The floating pyramid stood out like a bad omen in the sky as we gathered around its base. I hefted my sword and counted my grenades, only one this time in case of emergency. I felt more or less ready to fight the alpha meatcube, which I could vaguely see in the pyramid’s shadow. Unfortunately, I was spared the indignity of embarrassment, an altogether worse fate approaching me at the speed of a train with broken brakes.
“Change of plan,” Carlyn said, her expression full of a laid-back ease that set my nerves on edge for some reason. “Mairenn leads the charge this time.”
I stared at the other woman in silent shock. “Carlyn, that’s-” Borgen began, eyes practically bulging, but she cut him off.
“Don’t worry, I’ll go with her. I won’t let anything happen to our little hero. I just think a bit more experience would do her some good is all.”
Borgen gave his sister a hard look but relented. “Fine. If those are your orders then those are your orders. We’ll wait for your signal.” He folded his arms, avoiding my increasingly frantic stare.
“Good,” Carlyn continued. “Now, let's get going, my little hero. No time to waste.” She placed a firm but gentle grip on my shoulder and began guiding me forward into the shadow of the pyramid.
“Is this a good idea?” I ask, trying to shrug away from her grip to no avail. It was terrifying, her ability to keep a hold of me so firmly and gently at the same time.
“Trust me,” she says simply, and as the words left her lips I realized that I had no choice. I watched the giant meatcube ambling near the center of the shadowed plane of dirt, using its one massive arm to pull itself forward, all seven of the thing’s joints bending at unnatural angles. The smell of decay hung in the air around us, seeping past Carlyn’s lingering perfume spell and clinging to us like a fresh layer of grime. The earth began to rumble beneath us and I heard the tell-tale sounds of undead clawing their way to the surface.
Carlyn must have sensed my tension because she squeezed my shoulder in what might have been reassurance and said, “relax. I doubt any of the zombies here will prove any deadlier than the ones from last night. You’ve got this, and if you don’t I’ll just kill them all for you anyway.”
“Sure,” I said, nodding agreeably as my stomach began to do flips. “I’m not worried, not in the slightest.”
“That’s the spirit,” she said with a grin, slapping my back. The sudden smack sent me stumbling forward a handful of steps and the other woman chuckled to herself. I half turned to snap at her and ask what the fuck she thought she was doing, when suddenly the giant meatcube, only a few yards away, began to twitch as if the whole of its fleshy cube form had just been hit with a jolt of electricity. Its one massive limb suddenly hit the ground in a spray of dirt, and the next moment the meatcube was sailing through the air in a blur of motion, its circular maw of gnashing teeth aimed right for me.
I ducked and rolled away, reflexively falling into a series of breathing techniques Nika had taught me for combat. The ground shook as the thing impacted the spot I’d been, spraying me with wet dirt and sending me stumbling back. Without any more time to waste, I drew my sword from my storage and charged the monster while it was still stunned by its landing, letting out a wild battlecry, reflexively activating my taunt skill somehow and its one big eye glowed a sinister red. My battle cry turned into something more like a scream as I watched the thing's long arm, equipped with nearly a dozen clawed fingers the length of my sword’s blade, reach toward me with an unnerving spread. Its seven or so criss-cross joints cracked and popped sickeningly with the motion, oozing some sort of foul greenish puss that smelled much like earwax tastes.
For a moment I was trapped in the strange world of shock, wondering how the spindly appendage could support itself, then as it drew nearer my only thoughts became, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, it's going to fucking kill me. The bladed fingers dropped like a blacksmith's hammer against my swiftly upraised sword, making every joint from my arms to my knees pop from the sheer pressure of the strike. The force was so great it crushed the soil beneath me, my boots burying themselves nearly four inches into the dirt with the impact. It was all I could do to keep standing beneath the strike as I brought my offhand up to brace against the flat of the blade and widened my stance.
Pushing against the massive amount of weight above me I let out a wild cry, but to no avail, as the thing continued to push me down deeper and deeper into the ground as visions of death blinded my mind’s eye. Just as the wet earth reached above my ankles a ball of black flame splashed against the space between the hand’s forefinger and thumb. The meatcube let out a hissing roar and drew away the boney arm, the whole monster rolling away with two wet thuds against the ground.
Carlyn was giving me a thumbs up from where she stood, just out of the way, fending off a handful of undead who’d finally broken free from the dirt around us. I idly wondered if I’d have to start worrying about zombies too, but the meatcube didn’t give me enough of a reprieve to really get too concerned.
I barely caught sight of the clump of dirt the size of Borgen’s full agondlon form hurtling towards me in time to get out of its way. I opted to just run toward the alpha instead of away from it to avoid the violent spray of dirt that was likely to follow the impact. What? You thought all of Jones’ lessons on the nature of reality went over my head, didn’t you? Well, I'm just a dumbass, not an idiot, so I did manage to learn at least a couple of useful things, hence the above logical action.
The ground shook once more, but I managed to keep myself steady, sword raised and ready to strike as I charged straight toward the hulking monster. “The diamond is unbreakable. The river cannot be contained,” I recited, felling the spells fill me with power as the thing’s oversized arm flew towards me again, fingers poised to slice me into half a dozen little pieces, but at the last moment, I threw myself into the air, catching the strike with the flat of my sword and using the energy and momentum to fling myself towards the meatcube, the tip of my blade aimed right for the middle of its one giant eye.
My aim proved true and I landed with a satisfying, but also grossly wet, thump atop the beast as my sword buried itself to the hilt in the meatcube’s eye. I felt a moment of pure elation before I realized that my weapon was now completely stuck in the alpha monster. I was incapable of budging it even an inch. Shit.
With the power of pain and rage, the monster’s arm came at me again, twice as fast as before. I had a second to think, oh fuck, before its palm slammed into me with crushing power, sending me flying like a bullet from a gun to crash into the ground with a thundering bang. Slowly, I pried myself from the ground on wobbling legs, compacted earth falling from me in clumps. I managed to rise halfway and take one faltering step before the power of gravity compelled my face to kiss the now-muddy dirt. Everything hurt, it was as if I’d never known anything but pain, and it was all I could manage just to keep clinging to existence while death toyed with my consciousness.
In the hazy of fading awareness, I could have sworn I saw my father’s face appear above me, a bit more haggard and rough than I’d recalled him being, but still him. A moment later he was gone, vanishing behind a wall of black. Cold crept in from the fringes of my awareness, starting in my hands and feet and slowly climbing up my limbs. My breathing became ragged and I focused on just sucking air in and out, in and out, shadows encroached further into the corners of my vision. Again, In and out. My thundering pulse slowed in my ears. In and out. Síle’s smiling face welcomed me home. Then, nothing. Commingled darkness and light subsumed me in their eternal embrace for all of a moment, a moment that stretched to infinity and back again and again and again and-
The smell of wet grass and dirt filled my nose again as I drew another long ragged breath of air, then coughed up something thick and viscous in a half-wild spluttering, rolling onto my side in time to splatter reddish-black bile across the ground. My stomach heaved as I shook myself from the torpor of the moment and pushed myself up to my elbows. More vile black and red vomit sprayed out from my mouth the next instant, creating a small frothy puddle between my quivering hands. I retched twice more before simply slumping to the side with a small splash and staring up at the underside of the big pyramid above with an unfocused gaze.
Stolen story; please report.
“You still holding on there, little hero?” Carlyn’s voice said from just outside my line of sight.
I closed my eyes against the hot pain in my skull and breathed heavily for several seconds as I did my best to stabilize my breathing again. “Am I alive?” I asked with a groan, eliciting a chuckle from the other woman.
“You ready to get back into the thick of it?” She asked, evidently stepping forward as her face appeared to loom over mine, her usual grin stretched across her face.
“One more minute,” I said, then felt another wave of agony wash over me before I turned and hurled out more of that terrible fluid from my mouth.
Carlyn made a mildly disgusted expression. “You’re lucky I like you,” she said, then uncorked a healing potion and brought it to my mouth. Before I could refuse she was pouring it down my throat. I choked and gagged, but managed to swallow most of it, feeling the magic liquid going to work repairing my insides.
A few moments later I Let out a heavy breath and rolled to the side away from my bloody bile, pushing back up to my feet. Carlyn handed me my sword a moment later with a grin still playing on her lips. I glanced around the battlefield to locate the giant meatcube, finding the others already engaging the monster with what I now knew was barely half their true strength, only for my eyes to catch on something disquietingly familiar a few feet away. It was a mangled body, or more specifically the coat the body wore, faintly flickering embers of black flame clingily weakly to the thick cloth.
Rushing forward, I dropped to my knees beside the corpse, ignoring Carlyn’s confused protests, my hands already rummaging around the coat I knew far too well, a coat I hadn’t seen in years. I withdrew a small notebook and a thin card from one of the coat’s remaining pockets, eyes watering as I read the name written in bold text on the card’s face. Jack Crowe. Somehow, it was my father, his body destroyed to the point that you could barely even tell that he’d been human.
“How,” I asked weekly, and felt Carlyn’s hand land gently on my shoulder. I shrugged out of her touch as kindly as I could manage, but I caught the flicker of pain that flashed across the other woman’s features and felt a faint hint of regret.
“You knew them?” She asked, her voice soft, soothing as if talking to a child. I nodded and showed her the name on his card. “Huh,” she said, almost inquisitively. “When the dungeon reanimated him it must have incorporated his body into itself. It's not unlikely that he exists like this in other instances of the dungeon.”
My heart ached at that thought, but I realized it was useless to even try and think of a way to free him from the dungeon’s grip. I was but a silly little human girl who couldn’t even begin to understand how the dungeon worked, there was no hope for it. Aware of how inappropriate it was for me to be sitting here, once more mourning a man who died years ago, I opened his journal and began to read. Thankfully, Carlyn didn’t protest. She just stood by my side, making sure nothing came near me. We both knew the others could handle that thing perfectly fine on their own, and I’d already hurt the alpha so it wasn’t like I actually needed to be in the fight anymore.
I experienced snapshots of his days in the dungeon from his own experience, laughing and crying as the words drew up memories and a picture unfolded in my mind. He’d been an experienced adventurer, well-regarded for his skills as a solo dungeon diver. He’d been smart, way smarter than I’d been on my first dive, only tackling what he knew he could manage before leaving. The last dive had begun like all his others had, slow, methodical, terrifying in places, rewarding in others. It wasn’t until he reached the second floor that he began to run into trouble.
It was his first time tackling it. His first night he was attacked by only a handful of undead, but he sustained some sort of injury that he couldn’t heal. He should have come back after that, crushed his return token, and just taken the loss, but, like me, he’d decided that he could keep going. The last entry mentioned the floating pyramid, his excitement over having found the second floor’s alpha so quickly, and his overconfidence.
I closed the book and stowed both it and the card in my storage ring, wiping the tears from my eyes before getting to my feet and turning to watch the others fight the alpha, mind full of too many emotions that I didn’t want to deal with.
I watched as George shifted from his usual half-man half-bear form into a colossal centipede monster the size of Síle’s family’s tavern. I was entranced by the sort of ephemeral beauty in the way he moved, a river of carapace and destruction weaving around the alpha in difficult-to-follow patterns. Nika rode atop his back with her ever-changing weapon slashing at both the meatcube and the undead, managing to keep most of the latter away. Together, the couple seemed almost unstoppable.
Borgen and Jones stood a bit away from the main fight, hurling arrows and spells into the mix with frightening accuracy. Almost every shot Borgen let loose from his bow sent faint thunderous tremors through the air, thin gouts of blood and chunks of flesh flying off the alpha’s body with every well-placed arrow.
Only a few minutes after the fight started, the undead were dispatched, and the meatcube was laying in two pieces on the ground, bisected by Nika’s odd weapon. I stared on at the remnants of controlled destruction all around, still managing to feel some sense of awe from it all despite the much more impressive display they’d shown last night.
“Not over yet,” Carlyn said as we neared and the others all fell into a pattern they’d clearly practiced time and time again. I moved to the back of the formation, just doing my best to stay out of the way. At this point, it was all I could really do. I was likely just a liability here.
Beyond the party, the bisected remains of the giant meat cube began to twitch violently. The thing’s one long, multi-jointed arm curled up around its half of the body, then with one quick motion, lifted the other half, and pressed the two pieces together until the bisecting line glowed a malevolent red-orange and smoke rose up from the monster to settle along the underside of the floating pyramid.
“Loose!” Carlyn shouted, black flames leaping from her fingertips as Borgen released an arrow about as tall as myself. Borgen’s arrow split as it flew, then split again and again and again until nearly four dozen smaller arrows split the air towards the malicious cube of flesh, half of Carlyn’s flames washing over the projectiles and igniting them.
The alpha simply swatted most of the physical projectiles from the air with a casual swipe of its too boney hand, but the few that landed glowed with a malevolent intensity. Flames danced around its warding limb, searing black lines across the cube’s faces as whatever the agondlon sibling had done started to take effect. Its fleshy surface rippled like a bucket of jelly being slapped and the hand began flailing about wildly.
George and Nika charged forward, the small quiet woman’s ever-changing weapon lashing out in front of the pair before centipede Geroge crashed into the monster, crawling all over it, wrapping his body around the meatcube and clamping his mandibles around its one boney limb, pinning the monster to the ground.
Jones threw a myriad of healing and reinforcing spells toward the two with pinpoint precision, somehow managing to avoid hitting the still-struggling mass of flesh. Borgen continued to launch arrow after arrow at the monster as Carlyn readied more spells, and I just stood there behind them, questioning what the point of my involvement even was.
A moment later dark lines of flame sprung from the exposed sections of the monster’s flesh, searing deep gouging tunnels through the monster’s body, leaving melted fat and muscle in the spell’s wake that poured out and puddled around the alpha in a foul-smelling pool. The monster shuddered once more, then went limp beneath the gnashing legs of centipede Geroge and the slashing attacks from Nika.
As the party confirmed the kill and began setting up to break the thing down, I retrieved my sword and sighed as I wiped the blade clean of gore with the sleeve of my still torn shirt, staring at the now sagging corpse of the monster with a growing sense of futility building in my chest.
A hand slapped against my back, sending me staggering forward before they caught me. “You did good,” Carlyn said, and I glanced up to find her usual smiling face looking down at me with something nearly patronizing playing in her eyes.
“Sure,” I said shrugging out of her grip and averting my gaze.
“Is something wrong,” she asked, and I could hear the frown in her words.
I stood silently for a moment, then, despite everything, let some of my frustration out. “Why?” I asked, glaring up at the taller woman. “What’s the point of keeping me around when you’re all so strong that I’m basically useless.”
“Because you’re fun,” Carlyn replied immediately, her smile returning to her face. “And, you’ve got rare potential. I’m certain once we finish this job and meet the benefactor they’ll agree. Besides, I like you.”
“And what is ‘the job?’ Who exactly is your benefactor?” I asked, still frowning at the other woman, uncertain if I wanted her to admit the truth to me.
“You’ll see,” Carlyn said, then moved past me, pausing to pat my shoulder. “Don’t worry. You’re one of us now, and we take care of our own.”
I gave her a weak smile that seemed to mollify the other woman, doing my best to hide the fear knotting up painfully like a spear through the heart. Unfortunately, it wasn’t me I was afraid for.
----------------------------------------
Anticipation fills us as we watch our quarry draw near. Not long now, we tell ourselves, watching, waiting, toying with the threads of fate. Soon it will be ours, but the time for careful action comes and so we prepare. We shoo away our pets, weaken walls, and reshape ourselves again and again, laying a trap and setting the bait.
We tremble, checking our plans again and again, but the tapestry is undeniable. The only thing we can do is wait, but it hurts like nothing has hurt us before, the longing inside us stretched to its limits, feeling as if it might tear away something vital. Not long, we tell ourself, not long. And so we wait for the fated end to begin.