"Incursion?" Nina asked. "What do you mean?"

It wasn't just the mantises. It was their world, too. The ammonia world.

"Recently," I explained, "a presence invaded Lantor, one of the mental worlds I created," I said.

"Yeah," Lark said, "you told me."

"I didn't tell Nina."

"What kind of presence?" Nina asked.

"The presence of another world," I said. "Or… no," I corrected myself, "many other worlds."

As I spoke, my thoughts reached back to my adventure with Brand in the Incursion, in the Hoduul mountain range, beyond the Forgotten Sands. "I'd seen these mantis-creatures there, though they'd been dead." I pointed toward the woodlands. "I also recognize the shapes of these trees."

Drawing from those memories helped me make sense of what I was seeing. Being able to look at my surroundings and match what I saw with what I'd seen in the Incursion made a literal world of a difference.

"The ground is a dark, ruddy brown," I said, glancing down at the granular dirt at our feet. I looked up. "The skies are filled with a creamy orange haze." I reached up, waving both my right arms across the sky. "All the living things you see have hard, metallic colors, us included."

"Metallic colors?" Lark asked. "So… fucking gray?"

"Yes, silver and gray," I said, "but also browns, and reds and purples, all dark, almost at the edge of nearly black. Also, everything smells like ammonia, and is cold, impossibly cold."

The forests' silvery plants were made of fronds and sheathes of tubular leaves, like giant grasses or bromeliads. Thick lines of fanged vines striated along cliffs and rocks, carpeted surfaces like so much electrical cabling.

Some even climbed up the trees.

Even so, there were huge stretches of land where the world gave way to orange badlands, lifeless and bare.

A meadow lay directly ahead, with bromeliad groves to its left and right. The meadow was littered with puddles of what was presumably ammonia. Extremely short stubs of single-bladed "grass" covered the ground in uneven patches, giving the feeling of a marsh that had just shaved. The few animals I could see roving about looked like crosses between insects, mammals, and plants. Shrimp-stoat-snakes wriggled through the dirt as wingless flamingos stepped across the ammonia pools in long, stick-legged strides. The one common denominator to the animal life was the presence of antenna structures, which jutted from their heads like radio antennae.

I gasped softly. The sound emerged from my flower in a luminous smoke ring.

"Why didn't I make the connection sooner…?" I said.

"What connection?" Nina asked.

"To Lantor. Brand and I used tunnels to cross through the Hoduul mountain range," I explained. "In them, we'd seen portals that led to other worlds, just like the portals and portholes in the Vyx's Network." I looked toward the horizon. "What if the Incursion was the Vyx and their Network invading my mind?"

I looked to Nina.

The light of my musings wicked off my body. They moved like butterflies in slow motion. They faded away with every twitch and curl.

"Or maybe you were tapping into them," Nina said.

"Maybe so," I said. I dug my feet into the ground. "Angel… there's just so much. Suisei has to be out there, somewhere."

"He's not gonna find himself," Nina said.

"I know."

"So…" Lark stepped forward. "Where to?"

"Anywhere," I replied. "We might as well get moving."

We walked into the meadow. We took care to stay close to one another, and to keep away from either of the two groves of trees at its sides.

Those brambles were thick, and, though it might have just been my alien vision, I could swear, they moved, and with an almost predatory intent.

We had to be cautious. Everything was new to us. Even with all my experience delving into mental worlds, I had to keep reminding myself that what I was seeing was actually real—or, at least, that it once had been, prior to being Archived.

Wherever I looked, I saw the streaks of bio-electric silverlight pulsing through living things. Wisps of light wafted up from paths along the ground as shrimp-snakes and other creatures skittered through the sparse vegetation. The light's texture and "color" changed slightly as the animals approached us, and continued to change as they passed us by.

Seeing one of the wingless flamingos going about its day, I crept toward it while keeping myself low to the ground, both because I figured it would help to practice moving stealthily, and because I genuinely wanted to observe the incredible wildlife of this world.

After a bit of fussing around, crawling low to the ground revealed itself as pretty straightforward. To keep myself stable, I had to both spread my legs out to my sides and also lean forward with my torso to press my lower pair of arms against the rock.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Nina crept alongside me. "What's it doing?" Her whisper was a susurrus of shallow luminance.

"Eating, probably," I said.

We watched as the creature dipped its antennaed head in the shallow pools to nip up grubs. However, after a couple of seconds, I realized the flamingo wasn't eating them. Instead, it sank its fang-like mouthparts into the grubs' bodies. The prey crackled like busted batteries, sending out electric sparks as their bodily fluids dripped down the predator's carapace-covered neck.

We watched the silverlight drain from the grubs' bodies. Once the grubs' energy was spent, the flamingo tossed the corpses into the flimsy grass with a flick of its head, and then, turning, wandered over to the next pool.

All of sudden, Lark leapt out from between some trees, arms spread, tail flicked, and shouted: "Boo!" Electromagnetic waves rippled out from her head. The flamingo flopped around ungainly, kicking up dirt as it ran.

Nina yelped. "Why'd you do that?" she said.

"The tension was getting to me," Lark replied.

"Guys…" I said.

The ground beneath us was starting to move. Crumbs of dirt got shoved out of the way.

Was an army of giant termites breaking through to the surface?

Nina and I pushed off the ground and skittered forward. Lark followed, but stumbled and couldn't make it out in time.

I yelled. "Lark!"

All of a sudden, clusters of silverlight emerged from the ground.

"Whoa…" Nina whispered.

The creatures coming out of the ground looked like potatoes, if potatoes had little helicopter blades whirring atop them. There were dozens and dozens of them. They rose up all around Lark, buzzing like hummingbirds, only to then scatter every which way, zipping away from us.

Lark, meanwhile, had fallen to the ground, her stinger tail drooping behind her. Sheepishly, she raised her flower head and looked around, watching the electro-potatoes as they buzzed away.

"Is it safe?" she asked.

"I think so," I said. I scuttled forward. "Whatever those electro-potatoes eat, it isn't us."

Lark looked around warily. "This place doesn't make any sense," she griped. "There are whales in the sky and flying potatoes and—"

"—Uh… guys?" Nina said.

We turned.

Nina, who had stepped off to the side, had fixed her gaze on a large object at the far end of the meadow. "There's something up ahead. Something big."

I walked up alongside her.

Nina was right, there was… some kind of mound.

We walked toward it.

It took me a second to make sense of what I was looking at. At first glance, it looked like a bomb had gone off at the far end of the meadow, only instead of spreading fire and ash, this explosion had seeded a garden across the ground, concentrated around a room-sized mound of I-don't-know-what at its epicenter. Upon closer inspection, the mound appeared to be made of flesh. Since it showed no trace of the silverlight current that flowed through every other living thing in this alien world, I could only assume it had died long ago.

The mound bristled with thickly meshed fanged liana vines. The fanged vines crackled with energy. The fanged vines crisscrossed with a second, smooth variety of vine, whose networks emanated from fleshy, tongue-like lobes that grew from the mound in tightly bound rosettes. Miniature versions of the furled-leaf trees had sprouted near the mound's apex, and nearly every square inch of space between them or any of the other plants was carpeted in a short, fuzzy, moss-like plant that I hadn't seen elsewhere.

I noticed the moss didn't spread that far from the mound.

Creatures scattered as we approached. It happened so quickly, I only got the barest of impressions of winged dogs bounding away like leapfrogs or anemone-headed pterosaurs taking flight in a flutter of wingbeats. One thing I did notice, however: all of them had been feeding on the silverlight in the mound's abundant plant growth.

Walking around the mound to get a better look, I spotted something spread out on the ground, shriveled and tattered. It was the wing of one of the great sky-whales, still recognizable, despite the ravages of the vines and the other flora. The wing extruded from the base of the mound.

"It's like an oasis," Nina said.

The word "oasis" combined with something Ileene had told me in one of our therapy sessions.

"Whalefall," I said.

"What?" Nina asked, skittering up beside me.

"It's something Ileene told me," I explained. "Except for geothermal vents deep down at the bottom of the ocean, all life in the seas is powered by the Sun. Because of this, most marine life is concentrated off the coasts, where the continental shelf keeps the seabed from being too deep. There, photosynthesis provides coral, kelp, and plankton with the nutrients that lay the foundation for food chains. Then things eat the coral, kelp, and plankton, and other things eat those things, and you get a healthy habitat. The waste that results from all that life drifts down to the deep to feed the critters living there. However, out in the open ocean, there's much less of the photosynthesis going on, which means the creatures that live on the seabed in the open ocean become scavengers that pick up whatever offerings snow down from higher waters." I turned to her. "Whales are huge, so when one of them dies and its corpse sinks to the seafloor, it triggers a bonanza of life. Ileene told me marine biologists call these events whalefalls. They create oases where they land. Whole ecosystems spring up around them, bringing life to the barren dark."

I turned to the mound.

Lark crossed her lower pair of arms and nodded in approval. "I told you they were whales⁠."

"Right here, we're looking at a whalefall." I looked up. "One of the sky whales must have fallen here after it died, and now… all this life has sprung up from its corpse."

"What happens when the whale's body is used up?" Nina asked.

"Here?" I said. "I… I dunno."

"No, I mean, in our world, in the oceans," Nina said.

"Oh, that," I said. "I actually asked Ileene the very same thing. She explained that there are enough whale carcasses on the seafloor at any one time that the creatures that live on them can migrate from one to another, sometimes across multiple generations."

Suddenly, a fierce wind swept over the meadow and the woods. It was colder than anything I'd experienced before. Whole parts of my body tingled and went numb as the winds buffeted us. Swaths of static spiraled across my field of vision. The gust lasted for maybe only thirty seconds, but for many minutes afterward, my body shivered despite my every effort to stop it.

"What was that?" Lark asked. There was static in her light-voice. "Wait… what the hell?"

Skittering back in shock, she pointed at the nearby plants.

Some of the vines around us had shriveled or even broken. More shattered beneath Lark's footsteps as she backpedaled.

The three of us scuttled away from the mound to get a better look at our surroundings.

"Angel's breath…" I muttered.

Fine crystals had formed on the crust of topsoil among the broken vines or in nearby puddles. These gradually melted, except for some of the smallest puddles, which had frozen over.

Were they stuck that way, now?

"I—"

—And then a voice called out: "Who goes there?!"

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