Chapter 3: The Flute in the Dark

  For a solid minute, I did not move. I just hung off the side of the moss-slicked log with my boots dangling over a drop that looked like it was deep enough to have its own weather system.

  The adrenaline was running out of me, leaving a shaky, electric exhaustion behind, like a sugar crash times ten. Round one to the rookie. Great. Now I just had to get through the rest of the tournament without, preferably, the universe attempting to turn my soul into abstract art again.

  The flute music continued. It was a thread of sound in silver weaving through the oppressive humidity, a melody that seemed structured, deliberate, achingly sad. And it was close.

  But before I set out after any more mysterious noises, I needed a second. Just one second to stop, breathe and work out why my brain felt like it just downloaded an encyclopedia written in lightning.

  I pulled myself up on top of the log and sat cross-legged in the shifting shadows of the glowing fungi. I closed my eyes and looked within.

  The image of the Astrolabe popped up into my mind's eye immediately.

  It felt nothing like a HUD or game menu. More like a remembered limb, a phantom organ which had always been there, just waiting for me to wake up.

  The dream on the Wayline, that cosmic river of turquoise light I'd surfed between worlds, hadn't just been a dream. It was a process of installation. The Astrolabe hadn't come with a user manual, it had come with an update on the firmware of my soul. I didn't just know that I had stats, I knew what they felt like.

  I centered on the sphere of light in the middle - my Wayfarer's Star. It was my life force. Right now it was pulsing steadily but it looked a little dim, a little frayed around the edges. The squeezing pressure of the transition had taken a toll.

  Around it were the constellations, the quantifications of my new reality.

  Egress: The Arrow. That was the flow. The reason I was able to stick a landing on some wet moss and vault a mushroom the size of a Volkswagen. In my old life that was parkour, muscle memory and a misspent youth running from security guards. Here, it was an essential law of my being. I was fast. I was agile.

  Kensho: The Eye. That was the intuition. It was the "hacker's sight," the ability to see the exploit in a system or the hidden path in a server farm. It was why I'd seen the log bridge when panic should have made me blind.

  Then there were the others. The ones that worried me.

  Horizon: The Mountain. This was endurance. Soul-toughness. A score of seven was... pathetic. It explained why the simple process of coming here had almost torn me apart. I was a glass cannon; fast and sharp, but if this world threw a good hit on my metaphysical jaw, I was done.

  Lumen: The Chalice. My battery. I could feel the dip in it now, a hollow feeling in my chest where I'd burned energy to fuel the Veil. It was recharging, but at a slow rate, like sucking milkshake through a coffee stirrer.

  And then, there was the empty socket.

  On one of the inner rings there was a small, dark depression. In my dream. No, in memory of the journey, I had seen a silver mote of light settle down there. A Charge of Stillness. I knew with innate certainty that the Charge was made by the tranquility of the Wayline travel.

  I had spent it to activate the Aetheric Shroud.

  The realisation came to me in a cold splash of reality. That five minutes of invisibility wasn't a cooldown ability. It was a consumable. A rare, precious commodity that I could only gain back by leaving this world and surviving another trip through the void.

  "Okay," I whispered to the glowing forest, my voice small in the huge, humming twilight. "No more panic buttons. We do this the hard way."

  I checked the Veil again. It was holding. My own resonance was currently humming a low fidelity cover version of the song of the forest. It was a Tier 1 disguise- The Flicker of a Stranger. Good enough to fool a predator like Mr. Peepers who was on the lookout for a meal, but flimsy. It was thin like wearing a disguise made out of tissue paper. If I ran into anything smart, anything that actually looked at me, the Veil would crumble.

  My eyes snapped open.

  Smart. Like whatever was playing that flute.

  The music swelled, a complicated, trilling run of notes that seemed to calm the very air. The humidity was less oppressive; the buzzing of the insects dropped an octave.

  The sane part of my brain, the part that had kept me alive in the data-havens, was screaming at me to find a hole and pull a rock over my head and wait for my mind to recover from this world-changing shock. Heh. But there was one other side of me. The piece which had touched the server rack in the first place. The aspect that could not walk past a locked door without wondering what was behind it.

  Curiosity. My fatal flaw and my worst virtue

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  "If it can play the flute," I reasoned, rising and testing my balance on the slippery wood, "it probably has hands. If it has hands, maybe it can direct me to the exit."

  It was thin logic but better than waiting for Mr. Peepers to come back with friends.

  I moved. My high Egress made it easy to travel the fallen log, turning a treacherous balance beam act into a casual stroll. I made it to the other side of the chasm and slid into the shadow of a gigantic tree, its bark rough and warm against my back.

  The music was coming from a clearing just ahead. I crept forward, using my Kensho to guide my feet to the quietest patches of moss, keeping my profile low.

  I peered around the enormous trunk.

  The clearing was a natural amphitheater, bathed in the soft, turquoise bioluminescence of the canopy. In the center, sitting cross-legged on a smooth, dark stone that looked suspiciously like an altar, was a figure.

  It was small, humanoid and dressed in a simple, earth-toned robe that appeared woven from the forest floor itself. A deep hood hid its face except for a pool of absolute darkness. In its hands, slender, pale hands with too many joints, It held a flute carved from white bone.

  But it was not the musician that froze the breath in my lungs. It was the audience.

  Sitting in a loose circle around the stone, completely motionless, were the nightmares of Aethelgard.

  I saw two more of the Peepers - creatures, their obsidian limbs tucked under them like resting cats. There was a hulking, six-legged beast with chitinous armor plates that slowly changed colors. There were things that resembled oversized, furry moths with teeth.

  They were all listening. The music kept them in a heavy, narcotic trance. This wasn't a survivor hiding from the beasts. This was a shepherd singing lullabies to the wolves.

  Don't look at me. Please, nobody look at me.

  I clamped down on the Veil with my mind, and poured a trickle of Lumen into it to smooth out any edges. I was a rock. I was a mushroom. I was nothing.

  I took a step back, thinking of fading away, to find another way.

  The music stopped.

  The silence that followed was abrupt and violent. The heavy, narcotic atmosphere in the clearing evaporated. The six-legged tank-beast emitted a low rumbling growl. The Peepers moved, their multiple eyes snapping open.

  The robed figure lowered the flute. It didn't turn. It didn't stand. But I felt its attention turn.

  It was a physical sensation, like the drop in air pressure before a storm. The head of the figure was tilted slightly, the darkness of its hood facing my hiding spot.

  It didn't see my body. My Veil was working, I wasn't registering as a visual anomaly.

  But then, the sensation changed. It deepened. It was like a cold needle going into my mind.

  This wasn't sight.

  This was Kensho: vast, ancient with terrifyingly refined senses that this system provided me.

  The figure wasn't looking at the "me" that was hiding behind a tree. It was looking at the Astrolabe. It was looking directly at the burning, alien sun of my soul.

  My Tier 1 Veil, my "Flicker of a Stranger" was designed to fool the passive senses of the world. It was a camouflage net thrown over a tank. It was fine if you were just glancing at the forest. But this entity wasn't glancing. It was scrutinizing. It was checking the metadata of reality, and I was a file format that it didn't know.

  The creature's look was administrative. It was a moderator logging in to the server to check on a glitch report.

  I was made.

  The beasts in the clearing lifted up, a dozen heads snapping in the direction of my tree. They couldn't see me yet, but they could feel the focus of their master. They were waiting for the command to tear the intruder apart.

  Panic flared, hot and bright. Run? No. Egress couldn't outrun a gaze that pinned you to the conceptual fabric of the world. Fight? With what? My wit and a winning smile?

  A voice echoed in my head. It wasn't sound, it was a resonance, it was grinding like tectonic plates.

  Click-thrum-hiss-krrr.

  Gibberish. Alien noise.

  But, the Astrolabe surged, my Kensho flaring to life. It picked up the noise, stripped away the alien syntax, and rammed the raw meaning right into my brain.

  [Conceptual Imprint: You. are. Loud.]

  It wasn't an accusation. I had an inkling that from my astrolabe that, to this being, my soul was a boombox in a library.

  I had a choice. I could keep hiding, clinging to my shred of a Veil until the monsters came around the tree and ate me. Or I could admit defeat.

  Hiding was a lie. This thing saw the truth. So, I would give it the truth.

  I took a breath, controlled my shaking hands, and dropped the Veil.

  The drain on my Lumen stopped. My soul, raw and unfiltered, hummed out into the clearing. It felt exposed, naked.

  I walked out from behind the tree with my hands up and palms open.

  The monsters flinched. The tank-beast roared, and it was a sound that shook the leaves. One of the Peepers tensed up to spring.

  The robed figure held up one pale multi-jointed finger.

  The clearing froze. The monsters settled back, their aggression checked by absolute obedience.

  The hood of the figure appeared to absorb the light. I could not see eyes, but I could feel them dissecting me. It was waiting.

  I couldn't speak the language. I lacked the understanding of their language. But communication is more than words. The Astrolabe had conveyed the meaning of the figure to me; maybe it worked both ways.

  I focused on my central Star. I collected a tiny mote of Lumen, a carrier signal. I closed my eyes and imagined a concept. I poured my intent into it, peeling off the panic, the sarcasm, the bravado.

  Image: A leaf blown by a storm.

  Feeling: Confusion. Harmlessness.

  Concept: Lost. Just passing through.

  I pushed the thought outwards, a shout in the mind into the void.

  For a long, heart-stopping moment, nothing happened. The figure sat motionless.

  Then, the grinding voice came again, echoed by the Astrolabe's translation.

  [Conceptual Imprint: The song here is tight woven. You are a torn thread. You bleed echoes of other places They...]

  The figure gestured vaguely at the monsters.

  [...they hunt the dissonance. They hunt the noise.]

  It made sense. Horrifying sense. I was not just foreign, I was metaphysical noise pollution. My very existence was responsible for their immune response.

  [Conceptual Imprint: You cannot be here. But you are not rot. You are... wandering.]

  The pressure on my soul was reduced. The cold scrutiny gave way to something approaching indifference.

  It lifted a hand and pointed a long, bony finger deeper into the forest.

  [Conceptual Imprint: There is a Dead Spot. A silence in the song. Go. Be quiet.]

  A new icon shimmered on the edge of my internal Schema. A waypoint. A destination.

  [Conceptual Imprint: Run, little noise. Before the song changes.]

  The figure lowered its hand and brought the flute back to its lips. The haunting, sad melody began again. The monsters’ eyes glazed over, their attention drifting away from me, returning to the narcotic embrace of the music.

  I had been dismissed.

  I didn't wait for an encore. I backed away slowly, careful not to make a sound, until the trees obscured the clearing. Then, I turned and ran.

  I followed the waypoint, my Egress carrying me over roots and rocks. I didn't know what a "Dead Spot" was, or why a "silence in the song" was a good thing. But in a world that hunted noise, silence sounded like the only sanctuary I was going to get.