Mortality: The Story of Mortanius

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Chapter Forty-Four

He didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious, but it felt like it must have been hours. He awoke in the dark, lying on his stomach in a place that smelled like mold and wet earth. Warily, he got his arms and legs under him and pushed up into a sitting position. His whole body felt sore, as if he’d been doing heavy labor. Fumbling in the dark, he found something small and round. A stone, which he cast a spell on it to make it glow. His surroundings came into focus and he realized he was in a tunnel or cavern of some kind. The roof of the cavern was twenty feet above them, bathed in shadow.

Azimuth lay in the dirt a few feet away, and he crawled over to her. She was uninjured as far as he could tell, but was unconscious like he had been. Carefully shaking her and touching her face, he finally managed to rouse her.

“Mortanius?” she mumbled. “Where … where are we? What’s going on?”

“We’re underground somewhere. I don’t know what happened.”

“I thought that … I heard a voice.”

“I heard it too.”

He helped her to her feet and she brushed away strands of hair which had fallen across her face. Her hands trembled slightly as she looked around, her eyes growing wide with growing fear. Her dress was smeared with dirt, as was Mortanius’s robe. It looked like they had both crawled through the mud to get to this place, wherever it was. Mortanius raised his glowing stone to try and see more of their surroundings.

“How did we get here?” Azimuth asked.

“I don’t know. I woke up a few minutes before you did.”

“The other dimension … there were creatures there ...”

“I see our footprints,” Mortanius said, pointing at the ground. “We can follow them back.”

“That voice,” Azimuth said, clenching her hands together. She looked upwards into the darkness of the cavern and stepped away from Mortanius. “It was from the other dimension. I can’t believe it.”

“Come on. Let’s see if we can find our way back to the Cathedral.”

“Mortanius, don’t you see? We communicated with another life form!”

“Yes, and that lifeform did something to us,” he replied, trying not to snap at her. “It rendered us unconscious and brought us to this tomb or whatever it is.”

“There’s only two sets of footprints. That means we walked here on our own.”

“Do you remember walking here? I don’t.”

“They guided us.”

“They?” Mortanius said incredulously. “Who is they? Some strange creatures from another dimension? How did they talk to us? How did we get down here?”

“That doesn’t even matter,” Azimuth laughed giddily. “We spoke to a race of beings from another dimension! And they said … they said ...”

“Nosgoth,” Mortanius answered. “I heard them say the word Nosgoth.”

“Yes, they did ...” Azimuth touched her forehead. “But how could they know ...”

“We’ll figure that out later,” he said. “Come on.”

“Mortanius.”

He was already walking away, following their own tracks in the dirt, hoping that she would follow him. But she hadn’t moved, and was looking up near the ceiling of the cavern. With slowly building frustration, he turned and said, “Azimuth, please. We don’t know where we are and I think we should try to get back as soon as we can.”

“There’s something up there,” she said, pointing.

He looked up to see what she was staring at and his words trailed away. About twenty feet above their heads, a narrow ledge was cut into the cave wall. He hadn’t seen it earlier because he had been directly underneath it. But now, from a different vantage point, he could easily make it out. And Azimuth was right, there was something there just inside the ledge.

She picked up another stone and cast the glowing spell on it. Then she cast a spell to make the stone lift up into the air. It rose above their heads and illuminated the ledge. The light wasn’t very bright, but it was more than enough to see by.

Mortanius felt the breath escape his chest. “Oh ...”

Lined up along the ledge, which ran in a rough oval around both edges of the cavern, was a series of long rectangular murals. Without another word, Mortanius and Azimuth both levitated themselves up onto the ledge to see them up close.

From one side of the cavern to the other, there were ten in all. They were similar the ones at the vampire temple, and yet quite different. They were not as carefully-painted, and obviously not as well preserved, but they were no less magnificent for it. The artist, whoever it had been, was not as skilled, and the murals had a crude, rushed quality to them.

It didn’t take Mortanius long to realize that the murals told a story that he was already familiar with. It was a story of the war between the vampires and their unknown enemies, but these murals told the story from the opposing point of view.

They never had a name for the ancient enemy of the vampires. Mortanius still thought of them as the Others. The vampires’ murals claimed that the Others simply arrived in Nosgoth one day and almost immediately went to war with the vampires. But these new murals told a different story. The first image showed a crowd of slender green-skinned creatures trading and sharing food with a winged, blue-skinned species. According to this mural, the vampires and the Others had once been at peace.

The second mural showed the vampires attacking the defenseless Others with swords and axes, killing even their children. The vampires were portrayed as violent and cruel, the Others shown as innocent and betrayed. The Others seemed more humanoid in these images, and less savage and bestial, but that was only to be expected. Mortanius immediately doubted the sincerity of the images, but he was willing to accept this version of events, at least for the moment.

The third image was more perplexing. It showed a crowd of vampires praying or otherwise engaged in some kind of religious ceremony. Above them was a superimposed image of a strange, blurry figure, clearly not vampire or Other. Was there a third species at play? Mortanius reeled at the thought that there might have been another player in the ancient war, one not even mentioned by the vampires. But in the mural, the vampires appeared to be praying to it. The only religion the vampires had ever shown was their dedication to the Pillars, so Mortanius didn’t know what to make of the image in the mural.

The fourth mural showed the Others and the vampires at war with each other. This one was the most similar to the vampires’ mural depicting the same event. The fifth mural appeared to show the Others gaining the upper hand in their conflict, driving the vampires back.

The sixth mural showed a familiar sight, the Pillars of Nosgoth. But surrounding the Pillars was a crowd of vampires slaughtering the drinking the blood of their own kind, an image that made Mortanius sick to his stomach. What did such a hideous image imply? Did the Others believe that the vampires had performed some kind of foul blood ceremony to seal the magic of the Pillars? Or was the vampires’ blood thirst a terrible result of Pillars’ creation?

The seventh mural showed the Others’ banishment to another dimension. It depicted them writhing in pain as the Pillars came to life, with the vampires celebrating in an orgy of blood and death in the background. The eighth mural showed a group of Others crying in despair as they discovered their new surroundings, a world of burning red skies and charred ground beneath their feet.

The last two murals showed the aftermath of their banishment. The ninth mural showed the vampires once again praying in some kind of ceremony, but there was no longer a figure in the sky above them, and many of the vampires were impaling themselves on their swords, blood gushing from their mouths. One of the murals at the vampire temple showed a similar scene, that of the vampires learning of their curse in the wake after the Others had been banished.

But how could the Others even know of this? If they were all banished, how could they know what happened to the vampires afterwards? In fact, how could these murals have been created at all? Had some of the Others somehow avoided the banishment of their kin, and survived to create this record of their defeat?

But the final mural confused things even more. It seemed to show an Other slowly changing shape, like a progression in sequence. The left side of the mural showed a fair, even somewhat attractive Other with soft green skin. Lined up beside it were Others with increasingly-distorted features, culminating in the Other at the far right, who appeared as a lanky, demonic-looking alien with rough, leathery green skin. Had their new dimension done this to them? And if so, how could anyone have been able to paint a mural of it here underneath Avernus Cathedral?

Mortanius had to remind himself that these representations were merely what the Others believed, or at least what they wanted history to record. The murals in the vampire temple were no different. The actual truth of the events of that incredibly ancient war were most likely a combination of these two conflicting legends.

Maybe the vampires mistakenly believed that the Others were responsible for their bloodthirst. The creation of a powerful magical artifact like the Pillars must have had all kinds of unintended consequences. The Other murals clearly implied that the vampires started the war between their two peoples, but the real world was scarcely so black and white. Maybe a group of rogue vampires had attacked first, which led to the Others counterattacking against innocent vampires, which escalated into total war. Somehow, Mortanius felt that was more likely than the entire vampire race deciding to make an unprovoked attack against a helpless foe. Unlike most of the human race, Mortanius had actually met and spoken with vampires, and alien though they were, they were clearly not heartless monsters.

Unless the events surrounding the creation of the Pillars had made them see the error of their ways. It was impossible to know by merely studying ancient murals telling two sides of the same story. The vampires believed the Others were an enemy that needed to be banished in order to save Nosgoth, and the Others viewed themselves as innocent victims of the vampires’ cruelty and betrayal. Somewhere in the middle was the truth.

But none of this was relevant at the moment. Mortanius’s primary concern was more immediate than the causes of an ancient war.

“We have to get back to the Cathedral,” he said. “We have to call the rest of the Circle and tell them what happened.”

Azimuth stared at the murals, completely transfixed. “These paintings have been down here for thousands of years, just waiting to be discovered. We must be directly underneath the Cathedral. I can’t believe these were down here all this time. They were waiting for us to make contact, so they could show us.”

“Show us?” Mortanius said. “They did far more than that. They took control of our bodies!”

“Only temporarily,” she said, waving it away as irrelevant.

“And that makes it better somehow?”

Azimuth looked at him. “If they can take over our bodies, they could have done anything they wanted. They could have made us go and murder someone. But they didn’t, did they? They used their power to show us something important, Mortanius. These paintings change our entire understanding of history!”

“We already knew the vampires went to war with another race and created the Pillars to banish them. These murals don’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.”

“They prove that the vampires started the war!”

“No, they don’t,” Mortanius scoffed. “They tell one side of a story, just as the vampire murals tell one side of a story. There’s no way to know which side is telling the truth.”

“We can communicate with them,” Azimuth said, her voice growing louder. “We can go and talk to them and learn the truth!”

“We could talk to the vampires before they were exterminated,” Mortanius replied evenly. “And I don’t think those creatures have any more reason to be honest with us than the vampires did. We don’t know anything about them, and what’s more, they don’t know anything about us.”

“They’ve been trapped in a foreign dimension for thousands of years! And now that they’ve finally made contact with their long-lost home, you immediately distrust them?”

“The very first thing they did upon making contact was to take over our bodies as if we were nothing but puppets for them to control!” Mortanius took a deep breath and lowered his voice. “They are just as alien to us as the vampires were. Who knows what that other dimension has done to them? How can we possibly know anything about them or their motives?”

“That’s easy!” Azimuth said. “We can ask them!”

She dropped off the ledge, levitated down to the ground, and began to retrace their footprints in the dirt. Mortanius wanted to say something, but at least she had finally agreed to return to the Cathedral, which is what he had wanted in the first place. He cast one last glance at the murals before going after her. He had the foreboding sense that these images would only create more questions than they answered, and he already wished that he had never seen them.

He levitated down and went after Azimuth, and he had to run to keep up with her. Using his glowing stone to light his way, he followed their tracks until they ended at a steep slope of loose dirt. Up at the top of the slope was a hole that glowed with dim yellow light. Azimuth had levitated up and was already through the hole. Mortanius wanted to call for her to slow down, but instead he simply levitated up after her.

The hole in the cavern wall led to one of the basement rooms in Avernus Cathedral. The wall had been smashed and blown apart, along with about twenty feet of solid dirt, by some kind of powerful magical spell. The light Mortanius saw was from some burning candles. Mortanius realized that the Others had directed them to this room, used their magical powers to blast a hole in the wall, and then led them down into the catacomb they never even knew was there.

How could the Others have known? What were the odds that Avernus Cathedral had been built on this exact spot? How could the Others possess their bodies from another dimension? Dozens of other questions flooded into Mortanius’s mind as he went off after Azimuth, following her muddy footprints on the tile floor.

He didn’t reach her in time. She was already at the Dimensionscope, her hands gripping the handles tightly, the silver disc flashing with intensity, its surface swirling like a whirlpool of blood. The entire device sizzled with magical power, so much so that Mortanius felt it push against him like a physical force.

“Azimuth!” he shouted, fear gripping him. “Please, stop!”

“There!” she shouted, her hair whipping around her face as she stood in the center of a magical gale. “There they are! Speak to us! Tell us who you are!”

The Dimensionscope once again showed the world with the red sky, and once again, standing in front was a group of inhuman creatures, as if they had been waiting patiently for the Dimensionscope to return. They stared directly at Azimuth.

“Shut it down!” Mortanius cried, starting to run forward.

The window into the other dimension rippled suddenly and a beam of magic exploded into the room, bathing both of them in crimson light. Mortanius was blown clear off his feet and slammed onto his back. Azimuth screamed, her body going rigid as if she was being electrocuted. Lightning crackled from the Dimensionscope, flowing through her body and scorching the walls and ceiling. Mortanius curled up on the floor and tried to protect himself.

And then it was over. The room went quiet, the magical surge gone as soon as it had come. The Dimensionscope went dead, its silver disc now blank. Half of the braziers in the room went out in the torrent of wind, and the remaining light seemed feeble and uncertain. Mortanius rolled onto his back and stared with wide eyes, unable to process what had just transpired.

“Azimuth?” he whispered.

She stood in place, apparently unharmed, her hands hanging at her sides. Her head was down, her chin resting on her chest, her eyes closed as she breathed in and out.

Mortanius got to his feet. “Azimuth?” he asked, stepping onto the dais. “Are … are you okay?”

Her head lifted up and she turned to face him. When she opened her eyes, Mortanius flinched in terror and stumbled backwards, falling off the dais and landing on his back once more. He froze in place, fighting the urge to scramble away in fear.

Her eyes glowed green with a terrifying magical illumination so bright that he almost had to shield his eyes. Her face was slack and expressionless. When she spoke, the voice that came from her lips was not her own.

“We .. are … here,” she intoned. “You … have found … us.”

“What … what are you?” Mortanius choked out.

Azimuth, under the control of an alien presence, looked down at him. “Our name … is … Hylden.”

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