CHAPTER ONE
A Passenger of Dread
The man's face was missing, but Lord Vigium locked his gaze upon the fold of blood-crusted skin he assumed had once been the bald man's eyes. A second fold of skin slashed down the center of the head, crossing the eyes in a symbol Vigium had once seen rendered idol among a cult of kneeling sycophants on a world far from here.
That had been long ago. Before time became a trade of precious moments exchanged for a life he could no longer live. Vigium shook, his body going rigid for a moment.
Moments spent; moments gone. Moments kept in audit upon the walls.
The prospective passenger spoke. His voice was clear of tone, yet gruff in delivery, as if he were forcing the voice from a deep pit, the sound traveling so high that the shout became no more than a heavy whisper when it caught the surface above. Vigium heard this echo of the man’s voice but could not find a mouth through which he spoke.
"I wish to travel to a different domain," the passenger said.
"The only domain I have access to these days is the Somniumagri, friend,” Vigium said.
A burly, vague figure swathed in dark robes passed them, departing his ship for land; a gray, furred familiar followed. The damned lynx. Vigium moved to pursue, but the faceless man’s arm reached out and gripped him by the shoulder.
“That is the domain I choose,” the passenger said.
“Then that is where I will take you. But first, if you’ll excuse me, I must gather my dues from my previous passenger.”
The robed figure, Madame Wendel, and her companion had already gotten themselves lost in the fray of the busy docks. Vigium searched the many covered heads, watching for the particular gait that passenger had, but he could not find her.
“Blast,” Vigium breathed.
“Gone so soon?” the new prospect asked.
“I suspect she was trying to evade payment.”
Vigium stepped further down the plank, coming to the dock itself. The bald man with the wicked face followed, the salt-crust of his boots flaking into the cobbles.
“Perhaps it was not a tithe meant to be collected,” the man said.
“You must not know me, sir,” Vigium returned, resting eyes once again on the caved-in mess of what had once been human features. “My services are particular, singular in their efficiency, and they are quite expensive.”
“So I’ve heard.” There was a hint of disappointment in the man’s voice, a detection Vigium scoffed at.
“I hope you won’t attempt the same evasion.”
The man shifted, tapping the toe of a boot into the stone below them. The old salt seemed to puff away in a small cloud.
“Your shoes do not draw you as a native,” Vigium noted. “You’ve traveled the seas recently.”
“Not these seas.”
“There is no other sea here, only the great Amaranthine behind us. You’d have traveled many thousands of miles to have come from another.”
“Many thousands, yes.”
Vigium almost smirked but did not award the stranger that easy route to his less-guarded sense of intrigue. “If you have come so far, why leave behind all of this?”
“This town is incompatible.”
“This town, yes, but this world? I would challenge that cynicism with great fervor.”
Vigium parted his arms, embracing the scope of the shore around them. Though the dock was populated by souls across many lands and times, the Vision's Edge could only sail upon one sea. And this place where the ship had docked - the seaside shanty port of Morpheus - was the only place he could acquire new goods and clients to ferry.
The passenger cast his faceless head behind him, soaking in the deep brown bluffs of Morpheus, the shambles of wood and gray thatchery they called houses, the black brick buildings and white smoke that poured from their chimneys. It was an ugly place with even uglier inhabitants. Though despite the rocky complexion and general downcast malaise of the Morpheans, the passenger, it seemed, was not a native; his own ugliness must have come from a far more haphazard origin than just simple genetic unluckiness.
One of the only beauties Vigium knew here was the map-cast sky, the burnished bronze plane of an inverted faraway land surrounding this world he docked in. The details of the shellworld’s topology were just barely visible behind the atmosphere between their world and this. Once, millennia ago, a brilliant white moon shone brightly between the two planes, day and night, never setting beyond the horizon.
Vigium remembered it well.
Now that it was gone, the skies looked muddled and thus the people of Morpheus often cast their heads down. They preferred the view of their sandaled toes crushing the tufts of brown grass and scuffing the smooth gray cobbles beneath their feet.
It seemed they did not want to look upon the obvious blemish in the sky; the black rent that had shattered a portion of the map above, leaking out into the great unknown beyond. Perhaps it terrified them to know that the rent had been opened by the same horrific mass of destruction that had also created the vicious cliffs of Morpheus which they stood upon.
Perhaps they felt responsible.
But how could they hate such beauty? Though that same destruction had disconnected Vigium as much as it had amputated a chunk of the world, the remains were still beautiful to behold, the second and final beauty Vigium accepted here. Acceptance of that was itself quite tepid; a conflict he had yet to reconcile across Ages of bitterness and pain.
The cliffs fell to impossible depths, far beyond the rocky bed of the ocean it had once been, deep into the core of the world. But somehow, due to the nature of the fury that had stolen the land, the ocean surrounding the wicked chasm still managed to hold back the waters surrounding it. Of what had once been miles of port remained only a fraction of it still operable upon the waters of the Amaranthine Ocean. The rest, well…
The Morpheans had been so terse in their denials, so adamant that the destruction could not harm them that they had left those piers to rot. Hundreds of futile docks still stood, jutting out of the land like so many telling spikes of stubborn defiance. Planks of decaying wood stripped themselves to splinters as time and disuse tugged segments of their construction down into the endless abyss.
A shimmering curtain of ocean water ringed that void, unnavigable to even the most seasoned seafarer, the cleverest of captains.
All but Lord Vigium had failed to crest that deadly curtain holding back the sea.
"You will take me to the Domain? To my place at the Collector's Web, yes?” the passenger asked, pulling Vigium back to the present.
"Of course,” Vigium sighed, focused now by the man’s insistence to depart the beauty of the larger world around them. “I operate anywhere within the borders of the 'Agri."
The passenger nodded, pulling a leather bifold from his pocket within which he hesitantly removed and then unfolded several slips of green paper, each festooned with the craggy faces of men long dead.
"I cannot accept this currency, friend," Vigium said, clasping his hands before him in contemplation. "That is no longer accepted anywhere, I'm afraid."
The passenger flipped through the bills, feeling their folded corners, their crumpled skin. He placed them back in the bifold and ran a rough, pale hand down the front of his tattered brown tunic. The man pulled aside a fold of fabric draped across his chest to access a hidden pocket within, the slowness of the action becoming quicker as hope filled him. Vigium noticed decades of thick white scars across the wiry, taut muscles of his chest.
The passenger sighed, patted the pockets of his torn black trousers as he replaced the bifold. Across his waist was a simple studded leather belt with pouches, but the passenger did not check those. Instead, he fingered a silver triangular stud on the cuff of his pants pocket, thought less of it than he had hoped, then dropped his hands to his sides and bowed his head.
"I have nothing else of value to you,” he said.
"Then we shall make other arrangements," Vigium offered, a jovial tone of sympathy to his voice. Though the transaction required payment, the Captain of the Vision's Edge was not averse to trade of other forms. Intrigue satiated him just as well as cash.
"Perhaps the man I seek in the Collector's Web will have something for you,” the passenger offered. “You must know of him if you know the Somniumagri. I can assure you he still has many items of wealth despite leaving the Marketplace in this dire new shadow of change we find ourselves in.” The passenger paused for a moment, reading Vigium’s face. “Of course…if you can trust me to pay on arrival."
"I do not know your friend. I may like to see what he could possibly have for me, of course," Vigium whispered, eyeing the burlap sack strapped across the man's shoulder. "Though collateral may prove a better barter than words."
The passenger nodded. There was no need to mince words with the man, to Vigium's relief.
"I must make it clear that I cannot give you these items," the passenger said as he pulled the sack close and undid the rope that closed it. "It is all I have, and they are not to be parted with."
"Sentimental heirlooms, maybe?" Vigium jested.
"No," the passenger said, pulling from the sack two polished blackstone masks. "My soul."
He handed one of the masks to Vigium, who took it with gentleness and respect. The face was smooth, two eye holes chiseled into the stone with care, beneath which was carved a wide grin. Inset into the mouth were six small white nuggets of a substance Vigium could not detect. A hard mineral or enamel, he guessed, perhaps even shellacked bone. Vigium turned the mask over, the inside face was painted a glistening dark red.
"Beautiful craftsmanship," Vigium offered, unsure of how best to appraise the item.
"Thank you," was all the passenger gave back. He held up the second mask. It was similar save for an inversion of the carved features on the front. This one was a frown rather than a smile. Again, six small white nuggets were set into the mouth.
"May I ask their origin?" Vigium said, running a finger along the smiling mouth, searching for a familiar tactile clue to discern the mineral used.
"You may ask, Captain, but I may not answer."
Vigium smiled. He was used to the coyness of his strange clients, though this one filled him with a vibrant unease.
"Fair enough, my friend, fair enough. Keep your secrets."
"Not a secret, Captain. It is something I do not know."
"I see."
"Then you are blessed. It is an unknown that haunts me, and I suspect it will continue to do so until my death."
"When you die, will you care any longer?"
"Yes, sir."
"Oh?" Vigium smiled. "How can you be so sure?"
"I have died before. Many times. Each new breath I take is an uncertainty, but I am certain that each last breath I take will not be my last. It cannot be."
Vigium's smile faded. He handed back the mask, cast his eyes to the wet, creaking wood of the dock behind them, and whistled notes with no tune. Now he looked no different than the usual rabble of Morpheus, a fact that pained him.
"Do not be dejected, Captain. I have long since accepted my cyclical terrors. Though I will assure you that I am not undead. Not quite. There are no…sinister magics involved in my resurrections. I am simply eternal, to a degree. I will soon find answers as to why and, with luck, a true death."
"Mmm, yes. Answers abound in the Somniumagri. Though I wouldn't say I am dejected, sir. Merely...," Vigium scraped the toe of his boot across a crease in the cobbles beneath him.
Words escaped him. The passenger offered none to fill the void.
“Will you wait just a while before we arrange the particulars of this transaction? I have a quarry to hunt before I depart.”
“Your sly passenger?”
“The same. She owes her dues for my services, much as you will.”
The passenger tilted his head. “May I assist you? I have a certain…proclivity for the hunt.”
“No, sir.” Vigium forced away a sudden shiver down his spine. Something about the offer unnerved him. “The hunt is all mine.”
The town of Morpheus had once been a piece of a larger realm called Withermere. Vigium had known some of their ilk millennia ago, only to find himself broken when their willfully-forged betrayals caused a chain of vicious interventions from the very same God whose Fury had later exterminated them. Now, in the Aeon of the present, the obliterated, dusty dunes that had once been full of progressive life had truly withered to blight.
God saw their progression as a threat and punished them for their foresight.
Now Morpheus was only a dreary port filled with dreary townsfolk. Its popularity as a trading post was not due to any beauty or intrigue within the town itself. Morpheus was now only a stop-by, a function. A place one must visit to restock and gather paying customers who – like the seafarers who came and went from the docks – wanted nothing more than to be anywhere else. Anywhere at all.
Far in the distance from the modest town, across miles and miles of brown, flat plains, an enormous black mountain, Messistor, loomed. A massive silver archway beckoned heroes of old to the slopes of the mountain. Vigium was surprised that the old Withermere gate still stood despite the Fury that destroyed its realm, even more surprised that the other five gates – each connected wall-to-wall to form a hexagonal fortress around Messistor – stood despite the troubles that had ravaged this world in the previous Aeon.
Three Ages have passed without a glimmer of life from Messistor. God must be sleeping.
Or dead.
No one knew the fate of the meeting during which God showed himself to a Source Soul for the first time. His true self. His whole being. Not the God the people of this world, of this universe, feared, but the man behind the cosmic sheen. The one known as Cager.
No one except…her.
Vigium pressed himself between two Morphean citizens blocking his path. Get those thoughts out of your head, he chided himself, she is gone.
But what was her name?
“Still some poor, sanctimonious saps trying to harvest, methinks,” one of the Morpheans, an ancient man, was saying to his equally eldered companion.
The serendipity of the overheard exchange slowed Vigium. He busied himself with inspecting the array of sceptrefruits out for sale at the pavilion the elders were shopping at.
“Ehes, you fiddling fool,” the second old man spat back, “there’s nothing left in the Godfield. Nothing at all.”
“When was the last bloody time you pulled your wilted, impotent body up that way?” Ehes said.
“I hear it in the wind, you ninny.”
“The wind carries more lies than breaths, Ulve. You can’t believe any of them. Even the ones that are true. The probability is too great to trust.”
Ulve scoffed and tossed a sceptrefruit between his hands. The knotty, tough skin didn’t bruise, but a mist of zesty oil spurted from its pores. Ulve rubbed it into his palms as though it were a salve.
“Some monster without a face has scythed the Godfield for a deity and razed the empty stalks so no others can ever grow there again, Ehes,” Ulve said with certainty. “You’ll have to trust that breath, I say.”
“And which deity do you believe he gave the textiles to?”
“Ohhh,” Ulve cooed, teasing his companion. “Oh my, my, my, you know the one. The one here and there and now and then.”
Ehes stepped back. Though he did not trust the whispers in the air, his fear reacted with confidence before the ingrained logic of his mind could stop it. He believed it.
“Miner,” Vigium bellowed, catching the old men’s attention. He had reacted the same way Ehes had, a guttural word spoken before his mind could process it. He bowed his head in shame, for he believed it too.
“Aye, Mister Captain Sir,” Ulve said, placing the scepterfruit back in its wicker bin. He sniffed at the aroma in his palms, drinking in some new whisper as the rumor-filled air lifted the oils to his nose. “That’s the one. You know what else they call him?”
“Usurper,” Ehes whispered.
“And this faceless monster?” Vigium asked.
“Don’t know him, Mister Captain Sir,” Ulve said with a shrug. “All’s I hear is a few hushes in the breeze that say he’s trying to leave our world to…hide the evidence.”
“Thank you, elders,” Vigium said, bowing his head to them. “Fortune to your honors.”
One of them said something as Vigium turned and lost himself in the crowd again, but he wanted to hear no more of the wind’s wistful whispers.
He once listened to the echoing song of chatter in the wind, but now the tune of its notes was different. No longer a song Vigium enjoyed.
Cast it out of your head. That passenger cannot be the only man without a face on this planet.
Vigium hissed that lie into the air around him, hoping it would not merely stifle the wicked tune he had become privy to, but would just as soon render the instrument which played it into a million useless splinters.
There were a dozen taverns in the heart of Morpheus where Madame Wendel could have sequestered herself. As Vigium pattered along the beaten paths, peering in windows and open doors to catch sight of her telltale robes, an inkling of rebellion stirred his aged feet away from his hunt.
I could just keep walking, make my way to the edge of town and choose a path to take. One path could take me to Messistor; I could investigate why the Forges within have gone dormant. See if I could find God’s corpse, if that’s truly what happened. Or I could stroll to the Godfield and verify the old man’s whispers.
I could even bypass them both and head east, cross a land bridge and find my way to the realm opposite the Amaranthine Ocean. Perilous, yes, but perhaps there is something there for me. I could leave this all behind.
But I am afraid. I am afraid, and I believe the winds that have sailed me true. When those winds bode portent, I must listen.
Though he was entwined with the spirit of the Vision’s Edge, he did not truly trust his soul to be tethered to it. However, the further away from the ship he trekked, the deeper the longing for her hull and wheel and sails pulled at him. It could just be sentimentality.
But in the Aeons since his severance, he had grown accustomed to her sway. It was the only way he knew for sure that he could leave this world. It would never take him anywhere other than the Somniumagri. Her maps had long ago faded to useless scribbles on parchment when he had lost his heartbeat.
Yet even though the nature of the Somniumagri was in constant flux, always changing its shape and hue, always providing new sights or simple variations and combinations of ones he had grown to know so well, there always had been and always shall be the desire to go elsewhere.
Even if it meant stealing moments of time to do so.
Someday, maybe.
Vigium spied footprints in the dirt road, ones that called out to him not as a whisper on the wind, but a scream in the storm of his mind’s fray. A pair of human feet, rather large, a strange gait to their plodding. And another set, four large paws trekking in tandem with the former.
A bliss caressed Vigium’s heart as he passed the window of the closest inn. Not a bliss of longing for a truly new horizon, but one which carried an irritation which bristled at the otherwise perfect rim of his sudden pleasure.
He followed the prints to the nearby building and, with a smile, stepped inside The Barrel’s Bottom – the tavern he himself preferred when stopping in Morpheus.
Serendipity strikes again.
The prey had entered a trap he had not realized nor intended to set.
“Madame Wendel?” Vigium sat himself directly opposite the tall, hunched-over figure. Her large hands, soft, otherworldly in size and shape, cradled a bone mug of mead. Her hideous gray lynx sat on its haunches beside her stool. It smiled at Vigium, showing a rank of heavy teeth which – were it not for the prominent fangs – looked almost like a human grin.
“It’s come,” Wendel spoke in a pained, dry croak. Her accent was neither Miwemian nor Erenzigan. It was not unheard of for souls from other worlds to come to the parasitic duality of this planet, but it was unheard of that one would find anything other than embittered resent here. Still, Wendel spoke clearly through the biting drawl of her own world. “A Covenant has come upon us, Lord. My father is dead.”
“I am sorry to hear that,” Vigium offered, smoothing his own tone despite his anger. “Is that why you’ve asked me to take you to Morpheus?”
“Not at all,” Wendel said. She sipped the mead, swallowed it hard, a grimace dropping to a frown. “It’s not the same. I’ve come to respect the brew my Orchid loved.”
“I’m sure the barkeep can find something else. There are many brews from many lands here.”
“Not hers. This is far less sour on my palate.”
“What do you prefer?”
“Mint.”
Vigium allowed a small smile. “An herb not found here. Not even the Godfield of Withermere had such growings.”
“No. I believe it was unique to my own world.”
“Most likely.”
The woman’s accent vexed him. He had tried to place it during their sparse conversations along the journey back to Morpheus. When she had approached him in the Somniumagri, seeming to manifest from a haze of mauve-tinted heat, she had merely asked for his passage to the furthest place he could travel.
Morpheus was the only port he could offer. His singular point-to-point. It was not often he found passengers for the return trip to Morpheus. The bulk of his customers meant to travel from Morpheus to the Somniumagri instead.
Wendel was so different. And now this speak of another of her kind. This Orchid she mentioned. If he could discover who that was, perhaps the mystery would unfold.
And then, should Wendel prove further fickle, Orchid could prove to be another option to gather the tithes he was owed. He would hunt her friend if she could not pay. Such was his way.
“May I ask what your purpose for travel was, then?” Vigium asked.
The lynx yawned, showing its yellowed array of sharp, eerie human-teeth and fangs. Its cold green eyes pierced Vigium as Wendel caressed its scalp, running fingers in tender circles around its stiff, pointed ears.
“My father is dead,” the lynx spoke in a deep, unsettling drawl.
“My pardons, Madame Wendel,” Vigium choked, tearing his eyes away from the beast. “But I do not engage with this sort of magic.”
“Our voice has become one, and I am tired,” the lynx responded. Wendel busied herself with her mug, dropping her nose into it, not making eye contact with Vigium. “We shall converse through young Dulcistiefel, now.” The lynx bowed its thick, grievous head in greeting. “You asked what brings us here? Covenant has come upon us.”
“What is that?” Vigium forced himself to proffer his queries to Wendel herself, ignoring the voice coming from the lynx.
Wendel reached into her robes, pulling a small glass jar from some nebulous pocket within. A compact brown dust filled the vial to the brim. She tapped a few sprinkles of the ash into her mug, swirled it around until it dissolved.
“My father has been bled dry by Cager,” Dulcistiefel cooed as Wendel pulled back her hood to reveal a mass of jet-black, wavy locks on her head.
Now that was peculiar. Not only the mention of Cager, a name Vigium knew, but the hair. She had very distinctly sported a tight bouffant of red curls when he had met her.
“His bridle,” Dulcistiefel continued, “will be rendered down to a crown for Cry.”
Ah, Vigium thought, yet another name I know. What dealings does this woman have with Gods and Goddesses?
“Perhaps you are here to find Cager, then? To scale the slopes of Messistor and reach his hovel within?” Vigium asked, allowing her the opportunity to speak more, knowing that the man who had brought her here knew all too well who she spoke of.
“No, not at all,” the lynx spoke, tilting its head to its master as she lost herself in the swirls of the drink which her mouth seemed to be kissing rather than consuming.
A moment passed between them. Vigium worked the clues over in his head. Cager had been the one to destroy the world just outside them. Had taken his Fury into physical form and obliterated the sky above. Cry, however, seemed to be mere myth in comparison. No one Vigium knew had ever dealt with her in directness.
Yet Cry’s influence was everywhere.
“May I ask you, then, if you have business in Morpheus?” Vigium asked.
“No, not at all,” the lynx responded again in his damning way.
Vigium placed his palms firmly on the table. He watched as Wendel brought the mug to her lips, hesitated, then downed the contents in two heavy gulps.
“I must find them,” Dulcistiefel croaked. The sludge of dust in the liquid caked in Wendel’s throat, the affect it would’ve had on her own voice mirrored the new gruffness in the lynx’s speech. “I must find Purpose without consulting my father.”
“And where are they?”
“I don’t know.”
“Perhaps I can assist you. And then…payment?”
Madame Wendel tossed her mug to the floor. The bone fractured but did not shatter.
“I wanted to have Purpose,” the lynx purred. “Now that he’s gone, I…,”
The voice trailed off as Wendel herself erupted into small, pitiful sobs. Tears did not fall, however.
Something stirred within her. Her eyes dilated, her body shaking, Wendel’s bones cracked with a terrible exactness.
From the root of her scalp, the black waves of hair began to retract and fade to a bright, hideous red as they pulled together, coiling with ferocity.
“I come to beyond the Covenant.” It was her own voice now, from her own sad mouth, stripped of its peculiar accent. The lynx merely watched with its sharp almond eyes as Wendel’s demeanor became rigid and caustic, her voice deepening into something ethereal, layered, as if many new voices spoke beyond just herself and her animal familiar. “The Orchid evolves, manifests a gift I do not have. I am half of a half. My father is dead. My other father is long gone, a stone horror on a throne. I cannot reach his mind even if I reached his bones. Though these words hold no meaning to you, Lord Vigium, they hold meaning to all. You are not all.”
Vigium felt a cold sweat break first at his neck before tickling like sharp, marble fingers trickling down his spine. The look in her eyes, dead-like eyes, ones that did not see him but instead saw everything else, boded a fierce presage that no wind could carry. Everything in the universe could be known to this woman and yet it seemed as though Vigium himself was her only blind spot.
“Madame?” Vigium’s voice was a throaty, hoarse thing.
“I offer you payment now, Verascan renegade,” she groaned. Her unseeing eyes rolled back into her skull, as if reading some arcane deposition buried deep within. “Severed, you are known. Severed, you will be. Smokeblood, a Covenant has been brokered. You have felt it though you do not know it. This barter of Gods will open new paths of travel whilst destroying others, including your own. Your marks will fade. These are the words of truth. This is my penitent payment.”
Something awful began to ululate in Wendel’s throat, a churning chant of evil. Others in the tavern turned to see the horror being conjured by the woman’s voice. Vigium stood, his gaze stolen by the bone mug on the floor. It mended itself as a wisp of blue smoke curled across the crack.
He left her there to invoke her hideous dread.
This payment was plenty.
