Ymiden 5th. The Untold.
In the beginning, Nir'wei had believed that Emea was chaos. Of course he'd been right; it was practically indisputable fact. Raw imagination smashed together in flares of light and sound and colour, random and asymmetrical shapes manifested into existence out of glass, or stone, or some unknown liquid that spooled colour from its surface in a way it simply shouldn't have. Some imploded with a flash, others simply dissipated into clear smoke, and still others suddenly shattered like a dropped mug. Most of them formed and disappeared within seconds, collapsing under their own weight and size. In the face of such overwhelming stimuli, it became impossible for any one thing to manifest properly. However, now that he'd spent no small amount of time in it, he was beginning to appreciate the structure to the chaos.
There were rules. Sort-of. Perhaps rules wasn't really the right word, but he wasn't a scientist; all that mattered was that when he did something, he got a response. Think hard enough about a cube and he could make one. Think harder about it, the size, the shape, the facets, the colour... it never came out quite like he expected it to, and sometimes didn't come out at all, but he could make something roughly similar as long as he held the image in his head. He'd yet to really find a use for it, but it was fun, tossing imaginary balls and watching as Squeak merrily bounded off to fetch them again. That was about the only thing to do now.
They'd either traveled the entirety of the Untold, or nowhere at all, and there was absolutely no way of figuring out which. The void stretched in every direction as far as the eye could see and refused to obey the traditional laws of space and time. There was some structure in this, too - he'd learned now that he could jump exceptionally long distances in an instant by simply thinking about where he wanted to go, but he couldn't do the same with time, nor could he make time reverse. There was a geometry to the world that meant if he jumped to a place and then returned, he would return to the same spot he started at, not an entirely new place. These seemed like tiny revelations, but in a world where nearly nothing worked in the same way as Idalos, even the straws were worth grasping. He'd tried to jump to where he thought the edge would be, to no success. He'd gone in one direction, jumping between points like a frog on steroids, but he hadn't reached a wall, or a corner, or even come back around to the same spot he'd started at. He could only make one assumption; like when he'd passed back through the Veil and re-entered the Dreamscapes, he needed to know where he was going before he could make the jump beyond what he knew.
But if that were true, the entire expedition would be for naught. Vri, in refusing to just tell him where he needed to go, had doomed him to inevitable failure. It was like the Cathedral of Dreams all over again.
For a moment he just tried to lie back and relax. Make sense of everything. He'd been doing that more and more lately - though he suspected it was something to do with the fact that in this place there was no night and day, and his body lacked the ability to sleep or dream. Somewhere deep down he still needed it, as part of one of the few functions that still kept him mortal. It insisted on some kind of pseudo-sleep, where he could close his eyes and almost imagine that he was back in Idalos, smelling the morning dew on the grass, feeling a light breeze as it blew over his bare skin. Emea, on command, began to mimic those exact same feelings, but it wasn't the same; the wind moved in streaked clear patterns, the grass smelled... too grassy. Just like everything in this dimension, it just felt too oversaturated, like it was somehow trying to overcompensate for its inauthenticity. He appreciated the sentiment, but the more he tried to fix it, the more jittery and unfocused the vision became, until he eventually settled.
In his haze, he dreamt of Emea. Shifting and shaping, vivid and pure. The cracks and the decay, gone. The blackened spheres vibrant and shining, wispy and translucent like fogged glass and deep within, he could see signs of deep green foliage, bright and colourful buildings, whole cities and empires teeming with people and creatures. The paradise it could one day become... and walking through it on a path made of pure white light, the man he could be, tall and proud. With wolves at his sides.
"Did you see that thing?"
"It's coming round again, we need to move."
What were those voices?
"Watch out!"
"WAKE UP!"
Nir'wei jerked awake in time to see Cold dashing up ahead, leaping from one chunk of materialised floating rock to the next, snarling with teeth bared after
a blurred black shape that seemed to flow across the space above, creating physical footholds as it went that hung in nothingness like they were suspended by invisible strings. In one leap it spun upside-down, formed the next foothold, jumped several feet straight down and then jerked horizontally as if the entire world had spun ninety degrees, leaving the wolf to continue tumbling and spinning as it struggled to come to terms with the impossible geometry. An Emean Being, in the flesh. So fast he could barely make it out, with a rippling black body that moved like a mobile puddle of contaminated water. Several flashing purple dots swung his way for an instant, then looked away. Eyes?
Grey nudged hard at his side, trying to push him into running; Nir could feel the worry in his fellow wolf's mind, what this thing could possibly do to them all. Yet as he watched it wink between the gaps in space, weaving around Myrth's attempt to intercept it by phasing forwards several leaps' worth of distance with a single step, he knew that they couldn't let this thing get away. Not if he wanted to make it in this world. Not if he wanted to figure out how to survive the likes of the Black Horse and the other monsters lurking deeper within the sporadic chaos of this dimension. He needed to adapt... he needed to learn. Grey nudged at him more insistently, mistaking his idleness for stunned confusion, but instead of turning tail, he leaped forwards to join the others and charged the creature from the side while Squeak was busy blocking its charge, hopping one way and then another like an excited puppy while the beast twisted in attempts to jet past.
It was a chase entirely unlike anything he'd done before - because this time, instead of directing the team, he was a part of it. Because of their seamless connection, no words were needed - between one moment and the next he could always feel where the others were, which ones were moving to attack, who was repositioning. In the chaos of the moment there was no leader, no chain of command to follow. He took orders and followed them. Attacked and fled. Now facing a full assault the black shape started to retreat, throwing up screens of mesmerising colour like thick window-panes of crystal every time one of the wolves came close to snapping at its heels. From its black mass it created hands, legs - at one point Nir'wei drew close while the creature was busy fending off Grey's snapping teeth, only for a pair of horse-like hooves to sprout from the middle of its back and nearly kick him square in the open jaw, if not for the few seconds pause between manifesting the limbs and then rearing them back for an attack. Between them all, Vabina charged like a tank. Vastly outweighing both the wolves and the creature, she was the anvil to their hammer, her sheer size and weight cowing the being the moment she launched her first attack and utterly shattered the shard of rock it had created as a stepping stone.
It outmaneuvered them. But they outnumbered it. In the battle of wills, it was almost an even playing field. It learned from their tactics and started singling Nir'wei out more often, manifesting a pair of giant hands that grabbed him by the hind legs and tossed him backwards end-over-end, but with nothing to collide with he simply floated for a moment before rushing straight back into the fray. In hindsight, maybe it was purposefully avoiding causing harm. He couldn't see it, though, not here. All his life he'd been fighting from a distance, shooting at things far away, letting wolves and other people take to the front lines while he supported from where he could. This was the heart of the fight.
The others distracted it with a constant barrage of attacks that the creature could do nothing but avoid, given no room to counterattack or prepare its thoughts. Nir'wei swept in for a leaping bite and it swirled underneath him, looking ready to punch straight up into his chest with a manifested hand covered in jagged spines. Grey snapped for its head, Myrth for a leg, and the creature jerked aside, then again as Squeak came dangerously close to bowling straight into its side, Cold and Vabina both looking ready to charge... and in that moment, surrounded on all sides by five others, Nir'wei spun himself upside-down and bit hard into flesh. Black, foul-tasting ichor filled his mouth and the thing made a harsh cry, like three different voices playing over the top of each-other, and pulled from his grip as it vanished, like it'd been swept away in a fast-flowing current of water. Did currents in Emea exist?
In the aftermath, they checked themselves for wounds. Between the five of them, nothing egregious. "It appeared the same way it went, blurring like that," Cold said with a shake of his head. "Just after we'd all got comfortable, too. Snuck up between us but it only seemed interested in you." Well, nice to know he'd already succeeded in making numerous enemies, but that made it different from the Black Horse, at least, which had attacked them all indiscriminately. "At least it's gone for now." If only.
"We can't afford to stay on the back foot," he announced. The others looked to him; he could sense confusion and concern. "This isn't our world. It's theirs. As much as we might like to believe that we can overcome everything here without becoming a part of it, we're all wrong... so we need to adapt. Or rather, integrate." The scraps of Emean flesh and ichor still on his tongue slipped down his throat as he swallowed, and Taste of Prey activated. "The hunt has begun.
They howled as one, and together, they slipped into the streams of Emean energy after their prey.
In the beginning, Nir'wei had believed that Emea was chaos. Of course he'd been right; it was practically indisputable fact. Raw imagination smashed together in flares of light and sound and colour, random and asymmetrical shapes manifested into existence out of glass, or stone, or some unknown liquid that spooled colour from its surface in a way it simply shouldn't have. Some imploded with a flash, others simply dissipated into clear smoke, and still others suddenly shattered like a dropped mug. Most of them formed and disappeared within seconds, collapsing under their own weight and size. In the face of such overwhelming stimuli, it became impossible for any one thing to manifest properly. However, now that he'd spent no small amount of time in it, he was beginning to appreciate the structure to the chaos.
There were rules. Sort-of. Perhaps rules wasn't really the right word, but he wasn't a scientist; all that mattered was that when he did something, he got a response. Think hard enough about a cube and he could make one. Think harder about it, the size, the shape, the facets, the colour... it never came out quite like he expected it to, and sometimes didn't come out at all, but he could make something roughly similar as long as he held the image in his head. He'd yet to really find a use for it, but it was fun, tossing imaginary balls and watching as Squeak merrily bounded off to fetch them again. That was about the only thing to do now.
They'd either traveled the entirety of the Untold, or nowhere at all, and there was absolutely no way of figuring out which. The void stretched in every direction as far as the eye could see and refused to obey the traditional laws of space and time. There was some structure in this, too - he'd learned now that he could jump exceptionally long distances in an instant by simply thinking about where he wanted to go, but he couldn't do the same with time, nor could he make time reverse. There was a geometry to the world that meant if he jumped to a place and then returned, he would return to the same spot he started at, not an entirely new place. These seemed like tiny revelations, but in a world where nearly nothing worked in the same way as Idalos, even the straws were worth grasping. He'd tried to jump to where he thought the edge would be, to no success. He'd gone in one direction, jumping between points like a frog on steroids, but he hadn't reached a wall, or a corner, or even come back around to the same spot he'd started at. He could only make one assumption; like when he'd passed back through the Veil and re-entered the Dreamscapes, he needed to know where he was going before he could make the jump beyond what he knew.
But if that were true, the entire expedition would be for naught. Vri, in refusing to just tell him where he needed to go, had doomed him to inevitable failure. It was like the Cathedral of Dreams all over again.
For a moment he just tried to lie back and relax. Make sense of everything. He'd been doing that more and more lately - though he suspected it was something to do with the fact that in this place there was no night and day, and his body lacked the ability to sleep or dream. Somewhere deep down he still needed it, as part of one of the few functions that still kept him mortal. It insisted on some kind of pseudo-sleep, where he could close his eyes and almost imagine that he was back in Idalos, smelling the morning dew on the grass, feeling a light breeze as it blew over his bare skin. Emea, on command, began to mimic those exact same feelings, but it wasn't the same; the wind moved in streaked clear patterns, the grass smelled... too grassy. Just like everything in this dimension, it just felt too oversaturated, like it was somehow trying to overcompensate for its inauthenticity. He appreciated the sentiment, but the more he tried to fix it, the more jittery and unfocused the vision became, until he eventually settled.
In his haze, he dreamt of Emea. Shifting and shaping, vivid and pure. The cracks and the decay, gone. The blackened spheres vibrant and shining, wispy and translucent like fogged glass and deep within, he could see signs of deep green foliage, bright and colourful buildings, whole cities and empires teeming with people and creatures. The paradise it could one day become... and walking through it on a path made of pure white light, the man he could be, tall and proud. With wolves at his sides.
"Did you see that thing?"
"It's coming round again, we need to move."
What were those voices?
"Watch out!"
"WAKE UP!"
Nir'wei jerked awake in time to see Cold dashing up ahead, leaping from one chunk of materialised floating rock to the next, snarling with teeth bared after
a blurred black shape that seemed to flow across the space above, creating physical footholds as it went that hung in nothingness like they were suspended by invisible strings. In one leap it spun upside-down, formed the next foothold, jumped several feet straight down and then jerked horizontally as if the entire world had spun ninety degrees, leaving the wolf to continue tumbling and spinning as it struggled to come to terms with the impossible geometry. An Emean Being, in the flesh. So fast he could barely make it out, with a rippling black body that moved like a mobile puddle of contaminated water. Several flashing purple dots swung his way for an instant, then looked away. Eyes?
Grey nudged hard at his side, trying to push him into running; Nir could feel the worry in his fellow wolf's mind, what this thing could possibly do to them all. Yet as he watched it wink between the gaps in space, weaving around Myrth's attempt to intercept it by phasing forwards several leaps' worth of distance with a single step, he knew that they couldn't let this thing get away. Not if he wanted to make it in this world. Not if he wanted to figure out how to survive the likes of the Black Horse and the other monsters lurking deeper within the sporadic chaos of this dimension. He needed to adapt... he needed to learn. Grey nudged at him more insistently, mistaking his idleness for stunned confusion, but instead of turning tail, he leaped forwards to join the others and charged the creature from the side while Squeak was busy blocking its charge, hopping one way and then another like an excited puppy while the beast twisted in attempts to jet past.
It was a chase entirely unlike anything he'd done before - because this time, instead of directing the team, he was a part of it. Because of their seamless connection, no words were needed - between one moment and the next he could always feel where the others were, which ones were moving to attack, who was repositioning. In the chaos of the moment there was no leader, no chain of command to follow. He took orders and followed them. Attacked and fled. Now facing a full assault the black shape started to retreat, throwing up screens of mesmerising colour like thick window-panes of crystal every time one of the wolves came close to snapping at its heels. From its black mass it created hands, legs - at one point Nir'wei drew close while the creature was busy fending off Grey's snapping teeth, only for a pair of horse-like hooves to sprout from the middle of its back and nearly kick him square in the open jaw, if not for the few seconds pause between manifesting the limbs and then rearing them back for an attack. Between them all, Vabina charged like a tank. Vastly outweighing both the wolves and the creature, she was the anvil to their hammer, her sheer size and weight cowing the being the moment she launched her first attack and utterly shattered the shard of rock it had created as a stepping stone.
It outmaneuvered them. But they outnumbered it. In the battle of wills, it was almost an even playing field. It learned from their tactics and started singling Nir'wei out more often, manifesting a pair of giant hands that grabbed him by the hind legs and tossed him backwards end-over-end, but with nothing to collide with he simply floated for a moment before rushing straight back into the fray. In hindsight, maybe it was purposefully avoiding causing harm. He couldn't see it, though, not here. All his life he'd been fighting from a distance, shooting at things far away, letting wolves and other people take to the front lines while he supported from where he could. This was the heart of the fight.
The others distracted it with a constant barrage of attacks that the creature could do nothing but avoid, given no room to counterattack or prepare its thoughts. Nir'wei swept in for a leaping bite and it swirled underneath him, looking ready to punch straight up into his chest with a manifested hand covered in jagged spines. Grey snapped for its head, Myrth for a leg, and the creature jerked aside, then again as Squeak came dangerously close to bowling straight into its side, Cold and Vabina both looking ready to charge... and in that moment, surrounded on all sides by five others, Nir'wei spun himself upside-down and bit hard into flesh. Black, foul-tasting ichor filled his mouth and the thing made a harsh cry, like three different voices playing over the top of each-other, and pulled from his grip as it vanished, like it'd been swept away in a fast-flowing current of water. Did currents in Emea exist?
In the aftermath, they checked themselves for wounds. Between the five of them, nothing egregious. "It appeared the same way it went, blurring like that," Cold said with a shake of his head. "Just after we'd all got comfortable, too. Snuck up between us but it only seemed interested in you." Well, nice to know he'd already succeeded in making numerous enemies, but that made it different from the Black Horse, at least, which had attacked them all indiscriminately. "At least it's gone for now." If only.
"We can't afford to stay on the back foot," he announced. The others looked to him; he could sense confusion and concern. "This isn't our world. It's theirs. As much as we might like to believe that we can overcome everything here without becoming a part of it, we're all wrong... so we need to adapt. Or rather, integrate." The scraps of Emean flesh and ichor still on his tongue slipped down his throat as he swallowed, and Taste of Prey activated. "The hunt has begun.
They howled as one, and together, they slipped into the streams of Emean energy after their prey.
