Was there a limit to the universe’s vastness?

The purpose of science and magic was to push back the boundaries of human understanding of the cosmos ever farther. But the more Valdemar learned, the bigger the universe appeared. Each new piece of information showcased how little mankind mattered in the great cosmic dance.

And as he glanced at the map before his eyes, Valdemar felt incredibly small.

The Blood’s magic derived from Ialdabaoth, true… but the almighty Stranger was only a node in the vast web of life. There were countless of its kind across the planes, connected through the bonds of kinship and lineage.

There is a war in heaven.

This map represented one of the sides. The side of aberrant life; the side of the Blood.

An army of Strangers made of countless smaller lifeforms that had broken off from the whole. Each shaped like a sphere…

The black sun grew to encompass the universe itself, the shadow of eyes, mouths, and tentacles wriggling beneath its surface.

“Could it be…” Valdemar whispered as he remembered his visit to the Silent King’s alien realm and the brief glimpse of the abomination lurking inside its blackened sun. “If it can happen with a star, then…”

What about a planet?

Lady Mathilde had theorized that the eyes of Ialdabaoth were the signs of a parasite spreading through the tunnels of the world. Considering what Valdemar had learned so far, he was tempted to consider a more worrying hypothesis.

Ialdabaoth was the world. Not just the people living on it, but the entire planet.

Could the world's heart be made of flesh rather than magma, as geologists believed? What if the crust of the planet, those depths and surface of rocks and stones, were nothing more than a shell? The remnants of cosmic dust and meteors slowly accumulating across the eons?

And if this theory was true, then was Earth a slumbering Stranger too? Was it an egg that would one day hatch and unleash a cataclysmic abomination unto the cosmos?

No, I can’t think like this, Valdemar thought as he focused on the memory. Even if that’s true, Ialdabaoth’s freedom is not inevitable. It wouldn’t need outside help if it was.

At least this explained how the Blood could contact other worlds and planes. The web of flesh transcended Ialdabaoth and had spread its tendrils across the planes. All universes blessed with life were connected by these sentient worlds, bound tightly through a double-chain of polynucleotides.

And as he observed the map while trying to make sense of it, Valdemar noticed a troubling fact: Ialdabaoth occupied a central place in the web and was linked to many other living worlds. This placement could simply be the result of the Pleromians using their world’s Stranger as the baseline of their map for practical purposes, but somehow Valdemar doubted he would be so lucky.

Now, Ialdabaoth was sealed long ago and is now trying to break its bindings, the summoner thought as he assembled pieces of the puzzle. If we assume that these wards are somehow connected…

Then Ialdabaoth’s freedom would start a chain reaction through the web. Its freedom would unleash dozens of its kindred, the ripples spreading through a hundred more across the planes. The Strangers would wake up to claim the multiverse as their own.

They would win the ‘war,’ whatever it meant.

You are the me from the other side, the Nightwalker had said.

But what was this other side?

Death is the universe’s natural state.

Though the map was detailed, Valdemar couldn’t help but notice the vast empty space separating each living world from the other. The Lilith had made a valid point, the universe was filled with death. Life was preciously rare, far too much for Valdemar’s taste.

Something out there was doing its best to scour the cosmos of its inhabitants. And if the Whitemoon was Ialdabaoth’s counterpart as much as Valdemar and the Nightwalker mirrored each other, then the rogue planetoid that cast mankind underground was only an agent of a greater power.

“Show me what you were running away from,” Valdemar whispered as he compelled the memories to answer his questions. “Show me what you feared so much. Were you worried that Ialdabaoth would wake up? What is the Whitemoon?”

The memories around him blurred. The walls turned to flesh and humanoid figures started writhing everywhere Valdemar looked. The dirty smell of sex filled his nostrils, while the summoner tasted something salty in the air. Even the Black Pillar took on a phallic shape

The memories were riddled with holes and the Pleromian had filled them with disgusting sexual imagery.

“Curse you, you ecstasy junkie!” Valdemar whispered in condemnation. “All this priceless, cosmic knowledge, and you filled your brain with pointless pleasures instead?”

Words couldn’t properly convey Valdemar’s sheer disappointment. The Pleromians had achieved so many wonders and they threw them all away.

No matter. Even if the Pleromian’s memory was faulty, the Black Pillar still held the full wealth of his kind’s knowledge about the Strangers. Valdemar only had to return to the Institute and decode it.

He couldn’t say the same for the portals.

“Show me how you can open tears between worlds,” Valdemar ordered. “Tell me how to reach Earth.”

This time, the Pleromian’s soul answered his command.

The memories of orgies and sexual imagery collapsed into nothingness. A new vision rose from the depths of the harvested soul, showing a familiar underground dome and an archway of black stone. Metal cables held the doorway in place, as they would centuries later.

The Institute’s Pleromian portal had changed little across the eons… with one small exception.

Where are the crystals? Valdemar wondered. Shining red stones were infused into the structure in the current era, but they were conspicuously missing in this memory. So where were they?

It didn’t take long for Valdemar to receive an answer.

Watching the memory through a single eye, he witnessed a procession enter the chamber. Pleromian blood sorcerers, the memories’ owner among them, escorted a ragtag line of humanoids. A shirtless and beautiful dokkar prince, attended to by collared concubines; a Derro reeking of drugs and incense; a human so fat slaves had to carry him into the chamber; a troglodyte that advanced with an air of grim, but noble resignation; a Pleromian dressed in rich robes of harvested skin, smiling at a silent honor; and many more creatures Valdemar had never seen before, from many-legged humanoid bugs to a shapeshifting doppelganger. All of them bore tattoos showcasing their blood type.

They looked less like prisoners and more like pampered pets, fattened on warm meals, concubines, and cheap drugs. All of them appeared satisfied with their lots as they walked towards the archway.

A hooded Pleromian awaited next to the portal with a sharp scythe in his hands.

Valdemar winced as the dokkar, the first in line, bent before the portal without any hesitation. The Pleromian executioner raised the scythe above the sacrifice’s neck.

The blade glittered from the light of torches as it fell down.

The head cleanly rolled on the ground while the decapitated corpse fell against the archway, feeding the metal cables with its blood as if they were a tree’s roots. The archway pulsated as if alive as it drank the precious fluid, and small red crystals formed all over the structure. Another victim followed, feeding the crystal with their life.

The hideous reaping stretched on for what felt like hours. Dokkars, humans, troglodytes, Derros, all the creatures populating the world were sacrificed on the altar of progress. Even a few Pleromians lost their heads as they closed the procession, their blood soaking the archway while sorcerers sang incantations. Their headless corpses were piled up until they reached the ceiling.

None of them resisted.

Lord Och had once told his apprentice that a victim had to be willing for the Earthmouth ritual to function. Only martyrs could serve as the support beams of bridges linking the worlds together. These people had been raised like expensive cattle, granted every privilege on the condition that when the time came, they would lay down their lives for the glory of their enslavers. Their blood and souls infused the site of their execution, becoming one with the steel.

In the end, the Pleromian portals were nothing more than eminently more sophisticated Earthmouths.

And considering Derros were among the sacrifices, this wasn’t the first portal the Pleromians had built.

But how could these portals be stable? Earthmouths were two-ways streets; you needed one on each side to keep the road open. Valdemar doubted a Pleromian enclave awaited on the other side of a planar rift.

“Show me its activation,” the sorcerer ordered as he slipped through the memories. The sacrifices’ corpses vanished, but the Pleromian sorcerers remained as they spoke ancient words of power to the portal. The archway hummed as the Blood grew in power, the fabric of space folding. The crystals resonated together, singing the song of life itself.

Valdemar watched the process with rapturous attention, taking mental notes as a crimson glow erupted at the archway’s center. A rift in space widened inside the portal, opening to a screaming realm of gasping flesh.

“It’s a resonance!” Valdemar realized in joy, as everything started to make sense. “It’s a resonance, not between two Earthmouths, but between two lineages of life!"

The Pleromians had fed the portal with a rough approximation of the genetic material of the creatures they expected to find on the other side. Though there was no portal on the other side nor anybody to open a breach, blood called to blood.

“That’s how I can serve as an Earthmouth between two realms,” Valdemar whispered. “I have the two lineages of men inside me. I’m a bridge between two mankinds, and Ialdabaoth’s power provides the energy to stabilize the pathway.”

That was what Otto Blutgang didn’t understand. He had managed to rip tears into other worlds through lightning and machinery, but without a sympathetic connection to the other side he couldn’t hope to stabilize them. He was trying to create bridges with steel, when it was the kinship between different forms of life and the agony of sacrificed souls that kept portals open.

Valdemar replayed the memory, memorizing the chants used by the Pleromians. “Command phrases,” he guessed. “I can activate the portal with them.”

They didn’t need Blutgang’s help. Opening the pathway to Earth would be quicker with his technology, but not necessary. They just had to activate the Pleromian portal with the words Valdemar had memorized, maybe tune it a little with his blood, and they could open the rift to that world.

At long last, the path to Earth was clear!

“Should I honor the deal with Blutgang?”

Valdemar didn’t hesitate for long.

“No.”

The idea of spitting on a functional portal to Earth sickened Valdemar, but using it meant making a deal with a fiend in the process. Even if Otto Blutgang followed through with his end of the bargain and let volunteers start an exodus to another world, he would immediately use the stolen Pleromian technology to subdue those who remained behind and expand his sick mechanical consciousness across the cosmos. He would infect other worlds the same he had poisoned his entire species.

There was nothing wrong in transcending the boundaries of mortality, but Otto Blutgang was a brain-harvesting parasite willing to lobotomize his own kind. He simply couldn’t be trusted with this kind of power.

It said something that Valdemar would rather entrust this knowledge to Lord Och than the Derros.

“Now, we have to find a way to bury this facility and escape it alive,” Valdemar said as he prepared to collapse the memory and return to the waking world. The Pleromian’s soul would remain powerless inside his stomach, though the sorcerer didn’t know yet what to do with it. “But once it’s done…”

He would finally see the sun.

At long last, his dream of reaching Earth would come true.

The Dark Lords are deceiving you, my prince.

And the Dark Lords would follow.

Only now, so close to the altar of victory, did Valdemar wonder about the true cost of his dream.

Valdemar wanted his kind to see the sun. He had never desired to keep it all for himself. And after seeing the Dark Lords up close, he had no doubt what would follow once they could open pathways to other worlds.

Empress Aratra, if Lord Och’s tale was to be believed, had betrayed her own mentor and established a tyrannical regime underground for centuries. Valdemar had hoped that the Empire would reform upon finding new worlds full of resources and sunlight, but… now he doubted.

Lord Bethor only believed in strength and violence. To him, sufficient might could solve any problem. He was a necessary evil when mankind faced threats like the Strangers and Otto Blutgang, but against a peaceful civilization? He would shatter any resistance thrown his way with fire, subjugate the weak, and seize all the resources he could. A necessary evil was still an evil.

As for Lord Och himself, Valdemar refused to let the Lilith’s words poison his mind. And yet…

And yet he could tell something didn’t add up in this scenario.

Valdemar simply couldn’t imagine Lord Och letting his apprentice learn such an important secret without having discovered it himself first. The lich was too cunning, too hungry for knowledge, too careful. He had already butted heads with Valdemar about their respective visions of the world.

Had Lord Och already extracted the information from the Pleromian’s mind before surrendering it? Or maybe he couldn’t reach the depths of its memories because of how the creature’s mind worked, and he had sent his apprentice to sully his hands by eating the soul?

Valdemar’s mind flared with paranoia as he examined the portal’s memory. He was certain souls were the fuel keeping it open, and yet he hadn’t sensed any within the device when he visited the real one. Had the long centuries degraded them, much like how only the echoes of pain and degradation remained in the Pleromians’ vaults beneath the Institute?

In that case, it explained why the portal wouldn’t work in the present day. It was functional, but it had exhausted its fuel. And the way to recharge it…

A doubt seized Valdemar’s mind, and he immediately reviewed the memory of the portal creation. The procession of sacrifices rose from the dead to repeat their execution once again; and Valdemar couldn’t help but feel a sense of déjà vu in more ways than one.

The dokkar male walked first to his death, his arrogant, aristocratic way of talking echoing Frigga’s smug confidence.

The human followed, bloated and complacent like the Empire’s masses. A troglodyte carried on with the same grim resignation as Hermann, whenever he and Valdemar spoke about their kinds’ inability to coexist.

The many-legged bug that walked after them was no Master Loctis, but maybe the living swarm could serve as a substitute?

And the doppelganger… Iren was half of one…

“That undead bastard…” Valdemar whispered in outrage.

What were the odds that a member of almost all of the species sacrificed to open the portal had been gathered in the Institute? Fed promises of medical treatment, of a better world, or political advantages? Even Frigga had signed a magical contract of some kind to study at the Institute, and the lich could have easily hidden a sacrificial clause inside.

“What a heartless dick!” Valdemar clenched his fists in rage. “He knew.”

Why would I sacrifice you, when I know we shall eventually succeed with another method that won’t cost you your life?

The lich had never said it wouldn’t cost that of someone else.

“No, wait… he doesn’t have the Pleromian. I’ve eaten the soul.” But Lord Och had tried to clone them in the past. He had shown Valdemar the lab. He didn’t need a Pleromian with powers and knowledge, only someone willing to sacrifice themselves as part of the ritual.

The lich was immortal. For all Valdemar knew, he could have raised a Pleromian clone in secret and indoctrinated it to serve as fuel for the portal. Lord Och’s apprentice didn’t even know where his master kept his true workshop.

Even the Derro could easily be arranged. The Empire had many prisoners of war in its cells, one would perhaps accept the sacrifice as part of an exchange. Or perhaps that was why Lord Och had insisted on following his apprentice? To negotiate sharing blood banks with Otto Blutgang?

“Maybe I’m just being paranoid,” Valdemar muttered as he tried to calm himself. “How could he have known? He would have needed a living Pleromian to interrogate, or to find instructions. The ruins beneath the Institute didn’t have any as far as I know.”

But…

But Lord Och did access another source of Pleromian knowledge in the past.

“I know of at least another gate like this one in Ariouth, though I haven’t been able to examine it since my previous apprentice and I had a…” Lord Och’s voice turned cold as ice. “A disagreement.”

The other portal in Ariouth. The one under Lord Phaleg’s control.

The lich had always been evasive about the cause of his feud with his former apprentice, blaming it on ungratefulness. But knowing Lord Och’s deceitful nature, Valdemar wondered if it had something to do with the second portal. Perhaps the two Dark Lords had found a trove of knowledge and couldn’t share, or disagreed about how to use the device. The Institute’s vault didn’t have any guide to work the portal, but the Pleromians could have left hints in Ariouth.

I knew he was a snake, the summoner thought, and I still let him bite me.

Why all this plotting? To get the command word? Or was the lich trying to manipulate Valdemar into agreeing with this terrible plan, wearing down his reluctance one revelation at a time? Or maybe Lord Och didn’t know about the portal’s requirements, but had come to suspect them through trial and error.

Whatever the case, Valdemar couldn’t ignore the signs. Even if Lord Och didn’t know how to activate the portals, he had the means to do so at hand. The lich had kept his apprentice alive because of his unique nature, but Valdemar didn’t doubt for a second that he would hesitate to sacrifice less ‘precious’ assets.

The moment the summoner returned to the living world, Lord Och would scan the command words from Valdemar’s mind.

But the summoner couldn’t forget them either. What were the odds that they could capture another Pleromian that knew them? They would need to collaborate with Otto and all the ghastly prices that he would demand.

Valdemar had to register the command words somewhere the lich wouldn’t find them, erase them from his mind, and somehow find a way to recover them later with Lord Och none the wiser.

A highly difficult, impossible task.

“No,” Valdemar muttered, his heart full of determination. “Impossible is but a word.”

He had an idea.