Undermind

Wiping a speck of grit from her eye, she blinked up at the muscular figure methodically working his way up the cliff face above her. Again, she found herself captivated by the mess of curly chestnut hair flapping out from beneath his orange helmet. She wanted to reach out and stroke that mane of his. Would he purr for her?

“Slack!”

Ivan’s shout jolted her back to the here and now. He wasn’t calling her a slacker, but rather, asking her to reduce tension on the rope. She complied, berating herself for the brief lapse in attention. This was her friend’s first time leading a multi-pitch climb. So far, he’d taken to it with aplomb, but falls could happen in an instant, with no warning. It wouldn’t do for her to be daydreaming about his mullet if that happened.

She let out a little breath as Ivan clipped himself in at the third belay station. Whooping, he grinned down at her, and settled in to belay from the top.

Now it was her turn to do some climbing. This third pitch was the trickiest, but she’d led this route before. Being second took a lot of the risk and challenge out of it. Still, peering over the side of the ledge, she felt a thrill at the sight of the sheer drop onto jagged rocks, eighty metres below. Nothing like a little primordial fear to get the blood pumping.

Once she was back out on the rock face, her nerves settled, and her thoughts turned to the technical. Curling her fingers and toes into cracks in the rock, she slithered up the trickiest section, unclipping and stowing quickdraws as she went. From there, it was an easy traverse over a sixty-degree slab to the cleft, or chimney, that would take her most of the way to the ledge where Ivan stood.

Halfway across the slab, there was a sudden sharp tug on her back, and she almost lost her footing.

That was odd. Her ropes were attached to the front of her harness; definitely not her back. A quick check confirmed they weren’t snagged on anything. Must have been her imagination.

“You okay down there?” called out Ivan, now just twenty metres above her.

“I thought I felt a…never mind.” Shaking her head to clear the odd feeling, she resumed her traversal.

There it was again; the tugging sensation, stronger than before. Strangely, she couldn’t tell which direction she was being pulled. The feeling intensified, and a wave of dizziness swept over her, accompanied by a tremor that quickly enveloped her whole body.

Next thing she knew, she was tumbling backward, spinning on the end of a rope pulled suddenly taut. With a sickening thud, the back of her head smashed against something cold and hard and rough.

There was a shout from above.

And then she was in another place. Her clothes were gone. It was warm and dark and wet, and there was this…thing attached to her back. Not exactly a rope, but more like a thin tentacle or vine, with wispy leaves sprouting along its length. At the other end of the fleshy appendage was a small aquatic creature about the size of her head, trailing tiny filaments as it swam lazily around her, like a jellyfish hooked on a line.

The organism wasn’t a jellyfish, though its glistening, translucent flesh and undulating form reminded her of one. There were wings like a manta ray, a stubby tail, and all sorts of limbs and appendages whose function she could scarcely imagine.

This place…this creature, in all their strangeness, seemed somehow familiar to her. She wasn’t frightened. The little winged critter felt in some indefinable way…part of her. And she was…home.

An instant later, she was back in the world she’d just left behind. But not in the same state she’d left it. Now she was far out from the cliff face, feeling a shock of cold air against too much exposed flesh. Where was her harness? The ropes? Her clothes…?

Rising up to greet her was a pine tree sprinkled in unmelted snow.

“Oh, hello tree,” she said, as reason fled her fevered mind. “I hope you’re soft.”

It wasn’t.

She lay in slushy snow beneath the tree, twisted and torn, trying to work out which of the lumpy things she felt beneath her battered body were broken branches, and which were her own broken bones. A grey haze settled over her, taking some of the pain away. She stopped shivering.

Twigs and snow crunched beneath heavy approaching footsteps. An inarticulate, rasping moan escaped her lips. The footsteps continued, slow and methodical. Someone was very close. Had they not seen her? Why weren’t they rushing to her side? Again she tried to alert them, but this time the only sound she made was a gasping wheeze.

Then he stepped into view, and what remained of her blood froze in her veins. She gazed up at a gleam of grey eyes so pale that they almost seemed to have no irises. His androgynous face was white and cold as snow, and as rigid as a mask, set in a perpetual frown. Beyond the face, she only got the vaguest sense of shape and colour, for the creature’s body was swathed in billowing white mist.

He moved closer, and she felt her heart crystallise in her chest. She could see her imminent death reflected in those pale eyes.

“This isn’t what really happened,” whispered a voice on the wind. “He was never here. Another climbing party came to your rescue and called in a chopper. Remember!”

The words jolted her, bringing her thoughts swirling to the surface. She didn’t remember the rescue itself, but she remembered its aftermath: waking up in hospital, and the long recovery…

Now she was lying on a stretcher aboard a helicopter, though she couldn’t recall how she got there. Dazedly, she gazed up at the grizzled paramedic sitting beside her. Or at least he dressed like a paramedic. But that face…

This couldn’t be right.

“Ah, this is an improvement,” said Calbert Bitterbee, glancing about the interior of the rescue helicopter. His voice was clearly audible over the engine noise, which was strangely muted, as if she were hearing it from deep underwater.

“Dad…?” she croaked, amazed that words could still fly from her mangled throat.

He looked at her with eyes like liquid shadows. “Yes…and no. I’m not really here, you see. Neither are you, of course, but you’re more here than I am. I’m just an echo; a ghost, if you will.”

His was the voice she’d heard on the wind. Again his words tugged at her. Not really here…

She was inside her memories; ones she’d thought lost, but somehow brought back in the form of this…lucid dream.

And with that realisation, the pain was gone. Undoing the straps holding her in place, Saskia sat up on the stretcher, her bones unbroken, her flesh whole again.

“So it’s true then?” she asked the ghost of her father. “You…died?”

“Yes…and no,” he repeated. “Death means something different for the flatlanders than it does for ones such as you or I.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m surprised you don’t already know. You’re my daughter. Did you forget the lessons I taught you?”

“What lessons?” she snapped. “I never met you in real life. You bogged off before I was even born!”

“Huh,” he said. “You’re right. I wonder why I did that.”

“You mean you don’t remember?”

He shook his head. “My memories only extend up until the destruction of his local mouthlet. Your real father has no doubt evolved over the centuries since then. I just assumed he’d have taught you because that’s what I would do.”

“Well you didn’t. He didn’t. So please, enlighten me.”

“Sadly, there’s no time for that right now,” he said, looking out the window at the dwindling alps. “He’s not going to give up this easily.”

A sliver of dread wormed its way down into her stomach. Wordlessly, she rushed to the window to see what he was looking at.

Atop a distant peak walked a colossal figure, shrouded in storm clouds, but instantly recognisable. The same creature that had come for her on the mountainside, but blown up to titanic proportions.

“What the hell is that?” asked Saskia in a tremulous voice.

“That,” he said, “is Abellion.”

“The god?”

Calbert gave a derisive grunt. “Gods are overrated. But this one is dangerous. You need to leave. Find your own place of power.”

“Huh?”

The man who looked like her father sighed. “As you’ve no doubt surmised, this is a dream, of sorts. Ultimately, you have control, even if Abellion seeks to warp the dream to his advantage. He brought you to this time and place where you were weak and vulnerable. Don’t let him keep you here.”

Saskia watched the titan step over a foothill as if it were a small rock. He was gaining on them. “If it’s a dream, why can’t I just wake up?”

“Because he won’t let you. Until you find your place of power, you cannot fight him. And make no mistake: this may be a dream, but he can hurt you here. Maybe even destroy your mouthlet, which for you, immature as you are right now, would be…catastrophic.”

“What the hell is a mouthlet?”

“No time,” repeated the ghost of her father, pointing out the window.

“Okay,” she said, breathing deeply. “What do I do? Wish myself away to…I don’t know…a pristine island paradise, sandy beaches, sun umbrellas, that kinda—oh.”

She was lying on the warm sand of what looked like a beach-front Vanuatu holiday resort. Or what she imagined such a place would look like. She’d never gone for the whole island tourism thing in real life.

Down by the water, a little girl carefully sculpted the parapets of an intricate sandcastle using a butter knife. It looked a lot like the ones she herself had painstakingly sculpted as a child. She’d wept bitter tears seeing her labours of love wash away with the tides, but that hadn’t stopped her from starting over again and again…

There was a deafening thud, and the ground shook. Screams erupted from down the beach, where a giant cloudy foot had landed, flattening palm trees and buildings alike. Panicked tourists ran toward her, arms flailing like in those cheesy monster movies she secretly loved to watch.

“This isn’t helping!” she shouted, leaping to her feet.

Calbert reclined in a beach chair next to her, looking like one of those shirtless, oiled-up beefcakes in the posters she used to hang from her bedroom wall as a teen. Crap, this was an image of her father she could not unsee. He tilted a glass of tequila in her direction. “I said place of power, not place of serenity. Although this is neither, in your case. You don’t even like beaches.”

It was true; sandcastles aside, she’d never been much of a sun and sandy beaches kinda girl.

“How do you even know what I don’t like?” she shouted as they ran down the beach away from Stompy McStompface.

“I am you, as much as I am him,” he said, running beside her. “But that’s not important right now. You need to leave.”

“Right,” she said, glancing back at her pursuer. He’d shrunk back down to human size, and now flew through the air, trailing a nimbus of white clouds. “Place of power…place of power…where are you?”

Then they were standing on the side of the road atop a wide curve of concrete, in the midst of a desolate hilly landscape. On one side of the road was a lake. On the other, a precipitous drop to a river and lots of machinery below.

Saskia groaned. This was the Hoover Dam. “Dogramit! Not that kinda power…”

Without waiting for her pursuer to show himself once more, she closed her eyes and tried to think what her true place of power might be like.

It needed to be a place where she could control the flow of the dream. A place where she was the god, not Abellion.

She thought of her childhood sandcastles; remembered the unbridled joy of creation, even if those creations had been as ephemeral as this dream.

Then her thoughts turned to god games, beginning with the old classics Populous and Dungeon Keeper. During her recovery after the fall, she’d played one such game obsessively for months: a fantasy stronghold simulation called Walls of Aether. It had been one of the few bright spots of a very dark time in her life.

When she opened her eyes again, she stood atop the parapets of a castle floating in the clouds. Airships buzzed about the outer walls, bristling with cannons.

“Ingenious,” said Calbert. “But how much power do you really have in this place?”

A slow, crackling boom sent shivers down her spine. And then she saw her nemesis, sitting astride a white dragon, swooping down from the clouds above. Lightning arced from the creature’s wingtips as they lashed the air, each wingbeat heralding a clash of thunder.

Cannons boomed as a swarm of airships manoeuvred around the approaching dragon, turning broadsides toward it. Explosions blossomed along the creature’s wings and underbelly. It let out a bellowing roar that shook the castle walls.

The dragon turned its head to the side, and a jet of blue fire belched forth, engulfing one of the airships. In an instant, the flaming wreckage fell from the sky and was gone. Two other airships shared its fate in quick succession.

Saskia looked at the dragon looming ever larger in the sky, and shook her head.

This was no good. She’d thought about the setting of the game, Walls of Aether. But what she needed was for it to be an actual game, with herself on the outside, looking in. As long as she was stuck inside with Abellion, he could get to her through any defences she might conjure.

But maybe she could do better than that. Recreating a dream version of a god game was all well and good, but she wasn’t just a player of games. She was a game developer and artist. On Earth, she’d created entire worlds on paper and inside the labyrinthine minds of computers.

“I’ve got it!” she cried. “My place of power is right…”

The scene shifted.

“…here!”

Saskia sat at her desk in a tiny studio beneath a seedy strip club. Around her sat her fellow gods, Fergus and Raji and Dave, eyes flicking between their screens, keyboards chattering as they spun out lines of code.

“Guys,” she said, “I need you to help me build a dungeon.”

“We’re showing off the demo in…negative three months,” said Dave, frowning at the incongruity of his own statement. “We shouldn’t be adding new features—”

“Shut up, Dave,” said three voices in unison.

“What kind of dungeon?” asked Raji.

“The kind that would make our players want to hunt us down and shoot us,” she said.

“Excellent!” said Fergus. “That’s the best kind.”

As they worked, she focussed her will on the rules she’d imagined for this dream scenario. Foremost was the rule that Abellion was inside the game, and couldn’t get at her real self. All he could reach was her in-game avatar.

She looked upon that avatar in the level editor, smiling. It was a troll. A troll with effectively infinite health, and immunity to all harmful magic and effects; who could cast every spell and use every ability she could remember from Threads of Nautilum. For good measure, Raji also created a few new overpowered spells for her, with names like, ‘Petrify Abellion,’ ‘Polymorph Abellion,’ and ‘Disintegrate Abellion.’

Giggling like school kids, her friends filled the dungeon with unkillable monsters that could slay anything in a single hit and couldn’t be turned against her. They placed unavoidable traps that would teleport their victims back to the start of the dungeon. Fergus added the finishing touch; a dampening field that nullified the spells and special abilities of intruders, and imposed heavy penalties on their strength and speed.

“What is it you’re doing, exactly?” asked Calbert, a puzzled expression plastered across his face. Apparently there were limits to what he could glean from her memories.

“Why, I’m cheating, obviously,” she said. “Let’s get this party started, shall we?”

Loading up the game with the custom level they’d designed, Saskia re-familiarised herself with the controls (it had been a while), and then sat back and waited for her opponent to make his entrance.

Suddenly, a buxom elf maiden appeared next to her avatar, making her nearly jump out of her seat.

“Who the hell is Lelu?” she demanded.

“That’s me,” said Fergus with a laugh. “Can’t let you have all the fun.”

The dungeon doors exploded inward, and there he stood: one glowering god of destruction. She’d had her friends design the dungeon so he had a clear line of sight to her avatar. He just had to get to her. But between them, there stood columns of every fantasy monster in the game, from minotaurs to manticores.

The Arbordeus stepped forward. Then he flew backward and smashed against the wall, having just taken the swipe of a giant meat hook to the face. With a flicker of movement, he was on his feet again, facing Bolgor the Bloody, ordinarily the boss of the Butcher’s Lair dungeon in Nautilum proper. Somehow, Abellion had withstood a blow that was supposed to be able to instantly kill anything. Bolgor’s next swing didn’t move him one millimetre. He advanced, shouldering the massive boss aside.

“Guess I’m not the only one who can cheat,” she said with a slight shiver. If he could bend that rule, what else could he do?

The other monsters piled on Abellion, raining blows and arrows and spells down upon the advancing god. He ignored them.

Then he stepped on one of the teleportation traps, vanishing and reappearing back at the entrance, upside down and a metre above the ground. He fell in an undignified heap.

“Nice touch,” she said to Raji.

Picking himself up off the floor, Abellion stepped toward her avatar. His expression oozed malice, but really, that was nothing new.

The second time, he got a bit further before being teleported, and she realised they’d stupidly forgotten to make the traps reset themselves.

This went on for some time. The monsters were largely useless. There were a lot of traps to get through, but it seemed there’d be a confrontation after all. She’d been hoping to avoid that.

When he got close enough, she and Ferg’s avatar, Lelu, started pummelling him with spells and arrows. The best they could do was slow his advance with basic kinetic energy. Their attacks didn’t seem to be doing any damage, and he shrugged off all the immobilisation spells she threw at him. Even the big guns, the variants of Petrify and Polymorph, only lasted a few seconds, though she got a laugh out of watching him run around as a tiny piglet. Disintegrate was a total wash; just another high damage attack against an infinite health pool.

“I’m running out of tricks,” said Fergus, frowning as he struggled to manoeuvre his nimble avatar away from the lightning-fast god.

“Me too,” she said. “Uh…what about dev cheats?”

“On it,” said Raji. He squinted at his screen. “Hey, why is god mode enabled on this NPC?”

She rolled her eyes. “Because he’s a god, Raji.” Then a thought occurred to her. “Could you try just disabling it?”

“Sure thing.” Raji typed out the cheat command. Then a moment later, he said, “Fuck! It won’t toggle off. What the fuck is going on?”

“Just delete the in-game entity,” suggested Dave. “Nothing beats the unholy Delete spell.”

“Good idea,” said Raji. “Hasta la vista, baby…”

“…and I’m dead,” said Ferg, throwing up his hands at the sight of Lelu’s mangled corpse being torn in half by a god.

“And this moffer’s still alive!” breathed Saskia as she speed-cheated down the corridor away from Abellion.

“Motherfucker,” said Dave. “That’s how you say it. Motherfucker. Why can’t you just swear like everybody else?”

“Bog off, dream Dave,” she said. “You’re even more annoying than real Dave. Okay guys, I’ve had enough of this. I’m gonna try…diplomacy.”

“Like you just used on Dave?” said Ferg.

“Pretty much.”

She could have kept running, and probably would have evaded Abellion for a while longer. But this was getting ridiculous. This needed to end. So she made her avatar stand impassively as he took hold of her throat, and squeezed.

And squeezed.

And squeezed.

“Yeah, you’re not the only unkillable godlike being in this dungeon,” she said into her headset, hoping her voice would somehow transmit to her assailant, even though they didn’t have voice chat in their game. “I can just reset the game any time, and you’ll be back to square one.” She didn’t actually know if that would work, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. “Or—and this may be a strange notion to you, being a god and all—you could just bog off and call it a draw.”

Abellion abruptly let go of her avatar and stared up at the camera. He leapt into the air and seemed to grab hold of the screen, eliciting a squeak of fright from her.

This should be impossible. Threads of Nautilum was rendered with an isometric perspective, and the camera, if it existed as a physical object within the game—which it didn’t—would be somewhere far above the dungeon ceiling. But the Arbordeus seemed to have twigged onto the nature of this dream scenario.

A mist-shrouded fist smashed into the camera, and at that moment, a small crack appeared in the centre of the monitor.

“Oh crap,” she said, yanking out the power chord. The screen flickered, but the image remained as he lashed out, again and again, and the tiny crack split into a multitude of them, spidering out to the edges of the screen.

She had only moments until Abellion broke through into her place of power.

Desperately, she did something that the rational part of her brain told her had perhaps a million-to-one chance of working. But this was a dream, and her rational mind could go fork itself.

Saskia took hold of the controls, and made her avatar cast an overheal spell on a god.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then Abellion exploded into a fountain of gore.

She gasped, shocked that it had actually worked. That ‘overkill’ effect was a bit excessive though. She counted at least three eyeballs amongst the pile of goo.

Raji laughed. “Nice! You exploited the integer overflow bug.”

Never mind the fact that they’d probably fixed that bug months ago. Her dream; her rules. She could just unilaterally decide what bugs they had and hadn’t fixed, and it would be so.

She wasn’t entirely sure of the details of the integer overflow bug, but she’d heard them discussing it. The gist of it was that if someone added a small number—say, the amount of temporary health bestowed by an overheal spell—to a really big number—say, an infinite health pool—that really big number would become a really big negative number.

In other words, Abellion had gone from being immortal to being really, really dead.

“Did I just destroy a god?” she asked in a quavering voice.

“In your dreams,” said Calbert.

Saskia groaned. “Now I know where my terrible pun genes came from.”

“Seriously though, good job, child,” said her father. “You’ve kicked him out of your mind. He won’t be bothering you in that fashion again. But out in the real world—or one of the real worlds, if any world can truly be considered real, which is too heavy a philosophical topic for this dream—Abellion is still very much alive, and pissed. These past few days, he hasn’t only been battling your sleep self; he also sent his Chosen after you. So it’d be best if you wake up now.”

“Hold on, what do you mean days?”

“You’ll see. Oh and one more thing. Don’t let the dwarves complete their little funnelling project. It is not the salvation they think it is. It is their doom.”

The ceiling was moving.

No, that couldn’t be right. It was her that was moving. Saskia looked down at the small army of undead workers that were bearing the massive stone platform on which she lay. It creaked beneath her weight as they hauled her through a set of large iron doors and into a long tunnel that wound its way down a steep flight of stairs.

A large column of skeletal guardians followed them into the tunnel, sealed the door shut, and stood facing it, weapons drawn.

They’ve figured out how to open and close doors? thought Saskia. Or is that Ruhildi’s doing?

Sure enough, an armour-clad Ruhildi dashed out from amidst the guardians. “Thank the forefathers!” she said. “I thought you’d never awaken.”

Calbert’s words were still fresh in her mind. There was so much to process, but right now, one thing took precedence over all the rest.

“It’s good to see you too, Ruhildi. But we have a big problem. Abellion’s sent his…Chosen against us? I don’t know what that is, but it sounds bad.”

Ruhildi grimaced. “It’s a little late to be telling me that, Sashki. The leaf-ears have invaded the Sanctum. They’re almost upon us!”

Saskia hopped off the platform, and it may have been her imagination, but she could have sworn she heard a sigh of relief from the undead workers. She glanced down at the chunky steel plates strapped to her body. They seemed to have been hammered together in a hurry.

“This was your doing?” she asked.

“Aye,” said Ruhildi. “Not my finest work, but I were in a hurry.”

Saskia stretched arms and legs that had gone stiff from lack of use. The plate armour barely impeded her movement, despite its bulk. How had the tiny dwarf had gotten it onto her?

“No, it’s…good,” she said. “Thanks for looking out for me.”

“Thank me later, if we live to tell of it,” said Ruhildi. “We’d best get out of—”

A bright light tore through the middle of the door. It shuddered and burst inward, and through the doorway stepped a ragged band of elves, smeared in crimson from head to toe. One of them bore a long blade that glowed so brightly it hurt her eyes to look upon. She thought she recognised his silhouette.

Frantically, Saskia tried to think of a way to defuse the situation.

“Hold, alvari!” she cried out in Elvish. “Stand down for a moment and let’s…”

The skeletal guardians surged forward. At the same moment, the elf swung his blade of light, and three guardians disintegrated into bits of blackened bone and shards of steel clattering against the stone walls.

“…talk.”