“Breathe normally. You may inhale it without drowning.”
“What? Is it keron? I thought only the military had such substances.”
“Come on—keron? We’re in a virtual world. What’s stopping us from having things like this? It’s the perfect gate. Who would ever imagine this water is breathable?”
Gill stared at him, unsure whether to believe him or not.
“After all, I offered to help you,” said Urdun. “If you don’t want to go, we may stay here.”
“Go ahead,” he barked peevishly.
Without a word, the old Antyran jumped into the hole, splashing the disk-shaped grass around.
Gill approached the waterhole and looked into its crystal-clear depths, startled by the prospect of jumping in headfirst . He saw Urdun’s feet quickly swimming away. He had to follow him if he didn’t want to lose him from his sight, but the thought that the cold water would rush into his chest and quickly suffocate him wasn’t exactly reassuring. He felt the atavistic fear of drowning that had haunted the Antyrans ever since their long-gone ancestors had lost the ability to breathe underwater through the recessive gills.
His companion was barely visible. He couldn’t give up, not with Sigia’s fate at stake.
“On Zhan’s eye!” he exclaimed. He gathered all his courage, closed his nostrils, and jumped in after Urdun.
Just as expected, the water was cold as ice, and the tunnel was long, narrow, and darker with every inch.
Very soon, he couldn’t hold his breath, and Urdun was still swimming forward. He couldn’t glimpse another realm or even a cave to provide a mouthful of air. When he realized he couldn’t go further, he tried to turn back, but the walls were too narrow. Gill started to struggle, muddying the water around him. As soon as he took his hand from his nostrils, the cold water gushed in… He inhaled it into his chest, suffocating, while trying to reach the interface to pull it off.
After several seconds of agonizing convulsions, he calmed down. Urdun didn’t lie this time; he could breathe normally—although perhaps a bit harder than in the air. The only inconvenience was that the cold was freezing his chest, but it was not so much as to prevent him from going forward.
Terror gave way to excitement. The feeling of breathing water, of being able to breathe it like air, filled him with a kind of euphoria unknown to his species since time immemorial!
After several dozens of yards, he saw light, a sign that they approached another exit. The tunnel became slightly larger, allowing him to swim vigorously to catch up with Urdun.
They came out of the hole in a dense forest of tall trees, covered in small, thin leaves curved in all directions. The leaves had a dark green—almost black—hue. The light was weaker here, and not just because of the trees—it was dusk. It seemed they had left the prison island and arrived on another one where the local time was just before nightfall.
Urdun scouted the surroundings as if he expected something dangerous to come out of the darkness. Satisfied with the inspection, he pointed to a small opening in the thicket.
“See the path? Go on, it will lead to a road.”
“And you?”
“Right behind you. Be careful not to lose the trail; it’s not wise to stray off the path in this place.”
“The council is on this island?”
“Be patient, we’ll get to it later.”
They traveled for a while in the woods, Gill leading the way and Urdun a few steps behind. The air around was heavy, cold, and moist, and no breath of wind could pass through the impenetrable green wall. They had to hurry to avoid freezing to the bones. As they pressed on, the place gradually revealed its true face… It was a sinister, huge swamp, suffocated by poisonous gases and covered by black trees growing in the mud. Over time, the fallen trunks and leaves made a putrid platform, hiding most of the water and mud underneath. Only occasionally, in a few less-crowded places, they could see the long, thin stems of the arkanes, the herbs of the peat bogs.
The place looked exactly like the childhood stories of the Black Forest, the place where no mortal should enter…
In the story of the Black Forest, the trees were purposely impregnated by the bog’s nifle to confuse the travelers while the trails behind them changed their place. The poor Antyrans who had the misfortune to step inside were never to be seen again, their kyis forever doomed to haunt the clearings and lure other victims to end up like them.
Of course, it was only a legend of the old days before Zhan’s coming, a story told at dusk in the aromary rooms customary in all respectable nesting shelters. The storyteller always started by opening his aromary box, to allow the carefully crafted fragrances to spread into the air and accompany the story.
Bailas had banned all the legends that made Antyrans believe in anything else but Zhan, but they didn’t die. Parents kept telling them to their children, from generation to generation, even though in the last centuries nobody believed them . Nobody believed them because there were no black forests anymore…71
And yet, Gill was in precisely such a forest.
He turned to speak to Urdun, but his companion had disappeared.
“Urdun! Where are you? Urdun!”
No one answered, not even the echo. He shivered, pervaded by cold, the bitter flavor of defeat stalking him from all the corners of the sinister forest. Urdun wasn’t scared by his threats and had dared to deceive him again…
The realism of the simulation made him forget where he was; it made him lose sight of essential details—like the fact that in the realm of mirages, things were never what they seemed.
The old Antyran had seemed genuinely frightened by the prospect of a forced disconnection, numbing Gill’s vigilance. For a moment, he felt the sharp sting of fear—he underestimated Ugo and stepped obliviously into a new trap, a plan hidden in another plan… What else did he miss? He couldn’t understand—when did Ugo have the time to warp all the threads of the complicated reality in which he had trapped him? How did the jure manage to anticipate his every move? The enemy proved to be more resourceful and dangerous than he imagined… more dangerous than he could have ever imagined.
His negligence in allowing his companion to walk behind him might have closed the doors of the virtual world. He would be forced to follow the only remaining path that Ugo was unaware of—the escape through the skylight—in a storm of physical violence. It would be a long day, a day when death would gather with obscenity a rich harvest of kyis. And the kyis… would belong to the others.
For an instant, he stopped to look at the inner seed that lent him strength to move forward, regardless of the number of bodies he had to step on. A quote came into his head, a paragraph from the Book of Creation Inrumiral, verse 12.3. The orations of Zhan’s third coming: “From darkness with darkness combined, from ice upon ice multiplied, through the vein of night, Arghail creeps into existence. His footsteps will fade and his voice will vanish, and eternity will be death.”
He was feeling the same about himself; he was feeling the source of power growing inside him with every passing moment, becoming more indifferent to the sight of death.
The madness of the last days insinuated in his kyi like an insidious, toxic aroma, which, for the first time, made him doubt that he still knew where the border between good and evil was. Maybe Baila wasn’t so wrong to proclaim that “Gillabrian is Arghail’s tool.” The night’s border was thin, and he no longer had a problem with crossing it. For Sigia.
He turned back on his steps, trying to make as little noise as he could, afraid that he’d wake the forest’s life lurking in the darkness. But the old Antyran was nowhere to be found, so he finally burst toward the tunnel leading to the prison meadow on Tormalin. Although it was the only path, he kept losing it and had to search it out through the thicket, his head spikes wrinkled by the fear that he might be lost for good. Was the fear clouding his smell, or was the path playing tricks on him?