A ripple of hesitation went through the torch-bearing mob as they crossed the boundary into my domain. Their gazes flicked upwards to focus on nothing as each one of them read my newly-minted area description. I saw eyes widen, heard exclamations of shocked dismay and muttered obscenities.
“That’s far enough,” I said. With [The Heart Whispers], every member of the angry mob heard my voice as though I was standing just over their shoulder. “Take another step and Pacifica Blackwater dies.”
That froze enough of them in place to kill the mob’s forward momentum. “What have you done with my daughter, monster?” demanded Temperance Blackwater from her place at the front — a little theatrically, I thought.
“Temperance!” I said, sarcastic sweetness dripping from my words. “Welcome back. Shame your husband couldn’t join us. How’s the ankle? Pacifica’s fine — I haven’t hurt her, which is more than I can say for you.” I wasn’t just being a bitch, here. My goal was to sow doubt and disunity. The revelation that their earlier actions had all taken place in the palm of my hand; the reminder that I had hurt them effortlessly then, and the unspoken threat that I could do it again now; the attack on their leader’s character: hopefully, at least one of these would get any given member of the mob thinking, rather than following. “Come see, if you like.”
She eyed the hill suspiciously, and didn’t step out from the mob — too wary of a trap, I guess. I couldn’t have much of a hostage negotiation if one of the parties wouldn’t come to the negotiating table, so I decided to bend a little.
“Alright, I’ll show you, if you prefer.” A whispered instruction to Nar-shesh brought the hostage squad to the edge of the second terrace, where the townsfolk could see them. Pacifica was at the front, a goblin on either side tugging her along by her elbows.
“Mom!” she yelled, with fearful relief that sounded completely sincere. She struggled theatrically against the goblins, and they theatrically restrained her. Man, everyone was doing a really good job selling the bit!
“Pacifica!" Temperance surged forward at the sight of her daughter, eyes wide in surprisingly genuine-seeming distress. She only made it a few steps from the crowd before coming to an almost comical halt, like a dog reaching the end of its leash, as her brain caught up with her legs. She regained her balance, doing her best to play it off like she hadn't just been too scared to stray from the safety of the mob. If I had lungs, I'd have breathed a sigh of relief — we'd be totally boned if they all just charged us right away, instinctively following her. "Sweetie, are you alright? Did they hurt you?” she called to Pacifica. Her words reeked of insincerity to me, but her performance was apparently good enough to convince her fellow villagers.
“No, they haven’t,” Pacifica said. “Mom, I’m- Please, I want to come home with you! Please just give them what they want!” The crowd probably couldn’t see it from this distance, but a tear trickled down her cheek as she pleaded. Damn. Gold star, Pacifica. We’d talked about the plan in general terms, but her specific lines were all improv.
“I literally just said I didn't hurt her," I said, a little waspishly. "Do you listen, when people talk, or are you just waiting for a chance to grab control of the conversation? Whatever. Anyway, Pacifica will be staying here for the next little while. A hostage, against your good behavior.”
“We won’t go along with your evil schemes, monster!” One of the villagers yelled, to a chorus of agreement.
“Shut the fuck up, yes you will," I said. "What are you going to do, charge in here and try to kill us all? Maybe you succeed, maybe you don’t, but either way we'll cut her throat first. Are you gonna condemn an innocent girl to death in front of her mother?”
More than a few people who looked like one dead girl was a price they were willing to pay cast nervous glances at Temperance, at that. Temperance herself was seething. “If you think I'm going to let you just take my daughter from me, you're dead wrong!"
"Relax, you heinous bitch," I said. "A hostage your enemy has no intention of ever letting go might as well be dead, and if Pacifica's dead then she's useless as a bargaining chip. You'll get your daughter back in due time, once I feel like I can trust you."
"Oh yeah? And how can we trust you?" someone called from the crowd. "What guarantee do we have you'll keep your word?"
“Gee, I don't know..." I paused to read the villager's status bar. Pacifica had implied that being able to see other peoples' names on their status wasn't normal, so I figured there might be some intimidation factor in knowing someone's name seemingly by magic. "...Gudrun, let's think through your options real quick." From the shocked expression on the woman's face, it seemed like I'd guessed right — it was scary. "There are three ways this could go. Option one: you decide I can't be trusted, charge in here, and the girl dies. Guaranteed, 100%, she's dead. Option two: you trust that I'll keep my word, and after you all leave I go back on my word and kill her. Guaranteed, 100%, she's dead. Option three: you trust that I'll keep my word, and in a week or two you get the girl back. Guaranteed, 100%, safe and sound. Now, if you were paying attention, you will note that while you only have a fifty percent chance of bringing Pacifica back alive if you do as I say, you have a zero percent chance of bringing her back alive if you don't." I gave a performative sigh. "Look, I know it's frustrating. You got all hot and bothered and came out here looking for a fight, and I'm not giving you one. I get it. I really do. But you've already done your part. If I hadn't known you all were going to show up here tonight, then the girl would already be dead. Really, you've already won! You've saved her life. All you have to do now is not fuck it up. Be smart. Play it cool. Go back to your little houses, stay out of the woods, and wait for the heroes to show up. Don't borrow trouble — this is no longer your responsibility."
Leaning too hard on their compassion would be a losing move, I figured. These were the children of the generation that had driven the goblins from their homelands. Violence and greed were their birthright. Instinctively, on some level, they all knew that, even if they couldn't admit it. Thus, my social attack travelled along a different vector: laziness. As long as I made it seem like doing nothing was a viable plan — like they'd already made a sufficient showing to secure their own reputations, their own moral high ground, and their own property — then some portion of them would gladly take the safer, lower-effort option.
Of course, that all made it sound a lot smarter and more intentional than it was. Mostly I was just throwing shit at the wall to see what stuck. Thankfully, it looked like it was working. The mob almost seemed to shrink in on itself, members instinctively shifting closer to each other in twos and threes to trade murmured words of hesitation. The heat-haze of azoth around them was thinning out, too, the flames in their eyes flickering.
Temperance, if anything, looked even more livid than before. She glared up at the goblins holding Pacifica. “You’ll pay for this, witch,” she hissed. “One day soon, you’ll all pay for what you’ve done.” I resisted the urge to say something mocking back, and just let her stew. I had her over a barrel and she knew it. Even as the crowd shrunk in on itself, no one was standing close to her. A visible bubble of space separated her from the mob she'd whipped up — it hadn't taken much at all to drive a wedge between her and the other villagers. Based on how she'd treated her companions and her husband during her earlier visit, I couldn't imagine she was well-liked to begin with. Even a brief, passing implication that she'd mistreated Pacifica had been enough to cast doubt on her motives here for wanting her daughter back in her clutches. Abusive parents were almost invariably, I’d found, obsessed with reputation and appearances. There was no way Temperance could exhort the mob to attack, here, with her daughter’s life on the line: her social standing, already imperiled, would take a fatal hit if she was that openly callous about her daughter’s safety. No, she was going to pivot from righteous outrage into the pity play any second now. Right on cue, she cried out “Pacifica, be brave for mommy, okay? Everything’s going to be alright!” She gave an obviously-fake sob, cheeks dry as bone, before continuing. “I love you so, so much! Just hang in there! We'll bring you home soon!”
Pacifica’s face twitched in something like disgust as she watched her mother’s performance. She opened her mouth as if to respond, but closed it again without saying anything.
With that, it was pretty much over. Temperance spouted a few more inanities as she and the rest of the mob sullenly retreated from my domain. I doubted this would be the last I saw of her, or the good citizens of Planter’s Bend, but this had at least bought me some time.
Pacifica watched the townsfolk leave through the rapidly-darkening dusk. Even after they were lost from view, she stood at the edge, looking out over the forest. The rope that had bound her wrists, she now ran absently through her hands, coiling and uncoiling. A chill breeze swept through the trees. She shivered.
“You alright?” I asked.
“What do you care!” she snapped, the rope going taut between her hands. I didn’t say anything, letting her sort through her feelings. “...No,” she said after a moment. “I don’t know. It wasn’t…I don’t know what I expected. We put her in an impossible situation. What else could she have done?”
“Well, she could have asked to see you up close,” I said. “Made sure you were okay with her own eyes. Tried to get some time to talk with you privately. She could have begged me for mercy, or offered herself in your place.”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Pacifica wrapped her arms around herself, whether against the cold or to self-soothe I didn’t know. “Yeah. I guess she could have.” She stared out at the darkened woods for a moment longer, then shook her head. “So what now?”
It was at that point that Striga dropped a dead rabbit on her. She landed next to Pacifica, glaring resentfully up at the taller human girl as she spluttered in surprise and confusion, nearly dropping the carcass. She gave a short cry that [Apophic Tongue] translated simply as “Eat!”
“Now? Dinner, I guess,” I said. “Go bring that to the others.
With the threat of an uncertain future hanging over my head, though, there was no time to relax. I was still left with Pacifica’s question — what now?
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"Alright, everybody stop. Stop!" Temperance said brusquely, holding up the arm that wasn't still in a sling, as soon as she could no longer see
"Far enough for what?" asked Jens, who had for some unknowable and inane reason attached himself to her after they'd left James back at the farm. "Are we not going back to town?"
She threw a withering glance in his direction. "You can go back to town if you like, Jens," she said. She turned to address the rest of the crowd. "Any of you can go back to your homes now, if you want! I can't stop you. But I'll be damned if I'm going to let some godforsaken monsters talk to me like that."
"And what do you propose to do, exactly, Mistress Blackwater?" asked Jochem Presdjees. His tone was cutting and imperious, with a facial expression to match. Temperance bit back her instinctive, furious response. Jochem was the mayor's eldest son, and a bailiff of the county court besides — a prominent citizen in his own right. He was her social superior in every way, not someone she could afford to casually offend. If she hadn't already known that, the fact that the crowd of lackeys he'd brought made up a good third of the [Angry Mob] would have been an obvious visual cue. Initially she'd been delighted by his presence — it was as good as an official endorsement of her call to action. Now, though... "Just a moment ago you seemed quite convinced by the monsters' proof of your helplessness."
Now, the downside of his presence that she'd willfully overlooked before had made itself apparent. When the eyes of the powerful were on you, to be anything less than perfect was a disaster.
She took a deep breath to calm herself, which was only somewhat effective. Her tone was still tight when she answered his question. "We can't storm the dungeon or they'll kill my girl, that much is true. The goblins wouldn't have bothered to take her, though, unless they thought a fight with us was one they couldn't afford. Why try to scare us off, otherwise?" She spoke a little louder, projecting her words for the benefit of the rest of the mob. "The monsters are scheming something, we all know it! As soon as they've got what they want, my daughter will be of no use to them anymore. There's no guarantee they won't just slit her throat! Until they get what they want, though, they can't kill her, because her life is the only thing holding us back."
"Get to the point, Temperance," said Old Thomas, an impatient scowl on his face. A vein throbbed on Temperance's forehead. He'd get his comeuppance for speaking to her like that soon enough. Just like Jochem Presdjees, just like her clumsy dullard of a husband, and just like that nameless bitch of a goblin sorceress, too haughty to even show her face to the woman whose daughter she'd kidnapped.
"We stop them from getting what they want," she said, rather than lashing out at the old hunter. "Box them up inside that fort of theirs. Keep watch on them, at all hours of day or night. Any goblin sets foot outside the dungeon, and we snatch them up — get hostages of our own. We can't rush in, but that doesn't mean we have to let them sneak out. We can't trust a word they say — this is the only way to really keep our families, our homes, safe. Let them think we skulked off with our tails between our legs! What do we care? We know better than them what we'll do to protect what's ours."
From the surprised look on Jochem's face, she could tell he hadn't actually expected her to have an answer to his challenge. From the way he stroked his chin rather than immediately retorting, she could tell she'd hooked him. "Father always said 'if you can't win, just overturn the board,'" he said. "Alright, Mistress Blackwater, I see the merit in what you say."
"We can't all just stay out here in the woods forever," another villager protested. "There's work to be done!"
"Did I say we were all going to stay out here in the woods forever, you bleeding idiot?" Temperance snapped, sparks of azoth flying from her eyes and mouth as she rounded on the speaker. "Obviously we're not! We'll have to take it in shifts, decide on where to station sentries, arrange for provisions. We're going to do like the monsters said — be cool. Play it smart. Tonight, we all go back home. Tomorrow, we make plans."
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In the end, I’d decided to stave off the emptiness and uncertainty with work. Beneath the earth, my partially-flooded limestone caverns shifted and rumbled as I arranged their random, natural layout into a proper labyrinth. I’d never designed a maze before, so there were a few false starts. I’d initially assumed that having as many branches as possible was best, to give adventurers the maximum number of potential wrong decisions, but I found that the shorter corridors weren’t leaving me with much room to work. Fewer but longer paths would increase the price, in time and danger, of choosing wrongly.
I still didn’t have but the one monster to populate this floor, so I unavoidably ended up designing with Chompy in mind. The principal hazard was, therefore, the water. At numerous points, the only ways to proceed through the maze were entirely underwater. One of the longest underwater passages terminated in a dead-end, which would hopefully drown some people before they could make their way back out. Where the cramped, twisting corridors opened out into stalactite-dripping caverns, foes would need to pick their way along narrow stone pathways that wound between deceptively deep pools. All of these water features were connected to each other by a second network of tunnels underneath the maze, completely flooded and too small for a human to pass through. In contrast to the maze above them, these were laid out in an orderly grid: their purpose was to allow for the rapid redeployment of my cave lampreys and any other aquatic minions I might acquire, as well as giving them spaces to hunt and nest.
I moved my heart-body into a new chamber, a long fishhook-shaped tunnel. My pedestal sat at the beginning of the hook: if anyone made it all the way to me, I could quickly connect the point of the hook back to the labyrinth, thereby creating a second viable route to my core and allowing me to drop the ceiling on them. That tactic had worked out pretty well for me last time, after all, so I wanted to keep it in my arsenal going forward.
The old core chamber, with the water and the pillar, now connected through a hole in its ceiling to the long end of the new core chamber. It would eventually serve as Chompy’s boss arena. To that end, I expanded the chamber significantly. It was now shaped like a very squat spinning top. As before, the chamber was full of water, with only a small ledge at the entrance. Adventurers would be obliged to fight Chompy in his favored environment. The bend of the chamber’s ceiling meant that the top of the pillar was obscured from the entrance — that way, adventurers couldn’t just snag it with a grappling hook. They also couldn’t see that the pillar now stopped about twelve feet short of the top of the shaft, where the door to my core chamber would eventually be situated. I didn’t expect the climb would delay anyone for more than a moment: it was more of a ‘fuck you’ gesture.
As I did all of this, I ignored the little voice in my head pointing out that it was an obviously suboptimal use of my time. The second floor was unfinished, so why bother working on the third? I’d be better off juicing up my mega-bat and getting to work on the boss arena. Especially since I was being noisy and the goblins were trying to sleep-
The goblins didn’t appear to be trying to sleep. I mean, some of them were, but most of them were still up and about, even though it was pretty late at night. Ergiza was knapping a flint, while Teekas and Malik conducted an inventory of our food stockpile. Immir-shesh was repairing a woven backpack that had torn during the goblins’ flight from the band of goblinslayers. His mother Ninkur sat nearby, softly singing as she ground some sort of plant matter in a mortar and pestle.
“Hey, Nar-shesh,” I asked. “Why is everyone still up? It’s pretty late.”
He blinked in confusion. “What do you mean? The sun only went down a few hours ago.” I was equally confused, because he wasn’t saying it with a ‘the night’s still young’ kind of tone. Then, as I looked at his eyes glinting like pennies in the darkness of the cave, an obvious thought occurred to me.
“Wait, are goblins nocturnal?” I asked, already feeling like an idiot.
“Uh, yeah,” he said, sounding amused. “Did you not know that?”
“No!” I said, flustered. “When I first met you guys, it was daytime! And then you went to sleep that night! How would I have known that?”
“Our sleep schedule’s been all fucked up from the trip!” he said, gesticulating for emphasis. “When you’re a nocturnal species and you’re trying to sneak through the territory of a diurnal species, you gotta be awake at weird times, for safety! Otherwise, just for example, they catch you sleeping in a barn and then they set the barn on fire!” He sighed. “But since the hostage thing went okay, I guess everyone figures they can finally unclench and start trying to get back to normal.”
“Well…that’s good,” I said. “I’m glad they all feel safe.”
“Yeah,” Nar-shesh said with another sigh, sticking his hands in his pockets. He didn’t seem pleased.
“Still worried?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said, shaking his head ruefully. “Feel like I can’t relax for a second or something terrible is going to happen, and… y’know.” And it would be my fault, he left unsaid.
“I think that’s a common way to feel among people who’ve been through a traumatic situation,” I said. All I got in response was a noncommittal grunt. I decided to let the matter lie. It had been a scant few crisis-filled days since he’d watched friends and family die in front of him. Fumbling my way through some amateur psychotherapy could wait until the wounds had scabbed over.
“Oh!” I said. “I forgot, there’s something I wanted to show you. I had my first [Fertile Caverns] spawns.”
Nar-shesh’s brow quirked skeptically. “Last time you showed us all something, Teekas almost got her arm bitten off.”
“This will definitely probably not be like that,” I said, with absolute confidence.
He made an unimpressed face.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “It’s mushrooms! How bad could it be?”