In retrospect, it probably would have been smarter to release all the souls after she had explored the basement.
“Ouch,” Momo moaned for the tenth time, pain rocketing through her skull as she inadvertently slammed herself into another hard corner of the cavern. As it turned out, the staircase led to a small, very unlit, chamber, with several intersecting stone walls comprising an unwieldy underground maze. At least it felt like a maze. It could have very well been a completely normal room, only Momo had a truly dismal innate sense of direction.
“You really couldn’t have waited just ten minutes before freeing all those souls?” Kasula groaned, using her hands to feel a path along the jagged walls. “One, you’ve made it impossible to see, and two, it was vaguely traumatic watching you bring yourself to the brink of death and then chug a health potion seven times over.”
“Those people were suffering, Kasula.”
“Well now I’m suffering, Momo.”
Momo rolled her eyes.
“Aren’t elves supposed to have [Dark Vision]?”
“Don’t be ignorant. Those are forest elves,” Kasula scoffed, mistakenly shimmying her hip into Momo’s side. They were pressed together like canned sardines, both of their hands fighting for territory in the claustrophobic hallway. “Forest elves, as you may recall, are the inferior branch of our species that decided to swear off possessions and live in the woods like a bunch of common animals. I descend from the people who liked bathing – the high elves.”
“Sounds a bit racist.”
Kasula sniffed, mildly incensed. “Don’t get it confused. I think my people are utter fools too. There is no sane race of elves. But if I were to be stuck starving myself as a paragon or dying from my own stench while camping in a tent, I’d choose… neither, actually. That’s why I hightailed it and left. Screw them all.”
Unwilling to comment on elf politics, Momo bypassed Kasula’s point entirely.
“I think I have something that can help with this,” she mumbled.
“Help with what? The endless, self-inflicted plight of the elf race?”
“No,” Momo said, monotone. “With our vision issues.”
She had gotten bored one day and decided to actually read the detailed descriptions of her new Dokkaebi skills. As it turned out, her imp form had two implicit traits to it, characteristics the System attached to certain polymorphed forms. One of the traits was called Flame Wielder, or the ability to generate fire at will in the palms of her hands.
“Momo? What did you just do?” Kasula said with a tone of exhaustion. She looked around blindly, her ears picking up the subtle fluttering of wings. “Did you summon a bird in here?”
“Nope,” Momo said, popping the p as a flame unfurled behind her fingers, illuminating her tiny, devilish face to Kasula. The elf didn’t jump, but she did gawk at her for several long seconds.
“You really are full of surprises,” she said plainly, then took Momo’s small hand and guided it towards the wall like a flashlight. It illuminated the craggy wall in the shape of a halo, revealing another series of paintings like the ones upstairs. They depicted the same subject – a youthful, terrible Sera – but each consecutive painting exposed more of the bone underneath her skin, until finally she was just a skeleton, raw and expressionless.
A caption for the painting series sat just under the last portrait, a plaque with text written in delicate, feminine script. It read – Die Bitch!
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Oh,” Momo said, momentarily speechless. Then she laughed.
“What the hell are you guys doing down here?”
Kasula tore Momo’s hand away from the wall and towards the other end of the hallway, where a figure, faintly illuminated, was standing bent over like a creaky old man. Momo grew the size of the modest fireball in her hand, expanding the radius of the light to expose a severely unamused Vivienne, with a gaping, bloody wound slit around her middle.
“Vivienne!” Momo exclaimed, wiggling out of Kasula’s grasp to fly over to the grimacing knight. She instinctively reached out to touch the wound, but forgot she was a literal fire-wielding imp. Vivienne squealed in response, swatting Momo’s hand away and berating her.
“Are you trying to kill me?” she spat.
“No!” Momo squeaked, demorphing in an instant. The room fell dark again. “At least not intentionally. What happened to you?”
“None of your business,” Vivienne said, then winced again, grasping at the wound. Momo thought to activate her [Eye of the Nether Demon] again and try out [Soul First Aid], but from her understanding, that incantation only worked when the person’s health was hovering around zero. It repaired the tether between the soul and the body, not injuries of the flesh.
“Here,” Kasula said, stepping between her and Momo in the dark and blindly reaching out her hand towards Vivienne. Magic like moonlight traveled from her fingertips to Vivienne’s center, cauterizing the wound and stopping the bleeding. Vivienne breathed out a lofty exhale and stared at the floor for several seconds, centering herself.
“Thank you,” she said, lifting her head. Her voice was small and embarrassed. She removed her mantle and fastened it over the healing wound to cover it. “It was a stupid, completely avoidable injury. I was handling this old dagger when the lights suddenly went out. The place is lit by everburning soul flames, so they shouldn’t have just dissipated like that. The sudden blackout made me drop the dagger and I ended up slitting my stomach wide open.”
Oops. Momo felt bad, but she wasn’t about to out herself as the culprit. Kasula side-eyed her.
“Dagger?” Momo said, shifting the subject. “Is it part of that Blood Immortality Set?”
Momo couldn’t see Vivienne in the darkness, but she could hear the way she froze.
“What do you know about that set?” she asked slowly, her tone cautious.
“I know that I’ve unwittingly befriended two out of three parts of it,” Momo muttered, recalling without any fondness her interactions with both talking artifacts. “That’s how we unlocked the basement staircase. I shoved the bracelet and the locket in the space behind the portrait.”
Vivienne grabbed onto Momo’s wrist. “Are you kidding? You have the other two pieces?”
“Um… yes?”
“And you didn’t tell me?” Vivienne said rabidly, shaking Momo’s arm like it was a pool noodle.
Momo frowned. “Okay, slow down. You were literally trying to kill me up until a few weeks ago, and also, I didn’t know you cared. Everyone I talk to seems convinced they’re pretty useless. Plus, aren’t they vampire-only items? I don’t know any vampires, do you?”
“They’re not vampire-only,” Vivienne said quickly, then took a breath, steadied herself, and let go of Momo’s wrists. “You can wear them under one condition: a major or minor class blessed by Neculai. Back before Morgana and Neculai went their separate ways – a fairly recent development, in the grand scale of mortal history – there were plenty of class collaborations between the two.”
She paused, then extended her arm. It was only when she rolled up her sleeves did Momo realize that she’d never seen Vivienne without body armor before. Her arms were almost always completely covered in some kind of gauntlet or layered cloth. When she pulled the sleeve back, Momo’s eyes ran over dozens of runic inscriptions like the ones that covered the arms of the man in town. Normally, she wouldn’t have been able to see them in the dark, but the runes glowed a faint red, emanating a crimson light.
“What are these?” Momo asked softly, looking up to search Vivienne’s eyes. Under the red light, the woman’s skin looked almost ghastly, like that of a blood-covered ghoul.
“Blood runes,” she answered stoically. “Every Sanguine Death Knight has them. I told you, I was a necromancer before I… changed classes. I sacrificed a lot to undergo that transformation. Completely purged myself of the Nether. But these runes are different – they don’t exactly wash away in the shower. It was bloody difficult keeping up my identity in Nam’Dal with these inscriptions running up my arms and legs. But I’m sure their permanence was part of Neculai’s punishment. He’s a petty devil like that.”
She pulled a jagged, sharp-edged dagger from the harness on her thigh. It was glowing vermillion and littered with the same runic letters that ran up Vivienne’s arms. The runes glowed green, contrasting beautifully with the macabre red. The tip of the dagger was bathed in a permanent draping of blood, as if it was always fresh off a stabbing. While Momo couldn’t hear chattering, she got the sense that there was some morbid sentience to it. It was waiting for an opportunity to strike with bated breath.
“But when I have all the artifacts together…” she said, moving the hilt gently to observe the dagger from all sides, staring at with absolute reverie. She looked back up towards Momo, and her eyes glowed red – red like Valerica’s. “I’ll finally be able to change back.”