Chapter 139 – The Wildlands

Alfric stood out less than he had feared. The population that Cate had chosen skewed young, and there was a bit more of the variety to their complexion than across central Inter, where he’d been spending much of his time.

It had been claimed that she’d selected ten thousand people, which was apparently her own number, and that seemed like far too many people to have simply vanished without another word about it. Done over the course of a year or two, it meant an entire family’s worth of people every day, thirteen or so. Because not all of the people who Cate had spoken to had actually come, and because some had taken multiple visits, that meant something insane like organizing fifty meetings every single day.

Alfric was left looking at the people and thinking about how he would do it while also trying not to be too obvious that he was looking around and wondering about the logistics.

He decided that he would, if he had to abduct ten thousand people, run a few flophouses in the major cities of Inter. These would attract young people, or at least people prone to wandering and exploring, up for some grand new adventure. He wasn’t sure how many people he would be able to get that way, but it would be a good start, so long as there were some kind of teleportation entad involved.

As far as gathering the ‘right’ people, that would be a bit easier, if you had insane entad support. An entad had been used to declare him compatible with Lola, so he wasn’t terribly sanguine about that approach, but if you were bringing people in at volume, it seemed like it would be better than attempting to screen them in any normal way, especially if you were trying to do the whole thing alone without any confederates. Of course, confederates would make the whole thing less logistically fraught, but that introduced a lot of risks in terms of the secrecy being broken.

It would have all been easier if it could be advertised, but Alfric didn’t think that would have been able to go by unnoticed, even if it was cloaked behind pseudonyms and misdirection. A ship of a hundred people never arriving on distant shores would have raised some flags, he felt, though it was entirely possible that it hadn’t been. He thought he would have known, if someone was offering trips to a new world.

The people of the village were friendly with him, even when he asked questions that by rights he probably should have known the answers to.

“It’s sort of all wild, but the Wildlands don’t really stick,” said a girl at the general store. It wasn’t actually a general store, since no one had to pay for anything, and was really more of a communal warehouse, four times the size of Bethany’s shop in Pucklechurch. It was incredibly well-stocked, with glass jars stretching up and down a few aisles, and a number of bins for things like flour, sugar, or salt.

“Stick?” asked Alfric.

“You wander out, you see a forest, and then that forest isn’t there the next time you go out,” said the girl. “I went once or twice, just to see it, but I don’t think that I’ll go again, at least until there are some stabilizers out there.”

“Stabilizers?” asked Alfric.

“Um, little towers, I think,” the girl said. “They haven’t built any yet, but when they do, it’ll be in the best, most worthwhile places, and maybe with a nice cleared path from place to place.”

Alfric frowned. “If I wanted to go out into the Wildlands, who would I talk to?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just went with some people, you don’t really need to sign out or anything, that’s not how it works here.” She gave a laugh. “We don’t have permits or anything.”

“But there are monsters, like in a dungeon?” asked Alfric.

“Eh,” she said. “I think if you go in far enough. And you’re not supposed to sleep in there unless you’ve got someone to keep watch, or some defenses. But there’s no dungeon madness or anything like that. Most of the things you see are either docile or skittish.”

Alfric didn’t know what to think about all that. It didn’t sound even remotely like anything he’d heard of before, except that perhaps this was what the Editors had intended the monsters of the dungeons to be all along.

He set out for the Wildlands without really thinking too much about it. They had the party channel, but weren’t using it, in part because Cate verifiably had some way of capturing party communications. They suspected that she wasn’t able to do it at a distance, and not without them knowing, but it was better to stay silent and not risk it.

There was a trail leading into the Wildlands, thick enough that it was more or less a road, and Alfric walked it for some time until he felt like he was far enough away from the village. Then, he pulled out a glove his mother had given him and slipped it on. He called forth a broad wooden board into being that allowed him to fly, as long as his body. He stood on it, getting his balance, then took off.

It was slow, half as slow as the helm, and more dangerous because if he slipped from it he’d be rolling across the ground. Still, it was just about as fast as he could run, but without any of the effort, and it meant that he’d reach the boundary of the demiplane within an hour, possibly sooner.

It was an adventure, like the ones he’d dreamed about when he was little, and long since given up on. He felt the wind on his face and watched as the road narrowed. It was a pleasant day, and the sun was still rising, promising that some of the crisp chill would be cut.

He almost missed the transition. It wasn’t exactly subtle, but the moment of resistance could easily have been chalked up to a gust of wind or a bit of turbulence. His mind went to the transition between the world and the dungeons, which was always a moment of blackness, and this was nothing at all like that. He turned his board back around and crossed the border a second time, trying to pay attention to how it felt, then crossed a few times. There was something dreamlike about the Wildlands, he decided, but it was subdued. He contemplated this for a moment, then pushed off once more, drifting in deeper.

He caught the scenery in the distance changing. There had been a fine-looking mountain some miles away, one which he’d been heading toward for lack of anything else, and he’d taken his eyes off it for only a moment to look at a herd of large animals with long necks and longer tongues. When he looked back, the mountain was gone. He pulled up short, standing on the board in quiet contemplation, then closed and reopened his eyes, looking away and then back.

The changes happened in the distance, where things seemed to be more in flux, but he occasionally caught them closer to him, with the trees of the distant forests changing a hundred yards away. It only happened when he wasn’t looking, which meant that it depended on observation somehow, or was some kind of observation effect. He wondered whether everyone would see the same distant objects, and whether two people could force a mountain to stay put until they could reach it.

When that was done, he circled around to the animals, which were apparently close enough to him that they hadn’t disappeared when he wasn’t looking at them. This, too, was a good thing to know about the Wildlands, and he tucked it away for later.

The creatures were like goats, but much taller. Much of their length was in their necks, and they were standing together under trees, slipping out long tongues like an anteater’s, which they used to pull leaves from branches. Their eyes were at the base of their neck, and they didn’t seem to have proper heads or skulls. It also wasn’t clear where their brains were, if they had brains.

They were, all-in-all, not that different from dungeon monsters, except in two key ways. The first was that they seemed more at home in their environment, as though they had been eating from the trees here in their natural habitat rather than created in a room for a dungeon where they would sit and wait. The fact that they were eating at all was surprising, since it was pretty rare for dungeon monsters to eat, even if they had nominal food around them.

The second major difference was that they showed nothing like dungeon madness. Alfric kept expecting them to notice him and charge, but their eyes, which swiveled independently like a chameleon’s, went to him on several occasions with no reaction. They showed no particular anger or even caution at a flying man, and he got close enough to pat one on its flank. It kept one eye on him and the other on the leaves it was pulling down with its long tongue. The word ‘docile’ seemed apt, and he was worried that if he left, the creatures would disappear, never to be seen again, just like they would have been in a dungeon.

Eventually he did leave though, wanting to see more of these Wildlands so he could understand their nature.

Alfric wasn’t terribly good at identifying trees, but he thought that these were imagined ones too, not the oak or ash of Pucklechurch or central Inter. Aside from that, they didn’t seem to be magical, though it was difficult to tell from a distance without interacting with them. He saw mottled bark and broad leaves, long purple fruits hanging down in clusters from branches that were bending under the weight, but for all he knew, this was perfectly normal.

The forest eventually transitioned to wetlands, one which had hundreds of dead, leafless trees which he guessed had died off in flooding or something similar. They stood, stark, reminding him of gravestones or the horns of some long-dead animal.

Alfric flew low enough that his board disturbed the water, and he looked for animals, hoping to find some new species. Eventually he spotted a frog and pulled up short, though he’d only barely seen it. It was small and well-camouflaged against the dead tree, and he stared at it for a moment, taking it in. It had four eyes, with a smaller set nestled below the main pair, and long slits for nostrils that went down half its face. It looked back at him when he looked at it, then eventually leapt from the dead tree. When it did, it stretched its limbs out wide and glided through the air until it plopped, unceremoniously, into the water and disappeared.

Nothing was trying to kill him. He was simply in unspoilt nature, miles away from anyone else, seeing new plants and animals that it was likely no one had ever seen before. There might be danger, but he hadn’t seen any yet. It felt like he could pitch a tent and be relatively certain that nothing would attack him in the night. With proper preparation, he could hunt and forage his way through the Wildlands, leaving civilization far behind, exploring mountains that no one had ever so much as touched before, and that no one would touch after he was gone, because they would vanish.

There was a funny feeling in his stomach, like butterflies. He had learned things from being out in the Wildlands, and needed to go back, but it had only been two hours or so, maybe even less. It wasn’t even lunchtime yet. He had no idea what more he might learn from flying through these environments, but he was keenly aware that he wanted to go explore and see what the Wildlands might create for him.

He wanted to talk to the others, to share his excitement, but they had agreed to stay off the party channel.

The marsh turned into a swamp, this one with thick, healthy trees which seemed to be using their roots like stilts. They were draped with scarves of moss, reminding him of regal women attending an opera, the occasional spar of black rock serving as stolid men with toupees of flowers. He wished that he could find some marker of it, that he could write it down in a dungeon report, or that he had some facility with art. He could learn to be an artist, he thought, or get an entad to do it, but the idea that this would all disappear when he left made him feel something like despair. That made no real sense, and was never anything he’d felt about dungeons, for all their oddness and intrigue.

He’d been in the Wildlands for nearly two hours when he saw the house.

He flew to it, cautious, very aware that he wasn’t wearing his armor and didn’t have his weapon in hand. The glove he’d borrowed could expel the armor, but he hadn’t thought that he would need it, and from Ria’s recounting of the fight, Alfric would have been completely outclassed by the real threat.

The house was nothing unusual, just a small place with a sloped roof and cobblestone walls, thick timbers that might have come from the local trees. There was a clothesline outside that ran between the trees, and white sheets billowed in the cool breeze. There was a fire pit, cold, with two wooden chairs beside it, and a garden plot that seemed to be coming along. Alfric felt awkward about peeking inside the house, but there was a suggestion that someone lived there, and that felt too significant to let pass by.

The house was well-furnished, small and cozy, but no one seemed to be home, and the sheets drying in the wind were the only sign that someone had been there recently.

If it had been a dungeon, Alfric would have accepted it as it was, a nonsense place that suggested something but meant nothing. The Wildlands seemed different though, with less in the way of incongruent geometry and juxtaposed features that couldn’t possibly mesh together. The house raised questions, like who lived here and how they lived, so Alfric looked around more, and eventually found what he’d expected to find, which was a narrow road.

This he followed, which eventually brought him to a village, a small one like the various points around Pucklechurch, home to hundreds, if that, and abandoned, similarly to the house. It looked as though everyone had simply left at some point, full storerooms, silverware, clothes, cookery, pantries, and everything else left behind. It was spooky, in its own way, but it might have been spookier if there had been a full village of people out here, or bastlefolk. He tried a few doors and found them all unlocked, but only went in for long enough to confirm that everything was laid out like he’d thought it should be for a home, or tavern, or something like that. Everything fit, besides the lack of people.

Alfric flew away, keeping himself from looking back, then returned.

The village was gone. Alfric had expected that, but it was still somewhat of a shock, all that civilization wiped away just because he had gone far enough away from it and stopped looking. He’d gotten there by following a thin road that had thickened as he’d gone, and wondered whether that would always happen if he could find a road.

The next hour of exploring passed without incident. He never saw a home again, or a village, or anything like that, though he did see a few decaying ruins that were largely overgrown with vines. His natural inclination was to go deeper, but that wasn’t necessary, since he could return to places he’d been before and see what changes had happened while he’d been ‘away’. It was startling how well everything ‘fit’ together, not the slapdash way that dungeons would cover up the seams where two rooms joined together, but in a coherent, cohesive manner.

He diverted to the thin white trail of smoke as soon as he’d seen it. If the breeze hadn’t died down, he might not have spied it, but it was intriguing because it felt like it meant something, and it was the second sign of civilization he’d seen, if he could count the house and the village as civilization. The fire seemed different though, in that it was something in motion. The village hadn’t seemed like a place that people had left. It wasn’t as though he’d come across it mid-evacuation, half-eaten meals left behind, hot bathwater, or anything like that. Instead, it had been a sterile scene, almost as though arranged for his benefit.

The smoke was different, because it implied a fire, and a fire transpired.

Alfric landed at the campsite, which was sited at the edge of a lake in a flat stretch of dry land before a forest of trees with bumps on their bark. He saw a pot of stew bubbling over a fire that was almost down to embers. A large couch sat to one side, incongruous, as it was the kind of fine leather that you’d never leave out in the rain, and it was especially not in keeping with the canvas A-frame tent that sat to one side. There was no road or trail leading to the campsite, and the place felt different in a way, strange in how mismatched the individual pieces were. There was an ax sitting near the tent with an overly ornate handle of burnished wood and a head of engraved metal. Alfric stared at it all for a moment, wondering what rules had given rise to a place that was so comparatively odd.

“Can I help you?” asked a woman’s voice.

Alfric froze in place. A part of him wanted to go fully armed, to hiss and spit like a startled cat, but instead he turned to the source of the voice. It was a woman’s head, poking out of the tent. She had long brown hair and wide green eyes, and for a moment he thought that she was his age, but from the way she frowned at him, he decided she was probably older. She emerged from the tent, just a simple tank top and some shorts, which seemed like too little for a relatively chilly day. She had no shoes on and stepped in the dirt like she didn’t care.

“Well?” she asked.

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“Uh,” said Alfric, who was still standing on the board he’d borrowed from his father. “Just … passing through?”

“Ah,” she replied. “Well, there’s stew, if you’re interested.” She pointed at the pot that was still bubbling above the fire.

“Are you … sorry, are you from the village? Or the palace?” asked Alfric.

“Nah, I live out here,” she replied. “You’re part of the new wave?”

“Yeah,” said Alfric. “I guess.” She was moving easily, and he was unsure of himself.

“Stew, or not?” asked the woman.

Alfric looked at the pot. “Is it just you here?” he asked.

“That’s not a great question to ask someone who you find out in the Wildlands,” she said, folding her arms across her chest. “It gives the wrong impression.”

“Sorry,” said Alfric. “I didn’t mean it like that, I’d just — from what I had heard, there were monsters out here.”

The woman held her hand out to the side and the ax spun through the air at frightening speed to land itself snuggly in her grip. She raised an eyebrow in Alfric’s direction, then lazily threw the ax off to the side. It spun through the air, nearly a disc, and sliced straight through a tree, which didn’t finish falling until the ax had spun its way back toward her hand.

“Everything okay out there?” came a man’s voice from within the tent. He sounded distant.

“It’s fine, just someone from the village!” she called, raising her voice to be heard in a way that didn’t seem like it should have been necessary. Alfric was suspecting that the tent was larger on the inside, possibly much larger.

“Sent by Cate?” asked the man’s voice.

“I don’t think so!” said the woman. She was looking at Alfric appraisingly. “I think he’s just a random!”

“Out this far?” asked the man.

“He’s got a flying entad!” she called. “And the fire was sending up smoke!”

There was a brief pause. “Is the stew done?”

“It’s been done, it’s just a matter of how long you’re going to wait for the flavors to meld!” she replied.

There was another pause, this one longer. “Okay!”

The woman turned back to Alfric. “You didn’t answer whether you wanted stew,” she said.

“I guess I would take some stew,” said Alfric. “I haven’t had lunch.”

“We always make enough for a guest,” said the woman. She held out a hand. “Sana.”

“Alfric,” said Alfric, taking her hand.

“We’ve been out here for three years,” said Sana, unprompted. “In the demiplane for four.”

“This is my first full day,” said Alfric.

“You have some dungeoneering experience?” she asked.

“How could you tell?” he asked.