By Chantal Holmes
A small arc of light broke through the drifting blackness, a noiseless precursor to the cascade that would follow. They came in erratic clusters at first, then waves: crest after crest of thin, white tendrils that rippled outward as they slowly pulled a distortion wide. With a flash of something from within the disturbance’s depths, a small vessel passed through the opening, the anticipated thunderous clap and crackle of the tunnel snapping shut only imagined and inferred as the void around it strangled the noise before it could sound. The arcing tendrils rapidly decreased in number, the ebb and flow of their ethereal, dragging fingers flickering and sputtering out against the black, disappearing just as quickly as they had arrived. In its wake, the vessel was left cast adrift amid unfamiliar stars: rotating slowly as the silent nebulae watched it pass, a piece of flotsam and foreign particulate in the shifting glow of their starry sea. Its hull was marred with odd rake lines and pockmarks sustained before its drop out of warp, but hadn’t appeared to be breached; through the small viewport at the helm, the silhouette of its pilot lay slumped over the console.
He was nearly motionless, save for the slight rise and fall of his back and the flicking of his eyes as he lay in restless slumber. The visions that painted the inside of his eyelids were plagued with dread. He watched as a distant glimmer was swallowed by a starless, undulating abyss, silhouettes of slightly blacker shapes circling in its place. Their movement was darkly hypnotic: a trio of long, serpentine shadows moving ever closer with the grace of eels, a muffled yet strangely melodic sound following with them. A chill seeped into his bones with an immediate pang of recognition, and yet he found himself rooted in place, joints locked and immobile, body refusing to listen to his internal screams to move anywhere else. Unable to so much as turn his head, he could only watch as the shadows became less indistinct, the knot in his stomach twisting as he began to see the faintest traces of veiled color in the dark. At the first dreaded flicker of bioluminescent glow, he felt the ground fade from beneath his feet, sending him plummeting into the abyss’ creeping reach. Unseen shapes brushed past his limbs, a silent warning of hidden hungers, but it was the feeling of something much more human, of fingers curling around his ankle, that precursed being sharply dragged sideways and deeper into the dark.
It felt as though the spectral hand had thrown his dreaming self back into his own body, a hypnic jerk so strong that the back of his head collided with his seat as he bolted upright; spots riddled his already blurred vision, taking a few rapid blinks and rough shake of his head to fully clear as he righted himself in his chair. He quickly checked to make sure that everything was still functioning as it should be, that his repairs were still holding, before leaning back to let the rest of his unexpected headrush pass. The lilting tones of a distant melody still echoed in the back of his mind, soft and indistinct notes that beckoned, threatening to fill his mind completely if he dared to let his focus linger on it for too long. Rubbing at his temples, he tried to turn his attention to anything else to push back the melody’s increasing volume; his eyes eventually settled on the switch for his ship’s emergency beacon, slowly pulsing in invitation. Multiple consecutive jumps, while necessary, hadn’t been the kindest to the hull, but had he traveled far enough? He hovered his hand above the switch for a moment, pausing. As much as the prospect of a passerby seeing an active distress signal was comforting, he knew better. A beacon in his current situation would likely only serve to hasten an untimely end long before it called anyone to his aid; the hunted don’t shout in the dark to let the hunters know where they are. Curling his fingers back from the switch, wincing a little at a sharp protest in his palm, he let his hand fall from its resting place.
As his arm fell back, the distinct sound of something clattering against metal broke the relative silence. To his right, he barely glimpsed the edge of the darkly colored object as it rolled along the floor. Unhooking one of the belts holding him in his seat, he carefully nudged the object toward his fingers with his foot, quickly picking it back up and turning it over in his hand. It was heavy, despite its size, and shaped vaguely like a vajra made of two flaring tridents. He had initially thought it had been carved from a piece of meteorite, but seemed instead to be some form of near-black metal with the texture of sandstone. Its color slowly shifted in the light, ranging from obsidian, to deep purples and blues, to scarlet and back again in waves as he turned it in his hand. Seeing no damage to it from the fall, he reached set it back on the small shelf to his right, being mindful of its flared ends, the throbbing cuts in his hand serving as a reminder that they were deceptively sharp. He stared at his own hand hovering in the air for a few moments before resting his arm back on the arm of his chair. Despite the discomfort the peculiar object gave him, it was likely safer in his hand than returned to the shelf it had already leapt from once.
With a little more effort than he cared to admit, he shifted his attention from the object in his hand to the viewport and the darkness beyond. The slow, rolling, movement of the nearby nebulae was a welcoming sight alongside cold and unfamiliar stars, their warm colors offering something other than the ever-present black; a moment of calm to gather his bearings, a sunset-hued gaseous sea to behold as he tried to plan his next steps. Something about the blackness out here was different, more enveloping, growing unsettlingly darker if he dared focus on it for more than a few moments; it took an active effort to keep his eyes trained on the nebulae’s glow to avoid that sight, fidgeting by slowly rotating the artefact in his grip. He reassured himself that the effort, that the artifact resting in his hand, key and compass rolled into one, had been worth the equivalent of sailing to the edge of the map and stopping just before completely blinking out of existence. He could feel the faintest of vibrations against his palm as he rolled the object along the length of his palm, an odd sense of comfort pairing with it. They traveled up and along his bones, his eyelids once again starting to grow heavy as they reached his skull. Maybe he could rest his eyes for a few minutes and…
Something shifted against the nearest nebula’s flow. The creeping heaviness of his eyelids immediately lifted as he leaned forward, looking for any indication that the shape he’d seen was only a result of a half-dozing hallucination. Darker patches weren’t entirely uncommon within the confines of a nebula, dust clouds were far from an alien occurrence; perhaps he’d begun to nod back off just as one had been rolling into view. A fresh pang of unease threatened to fire along his spine as his eyes scoured for any trace of what he’d thought he’d seen. For an eternity in only a few brief moments, nothing seemed amiss or out of place, not a dark spot in sight within the glowing stellar lagoon; only once his eyes had begun to burn from lack of blinking, did he dismiss what he thought he’d seen as exhaustion. It had been waiting, patiently, for him to sigh and settle back into his seat before reemerging: a dark silhouette against the glow, far too opaque to be a passing cloud of dust. Its movements were a far departure from any drifting piece of rock or debris, weaving in intricate and serpentine patterns that would have required intelligence to navigate. The longer he stared, mildly entranced by the graceful shapes it drew, the stronger his sense of dread became. He instinctively gripped the object in his hand tighter, numbly irritating the cuts it had already left.
The artifact is a mark. Once it’s missing, they’ll hunt it down without rest, no matter how far you carry it. The last warning he’d been given clawed its way to the forefront of his thoughts, giving fresh and ominous gravity to the quiet hum now permeating the cabin. He’d only stopped for a few minutes, just long enough to breathe, how had they caught up so quickly?
In the center of his viewport, to the left of the nebula he’d been watching so intently, a single vertical line of light cut through the black. It was too far away to properly gauge its size, the line promptly distorting into a semicircular shape that sent his heart further into the pits of his own stomach. His empty hand drifted its way to his console, inputting line after line as quickly as one set of fingers would allow, refusing to take his eyes away from the newly forming distortion ahead of him. As he rushed to depress the final key and ready a switch, he felt something large brush past the ship’s lower hull; a line of faintly glowing, electric shades of indigo and blue passed by the far left of his vision, vanishing as quickly as it had appeared as his ship was sent into a sharper spin. He could only watch as the ominous shape in the distance rotated, the haunting melody from his nightmare starting to fill his head again in perfect sync with the hum and vibration of the artifact still clutched in his hand. The ship’s comms, which he had been certain hadn’t worked since his third jump, began to crackle with soft static as a processing error flashed across his screen.
“That little toy of yours won’t be able to handle another jump so soon, let it rest. You won’t get much farther anyway.” A voice scolded, somehow both sharp and lined with velvet. The rotation of his ship suddenly halted, the faint groan of metal hinting that something had taken hold of it.
“Do you realize what you’ve done? The doors you’ve so haphazardly opened?” A second voice, whispered and icy, faintly broke the static of his comms unit.
“You don’t need to run,” a third voice, soft and strangely melodic, gripped the back of his mind, “Perhaps we can come to an… agreement. After all, you were kind enough to let us through.”
He watched as the ship rotated its way to an upright position, the groaning of the hull abruptly halting as whatever held it relinquished its grip. Any words he wanted to say, questions he wanted to ask in return, abruptly died on his tongue as the owners of the three voices slowly passed him and came into view. They were half humanoid, their upper bodies each having a degree of hourglass figure, transitioning into a long tail from the hip onward. He watched as they “swam” ahead, propelled by the gill-like openings along their torsos paired with the movement of their tails, allowing their sheer scale to slowly set in. Each tail appeared as though it could have easily wrapped itself around any of the planets he had visited, able to slowly constrict the sphere until it eventually cracked. They’d been the only things he’d seen in the sky as he’d rushed back to his ship after prying the artifact from its resting place, and a recurring theme in each jump-induced nightmare in the brief time since.
Vaskot, the first of the three, took to the slight left of the distortion and idly crossed her arms. Her human half was more bronzed in tone than the other two, and noticeably more muscular, with a peculiar split running from her navel to the bottom of her ribcage; an angry glow slowly pulsed behind it, in time with what he estimated to be the equivalent of her breathing. Her mouth spread far up each cheek, which he could only imagine filled with wickedly serrated teeth, adding an extra touch of menace to the angled, long S shapes of each of her four eyes. From the peak of her hairline, a shape not too unlike an anglerfish’s lure protruded, its glint sending a familiar chill back down his spine. Her ears were little more than a pair of forked fins, and her hair a series of barbed whiskers slicked back away from the protrusion holding the lure on her head, each fading from black to umber in hue. He could make out the shape of stiff, spined, fins attached to her lower arms, and eight crab-like legs extending from her lower back above her tail. Her tail itself was segmented: each portion resembling the shape of two manta rays tied at the fin and draped over a piece of pipe, stinger-like shapes trailing below and behind them; each segment appeared to have a layer of chitin along the back, colored in still more shifting shades of umber, dark spines with gold-glowing tips extending at regular intervals between paler golden webbing. The barbs were also present on the crescent-shaped ends of her tail, swaying slightly as it moved. He could see faintly glowing markings carved into the chitin, but couldn’t even begin to guess at their meaning or purpose.
The second of the three, Aphaantesha, took to the right of the distortion. Her face was slightly more human in appearance, save for the fan of three black rhomboid shapes that were her eyes; a single, piercing white spark glowed in their depths. Any semblance of hair she may have had was lost to veil vaguely reminiscent of a comb jellyfish while her ears had been split into a two sets of paired fin shapes. She folded her four arms in front of her, partially concealing the slits along her sides that she’d been using to propel herself forward. Draped over her shoulders, a series of layered frills rested like a natural shawl; similar frills, folding from back to front, decorated the entire length of her tail, giving an appearance similar to the many layers of a ruffled skirt. The few fins he could see along her tail were wide and flamboyant fans, each ruffle shifting ever so slightly even when she remained still. Her entire being was pale, skin and scales bordering between both opalescent and pearlescent in the reflected glow of the nebula nearby. She looked delicate, almost frail, but there was something unsettling lurking beneath her piercing gaze.
Shilihdoth, the final of the three, took a position slightly beneath the distortion and directly in front of it. He was unable to see the upper portion of her face, it having been concealed by something in the shape of a bluebottle’s pneumatophore: dark and colorless, save for a brightly blue and violet glow along its upper crest; dark filaments descended from it, resting upon her shoulders in loose curls. From the depths of the bizarre head covering, five eye-like shapes, four horizontal and one vertical, glowed brightly. Thin, bioluminescent lines of electric blue and equally electric indigo followed the curvature of her ribs, while a pair similarly hued fins stretched from a narrow point at her waist to a much wider point behind the shoulders of her four arms, forming an overall arrowhead shape around her torso. The fins continued to transition into a tall, fanning collar of seven dark tendrils that flowed and writhed, seemingly moving of their own accord; from various points around her hips, thin tendrils ending in the spearhead shape of a squid’s tentacle extended, behaving in a similar fashion. Her tail was noticeably eel-shaped, with two long fins spanning its entire length before merging into a three-fin fan at the very end. Lines of the same bioluminescent glow found along her ribcage could be seen near the fins of her tail, tinting their dark translucense with an ever-shifting gradient of purple and blue. Her skin and scales were dark, though he couldn’t place the precise color he thought he was seeing. Black? Deep purple? An abyssal navy? He shook his head. It was this one who he assumed had whispered through his comms system, as well as the one who had initially sent him into his unfortunate spin.
Only one word circled in his head, tossed about like a ship caught in solar crosswind: leviathans. It was a far cry from the most accurate descriptor, what he was seeing before him more of an ominous crossing of sea serpent and mermaid of mythologies past, but it the thought continued to churn without rest. His eyes flicked between each of the creatures, wondering if their forms were a way of laying their capabilities bare; were they genuinely as they appeared, or had they merely adopted bodies that he would be able to somewhat understand? The unrelenting grip of their void-touched gaze, as cutting as it was paralytic, and ghosts of knowing smirks offered wordless answers to his unasked questions. Somehow, even in the vast and life-devoid expanse around him, he was feeling smaller than he ever had before: a bitter taste of burgeoning megalophobia he hadn’t known he possessed. Ruminations of what doors he may have unlocked, of what eyes he had just given the freedom to stare back from the starry abyss, of what else may have been long passing alongside him unseen, swam unfettered. He had miscalculated, gravely miscalculated.
From the inner reaches of the distortion, a low rumble began to creep: unheard in the vacuum beyond the ship’s confines, but felt without dilution through bone and marrow. As the feeling settled itself into the sides of his skull, a fourth voice conducted through it became clear as it eventually found a language he could understand. It was a deep and hollow sound; a ghost at the bottom of a starless sea, a distant and dead star speaking in a tone of blatant and dismissive disinterest seeping out of its every word.
“Do you even know what you carry? Where, precisely, the object you clutch so tightly will lead?” It paused, giving him just enough time for a half answer to form, “Or did you blindly follow the directions of someone else?” His mouth grew dry with a lack of a proper response. Up to this point, he had been following little more than vague hints and breadcrumbs, names without history and directions that had pointed in circles; all he knew of the artifact was that it wasn’t intended to unlock any physical door, but one of potentials, one that required the proper hands and knowledge in order to do so. He held a skeleton key that he had no way of using on his own, and each of these four beings knew it innately. In his attempt to unlock his personal doors, he’d thrown open another that was far better left shut. The imagined smile that he could feel through the distortion’s continued rumble was one of cold understanding, holding the answers just out of his reach. As if by silent order, the creatures stirred once more.
“We’d like to have our little trinket back, if you’d be so kind. We’d be able to give you far more than it could alone: sight beyond sight, reach beyond reach,” The shimmering one’s voice slithered back into his mind, “Everything you’re missing, chasing, direction for the directionless in infinite threads of fate.” She moved slightly to the right of his viewport, slipping out of sight.
“If that’s too much, of course, you can just return it and be on your way.” The umber one leaned forward, peering at him through the viewport, “Travel home empty handed, pretend it was all just a fever dream of monsters and wayward wishes… and pray we never cross paths again.” She flashed him a terrible grin, as she leaned back, diving below the bottommost edge of his limited view.
“Or, should you feel particularly bold…” The dark one’s whispered voice once again permeated the cabin, “You’re welcome to continue as you are, attempting to unravel the mysteries of your new toy on your own and use it as you see fit. But know our pursuit will also continue. You will know no rest until we reclaim what’s ours.” She, like the others, quickly swam out of sight, joining the other two in what had become a slow circling of his ship.
“Do take your time to think things over,” The frigid voice rumbled through his bones once more, “We have until long after the last star fades.”
He slumped back into his seat, eyes only half focused on the distortion as he attempted to process what he’d just been presented, silently weighing which of the three would be the lesser possible evil. In every piece of breadcrumb text that he’d followed, bargaining with the unknown, particularly if their offerings were nebulous and indistinct, was already an ill-advised choice. While the notion of whatever they defined as sight beyond sight was morbidly fascinating, of accomplishing the same thing he’d been attempting on his own may have been beneficial, he couldn’t free himself of the feeling that such a “gift” wouldn’t also carry some degree of terrible side effect alongside it. Returning the artifact to them in any regard appeared safe on the surface, but both of those options not so quietly indicated that these creatures would retain the freedom they’d gained from his folly. It was clear enough that he lacked the position to make a counter-offer as well, the tone in each of these beings’ propositions indicating they would rid themselves of him with all the tact and compassion as one would a gnat if he attempted and his offering fell short. Rubbing his left temple, trying once again to ignore the song threatening to drown out his thoughts, he sighed. If he tried to outrun them again, how far would he need to go? How long would it take for them to close any of the distance he’d attempt to gain?
Casting a glance to the artifact in his hand, he relaxed his white-knuckle grip and allowed it to fall to the floor in silent resignation, resting his foot on it to keep it in place. Reaching into the shelf to his right for a second time, he retrieved a roll of gauze to wrap his bleeding palm, taking his time to fully commit to the course of action he was about to take. He gave his seat a light adjustment, and rested his hands on the keys of his console as calmly as his body would allow. The distortion had grown wider since he last looked outside, what had looked to be the size of a dinner plate from his current distance having since stretched into a gaping maw. He kept his eyes trained on it as he slowly typed out the same series of commands as he had before, watching as long shapes swam and swarmed in the darkness of the other side. The sound he imagined on the other side, the clatter and slide of scale against scale amid whatever other voices and whispers may have been contained within, was enough to make his skin crawl. With the press of a key, he started a second run of his initial inputs; his other hand dropped to and depressed a button for external communications.
“While you’ve been very gracious by providing me a few options to remedy my… predicament, it seems to me that you’ve neglected to consider the very thing that brought the five of us out this close to the outer reach in the first place.” A response from his console drew the slightest ghost of a smile from him. He waited a few seconds, just long enough for a gap between the circling leviathans presented itself, before throwing his ship into maximum throttle and hurtling himself toward the ever-expanding abyss.
Bracing against his own chair, he began to count down in his head, hoping that the bent light of the distortion hadn’t interfered with his calculations. He kept his foot firmly pressed atop the artifact, squeezing his eyes shut as a furious roar collided with the back of his mind; there was no indication of disappointment in his decision, only the sounding of the proverbial hunting cry as he sped away. The ship’s rear display, damaged in a previous jump, couldn’t show their precise movement, but he was able to picture their abrupt halt and attempt to rush after him with both uncomfortable and uncanny clarity.
The first arcs of light began to appear just before he reached the edge of the writhing distortion, increasing in their frequency as he sped past its edge into the slithering dark it contained. The arcs appeared in clusters before steadily rippling outward as a tunnel of his own opened inside the larger one, illuminating the innumerable tails of similar creatures crossing over one another below as they clamored to knock him off course. One tail missed its swipe, sending him inadvertently forward and through his own tunnel just as it opened, and promptly back into the silence of his own thoughts. He sighed heavily, tapping the back of his head against the headrest of his chair, lungs aching ever so slightly from being held tense until he was safely through.
Gingerly lifting his right arm, he studied the reddening bandage wrapped around his hand. He was going to need to learn to be a little more careful of the artifact’s sharp edges until he became more accustomed to holding it, and he had a feeling he’d have plenty of time to do so during the game of endurance he’d just begun.
“A key to waking dreams and endless possibility,” He breathed, “And to locking each of those sirens back behind the door they slithered from.”
