-Bhashera, Forgotten City-
Amara
“How strong’s the door?” Mendax growled.
“It will hold,” Lokar responded shakily. “But not against a horde. We must be quick.”
“Yeah, well,” the bulky Gnoll replied. “Looks like we’re up shit creek then.”
Their eyes had turned away from Kimon the second he told them the news. They had redoubled their efforts in securing a defensive position in the church, while Amara stared at them all, still wide eyed and reeling from Mendax’s insults.
“Does anyone want to tell me what a ‘Wave trial’ is?” she asked. She was about to punctuate her question with a curt ‘Your Lightbringer commands you!’ but judging by what had just passed between her and Mendax, she thought better of it. It would probably do more harm than good.
You’re learning, dear, her mother’s Voice told her. That itself is the mark of a good leader.
Kimon came to stand before her and deliver the statement that caused him to tear at his long, grizzled beard like it was burning.
“A Wave trial,” he explained. “A test of resolve imposed by the Ty’Kella in their most hallowed sites. Only those unified in their strength and in their faith triumph.”
“And those that don’t?”
He looked at her hard, furrowing his brows in response. She already knew the answer.
“The trial is always the same,” Kimon continued. “Endure. Resist the attacks of the Dungeon’s residents for a specified period of time. Once completed, the door shall be opened, and one must make their escape where the evils of these tombs cannot follow.”
She looked back at the two other members of the team, heaving and sweating through their work – using anything and everything they could to plug up any holes in the ruined church walls.
“Those stained-glass windows ain’t gonna do us any favors,” Mendax groaned. “Damn it all – my soul for a Terraformer!”
“Don’t be so despondent, Brother,” Kimon called, placing his withered claw on Amara’s shoulder. “After all, you have a Windcaller and Pyromancer now, don’t you? One cannot be too greedy when it comes to the machinations of the Glance.”
He scowled back. “Just don’t go blastin’ us away while your slingin’ about your pretty incantations.”
Kimon smiled down at Amara who found herself wrapped up in the heat of the moment. Battle was upon them – and that meant EXP, of course, but she didn’t like the sound of this ‘Wave’. If it was anything like the wall of scarabs she’d faced above, they’d need to muster all the strength they had.
She shivered as she imagined a horde of those Scorpirex descending on them in a flood of biting, gnashing teeth and raised stingers…
“I’m low on Glance,” she said to Kimon. “No potions left, I-“
“Not to worry,” the old Glancer Gnoll replied. “That is why we are making our preparations. We shall rest here, tonight, and recover our reserves. Then tomorrow I shall begin the countdown.”
She blinked through her uncut fringe. “It’s safe here?”
“No-n-no-nowhere is ever truly safe, My Amara!” Lokar shouted over his exertions, plugging up a crevice with plywood. “But we shall make it a place where you shall be proud to lay your glorious head and sleep what beauteous dreams one such as you-”
“That’s plenty,” Amara interrupted with a wave of her hand. “How long will the Wave be?”
“According to the inscriptions here, we must survive for twenty minutes. Then, the way shall be open.”
“Twenty minutes,” Lokar stammered. “Against an army of Scorpirex. A mere nothing compared to your powers, Amara!”
She let her arms drop, thinking about it: a twenty-minute onslaught where the aim was simply to resist, not achieve victory.
You need not put yourself in harm’s way, her mother told her. Use these three as fodder, and remain in the rearguard. Let them organize themselves, they will-
Mom, she responded. I need them to trust me.
She felt the Voice recoil, like it was prospecting her with new eyes.
They will die for you, Amara. You know it when you look at them, don’t you?
She did. She saw it in Kimon’s sad smile, in Lokar’s exaggerated obeisance, and even in Mendax’s increasingly determined grunts of effort to secure the place.
But she was thinking about what Kimon had said, and what Mendax had said, and was starting to realize that, if she listened, she could understand this strange new world around her. This was her home – her true home. That’s what mother had told her. If she was to make it her own, and bring its powers to bear against the corrupted world of Averix above, then she had to start taking the concerns of its inhabitants seriously.
And here they were, right here in front of her. The remnants of a whole civilization that had had staked their faith on her and come up short. Now, she was here, and so she understood – how could Mendax feel anything but distrust for her?
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I can’t just order them, she told her mother. I have to know how to move them.
Her Mother considered, weighing up her words as the three Gnolls made ready to camp for the night – Kimon gathering a few loose sticks of wood to build a small, but steady, bonfire.
How my daughter is growing, she finally whispered. Even in your first dungeon, you are learning the right lessons. You will go far here, Amara.
She’d already gone farther, seen farther than she’d ever thought she would. Now her greatest challenge lay before her, and she wasn’t about to sit down and let her new teammates fight her battle for her.
She checked her stats, rolling her eyes back in her head and seeing the words born of the Everloft scratch themselves into her brain:
Profession: Glancer (Pyromancer)
LVL 2 (EXP: 190/250)
HP: 10/10
Glance: 10/40
More powerful than she’d been, but also low on reserves. She’d need the rest. She’d need these Gnolls. She remembered how the shambling zombie wrapped in papyrus upstairs had nearly ended her life with its jawless, mummified maw. Mom was right – she couldn’t go this alone. Not if she wanted to survive – and gain the power that was promised to her
She needed a team.
“Mendax!” she yelled, facing the grunting beast.
The other two glanced cautiously towards them, and then chuckled with relief as Amara fell in step beside the great Mendax, offering her firelight to guide him as he constructed his makeshift barricade by the door.
“Need a light?” she asked. “I am the Lightbringer, after all.”
The great beast eyed her once, huffed, and continued pounding away.
----------------------------------------
“Amarata’s servants are really that dull?”
“The dullest. One time, I saw a priest say that she made the sun, and so to slave away under it all your life is a good thing because it makes her happy.”
“A most mean-spirited Goddess, indeed.”
“Don’t your Gods ask you to do stupid things?”
“Oh, we don’t shy away from the odd animal sacrifice. But I’d take that over working in a field for a living.”
She was sharing the warmth of their fire with Kimon, huddling her knees to her chest. For the first time, she actually felt embarrassed by her raggedy clothes. If this Gnoll had been an ordinary man, she’d have probably singed him for letting his eyes stray to the torn strips of her cloak where her bare flesh was visible.
Luckily, he was more interested in conversation than in the body of a surfacer.
Surfacer…
“Kimon,” she began, twirling an unkept thread of her hair round her finger. “What was that word Mendax called me – Ch- Cha’Kalla-“
“Ch'alokk,” the old Gnoll finished. “It is an insulting term for a surface-born mortal who comes to live in the Everloft.”
She glanced towards the spot where he had rolled over – far away from the rest of them, hunkering down in the shade of a restored stain-glass depiction of a group of Gnolls praying together, expressions of mute joy spread across their faces.
“Do not worry about him,” Kimon said. “He will sulk, and he will moan, but he is committed to seeing you safely to our Stronghold just as we are. If he wasn’t, he had ample opportunity to leave long ago. He knew the risks when we began our journey.”
“How many of you died?” Amara asked with a sudden start. “How many of you died to find me?”
Kimon turned his face to the ruins outside, watching the specters milling about just beyond the stained-glass windows.
“Many,” he said. “But the life of our kind is not a long one, Amara. We live to serve a higher purpose, and when our time has come, we go to the abyss willingly.”
He gazed deeply into the flickering embers licking at the musky air of the church.
“Most of us would give anything,” he said. “Do anything. Curse anything – worship anything, if it could give us the freedom we have sought since first we awoke in this realm of endless desert. I imagine many of your kind born with the gift of the Glance above feel the same. Freedom is a prize worth dying for. If not for yourself, then for others like you.”
Amara pondered that, staring into the crackling embers of their bonfire. It was a fair wish, sure, but did it have a fair and just cost? She wondered how many of those Gnolls who fell in her name had cursed her at the end – either with open denouncement or silent hatred.
Thinking about it, seeing the faces of the miserable looking shadows walking their lonely paths through the ruins outside, she realized that she wouldn’t blame them if they did hate her. She’d have hated her, too.
And how many more would hate her in the future? How many more would fall in her name when she tried to claim justice for the persecuted Glancers in the world above?
She nodded to herself and stood, resolved to do something she’d never done before in her life.
“Where are you going?” Kimon asked her.
“To see Mr Smiley,” she replied.
Kimon shrugged and watched her go, laying down to get the rest he undoubtedly deserved.
“Good luck,” he whispered.
As she approached him, she didn’t even have time to think about what words she could use to convince him she was the real thing – what they’d waited for.
Actually, was that what she needed to convince him of at all?
Any answer she had to this question was cut down by a wave of his big paw as she stood behind him. “Shove off,” he murmured. “I’m having what might be my last sleep.”
She didn’t sit down beside him, nor did she try and catch his flinty eyes. She spoke instead to his back, and dug her nails into the soft flesh of her fists.
“I’m sorry.”
At first, he said nothing at all, and the silent echo of herself saying those words turned her stomach, so that she considered just walking away in embarrassment then and there.
Then, after what felt like an agonizing age: “You don’t even know what that word means.”
She gulped again, focusing on what he had said before, trying – trying desperately – to look past the anger welling up inside her. That wasn’t the tool she needed, here.
“It’s all I have to give you,” she said. “I don’t know how many Gnolls you saw die. But I’ve seen death, too. And nobody ever said sorry to me. Maybe if they did, I wouldn’t have killed them.”
She saw his ragged ears perk up. He was listening, now.
“I’ve killed people,” she said. “Because they were bad. I killed my own dad because he was evil. I killed plenty of surfacers – Ch’alokk – because they were bad people. I even almost killed an Argent – and he was one of the worst of them all.”
She saw the face of the grinning Yok’ra, Arekis, then – that vile, toothy serpent and his gang whom she’d been forced to run from.
But then another face broke through the haze of her fury. Rough and hewn, matted and caked with blood. Yet, there was a kindness to it, too. A gentleness that was uncommon.
The dog-man looking for that girl, Yelena…
“I met someone once who told me that the world’s not just full of bad people,” she said when Mendax still said nothing. “He told me it’s worth trying to see how people are more like you than you think. I don’t know if he’s right or wrong, but he was the first person up there who actually helped me.”
She said her final words over her shoulder as she left him there, still facing away from her.
“So, I’m going to ask you to stop seeing me like the other surfacers you know. Because I’m not like them. I came here to make sure that the world up there is cleaned up. All the bad people will be burned away, and only the good ones will be left.”
“Who decides that?” she heard him murmur as though in a dream. “You might end up having to burn the whole world.”
“Maybe I will,” she replied. Then, seizing her moment: “Will you help me?”
And she watched his great back rise and fall, indicating either laughter or a fit of mad rage – she couldn’t be sure. But when she heard his voice again, she registered not anger, but something that just might have been begrudged respect:
“I’ll think about it.”