Pyresouls Book 2 | Prologue

Author Note: I'm leaving this prologue chapter up as a free teaser for Pyresouls 2.

I hope you all enjoy your return visit to Lormar!

September 12th, 2035.

Altis Main Campus.

Things were looking up for ol’ Johnson. He’d been given his own M-Space terminal, daily sacrifices, and a host of new toys to play with. He even had access to the Barbs and their radii of control. The things he could do and influence were beyond mortal minds.

Unfortunately, his M-Space terminal was, by its very nature, taking a while to fully apparate into the tight confines of three dimensions. His sacrifices were often late but at least he was getting two square meals a day. How they compressed the humans into such a compact shape was beyond him, but a sacrifice was a sacrifice.

He didn’t want to cause any waves so early into his promotion.

Wriggling his fingers over the keys, Johnson was about to use the mundane computers that humans used to manipulate a few events in Lormar. His fingers didn’t even touch the keys as he began to type.

Johnson heard things around the office from the human developers, who thought they were working on the best new grueling game, about code and this language or that. He picked up enough to keep his disguise intact but it was amazing how humanity devised all these obfuscations to the truth.

He supposed that’s why they went mad looking at the true forms of the Old Ones. Most of what a human did on any given day was lie to themselves about the reality of the world around them.

It should have come as no surprise to Johnson that when they had skimmed the pond of universal truth the apes had decided to lie about that too.

If they bothered to go deep enough they’d see everything was just math. Ridiculously complex math that often writhed through multiple dimensions, but math all the same. All their programming languages were a hilarious joke, a sort of drab prestidigitation compared to the true ‘magic’ that underpinned reality.

That’s how the Board had managed to slither into Earth in the first place. Programmers were always summoning up eldritch abominations with misplaced semi-colons and what they took to be errant non-repeatable bugs. There were even novels about this happening and humanity still ignored it.

The mail cart trundled by his cubicle. Just a few more days until his new office wriggled in from places beyond. As long as you dressed it up in taupe paint, cheap carpet, and four walls humans didn’t even notice.

“Got a package for ‘Johnston,’” said the mail clerk. A thick padded envelope was handed to him.

“Johnson,” he corrected automatically. The fingerless gloves the man wore were odd, but then again the breed of human that worked shuffling bits of paper back and forth to other humans was odd.

It only occurred to Johnson once he opened the unmarked package to get a closer look at the man. A slim black leatherbound book, edged in silver glyphs slid out of the envelope.

He could instantly smell the stale Lormarian air. “The Archive,” he hissed, clutching the book tightly to his suit.

Johnson stood up sharply. Sluggish eyes scanning the light waves of the world instead of his natural form’s far more efficient methods. He had to find him. There. The mail clerk!

Sidling out of his cubicle, Johnson power-walked down the aisle filled with the clacking of keyboards. It reminded him of home. The Thousand Maws of Gor’olothi with their horrendously clicking mandibles always soothed him.

The mail cart made a sharp turn toward the elevators. Johnson had never paid much attention to the humans around him if he could avoid it. They were hideous creatures with no sense of grace.

But he was pretty sure that most mail clerks didn’t wear jean jackets, fingerless black gloves, and a red hoodie that glittered with stardust. Something about the man set Johnson on edge.

He turned the corner, confident that the clerk would be waiting for him.

Instead, he only found an unattended mail cart brimming with undelivered bits of paper. Johnson looked around, but there was no sign of the man. He felt unnerved. And that was never a good sign.

Taking a page from humanity, Johnson decided to ignore it. He turned around and immediately stepped in a wad of used gum. Grumbling, he returned to his cubicle, using a business card to scrape off the goo.

It smelled vaguely of Dr. Pepper, a drink he was particularly fond of. He didn’t know they made gum out of it. With a shrug, he rolled his chair into the corner so nobody could see what he was doing, and opened the Archive.

Johnson was never one to look too intently at a gift. After all, with the Archive in his tentacles, he could do untold damage to that upstart Jacob Windsor.

He allowed himself one sinister grin that split his face wide from ear to ear with a thousand glittering teeth that would have sent any normal human into a gibbering mental break. “Let’s see how you like somebody messing with your progress, Jacob.”

The Archive opened. Its pages fluttered to the current events in Lormar. He found Jacob’s actions easily enough. Too easily. The man weighed on the fabric of space and time like a lead ball on a stretched piece of fabric.

Before his very mundane human eyes, the words shimmered and reorganized themselves based on Jacob’s current actions and intent. Oh, this is too easy.

With one eye on the Archive and a surreptitious tentacle holding the book open, Johnson began to “type” at the terminal.