Gale,

Found you pretty toasted so I res-ed you. Sorry I couldn’t stay. H was on my trail. Some dumb adventurer gave away our position. I hope you aren’t keeping him.

N’s getting more powerful, G. Gotta be careful. H will kill me again if I try to escape, so I’m waiting for you. Trying to dredge up info. Each region (5) was made by a void spawn to give power to N.

G2G

Drake

Darkos had gotten so smart. When had Darkos gotten so smart?

Geela rolled up the newspaper and attached it to her belt. She’d reread the scrawled note a good three times before confirming that yes, that was Darkos’s handwriting and yes, only Darkos would know those old pseudonyms, so yes, this had come from Darkos. Darkos had correctly reasoned that Geela would be suspicious of any letter supposedly from him, but their aliases back at the Celestial City had been known to precious few. Yes, Nefaria had ultimately uncovered them, but she’d been verifiably unwilling to share her secrets. Hari would certainly not have known.

Which did leave one question left for Geela to ask. If the void monsters were losing power, their realms crumbling away, how could Noire be getting more powerful?

It was a solid question. Were one of her old students to ask, she’d have given them a respectful nod. ‘That’s a solid question,’ she’d say. But Geela wasn’t at the head of a classroom right now. She was lying on the floor of a devastated void region, newly resurrected, and covered in jellyfish corpses. So instead of focusing on the answer to her latest question, she did a quick toe to chin assessment.

Everything felt pretty good, which was standard for Darkos’s resurrections. Boy knew his void healing better than anyone. If anything, the fact that she was in the void made it even easier for him. The average healer would find it nearly impossible to pull her soul back into her apparition through her body before her avatar faded away entirely, but as a denizen of the void, he’d managed it with impressive finesse.

The only thing she really needed to tend to were her hostages.

“Oh, you’re alive.” The sad little sigh emitted from a pocket as Geela fumbled around her robes to find the huddled form of Bugsquito. “I was hoping maybe you weren’t.”

Geela summoned a new cage for it, shoving it inside. “Why the hell didn’t you run?” she asked as her other hand reached for Scout. “Seriously. I’m running out of excuses for your bad calls.”

“The medusas are harrowing!” it lamented, covering its face. “I know you won’t kill me because I’m useful to you. They would be outraged, thinking I helped you. We are linked, they and I. They would die for their master and here I am, sitting in your pocket.”

Darkos had said there were five regions, each designed by a void spawn to send power to Noire. Could that mean each void spawn was responsible for designing one of the mutant monsters?

Geela’s eyes fell to the tiny cage where Bugsquito, enraged and dejected, sat. Personality-wise, she’d attribute the over-the-top evil cackles and general sloppiness to Sinistrina. It mostly matched up, if it weren’t for the fact that the arid climate of the Volcanic Region was generally lacking in bugs.

Scout, on the other hand, was definitely a Malevo thing. It was also alive, as demonstrated by the disgruntled croak it gave in response to Geela’s poke. Good.

“We monstersquitos aren’t meant to be taken so far from our homes,” Bugsquito continued. “It messes with us. Forces us to draw from within, develop individually instead of as a unit. I miss my unit. I—”

“Bugsquito. Shut up.” There would be a time for interviews and investigations later. Geela had been so close to Hari and Darkos, she mustn't be far now.

Still, she took her time getting to her feet, taking stock of the dilapidated world around them, eyes still flicking over the newspaper. Now, however, she took in the words beyond Darkos’s note: a handful of articles, blogs, an editor's column. Darkos said Noire was getting stronger, that it was using the regions to draw power from its children. With so many of the children dead, though, it should be losing power.

She began rifling through the dead jellyfish, finding more and more newspapers, looking for something that could help tie together the rumbling in her brain. It felt good, the disrespectful looting, throwing bodies aside, and scavenging for anything handy. She’d really only ever done this once, eons ago after a legion of very uppity knights had shown up at her castle demanding her head. This time she felt a bit more conflicted, though. She wasn’t quite sure how all the medusas had died, but it probably hadn’t been on her. Had Darkos done it? Was he that powerful now? Was he now giving Noire power?

Finally, her eyes landed on something interesting.

The Wonderful and Wicked Nightlands: Vacations in the Void

There was absolutely no reason for the Void Realm to have travel brochures, but it was a welcome departure from the same twelve stories of Hari’s victories, over and over. Mostly it boasted all the ‘must-sees’ in Hari’s region, but when the entire brochure was unfolded, it provided something far far more fascinating.

A map.

It was, technically speaking, impossible to map out the void, given its eternally shifting nature, so the map couldn’t really traditionally mimic a regular mortal map. It was, instead, a three-dimensional hologram that expanded over the page. The hologram showed an enormous ball of squirming, melting, collapsing, wriggling tubes. Among them, nestled like swollen tumors, were five pulsing growths that snaked their way through the tunnels. Passageways expanded off the cavernous regions before squishing against themselves and falling away. Some wrapped tighter and tighter around the caverns before the region split in half, only to reform after absorbing the tunnel itself.

At the core of the whole thing, lay Noire’s nest. She couldn’t see much of it, but it was there. To someone trying to twist through the tunnels, it could genuinely take an infinite amount of time to reach it. To someone hopping straight through, it could take a week. Geela was doing a mix of both, given her limited strength, which is where her rough estimate of a month came from. For some reason, however, Hari didn’t seem to be hopping through the walls at all. Otherwise, Geela never would have caught up with him.

This meant that, technically, Geela had a good chance of catching up with them again. Therein lay a bit of a concern, however. Noire was getting stronger and Hari was at his strongest here. Perhaps Darkos had been the one to destroy the medusa region, but wouldn’t he have told Geela were that the case? He’d have definitely bragged about it a little bit, which made Geela worry that there was yet another thing she hadn’t considered.

She had time to approach this a bit more strategically. She had a map and a way of tracking Hari and the assurance that she could skip through a few tunnel walls and reach him with reasonable speed. She slept less and moved lighter. She had time. Time to scout out the other regions. Time to find more monsters, interrogate them, maybe even destroy their world and further weaken Noire.

“Alright, Bugsquito, Scout,” she said, tucking the map into her pocket. “What say we take the scenic route to Noire’s nest?”

“Not very scenic from within the folds of your pouch.” Scout sounded particularly glum about this, and Geela liked to think it was genuinely upset about missing out on the tour.

“How often did you get to leave your realm anyway?” she asked as she rolled her neck, wrists, and ankles, ran checks on Bugsquito’s cage, and combed over the map. “Being that you existed to transfer power to Noire, I’m guessing not often?”

“The froggerts often visited the regions in their early days,” Scout said, its voice bordering on proud. “We had to ensure they were developing up to snuff.”

“Mmm, what about you, Bugsquito?” Geela asked, outfitting her clothes with a static trapper, to gather any static electricity generated by her walking.

“I already told you I’d be a terrible guide! How dare you rub my nose in it now, when you were already warned!” It was so hurt, Geela actually gave it a double-take.

“Well,” she said, “you’re in luck. By the end of this trip, you’ll be the best-traveled monstersquito in the realm. Or dead. I’m not picky.” A smile on her lips at Bugsquito’s panicked eyes, she lined her finger up with the ever-shifting You are here! on the map. Noire’s nest was above them now, but between them and the nest was a bulbous cave not too far off her path. “Now tell me. Whose home is this?”

“I’ll never tell!” Its face furrowed in rage. “For any words I say will do nothing but prepare you for the mysterious evil you will find there.” It grinned evilly. “You think you’ve seen terrors so far? You are not yet prepared.”

“Hmm, so definitely something new then.” Geela rolled the travel brochure up and began walking. “Wouldn’t do to be retracing my steps, going out of my way just to end up in bugland again.”

Before Bugsquito could realize that it had, again, given something away, Geela hurled herself through the floor of the medusa region and out of the demolished city once and for all.

—

It felt good having a path forward and a map to get there. No more accidentally stumbling into massive regions, Geela now had a course set. Yes, that course was often dramatically altered by the shifting of passages and the shortcomings of her brochure. The map often suffered from a delay too. Geela would emerge from a tunnel shift, gasping and shaking off the sensation of being hugged by a swamp slug, and fumble for her map. She’d pop it open, and ask ‘alright, where the hell am I now?’ and instead of springing alive and answering her question, the entire hologram would be replaced by an irritatingly mundane hourglass figure, sands slowly trickling to the bottom only for it to flip over again, as if laughing at her.

Ha ha! You actually thought I was finished loading that time, didn’t you?

Then, when it finally did render, it’d politely inform her that, in the time it took her to wait, the tunnels had shifted and she was now several miles down from where she ought to be. All said, however, she was making faster progress towards the next region than she had towards Hari, which did make sense given he was a rather small individual as opposed to a planet-sized cavern.

The one thing she’d been unable to do during the day’s journey was fish more information out of Bugsquito. Every time it tried to speak, Scout would start croaking. Not, like, any kind of pattern or series of frog noises. Just one, long, monotonous croooooooak until either Bugsquito stopped talking or Geela stopped asking.

She was debating just killing it, but she also kinda wanted to keep it and bring it home with her. So instead of splatting the irritating frog underfoot, she kept it along, determined to maybe soundproof, or at least sound-dampen, her glove next time she had the chance to rest.

But that chance wouldn’t come until after she reached the next region. Originally, she’d expected to have to spend an evening on the road but after a lucky wall-hop brought her unexpectedly closer to her goal, there just wasn’t time.

“Alright then, little monsters,” she said, bobbing on her feet. “Ready to make some new friends?”

The entrance to the cavern was around the corner, but Geela didn’t want to risk getting spotted before she’d had the chance to prepare. She reached into her static trapper, taking stock of the appreciable amounts of energy it had gathered. Enough to keep her defended for sure. Then she practiced visual blinking a few times, just around the center of the tunnel, to reorient herself with the sensation of portalling to wherever she laid eyes on and to refamiliarize herself with the strategy of leaving several feet between her destination, in case the walls or floor shifted.

She patted the lightning cage and the glove to make sure Scout and Bugsquito were well in place.

“The entities in there do not make friends,” Bugsquito said. “Ohhh that I had just died with my swarm. I would not be so afraid of death as I am.” Then its little voice dropped a few decibels, but Geela could still hear it muttering furiously to itself, “stop your panicking. You’re only going to give her more ammunition. Keep it together, Bugsquito.”

“None of them make friends, dear.” Geela pulled some shadows out to shroud herself. “But then again, neither do I.”

She stepped around the corner, looking out over a dense cloud of darkness. Darkness within darkness. Darkness so dense that even with a form made to exist within the dark, Geela still couldn’t see.

Geela walked up to the edge of the cliff that allegedly led into the pitch-black room. She reached a hand in and felt, to her surprise, nothing. No inky coldness, no slick slime, no prickly energy. It was as though nothing were there at all. Initially, Geela had pegged this as void magic but now she really wasn’t sure. Void magic, for all its attachment to darkness, didn’t actually mess much with your eyes. It broke down the very essence of light, the building blocks that created visual energies. That always left some kind of trace, some kind of humming scent in the air. Even without being able to sense void magic directly, it left a trace the way fire magic left heat or frost magic left cold. There should be something here, were this void magic.

That said, just because Geela couldn’t sense void magic, didn’t mean she couldn’t sniff this out. For example, she hadn’t been able to feel that the core of Darkos’s magic was void because her Mystic Sensing came from void magic, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t get whiffs of fluttery healing magic around him. It was just weak because the source had been void, not life. It was the same thing here. She couldn’t feel the core of this magic because it was, obviously, void. But she could just make out that lovely migraine, the one that came from staring at a visual puzzle too long.

Press the pattern to your nose, stare long enough, cross your eyes, and pull the paper away from your face and a canary will appear!

It was an illusion. The darkness was just illusion magic. And that meant Geela could fight it with like-kind.

It was almost a letdown, fashioning an illusion of herself and sending it into the cavern. After she’d spent so much time preparing for a fight, tricking herself away from one felt a little disappointing. She snapped out of the feeling pretty quickly, however. Geela wasn’t meant for fighting, and the last three attempts she’d tried going in headfirst had ended up worse and worse until she’d literally died.

This was the right call.

As the illusion took shape, she threw a few psychic wards on either side of her because she’d need her eyes closed for this operation. A personal illusion like this gave her options that other more mundane illusions wouldn’t. For example, this could return back visual and auditory senses to her. Of course, it wouldn’t be nearly as good as Darkos’s astral projecting or even as good as possessing half of Berta the Blood Witch back in the Celestial City. It would be more like having someone describe something really really well and trying to picture it in your head. She hadn’t tried this in a while, so perhaps she’d gotten worse with lack of practice or better with increased power. Either way, it would give her a good starting place. The goal here wasn’t to blow up the smoke region as much as she’d love to. She just wanted to see what was in it, learn a bit about how it sent Noire power, whether it was stronger or weaker than it used to be, stuff like that.

Then maybe blow it up if the chance presented itself. Stretch goals.

“Alright,” she said after another twenty or so minutes of detailing her illusion. It had taken an extra amount of time to get it right, but she wanted the link to be strong so it could really send back some good info. “Ready to bring me back some information?”

The Geela illusion cocked an eyebrow back at her, one scathing enough to make Geela sting.

“That is what I’m here for,” she said with a scoff. “Really to expect anything less is an insult to both of us.”

It was a perfect likeness that drew actively on Geela’s own subconscious, formulating responses based on how Geela herself would reply.

“Excellent.” Geela snapped twice. “No more dawdling then. I want to know what monsters are in there, how they’re powering Noire, and which of its bastard spawn made the place.”