Druid's Due Read online

  There, the shambler struggled against dozens of vines, roots, and creepers that had sprung up from the ground to trap its limbs. More importantly, the Druid Oak had obeyed my commands and wrapped several smaller tendrils of root and vine around and between the thing’s multi-jointed digits. This temporarily prevented the shambler from phase shifting, but I knew it would soon use its size and prodigious strength to break free.

  Seconds later, I was finally able to breathe. As my lungs filled with air, I tried to call Dyrnwyn to me. Normally, this was a piece of cake; it was simply a matter of using my link with the wood scales that covered its hilt to telekinetically bring it to my hand. However, my mental commands went unanswered, and the shambler was starting to break free.

  Must be the bark-skin armor interfering. Shit!

  I looked up at the creature as I struggled to my feet. It had snapped all the ropy vines and roots that held its left hand, and was shaking the remnants from its fingers like a dog shaking a thorn from its paw. Once it was completely unfettered, it’d phase out and I doubted I’d trick it the same way twice. The damned thing could stalk around here at will then, waiting for me to sleep so it could strangle me and take me back to its own dimension for a snack.

  I simply could not let that happen. Too much was at stake.

  “Get me out of this armor—now!” I shouted, my voice ringing out across the clearing. The shambler’s head snapped toward me, and by the look in its eyes I suspected it understood me. The Oak sent me a series of images detailing various ways the shambler might dismember me. “I don’t care, just do it!”

  I felt a note of discord through my link to the Grove, but it complied. Instantly, the bark shriveled away from my skin and crumbled into dust. With a thought I called Dyrnwyn to my hand, and as the warm hilt slapped into my palm, the blade ignited like a white-hot road flare up and down its length.

  I bounded toward the creature, using a bit of my Fomorian strength to propel me at speed across the clearing. Time seemed to slow as the shambler used its free hand to tear at the remaining bonds that held it. It ripped out of the vines and roots that constrained its remaining hand, opening those simian, baboon-like jaws and arching its neck as it roared to the sky in triumph.

  Don’t count your inter-dimensional chickens just yet, Wrinkles.

  What the creature failed to realize was that two of its fingers were still wrapped tightly by small threadlike vines. It tried to shift out of existence, but noticed its mistake too late. The shambler looked at me, its glowing yellow eyes reflecting the brighter light of Dyrnwyn’s blade—along with the realization that the predator had now become the prey.

  Those yellow eyes tracked the blade as it swooped down. Not at its neck, because that was out of reach. No, my target was the creature’s means of escape. The flaming blade flared briefly as it sliced cleanly through the shambler’s arms, one at the elbow and the other just above the wrist. As I landed I dropped and spun, pivoting to chop one of its legs off at the knee.

  I rolled out of the way, extinguishing Dyrnwyn’s blade with a thought. The shambler was still alive, but not for long. As it fell, black blood spilling onto the soft grass beneath it, more vines and roots sprung out of the ground to wrap it up like a spider encasing its prey. The Grove pulled the now helpless beast down, down, down into the loamy clutches of its bosom, and as the shambler’s cries faded away, I had no pity for it at all.

  “Better you than me, motherfucker,” I muttered.

  Clucking my tongue, I spared it one final glance before it sank completely into the rich dark soil, where it would feed the Oak’s recovery and bring us one step closer to returning home.

  2

  There are things more dangerous than shamblers lurking in the Void, dark things best left alone to pursue whatever vile and horrific designs a being of pure evil might devise. Pro tip: If you find yourself in the Void, the last thing you want to do is draw their attention. I discovered this the hard way, which, upon much reflection, is how I often learn such things.

  Unfortunately, drawing attention to myself out in the very literal middle of nowhere had been unavoidable. Much to my dismay, my efforts to repair, replenish, and regrow the Druid Grove acted as a beacon in the cold, absent reaches where we drifted. Magic and energy—especially the vital life energies of the Grove—were anomalies in the Void. Whatever dwelt in or traversed the desolate spaces was eventually bound to notice their presence.

  I’d ended up here after Jesse had fooled me into having sex with her, impersonating my other ex-girlfriend so convincingly I’d had no idea who it was until it was too late. By that time, we’d both been locked in the throes of the Grove’s claiming ritual, a sort of tantric, primitive mating rite that required me to—ahem—contribute my DNA directly to the Grove, sealing the bond between us.

  The betrayal and violation I felt over that single deceptive act could not be understated, although I understood why she’d done it. First, she was bug-fuck nuts—a side effect of too much magic being pent up inside a partially-human body that had never been meant to contain it. And second, the human side of her still loved me.

  Jesse, having been resurrected in the dryad body of the Druid Oak’s avatar, had inadvertently initiated the bonding ceremony, unaware of the consequences of such a union. Prior to that fateful evening, Finnegas had begged me to do it of my own accord. I’d refused, simply because I hadn’t wanted to cheat on Belladonna. Plus, I’d thought the whole idea was barbaric and more than a little misogynistic to boot.

  Despite my misgivings about the manner in which it had occurred, I was thankful I’d bonded with the Oak, and through it, the Grove as well. Because of our connection, I’d instinctively determined what I had to do to restore the Oak to its former and intended glory and heal the Grove. It was now my sole mission, because if I didn’t nurse the Oak and Grove back to health, all three of us were doomed.

  Although I was the one who’d damaged the Druid Oak and Grove in the first place, Jesse had goaded me into it. Then, she’d tricked me into sleeping with her, and that had saved the Druid Oak—but it was still pretty fucked up, all things considered. The good that resulted from that deception might very well have balanced out the bad, but I still didn’t know if I’d be able to forgive her for it.

  That personal dilemma weighed heavily on my mind, and I often found myself wishing I could go back to the way things were when Jesse and I were young. They say you can never go back, but I wondered—if Jesse were human again, could we rewind the clock? Would it be possible to reset our relationship, and put all that craziness behind us?

  I honestly had no idea, but that particular philosophical quandary would have to wait. Presently, I had bigger issues to contend with.

  As I’d discovered, the Oak was never meant to be weakened, mortally wounded, and cut off from the Earth, which was ultimately its primary source of magic. Certainly, the Oak generated its own magic, as did all living creatures, but in its injured and infirm state it lacked the ability to self-rejuvenate. It was unable to return to Earth, never mind traveling to any other plane or location. That’s why I’d been slowly nursing it back to health with my own magic, all while rebuilding the Grove as well.

  And it was coming back to health—but slowly, ever so slowly. Forming matter in the vast empty reaches of the Void meant it had to be transported from somewhere else. While magic could bend the laws of physics, it could not cheat them completely. I was no more capable of creating matter than any other magic-user, and thus was bound by the laws of conservation.

  Thankfully, my Craneskin Bag had provided a sufficient amount of mass to get us started. The damned thing had accumulated tons of junk over the centuries, and I got the impression it would be glad to be rid of it. So, I’d cleaned out the Bag and fed the useless contents within it to the Grove.

  No matter what I fed it, the Grove happily sucked all manner of matter underground. There, it rapidly decomposed, after which it was used as the raw building blocks for creating earth, water,
and plant life. But once I’d relieved the Craneskin Bag of any and all superfluous items, I’d then had to use the Oak’s enfeebled magic to transport matter from elsewhere. The process had started slowly, but as the Grove healed, it began to acquire matter on its own at a steady pace. Unfortunately, our efforts were still insufficient to bring the Grove’s magical protections back online, so we were still vulnerable to intrusions by unwanted visitors.

  When completely healthy and whole, the Grove and Oak were protected by wards and magical barriers of immense power. Those spells kept the Grove hidden in the vast reaches of the Void, while also preventing anything that did happen upon it from entering its boundaries. In fact, its primary method of self-preservation was both simple and ingenious—it promptly zapped itself somewhere else whenever it felt threatened.

  To my shame, I’d screwed that all to hell when I’d damaged the Oak during my fight with Jesse. My Hyde-side definitely had one gear and one gear only—seek and destroy. The riastrad was a powerful weapon, but it was also a liability, because when I let it take over I couldn’t think clearly.

  After finding myself in this fix due to losing control after I’d shifted, I’d sworn to avoid fully shifting in the future if I could avoid it. As this little jaunt to the Vast Emptiness had proven, it was too damned dangerous to go directly to the nuclear option every time I found myself in a fix. It’d taken having to freeze myself in stasis and being lost in the Void to see the error of my ways. From here on out, I would think before acting, instead of relying on my Fomorian muscles to solve my every problem.

  Once I get out of here, that is. Kind of hard to hold off on the nuclear option when you’re fighting a nuclear war.

  Speaking of which, it was a damned good thing my brain hadn’t stopped working when I’d cast that stasis field, or else I’d have been Thing food by now. And “Thing” was the only term I’d come up with to describe the entities that had attacked us thus far. Why they were here in the Void was a mystery, but I suspected it was because this was a place between places, a “non-dimension” between dimensions of sorts. If I was right, then it made sense that inter-dimensional beings would use the Void to hop between realities and planar spaces.

  It was just my shitty luck that I was stuck here with them.

  Soon after I’d started healing the Grove—“soon” being a relative term, since I had no way of measuring time at the moment—they’d started coming, probing at the outer edges of our little island in the Darkness. Some were relatively easy to deter, like the black, eyeless, winged creatures that were the first to appear in the Grove. The Oak’s natural defenses had made quick work of that first wave, capturing the alien beings with ropy vines and then pulling them into the soil to help feed our rejuvenation efforts.

  It was a good thing too, because at that time I hadn’t managed to create a livable atmosphere—thus, I was still confined to my stasis field. Later, after I was able to move around again, I’d learned that those early trespassers were among the least dangerous inhabitants of the Empty Reaches. Granted, any creature able to traverse the Void was no joke, since it took a certain toughness to survive the complete absence of everything. Considering that anything capable of extra-dimensional travel must inherently possess magic or technology of an advanced variety, it came as no surprise that I found myself fighting for my life and that of the Grove on a routine basis.

  I’d barely rested when the Grove alerted me to the presence of a being far more dangerous than the shambler. Based on the information the Grove was sending me, it was easily the most formidable of any Void creature I’d encountered thus far. I’d likely have come to that conclusion based on its size alone. However, it was the creature’s appearance that informed me I was not dealing with your standard Void-traveling creep.

  Apparently, I was about to face down the spawn of an Outer god.

  Probing the ragged edges of the Grove was a huge, blackish-green, ill-shaped blob of tentacles, eyes, mouths, and legs. My connection to the Druid Oak had alerted me to its presence just moments before, jarring me from a meditative state in which I’d been trying to balance the water, soil, and gas ratios in the Grove. You’d think such a thing would be easy—it wasn’t. When Void entropy had eaten away the original iteration of the Druid Grove, the little pocket universe lost a bit of the magical code that regulated such things. Eventually it would rewrite itself, but it hadn’t happened yet. So, parts of the Grove were flooded, while others were nearly parched, and I’d been attempting to remedy that situation when the Thing appeared.

  I didn’t need to run to the edge of the Grove to see what was out there, because I noticed its presence as soon as I opened my eyes. Although perspectives and distances were weird in the Void, I estimated it to be at least fifty feet tall and just as wide. At first, I had no framework by which to classify the Thing, and frankly just looking at it was making me nauseous. Many of the creatures I’d run into out here had that effect—in fact, their “wrongness” was sometimes so overwhelming I had to shut my eyes and fight them while relying solely on my connection to the Oak.

  The creature floated out there in the Nothingness, poking and prodding at the horribly inadequate wards and protections I’d constructed to protect my little pocket dimension while it healed. I’d considered myself a pretty fair hand at creating and casting protective wards back on Earth, but these creatures ate such barriers for lunch. I speculated that my wards would be stronger back home, where the solid firmament of reality would shore up the separation between spaces and things.

  But here? Here the delineations and boundaries that seemed so natural and permanent back on Earth were much more malleable, and that made it easier for Void travelers to break through my defensive spells. Yet, that didn’t mean the Grove and I were completely vulnerable—far from it.

  “No rest for the weary,” I said as I rose, stiffly, from my comfy spot by the Oak.

  My ancient druid mentor Finnegas had taught me many things that had helped me survive to the ripe old age of twenty, and one of them was a simple battle axiom. When in doubt, attack. Heeding that advice had saved me out here countless times. I hoped it would do so again today.

  I accessed my mental link to the Grove, checking to see which spells, defenses, and traps we had ready. The Oak and Grove might be healing, but they still possessed formidable power I could bring to bear in our defense. I’d also made a habit of setting aside resources in preparation for each new attack, and assured myself that we were prepared to deal with this intruder.

  Yep, we are totally ready to fight the offspring of an Outer god. Right.

  The thing I’d learned about these Things was that out there in the Void, they lacked substance and solidity. Like the shambler, most of them remained ethereal while traversing the Nothingness, so attacking them while they were out there was pissing in the wind. To fight them, I had to bring them inside the Grove.

  Smaller creatures would enter the Grove willingly out of necessity in their attempts to hunt, kill, and devour the sole inhabitant—me. That tended to work in my favor, since the moment they entered or materialized here, I could hunt and kill them with impunity. Relatively speaking, of course, because killing some of them was easier said than done.

  But a being such as this one? It would be more than happy to float out there in the insubstantial Darkness, ripping away chunks of life, matter, and magic to fuel its own continued maleficent existence. It would be a real challenge drawing in a creature of this size, but I’d been waiting for just such an opportunity. If I brought the creature’s considerable carbon-based bulk into my little pocket of reality, and if I managed to kill it, well—I could then use its remains to complete my work on the Grove’s restoration and recovery.

  A corpse was just a corpse, after all—no matter how inherently, primordially evil it had been when alive.

  Yet the cost to do so could be high. There was a reason why people went mad staring into the Void, and it often had to do with the Things they saw there. I was having a
difficult time just looking at this abomination in its current insubstantial state. Once I brought it into this reality, its immense malevolent presence would likely exert a maddening effect on my mind.

  I’d experienced it before, during my encounters with lesser beings. Presumably, most had been servants and supplicants of dark gods—alien races long-forgotten by man or perhaps worshipped as gods themselves in some dark corner of my world. Pale reflections of their masters, their presence still turned my stomach and weakened my resolve. Everything about them reeked of wrongness, and at times it was all I could do to resist curling up in a ball to be eaten.

  The experience was reminiscent of the fear I’d felt when I battled the Maori god of evil. Whiro’s avatar had emanated an almost palpable, abject terror that had paralyzed me and shaken me to my core. Thankfully, no Void traveler thus far had caused me to experience a level of dread like I had in Whiro’s presence. But this Thing, this amorphous colossus of writhing appendages, eyes, and orifices—I suspected it might just come close.

  I had a pretty good idea what it was and what had spawned it, based on recent research I’d done on inter-dimensional entities. If I was right, this Thing was a child of Yog-Sothoth, one of the most powerful of the Outer gods.

  Yeah, this is going to suck, I reflected as I sent the mental command to the Grove to begin our assault. Let’s just hope it pays off.

  The great thing about my bond with the Grove was that I didn’t have to contain its magic as Jesse had. She’d been bound to the Grove when her resurrected human body merged with that of the Oak’s avatar, turning her into a direct conduit for the Grove’s enormous power. Possessing and wielding all that magic had driven her insane, but as the intended caretaker of the Grove, I was in no such danger.