Illusion is the bed-fellow of realities that are not real, and the Guv’nor, a being of the Light of Consciousness, second rank, was a consummate illusionist, one who preferred to be thought of as a play actor, one, strangely enough, who’d no desire to reveal to anyone who he really was. He’d always adopt other identities, dress himself in garbs that were suited for most occasions and guaranteed to put on a good show, and in that way he managed to divert attention away from what was important.
Aspects of form have their uses, especially when one was forced to associate with those of lesser worth. Such as now!
It wasn’t hard to discover where Witness and Questor had tried to hide, and in a snap the Guv’nor sucked them back into his presence, which was, on this occasion, in the Dire Misfortune Room, deep down in a cold, stinking, damp and desperately gloomy dungeon. The stone-block walls ran with fetid, caustic slime, guaranteed to rot through anything it came in contact with, and the smell of the place was so bad that W&Q wondered how they would be able to breathe. Noting their discomfort, the Guv’nor instantly kitted them out with a supply of tanked air and a couple of masks.
Somewhere out in the pitch dark, scary noises that sounded like skittering claws on stone and swishing, slithering bodies through water, assailed W&Q’s ears. On all sides tiny beady red eyes of unnamed but probably hungry pests, glittered and winked in the black gloom, giving the reluctant heroes a full-blown case of the creepy heebie-jeebies! The Guv’nor evidently hadn’t planned a fun time for them, this was a run through of what was likely to be their next assignment, and the chosen setting was probably a hint as to how nasty it would be.
The light from the vortex of raw energy that had spun W&Q into the vile conditions of the dungeon allowed them to make out two blackened and uselessly smoky lamps swinging and creaking haplessly from an iron cleat bored into a stone knob high above their heads. They saw too, much to their horror, that there were rats everywhere, huge brown fat ones, twitchy-nosed black ones, slinky-sleek white ones, and worst of all a clutch of starving and patchy baldy ones. The rodents had good, razor-sharp teeth that they grinned wickedly through, and their thick corded tails stuck straight up behind, curled round at the ends like hangmen’s nooses waiting for someone to try them out. Unannounced monster spiders dropped onto W&Q’s heads and latched on, curious to take a closer look and a few sample bites. Black beetles, striped and spotted ones, stirred so thickly about on the flagstone floor that their hard little legs made a thunderous racket as they pounded over the carapaces of their luckless comrades who’d become trapped on the bottom of the heap.
taken from The Blessings of Dis, the Second Book of The Gatherers Trilogy.