The cobblestone hall through which I walked was so mundane that it unsettled me.
At any moment, I expected my luck to turn. I expected the walls to open, revealing vicious arrow traps. I expected the floors to give way to a bottomless chasm that swallowed me whole. I half anticipated the old, worn torches that dimly lit the hall might come alive and attack me relentlessly.
None of that happened, and I made my way into the second room.
The hall opened into a large, cubic area of the same material. Torches still lined the walls, and moss grew across some of the stones. In the center of the room, there stood a massive bronze scale. At the other end, was a single wooden door. It certainly didn’t look particularly strong. There were darkened patches where the wood appeared to have rotted, and minute holes in several places. I walked over to the door, and rapped my knuckles upon it.
Solid. Sturdy. Unmoving, despite its appearance. I tested it with my sword, pressing it against the soft-looking wood lightly, not wanting to damage my only weapon. The door didn’t budge an inch.
“Same as before, then,” I murmured to myself. “No cheating the room.”
I made my way back over to the scale. It didn’t really have any distinguishing markings upon it. Sighing, I stood upon it, just to see what would happen. Given I carried the greatsword, I imagined I was likely quite heavy.
Immediately, the door swung open.
I gawked.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said, incredulously. Then again, perhaps the door would close when I stepped off the scale. Perhaps the Dungeon imagined our party to be heavy with gold and loot from the previous room, and was eager to see what we’d be willing to leave behind. Tentatively, I stepped off the scale.
The door remained open.
“Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” I started to laugh, almost hysterically. “What…what the fuck?” My laughter quickly dissolved into racking sobs.
“What…what the fuck,” I gasped between breaths, “is this shit? A fucking child could have made it through this.”
For its part, the room and scale and door gave no reply, just as inanimate as ever.
“Why? Why did you have to give us that first fucking room? What’s the point of all this?”
I kept crying, bent over in grief, my chest palpitating madly as I wept. The room was as silent as ever.
“It’s…it’s not fair. Why did you have to kill them? Why did they have to die?”
All of the pain, the anger, the trauma of the past twelve hours hit me like a train. Tears, hot and wet, slid down my face in a river. My fingers gripped so tight that blood seeped out from between them. The song coursed through my veins, for the first time since my trigger, and much changed for it. It was no longer an ephemeral vesper, no longer a vacuous, shrouded thing, there in whispers and gone just as quickly. No, now it was real.
Entropy surged through me, guided by the Shardsong.
It tore forth like a hurricane, billowing out of my flesh and ripping across the room, looking for the source of my anger, looking to hurt.
I could feel myself losing control. The song was great and terrible, mirroring my own emotions, my own blinding rage and keening sorrow. It wailed as it raced across the room, leaving deep furrows in the walls, picking the copper scale up and slamming it against the floor, hurling it every which way.
I levitated in the air, borne on gales of fury and grief. My back was hunched, and my fingers had contorted themselves into claws. I wanted to scream. I wanted to hit something, fight something, kill something. To give the Labyrinth back suffering in measure equal to all it had taken from me. I wanted to show it MY PAIN.
I will not lose myself.
I closed my eyes.
I took long, slow breaths, allowing the air to flow deeply into my lungs and back out again. I called the Entropy as I did, pulling and pushing the sea of energy within me. Gradually, bit by bit, piece by piece, I regained control.
The song calmed, winds of Entropy carrying me back down, laying me gently on my feet once more.
This, all of this, was meaningless.
I had no reason to believe that Knossos was any more sentient than an amoeba. And even if it was, the World Titan was massive, vast beyond belief. If it truly was a Godlike being, it would not care what happened in one room out of millions.
It was not responsible for my suffering.
We were the ones who’d decided to delve, and we did so seeking bounty. Entropy crystals. And I hadn’t found any yet. I took one last deep breath, picked up my sword, and continued on through the door.
The scenery changed once more.
Upon passing through the wooden portal, I found myself in a dark tunnel. It was not, however, like the tunnel at the beginning of the Maw, well-lit by moss and composed of hard grey stone. No, this tunnel was murky, opaque, almost pitch black. From what little I could discern by the light of the previous room, it appeared to be formed of soft soil.
I hesitated. Anticipating something like this, I’d already tried removing the torches from the earlier room and hallway, and found them firmly rooted in place. I didn’t have any other sources of light on my person, and the only one carried by the party had been savaged in the battle with the pillow mimics.
But perhaps there was another way.
Furrowing my brow in concentration, I called the song once more, flexing it like a muscle, feeling it billow forth in glee. I concentrated it in a small radius around myself and focused on hearing.
A flood of information slammed against my mind.
Gritting my teeth, I relaxed the flow, concentrating on only the most general information, the very surface of the stream. Gradually, an image began to take form within my mind, the area around me becoming clear. It took a fair bit of focus to maintain, and didn’t reach as far as sight, but it gave me an excellent awareness of my surroundings in all directions.
Slowly, taking care not to disturb the mental image, I set off into the darkness.
The earthen tunnel was long and winding, often contracting to the point where I was forced to crawl on my hands and knees, pushing my sword in front of me. More than once, I faced a fork in the path, at which point I allowed the song to guide me. Its insights hadn’t let me down thus far, and I trusted it would eventually lead me out of this maze.
Before long, some thing entered my awareness.
It was a creature of some sort, snuffling around in the darkness ahead of me. It shuffled along, hunched slightly over, a wooden spear grasped within its small paws. I couldn’t see its color clearly in the song, but it looked like some malformed cross between a lizard and a dog. It had to be half my size.
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Suddenly, as I crept towards it, its head whipped around. Letting out a hissing screech, it hefted its spear and charged towards me. I wasn’t afraid, though, more confused than anything. The creature was slow and weak, and I easily sidestepped its clumsy charge. The song was resonating with something inside it, reverberating oddly in the dark dirt shaft. Narrowing my eyes, I sharpened my focus, and heard.
~~~
Kobold
~~~
The Kobold screeched at me once more, stabbing at me with its makeshift spear. In a single, swift motion, I grabbed the weapon, yanked it from the Kobold’s hands, and thrust it deep into its chest. The Kobold didn’t make a sound, expiring instantaneously, and evaporating in a shower of blue sparks.
In its place was a single, glowing, azure gem. An Entropy crystal. It seemed, strangely, not as real or present or potent as the one before, dropped by the mimic knight, yet I pocketed it all the same, and continued onwards.
Several more times I encountered Kobolds wandering the subterranean passageways. Each one attacked, despite my occasional, probably stupid, attempts to reason with the creatures. I killed them without exception and without difficulty. I likely could have avoided the beasts, but every one I spared was a crystal forever denied to the villagers, and merely knocking the Kobolds unconscious, I found, would never result in dropped crystals.
However, strangely, not all of the creatures evaporated, leaving crystals behind. Some that I killed simply remained, blueish blood seeping from their wounds into the earth beneath.
I didn’t know what to make of that.
Soon enough, hours had passed. I’d accumulated tens of crystals from Kobold corpses, carried with me in a roughshod bag I’d fashioned from what little cloth the creatures wore. It wouldn’t matter how many I looted, though, if I never made it out of this damned Labyrinth.
Thankfully, I was beginning to notice a shift in the song. Several of the more recent intersections I’d passed by had hummed distinctly to my ears, thrumming with light and life and warmth. Eagerly, anticipating an exit, I’d followed the forks to their source.
The auburn light of torches stung my unused eyes as I emerged from the network of tunnels into a grand cavern. I gaped in amazement.
The underground chamber was absolutely massive, like a great upside-down lake had been carved out of the earth. And it was filled to the brim with life. Hundreds of tiny Kobolds scrambled back and forth between slipshod huts. They hustled and bustled every which way, carrying with them food, building materials, and roughly made weaponry.
In the center rose a vast, earthen dome.
This wasn’t the exit. It was the Kobold’s home. And I was going to have to fight my way through them to get out.
Upon contemplating the prospect, though, I couldn’t bring myself to worry. Individually, the Kobolds were incredibly weak. Weaker even than the pillows from the mimic manor. And I was Blessed now. Granted, my Blessing didn’t do very much at the moment, but being at the Grain stage alone had increased my speed, strength, and stamina.
If they came at me together, it would be a repeat of the bloody bedroom. And my Gift having increased my connection to the song, I wagered I could last much longer this time, push myself much harder, and maintain control whilst doing so. I cracked my neck, hefted the greatsword over my shoulder, and began making my way towards the village.
The Kobolds noticed me quickly.
These ones seemed a measure more intelligent than those from before, and after I dispatched the first several with long, devastating swordswipes, they held back, scurrying out of my range. Fifty or so of the lizard-like creatures grouped together, surrounding me on all sides.
They tested me, poking with spears from every direction. But my awareness was present even in places I couldn’t see, sharpened from hours navigating the dark caverns, and I returned each of their attempts with vicious blows. I cut down Kobolds easily, but more simply replaced them, yipping and hissing at me, the swarm of creatures seeming endless.
I started taking hits.
A cut here, there. Shallow, but accumulating. It was inevitable, really. Fast as I was, I couldn’t defend from ten attacks simultaneously. I had to admit, if I’d still been mundane, they probably would’ve been able to kill me eventually. But I wasn’t human anymore. I was Blessed.
Grinning savagely at the Kobold horde, I called upon the song once more. I bade it rip and tear and rend asunder. Keening with ecstasy, it complied.
Entropy burst forth from my form, lashing out in great rents of azure energy. The storm of force tore into the creatures, slicing and dicing them by the dozens, littering the street with their corpses.
The Kobolds shrieked and ran, some even dropping their weapons, all notion of killing me forgotten as fear overwhelmed them. They raced back to hide between and behind and within their huts, their village swallowing them up, and within mere moments the dirt road before me was deserted entirely.
Interestingly, I noted, none of the city Kobolds had dropped crystals, the pile of bodies strewn about their village very real and not in any way diminishing. I tsked at the slight pain of newly opened cuts across my body. Healing with the song was slow, and my fighting style was aggressive.
I really needed a regeneration Blessing.
As I walked the streets of the newly abandoned village, I considered my destination. The way out, I guessed, was the large, domed edifice in the center. At first I had thought it to be a town hall of some sort. Perhaps a chieftain's hut. As I approached, however, its true nature became clear.
It was a giant temple. Well, giant compared to the rest of the town and its denizens, at least. It grew awkwardly from a pyramidal base into a spherical top, with primitive works of art scrawled haphazardly across its exterior. The artwork depicted fire breathing lizards, long wyrms that twisted and wound all about one another. There were no doors to the temple, only a wide opening leading to a grand set of stairs. The entire structure seemed to be made of kilned clay, a mite more impressive than the ramshackle architecture of the rest of the village.
A couple brave Kobolds watched me as I entered it, peeking from behind walls and huts as I scaled the adobe steps. The staircase was long, perhaps forty feet or so in height, and when I reached the top I found myself overlooking a great circular arena.
At precisely the other end of the ring sat a broad, brick throne. To its left was a pile of food, all freshly prepared, vegetables and fungi no doubt collected from the cave system that surrounded us. To its right rested a large, stone club littered with spikes. And atop the throne, reclined my adversary, the Champion of the floor.
It was to its brethren Kobolds as a tiger was to a housecat.
It was tall, four feet taller than me at least, towering over the earthen arena from on high. It was huge, thick muscles bulging angrily from beneath cobalt scales that seemed tough as armor. Its form was patterned in sleek orange lines and flourishes that glowed like volcanic circuitry.
Its face was proud, all sharp lines and smooth edges, more dragon than the lizard-dog appearance of its serfs. A thick snout and strong jaws peeled back slightly to reveal glittering white teeth.
It looked noble. It looked sovereign.
The song poured off it in waves, an aura that washed out and over me, reverberating with blood and fang and fire. Its name blazed forth radiantly, true nature revealed to me as I heard it.
~~~
Brymir the Exalted
Attunement: Draconic Blood 4
~~~
I gasped as its Shardsong reached my ears, Draconic Blood echoing around inside my mind.
My own song responded, reaching out and wrapping around it with countless insectoid arms. My Blessing learned its form, probing, charting every bend and bevel, exploring its eldritch architecture, scanning its arcane electronics and mapping each node and junction.
ADMINISTRATION searched for harmony in the song, and found it.
With a jerking, swirling, spinning sensation, my soul shifted and recalibrated and my song re-tuned to include the new melody.
~~~
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~~~
I barely had time to react before the knowledge and nature of the new Blessing was brutally forced into my mind. The nicks and cuts I’d suffered earlier at the hands of the Kobold horde melted away like rain, and my body swelled with limitless vitality.
This, now this, was a Blessing. This was a start. This was good.
I flexed my muscles and grinned ferociously at the Champion. It returned my smile in kind.
With a great and resounding roar, Brymir grabbed the greatclub at his side and leapt from his throne, flying high and landing in the center of the arena, making the very foundations of his temple shake and shiver.
I took one step into the arena, and leveled my greatsword before me in a two-handed grip. The Kobold Champion was the last hurdle, the last obstacle before I was home free. The last barrier before me, keeping me from honoring my promise to Aldwyn.
I was going to tear him apart.