On a day in the Terramac exactly like every other, something went very wrong and/or very right. It’s difficult to say which, how, or why – certainly the people of the Terramac would never answer. Their past, much like their future, is irrelevant. They will live with the consequences; everyone else, alas, must settle for dealing with them.
In this case it meant coping with an avalanche of molten mountain that scarred half the Baldy range from peak to peak, spattering across slopes and filling valleys with hot bubbles of squirming, coiling….substance. Not quite solid, close cousin to liquid, never a gas and plasma didn’t recognize it.
Still, it was quite something. And when it hardened, well. Things got weird.
Of course, there is never a lack of folk willing to pay for weird.
That was then. Now, riding into the present on Then’s back, four rucksacks stacked high and coiled about in heavy jackets, the admirable, the determined, the steadfast, the driven Ms. Jun Dolet.
She’d come to town. There wasn’t much other choice, up here in the Baldies. It was either stay in your cabin drinking, trapped by a blizzard; or go into town and get drunk, trapped by a blizzard. And Jun didn’t own a cabin. Jun didn’t own a single thing that wasn’t packed on Then or inside her own skull.
But Jun had a plan, which are a notoriously portable form of wealth. And it started there, in Pultro. A boiled town, that got by on milking the odd recluse or wealthy meditant who wanted to sit in its steam caverns for a few weeks imagining the meaning of life until they could taste it. That and the furs and feathers of small things too stupid to escape traps.
Jun walked into the bar and bought everyone a glass of something until they were all her best friends, which cost her a total of one old half-a-coin. It wasn’t very much, but then she only needed to buy two glasses.
The man in the corner told her she looked just like his little sister, then cried himself to sleep. The bartender was more awake, and less able to dodge eye contact or conversation.
“So, I hear this is a pretty famous place,” said Jun.
“What sonuvabitch told you that lie, I will fight him until he turns ugly,” said the bartender.
“Nobody I can remember. Some kind of scholar. But he said there’s one thing about the place that anyone should be curious about, and that’s figment stones. He showed me one.”
“Never heard of ‘em,” said the bartender.
“Here,” said Jun. And she pulled out a little pebble and rolled it in her palm. It was flat, but didn’t seem happy about it; as if all that it required to get itself up and moving again was a little shove.
“Never seen one before,” said the bartender. “Not around here.”
“He said there used to be a mine out here. That it used to be famous.”
“Never known that either,” said the bartender. “Try the Grey Loop, up by Thickethead. There’s nothing there at all.” Then she finished her drink and passed out, and Jun was forced to take her advice or leave it.
She took it. She took it right out of the bar and back to Then, who’d been patiently drinking from the town’s (under-heated, slightly-minerally, well-boiled) public well. She took it with her eighteen miles out of town, plus another quarter-mile vertical. She took it through a maze of boulders that wedger her fast until she had no choice but to drop two rucksacks, and an interesting encounter with something fast and feathered with too many teeth and not enough caution.
Then she took herself back to Pultro, along with Then, two rucksacks, and a pocketful of extremely sharp and pointy fangs, which bought her a few more supplies and a night somewhere dryish.
“Figment stones,” she asked the hosteler, who was frankly amazed that anyone wanted to stay in town, including himself. “Seen any?”
“Never heard of a thing like that thing,” he told her. “You sure you’re in the right place?”
“Absolutely,” she told him. “Folk pay a mint for these thing, rich idiots. You crush them and inhale them and you see, well, just about anything. Everything. All at once.”
The hosteler scratched his face, hitting his nose by random chance. “You could check the old Mork-Matten mine, down the trail and off the dead lumber track. You won’t find anything there though.”
So the determined, steadfast, and driven Ms. Jun Dolet (and Then) set out again, in the opposite direction. She went down the dead lumber track and found that it forked, and that those forks forked, and those forks also forked. Some of the forks were the same, and others just looked the same, and some of them looked like forks but were actually dead ends where the trees had run out, the rocks had grown too thick, or where a Slibbean Icemaw had set up its breeding den. The last one got Then, but in her haste to lose the beast in a thicket Jun had the good fortune to fall directly into one of the surface tunnels of the old Mork-Matten mine, directly onto the long-lost bones of old Malaster Mork, which still had Dep Matten’s pickaxe buried in its cervical vertebrae.
The pickaxe wasn’t worth much, but the story got her a free stay in the cabin of a twitchy trapper on the way back before she could finish freezing to death.
“Shouldn’t have gone out there,” the trapper told her, eyebrows bouncing like electrified caterpillars. She was six foot and more, but through careful cringing and constant furtiveness had attained a height of half her size. “Bad business out there. It’s too cold. Better stay in, where it’s safe. Safer. Safeish. Did you hear that? It was just the wind, but there’s stuff that sounds like it’s just the wind. Icemaws. You scared up one; it’ll be out there now, looking for food until it’s got it. Us, probably.”
“Figment stones,” said Jun. “Not one in the mine.”
“Well, yeah,” said the trapper. “It was an iron mine. You step on anything in there? Could get lockjaw. I almost got that last winter. Cut off my foot, that fixed it. Got a new one. Want to see it?”
“Sure,” said Jun. “But I need to know where to look for figment stones.”
“Not here,” said the trapper. “None around here I expect. Could look by the Manybends. It’s got lots of stones. Big stones, small stones, medium stones. Creeping stones. Those are stones that creep up on you, while you sleep. Sleep creeps. One of them almost got me five years ago, and I haven’t been back since. It’s how I got this scar.”
Jun looked at the scar and a lot of others and slept late, woke early, and set out for the Manybends river with half the trapper’ provisions, all of her liquor, and a murderous, many-headed hangover.
“Really, taking this stuff off her hands is doing her a favour,” she told herself.
The steadfast and driven Ms. Jun Dolet arrived at the Manybends and found that it exceeded her on all counts. It was faster, steadier, more driven, and considerably rougher and more anxious to get to know her than she was. By the evening of the third day she’d been in and out of it five times, of which only one had been intentional.
(The others, in order:
Bear.
Bear on the opposite bank.
Grand Murderfish – a real record-breaker; luckily it had only caught her coat with its teeth.
While drying herself off, a large stone had crept up on her and pushed her into the rapids)
Two of her toes were near-black, but sufficient whiskey and fire put paid to that and they reluctantly came alive again long enough for her to stumble into town and slouch down in the bar, trading a pack full of fool’s pyrite and a (slightly stabbed) Grand Murderfish eyeball for a lot of extremely bad liquor.
“Figment stones,” she told the bartender, and the bar. “Figment stones. They look like….stones. You seen any? Anywhere?”
“No,” said the bartender. “Go home.”
“Never heard of them,” said the bar. “Not once.”
“No such thing,” said the man in the corner.
“I’m going to piss,” said Jun.
And with much weaving and bobbing, the driven Ms. Jun Dolet harnessed just enough of her willpower to get herself to the outhouse before throwing up.
“Hllorpp,” she burped. No more rucksacks, no Then, one jacket, only the very last spec of determination, and her mouth tasted like pure pine sap – which might’ve been what the local booze was made from. It smelt even worse coming out than it did in; an overwhelming haze of stink was oozing up out of the pits of the privy, strong enough to tear your nose off and eat it.
Jun sniffled a little into her sleeve, which was square remulus purple strong major horse revved turn plonk doze bull chuff.
When she woke up a little, she was on her back with her head on dry pine needles, in cold air. Who knew if she’d have come back at all if she’d stayed in there, with the air so thick with…
Well then.
Jun Dolet dug a little next to the privy. Then next to the bar. Then in the middle of the town square. Then she paced around a little, clearing her head enough to make sure that she wasn’t crazy at the moment, and went back into the bar.
“Hey,” she said to the bartender. “What’s this?”
The bartender looked at the little stone in her palm. “Wood chips,” she hazarded.
“Pinecone,” guessed the bar.
“Scat,” said the man in the corner. “Icemaw, I reckon. Best run away.”
“It’s solid figment stone,” said Jun. “The whole town’s lousy with it. You’re drinking booze made from distilled sap from trees growing on top of it; you’re sleeping in dug-out cabins and shanties surrounded in it, the whole damned cauldron of boiled water this place sits above is pooling inside of it, and not a one of you has ever noticed?”
“Noticed what?” said the bartender.
“This. Figment stone.”
“I don’t see any. Do you see any?”
“What?” said the bar. “I can’t see anything. Ever.”
“You look just like my little sister,” said the man in the corner. Then he cried himself to sleep in two seconds.
“I think I see the problem,” said Jun.
She left town the next morning with four new packs: one filled with figment stone; one filled with provisions; one filled with a few samples of the local soil, water and booze; and one filled with the cashbox from the bar, which she’d persuaded the bartender didn’t exist.
One day, Jun vowed, she’d be back. Or rather, she’d pay someone else to come back for her. Figments were a decent enough indulgence, but the idea of spending that much time in them gave her the willies. You could wind up believing ANYTHING.
Thankfully, the world was full of people who’d pay good money for that.