Sam went from unconsciousness to wakefulness in the snap between seconds. His eyes flew open and his hands reflexively gripped for the hammer that no longer hung on his belt as the image of Araxesendenak’s burning eyes lingered in his brain. He jerked upright from where he was laying on something soft, and he felt panic surge in his veins along with his blood.
Then a hand roughly the size of a snow shovel planted itself firmly but not unkindly against his chest and forced him back down.
“Relax Butter-boy,” Sally’s deep voice felt like it was making his bones vibrate. “We’re not out of the woods, but we’ve at least found ourself a clearing for now. Take a second to shake the cobwebs loose.”
“Wha?” Sam tried to speak, but the family of mice that had apparently taken up residence inside his mouth objected by stuffing bales of wool down his throat. He coughed, gagged, spat out a mouthful of something he really didn’t want to think about, then blinked as the gray-green glob of unpleasantness spattered against lacquered wood flooring. Expensive wood floor, his brain reported. Pop would have paid through the teeth for stuff that good.
From the floor, Sam’s gaze traveled upwards. First it fixed on Sally, the huge woman smirking at him from where she loomed over him and the sofa, which was set against a wall festooned with art and windows that all had very expensive-looking curtains drawn across them to cut off sight from the outside. Then to the room itself, wide and spacious, tastefully decorated and furnished, and practically reeking of money. A dining set in the corner looked to be made of pure silver, and Sam was certain that the area rug in the center of the room was worth more than he had made in his short life working for Pop.
And from the room at large to two small figures trussed up with–Sam peered closer–their own pants and shirts, it looked like and seated on an expensive sofa not that far from the one Sam himself was sitting on. An older man and woman, eyes closed and slumped against one another, clearly unconscious.
“Okay,” Sam said slowly, “I think I missed a couple things here.”
“Sam!” Cora’s voice made Sam turn, and he felt his heart give a little stutter as the silvery woman practically ran over and wrapped him up in a hug, which after a second he returned with just as much strength as she was putting into it.
“I told you he was in no danger,” Giichi’s dusty voice came from somewhere to Sam’s left, but he didn’t feel like turning away to look for where exactly the halfling was. “If the damage was not enough to slay him outright, the tattoo would have stabilized him.”
Well, that was good to know at least. But then the reason for the halfling’s words trickled back into Sam’s mind, and he winced at the memory.
“I guess I didn’t blow myself up then, huh?” he said into Cora’s hair.
“No, you did,” Cora said, pulling back and scowling at him. “You nearly killed yourself. And the rest of us. I had to expend almost all of my mana just to keep your health from zeroing out!”
“That, I admit, was warranted,” said Giichi’s voice.
“Don’t you ever do that again,” Cora said, still glaring at him. “That was the dumbest, stupidest, most idiotic thing I have ever seen you do and I do not want to see you do it again.”
“Yes ma’am,” Sam started to say, but was interrupted by a buzz of wings and the muted slam of a closing window.
“The entire city’s gone bonkers!” Pearl said as she winged into the room, an uncharacteristically grim look on her elfen features. “Not just the skellies, they’ve got mortal guards out too. And I think the people who live here are alluding with them, too.”
“That’s ‘colluding’, kid,” Sally rumbled.
“Yeah, that–” Pearl broke off and her eyes went wide when she saw Sam.
“Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaam!”
Sam smiled softly and leaned away from Cora, giving the little fairy room to run up to him for what he assumed would be her customary tackle-hug of his head–
POW!
Sam’s head snapped back as Pearl’s tiny fist connected with his nose with all the force of a pebble launched from a gnomish Steam shot. He felt cartilage break under the blow, saw stars erupt in front of his eyes, and a corner of his mind was mildly surprised that his health bar didn’t drop by a few points.
“Pearl!” Sam yelped, feeling blood start to leak out of his broken nose as he flopped back onto the couch. “What the hell!”
“Shut up!” Pearl zipped forward to hover right in front of his face, pure anger painting the little fey’s features like a thundercloud in miniature. “Samuel James Spikeypants Tolliver, you just shut up! I’ve been saving up all my words ever since you blowed yourself up and now you’re gonna sit there and listen to them or I’m gonna explode and you won’t like what happens when that happens, so just shut up!”
The whole room went quiet as every eye, excluding the two unconscious elderly people tied up with their own clothes in the corner, turned to stare at the little narrator fairy. Sam felt his jaw drop.
“You almost killed yourself,” Pearl growled, flitting so close to Sam that he had to cross his eyes to look at her. “Not ‘almost died’, not ‘almost got killed’, you almost killed yourself. For reals. You’re not a Guardian anymore so no White Room so death is real for you now, and you almost killed yourself. You stupid, selfish… goober!”
“Pearl…” Sam tried, then yelped as she hit him again, though not as hard as last time.
“You can’t do that! What was your big plan? Sacrifice yourself so we could get out? Take out the big bad lich in one fell swoop even if it meant you dying too? And what about us? What about your family? The dungeon? Everyone back home is going crazy about you, searching and trying to get to you, and you were just going to kill yourself like that?”
“It was the only choice I had, Pearl!” Sam finally shouted. “The lich was there, I only had the tools I had. It was the only way I could see forward! He was going to kill us all!”
Pearl hung in the air for a long moment, glaring daggers right into Sam’s eyeball. Then she huffed and backed away, crossing her arms and looking down.
“Okay, so maybe you thought you didn’t have a choice. Maybe that’s okay, this once.” Her head came back up and she glared at him again. “But not again! You can’t ever make that choice again. So you better get good at finding other choices, because you have too many people rooting for you and coming for you to just throw yourself away like that. You’re Sam Tolliver. You gotta find the choices that keep you here. Because if you make me go back to Jack and Annie and Buggers and everyone and say ‘Sam died because he didn’t see any other choice’, I’ll… I’ll…”
The little fairy seemed to deflate all at once, and the look she gave Sam hurt more than anything the lich had done to him.
“I’ll be really really sad,” she finished in almost a whisper.
“And she won’t be the only one,” Cora added, placing a hand on Sam’s shoulder. The touch sent another strange trill of electricity up his arm. “Maybe you didn’t have a choice, but…”
“But no more dumbass heroics,” Sally said from where she stood by one of the windows now. “Like it or not, Bubba, you’re kind of the linchpin of this whole operation. You go down, everything goes down, and none of us really wants to know what happens if that happens.”
I didn’t have a choice… the thought echoed in Sam’s head, and he felt some of his own innate stubbornness rising in its wake.
So make sure you have better choices next time.
And that thought wiped away the stubbornness in an instant.
They were right. Mostly. Not that he shouldn’t have done what he did, he still firmly believed he only had that one choice and it had worked out alright in the end… But it had been a reaction, a choice forced on him by the circumstances. It felt like it first had in the Dungeon, when he had just been reacting to everything coming at him and not thinkiing ahead. Not planning.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
What would have happened if he’d taken just a few minutes to think through a plan, instead of just running like a bat out of hell? What if he’d prepared for an encounter with Araxesendenak?
He didn’t know. Couldn’t know. But maybe it was time to start finding out.
“Alright,” he finally said, drawing in a deep breath–through his mouth, his nose was still throbbing like crazy from Pearl’s punch. Had she always been that strong?. “Alright, I can’t promise I’ll never do anything likee that again–and you all know I can’t,” he added, seeing all three of the women open their mouths to say something. “But I promise I’ll do what I can to prepare and plan so I don’t have to do anything like that again.”
“Deal,” Pearl said. “And if you renege, I’ll pop you in the nose again.”
“Oh, Sam, you’re bleeding!” Cora said, apparently noticing the results of Pearl’s handiwork for the first time. “Here, let me…”
The silvery woman brushed her fingers gently along the side of Sam’s broken nose. Sam braced himself for the quiet rush of soothing magic that usually came from a healing spell…
Nothing.
“Wait, what?” Cora blinked and stared at her fingers. “Why can’t–I’m out of mana?”
“Me too,” Sally reported. “Been out since I hauled your asses over that wall. Ten gold says whatever yanked us out of the dungeon has screwed up our connection to the System somehow.”
Mana… Sam frowned and glanced at his own mana bar. It was empty, of course it was… But hadn’t he cast a spell earlier? Back when Araxesendenak…
“Giichi,” he called to the withered halfling. “Your tattoo–”
“Will you cretins never cease your prattle?” The ancient thing growled from where he was crouched over what looked like a portable engraving station. “I am engaged in delicate work. If you must speak, speak quietly. If you must speak to me, don’t.”
Sam stared at the halfling, then back around the room, then at the elderly couple still trussed up. Questions about his mana bar and the tattoo faded to the background against the deluge of new questions.
“So…” Sam glanced back at Cora then over to Sally and finally the angry bound couple. “Someone want to clue me in on what’s going on right now?”
“Long story short?” Sally grinned toothily. “We broke into a house and are laying low while what looks like pretty much every living and dead guardsman, citizen militia, mob, and roaming critter in a three mile radius are searching for us. And when they find us, they’re probably gonna kill us dead and not bother asking questions later. Assuming King Bonebag doesn’t get out from under the mountain you dropped on him and come after us himself soon.”
Sam blinked. “And yet you’re smiling.”
“Well, it’s gonna be a hell of a fight.”
“Ignore her,” Cora said, frowning at her sister. “She’s smiling because Giichi is working on a set of runes that should shield us from scrying spells, and another that will disguise us while we try to sneak out.”
Sam looked up at Sally, all nine feet plus of her. “Those had better be some hellishly good runes.”
“They are,” Giichi growled. “But they will be less so if I am distracted by inane chattering. Shush.”
Sam opened his mouth, then closed it again at a quiet headshake from Cora. Okay, he was willing to take the halfling’s words at face value for the moment. On reflex he tried to access his messaging system to talk to Cora mentally, but the big CANNOT CONNECT TO SYSTEM error practically slapped him upside the head, so instead he stood and beckoned Cora away to the far end of the room. Cora nodded and followed.
“Can you tell everyone I’m okay?” he asked quietly when he judged they were far enough away–and standing right by that dining set which was indeed made of sterling silver, he noticed idly.
“No,” Cora shook her head, frowning. “Both Sally and I have tried. For some reason, we’re cut off from the messaging system just like you are.”
“Pearl?” he called to the fairy. “Can you access the messaging system?”
“Nope!” the fairy chirped. “King Boney must have some kind of spell over the whole city or something. I’ve been trying to call Jack or Annie since we got here, and nadda.”
“Damn,” Sam grunted and started pacing back and forth. “We’ve got to figure out a way to get word back to them, if for no other reason than to let them know we’re not dead, right?”
“Sam,” Cora’s hand on his arm halted his pacing. “What happened to you? Sally and I felt you… We felt you disappear. We thought–” She bit her lip, and Sam winced, not liking the pain he heard in that memory.
Right. Right, he hadn’t had the chance to explain the whole thing back in his room. Things had been happening too fast. And even now, part of him wanted to be running, to be putting distance between them and Araxesendenak… But if Giichi could really hide them and disguise them like he said, that was worth waiting around for.
“It was the Failstate,” he said slowly, trying to sift through the jumbled memories of the past couple days and was a little shocked to see that it had only been a day or so since he’d been captured. Quickly he outlined his encounter with the child-goddess-thing, and glossed over how much it had hurt when she’d ripped his guardianship free from him. And ended with him waking to the message informing him of his new status and the fact that all his guardian items were being returned to him.
“Which is when I wound up with a face-full of Sally,” he finished, glancing over at the towering woman. “And… I guess I’m still trying to get everything sorted out in my head. How did you two get here, anyway? Some kind of failsafe system built into the Guardian system?”
“I don’t know,” Cora said, distress filling her voice. “I’ve never felt anything like what happened. I felt you being torn from me, like some great hand was reaching deep within me and yanking at the very thing that made me… me. And then…”
“And then we both got hit with some kind of magical whammy and wound up in your little love nest,” Sally cut in from where she had taken up position by the windows. “I figured it was something you’d fucked up, Butter-boy.”
“I don’t know why I’m here at all,” Pearl added, shrugging. “But I’m glad I am. You’re gonna need my help, obviously, and I wanna be here more than I wanna be stuck in the dungeon even if they need help too but they’ve got lots more people there so it’s probably better that I’m here helping you instead.”
“Wasn’t me,” Sam said, shaking his head. “But whatever happened, let’s not waste the opportunity it’s given us. I may not be Guardian anymore, but let’s see if we can’t at least change that. Can you make me one again?”
Sam caught the look that passed between the sisters, and felt something cold and slithery work its way up his spine. He couldn’t put it to words, except to say that he suddenly realized that something was very very wrong.
“We can’t,” Sally said flatly, her face going hard and brittle. “Whatever happened to you, happened to us too. Somehow.”
Sam blinked. “What do you mean?”
“We’ve been removed from the dungeon, Sam,” Cora said quietly, and the lostness in her voice made that icy feeling creep just a little higher.
Sam stared at the sisters, mouth working with no sound coming out. Finally; “What?”
“We’re mortal, Butter-boy,” Sally said, scowling. “Probably why I look like some fourteen year-old’s porn fantasy. Whatever happened to you, it transfered through your link to us. And now we’ve lost our connection to the dungeon and to our powers. Didn’t know that couldhappen, but hey, whaddaya fucking know. Turns out it can.”
“I still have my levels from when I went through Creation,” Cora said quietly. “but everything else… My connection to the mobs, my abilities as the Last, even my connection to the Essence. It’s all gone.”
And I’m terrified and trying to put up a brave front, Sam saw the unspoken message welling up deep inside those sapphire eyes. The hug he gave her was instinctual, wrapping her up and holding her as his mind went blurry with the implications of this particular revelation.
He wasn’t the Guardian anymore. Cora and Sally weren’t the Last anymore. Whatever the Failstate had done, it had taken all their powers away in one fell swoop. Had she planned that? Or had something gone wrong that even something that powerful hadn’t accounted for? What did that mean for the Dungeon? What did that mean for the Dungeoneers who were still trapped in whatever limbo they were in until Cora had been able to spawn them?
Questions piled on top of questions in his head as he held Cora. Was this some weird plan of Apollyon’s? Had the godlike creature had a hand in this somehow? Or was this something no one had expected? He’d seen glitches in the System before, anomalies where the Last’s creator had hid caches of weapons deemed too powerful for the world, or other things for which he had no name. Was this another? He already had ample evidence that the world’s creators had not been the all-knowing god creatures he’d once imagined them to be. Had they overlooked something else?
Questions on top of questions, and no answers in sight.
Right then.
He took a deep breath and let the embrace end, stepping back and looking first at Cora, then Sally, then over at Giichi and finally at the two still-trussed captives on their sofa. He opened his mouth to say something take-charge, but never got the chance. Another voice, familiar and coldly clinical, boomed out of the very air itself and was accompanied by a bright blue panel hovering in front of his eyes with brilliant gold text on it echoing what the voice said.
***KINGDOM MESSAGE***
A traitor has escaped from the Calcified Fortress and is currently in hiding amongst the population of Phyrexis. Lich King Araxesendenak The Just has been personally attacked by this man and his allies. To wit: the glorious nation of Xeladre declares Samual Tolliver and anyone allied with him to be Enemies Of The Crown. A bounty of two million crowns is herewith announced for the live capture of Samuel Tolliver. A bounty of one million crowns will be paid for his head. A bounty in the amount of two hundred thousand crowns is herewith announced for any information leading to his capture or death.
And Tolliver. I know you can see this. Pray my subjects find you before I do. I am coming for you, and for all that you hold dear. There is nowhere you may run, no hole deep enough to hide. Lich King Araxesendenak swears this by all that is unholy: I will see you and everything you loved snuffed out like a candle in the wind. Enjoy the war, dear boy.
Ah. There you are.
And as soon as the words faded, the sound of the necrohounds started up again.