Page 10

Return it to the Depths

F ar in the south, in the deepest swamps of the Beyond Frontier, a man slept a restless slumber. Growling and chortling, gusts of steam blasting from his nostrils, his scales itching and frills twitching.

The sage, untold hero of the Great Plague, Ibn Ghazi Barzai, twisted and turned as knowledge forbidden to him bubbled up from the depths of his mind. Steered by forces beyond reckoning, he arose from his bed and scraped an angle-web most sublime upon the bamboo floor of his home and sacrificed his own blood in place of the appropriate unguents upon its dark lines. Dozens of lines forming impossible, twisting angles superseded anything he had ever dared to record.

He snapped out of it ere he could begin the rite. The absence of something vital precluded it from taking place; the Liminal Coil. Neither his body nor his soul held the capacity to dive wholly into the Gulf, for he had feared just this.

Deepest dread hung over him as he took his Seven Spokes talisman in hand, gripping it with such fervor its spokes dug through his wards and his scales, drawing blood.

Barzai recited a prayer to Igaria, carrying out occult gestures with his left hand. Some less versed in the true cosmology of the world would call this borderline heresy, but those who knew, knew. The talisman came alive, the world rippling, reality reasserting itself. He was here, far from the Wheel, far from civilization, hidden by this ancient forest’s spiritual canopy… and still, they found him—the things from the deep. The things from Beyond the astral gulf.

Ever since that cursed day, he hadn’t had a single peaceful night. Once he was certain there were neither rifts nor an impending archon flash, he called out his scimitar, pouring vast arcane power into the artifact. Its metal became wreathed in blue flame, and as he traced arcane sigils in the air with it, it swam through reality just the same as a mundane blade did through water. Its edge, alighted in blue flame, reflected things halfway between the material world and the astral.

For weeks, peaceful sleep had eluded him, but tonight marked the first when things became this dire. Until today, he knew not why it was so, until his blade reflected something familiar. A messenger. A thing from the deep, which had latched itself to his soul decades prior. In his fervent desire to rid himself of the accursed Liminal Coil, he had entrapped The Thing as the guardian of that relic until one arrived who would be able to withstand the Seal of the Great King of Terror.

Even now, as he raised his scimitar, its handle wrought of Mnarian Gray Stone and inscribed with the sign of the Great Fivefold Eye, the Thing From Beyond struggled and writhed to squeeze through the veil. Even now, it whispered to him, speaking truths and knowledge he did not wish to know. To his misfortune, he had underestimated the creature’s craftiness, for even the drops of his own blood upon the floor were enough. Its form, obscured from true perception and thus made to look as if slathered in tar, erupted out of the unfinished angle-web in a burst of unlight.

Barzai skewered it to the ground, his scimitar pinning the beast in space and reality alike, its blue flame blazing over its form as the deathless creature thrashed against a restraint it had never known. In its own way, being forced to experience existence in such a mundane manner was as hellish for it as its whispers were for Barzai. He held no hatred for The Thing, only aversion and pity. It wasn’t malicious, after all; if anything, the opposite. It just so happened that the favor of a creature such as this was truly ruinous.

For a few minutes, Barzai sat, observing the spirit’s struggle, and chanting to himself to drown out its incessant blabbering of knowledge from worlds afar.

The reality of the situation sunk in. The Thing’s return could only mean one thing.

The seal which had held it has broken—a seal which even Barzai hadn’t been able to withstand. Indeed, in a desperate effort, he had commanded the Thing From Beyond to inhabit a pen and draw a mighty mind-invasion sigil and then sealed it inside, leveraging it against the condition that it would break if someone withstood its effects. The only way he could prevail over the abomination was by betting that the seal would never be broken, by betting against the possible future where it was broken. Now that this future had come to pass, he himself held no power over it, and he never would. The only thing keeping him from becoming a mad puppet to an eldritch, inhuman, child-like creature was his beloved scimitar.

Barzai huffed. The Liminal Coil had found its next host.

He knew what must be done to rid himself of the Thing From Beyond. The only method which could dispose of it permanently. The method he had worked so hard to avoid; he had to dive into the Gulf with it skewered upon his blade, and then take it back where it came from, listening to its whispers all along. The odds that he would return at all, let alone with his mind intact, were slim, but he had readied himself for this eventuality.

There was no choice. The preparations were long and grueling, forcing him to venture out into the swamp, where he had buried something he never wished to exhume: His old Gulf Key. The Liminal Coil’s sibling. Moreover, he had to carry out several rites to reinforce his spirit. He donned a gruesome contraption of bronze-like metal that clamped onto his spine, ribcage, and skull, reproducing some of the Liminal Coil’s benefits in a crude and limited manner. Like a horrific parasite, it held onto him, digging into his skin. The Rite of Dho-Raza and the subsequent astral dive came to him far more easily than he wished they had. Everything was there, irrevocably carved into his brain, alien wisdom with his mind twisted around it like scar tissue around a half-rejected implant.

Barzai barraged The Thing with questions. One after the next. From the mundane to the esoteric. To his regret, he received a vast wealth of knowledge which would have aided him greatly if he had known it sooner. Amidst terrible futures of unprecedented human suffering and horror, invaluable insights were laid. The Thing spoke to him, that much was true, but it was in no language of man. It was in thought and memory. Each unearthly, horrific noise came with a flashing premonition as vivid as if he were truly there to see it.

But, before even the halfway point of the journey, he ran out of questions. He felt The Thing begin to ramble of its own volition, gnawing at his already-scarred sanity. At this rate, he would go mad.

So he asked, “Who broke the Seal?”

For the first time, the Thing was silent. What felt like an eon passed before he received an answer. By then The Thing’s home, an inconceivable vastness of pearlescent spires that intersected and stacked atop one another in impossible geometries, had come into view of his soul’s sight. The answer was a face, a young woman with green eyes that had murder behind them. She looked at the seal, and the moment The Thing From Beyond moved to empower the seal, the creature felt an absolute terror, as if the power of its prison had been turned inward. It ended when The Thing From Beyond fled its now-broken prison. There, in the Astral Gulf, it glanced back, and beheld a humanoid shape of smoke surrounded by grinning maws filled by shark-like fangs, with tongues or perhaps tendrils of blackest pitch lolling out from some of them. Barzai, unable to fully grasp The Thing’s eldritch senses, saw no more than that. It was an astral body abnormal to the extreme, especially given the circumstances. It eliminated the possibility of an Outer God’s involvement, but, unlike everything else to do with The Thing From Beyond, it didn’t deny conventional logic. If anything it made perfect sense that a freak would be the one to inherit his cursed legacy.

The emotions which The Thing sent to him were a blend of terror and confused familiarity, like seeing something known in a place it absolutely does not belong. Without words, he asked the creature to elaborate on that familiar terror.

His received answer was an image of the Dark Invoker, a divination card representing a boon from a foreign source that carried a corrupting influence or a catch. A loan, a gift given with ulterior motives, a high station given for a bribe, and so on. It was inverted, mirrored, and in photographic negative. Then, as if The Thing was confused, it, for the first time ever, somehow pulled that thought out of Barzai’s head. He was struck by a moment of confusion, in which it wriggled off of his blade.

The Thing From Beyond swam about and wrapped itself around his soul, forcing him to understand—pushing knowledge into him. Barzai thought he would split in half and depart for his next life, leaving his astral body as food for The Things From Beyond.

It did not come to pass.

He awoke in his hut, violently hacking up blue-burning sludge, covered in astral gunk… and with knowledge of the Liminal Coil’s possessor—Brunhilde Krahe.

It suddenly made sense why That Woman had resisted the Sign of the Great King of Terror, why her Astral Body was so peculiar. Truly, that inverted image of the Dark Invoker had been fitting.

Ibn Ghazi Barzai had long divorced himself from the Liminal Coil, and resolved himself to a hermetic life. As he saw it, the matter was out of his hands. Nonetheless, his fear for the safety of the Liminal Coil’s inheritor hadn’t been alleviated; it had merely been replaced by a desperate, abiding hope that whatever unshakeable convictions had granted her access to the Liminal Coil wouldn’t lead her down a path of ruin… And that she wouldn’t think to seek him out.

Sighing, he spent several hours ridding himself of the diving apparatus and replacing his old Gulf Key. Then, he cleaned up his home and removed the angle-web.

When it was done and everything fully sunk in, a bitter laughter reverberated through his hut. Barzai slept well for the first time in weeks and thereafter dredged up flasks of liquor from the swamp—flasks he had put there just for this occasion.

It was, despite everything, a cause to celebrate. The Thing From Beyond the Gulf was gone, back where it belonged, and he no more felt it tugging at his soul. Even the System reflected his severance from that abomination.

By Zavesh and Igaria both, he truly hoped That Woman would not come to seek him out in search of the Coil’s counterpart… Or, at least, that by the time she pieced it together, he would be dead.