Never in her life had Elia drawn her sword more quickly. Besides that one time when a knife she’d picked up started wiggling in its sheath. Or that time The Old Maiden snuck up on her and tickled her ribs quite illegally. Or when … the point was, she was fast, and so were Mouggen, Karla, and even Cesare, in lieu of a weapon he found a discarded table leg.
“Hey, woah, that’s a lotta pointy pieces pointing my way.” Clive looked in wonder at all the attention on him. He was the picture of a dreg, dried up skin like paper beneath his tattered armor, but the eyes beneath his green, feathered hat still betrayed the spark of a person. Most of a person anyways. And that was saying nothing about the intelligence of that person, though how smart could someone who was trying to lick the nearest weapon be? “Hehe. Thpoon.”
Elia thwapped him on the nose. “Freak.”
“Who’s ‘The Rhuna’?” Mouggen whispered.
“A pain in the butt, that’s who,” she replied.
“Actually, she’s THE BEST,” Clive said, rubbing his nose. “Seriously, I was pretty split y’know, but once you get to know her, it’s like the world gets a whooole new color.”
“The color of bruises.” This guy was not even convincing Rye of his friendliness. “So, what are we to do with the prisoner?”
“Kill him,” Cesare said with conviction. “A friend of the Rhuna is an enemy of the world.”
“Woah! Woah, we’re not monsters. We can lock him back up, right?”
“We’re at war, Rye, and while locking him back up for decades is barely enough to make up for all the atrocities he’s no doubt facilitated, it’s unnecessarily cruel and not worth the risk. Chop him up I say, so he can’t come back as more than a sludge.”
Clive looked at the man who just suggested his more permanent death like he’d found a new friend. “Wow, you’re pretty thorough. I think I know why the great Rhuna warned us about the people from the outside, but still, that’s SO COOL to meet you all! No, no wait, that’s not right… I think. Anyways, I really, REALLY need to do something in this tower. Can I get your help?”
“No,” Elia said before feeling a twinge of disapproval. “What kind of help did you have in mind?”
“Well, you see, I have to get up to the top. The tippy top. Like really high up, there’s a dean up there and, well, I gotta talk to him. Nice and friendly-like.”
“And how do you know that?”
The man brightened up even more. “I’ve been up there, many, many times, but oh, it’s terrible! Whenever I try to talk to her, she does some weird magic wibbly-woo, and then I’m back down here. So, will you help me? Will you? I won’t take your loot, or care what you do, I just want to talk.”
Elia pointedly looked to Rye, who was fully focused in that same way whenever it came time to barter. With a quick mental nudge, she disappeared back into her body.
He seems friendly. Way too much so. He might have hit his head a few too many times, and we can’t trust him, but setting that problem aside, we were planning to go up anyways. If Rhuna – The Rhuna, apparently – comes after us like in Glenrock, we’ve got a feather for a quick escape.
“And more bodies between us and what is an all but confirmed boss with weird powers is all the better.”
“You’re not seriously considering his offer, are you?” Cesare let out a single, high laugh. “If Mouggen thinks – thought – the maroon pact was bad, he hasn’t seen how the old faith operates. They’re second only to the knights of Avon in their depravity. Also, Clive here is more than a mindless dreg foot soldier, which means he’s valuable to her. He could tell us great secrets.”
“Since when are bards experts in politics?” Elia grumbled.
“Ever since lords and ladies found their love for music.” He sat his table leg down, because so much wood was heavy and he was still just a lithe guy who loved peace and music. Not a hero, not a fighter either, or so he claimed. “I’ve been in Loften the longest out of all of us but Karla, though I didn’t spend my time locked behind walls, no offense.”
“None taken.” Karla mumbled. “But I’m not sure I could kill an unarmed human. As a hero.”
Rye zipped out and gave her a ghostly side-hug. “And you won’t have to.”
“Rhuna. Maroon pact.” Mouggen hummed. “Well, I’m not sure what the big fuss is about, but if he has something to spill, let him spill it.”
“Hummm,” Clive imitated the big sunshine man. “I could tell you, yes. But I couldn’t. Could, but couldn’t. But you don’t trust me. Don’t trust me at all.”
“Not over my dead undead body,” Cesare said.
“Hummmm. But over mine?” He gasped, as if inhaling an idea from the general vibe of the room. “You can just kill me! That’ll make you trust me more, right? Right? I volunteer as a sacrifice!”
Everyone looked a bit taken aback. Nali and Karla were way at the back, entirely sidelined by choice and the fact that, well, one of them was Karla. All the tenacity in the world wouldn’t help when the adults were having conversations, though maybe excluding her was precisely what was leading her to act so… immature. Maybe that was her way of escaping the cage of her home, where every step leads around the same circle of aristocrats. Better than the maze, but by Elia’s reckoning, still pretty shit.
“Alright Moug. Do it.”
She blinked as in one fell swoop Mouggen stepped up and stabbed the man through the face. He flopped to the ground like a twitching puppet. Something about it churned her stomach. Perhaps the suddenness of it all, that Mouggen just listened to him, or the fact that the man was entirely unarmed.
She didn’t have much time to complain as the body twisted and writhed like something from The Shining. Clive’s face sizzled in place, flesh re-knitting itself before with a gasp, he was sitting upright again. The reactions were varied. Surprise from Cesare, Karla, and Mouggen, who took a step back. Disgust from Rye. Curiosity from Nali and Quibbles.
Her toad croaked a suspicious croak. She scratched him on the head, whispering that everything was fine while placing her razor-sharp spoon right at the undead’s neck, not that it helped anything but her own nerves.
“See? I’m immortal! You don’t have to worry about my safety, I could walk out front, catch all the traps, tell you all what’s where and who’s who, and you’ll be safe and snug as a safe wrapped in blankets! Yes, that’ll work. I volunteer as bait!”
“An immortal rag doll would be a great tank or distraction.” Elia didn’t let him out of her sight. “We can chop him up later, Cesare, if that makes you feel any better.”
“I… I guess that would.” He frowned.
“Wouldn’t want Mouggen dying on us again.”
“That… is true.” Cesare sighed, defeated. “You know how to hit where it hurts.”
“What can I say? I’ve got a boon. Now come on Clive, be a good bloodbag and catch us some traps.”
“Yay, I’m useful!” he yelled, walked out through a door, and immediately had his neck snapped by a drop-slime.
“Does anybody else feel like this dungeon has a sick sense for comedic timing?” Karla asked as his neck reconstituted with a crack.
“I think it’s running out of punchlines. Which means we’re not far away from the top.” Elia looked up the stairwell, an embroidered tapestry of a woman tugging at the stars with strings hanging above. “Rye, I trust you, but if this is going to be another Commander Hall situation, I’m throwing him off the roof.”
----------------------------------------
Rye was a bundle of nerves as they ascended the tower. The nitty-gritty of it wasn’t even at the forefront of her worries. Mouggen and Karla were taking anything that approached them quite well, hacking and tearing through dregs and misbegotten failures of nature while Elia was taking it easy at the back with Nali.
No, what was worrying her were the little things her mind had been niggling about these past few weeks. No matter with whom she talked, it was as if they had lived a reality just that little bit different from her. Karla and Elia were the furthest apart, both having grown up in this violent world. Cesare went through Loften entirely without a care, but the moments where he let a hidden sharpness shine through were… doing things with her that were rather distracting. Nali meanwhile was plain weird, playing by her own rules and somehow not having been punished for it yet. Lastly, Mouggen seemed so alien in his dogma, so different from what she was used to in the empire.
One didn’t venerate the sun as a concept. That was silly, the sun was a direct effect of one divine being or another. Sure, she could understand not knowing which god to venerate with his evident memory loss, but he could just ask her. Rye knew, she’d studied the myths and legends of the pantheon. Worga was the goddess who birthed the sun and Wroti the one who guarded entry into it. If he was more interested in the way that light reached the people, then maybe he’d prefer worship of Aurana, goddess of the radiant sands, and adoptive daughter of Worga.
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Did he not know his gods? Was he from a time before when they didn’t know their names, let alone those of the three seasons?
A statue nearby came to life, hopping off its pedestal and squishing Clive into mush. It was quickly dealt with the moment Elia joined the fray, what with her cooking boon that could cut through near anything if it had a joint.
She watched the puddle of Clive reconstitute itself over the next minute. Here was a servant of their enemy, of everyone’s enemy, friendly like a rockdog pup.
“So, why are you immortal?” she asked. “Is that the next step after you stop aging?”
“Oh, nono, that’s just a me-thing.” He pulled down his shirt, ripping it in places to show here where a beige shard of pottery was embedded into his chest, thick veins growing all around it like a knot in a tree. “I’ve got a greater shard.”
“Um…” Rye ummed. “Greater shard of… the grail?”
He smiled, like a kid finding another one with the same interest for toys. “Yep, greater shard of Sacrifice, from the grail of ages itself. She gave it to me. Rhuna said I was special. She always gave me extra lunch after the other kids stole mine.”
The word ‘sacrifice’ echoed unnaturally. Rye glanced around, but no one else seemed to have noticed. “Other kids?”
He nodded happily, stopping to let one of the ever more frequent growing crystals of ice spray him with a deluge of little shards.
“Yeah! She has a whole bunch of them.”
“And she treats them kindly?” An impossibility, coming from the woman they’d met.
But what if they were in the wrong. What if Rhuna was misunderstood, was actually nice but just too crass to show it, like Elia?
“We have so many toys! We’ve got teddies and swords and jars of bugs and spears. We go to school, where we learn cooperation, dueling, murder, theft, and whole bunch more cool subjects. Sometimes, if we’re really good, we even get a day off of pain resistance training. I always used those days to hunt for crunchy bugs in the cracks between the floorboards. One time, The great Rhuna caught me, and you know what she said?”
“Nnnoo?” Rye squeaked, her hopes fizzling out faster than ever.
“She said, and I quote, “Wow, who the fuck gave Gollum over here some clothes? He looks even uglier with them on and – did you just eat a bug? Hah, fucking wretched.” Isn’t she just the best?”
Rye didn’t know what to say to that. So, instead, she gave him a smile somewhere between nervous and sad while slowly but surely backing off. He waved, and as a conjurer took that chance to give his face a new hole, she took the same to jump all the way back into Elia’s mind.
“Easy there, you’re gonna give us a concussion,” Elia said, shaking her head. “Rye, in case you didn’t notice, you’re a ghost. Ghosts don’t get spooked. They do the spooking.”
Rhuna is evil.
“Good try, but maybe something unexpected next time. Something with pizzazz like ‘the sky is falling’ or ‘where is Quibbles’.”
Rye swallowed heavily.
You know how we found a minor shard of the grail and it fixed all our spirit issues? Clive has something called a greater shard, and I think it makes him immortal. I always thought your [Psychometry] boon had a thing for storytelling and over-dramatization, but with the world in chaos and power of the gods in the hands of mortals, well…
“What even is the grail of ages? It’s not a symbol if we have literal pieces of it to carry around. Is it like a divine fruit-punch bowl?”
No, you, you… argh! The grail of ages is NOT a bowl for fruit drinks, it’s the masterpiece of our lord Ruthe, god of creation. It is said that once you die, and your soul makes it to Gatheon, it falls into the grail where you are stripped of everything in excess of what makes you you. Your soul is weighed against a feather, tasted for signs of sour- and bitterness, or smashed against another depending on who you ask, but either way, you are tested. If you succeed your soul floats above into the sun, where all your goodness shines on those below until you are chosen to reincarnate again. If you fail, you fall between the cracks in the earth to hell, where you are chased and eaten, then ground up by demons, the good and the bad separated, and mixed with the strata of earth, such that you may be purified and rise up again over eons.
“And the earth just… absorbs all your badness? Sounds like an unsustainable system polluting the very ground we’re standing on.”
Rye shrugged, forgetting that Elia couldn't see her.
The point is, the grail is the center of the cycle of souls. It isn’t unreasonable to assume that even tiny shards of it can fix parts of us, patching us like moth-eaten tunics. But why would Clive have a bigger one, unless…
“Unless Rhuna has them in excess. Sheesh, no way we’re beating her anytime soon.” She glanced at Clive, who was entirely happy to talk the ear off of Mouggen and Karla, both of which looked just about ready to tear his head off his shoulders. “Though, with the way her subordinates end up, I’m not keen on joining either.”
Me neither. She tortures people, I think. Makes their heads weird. Makes them worship her. Like some sort of false god.
“And somehow she’s not the one being smited,” Elia muttered, eyes drawn to the surroundings.
The smaller studies and rooms for experimentation had made way for more prison cells, the dried-up corpses of all kinds of humanoids and non-humanoids littering the floor. Rye recognized bekki, recognized a stoneman, and dozen other minor races.
Rather more concerning was the number of cells that stood empty, with signs of previous habitation. All drag marks lead forward, and forward they followed after them.
Cesare hissed as they walked past a cell with a woman inside, her skin black and cracked like charcoal, thin lines of embers glowing beneath. She was squished in a cell with a creature that had the lower body of a cow-sized wolf, four legs and all, and the upper body of a human from the hips up.
“Pyromancer and a witch,” Cesare said. “If whatever we’ve seen previously hasn’t settled it, I think that does it.”
“Witches are… evil.” Mouggen added. “I… I must have read that somewhere. They eat children, I think, and pyromancers…”
“Pyromancers are just conjurers but even more volatile,” Cesare added. “Even the simplest spell is a runaway reaction.”
“Ah. Thank you for the reminder.”
There was little rescuing to be done here, but they still found a few bits of loot.
Viln bracers
Metal bracers from the birthplace of conjuration. Before the land fell to the moonwell, this type of armor was widely spread among conjurers.
Slightly shields the wearer from the effect of miscasts.
Elia took those, though only put the right one on as her shield hand was still more valuable being protected by the thick layers of her other armor.
Maiden robes
Robes of a traveling maiden. Plain and simple, they weren’t made with the expectation of seeing battle.
“They really just plucked anyone from the streets, huh?”
Despicable.
Princess set
A set of fine wear fit for a princess. Looking the part of refined royalty is essential for every prince or princess, as Prensi, god of princes and princesses, would not allow otherwise. A princess without their clothing suffers greatly, and wilts like a flower to soon die.
“Grim.” Rye reminded herself to teach Elia all about the princes and the princesses at a later date. “Hey Karla. I think we’ve found your princess.”
Karla walked over, near instantly homing in on the piece of dress they’d found scrunched up in a corner.
“This is proof. A princess was here.” She said, sniffing once like a bloodhound. “But a princess never leaves without adequate dress unless… unless she is about to be eaten by a dragon. It all makes sense now. We need to go, quickly. Nakama!”
“A dragon. Of course! Why didn’t I think of that? It all makes sense, yep, all of it.” Elia chuckled in a way that made Rye concerned for her mental wellbeing as they approached the end of the hallway of ever more empty prisons. A door stood in the way, large and imposing yet luckily without more personality than the stone surrounding it.
“Oh boy, we’re here,” Clive said. “Can’t wait to go in there again. Oh, also, if you people have some sort of magic, some boons you’d like to get or something else, now is a GREAT opportunity before we all get busy. Busy with dying likely, but when has that ever stopped us undead?”
Mouggen said some prayers while Cesare heavily evaluated if fighting with a table leg, or at all, was really what he was here for. He discarded the leg, filing in with Nali among the non-combatants. His wool-boon was useful for playing catch & rescue anyways.
“One sec.”
Shard count: [Common] x44, [Uncommon] x14, [Rare] x1
“Alright, considering I’ll need to sacrifice one soon, I’m gonna roll a boon,” Elia said, combining ten uncommon shards into a single uncommon dice and flicking it.
The dice flew and flew, bouncing so ridiculously much that Elia swore there had to be someone screwing with her rolls.
You have gained a divine boon: Gauntlet of the Viper [Uncommon]
[Body] Left Gauntlet of the Viper [Uncommon]
Conjure the left gauntlet of The Viper of Viln, a famed assassin who is said to have killed in the name of his profane god. The fingers of this gauntlet are fashioned into sickle-claws, each coated in a numbing poison. The poison recharges between summons. Summoning the gauntlet causes physical exhaustion.
Elia activated the boon with a thought. The gauntlet appeared as if plucked from the air, neatly fitting itself around the already generous armor of her left hand. Fine, silver metal wound its way in form-fitting segments to her arm and hand. The image of a white snake coiled its way down up into her fingertips, the curved claws feeling like lethal extensions of her own body despite only being an inch long. The gauntlet was thick, nearly enough to be its own shield, which was suspiciously practical considering she hadn’t found her buckler again.
Oh, that looks useful. Lucky you.
“Yeah,” Elia laughed sardonically, “and not at all ominous. Alright, let’s crack this door open. Any bets on what’s behind them?”
“Dragon,” Karla said.
“Conjurer monstrosity,” Cesare shrugged
Nali looked worried. “A demon, perhaps? A very, very angry buddha?”
“Whoever’s responsible,” Mouggen said, hefting his greatsword, “for the tragedy that is this heresy-besotted tower.”
"You're all over-thinking this," Elia said, leaning against the door. "Whoever is hiding behind these babies is worth a lot of shards, and a whole heck of a lot of souls."
"Loot!" Karla yelled. "I change my answer to loot!"
That prompted a wave of revisions, arguments, and minor displays of hubris. If Rye didn't know any better, she would have thought they were all gathering their confidence. She hoped they could spare some for herself; confidence was always the part she was least... confident about with herself. But she did learn to cast magic in two months, and she did improvise a spell to kill a giant sludge. She was an important member of the team, heck, she was a part of the team. People treated her like a person, people trusted her. She could carry her weight. She would.
Under the combined strength of half a dozen people, the door ground open.