A goddess's legacy weighs heavily on the shoulders of a socially-challenged college freshman.
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Liza Shiel-Smith--so named for an otherworldly ancestor who easily cleaved space with a flick of her finger--wants nothing more than to enjoy college...
The carpet creatures had enveloped everything outside of the basin and were creeping over its edge. The parts that had been on my feet had reached my thighs. I leapt off the basin, driving my weapon's blade into the center of the creature. It cleaved through to screech against the metal floor. I shuddered.
If this room was full of man-eating carpet, the outside couldn't be much worse. I sprinted for the door with a hole in it. Something under the carpet caught my foot, sending me flying just short of the threshold. My weapon slipped from my hand, and I hit the ground with surprisingly little noise or pain.
A labrador-sized orange snail hopped into the door hole. Extending eyestalks toward me, it stepped closer on little legs. Violently orange slime oozed off its sides and pooled in its toothless mouth.
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I caught a glimpse of flying slime before the carpet creature rose between us. It shuddered and lunged away from me. A squawk erupted from a snail-shaped bulge in the carpet. The bulge shrunk at a terrifying pace before the squawking fell silent.
My body shook so badly that I struggled to get to my hands and knees. I tried to stand, but debris under the carpet made it hard to find a stable place to put my feet. The appearance of the slime monster had greatly reduced my desire to leave the room, but the ever-creeping carpet was constantly on my mind.
I froze just before the threshold, staring down at my carpet-covered legs. Even if I ran and managed to escape the main carpet, it would remain clinging to me. Trying to swipe it off with my hands only transferred it to my arms, and there was no way I was using that freakishly sharp ring weapon anywhere near my skin again.
Fear throbbed in my jugular, but I forced myself to stop and think. I wasn't in pain. The carpet didn't even itch. Some of it had taken up residence on my head—which was apparently bald, something that may or may not have been the carpet's fault. It scooted over a bit when I touched it, but it made no move to leave my head, even when I tried to scrape it off. It was like a ridiculous game of slow-paced tag around my scalp.
A lack of pain could've meant the carpet was numbing my skin while eating it, but slipping my fingers under the edge of the carpet to touch my scalp assured me that wasn't the case. Where the creature had touched wasn't pockmarked, cracked, or seemingly damaged in any way; it wasn't numb either. None of the carpet attempted to move onto my face or ears, which seemed like a missed opportunity if it wanted to suffocate me or drill a hole straight into my brain.
On a manic whim, I grabbed a flap of carpet hanging from my head and pressed it over my face. The carpet stuck in place but immediately formed eye, nose, and mouth holes. Thoroughly bewildered, I peeled the carpet off my face. It dangled from my scalp again.
Ookay, so the carpet creature did know what I used to breathe and see, but it didn't want to cover them. That was good. Maybe Mar'kost hadn't been lying after all.
If this was one of the Ortai temple dungeons he'd mentioned before, it hadn't been occupied by anything but monsters for over two centuries. At least, that was what people thought. They didn't actually know a ton because not even shifters could survive the extreme arkegy levels at the temple centers for long. Mar'kost himself had never gone to the center of his local temple. He couldn't have known about some abandoned Ortai pet or whatever the heck this thing was.
Maybe it was food. It certainly looked good at multiplying, and it smelled like food. I licked part of the creature hanging from my head and immediately regretted it when the furry clump attempted to lick me right back. If it was food, Ortai had very strange tastes. The thing was so thin that it couldn't have enough meat to be worth the trouble of removing the fur.
I retrieved my weapon and returned to the fountain. The smell grew strong enough to make my mouth water. Ah, it was the liquid in the fountain that smelled so good. Mar'kost had said Ortai drank liquid arka back in the day. I wasn't quite hungry or thirsty enough to drink something that had been abandoned long enough to possibly grow brain-eating amebas. Well, there probably weren't any Earth-like amebas—since organic things couldn't survive near the Source crystal—but there could be magic amebas swimming in there.
Sitting on the edge of the fountain, I set my weapon across my lap as I watched the carpet move. At this point, I wasn't sure of anything except the fact that the carpet didn't want to eat me immediately, while everything outside of this room almost certainly did.
The tables and chairs at the edges of the room were completely empty of carpet creatures, which implied that a large amount of the critters had taken up residence on my body. Only, I didn't feel weighed down by anything heavier than a silk sheet draped over my head.
As seconds dragged into minutes, the last of the carpet migrated to my head, neck, and shoulders. It hadn't noticeably grown in weight—which was weird enough—or size—which was even weirder. I hopped up and started jumping around the fountain to test its weight. Even while moving, it felt and looked like the silkiest ankle-length hair I'd ever seen. Upon closer examination, it didn't have individual strands, but it definitely could've fooled someone from a distance.
My attention strayed from my feet just long enough for me to trip over a broken chair leg. I flailed my arms, certain I'd end up with at least a broken finger, but I landed on a remarkably cushioning black carpet. Well, now I could guess the primary use of this strange thing—protection. It had protected me from the snail monster, and now it was protecting me from my own lack of spatial awareness.
"Uh, thanks." I didn't have a clue whether the carpet could understand me, but it couldn't hurt to be polite. "Sorry about cutting you earlier, by the way. I thought you were trying to eat me." As I stood, the carpet returned to hang behind me.
Silver glinted in the corner of my eye. I whipped my head around to see a metal box the size of a microwave sitting on the ground. It would've looked perfectly normal in a modern kitchen, but it stuck out like a sore thumb among all the rusty metal here. Even more strangely, the floor was spotless within an inch of the box in any direction.
Keeping an eye on the suspicious box for as long as I could, I ran around the fountain to fetch my weapon. The box hadn't moved when I returned. I held the end of my weapon's pole and used its bladed ring to poke the box.
"Captain's Authorization Detected." A monotone voice nearly gave me a heart attack as the lid of the box popped open.
Suppressing the urge to yelp, I leaned forward to peer into the box. A basketball-sized obsidian cube sat inside. Then it disappeared. I shuffled closer to check if there was anything else in the box, but I couldn't see anything.
"Welcome-"
A strangled shriek escaped me as I jumped back.
A masculine voice cleared his throat. "Forgive me for startling you, but I welcome you to Veil Piercer. I am an artificial replica of Weylan Shiel. How much do you know about this place and your heritage?"
My heart leapt in my throat as I located the voice's origin. What had previously been the center of my weapon's ring was now a black screen displaying the upper half of a bald man with the same marble-patterned white skin that I had. He had smooth horns and a toga-looking shirt made of silky black fabric that could've been a carpet creature.
"H-hi." I cleared my throat. "I'm Liza Shiel-Smith. I come from a world without magic, but I got a primer on this place from a shi- a friend I met. Not that I know a ton, but I know I'm supposed to be part Ortai, this place is an Ortai temple, and a lot of people thought Ortai were deities before they disappeared about three centuries ago."
"To be specific, you are a Void Ortai currently inside the Mess Hall of a ship designed to be capable of both interspace and interVoid travel. I can't tell you the ship's exact condition because the security system is nonfunctional, but it was incapable of flight over a century ago and likely hasn't been maintained or repaired since then."
"Wait, 'ship' like 'spaceship?' If you fixed it, could I fly it back to Earth?"
He raised hairless brows. "I assume 'Earth' is your planet of origin?" When I nodded, he added, "If I make a few optimistic assumptions about the current state of the ship, the available resources, and your skills, I can estimate that returning this ship's interVoid travel abilities will take a minimum of ten years."
