Millennial Mage

Tala stood, finishing off her buttered bread and smiling to her minder. “Ready?”

Thron quickly donned his pack with their supplies and nodded, keeping well out of arms’ reach.

She shook her head but didn’t comment. Instead, she directed her power into Flow once more, giving the weapon its void-knife form and herself voidsight.

Thron’s face twitched. “That’s never not terrifying, even now that I’m more used to it.”

“Used to it? Wait, you can see it?” Her through-spike should disguise her physical oddities and manifestations of power to most observers.

He shrugged. “Hints, yes, which honestly makes it creepier. It’s like seeing a monster out of the corner of your eye, but when you turn, there’s no trace of it. As to the other, you practice with your weapon’s void-forms enough that I get the sense of your eyes changing rather regularly.”

“Oh, umm. Fair enough.” She turned away from the slightly awkward conversation and examined the world around her, getting her bearings.

A few long breath cycles later, she was able to process the deluge of information, and she was back in relative command of her faculties and ready to continue on.

“We’ll follow this path first.”

“Lead the way.”

Tala set off down the walking path, biasing herself toward the inside of the narrow way.

She was following a thread of reality, and as she walked, she continued to find a rock path running parallel to that thread.

That seemed normal enough; their chunk just seemed to be a lengthy one.

Then, as she continued to walk, she glanced upward, and she stumbled to the side, her hand finding the wall beside her for support.

“Tali!” Thron growled. “I mean Tala, what’s wrong?”

“Look up, Thron.”

He presumably did. “I don’t… wait… What?”

“None of the chunks that were above us before are still there.”

“And we aren’t spinning. When did we slow? Did we slow?”

Tala shivered. This place continues to surprise. “More than that, watch above yourself and walk forward.”

She glanced back at him, and he was giving her a skeptical look. “Is this some half-baked plan to infect me with the dasgannach?”

“What? No! I’ll walk, too.”

He grunted. “Just making sure. I don’t know what they did to those things. Maybe, it’s imbued you with a desire to spread it, somehow.”

“That’s… that’s actually pretty creepy, now that I think about it.”

“Exactly.”

“Fine, fine. I’ll be extra sure to keep my distance, but see what you can see. You can probably just look out over the edge, too.”

“I was trying to avoid that.”

“Yeah… I don’t blame you there.”

They moved forward a bit, and Thron made confused noises.

“So, you see it?”

“Yes, and no. It’s like we’re somehow moving around the other fragments much faster than we’re actually moving, and when we get to a new side, it’s an entirely different fragment, instead.”

“That makes no sense, but that is exactly what I’m seeing.”

“Do you have any guesses on what the rust is going on?”

Tala scrunched her face. “Guesses? Yes.”

He waited a moment before prompting, “Well?”

She smiled at that. It reminded her of all the times they’d studied various subjects, inquiring back and forth to tease out little tidbits of nuance. “From the basic lessons we received, and what I’ve put together, I think what we’re seeing isn’t actually there, not in the same way such a thing would be there in Zeme.”

He tilted his head in confusion but didn’t interject.

“I think we are seeing a manifestation of fragmented reality poking through. These are the pieces that were left out in the reconstruction of Zeme. They are like the back face of a cross-stitch.”

“I think I know what that is, but I can’t say I’ve ever examined the back of one.”

Tala grunted. “My family used to do them on occasion. They teach dexterity and persistence.” She felt a smile pull at her face. I’m going back to see my family again. She just needed to figure out this place so that she could leave.

“Alright? What does that have to do with anything?”

“Well, the point of a cross-stitch is to make a picture on one side with various colored thread. On the back, you have all the places where the thread had to move across the cloth from one part to another. It’s a tangled mess that never really looks the same as the front, though there are echoes.”

“So, we’re in the sub-structure of Zeme? The parts that were stretched and bent to lock the place we live on into a modicum of stability?”

“I think so, it might even help add to the stability, though I don’t have the faintest idea how.”

“So, the changing fragments?”

“Ahh! Yes. That is our minds, trying to interpret the fragments that we see and doing their best. Because all of this is a hodgepodge of nonsense, that’s what we’re seeing. Each discrete instant is understandable, because otherwise we’d go insane, and our minds have opted to show us this tableau instead. But as a whole? None of this will make sense to us.”

“That was a lot of words just to say: We can’t understand it, and trying too hard might break our brains.”

Tala grunted. “Yeah… I suppose that would have been pithier.”

“So…?”

“So, I see another place I want to check out, right up ahead.”

They walked a little further and were suddenly walking across a pathless plain of gently waving grass.

There was no breeze.

There was no sun.

And the grass was coated in cold, thick, red blood that had somehow already stained their lower legs.

Thron gasped at the sudden change, and Tala looked around in confusion.

The thread that she’d been following hadn’t changed or altered in any way.

Curious, she walked back the way they’d come, circling around Thron.

He followed and once they’d walked a dozen feet or so, they were back on the narrow walkway, the blood utterly gone even from their clothing and shoes.

She turned around. “Alright, then. I don’t understand at all… Onward!”

He lifted an eyebrow at her.

“What? I can’t pass you without getting closer than you want me to.”

He groused a bit but finally just shook his head, turned, and walked back until they were in the grass meadow.

This time, however, instead of blood, the grass was covered in something that appeared to be snow, but was amethyst and oddly warm.

It wasn’t hot, just warm like a chair right after someone else stood up from it.

Thron looked around and grimaced. “I think I preferred the blood.”

“Yeah…”

Only a short way into the grassy plane, Tala paused near another protuberance in the threads of reality.

It seemed like the closer she looked the more threads she could see, but most were a lot fainter than the one she’d been following.

“Here goes nothing.”

She pressed her eye up against it, while maintaining her void-sight.

As the two meshed, she could see out into Zeme.

She stared at an expansive lawn, with an obsidian building in the near distance.

Tala laughed, pulling back. “Alright, then! I think we can do this. I just need to find a place outside of the city, and we can go from there.”

She looked back towards Thron and hesitated.

As he drew close to the nodule, she could suddenly see strands of reality fading into view, which extended out from him, as well.

The strongest one led back the way they’d come.

She looked down at herself but saw nothing. No, that isn’t right.

She focused, using a similar technique to that which she’d used to perceive magic in the air with her mage-sight.

Show me what I’ve dismissed or tuned out.

Suddenly, she could see dozens, if not hundreds, of threads spreading out from herself as well.

Again, the brightest led back the way they’d come, but one also led to the node she’d just looked through.

Without perfect memory, she couldn’t be sure, but she thought that she’d walked through this exact spot on that lawn when Pallun led them to the obsidian hut, while Thron hadn’t.

So, I have a tie to this location, but he doesn’t?

That might make sense, but it also might just be supposition.

I have to test it… but I doubt I’ll find a way in the near future.

The real question was, did she just happen to come across another nodule of a place that she’d been, or was it her having been there, which allowed her to reach it?

I just don’t have enough information.

She examined the threads coming from her self, and as she looked closer, she felt like she should know where they led, but she couldn’t figure it out.

Looking between herself and Thron, she did think that many of the threads seemed to be leading to the same places.

Because we went to a lot of the same places?

Picking one of those shared points at random from among those more prominent that they shared, she turned to follow the pair of threads. “This way.”

She set off across the purple-dusted grass, and Thron followed behind.

Even though she wasn’t following one of the more substantial threads, there seemed to be a way forward. She didn’t come to an edge or anything of the sort.

A hundred or so steps later, the ground transformed again in an eyeblink, and they were walking on a well-cobbled street, flanked by buildings that she dismissed for the moment.

It should be… there! She placed one eye against the new node and found that she could see through once again.

Hah! It was a crossroads near the edge of the city. Why was this among the stronger threads? If we were both there when we got back from Croi, that was days ago.

Maybe, it was because it was a crossroads, but they’d walked through dozens of those from the edge of the city to the House of Blood’s hold.

Why here?

She didn’t have an answer.

“Tala.” Thron’s voice had an urgency and an odd strain to it, that pulled her from her musings.

“What—” Words died on her lips as she pulled back, opening her other eye.

There were silhouettes standing in the windows of the buildings around them.

Every single window.

The silhouettes existed even when the windows were utterly clear glass, so the person or thing should have been easily visible.

There was nothing to them in her void-sight, and even the remnants of her magesight showed nothing.

Nothing.

Creatures of nothing? Is that a thing? She almost laughed, but the humor was overwhelmed by the cloying sensation that she’d seen these things before.

The nothing between the threads. Is this just another perception of them? Like the blood vs purple dust? Another way for our minds to attempt to make sense of what I’m seeing?

That made sense, but she really didn’t like what it implied.

What would have had to happen for her mind to decide that these things should be interpreted as vaguely humanoid creatures.

What did my subconscious catch that I didn’t. She missed Alat more than ever. The Alternate Interface would be able to comb through her memories and pick out exactly what it was.

Tala was at a loss.

She spoke quietly, while continuing to look around herself. “Are they moving?”

“No. I don’t think so. I just noticed them, and they were all there. It feels like they’re watching.”

“Yeah, that’s how it feels to me, too.” She briefly considered, once again, pulling out a blood-star and mirroring her perspective so she could watch in all directions at once, but dismissed the idea as she had before.

There was no way her unenhanced mind could handle that much input.

“So, where to now? I’ve no idea where we’re going.” Thron was looking around himself nervously, trying to watch every direction at once.

“Oh! Oh… I’m an idiot.”

“That’s what I like to hear from the woman I’m following through a twisted, nightmare land.”

“No, this is a good thing. I just didn’t think of it earlier.” She shook her head and flexed her will to grow gloves over her hands. Then, she strengthened the void magics in her elk-leathers, specifically around her hands, via aspect mirroring from Flow.

That accomplished, she tried to touch one of the reality threads.

Her fingers brushed it, and she felt a feedback through the glove and her connection with the elk-leathers.

It was faint, but she got a sense of where the thread would likely lead.

Quickly, she searched through the threads that seemed to be in common between her and Thron.

The more she worked with them, the more of them she saw, and by the time she thought she found the ones that she needed, she could perceive uncountable connections running off in every direction.

They almost seemed to be making up everything.

Honestly, it was straining her mind.

With a shake of her head, she dismissed Flow’s void-form, while keeping the void in her gloves and a light hold on the thread she wanted.

“Okay, I know where we need to go.”

He gave her a careful look. “Why do you sound hesitant?”

She swallowed and gave him an apologetic look. “Because we need to enter one of the buildings.” She looked towards the building they needed before looking at the figure in the window beside the door.

She jerked back gasping. “Thron? When did the mouths appear?”

The dwarf cursed as they both looked around. “I definitely didn’t see them before.”

Now, every single silhouette had a single, identical feature: A too wide, bright-white smile.

The teeth were decidedly inhuman in both kind and number.

Thron visibly swallowed. “Still want to go into the building?”

“Definitely not, but that’s the way, I’m almost positive.”

He nodded. “If you say so, but I’m going to build a corrosion field around us.”

She shook her head. “No. I have no idea what using magic externally like that would do. It might call all of them down on us, and it might not even do anything to them. You can’t really corrode nothing.”

He grimaced but nodded. “Alright… So, you think they’re ‘nothing?’”

“I really don’t know, but that seems to fit what little I’ve seen.”

Tala walked toward the door, her left hand forming a loose hold around the threads that she could feel, but no longer see.

She held Flow in her right hand for comfort’s sake and used that hand to push on the door before her.

There were no door handles.

Why is that worse? How is it creepy for a door to lack handles?

A part of her expected a creature to be standing on the other side when the door swung inward, but the way was clear as it led down a poorly lit hallway.

She glanced back and whispered. “Walk where I walk and don’t deviate. It should be safe if we follow this path.”

I really, really hope that’s true. But dubious platitudes were better than: ‘We might be about to die, try not to.’

As she turned back, she knew that one of the things would be standing right in front of her, and her entire body tensed, telling her to sprint away in any direction.

She fought down the urge and looked forward once more.

There was nothing there, and not ‘nothing’ in the sense of a creature.

The way was clear.

She shuddered, her entire body over stimulated by her innate fight or flight responses.

The building was a human style home, though it made no sense for such a building to be right on a main street with massive windows looking out at them.

Speaking of which, those windows had looked into a sitting room that was just off the hall they were in, to Tala’s right.

Against her better judgment, she looked that way.

The figure hadn’t moved, but it was still obviously oriented on her.

It hadn’t turned, the silhouette of its body was still pointed towards the window, but the smile had moved to the side of its head.

Yeah… that’s worse.

She once again had the perfect knowledge that looking forward would reveal a thing standing directly in front of her, and she growled as she fought down the urge to run.

Once again, she turned towards the too-dark hallway and found it empty.

Let’s do this.

You can do this.

Come on, Tala.

She didn’t run, she didn’t even jog, but she walked as quickly as she could.

Behind her, Thron made frustrated, unhappy noises but kept up easily enough.

The hallway went on for far, far too long, with dozens of closed doors to either side of the uncomfortably narrow corridor.

Behind each of them lay something that wanted to pop out and grab her.

She knew that to be true, but she fought down that knowledge and kept on, trembling at the strain.

Finally, the world was different, and they walked through a field once again.

Thron cursed, but it sounded relieved.

“Are you alright?”

“No, I’m absolutely not alright. What was that?”

“I don’t know. They weren’t creatures, though. At least, I don’t think so. They were… reactions to us, I think.”

“Like ripples in a pond?”

She hesitated. “Yeah, actually. That almost seems to fit.”

“Then, where are they now?”

Tala looked around. “I don’t know. This part of the Doman-Imithe might be more stable?

Just ahead she saw the next nodule that the thread she was following led to. “I think that might be our ticket out.”

“What? You’ve been looking at things I can’t see, girl.”

“Ahh, right. It’s right up ahead.” She shook her head. “Just let me verify.”

She quick-walked over to the nodule and pressed her face against it.

It slid away.

Right.

She remanifested void-Flow and her voidsight.

She yelped and stumbled backwards.

One of the things was standing right in front of her, only visible to her void sight.

She almost lost her loose hold on the threads, and something told her that would be disastrous for both her and Thron.

He’s anchored to me in this place? That was the feeling she got, but she’d also had the feeling that she should sprint away, so she had no idea what was happening or what was true.

The thing hadn’t moved, and it waited just on the other side of the nodule.

This one was utterly massive, however.

It still seemed like it was the size of a man, but somehow felt like it was hundreds of cubic miles in volume.

Like Terry? A lot there but also compact?

She didn’t know.

Very carefully, she moved uncomfortably close to the thing and pressed her eye to the protuberance.

Once connected, she saw the place outside of Platoiri where they’d arrived back from Croi, the landing place for their dimensionally compressed travel.

“I found a safe place.”

Thron came closer than he had before but still stayed out of arms’ reach.

“Let me see what I can do with this.”

She sheathed Flow and made sure she had void surrounding both hands.

Thus prepared, she pushed her fingers into the nodule.

Power began flowing from her like a whirlwind, but she had it to spare as soon as she dropped Flow’s void-form.

I didn’t like looking at that thing anyways.

She pulled with all her will and magical might, and a hole slowly opened.

Thron’s voice once again had a hint of urgency and strain. “Tala.”

She spared a bit of attention to look away from what she was doing but couldn’t really see, only to notice black shapes bounding through the grass towards them from all directions.

She didn’t take the time to put words to their form, and she didn’t honestly know if she could.

With a last surge of will and magic and strength, she pulled the hole open wide. “Go!”

Thron overcame his desire to stay away from her as he dove nearly through her arms and out the hole.

Tala followed, turning to watch the hole close.

But, it didn’t close.

“Well… that seems bad.”