Slumrat Rising - Vol. 3 Chap. 55 Birds Aren't Real

Truth woke up with questions. Did I just dream?

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Is that what you are calling the past life memories or visions or whatever now?

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If you don’t know, who should I ask? Truth got up and stretched, leading into a round of morning cultivation. Making sure he was feeling limber, fit, and ready to tackle the day. He had a feeling it would be a long one. He dug a hole and buried his duffel and spell bird. It took a long while, but he wanted to come back for them. He even left his beloved scarf in the duffel. He wanted as few encumbrances as possible.

He took the heavy needler, some water, a little food, a drawstring sack holding a few useful talismans he had modified. It would do. After all, if he couldn’t get the job done today, he would come back here and plan for tomorrow. A job like this took patience.

He set off towards Happori at a ground-consuming jog. A jog that would comfortably outpace city traffic, but he was used to that now. The Blessing of the Silent Forest always seemed to work better in the woods, though he knew that was probably his imagination. He just seemed to drift through, a speeding ghost leaving no tracks on the dry earth. Bending no branches. Scattering no scent. Rushing towards where his prey had its den.

It all felt rather empowering and special, right up to the point where he put his foot down and knew he had badly screwed up. It took incredible balance, reflexes, and muscle control to leave him flailing, balanced on one foot, as faint steam boiled up around the other. It was an even more impressive demonstration of sheer strength and grace when he was able to crouch on one leg, then leap backward off the same leg, landing a dozen feet away. Abner’s Amble might not be his favorite spell, but it certainly had its uses.

Truth froze, waiting for an explosion. It didn’t happen. He checked his foot- no damage. No signs of corrosion or anything similar. No signs of damage to the ground either.

“Thrush, scout. See if you can figure out why my foot started steaming.”

“If that is your wish, Master,” He murmured as though he were helping a junkie find a vein.”Though I should caution you that doing so will likely destroy this material shell of mine and require you to resummon me when you have reached safety.”

“Wait, really? What is it?”

“I do not know.”

“Then how do you know it would kill you?”

“I felt it damaging my connection to this world. Not intentionally, in the sense of a ward of banishment or forbiddance. It had a feeling of incompatibility.” Thrush stuck its beak under its wing and groomed for a moment. “I am embarrassed to say I don’t know how to explain more clearly. My pride as an Air Demon in the service of Caym is hurt.”

“You weren’t in contact with the ground. Simply existing over there caused you to… not be able to hold yourself together anymore, but it wasn’t a spell effect?”

“Essentially.”

“What sort of things can do that?”

“Anything that could damage my connection to this world would be most unusual, Master.” Thrush hopped around on a low branch, seeming more curious than alarmed. “I have never been curious as to the mechanisms of our embodiment outside of Hell. I simply know, as all demons do, that I require the energy of this place to remain here. A sort of shell of energy to hold the egg of my existence. I get this by feeding on vermin, unclean things, different forms of pain, sin, and most importantly, the grace of my Master.”

Truth nodded along. This was all standard stuff.

“I would say, then, that my “eggshell” dissolves in this place, the water of the world turning to vinegar.” Thrush sounded delighted, savoring the strangeness of things. “The very rules of this place, the essential nature of cosmic energy, have shifted slightly. You don’t feel it; you are more than real enough to endure the minute changes. I, on the other hand, as the least of imps, can only dissipate and return to Hell.”

“So why did my foot start to steam when I touched the ground?”

“I regret my ignorance profoundly, Master. It is painful not to know what others do, is it not?”

Ah, there it is. You can take the imp out of Hell, but not the Hell out of the imp.

“Could it be a sort of alarm or detection spell?”

“If it is, it operates on no principle I understand, Great One.”

Truth tried to work it through. His feet steamed, but not the rest of him. The nature of reality was subtly off the closer he got to Happori Village, but he was “real” enough to ignore any negative effects. The problem was thus his shoes, something about his feet in particular, or the ground. Presumably some combination of the latter two. Just to be on the safe side, he took his shoes off and tossed them roughly where he had stopped before. Nothing.

“Master, your feet…” Thrush chuckled like he had just seen a drunk driver hit a school bus. Truth looked down. His feet were very faintly steaming.

“It looks like the shoes were insulating me from whatever the effect is.” He raised his foot into the air. It was still steaming. He balanced on one foot for a while, watching the other steam in the air. Someone else might have found the pose challenging- most people can’t keep their foot extended head high for five minutes straight. It took him no particular effort. Body cultivation, he had long since concluded, was very fun.

“Alright, so it’s not the ground, it’s something radiating out of Happori Village. And it’s not all of me that’s reacting to it, but just my feet.”

“Forgive me, Master, but there are very faint whisps coming off your hands too. Extremely faint, but they are there.” Truth took a close look. He could see a tiny something on the very edges of his vision.

He thought a while longer. The only thing that he could think of that was at all relevant was the blessing from the Sea of Brass. A blessing which was supposed to be focused almost entirely on smiting demons. Not that he had to fight many demons since coming to Jeon, but it was a certainty that the System Astrologica would take every scrap of demon banishing power he could lay hands on.

He did his best to remember the vision he had. The skeevy old “saint” of nowhere he had ever heard of, talking about people who he had never- wait, did that old bastard mention Valentinian? Or Valentinians? Like the Meditations?! How the hell did he miss that? He could feel his mind start to derail, but he forced it back on track. That wasn’t important right this moment. The old man said something about washing the hands and feet. And evil often coming in through the feet, though he seemed more untrustworthy on that one.

Alright, so his feet and hands were extra blessed, but this didn’t feel evil, particularly. It certainly wasn’t infernal since it damaged Thrush. Truth wracked his brain. The old man was pissy. The vision was about… well it wasn’t about “evil” exactly, was it? Orthodoxy. Over and over again, he talked about enforcing orthodoxy. And orthodoxy is “whatever the boss says it is,” or words to that effect.

Huh. Was the “steam” him imposing his own orthodoxy on an unorthodox place? Or was this one of those “I am merely God’s vessel” type situations? And just what the Hell were they doing in Happori? He ran quickly back to his cache and dropped Thrush’s token in with everything else. “Hang out here. Don’t bother trying to guard anything if the opposition is more than some basic animal. Vermin, fungus, and other unclean things, help yourself.”

“I hope to see you again soon, Terrible One.”

Truth ran back towards the village, moving more quickly now. Once he saw his hands start to steam, he started experimenting as he went. Could he blend with the forest? Extremely well, it seemed. Incisive struggled. The foreknowledge was pulling in significantly more energy than it usually required, as were the scales. Even a plausible identity like “Blouth Meduti, Certified Talisman Maintenance Technician” struggled to establish itself.

Playing a hunch, Truth opted to put on an old, old identity of his. One he hadn’t worn… hardly ever, actually. He stopped in the green-gray spring woods and centered himself.

He was Truth Medici, Talisman Maintenance Technician (Provisional Cadre) (C-9-L). It was like wearing gossamer pajamas. He could practically hear the woods murmuring their approval, testifying to the truth of his existence. The steaming didn’t stop, exactly, it just stopped being important. He tried to pick out any changes that might be going on around his hands and feet, but they were too subtle. He couldn’t see the difference between his “orthodoxy” and the “heresy” of the world around him.

He slowed considerably when he got twenty kilometers out from the village. He did his best to become completely unnoticeable in the woods, shifting as close to silently as his superb physique would allow. The forest grew subtly noisy around him- birds calling, leaves blowing in the wind and brushing against each other, small things in the bushes showing why nature is called red in tooth and claw.

It set a city kid’s teeth on edge. The world was trying to tell him things, warn him about danger or opportunity, but these were all foreign signals to him. He couldn’t parse them. Only getting more and more stressed the closer he got to his target. A bird twittered overhead. Truth had read somewhere that it was a way of telling other birds to piss off or, alternatively, an invitation to get laid. In either case, he despised it. He looked around trying to spot the noisy pest. It was, as he should have expected, far up the tree. It looked… he didn’t know what it looked like. A bird that was not a duck, chicken, pidgeon, swallow or a bird of prey.

Truth eyeballed it for a moment. Something about it was off. He kept staring. It continued to be a bird. It took a moment to click. It wasn’t just a bird. It was a spelled beast or a flesh golem, stitched into useful shape and forced into a semblance of life by its masters’ magic. Unpleasant, but not unusual. He must be within the security cordon now.

Truth shook his head and turned away, then felt his eyes irresistibly dragged back to the bird. He had seen hundreds of spell beasts like that before. Where was the visceral revulsion coming from? There was something else. It was the way the bird looked so alive. More than simply mimicking life, it moved, shifted, responded to the world like it truly lived. Yet, when he looked quietly, it didn’t.

It was that gap, that horrible drop between what is perceived and expected, that was making him queasy. The bird voided itself and flapped off to the next tree over. Truth stared at the branch it had just left. White guano dried quickly in the cool spring air.

The dead bird had taken a shit. The nature of the world was different here. The orthodoxy ordained by God the Creator was being challenged by God the Usurper. Known locally as Starbrite.