Chapter 28: The Tree of Life

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 Valdemars 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 Bethors tower. In this case, blindness might have been a mercy.

The Dark Lord said that his lairs heart lay at the bottom and Valdemar thought he meant it figuratively. He wasnt.

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 Valdemars vision could see; maybe it ran underneath the entire Domain.

And if he couldnt 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 bodys 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.

Valdemars 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 Valdemars 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 collectives 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.

Valdemars face had joined the living tapestry at the towers 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 couldnt 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 Valdemars 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 didnt even need to sleep to dream of the surface.Read latest chapters at novelhall.com Only

The boiling abyss of Bethors 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 Kings realm, although his steps produced no sound. The winds flowed around him as if he were part of the atmosphere itself, a living void.

A black pool that transformed life into something else

A primordial dream acting as a subset of a larger Strangers 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

Its 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 Valdemars 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 couldnt inspire fear and obedience in your own hands or feet. Either it was a part of you or it wasnt.

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 didnt sew a tumor into a healthy body, and so Valdemar didnt try.

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

My consciousness isnt in my brain, Valdemar realized as eyes opened on the fleshy walls. Not those of his progenitor, but his own. Its 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, Valdemars 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 towers 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 didnt 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 didnt 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 didnt even know teleportation could work with lifeless matter alone.

Ialdabaoth, Lord Bethor said as Valdemar clothed himself. The word resonated in the summoners 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 makers 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 didnt 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 wasnt 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.