Undermind

“Methinks I broke her.”

The sound of Ruhildi’s voice pulled Saskia out of her reverie. The dwarf was looking up at her with a bemused expression on her face.

“Oh, don’t mind me,” said Saskia. “I just had an…uh, I don’t know the word.” Epiphany.

They returned to the cave in silence, while Saskia processed her newfound understanding of herself, and of the world. She shouldn’t be this certain about her true nature as an oracle. The evidence was flimsy at best. But she felt such certainty about it.

Maybe that too was part of being an oracle. She had been getting a lot of inexplicable hunches since she came to this world. Actually, she’d had her share over the past couple of years on Earth too, come to think of it. She’d always had a well-developed sense of intuition. It was part of what made her a good artist. Ever since the accident though, the cryptic dreams and strange feelings had at times made her wonder if her sanity was slipping.

As they got ready for bed that night, another random thought occurred to her, and she voiced it to Ruhildi. “Say, are there any humans on this branch? On Ciendil, I mean.”

Ruhildi was silent for a while. Then she said, “I ken not this word hoo-mans.”

Saskia sighed in frustration. “I don’t know how to say it in the stone tongue.”

“If you tell me what hoo-mans are, mayhap I can tell you the word for them.”

“Oh, uh…I guess we’re—they’re sorta like a cross between an elf and a dwarf?” said Saskia uncertainly. “With round ears like yours, and their men can grow beards, but they’re closer to elves in height, on average.”

“A half-breed?” Ruhildi looked at her, aghast. “Quit talking nonsense, Sashki. A dwarrow’d sooner cut her own throat than lay with an alvar!”

“No!” Saskia waved her hands in denial. “I mean, we—they’re not dwarf-elf hybrids or anything. I was just describing what they look like. They’re a completely separate race. Although, there are human dwarfs, but…never mind that.”

“Och, if you say so,” said Ruhildi, tilting her head to the side.

“So do you have a name for them?” asked Saskia.

Ruhildi looked thoughtful. Finally she said, “No, I never heard of folk like that.”

“Oh,” said Saskia, deflated.

Elves and dwarves and trolls, but no humans? Humans were the default race on most fictional fantasy worlds, forming the bulk of their population. But not on Arbor Mundi, apparently.

Perhaps that was why she had appeared on this world as a troll. Whatever had transported her here had put her in a body appropriate for this world. But wouldn’t it have made more sense for her to become an elf, since she’d appeared in the middle of an elven village? Elves were also far more similar to humans than trolls were.

On the other hand…there was that voice-recording session with Fergus, on her last day on Earth. She’d had trolls on the brain. Trolls and orcs and dwarves. Maybe her memories or subconscious had affected the race selection somehow. Maybe they’d affected which world she’d ended up in…

“Not that I don’t believe you,” said Ruhildi. “If you say you crossed paths with such folk, who am I to deny you? This is a vast world, with room enough for people and places I never dreamt of.”

Saskia felt light-headed. Finally, after all this time, with all this bat-guano happening around her, she was beginning to detect a glimmer of order behind the chaos.

She slept like a baby that night, and awoke with a new sense of clarity and purpose.

Having answered some questions about herself, the next item on her agenda was to find out about her new roommate’s agenda, beyond the obvious goal of finding her way back home to her people. After seeing what Ruhildi did in her sleep the other night, Saskia was pretty sure she knew where the dwarf’s talents lay, but she wanted to get it out in the open, before another incident occurred.

She’d put off the conversation off long enough. It was time to just come out and say it.

“I can help you find your way home, Ruhildi. I want to help. I haven’t told you everything about myself, and you may not believe what I’ve told you, but it’s the truth, and I’m not crazy.

“I know you have your own strange stuff going on as well. The other night, you looked like you were asleep on your feet. And then this thing crawled out from behind you…”

Ruhildi scratched her sideburn. “I were hoping you forgot about that, or passed it off as a dream.”

“There was a dead thing dragging itself through my cave,” said Saskia dryly. “Pretty hard to forget.”

“Och, it’s worse than you ken, Sashki. Truth be told, you’re not safe around me. Mayhap ’twould be for the best if I just leave.”

“No! I mean…don’t be hasty,” said Saskia, trying not to let despair trickle into her voice. She didn’t want to be alone again so soon. “Just tell me what’s happening. Maybe I can help with this as well.”

“Alright well…I should just show you,” said Ruhildi. “If you still want me to stay after you witness this, then I’ll stay for a time, and accept any help you can offer, and do whatever I can for you in return.”

Saskia followed her to the site where she’d buried the bones. She already knew where this was going…

Ruhildi knelt down, digging through the snow with her hands, until she reached the dirt beneath. She crouched there, unmoving, eyes closed and brows creased in concentration. A whisper of voices gathered in the air, warning Saskia that magic was being summoned. The whispering grew in volume. And then, abruptly, it stopped.

Nothing happened.

Several minutes passed, and nothing continued to happen.

“Impressive,” said Saskia.

“Shut it!” said Ruhildi.

Again a whispering sound filled the air, and built up to a crescendo. Finally, Ruhildi gave a shuddering groan. The voices went silent. The ground gave a slight tremble.

And then nothing happened.

Ruhildi leapt to her feet, cradling her hand, which had turned a rather more unhealthy shade of blue. “Och, I can’t do it when you’re watching!”

Despite her distaste for what she knew the dwarf was trying to do, Saskia struggled to suppress her mirth. She was no stranger to performance anxiety.

“It’s alright, Ruhildi, I get it. You’re a necromanc—” She paused. “Actually, what’s the word in the stone tongue for a magic user who controls the dead?”

“Necrourgist,” said Ruhildi. The word she spoke was close enough to the one Saskia was familiar with—necromancer—that translation was unnecessary. “You…don’t have a problem with that?”

Saskia did have a bit of a problem with that. It was super creepy. She’d been fine with necromancers in games, but the prospect of coming face to face with actual rotting corpses did not appeal to her. And then there were the moral issues. She’d been raised to respect the dead. Using corpses as personal slaves, even if the corpses themselves were just soulless husks, seemed about as disrespectful to their original owners as one could get.

On the other hand, she’d put up with a lot to avoid being alone again so soon. Best not to reveal how uncomfortable this made her…

“Well I admit it scared the bejewels out of me the other night,” said Saskia. “But now you’ve been honest about it, it’s not so…aargh!”

Something had grabbed her ankle. Something white and bony. A skeletal hand. Of course it was a skeletal hand.

She shook her foot, violently. With a crack, the hand broke free at the forearm. Then it began to crawl up her leg like a bony five-legged spider.

“Ruhildi,” she pleaded. “Make it stop!”

“I…och bollocks!” said Ruhildi. She reached out for Saskia, who was tearing great gashes in her own leg trying to prise the bony critter off. “Stop struggling, damn you!”

The instant Ruhildi touched the wayward hand, it let go of Saskia’s leg and fell, bony fingers splayed, into the snow.

Ruhildi looked at Saskia sitting in the snow with a bloody leg. She raised her bushy eyebrows. “You’re still alright with me being a necrourgist?”

Saskia didn’t trust herself to speak at the moment, so she just nodded dumbly.

“Until I can master this affliction, there may be…teething problems, like the one you experienced.”

Teething problems, as in actual teeth ripping into my flesh, thought Saskia.

“An affliction, you call it,” said Saskia. “Is it not just another magical talent? Like being a druid or oracle?”

“Druid?”

“Elven nature magic-user.”

“Och, they’re called greenhands,” said Ruhildi. “As for me, I were born a stoneshaper. Among my people, those with the gift of stoneshaping are reputed above all others. Necrourgy is a perversion of that gift. ’Tweren’t something I… ’Twere him that did it. When that bastard… What he did, it changed me; woke the monster inside me. And now I can’t be rid of it.”

“I’m sorry,” said Saskia. She was still left wondering what exactly had happened, but as for being changed into a monster…she could certainly relate to that.

“Why?” asked the dwarf, looking perplexed.

“Sorry for what you had to go through,” said Saskia.

“You need not apologise,” said Ruhildi. “’Twere my master to blame, and all of his kin, not you. You’ve been nothing but kind to me.”

“I wasn’t apologising,” said Saskia. “That was an expression of…” She trailed off, unable to think of a translation for sympathy. “Never mind. So I get that being a necrourgist isn’t all sunshine and bunnies, but is it really that bad? Once you learn to control your new power, it’ll just be another tool, right? One you can keep locked away, and pull out only when needed?”

“You’re not wholly wrong,” said Ruhildi. “But don’t assume it’ll be an easy thing for me to master. This monster within, it doesn’t answer readily to my will. And if I don’t let it out through spellcasting, it flies free as wild, unfettered magic. I’m not for going back to the ’Neath ’til I have it tamed, elsewise I might endanger my kin.”

“Well you can practice your spells as much as you like around the valley. Actually…” Saskia paused, considering what she was about to suggest. “I’d like to be there, to…well, help clean up the mess, if you lose control of your pets. I need to practice fighting humanoid—uh, alvar-shaped opponents. I’ve made enemies, you see, and I think one of them has an unhealthy obsession with me…”

Taking a deep breath, she told Ruhildi about the druid (or greenhand, as the dwarf called him).

Ruhildi eyes grew wide as Saskia’s tale progressed. “’Tweren’t just any greenhand you defeated, but a keeper. ’Twere no small thing, even for one as big as you. But those…visions, as you’re for calling them, when you touch the keeper’s staff…I never heard of such a thing afore. ’Tis fair odd.”

For the rest of the morning, Ruhildi struggled to control the unruly skeletons she unearthed. Whenever one of them ran amok, it became Saskia’s job to chase it down and return it to the earth. This was harder than she expected, because the deaders just wouldn’t die!

Yeah, she should have predicted difficulties killing something that had no skin. The problem was, as usual, movies and games had led her astray.

Destroy the brain, they said. Lop off it’s head. That’s how you kill the undead.

What a load of crap. Their brains were already long-since turned to mush and slurped up by worms. Rip off their heads, and they just kept coming. What use did a brainless, eyeless skeleton have for its head?

No, to stop one of these boggers, she had to utterly dismantle them, tearing their bones apart until there were no more joints to flex or teeth to chatter. And then stomp on those bones until they stopped vibrating.

It was…fun.

Despite her earlier scruples, it felt so good to have a truly mindless enemy to fight. Something she could kill without actually hurting anyone. Being a troll came with certain…aggressive urges, and this let her unshackle them with no consequences.

After a while, Ruhildi stopped trying to reign her minions in, and just watched Saskia going at it with that now-familiar bemused expression.

After a dunk in the icy river to wash off the sweat and corpse dust, she joined Ruhildi for dinner.

“So you’re a stoneshaper,” said Saskia after swallowing a mouthful of liver. “I take it that’s a dwarven thing, like the elves have greenhands and oracles?”

“Aye,” said Ruhildi. “We have our worldseeds. The alvari have theirs. Stoneshapers come from the seed of stone, held deep in the ’Neath.”

“Wait, what? You came from a…stone seed…?”

“The seed of stone is a worldseed. And only my magic came from that worldseed, not my body. We dwarrow are born the same way as everyone else, no matter what the leaf-ears say about us.”

“Alright, so how does that work? What is a worldseed?”

Ruhildi smiled. “So many questions, Sashki. You remind me of my…” Her smile wilted, and she stood frozen for several long seconds before answering, “The worldseeds are the source of all magic. Leastwise, all we mortals are like to get our hands on.”

Saskai frowned, seeing the light suddenly go out of Ruhildi’s eyes. “So, what, you walk up to a dwarven worldseed, touch it, and bam, you’re a stoneshaper?”

“I ken not this word bam, but no, that’s not how it works at all. The only way to gain the blessing of a worldseed is to be created in its presence.”

“Created as in born?”

“Not born. The act of creation happens a while afore birth, if you ken what I mean…”

“Oh!” Saskia felt her cheeks grow warm. “So your parents…”

“Aye,” said Ruhildi. “They stood atop the highest pillar of the humping chamber to beget me as close as could be to the crystalline glow of the seed of stone. Or so my pap liked to tell me.”

Saskia did an actual spit-take, and burst out laughing. “Humping chamber?”

“The official name is the Solemnity of Stone, but no-one calls it that. I don’t ken why anyone would want to be solemn about what goes on in there.”

“And to be an oracle, I’d also have to have been…uh, created near a worldseed,” guessed Saskia.

“Aye, the alvari call that one the seed of kenning, or some such. So you can appreciate how unlikely ’twould be for one of your kind to be a true oracle. The leaf-ears hold their worldseeds under heavy guard, even from their own kin. They’d never let a pair of trows get close enough to…”

“Hump,” said Saskia, recalling the pair of elves she’d encountered in a compromising position when she first woke up in this world. She thought she’d done a pretty good job repressing that memory, but now it was back, as clear in her mind as if it had happened yesterday. The thing in the tree that had looked to her like an old computer monitor, but somehow wasn’t…could that be a worldseed?

Yeah, that had to be it! Although…if only babies conceived in the presence of that thing could become oracles, then Saskia, who had been born and raised on Earth, didn’t qualify.

But in another sense, maybe she did. She’d entered this world in its presence, hadn’t she? What if her troll body had been created for her in that same moment? Creation didn’t necessarily mean conception, in her case. This seemed like exactly the kind of loophole that would have allowed the object’s magic to enter her; for it to turn her into an oracle…

The more she thought about it, the more the idea seemed to fit. And yet she was having one of those hunches again, and this one was telling her she still hadn’t figured out the whole of it.

Ah well. She was close! That much, she knew.

After they’d eaten, Saskia dug the druid’s staff out from under a pile of rocks in the corner of the cavern. A few days earlier, she’d buried it to avoid being tempted by its siren call while she took care of Ruhildi. That was no longer necessary, and Ruhildi was eager to see Saskia’s trophy for herself.

The moment she uncovered the glowing stone at the end of the gnarled length of wood, a low whisper swirled about her. Something fantasinating was happening; she could sense it. Before she knew it, she’d reached down and clasped the staff between her trembling fingers.

Ruhildi and the cavern around her faded away, replaced by an altogether different view. She was moving along a high causeway on a steep slope. The path weaved between a forest of curvaceous stone buildings that reached into the sky like pointy hats.

I’ve been here before, she realised.

Walking at the druid’s side was another elf with a scar on his cheek. She’d seen this guy before, but it took her a moment to identify him. He was the one who had jabbed her with the spear on her first night in this world. That scar was from her claws. Last time she’d seen him, he’d been lying unconscious at her feet. It was somewhat of a relief to see she hadn’t killed the guy. She wondered what his relationship with the druid was.

Probably found each other through Troll Haters Anonymous, she thought.

“Echoes afear,

Ixathi is here;

Come to gather you all.

No echoes in flight,

Nor binder’s blight,

Shall weather the final call.”

Saskia almost dropped the staff in fright at the sound of the low, wavering voice. The one who had spoken was an elf boy who lurched awkwardly behind the druid and his companion. He looked to be in his mid-teens, assuming elves matured at the same rate as humans, which was by no means a given. From the way he moved, she suspected he had some kind of disability.

This was the first time she’d heard anything through the staff. Strangely, all was silent except the sound of his voice.

Actually, that wasn’t the strangest thing. Even stranger was the fact that he’d spoken those words in English.

Saskia watched as the kid hopped over a muddy pothole, chuckling to himself. “That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for…damn!” He stumbled, splashing muddy water over his breeches. “Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here.”

Saskia did a mental double-take. That wasn’t something she’d expected to hear on this world. Her mind whirled as she tried to comprehend how an elf could be uttering famous quotes from American astronauts.

“Where’d you hear that?” she demanded. “Who are you?”

Even as the words left her lips, she remembered she wasn’t actually there. Distantly, she heard Ruhildi’s voice. “Who’re you talking to, Sashki?”

Suddenly, the young elf looked straight at her. Not at her host. Not at the druid whose eyes she looked out of. At her. She could feel his gaze boring into her. “Oh I didn’t be seeing you there,” said the boy, now speaking a different language—Elvish, perhaps? “I’m Dallim.”

“You can hear me?” asked Saskia, suddenly bursting with excitement. She’d assumed the connection was one way, but somehow… “Are you from Earth?”

“Earth?” said Dallim. “I don’t be from Earth. I think I…saw it once? Or dreamt it, or thought it up. Hard to tell the difference. Be you a dream?”

“No!” said Saskia. “I’m real! Just…far away.”

“Oh, you’re really real!” said Dallim. “I’m so happy for you! I do wish I were real.”

“You’re more real than anyone I’ve met in this world! You just quoted Neil Armstrong, for dog’s sake! How can you not be real?”

Dallim frowned. “That’s kind of you to say, funny-eared girl, but we both know that can’t be true.”

“It is true!” countered Saskia. “Hold on…funny-eared? You can see me? Don’t I look like a troll?”

The elf boy laughed. “You be no trow. You’re smaller than me! You’re a human. I’ve been seeing your kind before, in many worlds. Many dreams. Be you a dream?”

Saskia stared at him for several seconds, feeling increasingly bewildered. “Didn’t we just go over that…?”

But the spear-toting elf chose that moment to run up to Dallim, grabbing him roughly by the shoulders. The boy seemed to lose sight of her, and he lapsed back into cryptic poetry.

“Blade heavy and light;

Scorch and spray.

Pale and bright,

He lights the way.

By curse or by right,

Ye here and in sight,

Ye both, he shall betray.”

Again, he spoke in English, but she had no idea where he’d pulled that little verse from, or the one she’d heard earlier, for that matter.

Before she could ask him about it, Dallim wandered off. The adults turned away from him, and her world was once again shrouded in silence, except for the drum beat of her heart.