Bait

Shady once again came apart into hundreds of separate Shadies.

I watched as the Wendigo-shards tore through the transformed landscape, feasting on the corpses blooming into X-Mass trees.

Nexxali exhaled heavily, standing beside me.

Her form rippled and stretched, gradually shedding Laika’s appearance. The festive sweater and antlers dissolved into her Frontenachii hexasuit. The scruffy canine fur smoothed into sleek ginger. She rolled her shoulders, cracking her neck with a smug expression and then wiped her tears.

“Fuck… that was a lot more brutal than I expected. Being a traumatized dog is an effort and a half,” she commented, “Muchly painful despair. Excessive betrayal-ness.”

“That song was… intense,” I agreed.

“Had to be,” she replied, “blood pacts are stubborn things. You have to relive the original wound to unravel them all, sing the pain back to its source. It’s quite nice to work as a diver-team with Shady and Sage. It took me ages to dismantle my own blood pact.”

We waited in companionable silence as the Shadies finished their work. I had no idea what Shady was even eating here as the city around us looked like a massive graveyard. The hundreds of lanky, monstrous Wendigos tearing remnants of bodies from beneath pine trees only added to the overall horror film vibes.

One by one, the dark Wendigos gradually began converging back toward our position. They merged as they approached, until a single, naked, sexy Wendigo stood before us, panting furiously.

Shady looked… better.

The tension in her shoulders had eased. Her silver eyes held steadier, the feverish hunger dimmed, the skull less twitchy. She stretched her blade-claws, then retracted them with a satisfied click.

“Full,” she announced, patting her stomach. “Very full. Rrrrrrrr. Stuffed, even. I should do this more often.”

“Feeling less murdery toward the fox and doggo?” I asked.

“Marginally,” Shady admitted. She flopped down onto the snow beside me and pulled me onto her lap. “Are you planning to add Laika to your ever-expanding harem?”

Nexxali settled on my other side.

“Shady,” I said with a sigh, looking at her skull-face. “You can read my mind, yes?”

“I can,” she tisked at me. “But I don’t wanna. Why don’t you tell me how you feel instead.”

“I feel like I…” I began. “Like I didn’t ask for any of this. Like what I must do is already way too much mental stress for my person. But… I have to do it, like a hamster in an ever-spinning wheel.”

“You have to collect Omnids and prads girls?” She leered at me with silver eyes.

“I have to save my Earth, Shades,” I said. “Just because we’re freeing Laika from Saint Nikky it doesn’t mean that I’m going to sleep with her. Just because I’m helping her it doesn’t mean I’m going to date her. This week, I also helped Kawathra and Keiy, plus many… many others. Do note that they aren’t dating me. I seriously have my fill of girlfriends. You would have been enough if the Frontenachii didn’t drop the fucking moon on us.” I gesticulated my hand up. “I’m helping as many people as I can and my relationship cup overfloweth as it is. Seriously. I don’t see Laika as anything but a prad girl that we need to help, because if we don’t free her we’re all fucked. As fucked as this place is.”

“Well ranted,” Nexxali purred, rubbing her ginger head against my right side.

“Fine.” Shady huffed from my left.

We sat in silence for a bit, watching as fat snowflakes drifted down onto the silent, dead city.

“So,” I said. “What did we learn?”

“Many things,” Nexxali replied.

“Things that Laika missed, I presume,” I said.

“Yes. This Moscow was a stage,” Shady said, resting her dark skull-head on my left shoulder. “A set piece. The citizens here weren’t mundanes living out normie lives. They were… convicted prisoners playing roles. Very specific roles with very specific lines. The Red Stars above the Kremlin directed them with Charmchain magic.”

“They followed the System Wizard’s narrative,” I murmured, “Right?”

“Yes.” Nexxali nodded.

“All good stories need conflict in their heart,” I repeated Laika’s words. “They need sacrifice.”

“The GIGA-KHRUSH elevators,” Nexxali added. “Laika mentioned ‘Relocation to new magical districts’ from which none came back.”

“Because they weren’t being relocated,” I said, the pieces clicking together. “They were evacuating.”

“The Wizard was moving her real population somewhere else while leaving behind…” Shady began.

“Sacrifices,” Nexxali finished. “Prisoners. Traitors. Kindling… to feed the Coniferous Conversion when it arrived.”

I stared out at the pine forest stretching to every horizon. Trees that had once been people. A world transformed into a festive ornament. It seemed… mad.

“Saint Nikky thought she was conquering a world,” I said. “Harvesting souls for her Workshop. Expanding her dungeon’s domain. While, Wizard Revolution was orchestrating… What? A demolition of her own civilization?”

“That’s what it tastes like, yes. Nikky got an empty husk,” Shady said. “A skeleton crew of sacrificial pawns. The real prize, the high level Archmagi, prads and millions of humans slipped away through dimensional gates long before the first dungeon Seed was even planted.”

“Laika’s whole tragic backstory… Vladimir’s betrayal, the capsule, the burning… It was all choreographed. The System Wizard fed the doggo to a flying dungeon as a lure.” Nexxali said. “Laika’s genuine pain and hatred… made her the perfect Herald, exquisite bait. Completely committed to the cause. Loyal to her new Saint. And totally unaware that she’d been sold twice over.”

“Right,” I agreed, leaning against Shady’s warm, fuzzy chest. “But how is that useful for us?”

“It shows that Saint Nikky can be baited,” Nexxali said. “That she’s not an infallible being. That she operates on Astral currents more than anything.”

“So can we trick her by faking stuff in the Astral?” I wondered.

“I’m not an Astral diver,” the Serval replied. “I can only bend things in dreams with my music, but I’m not a pro at it like the resident Skinwalker. Do come out and tell us what you think, Sanguine. Contribute to the discussion.”

A few snowflakes halted their twirling, stopping in the air, suddenly forming fox eyes.

“Haiiii. Yepperoni. I can trick her, bait Nikky and her Sleigh to do a bigly dum’,” the fox-eye snowflakes replied with Sage’s voice. “From what I learned from my Omnithornian bestie, dungeons are generally not that smart, rely on Sentinels to bring prey inside to chew up, or plant expansion Seeds to claim greater domain. This only confirms it.”

Shady jolted slightly, letting out a small growl in the direction of the floating fox-eyes. The wind blew from the newborn pine forest, creating a fox figure sitting in front of us from more flurries.

“That’s good.” I smiled, enjoying Shady’s warm hug. “Prey to chew up? Could we pretend to be prey, go inside the Sleigh, fuck it up from within with a nuke or something?”

“What, like, Independence Day style?” the ghostly snowflake fox asked, “you want to nuke a bazillion kobolds that are livin’ there accordion’ to Laika?”

“Okay, fine, I am not that genocidal,” I chortled, “but how about an incursion into the Sleigh to study it and to sabotage it from within?”

“Das’ certainly possible,” Sage agreed. “First off, we’d have to bamboozle the Sleigh tho’. I don’t think it accepts undigested prey.” The floating snowflake fox pointed a paw at a Shady-chewed corpse of a Soviet man in a gray coat at the base of the nearest pine tree. “Basically, we’d have to get converted. On purpose.”

“Yeah, that’s not happening,” Shady growled. “Nobody’s murdering and converting my Ashy.”

“Not all of him,” the fox suggested. “Maybe just half of him?”

“That would leave him defenseless,” Nexxali pointed out. “Ripe for any Charmchainer to manipulate or for a Scrut to sniff.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I kind of need to be in two places at once as it is.”

“Tru, tru,” Sage mused. “Mayhaps you could chop him up some more, Shades? Make a third A-man?”

“I’m not chopping shit,” Shady rebutted. “Frig off. I… am not even entirely sure how I did it to begin with. It was ages ago and I was a dumb kid when I tore his soul in half.”

“Just an idea.” The snow-drift fox shrugged. “Don’t need ta roll ya barrel on me, Wendigaw Kong.”

“Why do you talk like that?” Shady’s tail whipped across the ghostly fox, momentarily disrupting the cohesiveness of Sage’s avatar.

“Like wat?” the snowflakes reformed back into a fox-ghost sitting in front of us.

“Like that,” Shady said. “It’s like you’re chewing up a quarter of your words. It bothers me on a personal level.”

“Sorrikins princess.” The fox shrugged. “Is just how I roll. It’s not that I’m dumb or lazy with my words. The Truth is that I’m protecting myself from memetics.”

“Particular speech patterns protect you from… Memetics?” I asked.

“Uh-huh. You ever notice how the Frontenachii and their prads talk?” Sage asked. “The way they say ‘Slayer’, ‘kobold’ and ‘knobfold’? The way certain phrases keep popping up in their speech patterns like verbal tics?”

“Yes,” I said, “are those not normal memetics?”

“Naw. Them particular words are memetic anchors,” Sage continued. “Linguistic hooks that burrow into your psyche and align your thinking with Omnithornian conceptual frameworks floatin’ in the Astral around Omnids. Every time an Omnid says ‘kobold’ to describe a servant, they’re reinforcing the social hierarchy in their own mind, the magic of social rulershippery. The words carry weight, meaning, an invisible infection. There’s magic in speech.”

“So you deliberately mangle your speech?” I said.

“Bingo, A-man.” The snow-fox grinned with ice crystal flurries. “I’ve got a few hundred foxes constantly skewering my mental patterns, slanting my vocabulary, scraping memetics off, scrambling any infectious linguistic structures before they can take root. It often makes me sound like a valley girl who huffed too much paint thinner, but it also keeps me… sparkly-clean.”

“Clean from what?” Shady asked.

“From getting my brain hijacked,” Sage replied. “A bigly problem for deep Astral divers like me. You go deep enough, n’ you brush against many things that want to live in your head. Wriggly sucker-fish tings’ that spread through language and thought patterns. The Sleigh warship, for example, is a massive memetic infection engine wrapped in festive packaging. Moving by it in the Astral contaminates edges of thoughts with festivus-adjacent conceptoids. Very brrrrrr. Very do not want.”

“I… don’t have this problem,” Shady said.

“You are a Wendigo, bruh,” Sage pointed out. “You eat that shit for breakfast. You are aligned with Void, a natural Astral predator covered in soul-grabbin’ hooks.”

“Aren’t Skinwalkers supposed to eat souls?” Shady arched a dark eyebrow. “What the fuck kind of jank Skinwalker are you?”

“The kind that collects verrrry particular souls for verrrrrrry particular reasons,” Sage’s snowflake avatar huffed. “I do not digest souls nor conceptoids. I either collect or avoid ‘em.”

“You’re fucked in the head is what you’re saying?” Shady grinned.

“Yes,” Sage said. “I’m fucked in the head. As a Skinwalker I’m a bigly deviation. I REALLY, realleh don’t want to get on the soul-digesting bus because once you get on it there’s no way off. Skinwalkers who don’t control themselves get addicted to soul munchin’… become dangerous monsters. From what my bestie Vespera told me, there was an ‘effy Skinwalker incursion in Skyfall Academy recently. An Outsider… Skinwalker named Valor who almost devoured the soul of Justice Nova’s daughter?”

“Yeah,” Shady said thoughtfully. “The Stabalists arrested him. Took him to the yellow house in null-cuffs. Happened a few days before I peaced out from Skyfall.”

“Exactly,” Sage said. “I don’t want to turn into an Outsider. I keep my skulk conceptually squeaky clean.”

Nexxali made a thoughtful noise, choosing not to butt into the Wendigo-Skinwalker discussion. She reached out and plucked a loose pine branch with a small, cracked ornament, bringing it to her nose. She inhaled deeply, whiskers twitching.

“The bloom smells different from the café locale,” she observed. “The café had this… gross entropic edge to it. Decay, flaws, cracks hidden under the surface. This…” She gestured at the converted forest around us. “…is clean. Fresh… Healthy.”

“Lemme sniff.” Shady snatched the branch and took her own deep breath through her dark, dog-ish skull-nostrils. “Huh. Yeah. The pine is, like, someone took the concept of ‘Christmas tree’ and removed all the messy… imperfections.”

The snow-fox avatar drifted closer, fox-nose twitching at the branch. “Syntropic alignment,” Sage confirmed. “The Coniferous Conversion takes entropic, dying matter and forces it into a stable, self-reinforcing pattern.”

“The Sleigh eats entropy?” I guessed. “It converts chaotic, magic-fucked, dying worlds into orderly, crystallized husks?”

Shady sniffed the branch again. “Not husks. Syntropic life. This forest is alive… clean. Incredibly so.”

“Which means what?” I asked.

“Think about it,” Sage’s snow-avatar said. “Laika and Comet said their worlds were basically drowning in entropy. Gray Echos. Magic failing. People becoming husks. Conceptoids infesting everything. Gates n’ dimensional shears opening on their own. Classic signs of a dimension approaching Systemfall.”

“Except here, Revolution already evacuated everyone who mattered to her,” Nexxali added, “excluding local kindling and possibly her Yankee enemies. Ah! She… let the Sleigh do the dirty work of… cleaning up a worldwide entropic infection!”

“Heh. The local System Wizard used a dungeon as a janitor,” Shady chortled. “Fed it the rotting corpse of her own world to keep the rot from spreading. Clever beerch. I guess that’s one way to restart things without wasting mana.”

“Yep. Nikky did Revolution’s housekeeping for free,” Sage added, “ate all da’ entropy here.”

“So what’s the future fate of this world?” I wondered, looking at the forest-covered Red Square.

“The trees are alive but the decorations aren’t,” Sage said. “The Festivus infection Seeds exist in the decorations and presents below the trees. Ah! I see. It’s all very uniform, very… defenseless… to a single, self-propagating spell. Once the decorations rot, and they will absolutely rot… if wobbled correctly in the Astral, you get a fresh, clean… linear-ish world to… recolonize! Christ, that’s devious as fuck!”

“The Soviet Union will rise again through the GIGA KHRUSH elevators?” I guessed.

“Presumably.” Sage shrugged. “S’ what I would do if I had no other options left. N’ways, we done unravelling the fate of this no-longer doomed Earth, ya?”

Nexxali and Shady nodded.

“Down we go then,” Sage declared, leaping towards us, and the Red Square wobbled, detonating, coming apart into falling stars.