by Ramy Vance
Death of the Mind
Dragon Approved™ Book Twelve
Ramy Vance
Michael Anderle
The Death of the Mind Team
Thanks to the JIT Readers
Veronica Stephan-Miller
Deb Mader
Kerry Mortimer
Kelly O’Donnell
If we’ve missed anyone, please let us know!
Editor
The Skyhunter Editing Team
This Book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2020 by LMBPN Publishing
Cover Art by Jake @ J Caleb Design
http://jcalebdesign.com / [email protected]
Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing
A Michael Anderle Production
LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
LMBPN Publishing
PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy
Las Vegas, NV 89109
First US Edition, June 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-1-64202-948-2
Print ISBN: 978-1-64202-949-9
Dedication
To my own little dragons: John and Orla.
—Ramy
To Family, Friends and
Those Who Love
to Read.
May We All Enjoy Grace
to Live the Life We Are
Called.
— Michael
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Author Notes Ramy Vance
Author Notes Michael Anderle
Other Books by the Authors
Connect with The Authors
Chapter One
Alex was in a place she didn’t understand.
Only a few minutes ago, she’d gone to sleep, expecting to be overcome by dreams.
And while Alex was in a dream, it was unlike anything she’d ever experienced.
She stood behind Vardis, watching him tinkering at a table, the same kind she’d seen in medbays. The sort she vaguely remembered from when she’d had her arm implanted.
There was a coldness in this place, one she was not familiar with. It stretched into her arms, her legs, into every part of her body.
Vardis didn’t seem to notice her. He was working on whatever was in front of him on the table.
Alex wanted to get closer, wanted to see what was in front of Vardis, but if she moved, he would know. She didn’t know how she possessed that knowledge, but she knew it down to her core. Any movement would make Vardis aware of her existence.
Until moving was necessary, Alex would watch. What she saw was enough to make her gasp and hope anything except what she was seeing was true.
Seeing wasn’t quite the word. It didn’t do justice to what was unfolding before her.
The alien was working on a scroll, but the words scrawled on it made no sense to Alex.
Until they did.
Not in the way that words had started to make sense when she was learning braille. There was no clear detailing of ideas, of emotions. Instead, these words called attention to another kind of feeling—one of separation. Each scribble Alex read drew her farther away from the text.
Vardis seemed to be having the same problem, and it was causing him noticeable frustration. The alien slammed his fists on the table, speaking in his own tongue under his breath.
The red shard floated above the texts, the same one Alex and Team Boundless had risked their lives to get. It cast a crimson hue over the scroll and the table.
Frustrated, the alien stood up and tipped the table over as he screamed. The scroll fell, along with everything else, yet the shard remained floating in the air.
Alex jerked away, the sounds of the clattering junk and the scroll hitting the floor ringing in her ear as if a gong had been struck. She yelped in surprise and covered her mouth the moment she heard her own voice.
Vardis turned, his eyes wide and searching.
It was obvious to Alex that he could not see her. Wherever they were, it wasn’t a plane that he had any more control over than she did. That was good. This was not a safe situation. Alex was glad that the alien didn’t have any noticeable edge over her.
Then the scene changed.
The lab vanished, and Alex was standing on a plain of blue-green grass that stretched as far as her eye could see. Huts had been built all over the plane and aliens of the same race as Vardis walked to and from the huts.
Few of the beings made eye contact with each other. They seemed to be working hard on something, although Alex could not tell what it was.
Whatever they were occupied with was all-consuming.
Alex could feel it.
Waves and waves of feeling came off them.
Vardis looked at the sky, staring into the purple glow shining from their moon.
Then Alex was back in the lab again, watching Vardis with another scroll. For some reason, she felt like she was less present than she had been previously, as if she were losing her grip on this place.
With that in mind, Alex walked closer to the alien, trying to look over his shoulder and see more details on the document he was working on.
Much like before, the scribbles were not understandable, but not in a way Alex could wrap her head around. But the moment she’d glanced at a few of the indecipherable pencil scratches, she felt her mind rip itself open.
Each individual mark shredded the core of her existence.
Through the pain, she peered at them, trying to understand how to make sense of them.
But there was no sense to be made.
The writing turned black, and the blackness extended beyond the scribbles, finding its way into Alex’s chest, and crawling down her spine so each vertebra whispered of its effect.
Alex snapped awake. Or at least, what she thought was awake.
She stood at the edge of a lake that was thick and red like blood. The lake lay beneath two red suns, each beaming down its heat on Alex. She felt like she was going to burst into flames. The feeling eased, and the liquid boiled at her feet.
Wherever she was made no sense. It was worse than when she’d been in the Dark One’s mind. At least there had been some kind of focus in that situation. This felt like walking around in the head of a madman.
And if Alex’s assumptions were correct, this was just the beginning. Alex wondered what level of Vardis’ mind this was. In any case, she had to figure out how to get out.
As she stared at the liquid’s surface, she could see images moving back and forth as if they were fish. Some of the images were of Vardis, and others were too blurry for Alex to see.
Curiosity got the better of her and she plunged her hand into the liquid, surprised it didn’t burn her skin. She grasped one of the images of Vardis and tried to pull it out.
The memory resist
ed moving past the surface of the water as if it had turned solid. “Memories,” Alex muttered to herself. “Those must be memories.”
That made the most sense. Vardis had told Alex they were connected psychically. The extent of the connection hadn’t been explained, but Alex could see it was strong enough to drag her from her dreams into Vardis’ mind.
Which meant the alien, in all likelihood, had no idea she was walking around in his subconscious.
The lab. There had been something important in the lab, something about the scrolls Vardis was working on.
Alex felt like she could make sense of the messages if she were only able to get closer. All she had to do was navigate through Vardis’ dreams.
Maybe there was something in them that would springboard Alex to that particular memory.
Alex plunged her hands back into the red liquid before her as the sky darkened with clouds. All around her, houses began to spring up as if they were flowers, building themselves in a series of ornate circles. The structures were circular and diminutive.
As Alex fished around, she tried to focus on what she’d seen when she’d first entered the dream. Vardis had been standing over some kind of table. The surrounding details were fuzzy, but Alex had the feeling that the room was in a science department or something like that, or maybe a medbay. She was certain the memory was from this planet.
Something bit Alex’s hand, and she quickly pulled it back and held it to her chest. Along with her hand came a memory, which evaporated as soon as it left the water.
As the memory around Alex started to shift and crumble, the red suns cracking down the middle, and the earth trembling, she peered into the lake.
She could see a child’s version of Vardis’ face floating to the top of the water, its eyes black and empty—a curled fetus, tail hugging its body.
As Alex tried to peer more closely, the liquid began to drain from the lake. Walls shot up out of the ground, separating hallway from hallway until Alex found herself in a military base not too different from the Nest, although more technologically advanced.
Aliens who looked like Vardis were running down the corridor, rushing past Alex without noticing her.
Either these memory people couldn’t see her, or they didn’t think there was anything strange about her. Either way, she was free to move about as she liked.
Alex followed the aliens, running to keep up with them and appreciating that stamina didn’t matter in a dream.
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.
