Alex Reynard
The Library
Alex Reynard's Online Books
Chapter 1
The sun was beginning to set.
A vast band of furious orange had settled on the horizon like an endless wall of flame. A forest fire in the sky. Between them and this burning wall were unknown miles of badlands. Realms crawling with constructs and other nasty tricks. Ghosts of the Allfilth's will. Toby was not afraid.
In fact he was tired. Irritated. His mind was a mess. He could feel his doubts and emotions swirling around in his stomach like the contents of a magic 8-ball. And now Phobiopolis was gonna start pulling pranks again. He was in no mood.
George had locked tendon-stirrups around his sandals. Toby held tight to the reins and stood up. His gaze was nailed to the horizon. The wind slashed at his face from the speed. He could feel it pulse against the tear-scars at the sides of his eyes.
"Faster, George."
George replied silently with speed.
The sky looked as big as the whole of space. Clouds, like battleships of smoke, sailed onward. Toby thought he could even see the first traces of the constellation-animals, beginning to wake and wander the Veil Of Tears as they had for eons past.
The color of the sky matched his mood. The sun was a molten red ball sinking into the ground. Baking it hot. Toby felt its heat inside him too.
It was a callous thing he'd done to the marten. He knew that. He felt guilty about it. He didn't feel guilty. He felt both at once. He let his emotions battle it out inside, not caring anymore which was right. Let them fight. He'd done it, it was over, and he was already far away. The past was closed now, so his doubts could whine all they wanted. Useless screams. The churning feelings inside of him only added to his anger. He thought he might take Luxy's advice. He began to scan for signs of movement.
The vine-carpet was always in motion, but George was dealing with that. Every hoofstep effortlessly pulped a square foot of tendrils. George was making coleslaw. Besides the green though, Toby spotted several of those arm-snails and shovel-faced bulls. Neither were a concern. The former were too slow to catch up and the latter too stupid to do more than stand around chewing. Farther away though, Toby saw something else. Cactusyotes. Just as Luxy had said. He'd seen them in almost every part of Phobiopolis. Hardy beasts, but not very strong against steel.
"Let 'em get close, George."
A nod. The stallion didn't have to ask why. He had been with his master long enough, he was beginning to understand the mouse's moods, shifting as they were.
Yips and shrieks. Green spines. Thudding paws. Packs of loping forms began to zero in on the mouse. Toby saw their open, eager maws. They'd love to eat him. Rip him apart. A dozen or so emerged from seemingly nowhere, maybe spawned from the vine-tentacles themselves. Maybe that's how they grew. It was unimportant. They were almost close enough now to nip at George's heels.
Toby turned in the saddle and held out his palm towards them.
He let one leap. Let it see his eyes before it died.
It became a spray of green paint across the air.
The pack took this as their cue to move in. Shoulder to snarling shoulder, they raced past the fallen, tangled skin of their packmate. Muscled past each other to sink the first bite into this trespasser in their territory. Foamy green spittle puffed at the corners of their eager jaws.
Flashes of steel. Pained yelps. Arcs of green blood. Bodies ricocheting against the ground, tumbling against their kin.
Toby killed six of them in as many seconds.
He barely blinked. His stone expression never changed. He no longer worried about losing his hammer. No matter how many times he fired it like a bullet, he would always have it now. He didn't feel any sympathy for the cactusyotes as he maimed and shattered their bodies. They had made the choice to come to him. This was their consequences. Toby kept firing until not a one was left alive.
He looked back to the horizon. Past it. Past Anasarca, to the dreaming shitbeast at the world's mirrored core. 'Got anything else?'
It did. The cactusyotes were only a prelude. As Toby and George thundered deeper into the badlands, other nightmares began to appear. Hypenas. Pig-things. Arachnopuses. Those cat-shaped barracudas.
As more of them came, Toby stopped aiming. He focused on the feeling of launching his dream-steel out to meet them. He became as familiar with the sensation of it leaving as the hammer itself. Till he could fire as many times as he could recall the feeling of firing. A yellow-eyed fish launched itself towards him, feline fangs bared. Toby tore it to shreds with a fan of hammers. The sound was like a machine gun. Like Zinc's beloved brass monster.
George joined in the festivities. He ignited his mane, and as the land grew darker, it cleared their path. A lone headlight. George blew a wedge of incinerating death towards anything stupid enough to attack from the front. He felt as remorseless as Sire Toby. Perfectly united in mood.
Toby's internal war fueled his cannon arm. Inside him, nauseous thoughts battled. Every regret he'd ever birthed clashed against his newfound confidence. As if his past were trying to wrench him back from riding towards his future. As if his old self was not about to be replaced without a fight. His thoughts were flashes, half-formed ideas that he countered before they'd even finished. He second-guessed himself, then second-guessed the second-guesses. He hated what he'd become. What he'd become was necessary. He felt guilt. He did not feel guilt. And soon, like a rising drumbeat, one thought began to drown out all the others. The reason why his new self was necessary. The reason he was rushing to meet. The one he hated with such fury it made his own self-loathing shrink back in submission.
"SCAPHIS!!!"
Pink eyes blazing with the heat of plasma, Toby stood high in the saddle, one hand on George's reins and the other still blasting out hammers at anything that dared move. Piranhacoons screeched as their backbones snapped. Tunnelroars burst like blue water balloons. Giant insects sprouted holes in their carapaces. And a lost, maddened ambulance was so peppered with craters it skidded onto its side and caught fire.
Scaphis. Toby's eyes gleamed red and his teeth scraped enamel. Scaphis. The enamel scraped. His jaw muscles swelled. Scaphis. A torrent of tears stung the corners of his eyes. He hated her. Powerfully. Infinitely. Raw, red-meat hatred pulsed through his veins like ignited gasoline. And he could SEE her all this time. That sloppy rope of plastic flesh stretching back to Aldridge's mountain. To the place where she'd killed him. Broke his bones and toyed with him. Where she'd balled George up like aluminum foil and discarded him. Where that goddamned tongue had come out of her face and pierced Zinc's forehead. Stole his mind. Piffle. Junella. Their identities violated. Their everything erased. And Scaphis had been insane enough to blame them for it. She had been lying the whole time. From the instant he'd met her. That very first moment in Trapforest Path. Good GOD, he'd TOUCHED her! While those toxic thoughts had been swirling around in her cracked maelstrom of a head, she had ridden piggyback on his shoulders. He had cared for her. They all had, even Junella in the end. It was unfathomable how someone could hold a lie that long. Sitting with them, faking weakness, being helpful just to shore up the act. All so she could use them to get close to Aldridge. She'd never cared about anything but the wand. She had fooled them all, then murdered them all. Because she'd gotten what she wanted and their friendship was disposable.
Toby filled his lungs and screamed.
So loud it felt like the sky cracked. So raw it felt like the earth shook. Toby screamed until he ran out of air, then pulled in breath to do it again.
George worried his friend had lost his mind. "...Sire Toby?"
"FASTER, GEORGE!!! FASTER!!!"
The stallion obeyed.
Toby screamed until blood flecked his chin. He screamed until his voice box was nothing but a wad of shredded cartilage. And he kept on screaming. His scream transcended the limits of his physical body, coming straight out of his soul now. The blind, animal rage that he had suppressed for every moment of his life until this moment. A lifetime of staying quiet and meek when poison was poured down his throat. When he was jailed inside his room. When his father was removed. When his own body became a wasteland of sores and pus and vomit. When fate kept him even from the peace of death and brought him HERE, to this repellent funhouse. A place where he was constantly preyed on, mocked, attacked, and had everything he'd ever cared about trampled on and taken away. Toby knew the star-being was asleep somewhere deep below, but right now he didn't care. Why hadn't it put up more of a fight against Logdorbhok? Why was this place such a fucking trashfire of pain and humiliation? Why had he been so stupid as to love someone who was planning the whole time to betray him? Why couldn't she have just taken what she wanted and let them go? Why had she gutted his memory, let him find happiness with the family he'd always wanted, only to lose that again!? Why had he remembered!? Why had she dragged him back!?
Toby screamed until the front of his chest was soaked in red. His tears slashed open the sides of his face. His jaw unhinged. His legs were fused standing. His mind was a galaxy of hornet's nests. His body became a monument to hatred.
They were passing through a valley of licking caves now. The yawning jaws lunged from the ground at the mouse and stallion, but got nothing for their attempts but mouthfuls of fire and metal. Toby fired blindly, yet even in the depths of his crazed rampage, some part of his compassion remained on auto-pilot. He launched his hammer hundreds of times. He killed countless constructs. But he never once struck George.
He had no awareness of self, except for a shatterproof knowledge that he was untouchable now. Because he willed it. Because he was not about to let anything else stand in his way. He was tired of being this poison realm's prey. It would be his victim now. He stood upon his chariot, feeling like a chromatic plow of purest will extended out in front of him, crushing and battering aside anything that came near.
George carried him onwards. Past lands they'd never seen before. Lands that were never situated between Rhinolith and Phlegmasia on any other souls' journey before. Phobiopolis threw all it could at Toby. It was swatted away effortlessly. Armies of skeletal dinosaurs. Murderous construction equipment. Plagues of flying scorpions. The night itself. It all burned. Toby carried his own weather: a constant rain of hammers.
At one point, the prosthesis-beast even returned. The lurching golem of discarded, bloody limbs and teeth that had menaced them on the way to Rhinolith. It came again, head on. Arms made of crutches, waving fingers made of peg legs. Each tooth was a set of clattering dentures. A thousand glass eyes spun.
George's blaze and Toby's arm cleaved it in half.
And they rode on.
If he'd been in anywhere near his right mind, it might have occurred to Toby to marvel at some of the uncanny sights he was passing. He forged a burning path through strange and exotic horrors, annihilating them with barely a glance. Slithering piles of filthy, tattered cloth. Eternally-burning wooden animals. Creatures that consumed through their nostrils. Lurching, ink-dripping storybook illustrations that struggled between two and three dimensions. Behemoths of emerald. A bog that sculpted swamp foam into everyone it had drowned. Gaunt gamins that swarmed blindly, nothing in their heads but empty holes. Toby left them all twitching and bleeding in the dirt. All of them. It was not enough to simply push them out of the way. They deserved to feel what they would have shown their victims.
They passed a monster cake that lived to slither its way down unwilling throats and burst stomachs from inside. Toby killed it. They passed a ghost whose baleful screams drove mortal souls to suicide. Toby killed it. They passed the Teddy Decapitator: a miles-long conveyor belt in the desert where ancient machinery ripped the heads from an endless supply of stuffed animals, and dumped their bodies in a greasy pile. George burned it down.
These things would lurch back to normal some time after the duo had passed. But so few souls ever traveled this way. It was almost tragic. Their one chance in decades to put on a performance, and the audience shot by with barely a flicker of notice.
Toby and George rode on. Knowing their destination. Waiting for Phobiopolis to cut out the roadblocks and let them arrive.
Toby's scream went silent after a while, only because there was nothing left in him capable of maintaining it. Luxy had told him to burn his tanks dry. To get it all out before he faced her. Toby's tanks had been fuller than anyone would have imagined. He burned more internal petroleum than an oil field fire. All the doubts. All the pain. All the self-pity. All the hatred. All the... everything. By the end, Toby felt as much like a living skeleton as when his friends had dragged him out of Dysphoria.
Except he didn't feel hopeless like then. There was none of that useless nihilistic depression. He felt like he'd walked through a waterfall of lava, melting away everything but his purpose. He knew what he had to do. He wanted to do it. He had everything he needed right with him. It was now just a matter of getting there.
The moon ahead was obscured by a white wall that extended up to infinity. And yet, they could see the mountain beyond it. Phlegmasia's wall was there, yet not there. A ghost image. George knew full well though, it existed regardless of their perceptions. He had been assured as much the first time: there was no going over without Aldridge, only through.
His hooves sliced barren sand as he hurtled towards the wall. There was nothing else in this blighted place but himself and his master. His keen eyes spotted the entrance to the maze dead ahead. Of course it wanted them inside. And he remembered the fate of the souls it trapped.
Toby had gone silent some time ago, though his hammer-arm still twitched at the slightest movement. Otherwise, George might've thought the mouse had turned to stone. "Sire Toby? What are we going to do about Phlegmasia? We have none of the protection we had before. I do not want to lose you if you find yourself reading the words on the walls."
Toby wasn't worried, as he hadn't been worried about anything else so far. This was all amateur shit. He could handle it. His muscles were latched solid to keep him upright, bundles of concrete and wire, but at his will they loosened and he sat down smoothly in the stallion's saddle.
He placed his palm on George's head in reassurance. He couldn't talk. His throat was a little scratchy at the moment.
"Sire..." George still sounded worried. The doorway was getting nearer. He had not slowed down, as his master had not told him to.
Another pat. Toby saw the single rectangle of shadow in the endless white wall. An idea came to him. Not a very pleasant one. But it came, just like he was sure that it would.
He rolled his neck, then cracked his arms out to the sides like spreading his wings. Fresh onions appeared in both hands. He'd only need one, but it couldn't hurt to have a spare.
"Sire, what exactly are you doing?" George craned his neck to see, then didn't need to. The odor hit his nose.
The mouse shrugged. This wouldn't be nice. But it was necessary. He shoved both halves into his eyes and ground them in till they fell apart in his hands.
He didn't shriek. Couldn't. But he also couldn't see a damn thing as they passed through the entrance to the maze.
***
Phlegmasia's grim hallways were wide enough to have driven the Fearsleigher through. Carrying merely a passenger now, it was far easier for George to navigate. He barely needed to reduce his speed. And was glad for it, as the constant babbling of the braindead was disturbing enough to make him want this over with quickly. Thanks to his construct mind, he wouldn't need to. Even though the layout had changed since before, and Zinc's red line was long gone, George knew this place played fairer than the rest of the world's lurching landscapes. George burned hoofprints into the floor wherever he went, and never turned the same corner twice.
When he was already a mile in, he realized to his horror that he could see. If he slowed down and beheld the words on the wall they were doomed. He began to panic. But of course, that was silly. On reflection the solution presented itself: never slow down. George was perfectly content with that.
If he truly worried about anything, it was Sire Toby, who had gone through three onions already. The mouse never cried out, but George could still feel him wincing. He could hear his friend gasping and sniffling. He kept his tendon-stirrups tight, and sped up as much as he dared. Maybe that alone would suffice, as his speed kept the words a blur for himself. But he admired his master's resolve in leaving nothing to chance. Eyes full of water saw nothing but grey.
It made sense to him, he reflected, that this place was Aldridge's design. It was so much more orderly than anywhere else. Stark and precise. Though far from clean, as the maze's prisoners had left behind slimy trails of effluence as they crawled back and forth, forever reading, like literate snails.
Two more onions, and then they were out.
George skidded to a stop at the edge of the world, watching pebbles and tile skitter over. They were back at the exit, where nothing but a thin ledge separated them from empty, glittering night. Black and white linoleum, then the tumbling debris of the asteroid field that masked Dysphoria's madness.
But things had changed. The stallion gaped at what he beheld. "Good gracious..."
Toby tried to respond but had nothing left in his throat to respond with.
"Sire, it is safe to look now. And also highly recommended. I cannot hope to make sense of this on my own."
Even through the stinging blur over his vision, Toby could make out the transition from dim white walls to a vast blackness sprinkled with starlight. He made his hand let go of the reins, which were stamped into his palms by now. An attempt was made to sling his leg over George's side to climb down, but Toby realized partway through that he didn't have the energy. Oh well.
George was startled by the sudden little 'splat' of a mouse falling over onto checkerboard tile. "Sire Toby! Are you allright!?"
The crumpled mess held up a single finger: 'gimme a moment'. He rolled his tired bones over, and with a flick of the wrist, neatly blew his own brains out. A moment later he had an unbloodied vest and a functioning larynx. He stretched his jaw and rubbed his eyes, still feeling afterechoes. "I've been better," he answered.
George moved closer to nuzzle at his friend's shoulder. "Are you entirely certain? You howled so long I thought all sense had left you. And, while ingenious the solution was, I am sure your eyes are currently unhappy with you."
The mouse actually choked out a rusty laugh. "Yeah, they are. Feels like they're full of welding sparks." He tried to look ahead but couldn't stop blinking yet. When you've crammed in that much onion juice, getting a new body doesn't make the pain fade instantly. "But I think... I needed that. I needed to let my anger go. There's been a lot of stuff I've held in. I needed to vent my steam. And to remember some things. Like why exactly we're here."
"To regain our friends from the control of Madam Tarrare," George affirmed.
"My head knew that, but I think my heart needed a refresher of how much she hurt us. A booster shot."
"I am not familiar with the term, but I will take you at your word."
Toby nodded. George's amenable nature was a reliable constant, and comfortingly so. "You were really, really fast back there. And, while I could barely concentrate on anything but screaming, I saw you did some neat fire stuff as well."
George bowed. "Thank you, Sire."
The mouse collapsed against him in a tired hug. "I love that I never get tired of how cool you are, George," he said, muffled.
The construct was so pleased he was momentarily at a loss for words. "...Thank you twice."
Toby exhaled slowly. He could still feel the heat from his warpath, but it was fading now. He felt like an overworked engine that had finally been allowed to break. He directed his gaze downwards until the tiles stopped doubling.
He looked back at the wall, flinching a bit at how much starlight it reflected. No flicker anymore: Phlegmasia's barrier was solid up to the top. He could feel the emptiness of space surrounding him without having to turn around. He knew this was the place where Anasarca had crumbled off from the rest of the world. Though, when he did finally look, he got a surprise.
"I hadn't actually thought about how Scaphis got through," he realized.
But obviously she had. And he certainly didn't need to ask how. A few hundred yards to his right, Phlegmasia's outer wall had been battered into a gaping, open wound. Scaphis had first tried to dig underneath, as shown by the scratches and scattered chunks of brick. Finding no end to the wall in a downwards direction, she'd punched straight through instead. A gargantuan tentacle went right up to the surface and seemed to fuse there, holding the wall back from its slow-motion attempts to repair itself.
Toby turned his head, following the flesh-highway back where it had come, and got a second shock.
"This was what I wanted you to see," George said. "Dysphoria is not as it was before."
The first time Toby had seen this place, it looked like far-flung desert of floating asteroids. An illusion to hide the vicious dreams within. But Scaphis had brute-forced her way through that as well. There was a long, long trail of her warped and disfigured flesh leading up to Anasarca, where it twirled around the mountain like the stripe on a candy cane. But to make her path through the Allfilth's playground, she had shattered reality itself. There was a great chasm cleaving the middle of the asteroid field, with flashing cracks streaking far off into the sky. Pieces of night flaked down like shards of mica. Dysphoria looked like a glass diorama that someone had split with an axe. Scaphis had poured herself through the trough she'd made, and judging by the whorls and scars in her skin, Logdorbhok wasn't giving her free rent. Branches of plastic, like reaching mold, were spread across and into the cracks. Twitching, spasming. As if receiving periodic shocks. Dysphoria pushed against her, but Scaphis pushed back, holding the path open like a foot in the door.
Toby felt a brief falter in his confidence. "Christ... The will it must take to hold all of that back... And she's got enough left over to send chunks scouting around for people to snack on."
George stood beside his master, marveling at the sight as well. "What an abominable mind she has."
Toby nodded absently. He glanced back at Phlegmasia, but the door was already gone. Of course. He wondered why there was anyone left in there, why she didn't snatch them up too. A probable answer occurred immediately. 'Luxy said her victims are will-batteries. They didn't have enough of it to interest her.' Toby also realized that he'd been too wrapped up in rage to keep an eye out for the ruins of Papilloma. Might have been worth it to detour by her first crime scene. 'They were better targets,' he reasoned. 'It'd take a lotta willpower to live next to the wall and not go mad or get seduced inside.' But they were here now, so it was moot. The sight of Dysphoria bested in a contest of strength taught them everything they needed to know.
Toby looked back at the road of skin. "This is the power we're up against, George. Are you ready for it?"
George gazed across the cracked and glittering divide for a moment. "I am a construct. I have nothing to lose but my newfound sense of self and my memories. I treasure this time you have given me. But if it is taken from me again, I am serene in the knowledge that, while it lasted, it was good."
Toby could not help but hug him again. To see him so willing to risk everything that made him who he was... Heartbreaking, but also heartening. Toby felt his own willpower reignite. He would see this through. If nothing else, just to ensure that George would continue being George when it was all over. His friend had worked too hard to deserve anything less.
"And you, Sire Toby? Are you ready?"
The mouse stepped back to let George see his sincerity. "One hundred percent."
George saw a great many things in his master's eyes. Exhaustion, emotional collapse, fear, pain, grief. There was no joy left in those eyes. But also not a single flicker of reluctance.
He looked back to the asteroids and Scaphis. "How are we to endure Dysphoria this time? We have no equipment. Are you planning to dumbfound some?"
"Nope," Toby said. He was too tired to smile, but he crossed his arms behind his back and waited to see if George could guess.
The stallion thought hard. "Did you deduce that since Madam Scaphis had found a way through, you could utilize for yourself whatever tunnel she made?"
Toby made a 'getting closer' sound.
"...No, that could not be it. She would undoubtedly feel my hoofbeats upon her skin and engulf us in a blink. Even if I were to use my wings, she might still sense the downdraft. And there is no reason to think her presence would prevent Dysphoria from contaminating our minds during the crossing."
Toby nodded. "All true."
The stallion snorted. "Then I am without further solutions, Sire! From your nonchalance I assume you have a plan, but I cannot guess it. How are we to get through?"
Toby slowly turned towards him, and managed to drag a grin across his lips. A Luxy grin. "We aren’t."
George was taken aback. "We aren’t?"
"Why bother?" Toby looked away again, to the top of the mountain. Then his gaze trailed down and down.
"We're going under."
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END OF BOOK FOUR
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