As Ecstatic Choreography wore off in a slow fade, I found myself face-to-face with the Dauphine. We were enmeshed now in some immeasurable way. The spell had rewarded us with a tour through the stored memories of Alexander and the Dauphine, but had also shaved some individuality away from each of us and deposited it with the other for safekeeping. I was an only child but I suddenly felt like we were sisters in a disconcerting way.
But she was much more alert than I was, and frantically trying to rouse me back to my full faculties.
“My Queen, please,” I heard her say, “tell me you can hear me.”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Good. Because we are being watched, on all sides.”
We were standing in the middle of a six-way intersection in the ruins of a city that reminded me of Chicago. Dusk was settling in, introducing an unpleasant sickliness to the environment. And the shadows that proliferated around us seemed correlated to the human silhouettes I began to notice in every direction: on mounds of ruins, lurking in hollowed-out windows and doorways, crawling behind flipped-over cars on the periphery of our location.
“Survivors?” I asked.
“No. Simulacra.”
“What?”
“Bait.”
“You mean—bait for us?”
“Yes,” she said, “a lure for some kind of trap.”
I studied the situation more closely. Couldn’t accurately count the number of silhouettes because they kept popping up and disappearing from various locations in an almost whack-a-mole fashion. Every now and then the remaining light would offer a glimpse into a pained face, racked with grief or anger, but generally they deliberately hid on the outskirts of our ability to perceive them directly—neat trick, I thought.
“It’s all part of one organism, and it currently has us surrounded,” she said. “I think you caught its attention when you cast Ecstatic Choreography.”
I nodded and said, “Yeah, it’s usually my fault when I’m surrounded by bad guys.”
Something about the scale of the situation bothered me. Call it intuition about how traps were laid and big bosses were designed.
Let’s say these wispy silhouettes were like the teeth of a Venus flytrap, and we were caught in the center of its potentially gaping maw. That required some kind of enormous ugly thing just out of sight. But we hadn’t seen the slightest trace of any actual living beings anywhere on the surface.
I was starting to see the bigger picture. We weren’t just surrounded by these distracting silhouettes. This entire world was a trap, designed to lure the unwary. Overkill, perhaps. But kill nevertheless if we weren’t extremely careful.
I explained my hypothesis to the Dauphine.
She said, “I suppose we must now consider that possibility, yes.”
“Can you open a portal to the other side of the logosphere?”
“I cannot reliably anchor the other side since the logosphere itself is an unstable environment.”
Anxiety was creeping into my voice as I said, “We could also just stay put and murder this deathtrap of a planet. I will put a sword right in its molten core, watch me do it.”
“You cannot simply stab this planet to death.”
“I can do more than that, actually, because I’m multi-classed in three disciplines: melee combat, spellcasting, and putting my hands in the air like I just don’t care.”
“I do not understand what that means.”
“Really I would be leaning on the first two disciplines for our current scenario.”
Suddenly I realized I had an even better idea.
“Ohhhh,” I said, “we shouldn’t even bother using Sparkle Dungeon spells or weapons.” I paused for literal dramatic effect, then said, “We should transmute this fucker.”
So yeah, that was my big plan. I would use the transmutation sequence. I would rely on my imprinted memory of the time Alexander used the sequence as he was dying, but I would finesse the input parameters of the sequence to instead transmute an entire planetary deathtrap into something non-deathtrapish, and probably smaller.
“No,” the Dauphine said, “your memory of the sequence may be imperfect. I will deliver the sequence instead.”
Once her decision was made, she wasted none of the time that we couldn’t measure accurately anyway, immediately launching into a blisteringly fast sequence, as though her voice was an audiobook sped up eight times but still maintaining perfect articulation. She was finished almost before I understood that she had begun.
Silence at first. Then distant rumbling of thunder, or possibly an earthquake many miles away. Creaking of wood, occasional panes of glass falling and shattering on sidewalks. The planet felt vibratory in a small but meaningful way.
Then the transmutation began. The entire surface of the planet began to be stripped off, like the husk coming off of a baseball after it’s been struck at ridiculous velocity. The Dauphine and I quickly took to hovering in our jetpacks well above the surface, prepared to defend against any remnants of a trap that might still be capable of triggering, otherwise generally taking in the sight of the transformation for the sake of science.
“Out of curiosity,” I shouted to her, “what did you try to transmute the planet into?”
“A color-cycling LED stage light!” she shouted back.
“Excellent!” I exclaimed. “Energy efficient!”
But something went wrong only a few minutes into the transformation.
As the planetary surface underwent unnatural linguistic compression, something inside the shell of the planet began clawing its way out.
The creature was such a deep shade of black that it was probably violating someone’s patent. Its boundaries were eerily amorphous, as though it was under no obligation to settle on a distinct unitary form just for the sake of being observed by the two of us. Arachnoid arms and legs emerged and withdrew unpredictably, and its gigantic insectoid skull was eyeless with mandibles wide open in a huge shriek.
And then, moments later, when the outline of these shapes had left us sufficiently frozen with terror for a moment, it transformed again, into something far more alien and unexpected, and we realized this creature could cycle through as many distinct exteriors as it chose in order to maximize the amount of fear in our hearts.
We couldn’t tell if it was amazingly huge or if the planetary cocoon that spawned it had simply been compressed to the point where it was useless as a reference for scale. We couldn’t tell how far away from it we were, whether we were in reach of its clawed grasp, whether the enormous bat wings that unfolded from its back were its primary form of movement or simply another grace note in the myriad of awful details that comprised this entity’s appearance.
It spat a loud hiss across the empty space between us, letting us know that even though it couldn’t see us with eyes, it knew exactly where we were.
I grabbed the Dauphine’s hand.
“Portal,” I suggested, and she obliged. A portal appeared behind us, and we accelerated briskly through to the other side, holding hands as tightly as possible so that we stayed together across the opening, emerging elsewhere into a multicolored swirl of logospheric space. As the portal shrank and tried to close, the claws of the creature forced their way through the tiny sliver of remaining space, holding the portal open long enough to squeeze through most of its body before the Dauphine managed to mentally slam the portal shut once and for all. Chunks of the creature’s body were neatly severed, but instantly began to regenerate and yes, we discovered, those giant bat wings were extremely good for motion, as it propelled itself toward us.
Still holding hands as tightly as we could, we accelerated in tandem, hoping to create distance between us and the creature. We could hear its malevolent hissing no matter how far behind it seemed to drift. But its chase was relentless and it was never very far from us. Anyway the concept of acceleration was poorly defined out here. It was some weird sensation theoretically demarcating that we were traveling unspecified units of distance faster with every unmeasurable unit of time we spent out here until we realized we were basically just sitting there motionless in space like Wile E. Coyote after he’s stepped off a cliff but crucially just before he’s realized that gravity does actually apply to him.
And still that creature got closer, grew bigger, threatened more.
I cast a minor spell called Headphone Splitter, which enabled us to hear each other’s voices with perfect fidelity no matter the ambient sound in the environment as long as we were in line of sight of each other, and then I outlined a change in tactics. She readily agreed.
I unsheathed Blades Per Minute, activating its vibrational properties, and held it at the ready. The Dauphine cast a portal directly in front of us which we quickly flew directly through. The anchor point for the portal was the actual reverse side of the same portal, meaning we came sailing out that side facing the exact opposite direction without losing any momentum, and proceeded to charge directly at the creature. In the few split seconds I had to gauge, the creature seemed to offer no meaningful reaction, and then we were upon it.
It was freaking enormous. Planet sized? No—the vast majority of that planetary trap had been part of its shell or its disguise. But easily several skyscrapers tall with a vast wingspan to boot, shrieking and hissing and making its displeasure known.
Blades Per Minute could achieve up to 160 distinct attacks in a one-minute window, with me aiming the sword like an animated whirling buzzsaw, producing a ruthless combination of slicing and jabbing that took enormous concentration to steer correctly. In this assault, though, we were pushing 180 attacks per minute, directed straight at the thing’s front claws which came right the hell off, and then burying additional attacks deep into its chest cavity.
Meanwhile, the Dauphine let go of my hand, and became an attack hummingbird, buzzing around the creature from all sides, opening and closing portals that chopped off extremities or shaved off other hunks of flesh. She could instantiate and destroy portals at computational speeds, and the creature could not regenerate fast enough to keep up.
By the end of our first minute of engagement, we’d nearly reduced it to half its original mass, and black ooze spilled from the dozens of wounds it’d accumulated. I was worried; my whole plan depended on killing it with one blazing salvo, keeping it on the defensive while we performed our hatchet job. We had not succeeded. The creature thrashed wildly and shrieked, more in anger, I thought, than pain or fear—another bad sign.
Since it had survived everything we’d thrown at it so far, I determined that one of us needed to just decapitate it so we could be done with it. I nominated myself and launched upward with Blades Per Minute aimed directly toward its seemingly unprotected bare throat. Before my weapon could strike, the creature’s head tilted down toward me, the tiniest of gestures to deflect all my righteous momentum, and with an explosive, heaving burst, it fired its version of a breath weapon at me, bathing me in a fountain of acidic black slime. I’d never felt pain so sheer and unfiltered before. Suddenly I was dissolving, nihilistic fluids filling my nose and throat, a sticky and solipsistic mucus coating me in hopeless apathy. I lost the vast majority of my hit points in that one attack, was too blinded to continue my melee attack with Blades Per Minute, and shrieked with so much pain I couldn’t concentrate enough to cast even a basic healing spell to get me through the experience.
The Dauphine rocketed up past me with an innovative attack, casting a series of portals one after another after another in a long row, each subsequent portal the anchor for the previous portal, aiming this extensive series of portals directly at the creature’s head. Unlike my foolish jaunt straight toward the thing’s throat, she could pull off this series of portals as a ranged attack, never getting close enough for the breath weapon to be a concern for her. The resulting effect was that she used these portals to burrow an actual tunnel directly through whatever brain it had up there, at which point it immediately fell limp and began to drift in space.
She pulled me away from the hulking, bloody mess of a carcass we’d created and spun me around so she could see exactly what had happened to me, but this gave me a perfect angle to see that the fucking thing was literally regenerating its goddamn head, and I just absolutely could not deal. I broke loose from the Dauphine and drove Blades Per Minute straight down through the center of the thing’s little doll head, down what might have been its spine or central nervous system, hacking the thing directly in half with a pained roar, and it split apart in a shower of dark blood and shredded internal organs that looked like they’d gone through a threshing machine, and eventually, finally, we were convinced it would not regenerate again.
I’d been thinking the portal was the Dauphine’s only spell, but I’d completely forgotten her other skill set as a healer. She could restore your hit points as she rescued you from the Shimmer Lands, but she could also dispel curses or get that shitty Rickroll out of your head, mend broken magic items or repair shorted-out headphones, even provide light augury or a quick lesson in beat slicing if you caught her on a good day.
As we floated aimlessly together, exhausted past description, she turned her healing attention toward me, her wounded comrade. Somehow she found a way to cleanse me of all that dark agony I’d just experienced. Technically I had enough mojo to heal my own hit points back up most of the way, but her technique was so effortless and simple that I didn’t realize it was happening until it was nearly complete. She was also capable of a more holistic approach to healing, as though she’d noticed some long-standing injuries that I’d just been tolerating, living with as though they were normal, and she’d decided to take care of those, too, like that crick in my neck from constantly having a headset on was finally eradicated. I was better than I had been before, and I was sad that I couldn’t return the favor.
And then, just as I thought I might fall peacefully asleep right there in the emptiness, unconcerned with finding my way back to a beacon or really any particular point in time or space, a familiar voice rang out across the logosphere.
“You make quite an entrance, Queen of Sparkle Dungeon,” the man said.
My eyes snapped open.
Alexander Reece was upon us.