The booming voice resonated from the painted zodiac on the ceiling, but the voice could have come from everywhere at once. Only Fabulosa’s cringe convinced me it wasn’t an auditory illusion coming from inside my head.

  The temple’s green glow brightened and in the same verdant hue of the juniper specter whose mote still lay on the arena floor.

  Soft green light ringed the structure’s edge. Squeaky shouts from blemmies rose from the streets. In my peripheral vision, I caught glimpses of Odum’s denizens stopping their peculiar routines and running toward the center of town.

  “Arise! Slaves of Odum, blessed be His name,

  Deliver the uncolored ones to His truth,

  Let them bask in the ecstasy of divine servitude,

  Enlighten them for all eternity to His wisdom.”

  Fabulosa pressed her palms to her ears and shouted at me. “It sounds like Odum wants to add us to his specter spectrum.”

  Dizziness hit me so hard that my gorge rose. I steadied myself as a falling sensation overcame me, and I doubled over for balance while the room spun. A halo of green silhouetted Fabulosa, and through the glare of Presence, I could see that my arms and legs also emanated the same green light radiating from the temple’s interior.

  Green light bathed the room.

  “Patch! We’re shrinking!”

  A debuff icon appeared on the periphery of my interface.

  The proportions of the world changed. Every second that passed, I seemed to be 10 percent smaller.

  I pointed to the town. “Quick, get out of the pit! Don’t get stuck in the pit!”

  I ran to the edge of the pit as Fabulosa did the same. I hoisted myself over what used to be a shin-deep depression. The kiddie pool size looked closer to the full-sized version, and we climbed out from opposite sides.

  “We need to get out of here!”

  Fabulosa Slipstreamed close to my side of the pit.

  We ran side-by-side from the center of town. The shrinking made us dizzy, so we lost our footing as we ran.

  I ignored the voice exalting Odum’s virtues, tried not to stumble, and avoided running into buildings. As we shrunk, the ground beneath our feet shifted. Our changing size made running harder, even though the streets grew wider. The buildings reached the height of our heads and continued to grow.

  I used the zodiac painted on the ceiling to orient myself through the irregular streets, maintaining a course for the edge of town. This helped me remain upright despite the dizzying effect.

  “He, who stirs the constellations in his slumber, awakes,

  He, whose dreams begat a thousand worlds,

  Beckons all to everlasting submission.

  Children of Odum, blessed be His name, attend to the nonbelievers.

  See them to their place at the feet of His being.”

  Fabulosa turned back toward me as she led the way. “He’s laying it on a little thick.”

  As the range of my Presence light reduced, it wasn’t illuminating as much space. Not only were we shrinking, but our spell ranges collapsed. The painted animals on the celestial dome became hard to see in the dimming room. Only the ring of the glow stones we placed around the city stopped the architecture from plunging into darkness.

  As we sprinted through the streets, the details of the facades sharpened. It became more apparent the doors, windows, and artifacts around town were fake. We still stood taller than the blemmies, whose mad features had grown more explicit at this vantage.

  The vertigo sensation hadn’t subsided, so we stumbled while we fled.

  The longer we ran, the smaller we became until we reached the city’s edge. The dizziness subsided when we stopped shrinking. We stood roughly half a foot tall, slightly taller than the blemmies, whose muscularity looked more imposing from our new vantage. I wasn’t confident we could break free if one of them got a hold of us.

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  Fabulosa pointed toward the dark wall, looking as panicked as I felt. “Is this the right way out?”

  “What do you mean? There are four exits.”

  “No! The thieves only opened one of them. Remember the borehole?”

  I’d lost my bearings when the ceiling dimmed, and being underground rendered the interface map useless. On the city’s outskirts, the buildings still blocked our sight. We couldn’t see over them and had gotten lost in the crooked streets.

  I slowed down. We’d spent so many hours cutting down specters I’d forgotten from which direction we’d climbed through a block of stone to enter this room. Rooms with radial symmetry made it difficult to maintain a sense of direction.

  The nearest wall looked blurry, as if too far away. I could barely make out as we headed toward the room’s outer perimeter. We ran until Creeper’s range of infravision revealed we hadn’t run toward the correct exit. Besides, our diminutive size and floorline elevation meant using Hot Air and Slipstream wouldn’t stretch far enough to reach the thieves’ borehole.

  “Patch, we have company.”

  I turned to see dozens of lizards emerging from their holes. They still were smaller than us, but the sticky tongues they zapped at crickets weren’t so cute anymore. Perhaps the outskirts of town wasn’t such a good idea.

  We didn’t have time to ponder the situation. A blemmy lurched around a corner and swung a heavy fist at us, even though we stood far outside its melee range.

  “Does it expect to hit us from there?”

  It didn’t. Perhaps blemmies had poor depth perception, but others ran toward us with a loping gait.

  The blemmy’s chest-face disturbed me more after I shrank down. Its facial expression seemed locked in a state of permanent confusion. Its eyes were unfocused, and its eyebrows hung beside the eyes instead of above. It had an oversized nostril, swollen gums, and misaligned teeth that sprouted from several rows—a fat molar stood where an incisor should have been. Even its grunts sounded ugly.

  A blemmy presented no challenge, but when first assessing the city diorama, we’d seen over 100 of them. The game considered one member a red threat because it belonged to a population. We could wear this guy to zero in a minute, but his comrades would soon be upon us.

  The mad scramble began. The blemmies chased us like angry villagers. When more blemmies joined the race, Fabulosa’s twisting Tangling Thorns caught hold of two pursuers. Not only did it please me to see the grappling vegetation working in the sandy underground, but its eruption created an obstacle for the other blemmies to run around.

  We picked up the pace and ran faster than our pursuers. When a few more appeared down the street in our path, I looked for a suitable defensive position.

  “You think we ought to Hot Air ourselves to a rooftop?”

  Fabulosa grimaced at the idea. Even in a defensible position, trapping oneself cut off future options, but we had no alternatives.

  I cast Hot Air before she could respond. I could use the blessing once per day, but if I’d misjudged this building’s height or couldn’t reach the top, I could reset the cooldown with my cassock. Fabulosa had no such luxury.

  I rose as the blemmies closed in on our position, and Fabulosa rose after me.

  Hot Air’s slow ascent presented a problem. I rose 1 yard for every second. I didn’t have time to see if I could reach the roof. The other problem involved its purely vertical ascent. If I were out of arms’ reach of the building, I couldn’t jump or lunge for it. Since the buildings were models, they weren’t perfectly straight, and the roof stood yards out of my reach by the time I’d elevated myself.

  A group of blemmies gathered beneath us. Although we stood far outside their grasp, they made grabbing motions and awkward jumps to reach us. They groaned and waved their arms as if they didn’t understand the concept of distance.

  When I reached the top, I Slipstreamed onto the roof. “Fab, is your Slipstream cooldown over?”

  “I got 40 seconds left.” She floated out of reach, panicked because her Hot Air would end long before Slipstream refreshed.

  I quickly pulled a knotted rope from my inventory and tossed its coils at her when she reached roof height. She caught hold of it with both hands. I wrapped my arm around the other end to reduce the slack and support my handhold.

  I nodded to her, and she released her Hot Air effect, and gravity swung her down against the building with a smack. Neither of us lost our grip.

  Fabulosa grew unexpectedly heavier, and I almost pitched forward off the roof. The tail of the rope had fallen to the blemmies, and some began pulling it. Their weight and strength grew more than I could bear, and my grip faltered.

  I lowered the line to the roof’s edge, hoping to use the friction to maintain my grip. While the blemmies pulled on the line below, I didn’t need to tell Fabulosa to hurry. She’d noticed the taut line from our vertical tug-of-war and wasted no time making her way to the rooftop.

  The tension made my arms feel like someone was pulling my arms from their sockets.

  The edge of the sandstone building crumbled as I struggled to maintain my hold.

  When Fabulosa reached the top, I let go of the rope before the mob pulled me into them. The line dropped to the blemmies below, who fought one another over it.

  We lay on the roof and gasped for air.

  Using the Dark Room improved our rope-climbing skills, and Fabulosa ascended quickly. Watching her climb made me consider the magical sanctuary for an escape mechanic, but we needed to move, not hide. The mob below might knock down the building, and judging from the timeless trappings of the immortality engine, we couldn’t out-wait them.

  I summoned Beaker, but he didn’t tower over us. Spells shrank him to a useless size, so I dismissed him. Even if he were his standard size, he might not be helpful. I remember how heavy blemmies felt in my hand and doubted he could kill many of them before they overwhelmed the young griffon.

  As I lay, catching my breath, I felt a tremor. Fabulosa sat up, rolled to the edge, and looked down. “They’re punching the building!”

  I got up and peered over the edge. Like a zombie horde, they surrounded the structure and beat at the walls beneath us, knocking loose bits of rock with every swing.

  Fugitives of Madness