PLANET: A Survivalist’s Guide (19 of N)

Day Twenty-three, midday. Two days underground, by my estimate, and already I crave the sun on my face, and to walk once more in the fungus gardens of Planet’s surface. At least here and now there are no more spiders, though our dark work will demand the death of a great many eight-legged beasts before we finish the task.

In the chambers beyond the dark temple we witnessed sights strange indeed; down the lefty passage a hall – like the temple, neither natural nor properly artifical – where fungal growths had been twisted by some dark and unnatural magic into miniature mockeries of the Monolith. Within the chamber, a strange creature, all ooze and tentacles whipping, we found stuck to the ceiling. Gravity in this chamber was afflicted by queasy confusion as well; the walls and ceiling were as second floors, which at least enabled my comrades to close with the strange entity and hack it to bits.

Down the rightward passage, more unnatural “creatures” of the Far Realm – I will not bore with the details, as I am given to think that every Far Realm encounter must needs be unique, and the information would not be helpful to you who come after. But beyond them, in a high place, we encountered the Illithid, who greeted us by name (a parlor-trick for a mentalist such as it to pluck that information from our minds) and told us this tale.

The Illthid’s Tale

Eons ago, in a place which has no width, length, or breadth, where time is nothing, the Illithid and its mistress-master YRL dwelled, until some mighty cataclysm (the details of which the Illithid declined to explicate) thrust YRL from YRL’s spaceless space and into the crust of Planet, crippling or slaying it in the process.

Alone of YRL’s unnumbered servitors the Illithid survived this transition, and alone of YRL’s likewise unnumbered enemies survived a single spider of unknowable pedigree. This Queen of Spiders (I do not think she is any relation to the dead goddess of that epithet) birthed and continues to birth a tremendous progeny, that veritable ocean of tiny spiders and larger ones too, which forever gnaw at senescent YRL. These spiders feed on YRL, and the waves of psychic pain that emanate from YRL’s center have resulted in that perversion of Planet’s natural ecosystem that we call the Country of Spiders.

The Illithid believes that if the Queen of Spiders is slain, YRL will regenerate sufficient of YRL’s power to leave Planet. This would end the psychic emanations, leading one might suppose to the end of the Country of Spiders and of the illness that afflicts the leaders and central minds of the various colonies – the sleeping-sickness that took Zharroun, Yang’s megalomania, and the monomania which Irina asserted afflicted Zakharov (which, presumably, he shrugged off as Morgan usurped his authority and the psychic assaults began to target that villain instead).

This is the root cause of the disease: the great fungal superorganism on whose surface we walk stirs, and grows quiescent, and reaches out with a diffuse and massive mind, an inhuman and potentially divine intelligence, or potential intelligence. It grows new senses for the purpose of communicating, and with YRL’s splinter in its side, what it communicates is pain and anguish. Can a planet be said to have achieved sentience? The splinter causes it pain, but what is the pain of Planet compared to the pain I feel?

For millennia, the Illithid has attempted to free YRL from the Queen of Spiders. It is too puny to directly assault her alone, and on Planet it can open only small and transient gates to the Far Realm, pulling through amorphous mindless drone-creatures like those it tested us with. It waited and watched as the shadar-kai came, but they never pressed beyond the bordermarches of the Country of Spiders, and it waited and hoped while the New Hoplites explored the spider-infested forests. It claims sufficient precognition to know that we and we alone are the best, last hope for the Illithid and its master-mistress; it flatters us with praise and phrases plucked from our memories.

We have conferred, and agreed that the death of the Queen of Spiders is a laudable goal. Loathe though we are to trust the forecasts of a clear scoundrel such as this Illithid, its tale answers many of our questions. Our greatest fear is that YRL, freed of the Queen of Spiders, will either depart for the Far Realm with us still “inside,” or that YRL will take the opportunity to regain YRL’s full powers and assault the Planetmind, burn Valley to ashes, destroy all that we hope for and love simply because YRL can.

Is this a risk we can afford to take? The Illithid offers a demonstration of the immediate relevance of the task, proof that YRL is damaging the Planet’s quasi-intelligence. We will partake of this proof, and consider.