by Foote, Rex
***
He had been walking for near an hour when he felt the presence. At first, he dismissed it as a product of what he had been through, and his growing weariness. But as he walked, the sensation remained, and it was wholly unpleasant. It was as if he were nothing more than an ant who had earned the regard of something far greater and more powerful than his mind could comprehend. At first, this sensation was nothing more than that—a sensation draped over his back, shoulders, and head. It stayed like that as he stumbled on, his feet dragging and gaining weight that made moving far harder than it should be. Not long after, it felt as if someone had attached weights to his hands, as they too seemed to drag by his sides. All the while the gaze of that huge, terrible presence pressed down on him, and what had begun as a mere sensation now acted like a physical force. It pushed him to his knees. Dread flooded him, and he felt his terror grow at his predicament.
“It’s not real,” he muttered to himself as he felt himself slumped forward to lie face down on the dusty, hard stone. “It’s not real.”
It was the last thought he had for quite some time.
***
The sensation of being poked by a stick roused him from his sleep. It had been a troubled sleep, one where half-seen images flashed before his eyes, each one difficult to recall but each bringing with it a sense of dread and terror. Though the poking broke that sleep, the biting broke the post-sleep daze. All over his body, he could feel sharp stabs of pain. Screaming, he sat bolt upright, and looked down to see that crawling all over him was a host of what looked like large, hand-shaped crabs with many legs. Except these crabs had twin eyestalks jutting up from the top of the shell as fingers, and a mouth lined with small, sharp teeth where the middle finger would be. These things bit and tore at his flesh and clothes, and almost without thinking, he started to Draw upon his energy. Ripping the writhing horrors from his body, he staggered to his feet, and when he was upright, he Shaped and cast the spell he had been Drawing for. At once, a field of pure force rolled off of him and the beasts flew in all directions, to land with utterly satisfying wet impacts in the surrounding darkness. As before, the oppressive silence greedily swallowed the sound, and Vulmer was left alone once more, bloody hands on equally bloody and torn knees, panting from the pain. There wasn’t an inch of him that didn’t throb with the pain of bites, and he could see blood dripping from his arms onto the dusty ground. Eventually, he sagged, and sat heavily, his thoughts treading well-worn paths, going to his wife and soon-to-be born child, and to his home on Arboreal. And with these thoughts came despair, despair that he would never again see his wife, his child, or his home. He started to weep, softly at first, but eventually it gave way to great racking sobs. Though he no longer had tear ducts, the blood from bites on his face provided, and so blood ran in between his fingers. As his despair threatened to consume him, a noise broke through. Lifting his head, he gazed in the direction the sound was coming from. It sounded for all the world like a great many sticks being tapped against the ground at once. Then he saw it; a writhing, boiling tide of motion coming towards him. He got to his feet and ran, desperation lending him strength. In the moments before turning to flee, he had seen a massive tide of the small, biting creatures, so vast as to cover the ground from wall to wall. So he ran, stumbling every now and then but always keeping his feet and always going on.
***
Just when it felt like his strength would fail him, he spotted another opening in the nearest wall. Without thinking, he altered his course for it and stumbled inside. He managed a few more staggering steps before falling, his breath coming in great wheezing gasps. So focused was he on just breathing that it took a while for him to notice that he had not been followed. Cautiously, he rolled onto his back and peered the way he had come, seeing nothing.
“Must have lost my scent,” he said. Though he had escaped the swarm, he now felt utterly spent, and so he lay there on his back, his chest still heaving. He would have lain there for far longer had a voice not called him from further up the tunnel.
“Vulmer.”
At first, he dismissed it as either a product of his frayed mind or exhausted state. But then it came again, louder and clear, and in a voice that got him to his feet in an instant.
“Vulmer,” his wife called from further down the tunnel.
If Vulmer had been in any other situation, he would have questioned what he was hearing, and probably deemed it to be a trap. But now, his mental defenses in ruins, his spirit broken and sanity on the verge of collapse, that voice, which for him represented love, joy, and happiness, was his lifeline. And so, he staggered on towards it. At some point he started to say his wife’s name in a cracked, broken voice. He was so focused on finding his wife that he didn’t notice the changes in the tunnel he was walking down. At first, the walls, floor, and ceiling were the same rough stone that the entire Skittering Dark seemed to be made of. But slowly the rock was replaced with lines of iron chains that all led in the direction Vulmer was heading in. To start with, it was the odd line here and there; then slowly the chains began to cover the walls more and more. By the time Vulmer finally noticed, both walls, parts of the floor, and the ceiling had been replaced by line upon line of thick iron chain. Finally seeing this, Vulmer paused, some of the oddity of it reaching him. He bent to examine one line of chain that ran along the floor, and his touch confirmed that it was indeed a solid chain of metal. As he held his hand to it, he felt the metal pulse beneath his touch, and he quickly withdrew his hand, taking a lurching step backwards. Maybe if he had been in a better state of mind, he would have turned back, but at the precise moment, he had doubts. Vulmer heard his wife say his name once more, and with that, all thoughts of pulsing chains fled his mind, and he walked on.
***
Eventually, he came to a small, circular chamber. By this time. the stone had been entirely replaced, and so he walked into a room made entirely of chains. In the center of the room, suspended off the ground by chains that came from all about the room, was a chain-wrapped humanoid form. The only part of this person not wrapped was its head, which was covered by a cloth sack. Staring at this chain wraped form, Vulmer felt a deep sense of dread. He had been so focused on the voice of his wife that he had ignored the slowly building sensation of it that had grown in him as he walked. Now, it was no longer able to be ignored.
“No, no, no, no,” he muttered quietly to himself over and over again as he took a step backward.
“Vulmer, I am here.”
That got his attention, and his gaze locked on the cloth-wrapped head of the suspended form. He swore on the Presk Okryd herself that the voice had come from there. Some small spark of who he had been asserted itself then, and he strode into the chamber, determined to see his wife again. He drew even with the figure quickly, and reached out for the sack, grasped it, and ripped it free. What looked back at him was not his wife. Instead, he gazed on his own face—calm, serene and utterly out of place on a body wrapped in chains.
“The one who walks the dark will come.”
Vulmer had been trying to digest the fact that his wife had not been the one wrapped in the chains, let alone that, somehow, he was the one imprisoned by them. So it took a few seconds to register that he—well, the version of him he stood before—had spoken.
“Bound in chains of his own making, he will come.”
“Wha…what are you talking about?” At another time in his life, Vulmer would have been embarrassed at the fumbling, grasping confusion of his answer, but at that moment it was all he could manage.
“He will take up the cause of another.” The other version of him seemed not to have noticed he had even spoken. “And seek to open cages that should never have had doors.”
What? Cages, doors? Vulmer’s mind was a mess of confused thoughts, and where the beacon that had been his wife had drawn him along, now there was only chaos.
“Remember.”
The bound version of him spoke the word in a low, deep tone tha
t shook the bones in his body, and caused the chains that made up the room to shake and rattle as one. His mind reeling from successive mental impacts, it took Vulmer a few moments to realize that he was falling, that the chain-bound figure, and indeed the room of chains, was shrinking above him as he fell away into a darkness so complete, he could barely see his own body. He screamed then. It was a scream that had been building in him ever since he had been separated from the girl, and it was a scream that had grown in intensity ever since. And as he fell into the devouring darkness, that scream tore from him, edged with madness.
***
His back connected with something solid, and rough. Looking forward, he saw, not much higher than him when standing, a rough roof of rock. From this, he determined he was lying down, on his back, in a tunnel. With this issue resolved, he turned his mind to trying to figure out what had just happened.
“I must have been seeing things,” he murmured to himself. “Or dreaming.”
“You are not dreaming, Vulmer Rotris, Feyweaver of the Elreni.”
Something in that voice sounded familiar to him, and he lifted his head to look forward at where he thought the voice had come from. Now, no longer lost in the jumbled mess of his recent memory, he noticed that he was surrounded on all sides by gloom, in which he could only see the faint outline of the tunnel. Directly ahead, he could just make out the outline of a tall person, their shape distorted by irregular bumps and contours.
“Who are you?” he asked, not liking the audible tremble that had entered his tone.
“You know who we are,” said another voice to his right. He whipped his head around to see another vague outline, and another spoke from his left.
“We are the ones you betrayed.”
“Betrayed?” This time his voice held a note of hysteria.
“Yes, betrayed,” said yet another voice, behind him. This one he recognized, and he twisted his neck about to gaze at the vague yet still all-too-familiar form of his wife. Without warning, the other three speakers stepped from the gloom, and Vulmer found himself frantically looking between the faces of his parents, his wife, and the Presk Okryd.
Shaking his head, he managed to stammer, “Wait, wait, wait. What?”
“You betrayed us, Vulmer,” they all said as one. “You came down to this place and fell victim to its influence. Through you, this place will seek to corrupt the Okryd Trees, using your gift as the means to assault them. You have betrayed your people, Vulmer.”
“But, I didn’t mean to come down here,” Vulmer half screamed, his mind trying to figure out what to do next.
“It matters not, betrayer.” Again, the voices merged into one, and their condemnation seemed to hammer into Vulmer so heavily that he tried to press himself into the rock to escape it.
“May the roots take you, betrayer. And may your suffering be long.”
And just like that, Vulmer was no longer lying on solid rock, but the soft dirt of a forest floor, though nothing else about him had changed. But this was a small detail, relegated to a far corner of his mind, though, for upon hearing his fate, a mad, primal scream tore from his throat. He tried to rise, but as he tensed to do so, roots burst from the ground about him and wrapped about his wrists and ankles. He wrenched his arms and legs, trying to break free, but found he could not move as the roots closed about his thighs and biceps, as well as waist and neck. With screaming his only option, he did just that, not even trying for words and instead letting out a feral, desperate cry of fear and madness. As he was dragged, still madly writhing in his bonds, into the dirt, he saw all their faces. His parents disappointed and grim, the Presk Okryd disgusted and contemptuous, and his wife gazed upon him with such a look of hurt that he ceased his struggles as the dirt closed over his eyes and he was pulled under. Of course, that was not the end; the Elreni reserved this punishment for only the most heinous of criminals for a good reason. As he lay immobile in his tomb of dirt, unable to see, or to hear, he felt pricks of pain all over his body, as the Okryd Tree whose roots had taken him pierced his skin and started to slowly, very slowly, drain it of vitality. In this way, the worst of the Elreni would feed their protectors and guardians. No escape was possible from this fate, as the pain of being fed upon denied the Elreni sleep, and so, as their bodies were drained to writhed husks, their minds broke.
But then, my mind is already broken, isn’t it?
***
When Vulmer woke, it took a long time for him to register where he was. He was slumped against a wall of rock, not buried in dirt. Slowly, he raised his hands to his face, turning them over before his vision. Yes, they seemed like his hands, and they did look real. Next, he found a bit of jagged stone nearby and cut one fingertip on it. He gasped his pain and sucked on the bleeding cut. The pain grounded him, and sharpened his thoughts. The last thing he knew—and truth be told, he never wanted to think about it again—he had been fed upon by the roots of an Okryd Tree. That he now found himself in a tunnel carved from rock was utterly disorientating. It was then that he heard the sound of dripping water, and he looked up the tunnel to see, not far off, an opening. Getting stiffly to his feet, he walked up to it and looked inside to see a small, damp cave, where pale grubs swam sluggishly through small pools of water.
“I remember this,” Vulmer said, and leaned against the wall. He had eaten some of those grubs, and then everything had gotten much, much worse. A thought struck him, and he walked across the cave and down another passage. He kept on walking down the tunnel until he was satisfied. He had found nothing except more tunnel. No big, disgusting pale grubs hanging from the roof. No opening into a vast hall, whose roof and far ends he could not see.
“It must have been those grubs,” he mused. “They must have caused me to see things.”
It all made sense now. He had eaten the grubs, walked a few more paces, sat down to rest, and fallen into a nightmare. This conclusion gave him hope; he was not a traitor, there was nothing off or wrong with this place, it had all been in his head. Light footsteps sounded behind him, and he whirled about to see the young girl, the one he had been taking to the surface. Upon recognizing him, the girl ran up to him and hugged his legs.
“I was so scared when you fell down that hole I thought you were dead, and I stayed there for a long time, but eventually I started to look for you and then I found you,” she said, without pause, into his robes. It was then that Vulmer noticed that his back was sore, and he reached behind himself to probe the worst spots, gasping in pain as his fingers touched bruised flesh.
“Yes, well we have found each other now, and that’s all that matters,” he replied, as a memory tried to surface, another version of events as to how he had become separated from the girl, but he pushed it away.
“Probably from that nightmare,” he muttered, softly so the girl would not hear. After all, he wouldn’t want her thinking he was unstable, or something like that.
Detaching her from his leg, he knelt down until their faces were level, and asked, “How are you feeling? Do you want to rest, or can you carry on?”
“I can make it,” she replied, smiling meekly and taking his hand in hers.
“Good,” he said as he rose. Already the mere presence of someone else had lifted his spirits, and the memory of the nightmare was fading. With the girl’s hand in his, they set off down the passage.
***
Vulmer and the girl had been walking for about an hour, their surroundings mostly unchanged, when the tunnel they were walking down opened up unexpectedly into a vast, black cavern. Vulmer stood at the tunnel’s opening, taking in the abrupt change of scenery. He could see where the curved walls of the cavern arched off into the darkness, his sight unable to cope with the distance, and lack of light. From where they stood, they could see a slope leading down to the floor, which tilted downwards at a slight angle. On this floor were ruined Human buildings made of stone. On his travels, Vulmer had only seen one or two such settlements, Humans preferring to use wood for building. The few st
one settlements he had seen had been ruined, like the one before him, but they had also been aboveground. As both he and the girl looked about in wonder, Vulmer felt his unease growing. Something about this seemed wrong, aside from the obvious. This place had a bad feel about it, like it didn’t fit and had no right to be here. And then, as he gazed down upon what little he could see of the ruins, a faint noise came from behind him, the way he and the girl had come, and it sounded like chains being dragged over rock.
“Come,” he said to the girl, who looked up at him in surprise, his voice breaking the silence. “Best to cross this cavern and be done with it.”
She nodded, and tightened her grip on his hand. They set off down the slope, Vulmer walking perhaps faster than he ought to have. They reached the base of the slope quickly enough, and were soon in the town itself. As they passed the outer buildings, the girl drew closer to him, and Vulmer didn’t need to wonder as to why. The farther they got into the town, the greater the sense of wrongness grew, and though he couldn’t say for sure, he swore he caught movement at the edge of his vision. The buildings didn’t help much; they were damp, dark things with mould sometimes covering entire buildings. To add to this, his vision was severely limited, seeing as the cavern was pitch black. Though he possessed sight gifted by an Okryd Tree, he still needed some light to see by, and so in the utter darkness, he was only a little better than a Human on a dark, cloudy night. Eventually, their path was blocked by a building that had fallen onto the street, creating a barrier of ruins and stone.
“Stay here. Once I get up there, I will call you up, okay?” Vulmer asked, and the girl nodded in reply.
It didn’t take much effort to climb over the barrier, and soon Vulmer was on top of it. Turning back, he was surprised to see that the girl wasn’t there. Looking down the way he had come, he couldn’t see her anywhere among the ruins, either. He was about to call for her when it struck him that he had never learned her name. In fact, standing atop the blockage of stone and rubble, several other things occurred to him as well, like how it was she was able to see anything, or how she had managed to keep her nerve in this place, being no more than five by his guess.
