The elevator rattled as it descended into the facility’s depths.

Valdemar crossed his arms as he did his best to fit in the cramped cabin, which was clearly adapted for Derros and not humans. The lack of space made him uncomfortable already, but it was the presence of glass eyes in the corners that truly frustrated him.

“Why are you so un-unethusiastic?” a device in the elevator’s ceiling somehow carried Otto Blutgang’s voice through it. “Our mu-mutual objectives will be ful-fulfilled once we have established tru-ust.”

“I don’t see what helping you will bring me besides more headaches.” The only reason Valdemar went along this plan was to rescue Marianne, assist Lord Och, and prevent a maddened Pleromian from escaping into Underland. If the summoner could smash the Derro king to bits and exorcise his spirit from the machinery, he would have done it.

“Once you ba-anish the Pleromi-i-ian, we can collaborate and op-pen the path to the infinite woooorlds…” The voice stretched on and screeched like a chalk on a board. “I will stab-bilize the portal to Earth and le-let you and volunteers through. Or any other wo-orld you wish for.”

Valdemar looked up at a glass eye with skepticism. “Would you let mankind use your portals?”

“The cosmos is infi-infi-infite. Our species can-not coexist due to lack of space and com-competition over resources. Portals will abolish scarci-city and let us share the bo-bounty of endless worlds.”

Valdemar looked at the elevator’s rusted door, waiting for it to open. “A troglodyte friend of mine used a similar argument. He said that this planet was too small for two species.”

“Enmity between us is pointlesssss,” Otto hissed like a snake. “Co-cooperation will benefit us both.”

That could solve their problems, and the Silent King had portrayed the Derro King as a valid solution for Valdemar to reach Earth. While it meant stomaching Otto’s atrocities, co-developing functional portal technology and sharing its use was a good deal on paper.

But there were a few issues Valdemar couldn’t ignore.

“What about the others?” he asked Otto Blutgang. “Those who won’t listen and will elect to remain behind in Underland?”

“What about the-them?”

The worst part, the Derro King sounded puzzled that Valdemar cared. Otto Blutgang had become a thing unable to relate to others.

No, that wasn’t right. From the way he enslaved his own species, the Derro King couldn’t feel empathy for anyone else in the first place. Every interaction was a cold transaction with him, an equation to be solved. Otto didn’t understand the value of establishing trust and goodwill, considered his own men resources to exhaust and throw aside for the sake of his ambitions, and didn’t care for anyone but himself.

In a way, that was why Valdemar believed the offer to be entirely genuine. A solipsistic being like Otto Blutgang didn’t hold grudges and would consider peacefully shipping potential enemies off-world an easier solution than a costly war.

But all those who would refuse to take the offer… the unbelievers, the skepticals, the fearful, the dokkars and the troglodytes…

They would have no future.

“Ktulu,” his familiar whispered from within his bag. Somehow, it managed to sound like a warning.

I know, Valdemar thought. This deal smells like rotten fish.

Otto had brainwashed nearly the entire Derro race besides a few personalities ‘worth preserving.’ While the species had been at war with humans long before Valdemar’s birth, he couldn’t help but feel pity for them. No one deserved to have their mind corrupted by a malevolent intelligence.

In a way, Otto’s actions were no different than Ialdabaoth’s. He had just traded flesh for steel.

But what alternative was there? Otto Blutgang controlled the facility, and while he had sealed it shut to prevent the Pleromian from escaping, he could certainly have it reinforced in a pinch. The moment Valdemar attempted to escape or sabotage the portal, Derro troops would come in. Not to mention the strange teleportation technology Otto had access to inside the facility.

Is there a way to free the Derros from their so-called Godmind? Valdemar couldn’t help but wonder. He didn’t see any, but he had to keep faith. The same way he had to believe he could free himself from Ialdabaoth’s influence.

The elevator’s door opened, and alien screams of agony drew him out of his thoughts.

Fearing he had arrived too late, Valdemar rushed into a steel corridor as the heat around him increased. The sound of thrumming engines and steam bursting through pipes resounded around him, while his Psychic Sight instantly detected a powerful locus in the Blood further ahead.

The corridor ended into a vast chamber holding the burning engines fueling the facility, and to the strange sight of Lord Och blasting a blob of black slime with lightning while Marianne watched with a blank expression. The lich clearly enjoyed himself, chuckling as a crimson orb sometimes threatened to emerge from the dark goo.

Valdemar had indeed arrived too late.

He had barely taken a step on a metal bridge connecting to the engine room’s central platform that Marianne turned in his direction, her revolver pointed at his face. “Easy!” Valdemar immediately raised his hands, Ktulu imitating him inside his bag. “It’s me, Marianne!”

His bodyguard observed him in silence for a moment, before her blank face turned to relief. “I’m so glad to see you safe, Valdemar.” Marianne lowered her weapon. “I apologize for the frosty welcome. The creature tried to trick me before.”

“Are there more available?” Lord Och asked as he continued his torture of the slime. “This one is almost spent.”

Valdemar examined the scene, both to understand the lich’s spell and the nature of its victim. I didn’t know you could use portal breaches offensively, he thought, it’s quite ingenious.

As for the slime… though it was a bizarre shadow of its kind’s former majesty, Valdemar recognized its nature from Otto’s description of the captive Pleromian. Lord Och’s torture had degraded it to a lost soul barely tethered to Underland by the power of the Blood. It couldn’t even manifest a psychic defense or a mouth to scream.

“Lord Och, this is barbaric,” Valdemar said with a disturbed frown before noticing the eyes and intestines scattered around the engine room. His sympathy for the Pleromian plummeted as he realized the scale of its rampage across the Derro facility. “After consideration, I retract my statement.”

“This creature enjoys torturing others,” Marianne said as he glared at the slime. “It deserves worse.”

“You will forgive an old man enjoying himself, apprentice.” The lich chuckled light-heartedly as he finally stopped blasting the Pleromian, letting it recover. “I’ve primed this creature for interrogation. This is the reason for our presence here, is it not?”

“Yes,” Valdemar confessed as he observed the pathetic ooze. “Otto Blutgang wants it sent back to the hell from where it crawled out, and then to stabilize his portal with my help.”

Marianne’s eyes widened, her fingers tightening on her rapier. “Otto Blutgang is here?”

“In a way.” At this point, the Derro King had become one with his kingdom. “He said the Pleromian was after you, Marianne, so I rushed to assist as fast as I could.”

A slight blush formed on Marianne’s cheeks for some reason. “I see,” she said. “You shouldn’t have. I’m the one supposed to protect you, not the other way around.”

Valdemar instantly felt remorseful. “I didn’t mean to imply that I doubted your skills,” he apologized. “I knew you would be alright, but… just in case…”

“I appreciate the gesture,” she replied, clearly eager to move on. “What do we do now with the Pleromian? If there is truly a portal here, do we secure it?”

“I’m certain the dwarf king would gladly trade use of his toy for this creature’s knowledge,” Lord Och said as he observed the Pleromian. The creature had manifested arms from its black blood, and desperately tried to get away from the lich. It was quite a pathetic sight. “But you know my point of view, apprentice. If I had a stomach left, I would rather have my cake and eat it too.”

Valdemar knew all too well what he meant. “You want to extract its knowledge before we surrender it to Blutgang?”

That was smart. When dealing with madmen, it couldn’t hurt to secure a leverage.

“We? We will do nothing.” The lich extended a hand to his student. “This is your moment in the spotlight, apprentice.”

Valdemar blushed in embarrassment behind his mask. “I’m a poor mind mage.”

“Oneiromancers infiltrate dreams, but that door is closed to you by virtue of your origins… that is true.” Lord Och chuckled. “And yet, Young Valdemar, through that same token there is another way to learn what that creature knows. You have already witnessed the process alongside my former apprentice, and it is time you put this power to the test.”

The dreadful memory of the Outer Darkness and the abyss at its center flared in Valdemar’s mind. The summoner glanced at the Pleromian, its red eye reminding him of Ialdabaoth’s maw and the countless souls lost to its hunger.

“No,” Valdemar whispered as he realized what his teacher had in mind. “I refuse. This will destroy it.”

The lich looked at his student as if he had grown a second head. “Do you have qualms of conscience for a creature such as this?”

“Valdemar,” Marianne said softly as she glanced at the ghastly chapel of flesh and eyes above their heads. “This monster would have added my eyes to its collection if it had the power and probably done far worse. It is mad and a danger to all. It cannot be allowed out of this facility or anywhere else.”

“To kill is one thing, but this method…” Valdemar clenched his fists. “It might leave nothing behind.”

His teacher was all but asking him to eat the Pleromian’s soul like a snack and shit it out once he had learned everything of value. Valdemar wasn’t sure if he could do that, and if he could… he was afraid of what it meant.

“Maybe, maybe not.” Lord Och shrugged. “Perhaps it will be up to you. Would you rather give it to our Derro friend without securing an insurance against betrayal?”

Valdemar snorted. “No.”

“Then try. You can always spit him out before you chew it too much.”

“Why not extract its knowledge yourself, my teacher?” Valdemar asked. “You have the power.”

“Because then nothing would remain for you to discover,” the lich replied. “I believe in encouraging my students to push boundaries, apprentice. You hate the inhuman half of yourself, but it is as important as the other. No good will come out of suppressing it.”

“Would you rather that I embrace the monster inside?”

“Of course not.” Lord Och grinned. “I want you to master it.”

When he put it that way…

Valdemar loathed anything that had to do with his father’s side of the family, but there was wisdom in the lich’s words. The Lilith had been able to attack him psychically because in his desire to suppress his nature, he had accidentally made it exploitable. If he didn’t test his limits, someone would make use of them against him.

Valdemar looked at the pathetic, broken horror trying its best to crawl away from Lord Och. At this point, death and oblivion might even be a mercy. He walked to the creature’s side while his companions watched, sensing undetectable pairs of glass eyes gazing at his back. If Otto wanted to stop this, he didn’t make a move to.

The Pleromian’s red eye emerged from the black goo to glare at Valdemar, right as the sorcerer called upon the Blood.

Even in its sorry state, the creature attempted to raise psychic defenses, but they collapsed almost instantly… and they felt wrong all the same. A human built a dreamscape to protect their sleeping mind and mental layers while awake, coating their essence behind layers of protection. The soul was intertwined with the body, one influencing the other. A healthier body meant a greater mastery of the Blood and thus better defenses.

The Pleromian’s spirit worked differently however. The soul was all there was to it; the body it created was a mere ectoplasmic shell it could discard at will.

It was closer to a Qlippoth than to a living being.

A silent battle of wills started between the two souls, as Valdemar attempted to subsume the Pleromian like he did with a Collector in the Institute’s Hall of Ritual. It was no contest; one soul was healthy and determined, the other bloated in its corruption and broken through a lich’s torture.

They are themselves, but they are also me, Valdemar remembered his visions of Ialdabaoth through the Blood. A thousand masks for a single face.

So hollow was the Pleromian’s soul, that Valdemar had no problem wearing it. The black blood dried as the crimson, ghostly eye floated inside the summoner. Valdemar digested the spirit the same way his father devoured his children.

Horrifying visions of a nightmarish realm filled his mind as he began the feast of memories. Glimpses of a terrible world of flesh under a dark sky, of pulsating ravines, and pyramids of corpses.

Valdemar heard the sickening moans of Pleromians as they raised slaves from their own flesh, only to violate them within minutes of their birth. He witnessed artists paint landscapes of tongues and madmen make coats out of their kindred’s skins. The screams of the dying were refined into terrible symphonies, their guts into twisted decorations.

The Pleromians had no need for cities anymore, or even the veneer of civilization. He witnessed flashes of a broken portal, its parts harvested to make sickening toys and crude instruments of pleasure. Science and learning had been forgotten in this mad realm, leaving only the most disturbing of pleasures.

Gone were the majestic titans and cyclops of the Institute’s murals. Only twisted husks remained, more interested in sewing themselves new arms and cruel delights than exploring the cosmos. The mad had long slaughtered the sane and the civilized, embracing the bottomless abyss that awaited once a mind had shredded the meandering pretense of higher thoughts.

The Pleromians had so degraded that they had lost most of their knowledge and majesty. They had become little more than savant animals, mad children driven by the instinct to rut and play and hurt. Only occasional flashes of insight let out the shattered remains of their lost majesty, ever so briefly.

In their search for eternal ecstasy, the Pleromians had abandoned everything else.

How long had they been trapped in a cognitive loop of mindless pleasure, unable to perceive the world outside? It was a testament to their immense power that they could wield the Blood at all anymore, the same way bats instinctively knew how to fly.

After wading through the toxic mud of these memories, Valdemar realized that their selfish madness made the Pleromians all the more dangerous. So long as they were trapped in this nightmarish realm of their own creation, their mind dulled by empty bliss and psychosis, they would remain ignorant of the rest of the cosmos. If they ever remembered the existence of Underland, or received proof that the universe they had left to die had survived… they would return to torment its people.

Otto Blutgang wanted to return the Pleromian home after extracting its knowledge, but Marianne was right. This monster couldn’t be allowed to spread the word to its kindred.

It was beyond saving.

Eating your soul is mercy at this point, Valdemar thought as the nightmarish memories faded away, replaced with a black empty void. The Pleromian had forgotten more about its existence than most humans would ever know. So little of it remains.

And yet… and yet not everything was gone. A few embers of memory remained, brought back to the surface by Otto Blutgang’s summoning attempt. They were blurry and indistinct, but Valdemar quickly gathered them into a shape he could examine. In a way, it felt no different than compelling a summoned creature to answer his call.

The oldest memories were unlike the empty cruelty that defined the creature’s mind. Valdemar watched through the depthless eye of a cyclops as a line of Pleromians shed their blood in individual pots of stone. The viewer marked each of them with a complex series of symbols as it collected them.

Lord Och had said that the Pleromians held a breeding program to stabilize their society, determining a citizen’s role at birth. Could Valdemar be witnessing it?

The summoner was tempted to look for another memory tied to summoning and teleportation magic, but he stayed his hand. What if… he thought, what if it’s all connected?

Valdemar was the result of one such breeding program meant to bind multiple worlds together. Had the Pleromians followed a similar logic? Did it somehow teach them how to open their portals?

Valdemar digested the memories one after the other, but they were so fragmented he only caught glimpses. Sights of shelves upon shelves of blood samples, tightly organized by lineages; visions of Pleromian sorcerers recording increasingly complex patterns of symbols into complex helix chains; flashes of arranged matches of two donors together based on organic compatibility…

This Pleromian was a biomancer, a specialist of the body. Yet the remaining spellcasting instincts veered towards summoning and spatial magic. How odd.

More to the point, the memories all took place in a familiar fortress. Lord Och had changed many things since humans took it over, but the walls of the Pleroma Institute had remained intact across the centuries.

The Black Pillar at its center was standing in the memories too. Valdemar watched through the viewer’s eye as it studied its stony surface. Only then did the summoner notice details that had evaded his human eyes in the past.

Symbols were carved on the pillar. Signs so small, so imperceptibly microscopic, that only a Pleromian’s peerless sight could identify them.

The Black Pillar of the Pleroma Institute wasn’t a mere monument. It was an archive of some kind. The place where the Pleromian biomancers recorded their studies of life itself.

Show me, Valdemar thought. Show me what you were looking for so feverishly. Show me the truth.

The viewer took a few steps back, and Valdemar saw the bigger picture. The tiny symbols assembled into a familiar, eye-shaped design. The same sign that his grandfather had recorded, the eye of Ialdabaoth.

All of life in Underland, assembled into a greater whole.

And yet, there were more symbols. They formed a sphere around Ialdabaoth’s eye, before spreading into chains of signs; into tendrils linked to other circles separated by a dark void. Each of these spheres held a complex set of symbols forming a larger one. Some were eyes, similar to Ialdabaoth’s and yet subtly different. Others looked like maws of teeth, or blooming flowers.

None were the same, but all were connected through a web of infinite complexity. Bonds that transcended the void of space and the frontiers of the planes.

Valdemar was mistaken.

The Institute’s Black Pillar wasn’t an archive, but a map.

A map of the universe, and the living worlds that populated it.