A Fortress of Pebbles

“Do you perceive him?” asked the Master of Mind, walking in a slow circle around the headstone. “And does he perceive you?”

“They want to know if we can see each other,” said Grandpa with a wink. He rummaged in his pockets very seriously for a moment and said, “Ah, there it is!” Then, both hands came back flipping the bird at the two Masters.

Neither of them could see, but it cracked Orion up.

“What is it, Orion?” said the Master of Language. “Is he capable of communicating with you? Every sentence you relay to us is worth 10 XP.”

“Are you really dead?” demanded Cassandra. This shut everyone up – the Masters watching her carefully.

“Biologically speaking?” said her grandfather. “Afraid so.” He hopped off the headstone, moving more spryly than Cassandra could remember. Even in her earliest memories, he had always seemed ancient – bones on the verge of snapping and skin hanging lazily on. Now, although he still looked old, he moved as if gravity were optional. He got right in the Master of Mind’s face and poked a finger through the triangular mustache, meeting no resistance. “Tell this one he looks better in his pretty avatar.”

Orion tried to speak, but was having trouble. Cassandra helpfully relayed the message. The Master of Mind gave a thin smile, glancing at the Master of Language.

“So you perceive us, then?” said the Master of Language to the wrong place in the air. “Good! Then, you’ll notice that we’ve successfully recruited your grandchildren. Cassandra, for one, was quite excited about the possibility of preventing…” He gestured at the fresh mound of dirt. “...the inevitable. But am I to understand that we are too late? I’ll be honest, this is all very confusing.”

Grandpa took stock of the Master of Language, leaning in as if to sniff the potato. “This one’s in charge,” he said to Cassandra and Orion. “Let’s all agree to be flattered by the fact that he’s come in person.”

Oblivious to the complement, the Master of Language added: “We’ve followed Cody and Joanne to this location several times. We suspected they might be communing with you, but we weren’t able to determine this.”

He glanced between Orion and Cassandra, awaiting a response. They, in turn, glanced between their grandfather and the Master of Language.

Into the silence, the Master of Language added, “Anything you can tell us about the Cult of Rot would be greatly appreciated. The Fortress would be indebted to your family for generations to come. You have my word as Master of Language.”

Grandpa somehow had a pipe in one hand now, though Cassandra hadn’t seen him light it. A smoke ring wafted from his mouth through the falling snow – neither affecting the other. “Tell them…” he said, gazing through the ring as if it were a portal to another world, “...that their Fortress is a prison.”

Cassandra looked at her shoes.

“What is it? What did he say?” demanded the Master of Language. Then, he softened, “It’s okay. Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

Orion was surprisingly silent, perhaps worried that the message might not be pleasing enough to result in a gain of XP. Cassandra’s problem was that she was literally standing on her own grandfather’s grave. No one had bothered to tell them he’d died, and she had a funny feeling it had all been Grandpa’s idea – because, let’s face it, things were always Grandpa’s idea. Mom treated his opinions like prophecies, and Dad went along with them more often than not.

The Master of Language must have realized Cassandra wasn’t shivering because of the cold anymore – that the flush in her face was due to a sudden surge of rage. “From what we’ve determined,” he said, “your Grandfather passed away – at least biologically – on the day you toured the Fortress. The day of the bus crash. Why no one told you, we don’t know…”

Cassandra remembered that morning – waking up and suddenly being told they were to attend a new school. Mom had their bags packed. Orion had cried. Dad had threatened to revoke Sega privileges. It had all been a Big Thing.

“The Fortress is a prison…” her grandfather recited, watching his smoke rings glide like wraiths over the graveyard, “...and those you have shut out… have already gotten in.” He spoke it with a beat or meter, like a poem or a chill rap. “The Fortress is a prison… and your walls are not enough… to keep your ward within.”

“It’s some kind of poem,” Orion finally said. “About the Fortress being a prison.”

“Tell it to me,” said the Master of Language gently, giving a nod to the Master of Mind. “We’re awarding you XP as we speak.”

Orion recited the poem, and the Master of Language scribbled it down in a notebook.

Grandpa didn’t stop, though: “Tell them that their prophecies will be their undoing. That they have already given the Rot precisely what it needs. That their chosen ones have already walked through our gates.”

Cassandra noticed that his teeth were gone, his gums black. The pipe he’d been smoking lay broken in his hand, as if he’d snapped it. He was changing, she realized; every time she glanced away and back, he was different.

“Tell them that their knowledge, their power, their pebbles have yielded only pride,” said the thing upon the grave stone – too ancient now for Cassandra to recognize as her grandfather, or as human for that matter. With a disdain older than time, it spat: “And… a crippling inability to recognize traps until after walking into them.”

Orion didn’t quite get around to relaying this last part. But when several graves in the vicinity exploded upward in geysers of icy dirt, these context clues conveyed the gist. Creatures made of bones and ragged flesh piled onto the Masters while the rotten laughing thing in the plaid flannel blew smoke rings toward the sky.

Razor sharp claws and teeth tore apart the Master of Mind’s screaming avatar almost immediately. The Master of Language seemed to be meeting a similar fate, but he dematerialized into a swarm of dots and reappeared unharmed next to Cassandra and Orion. “Come on! Back to the car!” he shouted, yanking them both out of their frozen states.