The Power of Ten, Book Three : The Human Race

His name was Pawlie Blakhamar, and he was the Mountain and the Hammer.

He wasn’t the only one, of course. There were Void Brothers all over the place now, especially given how people were quietly looking for Voids to Awaken.

He’d thought he was just a dhatun who liked being underground more than most, rather like a true dwarf. He’d never had any skill with the chi skills or magic, but it hadn’t bothered him, as he was happy to live down below, do some mining, and work away as a proper Blakhamar son did.

Getting Awakened had changed all that.

He’d gone to China to Level up, well ahead of his brothers, and then he’d gone up into Tibet, and plied Deep against the phobos there, over and over, staying up on the hated surface while he did, feeling the infection in Reality that extended everywhere, and knowing it had to go.

But it wasn’t really his place or his job. His job was down deep, in the Felldeep, hunting dark things in the darkest corners of the world that should have died long, long ago.

Lady Traveler had given some time, but not that much, to crossing the landscape and peeling open its secrets. The Felldeep went down more than ten miles, out of reach of the lesser Casters above... but not out of reach of Lady Azaia Morningwind, who had made it her personal mission to see The Map of the European Felldeeps completed.

He was now twenty-five miles underground. He had followed the will of the Land, sometimes walking along the Veil, sometimes with his feet on good hard stone, his nose twitching at a vibration and a feeling that something didn’t belong, something wasn’t right.

Some of the morlocks here had green brains. He had ghosted by and through the savages, seeing and feeling the effects of forced mutation upon them, turning once-humans into servants and slaves of older things that shouldn’t exist.

The lines on the wall of psychic cephalid tenta-script in this dusty tunnel wrapped around with faint psychic feelings of hunger, dread, and alien power had been another.

The Templars had been born in Europe, and likely their first discoveries of the cephalids were there. It made sense to go looking for such things there, and now, many, many miles below the Swiss Alps, he stood over a yawning tunnel into yet greater depths, and felt something old and foul below.

Something that should have long been buried beneath the mountain’s roots.

He was about to jump and waft down on the Veil, but something stayed his hand. This place smelled of old power, and such power tended to be crafty and careful.

He didn’t know how deep it was, but he swung over the edge of the rough pit, and began his climb down.

It wasn’t that he could mold the stone, it was that he always knew where to grab and hold, where the stone was strong and where it was weak; where he could drive a hand in for a grip, and where something would give way if he touched it.

He was two hundred feet down when the walls of the flue suddenly began to straighten out, and the stone began to wind and flow in an unnatural manner.

Shaped, and not by normal processes. He could feel the crystalline alignment of the stone had been changed to resonate with an alien paradigm, conducting psychic power upwards to radiate discouragement towards anything that might want to come down this way.

He didn’t use the Markchat at all, fairly confident any use of telepathy would disturb something down here. It was faint, but he could feel waves of awareness slowly sweeping past and around him, tirelessly and patiently looking for something, anything intruding on them.

The stone was slick now, with basically nothing to grab.

He tapped his heels together, and flexed his hands once. The adamantine claws and spikes slid out silently from their homes, blackslake ensuring that they made no sound when he pressed them against the stone, which gave way like cheese.

The makers of this flue might become aware if he disrupted the psychic resonance of the stone, but he was aware of how the power flowed through it, and his hands and feet moved with smooth assurance into the flaws and cracks between that flow. Unafraid and resolute, grim thoughts in mind of those drowned by shattered dams, slain by assassins, or rising to undeath in their thousands after being slain by nerve gas, he went down into the greatest depths any of his Brothers had ever been to, his Hammer Deep waiting on his back, solemn and ready to be used.

---

There was a Construct down below, built out of brain tissue. His revulsion was matched only by the necessity that it had to live for now, and that he would see it dead soon enough.

He could feel the static of its awareness all around him, radiating through him, looking for living thoughts to center itself on and attack.

He was a Void Brother. It might as well have been trying to sense an empty void.

It had visual organs, too, lobster-like things waving out from the front of its face, but its ability to sense thought was its main perceptive power. It wasn’t even looking up the shaft.

His Helices wrapped around him, the predominantly grey and brown hues gathering the shadows of the unlit stone to him. Directly above and behind the creature where it stood opposite a distinctly Shaped passageway out, he patiently and silently descended, one step at a time, splayed against the stone and no more than an odd trick of light atop it, moving with the innate grace, control, and precision of a Void Brother Ten.

Psychic waves swept through him as he touched the ground, his Helices sweeping across the stone invisibly, making sure there were no undue traps.

He could have reached out and touched the cerebral golem’s unmoving form, but that would be unwise given the crackling psychic energy about it, which would discharge if he did. Instead he moved sideways, to just outside the arc of vision of the thing, which was fixed on the passageway out. It was doubtless there to monitor forces ready to go out and up, rather than defend against things coming from above.

He flicked his hand, and a thin piece of rock curved away and around the back of the golem’s folds of brain tissue, chinking softly as it hit the wall and fell with a clatter to the ground.

Both tentacle eyes snapped automatically over that way, fixing on the chip of stone and its pieces laying on the ground, then lifting up automatically to see if there was something above it.

By the time its extruded eye-tendrils came back down, it was alone in the room.

------

It was at the same time the most harrowing, yet grimly satisfying thing he had ever done in his life.

Dhatun were not small people. Dwarves were already built thick and strong, and dhatun were the same way, only a head taller. Even the leanest of dhatun were like big-boned, stoutly-built humans, for all that they were shoulder-high to an average man.

Thinking something built as strong and broad as an ape could be quiet, agile, and sneaky just didn’t occur to most people.

Sama had told him it was a Feat called Improved Stonecunning, where the dwarven talent with earth, stone, and metal was not only improved, but broadened to any interaction with them. So, moving silently over stone, blending into stone shadows, climbing stone, and the like. It even applied to wielding all-metal or stone weapons and armor...

He wasn’t at the point where he could make a set of skinplate that would cling to him like clothing and be as quiet as flesh, but it was firmly in his future. He’d helped Briggs on more than a few advanced suits of armor, and was thirsting to make his own.

He didn’t even dare use defensive Bracers here, in case the Force Armor effect was noticed.

That didn’t stop his Crystal Dragon, of course, and he had resolutely taken the Paths of Stone and Iron all the way up. Defense was defense, after all.

His footsteps didn’t vibrate on the stone, his touch didn’t scuff, and there was no wasted motion. He slid across the stone as if greased, never scraping, never making a sound, and if he had to go up the walls and cling to the ceiling, he could do that, too. Advanced heavyfoot could be used through the hands slowly and carefully, and his claws and spikes slid into the worked and Shaped stone like it was tofu, precisely in the right way to take his weight.

The place was laid out like a multi-level maze, which as he moved through it, he realized was convoluted to resemble the folds of an alien brain. There were no stairs, and the tunnels that moved between levels were obviously for slaves. He saw more than a few of the masters of this place moving up and down holes in the floors and ceilings, or sweeping along aloofly just above the ground, not deigning to walk.

The slaves were usually lizardfolk of some kind, or morlocks. Some of the lizardfolk looked to have been partially mutated, with scaly tendrils about their mouths, and those were the ones that didn’t have the blank eyes of something else doing their thinking for them. Some of the morlocks were mutated, too, swollen to great size, or their limbs had been turned into claws, pincers, or the like. All of them had the blank eyes of total mental domination having erased any sense of self or will long ago.

They were basically organic automatons.

The cephalids had a resemblance to octopoid anthros, but there were clear differences, and the stink of something that should have died ages ago in the manafield was only part of it. Their skin was both slimy and leathery, and mottled in many colors as they moved, shifting through a kaleidoscope of hues and patterns with their thoughts and attitudes. If he concentrated on Aklo, he realized that those colors and shapes were accents to the language, although he could not hear anything, as the creatures communicated telepathically, and he didn’t have the skill yet to overhear and understand them... yet.

He could feel the buzz of tremendous amounts of telepathic communication going on, however, the unclean thoughts wafting over and through him. If he had his Markspace up, the clash between them surely would have alerted the cephalids.

The creatures seemed to prefer smooth robes woven from some form of silk, or psychoplasmic creations that shimmered in counterpoint and enhancements to the colors of the wearer’s skin, shifting as frequently and precisely as the skin below.

The basic, common type of the creatures had four tentacles around its mouth, seemingly between one to two feet long, but capable of suddenly extending to four feet, as he saw when they chastised a slave who stumbled or moved too roughly with whatever it was bearing for its master. Their mouth was like a lamprey, not the beak of an octopus, the nature of their brain-eating preferences on clear display. They had three fingers and a thumb, oddly jointed, but their feet only had two, widely splayed and with tight sucker-pads on the toes.

Naturally he saw no other thinking life forms. There were some beasts, lizards, or dinos bred for obedience and strength, most of them with signs of incidental mutation in the form of spines, slimy skin, fins, gills, or other modifications on them.

There were Constructs about, normally of Shaped psycho-stone in the forms of various tentacled horrors of assorted kinds, warped and transformed from normal beasts and creatures, and they seemed to form the standing defense force of this place, built up over who knew how many human lifespans. There were also some Flesh Golems, tentacled horrors assembled in some insane forms out of multiple corpses, spurred bone-whips, spikes, and other wonderful things added onto conjoined humanoid and bestial forms melded together and enslaved to the overriding intelligence that was always humming around him.

If he hadn’t been fighting in the phasma for months, the continuous sensation of watchers looking for him might have unnerved him. Now, that vibe slid right past and over him. Even this pstained and protesting pstone, which would probably ignite like tinder if introduced to vivus, was easy enough to synch with and render himself invisible next to.

He saw one six-tentacled cephalid, a foot taller than the others, the colors of its hide brighter and more domineering than its shorter kin, and its pshimmercloth robe accentuated with crystals and brighter metal. The shorter, human-sized cephs bowed and got out of its way. Its default tentacles were over a yard long as they hung there, and looked to be tipped with some kind of plunging stingers, too, coiling and twisting with more energy and activity than the baser cephs.

He didn’t get too close to the two he saw, although he had normal ones float by within arm’s reach, and both them and their slaves passed right on by him, unaware he was there.