Underland

How long had it been since Valdemar had faced his grandfather’s portrait?

Days? Weeks? Time passed so quickly in Lord Bethor’s tower, especially since Valdemar had spent his time training or practicing magic. His painting had waited covered in cloth all this time, its own painter unable to face the ghostly echo within.

Valdemar and Marianne had put the portrait on a wall after disabling the Painted Field. Ktulu was busy playing in the bathroom’s sink, leaving the two humans alone with the ghostly echo.

“Valdemar?” his grandfather’s painted remains asked with an oblivious look in his eyes. “Are you off playing outside again? Don’t wander too far, or your mother will worry.”

He doesn’t remember anything, Valdemar thought as he glared at his grandsire’s echo. Even so long after the Silent King’s revelations, watching the man’s face filled his grandson with rage and bitterness. Learning the countless atrocities he had made himself an accomplice of through the Verney Cult had only reinforced his loathing.

And yet… and yet Valdemar had seen his grandfather’s panic during his daughter’s ordeal beneath Verney Castle. He had tried to save her from Ialdaboath’s attention and failed. Had he been deceived too?

“Valdemar?” Marianne asked while his grandfather’s echo looked around in confusion.

“I can’t do it,” Valdemar whispered. Just looking at the portrait made him confused.

“You can,” Marianne replied, “you just don’t want to.”

No, he didn’t. Valdemar knew the right questions to ask, but he was afraid of the answers. He was scared to see his doubts validated; to know that the family who had raised him only ever saw him as a curse, a tool, and a burden. That the cause for which Valdemar had dedicated his life had been a lie from the very start.

Lord Och’s words came to mind. All I offer is the truth, but it is true what fools say. Ignorance is bliss, and the path we walk is not a happy one.

Back then, Lord Och had said that his apprentice didn’t understand his words. But now he did. Valdemar had been happy with his eyes closed, but the more he opened them, the greater his anguish. Each new revelation had left him feeling worse and more lonely than the last.

But it’s no longer about me, the sorcerer thought. It’s about the world.

“Why?”

The word came out of his mouth on its own.

His grandfather’s painting looked at him in confusion. “Why, Valdemar?”

“Why was I born?” Valdemar asked as he cleared his throat. “Was I only a way home for you?”

The silence stretched on for a few awkward seconds, the portrait’s face as still as a lifeless painting. For a moment, Valdemar thought that his grandfather’s echo had fallen into another cognitive pitfall and simply couldn’t process the question.

“Yes, you were.”

His grandfather’s words were full of remorse, but they hurt all the same.

Valdemar clenched his fists while the portrait’s gaze turned hollow and distant. “You sold out your own daughter to a Stranger to create a pair of doors,” the sorcerer condemned his grandfather, his body shaking with rage. “You condemned this entire world just for a ticket back home?”

“I was desperate,” the painted ghost admitted, his voice breaking. “I wanted to go home again. To my fiancé and real family. This place… this place is Hell.”

“Your real family?” Valdemar snarled. “Because my mother and I were only tools to you? Mom was just a grail to use and discard?”

“I didn’t know…” His grandfather’s echo sobbed as he held his head in his hands. “I didn’t know… I didn’t know Sarah would… I didn’t want any of this…”

“You knew this would happen the moment you threw your lot in with a Stranger cult!” This… this cowardly trash… watching him made Valdemar’s blood boil in his veins. How could he ever have looked up to him?

“Mr. Dumont.” Marianne’s voice was softer, devoid of rage. “Did you inform the authorities of the cult’s activities?”

His grandfather’s painting kept sobbing, heedless of the world around him.

“He can’t hear you,” Valdemar replied angrily. “He can only answer my questions.”

“Then ask him.” Marianne locked eyes with her partner before he could protest. “Please, Valdemar. Ask him.”

“What would it change to know that part?” Valdemar argued bitterly.

“A lot, and you know it.” She let out a sigh. “Are you so afraid of the truth?”

Biting his tongue, Valdemar turned back to this shitstain of a painting. “Did you rat out the Verney Cult to the Church of the Light?”

The portrait twitched briefly as he dried his tears. The ghostly echo was fragile and raw emotions weakened its stability. “I did,” he confessed. “I promised the inquisitors that I would tell them everything… if they let us go. Me, Sarah, and you…”

“But you didn’t tell them everything,” Marianne pointed out as she glanced at Valdemar. “Or else the inquisitors would have executed him, promise of amnesty or not.”

He was just protecting his ticket home, Valdemar thought angrily, but he asked the question anyway at Marianne’s urging. “Why didn’t you tell them about me? To protect your gateway to Earth?”

“No, I…” his grandfather shook his head. “Sarah… she made me promise.”

This time, Valdemar’s eyes widened. “Mom?”

“I wanted to tell the inquisitors the truth… to have the demon spawn destroyed, but Sarah… She said she would kill herself if I did. She didn’t want to lose you. Not like…”

Valdemar looked down in sadness. “Not like Crétail?”

“It wasn’t his fault,” his grandfather sobbed. “He was born wrong. Too much like his father, they said. He was hungry, but it was never enough. Your mother… She lured him to sleep with the box. That was the only way to make him behave. But one day he… he didn’t wake up. But even in death, he… he kept dreaming.”

But you cannot die.

“So you tossed his corpse in a well and tried to bury his restless spirit?” Valdemar asked. He wanted to be angry, but he could only feel sorrow and pity for the brother he had never known.

“Your mother… there was no other way. She was the only one safe. He hated the living, and… he wouldn’t sleep…” The ghost of Pierre Dumont looked lost in his memories. “Your mother… she hoped they would find a way to help him rest one day, but we… we never could.”

His mother… his mother sealed Crétail hoping it would let his tormented soul rest.

Mom wanted us to live? Valdemar thought in disbelief. Even though we had been forced on her? Even though we were monsters, she wanted to save us?

“Why didn’t you turn me into a gate after she died?” he asked with a frown. “Did she make you promise no harm would come to me?”

“I… I couldn’t bring myself to continue.” Though he no longer cried, his grandfather kept sobbing. The weight of his guilt and sins had caught up to him. “I have done so many terrible things… I ruined my daughter’s life before it even began… I made a pact with demons… even though I already damned myself twice-over, it had to stop somewhere.”

“With me? It stopped with me?” Valdemar clenched his jaw, his teeth gritting together. “Couldn’t you stop earlier?! You had plenty of chances to stop earlier! You said it yourself, you would have given me to the inquisitors! Why did it take Mom for you—”

He felt Marianne put a hand on his shoulder, but she had the grace not to say anything. Valdemar looked at her, and she shook her head. “That’s enough, Valdemar.”

“How can you say that after hearing this? He knew. He knew all along, sold his daughter to Ialdabaoth and—”

“Valdemar, take a good look at him. A long, good look.”

Valdemar bit his lips, but followed her advice. And as he did so, he began to see his grandfather’s portrait in a new light.

Before his death, his grandsire had appeared so wise and paternal. An elder who had seen more worlds than anyone else alive, and carried the loss of his home in his heart without giving in to despair.

The creature in front of Valdemar was anything but a wise elder.

The painting showed an old man prematurely aged by loss and regrets, his wrinkles as deep as rifts. His eyes betrayed his terror and incomprehension at the terrible world he had found himself trapped himself in. He didn’t look like the manipulator his grandson wanted to see him as; his back was crumpled, his hands trembling with shame. He looked…

He looked lost.

“He’s not the villain you want him to be,” Marianne said softly. “He is an old ghost full of regrets. He could have avoided this mess, this is true. But in the end he did the right thing. Can you truly keep hating him after knowing that?”

And yet, Valdemar was still furious. The anger smoldered beneath the surface, his blood boiling whenever he glanced at this shitty old man. The mere sight of this… this self-pitying wretch…

No, Valdemar realized as he looked at his own trembling hands, still full of the same fury. The rage came from somewhere else entirely.

Valdemar wasn’t angry because he hated his grandfather.

He was angry at himself because he didn’t.

Why? he thought while glaring at this painted ghost. Why couldn’t you be an asshole too? Why did you have to bring Mom into this?

He didn’t know what to think.

“I need fresh air,” Valdemar said.

As Lord Bethor had promised, his students had been allowed to leave the tower after their training.

The only way in and out of the fortress was through teleportation, but the Dark Lord had wisely set complex blood circles that could transport people in and out of his tower. Only those with proper authorization could use them, and he had allowed his students to venture outside to gather weapons and supplies.

However, both Marianne and Valdemar had to go wearing metal helmets to avoid identification. Lord Bethor’s spells protected them from magical tracking by the cult of Ialdabaoth, but it didn’t hurt to be discreet.

As befitting of their reputation, the weapon markets of Sabaoth were closer to open forges than markets. The merchants included sentient golems, humans, troglodytes, and even the occasional Dokkar. Undead workers toiled in smelters and forges to deliver swords, shields, and guns to clients on the spot. Smoke was omnipresent in the area and quickly purified by bound air elementals. Fire ones fueled the forges and furnaces with their own bodies.

Undead knights regularly checked the clients for identification, though thankfully none of them interrogated Marianne and Valdemar. She suspected that Lord Bethor had given his soldiers a special way to identify the duo, with orders to leave them alone.

It was… strange, to go outside. Her enhanced senses picked up everything now; the smell of sweat, the scent of alchemical powders mixed with metal, the clinks and clanks of hammers hitting an armor plate. Marianne had to focus constantly to filter out the ambient information without getting overloaded. Even looking at the smoke gave her headaches, as her enhanced vision picked up every grain of ash in the air.

“Are you looking for something in particular?” Marianne asked her partner as they traveled down an alley with chimneys and ovens on both sides. The air was hazy with smoke, while soldiers dutifully transported crates of supplies from the forges to the barracks.

“Not really…” Valdemar replied sullenly, the bag he carried on his back growing quite agitated. “And Ktulu doesn’t like it here. Too hot.”

“I warned you,” Marianne replied with amusement. “Why did you bring him along?”

“He forced his way into the trip.” As Valdemar spoke, the cloth bag’s opening briefly widened to reveal a black eye inside. Ktulu peeked outside, before immediately retreating back inside his hideout before someone could see him. “I think he wants real food.”

Marianne couldn’t blame him. Lord Bethor had golems serve them the same awful gruel and water for days now. Although she knew it was the standard food for soldiers and full of nutrients, she would rather eat something with flavor.

“We can go check the food after I get a new firearm,” Marianne replied as she examined the stands. Although rifles, flintlocks, and gunpowder weapons were rare and expensive, Saboath’s forges sold plenty of them. However, they mostly sold heavy weapons like blunderbusses or heavy rifles; although Marianne’s strength had increased since her training, she would rather use something adapted to one-hand. “My reloading flintlock was good enough, but it jammed all the time.”

“A rifle,” Valdemar argued. “Flintlocks can’t reload automatically.”

“A reloading flintlock,” Marianne insisted. Something in his tone had turned her defensive. “Why does everyone say it was a rifle?”

“Because it was a rifle and you made a mistake?”

Marianne sighed beneath her helmet. “Alright, I will get a single-handed rifle.”

Truth be told, she was happy Valdemar had enough life left in him to argue with her. She had expected him to fall into sullen silence or depression after his encounter with his grandfather. But the truth had only made him thoughtful.

I think he had doubts from the start, Marianne thought. It would have been easier if the world was black and white. “You were afraid your mother didn’t want you, were you not?”

“Yes,” he admitted while glancing at the stands. From the way he looked at their wares, Marianne was certain that he had never wielded a weapon in his life; Valdemar Verney had only ever trusted magic. “I’m not sure what to think now.”

“I cannot say I truly understand how you feel,” Marianne admitted. “But, for whatever it is worth, I have despised my parents too after they disowned me. This pain is sharper than most.”

“Does it ever go away?”

“No,” Marianne replied bluntly. “But no matter the circumstances of your birth, your mother and grandfather made the choice to treat you as a member of their family rather than a hellspawn. I know you want to see your grandfather as evil because it would be easier to hate him… but he wasn’t. You have seen what true evil is like, Valdemar. Can you truly compare your grandsire to that Lilith?”

“He still had plenty of opportunities to prevent things from degenerating this far.”

“True, and that makes him flawed. But in the end he stopped and tried to make up for his mistakes. Shouldn’t that point count in his favor?”

Her fellow sorcerer crossed his arms and didn’t answer.

And now she had made him sullen. Marianne sighed as she looked at the firearms available, her eyes wandering from a rifle to another. She noticed one with three small barrels, the device barely larger than a hand. “I’ve never seen this kind,” she muttered to herself.

The shopkeeper, a stone golem using a carved funeral mask for a face, turned to face her. “This is a new one-handed weapon we recently reverse-engineered from the Derro Kingdom,” he explained with a deep, bellowing voice. “We call it a revolver. The range is smaller than a flintlock and the damage is mediocre, but it is easy to disguise and draw.”

“Interesting,” Marianne said as she grabbed one, an exquisite steel weapon covered in dragon symbols. “What about the munitions? How many shots can it fire before you have to reload?”

“Three. It is reliable, but I suggest using a rifle if you want more power. You can mitigate the problem if you turn it into a soulbound weapon and purchase enchanted bullets, but it will cost a fortune and you will need connections.”

“I could pay to have a soul bound to a weapon?” It surprised Marianne. Soulbound items were excessively rare, since people needed a soulstone in the first place to manufacture them. Individuals wealthy enough to purchase one usually chose to be revived as undead or golems rather than have their spirit bound to a weapon or firearm.

“Yes, if you have the military’s authorization,” the golem replied with a nod. “Lord Bethor does not waste resources. Prisoners with the death penalty unfit for military service have their soul extracted to power weapons, and their body is repurposed into a mindless undead thrall. The souls of murderers make especially good firearms, since their bloodlust carries through the bullets.”

A soulbound revolver would probably pierce through Shelley’s skin. Although Marianne had trained to rely on her own strength, having a back-up weapon that wouldn’t tap into her bones for projectiles couldn’t hurt. “How much would it cost?”

“The military will need to place an order on your behalf for a soulbound revolver. Report to your superior, but I doubt they will agree. Such weapons are usually reserved for the best units.”

“I will try my luck all the same,” Marianne replied. She believed Lord Bethor wouldn’t mind, especially since she intended to enchant the bullets herself. She had an idea in mind that could prove especially deadly to the likes of Shelley and other wererats.

Bullets won’t work, Marianne…

The voice—an inhuman, shadowy whisper—echoed in her head while a chilling feeling took root in her mind. Invisible hands wormed their way into her brain and wove words from her thoughts

Marianne’s head immediately snapped around her, trying to locate the source of the voice. The alien feeling in her mind vanished as if had never been here, the strange words drowned out by the noise of the forges. Ktulu briefly peeked through the bag’s opening as if startled by her reaction, but quickly hid back inside.

“Did you hear that?” Marianne asked.

Valdemar emerged from his thoughts long enough to answer. “Hear what?”

Since the golem looked just as confused, Marianne kept her mouth shut to avoid appearing like a madwoman. Had her mind played a trick of perceptions on her? Or had she misheard something from the forges?

In any case, she took the forgemaster’s coordinates to place an order later and left with Valdemar for the food stands. They were few and far between, offering little more than smoked meat.

I would kill for a vegetable plate, Marianne thought as she examined a stand of dried and fried fish. An undead worker had gathered an unusual collection of salmon, tuna, and strange creatures, but none that interested either Marianne or Valdemar.

He requires fish, Marianne…

This time, Marianne looked straight at Valdemar’s bag. As she suspected, Ktulu was discreetly peeking out, his six cute eyes looking insistently at her. “Ktuluh,” it whispered while pointing a finger at the salmon among the various products. “Ktulhu.”

“Shush,” Valdemar whispered back, the familiar hiding back inside the bag before someone could see him. “I’ll take a few, I promise.”

Marianne wondered if Ktulu was the source of the voice, until she remembered that it said ‘he’ rather than ‘I’. She glanced down at Valdemar’s shadow, noticing three red lights briefly flaring on the shade’s head before being swallowed by darkness.

So that’s how it is, Marianne thought as she focused back on the stand. “I will buy six salmon,” she said.

I will keep you safe, Marianne…

Strangely, Valdemar seemed blissfully unaware of his pet monsters’ antics. “I didn’t take you for a fish person,” he told his companion. “But I can cook something with mushrooms when we get home.”

“You can cook?” Marianne asked in surprise.

“Yes, of course. I have been on my own for a while.” Valdemar turned his head in her direction, his eyes piercing through the helmet. “You never learned to?”

“I…” Marianne sighed in embarrassment. “To my shame, I did not. Bertrand always cooked for me.”

“What is there to be ashamed of?” Valdemar asked as he paid the undead worker, and received the tribute of fish in a separate bag. Ktulu grew agitated inside his own, perhaps displeased to have to wait to eat his dinner. “I will teach you.”

“That would be kind,” Marianne replied. And it will help you take your mind off your family.

As if he had heard her thoughts, Valdemar turned to gaze at Lord Bethor’s tower. The iron building could be seen everywhere in Sabaoth. “Marianne?”

“Yes, Valdemar?”

“Do you think Crétail is a monster?” he asked as they walked through the noisy alleys. “Even after all you have learned?”

Marianne considered her answer carefully. She thought back of Vernburg, of the Qlippoths playing humans inside its borders, of all the evidence she had gathered across this long and deadly case.

“No,” she replied. “I think there’s still a trace of humanity left inside.”

His head snapped in her direction. “Why?”

“The village’s Qlippoths played humans, and the most lifelike of them was Crétail’s nurse. The one who took care of him alongside your mother. If your sibling is the demiplane’s source, why wasn’t he dreaming of horrors? Why was he dreaming of someone who he thought of as a motherly figure?”

Why was he dreaming of Qlippoths playing human instead? Why did its Lilith handmaiden choose his mother’s appearance as her vessel?

“Your mother’s music box lured him to sleep too,” Marianne pointed out. “I haven’t heard of any monster that behaved this way. His behavior is more that of a child with great powers than a destroyer of worlds. But Valdemar, someone who spent twenty years trapped at the bottom of a well, is never going to be normal again.”

“I know. I have seen him. He is a tormented soul full of pain and hunger. But…” He shook his head. “Do you think there could be another way to deal with him? Outside of murder?”

“Do you think there could be another way to save Bertrand than killing him?”

“I already answered that before.”

“Then you answered your own question. Killing is the easy way to solve a problem, but it’s not the only one. Or else our entire society wouldn’t exist.” Marianne put a hand on his shoulder. “I don’t think you can turn him human, not after all he went through… but a better option than murder might present itself.”

Valdemar looked at her hand in silence, before nodding to himself. “I’m not going to destroy Crétail. He is innocent in all of this; just another victim of that filthy cult. Destroying him is not what my mother would have wanted.”

He clenched his fist with determination.

“I’m going to save him.”