Chapter XLVI (46)- Monsters of the World Dungeon

The dungeon’s uppermost levels were as arid and hot and boring as usual. Kizu managed to locate a couple traps using the enchanted atlas, but each was pretty obvious and would have been easily avoided, even without the book’s help. He wondered if those bloodspawn he’d trapped down in one of the traps were still down there. The thought raised his caution whenever their party came close to a pit trap. He doubted the monsters remembered him fondly.

While Kizu trudged forward in pensive silence, his attention absorbed by the dungeon’s atlas, Basil hummed a jaunty tune to himself, playing around with the structure of his arm, and Ione slept soundly on her giant lizard’s back. Mort crouched on Kizu’s head, fascinated by the World Dungeon’s tunnels. Kizu had worried the monkey might leap from his head to try and get a better look at the rivers of liquid flames at the bottom of the crevasses they passed. Thankfully, they stopped seeing fire rivers after the first hour or so of their journey.

Looking up from the atlas, Kizu frowned as they took another turn. The air smelled different down this passageway. Instead of sulfur, it smelled almost like rancid soil. The stone tunnel’s coloring went from coal black to an ashy gray. But here and there, Kizu spotted whisper-thin, glowing green cracks in the walls. It made for an eerie image, as though the plain stone walls hid something far more sinister behind them.

“Where are we?” Ione asked, yawning and rubbing her eyes. “I can’t see a thing down here.”

Past the rivers of liquid fire, the passages had dimmed to near complete darkness, save for the occasional glowing crack in the wall. It wasn’t a problem for Kizu or Mort, and he suspected Basil could see perfectly fine in the dark as well.

“Use a light spell,” Basil suggested.

“Never learned one,” Ione said. “Hold on.”

Ione slid off her lizard’s back and swept her hand across the ground. She brought out the chalk she’d taken from Kizu and sketched another summoning circle. Kizu found it amazing she could draw something so complex while completely blind.

When she finished, the circle glowed and then dissolved into hundreds of fireflies. They dispersed in a small circle around them, lighting up the tunnels with an eerie glow.

“There,” Ione said, flopping back on her lizard and tucking its skin flaps over her. “Now I can see where we’re going. Why is it so much colder now? The chill woke me up.”

Kizu hadn’t noticed it until she mentioned it, but the temperature had dropped considerably. He shrugged as they continued on their way.

“Probably because we’ve moved away from the magma tunnels,” Basil said.

“How far is it?”

Kizu checked his atlas. “We’re maybe a third of the way there. It’s hard to tell with the tunnels shifting so much. The further we descend, the more active the dungeon seems to be.”

Then, as they spoke, two dozen of the firefly lights winked out of existence. The party stopped dead in their tracks. Kizu unwrapped Sojan from his makeshift sheathe, pointing it at the missing fireflies.

Nothing happened. Kizu looked down at his atlas. He saw no notes about traps in this area, but there were a few unfamiliar words scrawled in the margins of the page. Unfortunately, he didn’t see any alternative paths leading forward. They could wait until the passages shifted and hope for a new path, but Kizu’s patience was running thin.

“Send some more of your fireflies over there,” Kizu said.

Ione grumbled about the waste of resources, but did as he asked.

Each firefly winked out of existence as soon as it passed through an invisible threshold.

“Spooky,” Basil said. “Let me try something.”

His left hand started to glow slightly. Then he tore off the tip of his finger. He tossed it forward.

This time, Kizu heard an audible chomp as the glowing fingertip disappeared midair.

Kizu stared into the dark. Despite his excellent dark vision, he saw nothing. He glanced at Mort on his shoulder, but the monkey looked as perplexed as he felt. Then Kizu drew out one of the dozens of potions he had prepared. He threw it forward. There was a shattering of glass as it disappeared. Then a roar of flames. The heat made them all stumble back slightly.

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When the flames died out, a scorched creature lay on the cavern floor. The bulk of the creature was a head with an unhinged jaw that stretched half a dozen meters, easily enough to reach the ground from the cavern’s ceiling.

“Did you kill it?” Ione asked.

Kizu shrugged, uncertain. It looked dead.

She got down from her lizard and nudged it with a foot. The burnt skin flickered slightly transparent at her touch. When the monster didn’t otherwise react, she got down on her hands and knees and began to study it up close.

“It looks like the main body is the size of a human child, while the unhinged jaw hangs loose at about twice the size of an adult,” Ione said, lifting up a scorched arm. Instead of a hand, the creature had small, boney hooks protruding from its wrists. “I think it uses these talons to cling to ceilings and waits for prey to walk into its open mouth.”

“A bit lazy for a magical creature,” Basil commented.

“About as lazy as a mage jumping instead of walking. These things must be extraordinarily clever. Energy efficient, too. I hope we can find some more live samples. Next time, don’t go killing it so quickly.”

Kizu rolled his eyes, walking past the monster’s corpse with Basil right behind him. After a moment’s hesitation, Ione climbed back on her giant lizard and followed them.

On alert now that invisible monsters had been introduced as a variable, Kizu made certain to keep Ione’s fireflies in front of him at all times. Twice more they encountered the grotesque creatures.

“I wonder what they hunt,” Ione said, examining a live one. “They aren’t actually all that big and it looks like they hardly ever move, so they probably don’t need that much food. But they still need something.”

“Bloodspawn?” Kizu suggested. “Or worms?”

“Maybe,” Ione said doubtfully.

Her question was answered a few hours later. They entered a cavern full of luminescent mushrooms that glowed a vivid turquoise. White creatures, slightly larger than mice with rounded bodies, scurried around amidst the mushrooms. Their hair bristled up like a porcupine’s whenever Kizu got near them.

“Sonney!” Ione exclaimed upon seeing the little creatures. She crouched down near one that was perched on a rock. “If you keep one with you, they’re said to increase your luck considerably.”

“I’ve never heard of a ‘Sonney,’” Basil said, eyeing one. “What kind of luck do you mean? Isn’t measuring luck with magic a crapshoot?”

“It’s classified as a magical creature. They’re extremely rare, only thriving in small pockets within the World Dungeon like this one. Overworld breeding doesn’t work for most of the magical creatures down here, including Sonney.”

Kizu picked one up like he would a porcupine, using two fingers to grab it by its stub of a tail. It squirmed, but its belly was completely without quills so he placed it on his palm. It calmed down. Mort hummed from his shoulder, looking down at it quizzically.

Ione gently took it from him. She cradled it in her arms like a baby.

“I think we should camp here,” Basil said. “If it’s safe for them, it should be fine for us.”

Ione quickly agreed, obviously eager to study the creatures more thoroughly. Kizu was feeling a bit tired, but he didn’t want to stop so early into their expedition. They had only been traveling for a few hours. Every minute they wasted was a minute that the World Dungeon had to shift, warping the route to his sister.

But the two of them were insistent, and if he abandoned them, they would be left without any sort of guide out of the World Dungeon. They could end up trapped indefinitely.

Left with no choice but to rest, Kizu found an alcove in the stoney cavern’s wall and wedged himself in alongside the blanket he had packed. Mort curled up beside him. The glow of the mushrooms, albeit widespread, was dim enough for him to slip into a doze.

Condensation dripped from the cavern’s ceiling. A drop fell on his face, waking him with a start. The little Sonney creatures were still darting around the patches of turquoise mushrooms. As Kizu crawled out of his hiding spot, he saw Ione, asleep on the ground next to dozens of the little rodents. But every trace of Basil was gone. It was as if the changeling had never been there to begin with.

“Ione,” he said, nudging her with his boot. “What happened to Basil?”

She turned over, causing her little sleeping companions to scatter, but it was clear she wanted to be left alone. It took another minute of prodding before she finally rubbed her eyes and looked around.

“I don’t know,” she said groggily. “He offered to take the first watch. Last I saw, he was sitting over there.” She pointed at a rock jutting up out of the ground.

Kizu cautiously approached the rock but found nothing. Just a large, smooth stone. He wondered if the magical rodents had anything to do with Basil’s disappearance. He eyed a nearby Sonney with suspicion. But when he mentioned the thought to Ione, she shot it down immediately, insisting that the creatures were harmless.

Ione summoned a dog with patches of white and red fur, bred specifically for tracking. It found nothing. Ione was baffled. She insisted that, at the very least, the animal should be able to pick up on Basil’s fragrant perfumes.

“He must be somewhere,” Kizu said. “People don’t just disappear.”

But they found no sign of him. After an hour of searching, Kizu decided to do something desperate. He went to his pack, ready to use the enchanted dagger to see if it held any answers. But, as he shuffled through his things, he realized something terrible. His atlas of the World Dungeon was missing.