Hunter took Fawkes to the corridor where he found the saber. She knelt besides the low-dweller carcasses, examined them with a gloved hand.
“A week,” she said. “More, perhaps.”
The saber hung from her belt, next to her own. They were almost identical. Hunter didn’t have to ask her. He could see the poorly-contained worry painted all over her face.
They searched the surrounding corridors, too. They found signs of battle, broken arrows, slain low-dwellers, and little more.
“More of our Brethren have been down here in the past few weeks,” Sister Peregrine said. “It must have been them.”
Fawkes met her eyes, sullen. Sister Peregrine looked away, turned her gaze toward the dark.
“Come. Let us put an end to all this madness, once and for all.”
So they went.
Brother Aurochs delved deeper and deeper into the dark heart of the Halls, and the rest followed behind. Hunter hadn’t had the time or the opportunity to get to know the man. He hadn’t heard him speak more than ten words, but had liked him almost instinctively. There had been a gentleness to Brother Aurochs, an air of stout but warm benevolence.
Instead of that, the were-buffalo now radiated a sense of primordial pain and sadness, a longing and a grief that overflowed from his hulking form and spread to everything around him. He clung to his greataxe listlessly and simply put one hoofed foot in front of the other in a pace that was almost glacial.
Right beside him walked Sister Peregrine, only she, too, was almost unrecognizable. The Sister Hunter had met was a creature of grace and pride; the woman before him was but a pale shadow of her. She was broken and beaten in spirit, if not in body, and had barely enough oomph in her to hold up the torch she was carrying.
The rest of the group were following at a respectful distance, speaking little and only in whispers. The palpable sense of gloom that surrounded the Brethren clung to them too, like the world’s heaviest cobwebs.
Fawkes was lost in thought, her pale and narrow face suddenly looking impossibly older under the shadows cast by the torch she carried. Hunter tried to reach out to her, get her talking, but to no avail. She wasn’t in the mood for conversation–even less so than usually.
The ravens spent most of their time scouting their surroundings, checking side-corridors for signs of low-dwellers. The gloom of the place had got to them, too. They had stopped their usually constant bickering and were focused on their task instead.
Fyodor padded next to Hunter, never straying more than a couple feet away. On a different occasion Hunter might have poked some harmless fun at what a scaredy cat the huge direwolf was proving to be; not at this time though. If anything, he now understood Fyodor’s ever-present angst a little bit better.
As for Hunter himself… well, he wasn’t sure what to think or feel. Elderpyre had long stopped feeling like just another game to him. He couldn’t even remember whether he’d ever been able to tell the game’s virtual world apart from the real one, not even at the very beginning. That’s how gripping its verisimilitude was, how realistic the feel of everything around him. He’d come to terms with that.
The people in it, though…
Hunter was starting to realize how real the people were starting to feel, too, and it was kind of disconcerting.
With Fawkes, it was more or less to be expected. He’d spent a lot of time with her and they’d been through some traumatic stuff together. Shit, she’d been more real to him than many of the people he knew in his world. Real people in the real world.
The Brethren, though?
He hadn’t had the time or the opportunity to connect with them. He liked them well enough, alright, but when it came down to brass tacks, they were just a couple of NPCs. A stream of ones and zeroes, no more than facsimiles of real people, convincing but ultimately as two-dimensional as a person-shaped cardboard cutout.
Right?
If that was the case, why was he feeling so damn bad?
Why had he risked going through another excruciating death experience just to try and pull their chestnuts out of the fire? Why did he get that terrible feeling in the pit of his stomach every time he looked at the now-transformed Brother Aurochs, or the devastated Sister Peregrine?
Immersion was the holy grail of every gamer and game designer out there, but this was more than just that.
Was everything alright up there in that head of his?
Was he beginning to slip?
Hunter tried to rationalize the whole thing. People had the tendency to an anthropomorphize pretty much everything. There was that old survival drama, for example, in which the lead, stranded on an island, had taken to talking to a volleyball with a smiley face painted on.
A fucking volleyball.
These, on the other hand, were almost indistinguishable from honest-to-God people. They were characters and situations expertly created and written for the sole purpose of tugging on his heartstrings, of granting an extra layer of emotional authenticity to the whole Elderpyre experience. He was supposed to feel for them, so it was very normal to start kind of caring about them.
He wasn’t going nuts or anything.
Right?
“That was one hell of a stupid thing you pulled back there” Fawkes whispered to him, cutting his train of thought short. “Brave, yes, but stupid. What were you thinking?”
“That’s an awful lot of words to just say ‘thank you’,” Hunter said, but his half-hearted attempt at a tease fell flat.
I’m not jesting, lad” she said after, hesitating for a couple of breaths in a decidedly non-Fawkeslike manner. “I really wonder what goes on in that thick head of yours. There are things I’d like to talk about when we get out of this old tomb.”
“Yeah, sure. Amen to that.”
“What?”
“I mean, I’m looking forward to it.”
“So am I, lad. So am I.”
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Fawkes turned her gaze back to the dark corridors that lay ahead, looking already lost in some somber thought. Hunter, not willing to let the first half-proper conversation they had in hours die out, spoke again.
“So, this friend of yours. You must be really excited to finally find him.”
“I’ll be when I do," Fawkes said with a sigh.
“What’s he like?”
“Reiner? You’d like him. You’re both a pain in my neck.”
“So he’s not all dark and serious and businesslike? You know, like you?”
Despite herself, that brought a strained smile to the swordswoman’s lips.
“I wish. He talks a lot and laughs a lot and drinks a lot and gets in trouble a lot. But he’s a good friend. One I miss.”
“So, uh… was it his saber?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sure he dropped it or misplaced it or something.”
“That sounds like something he’d do.”
“Good thing we found it.”
“Yes,” said Fawkes, but her voice betrayed her mind had already drifted elsewhere again. “Good thing we did.”
As they kept walking in torchlit silence, it became progressively harder and harder for Hunter to keep track of how much time had passed. Each corridor blended in with the next, each hall was identical to the last. It was as if both time and space had a different meaning down there in the cool, sterile darkness of the Halls.
Once or twice, they came across small groups of low-dwellers, but the were-buffalo dispatched them with an absent-minded brutality that was borderline more frightening than anything that could be lurking in the dark halls around them.
After what had felt like a small eternity, Brother Aurochs led them to a chamber different from almost any other they’d seen. This one was bigger, wider, its ceiling higher. Huge carvings of indecipherable runes and sigils covered the floor and walls–and maybe the ceiling too, Hunter suspected. At its other end there were a couple of towering double doors, much like the ones they’d crossed both at the entrance to the Halls and the entrance to the lower levels. Whatever was behind those, it was Important–capital ‘I’ important.
“We have arrived” Sister Peregrine turned around and told them, her voice hollow. “Whatever has happened to Sister Finch, whatever madness has overtaken her… she’s here. Just past those doors.”
Hunter threw a glance at Fawkes. If this was a dungeon, and it sure looked like it was, what lay ahead would likely be very dangerous. He wouldn’t mind some time to prepare, even if it was to simply catch his breath.
“If it’s all the same to you, I could use a few moments to prepare," he said.
“Is it important?” Sister Peregrine asked, visibly on edge. “I would rather we did not tarry any longer than we have to.”
“It is," Hunter said. “It has to do with my… nature. You know. With being Transient. If there’s danger ahead, I want to have all my bases covered as best as I can.”
The woman’s mouth became a thin, hard line, but she nodded.
“Alright. But do make haste.”
She didn’t have to say that twice. Hunter walked over to the double doors ahead, closed his eyes, and let his mind reach out to them. It was as he had suspected; they were the focal point of a Place of Power. Had they been outside, it would have called to his senses like a beacon in the dark. Down there, however, among the energy-saturated enchantments and the ever-present heartbeat of the Halls, it wouldn’t surprise him if he’d missed it altogether.
Yes. He did.
Something reached back at him through the link he’d established and tugged at his core, binding it to the ambient power around the doors.
More Aether. That was good. He’d already been sitting on a solid 600 Aether, enough to buy him some pretty decent upgrades to his Attributes. He’d been putting off spending it for far too long, worried that he might waste them in something suboptimal and gimp his character build. It was about time he did something with all that Aether. Whatever lay ahead, Hunter wanted to face at full strength.
He found a quiet spot, sat down cross-legged and with his eyes closed, and tried to empty his mind. It took him a moment; these things weren’t meant to be rushed. When he finally managed to find that inner peace and focus within, he was greeted with a notification.
Now that he had the chance, Hunter pulled up his notifications from earlier, too. Not that there were many of those; he’d gained a couple of ranks in his Conjure Familiar Ability, which was now at 19, as well as three more in his Low-Light Vision, which had reached a respectable 22.
He’d half-expected that to grant him access to a new Ability, just as how Survival had made Wildcrafting available for him to learn once it had hit 20. This time, however, he got nothing. It could be because Low-Light Vision was itself an Ability, whereas Survival was a Skill. Or it could just be that the way things worked in Elderpyre was arbitrary and confusing by design. Go figure.
Most interesting by far was the fact that he’d gained a whopping 6 points in his newly-acquired Toughness Ability. That brought it up to 7, and his Health total to 107. He hadn’t expected just running to contribute to his Toughness growth, but apparently the exertion was intense enough to qualify. Again, go figure.
Which led him to the meat-and-potatoes of the whole thing, and more-or-less the purpose of his meditation; the chance to tinker with his stats. His character sheet window popped open before him, and he started to pour all the Aether he had to increase his Health Attribute. More Health meant it would be harder for stuff to kill him dead, and that was a good thing, right?
Right.
Initially, he thought that each hundred points of Aether would get him a single point of, say, Strength or Willpower, or ten points of Health. Things turned out to be a bit more complicated than that.
Each consequent increase of an Attribute cost ten percent more than the last. This meant that he could pump his Health to 110 for just 100 Aether, but further increasing it to 120 would cost an additional 110, and to reach 130 would cost him another 121 on top of that. It made sense; diminishing returns were a staple in many crunchy games he’d played.
After doing some math in his head, he decided that investing everything in his Health wasn’t a great idea at that point–not with all those increasing costs and diminishing returns. He increased it to 147 (that final 7 was a bonus he gained from his Toughness Ability) and used almost all of the rest of his Aether to increase his Stamina to 130.
He'd initially considered increasing his Dexterity instead of his Stamina, looking for to increase his mobility and get hit less. Stamina would serve him better in the long run, however–pun not intended.
Granted, these weren’t the most creative upgrades to his character, but how did that old saying go? A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, or something like that. He’d rather face whatever lay behind those doors somewhat unoptimized rather than completely unprepared.
That left him with a grand total of 5 remaining Aether, not nearly enough to get another upgrade.
So there he was, finally fully upgraded and with virtually no Inspiration or Aether to spend on additional Skills and Attribute upgrades. He was about to stand up and tell Fawkes and the Brethren he was ready to go, but he remembered there was another thing he’d been meaning to try–a little arts and crafts project. He opened his backpack, made sure nobody was looking, reached for the Kannewik’s severed head, and plucked a handful of ancient, brittle hair.
This time around, creating a transmutation circle proved to be a much simpler process; his Craft Spirit Charm was at a considerably higher rank of 6 now compared to the measly 1 it had been the first time he’d tried to create a charm.
Crafting a Corpse Hair Charm was easier than crafting and enchanting a Bone Charm, too. His fingers deftly wove the dead hairs as if they had life of their own. It wasn’t much different than weaving a cat’s cradle, like his mom had taught him when he was a snot-nosed five-year-old.
Not half a minute later, Hunter was holding an intricate, mildly disturbing jumble of a long-dead man’s hair tied in knots. As a final touch, he summoned his essence and infused the knots and weaves with as much of it as they could hold.
There, all ready.
He took the completed charm and placed it in the front pocket of its poncho. Hopefully, simply carrying it on him would be enough for its protective enchantment to work. Even more hopefully, he wouldn’t have to find out anytime soon.
As ready as he was going to be, he rose to his feet, patted himself down, and turned to look at Fawkes. She’d been sitting at the other end of the hall, watching him do his arts and crafts with great interest. Hunter nodded at her, and she nodded back. It was time to see what this whole Halls Of The Cor Ancestors mystery was about, be done with whatever it was that Arjen and the Brethren expected them to do down there, and finally go find Reiner.