Ud the Mortal, Page 4

physical particles you can detect.

  Same principle though- parts of the whole.

  Food, he was smelling food. That’s why he was suddenly hungry. Scanning below, he saw what looked like mashed barley.

  Bread!

  He was so hungry, he actually found himself leaping off of his perch without thinking it through, aiming to pass through the opening and land on the table where the bread was located. However, his heels hit something hard right away, and he slipped, rolling onto his back, which hit the barrier hard.

  It came loose then, the whole thing, consisting of a wooden rectangle, something smooth and hard on the inside, and some other mechanism on the end of it.

  As a unit, Ud and the entire barrier and its components fell toward the table, each of them slowly spreading apart the further they fell.

  If that breaks, it will be dangerous, the Cat warned as Ud fell, though he instantly drew on Ud the Ghoul’s tricks to slow time’s pull on him.

  Then he sang out to the spirits of the earth, though the spirits of the air would have been better. But Ud didn’t know their names yet in this world.

  Finally, he grabbed the clear barrier part as he fell using what remained of his stores of soul energy to weaken the unfamiliar substance tendency to slip in his grasp, and then tossing it back up onto the roof as dirt filtered through the stones underneath him, softening his fall right in front of the table.

  It still hurt, however.

  Then, it took him several tries to get oxygen in his lungs, as they were stuttering after losing the wind.

  Yes, the cat said, leaping up to the roof to look down on him. The protective clear barrier. Hard to see. The humans use it as a trap. It looked distinctly amused as it peered down at him, its tail flicking back and forth. It sniffed the window as it teetered on the edge of the roof, askew, but stabilizing.

  We should reclaim this space, the spirits of the Earth said as Ud recovered. It has limited us for too long.

  Please don’t, he said to them. Groaning a bit from the effort, he stood up, and took the cloth from the table, tying it into a knot.

  The loose dirt that had cushioned his fall swarmed in the air behind him, like dark, angry bees.

  I will take you to a new place that you may claim, He said.

  We don’t wish to go there. This is our home. We lived here for thousands of years before the humans came. It was unfairly taken from us.

  Is there a compromise possible? He asked, giving up on tying the cloth. The human lives here now. He will not wish to move, I imagine?

  The Dead Cat above indicated his assent with this idea.

  Is there no way you can live with him?

  We wish to see the Sun. For life to grow among us so that we may lend our strength and grow strong together.

  The humans sometimes grow plants that smell delightful inside. They could grow more? There are additional containers in the little house out back, The cat suggested.

  Ud headed outside, letting the little cat direct him out around the back of the dwelling. There was a smaller house there, a mirror to the first, but it had none of the energy of the first. It smelled of earth and felt of decay.

  His kind of place.

  The problem was- it was ripe with memories. He opened the door and First World creatures living off Ghoul energy skittered out of the way. Animals that walked on 8 legs or four, or flew through the air.

  In the darkness, a memory of darkness found him.

  He was newly in Third World, and the sensations of being a Ghast were overwhelming. It was horrible, having his skin constantly fall off. All of the screaming that was everywhere in Third World was like an assault on the mind. He never had thought that he would miss being a being of silence and bones.

  At least he felt something now though. After Fourth World, the numbness and the white, he was grateful to feel anything, even the Ghast flies that spawned in his dying skin were like a new sensation, something real.

  Was that what he was thinking of? Was that the memory that was stalking him in this place?

  Maybe it was a memory within a memory.

  Ud sat in the hut he’d made of stinking mud, horrified by the decay of his body, but more horrified about what he was before he’d made it up this far into Third World.

  The memory tugging at him pulled him full under into a time even further back.

  “Skeleton, enter,” the Ereshkigali had said. Before he was even quite sure of what he was doing, he found his body obeying, Not from any magic compulsion, but out of habit. It was dark in the bone cave; there was no light at all. It was dry, with no water to be found anywhere.

  It was still, as there was no life.

  “Skeleton, remain,” She had said. His Ereshkigali.

  This time, he did have a Compulsion on him. This worked through the collar he wore on his long neck bone, which gleamed as it was exposed in the dim light cone of Third World before his master closed the door which formed into a completely seamless wall after closing. He wasn’t even sure how she had made a door from what he thought later must have been in some kind of huge beast, or the Fourth World remains of one, perhaps.

  But before she left, she had given him the compulsion so he couldn’t even try to leave.

  She didn’t come back for three and a half years. He’d had to calculate it later, of course. Using Crack Light positions from before and after. Later, he’d also thought of ways he could’ve taken the collar off of himself using scattered bones that may have pried off the collar.

  But at the time, all of that hadn’t even occurred to him.

  He was stuck, so he stayed.

  It wasn’t long until he actually forgot that he existed.

  His mind had been blank, like it wasn’t there anymore. He felt his spirit exiting the frail bones it came from, filling the darkness of the cave, only technically his own cage.

  Every once in a while, he was pulled back into the pile of bones lying on the floor of the cave. That which was only nominally still a sometimes-sentient being.

  Bones lying on bones.

  They would stir, rattle even, when some noise occurred outside. Some small consciousness would come back into his mind. The bones would rearrange themselves into a vaguely humanoid shape again.

  He might even sit up.

  More than anything, it was mildly unpleasant. Being tugged from not just sleep, but a lack of any cohesive identity.

  That’s why it was only later, alone in the dark in enclosed mud, that he could mourn what had happened. An identity riddle with holes and creeping oblivion.

  And that’s why only now, standing in this dark shed, full of the same darkness, but different, as before, that he could see the levels, the waves, the iterations of attempted identity restoration. It had happened even more to Ud the Ghoul.

  He is much older than the rest of us combined, after all. Ud thought. And I was him until today.

  Yet, there was so much that, even so old an elder as Ud the Ghoul in the broken conglomerate that was Ud as a whole, didn’t understand.

  How deep his lack of wholeness went, for example. The nested levels of memories in all the darknesses of his past. He’d never fully understood that before.

  It’s only here, at the very beginning of his ascent to the top of the world, that he could begin to understand at all. The idea that he was in pieces-hadn’t even occurred to Ud the Ghoul. He provided memories and advice, but never self-analysis on that level.

  He wasn’t such a positive entity.

  You can exist, persist, even thrive in pieces, Ud the Mortal thought.

  That was a new thought.

  A thought worth a smile.

  He grabbed the urns in a stack and left the darkness behind.