Beth skulked through the dim hallways of the High Temple’s dungeon, her heart thumping in her chest. Finally, she thought, my revenge begins.
Revenge upon her parents for taking her love from her. Revenge upon the aristocracy who robbed her of her freedom. Revenge upon Technis and his temples, the real power behind the ruling council of Satrap.
Beth would see them all burn.
Mana churned through her core as Beth wrapped the shadows around her, smothering her form with darkness as she silently slipped past a flickering torch. She kept her eyes trained on the guards ahead of her. They were facing the wrong way, slouching against the walls with casual overconfidence.
Like a burrowing mite, she had tunneled through he cliff face itself and into the arteries of the High Temple, cutting straight through to her target. All that remained between her and the first steps of her revenge were a few unprepared guards. Beth unsheathed her favorite dagger, a brutally simplistic length of darkened steel with a blade thin enough to slip through the gaps in a knight’s armor. She pricked her skin and waited for her blood to flow over the weapon, coating it in the blood-turned-venom from her heart of revenge.
“Durak, god of vengeance, I offer these souls to you,” she silently mouthed as she watched the slouching guards.
She slunk forward silently, her footsteps muffled by her consuming darkness, and eased her dagger into the first man’s body, right below his ribs. He collapsed from blood loss and the paralyzing effects of her toxins before he was fully aware of her attack. He fell to the floor and flopped like a fish, the rope to the alarm bell far out of his reach.
Beth didn’t pause to watch, immediately lunging at the second guard. His eyes widened in shock, but despite his surprise he had enough time to coat his body in a thin, blue barrier: the signature ability of those who called Technis their patron.
Beth directed her dagger to a gap in his heavy armor near his armpit, but the shimmering blue shield deflected her blow. She reacted instinctively, using her momentum to extend the dagger towards his face. The guard flinched backwards, but the tip of her dagger managed to pierce through his ethereal barrier, drawing a small, red line across his cheek.
He was as good as dead with her toxins working their way through his blood, but she still needed to keep him from sounding an alarm until his body gave out. She pressed forward with a rapid staccato of attacks, denying her victim the opportunity to use the longer range of his poleaxe. Beth grinned when her toxins caused the man to stumble. A powerful kick to his knee sent him sprawling across the floor, where Beth quickly jammed her dagger under his helmet. A strong push sent it through the blue sheen of his weakening barrier and into his vulnerable neck, ending his struggles.
She paused to listen intently.
The hallway was silent. According to the information she’d been given, the hallways under the High Temple were mostly abandoned in the hours before dawn. She had been told that there wouldn’t be any foot traffic before the shift change, but Beth didn’t fully trust anything or anyone. She certainly didn’t trust the competency of the mud-caked delvers who had planned the attack.
Not that she thought that they would betray her; their interests aligned, after all. They wanted to retaliate for some government policy and she wanted to burn it all down. Unlike the delvers though, she – and her patron – had long-term plans that involved her escaping the temple alive with her prize. She needed their help, but she feared that their short-term thinking would make them sloppy.
Beth quickly reached down to the man she had just killed and violently pulled the essence from his cooling body. Half went to Durak, as compensation for her abilities, and the other half settled upon her own core, lifting her step by step on the path to greater power. She drained the second man’s core and continued down the dim hallway, following a map that she had memorized weeks ago. Aside from the crackling of the regularly spaced torches that flickered as she rushed past, the passageway was silent.
Beth descended another two levels and murdered her way through another pair of guards and a room full of young acolytes. The young men had been busy packing several large barrels with what Beth thought were human organs, so she hadn’t hesitated. After seeing them handling jars of human eyes she couldn’t believe that they hadn’t been deserving of her deadly justice.
Beth raced through the hallway, her earlier stealth replaced by a sense of growing urgency. The temple was larger than her information had lead her to believe, the volume of evil being done in its hallways clearly demanding multiple undocumented expansions over the years. Beth sprinted down what she hoped was the last stairway. A dusting of consuming darkness spread from her body and swallowed the sounds of her passage while her cloak of shadows obscured her form. She was moving so silently and quickly that she was just as startled as the guard that she stumbled into.
Her instincts took over quickly, and before he could so much as twitch she had already driven her dagger through his right eye.
Beth glanced behind his slumping body to see three more guards in the room, expressions of shock spreading across their faces. Unfortunately, her favorite dagger was stuck in the first guard’s face. Beth cursed and dropped it, drawing her second-favorite dagger, a slender stiletto, as she pivoted to the nearest living foe.
From her peripheral vision she saw one of the other guards move to the cord that connected to an alarm bell in the aboveground guard house. If the delvers were doing their job then those guards would be busy by this point. If the delvers weren’t doing their job… well, she would at least go down fighting.
Her second target had raised a familiar blue shield around his body, but Beth punched straight through it and his metal cuirass with a dagger strike that cut like hatred. She would quickly exhaust herself if she became over-reliant upon the costly ability, but she needed to even her odds quickly.
Beth ripped her dagger free from the guard’s chest and pushed his twitching body at the one who hadn’t gone for the alarm. That gave her a clear path to the last one, who was still busy pulling on the rope. Beth raced towards him as he dropped it and fumbled for his short sword. He caught her dagger by conjuring a blue shield in the shape of a shallow bowl, but the guard couldn’t stop her mass from slamming into him as she body checked him into the wall.
Her shoulder hurt – slamming into a larger, armored man would do that – but her sacrificial assault stunned the guard long enough for Beth to slip behind him. She rammed her dagger into the unprotected points on his legs and through the seams at his waist. He dropped into a growing puddle of his own blood while Beth spun to face the final guard.
She lifted her dagger into a guard position in front of her face as the man approached, the tip of his poleaxe pointed straight at her throat. She dodged as he thrust his weapon forward, but a blue replica of the point at the head of the pole leaped out slightly ahead of his attack, catching her off guard. Beth hissed in pain and clutched the large gash in her side with her free hand as she circled around her opponent, searching for a way to get closer.
She placed her feet carefully, mindful of the blood-slicked stones beneath her and the ability-enhanced reach of the poleaxe. She had never been particularly strong, even with her abilities enhancing her physique, so she preferred to rely upon surprise and speed rather than brute force. This type of stand-off didn’t favor her.
The guardsman’s behavior told her that he agreed. He was content to keep her at bay with careful pokes and prods of his weapon while he waited, either for blood loss to weaken her or for more guards to arrive. Beth would have to take a risk and make the first serious attack. She clicked her tongue, annoyed.
She withdrew her offhand from her wound to flick a spray of blood at the guard. She transmuted it into a strong acid as it left her hand, so it hissed and bubbled when it struck the pole of the guard’s weapon. It was too weak to actually eat through the material, but the guard reflexively twisted his pole to the side to dislodge the liquid. The point of his weapon dipped to the side and Beth lunged forward and activated two abilities at once. She pulled at the shadows, coating her body in darkness once again, while also summoning a pair of shadow clones. The shadowy figures split from her body and rushed at the guard from either side.
Beth had heard stories of people who were powerful enough to form multiple bodies. She had formed her third core and was far too weak for such a technique – but the guard didn’t know that. He stumbled back in surprise as he coated his weapon in a blue aura and lashed the axehead of his weapon at the first shadow. It burst into motes of darkness as his weapon passed through it.
The butt of his weapon swung up at the second one, similarly dispersing the harmless figure of shadows.
Beth grinned when she saw the poleaxe hopelessly out of position. She rushed forward into the clear path her shadows had opened.
She leaned to the side as the guard hopped backwards and thrust the pointed butt of the weapon at her. It was a well-practiced movement, something that the skilled man easily fell back to in a moment of duress. Beth felt a swell of triumph; the guard’s training didn’t account for the body right behind him.
Beth was disappointed that he didn’t fall down in a heap; instead, glowing panes of blue light caught his tripping feet and stabilised his motion. His weapon was still pointed the wrong way though, so Beth pulled her third favorite dagger from her waist and fell upon him, lashing out with a dagger in each hand.
She had learned from hard experience that many real fights devolved into desperate flailing of limbs and weapons as the combatants grew fatigued. Desperation and fear had a habit of taking control of a person’s actions in those situations, and Beth leaned into the momentary surge of strength and ferocity. Her daggers stabbed repeatedly at the guard as he contorted his armored limbs to keep her away from his vitals. In short order, they merged into a heap of metal and curses rolling over the floor.
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Some of her strikes must have found something important, because she soon found that she was the only one moving. She slowly pushed herself onto her knees, her breaths heavy and ragged. A deep soreness radiated through her body as her adrenaline faded and her injuries made their presence known. She quickly checked for any fatal wounds of her own, afraid that she could have missed something in the heat of the battle.
Finding only shallow cuts and the gash on her side, she wiped off her daggers on a bit of clean shirt from her last adversary before gritting her teeth and hauling herself to her feet. She would pull the essence from the corpses in a moment; first she wanted to reclaim her favorite dagger.
A sudden clapping split the silence. Beth whirled to the source of the unexpected sound.
She hadn’t fully inspected the room as she rushed into it, and only now did she notice that the hallway terminated in a square space that held two large prison cells. Each cell contained a single person behind thick, wooden bars, and it was one of those prisoners who was clapping.
The girl behind the bars said something in a strange language and looked at Beth, her wide eyes filled with curiosity. Beth turned to retrieve her dagger; the girl wasn’t going anywhere until Beth found the keys to the cells anyway.
Beth could hear the girl talking, a continual stream of what sounded like questions coming from her mouth. The other prisoner, a young man, eventually responded.
“Wrong language, I think,” he observed.
“Oh? Does this one work? Can you understand me now, dagger stabbing lady?”
Beth huffed in pain and frustration as she wiped off her favorite dagger and liberated the key to the cells from a guard’s belt.
“The name’s Beth,” she replied gruffly. She worked some of the kinks from her legs she slowly walked to the cells.
Beth inspected the girl for the first time, and…
The girl was pitiful. Pitiful and strange. Not at all what Beth was expecting for someone who her god had promised would be the key to undoing Technis.
She was short, even shorter than Beth, and obviously malnourished. She was naked too, and her skin was covered in bruises and straight cuts that, to Bel’s eye, had been placed across her body with surgical precision. Her head was also covered in snakes instead of hair, with seven limp serpents hanging down from her scalp. Two big, round, shimmering, innocent eyes stared at Beth in wonder.
To her annoyance, Beth could feel the pitiful sight pulling at her heartstrings. She knew, with certainty, that this was the instrument of revenge to whom she had been guided by Durak’s divine providence. She also knew, with equal certainty, that this was a scared little girl who Technis’ priests had been torturing for heaven’s knew how long.
“Who are you?” she asked the girl as she fumbled with the key.
“I’m Bel. Well, Beloved, but James told me that’s a dumb name so call me Bel. I think Bel sounds nice,” the girl rambled.
Beth glanced at the young man in the other cell. She didn’t have any information about him. He looked a little unusual, but not as strange as Bel. The torchlight illuminated the gaunt face of someone that Beth guessed was in his late teenage years, with pale skin and fiery red hair that fell down past his shoulders and a bushy beard under his chin. Unlike Bel he was clothed, although his rags looked crusted with blood and bile.
He answered her unspoken question. “James Hill. I’m not anyone special, just Bel’s whipping boy.”
Beth glanced back at Bel.
“They hit him when I don’t do what they want,” the pitiful girl explained.
“Right,” Beth responded.
She grimaced. That did sound like something Technis’ priests would do. “I guess that means that I’ll be rescuing the both of you then.”
The redhead pumped his fist enthusiastically, but Bel just stared blankly as Beth opened the cell door.
“So you want me to follow you? Won’t we get into trouble?” she asked, confused.
Beth stared at the girl, but James quickly spoke. “She’s not stupid, she’s just always been here.” He frantically gestured at his cell door. “Just get me out of here and I’ll make sure she follows instructions.”
Beth grunted unenthusiastically, but she hurried to get James’ cell door open as well.
“Grab some clothes,” she ordered as she started draining essence from the corpses. “It’s cold outside, and I’m not going through all this trouble just for you to die of bile in the lungs.”
“Ah, sure,” the man replied. James pulled two belts from the dead men, but ignored their bloodstained clothes. Instead, he went into a corner where some cloaks were lying in a heap. “C’mere Bel, let’s see if I can make one of these fit.”
“Okay,” the girl answered cheerfully.
“Hurry up,” Beth urged, “you’re not free yet.”
Beth ignored the two of them as she carefully checked over her wounds once again. She cut a few strips of cloth to bandage some of the larger cuts as she waited for her core to refill with mana. She was tired. She hoped that the delvers were raising hell wherever they were, because she wasn’t going to be able to do much on her own.
“We’re ready,” James declared.
Beth looked up to see that he’d dressed himself in a heavy cloak and a pair of large boots. He had also used a short sword to cut his hair to shoulder length. Bel was in another cloak, her midsection bulging comically from all of the fabric cinched up with a belt so that the bottom didn’t hang under her feet.
Beth pointed at the sword being held incorrectly in James’ hand. “You know how to use that?”
“Sure. Well, I’ve seen movies. I’ll be fine.”
Beth shook her head at his strange words. “Drop it. Whoever Movies was, he didn’t teach you well and you’re obviously holding it wrong. If there’s any serious fighting just keep Bel out of harm’s way.”
Beth gestured up the hallway as James dropped the sword. “Let’s go. Light jog, we’re in a hurry.”
----------------------------------------
Their return through the dark passageways went much faster since they abandoned all attempts at stealth and were recklessly charging through the temple. Beth couldn’t have hidden the sounds that came from the two freed prisoners anyway, and if any reinforcements had made it down here they were already doomed.
Beth practically dragged the two up flight after flight of winding stairs as they made their way to the surface. The two of them were in terrible condition, doubled over from cramps after just a bit of running, but they didn’t have much farther to go.
Her goal wasn’t the same point where she had entered; there was no way that the large hole blasted into the side of the cliff wouldn’t be immediately obvious in daylight. Instead, Beth guided her two charges to a small tower at the back of the High Temple that overlooked a sheer cliff. Beth’s goal was the ocean at the bottom of the cliff where she had anchored a small boat away from the sharp rocks. Her compatriots had, hopefully, spent the night anchoring a series of ropes that would get them down the rock wall.
They finally emerged from the stairwell into a small, private chapel, proudly sponsored by some idiot high councilman. Beth frowned when she saw the corpse-littered floor. Either she was late or the delvers had gotten bored waiting and ransacked this part of the temple earlier than planned.
Bel yelped with surprise as Beth shoved the confused girl at James. “Keep an eye on her and look out for the bodies. They should all be dead, but you never know.”
Beth rushed through the chapel, drawing her daggers before she went through the open door that she thought should lead to an open-air landing outside.
A rough man looked up at her entrance and grinned. Then his eyes flicked to the figures following after her and his eyebrows went up with interest. “That her?” he asked, his chin tilted at Bel. “Who’s the boy?”
“That’s her,” Beth responded. She hadn’t bothered learning the giant man’s name, although she did remember him going on and on about revenge for his family or something similar. It wasn’t that she didn’t sympathize, she just didn’t have room in her heart to care about every person’s particular grievance with Technis.
“You were supposed to wait,” she accused him.
He spat to the side. “Some prick looked over the edge, so we had to rush ’em. Marcus collapsed the front doors. We should have some time.”
Beth grunted in irritation. Marcus – he was one of the ones that she didn’t trust. She guessed that the angry man has probably flown off the handle like a poorly made axe head and attacked at his first opportunity.
“Are the ropes set up?”
“Yeah, your water exit’s secure.” The large man shrugged his shoulders as he tapped his large, spiked hammer against the ground. He squinted at the two figures behind her. “Is that girl really worth it?” he asked. She could see the faint spark of hope in his eyes.
Beth glanced back at the snake-headed girl. She was currently marveling at the sky, saying some nonsense to James about the clouds.
“I don’t know,” Beth answered, “but this is where the forbidden gods have lead us.”
He snorted. “I don’t put much faith in any god.”
“Well, how else do you want to fight Technis? It takes a god to kill a god.”
He snorted again. Truly a man of many words, Beth thought.
She turned to the two former prisoners. “Come on kids, we’ve got some climbing to do.”
James tugged on Bel’s hand. The jaded assassin almost laughed when she saw him leading Bel in a large circle around the scary warrior.
Beth’s head snapped back at the sound of smashing stone from behind her.
“Shit,” the warrior cursed. “I guess I’ll get to give those gods a piece of my mind soon enough. I’ll hold ’em at the door, you get the girl out of here.”
Beth nodded. “May Durak guide your soul.”
The man laughed. “God of vengeance, huh? Think he likes heroic last stands?”
Beth barked a bitter laugh. “It’s worth a quick prayer”
She grabbed James and Bel by their shoulders, hurrying them over to the cliff edge.
“Whoah, shouldn’t there be a safety railing or something?” James balked.
“Shut it,” Beth spat. “Grab onto the rope, we’ve got to go fast. There’ll be a few ledges on the way down to rest and switch lines. I’ll be following behind and cutting them short.”
Beth harried the two down the ropes, cursing at them whenever they slowed. She could feel death breathing down the back of her neck as they went.
Every time her two charges fell to a small ledge, Beth paused to rub some of her transmuted blood onto the thick rope. She couldn’t make acid strong enough to eat straight through the material, but that was okay – she was still on the rope after all – she just wanted it to fail if a group followed after them.
Beth was certain that she looked like a maniac by the time she forced the two into the water and hauled them into her boat, but she didn’t care about their wide-eyed glances. She could play nice later – once they weren’t all about to die. Rather than haul up the anchor, Beth cut through the rope and immediately rowed out to sea.
The moment Beth stopped yelling at her, the young girl started pointing and shouting about everything around them.
“Look James, there’s so much water!”
“It’s an ocean, Bel.”
“It’s so big! Does it turn into the sky over there?”
“No, the sky is above us, and the ocean is below. They’re separate.”
“But look, what’s that?”
James turned where Bel was pointing. “That’s a…what the hell is that?”
Beth looked over her shoulder before looking back at the boy’s confused expression. “That’s Technis’ Barrier. Don’t tell me that you’ve never been outside of the dungeon either?”
James shook his head, but his eyes remained locked on the shimmering blue of Technis’ Barrier, unblemished by cloud or wave. “What is it?” he asked.
Beth squinted at him, wondering if the priests had done something to his head. “It’s Technis’ Barrier,” she repeated. “It’s what keeps everyone who’s in Satrap in line. Without it, all the monsters would get into Satrap and kill us all – or at least that’s the story told by Technis’ priests.”
“What’s Satrap? Is that where we are?”
Beth laughed. “Yes. We’re in Satrap. How can you not know that? Were you imprisoned your entire life?”
James shook his head slowly. “I’ve been outside, but… in my world nothing like this exists.”
Bel shrieked and almost pulled James over the edge of the boat in her excitement. “Look! Look, James, a thing – a, a fish! Look at the fishes!”
Beth shook her head. She didn’t know what the gods had planned for the girl, but right now she seemed nothing more than an overeager child.