Amara

- Catacombs of Bhashera, LVL 2 -

After burning a dozen more packs of scarabs, she was feeling the pain of constant exertion begin to gnaw away at her bones.

'Tis the penalty of a low strength skill, the voice said (she really wished mom would stop talking for a minute).

"Whatever," Amara replied as she launched another fireball toward a rusted urn that exploded with the skittering, tomb-crawling insects.

She'd cleared maybe five more chambers since she'd approached what mom called the 'Second Level' of the dungeon. The paths now were wider than before, and each individual room held urns that could be easily destroyed to reveal either treasure or trash. She'd picked up a few odds and ends which she barely looked at - rusty weapons, shiny rocks, pieces of parchment written by other explorers who had died here decades ago. What use did she have for their meandering thoughts now?

The items she did make use of were her prizes from the old bag of mummified bones she'd vanquished upstairs. It turned out the Arcanist's Elixyr was a kind of potion, and when she uncorked and drank from its slimy blue contents, she found her Glance energies were restored:

Glance: +10

Glance: 20/40

Not quite enough for a full recharge, but enough to get her through.

She began to notice a pattern as she traversed the sandstone corridors of this place: at every new section of the labyrinth, there were a series of small grooves set into the walls in sections where the odd hieroglyphics ended abruptly. She tried this Appraisal thing on them, but it was practically useless: it was a wall. It was old.

Great.

The other thing she was starting to notice was that there was a kind of consistency to the painted markings on this level. Or, at least, they resembled shapes she could comprehend.

In one room, she'd ransacked a few overturned urns and suddenly become fascinated by an intricate mural painted on the chamber wall. She held her firelight up to investigate and saw five shapes carved into the wall: warriors, from the looks of them, holding spears, clubs, maces, and various other spikey things. Each of them wore crudely depicted sets of what looked like chainmail and were currently engaged in an act of prayer. She'd seen enough bowed heads and dumb, sad-looking faces in the Amaratian churches to know what prayer looked like. But these guys were at least prostrating themselves around something that deserved a little worship: they were all arranged around a pit of raging fire.

Then she fixed on the details of their sharp, pointed ears and long noses and realized that this was no collection of human warriors.

"Canis," she scoffed. "Ew."

Not a dog fan, dear?

"They're sloppy and smelly and shit everywhere," she replied. "What's there to like?"

She said this, but the images of these Canis warriors tailed her shadow throughout her journey, watching her as she blazed a crimson path through each new corridor with their diamond eyes.

When she'd finally decimated enough scarabs to have exhausted their usefulness to her as an EXP source, she began to think that this temple's winding corridors were playing tricks on her.

"I've been here!" she shouted to emptied rooms full of shattered urns and scorched walls, awakening more scarabs in the process, which she dispatched with a flick of her wrist.

She found the same problem again and again - on each path she took, she saw paintings she'd already passed by and rooms she'd already cleared, or at least, she thought she'd cleared them. In fact, a few of them seemed to bare more of the little pests than she'd remembered.

That's exactly what they were becoming, she thought with a dry grimace: Pests.

Maybe that's the whole point, her mother cautioned her.

She stopped in the middle of a cross-section of cracked brimstone walls.

"Huh?"

The rules here are different from the world above, dear. Here, creatures are birthed from a near-infinite source of creation: the Glance itself. Every insect you battle is nary an individual life but a part of a greater whole. A hive system that can replenish itself just as quickly as you can kill them.

She considered this, stopping on the precipice of yet another familiar-looking chamber.

And now they're nothing but a hindrance to me.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Exactly, her mother confirmed. Check your reserves.

She did, and she cursed herself for her stupidity:

Glance: 3/40

They were bleeding her dry.

"Little bastards!" she shouted at the dog-men on the walls. Their stares now seemed to her like jovial displays of laughter among brothers who were playing a vicious prank on their errant, naive sister.

The comparison was enough to boil her blood, and without thinking, she struck at the wall beside her.

"Shit!"

HP: -2

Her hand stung. Throbbed. She felt even more like a moron.

Careful dear, her mother counseled. Your spirit is strong, but your flesh is weak.

"You're right, Mom," she begrudgingly admitted. "But I'm no fool."

She said this as she watched the cracks on the great mural lengthen and break more of the ruined sandstone. Now, new cracks were forming before her eyes, and if her feeble, pathetic little punch could do that...then her true source of strength could tear this thing to the ground.

But she stepped back first. This time, she'd make sure she wasn't walking into some ancient trap:

Appraisal: success

Object: Brimstone (Ruinous)

WK: PYRO, ERTH, BLDG

She downed another Arcanist Elyxir and cracked her fingers, flexing them quickly, feeling the power trickle through both her arms.

Dear? the voice asked.

"I'm gonna try something."

...Dear, I...

Glance channel: Fireball

She focused the energy through both her hands and watched her globe of flame shoot towards the wall and break it apart with a crashing cacophony of bricks and ancient markings. The rest of the walls' inner casing crumbled slowly and revealed a passage covered in a plume of dirty ash.

"Who needs strength when I've got exploding palms?" she said, wiping the wisps of smoke from her sight. She resumed her steady pace as she climbed over the fallen stones and brought up her firelight.

Amara, I only want to urge you to be more cautious. You need to observe your surroundings with more...humility.

"I'm thinking about my surroundings, ain't I?" She challenged. "I used the Appraisal thing to see the weakness in the wall."

But you gave little thought to its structural integrity, dear. The wall could have easily colla-

"Well, it didn't."

You said the same thing about your near-death experience.

She started walking faster into the emerging tomb, seeing nothing but bare orange brickwork covered in dust - as though another soul had not traversed this hallway since the construction of this ugly place.

"You weren't there to help me that time."

When I am here, you must listen.

"But you keep speaking in riddles!" she shouted into the expanse of darkness that stretched out in front of her. "You told me to push forward and light up more of the fire in me. Now you're telling me to slow down. Why should I stop now when I've already come this far through my power and nothing else!"

Because if you don't, things like this will happen more often.

She heard the click underfoot as her mother delivered her final word. Then, the grooves set in these walls started making noises too - a series of mechanical ticks like clockwork turning, awakening systems that had been dormant for ages.

She ducked just in time for the first crossbow bolt to just slice past the top of her fringe, and the air above her was filled with the chorus of flying projectiles.

"What?" she yelled over the din.

A trap, dear.

She looked beneath her knees and witnessed the loose piece of stonework that had come loose as she'd stepped on it. The exact same kind of mechanism that had trapped her with the reanimated ash-corpse above.

She kicked at the thing and felt only another pang of pain radiate up her leg. The bolts above continued their unending flight path - the holes shooting them with more speed than any trained marksman could.

Her flickering flamelight revealed the end of this corridor in sight - there was a small hole that looked like it opened into a chute, similar to how she entered the temple from above.

She began to crawl, again cursing her own stupidity. And with her feeling of embarrassment came more rage filling her entire body.

Amara, her mother's voice whispered inside her, dim and faint over the flight of the bolts above. Anger will only take you so far. You must remember-

"-to save my strength, got it!" she yelled, and threw herself out of the corridor and down the small chute in a little ball, her hair trailing after her.

Once again, a spectral force hiding in the air ensured that her landing was soft. She stood now in a larger chamber than the others she'd seen in the temple. Here, the same azure braziers as that which she'd seen above were blazing at every corner, bathing the chamber in their otherworldly glow. But this time, new images dominated the tomb.

She brought her little light up to see them. If anything, it distracted her from mom's silly worrying. She didn't need to hear anyone worry about her anymore. She wouldn't hear it.

The paintings and frescoes down here were shinier and clearly more recently crafted than those on the rest of the temple's floors. She drew her hands over a few of them, enjoying the smooth, soft feel of their surfaces. The newness must mean something, and that was perhaps indicated by the actual depictions in these particular works: the dog-men not at prayer or laughing together in the spirit of warrior-brotherhood, but facing foes with their spears and axes. It looked like they were fighting against living shadows - bipedal, numerous, and apparently, formidable. In several places, the dog men were shown to be punctured with arrows or hacked to pieces by hulking men with broadswords. Many of them, though, shared the same cause of death - being stabbed in the back by small, nimble foes with hoods and knives that glinted against the shadows of the tomb.

"What...is this?" she asked.

Her mother gave her her answer.

War, Amara. War.

She followed the intricate depictions of bloodshed with mute fascination, her fingers lingering on the specks of blood trailing from the little stick bodies of the dogs.

"Who's war?" she whispered. She found her voice was swallowed by the room.

Her mother's response, however, was crystal clear.

Yours.

The braziers in the room then shifted suddenly, throwing new shadows across the walls. As she turned, Amara saw that the banes of her first Everloft experience were back: ten little scarabs skittered out from between the brickwork of the far wall.

She readied two flames in both her hands and stood her ground with a weary sigh.

"You little guys really are a pain, y'know that? You ain't tough, but you are a pain in the ass!"

The wall itself answered her by crumbling to pieces, sending a cloud of ancient dust and stones cascading toward her. Through the haze, she sent out a swathe of flame from her twitching hands and saw in her own fire the moving mass of onyx that shot forward from the wreckage of the chamber wall: not one single entity but hundreds - thousands - of little scarabs that had congealed together into an undulating wave.

One that was heading straight for her.

Amara, her mother said. You recall you told me you would listen to me from now on, yes?

She nodded, keeping up her hands and already backing away so that when her mother's next command came, it was her body that obeyed on instinct:

Run!