The whining, tinny voice beckoned. It called to her in that maddeningly familiar language. Like the memory of a memory of a memory. So distorted by time that it had become something entirely different. Like a painting recreated a hundred times over centuries, by a dozen different artists.
Talia’s vision was a blur of greys and flashing purples and reds. Runescript scrawled in glowing lines across her irises flickered at her, flashing past too fast for her to comprehend even if she’d known all the characters.
She was conscious enough to realize that she was being carried —the sway of her carrier’s gait causing nausea to swirl up in her gut and sending sparks of agony down her manaburned limbs.
Voices muttered in low tones around her, worried and insistent. Arguing, maybe?
A muffled curse filtered through the whispering cacophony.
Smack
Pain flared at the back of her skull.
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“Finally, she’s stopped mutterin’,” someone drawled.
What muttering?
“Only a matter of time,” another voice commented.
“Hush. She saved our lives, at no small cost to herself. The least we could do is show some respect.”
“Aye, delvemaster, I ken yer meanin’ but ye cannae say it ain’t unsettlin’,” the first voice commented.
“Unholy is what it is. She’s reaped her due, mark my words. The gods are calling her back to mete out punishment. Lords know what demons she’s trucked with to avoid their summons.”
“Enough, Cassidy.”
“You heard her, Delvemaster! It’s unnatural! Any of you heard anything like that before?! No? I didn’t think so. Demons, I tell you, mark my words.”
“I said enough! Quiet down, the lot of you. We don’t know what else is down here with us.”
Calisto’s whipcrack of admonishment struck like the stab of a dagger. In the darkness of her eyelids, Talia heard nothing but the pad of leather on smooth rock and the slight clink of buckles against scabbards.
Something sticky and dry was stuck to Talia’s face, crusting her eyes shut. The air smelled of dust and decay. Cracking her eyelids—
“RAARAARGGHH!”
The strangled sob of agony echoed in the silence. Talia only realized it was her own when the rawness of her throat registered in her mind. The sensation was delayed. As if it were witnessed from a distance. Happening to someone else.
Her brain was on fire —her body the fuel that fed it.
Someone drove a blissful nail into her forehead and the darkness swept her up in its embrace like a splash of cool water. A soothing, sibilant whisper in beastkin dialect walked her into a dreamless sleep. Consciousness faded with a hiss.
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Scuffles against stone. The heave and exhale of massive lungs right against Talia’s ear. The wetness of sweat dripping onto her face. Her head banged rhythmically onto someone’s half-plate, driving flares of pain into her brain with each bob.
“—un faster!”
“What the fuck is that thing?!”
A low thrum rippled through the air. Metallic and grating. A warble, but not quite. A subsonic screech that made Talia’s ears ring. What sounded like metal sabatons stomped a staccato against the floor.
“Do ye really care?! Run ye fool!”
“We’re going to die here!”
“Shut up and run!”
More heavy breathing. The patter and skid of boots echoed against dusty floors.
“Bruce, watch out!”
Whether or not Bruce did as instructed was a mystery to Talia. But from the muffled grunt and the way the world tilted on its axis, she thought with startling clarity that the warning had probably come too late.
The sensation of weightlessness that soon followed all but confirmed it.
One.
Bruce was silent as they fell. Sparks ran up Talia’s arm as the great big man curled her up against his chest.
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Two.
Something was causing the wind to whistle a tune. It sounded mournful, like the end of a tragedy. Bruce’s helmet, maybe?
Three.
It was funny how time seemed to warp in these moments. How clarity rushed in all at once. A deluge of terrible realization. The understanding that you were going to die.
Fo—
Gravity finally exerted its due. Something crunched under her. Talia’s head rebounded off Bruce’s breastplate. Hard.
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Wakefulness fluttered in slowly through the open window of her eyes. Around her, a cave. Too smooth, too uniform to be natural. Like a great big cistern, or the huge tanks for water treatment back in…
The odd thought drifted down the well of her thoughts.
Where am I?
Trying to move her head sent a tearing sensation down the centre of her forehead.
Darkness crept back in, but this time was different. This time, she dreamed a familiar dream.
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The dream began with wide, metal-coated corridors. She recognized them as the tunnels she was in. Was supposed to be in? The dust had been cleaned away, and bright, indirect light illuminated her path forward. A voice she didn’t understand blared at her with purpose. For some reason, it sounded clearer. Crisper. More human.
But that doesn’t make sense. I’ve never heard this before…have I?
It was possible, she supposed. Something about her memories was fuzzy and unclear. They hurt to think about. So instead, she focused on the voice.
It seemed like it was narrating the path forward. Guiding her?
As the dream repeated, she paid closer attention.
A cistern. The cistern, the one she’d found herself in during those brief instants of consciousness. Her perspective shifted without her approval, orienting her toward a door. First, the voice led her straight for what felt like kilometres. Occasionally, doors appeared to the sides, but the contents of the rooms they led to remained indistinct. When she tried to peer into them, the dream fizzed at the edges, and the voice grew alarmed, pulling at her attention.
No wandering, got it.
At the end of the straight corridor, a large shaft hung in the centre of a dark abyss. Like the cistern she found herself in, but wider and taller by a factor of ten.
A lift shaft?
Something about the thought niggled at her, but she couldn’t quite pin it down.
She rose, and rose, and rose. And then the lift stopped, leaving her at an intersection. The dream guided her through a series of labyrinthine tunnels, each wide enough to fit a small wagon.
Left, left, right, left, through that cloudy, totally not ominously vague room, stop.
A large, rune-encrusted door awaited. She caught a bare glimpse of a specific part of the script—
“Gahh fuck!”
And she jerked awake.
Where am I? Right, the cistern. Wait—
A chill wormed its way down her spine.
Who am I?
For a brief, terrifying moment, her mind supplied her with no answers, nothing more than an awful migraine. The blank space where her identity should have been was somehow more awful than the pain.
I— I’m Talia. Daughter to Ylena and Eric and...Orvall?
Bits and pieces came to her. The rumble of a lullaby, hummed. A soft hand brushing hair out of her face. The scratchiness of a tangled beard against her cheek.
The hollowness in her chest as she knew with frightening certainty that Ylena and Eric were dead.
Is that…all I remember? It can’t be, right?
Something under Talia squelched as she drew her knees to her chest. Her limbs buzzed with pinpricks as she scrambled off whatever it was.
A corpse.
Blank brown eyes stared listlessly upward through an open-faced helmet. The huge beast of a man lay on his back, blood forming a pool around him. The tracks she dragged through the puddle showed that it had already congealed.
Not sure why she was trembling, Talia reached over and shut the dead man’s eyelids, fighting off the sensation that she should know his name, or recognize his face. A glance upward made it clear what had happened to him.
That’s a long way to fall, friend.
And a friend he must have been, as without him breaking her fall, it would likely be her lying there, staring up with empty eyes. That much, at least she was certain of.
“Thank you,” she muttered, “I don’t know what I did to deserve your sacrifice, but thank you.”
If there were words to be said to send him off, she didn’t remember them. Talia settled for a moment of silence, gently shutting his jaw and etching his features into her memory.
Then it was time to take stock.
The giant man’s pack was presumably trapped beneath him, its contents squished and soaked in blood. At least she was able to pry his weapons from under his corpse and add them to the small, intricate belt knife at her waist.
Neither weapon seemed particularly…practical. At least not for her. A giant mace, more of a quarterstaff with a bulbous, flanged head, as well as a truly unwieldy cleaver almost three-quarters the length of her body.
In the end, she left the mace for the sword, as it somehow felt right in her hands. One of which, she noticed with mild surprise, was missing at the bicep, replaced with a dark metal prosthesis that glowed purple from beneath adamite scales. Exploring its responsiveness tentatively, she shrugged when she realized that in nearly all respects, it was no different than her flesh and blood left arm.
A quick riffle through the pack that must have been hers revealed bricks of dried rations, along with a few ingots of metal and a whole host of tools. For arcanistry, she knew, though she knew not how she knew.
She found a circlet of adamite where it had bounced away onto the far wall. It seemed to fit snug on her head over her cowl, drawing a wince as it pressed against impressive bruises and bumps.
A final search of the area revealed nothing else of substance. Apart from her unfortunate friend’s corpse, the cistern was empty. The insistent feeling that she was forgetting something gave way to a muddled haze that clouded her thoughts.
Pain ripped across her body and mind. Bone deep and tearing.
Something is wrong with me.
She knew it like she knew the arcano-sun shined. A rooted certainty.
Am I dying?
Her mind went back to the voice in the dream. The warning it held in its tone and the urgency of its speech.
I guess that’s the only clue I have. Fat load of good that’ll do me. At least it’s something, though.
Talia muscled on her pack, slotting the blade in its upside-down sheathe with a movement that was too smooth not to have been practiced. Her muscle memory, it seemed, remained.
Now if only my body would also remember that it’s not on fire. Damn, that smarts.
But there was nothing to be done.
It was time to find a door. And hopefully, some answers. If she was lucky, maybe even some help.