Corsica...?
Skylar's hands came up involuntarily; the flesh under his fingertips was supple and strong, ever-so-lightly dusted with freckles just as he remembered. Her mouth moved towards his, warm and inviting, and he closed his own eyes helplessly against the surge of desire that welled up in him.
But it is hard to close your eyes in a dream.
The disruption of sensory flow to his visual cortex fractured the immersion almost instantly; it was as though he could see directly through his eyelids, and what he beheld was not the woman of his memories. As though through a veil, darkly, he glimpsed something crude and inhuman -- more will than matter -- and had the queasy, ghastly feeling that he was embracing not a woman, or even another physical being, but some cyclopean and blasphemous pseudopod of another entity entirely.
Electric horror shot through his entire body, and he shoved the dream-figure away and flopped out of the bed onto the floor, gasping painfully for breath. Skek-drotz, that was way too close. Thanks, chat.
"What's the matter?" the feminine voice mocked him teasingly. "Isn't this the form of the woman you love?"
Skylar groaned, laughing wretchedly. "What would you know about love?" He twisted around, sitting up to face the thing in the bed.
The figure had changed; where before there had been a vision of ripe, lustful loveliness, there was now a man -- slender, effeminate, but nevertheless a man -- sitting cross-legged in the bed and watching Skylar with an amused expression, chin resting on one fist. The sides of his head were shaved, and his ink-black hair was slicked straight backwards from a sharp widow's peak above prim steel-rimmed glasses; a brilliantly white shirt sat under a black vest over black slacks and shiny black dress shoes. He smirked at Skylar's shock. "Oh, come on," he purred -- and Skylar was astonished that the voice was still the same, a sensual and smoky woman's voice -- "aren't you open to being at least a little flexible in the bedroom?"
"So, you're a dude," Skylar grunted, heaving himself off the floor -- movement had that light, easy quality he now recognized from dreams. "This how you get off? Tricking other dudes into thinking you're a chick?"
"I am a woman," the strange figure disagreed, "but I am also a man." In the blink of an eye, the body shifted smoothly -- the appearance was identical, but the figure was now unmistakbly female, with subtle but pert breasts, a slender waist, and wider hips. "But you might not find my voice as pleasant," it continued, and Skylar blinked at the now undeniably masculine tone of its speech. "I am both male and female, and whichever of my aspects I bear outside, I bear the other inside."
"Wow, that mishkot sucks," Skylar goggled. "So you're like an eternally frustrated transgender person? Isn't that kind of hellish for you?"
"It is my nature," the figure said, rising from the bed and shifting back to a male body, "to be uncomfortable." He bowed mockingly, looking up at Skylar from his genuflection with cat-green eyes that were somehow painfully feminine. "Being Timurus, the Devari of Deception, and all."
"Okay, now you really korsked up," Skylar complained as the dream shifted -- they were abruptly in a field under a star-lit sky, with scattered dusky trees and a great black mountain blocking out part of the landscape in the distance. "Now I have basically no reason to listen to or trust anything you say -- you're supposed to give me some information first, then reveal your deceptive nature, so that I question the information I was given. What's up with this incompetence? Is this your first time corrupting a mortal?"
"I am not generally in the business of corrupting mortals," the Devari demurred, moving to sit beside him -- the dissonance of the sultry female voice coming from the male body continued to grate on Skylar's consciousness with each word. "Think of this more as a 'welcome to the team' sort of thing."
"Yeah, well, you're not doing yourselves any favors by sending the Dark God of Lies for my onboarding," Skylar observed. "Now I can't really trust anything you tell me." I shouldn't even think of it as a person. It's a creature, an unknowable entity. The gender thing shouldn't even register.
The Devari laughed, and it was a worrying noise -- full of mockery and fulsome extravagance. "How little you know," it mused, holding up a hand and examining its nails; they were buffed and manicured, and shone with reflected light Skylar was pretty sure didn't quite match the ambient light in the dream. "Lies told entirely with the truth are the best sort of fun."
Skylar rolled his eyes. "If you say so, Mysterious God Creature Who Transcends The Concept of Gender. But it still seems dumb to send you instead of, I don't know, literally anybody else."
"Ah, but there our options are limited," the figure continued, standing up and placing a hand on one of the nearby trees. "Each of my brothers and sisters is... idiosyncratic in their own way. But my Erszet is all things which belie their true natures -- among which I count dreams and illusions, making me the only one who could speak to you without arousing your companions' suspicions." It turned a mocking smirk upon him yet again. "After all, we wouldn't want your little friends learning the true extent of your 'cultiness', wouldn't you say?"
Skylar snorted. "Aren't you supposed to be gods, though? Couldn't you just do whatever you wanted?"
"We are not gods, Skylar Kass." Abruptly the figure before him was a fractal knot in space and understanding -- infinitely nested within itself and the space around it, and Skylar's brain creaked under the strain of simply perceiving it. "Devari are born of the union of god and mortal -- each of us is half-human. And while our divine nature grants us many aspects incomprehensibly powerful to you, we are yet born of mortals, and think and reason as such." With a sudden snap, the figure was as it had appeared before; but now the Devari was in its feminine aspect, and its voice and eyes were correspondingly masculine as it leveled an accusing finger at him. "But don't get the wrong idea. A mortal intelligence that can see through time, answer ten thousand prayers in a heartbeat, and destroy your mind utterly with a mere flex of will is still somebody you shouldn't fratz with."
Skylar cringed in what he would have liked to have been a reasonable facsimile of terror but was in fact authentic and actual terror. "Okay, jeez, point taken. I'm sorry and stuff, your Deceptionfulness."
The Devari sighed and switched back to its male aspect, shifting its back against the tree and sliding down to the grass with a forlorn expression. "Don't be like that. We're supposed to be working together, remember?"
"Look, you can be an unknowable eldritch intelligence or a put-upon misunderstood pawn of events, you can't be both," Skylar complained. "If you're going to try to screw me, at least turn back into Corsica so I can get off too."
"Ah, yes, you did enjoy that form, didn't you?" In an instant, the vision of desire was back -- a bedsheet draped around the woman's body artfully, concealing and revealing just enough to send lust roaring through Skylar's veins again. But his mind stayed sharp -- now the voice matches the body, probably because they're both deceptions. Useful to know. "But no -- we don't have time to play tonight. And I think you've hurt my feelings a little -- you'll have to earn that kind of a reward, my cultist." And, with a suddenness that left him an aching void of frustrated desire, the Devari had assumed its previous form again.
Skylar groaned and buried his face in his hands. Great. This is the guy/chick that's going to grant me the powers that'll keep me from getting killed? I might have been better off hitting things with a stick. "Let me guess, you want me to do typical culty stuff to earn your favor, right? Sacrifice babies and fratz like that?"
"What? No, that's dreadful. Why would you think that?" The Devari's tone of voice was shocked and hurt, though Skylar doubted it was in any way sincere -- however, he knew that his understanding of the Devari's nature was pathetically feeble even without such doubts. He thinks we're evil, he remembered the other Devari lamenting. He thinks Father is evil. "Lucian propaganda, all of it," the figure protested, shifting back to a female form. "The basest of scandalous falsehoods, I tell you."
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
"Sure, whatever, God of Lies," Skylar yawned. "But that still doesn't tell me what you do want me to do. Gram is already winning the war, right? Whole planet in darkness, Lucians losing their cities left and right. You're playing this up like you need me, but from what I can tell, you're doing just fine without me. And now you've made it so that I can't trust anything you tell me on top of that, so where are we even supposed to go from there?"
Unexpectedly, the Devari laughed -- deep, rich, and fulsome, it was a hearty bellow of mirth that felt sickly incongruous emerging from the slender, sultry frame of the demigod's female aspect. "Well played, well played. Is this the part where my only remaining topic of conversation is the power you were promised?" The burning green eyes which turned upon him smote him with their amused indulgence, and Skylar cursed. I think I was the one who got played. "Very well. Listen closely."
The Devari raised its right hand, and smoke boiled across its fingertips. "Each Devari can empower their servants with Arts, as you know -- and you also know something of Open and Closed Arts, as well as Granted and Achieved Arts." Skylar narrowed his eyes. More confirmation they're listening to everything I say. "I'll leave the specifics to others -- but let us begin by saying that the Art I will grant you, Weir, is a Closed Granted Art. This means two things -- first, that the nature and execution of its power is known only to you, and that you may use it immediately, without the need for study or acclimation."
"Makes sense," Skylar nodded. "You need something that I can use right away, and that won't give me away as a cultist to the others. So what does it do? How does it work?"
"Ah, there we come to a problem." The being calling itself Timurus was abruptly male again, tapping a dainty forefinger against its lips in a jarringly feminine gesture. "Normally I would fill you with just enough of my power to allow you to use the Art to your capabilities, but you have consumed Father's elan directly -- and quite a lot of it -- while being utterly unfamiliar with the use of such power in any capacity. As a result, any attempt to use this -- or any -- Art will be quite dangerous if you exceed the limits of your control." The demigod crouched down, staring into Skylar's eyes, and black power swirled across the shining green irises; he flinched, but forced himself to hold still. "Thus the power of Weir will be useful to you only in a very limited fashion. Behold." The Devari reached out and flicked a finger at him, as if casting an errant drop of water in his direction.
Skylar's skull split open. PAIN -- relentless, searing pain -- filled every ounce of his awareness, leaving him blind and gasping with agony for a half-instant that seemed timeless and eternal. Then, just as suddenly, it was over; he jerked, feeling only the echoes of the crippling anguish that had suffused him so completely. "What the skek was that?!" he gasped. He examined himself, but he was completely unharmed; as understanding penetrated his brain, he turned his eyes to the Devari with incredulity. "Are you vishnat serious?!"
"Look, I'm working with what I've got," the deity complained. "This is all I can give you, okay? Arts don't exactly grow on trees."
"I'm sorbnek dead." Skylar groaned, slapping his palm to his face. "The other guys can summon fire and and turn into monsters, and I have the power to give somebody a headache for one second."
"As you acclimate to the power, it may be longer than one second," Timurus corrected him. "With time, you may capable of as many as a dozen."
Skylar laughed bitterly -- he didn't even have to look to perceive the smirk on the other being's face. "What a sorbnek joke. What's next, the ability to tie a bad guy's shoelaces together? Can this power even cause real harm?"
"No," the Devari confirmed, now wearing a female body again. "It is sensation only. But you will have to find a way for that to be sufficient if you wish to survive." Around him, Skylar could sense the dream beginning to fray -- whether because he was waking up naturally, or because his sheer astonishment at how korskak his only power was going to be was wrecking his perception of everything.
"You still haven't told me what you want," he complained, watching his body slowly dissipate into tatters and streams of dreamstuff. "Or what Gram or Lucia want."
"That's not a question I can answer," the Devari's female voice confided in him. "We can't know their minds either. We play at being godlings, but..."
With the last of its physical form, Timurus gestured grandly towards the black mountain in the distance; and, as his consciousness disintegrated, Skylar glimpsed the truth -- that what he had mistaken for a mountain, vast beyond mortal scale, was in fact a great toe, attached to a foot whose scale dwarfed planets and stars. And above, stretching infinitely into the distance beyond, was a night-black physical form -- male, unmistakably solid -- which knelt astride the fundament of existence and bent an inscrutable gaze upon all creation. Glimpsing the literal actual face of God -- a dark, unknowable god who inhabited and constituted the furthest depths of tenebrous and ineffable cosmic truths he could only guess at -- was the final blow to his already-tenuous grasp on reality, and Skylar's mind dissolved into unconsciousness.
With a start, Skylar awakened, gasping and clutching at his pounding heart; for a moment, he wondered if he'd imagined the whole thing. But he felt the knowledge of Weir burning bright in his mind, feeble as it was, and he knew from that fact alone it had been no true dream. Great. I am now armed with the ability to really piss someone off at will -- which I kind of already had, so fratz you very much, Dark God of Corfsmot. Aymon's slumbering form was gone, but Levan and Reine were sitting by the fire, sharing a hearty breakfast of absolutely nothing; Skylar's own stomach growled at the idea, but he ignored it. We're all going hungry until we can get out of this place. I'll just have to suck it up.
Painfully, he clambered to his feet, stretching -- a night on a stone floor with only his trenchcoat for bedding had done him no favors, but at least his body was young and strong. Could be worse. He contemplated going over to the others and making conversation, but the idea felt inadvisable almost immediately; guessing Aymon got more god-juice from Svata and went out to scout, so we can't do anything until we know what he sees. He shoved his hands into his pockets and slouched in what he hoped was a good imitation of teenage angst as he suppressed the urge to try his new magic powers out on his companions.
Fortunately, he didn't have to wait long; within a few minutes, Aymon's greathawk form came spiraling in over the top of the battered gate and swooped down to land majestically in front of the others, returning to the elf's anthropoid form as it did so. "I have sighted the path," the bearded elf began without preamble, "but time is short. More nightspawn gather along the pathways -- if we move swiftly, we may avoid them, but the gap closes even now."
"Then we depart now," Reine decided, kicking the fire's embers into a spray of ash and leaping to her feet with an incongruously valley-girlish bounce. "Loathborn, Zuzan, ready yourselves for a hard march." Without another word, she strode forward, kicking aside the black iron gate into the courtyard. Aymon was at her side in an instant, loping with the easy agility of a hunting cat; Levan and Skylar brought up the rear, with Levan groaning himself into a soldier's trot as his rust-pocked sword waggled over his shoulder.
Skylar, for himself, was cursing his decision to burden himself with the disassembled staff; it took him nearly five attempts to assemble it while bouncing and stumbling after the others, and more than once he dropped a piece and had to scramble for it before cursing and sprinting to catch up with the others. At one point, he slowed and looked around, noticing the distance between them growing wider and wider, and wondering if he even wanted to catch up and keep being part of the group...
"Faster, cultist!" barked Reine in his ear; he jumped in surprise, then found himself stumbling forwards with stinging buttocks from a swift kick to the rear. "Next time, it'll be my sword," the Justiciar warned before sprinting back to the head of the column; Skylar just groaned and slogged forward, every muscle and sinew in his body burning with the strain of the march.
The first hour was awful; the second, hellish, and the third even worse. By the fifth, Skylar was seriously contemplating just flopping down and letting Reine stab him; the alternative didn't seem like it could be any worse. "Not... exactly... trained... for this," he panted to anyone who would listen, but it didn't appear anyone was; Reine dashed ahead and around the perimeter as though her spine were full of batteries, and Aymon's easy grace carried him forward over the rocks and gullies as though he were floating. Even Levan, who was having the hardest time of it, seemed to take to the march with an old familiarity; another piece of evidence pointing to him being a soldier, Skylar noted even as his lungs burned and his legs ached. "How... much... further?" he groaned.
"We near the two-thirds mark," the bald elf answered him, dropping back to run alongside him; on either side, Skylar could just barely see that the terrain had begun to shift from a bog to a valley, with rising swells of rock on either side. "Garlan's Fork is less than an hour away. But our pursuers will catch us soon; I recommend you do not look back." He sped up and returned to the head of the column, while Skylar, naturally, risked a glance behind him.
What he saw almost made him soil himself.
A huge pack of monsters had appeared in the distance behind them, ghostlike and eerie under the pale light of the moon -- it appeared to be mostly composed of Ubara, but some of the beasts had squat, misshapen riders like evil little dwarves, and a few towering shapes of lumbering, claylike forms Skylar couldn't even guess at were sprinkled in among the mass of running beasts. He groaned and sped up. I don't think my headache powers are going to stop those dudes.
Up ahead, he saw Reine bounding like a hare up a rocky embankment where the valley began to narrow; Aymon, pulling up short, hung back and stretched out a hand to Levan as he came puffing up the slope. With a quick grasp and a mighty heave, the bald elf tossed him up towards Reine, who barely managed to catch and hold the Loathborn long enough for his stubby, flailing legs to find purchase against the stone. Then she fell back, out of Skylar's line of sight, to do something he couldn't see; but before he could shift for a better vantage point, something struck him heavily in the back, and he staggered forward to find a crude stone-tipped spear lodged partway through the thick leather. Oh wow. I'm probably bleeding.
"No time to dawdle, Zuzan!" Aymon cautioned him as he appeared out of the darkness next to him. In the blink of an eye, the Ilkon's musclebound hand latched onto Skylar's collar. "Hold on tightly if you wish to live!"
"Hold on tightly to whaAAAAAAAAAAAA.......!" Skylar screamed in surprise and terror as the elf shifted into a greathawk with its talon still curled around his trenchcoat; with a single flap of its vast wings, he found himself launched bodily into the air as the trenchcoat begain to slip up and over his arms, threatening to dump him down onto the hard ground. Fratz, fratz, fratz ...!
Desperately, he grabbed onto the coat with both hands, his silly little staff dangling from the crook of his elbow, and screamed; surely, any instant now, he would lose his grip and fall, and only bone-shattering pain and an indeterminate period of devouring awaited him...
"For the love of Lucia, please, shut up."
Skylar stopped screaming and opened his eyes; he was sitting down at the top of the ridge next to Levan, who was giving him a very hateful glare indeed. "Oh. Uh, sorry." Holy drotz that's embarrassing. Don't roast me, chat, I'm doing the best I can. At least I didn't pee myself.
Below, the first of the Ubara were beginning to reach the foot of the rocky scree, but it was clear they couldn't ascend as easily as the others had; the maneuver had bought them a few minutes, at least. Reine, bouncing on her heels, was ready to continue the run, but Skylar was exhausted and Levan looked close to his limit. Aymon, taking form next to them, frowned. "I have perhaps one more shift remaining to me. Are you able to continue?"
Skylar gulped, his mouth dry, as he considered his response. I have to make sure I make the right call here. What I say will definitely have a big impact on how they think of me going forward.
I'M TIRED BOSS
