The Maker of Entropy

by John Triptych

  Sensing movement behind him, the guard turned around and was taken aback by a loose pulley swaying violently back and forth across the length of the land ship’s hull. Walking over to where the base of the mast was, the crewman attempted to catch the pulley as it swung by, hoping to grab hold of it and tie it back down to the mainsail.

  Zeren grinned as he flicked his fingers, suddenly increasing the Vis he had been harnessing by a hundredth fold. The crewman lunged forward and missed his grab as the pulley zoomed past his outstretched hands before swinging back towards him with an even greater momentum. The heavy bronze pulley was the size of a man’s head, and it suddenly hurled itself right into the shocked sentry’s face while evading his hands. The impact was enough to knock the man headfirst and backwards onto the deck, completely stunning him.

  Using his Vis to propel him into the air, Zeren made a short leap onto the deck, the soft padding on his boots muffling the sound of his landing onto the bronze flooring. Quickly making his way over to the stunned guardsman, he grabbed some loose leather ropes to bind the unconscious man’s legs and arms. Just as he finished placing a gag over his victim’s mouth, the bronze trapdoors leading down to the ship’s hold suddenly swung open and two more men came out.

  Cursing silently, Zeren held his hand before him as he used the mindforce to hurl the first man to the side of the gunwale while drawing out his sword. Rushing towards the second man, he aimed the tip of his blade at the target’s throat, hoping to pierce the jugular before the other one could raise a cry for help. He was somewhat surprised when the second man fell onto his knees and raised his hands up in a gesture of surrender. His victim’s face suddenly looked familiar the moment he had closed the gap in between them. Zeren stopped the point of his sword just inches away from the other man’s throat.

  “Do not attack, Zeren, it is I,” Orilion said as he remained kneeling down. “Do you not recall we are on the same side?”

  Zeren was shocked as he withdrew the point of the blade and backed away. “What are you doing here?”

  Orilion exhaled deeply as he got up. “Looking for you, of course. It seems you have not heard of recent events.”

  Chapter 21

  She could see herself standing in a white, featureless room with no apparent ending. Looking around, all she noticed were an endless tract of bare walls in the far distance. The ground underneath her seemed semi-liquid and would ripple slightly with undulating tiny waves whenever she tried to move around. Time had no apparent bearing, for it signified she had been in this strange place for countless eons, a prisoner in what appeared to be a cage with no bars. She was free to move around, but it was clear she was indeed trapped, for there was nowhere to go.

  Miri tried to run in different directions, but it felt like she was heading nowhere. The limitless room remained at the same length as before. She tried to scream for help, even using her mindsense to find another living creature, but there was no response. Just as she was about to give up, she saw a cloaked figure up ahead.

  With an eagerness borne of desperation, Miri ran as quickly as she could until she came face to face with the hooded form. She tried to speak but no words came out of her mouth. The person in front of her wore grey robes made of very strange and somewhat shiny material; it almost seemed like it was wearing a second, membranous skin. Miri gesticulated with her arms to try and get a response from it.

  The figure turned in her direction, and she was unable to see any features within the shadow of the being’s hood. Miri gritted her teeth and pleaded, hoping this stranger would heed her cries for help. She backed away a few steps when it suddenly raised an arm and pointed to her. Miri could see the being’s exposed hands and fingers had a shiny green hue to it.

  And then it began. Miri could no longer move no matter how hard she tried. A reddish cloud of strange dust suddenly manifested itself all around, engulfing her entire body. Miri tried to hold her breath, but in the end she failed. The moment the red dust entered her lungs, something hidden in the mist began to consume her from the inside, causing tremendous agony. By the end of the ordeal she was nothing more than a rusting skeleton, sinking slowly into the stark, featureless flooring.

  Miri opened her eyes and sat up with a jolt. Blinking her eyes awake, Miri realized she was back in the abandoned subterranean city, having dozed off while camping in one of the buildings near the flowing river. Looking around, it was clear she was alone. Her backpack lay nearby, while her spear was propped up along the nearby wall

  She tilted her head up and shouted. “Rion! Where are you?”

  A hurried smattering of footsteps was heard as the boy came running back into the room. “Miri, you are awakened again.”

  Wiping the sweat from her brow, Miri glared at him. “Did I not tell you to wake me up?”

  Rion gave her a disarming smile. “I am sorry, but it seemed like you needed to rest. I just did a bit of wandering for I was curious as to how this city was built.”

  She remained angry. “I told you never to leave my sight. You were supposed to stay here and not go roaming about on your own.”

  The boy looked down. “I am sorry, Miri. It seems my curiosity has led me astray.”

  Miri stood up and stretched. “You must have a care, Rion. We are in a strange land and there may be danger lurking about.”

  “Yes, you are right- but I did stay within earshot just in case you did awaken.”

  She took the spear with her right hand. “Do not make excuses, Rion! Do you not recall when you did a very similar thing at the Black Redoubt?”

  Rion’s lips trembled. He remembered the battle along with his subsequent abduction, and also the loss of Miri’s young Striga protégé. “Y-yes. I … I am truly sorry, Miri. I … I hope you will forgive me.”

  Miri bit her lip as she walked up to him and placed a hand on his quivering shoulder. “I admonish you only because of the danger we are in. Please let this be the last time we talk about this again.”

  The boy hugged her tightly, burying his teary face into her bosom. “Yes, I promise.”

  Miri placed her hand underneath his chin and tilted it upwards so he could see the smile on her face. “Did you discover anything worthwhile?”

  Rion quickly returned to his cheerful self. “I did.”

  Picking up her backpack from the bare floor, Miri joined Rion as the boy led her to a nearby plaza. They had camped as close to the river as possible, but their prior searches failed to find any sort of vessel that could serve as a raft to begin the journey on the dark waters. The tangle of twisting streets seemed bewildering, and they had stopped at one of the buildings to rest. Despite experiencing the nightmare she had just woken up from, Miri decided not to tell the boy so as not to discourage him.

  The moment she entered the area, Miri let out an awestruck gasp. At the opposite end of the plaza was an enormous statue. The face on the obsidian sculpture resembled a woman’s- with a slender, angular face and neck, along with teardrop shaped eyes. The body itself was of a large canis-like creature. Resting on its cylindrical belly, two strange limb-like organs seemed to sprout from the statue’s back. Peering closer, she couldn’t help but notice the protrusions on top resembled folded lungs, but with bizarre, scaly growths. A series of large glyphs were carved along the base of the statue.

  Miri pointed at the writing. “What does it say?”

  Rion bit his lip in mild frustration. “I had a hard time attempting to glean the mysteries of the words, for some of them are unknown to me. All I could gather is this statue served as some sort of guardian- or perhaps a teller of riddles.”

  “What was it guarding?”

  The boy shrugged. “I do not know the answer, nor would I know of what tales it might have told.”

  “Let us hope this strange being was not based on a true beast,” Miri said wistfully, “for I would not relish facing such a creature.”

  Something began to stir above them, causing a sudden change in the overhead illumination. Both Miri a
nd Rion looked up in dismay as the floating sphere things at the top of the fault’s ceiling started to congregate, forming a teeming mass of blinking balls of light. The strange forms seemed to bounce off of each other in a frantic, whirling dance that defied rhyme or reason. The scintillating blare of orange and bright colors was bewildering to the eye of any observer, and neither of them could discern what was going on.

  “What is happening?” Rion asked.

  Miri shook her head in confusion. “I do not know. Perhaps it is an outside air current from one of the many holes in the ceiling is buffeting them against each other.”

  “Can you sense their thoughts?”

  “No,” Miri said. “They do not seem to have minds at all. It would seem those things are no different in thought from the algae we harvest on the ground.”

  Without warning, every one of the sphere creatures began to lose their bioluminescence, the radiance emanating from their puffball-like bodies quickly began to fade, their bloated membranes losing the air inside of them. In mere moments the creatures rounded bodies had completely deflated, and their wrinkled forms began to slowly float down towards the ground. The entire area was soon plunged into a twilit darkness as only the algae growing along the cave walls provided the remaining bits of light within the massive fault.

  Rion looked around with alarm as deflated membranes began to fall all around them. “By the gods, what is this?”

  Miri used her spear to parry away one of the deflated sphere things that nearly fell on top of the boy’s head. It looked like all the bizarre floating spheres had just suddenly died, their bodies falling down towards the ground. “I think it is best we seek shelter in the nearest building. Do not touch them.”

  They both began to dash towards the nearest house-like structure, making sure to move around the filmy, wrinkled pieces on the rock floor. Just as they reached the apparent safety of an open entryway, a loud rumbling noise was heard all across the dead city. The boy looked up at her in consternation, and Miri sent out a soothing thoughwave to calm him down in response.

  Just as Rion had begun to relax, Miri’s own mental tendrils started quivering in alarm. A sudden onrush of fragmented instinct began cascading all around her, nearly overwhelming Miri’s opened mind. It felt like the entire city had suddenly come to life. Gritting her teeth, Miri instantly brought up her thought defenses while trying to form a more coherent unearthing of the nearly limitless mental patterns all around them.

  Rion held her by the elbows, his eyes staring back at her with concern. “Have you sensed something?”

  “Yes,” Miri said tersely. “Perhaps this city might be inhabited after all.”

  With her mental tendrils now fully attuned, Miri began to delve deeper into the teeming mass of minds, hoping to find a commonality enabling her to discern if the nearby thoughts were either of beasts or of humankind. The mental patterns seemed strangely similar to that of men, but the higher echelons of abstract thought had somehow devolved into a set of base, primal instincts of hunger and rage. She had indeed encountered similar mind patterns before and had nearly died because of it.

  Miri gritted her teeth. Now there could be no doubt. “Orlas.”

  Rion’s eyes grew wide with terror. The orlas were once humans who had been driven into a sightless, underground existence. The succeeding eons reshaped their very forms into an instinctual horde of blind, cannibalistic predators lacking any sense of mercy or reason. An orla lived only to feed and breed, and every living thing around it was considered prey, including their own kind.

  After the last of the spheres had deflated and died, there was a sound of scraping rock which emanated all across the once-dead metropolis. The ground at their feet began to shift, and both Miri and Rion feared the buildings around them would collapse on themselves, leveling the entire area. Miri held onto the boy as they huddled near the entryway, hoping the rumblings would stop.

  Despite being gripped with sheer fright, Rion looked up at her with eyes that belied an intense determination. “Miri, I could sense it once more.”

  Miri stared back at him quizzically. “Sense what? All I can feel are the orlas.”

  “The calling,” the boy said. “Something is sending me a message.”

  Miri tried to sort through the multitude of mental patterns to see if she could locate something more distinct, but all she could sense were the masses of hungry, hostile creatures nearby. When she tried to focus her thoughts on Rion’s mind, she could indeed feel the boy was in contact with another, but she was unable to understand what it said, much less pinpoint where it was emanating from. “Will you be able to find it?”

  Rion nodded. “Yes, Miri. It is telling us to head towards the river quickly.”

  “Then it is what we will do.”

  Making sure the shoulder straps on her backpack were secure, Miri quickly led the boy back out onto the streets, their boots making rapid strides along the streets strewn with deflated membranes. Despite being able to move faster because of her longer legs, Miri kept pace with the boy, shifting her direction whenever they needed to make a turn. Rion seemed to know where to take them, and she followed his lead without hesitation.

  Just as they got within sight of one of the larger thoroughfares, Miri realized what had caused the earthquake. The middle of the boulevard had somehow parted, revealing a series of vast, underground chambers beneath the entire city. The orlas- who were apparently sensitive to either the bright glows of the spheres or due to some other reason- had tended to stay inside the vast tunnel networks, only revealing themselves when the floating spheres had seemingly died out. Miri wasn’t quite sure if her guesses were right, but another series of questions had now manifested in her mind. Was there some sort of machinery allowing the city’s underground passages to be shifted and revealed the moment the floaters died?

  They had just made it to the opposite end of the thoroughfare when Rion pointed towards an alleyway ahead of them. “There … the path leads towards the river,” he said in between huffs of air.

  While running down the alley, they both heard the shrill cries of the orlas as the creatures began to pour out into the open. Miri could feel their frantic methods of communication as the orlas babbled amongst themselves in their own basic, guttural language. From what she could surmise they did posses a minimal intelligence, enough to know the right time to emerge from their darkened pits when the floaters met their periodic end.

  The spheres would apparently be birthed from the forming blisters of glowing lichen along the cave walls to survive freely in the air for a generation until they lived out their brief existence, only to repeat the cycle over time. For now, it was the time of the orlas, and they needed to wander about and feed.

  Rion turned to his left and they both quickly rounded a bend. The street had somewhat widened again, and three orlas leapt down from the roof of a nearby abode, their gait on all fours, their sense of smell undeniably attracted to fresh, alien meat. The creatures gave out a high pitched, yelping scream before rushing to attack. Rion didn’t miss a beat as he held out his right hand and gestured, sending a wave of invisible Vis which threw the creatures back, slamming them against the stone walls of an outlying building. Two of the orals were completely stunned, while a third writhed on the ground, letting out a feeble cry.

  Before dashing into another street, Miri glanced back and saw a horde of hundreds of orlas had converged onto the path they had just escaped from. The swarms of pale, horrid things wasted no time in devouring their stunned and wounded comrades. Miri was sick to her stomach as she kept her eyes forward once more, silently telling herself the slaughter she had just witnessed had served as a minor distraction to the white wave of death following them.

  After crossing an intersection, Miri could see the underground river was just ahead of them. There was what looked to be a hooded figure, floating on a strange raft of some kind in the middle of the flowing waters. With the horde behind them seemingly busy consuming their own species, s
he felt if they could safely get to the being on the floating platform, then all would be well.

  The moment Rion had made it to the river’s edge, another orla leapt out from an adjoining alleyway, completely surprising him. The boy screamed out in alarm as the pale creature threw itself onto him. Despite being somewhat shorter, the orla possessed great strength and its charge threw Rion into the ground before Miri could react. Just as Rion was about to use his Vis to hurl the maddened beast away from him, the orla managed to bite his flailing right arm, its jagged teeth ripping through the skin, the poison injecting itself into the boy’s blood. Rion screamed in agony.

  Miri thrust her spear into the orla’s back, stabbing into the creature’s thick spine and forcing it to release the boy. With the mortally wounded monster thrashing about, Miri lifted the orla into the air and threw it aside using the shaft of her weapon. Rion continued to writhe on the stony floor, his once cherubic face now a mask of painful torment.

  “Rion!” Miri said as she threw off her backpack and knelt down beside him. She knew anyone who had been bitten by an orla would soon be dead. Pulling out a dagger from her belt, she contemplated cutting the boy’s arm off in order to stem the venom’s flow. It was a desperate move but it could very well save him.

  Sensing her thoughts, Rion looked up at her with tearful eyes, his voice but a soft whimper. “No.”

  The figure on the raft had by now maneuvered the craft to the side of the canal so she could make a short leap onto it. Its form seemed to flicker in an out of existence, as if it was a sort of spirit or dream. The voice emanating from it was metallic and unemotional. “The main horde is approaching rapidly. You must enter the barge now or you will not live.”

  With tears in her eyes, Miri picked up Rion with both arms, her spear dangling from her right hand. Stepping over the edge of the canal and onto the raft, she laid him down gently on the smooth, shiny flooring of the barge. Almost immediately the flat boat began to move by itself, with a gentle momentum barely disturbing the calm, dark waters of the subterranean river.