Worldtree, D’halia
Sleeping quarters were odd and sparse. David felt like a gypsy boy, walking here and there without much defined direction; observe, the elderly woman said, but do not interfere, and he had listened. The seller’s stalls were of little interest, although the merchants themselves were intriguing enough: some were not human. Or not definably so. Here there be monsters in hats? He had asked himself.
He walked by a waif of a girl, barely taller than him and dressed sparsely in leather. What skin he saw was discolored in black tattoo patterns. She leaned on a black stick that reflected the purple light outside. She sat silently, looking into the room of sleeping kids, and her presence reinforced his calm.
But his eyelids were thick and heavy, and he found his bunk among several. He untied his shoes, pulled them slowly off and placed them on the trunk at the foot of his bed.
Clothes for the next day were set on the same trunk beside his shoes, a matching set of the comfortable clothes he wore today, only with a slightly different color. Green instead of red, still with highlights of gold.
His bed was soft, pleasantly warm, and he slid in quicker than he had done in a very long time; there was no fear of nightmares tonight. He had seen no sign of Jack the entire day, as he had walked through darkening and ambient purple lights.
He wanted to talk to Constance more. She seemed much more interested in the circus games. Why wouldn’t she? He asked. They were free, and you could win candy, toys, knickknacks. And, again, they were free!
His thoughts dissolved into mist as he settled on the shape of the walls in the Leviathan greatroom, a soft and smoothing slope he couldn’t help but touch as he walked past. He slid, as softly as he had gone to bed, into a dream of shallow waters.
He followed a crow on the beach, a large black thing, that hopped over the sand and rhythmic waves to peck at shells and eat the tiny crabs. It was well aware of David’s path behind it, and as he passed some of the empty shells, he saw mirrored reflections within them. Like staring at the sky, he surmised, through the sand.
A wave came and washed the mirrored shells away. And he walked.
From a copse of trees beyond the beach, a woman with dirty hair ran toward him. He felt sluggish in this place, as if moving deliberately and slowly in spite of what something inside his head told him to do.
Run.
She stopped in his path, the crow flying off, heaving. “The storm became at a quarter past ten,” she said with trembling voice. “A stark drum thrum and a broken-key dirge. And it grew through the forest with night-jaunt speed a violin’s timbre and jagged trills—it became a sculptor’s hands and the crowd awoke trembling.”
She nodded once as if looking for his acceptance, and ran into the surf. She dove, and in diving, she changed into a dolphin. The waves accepted her, and as she splashed in, the waves turned dark as if an ink spilled from her skin. She disappeared, and the setting sun cracked on the horizon.
No! He cried in.
The sun split open, cracked in several pieces, and sank into the water. The sky darkened. Behind him the crow-picked shells glimmered in the water like a single constellation. It looked like an oblong star with one point longer than the rest. Being the only light, he turned and walked into the center of it.
The sand parted. The sky disappeared. And he fell with sickening heart. He fell into incredible darkness. Yet he did not wake.
He felt cold stone floor beneath him and echoes of his breathing in a great chambered room. It felt familiar after a fashion, but he could not remember from where. A single light flickered down a tunnel to the right of him, and he saw he lay in a pit. Stairs surrounded him, but he could not see above them.
Then, a sound. An echo of a growl, an echo of a distant sound. He remembered some of them from previous dreams, from when he was scared to look under his bed, when Jack sat beside him, between him and the nightlight. Scratches of bone on stone, and he knew what was coming.
It was sickly, as candles lit down corridors he did not know existed and he stumbled to the stairs. He clambered up, growls of a hundred unseen things reaching his frightened ears. It felt so real. It was so real.
Creatures rose like shadows, hints and reminders of his unforgotten dreams. His heart raced, his nostrils filled with sharp sting and a sickly stench of decay. Decay, yes, this was what he feared. That smell. That smell of thousand-year rot. The decay that did not dissipate to time.
Yet he knew. He knew. This was not hell. This was not darkness intangible. This was a gutter of ancient places. This was their home; the outcasts. The ones forgotten but not removed.
He saw he held a single shell between his trembling fingertips.
A towering thing stood in front of him; he could not see it, except for the lightness of space beside it. He stumbled back down the stairs as the thing reached for him, missing his face by inches. All around him things crawled, stepped, even fluttered toward him. They spoke odd sounds, a language perhaps—to each other or to him, he did not know.
A thing beside him pushed a shaded finger into his shoulder, puncturing skin and sliding in as easily as if he were shadow. He cried out in agonizing pain, his eyes pulsing with his heartbeat, and stumbled back. And all it had done was try to touch him.
A crack like rolling thunder over the plains, and the room was briefly illuminated. It was filled with demons, perhaps, or simply monsters, or forgotten nightmares. The last thought made more sense than the other two. Forgotten, voiceless. Rotting.
“Huuuuuuh!” something hummed. It was unmistakably female. Unmistakably human.
Or, perhaps he mistook it for being unmistakable. It was still a something to him. A girl sailed through the air above him, a pair of blades pulled, a lantern hanging from a stick at her back. Her hair was black, tied back, and her shoulders were covered in thick leather. Her face was tattooed on the right side, a pattern of black bars that ended in points near her lip, a single long tattoo extending the left side of her mouth into a grin.
Her blades met the towering thing that had scraped at him, sliding through shadow. The creature made a sound like a tree falling, and others hissed. David held his shell out, hoping to use it as a flashlight to the creatures at her back. The light burned through the air and wrinkled shadow to bubbling pits where it touched creatures’ flesh.
The girl veritably flew through the oncoming creatures, sliding swords through shadow. Running to his left, she danced between attacks and parries, through sounds of releasing death and confused finality. The rotting invited the blade, he saw with confused disgust.
She downed seven in the span of seconds; they seemed to have no defense against her weapons—and they did not even get close enough to brush by her skin. They were simply creatures of the sewage of the mind, he imagined, but dangerous and powerful nonetheless.
They were unwavering in their onslaught. To the left of David were nearly fifty, and the hallways were filling with a considerable amount. The girl sliced through the legs of one, sliding her right weapon up between them, halving the thing as it stumbled down. David ducked as she came close enough to him that he could smell her sweat, ran past him, and impaled a small thing skittering across the floor.
Sweat? His head was swimming. It smelled sweet, but he didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to think at all. He dropped to his knees, holding his shell to his face. He looked in and saw only a blue lagoon within it. A blue lagoon? It was a strange thing to see in a shell, he thought, and it seemed he watched waves on a distant shore.
She pulled him up, her face inches from his, her eyes calm and entirely soft, her irises a darkening red. Her grin tattoo confused his slurrying thoughts. Everything was falling to mist. Everything was darkening. “Stay with me,” she said with a strong accent. The nightmares were closing in. He could see nothing but the light of his shell, and only when he concentrated hard. She dragged him several feet, and with a grunt she flipped him on her shoulder, sheathing one sword.
He held onto his shell as if it were the last thing he would ever do, and she cut a path through the creatures to the left and right and ahead. He saw her legs, saw the ground behind her, saw all the muck from all the dying things, and saw one single creature running up behind them.
Using his free left hand, he reached down and pulled out her second sword. The creature leaped, and he lifted the blade to intercept its arc. The blade slid in its mouth, half-formed eyes growing wide with confusion. His right hand clenched on his shell so tight it cut through his skin.
He glanced up, and the lantern blinded him.
He was in his bunk, gasping with a heavy breath. He was groggy, dizzy, confused. A lantern blinded him as several people stood over. The tattooed girl stood beside him, sweat and dark liquid on her clothes and arms.
“He fell into the Atrium?” A man asked, squinting at him. David barely understood the words. “How in the hells did he get there?” The girl remained silent, staring at him with her calm eyes. “Get him to the hospital. Get that wound looked at. What on earth is in his hand?”
“A shell,” he whispered as another woman tried to pry his hand open. It was red with blood. “A shell.”
“It seems a gift,” the woman said. She cocked her head to one side as David fought to hold onto consciousness. “Curious.” She looked at the girl across from her. “Make sure he does not dream again tonight. And D’halia, good work.”
The girl nodded. “I won’t fear love,” was her simple reply.
It confused David considerably, and was his final thought before dropping away.