Underland - Chapter 28: The Tree of Life

It took him hours to reach the bottom.

Valdemar had long stopped feeling pain by then, or anything else for that matter. The boiling blood had consumed his skin and his pain receptors along with it, leaving nothing but the flayed meat underneath.

Any other person would have perished from the experience, the flesh stripped from their bones. But even this charnel pit could only counteract Valdemar’s regeneration. His body generated biomass faster than the boiling blood could erode it, but not fast enough to let him recover.

There was no denying his inhuman origins now.

The Mask of the Nightwalker had survived the descent as well, pumping fresh air into his lungs. Its icy surface contrasted with the searing warmth of the bloody pit and its magical vision allowed Valdemar to see even in the deep darkness of Bethor’s tower. In this case, blindness might have been a mercy.

The Dark Lord said that his lair’s heart lay at the bottom and Valdemar thought he meant it figuratively. He wasn’t.

The summoner had landed on a pulsating, beating bed of meat. Countless bodies had merged together, their flesh intermixing into a vast field of arms, eyeless faces, and festering blisters. Bloated wound-pits inhaled the boiling blood only to pump it back into slimy arteries above. The tunnel through which Valdemar had fallen was only one of many.

All the corpses whose blood fueled the tower had fused in its core. Derros, dokkars, humans, troglodytes, warbeasts, surface monsters… Lord Bethor did not discriminate. Valdemar even noticed the rotting skull of a colossal dragon peeking out of the structure, its bleaching bones half-sunk by fleshy tendrils. The gelatinous, quivering structure spanned as far as Valdemar’s vision could see; maybe it ran underneath the entire Domain.

And if he couldn’t escape, the summoner would become part of it.

At least nobody is looking, Valdemar thought as he observed the ceiling. Flesh and organic material covered the bloody arteries and walls of the tower, but none of them had eyes. Not even the gods would gaze into this dark hell, this deadly abyss.

Valdemar attempted to redirect the blood to lift himself back to the surface but he felt resistance. An opposing force pushed back against his will, denying his magic, denying his power, denying him. Valdemar thought that Bethor himself had stripped him of his magic, but the more he struggled, the more he doubted.

The blood itself refused to obey.

Without his magic, Valdemar attempted to swim back to the surface the old-fashioned way. His body was too weak from the descent and refused to move.

Maybe I should reshape my arms, Valdemar thought. His own body’s resources were already strained countering the boiling of his flesh, so he turned to the festering heart for sustenance. I could reattach my limbs. Maybe I could create more.

Hands grabbed his flayed arms.

Valdemar looked on, horrified, as the eyeless faces of the abyss looked at him. Before he knew it, the heart of the tower started pulling him into itself, adding his flesh to the whole.

No, Valdemar panicked, trying to break free. But the more he struggled, the deeper the heart pulled him in.

‘We are one.’

These words were not words. No mouth uttered them. They were just chaotic feelings that his empathic mind struggled to translate.

The hateful flesh carried the malice of the dead.

Valdemar’s true sight told him that the souls were long gone, but their grudges still infested their remains. Their lingering feelings had coalesced into a shapeless force; not a soul, but a haunt, a resentful will at the very heart of the world.

And now, it wanted Valdemar’s flesh too.

Let me go, the summoner asked. When his plea went unanswered, he started giving orders with his will backed by magic. Let me go, I said!

But though Valdemar was skilled in the Blood, the collective’s power dwarfed his own.

‘Your lord has no power here, red prince,’ the hateful flesh replied. ‘Our king cast you down with us.’

The hateful flesh existed in fear of the Dark Lord above. It hated and worshiped him in equal measure. Valar Bethor was a god and the corpses were his throne.

What was one more body buried beneath the foundations?

Time lost its meaning.

Valdemar’s face had joined the living tapestry at the tower’s bottom, only his mask peeking out of the flesh. The word ‘body’ meant nothing to him anymore. Without skin, all the flesh looked the same; the sinews, the veins, the nerves and the organs had interconnected with a thousand pathways. He had become a cog in a living machine.

And yet his mind endured.

Maybe it was the Mask of the Nightwalker that allowed Valdemar to keep his sanity. Something in it repelled the hateful flesh. Or maybe it would be a gradual process, his will eroded over the years until he surrendered his individuality.

It would never happen.

‘We are one,’ the flesh said.

Without me, Valdemar thought as he tried to focus. His mind pushed back the whispering cacophony.

Should he sleep and dream? Close his eyes and think of the well? Would his nightmare startle even this hateful flesh and make it recoil?

‘No connection here,’ the collective replied as it sensed his plan. ‘No escape. Only walls.’

Valdemar couldn’t sleep. To dream meant to dive into the collective unconscious shared by all living things, but the tower acted as an impermeable skin of steel keeping his mind walled in.

This entire place worked similarly to his Painted Field; an enclosed realm separated from the outside world. A pocket realm, made of flesh rather than paint. Neither could he summon anything. Nothing could enter or escape this cage, not even calls or pleas. Like a bottle of wine, a lid kept everything inside.

A gatekeeper called Valar Bethor.

Though this abyss had many arteries, they all converged at one place at the summit. The Dark Lord heard Valdemar’s attempts to call interdimensional outsiders to his side and cast his demands back into the abyss.

But… were all paths truly closed to the summoner?

Valdemar focused on the mask he wore, losing himself in the cold. This time, he didn’t even need to sleep to dream of the surface.

The boiling abyss of Bethor’s tower vanished, swallowed by an even deeper darkness. A cold frozen wasteland of snow and flensing wind expanded before his eyes. The ruins of an elven city lay buried beneath a great glacier next to a frozen sea. The biting cold could turn steel brittle and chill the soul.

The Whitemoon overlooked him from the night sky and answered his existence not with whispers, but silence. Sometimes purple auroras flared in the heavens, only for the darkness to drown them as soon as they appeared.

In truth, Valdemar found the experience oddly comforting. The silence and mental separation from the hateful flesh eased the burden on his mind, allowing him to rest and recover mentally. The silence came as a relief.

Valdemar looked around himself, but found the world smaller than in his first dream. He towered over frozen houses identical to those he saw in the Silent King’s realm, although his steps produced no sound. The winds flowed around him as if he were part of the atmosphere itself, a living void.

He moved towards the frozen sea by no will of his own. His body, if it was even his own, walked by the will of another. Only when Valdemar reached the shore did he stop and kneel. His blackened, clawed hand swept snow aside, polished the ice underneath, and looked at his own reflection.

The visage that faced him didn’t belong to a man or any creature native to Underland. Its shape vaguely reminded Valdemar of a gaunt humanoid, but with elongated legs, crooked horns, and too many arms for a man. He couldn’t see the creature’s skin within the darkness, though he noticed patches of white fur and black scales. A spiraling white crater marred its face, a cold volcano oozing mist rather than lava. Valdemar observed as the reflection opened its vertical maw, but he saw neither fangs nor throat; only the blackness between stars and icicles bent into the shape of tentacles.

The Nightwalker.

As Valdemar looked through the Stranger’s eyes, so did it peer through the mask.

What are you? Valdemar thought. What do you want?

For a moment, he thought the ancient entity couldn’t hear or understand him. That the mask only stopped at letting them share their sights.

But then the creature raised a clawed, crooked hand and pointed it at its reflection.

You? Valdemar thought, trying to understand the creature. You are me?

Another hand covered the creature’s crater of an eye, but only half of it. A clawed finger pointed at the obscured side of its face, then back at the reflection.

Half? Half of me?

No. Not halves, but sides.

You are the me from another side? Valdemar tried to translate. The Nightwalker hadn’t made a sound so far, and appeared unable of vocalization. Which other side?

The Nightwalker looked up, and Valdemar gazed at the Whitemoon’s ghoulish visage. Only then did Valdemar realize the truth in all of its horrors.

The Whitemoon was more than a rogue moon.

It was a Stranger with a herald of its own.

And since sides implied a conflict of some sort… Valdemar guessed he might have found the answer to an ancient question that bothered countless mages across history: why had the Whitemoon come to this world?

To wage war on another Stranger.

Maybe it had tried to freeze the world’s surface in an attempt to slay the creature occupying Underland’s tunnels, only to find it warmly hidden beneath the world’s crust; out of reach from the cold and the alien horrors the rogue moon brought with it.

The Dark Lords knew the truth too; or at least Lord Och and Bethor certainly did. Had they covered it up to prevent a panic? To avoid revealing the existence of the eyes and their immense reach?

What does it have to do with me? Valdemar thought, knowing the Stranger would hear him.

The Nightwalker focused back at the frozen sea, before raising a hand and shattering the ice with a mighty blow. The Stranger gazed at its cracked reflection.

Break the ice?

Valdemar thought for a second that the creature meant it literally, before putting the two and two together. The Dark Lords had set a barrier separating the surface from Underland below, allowing only a few explorers to pass through. Whitemoon cultists regularly attempted to break these wards and receive blessings from their alien masters above.

The Nightwalker wanted him to follow in their footsteps.

No, Valdemar replied, knowing better than to let this ancient horror descend into Underland. Monsters from the surface hungered for warm blood, and from its cultists’ actions, this creature was no different.

And even if it was only interested in slaying the eyes, the Whitemoon hated life itself. It had caused the extinction of countless species and the survivors sheltering in Underland would suffer the same fate if it had its way.

Sensing his refusal, the Nightwalker raised its many hands at the skies. The freezing winds swirled above him, carrying snow and shards of ice. Purple auroras came to life above them and joined the storm, their lights bending into a dancing spiral that swallowed the skies. So terrible was the weather that the frozen city in the background trembled, the glacier collapsing from the sheer power of the battering winds.

It was a powerful spell if Valdemar had ever seen one.

But not one from the Blood.

It was a form of magic unlike any Valdemar had ever seen; not one that focused on manipulating life and death, but forces that were never alive in the first place. The wind, the cold, even cosmic radiation. He tried to understand how it worked, to analyze how the Nightwalker manipulated the elements, only for the Stranger to cancel his spell. The snow fell down to earth as the winds calmed themselves and the auroras died in the skies. The Nightwalker had given his audience a demonstration, but it asked for something in return for more.

Power.

The Nightwalker promised Valdemar magical secrets and power in exchange for his cooperation. It was a bribery attempt in all its crudeness. Even so, what would I use this magic for in a world of the dead? Valdemar asked rhetorically.

The Nightwalker once more covered half its face, a finger moving from one side to the other.

Switch sides? Was the Nightwalker offering Valdemar to become one of the alien creatures inhabiting the surface? To cast away his humanity—what little half he had inherited from his mother—and embrace the cold?

It might have been an appealing offer to a depraved cultist eager for power, but not to Valdemar. He didn’t bother trying to deceive the Nightwalker either; if it could understand the summoner’s thoughts, then lies wouldn’t work.

Still, it cost nothing to be polite. Valdemar thanked the Nightwalker for the information it had shared, but firmly denied his offer.

The summoner sensed no anger from the Stranger, nor did he receive threats. The creature simply looked at its cracked reflections without a word.

The creature was patient. Cold could turn even the hardest steel brittle with time and it was unchanging as ice. It would wait for Valdemar to change his mind.

The summoner closed his eyes and the connection with it, his mind returning to the bottom of Bethor’s tower. He meditated on what he had learned and tried to make sense out of it.

There was a war going on, with mankind caught in the middle.

The Blood was a connection, life; even the undead were half-alive. This ‘Cold’ that the Nightwalker used relied on forces that were never alive in the first place. It reminded Valdemar of how elementals manipulated fire or wind. The Blood and the Cold were opposites.

But my tower will resist your attempts. To use its power, you must conquer it. You must understand the true nature of the Blood.

Lord Bethor said that Valdemar could only escape by figuring out this riddle. He thought he already knew what the Blood was, namely that it was an esoteric force of magic; but the existence of sorcery beyond the usual framework called that into question.

And if the Blood was truly linked to life and death, why couldn’t Valdemar use it normally in this pit of flesh? Even if magic created sympathetic connections between individuals, the summoner should have been capable of tapping into his own body’s reserves to cast spells just fine.

Unless… unless he had misunderstood his magic entirely? That no matter how strong he could become, he still needed to tap into an outside element to use the Blood at all? Something that the tower cut him off from? But what? What was missing?

Valdemar opened his eyes, his buried mask facing the fleshy walls.

The eyes were missing.

A black pool that transformed life into something else…

A primordial dream acting as a subset of a larger Stranger’s reverie, protecting sentient life from the raw emotions of the Qlippoths…

Something that had existed long before mankind delved into Underland… from the very dawn of the world…

It’s its Blood, Valdemar realized in horror. The blood of our progenitor.

Separation was an illusion. All life in Underland shared a single lineage; they were but pieces of something far larger than themselves.

“The cancer theory seems to be the likeliest explanation for the biological oddities we observed, Lord Och; mutant cells breaking off from the body, weakening it and causing a reaction.”

It all made a grim kind of sense now.

But what was Valdemar’s place in all of this? A tool to destroy the infection? A way to reincorporate it? Or an unforeseen mutation, a cosmic biological weapon?

You are the me from the other side.

These were questions for later. Valdemar would have all the time to ponder them once he escaped this hellhole.

Now that he understood the true nature of the Blood, the summoner considered the hateful flesh with new eyes. He had tried to control it the way a master brought a dog to heel, but you couldn’t inspire fear and obedience in your own hands or feet. Either it was a part of you or it wasn’t.

His mistake was to see this heart of corpses as an outside element he had to bend to his will; instead of a separated part of himself that he had to reincorporate into the whole.

This time, Valdemar stopped struggling. The flesh welcomed him at first, welcoming him into the whole.

Only when the summoner sprung the trap did it try to reject him, and by then it was too late.

This place was a cancer separated from the Blood outside, a mass of corrupted cells lumped together and cut off from the body outside by walls of steel. It would exist forever in isolation, growing with each piece it absorbed. You didn’t sew a tumor into a healthy body, and so Valdemar didn’t try.

Instead, his will became a virus. His nerves spread to the corpse-network trying to consume him and his blackened blood with it. Valdemar’s consciousness infected the hateful flesh, and where strength had failed, subversion prevailed.

My consciousness isn’t in my brain, Valdemar realized as eyes opened on the fleshy walls. Not those of his progenitor, but his own. It’s in every cell of my body.

He was not a human, but the blood of a god incarnated into a man-shaped vessel. As long as a single part of him remained, his soul would remain anchored to this plane.

No wonder Lord Och advised him against leaving severed arms around. With time they would become mindless cancers of their own.

Valdemar could have probably infected and subverted the entire tower given time, but it would take more mental effort than he was willing to invest. It would change him too, and he might stop thinking of himself as human and become something else. Something like Valar Bethor or his ‘father.’

So Valdemar stopped once he had assimilated enough flesh to rebuild a body of his own; albeit one larger and capable of carrying him back to the surface. His human self was buried in a three-meters tall armor made of harvested corpses lumped together. A hundred hands worked as one to carry him upward through the artery leading back to the summit.

The boiling warmth of the blood around him eroded it slowly, until nothing but a husk remained once he saw the light above.

At long last, Valdemar’s hands, his real hands, emerged from the boiling pool. Air hurt as his nerves reformed, veins pumping black blood regenerating through his arms. He lifted himself onto the metal platform as he cast away his borrowed flesh-suit, letting it fall back into the tower’s artery. If anything, Valdemar felt like an amphibian crawling on land for the first time.

Lord Bethor was meditating in the middle of the pool, his armor gone and his eyes were closed. Valdemar didn’t interrupt him. He instead rested on the steel platform, waiting for his native regeneration to kick back in and rebuild his skin.

The process took only minutes.

Once he had fully recovered, Valdemar removed the Mask of the Nightwalker and put it aside. He didn’t care if he was naked. He was just happy to breathe true air again.

“Do you understand now?” Lord Bethor asked without opening his eyes. “What the Blood is?”

Valdemar sighed. “This is a body,” he whispered, “and we are cancerous cells.”

And the Dark Lord confirmed his theory. “All life native to Underland was born from the black blood your bodyguard saw, primordial slime that slowly evolved into humans, dokkars, dogs, and dragons over eons. We began to develop a consciousness separated from our godly progenitor, walling our minds off from its dreams and nightmares. I daresay our existence was a complete accident.”

Valdemar blinked as a crack in space opened right above him and fresh mage robes fell through onto his lap. The summoner didn’t even know teleportation could work with lifeless matter alone.

“Ialdabaoth,” Lord Bethor said as Valdemar clothed himself. The word resonated in the summoner’s mind like a dark promise, an ominous echo. “That is the name the Pleromians called our maker. It dreams, Valdemar. It mindlessly manifests the Qlippoths in its slumber, but though it often shows flashes of awareness they never last. It is a sleepwalking god, almighty, unaware, unconscious.”

“We only wield a piece of its power,” Valdemar whispered, the clothes feeling comfortably warm compared to the boiling blood of the tower.

“Yes. Though our skills in magic vary from the strength of our souls and bodies, we all borrow a sliver of our maker’s magic to a degree. It can affect even life from outside its lineage to a degree or call to other dimensions, as your meeting with the Silent King showed.”

And it had attracted foes from the darkness of space.

“How do I fit in all of this?” Valdemar asked. “Why was I born?”

Unlike his teacher, Lord Bethor deigned to give a straightforward answer.

“You are a bridge,” he said. “Not only between worlds, but between our progenitor and mankind. Perhaps you were meant to unite us back with Ialdabaoth or to destroy us, the way we burn tumors. I do not know, and what the gods want does not matter. You are cursed with free will Valdemar Verney, as we all are.”

Valdemar wondered if he could infect other beings of flesh with a single mind. Maybe that was the purpose that the Verney cult intended for him, to serve as a weapon to return castaway parts into the whole.

If so, he wanted no part in it. Valdemar liked his free will and didn’t want to take it away from anyone else.

No wonder the Primordial Dream reacts badly to me, the summoner thought with a grim form of amusement. He had a strong connection to it by virtue of his mixed parentage, but he was a subversive element inside a rebellious corner of the dreamlands. I truly need to build a new Painted Field here.

“Lord Bethor, why did you create that thing at the bottom?” Valdemar asked as he moved back to his feet. “What insight did you hope to gain?”

“That will be a discussion for another day,” Lord Bethor said. Clearly, he wasn’t one for idle chatter. “Now that you understand yourself and transcended the limits of a human form, we shall focus on body-modification and shapeshifting spells. We will also lay the groundwork for you to learn advanced summoning arts. You will become like a dragon, as competent in melee as at range. But first…”

“Yes?”

“You will get some rest. Tiring you out beyond what is necessary will only make you slower, and the first ritual I shall teach you cannot suffer a failure. It will influence your entire summoning career.”

This time, Lord Bethor opened his eyes.

“It is time that you summon your familiar.”