The sudden disturbance set the three of us on alert like a troop of meerkats sighting a hawk. I say three because Lynnria was so blissed-out, she might as well have been enthralled to the heavenly chorus. How could an insignificant tap against the door compete with that?
However, before we could decide what to do about it, a plain white card was slipped under the door. All six of our eyes traced its movement without blinking and, when it stopped, we continued our staring for some seconds. Waiting. But nothing else happened. If anyone was still on the other side of the door, they were either extraordinarily patient or had completed their task and left.
Jax was the first to move. Unwrapping herself from my leg and without bothering to stand, she scurried over to the note. There she paused to sniff at it suspiciously, consequently posing herself somewhere between a downward dog and a push-up.
I may have taken the opportunity to admire the view. Briefly.
“There be a scent here,” she informed us after a moment. “Familiar-like…”
“Could it be poisoned?” I asked.
Arx shook her head from her perch on my other leg. “Nothing dangerous can invade a safe room.”
“We’ve been in here a while. Maybe someone else wants to use it?” I suggested, half in jest.
“That can’t—” Arx began but quickly reconsidered. “Hmm… normally, that can’t happen. Each Mouth leads to its own separate Dungeon area, so we shouldn’t have anyone else in here unless that giant bird you were talking about got them.”
“I seen them other people,” Jax reminded us over her shoulder. “Back where I were trapped. Guards from the town.”
“Maybe the flood dragon missed them, and the thunderbird just showed up to pick off stragglers,” I hazarded.
That might have been a reasonable assumption under normal circumstances. And it might have even been true for the former citizens of Raialie. But not for us. No, I was quite certain both of those Mouths had been meant to find me specifically. Why else would the Demon Queen have sent me that angry command back in the stadium… and then politely invited me to dinner?
She’s going to be just as insane as the other two. I just know it.
Arx sighed. “I’m sorry, Master. I’ve never been in the Dungeon with more than a dozen or so people at a time, and then we were all cooperating. I haven’t had to consider a situation where people might need to compete for a safe room.”
“No one knows everything,” I assured her before turning back to the door. “What does it smell like?”
Jax picked up the card and stood, still holding the corner to her nose with an expression of deep pondering. “There be no describing it,” she announced finally. “Closest I can figger be aliken to Ahnbe’s mark, but it ain’t Hers. I dunno how I know that, but I do.”
I blinked a few times. “You’re telling me that card smells like… like Her…”
“Fanny, aye.” She chuckled. “Yer sheathed to the hilt in one right now, Master. What’s to be shamed of?”
I resisted the urge to glance down at the undulating sensations still massaging me and quickly attempted to stand. However, with Arx clutching at my leg and—I discovered—Lynnria’s tail wrapped tightly about the other, that was easier said than done.
“One does not usually expect a smear of feminine discharge upon a item of polite correspondence,” I intoned gravely and, I hoped, an air of aloof indifference. But I probably looked like an idiot. “Anyway, what does it say?”
The words had scarcely left my mouth before I winced, remembering too late that she could not actually read. However, to my surprise—and apparently Jax’s—she seemed to recognize at least some of the script.
“I ain’t sure,” she informed us, pointing a claw at the card, “but this word here be ‘toilet,’ or I be yer ma.”
Toilet? That seemed… specific.
“Bring it here, Jax,” I said, then glanced down at Arx. “Help me up, would you?”
“Yes, Dearest.”
*****
A few minutes later, the three of us were huddled together on the edge of the bed, puzzling over the bit of stationery. The calligraphy we had found there was absolutely beautiful, but that was about all we could say about it. The note had been written in a completely unfamiliar language.
Thanks to Arx, that list was far shorter than it had once been. She was all but fluent in half a dozen and proficient enough in three others that she could usually tease out their basic gists. And since binding her, those proficiencies had transferred to me.
This language she had never seen even in passing. However, that was not to say the letter was completely unintelligible. There were a few lodestones sprinkled about the text, which was the only reason we were still pouring over it. Foremost among these were the salutation and the signature, which were the only items even using a familiar alphabet. They read, respectively:
‘To the Triumphal Toilet Troop’ and ‘Xhinn.’
“How alliterative,” I observed dryly.
“Whate’er that means,” Jax retorted. “I nay ken what kinda squint this Demon Queen be, but She’s sending one up the river with this one.”
Arx and I turned to look at her.
“…What?”
I could only sigh. Being known as the Donum Clan was bad enough but, as Xhinn had just so adroitly demonstrated, the depths of my humiliation had veins yet unexplored.
The Toilet Troop? Oh, please don’t let that catch on. To say nothing of how demeaning it was, the name only worked because it was an in-joke. Anyone else that heard it would just think we were a bunch of perverts…
…
As for the rest of the letter, it might as well have been written in Dwarven runes for all the sense I could make of it—save for a few little anomalies. Eleven, to be precise. And that just so happened to correspond to the exact number of Words in our lexicon.
Because of course, that was exactly what those anomalies were.
“I think…” I began, pointing them out, “the only reason this letter was written in this language was so we would notice these.”
Arx nodded slowly, following my logic. “Could be. I doubt they would have been all that obvious otherwise. But that still doesn’t explain much. Why bother forcing all eleven of our Words onto a note at all? Especially when we can’t even read the rest.”
Jax shrugged indifferently. “Just a tait of flirting, seems to me. If yer the type what’s got a stick up yer arse.”
Arx growled low in her throat. “Never mind how you arrived at that little deduction. Why would the Demon Queen want to flirt with the Master?”
“She’s a goddess, ain’t She? Who else’d She wanna flirt with?” my First replied. As if that explained anything. “‘Sides, what womenfolk do ye know of what smears their ownselves on letters fer the fun of it?”
“I would!”
“Only if it were fer the Master.”
“Obviously,” Arx agreed, then grit her teeth in defeat. “‘Snails!”
Well… at least some of that seems reasonable. Once you filtered out the absurd amounts of bias.
Idly, I took a curious whiff of the card, but whatever ability I had recently gained did not seem to work on goddess… secretions. Or if it did, it was going haywire in a way that made no sense at all. She smelled like…
Nothing?
But like… literal nothing. It was as if someone had torn a hole in the universe and asked me to describe its scent. And the only thing that came to mind was ‘what is six times nine?’
…if extraplanar mathematics could be described as ‘wildly arousing.’
Shit… if Xhinn smells like that, what the hell kind of aroma does Ahnbe have?
“I suppose we’re going to need a way to translate this,” I murmured, sighing.
I had no idea how many languages existed on this world, but if Earth was any guide, that number would not be small. Human beings alone had managed to come up with several thousand. Hell, we even had well over a hundred language families. If you took all that and multiplied it by the number of species on this planet—itself a complete unknown—how many tongues would you end up with?
Unless it’s more a question of geographical separation and the mobility of the citizenry? I shook the thought away. I was getting carried away again.
Whatever the final answer turned out to be, there were a lot of variables to consider. And I had recently begun to appreciate the value of the more generic, quality-of-life types of skills.
“Seems like it might be a useful ability in the long run.”
Arx nodded sagely. “It’s a requirement for any serious Questing party. The Dungeon is well known for its puzzles.”
“Yeah, I’m getting that…” I agreed wryly. “Unfortunately, I’m fresh out of skill points, or I would buy a translation spell.”
“I got one,” Jax said with a sneer. “But it be locked.”
I reached up to stroke one of her horns comfortingly. “It’s alright, Jax. We’ll get you sorted out as soon as we can. What about you, Arx?”
“I have two,” she reported. “But as a Siren, I have no idea what a skill like that might look like.”
“Let’s find out,” I said, then leaned back to poke at Lynnria. “Mia? Are you done in there?”
Our fourth party member had been staring vacantly at the ceiling while we had been talking. I had no idea what was going through her mind—if anything—but from her face, she was still recovering from an encounter of near-religious proportions. Tears were flowing freely down her cheeks in a pair of continuous streams, and her skin was blotched from sheer discomfit. We had been trying to give her some space.
At my prodding, she slowly turned until her eyes found me… or something about a thousand miles past me. It was hard to say.
“Do you guys think I went too far?” I asked absently. “It was her first time. Maybe I should have held back a little.”
Arx shrugged. “She wanted to be a big girl, and now she is. Besides she tastes fantastic right now.”
“Y’ain’t wrong,” Jax agreed with a toothy grin. “Ye gave us a feast and more with this one, Master.”
I grunted. Leave it to a pair of empaths to display no empathy whatsoever. “Are you alright, Lynnria?”
She tried to say something that sounded pretty close to, “Djah~!” But that seemed to be all the breath she had in her. She was smiling though. A lot. So I would take that as a good sign.
I smiled back, feeling awkward. “Mia,” I called again. “We want to buy a skill.”
“Maybe she ain’t listening?” Jax suggested.
I honestly had no idea if that was even possible. The inner workings of our minds and Mia’s relationship with them were cans of worms I increasingly felt best avoided. I had seen glimpses here and there, and that had been plenty, thank you very much. The last thing I needed on my plate was a helping of cross-species symbolic interaction theory.
“You’re sure she’s in there?” I asked, turning to Arx.
She shrugged uncertainly. “I think so. She said something about needing to make sure the roots were growing along the proper non-resistance pathways.”
“Of course,” I agreed, nodding as if I had a clue.
“Okay, I’m here…” Mia announced, slightly out-of-breath. “Just give me… one…”
Some sort of popping sound tapped at my eardrum, and my right eyelid fluttered.
“There! Testing, testing… Lynnria? Can you hear me?”
Lynnria choked slightly and closed her eyes.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
My face twisted with bafflement. Never mind whatever the hell Mia had just done, I always had felt a little out to sea when people got overly emotional on me, and watching Lynnria had thrown me overboard. All we had done was fool around a bit. Why the waterworks?
“Maybe I should… give her a hug?” I suggested.
“Ah, she’s fine,” Mia said dismissively. “Now, I think I heard something about a skill?”
“Yeah, for Arx,” I replied, stroking Lynnria’s arm. She grabbed my wrist a moment later and held on as if her life depended on it.
Maybe she wants to cuddle? I had heard some women liked that, so I decided to start sending little bursts of comfort into her hand. It seemed to help.
“We need something to translate this note,” Arx explained, waggling the parchment in question in her fingertips.
“I see. Translation skill… Scout sub-type…” Mia repeated amidst the sounds of a pencil scratching out some notes. “Active skill, I’m assuming? A Passive would be cheaper, but hardly anyone is interested in those when it comes to translations.”
“Why’s that?” Jax asked curiously.
“Cram it, tailless. No one asked—” Mia stopped with a little gasp of horror. “I apologize. Truly. That was… uncalled for.”
My First nodded her understanding, but she was clearly fighting to compose herself. She looked like she had just been slapped. Arx quickly gathered her into her arms and stroked her nails down her sister’s spine. “It’s alright. I’m sure it’ll come in eventually.”
“T’ain’t fair!” the other said with a fragile little hiccough. “E’en Lynnria has one, and she ain’t even a real Dolilim!”
I stared at the two of them for a moment, uncertain whether to be sympathetic or to laugh. We had someone on the verge of an emotional breakdown sitting right beside us, and this was what everyone got upset about?
But perhaps I was too out of the empathic loop to understand the nuances. Jax had not been complaining about it, so it had not been something I was worried about. However, it was clear that this Layer cap business was not doing great things for her state of mind. She had been used to growing with me—both in terms of power and physically. And if I knew anything at all about Dolilim, it was that they did not like being cut off from me.
In any sense of the word.
“Best answer her question, Mia,” I suggested.
She cleared her throat awkwardly. “Uh… yes. Of course. Well, Passives in this category are usually designed to assist in gaining language proficiencies, but the only types with any interest in that tend to be Scholars, Scribes, and the like. Not Questers, in short.”
“No, I think we’re looking for something a little more immediate,” I agreed. “Something like that Magic Tongues spell you suggested once.”
“Bline suggested once,” she corrected me. “But even if I could replicate that spell exactly, it wouldn’t do. You’ll need something for written text.”
“Why not something that works for both writing and speech?”
Mia’s reply was delayed slightly by the sound of a repressed moan. “N-not possible in the Foundation Layers. Too many variables.”
That was a refrain I had heard before. From what I had gathered, each Layer had its own restrictions as to what you could and could not buy, and they usually made a certain amount of sense when you thought about them. Because the skill system in this world was so open-ended, there would be nothing preventing you from buying a city-spanning nuke with your first skill pick without some rules in place.
And it would seem having a… dubiously loyal purveyor of skills in our corner had done little to change that.
“Okay… and do we want a skill stemming from Class or kind?”
That was a new one on me, and I fell silent to ponder it.
However, I was not the only one to be struck by its oddness. The question tugged just enough at Jax’s curiosity to pull her out of her self-pity, and she sat up, scrubbing at her eyes. “What do ye—” She stopped, remembering what had happened the last time a thoughtless question had passed her lips. “Err… I nay ken the question. Explain the difference.”
Mia sighed. “You didn’t think the ability to convert status ailments into Life Energy came from being a Tenebrous Warrior, did you?”
“Course not, ye bloody weapon!” Jax replied hotly, perhaps compensating a little. “I were wanting ye to be specific, be all. The difference the skill would take.”
“Oh. Well, that part is somewhat flexible but, generally speaking, it’s a thematic question. Is this something you’ve learned to do with the sorts of abilities your Class deals with, or is it something you’ve learned to do because of the unique way your body behaves?”
Jax made to reply, but the mental hamster-wheel made an abrupt return, leaving her mouth hanging open.
“So…” I hazarded, saving her from her own awkwardness. “You’re saying you couldn’t just give Arx the ability to read all languages. There has to be some sort of flavor attached to it.”
“That is correct, my lord,” she explained brightly. “There is nothing specific about Dolilim that could grant such a supernatural ability directly. That I can think of, anyway. I’ll need to check. And the Siren’s theme seems to be based around vocal entrancement.”
“Meaning if we went the Siren route, the skill would have to do with singing,” Arx said for clarity’s sake.
“Most likely.”
She grunted. “I’d like to avoid that if I can. Singing for everything gets a little annoying.”
Mia made a little noise of agreement. “Now, are there any other requests or restrictions you’d like to make on this skill? Or shall I mock something up?”
We traded blank glances.
“Go ahead, Mia,” I said after a moment.
“My lord,” she agreed then fell silent.
While we waited, I pondered on the nature of this new spin we had been presented. Mia had already explained that skills were just assemblies of Words meant to describe an effect of some kind. So there seemed to be no reason a person needed to be restricted in the abilities they might purchase beyond basic concerns like power-scaling. With such an open-ended system, why did we even need Classes in the first place? Why not just let us pick skills and and assemble the tool-kit we deemed necessary to run our lives?
And what did a person’s kind have to do with anything? For that matter, what sort of skills might I qualify for just by being human? What was unique about my race?
That was an interesting question. Normally, I would have said that humanity’s true power stemmed from our over-developed brains, but that was not even uncommon on this planet. Other than that, the only interesting thing humans had going for them was a penchant for long-distance running. And I would be damned before I started investing in skills like that—the occasional structural collapse notwithstanding.
I was a wizard! No matter what technicalities Mia claimed.
Although, there might be some potential with this whole dreaming business. All of the other races remembered theirs. And I did not.
Mia seemed to believe this was something that could be cured simply by improving my Intelligence, but I suspected it would not be so simple as that. Dreams—or human dreams anyway—had to do with the divide between the conscious and the subconscious mind.
Do people on this world not have a subconscious?
About then, Mia returned. “Huh. I suppose I’m not all that surprised, but still…”
“Don’t make us ask, Mia,” I prompted.
She cleared her throat. “Apologies, my lord. I know this sort of thing ruffles your sensibilities, else I would not hesitate to mention it. However, it seems as though the Life Energy component within your Dolilim’s vaginal secretions can serve as an extremely flexible magical catalyst.”
My face fell totally flat, and I closed my eyes. I did not know what else I could have expected, but it would have been nice to make a discovery that did not further my swan-dive into degradation.
A ‘flexible magical catalyst,’ huh? Fantastic.
Meaning that if we were to be at all practical about things, the three of them would one day be traipsing about smearing the stuff all over the place.
Fuck me… I had even theorized about its potential as a healing elixir.
And now that little smear on the card made so much more sense. It was a perverse little hint about a perverse little method of solving the Demon Queen’s perverse little riddle.
As for the Dolilim, their reactions were a little mixed.
The comment was enough to finally pull Lynnria out of her stupor, and she sat up ramrod straight, an expression of mortified horror on her face. However, she quickly began chewing on one of her claws, her eyes darting about as though connecting the lines in a grand conspiracy of implications.
Jax, meanwhile, was a tad slower on the uptake. Mia’s vocabulary trended toward the decided opposite extreme from her own on the scale of incomprehensibility, so it took her a moment to even realize what she meant. But once she had, she only shrugged. She was a being of Lust by her own admission. What was the big deal?
Then, there was Arx—who greeted the pronouncement with nothing short of approval. And once she got her breath back from laughing, she practically shouted, “I’ll take it!”
*****
The three of us waited in suspense as Arx passed her moistened fingers over the text. Shockingly, it really was as easy as that. No complicated incantations. No delving into her inner psyche. Just a quick dip, a smear, and she was away. I was practically livid with jealousy.
And I was not the only one. Lynnria’s eyes had all but popped out of her head when Arx finished explaining the ability for us, and she had begun pacing about the room, mumbling something about it being ‘too good to be true.’
Arx cleared her throat, then began to read with a bit of a mocking lilt to her voice. It would seem she found the Demon Queen’s prose a tad stuffy. She even made certain to emphasize each of the Words we knew when they came up.
“To the Triumphal Toilet Troop,
I do hope your initial sojourn into my whimsical palace of delights has helped alleviate some degree of cynicism as to my intentions. That little rod of dirt-casting turned out to be quite unexpectedly useful, did it not? How fortunate for you that I decided upon its generation…
For the rest, I really must apologize for concealing the contents of this letter but, one’s nature being what it is, I cannot exactly hand out information on a silver platter. So one must content oneself with this—perhaps—overly florid bit of pretense.
Now that the three of you have lifted the unfortunate poverty of—”
Arx’s recitation was interrupted by a guffaw, followed shortly by a gasp of shock. Then she fell silent, staring hard at the next sentence. And occasionally at Lynnria.
“What? What is it?” she asked nervously.
Arx took a breath to compose herself. Though it looked like it was a struggle.
“Now that the three of you have lifted the unfortunate poverty of… of moisture from the labia of your fourth…” Again, she had to stop for a bout of wheezing.
“Quit yer havering, ye dafty,” Jax growled. “I want’s to hear the rest.”
“Sorry, it’s just… the phrasing.” Arx snickered uncontrollably for a second, pointing at Lynnria. “Look at her face!”
I grunted with disapproval. That was a thing I had been deliberately trying to avoid. With limited success. Lynnria was blushing so fiercely, her cheeks had actually started to match her hair.
“The Demon Queen was watching?!” she exclaimed finally.
“We don’t know that for sure,” I said, trying to be reassuring. “It could just be an educated guess.”
“Aye,” Jax agreed. “Ye was howling such, She’d hear ye clear down the hall.”
“Hands preserve…” she moaned in despair.
I sighed. “Keep reading, Arx.”
She nodded, trying her best not to again succumb to the giggles. Somewhat. “N-now that the three of you have lifted the unfortunate—”
“Skip that part!” Lynnria wailed.
Arx cracked slightly before agreeing with a little nod.
“—I think it time you venture forth once more. Do please first set your sights upon the door of the unfortunate needler. He would be most relieved to see you.
And be sure to take in a few of the displays along your way. One never knows what one might discover.”
There again, Arx paused. Though this time, her expression faded from laughter to barely contained hostility. “She closes with, ‘Mine before the Eye, Xhinn,’”
Jax snorted. “Told ye.”
“How can you be so calm about this?” Arx asked, her eyes flashing. “He barely survived the last one, and now we’re supposed to… what? Calmly march him to the scaffold?”
Jax took a breath and looked away. “If’n this be what I’s thinking—and this Queen were really the one what were in our heads—She be just as upset as we was to find out about Ahnbe. Nay, I’m thinking there be a scuffle o’er territory afoot.”
I quirked an eyebrow. “And I’m the territory?”
Both Jax and Arx looked at me. “Of course.”
“By the Three,” Lynnria breathed. “You were really telling the truth about all that?”
The two shifted their attention to glare at the younger woman.
“But why?” she said into the silence. “It’s not like he’s strong or anything. I mean… he’s good. Really… really, really… really good. And I suppose he can do some other things… that I’ve never heard of anyone else being able to do.”
“I be thinking ye answered yer own question, lass,” Jax said quietly.
“I might be able to shed some more light on that,” I began.
However, before I could elaborate, Mia continued in my stead. “Let us say that our lord’s ability to distort the dream fabric has not gone unnoticed. All of my once-sisters have expressed… at least a passing interest in this phenomenon. And because it seems to interfere with his ability to retain memories of the events therein, we believe some sort of bargain may have been struck without his knowledge. Possibly more than once.”
Arx lowered her head into her hands, “Oh, ‘Snails… All of them?”
“Indeed—fuck pipe!”
Then there was a soft click, and I instinctively knew the rest would be for my ears alone.
“Have a care, my lord,” she said quickly. “Your origin within the higher planes is almost certainly a forbidden knowledge. If you speak of it hnn… blast! Speak… speak of it carelessly, you may damage your companion’s minds. I must apologize to you in this. We removed your geas without ever thinking you might hnnngah! Without thinking of… of possible implications.”
There was a lot to unpack there. However, “I may?”
Whatever difficulties she had just been experiencing melted away with a shiver of delight. “Good, you picked up on that. We don’t actually know… more. But when our presence alone is enough to cause such harm, it’s a reasonable assumption.”
That… made a degree of sense. In much the same way as a ‘declassified’ CIA memo made sense. Most of the relevant information had been blacked out.
Which was frustrating for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that I had thought I could finally be able to discuss my own origins with the people I cared most about. It might damage their minds to tell them I was an alien? What kind of crap was that? I could not see how that could even possibly be true…
Though if it were, it would go a long way toward explaining why I had geas in the first place. If it had not been there, I would have almost certainly started talking about it to anyone and everyone within hearing. And true to form, rather than providing me with any explanation or even a casual warning not to do it, the powers that be had decided that the best course of action was to screw with my head.
However, I still owed my loved ones the truth. And going from Mia’s own behavior, forbidden things were only forbidden in so much as that I could not actively say them aloud. There was nothing preventing me from giving hints.
“There might be more to it,” I admitted, standing. “Though I don’t know if Xhinn even knows about it. Ahnbe certainly didn’t.”
“Master,” Jax said quickly, coming to her feet as well, “maybe ye shouldn’t talk about that other business with the lesser about.”
“Other business?” Arx asked.
“Lesser?!” the lesser growled.
Jax looked at Arx significantly—and completely ignored Lynnria. “Aye, ye know. The business? What with… them?”
Arx’s head lifted into a slow nod of understanding. “Oh… right. Them.”
I lifted a hand. I had thought I was pretty solidly in the loop around here, but they had lost me. “Uh… I’m not sure we’re talking about the same thing here.”
“We be,” Jax said confidently. “Ye always get a funny taste about ye when ye start to thinking about… the past.”
I blinked a few times. “Wait… you’re not talking about—“
“Wheesht!” she sounded, silencing me. Again with a significant look at Lynnria.
“Hey! Am I a member of this Clan or not?” Lynnria asked with a degree of justifiable agitation.
“Ye ain’t bound,” Jax explained simply, folding her arms.
“Oh, what? You think your Clan is the only one with secrets? Do you have enemies? Is that it?” she persisted. “That’s not exactly uncommon, you know.”
“Whether we do or not,” Arx said, coming to stand behind Jax, “we at least know you once did.”
Lynnria stiffened slightly. “W-well… so what? I’m a member of this Clan now.”
“And so you’d be willing to share all your old Clan’s secrets?” Arx pressed.
The younger woman hesitated. “I… don’t know. Yet.”
“Exactly,” Arx said with an easy stride around her sister. “You may be a part of this Clan, but you are not bound. We don’t know if we can trust you with the Master’s secrets. Or whether you would betray him to his enemies.”
“You think I could betray him after what I’ve just experienced?” she asked hotly. “I would sooner feed his enemies to a flock of Mina birds!”
Arx smiled toothily. “Good answer.”
“Aye. We’ll make a proper Dolilim out of ye yet, lassie. Maybe once yer horns come in, we’ll tell ye a few things about them what’s after—”
Arx whirled. “Jax!”
“Ah, so he does have enemies,” Lynnria said, folding her arms with self-satisfaction.
“Enemies? What enemies?” Mia asked me privately. “Do you have any idea what they’re talking about?”
“Not a clue,” I admitted.
I was pretty sure they were dancing around the origin story they had spun together out of clouds and cobwebs. The one about my princedom-in-exile and the jilted lover… or maid… or whoever it was supposed to be that had caused it all. Of course, I knew the real girl behind the tale, but Stevie had about as much in common with the current version of the story as an outhouse with a skyscraper.
Who these enemies were supposed to be was beyond me, though.
“Um… okay, guys? Seriously, this is getting a little—“
“Don’t ye worry yer pretty head none, Master,” Jax interrupted with a grin before sidling close. In a whisper, she continued, “We’ll have our revenge on that wench, mark me! One day, she’ll be on her knees before ye. Begging fer it! Once ye get that new flying spell of yer’n practiced up a bit… eh?”
She winked significantly.
Watcher’s Eye. Is that why she thinks I bought that?
I took a breath… then let it out again, defeated.
“Fuck it,” I muttered. “Come on, you lot. Seems like we’ve got to find a needler’s door. Whatever that is.”
“Right,” Lynnria said, scurrying to gather up her discarded lower garments.
“Feh. May as well leave that shite,” Jax commented impatiently. “Ye can’t feed proper with it on, ye know.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the other said primly. “Besides, it’s padded leather. I prefer to have at least some protection.”
“Not feeling any emotions yet?” Arx asked.
“No? Why? Should I be?”
“She might need to gain a Layer or two first,” I reminded them.
Jax nodded absently while twirling a claw through her hair. She had fixed the youngest of the trio with a speculative stare. “Suppose yer right. Hard to know what be what without enough er… sampling sizers.”
I had to suppress a grin at that. It was a tad mangled—and Lynnria should almost certainly be excluded as an outlier from any studies we might conduct on Dolilim transitions—but it would seem at least some of my fireside ramblings on the scientific process had seeped into my First’s mind.
While Lynnria struggled with her garments, I glanced at the remains of my own clothing. Jax had been… indelicate in disrobing my unconscious body, so there was hardly anything left of the thin green vest. And nothing at all of the skirt. Even for a loincloth. I sighed with regret. It would seem the next leg of our excursion would be au natural. Again.
“Oh, you bloody…” Lynnria growled with frustration.
Her pants had never been designed with a tail in mind, and whatever changes the last Layer had caused within the girl had not helped matters. Her backside had plumped and firmed just enough to turn the already tight leather into something more closely resembling yoga pants, and she had been trying to… appealingly dance her way into them.
“Maybe poke a hole in them?” I suggested, averting my eyes. Then immediately rolling them. She had been naked from the waist down less that five seconds before. What the hell was I getting uptight about?
“With what?” she shot back. “The golem took my dagger with it when it carried Arx’s body into the rockfall.”
“You’ve got claws, don’t you?” the still very much alive and conspicuously well-armed Arx said with nonchalance—drawing an incredulous stare from Jax.
Lynnria glanced at her hands. “Oh, right.”
Twisting her arm behind her waist, she blindly poked a hole into the seam of her trousers. It was swift work. A Dolilim’s claws were nothing to be trifled with. It was a wonder I had thus far remained uninjured.
While she was threading her tail through—and recommencing her delightful hopping routine—Arx waved the card toward me. “We don’t need this anymore, do we?”
I shrugged. “All it really said was to find this needler character and be mindful of the displays, right? And Mia would at least give us a hint if there was something we were missing…”
I paused meaningfully, and the Faen picked up the cue without missing a beat. “Of course.”
I nodded, satisfied. “So unless you know of some black market that deals in goddess-touched artifacts—”
“Oh, I’m sure it would be priceless to the right buyer,” she said confidently. Before ripping the card in two. And then progressively smaller bits. “Such a shame that no one else will ever see it.”
I will admit to being a tad stunned in watching her sprinkle the remains of what had—only a moment prior—been described as ‘priceless’ to the floor. Though in hindsight, the idea of selling something that proclaimed me as the property of the Demon Queen herself might have been shortsighted.
However, well before I could think of anything to say, the room itself emitted a low chuckle of amusement. And before our eyes, the fragments of the note began to softly glow. One by one, the dozens of pieces drifted toward each other, folding themselves into various geometric shapes. Then came one final little flutter of light, and there sat a perfect and quite familiar-looking, trilliant-cut gemstone.
A Yellow Key.
“Huh…” Jax said. After a solid minute of us staring at it. “I think this Demon Queen might be nuttier than her Faen.”
The floor replied with a menacing rumble.
Seleroan
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The sudden disturbance set the three of us on alert like a troop of meerkats sighting a hawk. I say three because Lynnria was so blissed-out, she might as well have been enthralled to the heavenly chorus. How could an insignificant tap against the door compete with that?
However, before we could decide what to do about it, a plain white card was slipped under the door. All six of our eyes traced its movement without blinking and, when it stopped, we continued our staring for some seconds. Waiting. But nothing else happened. If anyone was still on the other side of the door, they were either extraordinarily patient or had completed their task and left.
Jax was the first to move. Unwrapping herself from my leg and without bothering to stand, she scurried over to the note. There she paused to sniff at it suspiciously, consequently posing herself somewhere between a downward dog and a push-up.
I may have taken the opportunity to admire the view. Briefly.
“There be a scent here,” she informed us after a moment. “Familiar-like…”
“Could it be poisoned?” I asked.
Arx shook her head from her perch on my other leg. “Nothing dangerous can invade a safe room.”
“We’ve been in here a while. Maybe someone else wants to use it?” I suggested, half in jest.
“That can’t—” Arx began but quickly reconsidered. “Hmm… normally, that can’t happen. Each Mouth leads to its own separate Dungeon area, so we shouldn’t have anyone else in here unless that giant bird you were talking about got them.”
“I seen them other people,” Jax reminded us over her shoulder. “Back where I were trapped. Guards from the town.”
“Maybe the flood dragon missed them, and the thunderbird just showed up to pick off stragglers,” I hazarded.
That might have been a reasonable assumption under normal circumstances. And it might have even been true for the former citizens of Raialie. But not for us. No, I was quite certain both of those Mouths had been meant to find me specifically. Why else would the Demon Queen have sent me that angry command back in the stadium… and then politely invited me to dinner?
She’s going to be just as insane as the other two. I just know it.
Arx sighed. “I’m sorry, Master. I’ve never been in the Dungeon with more than a dozen or so people at a time, and then we were all cooperating. I haven’t had to consider a situation where people might need to compete for a safe room.”
“No one knows everything,” I assured her before turning back to the door. “What does it smell like?”
Jax picked up the card and stood, still holding the corner to her nose with an expression of deep pondering. “There be no describing it,” she announced finally. “Closest I can figger be aliken to Ahnbe’s mark, but it ain’t Hers. I dunno how I know that, but I do.”
I blinked a few times. “You’re telling me that card smells like… like Her…”
“Fanny, aye.” She chuckled. “Yer sheathed to the hilt in one right now, Master. What’s to be shamed of?”
I resisted the urge to glance down at the undulating sensations still massaging me and quickly attempted to stand. However, with Arx clutching at my leg and—I discovered—Lynnria’s tail wrapped tightly about the other, that was easier said than done.
“One does not usually expect a smear of feminine discharge upon a item of polite correspondence,” I intoned gravely and, I hoped, an air of aloof indifference. But I probably looked like an idiot. “Anyway, what does it say?”
The words had scarcely left my mouth before I winced, remembering too late that she could not actually read. However, to my surprise—and apparently Jax’s—she seemed to recognize at least some of the script.
“I ain’t sure,” she informed us, pointing a claw at the card, “but this word here be ‘toilet,’ or I be yer ma.”
Toilet? That seemed… specific.
“Bring it here, Jax,” I said, then glanced down at Arx. “Help me up, would you?”
“Yes, Dearest.”
*****
A few minutes later, the three of us were huddled together on the edge of the bed, puzzling over the bit of stationery. The calligraphy we had found there was absolutely beautiful, but that was about all we could say about it. The note had been written in a completely unfamiliar language.
Thanks to Arx, that list was far shorter than it had once been. She was all but fluent in half a dozen and proficient enough in three others that she could usually tease out their basic gists. And since binding her, those proficiencies had transferred to me.
This language she had never seen even in passing. However, that was not to say the letter was completely unintelligible. There were a few lodestones sprinkled about the text, which was the only reason we were still pouring over it. Foremost among these were the salutation and the signature, which were the only items even using a familiar alphabet. They read, respectively:
‘To the Triumphal Toilet Troop’ and ‘Xhinn.’
“How alliterative,” I observed dryly.
“Whate’er that means,” Jax retorted. “I nay ken what kinda squint this Demon Queen be, but She’s sending one up the river with this one.”
Arx and I turned to look at her.
“…What?”
I could only sigh. Being known as the Donum Clan was bad enough but, as Xhinn had just so adroitly demonstrated, the depths of my humiliation had veins yet unexplored.
The Toilet Troop? Oh, please don’t let that catch on. To say nothing of how demeaning it was, the name only worked because it was an in-joke. Anyone else that heard it would just think we were a bunch of perverts…
…
As for the rest of the letter, it might as well have been written in Dwarven runes for all the sense I could make of it—save for a few little anomalies. Eleven, to be precise. And that just so happened to correspond to the exact number of Words in our lexicon.
Because of course, that was exactly what those anomalies were.
“I think…” I began, pointing them out, “the only reason this letter was written in this language was so we would notice these.”
Arx nodded slowly, following my logic. “Could be. I doubt they would have been all that obvious otherwise. But that still doesn’t explain much. Why bother forcing all eleven of our Words onto a note at all? Especially when we can’t even read the rest.”
Jax shrugged indifferently. “Just a tait of flirting, seems to me. If yer the type what’s got a stick up yer arse.”
Arx growled low in her throat. “Never mind how you arrived at that little deduction. Why would the Demon Queen want to flirt with the Master?”
“She’s a goddess, ain’t She? Who else’d She wanna flirt with?” my First replied. As if that explained anything. “‘Sides, what womenfolk do ye know of what smears their ownselves on letters fer the fun of it?”
“I would!”
“Only if it were fer the Master.”
“Obviously,” Arx agreed, then grit her teeth in defeat. “‘Snails!”
Well… at least some of that seems reasonable. Once you filtered out the absurd amounts of bias.
Idly, I took a curious whiff of the card, but whatever ability I had recently gained did not seem to work on goddess… secretions. Or if it did, it was going haywire in a way that made no sense at all. She smelled like…
Nothing?
But like… literal nothing. It was as if someone had torn a hole in the universe and asked me to describe its scent. And the only thing that came to mind was ‘what is six times nine?’
…if extraplanar mathematics could be described as ‘wildly arousing.’
Shit… if Xhinn smells like that, what the hell kind of aroma does Ahnbe have?
“I suppose we’re going to need a way to translate this,” I murmured, sighing.
I had no idea how many languages existed on this world, but if Earth was any guide, that number would not be small. Human beings alone had managed to come up with several thousand. Hell, we even had well over a hundred language families. If you took all that and multiplied it by the number of species on this planet—itself a complete unknown—how many tongues would you end up with?
Unless it’s more a question of geographical separation and the mobility of the citizenry? I shook the thought away. I was getting carried away again.
Whatever the final answer turned out to be, there were a lot of variables to consider. And I had recently begun to appreciate the value of the more generic, quality-of-life types of skills.
“Seems like it might be a useful ability in the long run.”
Arx nodded sagely. “It’s a requirement for any serious Questing party. The Dungeon is well known for its puzzles.”
“Yeah, I’m getting that…” I agreed wryly. “Unfortunately, I’m fresh out of skill points, or I would buy a translation spell.”
“I got one,” Jax said with a sneer. “But it be locked.”
I reached up to stroke one of her horns comfortingly. “It’s alright, Jax. We’ll get you sorted out as soon as we can. What about you, Arx?”
“I have two,” she reported. “But as a Siren, I have no idea what a skill like that might look like.”
“Let’s find out,” I said, then leaned back to poke at Lynnria. “Mia? Are you done in there?”
Our fourth party member had been staring vacantly at the ceiling while we had been talking. I had no idea what was going through her mind—if anything—but from her face, she was still recovering from an encounter of near-religious proportions. Tears were flowing freely down her cheeks in a pair of continuous streams, and her skin was blotched from sheer discomfit. We had been trying to give her some space.
At my prodding, she slowly turned until her eyes found me… or something about a thousand miles past me. It was hard to say.
“Do you guys think I went too far?” I asked absently. “It was her first time. Maybe I should have held back a little.”
Arx shrugged. “She wanted to be a big girl, and now she is. Besides she tastes fantastic right now.”
“Y’ain’t wrong,” Jax agreed with a toothy grin. “Ye gave us a feast and more with this one, Master.”
I grunted. Leave it to a pair of empaths to display no empathy whatsoever. “Are you alright, Lynnria?”
She tried to say something that sounded pretty close to, “Djah~!” But that seemed to be all the breath she had in her. She was smiling though. A lot. So I would take that as a good sign.
I smiled back, feeling awkward. “Mia,” I called again. “We want to buy a skill.”
“Maybe she ain’t listening?” Jax suggested.
I honestly had no idea if that was even possible. The inner workings of our minds and Mia’s relationship with them were cans of worms I increasingly felt best avoided. I had seen glimpses here and there, and that had been plenty, thank you very much. The last thing I needed on my plate was a helping of cross-species symbolic interaction theory.
“You’re sure she’s in there?” I asked, turning to Arx.
She shrugged uncertainly. “I think so. She said something about needing to make sure the roots were growing along the proper non-resistance pathways.”
“Of course,” I agreed, nodding as if I had a clue.
“Okay, I’m here…” Mia announced, slightly out-of-breath. “Just give me… one…”
Some sort of popping sound tapped at my eardrum, and my right eyelid fluttered.
“There! Testing, testing… Lynnria? Can you hear me?”
Lynnria choked slightly and closed her eyes.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
My face twisted with bafflement. Never mind whatever the hell Mia had just done, I always had felt a little out to sea when people got overly emotional on me, and watching Lynnria had thrown me overboard. All we had done was fool around a bit. Why the waterworks?
“Maybe I should… give her a hug?” I suggested.
“Ah, she’s fine,” Mia said dismissively. “Now, I think I heard something about a skill?”
“Yeah, for Arx,” I replied, stroking Lynnria’s arm. She grabbed my wrist a moment later and held on as if her life depended on it.
Maybe she wants to cuddle? I had heard some women liked that, so I decided to start sending little bursts of comfort into her hand. It seemed to help.
“We need something to translate this note,” Arx explained, waggling the parchment in question in her fingertips.
“I see. Translation skill… Scout sub-type…” Mia repeated amidst the sounds of a pencil scratching out some notes. “Active skill, I’m assuming? A Passive would be cheaper, but hardly anyone is interested in those when it comes to translations.”
“Why’s that?” Jax asked curiously.
“Cram it, tailless. No one asked—” Mia stopped with a little gasp of horror. “I apologize. Truly. That was… uncalled for.”
My First nodded her understanding, but she was clearly fighting to compose herself. She looked like she had just been slapped. Arx quickly gathered her into her arms and stroked her nails down her sister’s spine. “It’s alright. I’m sure it’ll come in eventually.”
“T’ain’t fair!” the other said with a fragile little hiccough. “E’en Lynnria has one, and she ain’t even a real Dolilim!”
I stared at the two of them for a moment, uncertain whether to be sympathetic or to laugh. We had someone on the verge of an emotional breakdown sitting right beside us, and this was what everyone got upset about?
But perhaps I was too out of the empathic loop to understand the nuances. Jax had not been complaining about it, so it had not been something I was worried about. However, it was clear that this Layer cap business was not doing great things for her state of mind. She had been used to growing with me—both in terms of power and physically. And if I knew anything at all about Dolilim, it was that they did not like being cut off from me.
In any sense of the word.
“Best answer her question, Mia,” I suggested.
She cleared her throat awkwardly. “Uh… yes. Of course. Well, Passives in this category are usually designed to assist in gaining language proficiencies, but the only types with any interest in that tend to be Scholars, Scribes, and the like. Not Questers, in short.”
“No, I think we’re looking for something a little more immediate,” I agreed. “Something like that Magic Tongues spell you suggested once.”
“Bline suggested once,” she corrected me. “But even if I could replicate that spell exactly, it wouldn’t do. You’ll need something for written text.”
“Why not something that works for both writing and speech?”
Mia’s reply was delayed slightly by the sound of a repressed moan. “N-not possible in the Foundation Layers. Too many variables.”
That was a refrain I had heard before. From what I had gathered, each Layer had its own restrictions as to what you could and could not buy, and they usually made a certain amount of sense when you thought about them. Because the skill system in this world was so open-ended, there would be nothing preventing you from buying a city-spanning nuke with your first skill pick without some rules in place.
And it would seem having a… dubiously loyal purveyor of skills in our corner had done little to change that.
“Okay… and do we want a skill stemming from Class or kind?”
That was a new one on me, and I fell silent to ponder it.
However, I was not the only one to be struck by its oddness. The question tugged just enough at Jax’s curiosity to pull her out of her self-pity, and she sat up, scrubbing at her eyes. “What do ye—” She stopped, remembering what had happened the last time a thoughtless question had passed her lips. “Err… I nay ken the question. Explain the difference.”
Mia sighed. “You didn’t think the ability to convert status ailments into Life Energy came from being a Tenebrous Warrior, did you?”
“Course not, ye bloody weapon!” Jax replied hotly, perhaps compensating a little. “I were wanting ye to be specific, be all. The difference the skill would take.”
“Oh. Well, that part is somewhat flexible but, generally speaking, it’s a thematic question. Is this something you’ve learned to do with the sorts of abilities your Class deals with, or is it something you’ve learned to do because of the unique way your body behaves?”
Jax made to reply, but the mental hamster-wheel made an abrupt return, leaving her mouth hanging open.
“So…” I hazarded, saving her from her own awkwardness. “You’re saying you couldn’t just give Arx the ability to read all languages. There has to be some sort of flavor attached to it.”
“That is correct, my lord,” she explained brightly. “There is nothing specific about Dolilim that could grant such a supernatural ability directly. That I can think of, anyway. I’ll need to check. And the Siren’s theme seems to be based around vocal entrancement.”
“Meaning if we went the Siren route, the skill would have to do with singing,” Arx said for clarity’s sake.
“Most likely.”
She grunted. “I’d like to avoid that if I can. Singing for everything gets a little annoying.”
Mia made a little noise of agreement. “Now, are there any other requests or restrictions you’d like to make on this skill? Or shall I mock something up?”
We traded blank glances.
“Go ahead, Mia,” I said after a moment.
“My lord,” she agreed then fell silent.
While we waited, I pondered on the nature of this new spin we had been presented. Mia had already explained that skills were just assemblies of Words meant to describe an effect of some kind. So there seemed to be no reason a person needed to be restricted in the abilities they might purchase beyond basic concerns like power-scaling. With such an open-ended system, why did we even need Classes in the first place? Why not just let us pick skills and and assemble the tool-kit we deemed necessary to run our lives?
And what did a person’s kind have to do with anything? For that matter, what sort of skills might I qualify for just by being human? What was unique about my race?
That was an interesting question. Normally, I would have said that humanity’s true power stemmed from our over-developed brains, but that was not even uncommon on this planet. Other than that, the only interesting thing humans had going for them was a penchant for long-distance running. And I would be damned before I started investing in skills like that—the occasional structural collapse notwithstanding.
I was a wizard! No matter what technicalities Mia claimed.
Although, there might be some potential with this whole dreaming business. All of the other races remembered theirs. And I did not.
Mia seemed to believe this was something that could be cured simply by improving my Intelligence, but I suspected it would not be so simple as that. Dreams—or human dreams anyway—had to do with the divide between the conscious and the subconscious mind.
Do people on this world not have a subconscious?
About then, Mia returned. “Huh. I suppose I’m not all that surprised, but still…”
“Don’t make us ask, Mia,” I prompted.
She cleared her throat. “Apologies, my lord. I know this sort of thing ruffles your sensibilities, else I would not hesitate to mention it. However, it seems as though the Life Energy component within your Dolilim’s vaginal secretions can serve as an extremely flexible magical catalyst.”
My face fell totally flat, and I closed my eyes. I did not know what else I could have expected, but it would have been nice to make a discovery that did not further my swan-dive into degradation.
A ‘flexible magical catalyst,’ huh? Fantastic.
Meaning that if we were to be at all practical about things, the three of them would one day be traipsing about smearing the stuff all over the place.
Fuck me… I had even theorized about its potential as a healing elixir.
And now that little smear on the card made so much more sense. It was a perverse little hint about a perverse little method of solving the Demon Queen’s perverse little riddle.
As for the Dolilim, their reactions were a little mixed.
The comment was enough to finally pull Lynnria out of her stupor, and she sat up ramrod straight, an expression of mortified horror on her face. However, she quickly began chewing on one of her claws, her eyes darting about as though connecting the lines in a grand conspiracy of implications.
Jax, meanwhile, was a tad slower on the uptake. Mia’s vocabulary trended toward the decided opposite extreme from her own on the scale of incomprehensibility, so it took her a moment to even realize what she meant. But once she had, she only shrugged. She was a being of Lust by her own admission. What was the big deal?
Then, there was Arx—who greeted the pronouncement with nothing short of approval. And once she got her breath back from laughing, she practically shouted, “I’ll take it!”
*****
The three of us waited in suspense as Arx passed her moistened fingers over the text. Shockingly, it really was as easy as that. No complicated incantations. No delving into her inner psyche. Just a quick dip, a smear, and she was away. I was practically livid with jealousy.
And I was not the only one. Lynnria’s eyes had all but popped out of her head when Arx finished explaining the ability for us, and she had begun pacing about the room, mumbling something about it being ‘too good to be true.’
Arx cleared her throat, then began to read with a bit of a mocking lilt to her voice. It would seem she found the Demon Queen’s prose a tad stuffy. She even made certain to emphasize each of the Words we knew when they came up.
“To the Triumphal Toilet Troop,
I do hope your initial sojourn into my whimsical palace of delights has helped alleviate some degree of cynicism as to my intentions. That little rod of dirt-casting turned out to be quite unexpectedly useful, did it not? How fortunate for you that I decided upon its generation…
For the rest, I really must apologize for concealing the contents of this letter but, one’s nature being what it is, I cannot exactly hand out information on a silver platter. So one must content oneself with this—perhaps—overly florid bit of pretense.
Now that the three of you have lifted the unfortunate poverty of—”
Arx’s recitation was interrupted by a guffaw, followed shortly by a gasp of shock. Then she fell silent, staring hard at the next sentence. And occasionally at Lynnria.
“What? What is it?” she asked nervously.
Arx took a breath to compose herself. Though it looked like it was a struggle.
“Now that the three of you have lifted the unfortunate poverty of… of moisture from the labia of your fourth…” Again, she had to stop for a bout of wheezing.
“Quit yer havering, ye dafty,” Jax growled. “I want’s to hear the rest.”
“Sorry, it’s just… the phrasing.” Arx snickered uncontrollably for a second, pointing at Lynnria. “Look at her face!”
I grunted with disapproval. That was a thing I had been deliberately trying to avoid. With limited success. Lynnria was blushing so fiercely, her cheeks had actually started to match her hair.
“The Demon Queen was watching?!” she exclaimed finally.
“We don’t know that for sure,” I said, trying to be reassuring. “It could just be an educated guess.”
“Aye,” Jax agreed. “Ye was howling such, She’d hear ye clear down the hall.”
“Hands preserve…” she moaned in despair.
I sighed. “Keep reading, Arx.”
She nodded, trying her best not to again succumb to the giggles. Somewhat. “N-now that the three of you have lifted the unfortunate—”
“Skip that part!” Lynnria wailed.
Arx cracked slightly before agreeing with a little nod.
“—I think it time you venture forth once more. Do please first set your sights upon the door of the unfortunate needler. He would be most relieved to see you.
And be sure to take in a few of the displays along your way. One never knows what one might discover.”
There again, Arx paused. Though this time, her expression faded from laughter to barely contained hostility. “She closes with, ‘Mine before the Eye, Xhinn,’”
Jax snorted. “Told ye.”
“How can you be so calm about this?” Arx asked, her eyes flashing. “He barely survived the last one, and now we’re supposed to… what? Calmly march him to the scaffold?”
Jax took a breath and looked away. “If’n this be what I’s thinking—and this Queen were really the one what were in our heads—She be just as upset as we was to find out about Ahnbe. Nay, I’m thinking there be a scuffle o’er territory afoot.”
I quirked an eyebrow. “And I’m the territory?”
Both Jax and Arx looked at me. “Of course.”
“By the Three,” Lynnria breathed. “You were really telling the truth about all that?”
The two shifted their attention to glare at the younger woman.
“But why?” she said into the silence. “It’s not like he’s strong or anything. I mean… he’s good. Really… really, really… really good. And I suppose he can do some other things… that I’ve never heard of anyone else being able to do.”
“I be thinking ye answered yer own question, lass,” Jax said quietly.
“I might be able to shed some more light on that,” I began.
However, before I could elaborate, Mia continued in my stead. “Let us say that our lord’s ability to distort the dream fabric has not gone unnoticed. All of my once-sisters have expressed… at least a passing interest in this phenomenon. And because it seems to interfere with his ability to retain memories of the events therein, we believe some sort of bargain may have been struck without his knowledge. Possibly more than once.”
Arx lowered her head into her hands, “Oh, ‘Snails… All of them?”
“Indeed—fuck pipe!”
Then there was a soft click, and I instinctively knew the rest would be for my ears alone.
“Have a care, my lord,” she said quickly. “Your origin within the higher planes is almost certainly a forbidden knowledge. If you speak of it hnn… blast! Speak… speak of it carelessly, you may damage your companion’s minds. I must apologize to you in this. We removed your geas without ever thinking you might hnnngah! Without thinking of… of possible implications.”
There was a lot to unpack there. However, “I may?”
Whatever difficulties she had just been experiencing melted away with a shiver of delight. “Good, you picked up on that. We don’t actually know… more. But when our presence alone is enough to cause such harm, it’s a reasonable assumption.”
That… made a degree of sense. In much the same way as a ‘declassified’ CIA memo made sense. Most of the relevant information had been blacked out.
Which was frustrating for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that I had thought I could finally be able to discuss my own origins with the people I cared most about. It might damage their minds to tell them I was an alien? What kind of crap was that? I could not see how that could even possibly be true…
Though if it were, it would go a long way toward explaining why I had geas in the first place. If it had not been there, I would have almost certainly started talking about it to anyone and everyone within hearing. And true to form, rather than providing me with any explanation or even a casual warning not to do it, the powers that be had decided that the best course of action was to screw with my head.
However, I still owed my loved ones the truth. And going from Mia’s own behavior, forbidden things were only forbidden in so much as that I could not actively say them aloud. There was nothing preventing me from giving hints.
“There might be more to it,” I admitted, standing. “Though I don’t know if Xhinn even knows about it. Ahnbe certainly didn’t.”
“Master,” Jax said quickly, coming to her feet as well, “maybe ye shouldn’t talk about that other business with the lesser about.”
“Other business?” Arx asked.
“Lesser?!” the lesser growled.
Jax looked at Arx significantly—and completely ignored Lynnria. “Aye, ye know. The business? What with… them?”
Arx’s head lifted into a slow nod of understanding. “Oh… right. Them.”
I lifted a hand. I had thought I was pretty solidly in the loop around here, but they had lost me. “Uh… I’m not sure we’re talking about the same thing here.”
“We be,” Jax said confidently. “Ye always get a funny taste about ye when ye start to thinking about… the past.”
I blinked a few times. “Wait… you’re not talking about—“
“Wheesht!” she sounded, silencing me. Again with a significant look at Lynnria.
“Hey! Am I a member of this Clan or not?” Lynnria asked with a degree of justifiable agitation.
“Ye ain’t bound,” Jax explained simply, folding her arms.
“Oh, what? You think your Clan is the only one with secrets? Do you have enemies? Is that it?” she persisted. “That’s not exactly uncommon, you know.”
“Whether we do or not,” Arx said, coming to stand behind Jax, “we at least know you once did.”
Lynnria stiffened slightly. “W-well… so what? I’m a member of this Clan now.”
“And so you’d be willing to share all your old Clan’s secrets?” Arx pressed.
The younger woman hesitated. “I… don’t know. Yet.”
“Exactly,” Arx said with an easy stride around her sister. “You may be a part of this Clan, but you are not bound. We don’t know if we can trust you with the Master’s secrets. Or whether you would betray him to his enemies.”
“You think I could betray him after what I’ve just experienced?” she asked hotly. “I would sooner feed his enemies to a flock of Mina birds!”
Arx smiled toothily. “Good answer.”
“Aye. We’ll make a proper Dolilim out of ye yet, lassie. Maybe once yer horns come in, we’ll tell ye a few things about them what’s after—”
Arx whirled. “Jax!”
“Ah, so he does have enemies,” Lynnria said, folding her arms with self-satisfaction.
“Enemies? What enemies?” Mia asked me privately. “Do you have any idea what they’re talking about?”
“Not a clue,” I admitted.
I was pretty sure they were dancing around the origin story they had spun together out of clouds and cobwebs. The one about my princedom-in-exile and the jilted lover… or maid… or whoever it was supposed to be that had caused it all. Of course, I knew the real girl behind the tale, but Stevie had about as much in common with the current version of the story as an outhouse with a skyscraper.
Who these enemies were supposed to be was beyond me, though.
“Um… okay, guys? Seriously, this is getting a little—“
“Don’t ye worry yer pretty head none, Master,” Jax interrupted with a grin before sidling close. In a whisper, she continued, “We’ll have our revenge on that wench, mark me! One day, she’ll be on her knees before ye. Begging fer it! Once ye get that new flying spell of yer’n practiced up a bit… eh?”
She winked significantly.
Watcher’s Eye. Is that why she thinks I bought that?
I took a breath… then let it out again, defeated.
“Fuck it,” I muttered. “Come on, you lot. Seems like we’ve got to find a needler’s door. Whatever that is.”
“Right,” Lynnria said, scurrying to gather up her discarded lower garments.
“Feh. May as well leave that shite,” Jax commented impatiently. “Ye can’t feed proper with it on, ye know.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the other said primly. “Besides, it’s padded leather. I prefer to have at least some protection.”
“Not feeling any emotions yet?” Arx asked.
“No? Why? Should I be?”
“She might need to gain a Layer or two first,” I reminded them.
Jax nodded absently while twirling a claw through her hair. She had fixed the youngest of the trio with a speculative stare. “Suppose yer right. Hard to know what be what without enough er… sampling sizers.”
I had to suppress a grin at that. It was a tad mangled—and Lynnria should almost certainly be excluded as an outlier from any studies we might conduct on Dolilim transitions—but it would seem at least some of my fireside ramblings on the scientific process had seeped into my First’s mind.
While Lynnria struggled with her garments, I glanced at the remains of my own clothing. Jax had been… indelicate in disrobing my unconscious body, so there was hardly anything left of the thin green vest. And nothing at all of the skirt. Even for a loincloth. I sighed with regret. It would seem the next leg of our excursion would be au natural. Again.
“Oh, you bloody…” Lynnria growled with frustration.
Her pants had never been designed with a tail in mind, and whatever changes the last Layer had caused within the girl had not helped matters. Her backside had plumped and firmed just enough to turn the already tight leather into something more closely resembling yoga pants, and she had been trying to… appealingly dance her way into them.
“Maybe poke a hole in them?” I suggested, averting my eyes. Then immediately rolling them. She had been naked from the waist down less that five seconds before. What the hell was I getting uptight about?
“With what?” she shot back. “The golem took my dagger with it when it carried Arx’s body into the rockfall.”
“You’ve got claws, don’t you?” the still very much alive and conspicuously well-armed Arx said with nonchalance—drawing an incredulous stare from Jax.
Lynnria glanced at her hands. “Oh, right.”
Twisting her arm behind her waist, she blindly poked a hole into the seam of her trousers. It was swift work. A Dolilim’s claws were nothing to be trifled with. It was a wonder I had thus far remained uninjured.
While she was threading her tail through—and recommencing her delightful hopping routine—Arx waved the card toward me. “We don’t need this anymore, do we?”
I shrugged. “All it really said was to find this needler character and be mindful of the displays, right? And Mia would at least give us a hint if there was something we were missing…”
I paused meaningfully, and the Faen picked up the cue without missing a beat. “Of course.”
I nodded, satisfied. “So unless you know of some black market that deals in goddess-touched artifacts—”
“Oh, I’m sure it would be priceless to the right buyer,” she said confidently. Before ripping the card in two. And then progressively smaller bits. “Such a shame that no one else will ever see it.”
I will admit to being a tad stunned in watching her sprinkle the remains of what had—only a moment prior—been described as ‘priceless’ to the floor. Though in hindsight, the idea of selling something that proclaimed me as the property of the Demon Queen herself might have been shortsighted.
However, well before I could think of anything to say, the room itself emitted a low chuckle of amusement. And before our eyes, the fragments of the note began to softly glow. One by one, the dozens of pieces drifted toward each other, folding themselves into various geometric shapes. Then came one final little flutter of light, and there sat a perfect and quite familiar-looking, trilliant-cut gemstone.
A Yellow Key.
“Huh…” Jax said. After a solid minute of us staring at it. “I think this Demon Queen might be nuttier than her Faen.”
The floor replied with a menacing rumble.
Seleroan
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