Undermind Book 5, Chapter 4: Emergence (Rough)

The light behind her eyes dimmed. Blinking away the afterimage, Saskia found herself in a circular tunnel, seemingly made of the same kind of stone as the gate she’d just entered. There was no sign of the gate itself. Instead, the tunnel opened out into a familiar expanse of red sand. Around the entrance, the sand was strewn with bones—and among them lay a woman’s body, already beginning to break down as the magic of the Blightlands tore into it.

Saskia exhaled softly. She’d made it through without having her soul consumed by the gate. So far, so good. Now what about her passengers? Dipping into her soul-space, she found four demons, a demon cocoon and a Ruhildi. All just the way she’d left them.

“Good news, guys and gals,” she told them. “We made it through the—aargh!”

Back in the physical world, something had just constricted around her. Unable to flap her wings properly, she was being pulled down by…oh crap, it was a net. A net held by a trio of armoured humans who had appeared out of nowhere in her moment of distraction. Now she was in their clutches, and no amount of squirming was going to get her free.

“I made aargh twice,” said the succubus, Lilene.

Fun fact: in the demonic tongue, aargh translated to…a word her mother would disapprove of.

Her captors must be the same men who had shoved that poor woman into the Blightland to die. They’d been lurking in the recesses of the tunnel, watching what had transpired on the other side of the gate. The moment Saskia had come through, they’d pounced. She should have waited a while before entering the gate. She should have paid more attention to her minimap when she arrived.

Stupidiot! she berated herself. Such a rookie mistake. Must’ve left my brain behind on Arbor Mundi.

Bundled up like a cat in a towel, she could do little but watch helplessly as the men argued amongst themselves what to do with her. At least, that’s what it seemed like they were doing. Their words were unfamiliar to her, and her oracle translation magic hadn’t had time to master the new language. One of the men took off down the tunnel, while the other two continued their bickering.

“Do any of you speak the human tongue?” she asked the demons.

“There is many human tongue,” said Lilene. “I speak two of them, from time as concubine in King Jongban court.”

“Okay, gimme a sec. Let’s see if I can make this work…”

Ruhildi could hear everything Saskia could hear, but the same wasn’t true of her other passengers. Nor did she trust them enough to share all of her senses with them. But there may be another way.

“And…there we go,” she said after a bit of mental fiddling.

Now she was relaying the humans’ voices into her soul-space, kind of like a loudspeaker announcement broadcast to all of her inner residents. She couldn’t be selective about it unless she plugged them in more permanently, as she had with Ruhildi.

Lilene tilted her head to the side as she listened. “Salty old man want to throw you back into Blightland,” she said. “Sexy voice man want to wait for captain. I like sexy voice man better.”

“Me too,” said Saskia. Actually, the one with the smooth, sexy voice was the older of the two, and he looked as if something had taken a bite out of his face.

“Don’t let them decide your fate, Sashki,” said Ruhildi. “Use our stoneshaper magic to free yourself.”

“How do I do that?” asked Saskia. “The net isn’t made of stone.”

“The tunnel is. Stone can be used for cutting…”

“Oh.” And now Saskia felt like even more of an idiot.

She drew on her bottomless well of essence, preparing to reshape the stone floor into a sharp-edged blade. Then, just as she was about to release her spell, the captain showed up with more men. The captain was an unassuming man, and quite young to be in a position of authority. She could sense a whisper of…something like essence swirling about him.

This man had magic of his own. He must be what the Serpent King had called a soulbinder.

Saskia let her essence subside, and lay there, listening to what they had to say. She was beginning to understand some of their words, and Lilene filled in the gaps for her. “Captain want to know how you leave Blightland,” the succubus explained. “They will take you back to citadel, let inquisitor decide what to do with you.”

“Inquisitor?” said Saskia. “I don’t like the sound of that. Although better that than being shoved back through the gate, I suppose.”

Maybe she could still break free, but now there were more humans to contend with, and they had magic to boot. Probably better to wait for a more opportune moment to escape.

In the end, the decision was made for her. The captain pressed his hand against her back. She felt him gather his magic, and…

She went stiff as a board. Couldn’t move a muscle. Couldn’t even blink. One of the other men slung her rigid form over his shoulders, and that was that.

Unable to move her own eyes to get a good view of where they were going, Saskia cast her oracle sight into the man’s head and used his eyes instead. She watched helplessly as they hauled her back through the tunnel, emerging sometime later in a walled-off section of what appeared to be a large, heavily fortified citadel. There was a bleak and brutal quality to this place—all dark stone, sharp edges and more than a few entirely unnecessary spiky bits. It was just a few severed heads and flayed corpses shy of going full evil.

The citadel stood near the base of a steep and treacherous mountain range. There would be no climbing those peaks without ropes, or wings, or balls of steel. The darkening sky above the mountains shimmered with a ghostly light, like the Aurora Australis, but less green and more blood red.

Some kind of magical barrier? Yeah, that must be it. The shimmering light was a wall separating one side of the mountain range from the other. And what lay on the other side? Why, the Blightland, of course. The gate to the Blightland wasn’t the magical teleportation device she’d initially assumed it to be. It was just an opening in the barrier—one that closed and swallowed up anyone who tried to pass through more than once.

In the other direction, her view of the sky was altogether more familiar. There was the red moon, just coming into full brightness as the sun sank beneath the horizon. And behind the moon, Ixathi the Old God, in all of its winged, tentacular glory.

The soldiers carried her down several sets of stairs into the bowels of a foreboding castle dungeon. An actual dungeon, complete with dingy cells, dishevelled prisoners (some human, some demon), and the occasional mournful shriek echoing down its dank, dark corridors. The walls and floor were covered in grime and graffiti. Cockroaches—or the local equivalent—scurried out from underfoot. A chamberpot was tipped over in the corner of one of the occupied cells, its contents splattered everywhere. The stench made her want to gag, and it only got worse as they brought her to her…cage.

A cell was too good for an imp, apparently. As they shoved her into the little enclosure, Saskia tried not to give into despair. Sure, she was paralysed and stuck in a cage barely fit for a dog, but she’d find a way to get out. She always did. Once the captain’s magic wore off, she could stoneshape her way through the cage’s metal bars. After that…well, this was a dungeon, with all the security measures that entailed, so she couldn’t just waltz on out the door. Still, she’d think of something. This wasn’t the first time she’d been locked up, and it probably wouldn’t be the last.

“Don’t let her out of your sight—not even for a moment,” the captain told the guards.

The guards eyed her speculatively. “A caged imp?” said one. “What can it do from in there?”

“I don’t know,” said the captain. “That’s the problem. She came through the gate. From the other side.”

There was a shocked intake of breath, followed by a low curse. “As you would have it, sir,” the guard said finally. “The imp won’t be getting out on our watch.”

The guards turned out to be frustratingly dedicated to their jobs. Saskia felt at least two pairs of eyes on her at all times, and they rotated regularly to ease boredom and fatigue.

Far more of a concern to her was the fact that her paralysis didn’t seem to be wearing off, even several hours after the captain’s departure. Would she be stuck like this forever—an imp statue? Remembering what had happened to the Serpent King, she couldn’t discount the possibility.

With escape an impossible dream right now, she killed time chatting to Ruhildi and her demon passengers inside her soul-space. There, she didn’t need to move her lips to speak. Hell, she didn’t have lips in that place. The demons were surprisingly cooperative, given their predicament. Well, three of them were. Well, two, at least. Gorblarg the cacodemon mostly just laughed at her, while the elder dread knight, whose name was Drugal, demanded that she let them out.

“Maybe later,” she told him non-committally.

Until now, she hadn’t given much thought as to what she’d do with her passengers after they were through the gate. She couldn’t keep them cooped up in there forever, and she didn’t want to shackle them to her soul, as she might inadvertently have done to Nine. But at the same time, unleashing them on an unsuspecting world seemed like a terrible idea, at least until she learned more about them. They may have been sealed away in the Blightland for a good reason. And maybe it was her old human bias showing, but they did seem…kinda evil.

Besides, she didn’t even know how to set them free. It may be as simple as willing it to happen. Or maybe not. Now wasn’t the best time to try it.

“Curse you!” he growled. “I will not be caged!”

“Well you are,” she snapped. “And in case you haven’t been paying attention, I am too. So until we get out of this mess, suck it up, buttercup.”

“Let me out or I’ll…curse you, let me go!” He struggled to extricate himself from the tendrils tightening around his ankles.

“You’re embarrassing yourself, brother,” said the younger dread knight, whose name was Torv.

Unlike his brother, Torv was a fount of useful information, even if his dealings with the human kingdoms had been many decades in the past. According to Torv, this citadel belonged to an order of powerful soulbinders, called Blightguards. The Blightguards were responsible for maintaining the magic that made the Blightland what it was: a sealed off pocket of the world, where the rules of reality had been rewritten. Without the Blightguards, the barrier would fall, and the Blightland would rejoin mainstream reality. Life would spread out across the desert once more, and all the souls trapped within would be loosed upon the world. That didn’t sound like an entirely good thing to Saskia, though she kept her opinion to herself.

“But why go to all that trouble?” she asked. “What purpose does the Blightland serve? Okay, I get that it’s a sort of soul prison. But surely there’s an easier way to imprison undesirables?”

“Lesser souls can be bound, yes,” said Torv. “They are, after all, the source of a soulbinder’s magic. But there are those of us who are too powerful for any mortal binder to contain. It is we who they seal away in the Blightland while we are still held in our own mortal forms, and thus vulnerable. More than that, the Blightland is a prison for the demon they fear most: the father of us all, Gothgorad the Serpent King.”

If soul-trees could cough, Saskia’s would have had a coughing fit upon hearing that.

“Yeah…I don’t think they have much to fear from him any more,” she said.

“Oh? Why not?”

“Well you see, I kinda…ate him.”

This silenced all the demons for a while. They were probably having second thoughts about having submitted to the one who had swallowed their godlike progenitor.

It was Lilene who finally broke the silence. “Do not tell humans. If they learn you have power of Serpent King, they throw you back into Blightland.”

“Good point,” said Saskia. “Although if this paralysis doesn’t wear off, it’ll be a moot point. I won’t be talking to anyone out there in the physical world. Oh, speaking of which…”

Returning to her cage was none other than the captain who had paralysed her. Another man accompanied him, and Saskia sensed that he too was a soulbinder.

“This is her?” said the new arrival. “She doesn’t look like much.”

“Looks can be deceiving, inquisitor,” answered the captain. “My men witnessed her coming through the gate—from the other side.”

“Yes well…whatever the truth may be, we shall learn it.”

“I have placed a muscle lock on the imp,” said the captain. “Should you desire to converse with the creature, I will need to remove the lock.”

“I do so desire,” said the inquisitor.

Offering him a curt nod, the captain opened the door of the cage, pressed his hand to Saskia’s back and…

Her body went suddenly limp. She ached all over, but she could move again. She could move.

“Now’s your chance, Sashki!” said Ruhildi.

Her friend didn’t need to say it twice. Saskia launched herself at the door of her cage just as the captain was closing it. A surge of essence blasted the door off its hinges and into his face. He fell back with a curse.

The guards rushed forwards, drawing swords, but she was already out of reach, wings flapping against the ceiling as she shot towards the nearest doorway. Out came another net. This time she was ready for it. She changed course at the last moment, watching gleefully as the net wrapped around a hanging lamp, and caught fire.

The inquisitor let out a sigh, and spoke in a soft voice: “My dear imp, there’s no need to make such a fuss. Wouldn’t you rather come down from there? I only want to speak with you.”

Saskia glanced down at him, and in that moment he seemed to radiate warmth and kindness. She felt…confused. Why was she up here again? Why not do as he suggested? That man didn’t want to hurt her. He only wanted to talk.

Shaking her head to clear her foggy thoughts, she fluttered towards the kindly man.

“What are you doing!?” cried Ruhildi.

Saskia didn’t answer. It should be obvious what she was doing. She settled onto the man’s shoulder, teetering slightly as her claws found purchase on his leather pauldron.

“Good girl,” murmured the inquisitor.

“Best put her back in the cage, just to be safe,” said the captain.

“That won’t be necessary,” said the inquisitor. “She’s quite tame. See?” He reached to pat the top of her head. She leaned into his hand, crooning softly.

“By the forefathers, Sashki, snap out of it!” said Ruhildi. “This isn’t you! His magic has taken hold of your mind!”

A distant part of Saskia’s mind wondered if there might be some truth to her friend’s words. Something was certainly…different. But that small, rebellious part of her was being smothered by this overpowering feeling of…rightness she felt whenever she heeded the inquisitor’s advice. That was all it was, right? Advice. He would never stoop to giving her an order.

With Saskia still perched on his shoulder, the inquisitor marched out of the dungeon, followed by the captain and several of his men, who looked equal parts wary and annoyed.

The inquisitor seated himself on a stone bench, looking up at Ixathi and the moon and the stars. “My name is Faldrey,” he said, still gently scratching the top of her head. “What is your name, my pet?”

Answering him was the least she could do. “Saskia Wendle.”

“That’s an odd name for an imp,” said Faldrey.

She shook her head. “I wasn’t an imp when my mum named me.”

Faldrey gave her a quizzical look. “You weren’t an imp? Then what were you?”

“Human.”

His eyebrows shot up. “You were human? I think you’d better explain further.”

“The first me was human,” she said drowsily. “Then there was troll-me. And this me is an imp. Oh, and there’s also six-dimensional-tentacley-me, but that one’s kind of a wildcard.”

Looking even more confused, Faldrey switched to a different line of questioning. “How did you make the cage door come off?”

“Yes, I’d very much like to know that as well,” muttered the captain.

“That’s stoneshaper magic,” explained Saskia. “It works on metal too. Next time you try to restrain me, you should stick to wood or cloth or…” She trailed off, trying to think of another non-mineral, non-metallic material they could use. Bone was out—she could use Ruhildi’s necrourgy on that. There wouldn’t be any plastic or carbon fibre in a low-tech society like this.

“Noted,” said the captain, giving the inquisitor a sidelong grin.

“I’ve not heard of such a magic,” said Faldrey. “Are you a soulbinder? A demon soulbinder?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t really know what a soulbinder is, exactly. I do have a metric craptonne of soul-juice in my soul-tree, though. Most of it came from the Serpent King when I ate him.”

Ruhildi sighed loudly in her ear. The humans looked startled.

“Could the imp be lying to you?” asked the captain.

Faldrey shook his head. “Not intentional lies. She truly believes what she’s telling me. She may be addled in the head, but…”

“She may not be,” said the captain. “The imp did manage to escape the Blightland—something not even the Serpent King himself could do…”

Faldrey looked at Saskia. “So how did you do it, my pet? How did you escape?”

“Oh that?” she said. “That was simple. The demons told me we can only go through the gate once. I had never been through before, so…here I am!”

Ruhildi groaned.

“Never been through the gate?” said the captain. “Then how did she get inside…?” He looked at the inquisitor. “Could she have survived in there all this time—since before the Blightland was the Blightland?”

“No, Captain Rogert,” said Faldrey. “The Blightland barrier expanded from a single point, marking all souls it touched. Even one who never went through the gate the first time was still touched by the barrier itself. That would be enough to doom any who tried to leave through the gate.”

“It’s not that complicated,” said Saskia. “Today was my first and only trip through the gate or barrier or whatever. I arrived on this world just days ago. Before that, there was no imp-me. If I’d waited long enough, I could have just teleported out, but…”

“Slow down, my pet,” said Faldrey. “You mean to say you’re from another world? A world before this one?”

“Before? No. I mean a world that exists concurrently with this one. Look, think of this world as an island in a vast sea. I’m from a different island.”

The humans just looked even more perplexed after her explanation. Apparently they’d never even considered the possibility of parallel worlds.

“And what is this…teleported you mentioned?” asked Faldrey, using the English word he didn’t recognise.

“It means going from point A to point B without crossing the intervening distance.”

His eyebrows shot yet higher. “Show me!”

“I can’t,” she said. “I only just arrived on this world. The tentacle-teleport thing is on a long cooldown. It hasn’t had time to recharge.”

“I insist, my pet.”

Oh. He insisted. That changed everything. Now she had to find a way, even if it killed her.

Please, my undermind, she silently implored. Please heed my call. These humans require a demonstration. If it’s within our power, I need to…

Light burst forth from within, unexpected and all-consuming. She felt herself expanding and contorting, her flesh shifting into vast tendrils and impossible shapes. Inquisitor Faldrey, Captain Rogert and the other men shrieked as her tentacles seized hold of arms and legs and throats. Some of the men, her undermind left embedded in stone walls or fused together into nightmarish piles of flesh. The rest, it simply pulled apart.

Saskia found herself hovering in the air, looking over the carnage in shocked disbelief. The only reason she didn’t let loose a stream of vomit was that she hadn’t eaten a single thing since her arrival on this world—except souls. There was nothing in her stomach to upchuck.

The inquisitor…he’d pulled a dogram Jedi mind trick on her. And when her undermind answered her call, it had purged the threat with extreme prejudice.

“Och Sashki…” said Ruhildi. “You sure ken how to make an entrance. But I’m glad to have you back to yourself, and free again.”

Feeling too wretched to offer a reply, Saskia took to the skies, and flew long into the night.