My awareness bloomed. Maybe from the bonus points of Alertness or maybe I was tapping into Princess’s senses somehow, even after she broke off contact. Maybe I was--

REWARD: Webtouched

Okay, so maybe I was webtouched. It felt like those Spidey Senses I’d dreamed about. I couldn’t exactly see behind myself, but that didn’t matter. I could feel the space in a sphere around myself, all at once, even in my blind spots, like the tentative touch of a fly on a web.

And I knew where to move.

My back was to Chirotry as two of its carapace-whips lashed at me.

Without looking, I reached my left arm behind me. I bamfed my hatchet from my domain in mid-motion and blocked both whips at once, while spinning to attack.

The third whip hit me but I’d expected that. I traded a slashing blow across my side for a deep blood-splattered chop into the creature’s face.

I took another nasty thump, and delivered another cleaving wound.

Chirotry squealed and reared backward, lashing in what looked like panic with four front legs.

One caught me in the now-healed chest but I chopped through a shifting chunk of muscle and sliced another leg free of Chirotry’s body. Blood and gore splattered the ground and the shapeshifter definitely panicked.

A barrage of limbs and tentacles erupted at me. Fleshy clubs and jointed spears swung and jabbed, keeping me backed against the tomb. Two hammered at me while I parried and blocked the rest, relying on my new ‘webtouch’ sense to intercept them while--

“It sacrificed its legs for more striking limbs.” Princess’s whisper sounded weaker than ever. “For one final assault. It is immobile now.”

“How do you know?” I asked, dodging a jaw-tipped tendril.

“I was summoned here. To help. While the land shattered. Into islands. The Sundering. And the ocean filled with mana. And the Plagues burned to kill every living ...”

“Princess?” I prompted, when she trailed off.

“The creatures here, in the temple. Are echoes of myself. After I was summoned. And abandoned. Here. I weakened and shrank. My magic bled from me and ...” Her voice grew fainter as I chopped at the multi-limbed horror in front of me. ”Goodbye, Alex, and fare thee well.”

“What do you mean, goodbye?” I said, but I felt her fade in my mind.

Her gifts didn’t fade, though. My increased alertness and speed helped me remain standing under Chirotry’s furious assault.

Well, plus the fact that I’d been fully healed while it was still bleeding.

And the fact that my skin was as hard as reinforced fiberglass now.

And I knew how to use my hatchets .

Oh, and I was goddam gemmed, so when Princess healed me, she’d also renewed my mana.

When four jabbing spikes broke through my defenses, I turned to smoke. I wafted myself upward, above the nightmare knot of limbs and mandibles. Below me, Chirotry looked like Cthulhu’s pet cockroach, a jumble of barbed tentacles and drooling maws. The size of a bull now, a mutant bull with tentacles.

I returned to my body holding one hatchet in a two-handed grip.

Before I landed on Chirotry’s back, I swung with every ounce of strength. My blade bit deep through the layers of chitin and scales and shattered something that felt like a spine.

An agonized squeal almost deafened me, like a hundred slaughtered pigs. Thick quills jutted upward to impale me, so I turned to smoke again as Chirotry spun in place, expecting me to attack from behind.

Instead I moved to where I’d started, right beside the tomb, and lunged forward, summoning my second hatchet. I hacked into the bleeding wounds at the shape-changer’s neck. Red-green blood sprayed everywhere as mouth-tentacles lashed at me and cudgel-arms slammed.

My health dipped and dipped again but I kept slashing, deeper and deeper, carving into that fucker like a miner digging into a seam of gold. Pain flared in my legs and chest yet I didn’t stop, I didn’t slow. Fluids splashed my neck and chitinous chunks smeared my destroyed jacket and I chopped and chopped--until, in a single moment, Chirotry sagged into a mound of undifferentiated flesh.

I kept hacking until a notification appeared:

Loot corpse?

“Ha,” I said, finally confident that it was dead. “Ha! Eat hatchet you shape-shifting fuck.”

Loot corpse?

“Sure, as long as I don’t have to butcher this thing.”

TREASURE! 6 pearl beads.

“Damn,” I muttered, feeling my wounds more painfully now that my adrenaline was fading.

Health: 22/53

“Okay, Princess.” I exhaled, and my heart settled a little. “We did it. We did it. Now, what were you saying about raisins and echoes?”

She didn’t respond.

“Princess?”

At her silence, I thought back to our conversation, which I hadn’t paid much attention to, on account of a horror-show monstrosity bearing down on me. And when I thought back, I realized she’d said she’d shrivel. She said goodbye. She’d asked to stay attached to me and I’d snarled ‘let me go!’

Of course, I’d had to tell her to release me; I couldn’t fight Chirotry with one hand stuck in a tomb.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

Still, I ... apparently I’d abandoned her. So I turned from the mound of dead flesh and frowned at the tomb with the alcove, now ten feet behind me. It was Princess’s tomb, but it wasn’t her tomb tomb. She wasn’t dead. I still felt a faint thread of connection between us. The faintest thread, like a ... cobweb. So she wasn’t dead, she was just ... what? Trapped in suspended animation in there? Shrinking to normal-spider-size after having been as a big as a horse or whatever? Losing her magic, forgetting her name ...

I took a step toward her, and a breeze rustled the branches of the charred black trees. At the noise, I froze in place and stared into the orange-tinted gloom.

SUCCESS: You cleared the infestation in the tombyard of the Temple of the Lingering Ones, Those Who Billow, the Forgotten Forms of Formless Flames.

REWARD: Gain major expoi and substantial strength

FAIURE: You abandoned the princess. No ally or blessing for you.

Big News! Level Up!

Big News! Level Up Again

“I didn’t save her yet,” I grumbled. “She’s like ten feet away. What’s the rush? You keep--“

QUEST: Leave the tombyard before the exit closes in a funnel of embers, burying you forever with the cremated dead.

REWARD: A future.

FAILURE: The whole ‘entombed forever with the ashes of the dead’ thing.

“Oh,” I said. “That’s the rush.”

The breeze strengthened, and the embers on the tombs around me rose into the air. Embers and ash and charred bones. A whirlwind of sparks and--and cremains--started to swirl between the stones. The smoke of a hundred charred priests caught in my hair and my scruffy beard.

The branches of the black trees crumbled slowly into ash, which drifted into the whirlwind. I looked toward the Hole but couldn’t see much--so I rushed toward the little tomb. ‘You abandoned the princess?’ Fuck you, I abandoned the princess. Maybe I wasn’t brave, maybe I wasn’t tough, but I didn’t walk away from people who helped me, not even if they were weird-ass spiders.

By the time I reached the fist-sized hole window into the tomb, the whirlwind was whipping behind me. At least the light was stronger, with a hurricane of embers in the air. I could see Princess in the middle of the floor, looking ... dead. She lay toppled on her jeweled side with her legs curled and her mouth open like a corpse, her jaws still glinting with venom.

She wasn’t dead, though.

The faintest trace of her still lingered in my mind.

So I shoved my arm into the tomb, trying to reach her. I’d reached her easily before, but she’d fallen in the wrong direction, and tumbled down a sort of dollhouse-sized dais. She was a handspan from my fingers. I considered popping her into my domain, but I didn’t know if that was safe. For all I knew, my domain was an airless vacuum, or full of toxic domain-gas.

So I stretched. The orange glowing whirlwind spun behind me. I stretched more. Bones rattled against each other and cracked against the tombs.

I still couldn’t reach her but I wouldn’t goddamn leave her, so I said, “Fuck it.”

Then I turned to smoke. I poured myself into the tomb and returned to my body, hunched awkwardly, crammed inside, trying not to squash Princess. The position would’ve been painful enough without bleeding from a dozen cuts.

I was running out of time. I was running out of mana. I needed to act fast. I winced in discomfort and looked down at the little spider. Well, not so little compared to Earth spiders. Like a good-sized tarantula, but more colorful.

Then I thought back to what she’d told me. The last thing she’d told me: I hope you won’t mind if I keep my fangs in you--

“Fine,” I said.

I lifted her gently, afraid that I’d break her fragile body. I moved her fangs into position, against the two puncture marks she’d already made in my wrist.

Then I shoved them home.

That time, I barely felt the pain. That time, her fangs really did just sting... but she didn’t react. Which, shit. So much for my clever plan. Still, there was no time to wait for her to wake up--if she ever did. I needed to keep her with me and beat ass to the Hole.

I was about to turn into smoke when Princess twitched on my wrist.

Then she changed shape.

Just like Chirotry.

She unraveled into a long braid, thinning and stretching, her body unravelling to both sides of her head. In a moment, she was anchored to me by her fangs alone. Then her thin snake-body encircled my wrist and joined together both ends, looking like ... like a bracelet made of beetle wings.

Like I was wearing a jeweled cord.

She clamped fully around my wrist and--

SUCCESS: You saved the princess, you stubborn ass!

REWARD: Yes.

HOWEVER: You still need to escape the tombyard. Why are you even reading this? Go! Are you trying to die, you m--

I turned into smoke and poured from the tomb, with Princess still wrapped around my wrist.

The whirlwind of smoke and embers caught my gaseous form and spun me halfway across the underground chamber. That should’ve disoriented me, but my webtouched senses returned tenfold after being attached to Princess. I tracked my position easily. I waited as my mana trickled toward zero until with a single point left, I turned solid.

The whirlwind threw me toward the Hole.

Perfect spider-timing!

However--extremely imperfect spider-landing. I hit the ground hard enough that the impact knocked the wind out of me, and probably a few health points, too. I staggered to my feet with the wind lashing at my hair and the tatters of my leggings and jacket. I lurched toward the Hole...

Princess whispered, from her place around my wrist.

“What’s a little poison between friends?”

she whispered again.

Except she wasn’t really whispering. Maybe she hadn’t been really speaking aloud earlier, I didn’t know. She’d been pretty confident that nobody else could hear her. But now? Now I heard her from the inside. Which would’ve freaked me out if I hadn’t already exhausted my ability to lose my shit.

“Huh?” I said, in my clever way.

I pushed through the gale, toward the Hole. “In that case, uh, sweet dreams?”

“Yeah, well you saved me too so--“

I stopped speaking when the whirlwind of dying embers and bone shards funneled suddenly toward the Hole, twenty feet in front of me. It was like a tornado aiming at the exit. Except instead of tearing buildings apart and tossing cows around like a normal tornado, this tornado put things together.

Specifically, it put together a million bits of skeleton and ash that took shape in front of the Hole. Joining together to form a giant golem of bone and smoke and embers.

Let me repeat: A giant golem of bone and smoke and embers.

INTUIT: The Shade of a Hundred Dead Priests, Emerald Tier.

“Or fucking that,” I muttered.

So I blipped my hatchets into my hands from my domain. Because what else was I supposed to do? Either I got through the Hole or we died in the tombyard.

I said, though that time I didn’t talk to her aloud.

I spoke to her in my mind. Well, if you’ve got a magical talking spider’s fangs in you, a little thing like cross-species telepathy doesn’t surprise you.

she said, because of course she’d heard me.

she said.

“Some ally,” I grumbled, then took a step forward.

The shade didn’t move. It simply stood there, fifteen feet tall, watching me with shadowy eyes as it blocked the Hole. The creature grew brighter and hotter as more embers coalesced and thickened its glowing fiery body. I didn’t care what Intuit told me, that thing didn’t look a wispy-type ‘shade.’ It looked as solid as a tank, and about as friendly.

I took a steadying breath, and the tombyard cavern started collapsing behind me.

The back wall tumbled into an avalanche ... of smoke. Then the side walls started falling, too, and turning into black vapor. Stone boulders cracked and tumbled, then turned to smoke when they hit the ground. A quarter of the cavern was gone in a handful of heartbeats.

I took another step forward, then another.

The shade still didn’t move. It stood as still as a statue. Maybe it was a statue? Or an unawakened shade, still inactive or incomplete? Maybe.

I checked my mana: one point.

So no turning to vapor for me. No drifting past. Still, that didn’t mean I needed to fight. I’d just sneak around Mr. Tall, Dark, and Ashy. If it couldn’t move, there wasn’t a problem.

I held my hatchets defensively high, just in case, as I slunk to one side of the looming, ember-glimmering figure. I caught sight of the Hole behind it. Fifteen feet away. I exhaled and didn’t pay any attention to the cavern collapsing behind me.

I focused on the Hole.

I took two more silent steps ... and the shade raised a massive palm at me. Except not ‘raised,’ really: the palm just appeared in front of me, like it’d been there all along. Or like that’s how fast that thing moved.

I froze.

“We will blast you,” the shade said, in a voice like a wildfire. “By blasting--“

I didn’t wait for the rest of the threat: I chopped both hatchets into the ember-y fuck’s palm and dove past--

And found myself hovering in the air in front of the shade.

Just hovering there, five feet above the ground. As if I was caught in a tractor beam between the collapsing cavern and the giant demon-shade.

Which seemed not to even notice the hatchets buried in its palm.

“We will bless you,” the shade repeated. “By blessing your weapons.”