I had a divination professor named Sturgis. He was from a town in the Drakenwald, just like you, I believe. Like most diviners he ended up going crazy, but he also managed to do something no one else had ever done before. He saw into the Blight, all the way into the very heart of it. He even got a glimpse of what was on the other side.”
“The other side of the…what was it you said? The crack?”
“Yes. See, there are a lot of theories about what the Blight really is. Some believe it was left in the wake of a sorcerers’ battle or magical catastrophe, back in the time of the serpent people of the Sunken Lands or maybe even before that. Here’s my personal favorite. Do you know what a dimensional membrane is? No? It’s like a wall, separating one dimension from another. Now imagine that something one dimension over has been banging on the wall since the beginning of time, trying to break through into our universe.”
Heinrich wasn’t known for his imagination, but in his mind’s eye he saw a great scaly fist smashing into a crumbling stone wall. “And the wall finally cracked?”
“Right. And that’s where the essence of that other dimension started leaking through, killing or mutating everything it came in contact with and creating the Blight in the process.”
Heinrich spent a few moments letting that sink in. “Is that what you believe?”
Critchler shrugged. “It’s just the theory I find most interesting. Nobody knows what really happened. Even the elves claim they don’t know, and they were the ones that erected the guardian pillars in the first place. If it wasn’t for them, the Blight would have spread across half the world by now.”
Heinrich snorted. “Yeah, well, elves say a lot of things. For all we know, those pillars don’t do a damn thing.”
“Maybe. But you have to admit, the line of demarcation is pretty abrupt. Just one step past any of those pillars and it’s like you’ve walked into a nightmare.”
Heinrich had to concede that point. The imaginary cartographer’s line connecting one pillar to the next represented an invisible boundary he wouldn’t cross for a year’s pay. “Okay, okay. So what about the professor? The diviner guy?”
“One night he and some other professors were sitting around, drinking and talking and the subject of the Blight came up. So Professor Sturgis told them his theory which another professor, a transmogrification specialist named Hengler, took great pleasure in deriding. Professor Sturgis sat their stewing for the rest of the night. By the time he got back to his quarters, he decided he was going to show Hengler what real wizarding was and determine the nature of the Blight once and for all.”
“So in other words, wizards are just as full of it as the rest of us,” Heinrich observed.
“More so. Now, from a wizarding viewpoint the simplest solution would be some sort of scrying spell, like say clairvoyance, but if it was that easy somebody would have done it a long time ago. Something prevents remote viewing beyond the guardian pillars, maybe some property of the pillars or even the Blight itself. But Professor Sturgis had hated Hengler for years and wasn’t going to give up so easily, so he decided to try something no one else had tried before. Not because nobody else thought of it, mind you. Everybody else just figured it was suicide.”
“Desperation’s made men do some pretty stupid things, me included. Course in my case, a woman was usually involved. A man has needs, you know.”
“Uncle Tobin told me that’s what prostitutes and fancy boys are for. Anyway, Professor Sturgis decided to try astral projection. That’s when you project your consciousness outside your body. Your astral form is invisible, can fly, and even pass through solid objects. It’s like becoming a ghost without the dying part. Professor Sturgis figured that would let him circumvent the remote viewing problem without physically entering the Blight. Theoretically, anyway, He had no idea what affect the Blight would have on astral forms but as we’ve already established, desperate times call for desperate measures.”
“That same night,” Critchler continued, “I received a visitor at well past midnight. It was Professor Sturgis who wanted me to document what he saw in case something happened and he wasn’t able to return to his body. When astral projecting, the astral self remains tethered to one’s physical form and so the professor would be able to communicate with me through his otherwise insensate body and describe everything he witnessed. We began making preparations and within an hour, the professor’s astral form was streaking toward the southern frontier while his physical body remained safely locked away in his quarters with me.”
“Could somebody’s astral form be watching us right now?” Heinrich asked, poking the empty air with his spear.
“It’s possible, I guess. So anyway, astral travel is quick and it didn’t take the professor long to reach the Blight. I could tell when he crossed over. His entire body spasmed and for a moment I thought he was having some sort of attack but then he started speaking. It was strange, hearing him talk while knowing his mind was really thousands of miles away. This is what he said. The moment he crossed over, the sky went dark and was filled with constellations he didn’t recognize. All around him strange, ethereal shapes swam through the air. He said they reminded him of the creatures that sometimes wash up on the shores of the Western Sea; weird, semi-transparent things all teeth and tentacles, no two alike.”
Heinrich squinted into the darkness. “These things are floating around out there?”
“On the other side of the pillars, yes. Don’t worry. The pillars hold back extra-dimensional creatures like the astral horrors, which is what Professor Sturgis called them. Blighted mutants can still get through because they’re native to this world, and by the same token can usually be killed with plain old steel. Anyway, the thing about astral creatures is this. If you can see them, they can see you too. And if they can see you, they can touch you.”
“Magic has silly rules.” Heinrich shivered. If he didn’t know better, he would have sworn the temperature had dropped significantly since the start of their conversation. “I’m assuming he didn’t turn around and go home.”
“Nope. That’s what a sane man would do, but Professor Sturgis went a little crazy that night. And then a lot crazy. So he kept going, hoping that the astral horrors would leave him alone, and the farther he went the stranger things became. He saw a forest of dead trees whose twisted limbs reached hungrily toward the sky as he passed overhead. Cancers with human faces that screamed and howled as they were devoured by their own ravenous flesh. Gelatinous things aglow with the ghost-light of their own luminescent organs that left a burning snail trail of acid slime as they oozed across the ash-gray earth. Towering behemoths less animal than vegetable, at war with flickering black shapes filled with glittering stars.
“And on he went,” Critchler continued, “deeper and deeper into the Blight. And still things got stranger and stranger. He saw the ruins of a village where the buildings had come to life and wore the bones of their former inhabitants like jewelry. Sometimes the ground traded places with the sky, and sometimes it was impossible to tell where one stopped and the other started. Time and distance aren’t fixed in the Blight and so he wasn’t sure how long he traveled before he finally saw it.”
A few moments passed before Heinrich realized Critchler was taking a dramatic pause. “Saw what?”
“The rift. Actually he said ‘a jagged, city-sized tear in the curtain of night’ but I like rift better.”
“What, the hole? I thought you said you it was a hole. Then you said it was a crack. Make up your mind, man.”
“Well, now I’m saying it’s a rift. It’s storyteller’s prerogative. So anyway, the space around the rift was fuzzy and distorted, like a heat mirage, and swarming with astral horrors like the ones he’d seen when he first passed into the Blight. Far below he saw explosions of indescribable color and heard the mad beating of drums and tuneless whine of flutes. Curious, he flew down to take a look and saw a carnival of the damned.”
Heinrich suddenly perked up. “A carnival? Were t
here any dancing girls?”
“There weren’t any girls, dancing or otherwise.”
“I haven’t seen a girl in almost ten years,” Heinrich said, frowning. “Doesn’t sound like much of a carnival to me.”
“It wasn’t really a carnival. When Professor Sturgis close enough to take a good look, he thought he was getting a glimpse of hell itself. But it wasn’t hell. It was worse.”
Heinirich snorted. “What’s worse than hell?”
“Were a fellow to find himself in hell, at least he’d know where he stood. But what Professor Sturgis saw, that was something else entirely. Speaking of hell, there’s an interesting theory going around regarding the whole infernal/celestial dichotomy which states-”
“Dammit, Critchler, just finish the story.”
“Okay, okay. There’s not much more to tell. Professor Sturgis said the performers were the strangest things of all. Not nightmarish monstrosities like before but something much more bizarre. They were real enough yet somehow incomplete, like concepts of things rather than the things themselves. Not shape-shifters, exactly, but constantly changing, always hinting at something else but never really becoming anything. What was it the professor said? They were like ideas that had become real before becoming fully realized, if that makes