Act III: Concerning a Hero's Quest For Self-Discovery

Chapter Fourteen: Hearts and Diamonds

-turbulentGamer started hassling anomalousThespian-

TG: About fucking time you got in touch with me!
TG: Man I haven't seen or heard from you in over a week
AT: yeah, you've always been offline every time i check, bro!
TG: I know
TG: I've been up to my ass in scaly winged Jurassic creatures who just so happen to be sentient scaly winged Jurassic creatures
TG: These consorts are crazy dude they remind me so much of the Air Nomads from Avatar
AT: yeah, tell me about it.
AT: mine are cobras who remind me of native americans.
AT: had to climb a fucking sword ladder to make them actually believe that i'm their precious knight.
TG: Wow I'm kinda jealous
AT: why the fuck would you ever be jealous of something like that?
TG: I went through some sort of trial as well
TG: It was pretty rough
TG: Rougher than climbing a ladder haha
AT: um…
AT: it wasn't a ladder, it was a sword ladder. sword blades instead of rungs.
AT: get the picture?
TG: Ah
TG: Okay that's what you meant by 'sword ladder'
TG: How'd you manage to climb something like that
AT: oh, you know. shenanigans.
TG: Hmm well then I don't know which of us really had it worse
AT: how do you beat having to climb a ladder of swords?
TG: My consorts pushed me off a mountain
AT: …
AT: dude, we really need to hang out, sometime.
TG: I know man!
TG: We need to get together and play some halo
TG: Fuck all this seven gates bullshit
AT: all this 'consorts putting us through mortally dangerous trials' bullshit…
TG: Yes fuck it all I say
TG: So did you combine your laptop with your sunglasses or something
TG: Or are you at your house
AT: no, i left my computer at my house.
AT: i'm dreaming, at the moment.
TG: Oh you're using the computer in your dream room
TG: Yeah I do that a lot too
TG: Don't always feel like going outside
TG: I hate the whispers
TG: Gino and Cass love listening to the gods but they freak me the fuck out
TG: They freak Gwen out too so don't think I'm just being weird
AT: gods?
TG: Right your sprite went all ballistic
TG: You wouldn't know about the gods
TG: Hell I don't know very much about them
TG: They live in the Furthest Ring and they whisper to our dream selves
AT: i've never heard anyone whispering to me when i'm dreaming… am i doing it wrong?
TG: No no you're a Prospit dreamer
TG: Prospit is way too far away from the Furthest Ring for you to hear the gods
TG: Only Derse dreamers can hear them
TG: It's pretty much our equivalent of the Skaian clouds
TG: You see all sorts of crazy shit when the golden moon is closest to Skaia
TG: I hear all kinds of crazy shit when the obsidian moon is furthest from Skaia
AT: okay where exactly is derse? i mean, i keep hearing about it, but i can't find anything in the sky that looks like a big-ass purple city-planet.
TG: You don't know the layout of the incipisphere?
TG: Fuck sorry I keep forgetting your sprite went nuts
TG: Allow me to fill the knowledge gap
TG: In the very center of the incipisphere is Skaia
TG: My sprite described it to me as a dormant crucible of pure unlimited creative potential or some shit
TG: An energy source of sorts – it's all pretty weird and hard to understand
TG: Everything orbits around Skaia
TG: Prospit is close enough to Skaia that its moon can brush down through its clouds during the solar eclipse
TG: Further out are the eight planets
TG: Our planets
TG: Then there's a huge asteroid belt beyond our planets that my sprite called the 'Veil'
TG: And beyond that is Derse.
AT: that's pretty fucking far away.
AT: do the people there worship you, too?
TG: …
TG: I mean yeah they do but it's kinda weird
TG: We're technically fighting the Dersites because they want to destroy Skaia and we're supposed to stop that from happening
TG: But we're still like celebrities to the common Dersites
TG: Like their mascots or something
TG: Like I said it's complicated and weird
AT: if we're fighting the dersites, why don't they just kill your dream selves? i mean, you're right fucking there!
TG: That's part of the weird and complicated shit
TG: I think there are certain rules that exist that prevent the Dersite monarchs from taking action against our dream selves
AT: well, that sucks for you guys, having to live in a place filled with people who we're fighting.
AT: the prospitians fucking love us.
AT: tami and the bitch woke up in their towers, just the other day
AT: and there were so many prospitians in the streets i

I blinked several times, barely having time to recover from the blow before I was ripped from my seat and thrown into the opposite wall, over my bed.

I'd just been chatting with Theo, when suddenly something grabs the back of my head and slams my face into the keyboard. I didn't break anything, but that doesn't mean it didn't hurt. Because it did. A lot.

Swearing under my breath, I picked myself up off the ground, but my assailant was already shoving aside my bed and coming after me once more. I barely got a glimpse of the attacker before the next round of beatdowns came. He was a giant brute—easily seven feet tall, with shiny, ebony skin. I quickly realized that it was the same kind of carapace-like skin that the Prospitians had, only it was midnight black in color instead of alabaster. His face was a mean and crude one, and it looked like it was too small for his head.

This brute had a giant battleaxe across his back, but he wasn't using it. He didn't need to—he felt strong enough to snap me in half like a twig. Instead, the dark-skinned carapacian reached into his coat and drew out a thin knife, holding it limply in his left hand.

Just as I got back to my feet, the carapacian brute seized me by the throat, and he started to squeeze. I hammered at his grip with my fists, my feet flailing uselessly in the air. It was no use—this guy was like a pain sponge. He just seemed to absorb every blow I landed on him.

I was seeing dark spots at the edges of my vision, and they were gradually coming in closer and closer. I needed to get myself some air, and fast.

The thing about my dream self is that I get a lot more absent-minded when I'm on Prospit then I ever am while awake. This was kind of weird, because I always feel more awake, more…more alive when I'm dreaming on Prospit, but I still fell victim to the absentmindedness and occasional stupidity of our dream selves. And that was why it didn't occur to me to use my Aspect until I'd already been half-strangled.

Still, better late than never.

Surprisingly, it was much easier to use my Aspect while dreaming on Prospit than it ever was for me when I'm awake. I mean, we have difficulty using our powers in the beginning because they've been dormant our entire lives. But while we're sleeping, I guess a lot of the psychological barriers between us and our Aspects are no longer there.

I balled my hands into fists, and they started to shine with that familiar, faint amber glow that seemed to appear every time I used my Aspect. I took a deep breath, met the carapacian brute's gaze, and struck. I put enough juice into that attack to knock an ogre flat on its ass for a while, but this guy just took it like a champ, barely even sliding back from the telekinetic blow.

His mouth twisted into a leer. "The Queen said you'd try that, kid," he chuckled. His voice was low and raspy, and it was laced with a thick, harsh accent that reminded me a lot of the stereotypical angry Brooklyn cab driver. He held up his left hand, which he was using to hold his knife, showing off a small, amber ring. "Think we'd come after youse guys without proper protection?"

And with that, the brute let go of my throat…but I still couldn't breathe. There was still something squeezing the life out of me, but… I then realized that it was the brute, using telekinesis to strangle me. This fucking douche was going all Vader on me. He had my powers.

Pain. I felt some pain, right around the right side of my chest… I looked down, saw the dark-skinned carapacian brute's knife, buried up to its grip in my chest. A clean thrust, right between the ribs… This guy obviously didn't have the patience to wait for me to die of suffocation. I found that I was having trouble breathing. I got a metallic taste in my mouth, and when I coughed, I could feel something wet splattering down onto my shirt. It wasn't saliva.

"Must've… Must've…punctured a lung…" I could hear myself murmuring.

"Now, that just made my day," the brute chuckled. "All youse Heroes, y'all think yer all invincible with yer fancy-schmancy powers. Right up until someone goes an' throws yer powers right back in yer face."

What happened next, I really can't say for certain. If my body were run on AA batteries, it would've felt like someone took those batteries out and replaced them with a fucking Iron Man arc-reactor. And if you don't know what an arc reactor is, then watch the Iron Man movies, and you'll find out. It was a surge of energy from some deep crevice of my mind that I never knew existed, unleashed by the raw subconscience of my dream self.

There was a blinding explosion of amber light, and the carapacian brute's telekinetic grip around my throat was shattered. The brute himself was thrown across the room and into my computer desk. As for me… I was falling.

I could feel the rush of wind against my face, and I nearly closed my eyes for a few moments, but I forced myself to keep them open. If I let them close, they'd probably never open again. I righted myself and soared back up into the sky before I could splatter myself all over the streets of the golden moon below, bathing in Skaia's radiance.

Skaia's warm rays of light felt so much comfortable now than they ever had before… God, it was so tempting to just close my eyes and float along with the breeze, maybe take a quick nap…

No! No naps!

I'd been dipping below the tops of the buildings while I thought of sleeping, but I wrenched myself back into the air. It was getting harder and harder to breathe—I honestly have no idea how I was able to make it this far. A normal person wouldn't have even made it out of the room, I would think. I faintly remembered one of the last things my Sprite had said to me, back when I first arrived in the Land of Rain and Rivers.

You're a goddamn Knight. Knights can get sliced up within an inch of their lives, and they can still keep right on going.

Well, that was one thing my Sprite seemed to have gotten right.

On some level of my mind, I knew exactly where I was going, but that was just primal instinct. Reacting to my chest wound without even thinking about it. I already knew that there was no way I would be able to heal that, but maybe I could get some help. I mean, I'm just trying to rationalize my actions—at the time, I didn't realize what I was doing until I was able to see my destination.

The dream tower rose above the curvature of the golden moon's horizon, growing larger and larger as I hurtled through the sky towards it. When the tower came into view, my weariness seemed to subside just a tiny bit, and I flew towards it with a renewed energy. My wound was bleeding openly, now—the telekinetic blast back in my dream room must have ended up tearing the knife free. And I knew that, when stabbed or impaled by something, you're not supposed to pull it out because it'll make you bleed ten times worse.

Well, I was bleeding ten times worse. The top of my golden-yellow Prospit pajamas was already stained brown and red with my blood. As I neared the approaching dream tower, my vision started to go, and I started getting extremely dizzy, to the point where the tower seemed to be drifting from side to side, up and down.

I slowed down as I reached the top of the dream tower, but I overshot the nearest window and ended up hitting the side of the tower. I flung out a desperate hand as I slammed into the golden stone, managing to snag the sill of the window that I was falling past. I grabbed the windowsill with my other hand and floated myself up and over, into the dream room within.

My dream room existed only in tones of green, but this one was only in tones of red. All the rooms appeared in different colors, it seemed. This dream room had a twin-sized bed, a small desk with a MacBook laptop and a desk lamp, a nightstand with an alarm clock, several posters of various punk bands adorning the walls, a sizeable collection of different instruments littering the floor on the other side of the bed, and a dresser with a red lava lamp on top.

Sleeping in the bed was a girl, dressed in golden-yellow pajamas just like me. She had short black hair—not quite as short as mine, but close—and several piercings at various points on her face. There was a nose ring—not through the septum, thank god—an industrial bar in her right ear, as well as no less than three studs in either ear. She also had a diamond stud above her left eyebrow. Smaller mouth, straight nose; people always used to joke and say that she was the female version of me—in terms of physical appearance, mind you. And while we weren't identical twins, obviously, I had to admit that we did look pretty similar. Except for the eyes—she had emerald green eyes, whereas I had…well…you know.

I was losing consciousness fast. I was out of time.

I tumbled through the window into the dream room, falling in a heap onto the floor. I tried and failed to take a deep breath, falling into another painful fit of coughing. I pulled my hands away from my mouth, observing my handiwork. "Definitely not healthy cough-blood…" I wheezed to myself.

I dragged myself across the floor of the room. Because everything in this room existed in tones of red, it was hard to see all the blood that I was leaving on the carpet, which was probably for the best. I reached the bed and, in one final feat of strength, pulled myself up off the floor. I reached over and jostled the sleeping girl on her shoulder.

"Tam…" I groaned, grabbing her other shoulder and shaking her in earnest. "Tami! Tam…wake up…"

"What the…?" Tami Abramov's eyes snapped open and she flew upright, pushing me back off the bed and onto the floor. "What the fuck is going on? What are you doing here—are you bleeding?"

I kept on mumbling, no longer having the strength to do anything else but lie there on the floor. I felt Tami looking at my stab wound under my shirt. I kept telling her to help me, but I wasn't sure if she could understand a thing I was saying. It probably sounded like slurred gibberish. And so my last act before losing consciousness was not one of strength, but of communication. Focusing every last bit of willpower I had into verbal form.

"Tam… Your Aspect… Do the Lifey thing…"

My sudden inability to breathe was what woke me up. There was a thin line of fire around my throat that was cutting off all my air. I tore at my throat with my fingers, felt what was strangling me. It was a thin wire—a garrote. God damn it all, it was like my dream all over again…

I didn't even wait to see if whoever the fuck this guy was—I think he was surprised that I had woken up, and I took advantage of this. I forced myself up onto my knees and drove an elbow back into my would-be murderer's belly. The attacker's flesh comprised of a rigid black carapace, as well—exactly like my attacker on Prospit.

My blow made the attacker falter, but not enough for him to lose his grip on the garrote. That was no problem, though—I only wanted to buy myself enough time to retrieve the Roman Bowie from my strife specibus. I thrust the medium-sized blade back towards my attacker, but he saw the attack coming and had ample time to evade.

I wasn't really trying to kill my attacker, there; all I wanted to do was get him off-balance so that I drop back to the ground and sweep the assailant's legs out from under him. The dark-skinned carapacian went down with an audible grunt of annoyance. Finally, he lost his grip on the garrote, and my lungs expanded to their fullest extent, sucking down all that sweet, fresh air. And with the return of the air came the return of my voice.

"Scales!" I shouted into the ruined wall that separated my room from the room that I knew my companion was sleeping in. "Scales, wake the fuck up!"

All I heard in reply was a bleary, murmured, "Go sstick your head on a pike. Let me ssleep."

"Jesus H. Christ, Scales, get the fu—shit!" I barely had time to drop to the ground when a sharp spear with a bright red, diamond-shaped tip came thrusting out of the darkness, impaling the air right where I'd been standing. My attacker recovered from the thrust and brought it plunging down towards my stomach, but I held out my hands and stopped the spear's movement with my Aspect. This guy was fucking tough to hold back, too…but he did not seem to possess the abilities of the brutish carapacian on Prospit. My Aspect was still effective against him.

I was doing alright, but then my attacker kicked me, right between the legs. I howled in pain, clutching at my manhood, curling up into the fetal position. I don't even remember anything that I was shouting at the time, and that's probably for the best—he'd kicked pretty hard. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the red diamond-tipped spear come stabbing down once more…only to be halted once again.

This time, a sword came out of nowhere and knocked the spear aside, and the tip of a scaly red tail whipped out of the darkness, striking the dark carapacian on the side of his head. This sent the carapacian tumbling to the ground. The sword came at the carapacian again, but the attacker had just enough time to wrench his spear free from the ground to block the attack. He then vanished, stalking off into the darkness, leaving Scales and me alone once more.

I sat back against the crumbling stone wall of the ruined home we'd taken shelter in for the night, allowing myself to catch my breath. I was covered in a cold sweat, and I couldn't seem to stop shivering, not to mention the fact that my balls felt like red-hot embers. An image of a knife buried in my chest flashed through my mind, and I felt a sharp, phantom pain where my dream self had been stabbed. Someone had tried to kill my dream self on the golden moon while someone else was silently making short work of my waking self while it slept. This was no ordinary attack—it had been organized and timed precisely.

This had been an assassination attempt.

"Knight?" Scales slithered across the room, making sure I wasn't hurt badly. "Who wass that? What hass happened?"

I took another deep breath and sat up slowly. "I don't know who that was, but I know one thing for certain," I looked up, meeting Scales's gaze. "The rules have changed."