Hari climbed the last step into the dungeon and was washed over by golden brown light. She saw cliffs of masonry, a tiered garden of floating geometric shapes made of huge stone blocks. Plants, both normal green ones and silvery made of swords and shields and other weapons, grew as a doppleganger of the sort of hanging gardens around the Empire's palace. There were signs that the Spider had been here before, namely what looked like goat skeletons piled neatly off to one side next to the efforts of someone learning to make clothes out of their hides. Hari noted shaped bone tools scattered about that resembled Growl-Whine's weapon.
The Spider was right behind her, and seemed to stare between the piles of bone and the crude attempt at sewing for a half beat before it scurried ahead and down a set of stairs. Hari supposed it had forgotten that it could teleport for a moment as it came back up the stairs to clump near her reeling companions. Brines was steadying himself against a huge clay pot impressed with tiny swords as decoration, wearing his athletic gear under a few belts and bandoleers. Hari always felt a small bit of annoyance at how many materials Cascadia had for different clothes and colors. His stretchy outfit had everything in black with neon highlights. Bearer-Of-Burdens, on the other hand, was brown and beige in delivery get up including a baseball cap that made it impossible to see her eyes. By chance she actually had a pretty good set of colors when they were in the shade from a sun that Hari could not see.
She only had a moment to start tracing a path down and back up out of the garden when yanking happened. Six teleports, whisking them to high points in the garden and then another stairway. The spider started up the stairs and Hari found herself running to keep up. Bearer dashed past her because of the boots, but Brines kept up which was impressive. Most humans couldn't run as fast as she could, especially not when she was tipping the scales with a quick [Swiftfoot] before she took the stairs in twos.
It might be the aura he was giving off. It didn't feel like she was pushing herself at all, and the faint white lines she saw outlining Brines on the floor would explain why the fight in the ruins hadn't taxed her much if at all. Perhaps that's why the spider pointed him out: he wasn't as heavy to teleport as Grunt and was some sort of energy battery. Handy.
Cresting the stairs to the second layer they saw a landscape made of metal vines swinging segments of Tower back and forth like clockwork through a dusty brown sky. Each segment would swing to meet two to four others, interlocking a moment before swinging back. There was a creak as if something was straining that filled the air as clusters of buildings and walkways swished through the air, one segment passing sideways right beside the entrance, blowing Hari's hair back and tickling her ears.
Brines started to speak. “There's no way we're going-”
A moment later they teleported onto one of the swinging stone floors, connected by stringy steel vines to something far above them. Hari had a moment of fear as her stomach dipped as the floor swung forward and she felt the air screaming past them and she started to throw her arms up as she saw a castle approaching like a runaway carriage, but The Spider was walking over to the edge and as it did the vine started to slow it's swing.
Once it stopped, they were blink-yanked to the other side of the castle island she had just seen link up to them, then blinked again and for a half moment Hari was out in open air and she didn't have time to scream before there was a blur and they were at another island somewhat stumbling on the ground aside from The Spider who started popping them up a vine. She could see a dark tangle of vines like a ceiling get closer three times until they were at a stairway at a stable feature hanging down near the gently tilting landing they were standing on. It looked like a small stone fortress suspended by thick steel vines.
The spider just stepped over the small gap between the slightly rocking vine, and Hari had to help Brines by stepping across and pulling him to the platform. Standing on stable ground, the residual effect was causing her to feel sea-sick. The Spider didn't help, pushing them all to go up the stairs with it's surprisingly firm stick hands. Hari had to take a few seconds to try not to start heaving, stabilizing once they climbed the winding blue stair passage to the third floor.
Hari saw a vast pond with steel lillypads. The sky was brilliant blue, and huge obsidian walls that resembled the ones of the High Plain they were camped on towered in the distance, their black colors fading to a blue hue from the sky. Some of the plants coming out of the water had cruel bladed edges, and the colors were a metalic rainbow as vibrant as any garden Hari had seen.
The spider moved them like a child's toy, bouncing from pad to pad, avoiding natural obstacles in the form of sword-plants that curled all around the platforms as well as the spears that formed 'flowers' at the center of every plant.
They came to a halt as the spider flicked a knife into it's hand and killed some armored mammal the size of a racoon. A second later it blinked back to them and they were off again, getting higher out of the water towards a large actual lotus topped lily pad. At the apex of the water garden, Hari could see miles, and the smell of the flowers was wonderful, but they were there to enter a floral staircase, bright pink and impossibly carved into the plant.
Brines was staggering, given that they had moved two dozen times in the last thirty seconds. “What the hell is this-”
The spider grabbed him and started dragging him up the stairs, chattering and stamping an arm on the ground angrily.
“Yeah! You heard the bug. Keep up!” Bearer added, running backwards up the stairs. Maybe she had some sort of corrective ability like Seru's, where it made her movement less prone to tripping. Hari suspected as an elf she could learn to do that, but it would probably take a solid fifty years.
The pink stairway merged back to blue, and Hari barely had time to see plants floating in a void, connected by black walls standing on little segments of dirt before they were flying into the blue void, two teleports later landing near a stream flowing out of a stairway.
Sloshing up cool water, they arrived at a fifth floor that resembled the source ruins, but as a possibly endless hillside with water flowing down it. She had a moment to get disoriented seeing the horizon skewed from where she was standing then the teleporting started again, only pausing as The spider dispatched two monsters that looked like giant arms with a tiny person attached. Hari started casting Blink Strike but stopped when the spider was putting it's own weapon back into a wedge in it's carapace, both monsters falling over.
Back to teleporting right to another set of stairs. The Tower's boss lobby looked like some sort of glass enclosure looking at the stars, with little phone-like devices built into tables blinking in the dark and displaying green lines like hills. The spider ignored it all, just skittering forward.
The clean doors lead to a dark hall that spit them out in a chamber that was a horrific flesh spun arena, with monster arms or tentacles jutting out of what looked like innards all around. The chamber had mouths gnashing and eyes following them as they all moved away from the walls. Hari looked all around, trying to avoid puddles of brown liquid that reeked of bile. The smell didn't help Bearer-Of-Burdens who started gagging, and Brines looked green again. Hari just had time to notice the Spider was finished extruding a two handed blade before the bug was gone, slicing parts of the room off, the entire room spasming and screaming in a thousand voices as she worked her way through the five limbs present, poked out two big eyes, and then slammed her sword into an exposed brain, breaking the blade. A moment later Hari's vision flashed.
Hari opened her eyes. It was blue. She tried to ask an open sky “What the hell was that?” but there was no response from drifting clouds. She thought it was odd how calm she was despite falling. Perhaps the wind being absent made it feel surreal. She landed on her feet even though she should have at least broken her legs hitting the ground as hard as she did. There wasn't even a scuff mark on the stonework under her boots. Looking around, she was surrounded by the green of an elvish garden, a space made from wood that had been shaped before it was culled from giving-trees, interlocking in shapes that both the elves who had tended the tree and the tree itself would have found fanciful, but in this case she saw things from Cascadia such as a stop light and a helicopter made of shaped wood mixed in with warriors and animals. Bits of green marked it as a living garden, and as she turned she saw more and more twists and turns, to the point that she spun more than a full circle and kept seeing new things, arches of shrubs, a climbing tower, a flower glade, and a green bottomed crystal springs that looked perfect for drinking from. There was no breeze, but the faint sound of tittering fae laughter and the smell of hundreds of flowers made her feel at home.
“Intent breeds power.” A voice called. It was a small woman with mouse ears, wearing purple and red robes. It should have been impossible to hear the woman given the distance they were, but it was as clear as if they were standing feet apart.
Hari started wracking her brain to think of an elvish goddess who favored the mouse as she strode across the stone paths and a barrage of wooden bridges, but found that she lost sight of the mouse-woman for just a hair's breath and in that moment she had vanished. Still, she could see gates into deeper segment of the gardens, scrawled with little runes and drawings.
“Corvayne told me about something like this...” Hari started walking, looking for something that suggested melding or communication. She rejected a campfire capping steaming wood, and also passed something that circled a staff and sword with curled helix vines of red around blue wood.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
She had, sometimes, thought that Corvayne could have intuited his choices better, but in the moment having a wealth of choices and knowing that she needed just one thing made her reconsider. She on a whim tried casting an [Investigation] spell, but even though the magic flowed it didn't change anything about the garden. She kept walking around the edge, seeing one for a boot with wings, one for a pick-axe and mug of ale that looked dwarven and out of place, and another gate that looked awful and fleshy and was dripping blood on the grass.
There was a gate that was patterned like Corvayne's clothes and had a circle of weapons. Perhaps it would let her pull all the tricks he did. Not what she needed.
Hari stopped in her tracks when she went around a corner into a shadowy nook and spotted an black obsidian gate, edged in sharp black crystal and actually encircled in green spiked vines. She was tempted to take the gate herself, guessing it was related to Corvayne's condition. Her hand started to move before she paused. No, she wouldn't get any better info on it taking it herself, and it might very well put a death timer on her as well.
Part of her hesitated to pull her hand away. She could try to figure out the secret of the triangle that the spider was using. Maybe her spells would work on herself, let her figure out what was happening.
Foolishness. She didn't have time to waste.
Hari kept going. There was one gate that reeked of pine sap and deep forest that had a ranger on it. It was hard to think about what it could do. It seemed to Hari that Corvayne's powers were direct, mostly, things he activated. He claimed, however, the shadow hands sort of did things without him really telling them to.
As if summoned by thought she saw a gate cloaked in shadow and once more she was tempted to take it but passed, guessing it wouldn't help her current problem. One that had more promise was a book supported by wood carved books stacked into an arch. She noted it's location and wandered to the last two gates. One was made of emerald, but smooth where the obsidian gate was jagged. It was also marked with a symbol rather than a drawing. It was the only other gate with an obstruction, curled plants covered in sap blocking it. The last gate had a person with a backpack on the arch, a simple figure looking at a wood horizon. A traveler perhaps.
It was... REALLY hard to decide!
The presence of something preventing her from going into the two gates now suggested there was perhaps an inherent danger in the power. But emerald was a life color and she might find something that actually helped her heal Corvayne. Risk, reward.
Carved books might help, as might the traveller: the compass power supposedly let Corvayne find things. Perhaps if the cure were her destination, the power would help guide her there. She rejected the ranger, and campfire, and whatever blood and shadows were. Even with those four, she kept running through what she knew in her head. Forget dooming Corvayne, the wrong pick might doom herself. She tried to think back to Undine's advice, the old woman talking about three friends and three paths. 'We got into an argument for a good hour of the day before we just took a dice and rolled off for it.”
She thought of Seru too. Fate. Luck.
Hari had a thought, and reached into her pocket, thinking of Seru's game. She pulled out a dice made of wood, with four sides and painted green appeared in her hands.
“One for the Green Stone, Four for the black, Two for books, Three for a traveler, looking forward, not back. Gygax and Lythandies, help me save him.”
She rolled, and the little four sided die clattered on the stone, making the sound of plastic rather than the wood she conceptualized it as.
Three. Traveller, looking forward not back. As she picked up the dice and looked to the gate, she felt like the carving had changed slightly. She was a traveler, and this was a trial to keep going on her journey. She didn't have the kind of goals her friends had, just the vague desire to become a great adventurer. To return home to Stillwater and prove to her tribe that she wasn't some clumsy human-born bastard. It was a childish fantasy, to make her family do more than laugh at her desire to see more, to be more than another elf molded to what their elders had long ago deemed as perfect.
She was a traveler, and with the dice roll cementing her mind she strode up to the gate, and walked through it.
A moment later she was back in the gross chamber. There was some whiplash as the smell of flowers was instantly replaced with that of the acrid chamber they had left.
The spider was rooting around in the treasure chest. It pulled out a bag and fished into it for a ring. It put it in it's mouth, then spit it out onto it's finger.
“Anyone get a communication power?” Hari asked.
She tried asking the spider, who didn't respond besides once more starting to push and prod them to exit the room. It tried hissing and chittering at them, but it didn't seem like anything to Hari.
Bearer started walking, giving the spider an flat look as she made her way to the door. “Nah. It's still gibberish.”
Brines shrugged. “I think it's a crap shoot, we didn't really pick our abilities...”
The spider didn't wait for them to finish the thought, first pushing then leading them up a sinewy tunnel that merged into blue stone as they stepped out into the next world. This one continued at least the stonework theme, with large boxy black bricks forming lines that moved through geometric arrangements of yellow sandy blocks.
Brines whistled. “Looks like an Escher drawing.”
Hari had no idea what that meant, but it looked like the sort of line carvings dwarves put on random stones when they got bored. She didn't like the lack of smooth surfaces, having just come from the garden. Then again, it didn't look like an organ, having just came from an organ too.
The spider grabbed them with it's magic and started pulling them up a series of broad cube to the top of the boxes. Hari hadn't really gotten the scale before the fourth teleport set them atop a vast plain with open pits from which stacked cube spires reached up to the next row of boxes. Standing on them for a half second, and seeing how slow the perspective changed, Hari realized that the thin lines reaching up like black needles must be more than a mile thick.
They kept teleporting, and Hari was in awe of the amount of mana that the spider had to be burning through to keep moving over and over. It did stop at some point, pulling something out from it's wing that looked like a pouch. It bit into it and sucked out some sort of blue fluid, then five seconds later they started moving again, gradually moving towards a pillar.
Oddly, Hari felt way more comfortable with the constant jerking motion of the teleports as they neared the huge pillar, no longer a needle but instead an imposing black tower. The spider turned perhaps ten or fifty miles before the pillar, the scale hard to tell. What had looked flat from afar had features that hinted at other floors, including streams bubbling up from unseen springs, a garden of steel and dust, and smaller ruins that looked like The Source's entrances. In those dark spaces she could see things reacting to them but not fast enough for the spider to bother.
As they neared the base of a second huge black line of cubes and it loomed to take up the whole view forward, Hari saw there were not as simple as she thought, with a maze of stairs, walkways, balconies, ladders on the black surface of the structure, all made of cubes and colored browns and golds to contrast the shiny black surface. Dark holes into the cube suggested untold more miles of square tunnels and chambers inside.
There was a single wide bridge across the titanic square chasm around the pillar up and the spider skipped them across it in six blinks, landing them in what looked like a temple entrance. It stopped and chewed another blue sack while Hari looked back. The needle behind them must have been further than a hundred miles.
Bearer looked back. “How far do you think we just went?”
Brines was holding his gut. “Too far.”
Hari had been thinking as he asked the question and blurted the number as it came to her. “Three hundred miles.”
Bearer shrugged. “Yeah, I mean, this pillar is at least three miles thick.” She gestured back at the black and gold colors of the line. Hari looked up and got a sense of both virtigo and insignificance as the fine rows of hundreds and hundreds of floors and walls extended into the tan dimness above them.
“We're so small....”
She felt a hand rest on her butt, and felt white hot fury for a moment as she spun ready to kill Brines or slap Bearer. “Wh-” She stopped when she saw it was the spider, who wasn't even paying attention, instead just looking up and placing it's hand at a height that was probably natural.
Brines and Bearer were both looking up too. There was, at that moment, unity with them.
Then Bearer turned to Brines. “You wanna put your hand on my ass too?”
Brines started sputtering and the former courier girl laughed, then lead them into the stairs up to the seventh floor.
The spider didn't blink when they crested the lip of the tunnel out, instead popping extra legs out of itself to walk into a series of courtyard gardens, no more than twenty feet across and lined with wood that supported tomatoes, stone planting beds full of peppers and rainbow chard, and some blue tubers peeking out from dirt that Hari had never seen before.
The spider followed a particular path, not bothering to teleport. Hari followed right behind as she knew it probably would get annoyed again if they didn't keep it's pace.
Sitting in one of the points of the garden was a old man. If not for him waving Hari might have missed him for how the browns and grays blended in with the garden's colors.
“Oh hello miss bug! It's been a little while.”
The Spider dropped a few shaped tools, and some coins. The man smiled, and gave it a burlap sack, then adjusted something near him and a door opened to a stairway up. It was not blue stone like before, but orange.
“As always, a pleasure doing business.”
Hari slowed. “Does it understand you?”
“Oh no. But I gave her some food and she started trading me gifts.”
Hari looked at the old man, then the spider who was waiting on the stairway. “How do you know it's a she?”
“Not sure. Sometimes you just... understand things. Like, I found this garden and decided to work here. Keeps me young on the inside.”
“I'm surprised she doesn't just teleport through.” Brines asked.
“Oh she used to!” The old man laughed and patted the door. “But she always walks through now.”
The spider gently prodded Hari's hand, and she waved at the old man and once out of his view they picked up the pace again, jogging up the stairs.
The orange stairway was longer than a blue, and she felt like there was something about the orange gently glowing crystal that was building energy.
The spider turned a curve in the shallow steps and slowed, and Hari saw where it was leading them.
At the top of the stairs was what looked like a literal wall of animal arms and faces, straining against a barrier only suggested by orange glowing runes that suggested to Hari the expectation was to bring at least 36 people, and a horned monster icon like the spider had drawn, next to 'times 128' in elvish.
Brines must have seen his own language, because he asked. “Wait, over a hundred times the monsters, why would-”
The spider didn't slow as it hit the last steps, instead bursting through the wall with a shadow step. The wall of monsters froze in place then fell apart in a torrent of blood and parts. A stream of blood started flowing down the steps, seeping into the stone as howls and cries of rage and pain came from the floor ahead like a thousand panthers stepping in a bear trap, all at once.
Hari, despite feeling the correct action would be to run, stepped up to the threshold of the level, and it was madness. A landscape that was heaving with monsters, deep crimson under a blood moon that was dripping to the ground.
Brines looked at Hari, then turned back to stare at the carnage unfolding in a circle around the spider.
“Uh, do you think it meant to take us to monster hell?”
Hari didn't need to use any investigation spells to answer him. “Yes.”