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There I stood in what looked like a ruined dance hall, the floor littered with the bodies of the dead and with a smell that would raise the dead if they weren't so dismembered. It stunk, with almost a green miasma, which I realized was not the reason everything didn't seem quite so solid. It wasn't. Things were different, the air was different, real and unreal at the same time. This wasn't any place I was familiar with.

Just what had happened when the lord of misrule led us into that building? Where had that doorway taken us? Suddenly, I realized that wherever it was, it wasn't in Oregon, or even any land I knew. I grabbed a small box that had been hidden inside the shattered alter. Then I realized that someone knew where we were.

.

Well, well, well. We weren't in the world. But Tindalasse recognized it, you could tell by that look on his face.

Tinda ...

Yes?

Come clean. What do you know?

This is next semester's assignment.

What? (is everyone going to keep cracking bad jokes?).

Dreamlands, we are in the dream lands.

Where?!

I'm not sure, but it is the dreamlands for sure. You know that the shidhe came from here? Next semester we get lectures on the dreamlands.

Well, how do we get home?

I'm an elf. I am home. Oh, you mean how do we get back? (I'm going to throttle him, of course he knew what I meant). Hmm.

I could tell. He did not have the slightest idea, so I looked around to see if anyone else did. Which is when I realized we were not in costumes, but we still all looked different. Amber was a fire elemental, Ariel looked made out of ice, and there was some sort of weird glow next to her.

The glow  was bright, but in the center I could see a flicker and then I could see Michael, and he didn't look like himself. Suddenly I knew where that guy that Ariel had met before had come from, it was the way Michael looked as his dream self and we had been at a place where dreams and reality overlapped, visiting a grand bazaar. Guess everyone looks different here. Great, now I've got to worry what I look like. Everyone looked different, more or less. Amber was a flame, Tindalasse looked like that presentation picture of him (instead of dark, with curly hair). Parakyle looked like he was made of solidified fire. Wolfie looked half man, half wolf (actually, he looked pretty darn good), and his clothes looked more like mist than the iron hard scales that they were (boy, he looked pretty darn good).

But we all looked lost.

Er, Tinda, is is safe to just stand around here in this ruined mess? Is there anything we need to worry about?

Oh. Lets get moving, just in case.

Just in case what?

Let us just get moving now. We can talk later.

Great. A terse, taciturn wisecracking elf. I really am going to throttle him.

If I survive these things coming at us. What are they?....

Drat, the trash collectors just showed up.

What I saw were slimy creatures that looked for all the world like men with octapus-like heads. They had arms, but they also had about eight tentacles each. A mind probe came up with nothing, but the chaos reek about them was strong. As we backed away, they fell on the bodies of the dead, but it was obvious that some of them had seen us and were interested in more than a cold meal.

Which Amber gave them, as she exploded into a roaring flame. I had her back and Wolfie had mine.

Acid blood filled, chaos tainted, regenerating slime covered monsters. Ick. There are days when a girl really ought to stay home and wash her hair instead of going to a dance.

But Michael seemed at home and Irealized that his familiar, a white crow that had seemed rather useless, was picking out the eyes of the fallen. When he did that, they didn't regenerate and get back up. Not so useless after all. We burned the bodies afterwards, truly dead or not.

But then we walked out of the ruins to see just where we were. I'd look a the box I'd grabbed later, sounded like gemstones inside of it. The ruins themselves looked like something out of the oldest cities, lost even to human dreams and the last of the memories I had seen passed on in the lodge.

At least I meant to walk out of the ruins. We did walk out of the ruined building we were in, but it was obvious that we were in a ruined city, and from the night sky above us, Tinda could tell we were in the inner dreamlands. Which meant that we wouldn't have to worry about ghouls to go with the Walktipi, but I could see Wolfie shaking his head. "We are going to have to worry about Wamps if we don't get out of here quickly.."

Wamps have a pale, egg-plant shaped body, usually a rotting white in color with red accents. Up to twice mansize, contaminated and diseased, the natural initiates of Malia. Just what we did not want to meet. so we ran. Here and there we saw monstrous webbed footprints of the nine-legged Wamp, so we just kept running for the forest. I hoped that was a good idea.

... I heard a diabolic chuckle on the hillside above me. The sound began with a sharp abruptness that startled me beyond all reason, and continued mirthlessly, never varying its single note, like the mirth of an idiotic demon ... It had a pale, hairless, egg-shaped body, large as that of a gravid she-goat; and this body was mounted on nine long, wavering legs with many flanges, like the legs of some enormous spider ... I saw that there were no eyes on the oddly sloping face; but two knife-like ears rose high above its head, and a thin, wrinkled, snout hung down across its mouth, whose flabby lips, parted in that eternal chuckle, revealed rows of bats’ teeth.

 — Clark Ashton Smith, The Abominations of Yondo.

We could hear the wamps, gibbering behind us. The numbers were too much for us (at least that was my guess), but as we reached the city edge and plunged on into the marshy forest to the south side of the city, the wamps dropped behind, as if they did not care to foul their legs with the water we ran through. Splashed through. Right into a nest of Voonith (later I had to ask Tinda if he had made these names up. He looked wounded, and my prof confirmed that these things really had these names). Amphibious carnivores, bleached pink, green and yellow like a cross between a giant salamander and a frilled worm. Their skin was riddled with bursting pustules and cysts, and they looked like caecilians.

Voonith are amphibious Oriab creatures who howl at night from hidden pools. They dare the slopes of Ngranek.

Not that I wanted to get eaten by wamps, but these "voonithsh" creatures were definitely not what I wanted to run into either.

It was a sharp and bloody fight, after which it was time to take stock of things.

We could go back into the city and try to find a way back into the world from the building we had been in. Of course we would have to fight our way pas the wamps and walktipi, and they looked to be a hungry, swarming bunch. Not to mention, there had not been any sign of the way we came in before we had to start running.

We could keep to the swampy parts. That meant more Voonith. Or, we could head into the dryer forest. "Gugs" is all Tinda said.

Come on, couldn't the boy come up with some good news? "Well, solitary gugs" Tinda said when I pushed him on that.

"Well, before we worry about what is going to eat us, does anyone have any idea what path will lead us home?"

Michael smiled. "I do, I've already found the path." His familiar circled around, but it was obviously fixed on something the rest of us couldn't see, though if you looked at it from behind Michael, something like a path had a sort of glow when he focused on it, and it led out of the swampy parts and into the trees.

So it was going to be "Gugs" (whatever they are) it was.

Did I really want to find out what they were? Remind me not to ask again when I hear a stupid name. We saw some voonith boiling up behind us and ran for it, rather than fight.

Then we ran smack into one. A Gug is a giant, three or four times or more taller than a man. A jaw as big as their face opens vertically -- as far as I can tell, that is their head, though they have a great eye on either side. Their arms branch at the elbows into great hook clawed paws (so, two arms, four forearms with paws) and their legs have great clawed feet (like chicken legs -- I know, that isn't fair to chickens) . I'm sure glad they were solitary. With more than one, what the ugly didn't kill, the bad breath (they pant it out in a yellow haze, chanting "gug, gug, gug" as they move, hunt and fight), and the berserk rage would have. But one at a time we could take them. I'm sure glad we had all of us.

It was a paw, fully two feet and a half across, and equipped with formidable talons. Alter it came another paw, and after that a great black-furred arm to which both of the paws were attached by short forearms. Then two pink eyes shone, and the head of the awakened Gug sentry, large as a barrel, wabbled into view. The eyes jutted two inches from each side, shaded by bony protuberances overgrown with coarse hairs. But the head was chiefly terrible because of the mouth. That mouth had great yellow fangs and ran from the top to the bottom of the head, opening vertically instead of horizontally.

But we were getting tired and needed a safe place to rest. At least time wasn't going to pass quickly here -- so I'd be back for classes, might even be able to spend the fall festival with the Bitter King's court. I could use something a little less weird. Not to mention, I wanted some straight answers out of Tindalasse. It was time the boy talked.

At least that is what I thought, until I got him talking. Maybe babbling is more like it. In these forests, we could expect solitary Gugs, cast out from their people for the presence of decaying diseases, and degenerate Serpent People.  As far as he could tell, we were in the surface sewer of the dream world, where everything that had been forgotten went to fade away. Walktipi and Wamps tended to live in the cities, Voonith in the mire the cities faded into, Gugs in the forests that eventually overtook the mire. Fouler things drained into the caverns beneath, where there were things we really did not want to meet, Abhoth, Ghasts and Shantak, some Gaunts and Bholes . Should we reach the coast, we could count on Gnor mazes and the occasional Haemophore and residual Beings of Ib.  All things that had pretty much faded away from human dreams, except in the area we were in.

"No field trip, though," is how Tinda finally concluded, when he got back to talking about how we would visit a number of dream locations and habitats, until we got to the realm of rotting dreams, which is pretty much where we were. The Lord of Misrule's spawn are often found here, which must have been what was behind the gateway that was opened up as a trap for us. Now we just needed to find our way out.

Michael thought that was where his white bird was leading us. I hoped he was right.


Copyright 2001-2003 Stephen R. Marsh and Heather N. Marsh
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