Soon, the living carpet covered most of the ground, and Gill could hardly walk without stepping on it.
The land was strewn with massive blocks of marble, their milky crags rising through the rug of seeds. So much tekal on the imaginary island, and so little left on Antyra I! The extinction of the licants wasn’t exactly a great idea; the forests with the most prized wood were dwindling with every felled tree, and no new seeds were growing roots in the absence of the energy-rich meal offering.
The waterhole through which he exited had a circular marble railing carved by skilled hands. The excess water trickled over the lip of the basin, directly into a trough for watering moulans. It was a small fountain built for the travelers walking on the nearby path to quench their thirst.
In a few steps, he got out of the forest. The hill bordered a green river meadow covered by the same strange discoidal grass he had seen in Tormalin, dotted here and there by dwarf bushes riddled with curved thorns. Nearby, the slope was gentle, but further downhill, it became steep and rocky, hiding its base.
On the other part of the valley, there was another hill, taller than the one where he stood, strewn with thick bushes and round like the baldness of a zabulan.72
A wide and shallow river flowed from the narrow valley at his left. After a large meander, it quickly disappeared from sight, hidden by a dense forest.
The valley was apparently followed by a dirt road on his left, flanked on both sides by steep, forested ravines, dotted with jagged rock ridges. Farther away, in the same direction, he saw a huge mountain split by an impressive glacial trough, carved by the glittering tongue of a huge glacier.
He filled his chest with fresh air. Millions of small, yellow stems of vermalin dotted the green, juicy grass covering the hill; their sweet scent caressed his nostrils, helping him to forget the awful stench of the black swamps.
The road in the valley had to go somewhere; Gill decided to reach it by following the small creek that flowed from the portal fountain. The trail was muddy, and he had to step on the flat, sparkling mica rocks in its riverbed.
He hadn’t descended much when his eyes were drawn by a patch of mud that had a footprint in it. A small dent filled with standing water, in which there was a… foot-glove73 of a child?
He grabbed it between two fingers and pulled it out of the mud. Immediately, he noticed it was lighter than a snowflake and didn’t look like a glove but, rather, like a tiny leather shoe, shaped for a foot with two equal fingers. At first glance, he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him, but then he understood the riddle—the trees, the sky, the grass, his palm, all were mirrored by the shoe in his hand. A shoe of a chameleon dwarf!
The virtual world didn’t cease to surprise him. The tiny object came as a tail blow in the face of the normality he thought—for a moment—that he had regained.
Getting over the initial shock, he looked carefully around. Soon, he noticed that other footprints similar to the first one riddled the muddy creek. A whole bunch of chameleons had recently passed through the area.
Driven by curiosity, he went after them to see where they led.
They were so well camouflaged, and his senses were so untrained to locate them, that he almost stumbled into them. He had reached right in the middle of their pack before he noticed them, when they moved out of his way—hundreds of dwarf chameleons, all around him! Up close, they were betrayed by the tremor of the air, resembling the whirling refraction of a wildfire.
Their transparency reminded him of the sinister shadow that had attacked him in the prison meadow. Save for their diminutive stature, the dwarves were strikingly similar to the virtual Ugo. The jure wouldn’t have any difficulty hiding among their ranks, he worried.
The chameleons were mythical creatures of the folklore before Zhan’s coming—usually described as more or less similar to an Antyran, but missing the tail and gills. Instead, the legends told of a pair of oversized funnels surrounding their hearing alveoli, and sly little eyes placed close to the nostrils.
Since they were in a meadow, they had naturally “borrowed” the dark green color of the grass—even their sparse head spikes became green. The white of their eyes, however, contrasted with the rest of their appearance—and also the conical gray teeth, which became visible when their owners displayed a foolish grin if they noticed they were being looked at.
One of the dwarves approached him and took a deep bow. The others immediately followed suit by putting their little palms on the grass. Without a word, the first creature unwrapped a piece of metal from under the folds of his mantle and handed it over.
The object resembled the scratching claws used in antiquity, quite similar to the ones he had a chance to study in the vaults of the Archivists Tower. But the grayish-white shiny color, which left him no doubt it was cast of platinum, and the prominence of the claws were good hints that it had a different significance altogether. He knew it, of course, all too welclass="underline" the Brocat of Loyalty, which meant that the chameleons put themselves under his direct command. Command to do what? Could the creatures be the avatars of some Ropolitans? Or maybe artificial intelligences with some functions in this twisted world? He suspected that he had stumbled into a land of legends, a game…
He reached out for the brocat, hoping to get some answers. Indeed, as soon as he took it in his palm, a gentle breeze started to blow several yards away, quickly turning into a violent dust devil that swirled the grass disks and dry vegetation in its dizzying dance. A hole of darkness appeared at the base of the twister—a rupture in the space structure that expanded to make room for a… a white, translucent sphere, taller than his stature. It could only be the portal sphere Urdun had told him about!
Without delay, the side facing him opened lengthwise, and a young female stepped out of the object. She had swarthy skin and childish features—playful blue eyes deep as the Blue Crevice, complemented by a slightly open mouth showing her perfect teeth, framed by fleshy, prominent lips. She was the kind of female that everyone liked from the first glance, except for the tarjis—who would have surely been offended by the boldness of her tunic, which generously exposed her left shoulder.
The outline of her delicate body, combined with the firmness of her muscles—which could be guessed under the slippery fabric of her clothes—deeply unsettled him. Gill wasn’t able to fully understand the reason. Was she deceiving him with hidden aromas? He felt the dashing pulse of his hearts beating wildly in his head spikes, but then he remembered Urdun’s sayings, that in the virtual world, everyone looked as they wished. He had no way of knowing what kind of shell lay abandoned in the fluff of a greasy nest, crammed in a cave she might share with other bixanids immersed in trance.
Four disproportionately tall, muscular individuals descended from the same sphere right after the female. They were most likely artificial intelligences; they looked identical and were dressed in yellow tunics embroidered with strange symbols. Moreover, he could read the text painted in blue on their right asymmetrical shoulder: “Property of the Games Registry—Valley A2—Statistics.”
Just as he was about to greet her, he saw the scar on her bare shoulder—an utril with open wings, incised deeply in her skin. On Zhan’s eye, a grah! Only they used such tribal tattoos! That explained the robustness of her making, the feeling of wildness barely tamed by a smattering of etiquette—her strangeness that he smelled from the first moment their eyes met.
As an archivist, he knew all too well the origin of the grahs. They had a common ancestor with the Antyrans, but a fateful migration of the North Pole right in the middle of the only continent, some five hundred thousand years prior, had split the two populations. Strong and violent, swift to shed blood but honoring truth and justice, passionate in love as well as in hate, the grahs went through countless wars, alliances, and even marriages with the Antyrans—although, in most cases, the fruits of such unnatural bindings were born sterile and didn’t live long.