Katalepsis IV: “the Other Side of Nowhere” (part 2)

The giant blimpmonster screaming ends up being a little easier to shake off than it initially seemed. Unfortunately, the blimpmonster itself turns out to be more actively aggressive than it initially seemed. And also to not be alone. Multiple town-sized creatures are bearing down from the sky, sending the sky jellies fleeing away like fish before an approaching shark (as Heather poetically phrases it). And, after hovering a bit, one of them is starting to extent an enormous tendril to crush the party and everything else within fifty meters in front of the castle gate.

The solution to the problem ends up being much more mundane than you'd probably expect. The castle might be shaped out of the same weird material as the rest of this mirror-Sharrowford, but the gate is just plane old metal wedged into place. Which makes sense if you think about it; a world where everything is one contiguous solid object doesn't really lend itself to moving parts. It also reinforces the conclusion that the New Suns only discovered this weird world fairly recently, and have mostly been employing very crude measures to make it their own. Anyway, it's just a plain old metal plate on plain old metal hinges, and the two Praem instances and Twil working together are able to bash it down before the creature can reach them.

I'm really kind of baffled as to why Alexander isn't having someone shoot guns at them from up on the battlements while they're busy with the door. I know he wants to keep Heather alive, but he doesn't seem to feel the same way about Evelyn or Raine (Twil and the Praems are irrelevant on account of bulletproof, of course). Maybe it would interfere with the dog whistle he's using to sic the blimp monsters on them? That could be.

The castle's interior is a disappointment to Heather the architecture aficionado. It's only a superficial, impressionistic "castle" grown out of the weird green rock. Little to no authenticity to how castles were actually designed historically, once you're inside. 2/10 on a good day, lern 2 design cultists. They get away from the entrance and shelter from the monster screaming noises, buying themselves a few moments of respite.

Everyone is too shocked and harried to say more than a few, panting sentences. The little that they do say to each other is fairly informative, though.

"What the hell was all that?" Twil asked. She wiped blood off her face, then bloody hands on her hoodie, then tutted at herself. The gash on her forehead was already closed up. "Why are you all talking like we weren't just chased by flying tentacle moons?"

"I've seen weirder things," I admitted.

"I haven't," Raine said. "That's a new record."

"I have," grumbled Evelyn.

Reminder that while Heather is the least educated and experienced with supernatural stuff out of the party, she's probably seen the most supernatural stuff out of all of them by far. Huge flying creatures trying to *attack* her is a rarity, but just seeing them in general is pretty much Tuesday for Heather. Additionally, she (and Evelyn, though I'm not sure if she got as clear a look at the sky tendril) already had the Planet Doge experience, which is even more directly comparable to this.

...

Planet Doge is actually more relevant to this adventure than I initially thought. We're not literally on it again (I don't think), but this is another entity of similar size and at least somewhat analogous physiology.

...

While they're trying to figure out where to go next, they get attacked by a couple more cultists herding a bunch more mook zombies. Leading to a pretty forgettable, pretty generic fantasy battle scene. Definitely not helping with the "this is a video game" vibe I commented on in my previous post. The one standout moment here is when Heather realizes where the bodies to make these zombies came from:

No question where the Sharrowford Cult had harvested their raw materials. Scraggly grey beards, unkempt hair, frames ravaged by malnutrition. Most were middle-aged men, but a few young women showed among the dead faces, skin stretched and translucent, dressed in thick coats, filthy jeans, too many layers. One had been made from a teenage boy, dirty orange hair plastered across his forehead. Sharrowford's missing homeless.

Zombification seems to require freshly dead, relatively intact corpses. There's no way to source them ethically. Heather retroactively realizing just how bad these people are - how much blood the guy who was dumb and annoying at her in the coffee shop directly has on his hands - gives her a horrifying shock and makes the situation feel that much more serious. Assassinating rival wizards and abducting persons of interest turns out to be the very least of the Brotherhood of the New Sun's atrocities.

In terms of plot advancement, the takeaway of the big dumb zombie fight is that Heather - whose brain is still recovering from crippling Zheng earlier and not yet up for more self-implementing hypermath attacks - ends up getting separated from the others and chased away into the castle's moulded green corridors. Chased until she can no longer hear the zombies shambling after her, and also can no longer hear the sounds of her companions or remember the way back.

She wanders alone in the bizarre dark green catacombs for a painfully long time. Occasionally hearing sounds, but having to retreat from them when they turn out to be very zombie-gibber-y. This is the first time in a while now that Heather has been involuntarily alone. She used to spend much of her time in isolation, but having now gotten a taste at normalcy she realizes how much agony aloneness had always had her in. To a greater and weirder extent than it would for most people:

I was never meant to be alone.

Not just here, in this insane misadventure, but at all, ever. I was born a twin, with another half, a mirror image. I wasn't made to be alone. Cut off from my friends and companions and my lover in this contorted trap, all I could think was that I should be dead.

Maybe it's not like this for other twins; perhaps they don't feel this strongly, perhaps they have separate lives and identities instead of this gaping hole inside. I should have died without Maisie, we should have withered once parted. I wasn't meant to be alone. I couldn't function. I was a ghost, a phantom of half a person, and I'd spent a decade learning how to pretend I was still alive.

A few weeks, a couple of months of support and friendship, had filled the gap in my soul. And now I was alone again, and dead.

Maybe this is just Heather being her dramatic self, but I don't think it is. Not after the whole revelation about "blink witches."

From what I've gathered about this work and its author, I don't *think* the story is going to assert that twins as a whole have some special supernatural quality. Rather, I think what this is building up to is something along the lines of there being another type of twin. Rare enough and superficially indistinguishable enough from the more common types of twins to have escaped obstetric or genetic study. There are fraternal twins, maternal twins, and something else. Something with a catalyst and basis beyond the mundanely biochemical, and with an innate magical entanglement. The blink witches.

That's my suspicion, at least. We'll eventually see if I'm right or not.

After a period of miserable, terrified wandering through the castle, Heather finds an anomaly in the castle's structure. An artificially carved tunnel, with metal steps and support struts set in it, excavation tools laying all around its entrance. Also, when touching the weird green wall material that this tunnel is carved into, Heather realizes that it doesn't actually feel like stone or earth at all. It has a chitinous texture to it, like a scab or an insect husk. Distinctly biogenic. Exploring the excavated tunnel brings her down under the pseudo-earthly surface and into a much more bizarre system of vast, aveolar caverns down below. The texture of the surrounding changes, as does its color, and now there are threads of bright yellow light running through it between nodes and nodules like stars set in the walls.

This isn't just an encrustation of living material. It's descending passed the epidermis and into the living skin tissue of another planet-creature.

In a bottomless gulf before her, Heather sees an incredibly bright golden star that all the other threads and nodules seem to be channeling energy from. Here, too, she runs into Lozzie again.

Now that she sees her up close, Heather sees that Lozzie's dream-avatar is...mostly representative, but not completely. Tragically, the trans flag hoodie seems to have been a creation of Lozzie's own imagination. She also is a lot thinner, unhealthier, and dirtier than her dream projection. About what you'd expect, I suppose.

There's also something weirder about her, something about her eyes that Heather has trouble articulating exactly. Probably related to whatever her whole deal is.

She had something wrong with her eyes—her lazy, heavy-lidded look from our shared dreams was held in check by panic and fear, but it was still present, a slackness in her extraocular muscles.

I suppose I hadn't been entirely myself in the dreams either.

Heh, I wonder what that last line is supposed to getting at, aye Heather?

Pictured above: Heather's projected avatar within dreamspace.

After establishing that they do, in fact, remember each other and know who one another are, Lozzie starts filling Heather in on what the hell all this even is. Not in much detail, of course. They do have more immediate concerns to focus on. But enough.

This organism has suffered a kind of...dimensional collision...against the outside of our own reality. The green, fibrous landscape is just what it feels like; a scab, grown over a wound shaped like the piece of our world that it hit. The "upper" edge of that scab, as we percieve directions, overlaps with the section of Earth's surface that Sharrowford is build on, and thus Sharrowford's landmarks were imprinted into the shape of the wound. How big the wound actually is - how many cubic miles of Earth it's contiguous with, and whether Sharrowford is at the center of it or just one of several towns it happens to overlap - is unstated for now.

Interestingly, this implies that these entities are acted upon by mass within a given dimension. It doesn't seem to have scabbed over a blob of our reality that includes the air, or the empty space in low orbit above England. Just the planetary surface and solid objects built onto it. Fascinating.

On a more sinister note: Lozzie strongly implies that the creature's mishap was no accident, and that her brother's predecessor in the Brotherhood of the New Sun's leadership was responsible for luring it into a collision course, around twenty years ago. It's only much more recently though, under Alexander's leadership and exploiting Lozzie's own unique powers, that they've been able to set up easy two-way travel between the wounded creature's dimension and Earth's using the warp tunnels.

Also, the giant flying blimp-things hovering over the wound are in fact the creature's larvae. Hovering around their wounded mother, trying to keep any parasites that they can notice away from the injury. Alexander has unfortunately learned how to spoof their perceptions, presumably using a version of the same trick the last boss used to lure the alien into this trap in the first place.

The creature is still alive. Sort of. Lozzie seems to have trouble explaining if its wounded and healing, or wounded and dying, or something else that has less of an analogue in biology as we know it.

That's not all, though...

Lozzie attributes her own powers, indeed her own entire *state of being,* to the creature. She had some sort of communion with the entity - specifically, with the star-like vital node located in the chasm deep below them - and it changed her. Alexander has been trying to repeat the process ever since then, trying to create an army of Lozzies. It's not explicit, but the subtext pretty strongly implies that he's motivated by envy of his little sister.

More gruesomely, those bodies that he turned into zombies? Yeah, that wasn't the first thing he used them for. Nor are they the only bodies. As Lozzie walks Heather across the scaffolding to guide her back up, they come across a laboratory set up overlooking the node.

The platform in the depths would have seemed large, if it was not hidden so deep in the vast and unnatural cave. At one end of the platform a stout metal table faced the void, fitted with restraint straps to hold a person, and cut with channels to collect spilled blood. It was covered in dark stains. A helmet made of copper was anchored to the head of the table, and inside I could see little patches of scalp and burned hair. A thick cable of bare copper and woven rope descended from the helmet, led off the side of the platform, and snaked down into the void below. A triple-layered magic circle in stark clean white ringed the table, surrounded by the ghostly remains of dozens upon dozens of older circles.

A shrivelled twist of cooked gristle lay atop the table, like a piece of meat left too long over a fire, no larger than a cat.

The cages were full of corpses.

Perhaps a dozen, if I could have counted. Dried, desiccated, preserved from rot by some quality of the air. Some were bound and gagged in death, others curled up and shrunken. One had gnawed off his own fingers—I doubted rats were responsible, down here. Several had their eyes bandaged as if blind, the dressings caked with dried blood, the faintest green-gold glow showing through the fabric. All were lumpy and misshapen under their filthy clothes, as if changed in hidden ways. None could have been older than twenty. Several were small children.

Lozzie spoke, waved her arms about, and grabbed my hand, but I didn't really hear her.

I wasn't surprised. I'd seen the prelude to this discovery, the zombies made from kidnapped homeless people, the ape demon impaled outside the castle as a warning. The fruit of cruelty.

I'd never seen evil before. The Eye wasn't evil—it was alien. Despite everything it had done to me and to my sister, despite the torture of having my mind altered, my reality bent and broken, the Eye was not evil. The star in the void wasn't evil either, nor were the nightmare spirits I saw every day of my life, nor were the inhabitants of the hundred Outside places I'd been to.

This little space, this thing done by people—this was evil.

This filthy secret, this was the centre of what the Sharrowford Cult was doing. I didn't need to be a genius to connect the dots; the corpses to the table, the helmet, the cable dropping into the depths, down to that thing in the void.

Forced communion.

Lozzie urges Heather not to think about it. At least, not for as long as she doesn't think she can do anything about it.

Likewise, she urges her not to stare too long or come too close to the glowing star down below them. The alien is still conscious, to a certain degree, and it is suffering. Both physically and emotionally, as its children continue hovering around it fruitlessly hoping that their mother will come back to them. It wants someone to comfort it, but if Heather opens her mind to it will probably overwhelm her. She'll forget about anything and everything else, and probably end up starving to death unless Alexander catches her first. Lozzie does not believe that it has the ability to empower another human the way that it empowered her; either it used up that ability with Lozzie, or Alexander's attempts at forcing it since then have done too much additional damage.

...

I love how Alexander's organization basically consists of torturing slaves into torturing other slaves into torturing still other slaves. Plus the odd hired schmuck or three.

The implication that he inherited the Brotherhood from an older, possibly related, precursor and is not-very-competently trying to use the assets that the predecessor collected also plays into a big theme of this plot arc. Evelyn, Twil, and Alexander, three in-over-their-head heirs of morally dubious wizard dynasties. Trying to deal with the baggage they've inherited in their own ways. Either abandoning, reforming, or doubling down on what their elders did.

...

As Heather is still trying to wrap her mind around the horror she's just witnessed, Zheng finds them. It appears that she's back under Alexander's control now, and she's bidding them to follow her.


Next post, I'll finish "The Other Side of Nowhere" and do some more prolonged analysis of it and "Conditions of Absolute Reality." The two really are parts one and two of the same story arc, and that arc closes with the end of "Other Side."