Darkness Named

by Riley S. Keene

  She just continued going until the sky darkened towards evening. While she didn’t feel completely confident that the seven hundred grass she had stacked in her inventory was enough, it was more than she’d ever had at one time. And that was just fine for a start.

  Her herbalism skill had increased dramatically during the day. It had pushed her over the bar to Level 10, as well. Tanisha considered increasing her stamina, just because the number was so low. But it wasn’t worth it. Sure, she lost stamina during the day, but it was only a slow drain while she was moving around. Activities drained it faster, but she wasn’t going to be doing much on her trek across the False Lands. She would have to worry about long-term sleep deprivation if she extended her travel any further than she was planning. So, instead, Tanisha increased her hunger bar to an even 150.

  In the morning, the first four jerky were done, and Tanisha rotated them out and replaced them with the last of the meat that had come from her raquail traps, as well as the stuff left over from the blackened bear hunts. When that task was done, she went about her morning routine.

  Shinji joined her in the river this morning, at least for quick bursts. He’d run into the water, splash it against his fur, and then dart back out onto the dry land and furiously comb the moistened area. Tanisha tried to not laugh at him, but it was such an odd reaction that she really couldn’t help herself. He seemed unamused by her laughter and chittered at her furiously, as if the water were somehow her fault.

  Once she was dressed again, she moved on to her next task: logging. She grabbed a handful of axes and popped them in her inventory.

  “Hi-ho, hi-ho,” she said in a sing-song tune, as she led Shinji out towards the woods, “it’s off to work we go!”

  She started by hacking down trees and leaving the logs and sticks where they fell. Because she was leaving her camp anyway, she targeted the trees that were closest. She had, in accordance with gamer instincts, left those untouched previously, in case she needed to get some wood in an emergency. But now that she was leaving? They were prime targets.

  If there was an emergency need for wood, she’d just have her stockpiles.

  She found that she liked directing her chair to step over the thick row of logs after felling a tree, because it meant that her mustelan companion would climb up and stand on them to survey the world. He seemed to like being tall—as long as it didn’t mean climbing up on her chair.

  After spending all morning cutting down trees, leaving five shattered axes in her wake, she returned through the area and collected both the sticks and the logs, stacking them into the little inventory spaces.

  It was mid-afternoon by the time she was done. She had over two hundred sticks, and forty-two logs. Tanisha did some quick math. If she turned every log into sticks using the woodworking workbench, it would bring the total number of sticks within spitting distance of the amount of grasses she’d gathered on the previous day.

  Mass logging like this was much less efficient than her grass gathering. And it irritated her. She’d gained so few logging skill ups, and that was because she’d get skill ups from breaking down the logs into sticks. But it meant that she had to spend double the amount of time on the skill. If she were trying to optimize her levels, it would be much better to spend her time gathering grass and tossing it to the wind.

  “Stop it,” she said, scolding herself. “You’re not going to write a dissertation on this and get in touch with the developers. Get moving.”

  The rest of the afternoon was spent on the tedious task of breaking down logs into sticks. Her original plan was to break them all down, but she quickly realized she was going to need more grass than sticks anyway. So, after thirty logs were turned into roughly three-hundred sticks, she decided to leave the remaining logs in their full state. They’d be useful for making campfires, if she needed to stop somewhere.

  Day two bled into day three, and the task for the day was for her and Shinji to turn most of her grass into a hundred rope. The mustelan made the task go quickly, as the two of them crafted facing one another. Tanisha told him of her family, especially her dad. The whole thing felt like one of those Stitch-and-Bitch circles she’d been invited to while living in Seattle. Tanisha had never gone, because she was really terrible at most crafts. But this was fun! And eventually she was tempted to just keep going. But torches would require raw grass, and so she needed to make sure she had plenty in stock.

  The next day was dedicated to making those torches. It was slower work, since Shinji couldn’t help. And not just slower. More mind numbing. She had to weave the grass over the head of the stick over and over. Talking to Shinji helped once again, and today Tanisha focused on talking about the engineering firm she worked at in Seattle, and then eventually about the city itself.

  She was about halfway through a story—about a particularly dense client who had refused to listen to her until they had carbon copied her branch manager, who literally copied her emails word-for-word back at the guy—when she paused. When was the last time she’d told this story? Months? A year? It’d been a while, at least. Not only that, but the last time had been over text message. When was the last time she’d told any story out loud, with her actual voice?

  It just reconfirmed that she needed to get out of here. These tasks might have been monotonous and boring, but the grinding would be worth it. In the end, she’d be able to escape the False Lands and get her life back on track.

  As long as she kept reminding herself of her goal, she wouldn’t come through this experience and just stay in Oregon.

  At the end of the day, she had a hundred torches, four more survival skill increases, and she was Level 11. She stored her rope and torches in her storage chests for when she was ready to depart. As it was, she felt like she would be ready far before the meat was done drying. This was the fifth day, and while she still wanted to experiment with her pots and build her tents, that wouldn’t take her three days.

  In fact, she might be ready to go tomorrow night.

  Tanisha treated herself to a hefty dinner—topping off her newly-increased hunger meter—before settling in for the night. It wasn’t even fully dark yet, but she wanted to make sure she was topping off her status bars. It also meant she could save some more of her resources if she didn’t have to keep the campfire going once dinner was done.

  “Screw it,” Tanisha said as she climbed into bed. Shinji watched her, as if he were curious as to why she was retiring so early. “I’ll just make a bunch of drying racks. Just get this wrapped up.” She patted the mat next to her, but the mustelan didn’t move. Tanisha didn’t care. He’d come to bed eventually.

  And when they woke up, she could go about finalizing her plans.

  Chapter 35

  That night, she dreamed.

  Dreams weren’t rare for her, but they were often very abstract. She would dream about the missing sensation in her feet, or about engineering reports arranged like different-colored mosaics in a stained-glass window.

  This dream was much more… dream-like. It felt real and whimsical all at the same time. Tanisha was aware that things weren’t real, but there was nothing she could do about it.

  In this one, she had fully-functioning legs, but still rolled around in a wheelchair.

  The chair itself was her outdoor hunting chair, even though she wasn’t in the woods. Instead, she was back in Seattle. While the wider-set wheels of the hunting chair drew far more irritated glares from commuters who had to step around her, the hardier chair actually had less trouble in the city. The streets of downtown Seattle were rough and uneven. Curbs weren’t optimized for wheelchairs, requiring her to do the obnoxious little “chair jump” to get up on the sidewalk from the street. There were stairs. And hills. So many hills.

  She’d forgotten about the triathlon of maneuvering around a city build on land where a city was unwelcome. Her back was coated in sweat, and she’d barely gotten an eighth of the way to her destination. Wherever it was.

  Being back in t
he city was a nightmare, and for more reasons than just the travel. The dream itself didn’t make sense, but it was all the worst things about city life. There were a thousand bodies pressed into the streets as if someone had decided to hold a parade on a workday. At one point she became swarmed by obnoxiously loud children asking their parents questions about the woman in the wheelchair as if she couldn’t hear them. When she inevitably had to board the bus, due to closed sidewalks on every street, there were millions of eyes glaring at her as the whole transit system seemed to come to a screeching halt to let her on. People were moved from their seats and the driver had to help her buckle her chair in, even though she told him ten times that she had it herself. As if she were somehow incapable of the simplest thing.

  Then there was the pollution. The air was so thick it hurt to breathe, and when she blew her nose the tissue came away black with soot. Every smell imaginable assaulted her nostrils even though they were clogged from the air quality. From the sweet scents of fruit and pastries at Pike Place Market to the scent of rotting fish on a warm summer’s day down by the waterfront, it made her a little homesick. Until she passed an alley that smelled of booze, urine, and garbage left to bake in the sun.

  And the noise. There were so many cars. Insecure individuals with loud engines passed by, revving their cars up and down First Avenue before they screeched to a stop at a nearby red light. There were old cars that sputtered and struggled, blowing out thick clouds of pure smog. She was assaulted by sirens that sounded like they were perpetually two blocks away. Streets were packed with trucks, and cars, and buses, and in between them, pedestrians walking against the lights, weaving between the cars as if they had never seen a crosswalk in their life.

  The pedestrians made almost as much noise as the cars. Chattering, laughing, playing loud music. There were crying children, begging homeless folks, oblivious tourists. Stumbling drunks shouting at each other about money.

  A thousand sounds assaulting her ears, making her feel like it would never be quiet again.

  How had she even slept in this city? Every noise demanded her attention.

  It was impossible. She couldn’t live here again. Not like this.

  She might go back to trying to lead a normal life, but it wouldn’t be in Seattle. Maybe she could work there again? But live there? No. Never again. Was it any wonder that she had lost herself to fictional game worlds when she wasn’t working? The alternative was going outside into that mess. Breathing the unbreathable air. Navigating a city that seemed to hate her for her disability. And the only time she left willingly was to get in her truck and drive across the state to vanish into the wilderness.

  Tanisha found herself awake. She wasn’t exactly sure when she woke up.

  The night was pitch black and heavy. All she could see were the meters on her UI in the corner of her vision. Her stamina wasn’t fully filled, but it was filled enough that she didn’t feel the urge to just lay back down and pass out. Stability was an issue, as she watched the bar slowly drop at being in the pure black dark of night in the False Lands, but it wasn’t a worry yet. It was nowhere near as bad as the first night.

  “D-do I just go back to sleep?” she asked the darkness. A nearby squeak alerted her that either Shinji was awake, or she’d woken him up. Tanisha fumbled around in the dark for a good minute before she was able to open her inventory and pull out a torch from it. She was glad she kept one on her, as all the others were in the storage chests. “What time is it, even?”

  Shinji flinched back from the light, covering his little eyes. When he had adjusted to the blinding brightness, he sniffed at the air outside the tent, as if telling her to check for herself instead of asking him. He then turned himself in a circle and lay back down on the sleeping mat.

  She got the impression he was irritated at having been woken up.

  “Well, I’m irritated too,” she said, tucking one arm against her body as if she were going to fold her arms over her chest. “I kinda thought this whole video game thing would take away nightmares, just like it did all the other human functions.” Tanisha sighed and rubbed at her eyes with her free hand. “I could use a drink of water, maybe.”

  The mustelan gave no response, but to wiggle his nose at her.

  “Fine. Sulk, why don’t you?”

  Tanisha wiggled out of her sleeping hut and made her way slowly to her chair. It wasn’t easy while carrying a torch, but Tanisha had nowhere to put it, besides driving it into the soft dirt every few inches as she dragged herself along on her hands.

  Her camp had been poorly designed to serve her in the darkness. The workshops were a little far to her left to be visible within the narrow circle of light from her torch. Even when the campfire was lit, they were just slightly out of view, thanks to the way the darkness pressed in against the radius of light. The storage area, off to her right, was also on the other side of the dome of darkness that enclosed her.

  Her torchlight illuminated a bare bit of ground, and beyond that, the night was featureless. She hadn’t even been here long enough to picture where, in the darkness, her other constructions were. What if she hadn’t had a torch on her? The wall of impenetrable night would have obscured all. Tanisha had a feeling that, without her torch, she wouldn’t even be able to find her way to the campfire, which was barely ten feet ahead of her. Let alone her chair, which sat next to the door of her squat sleeping quarters.

  Even outdoors, she couldn’t tell what time it was. The sky was moonless, and she didn’t know how long she’d been asleep. It felt like enough. Perhaps she could just put together a meal and get to work on the task of the day, guided by firelight. She had to craft a bunch of tents, and then decide if she was going to waste some sticks and rope on speeding up the meat-drying process.

  But that was future Tanisha’s problem. For now, she was going to get a few handfuls of cold water and see how she—

  The hair on the back of her neck stood up. Tanisha froze, her arm hovering mid-air as she was about to dig her torch into the ground again. This was the sensation of being watched, but there was nothing inside her ring of light. Her stability was too high for it to be Stick Folk. Was it a wandering mob, blundering into her camp? A lone stranger desperate for help? Perhaps an event she triggered in her sleep?

  Tanisha looked up at her quest UI, and at the text there that directed her to seek out other players. Had other players gotten that same quest? Perhaps they had a compass to point them right towards her.

  But there was no other ring of light in the darkness. No glowing symbol of humanity. So unless their gift from Otekah was to see in the dark, it wasn’t another person.

  Which was honestly a big relief. No one with good intentions came to visit in the night, and Tanisha wasn’t entirely sure how PVP worked in the False Lands. She really didn’t want to find out, either. And so with the threat of another thinking person—especially one who would witness her at her most vulnerable—removed, Tanisha continued to her chair.

  She was nearly there when she heard it.

  A roar of a creature. And it sounded like it was close.

  It was a low, unnatural sound, like a saw through thick cardboard. It had a canine quality to it, and as the roar trailed off, it turned into a growling, snuffling noise. She could feel the bass of it in her chest, and her fight-or-flight response kicked in. For a moment, she wanted to hurl herself to the ground and lay still. She was able to elbow past that and get into the seat of her chair.

  But the next sound was an enormous thump.

  Again, from far too close.

  That crashing thud dispelled all notions that perhaps this was a smaller beast with overdeveloped vocalizations.

  Despite the screaming protests of every part of her brain, Tanisha gritted her teeth and directed her chair towards the noise. The skittering steps of the mech seemed too fast as she approached. But Tanisha needed to find the source. To see what she was up against. If she could see it, she could figure out if it was after her, and what she coul
d do about it.

  She was not prepared.

  Tanisha gasped when the light reached the creature.

  Within the entire circle of her light, all she could see was an enormous furry foot, black as the night it emerged from. It was the length of her entire arm. The toes were tipped in ivory-white claws that were easily ten inches long.

  Beneath its feet, the ground shook.

  Chapter 36

  There was no response that seemed adequate for the amount of terror, anxiety, and sheer distress Tanisha experienced in those few seconds. It felt as if her entire being wanted to scream and cry and run in fear.

  But somehow, her first actual action was to slap a hand to the bottom left side of her UI and draw her hammer. Its weight drew her attention from the creature, and Tanisha stared at the weapon in her hands with too-wide eyes.

  It was admirable. Stupid, sure, but admirable.

  She wasn’t sure fighting the creature was what she wanted, no matter how awesome it would be. Not only was it at least twenty feet tall, she had no idea what it was or why it was here. Perhaps it was just passing by and would leave her alone.

  It took another earth-quaking step towards her, and Tanisha directed her chair away on instinct. She kept the black furry feet within the ring of her torchlight—mostly because she didn’t want to lose sight of it if it faded into the darkness—but also stayed as far away from it as possible.

  Perhaps it was a rare spawn. Not a boss, but an Uber? Something that wouldn’t want anything to do with her if she left it be. Maybe it was just the fear whispering through her mind, but she really hoped it would just continue on.

  The creature took another step, and the feet didn’t follow her retreat. Which gave her a bit of hope. And then the hope was quickly dashed when the creature roared again. The sound shook her to her core, with the low snarl resonating in her chest and the terrible sawing noise grating on her nerves and filling her with fresh panic.