An Errant Shape

Part Three

 
     The miners' confused doubts did not leave the knight’s back until he had made it deep enough into the mine to break their line of sight. The cave was damp and filled to the brim with a swirling sea of scent obscured by the torch’s aura. He carefully descended a few slopes until he arrived in a level nexus of paths, each tributary’s opening held up with wooden supports.
     A shallow puddle lay below a cluster of dripping stalactites. The knight dropped his torch into the water, deliberately extinguishing it. With its interference gone, he drunk deep from the miasma of information available to him. He indeed smelled rot coming from the route Haroghaz had described, yet the entire cave system teemed with competing smells. The knight loosened the straps on his gauntlet, creating a small opening and then kneeling to the ground. Several tiny creatures emerged from the area his wrist should have been, scuttling down the various conflicting routes.
     He retightened his gauntlet and began to follow the scent of rot. His sense of smell let him navigate more smoothly than his sight ever could. His journey lasted nearly half an hour before he reached the untamed parts of the cave system, where smooth slopes became perilous crags and wide passages became narrow fissures.
     However, he persisted. His armor allowed him to recklessly move forward, suffering impacts that would have cut into the miner’s flesh but barely registered with him. Even more impressive, throughout his entire voyage into the depths, the knight never ceased his ritualistic fidgeting.
     His voyage stopped at a dead end of compacted rock. It was a strange sensation, because he could still smell rot coming from in front of him, despite being able to tell from the echoes of his clanking footsteps that the path was closed off. Before he could investigate, a rumbling sound interrupted his thoughts.
     It ended as abruptly as it began, replaced by a soft slithering sound that seemed to emanate from all around him. The second the knight touched the hilt of his mace, the wyrm burst toward him from the wall. He reacted elegantly, dodging quick enough to direct the wyrm’s gnashing teeth into his pauldron. It bounced off the metal and twisted around for another attack. Its snapping jaws lashed at his visor, but the flanges of his mace careened into the side of its head before they could close around his face.
     The wyrm shuddered and released a pitiful squeal before it collapsed to the cave floor. The knight slipped his foot out from under the weight of the wyrm. As he stared down at its body, his work apparently concluded, he felt profound dissatisfaction. This was what killed eight miners? The miners were afraid of something so weak? His suspicions were rising, so he raised his left hand in front of his face.
     His fidgeting had ceased. For a normal human being, that would not be a surprise. The fight had set his mind on alert and a passive activity like his fidgeting would halt unconsciously. However, the knight was not human, and his body and the consciousness that controlled it did not function like a human’s. But a magus wouldn’t know that as they seized his mind.
     The knight smelled his surroundings, the rot remained. He prodded the walls with his mace. Rock scraped against metal, that is, until the mace’s head slipped into the rockface as if it was made of air. The knight put his free hand into the wall as well, waving it around to confirm the width of the illusion.
     It lined up with the trail of rot. He stepped past the fake wall, leaving behind the wyrm’s corpse, which he was now confident was an illusion too, albeit a more advanced facsimile. The passage beyond the illusion was as rough as the rock that came before, evidently the true extent of the now deceased miners' expeditions. A light, bright purple in color, filled the chamber the knight approached as the scent grew stronger.
     He kept both hands firmly set on his weapons, not bothering to maintain his alert system for a threat he already knew was present. The passage opened up. He saw an array of unfittingly lavish amenities set up on the right, and a neat pyramid of human remains on the left. In the center, the purple light bled out of an intricate circular pattern drawn on the cave floor. Behind it all, a dark figure obscured by the magic circle sat calmly on an ornate, cushioned chair, sipping from a mug of what smelled like hot cocoa.
     The knight was paralyzed for a moment with a terrifying sense of familiarity, but he persevered, stepping into the room. Yet the second he did, a huge weight impacted his back, puncturing his cuirass, and driving him to the ground.
     Immobilized by the impact, he was forced to watch as his attacker stepped over him, struggling to drag their pickaxe with all four of their thin arms. Shiikan’s gaze was fixed on the knight as his chest heaved. The outline of his figure wavered unnaturally with the remnants of a concealing illusion cast on himself. 
     He turned toward the sitting figure to sign a message. ‘What do we do with him? They’ll send more now.’
     “Don’t worry,” the figure, a woman, said in a placid voice that filled the knight with fear because he knew exactly who she was, “Our work here is ready to be concluded. Having the magistrate’s mercenary confirm that miner’s story would have averted suspicion, but it was not a requirement.”
     ‘He saw through our phantom. That makes him dangerous.’
     “Hm” The woman begrudgingly left her seat with a sign, gliding across the rock with careful, quiet footsteps. She wore a black tunic embroidered with lavender accents and matching trousers. Her face was pale, her irises permanently stained a deep violet, and her wavy brown hair cut short. “Miura?”, she asked as she leaned over the knight.
 He did not respond verbally, instead choosing to immediately twist his arms backward to reach for his weapons. However, his entire body was paralyzed in an instant as the young woman’s eyes pulsed with their color and all the air around them wavered.
     “Well, that’s rude. I didn’t think you were that upset with me,” she said with a pout.
     ‘Johanna, you know him?’
     “Of course I know him. He’s a creation of mine. Like a son to me, albeit the rebellious kind.”
     ‘Your magic can … create life?’
     Johanna shook her head. “Shiikan, I may outweigh you in terms of my pact’s strength, but that does not change the nature of my—or anyone else’s—abilities.”
     Shiikan still broadcast confusion. Johanna took another sip from her drink before her eyes lit up again. The knight, Miura, shuddered as he rose to his feet, ignoring the wound in his back. She puppeteered him to walk around the magic circle and lower himself into the seat she had just occupied.
     “May I remove your helmet?”, she asked, leaning over so that the glow of her eyes reflected off his metal face.
     “Yes,” she forced him to say. His arms struggled against his will to pull his helmet off and set it in his lap.
     Shiikan’s expression turned from confusion to disgust at the reveal of Miura’s true form. A flame of swirling centipedes constantly crawling over themselves plumed from the neck hole of the suit of armor. The sound of their legs, antennae, and tails squeaking against each other filled the air.
     “You cannot create life with magic, only alter its perception, but creativity offers loopholes,” Johanna explained. “One could, say, link the consciousness of a thousand centipedes, creating a self-sustaining colony out of solitary creatures that uses their accumulated strength and intelligence to form a functionally sentient being.”
     ‘Why?’, Shiikan pleaded, ‘I don’t understand the benefit.’
     Johanna approached the circle and knelt to trace its rim with her finger, intensifying its light. “A similar reason to what we’re doing here. Draining hapless miners of their devotion is one thing, but to accomplish truly great things we need truly great sources of power. I was experimenting to see if an animal such as Miura here could develop attachments able to fuel a pact.”
     ‘And?’ Shiikan glanced back at Miura, whose body was seething with frustrated weakness. ‘Could he?’
     “No. He was never quite able to surpass the predatory callousness of his origin. But I hoped he could reach a higher kind of existence by traveling on his own.”
     “I escaped from you,” Miura hissed, the organisms that made up his body stridulating to synthesize speech.
     Johanna smiled widely. “Sorry, my bad. Of course you escaped. Incidentally, it seems you are in the perfect position to witness what I’ve been developing in your absence. Would you like to see it?”
     “Yes,” Miura replied, again unable to state his actual will.
     ‘We can’t keep him alive. If he escapes, the magistrate could find out about my help. He’d … make an example out of me. We need to deal with him like we did the miners.’
     “No need for impatience, Shiikan. We won’t need to worry about such things after this ceremony.”
     The rebellious magus still looked uncertain, but Johanna emanated nothing less than pure confidence. She flicked a finger at Miura, who refastened his helmet, but was still completely prevented from controlling his own body.
     “Let us begin,” Johanna declared, pointing Shiikan to stand on a square intersecting the outer rim of the magic circle.
     She took position in an opposing square. The magi produced thin picks from the folds of their clothing. Shiikan’s was a blocky, utilitarian tool that was issued to all magi of the monarchy, although his was meticulously cleaned. Johanna’s was an elegant, black instrument with a contoured handle. They set their picks against a tiny scar at the top of their foreheads, produced matching hammers, and began to drive their tools into their craniums.
     Miura watched the procedure with little alarm. Johanna had taught him some of magi’s methods of contacting demons. This was old hat for her, as evidenced by the clear lack of pain she expressed as she dulled her own senses. Shiikan did not fare so well, his face a display of abject horror while he carefully deepened the pick.
     When their picks reached their target: a small gland between the hemispheres of the brain, tucked behind the thalamus, the distorted air that had begun to swell throughout the chamber condensed in the spaces behind the two magi. Their demons manifested, beginning as beings that resembled massive spinal columns levitating in the air, webbed spikes of bones tapering down either side of their bodies. Almond-shaped masses of glass-like material emitted an iridescent sheen from the tops of their bodies.
     The condensation continued, giving both demons individuality. Shiikan’s demon grew blue chitin around its skeleton, curving forward to form a kind of rib cage. Its head’s colors transitioned into the realm of milky opal.
     By the end of its transformation, Shiikan’s demon was twice his size in height, yet Johanna’s demon defied comparison in its immensity. Curling from the cave floor over Johanna and along the ceiling, its spine creaked under its own weight. Crimson velvet like the down from a deer’s antlers covered the larger demon’s skeleton, draping to the ground in numerous bloody strips. Whereas the other demon’s head resembled an opal, this being’s head took on the luster of tourmaline.
     The demons produced an alien language from the chittering vibrations of their rigid heads, but their chatter quickly died down, being replaced by a voice from the larger demon that sounded eerily like a cobbled together version of Johanna’s and Miura’s speech.
     “Johanna. What scheme have you concocted this time?”
     “Read your script,” Johanna replied, indicating to the circle as she drew the pick out of her head, “I think you’ll be able to understand my intentions.”
     ‘It cannot be done,’ Shiikan’s demon signed, imitating his method of communication with its flexible ribs.
     “Nonsense. Your kind bridges the gap between the dreamscape and our physical realm. I have no doubt you do the same with other worlds. Think of this as a mass delusion, pulled inside out from other realms.”
     “She has never disappointed me,” Johanna’s demon declared, “Investing in her has always been profitable.”
     The other demon murmured something in their unassailable language.
     “That is irrelevant. If this exertion fails, we will only suffer a temporary loss.”
     Shiikan’s demon quivered in the air. ‘Very well’
     A purple glow welled in the demon’s heads and the magi’s eyes. The magic circle shrank down to a single, intense pillar. Miura felt the chamber contract, as if space itself was being pinched together. He told himself that wasn’t possible; magi dealt in illusions and deception, tricks of the mind. However, he knew better than anyone that Johanna’s ambitions were anything but limited to parlor tricks. She was always trying to turn intangible magic into solid results.
     The contraction released, straightening out rocks like they were molded from rubber. The pillar of light between the summoners dissolved, and in its place, a blob of wax-like matter plopped onto the ground.
     ‘We failed,’ Shiikan signed.
     Johanna frowned in response as she furrowed her brow at the pulsating mass.
     “We provided our power as requested,” her demon declared, “Your use of it was the issue.”
     “No need to kick us while we’re down,” Johanna mumbled. She reached out to touch the blob. It retracted from her hand, but she lunged forward to touch it anyway. Her eyes glowed with her demon as she spoke, “It’s empty, not even a speck of lust in the damn thing.”
     “You asked for a potent source of devotion. It is unsurprising that such an abstract request, drawn in from across your sibling realms, could result like this.”
     “Can’t you tell if there’s something more to this thing?”, Johanna asked the demons.
     “I can barely understand the twisting chaos of you creatures’ minds.”
     “And yet you fumble toward our sleep and contract with magi to steal that very chaos … It seems you are right though. Perhaps this thing could be the idol for some cult, but I do not have the time to found one.”
     ‘This has not proven beneficial,’ Shiikan’s demon said before receding into nothingness along with its sibling.
     ‘So that’s it? I can’t go back to the magistrate like this! My stores are drained; they’ll recognize the inconsistencies.’
     “Seems you’re no longer in a position to help me in this town then,” Johanna commented neutrally as she began gathering her supplies into a pack.
     ‘What? No. No. You cannot leave. You have to help me! At least share some of your pact with me!’
     “Oh, I’m afraid I’m all dry myself,” Johanna claimed, although Miura knew she had stores of power to spare. “So much so that I doubt I could maintain the most basic of spells.”
     Miura heard her words and realized her hold on his movement had disappeared. His hand shot to the handle of his mace, but Shiikan was faster. His eyes lit up and froze Miura mid-stand.
     “Goodluck with that,” Johanna said with a cutthroat smile as the color and shape faded away from her departing figure.
     Shiikan maintained an unblinking stare on Miura as he backed toward the pickaxe. His strength was waning, but it was still more than enough to keep the centipede knight rooted in place. Miura studied the pickaxe grimly. His greatest strength was not his armor or his decentralized body; it was the fact that the armor kept the nature of his body hidden to most. That advantage was lost, and Shiikan’s desperation had not dulled his intelligence. The pickaxe’s weight could stun Miura with a straightforward blow as it had before, and its flat top was perfectly suited to crush the bugs that made up his existence.
     Shiikan had his weapon now. He rested it on his shoulder, wrapping all four hands around its handle. While he approached Miura, he stopped, looking down at his feet where a tiny dark mass had just crept up his leg. In the next moment, his body spasmed, his grip on the pickaxe weakening as one of the centipedes that Miura had released earlier sunk its venomous mandibles into his flesh.
     Much more consequential than Shiikan’s slackened grip was his broken attention. His gaze lost its focus and thus its power. Miura’s attack resumed as if it had never been interrupted. The mace thumped into the side of Shiikan’s head. The blow was not as strong as that which killed Scoira, but the elven magus crumpled to the floor all the same, blood oozing out of the side of his head. Miura stood over his unconscious body, the apparent victor in an evidently fruitless incident.
     He looked down at Shiikan. The ethics of killing a man for his attempt at freedom did not pass Miura’s mind. All he considered was that Shiikan’s head would earn him marks, more than exterminating a wyrm should have, and that Shiikan was a magus and therefore too dangerous to live. He slit Shiikan’s throat with his dagger. 
     His amber blood pooled on the cave floor. As Miura set to work detaching Shiikan’s head, the blood crept toward the wax blob. Upon contact, the blob absorbed the blood, and its pulsations settled down as its shape began to change.
     Miura stood up once his work was concluded, attaching his trophy to the back of his belt. He noticed the blob’s transformation in his peripheral. Its waxy surface had condensed into the shape on an elf, tall with six limbs. It began to stand up. Miura gripped his mace, ready to strike down whatever Johanna had concocted. As the blob stood, its shape shifted from elven to human, flipping back and forth between the two, at points even imitating a dwarf. The structure of its face, its gender, and its age shifted as well. Miura noticed the magistrate’s face among them, as well as the captain of the guard and his own faceplate, and concluded that the thing was reading Shiikan’s memories just as a powerful magus could.
     He raised his mace to smash its skull. However, the thing did not react to him, simply blinking its eyes in wonderment at the sheen of his weapon. He hesitated, and in his hesitation the being signed a question, ‘Who are you?’
     The centipede knight’s mace was still awkwardly raised, but some tiny, rarely used part of his mind decided not to swing. “My name is Miura. What are you?”
     “I do not know,” they spoke in conflicting voices, “I feel like multiple people, but I can tell that the most prominent identity just ended. What do you think I am?”
     “You appear to be a unique existence. That makes it hard to label you.”
     The being imitated various gestures to indicate they were thinking, fingers under their chin, pinched noses, and crossed arms. “Does that not make me similar to you?”, they concluded while wearing Johanna’s form.
     “In a sense”
     “If we are similar, then maybe I would benefit from learning how you dealt with our situation.”
     Miura started to lower his mace for a moment but then regained his composure in the next moment, raising it even higher. “I am not the same species as you. I don’t even know if you’re a living creature.”
     “Neither do I. If you want to eliminate me instead, then please do. I am indifferent,” the being concluded as it imitated random facial expressions.
     Miura remembered when he first attained consciousness. As Johanna kept him locked away, his centipedes ate and mated with each other in abject confusion, forced to share sensations in a maddening upheaval of their simple lives. That confused pain had never really gone away; Miura simply adapted to it, an unpleasant background noise in the theater of his mind. He saw that same kind of chaos in this being’s rapid imitations.
     “… You can come with me. Can you hold a specific form, one that actually looks normal?”
     The being sculpted itself into Johanna, although it was a version of her that wore the colored garb of an everyday denizen of Tenketsburg.
     “Wh-Why do you keep becoming her?”
     “According to … these memories, this person associated with you. I thought it made sense.”
     “… Make your eyes blue, hair blonde, and make your facial structure more pronounced. Our story is that you were being held prisoner by Shiikan. Your name is … Len.”
     Len tested the sound of their new name as they altered the qualities of their face.
     “You can always change it later. For now, it appears that we are collaborators.” Miura extended his hand to Len, which the shapeshifter readily accepted as color filled their surface. “Try not to say anything that will get me killed. Unlike you, I’m not indifferent toward that kind of thing.”
     “Okay,” Len said with a smile that came just short of convincing Miura that it came from a place of genuine understanding.
  
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     Miura held up Shiikan’s head, sending a shower of amber droplets onto the marble floor. Len stared at the resulting stain with a mix of hunger and fascination. The magistrate looked down at both of them, himself only a dark outline sat on a throne between gleaming windows.
     “You expect me to believe that?”, he growled, obviously struggling to moderate his volume.
     “It’s the truth. This girl can attest to that. Your men can go down into the mines and see the bodies of those that Shiikan and his accomplice killed.”
     The magistrate shot up from his seat and strutted to the top of the steps. “You are trying to tell me that my own mage was killing my townspeople?! That he was plotting insurrection?! Have you the faintest idea what you’re saying?!”
     “You tasked me with making your mine safe again. I have done that. Shiikan is dead and his accomplice driven away. You did not task me with delivering the answers you wanted to hear.”
     “I should have you hung for this, for butchering a state official and lying to your magistrate.”
     Miura lowered the head and moved closer to the steps, ignoring the threatening sound of the captain of the guard unsheathing his sword. “And what will you tell your miners? They saw me emerge from that mine with his head. When you have to ask the king for a new magus, what will you tell him?”
     The magistrate clenched his fists so tightly that Miura heard his blood drip to the floor as well. “The miners will work if I want them to work, and the king will thank me for avenging a prodigy from his innovative program.”
     Miura glanced over his shoulders, sizing up the guards behind him and Len, now confident that the magistrate would not listen to reason over his own pride.
     “But what about me?”, Len asked in a high-pitched voice.
     Miura looked at them with concern but also confusion as he noticed that their height appeared to have shrunk and their facial features grown softer.
     “Y-You were roped into this man’s lies. So long as you do not continue to spread them, the law will spare you,” the magistrate declared with a weakened tone.
     “But he helped me … Mister Shiikan was hurting me, and this knight saved me from that, why would he have to die for that?!”, Len complained in a childish voice.
     “The knight lied to you. I know it’s difficult to understand, but people have to be punished for—”
     “NO! He didn’t lie to me! You’re lying! I’ll tell everyone! If you want to kill him, you’ll have to kill me too!”, Len screamed.
     Miura admired how authentic the emotion in their yells seemed, but he could not imagine them accomplishing anything more than a swifter demise.
     “Please understand,” the magistrate said coaxingly as he went halfway down the steps, “This man is saying things that could be very damaging to me and to Tenketsburg. That must be dealt with.”
     Len skipped forward and grabbed Miura’s gauntlet. “That’s not fair! He did more for me than you and your stupid town! You’re just a coward who’s trying to cover up for his own failure!”
     The magistrate glared down at them, sweat dripping down the side of his face.
     “Should I take them, sir”, the captain of the guard asked.
     “N-No,” the magistrate answered, swiftly turning around and collapsing back into his seat. “Let them leave. Give the knight his marks, but if he stays in my town, hang him.”
     The captain seemed discontent, but followed his orders, holding open the grand doors to the hall.
     Miura mockingly bowed and dropped Shiikan’s head onto the floor. As he led Len out of the hall, he snatched a small purse from the captain’s outstretched hand. They entered a long passageway built from stone bricks, floored with red carpet, and flanked by numerous guardsmen.
     Len sped up to walk at Miura’s side, alternating between various gaits as they went, much to the befuddlement of the guards. Miura studied Len and observed that they had grown back to the size and facial structures they had entered the magistrate’s estate with.
     When the pair exited the building and began to stroll down the street toward the town gate, he posed a burning question, “How did you do that? With the magistrate I mean.”
     Len tapped a finger on their chin, an expression from Johanna. “According to my … Shiikan’s memories, the magistrate has a young daughter. I can imitate her, so I mixed in her features to this face.”
     “But the way you talked? I thought he would kill us for how you disrespected him.”
     “The magistrate loves his daughter. He also loves women who look like his daughter, but not in the same way. It just felt like he would respond better to pressure when being reminded of his shame.”
     Miura looked at Len curiously. He did not understand the irrationality of humans and the other sentient species, but it seemed like Len had an instinct for that sort of chaos.
     “Now that we’ve dealt with that incident, I understand if you want me to stop following you,” Len offered with a placid face, “I know you’re a warrior for hire. I doubt I can be of much use with that.”
     “… I disagree actually. You can follow me as long as you like.”
     Len nodded, their gait transitioning to a jubilant skip. “Glad to hear it.”
     The pair crossed through Tenketsburg, ignoring the stares of its denizens. They began to walk down the forest road together, two lonely monsters amidst a sea of predators.

「This is a work of fiction. Any references to real places, real people, or historical events are used fictitiously. Other characters, names, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, places, or people, living or deceased, is purely coincidental.」

Copyright © 2021 Matthew Cammarano
All rights reserved.