If Damien had expected that having Sam’s worldbuilding notes would provide him with some sort of clarity, he was sorely mistaken.

Sam’s notes were the clutter of a madman with no recognisable form of organisation. There was no table of contents or index, no obvious means of discerning the significance of the various scraps of paper, torn-out journal pages, magazine clippings, napkins, coasters, and gridded maps.

It was the kind of thing that Tanya would have loved trying to wrap her head around. She had always been the one who leapt headlong into Sam’s meticulously planned puzzles and riddles. While she worked her magic, Murray and Damien would hold off the enemy while Carl split his time between keeping the meatshields on their feet and ensuring Tanya wasn’t distracted.

But if Damien’s relationship with Sam had drifted over the years, his relationship with Tanya was… complicated.

There was all of the betrayal and abandonment that he had heaped upon the others, mixed in with some sexual tension and unfortunate misunderstandings that meant their last interaction had been… explosive.

She called you a selfish man-child and said you’d always disappoint those closest to you, his subconscious reminded him as if he’d ever actually forgotten. You don’t hear those words from somebody you love care about and just shrug them off.

You just pretend to.

“What are those?” Layla had recovered from the realization that their “god” was dead faster than her parents and leaned over Damien’s shoulder so closely that the smell of her perfume teased his senses. His eyes drifted unconsciously to her cleavage, and though he tore his eyes away quickly, she had already noticed. She gave him a smile that momentarily distracted him from the task at hand.

Concentrate.

“These?” he mumbled with all the finesse of a drunk caught with his hand in the till. “They’re, uh, Sam’s notes. All of his ideas when he created this place.”

“Holy writings?” she whispered with obvious reverence. “Should we not give them to the church?”

“There are churches dedicated to Sam!?”

“Of course. We didn’t know that when we built them, of course, but it was apparent when he started visiting us that he was Samman, the Creator. His coming turned the tide against the Dark Sovereign for a time, and inspired thousands to join the crusade.”

Damien’s head was spinning. Crusades, Dark Sovereigns, his friend being a God… all of this was nonsense piled atop nonsense. Had he not experienced the realities of this place first hand, he’d have laughed at the sheer lunacy of it.

Sam had created a world for their Hand of Fate games, somehow found a way to travel to it, made himself into a god, went to war with a big bad of his own creation, and had died trying to defeat that villain in their own world. The entire thing was batshit crazy.

Looking at Layla, however, he realised he could never say such a thing. Her blue eyes shone with religious zeal that bordered on frightening. The news of Sam’s death had very nearly broken her parents - learning that he hadn’t been a god would likely kill them.

“How long was Sam - Samman - visiting here?”

“He first came seven years ago.” It was Oleg who answered, and he did so while helping an ashen-faced Magda to her feet.

Seven years. So he came either during or right after our last year in high school.

“And? What did he do?”

Oleg didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he saw his wife settled in a comfortable armchair before the fire and had Layla fetch her a drink.

“At first, he didn’t seem very godly,” came the eventual response. “In fact, when he first appeared upstairs, he was as wide-eyed and excited as a kid during the Winter Festival. I had half a mind to throw him out when he explained he had no coin, but then he disappeared out the door and came back not a half-hour later with more coin than I’d ever seen before. Said he’d stolen it from a harpy and a mountain lion in the hills nearby.”

Damien remembered that duo. When the harpy sang to draw wanderers in, the lion would strike from the shadows. The pair would share the meal and the treasure would be deposited beneath the roots of the tree they both called home. If he remembered correctly, Fred the Fighter had come dangerously close to death when the lion had critically hit him. He’d not only failed his saving throw against the harpy’s siren song - he’d willingly gone to her after Sam had described her… what had the word been? Pendulous breasts.

We killed them and looted the place, Damien thought. Why would there still be gold there?

The answer was simple enough, really. Like all good Talespinners, Sam had known when to reuse a good encounter. He hadn’t stopped playing when his core group splintered, and he had doubtless “reset” the encounter for use with one of his later parties.

That thought sent a cascade of thoughts tumbling through Damien’s head, like cards in FreeCell Solitaire filling the screen. He might not have Sam’s encyclopedic knowledge of this place, and he sure as shit didn’t know how to make head or tales of his dead friend’s notes, but he still remembered a thing or two about this world in which he’d spent countless lunchtimes and weekends immersed.

If Sam could raid old caches, what was to stop Fred the Fighter from doing the same?

“After that,” Oleg continued, “he just asked questions. With every answer I gave, he seemed to ken more than me words had conveyed. He started asking questions about far-flung places and people I’d never heard of, so I eventually sent him to Nefril. Samman spent days - weeks - with that mad old bastard of a wizard and, when he finally emerged, he said he had to go and confirm something for himself. We didn’t see him again for a time, but he did visit a few more times before that last night.”

Oleg had never been this forthcoming before. Hell, he’d neglected to even mention knowing Sam at first. Had he intentionally obscured the truth from Damien? Or had his memory been splintered in much the same way the village had?

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

What was your plan, Sam? And why the hell did you loop me into all of this?

“What happened on that last night?” Damien asked, but shouts from the cellar reminded him of the presence of his two least favourite people in the universe. He’d hated the bastards before they had killed Sam. There was no place on his totem pole of human contempt low enough for them.

“What are ye gonna do with ‘em?” Oleg asked, ignoring Damien’s last question. “They can’t stay down there forever. It’ll miff me customers.”

In the past, Damien might have made a quip about the lack of customers in the tavern, but it seemed the survivors of the tavern brawl he’d conjured remained. About a dozen men now called the common room home: drinking, eating, playing dice, and adding some noise to what had been an eerily quiet place in the past.

“I think I have an idea.”

“I don’t like that smile on yer face, lad,” Oleg observed, although he had a smile on his face too.

“These two killed Sam - Samman,” Damien explained. “I think they deserve to be punished.”

“I’ll get me the axe.” Oleg stood with purpose, his anger palatable.

“Hold up,” Damien called after him. “They don’t deserve a clean death. I had something a bit more interesting in mind. Does Voril still have his cellar?”

“Why wouldn’t he?” Oleg scoffed. “He cures meat down there.”

That’s not all that happens down there. There was a secret door that led into a cave inhabited by a terroctid. We never killed it, and if Sam had reset the lower-level challenges we had cleared but never used them, I bet it’s still there.

—---------

It didn’t take much convincing to gain admission to Voril’s home. Once he had been informed of Benji & Drew’s role in Samman’s death, it was all Damien could do to stop the smith from taking out his hammer and splitting their heads like overripe pumpkins.

Convincing Voril that there was a secret door in his cellar that led to a cave inhabited by a murderous octopus monster took a little more work, and explaining how he knew about this was an even more difficult task. All of this was made more difficult by the fact both Layla and Sofia seemed intent on murdering one another with their eyes.

Trust Sam to write gorgeous women who fall over themselves to win the heart of the heroic fighter, Damien thought. He knew his audience well.

Throughout all of this, Benji and Drew chafed at their bonds like a pair of ill-tempered dogs. They had called him every name under the sun when he had first descended into the cellar, but bound as they were, they could offer up only token resistance as he wrestled them to their feet and ordered them up the ladder.

Drew had tried to stand his ground, but Oleg had simply reached down, grasped the rope that held his wrists together, and pulled him roughly up through the trapdoor. Had he intentionally thumped Drew’s head against the roof on his way up? Almost certainly.

Disorientation had been a real help in getting the two across to Voril’s shop. The sheer, pants-pissing terror on their faces as they’d been led across the narrow bridge of cobblestone that separated the two islands of solid ground had been a thing of beauty, and while they were regaining their senses now that they were surrounded by walls and a roof, they were not yet back to cursing him out and threatening to do all manner of things to his long dead family.

Yet, as much as he hated them and wanted to make them suffer, traitorous feelings of guilt and compassion began to rear their ugly heads as he drew nearer to the secret door. It was one thing to kill these cowards for all they’d done but quite another thing to feed them to a creature that had terrified his friends back in the day.

Voril’s cellar was a spitting image of Oleg’s, save that in place of barrels of ale and jars of preserves, it held swaying stalactites of meat hanging from hooks and leather straps. The sight of so much butchered meat must have finally brought home to Benji and Drew their situation. Despite being identical twins, they could not have reacted more differently.

“I’ll fuckin’ kill you, you fuckin’ arselicker,” snarled Benji, a hissing cat longing to sink its claws and teeth into Damien’s neck.

On the flip side, Drew began to mewl and weep. “Fuck, I’m sorry,” he pleaded, “I’m so fuckin’ sorry, mate. I didn’t want to do it. I just… I just get so fuckin’ angry when I drink, and that Matthew guy told us some dark shit about Sam. I don’t think I even believed it, but I just get so fuckin’ angry when I drink. It’s a sickness, mate. It really is.”

“Shut the fuck up!” shouted Benji, rounding on his brother and battering him with bound hands. “Don’t you fuckin’ apologise to this rock spider.”

“Rock spider?” Voril asked, jerking back on Benji’s leash so hard that the smaller man fell over.

“Slang for paedophile,” Damien explained. “Which I am not.”

“I know you’re not, mate,” Drew continued. “I never thought you were. We was just drunk and angry and that Matt fella said he’d make us rich. He said -”

“Shut up!” roared Benji from the ground. “Shut the fuck up!”

It was Oleg who silenced him this time, delivering a rough kick to the bound man’s guts. Damien winced at all of this. He was not a villain or a murderer, and while he wanted to see Sam’s murder avenged, the longer this dragged on, the more pity he felt for these two sad, drunk pieces of shit.

“Please, mate,” Drew continued to whine. “Please. I don’t wanna die.”

Damien sighed. He couldn’t do this. The fire had gone out of his belly. Even picturing what they’d done to poor, sweet Sam was not enough to make him want to murder them in cold blood. Better to take them back to their world for a trial or, failing that, to let Oleg and Voril decide what they did with god-killers.

Benji, though, could no better read a room than he could a high school-level textbook. Had he taken a moment to interpret Damien’s body language or listen to his brother’s pleading, he might have made a smarter decision.

Instead, he decided to taunt Damien and, in doing so, taunted Oleg and Voril.

“He cried like a little bitch when he strung him up,” he sneered. “You ever seen a grown man blubber and piss himself like that, Drew?”

Drew shook his head, although whether in response to the question or to being involved in this was hard to say.

“He begged us, he did,” Benji pressed on. “Said he’d give us whatever we wanted. Like we’d want anything from a fucking loser like Sam. He was nothing in high school, and he’d been nothing ever since. We were doing him a favour.”

He held Damien’s eye contact throughout his ill-timed monologue, unaware of the gravity of what he was saying. Sam had been Damien’s dearest friend at a hard time in his life, but time had smoothed over the edges of that raw emotion. The same could not be said for Voril and Oleg, who had not only seen Sam as a god but who had interacted with him far more recently than Damien.

“It was pathetic, mate. He didn’t even try to fight us off. He just took it like a little bi -”

Voril’s hammer struck Benji in the belly, sending him flying back into the warped wood of the secret door. It groaned in protest but did not give.

Oleg had not brought a weapon, so he instead planted a softball-sized fist in the thug’s midsection. The force of it was enough to push Benji through the door and into the darkness beyond.

With the air knocked out of his lungs and the darkness surrounding him, he didn’t even register the mortal danger he was in. How many drunken brawls had this piece of shit been in?

This was no muddy, bloody scrap on the street outside the RSL, however. Had Benji had the wherewithal to take in his surroundings or the wide-eyed terror on his twin’s face, he might have made it back into the cellar.

Instead, cursing and spitting his disdain, he staggered to his feet and spat out a mouthful of blood.

“Come on then, you dogs,” he spat. “Come on and fuckin’ fight me.”

The tentacles that came from the darkness cared not a whit for his challenge. Each was as thick and well-muscled as Damien’s own arm, only much longer and possessed of a thousand toothy suckers that quivered in anticipation of the meal to come.

It was, for Benji’s sake, mercifully quick.

For the rest of them, the ripping, tearing, and sucking sounds would follow them up the stairs, out of the smith, and into the comparative “light” of the abyss beyond.

It didn’t feel like vengeance.