LIGHTNOVELONLINE 183 – Six-eyed Dream Serpent
The snake, after all, was right inside the terrarium behind the bar; it was just hiding, and slithered into view when Krahe expressed her interest in its venom. Its head shape was similar to a horned desert viper, but it had six blue-glowing eyes with hairpin pupils, including three pairs of horns - one for each eye. Its scales were varying shades of creamy and sandy off-white, but they glistened with an eldritch pearlescence that reminded her of the Astral Gulf.
“I’m curious, is the snake actually called a Six-eyed Dream Serpent, or is that just the menu name?” Krahe prodded.
“That is the most common name for them. It is… Arguably a soulbeast, arguably not,” the barman said with a practiced cadence that betrayed the fact he was both used to and fond of talking about his pet. “There is a tribe of snake mystics out west who think they come about when a lost soul accidentally incarnates into a snake egg.”
“Interesting. Does the venom have any truly mystical properties, then? Or is it just a particularly potent drug? In other words, will I see things based purely on my own psyche, or do its effects veer into the realm of true clairvoyance?”
“It depends on the snake,” he shrugged. “I can guarantee nothing… But I do not believe you will be disappointed. Nobody ever is, at least when it glows like that.”
The barman put on a truly amusing show of handling the snake, which, itself, pretended to be furious, lashing out and snapping mere millimeters from the barman’s face before he grasped it by the base of the head and pressed its head into a tiny shot glass such that its fangs hooked just over the edge. A spray of opaque, glowing, blue-coloured venom filled the glass three-quarters of the way, before the snake’s eyes glistened as if it was taking her measure, and another spurt filled the shot glass the rest of the way. In a flurry of motion, the barman placed the serpent back in its terrarium whilst also dumping the glass into the half-filled glass. The venom spread out through the liquor, bubbling in a violent reaction as the barman poured in a salt of some kind while stirring the mixture. After several seconds, the reaction ended, letting it all coalesce into a slightly thick, blue-glowing liquid with streaks of light pulsing within it as if it was lit by an unseen, fluttering candle.
“I suggest you try to get it down all at once,” the barman recommended.
Krahe had drunk far worse, so it was no issue; the shot was fine, taste-wise, sour-sweet with a slight burning heat. Its aftertaste was one of buzzing numbness. The effects that followed were akin to a DMT-induced vision of a dream-like alternate reality, but rather than seeing angels or devils Krahe found herself momentarily spirited away to a particularly filthy alley in a particularly filthy part of Megacity Gamma’s Sector 5. In this back alley, a local gang dumped the bodies of their victims, because the local cleanup drones were faulty and just mulched the corpses alongside the trash. A man with no arms crawled out of the trash container, muttering. It was… Something about Chernobog, and Jas’raba. And it was in the continental tongue of Ashametan. His eyes met Krahe’s, and the next moment, she was elsewhere, at another time.
On the coast of a dark lake, with an ancient city at her back, with the alien stars of Zastreon overhead and the Banishment Wheel in the far distance. There came a deep, sonorous sound; Krahe heard and felt it in equal measure. It rumbled up from underfoot, resonating with her ribcage and her spine - resonating the Liminal Coil. There was a question in that frequency, a question and a sense of advice, but she could not comprehend it.
Sector 7. That old bastard’s… Sauer’s hut. He was out in front, going through a form Krahe had never seen, using an arm cybernetic he had never worn before. Its outer shell closely mirrored naturalistic muscle curves in shining chrome, following old-style aesthetics. It bristled with plasma nozzles from palm to shoulder, and with each of Sauer’s motions, they erupted with greenish flame to amplify the movement. The old man was a whirling dervish one moment, then stone-still the next, his face hard and coldly angry in a way she had never seen while she studied with him. Krahe watched for what had to be several minutes, but from this distance, with these eyes, she could only follow the general gist of it at best; even then, it was because she recognized parts. As the mutant art that Sector 7 Style was, even this advanced form of it incorporated elements from other parts. The occasional thunderclaps and accompanying shockwaves from Sauer’s more violent movements, however, made it no easier to comprehend. Her next impulse was to look closer, but the old man froze and stared through her. Then, she was once more spirited away.
In a staccato of flashes, Krahe beheld the same scene playing out in wildly different settings. The founding of a small town on the frontier of civilization, frequently in an effort to reclaim or unearth ancient ruins. Growth, both of the town and its church. Then, corruption. Even the declaration of a splinter faith. The people suffer. Conveniently, as if by divine providence, a Saint arrives and tears out the corruption by the roots. Again. And again. And again. Thousands of iterations with wild and great variation, yet the same overall arc.
The vision lingered on a particularly egregious case, wherein the church presence in an entirely isolated town degenerated to the point of being little more than a bandit band extorting the townsfolk. A skull-faced saint, covered head to toe in exposed, root-like musculature, arrived, annihilated them, and took over, rebuilding the town only to disappear once things settled for the better. It lingered on that skull-masked face, with lilac flame burning in its sockets and the sigil of the Seven Spokes emblazoned on his forehead.
