Down, down at the bottom of the tunnels below the rock, down in a place that had been dug out and left empty and silent, were tunnels that had been clearly meant as a hideout of some sort. A bolthole within a bolthole, a last redoubt for whatever enemies were persistent enough to take the fortress and implacable enough to keep hunting for the inhabitants.
The resistance had found a use for it; though not the use they had intended initially.
“You're running us through the roguelike? Now? Before the big battle? With all of our gear?” LongTom groused. “This thing is best for noobs. We're pretty high level, we don't need to grind any, and the loot from here is usually crap anyway.”
“And what's a Geebo, anyway?” asked Vae.
“It was like this dude's familiar,” Longtom hooked a thumb back toward Rotgoriel. “Creepy raptor looking thing that talked like Gollum.”
“Yes,” said Rotgoriel, not knowing what birds or golems had to do with anything. “He is the reason this... roguelike... exists. He achieved a high level, and I gave him permission to evolve into his next form. But it is taking longer than anticipated. And if we are to yield this ground to the enemy, then I will not leave him to their mercy.”
Nobody had expected Geebo's hibernation to generate a dungeon.
Although it wasn't technically a dungeon. Not in the way he and Agnezsharron were familiar with the term. The two dragons knew the secret of dungeons, that they were the dreams of unborn dragons. Traps set up to draw in the living, and gain experience from their deaths, and a hoard from the treasure that their explorers lost within them.
Geebo's dream was different, in ways that were hard to describe. It could be deadly, which was why Rotgoriel had gathered backup for this, but it could also be whimsical. It was a toss-up every time you entered, and so the guild used it to run new recruits through for somewhat-safe experience and the occasionally useful loot drop.
“So we have to save this Geebo from his own dream?” Bittybop asked. Rotgoriel had explained an abbreviated version of things to them, without going into the secrets of dragons too much.
“He should have woken up by now,” Rotgoriel said. “The divinations that our Oracles cast at the time said he would be done before we left this place. But with our foes marching for our doorstep, we no longer have the option of waiting and hoping he can pull himself free of it.” And there was also the possibility that Rotgoriel entering Geebo's dream was the very thing that pulled him from his slumber, and finished the process. Prophecies were often self-fulfilling things; the gods were smug bastards that way.
“Makes sense to me,” Vae shrugged, making her oversize pauldrons shift and grind against her rather-aptly-named breastplate. “We're going to a new lair, we want to take our little noob level grinder with us.”
Rotgoriel held his tongue. To them it was a matter of convenience. To him, this was the salvation of a friend. Though their friendship had been a bit strained, before Geebo went to sleep. The drakkit had been irritable and moody, and Rotgoriel didn't know why.
The journey into the tunnels ended at the edge of a pool, watery and chill in that way only subterranean springs could feel. The four of them waded into the mess, with Bittybop the only one who had to paddle. And soon they came to the archway.
It wasn't much to look at. Just an arch of stone set into the wall. Nothing decorative, no runes, no flashy magical effects.
But the interior of it was dark. Even to a dragon's eyes. Impenetrable darkness, like a soft and heavy curtain.
“You sure you're going to fit, big guy?” Vae asked, and it took a second to realize that she was speaking to him.
“I have before. You. You're the leader. Invite us to the party at your leisure.”
“Me? I thought...”
“He's still an NPC right now, kiddo,” Longtom whispered and Rotgoriel pretended not to hear him. “The bot's running the show. It hates to be in charge.”
That wasn't completely accurate, by design. Rich had conspired with him to construct that fallacy, and Rotgoriel was glad to see that it had taken hold.
Vae handled the logistics, and Rotgoriel waited for each of them to file through first. He had another reason for deferring the leadership, and hopefully doing this would prevent trouble from arising.
Then he ducked his head, and pushed it through the archway.
Instantly the water around his feet went from cold to warm, the barren cave walls around him were replaced with endless clumps of vegetation thrusting out of dark water, and the smells of dampness and clean stone gave way to rotting plants, sulfurous wind, and the slimy odor of algae. Insects shrilled and clicked all about him, and save for his three other party members at his feet, everything else he could see, hear, or smell, was of the swamp.
“I've seen this one before,” Vae remarked. “There's giant frog things in the center of it. As long as we skirt around the big pool there shouldn't be any surprises, and the way to the next level's along one of the edges. We got lucky.”
“Maybe not,” Long Tom said, taking his rifle out and pulling his Camo cloak item closer around him, fading a bit until Rotgoriel could almost see reeds waving on his other side. “The wind changed when big, dark, and scaly arrived. I think it's scaling up.”
“Scaling up?” Bittybop asked.
“Adjusting the level of the monsters and traps for him,” Vae grimaced, her mouth just visible over the collar of her breastplate. “Come on. Let's move quickly. Maybe we can dodge the frogs before they get too big.”
If he had been alone, Rotgoriel would have flown up, found the exit, and left without a fuss.
But flying up now would only make a larger target for the things that were hiding in the swamp, and his companions could not fly, so he hunkered as low as he could and followed behind the group.
It was a little aggravating; even Vae Victus moved faster than he did, and she was practically festooned with armor, every bit of her save her head. But then they weighed little, and the sucking mud beneath the swamp was soft beneath his claws. It took effort to find purchase with every step.
Twice, Longtom called a warning and they backed away from quicksand. Thrice, they were set upon by mosquitoes the size of large dogs.
And above them, lightning flickered in the previously-clear sky, thunder rumbled, and a heavy rain started to sleet down.
“Oh, that's a change. That feels bad. Anyone else feel that?” Bittybop asked.
“We aren't wanted here,” Vae muttered, and Rotgoriel knew that wasn't entirely true.
He wasn't wanted here.
Something in Geebo's dreaming mind wanted him gone. Just like the other visits.
Water sloshed around his ankles and he rose to his full height, finding purchase on the more stable spots.
“Dude, stay low!” Longtom hissed.
“No point,” said Rotgoriel. “They come.”
The water rose and the players yelled as they scrambled for the high ground, or whatever they could find that sufficed.
And then came the wave.
A massive spray of liquid, as the first froghemoth crashed into the water not a hundred feet from them. It had sailed noiselessly out of a dark sky, jumped from what had to be a mile away, literally.
It rose from the mud, a towering clump of mud and muscle and maw, with bulbous predator's eyes on top, and it rumbled a croak of hunger and malevolence so fearsome that it made green numbers squirt out of his party member's heads.
You have resisted the Frogzilla's Growl skill!
You take 0 moxie damage!
“Oh Jesus!” wailed Longtom.
“There's smaller ones coming out of the muck!” Vae said, slamming her fists together. A massive round shield spiraled out of one gauntlet, and a spear sprang out of the other. “Grand Challenge!”
The smaller ones paused, and suddenly there was a horde of horse-sized fanged frogs hopping her way. Rotgoriel ignored them.
The big one hadn't taken her challenge. The big one kept on as it had been, its malevolent, massive orbs never leaving Rotgoriel's gaze.
“I would have it no other way! Scaly Wings!” Rotgoriel growled, and took to the air.
He had his task and his allies had theirs; the party he'd brought would keep the lessers off of him, while he took the biggest threat head on.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The thing's mouth gaped as he charged it, tongue flickering like lightning and wrapping around one leg. Rotgoriel grunted and altered his flight, trying to go past the mouth...
...but too late.
With surprising strength the thing drew him into its mouth, plunging his front half into darkness as its teeth snapped down on his spine.
CRUNCH.
Rotgoriel grunted at the impact, then thrashed his tail. That crunch wasn't my spine, he thought with relief.
Rancid air howled past him, as the thing screamed in pain.
Ah, it broke some teeth, Rotgoriel thought with satisfaction. This thing was no match for him, might-for might. “Dragon's Eye,” he muttered, and the darkness cleared. He was looking down a smooth, slimy gullet. Let's see now. That looks like the part it's using to breathe through. “Sandblast!” Rotgoriel roared, and filled Frogzilla's lungs with slashing grit.
The thing paused.
It coughed.
It choked.
And Rotgoriel pulled himself free as Frogzilla rolled in the bog, gagging, choking, trying to clear its lungs of obsidian sand. It was less of a fight and more of a mercy kill as Rotgoriel held it down with his weight and chewed through it until it stopped moving.
Nibbling on his flank pulled his attention back to his surroundings. He took a second to survey the fight, found that his party had backed themselves onto a hill that hadn't been there a second ago. For a moment he wondered why, then he saw a handful glowing brown humanoids with stony, whirling clouds of rock and mud in place of their legs. They motioned about them, and earth rose out of the swamp, providing a moderately defensible position to fight from. Their names proclaimed them to be 'Bittybop's Earth Genies.”
“A little to the left!” shouted Bittybop, from her safe spot behind Vae. “Ooops!”
One of the Earth djinn shrieked as it got mobbed by froglings, and dissipated into sparkling motes.
“Dammit! This is taking so much sanity... Summon Lesser Earth Genie!” Another one popped up and took the slain one's place, even as Longtom's rifle cracked, and frogs fell.
For her part, Vae was an solid bulwark of steel and spear. With no ability to affect the terrain, she had settled for making piles of froggy corpses to act as fortifications. It seemed to be going well there, though what she had in defense, she lacked in raw damage. It was clear to Rotgoriel that if things remained as they were, the trio would eventually be overwhelmed and slain.
Rotgoriel stretched, feeling his spine crack. The Frogzilla had put a pretty good dent in it. The sound of stone crunching on stone echoed through the marsh, louder than the fiendish croaking of the relentless horde.
The horde that fell silent as he stretched, and cleared his throat.
The horde that stared with lidless eyes, and trembled as he took a step forward, letting flames play in the back of his open mouth as he drew in a deep breath.
Two minutes later the only survivors of a froggy persuasion were those who had fled back into the thicker part of the marsh. Rotgoriel brushed gore from his mouth, and turned back to his group as the earth genies popped out one by one, their summoning time up.
“That was a wise move, building earthworks. In a swamp,” Rotgoriel said, surveying the walls. Nothing the frogs couldn't and hadn't hopped over, but it had given LongTom a stable sniping spot, and Vae a single front to defend. “Speak to Pat. Tell him I said you were officer quality, Conjuror.”
“I... um... You know I'm fourteen, right?”
“Did I stutter?”
“It's cool, kid, just nod and smile at the dragon bot. It'll forget about it when Rich gets back,” Vae gave the gnome a headpat.
“We should get going,” Longtom advised. “That was a boss. If we hit one on the first level, it'll ramp up quick from here.”
But it didn't.
They made their way to the next level unmolested, finding a dark, muddy hole down into the earth that opened up into a cavern so full of stalactites and stalagmites that it resembled a dripping, endless maw full of teeth.
And they felt familiar.
“These are similar to the caves under my parent's lair,” Rotgoriel rumbled to his party as he went. “These are the ones we explored together, or something very like it.”
“Kind of boring,” LongTom commented.
“The originals had giant crayfish. I cannot say I am sorry that these do not.” That thing had hurt. Of course he'd been smaller, back then. Barely ten feet long, just out of the egg.
Then an unmistakable odor crossed his nostrils. “Not so deserted as it seems. I smell fresh blood. Be wary.”
They let him take the lead. The caverns were vast, much larger than he remembered them, with ceilings so far above that Bittybop's little glowing lightstone didn't breach the darkness entirely.
“You get this sometimes,” LongTom said. “Creepy, empty levels full of stuff that makes no sense. No real loot. Just... sorrow.”
Rotgoriel glanced around to see water drip from above, hit something invisible an inch above Vae's head, and slide down in a curving arc. Invisible helmet, he thought. Smart. “You're not wrong,” he replied to LongTom's last comment. “But I do not know why Geebo's dreams are so sad.”
A surge of stench across his nostrils, and he whipped his snout around...
...and beheld the carnage.
In a heartbeat, in a blink, the way ahead had gone from empty cavern to a battlefield... no, a slaughter. For a second he thought the dead were dragons, then his gaze focused in on the differences. Not dragons, but something lesser, something less beautiful and mighty. Squat forms with odd numbers of legs lay fallen in death with stretched thin forms that could coil around him thrice, but were no wider around than the palm of his hand. Some had two heads, some had odd numbers of wings. Others were janky, mismatched assemblages of arms and legs and tails.
Rotgoriel felt something roll in his chest, some primal urge that made him stop and stare at the bloody heaps of corpses. Only the comments of his party broke his reverie, as their weaker eyes got within range of the mess.
“Shit, this is a regular Necromancer's paradise,” said LongTom. “Hey Bittybop, you got a secondary job yet?”
“Uh... yeah. Wow. This is... poor things. They're kind of cute, you know? In a misfit toys kind of way,” the gnome said, eyes wide in the light of her orb.
“They are grotesque,” Rotgoriel said, feeling ashamed that the others had seen them, and not knowing why. “Come.”
He moved between the piles, but vast puddles of blood dripped and slipped along the floors of the cavern, and those he could not avoid. The others waded, knee-deep in the dead, all save for Bittybop who got a free ride on Vae's shield.
The cave ended in a single round chamber, choked full of corpses. And with them pressing in on all sides, Rotgoriel could not help but notice that the wounds on these corpses looked familiar.
“These things were slain by dragons,” he rumbled, half to himself.
“They killed each other, then?” LongTom asked.
“No. These are not dragons. They are pale mockeries of us,” he said, searching through the pile.
Agnezsharron had taught him the trick to moving dragon's eggs from their dungeons, long ago. And though Geebo was not a dragon egg, his realm was close enough that the same principles might hold true here.
But it was no certainty. And if they didn't, then Rotgoriel didn't know what he could do, here. They would have to depart and leave Geebo behind, and he did not know what the Bharstool Warmers would do to his oldest friend.
Geebo was not a player.
Geebo could not respawn.
No, leaving him here would be a loss that Rotgoriel could not bear. And so Rotgoriel ground his teeth together, and growled, “Search the room. Look for a place that does not belong. Something... you would call it, glitchy.”
Then he took his own advice, and dug through the corpses, fighting back disgust as he began his search.
It was the sound of whimpering, that drew him. Whimpering and sobbing, faint but audible under the deepest pile of corpses. With a snort of satisfaction Rotgoriel clawed back the outermost layer of the dead, revealing a hole in a corner of the room that glowed green and flickered with a barely-visible light.
“Here,” Rotgoriel rumbled, holding aside the dead meat. “Bittybop. You are smallest. Go in there and retrieve what you find.”
“Um... go in where?” Bittybop asked.
Rotgoriel frowned. “Can you not see? Amplify your light, then.”
She did so, and the other members of the party leaned in, then looked up to him, confusion writ plain on their faces.
“There's nothing there,” Vae told him.
“Yeah,” Longtom said. “You think it's an illusion?”
“There is a hole, right where the wall joins the floor,” Rotgoriel spoke.
Cautiously, Bittybop moved over and poked around the area, shuddering as her small hand swept through the blood. Rotgoriel watched as she touched the hole, and her hand glided over it as if the empty space were solid rock.
“This stinks of shenanigans,” Rotgoriel muttered, scooting Bittybop aside with one hand and stretching out a claw. “Let me try—”
And abruptly, as his finger made contact with the hole, he was somewhere else.
Endless void stretched around him. But it was warm, hot and humid in a way that brought to mind the swamp. Green lights played in the distance, flickering candles of the stuff that seemed to burst up from the ground, and stretch up for hundreds of feet before guttering out.
There were words in the sky, words and symbols that he could not read. He took a moment to stare at them regardless, embedding them into his memory. His brother would want to see these later, he was sure of it.
And the sound of whimpering came louder... up until it was broken by a harsh voice, speaking in the tongue of dragons.
“Get out here and die, you miserable whelp!”
Another voice came, melodious and feminine, but filled with far more vitriol than the previous one. “You are filth, who never should have been allowed to grow!”
More insults and threats followed, and Rotgoriel turned, searching. Turned, or perhaps the reality he was in turned around him. This was a place beyond dreams, this had to be the core of the egg, where a young dragon's consciousness touched reality. He was not exactly here, he thought. He was an idea, a shadow in a dream. And this meant that Geebo was something like a young dragon, going through the sleep...
...the sleep where the ancestors would whisper secrets and truths and encouragements in a young dragon's ears, as he grew into the adult he was destined to become.
Except that wasn't what was going on here, and Rotgoriel's crest flared along his spine as he realized what this meant.
“You bitches!” he roared, and charged toward where he thought the voices were at the loudest.
Silence, for a second. And then he was there among them. A glowing green circle of symbols traced its way crookedly across the 'ground,' and in it was a thing, a small huddled thing of wings and blackish-green scales. But he had no time for that, because all around it, oddly shrunken down to about human-size, were the same ancestors which had spent three full goddamn years bitching about Rotogoriel while he slept and grew in his own transition.
They stared up at him.
He stared down at them.
Then he roared, and came for them, and they fled, winging out into the blackness and beyond his sight.
“Bitches, all!” he howled, as they left. Then he turned, looking at the thing in the circle.
Was it Geebo? It had to be. There was a lot of slime. It looked like someone had made a wax copy of Geebo, then half-melted it. It twitched and lay there in misery upon the formless ground, staring at him with what might be an eye.
“Well,” Rotgoriel muttered to himself. “I probably didn't look that good when I was inside my own egg. Come on. We need to move you.”
He reached out a claw, and hesitated as he came to the runic circle, then pushed past with sudden resolve. And thankfully, nothing happened.
Almost nothing. Moving faster than he expected, the mass that was probably Geebo surged forward and bit him with a sharp, sharp beak.
“Ow! You...” Rotgoriel bit back his anger, and pulled his hand back, bringing the furiously gnawing creature with it.
And as he did so, the blackness around him flickered, pulsing like a heartbeat. Green symbols flashed furiously in the sky, with a meaning that was beyond him.
Geebo paused in trying to gnaw his hand off, then whirled, flailing half-formed appendages as it tried to get back into the circle.
“Oh no you do not!” Rotgoriel said, and gripped the creature tightly. It turned its efforts from escape to violence, and he bit back more pain as the thing started shredding through the scales of his arm. He was strong and sturdy, that was true, but this thing was sharp and fast.
But he held on. If it came down to it, he could use magic to regrow his hand. He could not replace a dead Geebo, and he was certain now that death would find his friend if the drakkit did not leave this place.
Then, with one final green flicker, Rotgoriel found himself standing in shallow water, down in the clean, stony darkness of the cistern. Gasps and mutters around him told him that his party was here, too.
“Okay, that was weird. Thought I dropped for a minute,” Vae said. “You okay now? You were paralyzed for a few minutes, there.”
“I am,” Rotgoriel said, his hand throbbing in pain. He opened his fingers, to look upon the fleshy, slimy green orb that could not be anything but an egg. “But I am damned if I know what this all means...”