”So, did you find anything up there?” Gilbert asked and got up from the dusty kitchen floor.
“Pots, pans and disappointment. I think it’s just some leftover space between rooms that was used as storage.” Anastacia shrugged and whacked Gilbert’s back a few times to get at least some of the dust off him. “You’re just like full on hallucinating then? What’d you see this time?” She asked.
“Some kind of fire creature, nothing like any of the ones I’m aware of. For hallucinations these seem awfully real, and I’ve been drugged into having some quite a few times, so I have some prior experience.” The old adventurer explained while carefully opening another door, opposite to the one they came in from. “We should get going.”
Anastacia followed him into the dark room behind it. By the looks of it, the room appeared to be some kind of a dining room for the servants. It didn’t have the usual marble and gold flair of the mansion and the scraps of furniture on the floor seemed cheap in comparison to the mahogany shrapnel found in other rooms, but that was the only unique aspect about the it, but at least through it the adventurers were able to find their way back to corridor they had earlier been in.
“Hey, Gil.” Anastacia said suddenly and rifled though her pockets. Once she found what she was looking for, the necromancer handed the enchanted ruby ring she had gotten in the early days of her career as an adventurer over to Gilbert. “You didn’t sound like you were having fun earlier, so maybe you should have that one. It doesn’t make the pain go away but it’ll help you work through it.”
“Are you sure, what if you get hurt as well?” Gilbert asked and inspected the red gem on the ring.
“Then you’ll just have to carry me.” Anastacia grinned. “And honestly, I don’t feel like I’m in danger here.”
Gilbert took his glove off to slide the ring on his pinky. Despite being slightly loose even for Anastacia’s thumb, the ruby ring barely fit on him. “Suppose you’re right. Now that I think about it, why would hallucinations disappear when you’re in the same room? If they’re in my head, you shouldn’t be able to see them in the first place, whether they left or not.”
Anastacia frowned. “You’re saying that they’re not hallucinations, but some other kind of real trickery?”
“We’re in uncharted waters here, as far as I know at least, so who knows what they are. Lets just try to stick together from now on.” Gilbert said and opened the next door.
They went through the corridor door by door, quickly checking each room for anything out of the ordinary. Though the search didn’t amount to much, their strategy of strictly sticking together seemed to work, as Gilbert hadn’t gotten attacked again by the time they reached the other end of the main building. From there, their options seemed to be either to return to the lobby and try their luck with one of the two remaining doors there or go through a set of larger doors and enter the wing at that end of the mansion. The whole layout of the mansion was a bit odd, so neither of the options was in any way better than the other.
Suddenly Anastacia remembered something. “I think I saw a cellar door at the other end of this wing!” She exclaimed and peered into the garden through a window.
Gilbert scratched his beard and tried to picture in his mind what they had seen on the way to the mansion. “You might be right, it was covered in vines and such, right?” He asked.
“Yeah! Maybe we can get out of here from there? Or at least break the door and make sure we can bail out later.” The necromancer suggested excitedly.
“We can try.” Gilbert said, though it was pretty obvious he didn’t actually have much faith in the plan. Whatever they were dealing with probably wasn’t going to have such an obvious blind spot, especially now that they had announced it out loud. But lacking any better alternatives, he pushed the door and let it slowly creak open on its own.
What was on the other side made no sense: a windowless hallway that appeared to continue as far as they could see in the dark. The wing was maybe one hundred and fifty meters long at most, but the hallway didn’t seem to care much about such things and spanned much further than that without an end in sight.
“Okay, how about we just don’t deal with that.” Anastacia said and turned on her heel back towards the foyer. “Oh for fuck’s sake.” She groaned and stared down the corridor they had just walked through, which was now similarly infinite in length as the one in the other direction.
“Looks like it didn’t like our idea.” Gilbert dryly laughed. “Might as well press onwards then. We’re not lost in the woods here and no one will come looking for us.” He said and started walking down the dark hallway they hadn’t checked yet.
As they walked, they passed countless doors that were placed roughly twenty meters apart from each other on both sides of the hallway. After opening the first ten or so and finding an exactly identical room behind every single one of them, they gave up on it and stopped checking them. Anastacia’s ability to poorly have her wishes granted by opening doors seemed to have stopped working as well, so there really didn’t seem to be a way out of the predicament. Gilbert theorized that since they had caught up to their captor’s plan to separate them by distraction, it had changed its strategy and now tried to simply tire the adventurers until one of them either collapsed or fell asleep. Eventually, after passing countless doors, both of them had lost any remnants of their sense of time and had no idea if it had been two or ten hours since they started walking.
“Door… wall… candelabra… wall… column… wall… candelabra… wall… column… wall… candelabra… wall… door…” Anastacia listed the things they passed. She had been doing it for a while already and it may have started to get on Gilbert’s nerves.
“Could you not? I’m trying to come up with something, because this is clearly going nowhere.” The old adventurer snarled.
Anastacia let out a long, harrowing groan of boredom and slumped down on the marble floor. “Can’t we just bait it into trying something by taking a nap?” She suggested and rolled sideways a couple of times until she hit a wall.
Gilbert sat down next to her. “Well, our options are walking until we get exhausted and have to stop, waiting until we can’t stay awake anymore or just playing with the hand we’ve been dealt and just take a nap. I doubt we’re going to run out of corridor any time soon, so there really isn’t much we can do, and personally I’d rather deal with what comes next without tiring myself out pointlessly first.” He said and took out his pipe.
“What do you think will happen?” Anastacia asked and leaned against Gilbert’s shoulder.
The old adventurer calmly lit his pipe. “It’ll probably try to kill me, or both of us. Like I’ve said, we have no idea what’s going on or why, but we’re all out of options and there’s nothing we can do about it. Though I feel like if it could or wanted to just outright kill either of us, it would have already, so we’ve got that going for us.” He explained.
The pair mulled over their decision for a while and eventually agreed that intentionally provoking interaction was the only way that guaranteed any kind of progress on the quest. They decided that Gilbert would wait until Anastacia fell asleep before attempting to do so himself. They aimed their lanterns down the corridor in both directions and leaned against the wall in wait. Expressing some exceptional calmness under stress, Anastacia dozed off almost immediately and started snoring quietly.
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Gilbert blew some smoke into the air and stared at the wall on the other side of the corridor, fully expecting something to attack him immediately, but strangely nothing crawled out of the darkness over the next few minutes. He was still far too tense to actually fall asleep and decided to calm his nerves by pacing back and forth between the lanterns and stretching his arms and legs in the process. After a bit of moving about, he stopped to take a sip of water and stared into dark for a while.
As soon as he allowed himself to foolishly consider that maybe nothing was going to happen, Gilbert felt a familiar stinging pain in his wrist. The ruby ring did make it more bearable, but when the agonizing burning feeling returned to his leg, he had to kneel down. “Anna!” He yelled, knowing that the return of his injuries from the earlier incidents could only mean that they were under attack once more.
To his surprise, Anastacia was already up, but something about her posture was odd; in the dark it almost looked like she was being dangled from her shoulders like a puppet. Her head was limply hanging forwards and Gilbert could still hear her quiet snoring.
“Anna!” The old adventurer repeated but the necromancer didn’t react to it in any way. She simply stood there as if she was sleep walking. Gilbert forced himself to get up and shake Anastacia a bit, but nothing seemed to wake her up.
Suddenly the necromancer lurched towards the wall the adventurers had been sleeping against and started to trace something on it with her hand. Gilbert tried to wake her up a few more times by shaking a bit harder and shouting her name, but it didn’t yield any results either and the pain in his arm and leg started to get overwhelming again, so he decided to step back and observe until he could muster up the strength to overcome the pain again. He watched Anastacia slowly slide her hand along the wall once more before standing completely still for what felt like an eternity.
“Hello? Anyone there?” Gilbert tried, hoping to at least contact whatever it was that had taken control of the sleeping necromancer. He received no response, and instead Anastacia slowly reached for the enchanted knife she carried. “Hold up! Let’s not be hasty here…” He said and backed up a bit as the necromancer pulled the knife out of its sheath.
The possessed Anastacia began scraping the knife against the wall and started to clumsily carve something into it. Gilbert couldn’t quite make out what it was, but that quickly fell on the list of important things to focus on, as he heard a terrifying high-pitched screech from the darkness further along the corridor.
“And the bag of tricks still isn’t quite empty…” He muttered and forced himself up despite the pain. Gripping his mace tightly with his uninjured hand, he inched towards the direction of the sound and picked up his lantern. “Come on now, what do you have for me this time? Burning mannequins?” He said banged his mace against the wall a few times to bolster his confidence.
What crawled out of the dark was neither of his previous foes; accompanied by rhythmically clanking metallic sounds of its eight spider-like feet hitting the marble floor, what looked like a gutted bear plushie rushed towards him and leaped into the air, clearly aiming for Gilbert’s throat. Luckily, he was prepared this time and was able to swat the creature away, seemingly killing it when it hit the wall. Just to be sure, he stomped on it before kneeling to inspect the critter.
Its body was indeed made of a plushie toy that had been dismembered and almost beheaded, with its head dangling on with only a few bits of string. From the gutted stomach of the toy, sprouted eight rusted metallic spider legs, that all ended in an extremely sharp point that could no doubt pierce anything short of solid plate armor. At about the size of a cat, the strange machine-like critter wasn’t much of an opponent, but it was easy to see that given the opportunity for a surprise attack, it would make short work of anyone who wasn’t protecting their neck properly.
“Well, that wasn’t so bad.” Gilbert said and stumbled up to see if Anastacia was still being controlled.
The necromancer was still focused on carving something on the wall, though her head had drooped back, showing that she was still fully asleep and not acting on her own will. Gilbert limped over and tried giving her a bit of a push, but somehow despite her size, Anastacia seemed unmovable all of a sudden. He also tried squeezing her nose shut, hoping she would wake up to breathe, but it only made her snore louder. Figuring that there was probably some kind of magic going on that prevented Anastacia from waking up and that he probably couldn’t do anything about it, Gilbert switched his attention to the scribbles on the wall. At first they didn’t seem like anything he could recognize, just a bunch of haphazardly made lines, but when he traced some of the lines with his finger, he began to see some clear patterns among them.
“Where have I seen these?...” He wondered out loud and sat down to tend to his injuries. “Aren’t these supposed to go away by now?” he muttered and took off his boot. Using some of the emergency supplies he had on him, he stopped the bleeding on his arm and moved on to the burned leg. Typically Emilia was the one responsible for first aid, and she didn’t want to bother Sylvia with every paper cut the party suffered, so she always had an ample selection of numbing oils and herbal ointments on her. Gilbert had picked out a few of the more important ones under her guidance for himself and Anastacia to carry, just in case the priestess wasn’t able to help them. This included an ointment for burns, which he applied liberally on his leg before wrapping some gauze around it. “Imaginary or not, that does feel a lot better. Still possessed, Anna?” He asked and checked up on the necromancer’s work.
The girl just kept snoring as a response while her hands busied themselves with carving the patterns.
“Brilliant, I’ll just wait here then.” Gilbert sighed and lit his pipe to calm his nerves while watching over Anastacia.
Slowly the pattern spread in every direction, until it covered a five-meter-wide patch of the wall, from the floor to as high as the necromancer could reach. This however, didn’t seem to be enough for the thing in control of her, as she shuffled over to a new spot to start all over again there.
While listening to the necromancer scrape away at the wooden wall, Gilbert noticed a second, far more subtle sound coming from somewhere. For the entire time they had been inside the mansion, it had been extremely quiet, not a single sound besides the echo of their own voices had been audible at any point before the most recent encounter with the odd spider creature, so a sudden appearance of one was cause for concern to say the least. The new sound was much like the one made by Anastacia’s carving, so initially he figured that it was just its echo from down the corridor, but the rhythm didn’t match up at all. The direction it came from was slightly odd as well, it was almost like it came from directly above them.
Gilbert pointed his lantern at the ceiling and cursed quietly at the sight of a dozen or so broken toys that had been mangled and turned into the spider creatures. “Anna, waking up right about now would be great.” He whispered and slowly reached for his mace.
With a deafening scream, the critters dropped down. Gilbert was only barely able to lunge out of the way and get enough distance between himself and them to get into a better fighting stance. First of the wretched creatures that reached him got the same treatment as their decoy from earlier: a swift swing from a mace and a short flight at a wall. As more and more of the metallic spiders plunged themselves at him, he was forced to move back while being barely able to keep the sharp rusty spikes away from his throat. What didn’t help the situation was that unlike before, the critters wouldn’t stay down after they were hit, time and time again, the supposedly defeated ones sprung back up and rejoined the fight. Thanks to the ruby ring and the numbing ointment, Gilbert was more or less able to keep his head clear regardless of the pain, but every time he couldn’t repel an attack quite in time, he was rewarded with one of the spiders stabbing its leg at whatever bit of him was closest. He had once fought a whole pack of knife wielding gnomes over a land dispute, so he had some experience being in a fight where he was outnumbered by a flood of smaller enemies, and it definitely came in handy, but there was no denying that he was on the losing side of the battle and had to back down even further. As the fight continued, Gilbert started to get more and more tired, while his opponents still came at him with exactly as much vigor as before. He started to seriously consider just bolting away, but before he had the chance, the onslaught of stabs suddenly ceased. On the floor in front of him, where the metal spiders had crawled, was now a bunch of toys, ranging from plushies to animals expertly carved from wood. The adventurer kicked the closest one to make sure it didn’t come back alive anymore.
“Hmh… The pain is gone.” He muttered between heavy breaths and checked his arms for the scratches he had gotten during the fight but couldn’t find any. “Oh, guess it’s over. Anna, are you-“ He said and looked down the dark corridor. Neither the necromancer or her lantern were anywhere to be seen. “Anna?”
He turned around and was floored by the realization that he was back at the large door they had gone through into the seemingly infinite corridor hours ago. There was absolutely no way he could have backed down more than maybe fifty meters at most. Glancing back at where Anastacia was supposed to be, instead of the infinite darkness they had been walking in, Gilbert could see a large window at the other end of the building, a mere hundred or so meter away.
“Anna?” He asked again, knowing that she wasn’t there to answer. “Shit.”