Deeper still.
A giant lizard with attendants on either side stands fearlessly before her might. An offer is made. A bargain is struck. Garralosh can barely understand it, her mind no longer used to moving in such convoluted ways. She needs to eat. She needs to go deeper. That is all she can understand.
Deeper.
My perception grows darker as I descend, like a stone sinking to the bottom of a pond. More memories assault me. Endless scenes of hunting, of killing and feasting. Garralosh becomes younger and younger the further back I go. Less evolved, smaller. Desperate battle after desperate battle flashes. Her life an endless stream of fights where her survival is on the line. She’s wounded severely countless times, but always emerges victorious.
My vessel is starting to crack under the pressure, but I don’t think I can go back. Would the spell even make it? Part of me worries, but the other part is fascinated by the incredible scenes. I want to know more!
There are other memories beginning to surface now. Long buried, they’re washed out and faded. Perhaps only my mental assault was able to bring these out at all. How long has it been since Garralosh thought of herself as a human? Perhaps at some point, she simply began to imagine she’d never had another life. That she’d always been a monster.
But deep in her mind, she remembers.
I see a girl; a young woman, really. Perhaps in her twenties? There’s anger and fear in her. She lashes out, a knife in her hand. Red splashes and she runs, laughing, crying. She doesn’t get far. She’s cornered. They’re angry, but she doesn’t care. She tries to push through. Black.
Even further back…
She’s younger. In a school, maybe? There’s kids in uniforms, regular classrooms. It’s confusing. It doesn’t look as if Garralosh lived on Earth much earlier than I did. Things are outdated, sure. There aren’t any computers, but it isn’t as if it’s the eighteen hundreds or anything. More like the eighties…
Yikes! Judging by that guy’s hair, this has to be the eighties. That’s weird! Does this mean time flows differently between Pangera and Earth? Perhaps our souls have been held by the System, unconscious in a state of limbo until we get seeded into the Dungeon? Maybe I died and just slept for hundreds of years!
Focus, Anthony. Got stuff to do right now. Have the existential crisis later.
The world through Garralosh’s eyes is grey, isolated and threatening. She flinches away from people. Except when they come for her, then she moves toward. I can see why Gandalf made her a crocodile. Her bite was pretty savage even as a human… Yeouch.
The fatigue is real. It’s been a desperate struggle to get this far, and frankly, if it wasn’t for the support of the Collective Will Vestibule still trickling energy into me, I’d be in far worse shape.
But I’ve made it. Hovering before me in the dark is a sphere of pure white. I reach out and I seize it.
[You really should’ve spent some more points on Will.]
My advice doesn’t seem to go down too well. The thing that embodies Garralosh in this strange blank space we find ourselves in, thrashes and twists like a mad thing in my grasp, desperate to rend, to tear, to bite!
[Steady now,] I command, and bring my mind to bear to force her to be still.
She fights me the whole way. Even after I manage to get her still, she continues to writhe with rebellious energy. How long has it been, I wonder, since she wasn’t in control?
[Let’s have a chat.]
149. Dialogue
I’m not sure what I expected, honestly. Here in the base of Garralosh’s psyche, I kind of thought I’d be talking to a person. Instead, her mind is represented by an amorphous shifting mass that is at any one time part human, part crocodile, part Escher painting.
[I WILL KILL YOU.]
Good start!
[You do a lot of that. Killing, I mean. Why do you have such a grudge against the people up here anyway?]
[THEY HURT ME.]
When she communicates, it’s like a psychic scream that punches into my mind with brute force. Unpleasant, to say the least.
[How the hell did a bunch of farmers and townsfolk hurt you? They could barely hurt me!]
[NOT THEM. OTHERS. VENGEANCE.]
To get back at the person who chopped off her arm, she annihilated a kingdom full of innocent people… Yeesh.
[Care to explain that dragging feeling I noticed in your memories?]
The second I mention it, her struggles double in intensity and my mind starts to ache under the strain of pinning her down.
[GET OUT OF MY HEAD!]
[No.]
I’m able to master her again. My Will is superior. Neglecting her mental stats is proving to be a grievous error. I suspect the Ka’armodo has done a fair bit of Mind Magic on her and she doesn’t even remember it. I can only imagine the Lizard Wizard would have magnitudes more control and finesse than I do. I barely know what I’m doing!
[THE PULL. I EVOLVED TOO MUCH. TOO FAST. I WAS CALLED TO THE CENTRE. OTHERS LIKE ME. ALL DEEPER.]
Called? By the System or something else?
[You don’t like remembering that you were human, do you? Tried pretty damn hard to suppress it. Must have been part of what kept you… sane-ish. Even a cruddy life as a human was better than being a monster in the Dungeon, I suppose.]
[DON’T WANT TO REMEMBER.]
[Yeah, I know. I’m not minding it so much, you know. Then again, I’ve always sort of gone with the flow. The constant danger and the threat of death isn’t great, don’t get me wrong, but it’s nice to feel like I have a purpose, you know?]
[NO.]
[Fair enough. So, what was the plan in the end? You came to the surface, destroyed a kingdom, maybe two, and then what?]
[PULL THEM AWAY. BREAK THROUGH. KILL.]
[Always the killing with you. It’s never just ‘kick back and relax’ or ‘vacation from murder.’ Just kill, kill, kill. What about my colony then, huh? What about us? We never did squat to you!]
[KILLED MY CHILDREN.]
[They tried to kill me first, to be fair.]
[THEY ARE MINE. THEY ARE FOR ME.]
[In what sense? Wait, I’m not sure I want to know.]
I honestly thought the mind of Garralosh would be… more than this. She’s super old! More than a century—maybe even two! Where’s the accumulated wisdom of the ages? I suppose if you spend all your time sunk in a brutal, animalistic fog of fighting and eating, your mind doesn’t exactly develop a great deal.
She’s a mass of instincts and emotions. There isn’t much left of the human inside. Just enough for me to taunt her with, basically.
As fun and interesting as the conversation is, and I do genuinely want to learn more about this once-human turned murder-lizard, it’s mainly a distraction for the careful spell I’ve been weaving. Here in this place, time isn’t passing on the outside. At least, that’s how I understand it. I’ve been in Garralosh’s head for a minute or two but probably only a few seconds have passed on the outside. My goal is to try and bind her mind from her body, to trap her awareness here in this mental space so I can inflict lethal damage before she manages to free herself.
Not exactly a glorious victory, but I’ll take what I can get!
Even as I communicate, the careful weave of my spell continues. A cage. A prison of Mind Magic that will bind this weak psyche from its decidedly not weak body. Mind Magic is so damn useful. Who’d have thought!
[What happened to you, huh? You were a human being at one stage. I get you felt like embracing your new life here, I can relate to that. Believe me. But mass destruction? Seems a little off the deep end, doesn’t it?]