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The Gamer Chapter 1407 – The Gorgon
🕑 Added 2023-03-21 10:04:47 +0000 UTCMore even than Wednesday, John had wished that Thursday night never ended. Undine fell asleep in his arms that night and did not separate from him until breakfast was ready. They were both tense. Today, they would seek out the Mother of Water.
“We could accompany you,” Gnome suggested. The earth spirit, alongside the rest of the elementals, had accompanied him to the summoning room. No one even looked at the chairs or the bed nearby. All looked at John and Undine like a precious thing they were about to send rolling down the hill.
John could not blame them. The image of the Mother of Water was still etched into his mind. A silhouette the size of an ocean, illuminated by the thunderstorm of her wrath. Giant rivers that had wound like snakes, covering her head in malicious hair. Two gargantuan eyes of silver and a prismatic dot in the middle of her forehead. Water had been all around him. Water had been drawn out of him. Crushing and bloating him at the same time, her rage had killed the heartbeat of his mental projection.
Rarely before or since had he felt anything approaching that helplessness. A spark of annoyance, compared to the righteous contempt he held the Mother of Water in for torturing his beloved Undine.
“I’ve considered it,” he responded to the season elemental. “To change the summoning circle so you could come along, it could be done… but what would that accomplish?” He looked from Salamander to Siena, then Gnome, Sylph, and finally Stirwin. “She’s the ruler of that plane, more than a god in it than any god is in ours, save for Gaia. If we were in a feud with the Father of Light, maybe we could do something.” His gaze lingered on Stirwin. “But you can’t grow using the essence of water.”
“It is true.” Stirwin nodded. Sitting, the long-limbed crocodile’s head was at the Gamer’s chest in height. “We would be emotional support. We could also complicate things. The Mother of Water is fickle.”
“Any last minute tips?” John asked.
“In my long life, I had little dealings with the Mother of Water. I saw her once before the establishment of the planes. She was a lot like Undine then.”
The slime girl crossed her arms and stared. Ever so subtly, the gold of her eyes shifted towards crimson. A shift that reverted a blink later. “Her and my likeness have been well-established… let us hope she keeps her word, unlike me.”
John took Undine’s hand and shot her a reassuring smile. They were not going to have that discussion at this point. “We’ll be ready to leave at any point. It might be unpleasant for a moment, but we have been through worse.”
“Much worse,” Undine agreed and pulled him towards the part of the room where blue wires formed a summoning circle, encased in glass. They intertwined both hands, while sitting down. One at the edge of the circle, one in the centre. Final nods were exchanged and eyes closed.
Water rose from underneath him. The room was spiritually submerged, soaking his soul with the essence of the realm he was now in contact with. A tiny fragment of the elemental plane of water, first ebbing into his world, then draining back into its origin. He was pulled down, his soul separating from his body with the gentleness of a slow wave.
For one wonderful moment, he and Undine were one. Their essences mingled, as they travelled together through the hole that he had opened between the realms. When they separated again, they consolidated into spiritual manifestations that were identical to their real forms, down to the buttons on John’s shirt.
They were near the bottom of the ocean. Beneath them was a spread of fine sand. Fish-like elementals followed the ridges of tiny dunes, drawing patterns into the sand with the drafts they created. Massive bioluminescent eels and crystal entities provided supporting light here and there. A distant light source above the surface, more than fifty metres up, provided the true illumination. Like curtains, the rays fell through the water, broken by water elementals that could be as small as a fingernail in size.
“It’s at least nicer than it was last time,” John dared to say. One of the eels turned its gargantuan body towards him. For a moment, the Gamer thought he may have jinxed it. Then, his field of vision stretched around the edge, as if he was looking through a fisheye lens. A high-pitched sound rang in his ears and vanished as soon as they reappeared in another place.
He stood atop an almost even stone floor. Here and there, it was interrupted by bumps, which gave room for vents that kept the water in motion. Above him was a spherical dome, woven from layer upon layer of sponge and coral, all of it glowing with the soft yellows and blues of bioluminescence. The end result was surprisingly close to sunlight, at least in its intensity.
There was much more to the intricacy of the dome and to the reef that lay beyond the translucent door of the small space. However, his attention was pulled to the one person that sat, hands folded, on a modest chair fashioned from bones and shells.
She had an attractive figure. Large breasts and wide hips, thick thighs and long limbs. Her body was made from a light blue, opaque slime, spreading out into a white dress. Many layers waved like silk in the soft currents that curved through the room. Eyes glided over as easily as a sled over a frozen lake. Her irises were as silvery white as the freshly driven snow and beheld them with neutrality. The many tendrils of her hair moved like snakes or the arms of an octopus.
John felt none of the oppression from her, none of the rage that he had before. When she closed her eyes and bowed her head, he almost couldn’t believe it was her. If her likeness to Undine, in her body language alone, had not betrayed her, then the prismatic gem embedded in her forehead would have.
“I apologize for my previous behaviour.” The Mother of Water’s voice was a tranquil song, purer than the ringing of an empty glass. “Thank you for se-“
“You think that alone is enough?!” Undine interrupted her elemental progenitor. “For what you did to me?”
The many strands of the Mother of Water’s hair first wiggled in turmoil, then all went lifeless and turned into a miserable curtain of black. She said nothing, kept her head down. Undine’s fists were clenched.
“Say something!” she demanded. “Defend yourself!”
“I have no defence – I never do,” the Mother of Water confessed.
Angry, John stepped forwards, ready to demand more of an explanation. The moment the gulf between them diminished, his eyes picked up on a previously unnoticeable detail.
Thin like the strands of a spider’s web, black covered the elemental’s skin. Every exposed part of her skin, from the beds of her nails to the sockets of her eyes, were covered in miniscule Lorylim scars. They curved and swirled, like black oil on a pure ocean. The sight doused his and Undine’s wrath enough to invoke a different question. “Does it hurt you too?”
“Every time,” the Mother of Water whispered, her hands clenching in her lap. “Every child hurt by the cruel world, by inexperienced summoners and Gaia’s mistakes.” Her lips pulled back until they tore. Teeth split and sharpened, until the human mouth resembled that of a shark. Swiftly, the slime closed back up and restored her beauty. “I share their pain as I take their corruption. In ebb and flow, I suffer, for the alternative brings me more pain.”
“Is that your defence?” Undine asked.
The elemental ruler shook her head. “I do not defend myself for what I put you through, my daughter. You were unlucky to meet me on my darkest days. I could not reason and so I kept attempting what hurt us both.”
“Is that all there is to it?” Undine’s voice was small and in it rang an understanding that John could not share.
“How dark could those days be?” he therefore asked.
A displeased pulse went through the Mother of Water, yet still her head remained lowered, her eyes closed. “I am that which waters your fields and drowns your children. I am the wave that breaks your coastal settlement and that drains into the ocean, taking your history with it. I am the peaceful river you use to transport your goods and the wrathful sea that swallows thousands of men. I shoulder the burden of your species’ thoughts, your Faith in the vastness of water. I am the rain, and the snow, and the ocean, beheld for my beauty and feared for my catastrophic descent. To be the Mother of Water is to be the nourishment and to be the anger of a raging tsunami. When… When I…” She suddenly stopped, her voice cracking like glass shards under a heavy booth. “When the anger comes, it is unlike anything you could comprehend. I’m the most powerful of my siblings, rivalled only by the Mother of Shadows. Such power comes at a cost.”
John could not say he understood fully. He got it in concept. To lose himself to emotions, it was not entirely foreign to him. All things considered, he was blessed with considerable self-control. The result of efforts and contemplations manyfold. Yet, would he last under that kind of pressure? Could he even acknowledge it?
“Mother speaks not her name and her children should be obedient,” Undine cited an adage they had previously heard from an elemental that was in the middle of being cleansed of her corruption. “Why obey you?”
“Because you are my children. My lovable, naïve children,” the Mother of Water responded. “I ask you not for your forgiveness, daughter of water. I apologize. I should have told you my intentions, backed off when it didn’t work, chided you as a mother would if you had refused. The blight of chaos can not be allowed to spread here. You are too easily susceptible to the arch traitor.”
“Tiamat… her blood is salt water,” John mumbled, as the pieces slot in place. Every elemental had an aversion to the Lorylim, for good reason, but only the water elementals tore each other apart, killed each other to remove any even remote infection. An obsession with purity, perhaps, or the reaction of a realm that shared more with the Lorylim than the others.
At the mention of the chaos goddesses’ name, the Mother of Water’s body turned the same deep blue hue as Undine’s. John suddenly felt the weight of the ocean on his body. Every last fibre of his projection was about to turn inside out when it abated. The colour of the elemental ruler returned to the previous light blue. “I’m sorry.”
“Speak your name and do not demand my obedience,” Undine stated. “Then I will be willing to hear you out, at least.”
The Mother of Water finally opened her eyes again. Gold reflected in silver. A hand was extended towards Undine. Before her daughter could take a step back, the reach came to a halt. She drew the limb back to her chest. “It fills me with such joy to see one of you mature,” she said with matriarchal pride. “I am Abyssia, the tide of the depths in which you surround yourself. You owe me no fealty. You’ve accomplished what you had to without me. I beg that you trust me enough to ask, should it ever happen again.”
‘Seventh?’ John asked, his mind racing. ‘A Mother of Life elementals? No… no, that wouldn’t work… Arcane?’
Theories on the matter had to wait. Undine pressed her lips together. The complicated knot of relief and disappointment within her took a few moments to unravel. A large part of her, and John as well, had hoped Abyssia turned out to be an utterly awful person. Someone they could continue to despise. Instead, they were faced with a terribly afflicted mother.
“I do not know if I can ever find it within me to forgive you,” Undine hissed. “For the sake of my future and the power I can lend to those I love, I will hear you out. What do we have to do for you?”
Abyssia straightened up, a slight smile spreading on her elegant face. Simultaneously, her hair came back to life. The strands wiggled rhythmically in the currents. “You have given me all I could ask for, daughter,” she stated. “It will be my pleasure to weave into you the power you were born to hold.”
“Nothing?” Undine asked, tilting her head in confusion.
“Nothing, but letting me hold your hands.”
With no further hesitance, the abysstide elemental stepped forward. The Mother of Water took both hands of her daughter and held them in front of her forehead, as if she was in prayer. Prismatic light shone from her forehead. A pair of horns that could have been corals or antlers sprouted among the tendrils of her hair.
Undine’s body twisted. Black goo was secreted from her surface, pooling on the ground around her like a dress of molten candlewax and rubber. It sent a chill down John’s spine when the gorgeous face of his water spirit turned into a liquid visage of horror. Molten teeth drew in long strands from unshaped lip to unshaped lip and eyes that were entirely yellow, with only a narrow black slit at the centre. She was more goo than ever before, dripping and swirling in the water, which fed it all back into her.
Gashes opened on her surface. Massive teeth peeled out of the ‘skirt’ the ooze had formed. Eyes, each moving individually, twitched in the curves of the black swirls that went up the right side of her body. Her hair parted into many thick strands, curled and turned like that of her mother. There, too, eyes split open the tips. Even the points of her antlers were not safe.
As the eyes blinked, they turned into maws. As the maws gnashed, they turned into eyes. All over, back and forth, in a fashion that made John shudder in memory of the Lorylim. Was that aspect of them introduced by Tiamat’s influence?
The unnerving display reached a peak, the Undine he loved a hideous monster of deep blue oozing liquid shadows. Eyes and teeth were in every batch of goo that viscously dripped from her hands. Then the orifices and oculars all closed, the black was sucked back into her, and the energy that radiated from the gemstone ebbed away.
When all was done, Undine stood there. The only visible difference was the moving, snake-like nature of her hair. Even that settled when Undine controlled her emotions. “Did you guide these changes?” she asked.
“You are my daughter, more than any other.” Abyssia squeezed her hands, before reluctantly letting go. She shook her head. “I don’t need to guide or manipulate. Your path follows mine in many aspects. I hope your wrath never reaches the extremity mine has… Seek out Plasia next.”
“…Goodbye, Abyssia,” Undine said, and they left the plane.
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Shaqjor477
Just wanted to let you know, none of the images showed up in the post, they were empty boxes with links.
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