Edmund nearly stumbled as he emerged from the darkness between levels onto a surface far steeper than he’d tread before. He caught himself on the open entrance, swinging wildly about as the door rotated on its hinges. Without a moment’s hesitation Edmund spun, his blackbone boots scuffing against wooden planks as he brought himself about to face the floor ahead.
No trap triggered. No monster pounced. No opportunistic danger took advantage of his brief imbalance.
Edmund exhaled.
He stood in a small room, sparse more than two arms’ lengths wide with a ceiling that narrowly evaded scraping against the top of his head. At a nearly forty percent angle, the floor sloped down for some six feet before it submerged, its length vanishing beneath a pool of water.
Even through the thick haze of smoke that clouded the tight space, the dim torchlight glimmered upon the water, its surface still to a mirror finish, confronting Edmund with his own helmeted visage. He glowered at it.
Beneath the acrid tones of the smoke, the room stank of rotting wood, the planks that made up every inch of the space ragged and ready to break at the drop of a pin. To Edmund’s left, the wall curved in as it approached the floor, a behavior unshared by the perfectly flat right wall. Having never been aboard one before, that alone didn’t inform Edmund that he stood upon a ship.
The porthole did.
In the left wall, the one he realized to be the hull, two rings of rusted iron secured a small, circular piece of glass. Outside lay only darkness, impenetrable behind the glass from the light of the cabin, but for a singularly disturbing detail.
A trail of bubbles flowed across the window, traveling up from a spot along its base and three at its sides before disappearing from view.
At once the room’s sharp angle and flooded base took on new context. The ship wasn’t sinking.
It had already sunk.
Worse yet, the flow of bubbles put him on a clock as his air pocket slowly depleted. His sigil of the slumbering deep would keep him from drowning, thank Thrax, but it wouldn’t stop the rotting wood from giving in. A long creak echoed through the waterbound space. A chill ran down Edmund’s spine. Unknown tons of water weighed down upon the sunken ship, exerting force Edmund couldn’t hope to reckon with. He’d have to tread lightly if he hoped to avoid a collapse.
He assembled his spear and began with his traditional poking and prodding, leaving the hull mostly alone as he delicately nudged at various planks and floorboards in search of traps or secret compartments.
He found two.
Just before the waterline, a particularly ragged-looking board gave way at the slightest bit of pressure, revealing a dark purple ball of spikes sitting atop a rocky shelf just below, spikes Edmund knew without a doubt would’ve pierced clean through his boots and feet alike. Surprisingly, his smoke gave the spike-ball a name.
Rotflesh Urchin
With the butt of his spear, Edmund nudged it away from the hole in the floor, just in case. He shuddered at the thought of where he might’ve stepped had he failed to catch himself on the door earlier.
On the right hand wall he found a different type of trap, one he had the wherewithal not to spring. As the tip of his spear first tapped the cluster of rotted planks, it pricked a hole just large enough to emit a weak stream of seawater. Whatever room lay on the other side of that wall had long submerged.
Edmund didn’t doubt for a second that breaking a hole large enough to crawl through would collapse the ceiling above him. It made for a curious kind of trap, one that dangled the potential of a hidden room as bait. Edmund grunted. If nothing else, he had to acknowledge Liam’s talent for turning delvers’ greed against them.
His high ground surroundings fully analyzed, Edmund set his sights on the water below. His lesser dark vision failed to penetrate the reflective surface, leaving him little choice but to blindly feel around with his spear tip else plunge his head directly in.
Leaning back against the incline, Edmund slipped his hyper-magnetic spear beneath the dark surface, pressing down until he felt the now-familiar resistance of rotting wood. Moving slowly so as to disturb the water as little as possible, he swept the weapon to each side, in each direction bumping against something that readily moved aside as he pushed it. The second time, he noticed a few purple points break the surface.
Two more urchins had awaited just beneath the mirror sheen.
Uninterested in finding out whether The Island and his various forms of health regeneration would protect him from something called rotflesh, Edmund paused. The urchins seemed incapable of moving on their own, and the fact his challenger’s mark hadn’t triggered implied they weren’t even technically monsters. Trap seemed like the more suitable term.
That meant in all likelihood, there’d also be monsters down there. Disinclined to jump directly in, Edmund ran a mental checklist of his items and abilities in search of something that applied to this particular situation. Outside of Madness’s uncontrollably chaotic nature, a single item came to mind.
Edmund reached into his satchel and withdrew a leather bracelet bearing a circular woodcarving of a child’s face. He slipped the heartwood idol around his wrist and reached out to touch the planks of the inner hull.
He stood broad and tall, not the greatest of his kin, but somewhat of a local giant. Sure, he didn’t dominate the skyline like a few of his rootmates, but his fair share of birds and squirrels and snakes and insects made their homes amongst his leafage, scurrying about their brief lives before returning to the forest floor. In time they’d become one with him, the very atoms that made them ascending anew.
The first scream of agony to echo down the root network struck him as a peculiarity. The second formed a curious pattern. The twenty-seventh galvanized his terror. The twenty-eighth was his own.
His lifeblood drained as the axes bit, slicing rough and jagged cuts through his bark and into his flesh. His residents fled, abandoning him to seek sanctuary on neighboring branches. Some made it to safety. Some didn’t. Pain and panic and despair inched up his trunk as the blades struck deeper and deeper.
He fell, wreaking devastation on his neighbors as his collapse tore leaves from their branches and crushed the foliage below.
He felt the earth churn beneath him as they dragged him away, burned with rage and indignation as they tore away his bark, knew true hopelessness as they rolled him towards the spinning saw.
Bit by bit they cut away pieces of him, reducing him to little more than a splinter of his former self. This they forced iron spikes through to bind him to others, splashed with hot and sticky pitch to seal, and set afloat in water soiled with salt. He knew not whether those with which he’d been joined had once been a part of him.
Back and forth he drifted, pushed against the current by some force against those bound to him. From his vantage beneath the waves, he saw only darkness, knowing not when or to where he’d be driven next, until at last he caught a fragment of a conversation between two of the two-legged beings as they inspected the artillery room at his back.
They spoke of a venture, a mission seeking treasure upon a secret island in the Forsaken Sea. They voiced the name of those waters in trepidatious tones, attributing it some reputation for missing ships and crews never heard from again.
Edmund watched as the parasites leapt from the waves, amorphous things the same deep blue as the depths below, visible only when they opened their single eye. He heard panic up above, stomping footsteps and the clashing of blades.
Belowdeck, something exploded. A great crack filled the air. Edmund quaked as the shockwaves traveled through the hull.
Water rushed past. The world went dark as the sky above faded from view. Compressed air on one side fought against mounting water pressure on the other, reaching some kind of equilibrium as the former slowly leaked out from a hole in one of his neighbors.
Then the rot came.
It crept in through cracks in the pitch, an ever present, ever growing ache across his entire body, or what little remained of it. He died in pain, unknown miles from the earth that’d given him life and sky that’d offered him the chance to dream, reduced to little more than a splinter of his former self so that he could play some tiny part in the two-legs’ greed-driven suicide mission.
Edmund yanked his hand away.
He tore the bracelet from his wrists, stashing the idol once more in his satchel. Tears streamed down his face. His body still ached with the tree’s ancient injuries and indignities. He cursed.
He made a note never to use the idol on processed wood again, only to realize he’d have to repeat the process with a more appropriately placed plank if he wanted a clearer picture of what’d happened—ideally one on the upper deck and one near whatever explosion had sunk the ship. Edmund shuddered at the idea.
He fell back, wrapping his arms around his knees as he sat on the sloped floor and fought to parse the deluge of memories into relevant information.
He had a name for the waters around him: the Forsaken Sea. The label meant little to Edmund, but he filed it away as something to potentially look into at the next hub. More importantly, he’d glimpsed what he assumed to be the floor’s primary threat.
His Madness hadn’t deigned to intrude upon the tree’s memories, leaving Edmund without a name for the strange one-eyed blobs that had attacked the ship, but the tree had considered them parasites. That had to mean something, but Edmund failed to garner what. At least he knew to keep a lookout for dark blue shapes that might camouflage themselves in the waters ahead.
Last of all came the image of the creatures that had cut the tree down, that had torn it apart and carved it from a living being into a tool to serve their purpose. The memories had simply thought of them as two-legs, the distinction between the humanoid species unimportant to the ancient wood.
To Edmund, it mattered. To Edmund, their tall forms and lithe frames and pointed ears made all the difference. He’d learned some about elves across his various encounters with them. He knew they had a violently expansionist nature. He knew they practiced portal magic for its efficacy in warfare.
He knew they’d stolen and subsequently broken apart a powerful artifact to which he held claim.
Edmund gulped in anticipation. The third and final finger of the Dread Gauntlet was here. It had to be. Somewhere in this wreck, somewhere deep and well protected, the rotting corpse of an elven general wore but a fragment of a relic that belonged to Edmund.
He intended to reclaim it.
Wiping the tears from his eyes and pushing himself to his feet, Edmund looked down to the dark water below, still unaware of exactly what lay just beneath the surface, and knew what he had to do. However unpleasant, certainty won over risk every time.
Within minutes of making it, Edmund reneged on his promise to avoid using the heartwood idol on processed wood. He picked a plank that reached but a few inches past the waterline and leapt into its memories.
Its story went much the same. Edmund lived through the tree’s mighty life, its traumatic downfall, its torturous existence at the hands of the millworkers and shipwrights, its maddening ache as the rot spread through it.
He watched the rotflesh urchins settle around it, paid careful eye as a metal spear knocked some aside, tracked those it’d missed.
By the time Edmund pulled the idol from his wrist, he knew the exact location of every urchin for the next twenty feet. He only needed to move three of them to clear an area large enough to wade into.
The moment his ears submerged, his sigil of the slumbering deep roared to life, every rumble and vibration in the water translating into an image of his surroundings.
It painted a dark and distorted picture, one at odds with that of an open space he’d glimpsed through the wood’s memory. Edmund surfaced, grumbled a curse, and removed his helmet. He’d hoped the ebonsteel wouldn’t interfere.
Shoving the helm into his bag and clasping the satchel shut, Edmund dipped again into the water.
This time, his lesser subaquatic sonar worked as expected.
His eyes shut against the saltwater, his ears took in his surroundings, depicting the long and empty room sloping down ahead of him. Urchins sporadically dotted the floor, noticeably favoring nooks and crannies yet undeterred by open space. They had no predators here.
None of the amorphous parasites presented themselves. Instead, the broken remains of three iron ballistae, their cables long rusted through, lay in a pile where the back wall met the floor’s lowest point, blocking the doorway that led deeper into the ship. The rotflesh urchins seemed to love jumble or metal and rust, filling any gaps in the heap with toxic spikes.
Edmund would have to find another way forward.
He swam down, fighting the weight of his armor to keep from drifting into any of the urchins. His gear would almost certainly protect him from a casual scuff, but his hands and face were exposed, and Edmund didn’t trust the spines to avoid the gaps between his armor pieces.
Kicking on, he advanced toward the wrecked ballistae, keeping at arm’s length should anything burst through the cracks. Fuzzy as it was, his sonar failed to visualize the room beyond.
It did, however, note a particular softness in the wood to his right.
Edmund approached it, nudging three urchins away from its base to get closer. The rot spread in a similar pattern to the spot he’d considered a trap up above, though breaking such an opening down here would hardly let the air bubble out.
He wondered, for a moment, about the accords’ laws against tunneling, before deciding the unnatural rot pattern clearly counted as an intentional hole. His pocket guide didn’t include that level of detail or nuance into the accords, but the reasoning made sense to Edmund.
That left him with two questions—how to most safely clear the way, and what lay on the other side. Knowing the latter would inform the former, Edmund mentally braced himself to determine the answer.
Pressing the butt of his spear against the ceiling to plant his feet onto the floor, Edmund once again reached for his heartwood idol. He once again went through the pain and suffering of being cut down and carved and hammered into a ship.
And he saw the monsters in the next room.
Three of them drifted aimlessly about the open hold, still as death. Perhaps they were dead. Edmund figured he’d probably be fighting them anyway.
They’d been elves once, not that one could tell by viewing them now. Their soft tissue had rotted away, leaving putrid gaps where their ears, noses, and… other parts should’ve been. Their skin and muscles had, for the most part, survived, no doubt thanks to the dark blue masses attached to the back of their heads.
Edmund recognized the parasites in the wood’s memory.
The cloth and leather parts of the elven armor had long decayed, leaving mithril plates around the shoulders, chest, and legs but each joint and everything else entirely exposed. Across their entire bodies veins bulged unnaturally, following paths that matched no anatomy Edmund knew. At regular intervals the veins seemed to branch out, splitting up into a weblike shape roughly the size of Edmund’s palm.
One of the elves had, at some point, taken a slice across his forearm that had never healed, the rotting skin parting to reveal the web below as no artery. Dark blue tendrils ran along the tissue beneath the skin.
Edmund shuddered.
The parasites hadn’t seized control of the brain. They were delivering electrical impulses directly to the muscle.
Edmund cursed silently, his vocal pipes barely functional as he breathed the saltwater. He had two different forms of resistance to mind-controlling effects between Rebellion and his mithril bracers, but he doubted either would work against an invader that eschewed the mind entirely. He’d have to settle for the tried and true defense.
Don’t get hit.
Pulling his hand away from the decaying plank to exit its memories, Edmund slipped the heartwood idol into his pocket. With the water breathing equivalent of a sigh, he braced himself and forced his eyes open.
The saltwater burned.
He saw little at first, the blur of irritation and his eyes’ attempts at tearing up distorted the view around him. He blinked and blinked and blinked, the askew room gradually coming into focus as he acclimated. It looked much the same as his sonar had described, but for a single surprise.
The smoke remained.
It didn’t twirl in wafts and tendrils, subject as it was to the current’s whims, but it hung in the water, a gray haze restricting visibility even as his gaze pierced the dark. It rendered some comfort.
Edmund’s first obstacle would be the rot-softened wood between him and the next room. Break Through seemed like the obvious choice, one that would deliver him into the enemy’s midst without first alerting them via his tunneling. It bore the risk of dealing structural damage to the ship itself, but breaking a wall between two flooded sections seemed an awful lot safer than in dry air. Wood tended to float, after all.
He kept his shield strapped to his back. While it would've proved useful against the cutlasses the dead elves wielded, water resistance made carrying it a losing proposition. A shield did little good if he couldn’t move it properly. Edmund opted instead to two-hand his spear, a stance he’d practiced with significantly in the days before he’d found the ironwood shield. Underwater, he could hardly imagine a better weapon.
He hooked the strap of his cloudkith satchel around a bent piece of metal jutting from the ballista pile. The bag’s weight reduction enchantment robbed it and its contents of their density, causing it to float buoyantly in the seawater. Edmund didn’t want to worry about it in a fight.
Prepared as he was going to get, Edmund faced the weakened wall, lowered his stance, raised his shoulder, and Broke Through.
Wood cracked and splintered around him as he crashed through it, erupting into the cargo hold in a torrent of water. Eddies to both sides twirled the debris away, leaving Edmund’s path clear. He Recklessly Charged for the leftmost elf, torpedoing towards it even as he pulled a hand from his spear to cast his first spell of the encounter.
The challenger’s mark on his arm burned as his Smoke Lash—the only one of his spells he trusted to work as it should underwater—flew not for the elf’s sword arm, but his offhand. The smoky tendril wrapped around the corpse’s wrist. Edmund yanked.
Underwater, improperly anchored to anything stable, the motion sent the dead elf spinning around.
Just in time to expose the parasite on the back of his head to Edmund’s spear.
From his first trip into the ship’s memories, he knew these things had a single eye somewhere near their center of mass. Edmund made that his target.
Reckless Charge reset before he could even see what his challenger’s mark had changed.
Luckily, he’d get two more opportunities.
Kicking off against his fallen foe, Edmund spun to face the two remaining infested elves. He let his window to charge again expire, unwilling to rush into two enemies at once, not before he had their measure.
His mark burned.
The nearer elf opened her lipless mouth, from which oozed something dark blue and gelatinous. Edmund didn’t need to see its eye pop open to know what it was.
The parasite launched itself at him, rocketing through the water for Edmund’s head.
He tore a hand from his spear and caught it. Pain exploded through his palm as needle-sharp tentacles burrowed into his flesh.
They didn’t get far.
He’d caught the thing in his right hand.
For all the threat it posed, the creature’s life force proved startlingly meager as it withered and died to feed the crimson hand. Edmund let its corpse fall away.
The second elf launched a parasite of its own. Edmund swiped at it with his spear as it approached, but it jerked down to avoid his strike. Off course from its dodge, it collided with Edmund’s breastplate, tentacles immediately branching out from the collision point in search of the gaps in Edmund’s armor.
Edmund dug the pointed tips of his two armored fingers into its mass and drank of its life force too.
The next two came at once.
Both dodged his immediate attempts to intercept them, their paths diverting to circle around him from two directions. Edmund launched a Blood Bolt for the first, obliterating it even with the fairly undercharged casting.
The second made it to his neck.
As the sharp pain stabbed down his spine, Edmund jerked his left shoulder up and in, activating Rend off the pointed tip of his pauldron. The parasite went limp. With his offhand, he tore it from himself, ripping the flesh of his neck as he removed the burrowing tentacles.
Already two more swam towards him.
Edmund deeply regretted letting Reckless Charge go on cooldown. Fifty seconds was an eternity in combat, and he had no better movement while underwater. Both Smoke Lash and Blood Bolt would’ve functioned as ranged options to eliminate the sources of the onslaught, but Edmund needed every tool in his arsenal just to fend off the parasites.
Fervor ticked up, empowering his Madness and War with every second that ticked by as he fended off parasite after parasite. They grew smarter, hanging back until four or six could swarm in at a time. Thrice did Edmund resort to Brutalizing one to buy himself time. Once he tried to Firebolt one, only for the burst of bubbles and steam to extend no further than a foot past his hand.
The creatures seemed to slow as the battle dragged on. Their eyes turned red and puffy as the smoke in the water irritated them. They failed to dodge basic attacks as the smoke clouded their vision and seemed to thicken the water around them.
By the time Reckless Charge came off cooldown, Edmund was fighting off ten of the things at once, taking out three with a single Rending swipe of his spear, tearing them from his chest and bracers and leggings, feeding their paltry existence to the crimson hand.
He let them come. It’d been far too long since he’d had a good chance to train. The ceaseless flow of parasites offered some semblance of catharsis well needed after the events of the previous floor.
The haze in the water darkened. The room grew cloudier. The elves, the ship, the dungeon faded from existence. There was only Edmund, the parasites, and the smoke. They fell by the dozens, their eyes progressively redder, their movements slower. In time they appeared sickly, turning gray and dull instead of their natural deep blue.
The thirty-second wave was already dead by the time it got to Edmund. The thirty-third never came.
Edmund blinked as the Fervor of combat faded and the water cleared around him. Both elves had stilled, the parasites on their heads the same ashen gray as those that had arrived dead. The smoke had proven too much for them.
He let out a breath, his racing heart thumping back to its regular rhythm as the dust settled. At long last, he got a glimpse of the smoke drifting off one of the fallen elves.
Mindrot Dominator
These aquatic parasites feed on gray matter as they overwrite the nervous system with one of their own, taking control of their victim’s corpse to aid both in reproduction and reaching further victims.
Edmund shuddered. First rotflesh, now mindrot? Even as the wood of the ship and its former sailors rotted around him, the very vehicles of decay sought to take his life.
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Shaking the thought from his head, Edmund swam back to the first room to grab his satchel before completing a loop around the hold. It was a wide and open space, one clearly designed for the storage of cargo, yet no barrels nor crates nor chests crowded the floor.
A great hole in the ceiling at the very top of the tilted room explained both the lack of trapped air and potential loss of cargo. Either scavengers had salvaged it or the wooden containers had floated away. He imagined only the broken ballistae and other metal parts kept the entire ship from doing the same.
More curious were the strands of seagrass that seemed to sprout from the floor itself. The broad and wavy weeds glowed a dull green, casting the room in dim and sickly tones. Edmund supposed Liam had to meet the accords’ requirements for lighting somehow. He couldn’t exactly have used torches underwater.
With neither his eyes nor his sonar finding anything of interest in the hold other than the seagrass and smattering of urchins, Edmund set his sights on the open doorway ahead. He paused just above it, sweeping his spear down and around the frame, he knocked two urchins loose from their perch where they may’ve pricked him in passing. They rolled down the floor ahead.
He pushed on through a series of bunk rooms, the metal frames all that remained of the cots in which the elves had once slept. Now they played home for urchins and barnacles, rusting away as they weighed the wreck down.
Still Edmund swam. Deeper and deeper into the sunken ship he ventured, counting the air pockets that might’ve made the floor possible for delvers without easy access to water breathing. Edmund avoided them, not keen on the idea of expunging the seawater from his lungs only to inhale it again as he moved on.
He knew he’d reached the center of the ship when he saw the gash in the hull. He realized then why it sat at such an angle.
Two thirds or so into the empty room, the floor’s incline reversed. Wooden planks cracked and bent and tore, jutting up from the floor and down from the ceiling like jagged teeth in a predator’s maw. Urchins crowded the mess, venomous fangs to offer the wooden teeth some real bite. Up ahead, instead of down the floor angled upward, an ascent towards the exit to balance out the descent from the entrance.
Edmund didn’t move forward. He didn’t clear the room of threats and gun for the exit. He didn’t stop in some attempt to let the smoke guide him.
He knew what he was looking for.
At the room’s center, where an entire elven warship bent at a near right angle, a cluster of urchins crowded around a suspiciously barren section of floor.
Before he could approach, Edmund knocked free the urchins that clung to the broken ceiling, clearing the jagged planks for his own use as an anchor point. Only then did he brace himself against them as he jammed his spear into the center cluster below.
The group of urchins collapsed, falling through the hole in the floor they’d concealed. Instead of landing on bare rock below, they sank into a blue abyss until they disappeared behind the wooden floor. One by one Edmund swept the things through, clearing up what turned out to be a two-foot-wide gap in the ship’s hull.
He poked his head through.
He found two sheer rock walls, one ahead and one behind, and depths below that surpassed both the range of his sonar and the sight of his eyes. The wreck sat astride a chasm, held up by the rock on each end yet sagging at its center where the deep beckoned.
Even as his instincts rebelled against the idea of abandoning the relative safety of the ship to enter dark and unknown waters, Edmund had never been big on self preservation. He lodged his satchel into the mess of boards he’d cleared of urchins and hooked his shield through its strap. The ironwood disk wouldn’t fit through the hole in the floor.
Taking a breath to steady himself, Edmund pulled his shoulders in, reached his arms past his head, and kicked his way out of the ship.
A great blue nothing greeted him.
Edmund cleared the gap and righted himself, kicking against the negative buoyancy of his armor to reach back up and grab his spear. Through it all he monitored his sonar, sensing only the solidity of the rock on each side. Nothing living, nothing moving, entered his range.
So down he sank. He kept himself upright, ready to kick up or jab his spear down at the first sign of trouble.
A deep and sustained tone echoed somewhere in the distance, somewhere above, beyond the confines of the chasm. Another, in a different direction, answered it. Edmund’s heart quickened. He jerked his head back and forth, hoping his eyes could catch something his sonar hadn’t, but the black smoke curtailed his lesser dark vision in the unlit chasm.
The sound echoed again, closer this time. None answered. Edmund wondered if that was a good or a bad thing.
The shipwreck faded and disappeared behind the haze in the water. Still, no bottom to the chasm presented itself. Only the rock walls, some ten yards apart, defined some end to this great blue nothing, only they offered Edmund some semblance of motion as he descended.
No urchins clung to the cliff face. No dominators lurked in the shadows. No openings in the rock offered passage, at least not anywhere within Edmund’s limited sonar. He figured unlikely as it was he’d find anything, he could still search its length once he’d explored the bottom.
Assuming there was a bottom.
It was all so empty, so lifeless, so barren. As the minutes dragged on, Edmund began to wonder whether he’d stumbled into a test of patience, a treasure hidden not in obscurity or danger, but boring distance.
Until the first dominator struck.
It came in fast, appearing as a spot at the edge of his sonar’s range barely a second before slamming into his abdomen with enough force to send him drifting backwards. Immediately its tendrils fanned out, searching for the tiny gap at the base of his cuirass.
Edmund tore the dark blue blob away before it could find his flesh, draining it dry to feed the crimson hand.
The next one struck his foot, sending him spinning. He ran it through with his spear.
He should’ve realized, having seen the things through the heartwood idol, how fast they could travel in open water, how exposed he’d left himself by leaving the confined space of the shipwreck. At least in the chasm they could only come from two directions.
Edmund swam to one side, placing his back to the sheer rock, a tactic that would both limit his exposure and force the dominators to either travel their whole way along the wall or turn before they could strike him. He hoped their perception didn’t stretch far enough for the former.
Sure enough, the next two dominators whizzed right by, unable to adjust course as they passed. Curiously enough, they didn’t seem to turn, simply continuing on until they disappeared into the hazy distance.
The next four came along the wall, gunning precisely for Edmund’s position. He caught them one by one, primarily on his cuirass but once on his knee and another on his hip.
He wished he’d brought his helmet, or his shield, or something to protect his head, despite the practical reasons he’d left such behind. Instead, he kept his arms up on either side of his head, catching any dominators that came in high on his mithril bracers or serpentinite rerebraces.
The deep tone echoed once more, no longer distant and above, but near Edmund’s depth and boneshakingly intense. A deep chill ran down Edmund’s spine. The dominators stopped coming.
Silence reigned. Tense minutes passed, no assault, no tone, nothing. Edmund kept his arms up.
The faintest of noises reached Edmund’s sigil-enhanced ears, a dim chorus of clicks, almost reminiscent of a steak sizzling in hot oil. As he sank deeper, its volume grew, louder and louder and more seemingly from all directions as the water distorted the way it echoed up the chasm walls.
Edmund saw no sand and no stone at the bottom of the chasm.
Only crabs.
Pale crustaceans the size of Edmund’s head carpeted the ocean floor, crawling about in such numbers their very existence sparked the din. He scowled down at the creatures. The smoke only offered a simple name.
Spider Crab
Edmund blinked. He’d heard that name before. The crabs didn’t react to his presence. His challenger’s mark didn’t activate. What appeared to be normal, mundane animals crowded the seafloor he’d traveled so far to reach.
He avoided them all the same, kicking to keep himself suspended above the skittering mass. He surveyed them with eyes and sonar alike, the latter struggling to discern more than a fuzzy layer of something moving. It took a few minutes, but the former did eventually note an anomaly.
Some forty feet away, just next to the chasm’s opposite wall, was a bump, a small area where the craps stood higher than the rest. Edmund swam over.
He inverted himself, flipping his feet up towards the shipwreck to keep as much distance between himself and the crabs as possible as he reached down with his spear to nudge the creatures aside. Pale shells and narrow limbs gave way to something else pale and narrow, something eight feet tall.
A skeleton, its bones picked clean, lay upon the chasm floor.
Edmund hadn’t known exactly what to expect. He imagined some sea-dwelling leviathan or ancient ghost or the elven commander himself with a dominator stuck to his head. The only thing he’d known, a certainty by his experiences both with elves and with following other such side paths, was what particular item he and his smoke would find.
On the skeleton’s right pinky sat its only piece of surviving gear, a piece of finger armor, its tip pointed and its color untarnished by the rust and decay that so permeated this level.
Even at such a depth, it shone startlingly crimson.
Edmund didn’t bother to call a description from the smoke. He knew what it was, and he knew it was only a copy. The real thing would come from a loot chest, presumably one that would pop up once he’d cleared whatever boss Liam had—
One of the crabs shifted below to reveal a small silver box hidden within the skeleton’s ribcage.
Edmund hesitated. It couldn’t be this easy.
He shoved the crabs out of the way as best he could, taking care not to damage any of them in case that drew their ire. They seemed content to ignore him, making no effort to reclaim the ground he’d pushed them from. Within moments, Edmund’s way to the chest was clear.
He spun himself upright, sinking to the seafloor feet first. He landed gently next to the bones, his knees bending into a crouch. Ready to kick off at the earliest sign of trouble, Edmund snaked his hand in between the ribs and grabbed the box.
Nothing happened. No boss appeared. No crabs suddenly declared him their enemy. No horrific traps sprang. Edmund simply took the box and glimpsed its contents.
Finger of The Crimson Hand
The third of three minor pieces broken away from the Dread Gauntlet of Kor’Ilinesh and meted out as rewards by the Elven Queen Cyritha. Belongs to Edmund Montgomery Ahab. Provides major protection against all damage types. Can be used to drain the life force from a target in direct contact to power the Blooddrinker active ability.
He’d have to test what Blooddrinker actually did, but Edmund couldn’t have been happier to add another ability to his arsenal. Thrax, he would’ve been happy if the finger did nothing, content to take yet another step towards assembling his gauntlet. Now only the main piece remained.
For the time being he slipped the gauntlet piece over his left pinky, separating it from its fellows. The life force drain had proven deeply useful for dealing with the dominators, a threat Edmund expected more of on his return to the ship. Access to it via either hand would be convenient at worst and lifesaving at best.
Casting one last look across the eerie chasm floor, Edmund decided against pushing his luck any further. He kicked off and began his long swim back.
The sea of spider crabs had only just faded from view when the deep tone returned. The saltwater vibrated with its intensity, shaking Edmund’s lungs and chest and head even as it assaulted his eardrums. This time, he knew exactly from whence it came.
The dark silhouette of a behemoth floated down the chasm. From his vantage, it appeared to Edmund as little more than a dark blob, but what a blob it was. Top to bottom it stretched to easily triple Edmund’s height, while side to side it took up almost the entire width of the thirty-foot ravine. Were it incapable of swimming directly up or down, the thing might’ve been trapped between the rock walls.
A name appeared before the details did, also a mundane creature of which Edmund had already heard.
Blue Whale
Even familiar with tales of such creatures, the sheer size of it boggled the mind. The thing was smaller, Edmund believed, than the leviathan he’d slain beneath the frozen lake, but he hadn’t truly seen that, only parts of it. The whale, he saw.
It bellowed again, a deep and haunting tone that resounded off the chasm walls. It drew closer. Edmund kept swimming up, his eyes fixated on the approaching colossus. He squinted as the tip of its nose came into detail, followed by its broad maw and baleen, followed by its eyes.
Or lack thereof.
Dark rotting holes sat where the whale’s eyes should’ve.
It was only as Edmund swam higher that he saw the deep blue gelatinous mass stuck to the beast’s head.
His challenger’s mark burned.
In a jerky and unnatural motion, the whale swung open its jaw.
A river of dominators poured out. Thousands of the things flowed forth, a dark tide of impending death. The figure of the whale disappeared behind them as they blotted out that side of the chasm.
Edmund paled. His heart raced. His blood ran cold.
Here was a foe he couldn’t defeat. He had no tricks, no clever ploys, no bold maneuvers to neutralize the coming tide. Perhaps on dry ground, where Firestorm would work properly and he had a hope of outmaneuvering them, but not here, not in this chasm, not on their turf.
Even as the panic set in he didn’t freeze up. He may’ve grown intimately familiar with adrenaline’s impacts, he may’ve trained himself to opt for a particular one of its two options, but with a fight off the table, Edmund unfalteringly obeyed his instincts.
He fled.
Disassembling his hyper-magnetic spear to free up another hand with which to paddle, Edmund frantically swam for the surface. He had a long climb ahead of him, one through which he’d hoped to conserve energy, but already the dominators closed in. He’d have to settle for conserving his spells and abilities as best he could.
One slammed onto his left foot. He crushed it against the rock wall and kept swimming.
Another wrapped around his right ankle. He pulled his knee to his chest and yanked the thing free, draining it to recover his health and stamina and kept swimming.
Another struck his left thigh. It died to feed his newest gauntlet-piece. He kept swimming.
Two more grabbed his feet. Another latched onto his right hamstring. Three more hit his chest.
Edmund spent his first cooldown. He tilted back his head to look directly up at the hazy blue emptiness between him and the shipwreck, and Broke Through.
The dominators tore off him as he shot up and away. Water rushed past, roaring like a gale over his ears. He kept swimming.
They caught up yet again, first scattered forerunners that Edmund could rid himself of, then the navy tide itself, overwhelming multitudes that washed over him, clinging to every inch of exposed body they could as their tendrils wandered in search of flesh to pierce.
Edmund burned his second cooldown. With a great crack the wall at his feet split open. Orange magma oozed through, exploding into a burst of bubbles as it vaporized the water around it.
As with the last time Edmund had used this trick, the blast of steam launched him up even as it singed his flesh. The dominators on him weren’t so resilient, the boiling water more than enough to wipe the life from their eyes. They fell away as Edmund rocketed up.
He kept swimming.
Up and up and up he swam, desperately draining as many dominators as he could to replenish his dwindling stamina. The relative safety of the ship seemed impossibly distant, practically unreachable as already the dominators swarmed him again.
Feeling the hope die in his chest, Edmund spent his third and final relevant cooldown.
He cast Firestorm.
Instead of mass fiery death, the spell generated another blast of steam, again catapulting Edmund up and away from the horde that chased them. Unlike Magma Fissure, the burst inflicted no burns. The frostfang talisman at his chest turned icy cold as it went on cooldown.
He kept swimming.
The Firestorm had bought him precious time, killing a swath of dominators whose very corpses delayed the others. Still they came. Still they outpaced him.
In desperation more than true experimentation, Edmund activated Blooddrinker with the paltry supply of life force he’d fed it. A surge of energy ran through him, then dissipated. He blinked and glanced up at his constellation.
All his cooldowns had fallen by two seconds. It wasn’t enough. His shortest, Break Through, still had nearly a minute on it.
As if to seal his doom, a second whale song, perhaps the same that’d gone silent before, echoed down from above. His challenger’s mark burned. Even as the swarm inexorably closed in from below, dark spots materialized in the water above as a second tide crashed down to meet them, to crush him in between.
Edmund looked up at the second insurmountable force bearing down upon him and saw salvation. At last, an enemy in his way. Edmund set his sights on the nearest dominator above him, at the first wave in a sea of death, and activated Reckless Charge.
Edmund torpedoed up along the chasm wall, the horde below close on his heels as he surged into the one above. The force of the collision combined with the skill’s damage was more than enough to burst clean through that first target.
Reckless Charge reset.
Edmund used it immediately, picking another target yet higher up. His eyes and sonar both perceived only a wall of gelatinous tissue in all directions, a storm of dominators rocketing past him as the delta between his upward momentum and their downward flow more than overcame their ability to grasp onto him.
At the end of each charge, in the milliseconds before he activated the skill again, a dozen or more of the things would grab him and sink their tendrils into his flesh, but the force of the water resisting his charge and their brethren slamming against them tore most of them off each time, leaving blood to flow freely from every bit of exposed skin or gap in Edmund’s armor. He removed the stragglers by hand.
He swam no more. Only in Reckless Charge, only in his willingness to plunge deeper and deeper into the oncoming swarm could he find hope.
Hundreds of the things brushed up against his gauntlet pieces as he charged and he charged, none for long enough to fully drain, but enough that the micro-drains began to build. He pulled as much into his middle finger as possible, desperately refilling his stamina to pay his next Reckless Charge.
The ship came into sonar range.
Edmund slammed Blooddrinker with all he had. In his mind he chanted a silent prayer, a desperate plea to some higher power he knew wasn’t listening.
Be enough. Be enough. Be enough.
Energy ran through him. Edmund closed in on the wreck, on shelter he only had one way to reach without slowing enough to let the dominators take him.
Be enough.
Break Through ticked off cooldown. Edmund didn’t hesitate.
He shot free of the mindrot swarm, blasting through the hole in the hull in an explosion of splinters, and slammed into the jagged ceiling above. Pain blasted through his body as the impact broke more bones than he dared to count. Blood drifted through the water.
Edmund kept moving. He snatched his satchel and shield from where he’d left them and kicked off against the teeth like planks.
He wasn’t out yet.
Dominators flowed up through the narrow hole, the bottleneck Edmund’s only saving grace as he raced up the incline towards the front end of the ship. He stomped and kicked and crushed those that closed in on his feet, the tight quarters both hampering their agility and offering Edmund ample surface upon which to squash his attackers.
Twice he ran into groups of possessed elves. Twice he Recklessly Charged for whichever stood closest to the way forward, swiping the dominator on its head with his armored fingers and racing past. He cared little if they chased him. The swarm on his heels would kill him long before an undead elf got a cutlass through his back.
He didn’t plan. He didn’t search. He didn’t think. He raced through uncharted territory, breaking rotted boards and climbing through gaps and felling zombies as they came up, never stopping, never considering, never hesitating.
Even as he reached his hands through a hole in the wall to pull himself through and felt something sharp scratch against his right pinky, Edmund didn’t falter. The urchin rolled away in the wake of his passage. Edmund kept moving.
What felt like an eternity of a mad dash later, Edmund burst from the water into a room full of trapped air. Uphill, a door hung open.
A rush of dominators leapt after him, most landing upon the dry wood with wet thuds. Three managed to cling to him. Edmund dashed for the room.
He slammed the door behind him.
A chime rang out.
He ripped his three passengers free.
A chorus of thumps struck the door and surrounding wall.
He glanced down at his hand, where the skin of his pinky had already begun to darken. He reached for his satchel to dig out one of the poultices he’d purchased on the fifteenth floor for exactly this reason, only to stop short of lifting the flap.
A great crack echoed from somewhere onboard. The ship creaked threateningly. The hull to Edmund’s right began to thump.
He had to move.
He lurched from the door, jumping up the steep incline to yank open the glimmering topaz chest and grab the sword within. It appeared to match the elves’ cutlasses, sheathed in leather, its pommel glistening mithril green. He didn’t bother to read the description.
Something snapped to his right. Edmund jerked his head to the side to spot a crack in the wall. Water dripped through it in increasing quantities.
He spent one final second to claim his Aspect on the off chance the next floor didn’t have a safe place to rest and recover. It took barely a thought to open his constellation and form the confluence, the one he’d known was next for weeks. Madness and Wrath combined to make an Aspect he’d anticipated ever since he’d spoken with the scholar back on the tenth floor.
Tier 2 Aspect: Vengeance - Silver+ Resonance
Level 1 - Reveals all enemies that have damaged you in the past two minutes. Provides a lesser increase to all damage dealt to such enemies.
Edmund blinked. That couldn’t be right. Silver? All of Madness’s direct confluences had been gold. Thrax, he of all people should’ve had affinity for Vengeance. It should’ve been better than the mean of its parts, not worse.
The deep tone of a whale call shook the wreck around him. Water rushed over his boots as it flowed in through yet another hole in the wall. He had to move.
With a new sword in one hand and rotflesh venom coursing through the other, with a curiously low-resonance new Aspect, with the third and final minor piece to the crimson hand, with a whale and its swarm of dominators bearing down with enough force to crush the ship around him, and most of all, without looking back, Edmund stepped into the darkness.
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Hivemaster Edmund Montgomery Ahab, The Crimson Hand
Aspects Unlocked: 24
Tier 1 Aspect: Wrath - Red Resonance
Level 3 - Provides access to the Brutalize active ability.
Tier 1 Aspect: War - Gray+ Resonance
Level 10 - Provides a lesser increase to all damage dealt. Provides a lesser decrease to all damage taken.
Tier 1 Aspect: Elements - Gray Resonance
Level 9 - Provides access to the Firebolt spell.
Tier 1 Aspect: Solitude - Red Resonance
Level 10 - Provides a greater increase to constitution while fighting alone. Provides a lesser increase to celerity while fighting alone.
Tier 1 Aspect: Perseverance - Gray Resonance
Level 11 - Gain health regeneration. Gain greater health regeneration outside of combat.
Tier 1 Aspect: Madness - Prismatic Resonance
Level 18 - They’re watching you.
Tier 2 Aspect: Vengeance (Madness and Wrath) - Silver+ Resonance
Level 1 - Reveals all enemies that have damaged you in the past two minutes. Provides a lesser increase to all damage dealt to such enemies.
Tier 2 Aspect: Fervor (Madness and War) - Gold+ Resonance
Level 1 - Empowers the effects of Madness and War for each consecutive second spent in battle.
Tier 2 Aspect: Sorcery (Madness and Elements) - Gold Resonance
Level 2 - Provides access to the Smoke Lash spell.
Tier 2 Aspect: Obsession (Madness and Perseverance) - Gold Resonance
Level 4 - Gain strength and agility for each consecutive day spent pursuing your obsession. Gain mana for each consecutive month spent pursuing your obsession.
Tier 2 Aspect: The Recluse (Madness and Solitude) - Gold Resonance
Level 4 - Empower the effects of Madness while alone. Lessen the effects of Madness while accompanied.
Tier 2 Aspect: The Island (Solitude and Perseverance) - Gray Resonance
Level 6 - Grants greater resistance to over-time effects while in groups of two or fewer.
Tier 3 Aspect: Focus (Elements and Obsession) - Silver Resonance
Level 2 - Doubles spell damage when attacking a single target.
Tier 3 Aspect: The Challenger (War and The Recluse) - Silver+ Resonance
Level 1 - Provides access to the Challenge active ability.
Tier 3 Aspect: Artillery (War and Sorcery) - Silver+ Resonance
Level 1 - Provides access to the Firestorm spell.
Tier 3 Aspect: The Warmonger (War and Obsession) - Silver+ Resonance
Level 1 - Provides a greater increase to all damage dealt and a greater decrease to all damage taken while engaged in combat you initiated.
Tier 3 Aspect: The Philosopher (Elements and The Recluse) - Silver+ Resonance
Level 2 - Question the concept of truth.
Tier 3 Aspect: The Rift (Madness and The Island) - Gold Resonance
Level 5 - Provides access to the Rend active ability.
Tier 4 Aspect: The Tactician (War and The Philosopher) - Bronze+ Resonance
Level 1 - Deal double damage when executing a pre-crafted battle plan.
Tier 4 Aspect: The Target (War and Focus) - Bronze+ Resonance
Level 1 - Allows the marking of a single enemy as the target. The target takes increased damage from all sources.
Tier 4 Aspect: The Fissure (Elements and The Rift) - Silver Resonance
Level 3 - Provides access to the Magma Fissure spell.
Tier 4 Aspect: Rebellion (War and The Rift) - Gold+ Resonance
Level 1 - Grants resistance to mind controlling effects. Deal bonus damage to enemies above your level.
Tier 5 Aspect: The Breach (War and The Fissure) - Bronze+ Resonance
Level 1 - Provides access to the Break Through active ability.
Tier 6 Aspect: The Reckless (Wrath and The Breach) - Tin+ Resonance
Level 1 - Provides access to the Reckless Charge active ability.
Delver’s Mark of the Challenger
Empowers nearby dungeon monsters. Significantly increases the value of loot chests you open. Slightly increases the resonance of Aspects you unlock.
The Crimson Hand
Grants minor resistance to piercing damage. Bestows ownership of the Dread Gauntlet of Kor’Ilinesh.
Hivemaster
Grants lesser tremor sense. Bestows the right to challenge other hivemasters for control of their hives.
Trailblazer’s Sigil of the Azure Journeyman
The fourth step on the Path of the Azure Fox. Increases agility. Grants two windsteps. Increases positional awareness.
Trailblazer bonus: Sharpens hearing.
Trailblazer’s Sigil of the Rootmother
Non-intelligent Strethian lifeforms will treat you as an ally. Gain the ability to draw water and nutrients from fertile soil.
Trailblazer bonus: draw water and nutrients from all soil.
Sigil of the Slumbering Deep
Gain greater health regeneration. Gain immense health regeneration while sleeping. Gain water breathing. Gain lesser dark vision. Gain lesser subaquatic sonar.