A Song of Shadow Page 7

  A debuff called ‘Curse of Tartarus’ appeared in the corner of my vision. +100% vulnerability to dark magic. How lovely. I wonder whether the curse will expire when I leave the Intermundis or die? Or will my character carry it forever?

  One way or another, I hadn’t any desire to receive a tourist visa to Tartarus. I don’t think I was much welcome there. At least I don’t have to go on sitting at the edge of this cliff! As I backtracked carefully, I happened to glance upward. A light as thick as melted gold struck my eyes, blinding me with its majesty.

  The Divine Chambers glow not for mortal sight.

  None of the Holy Gods wishes to protect you.

  You have been damned for your temerity!

  The Holy light blinds you!

  The blinding light gave way to pitch darkness, disturbed only by a list of debuffs. Blindness for a day. ‘Curse of Eluna’: +100% vulnerability to holy magic.

  ‘See the world,’ they said...But what really upset me wasn’t the curses so much as the blindness. Does this mean that I have to hang out here for a full day before I can go on with my exploration? Or should I figure out a way out to the larger gameworld and look for healing? Although...It’d be a good idea to take care of this on my own.

  Blindly, I felt my way away from the edge, got to my feet and felt around until I found the eid. After some practice I managed to produce a clear chord, activating the Song of Cleansing. There was no effect.

  “You’re an odd creature,” Eid’s voice sounded in the darkness around me. “You have something within you that is clearly reviled by both Light and Darkness.”

  These words set off a whole chain of associations. Omar Khayyam’s immortal verses floated up to my mind:

  The hypocrites say, “Heaven and hell are in the sky.”

  Glancing within myself, I was sure this is a lie:

  Heaven and hell are not spheres of the world’s creation.

  Heaven and hell are two halves of the soul.

  But the concepts of heaven and hell did not exist here, so these verses didn’t apply. On the other hand, there was one old song called “Forbidden Reality” which fit perfectly. It was too bad only that I didn’t have my guitar synth or at least an ancient Telecaster...

  I imagined how fitting a guitar synth would sound in this setting with its ability to produce practically any sounds. I could play something with organ and electric guitar—that would be some concert! On a whim, I strummed the strings and to my astonishment heard the familiar sound. A triumphant organ filled the infinity of the Intermundis. On the eid, every note sounded exactly as it would on my syntar in reality! At the same time, the realization of how deeply Barliona’s technology had penetrated into my mind didn’t scare me so much as made me ecstatic.

  Okay. So how do I switch to electric guitar? There weren’t any controls and I wasn’t aware of any voice commands. Then again, how did I produce the organ to begin with? I simply imagined the sound I wanted.

  My imagination immediately recreated the riffs of a heavy metal guitar and the strings at my fingers sang with a new voice—a mighty roar that caused every cell in my body to shiver. All I need now is a mic!

  Several minutes of practice later, a harmonious duet of organ and electric guitar thundered around me. Let the Chambers of Tartarus and Eluna file all the noise complaints they want! It felt like my voice, also amplified by some unknown method, had flooded the Intermundis and every world it bordered.

  The song about the thin, vanishing line between light and darkness, good and evil, thundered in the very tissue of the Intermundis. The icons of my ‘Curse’ debuffs began to tremble, left their ordinary place and began to twirl in the darkness before me. But that didn’t matter. I was drunk from the eid’s new sound and the power of my own voice.

  The debuff icons hurled like mad comets at one another and smashing together, created a bright flash. A moment later the darkness faded, returning the familiar landscape at the edge of the world.

  The milky white haze stitched together the figure of a woman. Blurry, barely recognizable with empty eye sockets in a motionless face, as in my song’s verses. The woman raised a transparent hand which pointed at me. Yet I looked upon her without fear. She was just another being created by the music. My music!

  The song poured from me, telling of a merciless fate and a friend’s betrayal—a blow to the back. In the next instant, true pain pierced my body and a sword tip appeared from my breast. Eid’s sword.

  “You cannot escape Fate,” roared the eyeless woman and the world went dark, leaving a system notification in its wake:

  You have died and gone to the Gray Lands.

  You will automatically leave this location in 12 hours.

  Chapter Five

  Darkness, my heavy breathing and the echo of fading pain. My heart was beating like a hectic metronome, my fingers clenched the eid’s fretboard. What was that?

  “Forgive me,” a familiar voice sounded next to me. “There’s no arguing with Fate, and you yourself sang of dying from my hand. You are destined to complete the trial in the Gray Lands. You cannot escape Fate.”

  Only now did I realize why it was dark—I had reflexively shut my eyes from the pain, as little as there was due to my filter settings. Opening my eyes, I took in the dour, gray landscape. It was like all color had drained from the world, transforming its vibrancy into grayscale. The grass, the stones, the trees, even the sky—everything was faded and somehow unreal. No trace of the sun. No trace of shadow. A monotonous, oppressive grayness.

  Eid had changed too. Now he was little more than a blurry silhouette, a vague trace of his former incarnation. I couldn’t make out the expression on his face since he didn’t have a face, but for some reason I imagined that he was sincerely remorseful for what had happened.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I shrugged after a little bit more thought. “They say that everything comes back in this life. That’s what I get for offing Chip.”

  “Doing what to whom?” Eid didn’t understand.

  “If you behave, I’ll introduce you two,” I promised. “I don’t know whether you’ll get along but you won’t be bored. Speaking of boredom. Why do you look like Hamlet’s father all of a sudden?”

  “My previous incarnation was a part of the world we left, and you haven’t given me a new form yet.”

  “Hmm...” I muttered with some curiosity. “So I can make you look however I like?”

  “Something like that,” Eid replied carefully, perhaps anticipating something bad.

  “Well aren’t you lucky!” I tried to clap Eid’s silhouette on the shoulder but my hand passed straight through him.

  “Why is that?” the spirit wanted to know.

  “If Beast had stumbled upon you, you’d be a chesty sex doll. He always said that the bass was his one true love. You’d present him with the chance to make this sentiment a reality.”

  Did I imagine it or did the spirit backtrack slightly?

  “Relax buddy,” I guffawed, reassuring Eid’s anxiety. “Spiritophilia isn’t one of my fetishes. Ours is a professional relationship exclusively. Although it’d make a heck of a love song.”

  “I seem to have grown unaccustomed to you mortals’ humor.”

  “What, Cypro didn’t crack jokes like that?” I wondered, only now realizing that I was speaking to an authority on all things Tenth.

  “By the time I was created, he was over a hundred years old already and his humor was a bit more...mature,” Eid explained delicately.

  “And who taught you to be so polite?” I said a bit disheartened, wary that I was about to travel with a humorless companion.

  “This character trait, I believe, I inherited from my luthier,” Eid replied in a dignified tone.

  Meanwhile, I was contemplating what form to give him. Chatting with an incorporeal spirit wasn’t exactly pleasant. And at the same time, for whatever reason, nothing occurred to me.

  “Any requests?” I asked my companion hopefully.

&nbs
p; “I liked my last form,” he replied. “I was handsome and it fit my sound. So how about something masculine and heroic?”

  I tried to run through the relevant songs in my head but all that came were dumb jokes. I wonder what would happen if I sing some malarkey like ‘her legs never ended, her teeth reflected the moon?’ Would the system dutifully recreate such a bit of surrealism? Or would it be Lobachevsky time? An introduction to non-Euclidean geometry?

  Luckily for Eid, I didn’t bother experimenting and played what I felt like: Led Zeppelin’s “The Battle of Evermore.”

  This time, as I played, I watched his transformation carefully, unwilling to miss such a strange sight. Eid changed with every word I sang. The smoke that the spirit consisted of swirled, waxed, thickened and took on the form of a black knight on a raven-black steed. For whatever reason, I imagined his warhorse this way. It’s also worth mentioning that Eid now resembled a Ringwraith from The Lord of the Rings. I guess this is the failure of my impoverished imagination, but this is what I associated with a black knight who had taken thousands of souls. By the way...On the topic of taking souls...Was it a waste to use the verses on someone who’d already sent me to the Gray Lands? Although, where else would I go? I’m here already. As Sasha liked to say—they can’t send you further than the frontline.

  The world around me hadn’t changed one bit. There were no fires in the distance, though the gray dust was still there. And here and everywhere else. Either the song didn’t fit or in the Gray Lands I couldn’t change reality as I wished.

  Eid’s steed snorted impatiently and stomped his hoof, while the Black Rider atop him looked down on me.

  “Happy?”

  “More than happy, thank you,” the spirit nodded majestically.

  He dismounted and patted his horse on the withers. Oddly, Eid wasn’t as gray as everything else around us. And I too still had my ‘basic’ coloring. I suppose that was because he and I belonged to a different world. But I wonder why. After all, technically, I’m dead...Eid had killed me, hadn’t he?

  Dead!

  The thought pierced me quicker than Eid’s sword. What did that creature in the mirror tell me? “These writings are open only to the dead.” And I couldn’t be deader! I’m standing in the middle of the Gray Lands!

  My fingers trembling with excitement, I got Cypro’s notes from my bag. Opening the tattered cover, I found uneven lines, written in a small script.

  You were curious enough to find all the sigils around the Tree and reach the repository. Since you chose the unassuming travel journal, stories attract you more than artifacts, magic armor and the secrets of craftsmen. You are not prepared to sacrifice others to reach your goals, and your music is capable of touching others’ souls. Besides this, you are sufficiently acute to find a way to reach the Gray Lands and read these lines.

  Whoever you are, you and I are alike. The road is our fate and it seems to me that one day it will allow us to meet.

  Every traveler can use a guide. And you need a very special guide for the roads of the Gray Lands. A guide that belongs to two worlds at once. Finding someone like that, is a great stroke of luck. But luck is not a trustworthy companion. You should not rely on such a fickle lady. I will teach you how to create such a guide—a cicerone for the land of the dead.

  The text ended at this point, giving way to a system notification right there on the journal’s page.

  Quest chain available: Creating a Cicerone.

  Do you Accept? Yes/No

  As soon as I accepted, the rest of the page filled with handwriting.

  The nature of the Gray Lands is complex and not fully known to any creature I am aware of. At times, it seems to me that this place is not at all the way it appears to us mortals. For example, why do I sometimes encounter the souls of animals? Are there really so many sentients that preserve memories of them? I sense that this is somehow related to certain tribes venerating totem animals.

  Either way, you have to locate one of these souls and bind it to yourself. Good luck to you, my mysterious friend.

  The quest changed, specifying the object of my search—an animal soul. But there was no hint where I should even look for this soul. The journal’s other pages remained blank.

  “Listen Eid,” I turned to the spirit watching me with curiosity. “Where do you think I can find an animal soul around here? And how can I bind it to myself? I don’t suppose I’d need a lasso like a cowgirl...”

  “Have you forgotten that you must complete a trial?” Eid answered my question with one of his own.

  “Why should I forget it? But tell me what I have to do to complete it.”

  The phantom knight assumed a pose and announced triumphantly:

  “You must select a soul and lead it from the Gray Lands to Barliona.”

  “And that’s it?” I asked, a little surprised.

  “You think that’s simple to do?” Eid smirked.

  “Well, it doesn’t sound very difficult,” I admitted. “Tell me about the souls of animals. Could I perhaps lead an animal soul out?”

  “Not very difficult?” echoed the instrument’s soul. “In that case you should be able to handle this quest without any problems. As well as all the other ones.”

  Having said this, Eid fell silent, clearly unwilling to provide any further instructions. Well he can go to cold pasta hell then, this moody knight. I’ll figure it out on my own.

  Now that my vision had adjusted to the monochrome palette of the world beyond the grave, I could take a proper look around. A strange landscape. Paradoxically, the first thing that stood out was the awful visibility. There weren’t really any dust clouds, fog or other natural phenomena, and yet about a hundred meters ahead of me everything kind of melded together as if I were looking at a smudged pencil sketch.

  But even within the limits of the visible there were plenty curiosities to examine. Buildings of diverse dimensions and styles were arranged all around without any discernible order. Some of them seemed clear and rendered in detail, while others were no more than vague outlines. Approaching one of these buildings, I could study the viscous substance it was built from. Fluid and yet dense like mercury, it was in constant motion, changing the edifice past recognition. A bas relief depicting some arachnoid creatures appeared and gave way to a dimpled wall of some unpolished stone, and then another bas relief but this time depicting a sacrificial ritual. It was like the building couldn’t make up its mind what form it should take.

  I turned to Eid as the local expert on traveling through the Gray Lands.

  “What’s wrong with this wall? And where’d these buildings come from anyway? I thought this was the place souls go to, not a construction site. Or do you think that the souls need places to live too?”

  “All of these are like me—the works of great master craftsmen,” the spirit explained. Or should I say, ‘soul,’ since he still had his spirit/vitus...? But that sounded a bit awkward and not quite right so I decided to keep thinking of Eid as a spirit.

  “Creations that acquired a soul thanks to their creators’ efforts. Legendary objects that lost their material incarnation but remained preserved in memory. Ruined temples and palaces, sculptures and paintings, armor and arms. Their souls too reach the Gray Lands.”

  I took a renewed look at the gray world around me. The cemetery of legends. A museum of memories from a myriad generations that had lived in Barliona. And perhaps, not just Barliona? If the Intermundis is the space between worlds, then maybe the souls that come here are collected from many worlds too?

  Unfortunately, try as I might, I could see nothing that either confirmed or refuted this theory. Eid and I passed many objects and buildings but I couldn’t tell if a single one belonged to some other world.

  I turned my head left and right like a country bumpkin at her first visit to the capital. The Gray Lands amazed me with their impossible blend of the lifeless and the changing. A completely stunning impression...

  “Why are some objects stati
c while others are constantly changing?” I asked after watching the transformation of a tree that grew right in the middle of our road. “You had no form at all, and when you acquired one, you remained unchanged.”

  “Some items were described accurately and their images were preserved,” Eid nodded at a sculpture of a winged woman who reminded me a bit of Nike from Greek mythology. “Only contradictory legends survive about others and each person who remembers them imagines them differently.”

  My eye caught something vaguely familiar and I stopped to get a better look. A chess set stood on a pedestal that kept changing from a stone altar to an immense table to a simple, crude hunk of rock. Some of the pieces were missing, and those that were there kept changing constantly. The board on the other hand remained distinct: The light and dark squares were a sufficiently classic image. Everyone imagined them the same way, unlike the constantly changing finish.

  I tried to determine what the pieces on the board were. The squares where the pawns were supposed to be were vacant. The knights were rendered as classic animals in elaborate metal armor as well as the local variety of mountable lizards. The pieces ‘drifted,’ changing form, but remained recognizable on the whole. The rooks were present only for one of the sides: The two pieces towered over the others and yet changed so quickly that my eyes didn’t have time to process their various guises. The bishops were less ephemeral: One pair possessed the body composition and pointy ears common to elves. The bishops on the other side boasted the fanged maws characteristic of trolls.

  The queens proudly occupied their proper squares on d1 and d8. One of them wore a strange hat with deer antlers and was covered in melted wax, making it impossible to determine its race or gender. The only difference with the other queen was that I could discern a staff in its hand.

  On the other hand, the kings were a bit more definite. One was clearly an orc. Time and again, a wolfskin appeared on its shoulders, the sword in its hand transformed to an axe, a spear and sometimes even a scimitar. The other chess king was clearly a human, though its apparel and weapon kept changing from a sword to a staff and back.