Malik and Ergiza were talking, huddled close around the fire while Ergiza nursed her child, when Nar-shesh re-emerged from the dungeon. The low murmur of their conversation died out as he approached, squatting on his heels next to them and warming his hands. There was a wariness in their eyes, he thought, as they looked at him. He tried not to let it rankle him.
“What,” he said dryly into the awkward silence. “Do I have something on my face?”
“No, but you do have the number 10 on your status bar right next to where it says ‘level,’” Malik quipped back. “You feelin’ alright there, bud?”
“What? Yeah, fine. I just stood there and she pumped a bunch of azoth into me, it only took a minute or two.”
Malik shot him a look that indicated that hadn’t really been what he meant and Nar-shesh knew it. Nar-shesh studiously ignored it.
“Should you be talking about it like that?” Ergiza asked, nervously. “Isn’t it a mystery? Or sacred, at least?” ‘Mystery,’ in this context, was a word in the goblin language used to refer to the secret revelations of the cult lodges: revealing them to the uninitiated was forbidden, and dangerous. The danger came not merely from the fact that the lodges would kill to defend the sanctity of their mysteries, but that without the safeguards and preparations of a proper cult initiation, knowledge of the mysteries could bring bad luck, madness or disease, and even direct Heavenly punishment.
Nar-shesh shrugged. “She sure didn’t treat it like one,” he said. “There wasn’t any ceremony to it at all, she just did it.”
“Do fish treat water like it’s wet?” Malik said. He reached over to prod Nar-shesh’s chest, noticeably more muscular than it had been half an hour ago, with a finger. “You can’t take holy folks’ behavior as indicative of whether something is holy or not, they’ve got an abnormal perspective.”
“Alright, first off, hands off the tits, they’re brand-new,” Nar-shesh said, pushing his friend’s poking finger away. “Second off, I don’t get why you’re this fuckin’ worried about it. It’s not like either of you are gonna have to go through it, since you’re not sticking around.”
Ergiza and Malik exchanged a meaningful glance as she finished nursing her baby and tugged her tunic back over her shoulder. “We are,” she said.
Nar-shesh blinked. “You are…what? Is there a second half to that sentence?”
“Don’t be an asshole, dude,” Malik said with a chiding kick to his shin. “We’re sticking around. Everyone is.”
“Oh,” Nar-shesh said, not sure how to respond. He tried not to sound too confused as he asked “Why?”
Ergiza shrugged. “I think our chances are still better here than in the south,” she said. “I mean…we’re talking about a realmheart. Who cares how many hundreds of warriors the riverland chiefs can muster? She’ll keep us safer than they ever could, and she won’t…” She trailed off, leaving unsaid the prices that might be asked of a young mother in search of refuge with a dead husband and no surviving family.
Malik snorted. “I’m staying because I figure the sight of you dying heroically in battle should be funny,” he said, in a way that clearly communicated ‘I’m staying because I’m worried about my best friend.’
Nar-shesh had derived a certain angry vindication from the thought that he, alone, would remain by Persephone’s side — that only they would fight and die against the world, while the rest of the tribe moved on and kept living. Like it was so easy to do that. Confronted so abruptly with the fact that none of the others were reading from the script he’d written in his head - that he wasn’t alone — some nameless emotion filled his chest and began to rise chokingly up his throat.
He was saved from having to put words to the feeling when Persephone spoke from the air around them, her wine-dark voice ill-matched to the scattered nervousness of her words. “Hey, uh, nobody panic yet, but we may have a problem.”
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I didn’t have a watch or anything, but it had to have been at least an hour before the owl reappeared within the boundaries of my domain. I could see that she was hurt: a nauseating patch of charred and featherless flesh stretched across her left shoulder and onto the wing. She fell out of the air almost as soon as she came within sight of her nest, an uncontrolled tumble to the forest floor that left her sprawling.
“Hey, hey,” I said, doing my best to be soothing. “Stay still. You’re safe. The goblins are going to come help you.” She either didn’t understand me or was too freaked-out to listen: she made a distressed bird noise and tried to pick herself up and take flight again. “Stay still,” I said, doing my best to channel the authority over [Monster]-kind that my [Boss] skill allegedly gave me. It must have worked, because my words rang with an eerie echo and a gust of wind blasted outwards from the owl, scattering dead leaves. More importantly, she stopped struggling and simply laid there, trembling - in pain or perhaps in fear, I couldn’t say.
It was at this point that a few of the goblins came running over, Nar-shesh in the lead. They looked hesitant to approach the owl, stopping abruptly several yards away from her. I couldn’t fault them for it, as this was a sensible response to wild animals, especially injured wild animals with five-inch talons and beaks still caked with dried blood. However, I did need them to actually do first aid here. “Alright, they’re gonna come closer to you now, okay? They’re not going to hurt you. Stay still,” I said, speaking for the goblins’ benefit as much as the owl’s. Thus prompted, they moved forward, slowly so as not to alarm her. “Is she injured anywhere but the shoulder?” I asked. After a few moments of feeling around, the goblins indicated that she wasn’t. “Okay, good.”
I leaned in, focusing more of my awareness on her burned shoulder. It was a grisly sight, the blistered skin reddish-yellow and dry. Some of the feathers looked like they’d melted, rather than burned, into twists and trails of sticky black goop. The smell must have been horrific, and I was briefly grateful I no longer had a nose or a stomach. “Okay. What would you all usually do for an injury like this?” I asked.
“Make them as comfortable as we can,” Teekas said with a grim expression.
“Okay, and then what?”
From the looks on everyone’s faces, I realized that there was not an ‘and then what,’ and that these injuries — second-degree burns over this much of her body — would probably be fatal at the level of medical care we were able to provide.
Well, that…sucked.
That sucked! The owl had been my first minion, I wasn’t just going to let her die! There had to be something I could do. I’d reflexively begun scrolling through my skill list again, looking for something I could buy that would help, when the owl suddenly screeched in pain and bucked, throwing the goblins off and flapping a short distance away before tumbling to the ground again. I could see her health bar slowly ticking down. She wasn’t in imminent danger of death — it would probably be the inevitable infection or gangrene that would kill her — but her time was definitely running out. Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck. I racked my brain for everything I knew about burn injuries and how to treat them. And how had she gotten burned so badly fighting a dog, anyway? Did she raid a chicken coop owned by a fucking wizard or something?
Didn’t matter. Focus. Think.
“Hey, Nar-shesh,” I said. “Levelling up refills your health bar, right? What happens to the actual, like, injuries?”
“It helps with some stuff,” he said. “Blood loss, cuts and bruises. It doesn’t fix status conditions, though, or any injury that’s bad enough to apply a debuff. Like broken bones and stuff, chopped-off fingers, it won’t fix any of that.” In other words, I thought, looking at the [Burned] debuff floating beneath the owl’s health bar, I couldn’t just fix this by using [Empower Minion] to push her to her next level threshold. Still, I couldn’t just do nothing. Maybe…
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“Okay,” I said. “Who’s got the boiled water? Great, thank you. Is that cooled yet? Okay, we’re going to wash the injury site, try and get the dirt and burned feathers and stuff off.” The goblins cautiously approached my injured monster and did as I instructed. As they worked, I let my azoth seep into the owl’s body with [Azoth Mutation]. I’d multiplied her body mass several times over with nothing but magic: maybe, by the same principle, I could create a sort of magical skin graft to replace the cooked tissue.
The site of the injury didn’t respond to my will, which made sense if the tissue was as dead as it looked. I felt a sensation of heat, prickling, even pain as I prodded her flesh with my domain - the feeling of foreign azoth clashing with my own. Shit, maybe she had actually tangoed with a wizard, and what I was feeling was the lingering effects of the fireball spell. Well, fuck that. I was a dungeon core. Forget an azoth pool, I had an azoth ocean. No pissant podunk human wizard’s spell was going to stand up to me. I opened the floodgates, and the goblins jumped in surprise as they felt the electric tingle of my power wash over them. In moments, the burning feeling of the spell — and the [Burned] debuff — faded. Surprisingly, though, that didn’t eliminate the resistance. As I tried to create new, healthy flesh at the site of the injury, if anything, the resistance intensified. It felt as though I was pushing a heavy weight uphill, or struggling against a current. It was, I realized, the same sensation as when I’d tried to call myself by name - like Heaven itself wouldn’t allow this to happen. If anything, though, this encouraged me to push harder. Slowly but inexorably, and at the cost of much more of my azoth than I’d planned to expend, new flesh bubbled up to fill the wound, burned skin sloughing off. A ringing sound rose in my awareness as I worked, an unpleasant tinnitus hum. By the end, my fine control was not the best, and I was more or less just letting [Azoth Mutation] run on autopilot, which might have explained why the replacement feathers glistened in jewel-tone pomegranate, rather than the light brown of the rest of the owl’s plumage.
The ringing stopped abruptly, replaced by the ding of a status notification. Warning! Skill transgression detected. You have gained heresy. This will have consequences.
I felt the urge to laugh - to cackle madly, really - rising within me. That was ominous as hell, and objectively bad news by most peoples’ metrics, but I had a different takeaway. If the system was so bothered by me using [Azoth Mutation] to heal my minions that it went out of its way to threaten me over it… well, that must mean that it considered me a threat in turn, no? The system didn’t like what I was doing? Good. Fuck the system.
I decided I’d earned a bit of a cackle after all.
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Pacifica Blackwater leaned against the wall of the meeting-house of the town of Planters’ Bend. Inside, she could hear her mother’s strident voice over the hubbub of the crowd. “And if it was a giant mutant owl, I ask you, what mutated it? Frau Naismith told me, earlier today, she’d been hearing strange noises from the woods, and felt the earth shake! Something’s amiss, I say. Something’s not right with the world.”
Temperance Blackwater had wanted to be an adventurer when she grew up. One only needed to look at her status bar to see it: she’d chosen Mage as her class, rather than the more typical Farmer or Villager, or one of the numerous crafting professions, and she’d climbed all the way to level 5, higher than most anyone in town except the captain of the watch, the mayor, and the senior tradesfolk who’d been honing their craft for decades. She’d given up on that dream, Pacifica had gathered, somewhere in the neighbourhood of half a year before Pacifica was born and shortly after her marriage to Pacifica’s father, who was also in the meeting-house with her at the moment.
Pacifica rubbed her bruised cheek, wincing at her father’s congratulatory gift for surviving the owl’s attack. Her mother preferred to berate her at length for her mistakes: her father had, among other ways she might describe it, a more… efficient way of conveying that he was not pleased that she’d gotten his dog killed.
As genuine as her father’s anger had been, Pacifica nonetheless got the distinct impression that her mother was having a good day — a great day, even. She might have abandoned her dreams of becoming an adventurer, slaying monsters and romancing princes, but she had very much not set aside her love of being the center of attention. Fending off a savage monster that had tried to steal her child, through nothing but her own heroic courage and maternal virtue? Attempting to drum up a torches-and-pitchforks mob to chase after the beast, and by the sound of things succeeding? No, Pacifica was quite sure that even with a broken arm, Temperance Blackwater felt like the queen of the world right now. She’d probably kill a dog a day if she thought it would guarantee her this sort of treatment.
“Almost wish the owl had snatched me up,” she mumbled to herself, kicking at the dust. “Can’t see how gettin’ ate could be worse than this.” She thought of molten-gold eyes, a blood-dripping beak. Thought of what it might be like to have someone actually fight for her, even if only as a morsel to devour.
She thought, as she waited for her parents, about what it might be like to be wanted.
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The dungeon sighed. “Okay. Just…don’t eat children, okay? Not human children, not goblin children. No children. Adults only. Do you understand?”
The owl stared at the point in space in front of and slightly above her that she’d decided the dungeon’s voice was coming from, and said nothing. She wasn’t sure she did understand, but she could tell the dungeon was annoyed.
“Tilt your head down and then back up if you understand,” the dungeon said. The owl, as previously stated, wasn’t sure she understood, so her head stayed still. The dungeon made another exasperated noise. “Do you- okay, turn your head to one side, then to the other, if you don’t understand.”
The owl obediently swivelled her head.
“Okay! Wow, I thought you just didn’t-” The dungeon said. “That’s great, thank you for telling me you don’t understand. In the future, whenever you don’t understand something, you can turn your head like that. That’s called
The owl nodded, which made the dungeon laugh. “Okay, look. How would you feel if someone tried to eat your kids?”
“I would kill them,” the owl said. Finally, an easy question!
“Okay. So, when you try and eat other peoples’ kids, they will also try and kill you, right?”
“I will kill them first,” the owl said, puffing herself up. “I am very big.”
The dungeon sighed again. “Okay, that’s not really what I- Nevermind. You are very big. But if you tried to eat the children of something even bigger than you were, then it might kill you instead, right?”
The owl hesitated for a moment. Instinctively, she wanted to deny such a possibility. She was very big! She would kill anyone before they could kill her! Her shoulder, as if to remind her of recent events, spasmed with phantom pain. The owl swallowed her pride and nodded.
“Alright. And you’d agree that I’m a lot bigger than you are, right? Nod if I’m bigger than you are.” The owl nodded. “Okay, good. Just imagine that every child in the world is my child, okay? So, what will happen if you try and eat them?”
“You will… kill me?” the owl said hesitantly. Her hesitation was born less of fear than it was in not being sure that her answer was the right one.
“Yes, correct. Don’t try to eat kids. Okay?”
“Okay,” the owl said, sulkily. Privately, she decided that the child of the mean fireball human didn’t count for this rule. She really wanted to still eat it. It was a matter of principle, at this point - or a matter of pride. There wasn’t much difference between the two yet, for her.
“Alright, good talk,” the dungeon said. “Now, with that squared away, I’m glad you survived and made it back to me. I’ve decided, given this and other factors, that you should have a name.”
The owl did not have the necessary depth of introspection to be aware of this yet, but every word of Apophic uttered by the dungeon was carving out a little more space in her mind to make room for itself. Inside her skull, her brain was sizzling with azoth as the sorcerous language of the ancient rulers of monster-kind forcibly upgraded her cognitive architecture to allow her to heed her masters’ demands. It was in this way that she immediately understood the concept of names and of having a name. “Okay,” she chirped, happy that the dungeon didn’t seen upset with her any more.
“I’m gonna call you… Hm. How do you feel about the name Striga? Nod if you like it,” the dungeon said.
Striga nodded. “I like it,” she said. “I’m Striga.”