“Can someone explain to me what is going on?” I ask, summoning my staff. The head of my staff erupts in orange fire as I begin pouring my magic into it. When I look back up at the monster slowly circling us, I find that another one has slipped out of a hole in the wall while my eyes were turned away.
“We have to protect this meatman from the monsters,” Dovik says. He has already activated his ring, making a copy of Pokey in his free hand. “I’m guessing that we will have to defeat a certain number of the monsters or survive for a set amount of time.”
“You guess?” I say. I point my staff at one of the monster cats. I hate it, getting ready to blow this cat away. I like cats. The monsters being ugly and having too many legs helps console me–but still. I notice that a third monster has slipped out of the shadows, joining the other two in circling our group. It is getting hard to keep them all in my sight.
“Advance or defend?” Macille asks.
“Defend,” Dovik answers.
“Got it.”
“We have to protect the dumb meat thing,” I mumble, looking down at the weird construct for a moment. I call on reserves of strength I didn’t know I had to kneel down and actually touch the meatman, the wretched smell of the thing making me gag. With a swipe of my fingers, I place the meatman in my inventory, removing it from the room all together. “Got…it,” I manage to say.
A fly lands on my cheek, and the slimy feel of it on my face actually makes me retch. My stomach spasms, bile burning the back of my throat, but I keep myself from spewing all over the ground. I turn my watering eyes back towards the monsters above us, finding that something has changed in the room. The cat monsters have stopped their circling. All of them stare down at me with a penetrating gaze.
“They didn’t like that you did that,” Macille says.
“I don’t really care.” Still on my knees, I turn my staff towards the nearest Cabal Cat, launching a fully charged Dragonfire Bolt at it. The ball of orange fire races across the distance between us in an instant, smashing into the head of the Cabal Cat in a fiery explosion that completely engulfs the monster. The screams of the monster are eaten up by the momentary roar of flame, and when the flame vanishes into the air, it leaves a smoking ruin of flesh behind, lines of burning ruin running through the body of the dead monster as it slumps forward, burns glowing like dying coals. When the monster hits the stone floor its body explodes a second time, a cloud of darkness erupting from its corpse like smoke, sitting heavy in the air instead of dissipating, leaving behind an impenetrable cloud of inky blackness.
More of the Cabal Cats crawl from the holes in the wall, the monsters around the room joining a chorus of hissing and howls. In only a few seconds, there are eight of the monsters at the edges of the room, their screeching digging into my head. Two disappear into the black smoke that continues to linger, completely obscured by the dark.
“They really didn’t like that,” Dovik comments.
I begin to charge another Dragonfire Bolt on the head of my staff, but doing so draws my eye to my gloves. There is a sickly, clear liquid clinging to my hands from where I touched the meatman. Bile burns the back of my throat again and I feel as if the room is shrinking down on me. All I want in the world right now is to get out of here. I hurl another Dragonfire Bolt at a monster at random, the half-charge of the ability enough to end its life in a single strike. Like the Cabal Cat before it, its body erupts into a cloud of darkness as it slumps to the ground.
“Just kill them all,” I say, turning my staff to point towards another. The monsters are moving now, diving into the black smoke for cover. “They are just rank one.”
There is a grunt behind me. I turn slightly, finding Macille just behind me, his shield jammed into the open mouth of one of the monsters just five feet away from me. With a smooth motion, he cuts one of the heads off the monster, not needing to bother infusing his sword with magic to do so. The monster jumps away from Macille, dodging his strike that was aimed to remove its second head, but in a flash, Dovik is behind it. With an almost casual swing of his weapon, Dovik sticks Pokey through the Cabal Cat’s remaining neck, the neck exploding in viscera when Dovik pours mana through his weapon into the monster.
The Cabal Cat’s body erupts into more black smoke, near enough now that it blinds me; the feeling is as if someone just threw sand in my eyes. I gasp from the sting, stumbling back a step, and feel the swipe of claws scrape into my armor from behind, a singular claw sliding off the magically reinforced steel and cutting a gash across the back of my neck. I try to breathe; the black smoke pours into my lungs, tasting oddly like fresh sweetbread and making me light headed. Without looking, I force fire to erupt from the head of my staff in a stream towards where I expect the monster that attacked me from behind to be. It’s pitiful cry as I torch it alive tells me that I hit the mark.
Even if I could keep my eyes open against the sting of the dark smoke, I would still be blind. The smoke rolls across my skin like a wave of sand, not coarse enough to rub the nerves in my skin raw but possessing a weight that presses in on me. After three seconds, I hear the sound of an exploding monster in front of me and cut off the power that I am pouring into my staff.
“Is everyone okay?” I call in the dark.
“I’m fine,” Dovik calls back. “Can’t see anything though.”
“Macille!” I call. There is a grunting nearby me. I turn in that direction, wanting to help my friend, but unable to see, I might burn him as much as I might the monsters. There is a cry and a guttural shriek just a few feet ahead of me. “Macille!”
“I’m…fine,” he says from somewhere in the dark a moment later. “They attack your back. Keep your back to the center.”
I feel the trickling of my blood running down my back, beneath the armor, as he says the words. I spin, just soon enough to stop the monster leaping out of the dark to tackle me from behind, trying to push my head into the ground. The monster is three times as heavy as I am, and it easily drives my body into the ground as it launches out of the darkness toward me. I land hard on my shoulder.
Instinct drives me to throw my staff out. A shiver shakes up through my arm as both heads of the monster bite down on the staff I hold in front of me, the teeth of one of the monster’s heads gnawing into the meat of my pinky like a hot knife. The pain makes me gasp, and I draw in a huge breath of the black smoke, the thickness of the air making me feel as if I am drowning.
And then I am drowning. In my mind’s eye I see a monster in the darkness above me, a huge snake with pitiless eyes, sharp teeth gnawing on the simple stick I hold it off with. I feel the mud on my back, my body sinking into the stinking swamp as the monster tries to bring its head down on my collarbone, and the drowning of the smoke is just like the wash of fetid water pouring over my face all over again. My arm shakes, the monster above me, the real one, too heavy for me to hold back for long. One of the Cabal Cat’s clawed feet rakes into my side, three-inch long nails pushing through my supple flesh and spilling the dark blood.
The vision of the black snake disappears, the pain of my side banishing it. My hand continues to shake on the staff, my arm no longer able to stay straight. Shadowy eyes loom out of the darkness as the Cabal Cat inches nearer and nearer to my face. This nightmare is so much worse than that snake ever could have been, but I am different as well.
“You want to eat me!” I roar at the monster. With its mouths wrapped around the staff, I am able to jam my left hand down its throat before it can react. Dragonfire spews forth from my hand; a burning blaze erupts out of the back of its head before it can react, the cat’s leftmost head erupting in flames.
I see fear in the eyes of the cat’s right head, but before it can jump away, I wrap my legs around its huge body, driving the staff deeper into its mouth. There is confusion mixed with fear in its eyes. It tries to rake me again with its claws, but the fear makes its strikes lazy and uncoordinated, its dangerous claws landing only on my armor. It springs into the air with a thrust of its powerful back legs, but I keep my own legs clenched tight around its body, and it drags me into the air along with it, the extra weight causing it to spin uncontrollably. With a roar of my own, I pull my hand out of its dead head and jam it down the throat of the right head, burning the mewing beast from the inside out.
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Its body lands on the stone a moment later, my own straddling its corpse as it collapses. I look around, noting more than a dozen of the beasts staring at me; we have made it past the black smoke for a bare moment. The body of the monster beneath me begins to shake, about ready to explode with more smoke. Before I can disappear into the smoke once more, I point at one of the Cabal Cats with my staff. I want it to know that it will be the next to die.
Twenty minutes later I am sitting on the floor in the center of the room. Macille hovers over me, the magic pouring out of his hands working at closing the several cuts all over me. Just looking down at the marks across my armor lets me know that it saved my life today. Both of the boys are slick with sweat, and half of Dovik’s face is covered in his own drying blood from a cut across his brow. I wring out a rag made from the ripped remains of the undershirt I had been wearing before. There are enough holes in it now to make the garment practically worthless. The threadbare one I wear now is my only change of clothes, and I curse myself for not getting more off the dead soldiers on the slope; some had been women around my size. I guess for however much longer this Passage lasts, I am down to a single shirt and pair of pants. I scrub the ragged cloth in my hands across my blood-smeared arms, trying to wash the red away.
“That was a little insane,” Dovik says from where he lay.
“No one got too injured,” I say. The water in the bucket that sits before me is already a watery crimson as I plunge the rag back into it. I only brought so much water with me here, but this seems like a decent use. I feel Macille’s hand run over my back, my armor sits discarded next to me as the man works at healing the deep gash across my shoulder.
“Just barely.” Macille tsks. “If this wound was any deeper, it might have hit your spine.”
“Good thing it wasn’t.” The smoke around the room began to fade a few minutes after the last of the monsters died. The smoke lays on the floor, piles of black dust that almost has the luster of sand. “I don’t think I have fought a rank one monster that uses magic before.”
Dovik runs a finger through the dust before bringing it up to his face. “I’ve never heard of these monsters before. They seem like they would be pack hunters, odd for feline monsters.”
“You know a lot about monsters,” I comment, still scrubbing my arms. “That must be useful.”
Dovik shrugs, licking the dust off his finger before spitting on the floor. “The different kinds of monsters are just about endless. We can study monsters all we want, but new kinds are discovered all the time. It almost seems like a waste of time.”
“But…” I begin to say, but a stinging pain along my back cuts my words off as I gasp. I actually feel my skin tug as it pulls the split ends around the wound together and begins to reknit itself. I glare up at Macille, but he only offers me a shrug. Suppressing a growl, I toss a wet strip of cloth to Dovik so that he can start cleaning himself up. “Why weren’t you wearing your helmet?”
Dovik catches the cloth and begins to apply it to the blood on his face. “I am coming to understand that I hate helmets.”
“Do you hate having a head that much?”
“I just don’t like the feeling of something on my head. It makes me feel like I am trapped, you know?”
I shake my head at the man. The sentiment seems…well, incredibly stupid to me, but who am I to give advice. It isn’t as if I fight with a helmet on either. I look down at the only uninjured member of our little party, Adrius, who continues to sleep in the center of the room.
“I thought that a way out would have appeared by now,” Macille says as he comes around my side and also takes a seat on the ground.
“Bring out the meatman,” Dovik says, nodding to me.
“Ugh.” I lever myself to my feet with a grunt and walk a good distance away, pulling the meatman out of inventory as I hold a bit of cloth over my nose. Just the sight of the meat doll flopping to the floor is enough to make me want to gag.
As the doll splats onto the ground, there is a rumbling from the wall opposite of where we entered. An open doorway reveals itself from the stone, a passage of darkness leading out of the room.
“Well, there you go,” Dovik says, motioning towards the open passageway.
“Are you ready to move on?” Macille asks both of us.
I check my energies, seeing that both my mana and healing points are still above half. “I am fine,” I say. Dovik parrots my response.
We spend a few more minutes cleaning ourselves up before heading into the next room. Cleaning all of the blood off our armor is the most annoying part, and with a simple cloth it is impossible. Still, I don the magical armor once again and prepare myself for the next chamber.
Dovik leads us into a strange room, rectangular, very large. About halfway across the floor, the stone tiles that make up the floor begin to bear strange figures marked on their surfaces. It strikes me almost immediately that the odd symbols are the letters of some foreign language. At the opposite end of the room is a closed stone doorway around which are more symbols matching the ones on the floor.
“Another puzzle room,” Dovik sighs.
The room brings to me memories of the kitchen. I force the memories away; there will be time to think about that later, hopefully much later. “Can you read the script?” I ask.
“Yes,” Dovik answers. He scratches his head, looking between the tiles and the doorway on the other end of the room. “This might take a while.”
“Is there anything that you need us to do?” Macille asks, Adrius’ slumbering form slung over his shoulder.
“Maybe.” Dovik stares into space, his eyes roving over the room. “Take a rest for now. I don’t know how long this will take me.”
I take a seat with my back to the wall, watching as Dovik starts pacing in front of the tiles. Macille sets Adrius gently on the ground once more before taking a seat next to me. We watch as Dovik walks back and forth, muttering to himself in a language I don’t know.
There is a strange expression on Macille’s face as I look over to him, a dour seriousness that is different from his usual exasperation. I can see exhaustion in his eyes, and I only now begin to realize that we have been forcing Macille to push his magic harder and harder as we have advanced through this dungeon.
“How are you feeling?” I ask him. I only notice that I have set my hand on top of his when his eyes flick down. I let myself linger there, feeling the strength of his big hand through my gloves, squeezing his fingers for a moment before pulling away.
“I am fine,” he says after a long moment. He sets his head back against the wall, falling into silence, watching Dovik trying to work out the puzzle. I join him, watching on, sharing a long silent moment in this dungeon of stone that is feeling more like a tomb with every new room we discover. “I just can’t stop thinking about it.”
“Thinking about what?”
Macille swallows, the muscles in his jaw tensing before he lets out his frustration with a defeated breath. “I let her die,” he says. He blinks a few times, grunting. “Samissa, I can’t stop thinking about that arrow going through her neck. The way she looked. She was so surprised, and then she was nothing.”
“That wasn’t your fault,” I say to him. “People started attacking us without warning. How were we supposed to be prepared for that?”
“I was prepared for that,” he says, shaking his head. “Essentia magicians can turn bad so easily. That is what happens when you give people the kind of power that we have; it makes it so easy for people to give in to that terrible part of themselves. I have been warned so many times. I even started to guard the door; I understood why Dovik didn’t want anyone following us. Then, I let my guard down, and Samissa died because of that. I am the Guardian, I am supposed to keep everyone alive.”
It only strikes me then why Dovik had us mislead whomever would be behind us by opening all the doors in the chamber before the kitchen. I had thought that he wanted to trick people into going the wrong way to slow them down in the dungeon. Had he really been trying to protect us from murderous magicians?
“You saved Adrius,” I say, motioning towards the man. “Without your healing, I don’t think that he would have survived those wounds.”
“Maybe.”
“No maybe,” I say. “You are a good man, Macille. You are strong and kind. Don’t blame yourself because other people were murderous assholes. They will get what’s coming to them.”
Macille offers me a sad smile and shakes his head. “Thanks.” He falls into silence again, and I let him keep it. His words come again after a few more minutes of watching Dovik try to solve the puzzle. “I just can’t stop seeing it. She was gone so fast.”
I rub the big man’s arm, trying to give him even a little bit of comfort. “Was she the first person you saw die?”
“Yes. Well, no.” He looks at me, and I can see the sadness deep in his eyes. “I saw you die so many times, fighting the Desert Spearman.” His words catch me so off-guard that I forget to breathe. “In the real world, it was Dovik’s cousin. Samissa was different though. I actually spoke to her, I liked her. It was just so fast, a single instant and she was gone.”
Nodding, I see it happen in my head. Death is so fast here, life snuffed out in a single moment. She was a nice girl; I wish I knew more about her. My mind drifts back to the first person that I ever saw pass, my grandpa. He died in his sleep, the sickness that took him gentler than most. When I think about him, I can still hear the last shuddering breath he ever took, the way that it barely disturbed the dust floating through the sunlight spilling in from the window. That isn’t what Macille needs to hear from me though.
“The first person I ever saw die was a girl I didn’t even know,” I say. My mind takes me back to just a few months ago, back to the Green Mountain. “Kapin found her in the woods. This was during the competition on the Green Mountain. Something had stung her, and you could see the poison running through her. Bali tried to heal her, but she couldn’t cure whatever had been done. That girl suffered for a long time until she finally succumbed. I wouldn’t want that for anyone. We never even found what stung her.”
“Is there even a good way to go?” Macille asks me.
I don’t have an answer for him. This time, the silence that falls over us is too heavy to dispel with idle chatter. After some time, I find myself leaning against the big man, and he doesn’t seem to mind. I take what comfort I can from that. Without the fighting and the monsters to keep me busy, I find my own mind returning to the kitchen, and I hate myself for it. We watch Dovik work, content to stay like this for now.