Slumrat Rising

The sky was as blue as it ever was. But it wasn’t. The sky was clear as night, filled with a billion billion billion stars. But it wasn’t. The sky was red, the color of cold flames and hot blood, filled with screaming ghosts and raging demons. But it wasn’t. It was a beautiful blue sky today.

The Green Sea was warm as a mother’s love, or as cold as a mother’s contempt. It was hydrogen, oxygen, sodium and other trace minerals. It was one of the four elements, mixed, as all material things are, with the other elements like earth and air. It too was filled with demons and ghosts.

The world was a living, thriving, writhing thing, twisting madly over on itself. Everything an endlessly deep well of relations and meanings, waiting to be pulled up and savored by some thirsty soul.

Truth thought he had gone mad. Then he glanced up at the sun and knew he had. He barely glanced at it before he had to turn away. The ‘truth’ was not so easily understood, and even less easily defined.

On reflection, he should probably have considered that multiple things can be true at the same time. Likewise, things can have multiple meanings that are all valid. Trying to force yourself to see, and be the arbiter of, the truth of everything in your immediate vicinity was a bold choice.

At least he could see the base now. It was hard to see anything else.

The base rose from the sea, rising like a holy mountain. A place where heaven, earth and sea all intersected. A place for offerings, for worship, for the confirmation of the Mandate of Heaven. This was the holiness granted by the world, a place where one could walk up the starry path to wisdom. A kindness, a generous opportunity, and an invitation all in one.

The base suppressed the sea, a floating cathedral designed by spiders and by those possessed by terrible visions of dark places. A place of madness written in stone and steel and awful magics, all hinting at deeper truths. Truths that would shatter your too-mortal mind if you grasped even a crumb of them. Between the girders and flying buttresses stretched wires of ghosts and spirits. The statuary were nailed demons and human souls bound in marble and jade, screaming and clawing at their prisons as they tried to escape. Each and every brick and stone was carved with strange runes and sigils, operating on vile principles.

It was also a rather large concrete box sitting on a larger concrete base built on top of a small shoal rising out of the sea bed. It had been painted white. About fifty meters away was an empty dock, with a guard house next to the door. There was also an enormous shutter door, so huge it was clearly designed for ships to pass through when it was raised. It was closed now. No signs of flags on it. Why bother? Anyone who could see it knew exactly who the base belonged to.

The meanings shifted and slid around, ranging from the secular to the sacred to the profane. Truth figured out how to speak and called Perks over. He didn’t try to look at the snake just yet. He just scooped him up without looking, hopped out of the water and jogged to the dock. He would sort things out a little more when he was sitting on dry land.

Sitting on the dock was barely better than looking at it. He could feel it changing and shifting underneath him. This wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted to see the truth, to nail it down. He knew that he wouldn’t suddenly have perfect wisdom and understand the truth of all things. It was always going to be a journey, a progressive effort to understand. That was fine. This? This was madness. Lost between the layers of reality, unable to find the true path.

He looked down at Perks and saw a snake. And a snake demon. And a human spine. And a penis. And hunger. And wisdom. And betrayal. Meanings flickering over and through him. All ‘true,’ to varying degrees of symbolism and transcendent meaning, but so wild and multiform that they were paralyzing.

He couldn’t go on like this. He had seen some maddening things, but this was literal insanity. The thought kept spinning around and around. He clung to the thought, as though remembering it would protect him from being lost in all the things he was seeing. If he was going to anything more than scream at the sky, he needed an answer. He could acknowledge that the other answers existed, but he needed one thing to be true. One referent, to judge the other truths against.

He closed his eyes and focused on his breathing. Ignoring what breathing meant. Ignoring how his lungs were bellows, stoking the fires of his life. How the very act of breathing nourished him with the life-giving energy in the air, and polluted him with the impure air of the moral world. How nothing could touch him that he didn’t permit, and how he was one inseparable being with the world he was inhaling. Watching the thoughts fly past, not attaching an emotion to them. Keeping his inner eye firmly on finding solutions.

While all the things he was seeing were true on some level, they were not true in the everyday meaning of the word. Perks was not a human spine, and never had been. He was most assuredly not a human penis. By extension, Truth was one hundred percent certain his trouser-snake had neither scales nor fangs. A symbolic truth only got you so far, and generally, “so far” was a pretty short distance. The world simply couldn’t function that way. Regardless of the lack of enlightenment on this backwater rock, he couldn’t imagine other worlds running on endless shifting layers of meaning.

Someone was buying those talismans Starbrite manufactured. Someone was selling books and luxuries back. And food. So, so much food. Billions upon billions of tonnes of food had been imported by the Shattervoid every year. You could make rice as symbolic as you liked, but someone had to grow it. There had to be an ‘it’ to grow.

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The world, all the worlds, had some baseline, agreed on, meaning. He looked at that thought for a moment, then gave his forehead a firm, and very true, slap.

“Perks, I must confess I’m not a particularly smart man.”

Oh? Why?

“Why what?”

Why must you confess that? Is it a crime? Perks sounded mildly interested.

“In this case, it is a figure of speech. I have been using the Blessing of the Bronze Sea all wrong. Or, at least, not understanding what it was for. In my defense, it sure seems like nobody else understands what it’s for either.”

Do you need defending? Perhaps you shouldn’t have confessed, and remained silent.

Truth had a sudden flash of sympathy for Merkovah. He wouldn’t let it stop him in the future, but he did feel it. “Orthodoxy. What does it mean to establish an orthodoxy?”

I have no idea.

“It means we all agree on one truth and one reality. Even if you don’t really one-hundred-percent agree with it on the inside, you go along with it. And by agree, I mean you don’t fight the person who establishes it. And orthodoxy is whatever the boss says it is. Inside the span of my arms, I am the boss.”

Truth slowly poured power into the Blessing of the Bronze Sea. While those higher levels of meaning might exist, he wasn’t there yet. He also firmly believed that symbolism was strictly for people who can’t get to the damn point and say things plain. Symbolism, like subtext, was for cowards. No, only the secular was real. Just… a higher level understanding of the secular. Maybe with a thin schmeer of magic over the top. After all, how can you call magic fake? It was as real as gravity, and since gravity seemed to stop working once you got off the planet, magic worked in more places.

He let the feeling cycle through him. The dock under him firmed up, becoming rough concrete. He stopped smelling blood and semen, and just smelled the ocean again. He looked down at perks. A tan rat snake looked up at him. It was almost certainly not betrayal made flesh. He gently stroked Perks, enjoying how the scales felt under his fingertips.

He looked up at the white painted walls of the base. He could see it quite plainly. He could also see the galaxy of spells and souls flowing in and out of it. Endless sparks of light, tied to each other by spiderweb-thin spell traceries. Looking like nets sieving a hurricane.

“I’m sure that’s nothing.” Truth murmured.

What is?

“The thing that is definitely something important and bad. Come on, let’s go kill Starbrite and break things.”

Can I have my nest back?

“Your… oh. Yes. I should probably put on clothes. Somehow that had stopped mattering.” Truth muttered, and peeked into his storage ring. He grabbed a towel and dried off. The clothes he wound up wearing were almost all looted from the army- combat boots, army issue socks, belt, shirt, trousers… everything but the underwear. Civilian underwear was better, so he wore that. Perks happily returned to his nest.

The door wasn’t marked, as there was only one door. It had a lock, but a very basic one. Truth suspected it came pre-installed. If the enemy couldn’t be stopped by a reality distortion field, they certainly weren’t going to be stopped by a locked door. Why bother with anything heavy duty?

He casually picked the lock, heard the latch click open, and pulled on the handle. Which did nothing. He tugged it again. Still nothing. He checked the latch- yes, everything was properly unlocked. He carefully checked for wards or hidden spells, but didn’t find anything.

Was it a decoy door? Entrance was through the roof or the massive internal dock? It would make sense. If you could get an enemy dumb enough to stand out in the open on the dock, it would be security malpractice not to take advantage of that.

He jumped almost thoughtlessly, as a wave smashed over the dock and rushed up the side of the base. No barnacles on the paint. Must be special, somehow. It happened again when he checked the hinges. They looked real. Then again when he tried to shine a flashlight in the cracks of the door, to see if there were any hidden mechanisms. Then again-

He felt like swearing. They were on a shoal in the middle of the ocean. The waves would be constant. Therefore, the door was no doubt bolted from the inside to keep the waves from just smashing their way in. No wonder the hinges were on the outside- you would be insane to build a door that opened inward under the circumstances.

The door was sealed, mechanically, from the inside. No worries about the magic going out, they would be just fine. If someone wanted to come in through the door, they would need to get someone inside the base to open it for them. It was all very reasonable. Sensible, even.

Truth could feel the verbal violence bubbling up, trying to escape. He could remember the insane architecture hidden in every scrap of the base. The rational design was just one truth. It was the one he was permitting at the moment, but he would be a fool not to remember the others.

Could he jump up to the roof? Probably not. On the other hand, he would really prefer not to hack the door into pieces just to get into the building. He gave a hard jump just to see how high he could go.

“Hellfire!” He shot four stories straight up, and was still rising when he grabbed the lip of the roof and swung himself over.

“Well. Thank you angel and my Rough Patron?” He muttered, patting himself down for no good reason. The roof was mostly empty. There were a few well shielded vents, and a rooftop access door. There was also, he noticed happily, evidence of smokers. He checked over the door. Locked. A minute later, he heard a remarkably heavy chunk noise from releasing bolts at the top and bottom of the door. He opened it, peeked around carefully, and stepped through. He was in.

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