The Land of Sorrow
The Land of Sorrow
Fay and Ereta both wore worried expressions—the difference in the details. Fay's worry was total, utterly consuming. Ereta, no less concerned, was working through possibilities in her mind.
The way she rested her chin in her hand, folded her other arm across her chest, and closed her eyes in deep concentration sat naturally behind the fretful mask.
Tiyamal's reaction wasn't far off. Perhaps he'd interpreted Aslan's mention of the underworld differently, because he let out a heavy sigh, scraping at the scales along his jaw.
Watching her companions, Angie blinked several times. Why are they acting like this? The thought rose into words and slipped out toward Aslan.
"So? What do we do in the underworld? What're we gonna do?"
A straightforward question. When Aslan had said he needed to go there, it was the obvious next thing to ask—but Tiyamal shook his head as he looked at the girl.
The rebuke followed, as if it were only natural.
"Little one, what he just said means we are completely out of options—we're absolutely finished. You go to the underworld when you die, don't you? He was speaking around it. Means there's no way left."
Angie stared at Tiyamal as he explained, then gave Aslan a blank look. A quiet ah escaped her lips.
"That what you meant?"
Aslan blinked in surprise. That wasn't what he'd meant at all.
"No, I meant literally—we have to go to the underworld. You all thought I was being figurative?"
At that, Tiyamal's expression shifted. It had been the look of a man watching a beleaguered comrade with pity because they were out of ideas. Now it edged toward something closer to this bastard's lost his mind.
Tsk, tsk. The clicking of his tongue carried deep regret. The accompanying look said, No matter how desperate you are, you didn't need to go this far into nonsense.
"Aslan... is it truly that hard on you? I hadn't realized..."
"It's all right. Even if Aslan gets strange, Fay still likes him."
Ereta seemed concerned in her own way, her usually sharp gaze softening as she spoke. Fay, perhaps spotting her opportunity, spread her arms wide and added, Want a hug?
Not exactly in need of an embrace, Aslan shook his head. A wry, bitter smile touched his lips.
He felt oddly wronged. In a world with evil gods and magic, people thought he was crazy for suggesting they pass through the underworld.
But he also understood why they'd react that way.
Sorrow and Death had died long ago. The underworld was little more than a neglected spiritual sewer.
Common folk knew next to nothing about it, and they preferred it that way.
Only the fearless Bolen had ever grasped its location or its providence.
The underworld was a taboo—a forbidden ground.
Aslan could appreciate his companions' reactions. Angie, still catching up on her education, was the only one who'd failed to grasp his meaning. The rest understood perfectly well.
But this is the only way.
Aslan was certain. The method to cross over to the City of Mages right now was what the game called fast travel.
Weird by Geladrion's standards, but perfectly normal by his. Aslan turned the method over in his mind, working out how best to explain it. Slowly, the corners of his mouth lifted into a gentle smile.
Explaining for hours would get him nowhere. They wouldn't be convinced. Showing them directly was the better approach.
He met his companions' gazes—eyes that had, until now, always watched him choose the right answer.
Half-doubtful, half-baffled expressions. Aslan spoke to them.
"Just follow me for now. We'll need somewhere quiet."
*
The game set in Geladrion, Eternal Dominion, had a fast travel feature.
Not the kind you used carelessly, like in other games.
Eternal Dominion's fast travel was a function unlocked in the mid-to-late game, after crossing to the Southern Continent, finding the temple of the Ancient God of Hunting and Prosperity, and clearing its trial.
Fundamentally, it was meant for traveling between major regions—hopping from the Southern Continent to the Northern Continent, and so on.
It wasn't a pinpoint system; mostly, you moved from one temple to another.
But Geladrion had become Aslan's reality, and Eternal Dominion his life's task. The function wouldn't remain identical.
His precognition had already evolved from a simple action-roll bonus into something that simulated the future.
As Aslan stood in the graveyard he'd sought out for the fast travel, he recalled the finer details of the function.
A technique that borrowed the power of the Ancient Gods and the underworld—the domain of Sorrow and Death—to leap across space.
Normally, you could only use it after acquiring the Divinity of Hunting and Prosperity and obtaining the Knowledge that came with it. But Aslan carried every scrap of Knowledge required for fast travel inside his head.
He had the Knowledge. All that remained were the materials.
He had a protagonist who had absorbed the power of an Ancient God, and he had Purity, which contained an Ancient God's power. Aslan walked through the graveyard, mentally tracing the patterns needed to open a gate to the underworld.
The problem would be the fast travel process itself, he expected.
His thoughts settled, Aslan stopped before an unremarkable boulder in a secluded spot. His companions, trailing behind, were entirely off guard.
"Never thought I'd be opening a gate to the underworld in a cemetery."
No one reacted to his mutter. A slow wind blew in cold from the night sea, and Tiyamal let out a long yawn, the chill making him drowsy.
If this were a world filled with necromancy, zombies, and undead, his companions probably wouldn't have been this lax. But Geladrion had no necromancy to speak of.
If even one other person from my world were here, they'd be asking why the hell we're doing this in a tomb, Aslan thought. He drove the tip of Purity's blade against the rock and began to carve.
"...What now? Writing something? Need a hand?"
"No, I'm fine. It has to be this sword."
"Does it, now. Well, knock yourself out... this old-timer's going to get out of the wind for a bit."
As Tiyamal drifted back, Aslan etched the letters with painstaking care.
The script he carved with Purity's edge was the root form of the Ancient Imperial language.
Letters created by the God of War and Knowledge after the Ancient Gods had shaped the world. Letters imbued with power—usable only by the Ancient Gods themselves.
Because the modern imperial tongue had descended from those ancient letters, his companions—watching Aslan's tedious work with growing boredom—could pick out a few familiar shapes.
Though most of the script was long dead.
Aslan filled the rock face with dense script, his eyes flicking to the white flame running along Purity's edge.
He intended to use Purity—an object still thick with the power of the Ancient Gods—to both carve the letters and breathe power into them.
If the gate still wouldn't open after that, he'd have no choice but to tell Angie, who didn't even know the theory, to simply drag out her Ancient God's power blind.
He carved for a long time. Watching the tedious process wore his companions down. One by one, they sank to the ground, leaned against a tree, perched on the shoulder of the hulking figure leaning against that same tree, or settled beside him.
Fay's dangling feet kept tapping against Tiyamal's chest, and by the time the dragon-kin's face had thoroughly crumpled in irritation, Aslan finally finished the last character.
A vast circle of forty-eight letters. Aslan stared at it quietly, then drove Purity into its center.
As if parting empty air instead of stone, the blade sank in without resistance. The surface of the boulder began to ripple.
The ripples spread and frayed until they scattered entirely. No rock fragments remained. Only a passage—a tunnel formed of countless crystalline shards, like splintered amethyst.
The passage bored inward, impossibly deep, far exceeding the boulder's dimensions. Yet from within, no trace of the outside world remained visible.
Aslan took in the tunnel in silence. Then he retrieved Purity. His companions approached, their faces thick with shock, wonder, and curiosity.
"...It actually worked."
A sheepish laugh escaped him. Aslan returned the sheathed Purity to his belt, almost as surprised as they were.
In the game, fast travel had been strictly temple-to-temple. He'd considered the chance of failure fairly high.
"Let's go."
The long passage shone with an ominous light. Leading Tiyamal—whose face was thoroughly uneasy—and his other companions, most of them either expressionless or intrigued, Aslan stepped forward and pushed his foot through the gate to the underworld.
It felt like tearing through a membrane filled with some kind of fluid. And then he set foot in the underworld.
The place had a distinctive atmosphere.
A violet mist flooded the ground as far as the eye could see. Above, the sky was a shattered mosaic—cracks and angular planes like broken amethyst.
The floor stretched into infinity, an endless field of dark violet hexagons.
On that ground sat countless buildings rendered in shades of gray. Familiar structures. Even Tiyamal, with his poor eyesight, recognized them as the very buildings of Hatun—the city they'd just left.
A gentle current of water flowed across the gray cityscape and over the hexagon floor. It moved ceaselessly despite the flat terrain, a curious, alien sight.
Tiyamal eyed the water and tried to mask his unease with words.
"Water still flows, even here. How much drinking supply do we—"
"That's not water. It's souls."
He'd been about to fill an emptying waterskin. At Aslan's explanation, Tiyamal recoiled with a harsh, "Gah!"
No longer shielded by the cold, his scales bristled sharply, transmitting a host of movements all around him.
All of it from the currents.
Countless streams of flowing water. Countless souls, beyond counting. Stricken, Tiyamal's words stumbled out.
"I... see."
Beneath the stricken look was another expression: How the hell does this bastard know about this? But it crumpled too quickly to be certain.
Clear displeasure. Tiyamal didn't bother hiding it.
"So we're in the underworld. Now what? I'd really like to get out of here fast."
A stinging sensation crawled across his scales. He wasn't alone in feeling it—Fay had her mouth pressed shut, her eyes hard and narrowed.
She was nothing like Angie, who craned her neck around in wonder, or Ereta, who reached a hand toward a passing soul before discreetly pulling it back.
Tiyamal glanced at those two and realized: the only ones who wanted to bolt right now were himself and Fay.
Something invisible filled this space. Something was watching them.
We're being watched. Too many of them. Can the brat and Ereta not feel it? Even with this many?
Gazes so thick they'd induce motion sickness even in someone immune to crowds.
Everywhere his senses reached, out to the horizon—the stares filled every gap in the air, clinging to the party.
Nausea rising, Tiyamal spoke.
"Getting in looked tough, so getting out is probably easy. I'd appreciate it if we moved fast. Doesn't feel right."
Still, he didn't want to sow unnecessary panic among his companions. He deliberately withheld the details of what he was sensing.
He couched his feeling in vague terms. Aslan glanced at him and smiled, a little troubled.
"Getting in was the easy part, actually. Getting out's the hard one. Sorry, but I need you to bear with it a bit longer."
Tiyamal's face crumpled. Fay looked like she was about to throw up. But Aslan had no alternatives. His own Luck was reacting sharply, too, but there was nothing else he could say except hold on.
To leave the underworld, you had to summon a guide—someone with a soul strong enough to resist the underworld's pull, yet close enough to answer the call.
In the game, you'd summon that guide and tell them your destination. That was fast travel.
The problem was that few people who'd died before Aslan's eyes possessed both that closeness and that strength of soul.
In the game, you could call a dead companion or an NPC fated to die during the main quest. But he was only entering the mid-game now. There was no one here destined for that.
Which meant Aslan had only one name he could call.
One small mercy, at least: it wasn't a name he could ever forget.
Just thinking of it made his chest ache and his stomach turn—and at the same time, stirred something like longing.
Aslan let out a heavy breath and raised his head.
"Come out. You can see we're no priests."
At his words, spoken into empty air, something slowly took shape.
A being draped in what looked like a massive, gray-woven cloth. Its strange form bore no trace of humanity. It resembled a giant gray slug more than a person.
The only human remnants were two thin, stick-like hands.
The Administrator of the Netherworld.
As the self-aware will of the domain of Sorrow and Death turned its attention to Aslan, he glared back and shouted.
"I will name the guide who leads us!"
The Administrator showed no reaction, but Aslan spoke the name that ached in his chest every time it crossed his lips.
"The guide I call is Rowena! My wife, Rowena!"
Silence flowed into the space his shout left behind.
His cry, which should have carried to the farthest horizon, dissolved without a trace. In its absence settled the absolute quiet of the dead.
And with it, Aslan knew something was wrong.
When you named a soul, it should appear before you immediately.
In the same form it had worn in life.
But nothing came. Aslan fought to steady his ragged breathing, trying to ignore the dread coiling in his gut.
No presence manifested, despite the name he'd called. The Administrator only tilted the part of its form that might be called a head.
"The living cannot be summoned."
The voice sounded like it was speaking directly inside his skull. Aslan's eyes went wide.
He stood dazed, staring at the Administrator.
A swirl of emotions crossed his blank face.
Shock and terror tangled together. He opened his mouth, then closed it.
His mouth moved, but no words came.
Hearing that the woman whose throat he had cut still lived, Aslan didn't know what he could possibly say.