Underland

Ktulu loved water.

Ever since Valdemar introduced his familiar to his bedroom’s shower, the alien child had spent his time smashing its button to enjoy the feeling of water on its skin. Ktulu liked it cold rather than warm, perhaps because it reminded him of his native plane. To cut costs on water, Valdemar had set a basin aside and created a small-toy ship from his bones so his familiar could play with it.

He’s too clumsy to take care of his toys, the sorcerer thought, having been forced to repair the toy twice already. Ktulu usually cradled the ship too tightly, his small body belying his inhuman strength.

Valdemar knew that his familiar was more likely an ‘it,’ but somehow he couldn’t help but see the alien as a little baby boy.

“I could watch him all day,” Marianne said, as she and Valdemar observed Ktulu swim in the basin while cradling his toy with one hand. The noblewoman had a small, adorable smile on her face. Valdemar suspected that seeing Ktulu brought her back to a happier childhood. “Do you think he understands what we say?”

“I think he does, or at least a few words,” Valdemar replied while sitting on the floor next to the basin. “But he can’t speak our language, maybe because he lacks lungs. It doesn’t seem like he needs to eat or breathe either.”

Marianne nodded slowly. “I don’t hear any internal organs at work and his scent is unlike anything I’ve ever smelled.”

Neither could Valdemar’s psychic sight analyze the creature. Ktulu’s body was made of otherworldly matter from another dimension, one unbound by the laws of the Blood. It probably made him highly resilient as well, although the summoner didn’t want to put that to the test.

For now, Valdemar had focused on building up a bond with his familiar. The spell that called Ktulu to the material plane slowly formed an empathic link between their souls, one that would eventually become unbreakable. According to the document given to him by Lord Bethor, Valdemar would even learn to sense the alien child’s emotions and summon him to his side anytime.

Ktulu accidentally tossed his bone-boat over the basin. “Ktululu!” the alien child squealed as he clumsily fell over his tub's edge while trying to grab the toy. Ktulu’s tentacles wriggled around while he curled up on the ground, disappointed. “Ktulu fhtagna…”

“It’s alright,” Valdemar said as he rose from the floor and grabbed his familiar in his arms. Ktulu didn’t resist, his tiny wings flapping while he cuddled against his summoner’s chest. “It’s alright…”

Somehow, Marianne’s smile grew ever wider. “I think it’s the first time I saw you smirking like this,” Valdemar noted. “You want to hold him?”

“I’m sorry,” she said while trying to correct her expression. “It’s unbecoming of me.”

“To smile, or to hold him?”

Marianne blushed. “I should act better than a young maid swooning over a stuffed doll.”

Ktulu squinted at her with his six eyes, as if daring her to resist his charms. After a moment, Marianne raised her gloved hand with an embarrassed look. “Can I…” she asked, but didn’t dare finish her sentence.

“Pet him?” Valdemar asked with a chuckle. “Sure, if he lets you.”

Marianne shyly stretched her arm and scratched Ktulu beneath his tentacles with her fingers, making him wriggle in happiness. “I’m sorry,” she apologized to Valdemar. “I look ridiculous.”

“You don’t,” Valdemar replied, before noticing that she had kept her eyes open during the entire discussion. “Are your eyes feeling better?”

“I can keep them open for hours,” Marianne admitted. “And I can rest by closing them thanks to you.”

“You’re welcome.” The more his knowledge of biomancy increased, the more Valdemar realized just how far Ialdabaoth’s reach extended. The entity had small, invisible eyes in everyone’s blood and flesh. It was truly a god: omnipresent, omniscient, and maybe even omnipotent.

Thankfully, Valdemar had found it easy to manipulate the eyes inside people. It was no different than sewing open wounds shut. Can all biomancers do that? he wondered. Or is this a privilege of my birth?

Lord Bethor’s voice echoed through the room, as steely as an executioner’s ax. “Reynard, meet me in the training maze in five minutes for your osteomancy lesson. Verney, you will practice summoning in the ritual room. I will come to you in a few hours to delve into your dreams.”

Marianne pulled back her hand and regained her composure. “I will see you later,” she promised to Valdemar. “If I still have bones left.”

“Same, if I haven’t been eaten by a monster.” Valdemar glanced at his familiar. “You won’t eat me, right?”

“Ktulu wganag ftag!” his familiar squealed in happiness, the noise incomprehensible to human ears.

Retreating to the same ritual room where Valdemar first summoned Ktulu, the sorcerer carefully dropped his charge on the ground. The alien child sat and looked up at his partner with curious eyes.

“Do I frighten you?” Valdemar asked as he put on the Mask of the Nightwalker, letting it pump his lungs with fresh air from the surface. Ktulu simply tilted his head to the side in confusion. “I’ll take that as a no.”

According to Lord Bethor, Valdemar’s familiar should act as a dimensional beacon and let him summon creatures without a magical circle. The sorcerer had worried that his mask might interfere with the process somehow, and so decided to run tests with and without.

“Hungry thralls of the Nahemoths and members of the first caste,” Valdemar chanted. “I summon you from the depths of the Outer Darkness!”

As he cast the spell, the magician sensed a summoning link flare up between him and Ktulu. The familiar stood between his partner and the planes like a gatekeeper, ready to open the doors at a moment’s notice.

But he refused to.

Valdemar’s prayer went unanswered and the doors to the Outer Darkness remained shut.

“You don’t want to summon Qlippoths?” Valdemar asked his familiar. “Or to summon at all?”

His familiar responded by blinking with his six eyes.

Sighing, Valdemar decided to try summoning another creature. Remembering the brief vision of his familiar’s native ocean, the sorcerer attempted to call a water elemental next. Since it probably shared a plane with Ktulu, the alien might be willing to summon one.

Once more Valdemar sensed a magical link flare up between himself and his familiar. This time, the doors opened. Space rippled behind Ktulu and a form of solid water flowed into the material realm.

Valdemar immediately noticed something unusual with the summoned elemental. Gallons of water assembled into a bulbous shape with half a dozen tentacles, each ending with a lure-like shining eye. The elemental appeared like a hand large enough to squeeze the sorcerer like a fruit.

As he lacked a summoning circle, Valdemar prepared to beat his summoned thrall in submission if it turned out to be hostile. The creature didn’t move, and the sorcerer sensed an invisible connection between the two of them; a lesser version of the bond binding him to his familiar.

“Raise a tentacle,” Valdemar whispered.

The water elemental waved its central limb in a gesture that the sorcerer found quite obscene. Ktulu, however, childishly clapped his hands in response. After letting out a sigh, Valdemar returned the water elemental to its home plane.

After a few more experiments, Valdemar confirmed that wearing the Mask of the Nightwalker had no impact on what he could summon through his familiar. However, Ktulu was awfully picky as far as summons were concerned. The alien child refused to call fire, wind, and earth elementals, the entire Qlippoths repertoire, and even minor spirits. Even if Valdemar retained the ability to call these creatures himself with a proper summoning circle, he couldn’t help but be disappointed by his familiar’s obstruction.

“It would be easier if you could tell me what you will let me call than what you don’t want,” Valdemar pointed out to his confused familiar.

Ktulu looked at him in silence for a moment, before raising his tiny hands and making incomprehensible noise. “Gokrugug! Ibu!”

Valdemar sensed his familiar’s cold, alien intelligence clumsily brush against his mind through their link. Unlike a Dark Lord’s precise psychic attacks, the mental contact was rough and awkward. The sorcerer opened his brain to his familiar and let foreign thoughts into his mind.

Blurry images of a ruined stone city on the shores of a great lake formed in Valdemar’s mind, under a sky of alien stars and a moon red as blood. What remained of the architecture reminded him of a troglodyte settlement, though the settlement was completely uninhabited and most of the buildings had collapsed. The visions shifted to the lake near the city and a shadowy shape beneath the still waters.

He can’t summon anything by himself, Valdemar realized. I see. He can guide my words through the infinite worlds to their intended recipient, but it’s my might that will call an intruder to Underland.

The vision grew more and more precise, revealing the shape of a colossal lizard sleeping underwater. The creature’s length reached from one side of the lake to the other, and considering the size of the nearby city…

“No,” Valdemar said immediately.

“Gokrugug!” Ktulu insisted while flapping his wings.

“I won’t summon something I can’t put down.” Considering the creature’s sheer size, it would almost certainly destroy all of Lord Bethor’s tower if it were called. Not to mention that Valdemar didn’t dare to wake up a monster sleeping right next to a destroyed city…

The mental images dissipated abruptly, while Ktulu slammed the ground with his tiny hands in frustration. Then he turned his back on Valdemar while making an angry noise.

Even interdimensional squids can sulk, the sorcerer thought in amusement. Ktulu cautiously looked over his shoulder as if to check if his summoner was regretful, but avoided his gaze. Truly a child.

Valdemar walked around his familiar to face him, only for Ktulu to look away. “Something smaller,” the sorcerer pleaded as he knelt before his familiar. “Something that can fit in this room.”

The alien child cautiously looked at his summoner like a cat afraid of being tricked. “Kluthulu?”

“Whatever you wish,” Valdemar promised before tickling the squid. Although his familiar attempted to look impassive, he couldn’t resist for long and his tentacles wriggled in pleasure. “If it fits inside the room.”

Cajoled to death, Ktulu opened his mind to Valdemar’s. Instead of pictures of an alien city, the familiar’s thoughts now showed a vast expanse of absolute darkness. The pitch blackness was not the shadows cast by Underland’s ceiling, or the sea of space illuminated by the stars. This darkness was a primeval abyss of cold and nothingness, a void within which no life could survive.

And yet Valdemar noticed something moving in the darkness. A sinister creature that wasn’t undead, because it had never been alive to begin with. An entity that hungered for warmth and despised light.

How odd. He had thought Ktulu could only summon water creatures, but here he had opened up a summoning link to a plane of primordial darkness. Maybe he only wants to call creatures that remind him of his homeworld, Valdemar thought, or specific breeds of creatures. He needed to investigate further.

Before Valdemar called the creature into the room, he immediately cast additional wards around himself and Ktulu. Although the tower’s magical defenses dwarfed anything he could create in complexity, it didn’t hurt to be careful.

“Come forth, messenger of the void between worlds,” Valdemar uttered, although the words weren’t his own. Although he understood their meaning, they came to him in an ancient tongue he didn’t remember studying. A memory he never had guided his lips. “You who haunt the darkness, I call thee to the land of light and shadows.”

The veil between worlds rippled and darkness seeped into the room. Candles were blown away and magical lights extinguished. A chilling cold spread in the air and made Valdemar shiver. He could barely see his own hands, let alone his familiar. Even his psychic sight couldn’t pierce through the thick shadows.

“Valdemar,” Marianne’s voice called from behind Valdemar. “Look at us.”

The sorcerer almost turned around on instinct, but froze upon hearing the ‘us’ part.

“Turn around…” the thing in the darkness whispered, this time mimicking Lord Och’s voice. “Look at us, child…”

Valdemar heard large wings flap behind him. Though the sorcerer couldn’t see it either with natural or magical senses, from the strength of the breeze it caused, it must have been as large as a giant beetle.

A Haunter, Valdemar realized. The creature’s behavior matched the description of these entities from the Void Between Worlds. Powerful archmages usually bound them as hidden assassins or deadly guardians, a task in which they excelled. Haunters envied the living and hungered for warm blood; like a shadow, they feared the light and thrived in the dark.

Valdemar had never dared summon one himself, because they were notoriously vicious and dangerously intelligent. To meet their baleful gaze meant becoming their prey.

Lord Bethor’s words came to his mind. “If a dog disobeys, the fault lies in his master. These creatures exist to serve us. But how can you hope to dominate them, when you haven’t yet mastered your own flesh and mind?”

“If you try anything,” Valdemar whispered back without turning around, “I will kill you.”

If this creature was smart enough to speak, then it could be threatened into obedience.

The cold breeze ended, as did the whispers and the flapping of wings. Valdemar sensed the Haunter’s tense gaze on his back. Perhaps the creature imagined tearing its summoner limb from limb, or weighed its options.

As the silence stretched on, Valdemar prepared to send the summoned darkness back to its home plane. Before he could do so, the Haunter whispered a demand to its summoner with his own voice. “I require cold fright and warm blood.”

“You will get them,” Valdemar replied while trying to channel Lord Och’s callous arrogance and Bethor’s overwhelming authority, “but not mine. Not unless I allow it. Disobedience is death, or worse.”

To illustrate his words, Valdemar focused on the summoning link and mentally pictured his previous capture of the Collector Qlippoth. He remembered the creature being dragged into Hermann’s painted place, forever enslaved and used as fuel by mortals.

The mental image did wonders, and the darkness in the room immediately receded. “I will wait for the hunt,” the Haunter whispered as it sank into Valdemar’s own shadow. “But not forever…”

As the room’s lights returned, Valdemar gazed down at his shadow and found it darker than ever. Three red eyes briefly appeared on its chest, before closing abruptly.

After waiting a few seconds of tense silence, Valdemar glanced around the room to locate Ktulu… only to find his familiar in the arms of a familiar undead.

“What a strange and careless creature,” Lord Och said as he lifted Ktulu by the back of his neck with one hand and carried a grimoire in the other. The alien squid had frozen in fear like a helpless kitten. “Beware, my apprentice. There is nothing more dangerous than a child with too much power.”

“Lord Och?” Valdemar expected an illusion, but his psychic sight quickly confirmed that he was facing the real deal. “What are you doing here?”

“Is that a way to greet your teacher, young Valdemar? Especially when he comes bearing gifts?”

Valdemar looked at the grimoire that his master carried, identifying the leather cover as a mix of human and derro skin stitched together. “Gifts or homework?”

“What difference does it make? You will benefit from it in either case.” Lord Och dropped Ktulu, causing the alien child to immediately run behind Valdemar for protection. “He is quite shy, isn’t he?”

Valdemar’s familiar hid between his summoner’s legs and avoided the lich’s gaze, making a whining noise all the way. The lich terrified him. Even Lord Bethor didn’t cause such a reaction, Valdemar thought. Is it because Lord Och is an undead? “Why are you here, my teacher?”

“I only dropped by for a short visit,” the lich replied absentmindedly. “As Lord Bethor could not identify your familiar, he called upon my expertise. I admit I couldn’t suppress my curiosity and decided to see that creature myself. Imagine my surprise when I saw you had summoned a Stranger as your familiar.”

“A Stranger?” Valdemar was almost shocked as his incredulous gaze wandered to his familiar. Ktulu locked eyes with him, all six of them.

“Or at least the child of one,” the Dark Lord said. “Any creature can become a familiar, if they accept the bond, but you are the first to bind yourself to a Stranger this way. Congratulations.”

A Stranger, Valdemar thought as he grabbed Ktulu in his arms. The baby squid didn’t resist, his tiny hands and tentacles reaching for his summoner’s cheeks. “I can’t believe that he’s in the same class as Ialdabaoth or the Silent King.”

Lord Och chuckled at the mention of Ialdabaoth. “And why not? By the virtue of your birth, you are a Stranger yourself. The Silent King was old, and you are young. A caterpillar needs time to grow into a flying moth.”

Even knowing his ‘father’s’ true nature, Valdemar could scarcely believe he would become mighty enough to rule his own private world the same way the Silent King did. Nor was he interested in it. Opening the pathway to Earth was enough for him.

“Any sufficiently powerful sorcerer is indistinguishable from a god, young Valdemar,” Lord Och said before delivering his grimoire to his apprentice. “This is a compilation of forbidden texts from Stranger cults. Owning that book means death and damnation according to Church doctrine, but you should find a few useful slaves unmentioned in your politically correct summoning grimoires; thralls that your familiar will deign to contact on your behalf.”

“Death to anyone but you, my teacher?” Valdemar asked as he grabbed the book with one hand and held Ktulu with the other. His familiar had found enough bravery to glare silently at Lord Och, who found the reaction eminently amusing.

“The Church and the Dark Lords have a symbiotic relationship, my apprentice. For a country to be stable, temporal and spiritual powers must work hand in hand. We protect the Church of the Light’s spiritual integrity, and in return they forgive all our sins. I am purer than any saint.”

“Do as I say, not as I do?” Valdemar asked mirthfully.

“Different laws exist for the weak and for the powerful,” Lord Och replied with a dark laugh. “In any case, although he will never tell you, Lord Bethor is quite impressed by young Marianne’s progress… and yours most of all. I believe his fondness for you borders on the paternal.”

Valdemar’s legs started to itch at the spot where Lord Bethor severed them.

“Come, what kind of elder does not discipline the young now and then? It teaches them wisdom, and the chain of apprenticeship that binds the three of us is stronger than a severed limb.” Lord Och sounded strangely nostalgic as he spoke. “Or so I hope.”

“You’re thinking of Lord Phaleg, my teacher?” Valdemar asked with a frown, and took Lord Och’s silence for a confirmation. “What happened between the two of you?”

“Why do you want to know?” Lord Och snorted. “That is all in the past.”

“By your own admission, no knowledge is harmful,” Valdemar pointed out. “Maybe satisfying my idle curiosity will grant me useful insight.”

His answer pleased the lich, who opened up a little. “I gave my former apprentice too much, too early,” Lord Och admitted with a hint of bitterness. “Remember this lesson, young Valdemar: adversity builds character and teaches the value of gratitude, but if you spoil a child too much, he will grow slothful, take your help for granted, and come to see what you own as his by right. If you do not set boundaries early, all your future attempts to establish discipline will fall flat.”

“Are you giving me insight into your past, or advice for raising Ktulu?” Valdemar couldn’t help but ask. His familiar’s head perked up at the mention of his name.

“Students and children inherit our mistakes, young Valdemar, as well as our successes. They are what their elders make of them.”

Truthfully, Valdemar was quite skeptical. Having first-hand experience with Lord Och’s methods, he couldn’t help but wonder if Phaleg had grown weary of mind-games or simply lacked the patience to put up with the lich’s casual cruelty. Nor did Valdemar want to believe that kindness was wasted on anyone, whether they were children or adults.

Lord Och shrugged. “In any case, I shall take my leave now. I have received worrying news from my spies in the Derro Kingdom and I need to investigate.”

“Lord Och, before you go,” Valdemar said, “Have you any news from Hermann and Liliane? What about Iren? Are they alright?”

“Young Hermann is making progress on his Painted World project, and his master is happy with him,” the lich replied. “Young Liliane and Iren intend to come to Sabaoth soon, I believe. I doubt Lord Bethor will allow visits until you finish your training, so take it as an encouragement to work harder.”

Valdemar smiled. “Have I ever disappointed you?”

“Do not get cocky, young Valdemar,” the lich replied before teleporting away. “You haven’t reached the hard part yet.”