149. Realm in Crisis

  As the outrealmers climbed their way out of the secret cave, Serac mentally prepared for the unfriendly welcome that awaited. She especially wanted to avoid fighting Anchoreds, but nevertheless steeled herself to do whatever necessary for the mission.

  As it turned out, she needed not have worried. The pair exited the ladder to a deserted balcony, not a single harpoon gun pointed in their faces. Another trap? But the queen’s chamber was also empty (and alas, no REVOLVER in sight). Stranger still, all was quiet—a far cry from the ‘crisis’ Zacko had described. What happened to the fire? The headless chickens?

  “I swear I wasn’t making it up,” the Manusya murmured, himself mystified beyond belief. “Could the Yakshas have gotten their act together and sorted everything out? This quickly?”

  “Only one way to find out,” Serac said, forming a ‘plan’ on the fly. “Now that we’re both in tip-top fighting shape, we have two main objectives: get my REVOLVER back, and grab Renate. And I think we can reasonably expect both to be somewhere in the royal chambers.”

  “No argument there. Just keep your head on a swivel, alright? Something about this situation gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

  Serac couldn’t agree more. She found the sudden ‘peace and calm’ somehow more unnerving than her day spent in solitary confinement. Her unease only grew as she tip-toed her way across Loha’s room.

  Something fell on Serac’s head as she reached for the door, causing her to jump back in alarm. It was merely a clump of dirt, but where did it even come from? Serac looked up. A whole section of the curved ceiling had transformed—from lush-green Crown-leaf to coarse, gritty soil. Even as an outsider who knew nothing of a Realmtree’s natural life cycle, Serac had to assume this was anything but normal.

  More of the same awaited beyond the door. The hallway itself was deserted and deathly quiet, but parts of the architecture had clearly undergone the same transformation as Loha’s room. The Wayfarers navigated the surreal yet oddly comforting mixture of dirt and greenery, steering clear of walls and floors that had been so overrun by soil as to have lost their structural integrity.

  The pair eventually exited onto the rotunda, where all the branches of the Apical Bough converged into a single, spacious meeting place. Here, Serac and Zacko finally got their answers to the mystery, but not before contending with more questions.

  Now a third ‘element’ joined the green and dirt: pillars of fire that had been frozen solid. No, not in the sense that they’d been encased in ice. Rather, these flames along with all their lashing tongues and flying embers were in complete stasis, as if someone had painted them into the scenery.

  Curiosity getting the better of her, Serac touched one of the pillars, then pulled back immediately. Ow! She didn’t know whether to be surprised that the fire was still hot despite its frozen appearance. At any rate, she was thankful it hadn’t inflicted damage to her HP.

  “The fuck?” Zacko muttered beside her, pointing to the rotunda’s lower floor. “What do you make of that?”

  As if the frozen flames weren’t strange enough, the lower floor played host to yet another display that beggared belief. More dirt and soil, but this time, they’d been neatly collected into perfect cubes. Indeed, the rotunda was littered with upwards of a hundred cubes, all sitting in perfect stillness and waiting their turn to be Untamped.

  “Is this that Calmspawn army you were talking about?” Serac asked Zacko in a hushed murmur, somehow compelled to ‘respect’ the quietness all around.

  “Could be.” Zacko matched her volume. “But it can’t be just them. There are way too many cubes here. Did Shark Bro keep a separate collection we didn’t know about?”

  “Or”—Trippy with the monotone suggestion—“this is a new batch, freshly Tamped from souls that had gathered in the palace tonight.”

  The notion sent a chill down Serac’s spine. For this was Krongard, the peak of Pretjord protected by an elite Wayfaring regiment. What souls could possibly have gathered here to be Tamped by the Realm’s Immortal king? Sympathy getting the better of her, Serac touched one of the cubes, then kept her hand there for some time. She barely felt anything. The cube remained a perfect cube, silent and lifeless.

  “They’re not responding at all. Shouldn’t they Untamp when I touch them?”

  “The ones in the Pasture do, yeah. But we don’t really know the extent of Shark Bro’s magic. Maybe these cubes behave differently.”

  Against her better judgment, Serac tried several more cubes, all to the same non-result. At this point, it was abundantly clear that none other than King Tyr had frozen the palace in its eerie stasis. But to what end? Was this a well-meaning king’s attempt at crisis control? Or the signs of something far more sinister?

  Before Serac could speculate any further, she came across another cookie jar to tempt her wandering hand. And she was both delighted and horrified to see it. A perfect cube much like any other… except this one was composed entirely of pink-colored dirt.

  “Oh my gods!” Serac gasped loudly, manners be damned. “That one’s Renate! How could it be anyone else?”

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  She sprinted toward the pink cube, taking care to avoid kicking the others along the way. As she neared what was surely the Tamped form of her tree-frog friend, she saw that the striking pinkness wasn’t the cube’s only distinguishing feature. For the whole thing was vibrating ever so slightly, as if every individual grain of dirt were a fish scale attuning to the ripples.

  Indeed, ripples now swept over the cube as a veritable flood. It came courtesy of a bumbling Rakshasa and her bottomless [Hunger]—the insatiable desire to make the most of her time in the universe. The ripples flowed through the minute cracks within the mass of dirt, agitating and beckoning every grain. And there, they found resonance with a kindred spirit.

  One moment, it’d been a perfect cube. The next, she was a pink, diminutive frog woman whose hooded head barely reached the base of Serac’s horns, complete with wide-set eyes that bulged in frank astonishment.

  “Renate!”

  Serac drew her friend in for a tight embrace, manners be damned. The pink thing in her arm remained limp and unresponsive for a second or two, just long enough for Serac to wonder if she’d only imagined the Untamping. But then a webbed hand swept across her back and landed on her shoulder with a hesitant grip.

  “Rak—Serac,” Renate croaked in her familiar raspy voice, “how did you—?”

  “If you thought I’d give up on you that easily, then you don’t know me at all!”

  Serac then held Renate at an arm’s length, positively beaming as she inspected her freshly Untamped friend for any defects.

  “You look good,” she concluded. “And I don’t mean just physically. Something’s changed, hasn’t it? Something’s brought you back from the land of the dead.”

  For a moment, the frog woman’s rounded cheeks flushed a deeper shade of pink. She then averted her eyes as she confessed, “A combination of factors. No doubt you were a large part of it, what with your hopeless inability to keep your horns out of other souls’ business. Then, there was also the matter with”—Renate suddenly straightened in alarm—“my father! Where is he? What has he done now?”

  “We were hoping to ask you that, Bubblegum,” Zacko cut in then, wearing a noticeably ‘friendly’ version of his sardonic smile. “A room full of Shark Bro’s cubes, and you happen to be the only one that’s pink and amenable to Untamping. I reckon you know what’s going on better than me or Serac.”

  “Zacarias,” Renate replied in greeting, looking genuinely relieved at the sight of the Manusya.

  “Zacko will do me,” Zacko said with a dismissive wave of the hand. “My mama would never have stood for it, but at least while I’m hanging out with you lot, I’ll answer to my standard-issue nickname.”

  “We should also come up with a proper party name, by the way,” Serac piped up, suddenly giddy with good vibes. “I mean, ‘Team Serac’ worked in a pinch, but I don’t like how, um, egotistic it is. I’m open to suggestions!”

  Both Zacko and Renate looked at her like she’d grown a third horn. At nearly the same time, Trippy hit her with an impatient tsk. After a beat, Renate cleared her throat.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “we could table that discussion for after we’ve averted a Realm-wide catastrophe. As for what’s happened, I don’t fully understand it myself, but I do have a sense of what we must do to correct it. This palace-wide [Pacification]”—she gestured around the room, at the floor full of perfect cubes—“must be reversed before its effects become permanent… and before it spreads to the rest of the Realm. And we do it by cutting it off at the source. Simply put, we must smite Tyr Djofulsen.”

  Serac and Zacko watched Renate carefully, but there was no surprise nor doubt behind their gaze. Their eyes contained only sorrow. For they understood the true weight of the frog-shark Yaksha’s words.

  “Are you sure about this, Renate?”

  Serac reflected on the Pretjordian royal family’s sordid past, with her friend bearing the brunt of their sins. But she also recalled what she witnessed at the Greenhouse: a whole assembly line’s worth of Calmspawns shutting down, then powering back up in short order. She now understood the strange phenomenon had been directly tied to the source of its magic—King Tyr himself.

  Before her, Renate nodded. Hers wasn’t the second-guessing by a wayward daughter. No, it was the quiet resolve of a seasoned Wayfarer, competent and self-assured.

  “I’m sure,” she asserted. “Roundabout and heavy-handed though it may be, this is Tyr Djofulsen’s challenge to all of Pretjord. Here be an ancient power that threatens to lay waste to the whole Realm. Who among us possesses the [Hunger] and zeal to fight back—to break out of our shells and rise to a once Immortal’s challenge? It’s a side of my father he’d long ago Tamped and sealed away, for the sake of his people. For his growing family. But that man is no more, and in his place roils a ghost resurrected from the ripples. Well, if it’s war he wants, then war he shall have. And I will be the blade to finally put him to rest.”

  Serac took a step back and marveled at the frog woman. And here I thought Trippy Version One was the biggest edgelord I knew. But she also appreciated the woman’s candor and admired her courage. Renate was back, alright. Back and raring to go.

  “Well, then, what are we waiting for?” Serac chirped, grinning from ear to ear. “Let’s go commit ourselves a regicide! But first, you and I are gonna need our ‘weapons’ back…”

  “Yes,” Renate concurred, “and I believe I know where Loha has kept them. The throne hall—the topmost room of the Apical Bough. Come. Assuming everyone else here is still in their Tamped forms, we should meet no resistance.”

  Wasting no time, the frog woman turned to go. But then she stopped mid-turn to look over her shoulder, cheeks a deeper shade of pink and eyes pointed directly at Serac.

  “One more thing,” she croaked. “This may be a bit presumptuous, after how I treated you when we first met. But I’d like you to know… that I prefer Renna.”

  Serac blinked several times… then her already full-size grin somehow found the room to grow wider.

  “Got it! Pleasure working with you again, Renna!”

  A round of happy nods, and the trio was off to their new mission: smite the king. They made for the central branch that rose nearly vertically above the rest, their footsteps jarringly loud amidst the [Pacified] silence…

  But not for long. For parts of the frozen scenery suddenly burst to life: raging, swirling, crackling. They were pillars of black-green flames, risen again from the depths of hell.

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