As I walk, in darkness-not-darkness, with good Syerfu by my side and my needle spear in hand, I listen to the whispers of a thousand Udinnys behind me. They are hard to understand, their words are heard as if they are voices in a dream, loaded with meaning but that meaning so clouded it is impossible to understand. The words had a weight – though it sounds strange I cannot think of any other way to describe it – and that weight leaves me feeling that I have walked further along the path of Ranya than any other, that much is now expected of me.
Though, it could just be that I feel like I have walked an awfully long way.
It does not do for a monk to get above themselves.
The tunnel is tight, not much larger than I am, pulsing lights run along it, some bright, like Ranya, and others dark, like the tentacles I found everywhere in this realm. A shiver runs through me, a familiarity, a feeling that people I know and care for were close to me. Then it is gone. At the same time a flash of bright light passes down the tunnel. I try to follow it but cannot, though it vanishes not far ahead. I follow, thinking about how long I have been walking and how this place insists on remaining the same. It could be I am not even moving, or maybe that this tunnel only goes in circles; the walknut has ceased to be of assistance. It is foolish of me to expect this place to make sense, this is after all a realm of gods and there is no reason for it to obey the rules of the land of Crua I am used to.
I walk and muse until Syerfu stops, staring at the tunnel wall as if she finds something delightful in the matter of it.
“Come, Syerfu, we have things to be about for your mistress. We have no time to inspect the architecture.”
Syerfu turns her heavy head towards me and bleats. Then turns back to stare at the wall.
“What are you doing you foolish creature?” She bleats again. “We cannot stop, we have a long way to go, we have to get to…” Well, I am not actually sure where we have to get to, but I am intent on getting there. “Now come on.”
Syerfu bleats.
“What is this nonsense?” I walk back to the crownhead and she turns her head from me once more to stare at the wall and bleat plaintively. “It is only a wall, Syerfu.” In the darkness her eyes glow a myriad of different colours. “Do you see something I cannot?” A shiver. A feeling of familiarity. A faintly glowing line of light along the wall that vanishes at the point where Syerfu stands. “I cannot walk through a wall, Syerfu.”
Another bleat.
“Look!” I place my hand upon the wall, it is solid though warm, which surprises me. The volume of Udinnys past rises in my mind. Syerfu bleats more urgently and backs up. Then using her great and heavy head, she gently pushes me forward. “Syerfu! You will crush me against the wall.” I raise both hands, placing them against the dark surface. The susurrus of voices grows. For the barest, briefest moment I am blind. It should bring on a terrible sense of panic, but it does not, it feels natural and normal and with it comes the sensation that I am visited by another me, a long-ago me.
And I see.
But I see in a different way, not with my eyes but with some other sense that I do not understand, but feels entirely right. It changes the world around me. I see more, I see beyond. Lines of strange light that run through and around and up and down the material of the place. Ranya’s web is here, touching upon everything. Also, the dark web of the tentacles, not as widespread as Ranya’s, not as pervasive but far more menacing. Its threads so thin in places as to be almost imperceptible. In other places it clusters, thick and pulsating with a sense of dread. Between these two webs is another, different and somehow more permanent and powerful. A sense of energy and movement flows through it, vast and strong. It pulses along the tunnel and, in front of me, where Syerfu pushed me, it turns a corner and goes through the wall. All around me the lines of energy bend and I see an entrance to another tunnel. My hand still feels as though there is a wall, but this new sense shows me there is not.
Syerfu bleats.
I push.
Syerfu bleats.
The wall before me dissolves and a new tunnel opens, leading off in the direction I have seen the light going. Syerfu’s bleating stops as I enter the tunnel and she trots along beside me. The strange light is gone, and once more I am in a black tunnel, though larger than the last one. As I walk I feel for that strange sense I had used to find the tunnel, and like the skills of the needle spear I find it at my fingertips, ready. The tunnel lights up, energy pulsing along it, travelling, the world a framework of glowing power. Just as easily I send the vision away.
What other strange abilities would Udinny’s past gift to me? What magics are hidden in the people I have been?
No answers come. No doubt when they are needed they will step forward. For now I walk, as I have walked ever since I first heard Her voice, in trust, and my crownhead walks with me, my walknut in my hand, and my needle spear at my back.
The tunnel grows larger as we move down it, and then becomes another vast cave, like the one that had been infested with tentacles which I flew Syerfu through, though this one is clear of the vile things. When I look with my other sight I see energy pulsing round it, the gossamer threads of Ranya’s web and far above me a fracture, a place where the energy lines are broken, where their clean lines are disfigured and crooked, flowing hither and thither to find a way around and I wonder what this shows on the surface. Beyond the crack, way above me is something else, something I have never seen before. A huge, vast, shimmering wall of deadness. Was that the correct way to describe it? No. It was not dead, the energy of death has a rightness and a stillness to it, where it is not polluted by the touch of the tentacles of course.
How do I know that?
I do not know, but I do know. As clearly as I know I have toes.
Though in this place, I am not sure I do have toes, but let us not dwell upon that.
The wall far above is alive, but not alive and living, it is existing and it is a wall that separates us from another place, not a wall you could drill through and find a new room on the other side. This is an ending. A true and impassable barrier and all these thoughts crowded my mind, as true and real as they are strange and confusing.
As I studied the wall above, my eye is drawn away; movement on the bottom of the cave, shadows on the bottom of the cave. The movement weaving between the shadows, tiny, when compared to me. Little taller than my ankles but something of them I recognise from Cahan and Venn. Cowls. These were cowls, hidden within the frames of people I could not see. Who were these tiny people?
Or am I huge?
In this place, I have nothing to measure myself by. As I think on it I shrink and reform to be the same size as the ghostly cowls, and find myself within a maze, thick with energy, moving and changing and twisting, groups of cowls move through it.
And something else.
Within the strange space I inhabit is another intelligence and as I realise I hear the cry of all the other Udinnys.
“Escape!”
Escape what? I do not understand. Around me, the shadow cowl-people stop their movement, turn and orientate themselves in one direction. Then begin vanishing into the crevices and alleys of the maze. With their vanishing comes a feeling of oppression, like a cold rain falling. Running feels like a good idea but it is too late. As I sense it, whatever it is, I become very sure it has somehow sensed me.
“This, Syerfu,” I told my friend, “does not bode anything good.”
In the direction the cowl-people looked grows a tangle of blue and purple tentacles. Had it been there before? I am not sure. If it has then it had been small, not large enough to see. It is not small now. It is growing, swelling, changing and feeding, the lines of blue energy that lead to it are thickening. In the maze, the things that I had thought were walls are doing something, moving, shivering, and feeding the nest of tentacles. No, not all of the walls, only some.
“We should go, Syerfu.” Syerfu bleats. Which I take to be agreement.
I mount up, and as I do the nest of tentacles, swells, writhes and I hear a voice but not a voice. A sound but not a sound. Something I have never heard before and yet with it comes a deep and instinctual terror. This is a language long forgotten by me, by Crua, but known to my ancestors and passed down in the same way a raniri knows to run from a garaur without ever having seen one before. A voice that freezes my insides.
Something far back along the line of Udinnys screams. Screams a word I know and fear. That all fear.
“Osere!”
At the same time, the nest of tentacles bursts open and from it come shapes from my time in the forest with Cahan, long, streamlined and dangerous. They leap into the air, reaching out with vicious poisonous tentacles.
Spearmaws.
“Go, Syerfu! Go! Run and may Ranya guide our steps!”
Oh, how useful it would have been to be huge again in that moment. I could crush the spearmaws in my hand, but much as I may wish it different, I remain the size I am. Syerfu gallops through narrow spaces as the spearmaws launch into the air. My loyal mount fast as the circle winds, flashes down long corridors and past strange walls full of possibility. None are flat like normal walls, more like cave walls, rutted with hollows and outcroppings but at the same time strangely regular.
Syerfu screams, skids to a halt.
A spearmaw in front of us, hovering in the corridor, tentacles squirming and twisting.
Behind us another.
Above us two more.
“Syerfu,” I say, taking my needle spear from my back, readying it in my hand, “you may already have come to the same conclusion as I have, but this does not look good for us.”