Hans remembered it so clearly.

He sat in his small, windowless office off the main hallway of the Hoseki training facility. It smelled like old gym mats and still had racks mounted to the wall to hold mops and brooms from when it was a closet.

Devontes sat across from him. Twenty one years old and a Gold-ranked adventurer, the boy had already become a part of Adventurers’ Guild history, reaching Gold in record time and at the youngest age ever. In battle, he had taken to wearing silver plate mail with inlaid gold filigree, a gift from the royals to celebrate his remarkable achievements. Today, he was in a fine yellow silk shirt with fashionable black pants and polished boots. Were it not for his stature and presence, he could have passed for nobility.

“I thought you’d be happy for me,” Devon said to Hans. “I’d be the first Paladin in what, six hundred years? This is everything we’ve worked for.”

“No, we worked to make you a skilled adventurer. Paladin was never in the plan.”

“Because the opportunity is that good! We couldn’t even imagine it!”

Hans shook his head, leaning forward on his creaky desk. “You need to think very hard about this choice. A Paladin’s oath is a serious thing. There’s no changing your mind or having a bad day. You have to follow the oath, always, or you suffer.”

“You know I know that.”

“That’s part of what worries me. You’re not acting like it.”

“You always talk about adventurers doing good. What could do more good than a Paladin? With those kinds of gifts, I’d be able to do so much more.”

Hitting his desk with a closed fist, Hans cursed. “Wake up! Devon, you’re an incredible talent, a once in a generation kind of talent. That means people want to use you. They can’t do what you can, so they will find ways to get you to do it for them. Gods included.”

“I don’t believe this,” Devon spit, his chair bouncing off of Hans’ office door when he stood. “I already talked to the Guild Master and a few of the Platinums. They think it’s a divine blessing for our kingdom. But you know what? They said you wouldn’t support it. You just don’t want me to pass you.”

“You passed me a year ago!” Hans said. “I’m trying to look out for you.”

A voice from outside the office, muffled by the closed door, said, “Olza, are you crying?”

Devon pointed a finger down at Hans. “Stay away from me. If you bother me again–”

A stinging pain arced across Hans’ cheek. He blinked, trying to recover, but the office flickered, its walls blinking between his bare office in Hoseki to a dark corridor lit only by a torchlight, with a lady dwarf winding up to slap him again.

“Hans!” Becky yelled. “You old piece of shit! Get it together!” She slapped him again.

“I… Wha… My head.” Hans rubbed his eyes, finding his cheeks soaked with tears.

Becky unfolded a piece of paper and held it in front of his eyes. “Read it!” she commanded.

You’re under psionics. It isn’t real. Get it together. -Hans

That was his handwriting…

“Olza’s gone too!” Roland yelled to Becky as the alchemist sank to the stone floor, weeping softly.

Digging into her bag, Becky pulled out a few cans she had liberated from Hans’ alarm wire. “Help me with this,” she said to the hunter.

Roland took one end of the rope and helped Becky wrap it around Hans’ waist, tying it, and then doing the same to Olza, tethering the two together.

“Are you doing alright?” Becky asked Roland.

“I don’t feel it. Anything.”

“Me neither.”

Finally, they tied the rope around Roland’s waist as well. Roland insisted they do it just to be safe. With a hurried pace, Becky dragged her other three party members behind her, retreating back the direction they had come. Roland tried to steady Hans and Olza as best he could.

After a few minutes, Hans and Olza began to rally. They were far enough from the aura now.

“That was… That was…” Olza struggled. “I never want to feel that again.”

“You’re okay now. It was just in your mind,” Roland said, sitting beside her. “You’re safe. You’re with friends.”

Turning to him, fresh tears filled Olza’s eyes. “You were in that for… days? Oh, Roland. I’m so sorry.” She threw her arms around him, squeezing him tight. “I’m so sorry you went through that.”

Several minutes later, Hans looked around at his party members and asked, “Are we ready to talk? If anyone needs more time, none of us mind. Take as much as you need.”

Everyone said that they were ready.

“The squonks we found had a range of twenty to thirty feet, give or take,” Hans explained. “Even if these ones are stronger somehow, it’s close, or they are close, depending. We need to deal with them as quickly as we can.”

Becky tightened the grip on her axe.

“Becky is in the lead. Roland, you’ll back her up. Olza and I will follow for as long as we can. If we know it’s happening, we might be able to resist it.”

“What do we do if you can’t?”

“That will be your call,” Hans said, nodding his head toward the dwarf. “If your gut says run, do it. If your gut says keep hunting, do it. If you end up hunting while we’re out, don’t wait for us. Go chop the thing and then come back for us.”

The dwarf glanced at the floor, seemingly replaying the plan in her mind, her head bobbing along.

“Give me one extra minute, though. I have an idea.”

***

With Becky and Roland in the lead, Hans and Olza did their best to keep up. The Guild Master had a waterskin stuffed in his pants for emergencies. Or so he said.

When the party entered the hopelessness aura, Hans felt it press down on him. Fighting it was like trying to keep his eyes open on a long wagon ride. Like the weight of sleep, he could shrug off the hopelessness for an instant but then it pressed right back. He tried to count his steps, but he quickly realized the only thing he could think about was holding back that weight.

He felt tears beginning to pool in his eyes, and he wasn’t sure if he could resist much longer.

Hans squeezed the waterskin, shooting cold water down the front of his pants.

Reality rushed back, like curtains ripped open. He risked a look back at Olza, though she couldn’t go far tied-off to Hans. She was deep in concentration, her eyes closed completely as she repeated a soft mantra. He couldn’t make out the words. Looking ahead, he saw Becky and Roland cut a sharp left, disappearing into a shadow on the wall.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

But they were so small, so far away.

How far have we gone?

After his second blast of the waterskin and closing in on his third, the weight vanished. Down the hall, Hans heard the familiar sound of a blade cleaving into flesh, followed by the raspy hiss of a frightened squonk. Hurrying Olza as much as she could manage, he rushed down the hall to catch up with Becky and Roland.

He found the left they had taken, which was actually a crossroads of sorts. It had been difficult to see from a distance in the dark. Hans noticed the roots turned to the right. Going left and toward Becky instead, the hallway ended abruptly with a small chamber with a doorway but no door.

Two squonks were dead in the chamber, but the Druid and the hunter seemed more interested in the room around them. Fearing this was another psionic effect, Hans yelled and ran to retrieve them. When he entered the chamber, he saw what had held their attention. The entire room was wrapped in the thin roots of the Polzas, the stone masonry barely visible beneath.

“Boss, look at this,” Becky said after a moment. “Roland spotted it.” The dwarf knelt and pointed to the back leg of one of the squonks. One of the Polza roots had grown into–or out of, perhaps–the monster’s leg.

When Hans touched where they connected, he couldn’t feel a division between beast and root. He had seen vines and arrows pierce flesh before, where the object ended and the flesh began was easy to discern, but here, it was like the skin of the squonk gradually faded to a woody root.

“Were these squonks grown?” Hans asked to the room, but mostly he was thinking out loud to himself.

Roland involuntarily shivered at the thought.

Becky looked back down the hallway, in the direction the roots ran. “Might be a good idea to keep moving. I don’t think we should camp in here.”

The party agreed.

The dwarf saw the waterskin in the front of Hans’ pants, as well as the water that had soaked into the crotch of pants. “Should probably do those kinds of things in private,” Becky said.

***

The spiral growth pattern of the roots continued down the hall as they had been for much of the dungeon, but the spiral expanded. Instead of a trail of roots circling and circling the corridor, the trail widened over time. Eventually, the entire hallway was coated from floor to ceiling in roots, their continuing swirl becoming both mesmerizing and disorienting.

Chalking the walls was impossible here, on account of the roots, and Olza dropped the twine sometime during the battle with the squonks. Luckily, their path had been relatively linear, so finding their way back to the twine by memory alone shouldn’t be all that difficult. Though navigation was important, the party’s minds thought more about the noticeably rising temperature.

On one of his early expeditions, Hans’ party had come across a magma chamber deep underground. They never saw the molten rock, but they felt its impossible heat and could hear it churning on the other side of the cave wall. The deep underground could be unstable in places, and intelligent hell spawn were happy to use magma to attack unsuspecting adventurers.

The hallway with the roots wasn’t warming the way the magma had, which he found comforting. Hans’ best guess was that their depth in the mountains was responsible for the heat, but that wouldn’t explain the temperature all the way back in the Polza patch, or why it would rise so starkly in a brief distance, forcing the party to pull at their cloaks and collars for relief.

As they neared the end of the root-covered corridor, they saw a faint purple light leaking through a vertical fissure. No door, no chambers, no other hallways, just a glowing crack. Every root in the hallway funneled through the hole, giving the crack’s edges a blurry quality in the darkness. Moving closer, the gap was larger than Hans expected. At its widest points, the fissure was roughly as large as a doorway. Getting through should not be challenging, Hans thought.

Before Becky could insist on going first, Hans drew his sword and climbed up the lip of the gap, crouching to creep through.

The purple light was stronger on the other side, but barely. It was still dim, like a fire burned down to coals, giving just enough light to make out the shapes in the room.

The fissure opened into an octagonal room comparable to the size of the Tribe barns. The crack was six feet above the floor of the room, a more intricate version of the same masonry the party had walked over and by for the last several hours. Here, the room had an arch for every vertex of the octagon, and obsidian black stripes on the floor radiated out from the middle like sun rays. Thick bundles of roots accentuated those stripes, meeting in the middle at a fractured black cube. The roots plunged into the sides of the cube in dense clusters, two clusters a side.

The cube was about the size of a blacksmith’s forge, but its top half was missing, as though it were broken off. Looking around the room, though, Hans saw no debris and certainly not the ton or so of obsidian that would make up the rest of a cube that size.

The purple hue came from the center of the cube, a small circular light.

When Becky came behind him to enter the room, Hans held out his arm to stop her. Before they dropped down, they anchored a rope to a piton pounded into the hallway. The rope would make descending to the floor easier for the party, but more importantly, it would give them a better chance of escaping. Should they need to.

Hans went first, opting to jump down so he wouldn’t need to turn his back to the room. The impact didn’t feel great on his joints, but it was the smarter play.

Approaching the cube, Hans saw that the circle of light was actually a sphere, or used to be. Like the black cube, the sphere was broken, though the angle of its destruction seemed different from the cube’s. It was like the cube had been struck twice, once to break the black rock, and once to break the sphere within.

The sphere had a fragment of its smooth, perfectly round surface, but it was like one shard from a broken clay pot. Most of the sphere was gone.

“What is it?” Roland asked, staying several feet behind Hans.

The Guild Master didn’t answer, too enraptured by the riddle before him. He walked around the cube, careful not to step on the bundles of roots. Of the eight bundles connected to the cube–one for each side of the octagonal room–Hans found that the cluster they followed was unique from the rest. Where their roots had the deep browns of a healthy plant, the other seven were dead, dried to a sickly gray and coated in dust.

When his eye followed the gray roots to their respective walls, they ended partway across the floor. There were no other fissures or cracks for the roots to escape through.

“Why isn’t there a door?” Olza asked, looking around the room.

She was right. Other than the hole they climbed through, the room had no other visible entrance or exit. No door. No stairs. No ladders.

Without touching anything, Hans reached a palm toward the partial sphere.

Quest Complete: Identify the source of the heat melting the Polza snow.

“The heat is coming from here,” Hans announced to the party. “The roots must carry it somehow.”

Hans looked around to see if any member of the party had something to add. In a moment of brief panic, he didn’t see Becky, but he found her soon enough. She stood where they had come in, not climbing down to join the rest of the party.

“You okay, Becky?” Hans asked.

“Just watching our rear,” she replied.

Even if fear kept her from entering the room–which is what Hans suspected–there was no sense pointing it out. Having her at the entrance was a good failsafe, and she was right to be hesitant. They didn’t know where they were or what they were looking at. This entire chamber could be an elaborate mimic.

Probably not. Hans didn’t know if mimics could get that big, but his point stood. Becky’s reaction was reasonable, and it worked out to the party’s benefit anyway.

Olza came up beside Hans. The Guild Master had sheathed his sword and stood resting his chin in his hand. He stared at the purple orb, watching the light pulse faintly like a weak heartbeat. He hadn’t noticed the light changing until he came close, soft as the flickers were.

Hans cycled through his other senses, trying to learn about where he was, hoping to find more clues.

The room didn’t smell, which was peculiar. The halls they walked to reach this chamber held the distinct mustiness that came with being far underground where stale water seeped and fresh air couldn’t reach. For this chamber, and this chamber only, not to smell was interesting, but he couldn’t think of what that might point to for an explanation.

The chamber was quiet and still. Save for the sounds of fabric and leather moving as Roland looked around, the only other things he could hear were his heartbeats and Olza’s breaths, which were deliberately slow and forceful to calm her nerves.

If he closed his eyes, he could feel a slight vibration, the kind one felt when near a powerful source of magic. The sensation was so slight, however, that he questioned if he was simply imagining it. Stress and exhaustion could be tainting his perception. Was the room shaking or was he?

“Do you know what that…” Olza began, whispering before pausing again to look around. “...what this place is?”

Hans thought about Galinda’s story and what they had been through when the Lemura’s Labyrinth was discovered. He thought about how much suffering the dungeon brought to Galad and Galinda and every other tusk who tried to make Kirai their home.

“This place is a problem for Gomi. A very big problem.”

***

Open Quests (Ordered from Old to New):

Progress from Gold-ranked to Diamond-ranked.

Mend the rift with Devon.

Complete the manuscript for "The Next Generation: A Teaching Methodology for Training Adventurers."

Identify the unknown purple flower from Olza.

Protect your place in Gomi and maintain control of the Gomi chapter.

Find a practical solution for a planar leak. Bonus Objective: Find a solution that uses only resources available in Gomi.

Expand the Gomi training area to include ramps for footwork drills.

Find ways to support new tusks in their transition to life in Gomi.

Design a system for training dungeon awareness.

Complete an expedition into the Polza caves.

Research the history and legends of the Dead End Mountains.