Skyfall Field Trip

Shady opened her mouth to speak. Her tongue darted across her teeth like she couldn’t quite assemble the sentence she wanted to output.

“It’s… ugh, uhgmh…” She made incoherent noises.

“What?”

“Many words is effort,” she finally stated. “Especially when it comes to all the shit I’ve gone through on that stupid ass field trip, just remembered all of it myself during our dream-romp. Why don’t I show it all to you… with a memory kiss.”

“Mkay,” I agreed. “Kiss away.”

She leaned forward and crashed her mouth against mine.

The kiss was hungry, demanding, antlers casting shadows across the small tent as she angled her head to deepen the contact. Her tongue pushed past my lips and tangled with mine, and the moment our saliva fused together, reality shuddered.

The tent came apart, washing away as a new memory poured into my skull through the shared connection.

Dr. Victor Greyfield stood at the front of a group of colorful Omnid students, dark coat and wispy white hair catching the cold blue light of a circular, obsidian magitek gate covered in runes. The Dover Demon-Human hybrid teacher’s dark tinted glasses slightly concealed the red glow of his eyes as he gestured with long, spindly fingers toward a hexagrammic blue-white line glowing on the obsidian floor.

“Remember! Stay within the marked boundary of the stable path drawn by the Stabalist artifacts I’ve released into the Backrooms,” the old Omnid instructed in a slightly papery voice. “The corpse of Number Six feeds on attention and intention. Do not wander far away from the marked floor. Do not call out to anything you see in the periphery. Do not, under any conceivable interpretation of the word, accept gifts or make deals with local manifestations no matter what they offer you.”

The students nodded with varying degrees of seriousness. Shady stood near the back, arms crossed, already bored. She’s already been to a ridiculous number of dead and fucked up dimensions. 

Slayer, she spent seven years as a kid on the Frontenachii Citadel carved into the Corpse of Number Zero with completely sideways-fucked time. This field trip wasn’t going to be any different.

A tall figure detached himself from the cluster of older students and slid to stand beside her. 

A Skinwalker with a white wolf skull face. As he stood beside Shady, his face gradually warped and melted, becoming human.

I recognized myself in it. A slightly warped, much more handsome as if photoshopped for a few hours, muscular, tall Ash reached out to grab Shady’s hand.

“My… Princess,” the doppelganger-me murmured in my voice, dipping his head. “I want to show you something amazing today.”

“What is it now, Vincent?” Shady’s nose twitched imperiously as she regarded the Skinwalker.

“You’ll see. I’ve been waiting for one of the Instructors to take us to a divine corpse for a while now,” the Skinwalker whispered. “I expected a field trip to the Superstore, but this place will do nicely too.”

Shady considered the Skinwaker. The human face and voice he wore was very enjoyable to her for some inexplicable reason, but she was starting to become annoyed with his obsessive mindset. Then again, most highborn Omnids were obsessive, stuck on one stupid mental track or another.

“Mr. Thornheart, Miss. Frontenachii!” Dr. Greyfield stated. “Are you listening to my instructions or are you making dastardly plans back there?”

“We’re listening.” Shady and Vincent ground out together.

“Follow me, then!” Greyfield led the group across the dimensional threshold with an age-lined, gray-faced smile. 

The obsidian marble academy floor became replaced with damp yellow carpet stained with questionable gray-yellow mold. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, sickly white and looking like they were copy-pasted into existence.

Endless yellow hallways stretched in every direction.

Shady inhaled the stale air. It tasted fucked up and wrong, like infinite furniture storage rooms. The Backrooms had a smell of unending, warped liminality and all of her Wendigo senses recoiled at it.

“Pair up with your delving teams!” Greyfield called out. “Explore the direction of your choice and return to the gate in two hours time! One hundred points will be awarded to your delving group if you manage to document a unique artifact or an anomaly. Remember! The Backrooms are infinite. You are not!”

Vincent’s hand closed around Shady’s elbow. “This way.”

“What about our… delving team?” Shady asked, glancing at the bothered-looking Thunderbird, Kitsune and Quetzalcoatl trio behind them in the crowd of other students. 

“The others are going on their own to look for anomalies or whatever,” Vincent said. “I told them that we need privacy for a fun romp on a couch.”

“I see,” Shady said.

Vincent’s overly-handsome human face wasn’t staying on correctly in the Backrooms, looking like a half-melted mask being pulled off into a non-existing direction. 

Shady considered what she even liked in Vincent. It was fun to murder him and his kobolds, that was about it. He provided her a small outlet to pour violence into. 

Why was she so angry? She wasn’t sure. Everything lately felt so… disappointing, wrong. 

If things were wrong, then what was right-ness? What did she even want from life? Shady wasn’t sure, but she constantly felt that she wasn’t on the right path at all, that she was missing something pivotal, something precious that she had once, long ago.

A pet? A special artifact? A particular kobold that she liked to terrorise as a spawnling? The appreciation and friendship of her Empress great-grandmother? The fear-radiating walls of the Corpse-God Citadel? She had no idea.

The Skinwalker led her down a corridor that branched off the main group, then another, then another. The blue-white hexagrammic floor-marking line vanished behind them after the third turn. 

Shady said nothing, letting the Death-Seeker pull her deeper into the yellow maze. They’ve done all sorts of crazy things together that lead to their deaths, this wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.

After perhaps thirty minutes of winding, similarly lame hallways, Vincent stopped in a wide, irregular room where the ceiling sagged in places like wet paper. He turned to her, eyes bright with feverish excitement.

“Here. This place will do. I smell an infinite drop beneath the rotten floor. Yesssss. I’ve… been preparing for THIS day for years.”

He whispered something and snapped his fingers. A dimensional storage rune flared on his robe’s pocket, and a small knife slid into his grip. The blade was gray and dull.

Shady inhaled. The artefact blade smelled of suffering, an entire ocean of pain and fear focused towards… the concept of Binding.

Shady’s pupils contracted to slits. “What the fuck is that?”

“A concept-binder blade. Forged from one hundred and twenty thousand sacrificed souls compressed into a single function by Necromancer from some doomed world.” He turned the blade reverently. “I got it through six layers of brokers. Cost me a fortune.”

“Cute.” Shady lied. She didn’t find the blade cute. It smelled gross and weird. “What else you got? You are radiating too much excitement today.”

Vincent stepped closer. “Check this out.” He raised his left wrist, pulling off the robe. A hexasuit wrist-cover folded into itself revealing seven Lazarus bracelets.

“What’s with all the Laz bracelets?” Shady asked. “Are you trying to hold onto your soul seven times harder or something?”

“No. They hold extra souls empowering mine.”

Shady leaned in and sniffed the bracelets. 

The scents of seven different Omnid girls clung to them, layered under Vincent’s musk.

Shady’s Fractal Engine heart hiccuped. The bracelets radiated just as much fear as the knife, entwined with absolute, grating suffering.

“Those don’t belong to you,” she growl-hissed. “Your own bracelet is on your right hand.”

“Yes. I killed seven.”

“You… murdered seven Omnid girls?” Shady asked. “Their souls are still in the bracelets. I can smell them.”

“Yes,” Vincent smiled proudly. “They begged for it by the end.”

“Uh-huh. Is that supposed to impress me, or something?”

“Princess, you don’t understand.” 

“Explain then.”

“We’ve been doing this across many corpse worlds already, you and I.  Every time we hunted each other, every time you cut me down, every time I bled out from your claws and teeth. We’ve been practicing for this day for years.”

“Practicing for what, V?” she asked.

Vincent’s eyes burned. “To become gods.”

“We are already practically gods, you absolute unit of knob,” Shady ground out. “We’re scions from wealthy families.”

“Half-gods,” Vincente clarified. “Today… we become… full gods as long as we fully unfold, unlock our Fractal Engine hearts.”

“What.”

“A corpse-Number’s domain is a perfect place for a particular ritual. Two souls cut clean, woven together, bound to a Number. We will never truly die again!”

“We’re already immortal, idiot,” Shady stated, “Lazarus bracelets…”

“Are not real immortality.” His voice rose, fervent as he pointed at his left wrist. “These seven lowborn Omnid teens aren’t immortal at all. I’ve been gradually dissolving their souls, feeding on them, wielding their Fractal Engine hearts, becoming stronger… getting ready for this.”

“For what?” Shady growled, ready to snap the Skinwalker’s neck right then and there for his utter disregard for other Omnids.

“I want to be the rule, the law, to take control of a Number’s corpse from within as my domain. And only… You can do this with me, help us both ascend!”

“Eh?” Shady blinked, completely lost as to where Vincent was going with his latest batshit insane murder-me request.

“You’re the jewel of the Frontenachii Empire, Aqi!” His free hand lifted to her cheek, human fingers barely grazing the silver freckles. “A Prima Princess born from a ritual of massive sacrifice. Your family burned thousands of Wormwood Star shards to give you life. You carry more Abyssal Void inside you than every student at Skyfall combined. A million hoards are bound to you. You’re the true Lady of death, the strongest of them all… the girl with potential to awaken the Wormwood Star, the one truly destined to become the living manifestation of the Leviathan of Wormwood.”

Past-Shady half-listened to the Skinwalker’s rant. The flattery rolled off her like rain off an old tile roof.

“You,” he continued, voice dropping into honeyed reverence, “are the only one with enough conceptual soul-mass to make the binding truly stick. Anyone else would fail at this task.”

“Why?”

“This is a domain of a dead Number! Here you are practically unstoppable! There’s no cap limit on how much power you can pull from your kobolds in this place as long as you hold onto this binding artifact blade!”

“And?”

“If you pull power and skills from everything your family owns here during the ritual… You’ll awaken as… the Leviathan. We will awaken… together as Leviathan and Slayer, take over this place, ascend! All you have to do is carve a binding rune with this blade on my chest then on yours, then draw the same rune on the floor with our entwined blood, say the engagement words on this parchment as you carve out my heart and then slice your throat. Our Astal Fountains will melt through liminality and then our souls will re-manifest here, become reborn with the absolute power of Leviathan and Slayer, become conceptually reinforced by Number Six!”

Vincent exhumed and offered Shady an old parchment that smelled of arcane pain, fear and rot. 

“Uh-huh.” Shady said, accepting the parchment and looking over the words. “Let me get this straight. You want me to carve you up with a dumb binding knife, read this dumb binding poem, then carve my own throat open… and then we both get promoted to gods?”

“Yes!” The Skinwalker held the blade out flat across both palms. “Take the blade, Princess. We die together, like we did so many times before in other doomed dimensions. Except this time… We will wake as Gods!”

Shady looked at the blade for a long, long moment.

Then she smiled, big and bright and full of shark-teeth.

“Awwww, V. That’s the sweetest, most romantic, most suicidal thing anyone has ever asked me. Of course… I’ll do it.”