The Mother of Monsters

It was worse. It was so much worse.

When she first began the process of consuming the Mimic Aspect Stone, the ever-changing gemstone fell apart into fragments like before. Instead of motes of light, however, they each turned into weird multicolored worms. Knowing where this was going, Ianna immediately panicked and ran away, but that did little good for her. The worms shot toward her. When the cloud of worms made contact with her skin, they slipped beneath its’ surface, wriggling and writhing all over her. She screamed horribly until she blacked out from the pain.

She woke on her side near the steps leading up to the sarcophagus. At first, she thought she had died again. The nausea was an unpleasant hint that she’d only been unconscious. It took her a while to focus on the prompt floating a few feet away.

Ianna’s eyes widened as she read the ability. She could make monsters! The very idea of creating a monster that was loyal to her was incredible. She practically giggled with delight as she read over the specifics. It sounded like she was going to make a tiny baby mimic. Creepy, yes, but it was hers and that’s what mattered. She looked back at Simple Shift. Her other ability was less immediately appealing to her. She wasn’t sure how she could use Simple Shift at the moment. She hadn’t exactly seen many monsters to partially morph into. If only she could completely shift back into her old self. For the moment, she focused on deciding which attribute to pick to become a focus of growth.

Instead of jumping right in, she concentrated on each attribute to see if she could get a tooltip or something to expand on what each did. The powers that be graciously complied.

Ianna gave it some thought. She’d already picked willpower and she was not regretting her choice now. It seemed like a good pick, especially with magic powers like these. Endurance wasn’t a bad idea— death was terrible and dying was garbage, and given that she lost progress when she died, it was a tempting choice. Then again, she could respawn. On the other hand, influence implied that it made her powers directly stronger. That likely included her Mockery.

Settling on influence, she selected it from the list and held her breath for the cooling sensation she felt when she had picked willpower. Instead, she felt a sudden surge through her chest, and a wash of warmth race through her brain. It was like an abrupt, concentrated flush of dopamine. The sensation practically thrust her to her feet and it took all she had not to start running around the room in elation. The sensation passed, eventually, and she settled down enough to sit again.

All that was left now was to experiment with her new powers and find a way out.

She considered playing around with her shapeshifting powers first and actually making an attempt to transform into her real self. She looked around the room. “Tsk,” she tutted in annoyance. I need a better mirror than dark marble for that. Ianna got to her feet and made her way to the far end of the tomb— a place she hadn’t actually reached yet. A simple set of stairs lead up into an alcove that held a huge circular piece of marble that jutted out of the wall.

There was no discernable way to move the stone. She sure as hell wasn’t strong enough to move it herself. A thought occurred to her and she called out her staff to raise it and press it against the smooth stone cylinder. She heard a low hissing sound coming from the point of contact. She pulled the staff away and examined the marble for damage.

It was small, but there was a divot in the marble where the two had touched. She looked up at the huge slab of stone and sighed; it was cool, but doing it this way would take a terribly long time.

She turned around and examined the walls. There had to be a switch somewhere.

There was nothing but smooth walls near the door itself. As she worked her way around the outer walls of the tomb, she noticed that some of the walls were decorated with hard-to-see engravings that blended in with the marble. Figures were carved in various poses over what appeared to be some kind of script. The language was nothing she’d ever seen before. She'd seen many different languages with unique alphabets, but these were completely different symbols than almost any she'd seen before. It looked more like the script on stone tablets she’d seen in textbooks on ancient history.

As her mind wandered, she noticed there was something odd about the words. The longer she stared at them, the more she felt… things, deep in her chest. She stopped searching for a switch and scanned more of the lettering, hoping to get more than just those odd sensations. A seemingly random set of words set her off. Suddenly, she could clearly understand the feeling in her chest— a deep-seated longing that echoed from the words in a way that needed no translation. She looked closer at the images above the script she was staring at and took them in. A woman stood, reaching for a figure with crudely pointed ears and fangs. She looked back at the sarcophagus.

“No way.”

She moved back to the front of the tomb and searched for where the lettering started. It wasn’t hard to find. The figures showed a woman surrounded by many different-looking people— some with pointed ears, some with tails, some big and burly, others small and squat. She could clearly feel emotions from the words that she didn’t understand— wholesomeness, joy, togetherness. She followed the story, walking her way slowly around the tomb towards the left side of the sarcophagus.

There, the story abruptly halted— and re-continued on the wall behind the podium. It broke off again to wrap its way around the tomb, all the way back to the opposite side from where she started.

By the time Ianna had finished following the tale, she felt tears running down her face. She looked down at her hands and then made her way to the sarcophagus and sat down in front of it.

“Teyva Rani, I don’t know if you can hear me,” Ianna said, “I don’t know the finer details… but now I know your story,” She said.

“You loved them. I know you did. Even when they turned away from you. Especially then. You just didn't know what to do, didn’t you? You couldn't know trying to bring them back in the fold just pushed them farther away. Once you knew about the war, it was too late to prevent it... You had already decided to let them go on their own; didn’t you?” Ianna began, rubbing her nose, “You tried to stop the war when you knew about it, Teyva. That’s what mattered. I can’t believe they would say that the war was your idea. Not with the way you feel about all this.”

She pulled her knees up to her chest and stared at the quiet frame of the sarcophagus; “You tried so hard to make a place where everyone could be happy and it fell apart. Eventually, they all forgot you. But you’re still here, aren’t you?” Ianna’s shoulders fell.

“I know your story now, as best as I can anyway,” She said, wiping the tears from her eyes.

“So you aren't forgotten anymore, are you?”

There was a low rumble from the sarcophagus, then a grinding that pierced her ears. She covered the sides of her head with her hands. The cacophony ended with a crash, and when Ianna looked up, the sarcophagus had been pushed off the back of the podium, leaving what looked like a hidden compartment open to the air. As she stood up to peer inside, she turned and saw the marble cylinder at the far end of the tomb begin to move, pulling back before rolling out of the way.

A prompt appeared.

Ianna turned back to the podium where the sarcophagus once sat. “Thank you, your highness.”