Chương 1: Start Reading

In the depths of the Void, crushing silence reigned. Calling it dark wouldn't be accurate.

'Dark' was comparative; it implied the existence of light. There was no light here. Neither were there sounds or smells. There was no matter at all. The Void was a sea of nothingness, infinite and eternal. And yet, even here, life found a way. The Creatures of the Void, flexible in form and without purpose, drifting aimlessly in the silence.

Denizens of other planes feared the Creatures of the Void, considering them destructive, mindless monstrosities, that if summoned would do nothing but rampage, consume and destroy. This was unfair. If one of those judgemental denizens were suddenly cast into outer space, or underwater, or, indeed, into the Void, they would probably flail around in confusion for a bit too.

It wasn't the fault of the Creatures that they were larger than average, and that an aimless swing of an appendage could destroy an average city from the more mundane planes. Mages should stop trying to drop them into environments for which they were completely unsuited. While the Void was largely homogenous, it wasn't completely so. There was, after all, only one section of the Void that had her in it.

"HEY! HEY! DO YOU WANT TO PLAY WITH ME? HOW ABOUT TAG? NO? ARE YOU IGNORING ME? WHY ARE YOU IGNORING ME? COME ON, DON'T BE BORING!" Her latest victim flicked its collection of a dozen fish tails, darting away from the psychic noise of its tormentor. She huffed. Not an actual huff, of course, because there was no air, but it was the thought that counted. She could huff psychically with the best of them. Why was everyone so unfriendly? Why did everyone try to avoid her?

Just because she didn't want to spend her life drifting around uselessly like the rest of the boring old fogies. She wanted to do something. To be something. And, most of all, to make friends. Meanwhile, in the city of Glimmerhome, a robed figured was muttering to himself while drawing on the floor with a viscous red liquid that one might hope, incorrectly, was paint.

"No place in modern mage-craft for human sacrifice, is there? It's frowned upon to create additional opportunities for promotion by poisoning superiors, is it? Well, if they want to destroy the time-honoured traditions of our university, then I'll just have to express my disagreement using those very same time-honoured traditions. Let's see how they like that!" It's often claimed that talking to oneself is a sign of insanity. This is also unfair; many perfectly sane people talk to themselves.

It's often a useful way to put thoughts into order, or work through difficult problems. However, in this particular case, assuming insanity would have been accurate. The university in question was in fact the Institute of Inadvisable Incantations, and insanity was more or less an entry requirement. If anyone sane had entered, they might have questioned why the big, thick gate set into the ten metre high wall that surrounded the whole campus had its lock on the outside.

It wouldn't have taken much effort to spot that it had been built to keep things in, and not out. Not that many people on the inside would mind, even if they did notice. After all, with its own taverns, theatres, buffets and small but dedicated branch of the assassins' guild, why would anyone need to leave? The mage completed the creation of his sigil, and began to chant an incantation that was incredibly ill-advised indeed. The time-honoured tradition in question? If you're losing at a game, knock over the table.

Sure, in this case the table was a building big enough to fit thousands, but the principle was the same. The mage cackled as he drew upon the Void, calling forth a Creature. Little did he know the horror he was about to unleash. He merely wanted to destroy the university and slaughter everyone in it, and maybe the city outside too if they were unlucky and the Creature was one of the bigger ones. He didn't intend to subject them to her. That was going far too far, even by his mad standards.

The Creature sailed through the Void, having taken on her preferred travel form, looking for new friends. Her current shape would be best described as a fractal eel. From a distance, and if there were any light here, it would have the appearance of a fairly normal eel, if only because the lack of perspective here in the Void prevented any comprehension of the immense size. Viewed more closely, one would spot that the eel was in fact made of eels, which were in turn formed of smaller eels.

It was eels all the way down. There was no particular reason for this. She just liked the shape of eels, and the way they slithered. She felt the change as the power of another plane reached into the Void. She felt the opening, only a few thousand kilometres away. She'd heard about this, back before the other Creatures had learnt to flee from her immediately on detection. Beings from other planes would try to summon Creatures from the Void from time to time, for no apparent reason.

The summoners always seemed to die immediately afterwards, so the Creatures had never found out what it was that they actually wanted. Maybe they wanted to be friends? She propelled herself towards the distortion, hopeful that she would be the one to finally find out what these strange otherworldly beings were after. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. She wasn't an idiot, and she knew the other side of this portal would be very different from here.

Otherworldly beings were small and fragile, right? So she should make herself small too, to match. She didn't know what the beings on the other side would look like, so she decided to stick with her eel shape. Shrunken down to the tiny length of only a hundred metres, she proceeded through the opening and into the unknown. A five metre square basement somewhere below the university suddenly contained a hundred metres of eldritch eel.

It took a brief moment for the laws of geometry to work out that this was impossible, after which the building rearranged itself to compensate, in a rather explosive manner. She cursed, realising that she'd still got the scale wrong, and folded herself down further. Somewhere less than two metres seemed about right, judging from the flailing monkey shaped things falling out of the sky between the chunks of brickwork. Size suitably adjusted, she spread out her perception around herself.

Another one of the strange monkey things was quite close to her, in the same room she had been summoned in to. Was this the summoner? Did this one actually survive? She reached out to it with her mind.

"HELLO? DO YOU WANT TO BE MY FRIEND?" Unfortunately, it wasn't just her size that she had scaled incorrectly. The poor mage's tiny human brain responded to the full force of a Creature's psychic communication in much the same way that the basement had responded to her body. She felt the splatter of brain matter impact on her side.

"IS THAT A NO THEN? ARE YOU IGNORING ME TOO?" There was no response. She pondered. Maybe this weird monkey thing couldn't hear her, and these otherworldly beings had some other method of communication? She probed at the body, but as far as she could tell, it didn't have any sense organs at all. Maybe they were in that extra round bit at the top that had exploded? She extended a tendril and snatched up one of the falling ones, and examined the head carefully. Eyes and ears?

And an arrangement of strings and fleshy bits that generated sound from moving air? That would be easy enough to replicate. And since the only living things around here seemed to be monkey shaped, she should take that form too, so as to better fit in and increase her friend-making potential. She adjusted her form to look like one of the hairless monkeys, pausing briefly to ponder why she seemed to have a couple of extra lumps in places where her examples did not. They did have something there.

Maybe it was natural variation, and theirs were just small? Conversely, she seemed to be missing a bit lower down that they did have. How strange... She blamed quantum. Most inexplicable things could be blamed on quantum, in her experience. Switching on her new eyes and ears, the first thing she heard was the screaming. It seemed to be coming from all around. Was this how these alien beings communicated?

But there didn't seem to be much complexity in the noises, and the organs she'd probed should be capable of dealing with far more intricate sounds. The specimen she'd grabbed from mid air had stopped wriggling, so perhaps she could ask it? But how? She screamed a bit, but it didn't respond. She grew a few extra tentacles and poked at it, but it didn't respond to that either. Was everything going to just ignore her?

Well, these bags of flesh seemed to have some sort of internal organ that did their thinking for them. It didn't seem overly complicated, so she would just have to inspect it herself. She withdrew the tentacles that were still inserted into its lungs, where they had been completely blocking its airways, and thrust them up its nose and into the brain instead. Ah, so these two monkey things, or 'humans' as they called themselves, weren't ignoring her.

Apparently they were suffering from the condition she knew as 'death'. That was... inconvenient. Still, judging from the continued screaming, there were plenty more of these humans around who might want to be her friend.

In his palace in the centre of the city, a safe distance away from the Institute of Inadvisable Incantations, the Abode of Aberrant Alchemy, the Shed That Explodes On Tuesdays For No Apparent Reason, and all the other structures that were designed primarily for ease of reconstruction, the mayor looked through his window at the plume of smoke in the distance. He sighed in resignation and jingled a little bell on his desk.

"Yes, master?" The mayor did his best to suppress his nervous twitch as the voice sounded behind him. The servant came with the job, like the skull and unicorn wallpaper, but he'd never get used to his complete disregard for societal norms. For example, the tradition that moving from room to room should involve doorways at some point.

"How many casualties?"

"Outside of the III, only one. An unfortunate impact from a particularly ballistic brick, that pierced a window and impacted a gentleman as he was taking a bath."

"Excellent. Not the worst explosion of the week, then. Do we know what caused it? Anything to be concerned about?"

"Eyewitnesses reported the brief appearance of a giant eel. It vanished shortly afterwards, and the wall remains unbreached. There appears to be no cause for concern." The mayor refrained from asking how his servant had questioned eyewitnesses in the twenty seconds between the explosion and him ringing the bell. He'd learnt early on in the job that asking that sort of question merely resulted in headaches. Unfortunately, despite his efficiency, the servant was not infallible.

Thus the mayor remained blissfully unaware of the horror that had entered his city.