The Legend of Randidly Ghosthound

“Shit,” Neveah drummed her fingers against her thighs, trying not to acknowledge the rising tide of panic as he felt Randidly’s consciousness flicker out.

Normally, he would probably have bounced back to life almost immediately, hopping back to his feet before his body had even finished skipping across the broken ground. The accumulated exhaustion caught up with him, however. When he hit the ground, he remained there, his shoulders slumped against the gravel he had torn up in his tumble. The storm that had been spinning around him lurched and stalled out. The crackling electromagnetic bolts began to falter and dissipate.

Most worryingly, the black pillar stretching between memory and genuine Nexus began to flake away and fall to pieces. The Songstress of Absence’s note of unifying silence echoed for a brief interval without support from Randidly, but already it had begun to fade.

Neveah turned her attention back to the spider: it flailed its legs a little more, but each movement meant more hunks tumbled off. The leg remained stuck in Deganawidah’s morass of spinning energy.

The spider threw a few threads, somehow trying to bind Deganawidah, but the Thrice-Drowned ignored the attempts. Only an ember of the desires that first animated the spider remained in its body. Everything else had been expended to create a massive web, connecting a large portion of the memory to a pulsing heart within the spider’s body. The emotions that had been so vicious and intimidating toward the beginning of the spider’s existence had softened. Almost as though violence had been its only choice while the emotions held together a massive and powerful body, but as the body degraded, the complexity of emotion and empathy the spider could display increased.

Fully one-third of the remaining spider teetered and hit the ground with a boom. All that remained was a long arm, stuck in Deganawidah’s vortex.

“Let us be real!” The spider screamed.

“Without purpose, any open flame is dangerous,” Deganawidah said. “To allow your surly antagonism to linger would be an abdication of responsibility.”

“REAL!” Came the spider’s eloquent reply as more crucial pieces of smelted Nether fell off its body. Neveah’s panic continued to rise as she recognized that the window of opportunity that Randidly pried open was being closed..

Deganawidah simply snorted in response and turned away from the nearly expended manifestation. Neveah chewed on her lip; as the powerful effects created by Randidly faded, Aether and Nether forces appeared to remember their previous conflict. The two armies roused themselves slowly, following the lead of the special ground trying to rip through the Nether defenses.

As the spider cracked below, Songstress’s spear cracked above. Soon, the connection between memory and reality would shatter. Randidly had poured his heart into making a miracle and it had been strangled by Deganawidah and Elhume before it could even make an attempt to bridge the gap.

Randidly’s heartbeat was even and already Neveah could feel his absorption of energy rapidly shooting upward. The recovery process was kicking into high gear, albeit hampered by the fact that he was laying in the already barren Badlands. There wasn’t much value to be taken into his body.

The spider let out one last plaintive screech. Then its body caved in on itself, the long arm tumbling away and cracking the ground. Deganawidah’s figure vanished, returning to defend Lowanna against the crusade by the Prophet.

“We don’t have fucking time for this,” Neveah muttered. Wild patterns of Aether Engravings built themselves in her mind and then were obliterated by the inevitable realization it would not be able to salvage the situation. Each of her ideas could alleviate a symptom of the failure, but she couldn’t take advantage of it in quite the right way.

For all that she thought Randidly was insane for these ‘attempts’, she couldn’t deny that the result possessed a poetic sort of inevitability. And from that, his ideas drew their staying power. Her ideas, meanwhile…

She considered rushing to Randidly’s side and donating energy, but she knew that it would require more than even she could provide quickly; most of the energy he needed was significance, which she could not provide nearly as easily as Aether. She considered picking up the buck and forcing the memory through a transformation, but now she understood Deganawidah was an impediment to that option. Her mind raced through other possibilities.

While she thought, the world didn’t bother to wait. Even after the spider's body collapsed, the spirits that Randidly had assembled lingered. They rushed to form a ghastly specter that looked at the world with desperate and hopeless eyes. They sat at the center of a fading web of connections, the veins that could have animated the memory to become… something more than it was. The black pillar between reality and the memory degraded further, until it seemed that only a strand connected them.

And then Neveah had an idea. Those lingering, fading pieces Randidly had managed to create fit together into an answer.

“Oh. Oh shit. Oh. But I don’t-” The wheels of Neveah’s mind started spinning so quickly that they couldn’t catch onto the fabric of reality and spun out. After a moment of shredded mental-rubber, they began to flow normally. A whole new path sprung up in front of her, but along with that came a whole slew of problems.

These too, she could rapidly solve. Every answer added a bit of momentum until she steamrolled through all the hurdles. Whether he meant to or not, Randidly Ghosthound had provided her with all the pieces she needed.

Even without the full shape of the solution, Neveah’s hands began to move; ideally, she would have started this process yesterday. She wrote complex Engraving sigils into the air before even fully understanding how much work she would need to pour into this. But she had been idly studying the work of Westrisser while present in the memory. She could see the methods she need to use, and she believed it would work.

The memory would become a Dungeon, real through its connection to the main Nexus.

She stretched out her boundaries to the edge of where the Aether bubble had stretched, invalidating portions of the memory of their potential for reality. The memory Aether along the bubble stayed faded due to its presence, insubstantial in comparison to the truth.

The tips of Neveah’s fingers began to burn as she began working more quickly. Actually, Randidly and Neveah had discussed this very possibility when Randidly had talked about making it a new Cohort. In the end, they had given up on the idea, because even if it was fake, the Aether constructs that were the foundation of the memory couldn’t be altered easily. A Dungeon needed a definitive edge and the only possible location for that would be beyond the bounds of the memory. Neither Randidly nor Neveah had wanted to open that can of worms.

But now that the bubble had thoughtfully invalidated a portion—

Neveah sketched out an interior barrier, projecting eight mental arms into the air in order to finish before the connection between memory and reality faded. Mana burned at the end of those mental fingers, so it seemed like a furious swarm of fireflies were engaging in the raucous party of their lives around her body. Sigils and meaning carved themselves into the air, before being quickly beamed across the intervening distance to build her unexpected miracle.

Neveah had already done the calculations for the time dilation, able to create the exact same difference between memory and the Nexus with only a split second’s amount of notation. She quickly tapped into the Lifeseal around Homewell and created knock-off versions, albeit reinforced with some of the significance patterns she had learned from Randidly, creating several Safe Zones throughout the memory.

The web of connections drawn by the spider became the core framework, a Dungeon that drew more heavily on Nether than any of the modern equivalents. Neveah pulled the remnant spirits and created a bank of shape. Her mind envisioned a whole new method of Dungeon. Just as quickly, she sketched out the base forms of a new enemy within the Dungeon Memory.

Once she created all the mechanisms, the spirits happily latched onto her

Neveah felt the beginnings of a headache behind her eyes and felt a small burst of amusement. I’ve learned such bad habits from you, Randidly. But you are right. I can’t stop now. I need to accomplish this-

Biting her lip, Neveah summoned up a few more Mana fireflies. She worked as quickly as she could. She would build a Dungeon from nothing, in only a few seconds, building a connection to something real. The memory wouldn’t necessarily become the reality that Randidly had promised and hoped for, but as long as the connection to the Nexus existed-

She raised her eyes to check her time limit and saw the black spear between memory and Nexus crack and shatter. Their chance at ‘reality’ hung by a thread. As soon as the two mechanisms disconnected, the bubble would fade. Without the bubble, the Aether of the memory would make a nuisance of itself.

Neveah was out of time.

Yet hope glimmered into existence along the shattered image of the Songstress. The thread was suddenly encased in a pulsing gold light as Pine roused himself and reached out. Like the Moraies of old, keeping one life alive past its intended expiration, a bit of divinity settled across the memory. The two Aether constructs were locked together, beyond logical limits. Neveah worked furiously, the circle expanding to encase the entire area invalidated by the Nether bubble.

The mental arms she utilized doubled, then doubled again. She housed Tiamat, the Dragon Mother of Fear. And when her heart slammed against her ribcage, pressed beyond the boundaries of sanity by fear, she found in herself depths of potential she had never imagined.

She stood in a cloud of swirling lights, an explosion of neon bits of confetti. Obviously, her headache worsened precipitously. The golden light protecting the Songstress’s last note weakened, but didn’t break.

Symbol after symbol shot away, a solution wedged into the closing threshold. And just barely, the shadow of a miracle slipped through the gap.

With a gasp, Neveah finished. She sat down, panting and shaking. She had expended so much mental energy that the illusion of her human form faltered, for a few seconds leaving the monstrous carapace of a bone wyrm visible to the world. However, her part was done. Plus, she very purposefully tried not to think of the trouble that would result when the memory’s Aether did return and smash against the edge of the Dungeon she had created.

The massive Engraving she had erected began to spin and whirl. The edges snapped into place. The bubble sent by the main Nexus hummed in recognition of the selected section; it had been scooping up Dungeons and plopping them into the Nexus for a long time. As it activated, Neveah was surprised to note the whole of the memory was brought along.

Just with an unpopulated third of it existing outside the confines of the ‘Dungeon’. She wondered if it was possible to cross that barrier.

The memory rumbled as even Deganawidah’s efforts couldn’t fully restrain the disturbance in the significance. The whole of space around Neveah flickered as their positioning shifted and settled into its new location.

And in came a pulse of meaning that Neveah had to have felt against her skin to believe. It was not ‘reality’ that breathed through in that moment of uncertainty. But when the connections between the memory and the Nexus began locking into place, a sense of legitimacy passed through to their location. Those raging spirits began to gather up a roaring momentum. The web woven by the spider sank into the fabric of the memory, becoming battery and animating force.

Randidly’s patterns of significance replicated endlessly along the branches and pathways. The feedback loop intensified, bringing power and meaning to the knock-off Lifeseals that Neveah had built into the Dungeon. Nearby, hostilities escalated between Aether and Nether forces reignited in earnest, most of the soldiers and probably even the upper echelons not understanding the meaning or effect of those massive energy shifts.

Neveah rubbed the bridge of her nose, happy to have been able to complete Randidly’s work, but the longer she looked at the rising tide of momentum of the memory spirits of significance, the more she felt thankful that the Cult of the Savior was making trouble for the Nether Arbiter at the moment.

Because such was the potency of the emotions that, for the first time, the deep rock of significance that had weighed down the memory began to stir. Hope had been given to these spirits. And in the depths of Deganawidah’s history, individual bites of significance began to break off and flow into the Dungeon Web.

The amount was minuscule. It would take hours before it amounted to a handful, probably even longer before it would have a noticeable effect on Deganawidah’s power. But a flow had been established, one that made the result inevitable.

The structure of this cobbled-together Dungeon Web could not coexist with Deganawidah.

Neveah blinked as a new problem asserted itself. A figure flashed across the outskirts of Homewell, making a beeline for Randidly’s still-inert form. She recognized the image almost immediately: the young Don Beigon sensed weakness in Randidly and was out for vengeance.

Lucretia? Do you have-

Already on it, Lucretia replied. Only a moment later, a tall figure in a beaten leather coat stood over Randildy and slid his fingers through his belt.

Don Beigon slowed as he approached, his eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”

“A man who owes this fella a favor,” Hank Howard tipped his hat toward Randidly. He grinned at Beigon. “Take another step and you’ll regret it.”

Don Beigon sneered and took a step.

Hank Howard drew his revolver and shot him in the chest.

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