The orcs had spent their time in exile well, that much Anda knew. Nothing focused the will of a martial culture as much as defeat, should it not break it entirely. Tempered Insiders were not ageless, and the oldest male orcs from before the expulsion had long since passed away, but their rage and desire for retribution lived on. Absent the resources to build a society, and led by the Matrons, who were far longer lived than the males, the orcs had spent generations doing little more than training, honing their society to a razor’s edge of military sharpness, their personal power grown and tested by the harshness of the Boiling Plains and against ever more challenging episodes of instanced travel.

So it was no surprise that they maintained a certain level of discipline, even as the darkness smothered them, the shrieking wails assaulted them, and their powers deserted them. The retreat began in an orderly manner, given the circumstances, though all involved were finding their feet in the absence of Flash, Power and the many abilities and magically enhanced skills they relied on.

Finding their feet presented a more literal problem too. The sky was free of moon or star. The Orusk and Orsurs were effectively blind, the others nearly so. Despite these handicaps, it was only a matter of seconds before the commands were passed, and the band awkwardly reversed its course, following the wide swathe of their previous passage.

As they moved, Anda agonized a bit about letting Lilijoy go after the scouts. On further consideration, he decided ‘letting’ really wasn’t the correct word. He wasn’t particularly worried on her behalf, though some part of him felt that if there was any real danger to be found on the Inside, she would surely be the one to find it. Other than that, it was a relief, for he already felt guilt over abandoning members of the band he was ostensibly leading, even though the orcs had thoroughly rethought such issues in the light of respawning and had developed their own, new, traditions and tactics for battles where death was temporary. Usually.

The respawning rules were harsher for Insiders, with much longer times. It was not a sure thing that a respawn would happen at all. This put them at a considerable disadvantage in a large, protracted war, and was probably the primary reason the orcs had not made any moves until now. Or so Anda thought; he wasn’t privy to the strategic machinations of the Matrons.

One thing he was sure of though; the Matrons would never have given their approval for this expedition if they knew just how dangerous the Rotted Land had become. He had spent enough time in Purgatory to know just how thoroughly the rules could change, how consequences for Outsiders and Insiders both could become substantially more severe. He had told Lilijoy that this wasn’t Purgatory, and he believed his assessment correct, but there was nothing to say that this strange infestation within the relatively benign confines of the Garden couldn’t be even worse.

Onward, or really backward, they trudged, feeling weak and slow, fighting against infernal screeching and fear of the dark. The scouts formed a line, each in visual range of the next, following the dim outline of their predecessor. The Urkaen and Urglah had some degree of natural night vision, and they formed the first line of defense around the band itself, as if a few extra feet of vision would provide sufficient warning against any threats that called this nightmare home.

Traveling as slowly as they were now, with no way to see any landmarks, it became difficult to judge the passage of time. Even Anda’s internal clock seemed fickle, in the way that changing digits can be when faced with the interminable. The journey inward had been a matter of minutes, the time it took for the sun to fully set, yet the return stretched beyond any reasonable length, even as they continued to retrace their own footsteps through the recrement of earth.

The orcs began to mutter within their ranks, though he doubted they could actually hear one another, as it became clear that this dark place was reluctant to see them leave. Anda’s messages to Lilijoy went unanswered, and he began to wonder if his best move might not be to withdraw, to log out, and connect with her on the Outside. He hesitated to do this just yet, fearful that he might not be able to return, that somehow his absence would lead to the loss of the Insiders. It felt like a real fear, so he had yet to pull the trigger on the action. Lurking beneath that, less rational but just as present, was the feeling that logging out might not be possible at all. There was no reason to believe that, but the thought nagged at him, even after he pulled up the menus to reassure himself that his system was working well.

Their ‘progress’ slowed more and more, and Anda repeatedly adjusted his pace to avoid running into the orcs in front of him. Eventually he lost patience and broke free from the group, moving to see what was forcing the scouts to creep along so cautiously. He worked his way up the line, until he reach the foremost. The Urkulps’ movements were slow, sluggish even, though his eyes were alert as he constantly scanned, straining against the utter dark. Still, it took him a full second to register Anda’s arrival.

He leaned over and put his mouth by the scout’s high-set triangular ear. “Report!” he barked.

The scout’s reply confirmed his fears, not by content but by delivery. His speech was slow, and while Anda had never talked with him before, he suspected the deep and slightly slurred tone he could pick up, only because his system was filtering most of the wailing din, was not the voice he would be hearing on a normal day.

Time, it is a-changing, he thought. Bother.

***

The scout’s body shuddered and twitched in the white light cast from Lilijoy’s palm. While many parts of her internet memory were welcome to emerge as needed, there were vast swathes she had sequestered, full of the kind of images absolutely no one should have surfacing unbidden in their imagination. There was no room for squeamishness in her worldview, but there was also no need to have such things play any kind of prominent role in her daily life.

Despite this, she knew beyond doubt that the unfortunate scout appeared to have been dead for days. She had felt his flesh ooze between her fingers, had smelled the advanced putrefaction, never mind the sagging, discolored skin and sunken features. A thousand zombie movies did not prepare her for the disturbance she felt upon seeing the body move in the white glare, the gaping mouth of long teeth shown by shrunken lips and gums, and the unsettling question: what force was behind this unnatural animation?

Was it the Maasai revenant pulling the strings, or was some remnant of the poor scout trapped in a dead shell? What, exactly, was she going to do about it? The thought of putting it out of its misery occurred, but even there her options were few. The wicked knife was trapped in her inventory, and her Qi was unavailable. She could hardly pummel the thing to death mercifully, were it even possible. Additionally, it seemed all too likely that the other scouts, six more if she remembered correctly, which, of course she did, were suffering the same circumstance.

“What do you want!?” she yelled into the shrieking cacophony. Her voice was slow and asynchronous to her intent, a ridiculous stretched bass to her ears. The stillness of the air was a strange counterpoint to the tortured noise. It felt somehow like her voice should disappear into a howling wind, but instead it rang out clearly. Like a switch had been thrown the sound stopped and the corpse slumped fully into the undefined ground. Its writhing and twitching movements seemed to flow into the earth all around, merely displaced from flesh to dust, and suddenly the ashy ground boiled and writhed in the white light of her palm. It rippled and swelled, throwing up soft spikes and undefined formations, then retracting them just as quickly. It created the unsettling impression of fingers clawing and thrusting, attempting to penetrate from beneath into the open air.

Thankfully, the earth was still within a small radius of her feet, a couple meters at most, but outside of that the movements became more rapid, more urgent, as if the earth itself was in tantrum. At times, she thought she saw discernible shapes, rough humanoid figures, animals, and more than once, a rough globe flashed by, its surface pitted and scarred, surging up only to collapse.

Is that the moon?

Even with her mind moving at its fastest speed, the transformations and reconfigurations of the ashy ground were almost too fast to follow. If it was an attempt to communicate, it was going very poorly. If it was an attempt to alarm and disorient her, it was going smashingly. She could see no sign anymore of the orc’s body; whether it had been buried by the thrashing ground, or dissolved into ash she couldn’t say.

“Slow down!” she yelled.

Surprisingly, the land obeyed, juddering and pulsing to a near stop, though only relative to her fastest subjective speed. The soft substance of the earth formed countless stalks, waving in nonexistent breeze for as far as her light stretched. Abruptly pastoral, the atmosphere felt more ominous than before, the ashen tendrils cast threads of shadows under the utter dark, heightening her awareness of all she could not see.

“Etalaki,” a voice whispered from all around. “Etalaki.”

“Is that your name?” she asked, almost whispering herself, speaking as quickly as she could, for she feared her voice might be too slow to be understood easily if the environment was already moving as fast as she could think.

“Etalaki,” the whisper insisted, and a moon, Earth’s moon, formed just above the stalks of almost grass, seeming to rest on their fronds with all the mass of a balloon.

Before this expedition had started, Lilijoy had reviewed, or perhaps renewed, all thing there were Maasai from the internet archive. It was a profoundly small amount of material, compared to subjects far more trivial. Anda had laughed at her when she told him, and laughed even harder at what he found when he looked himself.

“These stories...” he managed after a few seconds. “I’m sorry, but they just… well, they’re accurate to an extent. People from a foreign land, trying to cut off a slice of someone else’s oral tradition are bound to get it wrong. They’re missing all the context, as if someone attended Catholic mass and thought they were celebrating cannibalism. As well, who is listening and who is telling the story matters! Never mind that the delivery, the wink, the pause, the hand gestures, are more important than the words themselves. There’s no way here to tell what is a metaphor, or a riddle, or a reference to a story that might have been told the night before.”

“I figured as much,” she had replied, “but it’s better than nothing? I hope?”

He shook his head. “Maasai culture, and more significantly, Maasai Clan culture, has changed drastically from anything you might find. I won’t pretend that our folklore doesn’t play a role. It forms a part of our cultural language, a shared set of metaphors, a form of shorthand for who we are as a people. In some ways, we doubled down, pushing away the outsiders, non-Maasai, I mean, and their beliefs. There were several… well, I guess you could call them purges, or purity movements over the past century. That kind of thinking is a big reason I left, or was exiled. It’s still not entirely clear which happened first.”

“It seems that your people were always a bit on the insular side.”

“That’s a very kind way to put it. As you no doubt noticed, the core of our foundational beliefs is that we are a chosen people. When we reached technological parity with the other clans, that came back with a vengeance, as if a century of repressed inferiority complexes boiled over.”

At that point, Lilijoy had begun to understand just exactly how Anda might have angered his clan to the extent they exiled him on the Outside and torture banned him on the Inside.

“Let me guess,” she said. “You said as much back when you were a member.”

“I was young and brash. Then I fell in with a group of free-thinkers, Renaissance of course, who taught me a new way to see the world and my place in it. It wasn’t a great combination. Perhaps this older and possibly wiser version of myself would have done things differently, fought for change from within, but it was a complicated situation.”

She had spent some time further picking his brain about the modern Maasai clan. Anda was always reticent to talk about his former clan, whether from some lingering sense of obligation ingrained over years of loyalty or just an honest wish to avoid the topic she wasn’t sure. Of course, he was much the same with Renaissance. She could image some time in the future he might be just as reluctant to talk about her as he forged new friendships and alliances. It was how he was, who he was, a core of close-guarded privacy under a personable exterior.

she sent.

As she sent the message, her method for detecting sensory interference with her system alerted her to an attempt to circumvent her action, something quite similar to what most Outsiders experienced when attempting to connect to the Outside when they were Inside. Stage Two made all her sensory processes multiply redundant, so resisting such methods was trivial, but she worried that Anda’s system might not be sufficiently developed to thwart the attack. If that was the case, there was nothing she could do about it on her end. She could only hope that Anda had escaped with the others and would be replying soon.

***

This is a nightmare, Anda thought.

He wasn’t prone to panic. Quite the opposite really. While he had never had the fiery passion for combat and struggle of the others in his age cohort, from a young age he was known for his level head, for his ability to think and then act in the most harrowing circumstances. The Maasai had spared no expense in simulating the traditional training of their young warriors; they earned their systems through harrowing adventures on the ruined plains of Africa, fighting off augmented animals and mechanized opponents. They learned to fight as brothers, and to sleep beneath the occluded sky with nothing more than their wits and the weapons they could make themselves.

After that, the Trial for the Inside had been a cakewalk. Aside from the geyser squid anyway. Then they were tempered further in the Great Grass Sea, followed by the ultimate, the journey that culminated in arrival at the clan’s tenuous holding in the outermost circle of Purgatory. That was only reserved for the elite, those destined for leadership and the high levels of personal augmentation that went with it. Anda Kukata had had it all, and then thrown it away.

Now he was having flashbacks to his earliest days in the worst possible way, the power, composure and even confidence he had earned before he was even a man rotted away like the Land surrounding him.

Shortly after he had realized that everyone, except him at least, was being slowed somehow, that the frame rate of time’s passage was being applied with an uneven hand, the nightmare had begun. The land itself rose up, swirling and climbing the legs of the scout next to him in streams of uneven gray. At first he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him, strained against the darkness as they were, but mere feet from his face he saw the dark streams entering the nose and mouth of the slowed orc, saw the widening eyes and hands moving to face as the scout reacted.

Anda spent no time trying to help him. The split second he realized what was going on, he sprinted back to the main group of orcs, and Lilijoy’s friends, shouting his warnings into the shrieking dark as he went. He made it back just in time to see, as best he could, chaos gripping the band, bodies rolling on the ground, warriors tearing at their faces. All in slow motion.

He nearly smacked the form that flew out of the darkness toward his face. It was only the ample time he had between awareness and response that allowed him to pull his blow, to recognize it as a slow-gliding Skria. He didn’t even have a moment to analyze the oddness of having his own personal time stream, for almost immediately twenty-odd pounds of panicked petauran were grappling with his face, sharp claws scrabbling for purchase on his lightly-furred dome.

In another time it might have been comic, but it was horrible and pathetic instead. The girl was sobbing and babbling in a deep bass, and Anda didn’t have time to try and understand her. He reached up and moved her to his shoulder, barely breaking stride as he went. He feared the worst for Lilijoy’s other friend, but as yet there was no sign of her, nor the bulk of the Orsurs who attended her. He hoped they had fled, somehow escaped this madness.

For whatever reason, his system and Outsider qualities most likely, the ashy earth wasn’t attacking him, so now his body was the only thing between Skria and whatever was happening to those who were… what? Infected? Certainly incapacitated. That meant logging out was no longer an option.

For about the millionth time he cursed the fact that no one had brought anything as simple as a torch, or a vial of glow-moss. If anyone did, it was probably trapped in their inventories, along with anything else that might be useful. He hesitated, unsure of the best course of action and felt a sharp rap on the side of his head.

“Find Jess,” Skria commanded, though it took her almost four seconds to do so. While she was speaking he ran in a broad circle, the only way he could get a grasp of the situation with virtually no visibility. Multiple trails led off from the main trunk of disturbed ground that represented their journey into, and hopefully, eventually, out of, the Rotted Land, no doubt from orcs fleeing. He could only imagine what it was like for them; to him the ashy substance crawled, but for them it must seem to sweep up the bodies of their comrades in a single strike. There could be no defense, no way to help, and he didn’t blame some for running, for all the good it was likely to do them.

Still, it hadn’t swept over all the orcs at once, and he could still see some attending to fallen comrades, just beginning to crouch down to assess their twisting brethren. That meant there were limits to the power of whatever this was. That or they were being played with.

There was no sign a large group had left the trail, so he picked up speed and began his reply, speaking as slowly as he could. “They went back this way. What happened?”

He set his system to gathering Skria’s slowed speech so he could focus on running in the pitch dark. He didn’t want to trip and send her flying into the ash. I suppose she might hover in slow motion long enough for me to get back up, he pondered. Better not to test it though.

He settled into a comfortable lope, trying to balance Skria’s weight while ignoring her claws and the bushy tail that kept wandering into his face, and began to process the past minute. He had held his emotions at bay, but now guilt, regret and self-recrimination were howling in the dark, a choir with the sounds in his ears that had never stopped. He also felt a simmering anger toward Nandi and the Archon, though he recognized it was partly from his desire to reject his own responsibility for this debacle. Still, he had been sent here, told to involve the orcs, all without any useful information or warning, and for what? So they could die uselessly?

This place really needs new management, he thought.

After some time, Skria finished her story. There wasn’t much to tell, not really. Chaos and yelling, then being launched into the air for reasons she didn’t entirely understand at the time. Without her magic, she was at the mercy of gravity, only able to glide. Fortunately, out of everyone, Skria had the best ability to see in the dark, to the extent that she had an ability called Day Vision, that allowed her to see normally when the sun was shining. She had seen Anda’s return to the group and decided he was the safest landing spot.

He was just thankful she normally talked so fast.

***

Well, that was nice while it lasted, Lilijoy thought.

“Can we go back to the moons and stuff?” she called out doing her best to dodge a four pronged wave of loose, ashy earth rolling toward her, looking as if some giant was stretching through the earth from below, running fat fingers along its ceiling. Whatever, whoever, the animating presence was in this place, they had lost patience with her, or changed their mind about trying to communicate. So far it had been a battle of mutual impotence. Beasts and warriors formed out of the loose material attacked and she obliterated them with feeble kicks and punches as they came. But now, it seemed, her opponent was getting more serious, seeking to overwhelm her with sheer volume. She wasn’t sure what would happen if she was completely buried in the substance, and she wasn’t in a particular hurry to find out. Thankfully, she seemed to have some kind of aura around her that interfered with or suppressed the cohesiveness of the constructs and kept them from forming at her feet. That had kept her from being overwhelmed so far.

She had a theory about that, but not much time to do anything about it, busy as she was dodging and weaving. There were rules to this place, loose and chaotic to be sure, but rules nonetheless. The constructs always maintained contact with the ground, their movement more of an animated sliding than true walking or running. Time was fickle, but there seemed to be an ongoing negotiation between her perception of time and the external forces assailing her.

The hand-wave subsided and now an elephant formed, towering above her as it charged, its legs stretching rather than lifting off the surface. It would have looked as if it was stuck in gray taffy, it it weren’t relentlessly approaching. All of the beasts attacking her so far had been those of the African Savannah, though many were warped and twisted. The elephant had a box-like body, as if a distant ancestor had been an armored personnel carrier, and tusks with broad axe heads on the ends.

There was going to be no dodging this threat. Instead, she leapt into it with her fist extended, a move that would have been foolish in any other circumstance. Her body was more solid than the elephant’s though, and she moved through the dark mass even as it bore her back. She could feel the material all around her, grasping and sliding on her skin, moving into her nose and ears.

There will be none of that! she thought, and pushed with her diamond energy against the intrusion. It was an instinctive reaction, but one born from the feeling she had had since the conflict began, or perhaps earlier, the sense that within the boundary of her physical presence and identity was her domain. The rules here were flexible, unformed compared to the Garden and her physical presence was a kind of metaphor for what she could control. It was the same concept that had led her to develop the Body Warp ability.

That’s what the aura protecting me is, she thought. It’s my reach. I could be there, and so in some sense I am. That means…

With a cry, she pushed the invasive ash off her skin entirely and then farther, in an explosive flare of power that left her temporarily suspended in mid-air within what was left of the elephant construct. It slumped into a pile as she descended to her feet.

“There!” she cried. “What else have you got!”

She regretted the outburst within a couple of seconds, as five forms lumbered into the very edge of her light, the bodies of the orc scouts.

“Oh. Okay, fair enough,” she muttered under her breath. “Guess it’s time for round two.”

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