Cold: Chapter Five
In which you have chosen to face the dangers of Leng on your own.
Chapter 5
“I appreciate the offer, but uh…nah.”
I didn’t really know what else to say to this guy who had so kindly offered to shatter my hand off in exchange for the protection of the very god I’d been resisting since this all began.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, I get that this is a dream, but like, is it though? What if I wake up and my hand’s still gone?”
“What if you never wake up at all?” Cold flames flashed in those eyes.
“That…look, I’m just going to have to take my chances.”
I stood from the fire and shivered as its heat faded and the freezing cold reasserted its grip.
“I wish you the best of luck with the spiders,” Saath Ma’at said.
“I can handle a few spiders.”
He laughed. “Sure you can.”
I eyed the cloak he had offered me, wishing he’d just give it to me anyway, but he didn’t.
“Alright, well, bye then,” I said. I turned on my heel and took my leave, heading in the direction he’d pointed, which I presumed was south. He’d told me to go to someplace called Inquanok.
Charcoal light filtered down from snow-filled clouds into the shadowed valley. Cragged mountains like frozen shards of glass framed my way forward through snowdrifts and icy plains. I felt frostbite tickling at my fingers, and I shoved them into my pants pockets to try to protect them, shivering harder than I’d ever shivered in my life. The air smelled of snow and something I couldn’t identify. The impression was of pepper and smoke and rot and fire, a cacophony of conflicting scents that swirled in my nostrils and refused to make sense.
I didn’t look forward to this Valley of Spiders I had to pass through, especially not without any kind of weapon on me. I wished I could just wake up, relegating this dream to the realm of “what the fuck was that” and nothing more, but for the moment, I seemed to be stuck here.
After a long while of walking, I saw another cave ahead, and I wondered if it might provide me some form of shelter. I approached cautiously and peered into the darkness.
Eyes.
Too many eyes.
Legs.
Too many legs.
Too big, too hairy, too…
I screamed and ran as a massive spider, larger than a house, larger than anything that should be alive, legs the size of construction cranes, huge eyes that glistened with black intent, mandibles that writhed and crackled, appeared at the cave entrance and began to give chase. Before I could run too far, I felt wet webbing snag my legs and I fell, struggling, into the snow. I rolled over and screamed, the spider on me, those fangs lowering, lowering…
Then, in a flash, the spider retreated with a screech that pierced my eardrums, as flaming arrows bit into its side. I shielded my face with my hands and shivered in frozen terror, whimpering, and it was at this point that I noticed that I didn’t have my adrenal implant in this place. It should have kicked in, dampening the fear and panic, but none of that happened. And it had been so long since I’d faced pure unfiltered terror like this that I felt my mind snap a little, felt my grasp on reality fracturing, felt myself losing control of some fundamental force of sanity and rationality.
And then I realized I didn’t have my cybernetic eye here either. I should have noticed that earlier, but the sheer unadulterated weirdness of the place had distracted me.
I tried to focus on the immediate danger. Above me, the spider writhed and recoiled from a barrage of flaming arrows. I rolled and dodged as its many huge legs plunged repeatedly into the snow around me. I tore at the webbing around my legs, the sticky substance somehow both pliable and harder than stone, but I managed to free myself and then scrambled to my feet and ran as the spider staggered under the assault of multiple flaming arrows.
“Don’t run too far!”
The voice came from somewhere to my left, but it also came from my own head, piercing into my consciousness and forcing me to stop in my tracks and look for its source. The voice sounded like gravel and grave dirt, dark and low and somehow rotten. I saw a figure holding a bow aloft, nocking an arrow, setting it alight with a torch plunged into the snow, and loosing it into the spider’s impossibly huge body. A few more of those and the spider fell, hard, billowing snow high into the air.
“Thanks for the help,” I said, approaching the figure. I stopped as I got closer and a smell hit me – a rotten, meaty, sweet smell, the smell of death, of corpses. I suppressed a gag.
“Do not fear,” the figure rasped at me. It turned to me and I stumbled backwards. The figure stood stooped, gray bones visible under flaps of rotten flesh clumped with brown moss. The face might have once been human, but I now saw a skeletal grin and sunken eyes, a dark hole where a nose should have been. Leathery, sharply pointed ears framed the head, which itself looked almost animalistic, elongated, wrong. Tatters of gray cloth hung from the figure’s body.
“Wh…aaat are you?” I asked in a trembling voice, my mind struggling not to shatter into a million pieces and leave me gibbering on the ground.
“Your people call me a ghoul,” the figure rumbled. “It is not a flattering name, but it fits.”
“Are you…uh…” I had no idea what I actually wanted to ask…it.
“I am alive, if that’s what you were asking. After a fashion, I suppose.”
“Why…did you help me?”
“Because you needed help,” the ghoul said. “This is a dangerous place.”
“Am I on the right path to Inquanok?”
“Yes,” the ghoul said. “Although there are two possible routes from here. Both present danger. One contains spiders. Many spiders. Not all this big, but thousands, swarms of them.”
“And the other?”
Why hadn’t Saath Ma’at told me about the other route?
“Avoids the spiders, but it gets very close to a place where giants carve cyclopean cities out of the very mountains.”
“Spiders or giants. Those are my choices. How big are the giants?”
“Big enough.”
“And I assume they’re not friendly?”
The ghoul laughed, or at least that’s what it sounded like. A strange rasping noise with a somehow wider skeletal grin.
“There is a third option,” it said. “Wake yourself up.”
“So you know I’m a dreamer,” I said.
“It is quite obvious.”
“How do I do that?”
“You don’t know how to wake yourself from a dream?”
“Not this dream,” I said. “I’ve tried.”
“Well, you are headed in the right direction, at least,” the ghoul said. “The people of Inquanok should have your answers.”
Maybe you can talk and reason with giants? Or get squished.
Giants. They only have two legs.