace. Wicked looking mandibles had sprouted on both sides of a mouth now too alien for human speech.

  Barale stood by, blank-faced.

  Soon my transformation will be complete. You will join me as my new brood. Your minds will be mine; your bodies will be mine. Ohbrill scooped up one of the wriggling worms and turned his head to Barale. Kneel and be transformed.

  She stepped forward and went down on one knee. Ohbrill put one hand gently on top of her head and held up the worm with the other.

  Lunakis leaped into her mind, found the chains of her mental enslavement, and shattered them with a strength that shocked him.

  Go! he thought.

  “Luny!” she cried, but wasted no time looking for him. She shouted a word, grabbed the hand in which Ohbrill was holding the worm, and smashed her forehead into it. The mystically augmented blow squished the worm against her skull. Ohbrill’s wrist snapped, lolling broken from his arm.

  Barale took advantage of Ohbrill’s pain and confusion to roll back and leap to her feet, drawing her hammer as she did so.

  Lunakis reached for the mental threads controlling each of the prospectives and severed them. They looked around in shock and cried out at the horrible sight before them. Ohbrill rose from the body transmuter, his horrible half-transformed body streaming with fluids. He shrieked with his mutated mouth while his mind bellowed. Who disrupts my control!

  One of the prospectives, a doughy but quick youth named Mownt, grabbed a chair and smashed it on Ohbrill. It did nothing, and the monster reached out with his clawed hands, grabbed Mownt, and drove his mandibles into the boy’s temples. Mownt twitched and Ohbrill released him.

  Barale rushed Ohbrill, striking furiously with her hammer as he dodged.

  Foolish human. I can see your moves as you make them!

  Lunakis felt the drone of the coming psychic assault. He was ready, and shielded Barale from the worst of it. She threw off an instant of vertigo while the prospectives screamed and blood poured from their noses. Ohbrill stood with his guard dow
n, confident in the overwhelming power of his attack.

  Get him now! yelled Lunakis. Barale let out a war cry and brought her hammer down on Ohbrill’s skull. It shattered, bone crunching and gore flying everywhere. The twitching body fell and Barale smashed open its rib cage. The air filled with a horrible stink. She stomped on what she thought was the heart.

  “Luny!” she cried out again, her voice ragged. “Where are you?”

  In the pit.

  “I’m coming for you,” she said. “Hang on.”

  Lunakis slipped away from her mind and into his own. The full force of the psychic lashing he’d just absorbed joined the agony of his near-dead body, and he passed out.

  ***

  “Where’s Mownt’s body?”

  Lunakis groaned and knew better than to try sitting up. Every limb but his right arm was splinted, and his head was swaddled up like a baby.

  “Isn’t it still in the atrium?”

  “Maybe someone moved it.”

  Lunakis looked sideways to see a few of the prospectives looking pale in their gray robes. He tried to speak but coughed instead.

  “Master Lunakis!” they yelled. “You’re awake.”

  He tried talking again, and croaked, “How long have I been out?”

  “About a day,” said Barale, walking in smiling and blood-spattered. “Sorry I wasn’t standing vigil over you, but I’ve been tracking down the rest of the spitters. They were easy pickings once Ohbrill wasn’t controlling them anymore.”

  She sat down next to his mat and covered his lips with hers. “I did it,” he told her, when they came up for air. “In the pit, when Ohbrill broke me, that was my second initiation.”

  “You feel more powerful?”

  “Yes, but,” he hesitated, “it’s more that I see new potential opening up within me. Anyway, what did you do with the body transmuter?”

  Barale tapped her hammer.

  “One thing we don’t need to worry about then. This cloister’s finished,” he said to the prospectives. “I’ll stay for three months and teach you what I can. Maybe shepherd a few of you through first initiation, if you’re ready. But after that we’ll all be leaving.”