Underland

The Derro facility had fallen into a state of disrepair.

An overwhelming stench of putrefaction went hand in hand with the smell of alchemical reagents. The sprawling chambers of metals had grown dark and unwelcoming, as strange crystal lamps flickered above the group’s heads. The ceiling, adapted for the dwarf-like Derros rather than taller humans, was low enough that Valdemar’s hair grazed against it. The sorcerer couldn’t help but feel a sense of claustrophobic unease as he followed Marianne through narrow corridors.

What happened here? Valdemar wondered. Half the pipes running along the metal walls were leaking either steam or oil. Shattered pylons laid broken on the ground next to dried residues of alien, unknowable origin.

And the brown traces on the floor weren’t rust, but dried blood.

“The door closed behind us,” Marianne warned ahead of him. She had put her revolver back around her belt, keeping a hand free. “I heard it in the distance.”

“I am disappointed by the absence of a welcoming committee,” Lord Och mused at the group’s back. “I expected at least one ambush or a trap, if only for protocol’s sake.”

Valdemar noticed that Ktulu was growing agitated in his bag and the Haunter disguised as his shadow flickered. They sensed something wrong in the vicinity, a force that startled them. “Someone’s watching us,” the sorcerer muttered under his breath.

“Not us,” Marianne warned. “The glass eyes are everywhere, hidden in the dark or so small you cannot see them… but they’re only staring at you, Valdemar.”

The old Valdemar would have been disturbed, but by now he had grown numb to such things. What does that say about me? He wondered. Is it paranoia if everyone is out to get you?

The corridor led them to a dark chamber larger than any other before, and the stench of mold joined that of putrefaction. Unlike the previous areas, this place had a higher ceiling adapted to a human’s size. One look was enough to tell Valdemar the horrifying reason.

Broken glass devices provided what little glow illuminated the laboratory. Oil dripped from the ceiling, the drops hitting the cold metal floor with a ticking sound. Preserved organ samples, from spleens to blackened hearts, were lined up on a metal table covered in a layer of infectious mold.

And along the walls were the donors.

The sight almost made Valdemar vomit. A dozen naked humans, both men and women, had been impaled on biomechanical spikes. The disgusting contraptions had skewered them like pieces of meat on a food stand, piercing through their ass and erupting from their open mouth. Cables connected their exposed skulls to the devices, while the contents of their rib cages were left exposed. Fungal growth had devoured most of their insides, leaving only dead husks behind.

The four Derros surgeons responsible for this horror show weren’t in a better shape. Their dismembered corpses had been scattered around the room. One had been cleaved in half at the waist, the torso and legs piled up on a human corpse like a twisted fish skewer. Another had been hit so hard in the chest that the blow turned the ribs and organs to a bloody soup. Only one was relatively intact, his throat slashed and eyes removed.

And the cherry on top of the disastrous sight, an iron golem’s remains sat in a corner, the brain powering it splattered against a closed metal door.

“What is this…” Marianne covered her mouth as her eyes looked at the ghastly spectacle. Valdemar pitied her. He already found the scene disturbing and horrifying, but his partner’s enhanced sight allowed her to see every gory detail. “What…”

“Mmm.” Lord Och alone didn’t seem concerned as he examined the impaler spikes more closely. “This is a new design.”

Even though he had seen worse at the bottom of Lord Bethor’s tower, the scene disturbed Valdemar. It wasn’t the sight of rotten meat and dismembered corpses that bothered him, but the implications of the scene. The massacre reeked of a cold-blooded, intellectual brutality; of a clinical sadism laced with an odious kind of curiosity.

It hadn’t been enough to kill.

The victims had to suffer first.

“Are you alright?” Valdemar asked Marianne with concern upon seeing her unease.

“It’s… No, Valdemar, I’m not alright.” She shook her head, her fingers tightening her grip on her rapier. “An inquisitor told me once that he turned undead because the job never got easier. I understand what he meant now.”

“And he had made the right choice,” Lord Och commented with cold nonchalance. “Undeath teaches emotional distance.”

Ignoring the Dark Lord, Valdemar put a hand on Marianne’s shoulder. “Maybe you could cast an illusion on yourself,” he suggested, trying to help. “Weaken your enhanced senses, filter out the horror.”

“I appreciate the thought, but I can’t.” Marianne gently removed his hand and tried to smile. “I can’t lower my guard in this place. Your life, and mine, depend on it.”

She’s brave, Valdemar thought as he answered with a nod. “Let’s figure out what happened before moving on then,” he said. “Whatever killed these Derros might still be around.”

“Most wise, my apprentice.” Lord Och waved a hand at Valdemar. “Come over here.”

While Marianne moved to study the Derro corpses, Valdemar joined his teacher in examining the biomechanical spikes. On closer look, the sorcerer noticed that the cables piercing through the victims’ skulls interconnected with the dead gray matter inside.

“I do not have your experience with derrotech,” Lord Och admitted, “but I have an inkling of this device’s purpose. What do you think?”

“It’s a neural connection device,” Valdemar identified thanks to his knowledge of biomancy and derrotech. “It’s the same system that allows the Derros to put brains in jars or command golems from afar.”

But why connect a dying man to a torture device? To record his agony?

“Look at these,” Marianne said as she pointed at the most well-preserved of the Derro corpses. Her gloved hand trailed against the slashed throat and then the empty eye-sockets. “While the lethal wounds were sloppy, the eyes were extracted with methodical, surgical precision. Some of them pre-mortem.”

Valdemar shivered at the implications. Even though he hated Derros after seeing their ghastly work in Astaphanos, he didn’t wish such a fate on anyone. “What purpose would it serve to harvest the eyes before death? If that was the goal, killing the Derros first would have prevented a struggle.”

“You forget the simplest explanation,” Lord Och said with a flat tone. “That there was no practical purpose but self-gratification.”

These murders had been carried out not out of a need for survival, but out of sadism.

“Did they do it to themselves?” Valdemar asked as he glared at the Derros’ remains. “They grow bored of torturing our kind and moved on to attack each other?”

“No,” Lord Och replied as he pointed a finger in the broken golem’s direction. “This machine was physically shoved against a wall. I have yet to see a Derro with the strength to do that. Only a warbeast or a powerful golem could have achieved such a feat.”

Marianne tensed up. “One of their experiments escaped?”

“Perhaps, Young Marianne. The surgical operation you noticed implies a higher intelligence than a savage beast, so we must remain on our guard.” Lord Och stroked his chin. “Have we been invited for cleanup duty, I wonder?”

“Or the figure on the projector we saw was the creature responsible for the slaughter,” Valdemar pointed out.

“No, it wasn’t.” Lord Och chuckled. “Though it was vague, I recognized the body shape. That kind of wasted effort would be unusual for him.”

Valdemar examined his master. He had grown to know the lich over the last few months, and he knew very well how little Lord Och cared about others.

To a Dark Lord, there was only one Derro worthy of remembrance.

But why would he be here, in a destroyed facility?

“Kthulhu.” Valdemar tensed up, as he heard his familiar grumble in the bag. “Fagthna.”

Valdemar was about to ask his partner what was up, before sensing something in the air. So did Marianne, who immediately looked around. A tension spread through the room, an invisible jolt coursing through the steel.

“Lightning,” Marianne whispered. “I sense electricity in the air.”

“Ktulhulu!” By now, Ktulu was growing downright panicked.

“We have to go,” Valdemar warned as he looked for the exit. “Quickly!”

“It’s not magic,” Lord Och said with a hint of curiosity. “I wonder if—”

The world vanished in a bright flash of lightning.

When Valdemar regained his sense of sight, he was in another room altogether.

The torture chamber had been transformed into a laboratory. Glass tanks full of brains floating in green liquid had replaced the iron spikes. The incomplete torso and head of a clockwork golem sat on a strange chair in their midst, its head a pincushion mass of needles and cables. Crystals on the ceiling provided clear, pulsating light, while strange turbines thrummed along the walls. Four narrow doors stood on each corner of the chamber, with one of them topped by the same glass projector located at the facility’s entrance.

“Marianne?” Valdemar called as he looked around himself. “Lord Och?”

“Ktulu?” Ktulu asked from inside the bag, his head peeking out to look around. “Ktulhuly?”

“Is this an illusion?” Valdemar activated his psychic sight as he observed his surroundings. He didn’t detect either of his allies in the vicinity. Had he been teleported to another area of the facility? But how? He hadn’t sensed any spell, any magic brushing against his defense!

Valdemar could only see one explanation. Somehow, the Derros had managed to replicate the teleportation spell with techno—

“Valdemar?”

The familiar voice made Valdemar flinch. The sorcerer glanced at the noise’s source, dumbstruck.

“Thank the Light you’re here.” The sitting golem’s two glass eyes made a screeching sound as they glanced at Valdemar. “You took your sweet time.”

Valdemar stared at the machine in incomprehension. He didn’t sense any hint of life in the broken, incomplete metal husk. Not even a brain to animate it. As far as his Psychic Sight was concerned, he was facing a lifeless pile of junk.

“What are you?” Valdemar whispered.

“What are you talking about, friend?” the golem asked, though it had no mouth to speak with. A strange form of derrotech produced the illusion of a voice. “Help me get out of here. I can’t feel my arms and legs.”

“What are you?” Valdemar repeated, more and more disturbed.

A short silence followed. The creature’s glass eye blankly stared at Valdemar, while electricity traveled through the needles embedded in its head.

“It’s me, Iren,” the golem replied with the tone an adult would use to speak to a slow child. “Look, can we play twenty questions after we’ve left this place? The Derros might return anytime.”

Valdemar didn’t answer right away, as his mind struggled to process this strange situation. The more he considered it, the more he asked himself existential questions. Was it a mind trick? Or a terrifying answer to the question of what made a human human?

“What’s the name of the biomancer,” Valdemar asked slowly. “The one who experimented on you?”

“How do you know that? Did Och tell you?” The voice turned angry and disappointed. “That old bastard, I should never have trusted him.”

I heard these lines before, Valdemar realized. “You told me yourself, Iren.”

“I don’t think we’re close enough to.”

Definitely pre-hospital, Valdemar thought, his fists tightening. The pylons. Must have been the pylons.

Was that why they had blasted Valdemar with lightning? Not to kill him, but to understand him?

“Look, we can discuss that after we get out of this place alive,” the deluded golem insisted. “I can’t move, so you’ll have to carry me back outside. Do you know if the Knights are coming? This place is crawling with—”

“Enough.” Valdemar glanced at the projector above one of the doors and noticed a glass eye embedded in it. “That’s what you were trying to figure out, isn’t it? What makes a human human? How do minds and souls work? Your experiments must have been pretty advanced if you could make a copy of Iren’s brain from his brief detainment in your lab.”

“What the hell are y-y-y-y-y-y-y-o-o-o…” The golem’s words dragged on, its speech stuttering and slurring. Electricity once again coursed through its head, before the sentence died incomplete.

A droning noise filled the room, as the glass screen above the door lit up. A shadowy figure appeared on its surface, surrounded by bright light. After one last glance at the deactivated golem, Valdemar stepped in front of the door and looked up at the glass eye.

“W-w-what is it that you fear?”

The voice was cold, booming, and reverberating. The words broke and stuttered, as the machinery struggled to translate thoughts into speech.

“Humiliation? Physical pain? Heights? I-I-I only feared one thing, and that was de-e-a-ath.” The glass eye rotated above the projector. “The loss of my memories, of my experience and intellect vanishing into nothingness. The end of my beautiful ex-ex-existence.”

“Is that why you connected yourself to the impaled victims?” Valdemar asked. That madman had done it often enough to receive a nickname out of it. “So you could experience death through another’s eyes?”

“Theories require empi-pi-pirical testing for con-confirmation. I have dreamed and died ten thousand lives.”

Dreams.

“It has bugged me for a while. Why your kind cannot dream, when all life in Underland can.” Valdemar had had the feeling that the Derros’ inability to use the Blood or dream formed a bigger picture, and he reached a conclusion. “You Derros have minds, but no souls. That’s why you cannot dream or use the Blood. Both imply a connection to Ialdabaoth, and the Pleromians didn’t create you with one.”

“S-so close and yet so fa-a-a-ar…” The figure on the screen twisted and flickered before returning to normal. “The Pleromians did not create us. They called us.”

Ktulu’s head perked up behind Valdemar, while the pieces of the puzzle fell into place.

“‘They shouldn’t be affected, but they have been here for a while,’” Valdemar quoted Master Loctis and Lord Och. Their discussion suddenly made more sense. “You were summoned to serve as slaves by the Pleromians, but you’ve spent too much time in Underland.”

“We did not have souls, but we-we-we are starting to…” The figure confirmed. “The corru-ru-ruption is reaching out everywhere. To all creatures walking across the planet. Trying to pre-prepare life for ass-similation.”

“Is that why you experimented with portal technology?” Valdemar asked while frowning behind his mask. “To return home before Ialdabaoth wakes up?”

“D-d-do you wish to know? To se-see?”

Valdemar gathered his breath. “Yes.”

He knew that discovery would come at a heavy cost, but he hadn’t come this far to return empty-handed.

The door below the projector opened, and Valdemar stepped through it without hesitation.

What lay beyond the threshold was a derrotech replica of the vault underneath the Pleroma Institute: a colossal dome of steel whose ceiling simmered with golden lines. A twisted, colossal archway of steel and wires stood at the middle of the chamber. Pulses of lightning raced through its crude mechanical structure, while the device thrummed with an infectious droning noise.

This wasn’t a Pleromian Gate, but an effective imitation.

The moment Valdemar laid his eyes on it, he realized that he stood before the portal that brought his grandfather to Underland.

Unlike Lord Och’s vault, this dome had another piece of furniture standing before the gate. A throne of metal and steaming pipes, occupied by a derro with hair as black as night and an inhumanly smooth face. The metal circlet around his head pulsated with energy, illuminating unblinking blue eyes. In them, Valdemar saw a glimpse of a dangerous mind, brilliant and mad in equal measure. A strange suit made of a black, elastic substance covered all of his body except for the head.

“I have studied your progress with great interest, anomaly. Your ecto-catcher was an innovative invention.” Valdemar’s host rose from his throne as he introduced himself. “I am Otto Blutgang, Godmind of Derrokind.”

Alias Otto the Demented.

Alias Otto the Nail.

“Show your true self,” Valdemar replied coldly as he faced the creature. “I know you aren’t really here.”

When he looked at Blutgang, his Psychic Sight sent him the same feedback as the broken golem outside. He didn’t sense any blood coursing through the Derro’s veins, or any trace of flesh for that matter. Even the lifelike eyes were made of colored glass.

Otto Blutgang’s smirk turned predatory as he raised his left hand over his face. His fingers sunk into his forehead’s skin and swiftly tore it down. Half of a mask fell to the ground.

“I-I-Is that better now?” the Derro King asked as he stuttered again. Half his face covered in false skin; the other in metal bones and wires. “Do you feel more com-comfortable?”

As Valdemar had guessed, this body was just a proxy, a mechanical puppet commanded from afar. As for how…

Ktulu had fallen silent in his back and glared at the Derro King with all six of his eyes. Whatever Otto Blutgang had become, Valdemar’s familiar considered it as threatening as a Dark Lord.

“Where are my companions?” Valdemar asked bluntly as he prepared to cast an offensive spell if he didn’t like the answer. Lord Och would be fine thanks to his immortality, but he couldn’t say the same for Marianne. “What have you done with them?”

“N-n-nothing. I care n-n-not for them. They are s-s-safe… for now.”

A little blood dripped from Valdemar’s fingers, ready to lash out. “Are you threatening me?”

“Must I?” The Derro King looked at Valdemar with what could pass for puzzlement. “We are si-si-similar beings whose interests align, anomaly.”

Similar beings?

“What are you?” Valdemar asked. “Not a Derro anymore, from what I can gather.”

“My greatest desire was to increase the intellectual capacity of my species. Unfortunately, the p-p-percentage of intellects worthy of preservation is pitifully low. All this neural processing power, wasted on vacuous personalities and base animal instincts. Rather than educate my countrymen, upgrading their mental faculties through overwriting seemed a more sensible solution.”

“You wanted to overwrite the minds of your compatriots with your own?” Valdemar asked while staring at this narcissistic king in disbelief.

“Anomaly, the only way to save your species from idiocy-induced extinction is to practice intellectual eugenics. Your society will be way more optimi-mi-mized once you have weeded out weaker minds and repurposed their wasted gray matter with a su-su-superior personality matrix.”

The chilling thing was that he believed every word he spoke. Valdemar could tell from his self-righteous, matter-of-fact tone. His sheer egomania made the Dark Lords look humble.

“But even the plasticity of a normal Derro brain could not support my overflow-owing intellect,” Otto Blutgang explained. “They could support spe-specialized thrall personalities, but a single nervous system was not en-nough for me…”

The Derros probably couldn’t handle an ego that large. He still brainwashed his entire race, Valdemar thought. And all of this sounds… pre-planned.

“After countless iterations, I haavee transcendeddd…” A burst of electricity briefly surged from Otto’s facial wires. “I have transcended the limits of the cerebral prison and become a being of p-p-pure intellect. A stream of thoughts and mathematics, the perfect complexity of a Godmind.”

The Derro King had integrated his soul into his own machinery. Not quite a lich, not quite undead. A genius loci of wires and lightning, a self-replicating mind inhabiting both flesh and steel.

And then the full scale of the Derro King’s ambition became clear to Valdemar, as he remembered his trip in the Outer Darkness and the invasive machinery within.

“You want to overwrite Ialdaboath,” the sorcerer guessed, hardly believing his own words. “To replace its mind with your own. To become a Godmind.”

Valdemar expected the Derro King to reply with a flat yes, but the answer was somehow even more chilling.

“Possible, but infeasible. I have dis-discarded this possibility in favor of crea-creating my own improved, circuitry-based vessel.”

Otto Blutgang wasn’t trying to replace Ialdabaoth. He wanted to become a better version, one made of wires and steel rather than flesh and blood.

We were walking inside his bloodstream, Valdemar realized. Inside veins of metal and iron innards.

“Thi-i-is a long-term objective, fraught with peril,” Otto Blutgang said. “In the meantime, the portal project must continue. I need you to sta-stabilize it.”

“So you may send a copy of yourself out there in case Ialdabaoth wakes up before you can take over the world?” Valdemar glared at this maniac. “How did you know I would come here? Have you been spying on me?”

The Derro King locked eyes with his guest.

“I have been watching your line since be-be-before you were even born,” he said, his eyes shining with mania. “D-d-do you think your grandfather and his p-p-platoon could have made their way to your p-p-pathetic civilization without my permission?”

Valdemar flinched, his blood boiling.

“My grandfather didn’t remember,” the sorcerer said, his voice laced with burning rage. “I thought it was the shock of crossing worlds, but it was you. You erased his memories of his abduction!”

“Your ex-existence was unplanned, anomaly, but I f-f-followed your genetic lineage’s progress for research,” Otto replied, his wires wriggling like rotting worms. “I calculated a sev-seventy-three percent chance that you would investigate this portal and your origins. I l-l-laid the groundwork for your arrival. No-o-ow we will help each other.”

“Why would I help you?” Valdemar hissed through his teeth. “It’s not just about the portal, isn’t it? It’s too much work to bring me here just to help you open a door back to your species’ home.”

“If you do not help me, your ov-ovulation machine will die.”

The blood dripping from Valdemar’s hands turned into small, boiling tentacles.

“Have I misunderstood? From your do-do-dopamine ratio, I assumed she was distracting you with her womanly pheromones. Be-between us, the thought of being seduced by a female neocortex fills me with dis-disgust. Mental self-duplication is a better way of intellectual reproducti—”

Tendrils of blood erupted from Valdemar’s hands and impaled the psychotic Derro King against his own throne. The crystalized tips of these tentacles pierced through the wires underneath Otto Blutgang’s suit and spread inside its artificial avatar, keeping it tightly restrained.

“Where is she?” Valdemar hissed. “Speak or I’ll scrap you.”

“What would it change?” The Derro King sounded supremely unimpressed. “Copies of my con-consciousness are s-s-spread all over my facilities. No-no-nothing but the complete era-ra-radication of Derro civilization will des-s-s-stroy me.”

Valdemar brought the Derro king’s face closer to his own, before channeling his best impersonation of Lord Bethor. “That can be arranged.”

Though it disgusted him to say it, Valdemar called upon his ancestry.

“I am the Red Prince, the one who can wake up Ialdabaoth and to whom the Qlippoths answer,” he said. “Do you truly wish to challenge me, you piece of stuttering junk?”

“I estimate a three per-percent ratio of probabilities that you will go that far. It is low.”

“But it isn’t zero.” Valdemar’s tendrils tightened their grip and bent the Derro’s metal bones. “You have enslaved your own race. Do you think I will hesitate to do everything in my power to utterly destroy you if you cross me?”

Otto Blutgang considered the threat, and suddenly turned more cooperative.

“I have sought to contact a higher in-in-intelligence to perfect the portal,” he admitted. “But the subject turned out to be volatile. I had to quarantine the guest in the facility, but I have been incapable of getting rid of it without B-Blood magic. With your assistance, I can s-s-send it back and sta-stabilize the portal.”

Valdemar frowned as he read between the lines. First rule of summoning, never call what you cannot put down. “What did you summon?”

In response, Otto Blutgang looked at the portal and Valdemar understood.

He had contacted the only kind of creature capable of helping with portal technology.

The ones that invented it in the first place.