Underland

The sound of bubbling liquids filled Valdemar’s room as he painted his grandfather’s portrait on a canvas.

The Elixir of True Sight boiled in a flask, releasing colorful magenta fumes. The smell reminded the necromancer of formaldehyde, and it mixed terribly with the odors of fresh paints around him.

Hermann and Liliane shared Valdemar’s workshop, both of them reading books around his table. The former was utterly absorbed by his ‘Expert’s Guide to Magical Pigments’ grimoire, while the latter occasionally raised her eyes away from her alchemy manual to anxiously check on the potion. While Liliane had offered to prepare the Elixir of True Sight for him, he had insisted on doing it himself. He wanted to learn alchemy, not watch someone else do it in his stead.

A week had passed since the summoner started working with Hermann. Iren had proved himself as good as his word, delivering the Derro tech pieces that Valdemar needed to complete his ecto-catcher. The device looked as good as new, with his grandfather’s journal resting safely beneath a glass dome.

Unfortunately, Valdemar had noticed a terrible problem while preparing the ecto-catcher and he needed a portrait container to house his grandfather’s ectoplasm more than ever.

Valdemar put his paintbrush away and disabled his alchemical boiler. The Elixir of True Sight had turned into a substance as black as oil, with a few magenta bubbles rising to the surface. “I think it’s done,” he said.

“Finally!” Liliane snapped her manual shut. “It’s been four hours. I told you, you should have raised the temperature by two degrees.”

“I didn’t want to risk botching the potion,” Valdemar replied. “The recipe said—”

“The potion’s inventor didn’t have the technology we have today and nobody updated the cookbook,” Liliane interrupted him brazenly. Valdemar had noticed that while usually shy and kind, the young witch turned unusually assertive and passionate whenever alchemy was concerned. She clearly took pride in her expertise. “Next time, Valdy, raise the temperature.”

“As you wish, Mistress Lily,” Valdemar replied with a smirk, before putting on his gloves to manipulate the flask. He shook it slowly, watching the concoction take on a violet hue.

“Lily?”

“Well, you do call me Valdy,” he pointed out. “That makes us even. I’m still sore that you gave me one, but not Hermann.”

This made Liliane giggle. “How about Hermo?”

“Please… do not…” Hermann pleaded, before looking up from his own book. “Congratulations… Valdemar.”

“For the potion, or the painting?” the summoner asked.

“Both.” Hermann glanced at the newly painted portrait. Valdemar had painted his grandfather Pierre in the twilight of his years, sitting on the rocking chair he loved so much. The old man smiled at the onlooker, his blind white eyes and long beard making him look like the very picture of wisdom. Valdemar had given him a simple white shirt, breeches, and stacked-heel shoes. “It’s… good. The colors are vivid enough… and you blood-soaked the pigments.”

Hermann had proven himself a good teacher, if slow due to his speech-impediment. The principle behind pictomancy was simple in theory: the painter mixed their blood with the paint, captured the ‘essence’ of the target, and then established a metaphysical link between the portrait and what it represented.

In practice, it wasn’t enough to capture the target’s form. You had to capture their spirit too. Much like normal painting, one needed genuine artistic sensibility to become a pictomancer. Additionally, as a Blood-based sorcery, pictomancy could only affect dead or living beings. Inanimate objects like stone were beyond the magic’s grasp.

Hermann practiced on plants and animals because it was easier to capture the essence of simpler lifeforms than a human being. Besides encouraging Valdemar to paint a portrait of his grandfather for the sake of his experiment, the troglodyte asked him to practice on the local vampire bats as a trial run.

“Are you sure I can capture the ectoplasm with that canvas?” Valdemar asked, as he waited for his elixir to cool down. “I don’t want to botch the procedure. I can’t botch it.”

“It should be… fine,” Hermann reassured. “Ghosts and ectoplasms are… easier to bind since… since they aren’t anchored to a body. You also know… your grandfather more than anyone… and you share the same blood. Your portrait will be… the perfect receptacle. It would have been harder if… he had a body.”

“Wait, you can rip out someone’s soul with a portrait while they’re still alive?” Liliane asked, horrified.

“Yes… and no,” Hermann replied. “Pictomancy can turn a portrait into a… a soul trap. If the target dies… the soul will move into the portrait… regardless of the distance.”

“So like a soulstone?” Liliane scratched her cheek. “But what if the painted person has one? Or if they’re turned into an undead?”

“The pictomancer’s portrait trap and the soulstone… will conflict to catch the soul. It’s a… a contest of magical strength between the creators of… of both devices. Same if… if the target’s soul is transferred into a golem… or an undead body. You cannot sever a soul from a living body with… with pictomancy.”

“But you can still trap anybody’s soul with none the wiser the moment they die.” Liliane shuddered. “Don’t take it the wrong way, Hermo, but I’m glad there aren’t more pictomancers running around.”

The troglodyte cleared his throat. “My name is… not Hermo.”

“Great, I will call you Not-Hermo now,” Liliane replied playfully. Hermann looked at her with an expressionless face for a moment, before giving up. “So, Valdy, where do we start? Will you drink the potion now, or attempt your experiment?”

She sounded quite eager to see both. Valdemar wondered if she intended to drink an Elixir of True Sight herself in the future, or if she had a ghost of her own to summon. “The potion,” he declared. “I need more experience in pictomancy before I attempt to summon my grandfather’s ectoplasm again. The experiment might fail otherwise.”

“Huh? Why’s that?” Liliane asked with a frown. “Did Iren give you defective pieces?”

“No, no, my ecto-catcher is perfect.” Valdemar clenched his fists in rage. “It’s the journal that the inquisitors damaged.”

This confused Hermann. “It… it looks fine to me.”

“The text is fine, the psychic imprint is not,” Valdemar explained. “I was in the middle of coalescing my grandfather’s ectoplasm when the Knights interrupted me. The process couldn’t finish and exhausted some of the psychic energy that remained.”

“And... you think you can’t... summon it again?”

“I think I can, but it may be damaged.” Valdemar couldn’t tell much until he actually attempted the spell, but he worried that another failure might destroy the ectoplasm outright. “That’s why I want to have a perfect soul portrait in place to catch the psychic echo, as I fear it might dissipate otherwise.”

“That’s horrible,” Liliane said with compassion. “Is there anything we can do to help?”

“Not much, I’m afraid. It’s up to me to paint the best portrait.”

“Speaking of portraits, I…” Hermann said, before showing a page of his book to Valdemar. “I have done research for the blue pigment… for our project.”

Our project? Valdemar couldn’t help but smile as he read. The text described a rare plant called Colophryar; the exotic flower grew no more than five petals at once, each dyed with a vivid shade of blue. Though highly dangerous in its natural state, the plant’s toxins could be refined into a variety of things from sleeping drugs to pigments.

“It grows only in… the Domain of Astaphanos… among its crystal ecosystems,” Hermann explained. “The flower is... a powerful magical reagent.”

“Oh, Astaphanos!” Liliane smiled with enthusiasm. “I was supposed to go there with Lady Mathilde and Frigga to collect rare ingredients. We could go there together!”

“I can’t leave the Institute, remember?” Valdemar pointed out, his friend’s expression deflating. “Besides, couldn’t Iren get us a sample?”

“He could, but… I’m not sure that they will be of the…” Hermann struggled a bit to find the right word. “The quality that we require.”

“You could always ask Lord Och for authorization to go outside,” Liliane suggested to Valdemar. “He might grant your request.”

“It costs nothing to ask,” Valdemar conceded. “As for the yellow pigment, I think summoning a Collector is our best bet. Their blood is golden and the creature possesses the ability to affect space and time in a limited capacity.”

“I’ve… never heard of such a creature,” Hermann admitted.

“Collectors are intermediate Qlippoths,” Valdemar explained. “They’re extraplanar creatures resembling giant spiders with the ability to freeze people in time. That’s why they’re called Collectors, as they enjoy gathering trophies. I’ve never summoned one though. The higher you go into the Qlippoth ‘hierarchy’ the stronger and smarter they get.”

Gnawers were so bestial that they couldn’t be interacted with, and eating everyone but the summoner was usually the extent of their service. Collectors were almost as intelligent as humans, and twice as vicious.

“Maybe we could… convince it to give some of its blood?” Hermann suggested. “We have much to… to offer.”

“I doubt it will listen. Collectors are born greedy, and they always want more. More powerful Qlippoths bargain for their services ahead of time before they can be fully bound, and they usually ask to be released into our reality after their service is finished. We’ll have to wound the beast on arrival and then banish it back home.”

“You know, I’m worried that you know so much about fiendish creatures,” Liliane admitted. “Lady Mathilde told me summoning Qlippoths was outlawed by the church. She said that while elementals are mostly passive and usually try to return home, Qlippoths actively try to remain in our world to cause mayhem.”

“Which is true,” Valdemar agreed. Summoning Qlippoths meant playing with fire, and no summoner was entirely safe from them. “When I couldn’t get a true magical education, I went to the Midnight Market and I managed to buy some occult texts. The most complex summoning grimoire I could get my hands on was an incomplete copy of Concordance of the Planes. Only the Qlippoth chapter was exhaustive.”

Valdemar suddenly wondered if Lord Och had access to a full copy. The sorcerer had always resented never finishing his education.

“I still don’t get why you’re taking so many risks for a portrait,” Liliane admitted. “It’s maybe because I don’t have a passion project of my own yet, but… you might die trying.”

“Besides proving my grandfather wasn’t a madman, I’m doing it for everyone,” Valdemar replied. “I serve a purpose greater than myself.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you like living in the dark? Being forced to raise the dead to meet our basic needs? Confronted by Derros and Dokkars, sandwiched between monsters from the surface and whatever creatures inhabit the world’s depths?” Valdemar glanced at his grandfather’s painting. “The world he described was much brighter, in more ways than one. There was no ceiling over anyone’s head, food was plentiful, and though there were wars, mankind wasn’t caged inside a prison of stone.”

“It’s… a noble goal…” Hermann said. He hesitated about saying more, before finally finding the courage to do so. “I’m… doing something similar. I’m… trying to find a new homeland… for my people.”

“You’re looking for a world to colonize?” Valdemar asked. This surprised him, as troglodytes had inhabited Underland’s caves long before humans descended from the surface.

“This Domain… and others... were my kind’s home before humans… before humans forced us out.” Hermann let out a sigh. “Even now, we… we are not tolerated. Lord Och gave me… permission to learn here, but… he is an exception. Our kinds… can’t coexist.”

“But we coexist right now,” Liliane pointed out with optimism. “It’s not impossible.”

“An exception… proving the rule…” Hermann replied. “If I were to visit another Domain without disguise… I would be looked at with distrust at best… or stoned at worse. This planet is… too small for all of us.”

“You’re being a pessimist,” Liliane replied. “Sure, we don’t have a sun above our head, but we have the magic and resources to prosper! We just need to better manage our wealth, change people’s opinions, and we’ll get along.”

“You are kind, Liliane… but you do not understand. You never had to… to run away from violence.”

Liliane pouted. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“That you’ve been spoiled too much,” Valdemar replied with a grin.

“I should toss that potion into your mean face,” Liliane replied. “I think you’re just running away with a few extra steps. It would be amazing if you could find another world, but it won’t fix this one. If we don’t solve our problems here, we’ll bring them elsewhere.”

“Maybe you should ask the empress to run reforms then,” Valdemar deadpanned.

“I will, Valdy.” Liliane winked at him. “But until I can get an audience, I will support your project in the meantime.”

“Thanks.” Her moral support, and Hermann’s, meant a great deal to him after so many years of being ridiculed for his theories.

Was this how friendship felt? If he had known, Valdemar would have struck one up much earlier. A shame he had met these people only while under Lord Och’s yoke.

Speaking of Och, Valdemar glanced at his Elixir of True Sight. It had cooled enough to become drinkable. The lich had all but ordered him to take it, but if anything, Valdemar was more afraid of not knowing the truth than the Dark Lord’s punishment. If invisible things watched him, he wanted to notice them too.

“So, ready?” he asked his new colleagues.

“Shouldn’t we bind you first?” Liliane asked with a worried voice. “In case you go mad?”

“I can… restrain him if needed,” Hermann pointed out. Valdemar didn’t doubt his word. Troglodytes were naturally stronger than humans, and that was without taking their spellcasting abilities into account. Hermann might have been a pictomancer first and foremost, but he probably knew the basics of combat magic as well.

“Here goes nothing then.”

Valdemar took a deep breath, and drank the potion.

He almost vomited the moment the liquid hit his tongue. The brew had a fouler taste than the sorcerer expected, more bitter than anything he had ever tasted. He felt like swallowing viscous, poisonous mud. The substance didn’t even wait to reach his stomach, dissolving into his flesh while halfway down his throat.

It was a struggle to drink the whole thing, and Valdemar put away the empty flask on the desk the moment he finished. “Are you alright?” Liliane asked, before immediately giving him a bottle of water. “Here, take it.”

“Thanks...” Valdemar said, but the water didn’t help wash away the foul aftertaste. Worse, a sense of unease filled his body, traveling from his throat and stomach through his blood. His eyes started to hurt. “Uh…”

Hermann quickly grabbed a chair to let his fellow scholar sit, and Valdemar was thankful for it. He didn’t remember ever feeling like this. He had never suffered any disease, and most poisons or toxins barely left him winded. Yet the Elixir of True Sight blurred his vision, stiffened his muscles, and made his belly growl.

And the heartbeat! He could hear it inside his head, as if his heart and brain had switched places!

“I… underestimated the effects,” Valdemar admitted, before wincing as a flash of pain coursed through his eyes.

This didn’t reassure Liliane. “Valdy, your eyes...”

Valdemar glanced at the empty flask and his own reflection in the glass. His grey irises had turned into a deep shade of crimson, like when he used magic.

Even the unflappable Hermann looked a bit concerned. “Can you see… Valdemar?”

“Yes. Yes, I can.” His enhanced metabolism finally kicked in, the feeling of unease washed away. Though he still felt tired, his vision slowly returned to normal. “I can see normally.”

“Your eyes haven’t returned to normal though,” Liliane pointed out. “Do you notice anything different?”

Valdemar frowned, squinting at his fellow scholars. He saw a red aura coming off from their clothes, the invisible energy produced by the spells woven into the fabric. He also noticed the same glow around his grandfather’s portrait. It was barely a step-up from the Potion of Insight he had drunk earlier.

It wasn’t until he looked at the journal that Valdemar noticed something odd. He rose from his seat, slowly lifted the glass dome protecting the book, and examined the cover as his fellow scholars watched in puzzled silence.

A strange symbol had appeared on the previously featureless book, its lines glowing with a pale red glow. Two curves joined in the shape of an eye held within a sideway cube, with a line slashing the rune vertically. Valdemar didn’t remember it, and yet it felt intimately familiar. Like a childhood treasure that he had never truly forgotten.

Valdemar flipped the journal’s pages, and quickly noticed new pictures among his grandfather’s drawings. These additions were not visions of earthly wonders, but odd anatomical designs. A swirling mass of flesh trapped inside a circle; a rat with human hands and an almost human face; an eldritch, shadowy humanoid without a face, but eyes on the chest, hands, and shoulders.

The images were disturbing enough, but the last one bothered Valdemar the most. Something about the eerie humanoid silhouette contrasting with the inhuman exterior shook him to his core.

Did I see it before? Valdemar thought. He had the feeling he did, but couldn’t remember. “Hermann, do you see these pictures?” he asked the troglodyte.

“Which pictures?” Hermann asked, confirming he couldn’t see them. “I have not taken… an Elixir of Truth Sight.”

But Lord Och did. Or if he hadn’t drunk one while alive, he could still see the invisible. That bastard, Valdemar thought. He knew but didn’t tell me. He wanted to see how much I knew about the journal.

“So it’s working?” Liliane grabbed Valdemar’s hand without warning to check his pulse, before applying her warm fingers to his neck. He sensed her using magic to analyze his body, but let her do her thing. “Mmm, besides an abnormal current of blood flowing into your eyes, I don’t sense anything wrong. You’re as resilient as a dragon, Valdy.”

“I do see things I didn’t notice before, but honestly it’s nothing worth going mad over,” Valdemar replied. “And my heartbeat is killing me.”

“Huh?” she asked while removing her hands. “Your pulse is fine. It’s even slower than usual.”

Valdemar closed his eyes, and to his surprise… Liliane was right. His psychic sight didn’t detect anything abnormal about his heart.

But then, where did the sound in his head come from? He focused, trying to locate it…

“It’s…” Valdemar’s eyes snapped open. “It’s… everywhere?”

Valdemar could hear the heartbeat coming from below, echoing through the ground like some twisted symphony. He put his grandfather’s journal aside to touch the nearest wall, sensing the imperceptible vibrations going through them.

You can’t see them, Lord Och had warned him. But they can see you.

“Valdemar…” Hermann cleared his throat. “You should… wait a—”

Possessed by a feverish urge to clear his doubts, Valdemar rushed to the door. Hermann immediately rose from his seat to stop him, perhaps thinking he would make a mistake. But though he quickly caught Valdemar by the shoulders, the necromancer still kicked his door open.

An eye looked back at him from the other side.

Valdemar was so shocked that he didn’t even struggle against Hermann’s grip. He simply gazed at the eye, at the yellow iris and the fleshy redness around it. The organ protruded from the stone wall on the other side of the floor, right above another workshop’s door. It was large enough to have belonged to a giant, and it was gazing back at Valdemar with an unblinking focus—

“There’s one above my door,” Valdemar realized, as he noticed a shadow above his threshold. Only then did he notice the veins in the ground beyond his threshold. Not a mere line of red as his Potion of Insight showed him, but a black vein pumping invisible blood through the floor.

Hermann and Liliane were saying things, but he couldn’t hear them over the slow, thunderous heartbeat. The troglodyte suddenly released his grip over the necromancer, and the world felt all the colder for it. Valdemar took a step forward without looking back, unable to resist the vile fascination possessing him.

He walked beyond the threshold, and saw.

There were eyes everywhere.

There was one above each door, in the ceiling, in the corners; some as small as human ones, others larger than his workshop. They were yellow and blue, and red, and violet, and colors he had never seen before; all fleshy mounds linked together by invisible veins coursing through the tunnel.

They were all looking at him with unblinking stares.

Valdemar struggled to breathe, his fingers shaking. He tried to escape the eyes by looking at the clock echoing in tune with the heartbeat below, but it offered him no comfort. Something else floated in front of the device, a burning, fleshy orb of light sitting atop a tentacled body with black bat wings. The creature blinked at Valdemar, before phasing through the clock as if it was made of water and vanishing.

“Fascinating, isn’t it?” Lord Och’s voice echoed at his student’s side, sounding as amused as an undead could be. “And you haven’t even seen the first floor.”

Valdemar turned his head to face his mentor, but he had dropped the old man disguise. The lich beneath the illusion had revealed himself, his ancient bones wreathed in a shroud of cold blue mist and tattered robes. Hermann and Liliane stood behind the Dark Lord, though they were clearly more worried for Valdemar’s safety than anything else.

“Lord Och?” Valdemar asked, his throat sore. The heartbeat around him had become background noise, easy to ignore… but the eyes’ gaze remained unbearable. “You’re… not using your glamour?”

“You pierced the veil, my apprentice. You see me as I am, and the world as it is.”

After a moment of hesitation, Hermann found the courage to interrupt the lich. “Lord Och, if I may… he should rest.”

“What he should do is my concern alone, Hermann,” the lich replied dismissively. “Your concerns are unwarranted. My apprentice has no wish to throw himself out a window.”

The Dark Lord gazed at Valdemar.

“Will you?”

Valdemar glanced at the eyes, at the dreadful implications behind their existence... they had always been there, watching him.

And now that the potion had opened his mind, he would see them forever.

Valdemar would never escape their gaze. He would hear the heartbeat beneath his feet, always wonder if a creature was waiting to pass through a wall to ambush him.

His fingers shook, his throat felt sore. If a tunnel looked like this… how did the rest of the world? What things outside the Institute’s walls had caused so many to go mad after taking that Elixir?

And the implications… the heartbeat, the force coming from below, the eyes in the walls...

Valdemar wasn’t one to flinch away from the truth, but… for the first time in many years, he asked a question whose answer he dreaded.

“This place,” Valdemar said, gazing back at the eyes. “Is it… is it alive?”

“My fortress?”

Lord Och’s teeth transformed into a ghastly smile.

“Or the world?”