“No, Vra’ta! Stop! Baaad dog!” Grimli shouted wildly as the recently unpackaged mechanical canine aggressively sniffed each body, his metal nostrils flaring at the stench. “We don’t go shoving our noses down corpses’ throats! That’s very impolite behavior. Not to mention you’re among royalty.” The dwarf jutted his thumb towards Momo, who was holding back a laugh.

While Ribeye was busy trying to rechart a path towards civilization, Kasula, Grimli and Momo were appointed to the Scary Village Investigation Committee. That meant, in essence, figuring out what the hell happened here. Step one, it seemed, was to let a dog muddy all the evidence.

“Ah,” Kasula blew out a breath, grinning as she watched Grimli chase Vra’ta around like an escaped circus animal. “Makes me miss Flocke.”

“Oh yeah,” Momo perked up. “What happened to that good boy?”

“Left him at the camp with a doggysitter,” she said sadly. “We determined he would have made the boat capsize, that big old loaf. But I left him with a porkchop supply bigger than the continent of Aloysius, so I know that boy is being spoiled rotten,” she grinned. “As he should be.”

“Vra’ta found something!”

Grimli tore their attention towards one of the nearby houses. He was holding the mecha-dog back with all his modest strength; the thing was frothing at the mouth, its dry, metallic jowls snapping at the rank air. The house was the same small, ransacked ruin that Vivienne had stormed off towards yesterday. Momo assumed she had chosen any old house to throw a tantrum in – but maybe it was more than coincidence.

She and Kasula joined Grimli by the doorway and leaned inside. The walls were exposed pieces of plywood; the floor was a dust-covered mess of rugs, once colorful, but now reduced to a dull, emotionless gray. Paintings with shattered glass frames hung from the walls, amateur portraits of a woman with jet black hair. The woman’s features were jagged and gruesome, like a human cliffside.

Something about the portraits struck a chord in Momo. An uncomfortable chord. She had seen – and painted – many portraits in her time, but she had never seen one that seemed to loathe the subject as much as this one did. Every brush stroke seemed to boil over with detestation. Momo walked inside, mindfully stepping over shards of glass, and inspected the picture in full.

“Sheesh,” Momo said, taking it in. “I would have probably mummified the person who painted me like this.”

Hearing her own words, alarm bells rang out in Momo’s mind.

It’s Sera.

Momo had only ever seen the woman bald, so it was weird to see her with such luscious hair dripping down her shoulders. It was long and black and spiky like a crown of snakes. She was also depicted much younger, maybe twenty or twenty two. The rattles of age hadn’t yet woven themselves into the creases of forehead, nor framed the open, grining recess that was her mouth. Momo wouldn’t call her beautiful by any means, but she was definitely eye-catching. In the same way that roadkill was eye-catching.

Her intrusive thoughts getting the better of her, Momo reached out and tugged at the painting’s frame. Curiously, only one side gave: the painting opened like a book, one edge peeling away to reveal a shallow indent in the wall behind it. The indent contained two holes – one was the shape of a locket, the other the shape of a bracelet.

“Well, that’s disappointing,” Momo mumbled. She was expecting something way more interesting than an indent in the wall. She was hoping for a secret spiral staircase, or a magical artifact that would momentarily take over her mind and reveal to her the sorrowful memories of the phantom widow that still haunted the residence. You know, typical haunted house fare.

“That looks an awful lot like the bracelet Kami was so desperate to get rid of,” Kasula said, startling Momo by materializing over her shoulder. “I forget what it was called – but it was so talkative, kept going on and on about immortality as if I would give a rotting shit about living longer – didn’t you end up with that piece of golden garbage?”

“The… Bracelet of Blood Immortality?”

“Yes!” Kasula clapped her hands together. “Thank you – yes, that one. So annoying. What’d you end up doing with it? Maybe it belongs here. The thief we stole it from definitely had the Vagrant Dunes look to him. Ridiculously blond hair, freakish height, even for a non-elf.”

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“You stole it from a different thief?”

“It’s the cycle of life, Momo,” Kasula said, giving her a blank, cranky look as she crossed her arms. “Artifacts like that – shiny on the outside, terribly annoying on the inside – rarely stay in one man’s pocket. They tend to travel great distances. Also, I must remind you that you stole it from us. We just let you keep your head along with it.”

That shut Momo up.

Sufficiently convinced, Momo went back to the ship to retrieve both items, the bracelet and the locket, from her backpack. She towed them back to the house, past Grimli and his still-drooling mechanimal, and affixed them into the open holes. To her surprise, they fit like a glove. Red, blistering heat emanated from the objects, and the painting slammed shut. The expression on young Sera’s face turned from a scowl to an even eerier, gaudy smile.

Then came the staircase.

“Hell yes,” Momo whispered, cheering slightly. She knew this place wouldn’t let her down.

The splintered floorboards shifted left and right, moaning apart to reveal a large chasm in the middle of the floor. Deeper in the hole, torchlight flared abright. The shimmering light was green, and to Momo’s great dismay, she saw the flickering facade of many faces, mouths agape and eyes wide with madness, trapped behind each flame. She had seen Valerica cast this trick before back at the Dawn – light fixtures powered by trapped souls. Advantage: they never burnt out. Disadvantage: it was a torture worse than death.

I’m surprised IKEA hasn’t tried this one yet.

Momo descended the stairwell carefully; the steps whined like newborns, the wood in obvious need of repair. She watched as her reflection stared back at her from the myriad flames. She swallowed hard. Sera hadn’t been here in years, and still these souls were busy lighting up her basement. She had probably forgotten about them completely. It was beyond a cruel fate, it was honestly just a stupid one.

Momo blinked. She had a dumb idea.

“[Eye of the Nether Demon].”

Even with the new name, the spell worked as expected. And as Momo had suspected, the place was filthy with Nether. It clogged every pore of the basement stairwell, making it hard to see even with the miserable green light. Also as she expected – or rather naively hoped – she could clearly see the soul chains protruding from each torchlight. They were worn down and aged, nothing like Culver’s. These souls had clearly taken a psychological beating.

Momo approached one light and peered at the soul trapped inside. Unlike the raw torture Momo saw on the other faces, this one was more… withdrawn. It looked to be a woman, middle-aged, with her chin sitting on her knees. She had her hands drawn up around her legs. She sat in the corner of whatever hellish room she was trapped in, utterly small and defeated. It made Momo’s jaw clench.

Momo wrapped her fingers around the soul chain. It stung terribly hot, like sticking your foot in an active furnace, but she stifled the scream in her throat. She knew it was a phantom pain, a mental one. Probably just a sliver of what the souls trapped inside felt every second of everyday. She steeled herself, gripping her teeth and strengthening her grip. Staring at the soul, she began to tug the chain upwards, away.

Sera won’t own you anymore.

After a full minute of pulling – and letting wet, uninvited tears stream down her face from the searing burn – the chain broke off its holster. It shot out of the torch with an explosive release, wiggling like a landed fish as it breathed in hot, molten freedom, before disintegrating into dust, into the Nether. Momo inhaled and exhaled like a marathon athlete, waving her hands wildly through the air and blowing on her palms.

Like a whisper of the wind, a light and feathery thank you caressed Momo’s ears.

“Momo? You good?” Kasula said, watching the display with equal parts interest and confused pity. “Because you look crazy.”

“I’mfine,” Momo stuttered, jumping up and down to distract herself as the pain dulled. Once it did, she found herself drawn towards the light once more. Her body stilled, goosebumps prickling her arms. The woman was gone. The flame had turned to billowing smoke.

Simultaneously, all around her, tormented figures pressed themselves up to the forefront of their torchlights like zoo animals with their faces plastered flat to the glass. They were screaming, begging, yelling, dancing – all manner of evocative behavior, desperate for Momo’s attention. Small, flickering fists pounded against the flames. She couldn’t hear them, but she could imagine what they were demanding. She had just done something they thought impossible.

Momo looked down at her hands. They were still hot to the touch, and her head pounded like an abused gong. Freeing them all… would probably kill me, she thought. But I can’t leave them like this. Now that she knew she had the power to end their torment, it felt endlessly selfish to just keep walking down the stairs. To treat them like mindless, battery-powered flashlights.

Frowning, Momo asked the courier for her health score, and the audio guide provided her with the convenient but unfortunate truth.

Health Points: 86 / 300

Sighing, she looked to Kasula.

“Kas, I need a favor,” she said. Kasula raised her eyebrow, curious. “Get me as many health potions as your hands can carry.”