I sprinted through the forest, trusting my intuition was correct and they were heading for the town. Low hanging tree branches slapped against my face and broke as I blitzed past. The only lingering concern was that if a tree were to glitch in front of me now, I’d probably be unconscious at best and dead at worst. But I had to take that risk. I let him go, which made it my responsibility.
Hugo was up high above the trees and had a better view than me, so I decided to ask him.
Lucas: Do you see them yet? They couldn’t have gotten far.
Hugo: You know you shouldn’t blame yourself if something happens.
Lucas: Me? You’re the one that talked me into this.
Hugo: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Lucas: I’m revoking your decision-making privileges surrounding spooky objects from here on out. You’re being demoted.
Hugo: When was I even moted, huh? When did you mote me?
I smiled. The banter was helpful. It took my mind off imagining all the horrible things that could potentially happen. The town had a lot of innocent people in it that could get hurt. There were also other Tower Climbers there who had no notion of the threat. Hell, I was one of them. But I knew enough not to touch it again. If this thing mind-controlled a Climber in a populated area, the devastation could be massive.
After a little more worrying and a lot of running, I broke through the trees and onto the main road that led to the town. We were still a few miles away from it, but I needn’t have worried. We had caught up with them.
Donald was on his knees in the middle of the road. His hands were held up in surrender, though he looked more sheepish than scared, like we’d caught him doing something he shouldn’t. Damian’s eyes were hard and his crossbow, steadied by both hands this time, wouldn’t miss again. A small crater in the road to Donald’s left meant that he’d already fired a warning shot first to get Donald to comply. It was surprisingly generous of Damian, considering how he felt about all this.
“So, what are we doing?” Damian asked.
“Well, I—” Donald began.
“He’s not talking to you!” I snapped.
A call had to be made, and Damian was making it clear that I would have to make it. Despite being on the road, we were still away from people. I could end this now. Just give the order and Damian would fire. Donald’s one good eye stared up at me, and I could tell his mind was racing to try and figure out the words to say that would save his life.
Then Hugo flew down to us. “Oh good, you managed to find them.”
Goddamn it.
“Hugo, I think this whole savior thing has run its course,” I said.
He was about to argue that it hadn’t, when Donald’s eye rolled into the back of his head. The shard twisted and Donald opened his mouth, but it wasn’t him who spoke.
“DO NOT… KILL… HERE.”
There was a deep, alien hiss to its voice, and every word seemed to contain tremendous effort to get out.
Donald’s eye rolled back into place and he gasped like he’d been choking.
Damian looked at me. “Not yet,” I said, frowning.
That was odd. It hadn’t said do not kill. It had said do not kill here. Would trying to destroy it here cause some kind of chain-reaction?
I waited for Donald to catch his breath and then said to him, “this is your last chance to give us a straight answer. If we even suspect you’re lying, then we’ll take our chances by blowing you up.”
Donald became afraid and his eyes pleaded with Hugo for support.
“What are you looking at me for?” Hugo asked. “You heard the man. Talk.”
Donald swallowed. “It all started—”
I cut him off. “No. No more stories. What is the thing in your eye?”
He pursed his lips, and then said, “I don’t know. Me and some workers uncovered a big black rock under the floor when doing construction at my brewery. It was only when we got closer that we realized it was made out of metal. None of us could move it even when working together. We even tied ropes around it and tried to get some horses to pull it. Nothing worked. The damn thing was just too heavy. My brother wanted to bury it and forget about it, but I thought we should try breaking it down into smaller pieces first. So then we tried using tools on it and a fragment broke off and got into my eye.”
“That looks like a little more than a fragment,” Damian said.
Donald looked more exhausted than he’d ever been as he sighed and said, “it grew.”
The three of us resisted the urge to step back again. I didn’t think it had grown in our presence, but I couldn’t be sure. Everything we learned about this thing just made me more certain that we should destroy it.
“And before you say anything,” Donald continued. “I’m not able to pull it out. If I even think of trying to reach for it, my arms go dead. I don’t know if the paralysis is real or just in my head, but its stopped me from trying to get rid of it every time. Asking someone else is even more useless. They always refuse and then quickly get away from me.”
They were probably picking up on the thing’s aura. God knows we were apprehensive about getting near it the first time we saw it.
“Can we speak to it?” Hugo asked.
Donald shook his head. “It struggles to communicate in our language. In fact, that is the first time I’ve ever heard it speak out loud.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
“What is it?” asked Damian.
Donald shrugged. He had no idea and assumed our guess would be better than his. It probably would be, though there was something about its message that struck me as odd. If every word is difficult to get out, then you choose them carefully. And yet, one of the words it used didn’t make sense.
“Why did it say not to kill it here?” I asked.
“Well, that’s the thing,” Donald said. “It is dying right now, but it wants to reassimilate with the rest of the metal we uncovered before it passes on. It said something about fragments being lost, about its kind not being able to experience true death unless its body was whole.”
“And if we helped it reassimilate?”
“I would be free and it would die whole. Its spirit would then return to the void intact, instead of in fragmented pieces that could never come back together again.”
The three of us looked at each other and were in agreement that this required another team meeting. We warned Donald not to move and then moved a little down the road. He wouldn’t hear us unless that thing had enhanced senses. That wasn’t something I would put past it, but I wasn’t willing to let him out of my sight again.
“I don’t want fragments going into my eyes if we blow this thing up,” I said quietly.
Damian shrugged. “We’ll all stand further back when I do it.”
“What if we blow it up into pieces and each piece becomes sentient?” I countered. “We’d just be making the problem worse, not better.”
“I have a few corrosive acids we could try to melt the thing.” He sounded almost eager for it, like it would give him a chance to test out some new deadly cocktail of chemicals.
I turned to Hugo. “What do you think?”
“I think…” he hesitated for a second and then said, “I think we should stick to the original plan.”
“Well my vote is to blow him up and then melt the pieces,” said Damian. “I guess Lucas is the tiebreaker.”
I was leaning towards Damian’s plan when a new System message appeared.
[Loading Questline]
[ERROR!]
[Unsanctioned Tower Activity Detected]
[Override Enabled]
[New Parameters Accepted]
*New Quest Unlocked* [The Mysterious Case of the Missing Eye (Unique)] – This quest is listed as Unique, which means you and your bonded companion are the only ones receiving it. Sometimes a hero is called upon and when that hero answers the phone, he delivers… heroism. Take the Voidborne shard back to where it came from and make it whole. Do this and a great prize awaits you.
I sighed heavily. “Goddamn it.”
“You got the message too?” asked Hugo.
I nodded. “What do you think?”
“Well, there’s usually a reward of some kind for these things. Except for that Golden Door quest, but that was more because the Officiator couldn’t deliver on it.”
The being that originally controlled the Tower was known to us only as the Officiator. A pale, strange-looking man with a robotic voice and a twisted sense of humor. He was killed by an alien called Tanver Vhar right as we were about to finish the Golden Door quest. Tanver Vhar then took control of the Tower but has struggled to learn its intricacies. Some time later, we learned that an incomplete back-up copy of the Officiator lived on and was working to take back control of the Tower. Both beings were terrible, but Vhar was worse, so Hugo and I decided that we would help if we could. This quest was from the Officiator, which meant we had to see it through to the end. Hence the heavy sigh.
“What happened?” Damian asked, trying not to sound annoyed that he had been left out of something.
“We got a quest notification,” Hugo replied. “We have to put the shard back where Donald found it, but we’ll totally share whatever reward we get for it if we can.”
Damian ignored Hugo and turned to me. “You felt that thing and touched it. You know it's bad. Before, you were worried about what Donald might do if he got loose. Well, imagine helping this thing get what it wants.”
I took another look at the shard. If you didn’t it pay too much attention, then the aura of the thing just gave off a noxious smog. It felt dirty to breathe air close to it and my skin felt unclean. But that was only a surface level look. The three of us had gone deeper until we’d felt abject despair and a sense of menace.
Damian could tell he was losing me for his side. “Did you at least learn anything from the quest message?”
I didn’t want to tell him about the phone call reference proving that this was a quest from the Officiator. He’d probably think I was insane for considering it a secret message. I reread the quest notification and picked up on something else.
“Oh, it says the shard is Voidborne,” I told him.
“Isn’t that Roan’s area of expertise?”
It was. Roan was one of the gods who’d used the Tower as a place to train and recruit new soldiers and servants. In return for pledging their service, Tower Climbers were given certain favors and advice from their god to help them battle through the floors. I had been adamant about not accepting any deals from gods, but Roan had schemed and manipulated his way into getting me to accept and pledge my service to him. Since then, he’d been remarkably forthcoming. Still, I doubted whether I should contact him. Roan had also assisted Tanver Vhar in the coup to take over the Tower. Their alliance had broken down shortly afterward, but it was unlikely he’d want to go back to the status quo by assisting the Officiator.
Lucas: What do you think?
Hugo: There have been other void creatures on the floors. Asking about one wouldn’t seem out of the ordinary.
I nodded and tried to send a chat message to Roan. The request was rejected. Not a surprise really. He’d been unavailable for the last couple of weeks. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I really thought he’d pick up for this call in particular. He must still be pre-occupied with that other business that he refused to talk about.
We walked back over to Donald and the shard.
“Okay, if we’re doing this, then we need more information,” I said. “What happens to Donald once the shard is removed?”
His good eye rolled back in his head. “SAFE,” it replied.
Its answer didn’t fill me with confidence.
“You really trust this thing?” asked Damian.
“I trust the quest and the one who gave it to us.”
We were about to leave when an old man in a cart pulled by two horses rolled over the hill. He was heading towards the town too, but he stopped alongside us. I glanced into his cart and saw… pumpkins. Just endless pumpkins. He also did not seem to care that we were holding a man at crossbow-point or that he had a shard of cosmic darkness sticking out of his eye.
The pumpkin man tipped his hat to us and asked, “you folks goin to the festival?”
“The what?” I asked.
He smiled broadly. “It’s Pumpkinfest today. Everyone’s going to be there. Do you want a ride?”
“I could,” said Donald. “I don’t feel so well.”
He was already standing up and moving towards the back of the cart before I could respond. Damian shot me a dark look, but I shrugged. At least this way we don’t cause a scene.
The four of us pushed some pumpkins away to make room and climbed into the back of the cart. Damian sat across from Donald with his crossbow in his lap pointed at him. If that failed, then we were close enough that I could pull him into my domain. Still, the way this merchant didn’t find any of this strange. Was the shard hiding itself somehow?
“How is it he can’t see you?” I asked it in a low voice.
“Concealed to all but the irregulars,” it replied in a quiet hiss.
Irregulars. Interesting name for us. It fit well and I wondered if that’s what it called people like us outside of the Tower. I did not like that it suddenly had an easier time speaking our language though. The dying thing could be a ruse. It might actually be getting stronger the longer it stayed in Donald. Maybe it was feeding on him?
Even if this was still a trap, I believed the Officiator had a good reason for putting us into it.
“I guess we don’t have to worry about sneaking him into town,” said Hugo.
“Maybe we could’ve hollowed out one of these big pumpkins,” Damian said. “He’d blend right in at Pumpkinfest.”
“That’s a good point,” the crow replied. He turned to the driver. “Should we have brought costumes, Mr. Pumpkin man?”
The old man glanced back over his shoulder and squinted at Hugo. “It’d have to be a pretty small pumpkin.”
They laughed and I chuckled along, keeping a brave face, while Donald sat there with a blank expression. Truthfully, I didn’t like any of this. Being so close to the thing was repulsive. Its very nature felt intrinsically wrong somehow. Yet here we were helping it for some nebulous prize. My curiosity about it was quickly waning and being outweighed by a desire to go back to the apartment. I just had to hope there wouldn’t be any complications getting Donald to the brewery.
This better be worth it.