We continued down into the cave, which mostly looked the same throughout. My sense of time disappeared on the path, where the only variety consisted of the repeated breathing and footsteps of the elf maiden. I had the red spool of thread in my left hand. Just knowing that Reyha was on the other end of the string was a comfort I couldn’t put it into words.
In order to keep my wits about me, I thought about the myth mentioned earlier. Olrol and Chalis had the exact same structure as the ancient Greek myth on earth. Despite this, I couldn’t bring myself to think that there was a monster waiting for me deep in this cave…
If the place we were in right now was another world known as the daemonic consciousness, then the situation was similar to that of heroes visiting the underworld or netherworld in so many myths.
In Japan, Izanagi went down into the netherworld to bring back the dead Izanami.
Orpheus descended to the underworld for his dead wife, Eurydice.
There were plenty of myths with this same theme, but the common factor among all the living who ventured into the realm of the dead was that they broke the taboo of seeing things that they shouldn’t.
I wondered if I was doing the same thing with this adventure.
✦ ✦ ✦
“We’re almost there.”
“Oh…good, okay.”
The voice of the mystic brought my consciousness back from nearly drowning in a sea of thought. I hurried to catch up to her.
“This really is a strange atmosphere.”
I noticed that the wind flowing from farther down the cave had started to feel cold. There was a small light I could now see in the darkness that I’d thought would last forever. The light was a cloudy white, like an overcast sky. Even that was better than the dark, and it spread farther. Both the mystic and I quickened our step, thinking that it must be the exit from the cave.
“Here?”
A warm breeze hit my face.
What I saw spread before me could only be described as a raging ocean of mud. We’d finally reached the exit of the endless cave to find ourselves on the shore of a muddy sea. With each wave, stones of various sizes piled up on top of each other.
This wasn’t real mud, or even a real sea. And yet there were “waves” that rushed to our feet from the reddish-brown “ocean.” When I looked closer, each drop that splashed onto the black stones was a tiny daemon.
They looked like deformed dolls, but they were definitely imps and fiends. I didn’t think they were real, living daemons. The countless tiny daemons splattering about either lost their shape, like clay melting in water, or soon returned to the ocean.
But that wasn’t all. There was a giant human-like figure towering above everything, big enough to cover the ocean’s leaden sky. (Or was it a ceiling?)
It was similar to the supermassive daemon that I’d seen in Filsand. Its legs were short, and both the arms and torso were abnormally long. The slender body was hunched over, and both hands reached the surface of the sea. The head was mostly round, and there was a single torn line where the eyes and mouth should have been. It felt similar to the jet-black, spherical nests that called the daemons from the other world.
I was already confused about the sense of scale. The distance from that humanoid creature seemed to be several hundreds of meters or even tens of kilometers, and the size seemed to change every time I looked, from a skyscraper’s height to a mountain’s. To be honest, if I hadn’t already felt like I was in the middle of a dream, I would have been going crazy right about now.
Well. If this is a Cthulhu adventure, then that was my SAN check. Guess I got a good roll…
But maybe the reason I was still somewhat lucid was the Mind Wall spell. In any case, from the looks of it, the daemon’s existences really were like those of ants or bees.
Fortunately, the gigantic humanoid wasn’t doing anything except standing there, and it didn’t seem interested in us at all.
“Is this hell?” I only dared let my words slip out because I’d already confirmed that the humanoid wasn’t moving.
“This muddy sea—no, this space, can be called the spirit of all daemons. That human-like figure is the part of it that is somewhat orderly, equivalent to the daemons’ consciousness or personality,” the mystic explained. Her voice was stiff.
“So, that humanoid thing is the King of Daemons…”
It was as I expected, or actually, in the end, it didn’t seem like the daemons’ consciousness was capable of mutual communication. Even if the daemons did all share a single mind, humans understanding it was a separate issue.
However, how was the mystic going to get information out of something so alien?
✦ ✦ ✦
“It looks like something will happen soon.”
“Oh?”
We crouched in the shadows of rocks to hide our presence from the King of Daemons. I don’t think it was because it heard our voices, but the giant figure started to slowly lift its head.
“Raaah… Raaagh…”
So, that was the voice of the King of Daemons? I couldn’t really distinguish it from the sound of the waves and the wind. Droning its eerie call, it started to shake its human-like head. Two fathomless black holes opened on its skull (maybe eye sockets) and focused on something.
The sky (if that’s what it was) was constantly changing color from gray to earthen and back. The part that the King of Daemons focused on started to quiver, and soon morphed into a meaningful shape.
“Is that…me?!”
In the corner of the sky (I’m calling it that) where the King of Daemons was focusing, a black and white figure appeared.
It was the inside of a cave somewhere. A robed man was holding a staff. It was a familiar figure…me. The perspective shifted to a nearby aristocrat who was screaming and carrying on, and then to an altar made from the corpses of daemons.
“Those are the memories of the daemons. When the daemons ‘remember’ scenes of the past, these black and white images appear.”
“If these are memories…and all daemons share a consciousness, then they all have the same memory.”
If I traced my own memory back, this must have been when I was battling Baron Corbal in Relis City. And if Baron Corbal was also there…
“So that’s the memory of the daemonist priest?”
The priest was the only one who could have created a memory from that perspective. That meant that some daemonists could share their memories with daemons.
In one corner of the sky, the mouth of the baron, filled with despair, grew even bigger. That mouth opened and closed over and over again.
“Margilus! Margilus!”
I’d thought they were only images with no sounds, but there was a voice that was neither human nor mechanical in the wind, calling my name.
“Margilus! Margilus!”
“I, too, saw this memory in which your name was spoken. After this, an image of an Epicenter deep in the valley of the Endless Forest appeared. That’s where the misunderstanding happened…”
But for some reason, the image that played back in the sky was not of Baron Corbal and me fighting. This same image of the baron calling my name played back over and over again.
Was it possible that the priest’s memory had been edited, so that the mystic would see it?