Strange voices echoed through the ruins. Zoe turned about, but she couldn’t be sure where they came from. All she knew was that they grew louder. The dark room with the three bedrolls had only one exit. She had to move or else she would be trapped.
With her legs broken, she relied upon the chains granted by the Black Star system to move. She directed the chain around her neck to grab the craggy doorway and pull her out of the room. Nothing. The ghostly links remained coiled around her neck like a choker.
[Ding!]
[You take me for granted.]
Zoe bared her teeth. This wasn’t happening. Not right now.
“No, I don’t,” she hissed. “You’ve been incredibly helpful. I’d be dead without you.”
[Ding!]
[You’re just saying that.]
“I mean it, I really do.”
[I don’t know…]
The echoes grew louder, bouncing from wall to wall, losing all sense of direction as they approached. Three separate voices: hoarse, booming, and smooth as honey. No time to argue with a butthurt eldritch being.
Her legs were still wrapped with the chain tethered to her hip. With her Might she could pull herself along with just her hands. It would jerk her body more than using the chain, but Vitality could suppress the pain. But what about the loot in her hands? A curved dagger and a jar of beads. There was something curious about the beads, she wanted to know more, but now was not the time. Suppressing a frustrated snarl, she stashed both items under the woolen blankets. Though they could be helpful, they would also alert the campers to her presence. But she couldn’t stop herself from taking one of the marble-like beads.
To leave this situation completely empty-handed would be a travesty.
With the bead tucked into her pocket, she crawled out of the room. Her fingers found holds in the pitted and worn tiles. It was easy enough to pull herself from the room, though her legs throbbed with every moment. Once more in the courtyard, she faced a choice.
Did she leave and risk the desert? Or did she venture deeper into the ruins?
Beyond the border of ancient flagstones, the desert glowed with its soft light. The ruins, by contrast, were a tangled mess of shadowy passages. With the sand being the only source of light, she knew she would quickly become blinded the deeper she went. But the desert held predators. Packs of them. She couldn’t see them now, but they were out there. Possibly waiting for her.
A voice echoed. She flinched at the alien tongue. It sounded as though it came from right beside her.
She made up her mind. The ruins had protected her from the shadowy predators, perhaps they would protect her from the campers as well. She hauled herself away from the courtyard and followed the route the river carved through the ruins.
Down a passageway, through rooms emptied by time. Stone shelves, benches, recesses, but all of it empty and crumbling. Was this a temple? Some kind of domicile? A workshop? She wasn’t an archeologist, and the shadows made any attempts at identification pointless. Only the sand that had blown in through cracks in the walls offered any illumination at all. Soon the river vanished beneath the floor.
[Ding!]
[-1 chain for ignoring me.]
Damnit!
The chain around her hip vanished and her legs fell loose once more. The sudden pain almost made her scream, but she bit her arm to muffle the sound. Why was this system so petty?
She hoped she had moved far enough from their camp and dragged herself carefully into the closest room. There was an empty corner tucked behind the rubble of a collapsed shelf. The room had two exits, so she wouldn’t be cornered if the campers stumbled upon her.
Her back against the wall, the voices distant, she resolved to fix her legs once and for all. With a flex of her Willpower to remove the Black Star interference on her status, she grasped her Skein.
[Skein 117/117]
She directed the threads of energy toward her Vitality.
[Skein 7/117]
[Vitality 20 (130)]
Life.
Her body brimmed. Overflowing. Growing. Regenerating. A seed sprouting in dark earth and surging for the light. She understood, for the first time, the true nature of Vitality. Not renewal, but growth. Not healing, but persistence. How else could the body continue, without Vitality? How could anything continue? Vitality was the burning light of the sun, the greenery on the riverbanks, the beating of a heart driving oxygen to the brain so it could tell the heart to beat again to drive oxygen to the brain so it could…
She lost herself in the feeling as her body rippled.
The Black Star system took a toll on her Willpower, and it was all she could do to rein in the lightning coursing through her veins and direct the explosive energy toward her legs. Her Vitality was 30 times higher than it had been pre-system. If it took months for a regular broken leg to heal, now it was a matter of hours. By concentrating and directing her attributes, she could shorten that time even further. Her medical knowledge helped her visualize her internal injuries. She probed the bruised muscles, hissing as she spotted the multiple fractures, the breaks, and the hisses almost became laughter as she felt them healing under her touch.
She found it hilarious that her entire career, her entire time at university, was now performed by a mental exercise and a magical force.
The boosted Vitality wouldn’t last forever. Even now it was ticking down, reducing by 1 per minute. Perhaps increasing one of her other attributes would help with that, but she didn’t care. Her legs were healing.
She gritted her teeth and wriggled her toes.
They responded, and the pain was minimal. She dumped more Skein into Vitality and let the process continue. Careful concentration directed the pulsing energy toward her bones. Her eye was still healing, but it wasn’t her priority. It could wait until she could walk.
After hours of this repeated magical healing, her Willpower hit zero. The world became a fuzzy place. She giggled as she kicked in the dust, and collapsed in the rocky corner.
Utterly spent.
###
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
Dawn came without sunlight. The sky blooming from dark to pale grey. No lavender clouds to shroud the grey heavens. Soft beams of sourceless light spilled through holes in the walls to strike Zoe’s face.
Well-rested, she stirred, and though her legs ached, she stood without a challenge. Her body was not yet fully recovered, but her Might gave her injured body more strength than any pre-system human. The room around her appeared to be an old storage room. Stone shelves set against stone walls. Nothing held there but dust and fragile cobwebs of long-dead spiders.
Her stomach grumbled. Her throat ached for water. In the silence of the room, she heard the trickling of the river beneath the tiles. Her fist clenched, flashed silver, and she punched through the floor.
Stone fragments fell into swift-moving water. Ice cold and fresh. She scooped up handfuls and drank. Not too much, since she didn’t want to puke like last time. Once she quenched her thirst, she moved. Her swift, hobbling gait took her deeper into the ruins. There was no telling if the sound of breaking the floor had alerted the campers, but she didn’t want to wait and find out.
The creature in the shaft of darkness, Trinch, had a power that totally eclipsed her own. Who knew what others like him existed in this dimension? She didn't want to risk a confrontation like that while injured.
Or at all.
So she moved from room to room, slow, and steady. Checking through doorways before she advanced. Always hoping to find some tool, some potential weapon, but finding nothing but dust and softly glowing sand in the shadows. The river sometimes emerged, seen through holes in the floor, or flooding a sunken hallway, but for the most part, it was an unseen vein beneath the grit-covered stone. What was this place? The longer she walked, the more the size astonished her. It seemed to be a town of interconnected dwellings, but there were no clues besides the occasional wall carving of serpentine creatures.
No matter how long she walked, she seemed to make no progress. Room after room leading nowhere. She stopped and rested on a stone bench. Not that she was tired, but just to get her bearing. Pale sky shone through rents in the ceilings, but she hadn’t seen a window looking out onto the desert for hours. It was starting to feel claustrophobic. She ran a hand along the rough stone. Dust came away under her fingertips. If she wanted, she could punch her way through the stone. Punch and punch until she escaped, but that much sound would surely alert the campers.
If they were even still in the ruins…
Whatever business took them away from their site in the first place could have done so again. Maybe she was being paranoid. Though, better paranoid than dead.
And her eye was still healing behind the impromptu patch she tore from her shirt. The tissue in her socket formed an orb, but it stung whenever she removed the coverings. She boosted her Vitality when she could, but retained most of her Skein out of caution.
There was something wrong with these ruins, she just couldn’t figure it out.
To distract her from her frustration, she pulled out the glass orb she stole from the campers. Daylight shone through the clear glass and highlighted the squiggle of red in the center, as though someone had captured a burning candle wick. The chain around her neck twitched. There was a connection there.
She brought the marble up to the chain and brushed the glass against the ghostly metal. The red wick flashed with light and heat. Startled, she dropped the marble. It rolled away, dull and cool. Her face and hands flushed with the fading heat. Gingerly, she picked up the marble and placed it back in her pocket.
Some kind of firestarter? It must be a feature of the Black Star system because it highlighted how useless the chain around her neck was without the system to assist her.
A voice distracted her from her thoughts. Hoarse, alien, close.
She looked about, saw nothing, and moved in the other direction. The voice called out again. Alert now, and the other two answered. She didn’t need to know the language to understand what they said.
Somehow, they had found her.
She ran.
Her legs ached with every step, but she forced herself on. Down halls, through rooms, sprinting as fast as her enhanced limbs could propel her. Her footsteps echoed off the walls, but if she could outrun the sound it wouldn’t matter.
She tripped. Stumbled. Fell. Crashed into a stony wall and groaned at the agony in her recovering legs. What? She glanced back at a fist-sized hole in the tiles. Water rushed underneath. No…
She was back in the room she woke up in. When had she been turned around? It didn’t make sense. The voices hollered. Closer.
She sighed at what she was about to do.
“Hello?”
[Ding!]
[Well, well, well. Look who’s come crawling back.]
“Can you help me?”
[Yes.]
Zoe waited, but nothing happened. She tried to move the chain around her neck. Nothing. This wasn’t happening.
She gritted her teeth.
“Will you help me?”
[No.]
Echoes bouncing from every direction. Closer. Surrounding her. She looked up through the hole in the ceiling at the grey sky and clasped her hands.
“Please help me!” she whispered. “I’m sorry for ignoring you, I’m scared, and I don’t want to die, and I don’t know what’s going on. I need your help. I can’t do this on my own!”
Silence stretched inside her mind. Footsteps slapped the stone. Excited grunts. Calls in the alien tongue. Laughter. They sounded like hunters drawing in on wounded prey.
[Ding!]
[+10 chains for groveling.]
[I’m glad you finally appreciate me.]
Ten ethereal chains sprouted from her back as though she were some kind of spider. They twitched as they connected to her subconscious. Their tips grabbed at the loose stone in the ceiling. With a clanging heave, they pulled down the stone. Zoe coughed on the dust as the chains dragged her up through the new hole in the ceiling and onto the roof.
“No…”
She stood under the grey sky and stared at an endless labyrinth. No desert in sight. Only a twisting maze of ruined stone.
Voices called from the room beneath her.
She ran. Chains hauled her from roof to roof, but it seemed futile. The collapsed houses, the hallways, the cream-colored buildings, extended to the horizon in all directions. No trace of the dunes, only the pale sunless sky.
A voice hollered. She looked back and saw a dark green silhouette. A creature like Trinch, but smaller. Lithe, and sprinting after her.
She put her head forward. Leaping gaps, skidding on dust and sand, begging for some way to escape.
But within seconds, a solid body of dense muscle tackled her. Arms wrapped around her and together they crashed through a ceiling and struck a damp tiled floor. Breathe exploded from Zoe’s burned lips. She struggled, flailing with limbs and chains as the green sasquatch of a being pinned her down.
A pulse of dread aura filled the room. Choked the noise from her throat. And sent her chains crashing lifeless to the floor. She couldn’t breathe as the creature looked down at her. Slowly, it stood and backed away. Hands raised and empty. A chain slithered from around its foot and brushed against hers.
“You understand me now?”
Zoe could only nod.
“Good,” the creature continued in her hoarse voice. “You are new here. I am Princh. What is your name?”
She coughed, her face growing red she suffocated under the leaden aura. The creature realized her discomfort, and the aura vanished. She scrambled back to the wall, staring, massaging her throat, as her chains stirred like drunken worms.
“My name is Zoe Chambers.”
The creature pinched her stubby nose.
“Trinch was right… we’ll never hear the end of this,” she sighed. “Well, Zoe Chambers. You’re officially in our custody.”
Zoe wanted to run, but where would she go? How could she escape? She forced herself to meet the creature's yellow eyes.
“What do you want with me?”
Princh smiled a grin of grey and overlapping teeth.
“You’re our ticket out of this forgotten dimension.”