Cold: Chapter Eleven
In which the First Priest of Inquanok gives you a choice that Dorothy never faced.
Chapter 11
“I need Jubin with me,” I said to the door guard, whose eyes reflected like black glass.
“You want to see the priests? The ghoul stays here,” the door guard said.
“I have vital information for the priests, and Jubin’s presence is required.”
“The ghoul may not enter.”
I felt black smoke rising again in me, and this time I felt I could use it not to injure, but to persuade.
“You will let Jubin in,” I said, doing my best Obi Wan (minus the hand flourish). I didn’t see the black smoke, but I felt its presence leaving me and infiltrating the door guard’s mind1.
The guard seemed to lose focus on me for a second, his placid black eyes taking on almost visible ripples.
“It’s…not allowed, but…maybe we can make an exception.”
“If you want to defeat the Cold One in the name of Nodens, you’ll let both of us in,” I said.
The other door guard furrowed a brow. “Are you sure, brother, that we should let this ghoul in?”
“This ghoul and this human commanded night-gaunts to get here. They say they have a message for our priests.”
“But ghouls are foul things, abominations of the dark that eat dead human flesh!”
“Thanks for that,” Jubin muttered.
“Yes,” the first guard said. “But…”
His hesitation gave me the opening I needed. I grabbed Jubin’s arm and pushed past the guards. The cyclopean onyx door opened with a bass creak, and we entered the priests’ palace.
The entrance hall soared upward beyond sight, shimmering black walls defining a geometric space I couldn’t quite figure out. I tried to count the sides, but each time I came up with a different number.
“You would call this a non-Euclidean geometry,” Jubin said.
“Ah,” I said.
“What?” I added.
“The space looks strange because it is strange. It doesn’t follow standard laws of three-dimensional geometry, and therefore, from your perspective as an observer, the angles will be, as you might say, weird as hell.”
I looked at the walls again, and as I turned my head, one wall turned into two, and then three right-angled walls curved around each other in a spiral that I should not have been able to see from where I stood.
“This is giving me a headache.”
“Come, this way,” Jubin said. “Thank you, by the way. You might have saved my life back there.”
“I got that impression.”
Jubin led me through the twisting, Cyclopean space, past and through walls and angles, down that looked like up and up that looked like left, right that looked like backwards and then sideways that looked like standing still. I thanked the guard for seeing sense about letting Jubin in, because I got the distinct feeling that I would be entirely and irretrievably lost inside this onyx maze.
“How do you know where you’re going?”
“Instinct,” Jubin said. “This way.”
He led me through a vertical hallway that felt horizontal, and I tried my damnedest not to throw up as my inner ear just gave up on trying to understand what the hell I was looking at.
Finally, we reached a massive onyx door that looked a lot more normal than anything I’d seen in this building so far.
“Knock,” Jubin said.
I knocked. The sound echoed wrongly and made me dizzy. I put a hand on a wall, or where I saw a wall, and nearly fell on my face, because the wall was over there, actually. Jubin caught me before I fell.
“Are you ok?”
“Just dizzy,” I said.
The door creaked open with a sound in the shape of a question mark, and violet light spilled into the hallway.
“Enter,” a voice said, a small voice, human. The man behind the onyx curtain?
I put a foot forward and found myself standing directly in front of a large black desk in an oval room made of triangular circles. I looked behind me and saw the door I had entered looked to be about a mile away.
I stared at the desk because it, at least, had angles I could understand.
“What is your business here?” The voice asked.
I glanced up, relieved to find Jubin standing next to me, and then focused my attention on the man standing behind the desk. An older man, gray, balding, wearing black robes etched with a sigil I didn’t recognize. Behind him, a violet stained-glass window depicted scenes of strange beings with too many eyes.
“I have a message for the priests. And a request.”
“Speak your name and your message.”
“My name is Ken Fields. I am a dreamer,” I began.
“That is evident.”
“May I ask your name?”
“I am Komer Ha’chalomot, First Priest of Nodens.”
“Very nice to meet you, uh…Reverend?”
“First Priest would be preferable.”
“Well,” I said, “it is very nice to meet you, First Priest.”
“Likewise, Ken Fields. Please, state your business.”
“I believe the Cold One brought me to this realm against my will because I am a part of an organization that is investigating Its cult in the waking world. It is a destructive cult that murders people with impunity, and we’re trying to stop it.”
“As are we,” the First Priest said.
“I know,” I said. “So we have a common enemy. What I can’t seem to figure out is why the cult is so fixated on onyx. The Cold One is stealing onyx from your quarries, right?”
“Correct,” the First Priest said.
“And in my world, the cult uses onyx mallets in its sacrifice ceremonies.”
“It freezes its victims solid and then shatters them?”
“Yes,” I said.
“How? Such a thing is only possible with dark magic, which I do not believe your world possesses.”
“Liquid helium,” I said. “It’s a substance that exists at a temperature barely above the coldest possible temperature in the universe. In that state, it has strange properties that I don’t really understand, but submerging victims in it for a short time does freeze them solid.”
“Tell me,” the First Priest said. “Why did you bring a ghoul here?”
“Jubin has been a guide and a friend, and I felt that if I left him to the whims of your guards, bad things might happen to him. Also, without him, I don’t think I would have found my way here. This building is…very weird.”
The First Priest nodded and sat down in a plush black chair behind his desk.
“So what is it you wish of us?”
“I’d like your help to get home. I need to continue the fight against the Cold One in my world.”
“Why can you not join the fight against the Cold One here?”
“I…I don’t know,” I said. “How long can a human dream? Would I risk losing control or connection to my waking body? I know time works differently here, but is it faster or slower? Is one minute here an hour back in my world, or is it the other way around?”
“It’s not precisely known,” the priest said. “There is a risk you might lose connection to your waking body. But many dreamers have come here and lived for hundreds of years, long after their waking bodies have died. There was a man named Randolph Carter whose legend here is complex, but I believe he lived here for several centuries, exploring, traveling, learning.”
“I’d really prefer to be back home. I don’t have any resources or money or knowledge of this place, and in the waking world my body contains technological enhancements that give me an advantage that I just don’t have here.”
“We can provide you resources and money and whatever you need, if you pledge yourself to the cause of Nodens and join the fight against the Cold One here in Inquanok. Quite honestly, the battle here is…we’re losing. The Cold One’s influence spreads daily. We ally with Nodens out of necessity, but His forces are only so powerful. And if Nodens feels like He is losing, then…”
The First Priest visibly shuddered. “I fear for the consequences to both this world and yours.”
“What might happen?”
“Chaos, destruction, madness, nothingness, the unchecked rise of incomprehensibly powerful beings whose malice is only matched by their insanity.”
“And that might happen to my world if you lose here?”
“Yes,” the First Priest said. “But then again, if you can defeat the Cold One in your world, that might give us a fighting chance here. It is difficult to strategize when you’re dealing with indescribably powerful eldritch beings who view us as tiny, insignificant things. Most of the time they leave us alone, but sometimes they war, like the Cold One wars with Nodens, and then we humans get caught in the middle. That is what is happening now. The Cold One steals our onyx for we know not what purpose, and Nodens allies with us temporarily because His interests and ours are aligned. But if that changes, I do not believe for a second that Nodens would prioritize our existence over His victory.”
“I…I don’t know what to do with any of that,” I said.
“Well,” the First Priest said. “It’s your choice, ultimately. I don’t know whether having you here or having you there would be better for our cause. My instinct is that more people fighting for our cause here is just better, but that might not be correct. The bottom line is that it is your choice. We do have the ability to send you home.”
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Free image from here. Not AI.
I rolled persuade and got a 22. Here’s a Call of Cthulhu character sheet for our protagonist Ken Fields. I’m not going to roll for everything he does - this isn’t an actual Call of Cthulhu game, after all - but sometimes it’s fun to randomize things a little, and this character sheet will add some basic rules to that randomness.