Meliora

by Starscribe

Chapter 22: Furipteridae

Jackie knew she’d screwed up at about the moment she turned to see her friend and realized she wasn’t there. Shit shit shit.

There was good reason why you never left someone asleep in the Dreamlands without someone else around. The danger only existed for those who were traveling there physically, since dreamers could not sleep while within.

“She’s gone,” Avery said, staring at the empty spot. “Was the surgery really that terrifying for her? I’m not offended—many of my own kind cannot remain here. I have a nurse burning out every week.”

“Not that.” Jackie wanted to vanish right to the Dreamlands at that second. But she couldn’t—not when there was a potential new alliance on the line. She had to waste a few more precious seconds to explain, that way the doors would stay open. “Look, the way my friend looked like you involved leaving her real self somewhere vulnerable. The only way for her to vanish would be… if someone took her.” She reached backward with a hoof, dagger falling out of nowhere and cutting the sky open.

Avery stared, though she didn’t seem afraid of the knife. Her mistake. But hopefully they wouldn’t become enemies after today, so it wouldn’t matter. “You’ve come here through the Astral? You’re that powerful?”

“No…” Jackie admitted. “I mean, yes. I could. But that’s a huge fuckin’ detour. Look, can we take a raincheck? Just… fly this airship of yours to the skies of Sydney. That’s where Meliora is building. We spanned a few universes, so most of the city won’t be visible to you. But I can give you the whole tour when you get there. In the meantime… I have to save my friend.”

“Go,” Avery said, without malice. “I will alter course. This cold war has gone on long enough.” She leaned in close, whispering into Jackie’s ear. “But if we help you, you have to help us. We will inherit each other’s enemies.”

“Fine,” Jackie said. “As governing mayor… blah blah… I swear that we’ll help you. If you help us.” She stepped out of reality, vanishing from sight.

Her constructed dream had shattered, taking any trace of her friend with it. “Fuck… if Alex finds out…” But no, it didn’t matter who found out about what. She was going to fix this before it got that bad.

“Misty!” she called, and suddenly the fish was there. Much larger than she was as it happened, flying beside her in the air. Her eyes actually widened as she saw Jackie. “You’re… woah. Nice wings, Jackie.”

“No time.” She gestured all around them with a transparent wing. In the Dreamlands, her physical appearance was meaningless. It didn’t make her any more vulnerable, as it certainly would have in the Phenomenal. She couldn’t get squished accidentally—squishing her required an act of will. “I took a gamble and lost, Misty. Liz is gone… she was asleep here, and I think something kidnapped her. Can your unicorn skills track her? She’s the real Alex’s sister, that should be enough of a sympathetic connection.”

“You know about sympathetic magic?” But she wasn’t arguing, Misty’s horn was already glowing. “Yes, she went this way.”

Jackie took off in a blur, forcing Misty to fly along beside her at a rapid pace or else get left behind. At their size, the blur of the objects around them felt incredible and dangerous—but there was no risk of a crash. As they got too close to anything, Jackie could just puff it out of existence. Even most people they met here were really just figments, which she could move aside and re-focus onto their lives without them feeling a thing.

They didn’t have far to go before they found a great chasm open in the ground, surrounded by a whole patch of dead forest. Huge claw marks had torn chunks of stone larger than either of them from the rock.

It was already sealing closed. But that didn’t matter—if anything, their size became an advantage. They flew, racing the stone as it crashed closed on either side. They were in almost total darkness, except for the illumination from Misty’s horn.

“You should know…” Misty said. “Not very many creatures can—”

“I do know,” Jackie interrupted. “I can smell the stink of it. I haven’t smelled that in a long time. I guess we never purged them from the Dreamlands the way we did from Earth.”

“Can’t,” Misty called, her voice wistful. “The Astral borders upon the Supernal and the Void. And life on Earth cannot continue without all of them. That means some fraction of the abyss reaches here. And when it does…”

“But why us?” She was mostly thinking out loud, now. The stone crashed down behind them, sealing them into a cave of sorts. They didn’t need magical light, though… there was plenty of “natural” glow here.

It was hell, literally. Mountains of lava rose in the distance, spewing forth their pyroclastic wrath upon an endless tableau of horror. There was never a lack of damned souls in hell—though they were really just figments, same as anywhere else. But so long as mortals dreamed of places of punishment, then they would have parallels in the sleeping world.

“Maybe it doesn’t like the breezies? I mean, lots of ponies don’t like breezies. Ruining crops, and overgrowing forests, and…”

“I don’t think it’s them they’re after,” Jackie interrupted. She could see many dreams here, drifting by all around them. She tried to ignore them—the sorts of dreams that formed here weren’t the kind she wanted to see. Part of learning her powers had been overcoming dreams like this.

Only another spirit of the Void created those dreams, and I only got over them with Alex’s help. I don’t have Archive with me this time.

But that didn’t mean her quarry could flee. It was an intruder in the Dreamlands—they were her home.

She could feel its influence, a trail of corruption cutting straight through the sleeping damned and warping everything it touched. The demons became crueler, torturing for sport instead of to teach some lesson. The fires burned green instead of red, and the smell of sulfur was replaced with decay and ozone. It couldn’t hide its nature from her, whatever it was.

Which demon are you, I wonder? And maybe she’d been thinking of it all wrong. It wasn’t attacking them because it hated breezies, it attacked Liz. Probably because it hated somepony in particular. Alex.

And she wasn’t here to help. She would’ve come for her family—but calling her here would give this creature time to enact whatever it had planned. Terrible things could happen to a living traveler in the Dreamlands. But Liz is immortal, isn’t she? How does that even work? Will she respawn on Earth the way Alex does?

That would make this simple—but then again, there was a demon involved. What if it isn’t going to do anything. This might just be on the trail. We’re in hell because—

Because of sympathy. When she wanted to contact fae creatures, she went to a part of the Dreamlands that was similar. If there was going to be a weakness into the fathomless abyss, this was where she would find it.

“This is too slow,” Jackie said, spinning around to face Misty. “I need a teleport, right now. Wherever the fuck this monster is. Bring us there.”

“That… that sounds stupid,” Misty began, but then she saw Jackie’s furious look, the dagger in her hoof. “Alright, alright!” There was a flash, and suddenly they were somewhere else.

The edge of a cliff. Massive formations of crumbling igneous rock flaked away into an opening into… nothingness. Below the edge Jackie could see stars, and shapes of greater darkness that circled like massive sharks.

A single island floated above the void, an island of apparently healthy growth. But only at first glance. Jackie’s trained eyes could make out the familiar fungus covering everything. It was jungle all right, but jungle that had been blanketed by fungus. And anything that was covered had a sad, defeated look to it. Leaves wilted and drooped, no birds called.

“She’s there,” Misty said, pointing out onto the island. It wasn’t very large, though at their size it was still easy to be tricked. She closed her eyes briefly, concentrating and returning to normal. Not that anything she saw there would care much about what she looked like. She could make herself as big as a building and it wouldn’t help her fight. She didn’t take a pony form, though, but rose onto two legs, wearing dull black armor and a sheath concealed near one armpit. She still had pony hooves instead of feet—it was hard not to have something of her waking life without concentrating. It was the form she took whenever she had demons to fight in here. Alex had trained her that fighting demons was a human thing—old habits were hard to break.

“What do you think it wants?” Misty asked from beside her. She hadn’t got any larger—still swam through the air, though now it was over Jackie’s shoulder. Cute, but it was hard for her to appreciate just now. “Bringing her somewhere like this…”

“Not for us to follow,” Jackie said, her voice low. “It ran as quickly as it could, tried to close up the earth behind it. Whatever it wants, we aren’t part of the plan.”

“Unless it wanted to get ready first,” Misty suggested. “Maybe it wants to set up some elaborate deathtraps.”

“Or maybe stealing Liz was a spur-of-the-moment decision. It saw someone it wanted, and took them while we weren’t there to stop it.” She drew the dagger from under her armor, spinning it backhand. “Whoever it is, they’re about to get fucked up.” She stepped out into the void. She still had bat wings in this form—wings were too cool to give up. Below the cliffs was a passage right out of the world. Probably things from down there couldn’t come up, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t fall down.

“I don’t like it here,” said Misty, settling onto her shoulder and holding there. “Whatever’s down there…”

“You should hate it,” Jackie whispered. Once she’d left “hell,” the air went almost totally silent. Only her wings, and Misty’s panicked heartbeats. “It’s the Abyss, the lowest-energy state. It’s all the things that don’t exist, that get wedged under the universe. You might as well hate them, because they hate us. For the crime of existing.”

“Can we leave?”

“Once we get Liz back,” Jackie said. “I don’t know… if whoever this is has the power to throw her down there. It’s possible. Or maybe this is a show. But I’m not going to leave her at their mercy to find out.”

They landed another second later, sending a little cloud of spores into the air around her. Jackie recognized a dream when she was stepping into one. Except that it didn’t follow some of the rules she was used to. It was strong—much stabler than most dreams she’d encountered before. The ground under her hooves felt solid. And the wall out into the real world was incredibly strong—she could slip back into the Dreamlands, but not out into whatever part of the phenomenal world this was in.

But most impressively, she couldn’t create anything, couldn’t change anything. She felt it like physical pressure on her body, trapping her in one form, restricting her vision. The normal sight she would’ve seen into the locations of every real mind in this dream was gone. She was basically blind.

“Shit. This is… bad.” She was dealing with perhaps the most skilled dreamcrafter she had ever encountered. Someone who could break the ordinary rules of the craft.

A bat who sold her soul to the void? But why would she want Liz?

“You are not the one I want,” said a distant voice, echoing through the foliage. The entire jungle seemed to shake, dislodging bits of rotten bark which spiraled around her in a little cloud. “Remove yourself, and I will forget you. You do not want another enemy.”

“I think I want another fuck you,” Jackie shouted into the forest. “Where are they, Misty?” The seapony pointed, and off she flew. “How about you give me back my friend before I feed you to the sharks?”

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

Oh joy, a hastily made bargain with fae creatures. Surely this will end well and with no regrettable consequences.

But that's a matter for another day. First Jackie has an Abyssal horror with even greater dreamshaping power than her to deal with. This must be Thursday...

[Halira]

Let's hope Liz doesn't come out of this demon corrupted.

[gakposter]

9192915
"You help us, we'll help you."

Bad idea, dude.

[Yami Vizzini]

Well, this took quite another turn....

[AyanamiRei]

I wonder what new enemy that Jackie will be making now!