Marc's vision swam – looking back, it was probably this fact that saved them all, but he couldn't have known that yet. All he saw was a blurry, vague mess, like the out-of-focus background in a movie. A large fleshy tube appeared out of the side of his vision... his arm. It was his arm. Why was it red, then?
Is that blood? He thought distantly. Please don't let it be blood, bleeding is bad for me...
He pushed himself up and tried to look around, but nothing was clear yet. He must have hit his head – did he have a concussion?
Where were the others? Marc took a lumbering, difficult step forward. The floor was tilted. A memory of the crash wormed its way back into his head – it could have been worse, he could have been thrown upside down.
There were four other bodies near the front of the ship. He still couldn't see them clearly, but who else would it be? Three peach-colored human bodies and one pink dog body.
When he realized what must have happened, it was like an icy hand gripped Marc's heart. This can't be. That can't be them and this can't be happening and I can't be bleeding -
Marc closed his eyes, trying to summon up the strength to continue, to look at what was before him.
When he opened them, his head had settled down and his vision was clearer. He looked at where everyone else was piled.
They were breathing!
Marc rushed over to check he wasn't just making this up – but no, everyone was breathing. Remont and Lya and Osette and Icelus; they were all knocked out. They might feel it when they woke up. But they were breathing.
In fact, they seemed to be just fine. There weren't any visible scars or bruises or anything, not like him, what with his bleeding...
He took a look at his arm. It felt... less sticky than he expected? Marc turned away from the rest of the group. Against all odds, they were safe for the time being. He looked for the source of his bleeding.
Nope. No cuts or bruises there, either. No broken bones. It smelled funny, though. Not at all like the rusty copper smell of blood.
Experimentally, he licked his arm. This was a bad idea, of course, but he had just been hit on the head. What he tasted was some weird, rich flavor that he couldn't place for a minute, because it was the last thing he expected.
It was red wine.
What the hell?
Marc's relief at the group being alive and unharmed was almost immediately consumed by his total confusion about what had just happened. Better to be covered in wine than blood, really, but how did that even happen?
He took a look around the room. The whole thing was tipping forward, and the cockpit had been totally squashed. Maybe it was just that well-reinforced; maybe that was what had saved them. It didn't explain the total lack of injuries, or the red wine, but it might have been why they were alive. Either way, there were no windows in the passenger area so he couldn't see where they were. The only way out was the door near the back, next to the engine room.
It was a two-yard drop down once Marc opened the door. The others could easily make it when they woke up.
The Wanderlust, he saw, was unsalvageable. The whole front was smashed to pieces and the envelope had holes torn in it. Marc spent some time looking out for shadow dogs, but he saw none. Maybe they had all died in the crash?
There was no immediate danger, at least. So he turned his attention to the crystal formation.
Here, on the ground, it looked even larger. Marc had been to the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. once before and a landmark of that size was about the only thing he could compare it to.
There was an entrance here. Marc cast a glance backward at the Wanderlus. He hoped that everyone would be okay while he was away, but he had to see this. Whatever was here, it was valuable.
Marc walked through a little arcing entrance into the crystal formation.
As it turned out, the whole thing was hollow. The entire enormous space was totally empty, acres and acres of it. The sparkling and luminous ceiling was just grand, like nothing he'd ever seen before. And nothing was here.
Except for one little thing in the middle. Marc could barely make it out, but it looked like... a pedestal of some sort? He started the trek toward it, which took a good ten minutes.
It was a small spire of some sort. The top of it was about even with his head. On the spire was... a crystal. It was purple, like everything else here. What was this? Some sort of root?
Marc reached his hand out and gingerly brushed the crystal, but when he finished he couldn't remove his hand from it. It wasn't sticky, it just... wouldn't let him go. He tugged and tugged his hand, but nothing happened.
Then a roar came from all around him, but not from a single source – it was as if the cave itself was screaming. Marc tried even harder to pull himself off, but to no avail.
And then something came rushing into him, from the crystal to his fingertips, a strange, warm liquid energy that he had never felt anything like in his life. It didn't stop – it just kept coming, and coming, and he didn't know if he could handle all of this, he felt full and overwhelmed...
Just like that, the energy flow stopped, and his hand left the crystal, and he flopped to the ground, heaving.
What?
Seriously, what?
“He's here!”
The call came echoing across the cavern – it was Icelus's voice. Marc turned to see his four friends, all of them fine, bounding toward him.
“Marc! Thank god you're safe!” Icelus nearly tackled him in her enthusiasm.
“H-hey, you too,” he said abashedly.
“I just can't believe we're all okay!” said Osette, stretching her limbs.
“Are you bleeding?” Remont asked, pointing to Marc's arm.
By now the wine was mostly dry and had left his arm sticky and discolored. He raised it. “It's not blood, see? Did you have any wine on board? It must have gotten on me.”
Remont looked down his nose at Marc. “What's wine?”
“Um... I guess you didn't have it on board then.”
Still obviously perplexed, Remont shook his head. “I guess so.”
“What happened here?!” Lya shouted.
She was looking at the small spire, no longer radiating as it had before. “It looks... drained,” she said, not making a move to touch it.
“It... did something weird,” Marc said. “When I touched it, my hand stuck to it, and then... it felt like some sort of energy passed into me?”
This stopped everyone stone cold (except for Osette, who, oblivious, continued to stretch and jog in place). Marc couldn't even fathom the looks on their faces. “What?” he asked.
“Marc,” said Remont, “I think you must have absorbed the psychic energy that was stored in this place.”
Marc stumbled back. “What?! I didn't even know I could do that!”
“I didn't know, either,” said Icelus, “but apparently you can.”
“How?!”
“I don't know,” she replied patiently, “Humans have never been in Oniron before. We don't actually know what they can or can't do.”
He put his hand to his head – he felt a headache coming on, which probably meant that he was trying to make sense of the rules. “So... what happens to me?”
“I'm not sure,” said Icelus. “But I can guess.”
“Anything.”
“You have untapped psychic power now, but you may not be able to use it at all. I don't know if humans can cast spells – nightmares can, because their minds are uncluttered with dreams, so they have perfect memories.”
“They do?” Marc hadn't known that.
“They do,” said Lya. “For the animalistic ones – that's most of them – it doesn't matter. Nightmares with human intelligence are more dangerous. They need to use spell circles to channel their magic, and spell circles are complex, but if you have perfect memory then that doesn't matter.”
“What about you, Icelus?” Marc asked. “Do you have perfect memory?”
She shook her head. “I'm not a human or a nightmare – I can use whatever psychic energy I have without a spell circle.”
“So what you're saying is,” said Marc, “I don't have a photographic memory, so I can't use any of the energy I just absorbed?”
Remont, Icelus and Lya shook their heads, one by one.
“Damn it!” Marc shouted. It reverberated across the huge cavern. “I shouldn't have touched it! This whole trip was a waste!”
“Now don't say that,” said a voice from behind them, “it helped me find you all here.”
They all turned to face the source, and found themselves staring at their foe.
“Piper!” shouted Icelus. She growled – and he simply smirked in response, knowing how powerless she was right now.
“Icelus, wait,” said Remont, “that's Chief Decan. He's the chief of Zamasea.”
“That's Piper,” said Icelus coldly. “I'd know him anywhere.”
“Remont,” said Marc, “that's definitely Piper.”
“I guess the jig is up,” said Piper. “It's true. I'm a nightmare. Sorry you had to find out this way, Remont – right before I have to kill you all.”
“What do you mean?” Lya shouted.
“Simply that you're all unarmed,” he said, “and I'm not.”
He snapped his fingers and in a second, out of every crevasse and crack in the crystal, emerged a horde of shadow dogs. There were probably a hundred of them – they grouped together like some angry viral infection and surrounded the five of them.
“Piper!” shouted Icelus. “How can you control these other nightmares?”
Piper made a motion with his hand and they all stopped. The five of them were surrounded and weaponless. There was no way they could fend off so many attacking dogs.
“If I had to venture a guess,” he said, “it's because I created them.”
“Artificial nightmares?” Lya asked.
Piper shook his head. “No, no. When I tried to destroy the Nexus the first time, my spell allowed me to siphon off some of its power in the form of crystals. Much like the one we're in right now,” he gestured to the cavern around them, “but not quite as potent. They let me walk into the human world, and over there I planted the idea of a shadowy, nightmarish dog into the mind of a writer. It was a gambit to try to defeat Icelus, of course.”
Marc felt like he knew this. Was he talking about Reid Marshall right now?
“But this writer was... unstable. His book failed miserably, made his debts even steeper. He began to have nightmares himself, with the shadow dogs the symbol of his failure. So of course,” he continued, “they showed up in Oniron. And because they passed from me to him and back to me, I think there must be some connection.” Piper chuckled. “Normally they're weak, because the man killed himself later. The nightmares of a single dead man don't have much power, after all. But recently, they've been stronger than ever. I don't know what's changed!”
Remont spoke up – maybe he thought if he could keep Piper talking, they could find a way out. “So how did you destroy the Nexus?”
Piper knew the stalling game that Remont was playing, but fortunately for them he wanted to indulge them. “I had to start my plan over,” he said. “Lucky for me, the writer of that original book was a friend of another writer – a much more popular one. Someone who could put out his own books. So I just gave him the idea, and it caught on in the human world. It became incredibly popular. It was easy to sneak a sigil in there,” he said offhandedly. “And the humans never even know what they did. Do you know why I took the name Piper?”
Uneasy silence. “Why?” asked Icelus.
“There's a story in the human world – the Pied Piper of Hamelin. He was a folk tale – someone who stole children away in the middle of the night by playing them a song. That's what I did. But this was so much more brilliant. I simply used the fixations of young people to get what I wanted, and they weren't even aware of it. They never thought – maybe there's an undertone to this I'm not getting.”
“Everyone,” whispered Lya while Piper was making his speech, “I have an idea.”
Marc jumped a bit in surprise. “What is it?”
“Just take a step directly back when I say so.”
Ahead of them, Piper looked done with the talking. “Anything else I can ease your minds over? Since you've all just been fumbling around in the dark this whole time?”
Icelus growled.
“No,” Piper held out his hand. “I suppose we're through then.”
“You shouldn't have talked so much!” Lya shouted. “Now!”
Marc stepped back, and looked at his feet.
Lya had drawn a spell circle there.
Now she crouched and hit the ground, and the runes lit up, and they were surrounded by a bright white light, all of their sight and sense was compressed into a single blip...
They all hit the ground roughly, sprawled out. They weren't in the cave any more; it was a flat field, and it looked like miles from where they had been.
“What was that?!” Remont said.
Marc heard a familiar sound: barking. He looked over at Icelus, who was crouched and snarling at Lya.
“Hey!” shouted Marc. “What's wrong?”
Lya was backed up, nervous, and Osette hid behind her.
“That was a spell circle!” said Icelus.
Remont gasped and his eyes shot to Lya. Marc shook his head in confusion. “Wait... but doesn't that mean...”
“It does,” said Icelus. She looked Lya straight in the eye. “She's a nightmare.”
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