Undermind

Saskia was getting a major feeling of deja vu. It was exactly as it had been in her dream.

The motionless flame of the seed of eternity hung in the air, casting an eerie blue glow across the platform. Sitting in a meditative pose beneath the flame was a man. Xonroth the Primordial; possibly the oldest creature on Arbor Mundi, now in possession of the power of a god.

Xonroth drew a large portion of his power from the woman sealed in the crystal sphere that floated behind him: Sarthea of the Night, Saskia’s ancestor, and one of the so-called old gods. Sarthea had been held in a deep sleep for a thousand years—first by Abellion, and now by Xonroth. If Saskia didn’t do something, Sarthea could be stuck like this forever, and the Primordial’s rule would go unchallenged.

The final piece on Xonroth’s side of the board was the dragon’s egg, which sat swathed in blankets at the very centre of the column, directly beneath the frozen flame. Garrain and Nuille’s unhatched offspring was a hostage, or maybe something more. Saskia hadn’t figured out what Xonroth’s intentions were regarding the egg, but she was pretty sure whatever he had planned, she wouldn’t like.

With a focussed thought, Saskia cooled the arlium in her artificial wings, allowing her to land gently on the platform. Velandir let go of her—and vanished under a fresh web of shadows. Rover Dog held onto her good arm. Without his support, she might very well have fallen the moment her feet touched down. That would have been an embarrassing way to start this battle.

In truth, she wouldn’t be doing much actual fighting. Not physically, at least. Debilitated as she was by the corruption ravaging her body, there was little she could do in a straight-up fight. It was all she could do just to stay conscious.

Her companions could fight, but even they stood next to no chance against Xonroth, who had commanded the power of every worldseed, and could draw upon Sarthea’s immense supply of essence.

No, taking on the Primordial directly would be beyond stupid. They had just one chance to neutralise him. She had no idea what their odds of success were. If this were a movie, someone in authority might have given her a low-ball estimate like ‘one in a million,’ which according to movie logic meant ‘guaranteed success.’ But such numbers were pointless here. There were too many variables. Too many unknowns.

Xonroth opened his eyes, just as he had in her dream. They were not the almost-white of Abellion’s eyes, or those of his Chosen, but more of a sky-blue.

“Ah,” he said. “Greetings, Dougan. It is good that you came. And you brought the interloper. Very good.”

“Princess brought me,” said Rover Dog.

Xonroth’s expression remained unchanged, but something about him hinted at mild amusement. “Is that so? You know, it is not too late to rejoin your fellow eternals. You always were one of my favourites, Dougan. It would be good to have you back at my side.”

“Why would I want to be your mind puppet?” asked Rover Dog. “Abellion wanted the same thing. I resisted him. You are no different.”

While they spoke, Velandir edged toward the crystal sphere containing Sarthea. Saskia followed his movements both by watching through his eyes, and tracking his marker on her minimap. He was key to their plan. She and Rove Dog needed to keep Xonroth distracted for a little while longer.

“But I am different,” said Xonroth. “Abellion was a tiny gnat, reaching for the sun. I am the sun.”

“Oh please,” said Saskia. “Would you listen to yourself? You sound like a cheap cartoon villain. At least Abellion was…you know, scary. For a while. Why couldn’t he be the final boss?”

Xonroth’s face creased in the faintest of scowls. “Before this day is through, you will know fear. I will…” His eyes turned distant.

“You will…jump off a cliff?” suggested Saskia.

His eyes remained unfocussed for several seconds. He was concentrating on the battle raging below, she realised. Xonroth may be an immortal, godlike being, but he wasn’t a great multitasker.

Finally, he looked at Rover Dog. “I urge you to reconsider.”

“You have lost your wits if you think I would submit,” said Rover Dog. “I am with Saskia. Fight me, or hand over egg.”

Saskia squeezed his hand. She couldn’t recall him ever saying her name until that moment.

“So be it,” said Xonroth. “Then it is time for you to…” He frowned, and his eyes glazed over again.

“Time for us to…bake a cake?” said Saskia.

“Time for us to make babies,” suggested Rover Dog.

She rolled her eyes at him. “Oh I wish.”

In truth, Xonroth wasn’t the only one who was a little distracted at the moment. Saskia’s attention was riveted on Velandir, who had just reached the crystal sphere floating in the air. A shadowy blade formed in his hand, invisible to everyone’s eyes but his.

Time for him to perform his grisly task. They had no hope of striking directly at Xonroth. He was too powerful. They had to remove the source of his power. And that source was Sarthea.

It was a terrible sacrifice. Destroy the mouthlet of her own ancestor, who was innocent of the destruction that Abellion, and then Xonroth, had wrought from her. But Saskia suspected Sarthea would ask her to do it, if she’d been able to speak. Perhaps she already had.

“Release me,” she’d said in Saskia’s vision, on Lumium. Maybe this had been the release she’d sought all along.

Velandir drove his shadowblade through the crystal sphere, and into Sarthea’s chest—

There was an awful crunching sound, and her view from his eyes abruptly tilted sideways then faded away. At the same moment, a mirror on her interface shattered. Through her own eyes, she could see him lying there, twisted and broken, in a spreading pool of crimson.

Dead. He was dead because of her.

She closed her eyes, and drew in a gasping, shuddering breath. “Thank you, Velandir.”

But as her eyes settled on the body encased in the crystal sphere, her sorrow and gratitude turned to despair. Sarthea was still here. Velandir’s blade hadn’t quite punctured her heart.

Velandir had been their trump card; their best chance to neutralise their enemy. And they had failed.

“You thought I could not see him there?” said the Primordial. “Perhaps now you begin to comprehend how wrong you were about—”

“Oh get over yourself,” said Saskia. “I know you couldn’t see Velandir until he made his move, because if you could, you wouldn’t have waited so long to murder him. Let’s cut the crap. You want me? Well here I am.”

Xonroth’s face darkened yet further. “So be it.”

Letting go of Saskia, Rover Dog pulled a gleaming axe from his belt and flicked it at the Primordial. Jarnbjorn sliced through the air barely a centimetre from Xonroth’s cheek—and almost caught the Primordial in the back of his head on the return arc. Nice try, but Xonroth was just too fast.

Still, better for Rover Dog to wield the weapon than Saskia, in her present state. They’d just had to make some tweaks to the accompanying gauntlet to get it to fit snugly on his hand. Catching Jarnbjorn in the gauntlet, Rover Dog charged the Primordial, hurling the axe a second time, even as he thrust a long blade with his other hand, seemingly aiming for the spot where he expected his foe to dodge.

But Xonroth wasn’t there any more. He stood behind Rover Dog, without seeming to have crossed the intervening distance. With a disdainful shove, he sent her friend sprawling.

“Really, I had such high hopes for you, Dougan, but this is the best you can do?”

Placing a blowpipe against her lips with shaking fingers, Saskia aimed and exhaled. A tiny dart shot toward the back of his neck.

He caught the dart without so much as a backward glance. “Pathetic. You think you can—augh!”

Brilliant white light blazed from his hand. A miniature star streaked toward the ceiling. Xonroth stared at the charred ruin of his fingers.

The dart had contained a tiny sliver of arlium, which Saskia had just heated to an incredible temperature. He’d released the tiny dart bomb too quickly for it to do as much damage as she’d hoped. Still, she’d hurt him, and that was something. She hurriedly loaded another dart.

“I tire of this,” he growled.

As he spoke those last words, he clenched his fist. And in that moment, a crushing weight settled over Saskia. The blowpipe fell from her nerveless lips and rolled away. Until then, she’d been struggling to sit up. Now, she was struggling to breathe.

Ahead of her, she could see Rover Dog’s head pressed against the cold stone, just as hers was. He reached for her, but the few metres that separated them might as well have been kilometres.

She focussed her will on the remaining darts in her belt pouch. It burst into flame as a dozen beads of shining arlium rose into the air, straining against the Primordial’s gravity magic.

With what little remained of her fading mental energy, she drove the arlium beads toward him. Without the blowpipe to propel them, and slowed by that dogram spell of his, their motion was closer to that of bumblebees than bullets. And now she didn’t have the element of surprise on her side.

In a flash, he was standing over her. Before she could pull her fiery projectiles back, they had wobbled beyond the limits of his gravity field, and shot toward the ceiling.

A sliver of dark, amorphous metal stabbed into her arm—her corrupted one. She felt it only as a shifting pressure. Her arm didn’t even bleed.

“Interesting,” said Xonroth. “This corruption should have destroyed you already, and yet here you are.”

“For a little while,” gasped Saskia, still having a hard time drawing breath.

“Perhaps more than a little while,” he said. “We shall see.”

The weight pressing down on her abruptly lifted, and she found herself rising into the air; not on her own wings, but lifted by some external force. Xonroth floated before her. Briefly she toyed with the idea of lighting up the arlium in her wings and soaring higher. Maybe she could lure him far enough away…

With an audible snap, her wings broke off, and clattered to the platform below. Then her armour began to crack and splinter, and fall away, dissolving into sand before her eyes, before being carried away on the wind. Her skin crawled in a quite literal sense as the last of the duanum sand flowed off her, and in its place, a crystalline lattice began to grow across her body.

She couldn’t move; couldn’t do anything but glare at the Primordial as he stripped her bare, then encased her in what was beginning to look like an amber cocoon. Last to be covered up were her eyes and mouth and nose. To her surprise, she felt no discomfort at not being able to breathe. But a fog was descending over her thoughts, and no matter how hard she fought against it, she knew she had only seconds before she lost consciousness. And just as clearly, she knew this was a sleep from which she would never awaken.

Rover Dog, she thought. It’s now or never. And I…thank you. For everything.

Unlike Ruhildi, he couldn’t hear her thoughts. But maybe some of her feeling of gratitude would make it through their bond.

Through her friend’s eyes, she’d watched as he crawled, inch by painful inch, toward Sarthea’s crystal sphere. Now she watched as he rose shakily onto his knees, and took hold of her ancestor.

Xonroth turned toward him in the air, but it was already too late.

Rover Dog held a tiny tube of silver liquid between his claws. He cracked open the tube, and poured its contents into the hole Velandir’s shadowblade had torn through the crystal sphere. It flowed greedily through the opening, and then…

Tendrils of light and shadow burst forth from the sphere. They flailed, and twitched, and tore at the stone beneath them. One of them wrapped around Rover Dog’s leg, but it released him a moment later—and surged through the air, reaching across tens of metres toward the Primordial.

He scooted back in the air.

The tendrils faltered, and sagged, and twitched, and went still. And then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, they were gone. Sarthea’s body remained within the crystal sphere, but there was no life left in it. Just a blackened husk.

Saskia hoped her ancestor wouldn’t be too angry at her, if they met in another world. There had been no other way.

Xonroth’s main source of essence was gone. But he wasn’t powerless. Not yet. With Sarthea’s death, he went back to drawing essence from the world tree, as he’d done before he became her vassal.

Saskia’s friends might be able to defeat him like this. He wasn’t quite the threat he had been. But there was another option; an easier way to neutralise him.

They were floating gently back down to the stone column. Good. It would be best if they were on stable ground for what would come next. She looked into the Primordial’s eyes; gleaming silver-blue in the light of the frozen flame. And as her consciousness faded, she drew him down into the dream with her.

They floated in the world between worlds; she and her enemy. Circling beneath them both, the great winged leviathan; her undermind. Distasteful and dangerous though this next step may be, it was for the best.

At her behest, a fleshy tendril coiled about the Primordial. Its tip reached for the back of his neck, already scarred where he’d been joined to Sarthea’s collective. He gave a slight shudder as the tendril entered his flesh, and began to fuse with it.

She felt their growing connection almost as physical pain—an immense pressure bearing down on her.

Time to wake up, and disable his magic, before he could do any more harm out there in the real world. She let herself rise gently toward the light of the surface. Any moment now. Any moment now, and this would all be over.

A hand closed around her ankle. She kicked, but it wouldn’t let go. Now she was sinking, faster and faster, and none of her struggles amounted to anything in the presence of this overwhelming…

Looking down, she saw that Xonroth’s eyes were open. His face was alight with triumph.