Vigil's Balance: Five - Fae Step Shuffle

I shot Arturo a brief wave, good luck, then nudged Darksilver in the ribs with my heels, urging him into a canter. Renholm padded along beside on Jacob Francis, keeping pace with surprising ease, while Cal walked beside me on my right. Despite all of his confident bullshitting, my spirit guide looked more nervous than I’d seen in a long time.

“Everything okay?” I asked softly, leaning close.

He grimaced and shook his head.

“I just have a bad feeling about all this,” he replied after a second. “I know we’re already in too deep to turn back, but these Fae pricks really are dangerous Boyd. So far your experience with the Fae has been Renholm, but he barely counts. He’s like…” He paused, rubbing at his chin. “He’s like one of those pet store alligators that kids buy because kids are stupid as all hell. Those things look cute and harmless, but they’re still alligators and eventually they get big.” He nodded at the two creatures ahead of us. “These things are grown-ass, cold-blooded alligators and they’ll turn on us the second they think they can get away with it.”

“We’ve dealt with things more dangerous than them,” I said, suppressing the tinge of unease I felt in my gut.

“You’re not wrong, but these guys are just the tip of the iceberg, man. I’ve been asking around the Spirit Realm about this Ionia lady, and she’s bad news. At least as bad as the Chaos Aberration we tangled with back in Wildespell. Probably worse. Plus, she’s got a whole army of sycophants that are willing to do her dirty work. You need to keep your head on a swivel until this mess is all over.”

We quickly left the property behind and followed the worn path that wound its way through the gnarled trees of the Elderwick. Our guides kept ten paces or so ahead and never bothered to look back at us. The Sasquatch moved like a shadow, his big feet padding along the walk without making a sound. It was unnerving watching something that large move so silently. By contrast, Darksilver hooves rang out against the moss slick cobblestones like a hammer on an anvil.

It wasn’t long before the world around us started to change.

It was so subtle at first, I almost didn’t notice.

The air grew heavier. More humid. It also grew thicker with latent Essence that lingered like spring pollen. I probably wouldn’t even have noticed the increase a month ago, but I’d leveled up my Arcana and Insight significantly which allowed me to sense the presence of Essence more easily. Kerra and Niels—the Citadel Weapons Master—had also worked extensively with me on a series of meditative “cycling” techniques that let me passively draw Essence from the environment and process it in my Core.

In theory, I could even advance through environmental cultivation, though it was way slower and less efficient than just murdering mortka and clearing bounties, which was my preferred method. Still, I could feel the added energy suffuse my cells with every breath, lending a little extra bounce to my step. Subtly heightening my senses.

We quickly lost sight of the keep, obscured by the tangle of trees and the canopy overhead. The further west we rode the stranger things got. Between all the supply runs, return trips to Wildespell, and Mortka hunting raids, I’d taken this path fifty times at least, and as a former Recon Marine, I prided myself on land nav. Shit, those were skills that were pounded into our heads since bootcamp. Admittedly, not all Marines mastered those skills—Cal couldn’t navigate his way out of a paper bag with a compass, map, and a machete—but I’d always been at the head of the class.

Wasn’t anybody better reading a map, shooting an azimuth, or determining a location via dead reckoning. I had a natural gift for remembering landmarks and memorizing terrain.

Even though this path hooked and turned like the path I’d traveled so many times before, it wasn’t the same. Not even close.

The dead grass, yellowed from the harsh winter, quickly turned green. Then, within the span of a few paces, it transformed into a sea of blue that swayed in a gentle breeze. And this wasn’t Kentucky blue grass—this was neon bright like something out of a cyberpunk novel. The trees themselves grew taller and more foreboding, looming over us like angry giants. Metallic red leaves bloomed on formerly barren branches. An unearthly wind whispered through the forest carrying the musky scent of wet foliage and rotting meat, all undercut by the sweet aroma of lilacs.

The midday sky gave way to the deep purples of forever-twilight and a sickly, pearlescent moon appeared just above the treeline like an overripe plumb.

Cal changed too, which told me we had somehow managed to enter the Etheric Realm. Curling horns jutted up from his head and wispy blue wings of energy floated from his back. A long lashing tail with a stinger on it trailed down from his waist. That stinger reminded me of Shella the pet scorpion Cal had kept in a Tupperware container beneath his bed while we were in Kuwait. His left arm was pale gray and waxy, though otherwise human, and his right arm looked like it had come off a dead gorilla.

“Damn it feels good to be home,” he said softly. “Now give me a sec, I gotta see a man about a horse.” Cal pressed his eyes shut tight and a wave of golden light engulf him, here then gone in a flash. When the light faded, the chimera-version of my friend was gone. Cal was back, flight suit and all… except now his lower body was that of an actual horse.

He turned into a goddamned centaur.

“Really?” I asked. “Is now the best time for this bullshit?”

“More like horseshit,” he corrected. “And don’t worry about it, dude, I’m just horsing around a little.”

Cal was a master of the Etheric Realm and as a being of pure spirit he could transform into pretty much whatever the hell he wanted even without the aid of Transformation Tokens. One of the many benefits of being a spirit guide.

“Any idea where we are?” I asked him.

He shook his head, lips pursed into a thin line as he grew serious. “No idea, broham. Someplace in the Fae Wylds if I had to take a wild stab in the dark, but past that it’s hard to know. That elfin duckweed up there is doing something to change the landscape. It’s magic, but I’ve never experienced anything like it before.”

“You are the worse spirit guide on the planet,” I muttered, before flicking Darksilver’s reigns. I brought my mount up beside the Sasquatch, who seemed to be the more reasonable of our two escorts.

“Where the hell are we?” I asked, still scanning the area for threats. I had a feeling that everything in this new world was dangerous. Huge flowers grew just off the path and giant, glossy pods hung from the thick boughs overhead.

“In route to the Queen’s Court,” Gobhoill the sasquatch replied as though the answer were self-evident. “Don’t worry, this is the fastest route I can assure you. Elduin is one of her Majesty’s best Navigators—the very reason she dispatched him to guide you back to the court.”

“A Navigator?” I asked

Gobhoill cast a quizzical glance at me. “Yes, a Navigator,” he replied, sounding rather confused. “How else would we pass from the Material Realm into the Fae Wylds?”

I shrugged. “I just assumed you would open a portal or something like Renholm does. Or Cal. Take us right to her front door.”

Gobhoill offered me an indulgent grin and shook his head. “There are no portals, Vigil. No easy way to instantly move from one place to another. Not even in the Fae Wylds. It is possible to step directly from the Material into the Etheric—such as your companions do—but traversing the Etheric is no quicker than traversing the Material, especially not if you are a being of flesh. But there are ways around that. The Etheric Realm is more malleable and the Fae Wylds doubly so. Creating a direct portal is not possible, but those who understand its nature and substance maybe fold it according to their will. Elduin is one such, but there are many others.”

He cocked his head and looked at me with genuine curiosity. “Do you really not know this?” he asked, voice low and gravely. “Or is this perhaps some cunning deception to lure me into a false sense of security?”

I looked at him and shrugged. “I’m a straight shooter, partner. What you see is pretty much what you get. If I don’t know something, I’m gonna ask so that I’ll learn.” I searched his face, my crimson gaze boring into his muddy brown eyes. “I say what I mean and mean what I say. People who underestimate me have a bad habit of ending up with their insides on their outsides, so don’t take my lack of experience for stupidity.”

“The rumors about you must be true, then,” the Sasquatch replied. “You truly are an Inkarnate, stolen from another world. That would explain how a weasel like Renholm managed to enlist you to his cause—because you know no better.” He paused and sighed deeply. “I almost feel bad for you, Boyd Knight. You seem to be an honorable fellow, which is a shame because honorable fellows rarely last long in the hunt. In my considerable experience, only the cunning survive until the end.

“If even half of the other rumors I’ve heard are true,” he continued, “then there is no doubt you are a powerful warrior, but there are many things you do not know about our people or our ways. I will give you this one lesson for free but understand that showing such inexperience elsewhere will have grave consequences. My kind value only one thing, Boyd Knight. Power. But there are different ways such power is expressed. We call them the five pillars. Strength is power. Knowledge is power. Guile is power. Authority is power. Resources are power.”

“But not honesty or courage or loyalty?” I asked.

He shook his shaggy head. “These are all false. Honesty is merely Guile expressed in another form. At times, telling the truth is advantageous so that when you lie, others are more likely to believe you. Courage is merely the preservation of power in the face of threat. And Loyalty is the greatest of all illusions, Boyd Knight. Loyalty is bought only with power and the perception of power.

“Why do men flock to the banner of a King? Is it out of the love of a monarch or because he is somehow inherently better than other men? They may say so with their mouths, but in their hearts, they would not follow such a man were he not born with power already firmly in his grasp. The weak die for the powerful, never the other way around. That is the true nature of loyalty.”

“Well that’s a dark and cynical view of the world,” I said flatly.

“Such is the view of all our kind,” he replied as though telling me water was wet. “And such is the reality of the world, whether you realize it or not. Heed this lesson well if you want to survive what is to come. Elsewise, those of the Court will see your nature as a weakness to be exploited.”

“If that’s true, then why are you helping me?” I asked.

“It should be obvious,” he said. “As with other false virtues, there is no true altruism in kindness—it is but a guise to mask guile. Perhaps I am seeking to win your trust now so that I may betray you later at an opportune moment. Or—and this is the truth, though you have no reason to believe me—I see your potential and believe you may have some small chance of unseating the Queen.

“I am not a member of her court in the traditional sense, but rather an Ambassador from Disciples of the True Moon. I am loyal to her only in that she has power over me. In the unlikely event that you should succeed, perhaps you will remember me with some degree of charity. Perhaps you will recall my usefulness and spare me. And in this truth is the final lesson—self-preservation is the true goal of all power.”

He fell silent as we rounded a bend and found ourselves facing a silver wall, composed entirely of mist that cut through the forest, straight as a razor blade, and rose into the twilight sky. During my last trip to the Etheric Realm, I’d learn that walls like these were called Boundary Folds.

As the Squatch had mentioned, the Etheric Realm was malleable. Disjointed. Distance and space weren’t always linear. The Material Ream was like a blanket, all stretched out and flat. To move from one corner to another, you have to go across the entire blanket. The Etheric Realm was like taking that same blanket and scrunching it up into a giant, messy ball. Things connected and touched in ways that didn’t always make sense.

That silvery wall was a fold in the cosmic blanket, which connected one zone with another. There was no telling what’s was on the other side until we went through, though I was assuming it was the realm of Queen Ionia and the Oblivion Court.

We rode head-on into mist and I braced myself for the pain I knew was coming.

Except there was no pain. The last time Cal had guided me through a Boundary Fold it had felt like backstroking through razorblades and hand sanitizer.

This time, the world seemed to swim on edges as the forest behind us disappeared and I caught sight of a massive tree rising three-hundred feet or more into the bruised sky ahead. Its pale trunk was larger than a skyscraper and protruding from its face were the gnarled, cancerous growths of what could only be houses and shops. Bridges, walkways, and blue torches festooned the gnarled wood. The leafy canopy was composed of ghostly blue-green leaves that pulsed gently in time with the beating of some unseen heart. Most bizarre of all, however, was that it looked like there were inverted, snaking tree roots that broke through the foliage and dug into the night sky itself.

Even without being told, I instantly knew I was looking at Telvyss the Void Tree of the Endless Night. The source of the Oblivion Court’s power. This thing was a god.

Or maybe a devil.

While looking up a way to kill Chaos Aberrations, I’d stumbled across some info about the divine war between the Celestial and Oblivion—a war I’d been inadvertently been caught up in. According to what little I knew, the Celestials and the Chaos Titans were locked in an eternal battle, being played out on a cosmic scale. There were a number of core worlds situated along what was called the Finite Arc, and whoever controlled them basically got to shape the rules of reality.

The Celestials were currently the shot callers and they’d banished the Titans eons ago into the outer darkness of Oblivion, but the Titans were grinding and hustling to regain control. Dominance. The world I was on, Alkran, was the key world node in the Cantorii Prime System. It was a common belief that if the Titans could subdue enough key world nodes, they’d be able to flip the script, exile the Celestials into Oblivion, and impose their own vision of reality on the universe.

Telvyss the Void Tree was one of the lesser Titans—an Eldritch, slumbering deity—but also one of the select few that had managed to get a toehold outside of Oblivion.

I’d been so awestruck by the sight of the tree that I hadn’t even realized that I’d just stopped dead in my tracks to stare at the incredible, impossible sight. Cal and Renholm had caught up with me while Elduin the grump elf and my sasquatch buddy, Gobhoill, had moved ahead by thirty-feet or so. We were in a natural valley, with pale, ghostly trees pressing in on our left and right. Dark moss hung down in sheets and neon pink flowers as large as umbrellas filled the undergrowth around the clearing.

It was idyllic. Otherworldly. Beautiful.

And my combat sense screamed at me that something was very, very wrong…