229. [BOLERO] Los Perdidos

  [Designation: SKYVEILS]

  [Instrument Class: PRIMAL]

  [Anchored Realm: TIDEREIGN (Immortal)]

  [Item Description:

  The outrealmer, in all their arrogant yet righteous ignorance, asked: “Why do you cling so? Times change. Souls die and are born again. Cities crumble to dust and are built anew. The only certainty in the universe is impermanence. So, I ask again, old-timer. What is it you’re so desperate to hold onto?”

  The ‘old-timer’, steeped in sorrow known only to the timeless yet timeworn, answered: “Memories. Possibilities. Choices. One door opened and another left untouched. Dreams nurtured in the sun and transformed under the moon. My people are ephemeral. Yet what is eternity if not ephemera writ large? Should my people be too small to leave their marks on this world, then I will keep them forever threaded into the veils. You ask what I hold onto? Everything.”]

  ***

  Zac—just Zac, and nothing else—tried to move but couldn’t.

  It happened sometimes. Often in a predictable pattern. But rarely, like on this occasion, without warning.

  He’d wake up in a hazy, formless liminal space. His joints would lock up, and he’d be stuck for hours in this weird non-posture. Lying down, standing rigid, neither and somehow both.

  The only thing he could move were his eyelids. Which was both a blessing and a curse. He didn’t know what he preferred. Unblemished, inescapable darkness? Or this foggy ‘there’s something there but the game won’t let me see it’ thing straight out of survival horror?

  Survival horror? What even is that? And what ‘game’? Why am I talking (thinking) like this?

  This sometimes happened too, though not as often as the other weird thing. And when it did, it always coincided with the first.

  He’d get these thoughts that didn’t quite belong. Words and concepts that turned into nonsense as soon as they formed in his mind. Where did they come from? Why did they choose him, when there were millions upon trillions of other, perfectly eligible s—

  Zac blinked the thought away. When he opened his eyes again, all was fog and something else that was or wasn’t there. He didn’t know why the thought scared him so much, but he did know the safest—only—thing to do was ignore it.

  How many hours? How many blinks to keep the nameless dread at bay? Zac had lost count. When he heard the voice, it took him a second or two to clock that it spoke something other than his own nonsensical thoughts.

  “—still working out the kinks. I can’t give an exact estimate, but it’d be at least another—”

  “Can you do it or not? I didn’t come here to hear you waffle about kinks and estimates.”

  The first voice belonged to a stuttery, neurotic male. The second to a woman—cold, stern, proud. For whatever reason, hearing her voice sent a shudder down Zac’s immobile spine. It made him picture, weirdly enough, a spider perched atop dew-draped webs.

  “Well, a lot of problems still need solving,” the neurotic man hedged. “We’re working on them around the clock, of course, but there are bottlenecks and downstream calibrations and—”

  “Answer the question.” The woman would have none of it. “Can you or can you not give me back what I’ve lost?”

  There was no hint of pleading in the woman’s voice. Only cold, proud authority. Zac waited with bated breath for the answer, as if he had any vested interest in the matter. He couldn’t see how; he didn’t know why. He grew annoyed with the man’s stalling all the same.

  “Yes.” The answer eventually did trickle out, along with a poorly disguised sigh. “I believe we can.”

  Now it was the woman’s turn to fall silent. Zac blinked several times in a futile effort to alter his non-view of the situation. He thought he saw a shadow grow within the fog, but he’d only imagined it. One of his shoulders began to ache as he waited. Odd—considering all of his joints were equally frozen.

  “Can you hear me?”

  It took Zac a second or two to clock that the woman was talking to him. His eyes widened, lids forgetting to blink.

  Now, this was new. Zac had woken up in this weird liminal non-state many a time, had thought with words that weren’t his own, and yes, had even heard strangers’ voices echo from beyond the fog. But never before had one of the strangers addressed him directly!

  Yes, he tried to answer. Was desperate to answer for reasons unclear to himself. But his mouth was clamped shut and his throat frozen, as useless as the rest of his body.

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  “It’s alright.”

  The woman spoke as if she’d heard him anyway. It was the same woman from earlier, but her voice had taken on a very different tone. Warm, tender. Still proud but in a way that let Zac into the fold. He pictured a spider now spinning and drawing the web into herself.

  “It’s alright,” the woman said again, and this time, Zac believed her wholeheartedly. “I’m a patient soul, and I’m willing to wait however long it takes—however long you take. After all, Manesfera wasn’t built in a day, was it?”

  Zac found himself nodding along, even though he couldn’t move his neck. What the woman said made a lot of sense to him. Even though… if he tried to take the words apart, they ended up sounding a lot like nons—

  Zac blinked the thought away. He stared as hard as he could at the unchanging fog. Tried to picture the kindly, loving smile of the woman atop her dew-draped web. But his lids grew heavy. It was time for another sleep.

  “Take your time,” the woman whispered from the darkness. “I’ll meet you when you’re good and ready, my little spiderling.”

  ***

  Zacarias Borges-Juventus tried to move but couldn’t.

  He opened his eyes wide, only to be met by unblemished darkness. He blinked several times in a futile effort to alter his view.

  The darkness was real, but it took him a second or two to clock that his immobility was only imagined. That fucked-up dream had been just that. A dream and nothing more. The safest—only—thing to do was ignore it.

  In the total darkness, Zacarias smiled to himself wryly. Hard to believe, but this was the second time he’d been caught up in a Realm-altering tantrum by a sitting Immortal. As to the exact nature of this latest clusterfuck… he was still trying to work it out.

  The last thing he remembered was standing with his party atop Ascension Promontory, doing his darnedest to ward off a Deva’s mind games while bracing against an Immortal’s spit-storm. In all honesty, he hadn’t done a credible job of either.

  But his piss-poor effort had since been rewarded with a bailout. A ‘hard reset’, [Tidewatch] had called it… right before it too went the way of solid ground and contiguous reality.

  For the next thing was getting swallowed up by the skyveils—which, wouldn’t you know it, were actually SKYVEILS this whole time—which had [Unmoored] Zacarias and his friends in pretty much every sense of the word.

  Had he reconstituted then? The unfortunate Liminal Karma count of [0 ? ] suggested that to be the case. The immediate darkness—along with the prominent absence of a giant lotus flower—suggested there was more to the story.

  Where is everyone else? was Zacarias’s first foray into making sense of the situation. But before that, where the hell am I? was his second.

  To answer the second and more pertinent question, Zacarias tried again to rouse himself… and found he could move just fine. Well, other than the fact he was confined to an uncomfortably tight space, barely wide enough and certainly not long enough to house his burly frame.

  He managed to wriggle one arm free and felt around the surroundings. A stone box of some sort, its surfaces cold to the touch and upsettingly grimy. He was reminded of the Duskpool Infirmary’s hidden floors, and the air in here certainly had that same staleness to it. Yet there was a scent about the place that seemed, even to his underdeveloped senses, distinctly well-preserved… whatever the hell that meant.

  Fighting down a familiar dread, Zacarias freed both arms and pushed every which way. Eventually, the surface directly above his face gave way with a loud ‘klunk!’. Throwing caution to the wind, he finished the escape with a double-fisted [Cestus], punching the stone lid up and away from the box.

  He shot up, only to immediately hit his head against another stone surface ([26!]). Blinking away spinning stars and muttering angrily, Zacarias gingerly squeezed himself out through the gap between the box and the ‘ceiling’ above it.

  ‘Outside’ was a space large enough for him to stand to full height and stretch out his limbs. Zacarias did so gratefully, all while adjusting to the dim lighting and the strange scent that filled the air. Resinous, smoky, oddly pleasant and calming. He found himself in a dingy hallway of sorts, each of its walls stacked from floor to ceiling with identical stone boxes—exactly like the one he himself had climbed out of.

  Sarcophagi, he arrived at the correct vocabulary. Hallways full of them. Catacombs, I suppose you could call this place. Did I just… reconstitute as a mummy that came back to life?

  It didn’t take long for Zacarias to realize he wasn’t alone. Noise of commotion echoed from one darkened end of the hallway. Thuds, bangs, and even the clash of steel against steel. Souls were fighting nearby, and they’d rudely neglected to invite Zacarias!

  Serac and the others? There was only one way to find out. He first walked toward the sound, affecting his usual nonchalance, before breaking into a run when he heard a high-pitched scream.

  The voice didn’t belong to anyone he knew, he realized only a Ksana later. But by then, he was already barreling down the hallway at full tilt, driven by an instinct hard-wired into Manusya men of a certain disposition. A disposition, for example, commonly found in hired muscles hailing from the Aracnido Sect and trained in THE NINEFOLD DAO.

  Yet, even as Zacarias ran to rescue (presumably) a damsel-in-distress, that familiar dread crossed his mind. Catacombs. Hallways full of sarcophagi. Sarcophagi full of (presumably) the ancient dead. Don’t tell me. Please, don’t fucking—

  Zacarias blinked the thought away. When he opened his eyes again, they alighted upon the end of the hallway, which intersected with another just like it. A figure suddenly appeared in the frame. A dainty Mriga woman with a torch in one hand and a pitchfork in the other.

  As Zacarias watched with wide-eyed surprise, the woman lost her balance and fell onto her back. The pitchfork tumbled out of her hand and clattered against the stone floor. The torch swung wildly, illuminating a second figure that darted in to bear down on the helpless damsel.

  A Mriga mummy come to life. Lanky frame, rotted antlers, and pupilless eyes that gave off the cold gleam of moonlight. Its blackened muscles bulged as it raised an ancient sword above its head. Between the hilt and the antlers, a Pathsighted label read: [Veil-spun Revenant].

  Zacarias smiled as relief washed over him. He then flexed his own, NINEFOLD-master-in-his-prime muscles as he readied to put instinct into action.

  Look I admit it, he admitted to himself. If this thing were a ghost, Antler-girl here and I might’ve been in trouble. But fucker is clearly a zombie, and I’m perfectly fine with zombies. There’s a big difference, I swear.

  Shaking off fears real, imagined, or dreamt, Zacarias Borges-Juventus jumped fist-first into the fray.

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