Some property of the poison I’d unknowingly imbibed jumbled my sense of time. The order in which I remembered the events later is impossible, things appearing to happen in my memory before the events that caused them. Of course, some of the events themselves never happened at all - some hallucinations, some dreamed. Here are the events as I later decided they must have happened, though it is not as they play out when I recall them. I have had different theories to how things played out, and this is only the one I held true for the longest time, not the first theory, nor the most recent.
I remember waking much later, but of course I must have woken first for any of it to make sense. So then there are two wakings, one I remember, and the earlier one, which I don’t.
I woke, and I stumbled down the tunnel with Amaia, both of us already under the mushrooms’ spell but neither of us deep enough to realize it - or too deep, maybe.
At the end of that first trip - in which maybe I had that conversation with myself, or maybe I didn’t - I did not see the light, though I remember it as if I did. I could not have.
Rather, what I must have seen were the bodies. Dozens of them, blackened and withered, skin peeled and warped. Whether they were all fully human I couldn’t tell, but they were all at least part human. The vision of them was seared into my mind, which explains things later.
Then, on edge already, we heard something in the dark. It is possible it was an auditory hallucination - or else perhaps only a mass of rodents, grown magnitudes larger by fear and confusion - but it sounded like an army, marching and chittering and singing evil songs accompanied by piercing instruments like xylophones and mandolins which reached us in echoes, impossible to tell how near or far they were.
We ran back to the mushroom hall, thinking it was safe, somewhere which we could hole up and escape the notice of the army - though, looking back, it seemed likely that the room itself is what caused the army to appear in the first place. If the army ever existed at all, it was something I wouldn’t learn of for months.
There we holed up, and we waited, and somehow, drowsed by the spore-filled air again, we slept.
Moving from the half-dream of the hallucination to the full-dream of sleep, we walked the halls again, and here there was no sensation of waking because I didn’t wake, and everything that happened next was created in my head.
That was when I must have seen the light, though as I remembered it immediately after, it was one of the first things that had happened.
Still under the influence of the dream, I witnessed that vision of light. In the light were monsters, and in the monsters were people, and in the people were flames, and in the flames was me, and inside of me there were monsters, and on the cycle continued infinitely.
There was a sensation like being washed away in a river of blood-warm water, and I didn’t get wet because the water was that chain of being, the monsters and the people and the flames and me, versions of me, better and worse and dead and alive, and among them faces like Tom’s but which were mine, faces which could not be mine but yet were.
And I thrashed in the water and lost track of Amaia - dream Amaia - and steam filled the air as I melted and burned all that I could reach. Then the water was gone, only the monsters and the people and the flames which I made and in them me. And the monsters were screaming, and the people inside them were dying, and they quickly looked like the charred remains which I had seen while still awake, the bodies which had planted the seed of the nightmare in my mind so that I could dream of them later.
When we talked of the experience later, Amaia’s memories diverged from mine in almost every way. She insisted that entire days passed down there in which we did nothing but skulk between shadows and hide from an enemy which never materialized. Well, sometimes she would say “we,” and other times she said only “I,” and other times still she claimed to be dragging me around with her as she fought off monsters which she could not describe later.
The dragging, at least, matched up, because I recall waking the second time to her dragging me out of the doorway of what I assumed was the mushroom hall. Then I blacked out again, and the next thing I remember, we were outside.
The clean air is what finally freed us of our hallucinations. It felt like slowly fading back into existence.
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
It was dark, and I had no way of knowing where we were, but the stars above were only stars and not eyes and that was comfort enough.
-
The next morning we were something close to fully recovered.
“Sleep well?” Amaia asked as I rose. She was tending a crackling fire which I half-remembered starting for us the night before, and the sun was rising in a direction which disoriented me - I would have guessed any other direction to be east before that one. Though I could barely see it, as we seemed to be in some sort of ravine.
I laughed weakly. “I don’t know.”
“Me neither,” she said.
We did a check of ourselves, hoping it would uncover some clue as to what happened to us in the tunnel. Everything was mostly intact, although we were shorter on food than I would have guessed. Digging through my pockets I was happy to find the cold metal of the ring still there. But beside it was something else.
At nearly the same time Amaia pulled a handful of something from her own clothes. Mushrooms, those same thin and withered looking ones we had slept beside before it all started. I opened my own hand and found I was holding the same, though I couldn’t recall ever putting them there.
I squinted at them suspiciously. Even outside I could smell that musty smell emanating from them. Without a thought I leaned in close and inhaled the scent, foolishly.
Immediately I was transported underground again. At least, it looked to be underground because I could see no natural light, no windows. I was behind bars, and the walls were made of stacked stone blocks, but the room itself was not without comfort. There was carpeting, and a pleasant looking bed, and other bits of furniture such that the cell looked like the suite of a hotel rather than the prison it was.
I felt at once in two places. I was on the bed, and I was also standing beside the bed looking at myself. In the bed with me was Naomi, naked.
Then I was awake again, and I was outside, and Amaia was looking at me with concern written on her face.
I blinked and shook myself, throwing the mushrooms to the ground. I breathed deeply of the fresh air, the cold of it helping to bring me back.
“Well,” I said finally. “That explains that.”
I told Amaia that the mushrooms must be hallucinogenic, and I had to stop her before she immediately tossed her handful into the fire.
“Do you want to trip again?” I asked. “Think about what’s going to happen if you burn those. We’d be inhaling smoky lungfuls of them immediately.
She still seemed a little dazed, but maybe that was because she was still holding the mushrooms. “Just throw them on the ground,” I said.
She did, and we walked a little ways away from our impromptu campsite to get some more air. I thought I had seen Tom for a second standing on the rim of the little hole we were in and watching us, so I knew I wasn’t fully clear-headed yet. We took the opportunity to survey our surroundings.
The tunnel had let out into the side of a hill. Or perhaps it is better to say into the middle of a hill, because the hill was not cleared away in front of the entrance. You had to climb a little stairway up and out of this hole in the hill, so that from outside no one would be able to find it unless they stumbled into the hole by accident - at which point they would probably break their legs from the fall, and the couple of old bones we found on the stairs attested to that. The stairs were overgrown with a thin vine I’d never seen before but which reminded me of the kudzu which had blanketed the southern US.
Reaching the top, I feared I would recognize nothing, that we would be far off to the east and we would die getting back to Coernet.
Instead, I recognized my surroundings immediately, at least partially. I was overjoyed to see the clay-stained water of the Blood flowing down below, some distance off but not more than a mile or so.
The tunnel must have been at a slight angle for us to have exited it as high as we did, but it did at least afford us a good view. I climbed still further up the hill so that I could see in the other direction - which I thought of at first as south because of the flow of the river, but I had to remind myself that I did not know if the Blood always flowed south to north as it did near Coernet.
But rounding the hill, mentally preparing myself to see nothing but woods and hills and river and monster, I saw a brisk day of sunlight shining on that great bridge of Coernet, the figures below making that arcane gesture with their hands which looked now like a symbol of greeting.
“We’re here!” I yelled, and I practically jumped onto Amaia as she climbed up beside me. “It’s Coernet! We’re not dead!”
Amaia only looked out over it all, but I caught the glimpse of a smile.
We were to the north some, but on the wrong side of the river, and past the fork such that a branch of the river lay not only between us and Coernet, but even between us and the garrison’s outpost on the river’s eastern bank. From above I could see that trying to swim across the river in either place would be suicide for any but the most skilled swimmers, and my spirits dropped slightly.
“How will we get across?” Amaia asked, and I only shook my head.
Then she patted my shoulder with one hand, and I nearly jumped. “Don’t worry, friend. We will find a way.”
I looked at her with suspicion. “Are you OK?” I asked.
She stared at me for awhile, then closed her eyes, breathed deeply, and looked at me again. “Sorry,” she said. “I was Cadoc in one of those dreams. Guess I was still waking up.”
I laughed despite our situation, and it helped to calm my nerves. “Come on then, ‘friend.’ Let’s put this fire out before monsters see it. We’re in enemy territory now.”
We descended back down the stairs, careful not to slip on the vines, and stamped out our fire. It was lucky we had exited the tunnel at night, as none was likely to have seen the smoke, and the fire itself would not be visible inside the hill’s pocket.
“Suppose we make smoke signals to the garrison,” I said. “You think they’ll come get us?”
“No,” Amaia said. “They’ll just think the monsters are burning something.”
“I guess you’re right.”
I caught sight of the mushrooms again, sitting there in the dirt, and an idea came to me.
“Amaia,” I said. “Hold me down if I try to wander off.”
She nodded and didn’t ask for any explanation. I rummaged around in my pack until I found what I was looking for - one of the health potions Ikhamon had given me. I uncorked it and, although I didn’t need it, downed what was inside. I offered Amaia a sip, and she took it, though I doubted she needed it either. It did help me feel more awake though, like coffee, which was nice.
Then, left with an empty bottle and a cork, I picked up the mushrooms and stuffed them inside. I returned the stopper and turned over the bottle in my hands, examining it, thinking.
I’d already planned to sell health potions to Dimen-X. I wondered if they’d agree to selling drugs, too.
