Chapter 775: Hello, World
The sky dome. The Bloody Moon. The Giant Paintings.
Exactly as Pasha had described them—and nothing like it at the same time.
Description could not carry scale. Standing inside the Divine Land, Roland understood why it warranted the name. The vastness of the space pressed against the senses in a way that no account of it could fully convey. He crouched down and pressed his palm to the floor. Polished stone, smooth as a mirror, cold and rigid against his fingertips. Not illusion. Whatever this was, it was real enough to touch.
He had been in the Dream World—a space equally detailed, equally convincing. He did not flinch.
A broadcast? he thought, looking upward. Or something more like a subconscious override?
The Bloody Moon hung above the Giant Paintings like a coin pressed flat against the dome of the sky. Too perfect a circle. Too exactly circular to be a sphere seen from a distance—more like a disc than a planet, and at an impossible apparent size. Its surface was not still: ripples moved across it in constant, slow patterns, dense enough to cover every inch of its face. Vortexes, not waves. Looking at it for too long produced an unease that lived somewhere below thought, not because it was frightening but because it was simply wrong—wrong the way a familiar word repeated too many times becomes temporarily meaningless.
He couldn’t feel its heat or its light, though it blazed scarlet overhead. It illuminated nothing. It simply existed there, vast and indifferent.
The astrologers described a red meteor, Roland thought. This isn’t a meteor. It isn’t a planet or a star. The shape was wrong for any of those. If the Battle of Divine Will had something to do with this object, then how did a flat disc become a falling stone? The question added itself to the long list of questions with no current answers.
He thought of the Astrologer of Dispersion Star—of trying to bring the old man here. He’d probably faint. But if he stayed conscious long enough to study it, he might be able to tell whether this corresponds to anything he’s observed in the sky.
Roland shrugged—a habit that had no audience—and turned to the four Giant Paintings encircling the space beneath the Bloody Moon.
A throne. A sea. A black screen. And himself—or an image of himself, with Wendy beside him, rendered in the same flat painted style as the rest.
He had read descriptions of these in the Pivotal Secret Temple library. A relic functioned something like a recorder, Pasha had said, continuously reflecting the world around it. The entirely black painting—the one that had gone dark and stayed dark—was the eliminated underground civilization. He greeted his own painted double and Wendy’s; they did not respond. They were images, not presences.
If the Divine Land could “affect reality,” Roland thought, moving toward the throne painting, then simply looking at these should be safe enough. He ran his fingers across the surface. Cloth—soft, smooth, with a weave so fine it felt like skin. The image did not yield; there was no crossing through.
He began a slow circuit of the hall, looking for anything Pasha hadn’t mentioned, considering whether the space had edges and how long it might take to find them. The silence was complete, and in that completeness, it felt permanent—
Then something broke it.
The sound came from behind him. Low, grinding—metal dragged across stone, or the reverberation of something heavy dropped against a hard surface. In the stillness of the Divine Land, it rang like a bell.
Every hair on the back of his neck came upright.
No one mentioned the paintings could make sound.
He turned.
In the throne painting, where before there had been only the carved seat, a figure now occupied it. Dark armor, the details of it occluded, and above the gorget: two eyes the color of furnace light, looking directly at him from a significant height. The gaze carried the particular weight of something that measured what it saw.
Motion in the sea painting next. Bubbles erupted from the painted depths in fat clusters, rising with a soft and continuous sound that was not quite silence and not quite water. From beneath them, an eye surfaced—an eye enormous enough to fill most of the frame, with three pupils arranged in a triangle, each one oriented independently, all three converging on him simultaneously. The surface of the eye pressed toward the border of the painting. The three pupils tracked him without blinking.
Did you two coordinate? Roland thought, with a feeling that was closer to wry recognition than alarm.
He stood in the center of the four paintings, below the Bloody Moon, and looked up at both of them in turn.
“Good afternoon.” A pause. “Did you also come for the Battle of Divine Will?”
Silence.
“We don’t have to fight to the last. We could sit down and discuss it.”
Silence.
“Can you understand me?”
Nothing.
“Say something even if you can’t.”
Nothing.
“Is this a staring contest? The first one to blink loses?”
He waited. Neither blinked. The armored figure breathed—he thought he could see the chest move—and the three pupils tracked him with a deliberateness that had patience in it, as though they were prepared to stay indefinitely.
It’s not actually dangerous, he thought. They can’t do anything except stare. Whatever Alethea was trying to warn me about, this seems to be the extent of it.
He was just about to turn away—to end the contest on his own terms—when the corner of his eye caught movement.
In both paintings at once.
A cluster of black tentacles had appeared in the frame of the throne painting, then simultaneously in the sea. They moved like water over rocks, fluid and purposeful, spreading and contracting. They reached the armored figure first. The demon—if that was what it was—seized the armrest of the throne and screamed. The sound was unlike anything Roland had heard from a human throat, and it didn’t need to be; it communicated its meaning regardless. Flames erupted around the figure. Transparent blades materialized in the air. The tentacles took both, absorbed them, and kept moving; the small articulated hands at their ends gripped and pried with a focused intelligence.
The demon fought back harder. Electric light burst from the armor in a white flare—and in that moment the tentacles flinched, loosened, retracted just enough. The figure lunged out of the throne and ran from the edge of the painting, frantic, leaving a broken piece of armrest behind. Whatever stood behind it had terrified a creature that commanded fire and lightning into open flight.
In the sea painting, the tentacles had pierced through the surface of the eye—Roland could see it, three or four penetrations—and a fluid the color of a winter sky, light blue and translucent, wept from the wounds. The Giant Eye did not scream. Instead, all three pupils snapped open simultaneously. Something—a ripple he felt more than saw, a pressure that arrived ahead of any sound—washed outward from the painting. It hit Roland and he stepped back once, involuntarily, struck by something between a smell and a force: overwhelming, formless. The tentacles pulled back. The eye sank. The painted water grew darker as the eye descended, deepened from sea-green to midnight to total black, and then there was only paint.
Roland stood very still.
The throne painting showed an empty, wrecked seat. The sea painting showed dark water.
”…What just happened?”
He had no answer. He stood in the silence of the Divine Land and looked at the aftermath—two ancient, enormous entities that had appeared in the paintings to threaten him, and been driven off by something else, in minutes—and had no framework for any of it.
He was still standing there, turning it over, when the relic went dark and the cavern ceiling reappeared above him.