by Ramy Vance
They stopped at a door, one of them reaching out and resting his hand on a panel at the side. The door slid open, and the aliens stepped in.
Alex slipped into the room behind them.
The aliens walked farther into the room, then stopped and talked among themselves. Vardis stood in the distance, hunched over a table.
He was looking at the same scroll as before, and she could see the shard next to his hand.
Alex got closer to the aliens, placing her head between the two of them as they spoke. After a few seconds, she could understand them—not the words, more like pictures against the back of her head, which explained everything and more.
The aliens were afraid.
They were terrified of whatever Vardis had created. They had heard about it and been told about his ambitions, but they hadn’t thought it could be done.
The kin were not to be trusted.
It was as simple as that. There had never been anything more terrifying and horrible than the kin—until the Dark One came.
Alex wasn’t certain what the kin were. Vardis had given her a brief explanation, but the way these aliens were acting made it seem as if the beasts were something much more complex than Vardis had alluded to.
And much more dangerous.
The two aliens flanking her discussed whether to kill Vardis right there. If he succeeded in his experiments, there was no telling how dangerous the kin might be. But then, he was trying to create a weapon to defeat the Dark One. Maybe they just weren’t opening their eyes wide enough.
Vardis turned, and Alex leaped out of his line of sight. He didn’t seem to notice her anyway. He was too busy crying. “The Dark One will destroy all of us. You know that, don’t you?” Vardis whimpered to his colleagues. “If we don’t find a way to kill him, he’ll wipe out everything in the universe.”
One of the aliens stepped forward to reason with the scientist. “Yes, but the kin? Given everything they’ve destroyed, you would inflict that pain on our world again?”
As the aliens spoke, Alex snuck to the table, standing on the opposite side of it as Vardis talked. Alex looked down at the manuscript next to the shard. She didn’t understand what it said in a literal sense, but she was hit with all the emotions and disjointed thoughts that Vardis must have had about it.
There would be time to make sense of it later. Somehow, she knew it would be easier after she woke up from Vardis’ dream. And how long is that going to take? she thought.
As Alex turned, preparing to leave, Vardis turned and saw her. The tone in the dream instantly changed. It was like all of the heat and air in the room had been sucked out.
Vardis screamed, pointing at Alex, sending her flying through the wall as the construct of the dream started to break down around her. For a moment, she flew through stars, then through walls, then through the crevices of her own mind. Guess he knows I’m here, Alex thought to herself. Wonder how long it’s going to take for him to find me.
Chapter Two
Alex was flying through the blackness, watching Vardis racing toward her. For some reason, she wasn’t concerned. The universe around her stretched too far and Vardis was so distant. Alex realized there was probably something in play that was keeping her from being overwhelmed by a sense of danger.
She knew this was a dangerous situation. Vardis’ mind would be a powerful place. But it looked as if he were just as confused by what was happening as Alex was. Maybe if he had been better prepared, he would have been able to muster a stronger attack.
For the time being, Alex was going to use this surprise to her advantage. She wasn’t sure if she could pull herself out of Vardis’ dream, leaving him to wake up confused, thinking that he’d been dreaming about the human. It wasn’t like Alex had gone out of her way to sneak into the alien’s dreams.
Besides, once she was out, she knew she would be able to understand the manuscript Vardis had been working on.
The blackness around her felt like a shrine. It was getting deeper and deeper as Vardis was getting further and further away. The alien couldn’t catch up with Alex.
Alex closed her eyes, trying to wretch herself from Vardis’ dream. It wasn’t happening. She was still stuck in the alien’s dreams.
Vardis was nowhere to be seen. Alex figured if she couldn’t get herself out of Vardis’ dreams, then she might as well explore and see what else she could find. The process shouldn’t have been much harder than pulling one of Vardis’ memories from the pond.
The problem was Alex didn’t know where to start. She knew that the blackness she was floating through probably meant something, but she had no idea. The book on dream interpretation she’d been reading seemed very far away, the ideas foreign and incomprehensible.
Then the blackness receded as if Vardis’ mind had heard Alex’s complaints about not understanding anything.
Alex was no longer in the dark of Vardis’ mind. He must have slipped deeper into sleep, conjuring a new place for Alex to wander through. She was back on the planet with the red suns. It must have been Vardis’ home planet.
She was in a field much like the one she’d seen earlier. But there were no buildings this time, no lake. Instead, a place in the field where the grass had been cut down low. Geometric patterns had been carved into the dirt, and the grooves filled with a red kind of liquid.
Alex walked up to the bald spot in the grass and stared at the patterns. They made sense, but only in the same kind of primitive way that reading over Vardis’ shoulders had. Alex gathered what was important. This was a bad place, and it was a place of her own creation.
She looked down at her hands. They were covered in blood, and when she touched her forehead, she felt the blood there as well. Alex looked sideways and saw there were aliens standing next to her. All of them with blood on their hands and foreheads.
The three aliens gathered around the patterns in the dirt, motioning for Alex to follow them. She did as she was told. There was nothing else to do. She had to know what was happening.
The four of them all bowed their heads and closed their eyes before humming came from them.
Dread gripped Alex. They were calling something, something that should never be called. Their voices cast into the darkness, going forth into a place that touched the brink of Alex’s mind, even here, deep within Vardis’ dream.
This was a memory and yet so much more. A deep blooded connection that ran through Vardis and could never be forgotten. How he had come to this knowledge, Alex did not know. But it extended beyond the simple framework of waking and sleeping.
The aliens stared up into the sky as they sang softly, Alex singing along with them, uncertain of how she knew the song but certain she’d never forget.
The sky darkened, clouds gathering and lightning casting bright flashes of brightness throughout the field.
A creature loomed in the hefty weight of the clouds, a creature so large that it took up the entire sky, its bright eyes, thousands upon millions of them staring out from the dark, searching and searching until they found what they were looking for.
Alex could feel the creature’s eyes rolling over her body, sliding into every pore, cutting her mind open from the inside. She would have screamed if she remembered how. But that was not why she was here. That wasn’t why any of them were here.
The aliens at her side weren’t bothered by the unknowable creature up above. They regarded it with the coolness of scientists. They were busy taking notes, occasionally looking up at the sky and commenting on what they saw.
Then one of the aliens pulled a red shard from a bag and placed it in the middle of the patterns drawn into the ground.
The creature above shrieked as a bright light peeled through the sky, turning everything white for a second. A red tornado shot up from the shard, sucking in all of the eyes that peered down on the aliens and Alex, yanking them from their celestial place, and shoving them into the red shard in the middle of the balding spot of the field.
Once the sky re
turned to normal, the three aliens spoke among themselves, motioning to Alex to come closer and check out the shard. Alex could see billions of eyes staring out at her from the shard.
One of the aliens held the shard out to Alex. “Eaters of worlds,” the alien said slowly. “Caught easily enough. We should hold on to this one just in case we have to use it.”
Then the scene changed.
Alex was standing in a laboratory. Vardis was there, but he was in a meeting with a handful of aliens of his kind. They were seated at a table, poring over notes. The red shard was in the middle of the table.
Vardis stood and cleared his throat. He pointed to a screen playing behind him. But it wasn’t quite a screen. It looked as if the screen were floating in the air but had no tangible existence. “As you can see from the projection, we could use the Old One as a weapon. It is a creature, just like any other. Matter and material. A nearly infinite source of matter. By using the changes I want to implement to its holding shard, we could create completely new creatures from the Old One. An infinite army.”
The aliens talked back and forth with each other, trying to come to a consensus. Alex could feel the tension in the room and she hid in the back, trying to keep from being seen by the scientist. She wanted to see how this all played out.
One of the aliens stood, anger radiating from his body. “You realize what you’re saying, don’t you? How much energy that would take? It could—”
Vardis raised his hand to silence the alien. “Drain an entire planet of its energy. Yes. We would, in essence, be using a devourer to stop another devourer. The only difference is that ours will remain chained up. A war is not won without sacrifice.”
Another of the aliens jumped to his feet. “You’re insane!”
The alien closest to Vardis stood and clapped his hand on Vardis’ shoulder. “No, he’s a genius! Who else would have thought this up? It’s all theoretical anyway. But it’s good to know that we have the possibility. An Elder One against the Dark One. Genius, pure genius.”
Vardis didn’t look happy with the praise. He was staring at the red shard, its hue reflected in the darkness of his eyes.
One of the aliens began speaking, but all his words came out backward. He climbed onto the table and started dancing, his legs jerking back and forth while he bopped up and down, occasionally pumping his hands.
Vardis rubbed his brow as if he were embarrassed for the alien on the table. “Please, Devardra, not now. I’m trying to study.”
The alien stopped, his head tilting back as he leaned back, his spine snapping as his hands touched the table. “But you never want to dance with me!”
The table shattered into a thousand pieces as the walls grew soft and hairy and then long and silky, draining down into the floor as Vardis paced back and forth, finally reaching out and grabbing the shard and retreating away from the table as the other alien continued to dance upon the table like some mad imp.
Alex blinked, and everything was different.
She was standing in a city, not so different from the archival footage she’d seen of a mission that had taken place in an area of Middang3ard that had been taken over by the Dark One. The buildings stretched high into the sky.
The tech in the city was amazing. Every building was sleek and seemed to have been poured from a material Alex had yet to see. But the streets were empty.
No, that wasn’t right. They weren’t empty. Dead bodies were everywhere.
In the cars. In the buildings. Piled high in the fountain. Blood was flowing.
Vardis was kneeling down in front of a fountain filled with the bodies of his people. He was weeping quietly. The shard was in his hand.
Alex would never have thought Vardis had been capable of this.
The shard and Vardis’ hand were covered in blood. As Alex got closer, she could see the faces of the aliens in the fountain. She had to step over the bodies of dozens of other aliens just to get close.
Anger welled up in Alex. This was what Vardis was planning on doing to her world? To Middang3ard? How could he do this to a whole planet again? “You’re not doing this to my world!” Alex shouted.
Vardis jumped up, clutching the shard to his chest. “Do what? I didn’t do this. I would never do this.” He looked around at the damage, at the bodies lining the streets, their eyes upturned to the sky, the bloodstains that seemed to be everywhere. “He did this.”
Vardis stumped forward, his eyes wide and frantic. He didn’t let go of the shard, but with his free hand, he pointed at the sky. “He did it.” Then Vardis fell to his knees, weeping louder than before. “I’m not letting it happen again. Never again.”
The alien slashed out with his hand, sending a telekinetic blast at Alex. It hit her square in the chest, sending her flying through the air.
Vardis was up again, his feet slightly levitating off the ground as he floated toward Alex. “He will never do this again.”
Chapter Three
Alex and Vardis stared each other down as they began to circle each other. She wasn’t sure what kind of weapons were going to be available to her.
This was a dream, after all. And one that wasn’t of her creation.
If Vardis was able to pull all of this out of his memory without realizing it, what was going to keep him from being able to handicap Alex?
But Alex was still partially in her mind too.
She wasn’t a passive part of this dream, being acted upon in ways over which she had no control. Originally, she’d been interested in what Vardis had been reading in the lab. Now she knew what it was about but had an even larger concept of what Vardis was capable of causing.
Then a thought crossed Alex’s mind. What if this wasn’t even him? Not Vardis as she had been used to him, aware and active. These could just be memories he was living through. There was a chance he wasn’t even aware she was in his dreams.
Alex raised her hand. “Wait, what are you not going to let happen again?”
Vardis surged forward, ignoring her question. Alex felt herself lifting into the air. Guess Vardis was aware enough to fight.
Alex went flying again, caught in the throes of Vardis’ psychic attack. It was a shame she wasn’t a telekinetic as well. Wait, Alex thought. I wasn’t telepathic until I met Chine, and I wasn’t that strong a telepath until Vardis connected me with him.
She pushed aside any thoughts of what she was or wasn’t capable of. Besides, this was a dream. Alex had done stranger things in them.
As she flew through the air, Alex twisted around to see Vardis heading toward her. She concentrated, tried to feel the flow of energy around her—the physical manifestation of Vardis’ will. Then she pushed out with her own.
Alex didn’t stop, but she slowed down. She pushed again, imagining a giant hand around her body, prying Vardis’ grip off her.
Suddenly, Alex hit the floor.
Vardis stopped in his tracks. “How did you do that?”
Alex reached out to draw her scythe, then noticed she wasn’t wearing her anchor. Maybe it didn’t matter. She imagined a psychic scythe and flicked it into existence. “I’m a quick learner.”
Vardis raised his hand, a ball of telekinetic energy forming in his palm. “Maybe too quick for your own good.” He threw it.
Alex flung up her hand, imagining a shield around her body.
The ball exploded, pushing Alex into the floor. She had almost felt the force of the attack. The shield had absorbed a lot, but she was not nearly as strong as Vardis was, not yet at least. She’d have to make sure not to rely on one trick.
Alex shook off the attack and sprinted forward, holding her scythe out, and leaped, landing behind Vardis. When she swung her scythe, the alien stepped out of the way, raised his hand, and shot a blast at Alex, who was barely able to throw up a shield in time.
The two stood there toe to toe, blasting each other. Vardis was easily able to deflect Alex’s attacks. Her attempts weren’t doing much either. Vardis easily waved them away. Mor
e than one trick, Alex thought to herself before dropping to one knee fast and slicing at Vardis’ legs.
The scythe cut through Vardis’ body, separating his ankle from his leg. He screamed in pain as he cupped his hands and sent a telepathic blast at Alex.
The blast hit hard, knocking Alex off her feet.
Vardis screamed as the world around him began to break apart again.
Alex thought she was ready for it this time. She held up her hand, trying to deflect the next attack.
The world slanted, and when it righted itself, Alex was on an operating table.
Vardis stood over her, holding a saw and wearing a nurse’s smock. “We’re going to cut you up!” He slammed the saw into Alex’s chest.
Alex screamed in pain as she felt the saw tearing through her skin, cutting through her sternum. Instinctively, she raised her hand and sent out a blast that threw Vardis across the room.
When Alex looked down at her chest, it was bleeding but not enough to kill her. A couple of seconds more, and Alex would have been dead on the table. If this were real life, this wound would have killed her. Maybe it was better not to think about it too much.
Vardis came flying from the side of the room, two saws in hand. He tackled Alex, sending her into the wall, and the two of them struggled to get to each other as the room rotated.
Alex flung a psychic blast that knocked Vardis off of her. He slashed at her back as they scrambled to get to their feet. She took a step forward and fell into a huge puddle.
Vardis stood above her. He raised his hands and Alex floated out of the water, enclosed in a giant bubble. She grasped her throat, trying to breathe before pulling out her scythe and slicing through the bubble. “Are you planning to destroy our world like you did your own?”
Vardis said nothing. He merely flipped Alex over and chopped her in the back of the neck. He was faster than she was here. Made sense. It was Vardis’ dream. He had the home team advantage.
