Undermind Book 5, Chapter 2: Humps (2nd draft)

The furthest depths of the Earth’s oceans are home to many a bizarre creature, but there are few more strange and terrifying than the order of Lophiiformes, more commonly known as the anglerfish. The most distinctive feature of the anglerfish is a fleshy growth protruding from the forehead whose tip glows faintly in the deep dark. In such places beyond the reach of the sun and moon and stars, this tiny light must be a curious thing indeed. Other denizens of the oceans are drawn to the shining lure like moths to a flame. They do not see the creature behind it—until they get too close, and the toothy maw of the anglerfish is revealed in all of its horrifying glory.

On days like today, Saskia Wendle wondered if her kind and the anglerfish might be related. Except she—the part of her that called itself Saskia—wasn’t the anglerfish.

She was the lure.

The part of her akin to the anglerfish itself, she called her undermind. Her undermind lay beyond this world—beyond all worlds—in a non-place she called the between. There was higher-dimensional physics involved that she couldn’t even begin to get her head around, and nor did she care to. Down that path lay only madness. But for all of its unknowable strangeness, her undermind had simple goals. It wanted to feed on the magic of this world. And on this world, magic came from souls. As she’d just learned from her encounter with the Serpent King, she could devour those too.

This was the reason why her thoughts had turned to the anglerfish. Her impish little body was the lure. The Serpent King had been her prey. And the undermind…it was the gaping, sharp-toothed maw that had devoured his soul.

Saskia didn’t know how to feel about that. On the one hand, if she hadn’t eaten him, he’d have eaten her. On the other hand…ew. She didn’t exactly have a list of things she wanted to do on this world, but if she did, chowing down on demon souls would not be on it.

Regardless, the anglerfish analogy only went so far. Anglerfish had but one lure, whereas her undermind’s tendrils reached into multiple worlds, with several different Saskias dancing on the ends of invisible chords. These incarnations, she called her mouthlets.

Her first mouthlet was back on Earth—a young woman who had grown up with no inkling of her eldritch nature. Saskia the human was still alive and kicking, as far as she knew.

The second Saskia had emerged fully-formed on the world tree known as Arbor Mundi. That mouthlet had been a monstrous troll—a fact that had not, at first, ingratiated her with most of Arbor Mundi’s native denizens. Nevertheless, a troll’s immense strength and endurance had also saved her life on many an occasion. But even trolls could be killed, and Saskia was no exception. She’d eventually succumbed to a magical affliction, and now she was banished from Arbor Mundi. For there could be only one mouthlet per world, and once that mouthlet died, there was no going back.

Upon Troll-Saskia’s death, her undermind had extruded a third mouthlet into this new world, the one the Serpent King had named Rothgoria. This mouthlet was an imp, though she had inherited the memories and some of the abilities of her human and troll incarnations as well.

And that wasn’t all she’d brought with her. The soul of Ruhildi, her undead friend from Arbor Mundi, was now inextricably tied to her own. It was good to have Ruhildi along for the ride, even if her friend presently lacked a body to call her own.

“Just so we’re clear,” said Ruhildi, “you’re saying you…ate a god.”

“Not a god, exactly. Just a really powerful demon.” As she spoke, Saskia fluttered between the dead trees of a dried-up desert oasis sixty kilometres north of the temple ruins where her mouthlet had spawned on this world—and where she’d encountered the subject of their discussion.

“A being who were around afore the first beasts of this world crawled out of the sea,” said Ruhildi. “Who forged new races as I might forge a hammer. Who shaped the course of history for generations uncounted. That, Sashki, is a god, not a demon. In this world, we are the demons.”

Saskia blinked. Her friend kinda had a point there. But she wasn’t going to concede the argument so easily. “I know, strictly speaking, demons are creatures from another world. In this place, humans are demons, we’re demons—everyone’s a demon except…well, the demons. But on Earth the name is usually associated with certain physical characteristics, not just the creature’s origin. Leathery wings, tail, horns, hooves, scales, snakes, an affinity for fire—those are the kinds of things Earth’s fiction and mythology portrays as demonic, so that’s how the Serpent King’s name for his people translated in my head. The actual word he used sounded more like a cat coughing up a hairball, but—”

“Alright, don’t get grit up your butt, Sashki. I were just yanking your tail. It matters not what we call him.” If Ruhildi had eyes of her own, they’d probably be rolling right now. “God or demon, he were fair ancient and fair powerful, and he’s in your belly now.”

Saskia’s tummy gave a little gurgle. “More like in my…soul-tree. I hope that’s enough to sustain me, because it doesn’t look like I’ll be getting any real food around here.”

Indeed, this parched husk of an oasis was one of the few enduring signs that anything had ever lived in this desert. The land, though never verdant, had dried out considerably since the Serpent King’s time. Battle-scarred scrublands had given way to a wide expanse of bare rocks and blood-red sand where not even the hardiest of cacti could survive. The desert stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction—which was pretty far from this aerial vantage—and continued yet further, if her minimap was anything to go by.

Oh yeah, the minimap. That little circle in the corner of her vision was another thing she’d acquired in Arbor Mundi, along with various other game-like user interface elements. No, she wasn’t starring in her own personal LitRPG. They were just representations of the extra-sensory information her oracle magic was feeding her. Had she not been raised on Earth and later taken up a career as a game developer, they might instead have manifested as voices or visions or dreams. Not that she hadn’t had her share of weird dreams as well.

Her minimap centred on her current location and extended for tens of kilometres in every direction. And all it showed was sand, rocks, sand, and more sand.

“This place is dead as the Deadlands,” said Ruhildi. “Not half as cold, though.”

“Thank Ixathi for that.” As she spoke the name, Saskia involuntarily cast her eyes up at the cosmic entity prowling the sky, visible even in broad daylight, dwarfing even this world’s moon. Ixathi the Old God, devourer of worlds. If there really was a god here, Ixathi was it. “Hell doesn’t have cold days. Cold nights, on the other hand… Wait, can you feel what I feel?”

“Och aye. Mayhap you only wanted to share your eyes and ears with me, Sashki, but I share allyour senses. I can feel the beat of your heart, the hollow in your belly, the wind whistling ’twixt your thighs—”

“Okay okay, I get the idea.” Saskia felt her face flush. Dogramit, imps could blush too.

Another fun fact: imps didn’t wear clothes. Even if they did, she wasn’t going to find any clothes around here. Here, there was nothing to wear but sky and sand.

“Sashki, your face is burning,” said Ruhildi. “Have you fallen ill with the fever?”

Saskia groaned as Ruhildi’s soft chuckle reverberated inside her head. It was an unfamiliar sound, but not unwelcome. Her friend had laughed so rarely back on Arbor Mundi. Maybe here she could find the happiness she’d been denied on her own world.

Leaving behind the dubious shelter of the dead oasis, Saskia continued on her journey northwards into the deep desert. She didn’t have any particular destination in mind, other than outta here, so she’d picked this direction largely at random, but now she’d best stick to it until she reached the desert’s edge—assuming it had an edge.

Her minimap was also a compass, so she didn’t have to worry about flying in circles. She wasn’t sure if in this world the compass oriented itself according to magnetic north or some other landmark. On Arbor Mundi, north had been in the direction of the world tree’s trunk. Different world, potentially different physical laws, so it was best not to assume anything.

This landscape, though desolate, was by no means boring. The expanse of crinkly sand dunes and oddly-shaped rock formations called to her adventurous spirit. It was unlike any environment she’d explored on Earth or Arbor Mundi. And if she did grow bored with looking at sand, she need only look up at the all-devouring, planet-spanning tentacular leviathan in the sky. She found it hard to believe that would be a boring sight any time soon. Terrifying, yes. Boring, no.

If that weren’t enough, the sheer novelty of flight—or to be more specific, self-propelled flight—was a rush like no other. It was one thing to fly aboard an aircraft or on the back of a dragon (been there, done that), but soaring on her own wings was another thing entirely. Once she got going, she was fast. Faster than any land-bound creature, including her troll mouthlet. Riding the warm updraughts was quite literally a breeze. It was better than climbing; better than chocolate; better than sex. Well okay, maybe not better than troll sex. But it wasn’t like she’d be getting any of that around here, so best forget about it.

As the sun crawled below the horizon, the temperature dropped precipitously. Scorching hot days and frigid nights were the norm here, it seemed. Her imp body hadn’t been overly bothered by the heat, but the cold was seeping into her bones, making her lethargic and slow of thought. She suspected imps might be cold-blooded. Their ancestors were reptilian, after all.

Saskia roosted on the overhanging portion of a small cliff, hooking her claws into a handy split in the rock, and dangling upside down with her wings wrapping snugly about her body.

This isn’t so bad, she thought to herself as she waited to slide into dreamland. Her chest vibrated with a gentle buzzing sound, filling her with thoughts of soft sheets and crackling fireplaces.

“Sashki, you’re purring,” said Ruhildi.

The vibrations stopped. “No I’m not!”

Ruhildi laughed. “You were rattling like a frostling snug in a snow cave. ’Twere a soothing sound—much easier on the ears than your honking trow-snores.”

Saskia was too drowsy to argue. So imps had a bit of feline in them? She’d have to watch out for dogs. Pity. She liked dogs more than cats…

The warm caress of dawn’s light against her wings brought her back to the waking world, feeling refreshed and raring to go. She unfurled her wings and—

“Whoa! Are you seeing this, Ruhildi?” she gasped.

The dunes, the rocks, and even the cliff walls to which she clung—everything was covered in myriad lights, like candle flames reflected on the surface of a lake. They varied in size and shape and brightness and colour, but she could see them clearly even in daylight. Several larger shapes moved ponderously across the desert sand. Other smaller ones flitted through the air like fireflies. The rest wavered in place, phasing in and out of sight, and swaying in the breeze.

“Aye,” said her friend. “Methinks I ken what we’re looking at.”

“Some kind of mostly-invisible, yet phosphorescent lifeform?” guessed Saskia. “None of them show up on my minimap.”

“No, they’re—”

“Oh, don’t tell me! They’re fairies! Lots and lots of fairies. Hmm…this could be bad. Do you think they like the taste of imp?”

Ruhildi made a pained sound. “Did you leave your wits behind in Arbor Mundi? They’re echoes, Sashki—what you might call souls.”

“You mean like ghosts?” asked Saskia. “But there are so many! And they don’t look like humans or demons, or whatever. They’re just…amorphous blobs of light.”

“They were once beasts and birds and trees,” said Ruhildi. “Now untethered from their lives, most have forgotten what they were. Some have merged; others divided. This…soup of echoes is what remains.”

Saskia shook her head. “Seriously? You can’t expect me to believe trees have souls. Animals, maybe, but not—”

“Why not?”

Saskia wished she could stare at Ruhildi, because her friend deserved a good stare right now. “Why not? Because they’re trees!”

“Garri once told me trees are akin to slow beasts,” said Ruhildi. “We don’t see them move of their own accord, but they do move, turning leaves towards sun; always changing with the seasons. Garri were full of shite about most everything else, but he were right about that.”

Saskia chuckled. “If you say so. He was kind of an expert on the subject. I suppose it takes a tree to know one.”

“Echoes come from anything that lives—and some things that don’t,” continued Ruhildi. “’Twere true on Arbor Mundi, and ’tis true here. Echoes just don’t usually linger overlong in the waking world.”

“Given the fact that this is now a lifeless desert, they must have been here for some time, yet I’m only just seeing them this morning. I wonder why.”

“Mayhap they have nowhere to go.”

“No, I mean I wonder why did I just start seeing them? Probably an oracle thing.”

“Mayhap. As a revenant, I could sometimes sense the passing of echoes. Here, I can see only what you see. Mayhap you’re drawing from my necrourgic power, as you did back in the temple.”

Now there was a thought. Saskia considered the possibility as she launched herself from the cliff face. Several airborne ghosts scattered before her.

Fantasinating. So they could sense her presence, even if they couldn’t ordinarily interact with the living.

She wondered if she could absorb these souls like she’d absorbed the Serpent King. Probably, she decided. They must be far weaker than the ancient demon who had ruled over this world for untold aeons. That didn’t mean she shouldabsorb their souls, of course. The thought of it was just…nope. Only as a last resort if one of them attacked her and there was no other way to deal with it.

It wouldn’t hurt to take a closer look at these souls, though. When she approached the stationary tree souls, even they seemed to shy away from her. Hesitantly, she reached out to touch one of them with her tiny clawed hands. Though it looked more like a bonfire than a living tree, she felt no heat coming off it. And when her hand brushed against the flame, it passed straight through with no resistance.

Okay, so as expected, they had no physical presence. They didn’t interact with the molecules of her hand. And she didn’t shloop them up like arlium. If she wanted to absorb another soul, she’d have to draw it into that dreamlike soul-space she’d entered with the Serpent King. But since she didn’t want that, she took to the air again, and continued her northbound flight.

There were souls everywherein this desert. Sure, they were more densely packed in some places than others, but there had once been an abundance of life here. Now it was all gone, and only the souls remained.

Later that morning, Saskia saw that they had company of an unusually persistent sort. Little red flames swarmed around her, spinning and whirling, like fireflies. One of them darted close and—

“Aargh!” hissed Saskia, rubbing her backside. “It pinched me!”

“’Tis an echo, Sashki. Echoes can’t hurt living flesh.”

“Well this one did! I’ll get you, you little…”

The next time it came close, her hand lashed out, lightning fast. She felt a faint jolt in the tips of her fingers, then the flame darted away again, doing loop-de-loops in the air. She had an uneasy feeling that something was laughing at her.

After she swatted away a few more brazen attempts to nip her in unmentionable places, the whirling flame vanished and reappeared in a different form. Though still seemingly made of spectral fire, it had taken on a recognisable shape. Those wings; that tail… It was an imp!

The ghostly imp regarded her with…well, an impish grin. He was male—made abundantly clear by his enormous…well, suffice it to say she found it hard to believe he’d been that well endowed in life. Clearly he was overcompensating.

“Oh ha ha, you little creep,” she snapped. “Pinch me again, and I’ll petition the local demon lord to have you punished. Oh wait, I ate him. Guess I’ll have to do it myself, then—if you don’t behave.”

Still grinning, he did a little cartwheel in the air. But then one of the other whirling flames coalesced into a plump female imp with exaggerated boobage. She slapped him hard across the face. The two shifted back into formless flames and spun away, lost among the maelstrom of souls.

“We hear you, hey tasty little fleshy,” spoke a chorus of voices. “We behave.”

“They’ll behave badly,” said a deeper voice, sounding like a father amused by the antics of his rowdy spawn. “Imps,” he snorted. “Whyever did I bring them back?”

Saskia looked intently at the souls darting around her body. “Who said that?”

“For an entity as powerful as yourself, false imp, you’re not very bright, are you?”

As he spoke a second time, a lightbulb flickered in her brain, accompanied by a surge of alarm. “Rothgorad.”

“In the—well no, not in the flesh,” he said. “In your flesh, I suppose…”

“I thought you’d…dissolved or something,” she told the Serpent King, even as she peered inside her soul space, examining the tree that represented the core of her soul. She couldn’t see any sign of a serpent gnawing on her branches, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t somewhere inside the tree, devouring her from the inside.

“Sashki…” said Ruhildi’s soul, glancing down at the branch that stirred beneath her spectral feet. In here, her friend had something like a physical form.

“Be at ease, false imp. I amdissolving—becoming part of you. But it is a slow process. For now, I am awake. As for how much longer I will linger as a separate entity…who can say? There’s a lot of me to digest.”

Saskia felt horror boiling up in her. “You’re Bobba Fett in the Sarlacc pit—and I’m the Sarlacc! I don’t wanna be a Sarlacc…”

“What strange metaphors your mind conjures up,” said Rothgorad. “Admittedly, this one is somewhat apt. But there is no pain. Not now that I have stopped fighting. And if it eases your conscience, I would have done the same to you. The strong devour the…less strong. It is how it has always been, and you would do well to accept it as I have.”

Saskia didn’t know how to respond to that. She wasn’t about to embrace his style of Darwinian morality. Still, she couldn’t find it in herself to hate him, and she wouldn’t wish this fate on her worst enemy. Maybe she could find a way to stop…ugh, digesting him—without unleashing such a dangerous entity to prey on whatever unsuspecting creatures that may still be out there. She’d have to give it some thought, but first…

“Wait, how did you know my Star Wars metaphor was apt? Can you read my mind!?”

“Oh yes, and what delicious thoughts you have,” said Rothgorad. “So deliciously strange—and deliciously stupid.”

Before she could reply, Ruhildi leapt to her defence. “’Tweren’t Sashki who bit more than she could swallow. How it must gall you to be bested by her.”

“Ah, the bound soul,” said Rothgorad, seeming to notice Ruhildi for the first time. “Soulbinding is beneath you. Devour her and be done with it. Think how much stronger you could be with her inside you, instead of hanging off like a dag from a sheep’s butt.”

“No-one’s getting inside anyone—except…well, you inside me,” said Saskia. “Also ew.”

By the time she began to pay attention to the waking world, the imp souls had departed. Must have gotten bored with her once she stopped paying attention to them. The landscape remained as barren as ever, with not a single sign of life, despite the abundance of souls.

What calamity had befallen this place? Had it simply been a climate shift, like what had occurred in northern Africa thousands of years ago? Or some other apocalypse?

“Am I the only living creature left in this world?” she wondered aloud.

“I doubt it,” said the Serpent King. “Much has changed since my imprisonment. The desert has returned. But not Ixathi—not yet. If the Old God had come back, these sands would be as empty of souls as they are of life.”

“And Ixathi wouldn’t leave a bunch of souls just lying there, if there weren’t any living creatures making more,” guessed Saskia. “It would have…harvested the crop.”

“Precisely,” said Rothgorad. “Perhaps you’re not as stupid as I assumed.”

“Gee, thanks,” muttered Saskia.

Several hours later, she stared at a dome-shaped ruins standing alone amidst the featureless expanse of red sand. She spent several seconds trying to find words to adequately describe the depths of her frustration. Unable to think of anything appropriately witty to say in her frazzled state, she gave up and went with her fallback option.

“This sucks.”

Ruhildi made soothingly agreeable noises in her mind, while Saskia elaborated.

“We’ve been heading north this entire time. So how the hell did we wind up right back here where we started…? My minimap is supposed to prevent crap like this. This sucks.”

“Methinks there’s magic afoot,” said Ruhildi.

“Oh really?” sarcasmed Saskia. “You know magic is just a catch-all label for weird crap we don’t understand.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Rothgorad. “I understand precisely what the soulbinders have wrought here.”

“Really,” said Saskia. “Then do tell.”

“Oh but I do so enjoy watching you bumble about like a blind beetle,” he said.

“Of course you do. Be a donkhole then. We don’t need you.” She sighed heavily. “Okay. Okay, okay. Something must be messing with the compass on my minimap. If we can’t rely on that, we’ll have to find another way to push through this spell, or whatever it is.”

“You could try using our stonesense,” suggested Ruhildi.

“What? I can’t…huh. I suppose I can now, thanks to you.”

It hadn’t even occurred to her to try that. Her oracle senses were usually so much more useful than Ruhildi’s short-range stonesense that there would be little point. But if something was fooling one set of supernatural senses, it couldn’t hurt to check the other.

“So how do I do this?” asked Saskia. “When I used your stoneshaping magic, I could sense something. Like I knew the position and composition of every particle around me. Is that stonesense? It’s not like I could see a map or anything.”

“Aye, you have the right of it. My stonesense were always with me, but methinks you’ll have to consciously draw upon it.”

“Okay, well here goes…”

She opened up the now-familiar channel of magic between Ruhildi and herself. And just like that, she was feeling her surroundings in a manner quite different from her oracle senses. She could tell there were cracks in some of the temple’s stonework that weren’t visible to the naked eye. All it would take was a bit of pressure to a certain spot, and most of the dome would come tumbling down.

When Saskia flew lower to the ground, she didn’t notice especially out of the ordinary, except…

Now she could feel a slight but noticeable sense of danger emanating from the red sand of the desert. The lower she flew, the greater the danger, but it never reached a level that felt truly life-threatening.

“Is…is this sand radioactive?” she wondered aloud.

Okay, maybe not, but definitely toxic. Examining herself through her oracle medical interface over time, she concluded that exposure to the sand really was damaging cells throughout her body. It was just happening at a rate outpaced by the regenerative powers she’d inherited from her troll incarnation. As long as she didn’t roll around in the sand, she’d probably be okay. Probably.

“’Tis magic doing this,” said Ruhildi. “It feels…a bit like a ward, but not quite the same. I can’t sense its source.”

Ruhildi’s stonesense must be feeding them both the same information, but Saskia trusted Ruhildi’s interpretation a lot more than her own. Her friend was a master stoneshaper, whereas she wasn’t even at the level of a novice. “Some kind of region-wide enchantment then?”

“Mayhap,” said Ruhildi. “That may be why nothing grows here. Nothing can survive…”

“Except me.”

“’Cept you.”

“Fantasinating though this may be, it doesn’t seem like our stonesense will help us navigate this desert,” said Saskia. “I don’t feel any…magnetic anomalies, or anything that would screw up the compass.” Actually, she was pretty sure her supernatural direction sense didn’t rely on magnetism to do its thing, but whatever. “I’m gonna just keep flying. We should keep a close eye on the minimap. If we see any rock formations rotate in a weird way, we can correct for it.”

This time, she headed east. As the day wore on, she did begin to see…oddities. It happened slowly, and the effect was so subtle it was barely noticeable, but objects were moving in unexpected directions relative to one another, not just relative to her. Sometimes they would move slightly closer together, sometimes slightly further apart.

“I wonder…” said Saskia. “What if nothing’s messing with our map? What if there’s some spacey-wacey weirdness happening? As in space itself warping around us.”

“You’ve seen this happen afore?”

“Only in games and movies and such. It’s a pretty common fantasy trope to have impossible mazes that constantly realign, where you can keep going in a straight line and end up right back where you started.”

“Your fantasies are fair odd, Sashki,” said Ruhildi. “I prefer the ones you have about humping a legion of big, sweaty tr—”

Saskia let out a strangled sound, cutting off her friend. “You know, just because we’re sharing this body doesn’t mean we should share everything…”

“Och, but I wouldn’t want to miss the good bits. Too long has it been since I had a good hump.”

“Can we stop talking about…” Saskia trailed off as the terrain beneath her began to shift and deform. “Humps!”

Indeed, a previously flat expanse of sand was now covered in mounds and hills of various sizes. But that wasn’t all. As she watched, the more distant terrain shifted into mountains and canyons. Further still, and it began to get really weird. The land rose up and around, curling back in on itself in impossible ways. Rippling sand dunes clung to vertical cliffs and overhanging arches, while rocky mountains had been squashed down into wide, flat rocky piles. But it wasn’t just impossible in the sense that it was laughing in the face of gravity. She’d lived on a tree the size of a planet, so those kinds of oddities were old hat for her. No, it was also impossible in the same way as optical illusions like Penrose triangles and Mobius strips—shapes that shouldn’t be able to exist in three-dimensional space.

This actually wasn’t the first time she’d seen impossible shapes made manifest. Whenever she herself emerged from the six-dimensional non-space of the between, her body briefly underwent an impossible-seeming transformation before it settled into a stable shape such as a human or troll or imp. She’d seen her own emergence through her vassals’ eyes, and it was truly disturbing.

But what she was seeing now was on an altogether different scale. Hundreds of kilometres warped into pure chaos.

“Mayhap your humps look like that,” said Ruhildi, sounding uncharacteristically shaken. “We flatlanders prefer the regular kind.”