Not wanting to be left alone, Serune had a strange notion.

If she could float and take her friends, they__’d need not fear the ocean.

Jumping on the wild idea they began to plan and think.

How can they make Serune a ship to sail atop the waves, and not fall below and sink?

They prayed to Assuine for wisdom, for guidance and her aid.

And at dawn the next day they all knew the knowledge for which they’d prayed.

The Sea Tree by Stelar Leafblossom

—

They raced through the dinning hall after Zale, gathering looks as they did. They’d come prepared for the PREVENT final, and as such all had their weapons and gear with them. The sight of a fully armored young woman was hard enough to miss without the antlered demonkin, dwarf, human, and quarter elf trailing behind.

“This way!” Zale said, leading them to the art building, their alarms still buzzing as they ran.

Zale led them through the front doors and immediately turned down a side hall. The receptionist at the front desk hadn’t expected an armed and armored woman to run at her this morning, and could be forgiven the shout of terror she let out at seeing Doug—a mighty and feared demonkin—following in her wake.

They ran down narrow halls to the basement of the building, down a familiar route Kole knew took them to the study hall room. Zale had provided them with a few locations of magical doors to her home across campus for them to meet at when alarms were raised so Kole had never thought to use the study hall as a route of entry.

Zale barreled through the musical instruments that filled the room, creating discordant clangs, twangs, and crashes as her armored form battered the fragile devices aside. Rakin and Doug followed closely in her wake as Kole trailed behind and Amara lagged even further back.

Kole ran right through the door into the study hall room, chairs and tables were strewn all across the floor of the room, but this didn’t register to Kole in his focus, and he jumped over those that he could and ran around those he couldn’t until he reached Zale’s home.

By the time Amara made it through the final door, Zale’s hand was on the handle ready to go, but then, the buzzing stopped.

“Flood!” Kole cursed, Amara and Rakin joining them with creative curses of their own.

What is a frass walker? He wondered, in response to Amara’s.

Then his mind caught up to the moment.

“What… happened… in there?” Kole asked between gasps, pointing back to the study hall room.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

All eyes turned back to it and grew wide as they too registered the chaos. The entire room was destroyed. Chairs and tables were everywhere, and daggers littered the floor, along with the dried remnants of dark liquids, some of which Kole was sure were blood.

Zale pulled her hand away from the door, taking the handle with it and the door vanished behind her. She ran out into the study hall chamber and her eyes scanned the room, everyone followed at their own paces relative to their levels of exhaustion.

“Look up!” Doug said, pointing.

Above, in the high ceilings of the room, large tangles of webbing covered the ceiling, and individual threads hung down from them of varying thicknesses.

“Here!” Rakin said, lifting a desk, revealing a spider the size of his head crushed beneath it.

“Runt!” Zale called out, holding a dagger up that she recognized.

She took off down a hall, following the trail of gore. The stains led out through one of the other doors in the room.

From the pattern of the chaos, it was clear that the fight had centered around that door, and it opened up into a hallway to another unused section of the Dahn. They ran past door after door, following the dripping blood and ooze from both the captured Runt and Spiders, finding smaller dead spiders whose bodies gave out on them as they went.

“Where does this lead?” Kole asked after they’d been following the trail for what felt like hours but had only been a few minutes.

“Who knows where anything in this damned place leads!” Rakin shouted in frustration.

Then, they smelled it. The stench that Kole knew he’d never forget. They all sniffed the air together and picked up their pace. The smell led them to the dormitory hall from the opposite end of the dining hall, and they followed it to the room they’d just left.

They burst into the room, expecting battle but found it just as they’d left it. Kole hadn’t looked at the room since Rakin had cleared it out, but there were new stains on the stone leading to the bare wall. These were much fresher than the rest, and Doug quickly pointed this out to everyone confirming his hunch.

“What do we do? Zale asked after they’d retreated from the stink.

“This doesn’t change anything,” Kole said.

“What? How?”

“They took Runt, because they needed her,” Rakin said, putting the pieces. “We took a Bond primal from them, so they took another. We just have to wait—“

There was a hissing sound, followed immediately by the resumed buzzing of the alarms. A tiny door popped into existence on the wall, and grey, stutteringly. Growing larger, then retracting in size before surging up again, as if someone was inflating a balloon while someone else tried unsuccessfully to suck the air out as it filled.

They all watched in awe as the door grew to the standard size for the Dahn’s magical doors, and it seemed to stabilize, but looking closely Kole saw the edges were shuttering.

“Its not stable!” he announced.

“What do we do?” Amara asked.

“Go through!” Zale said, not waiting for anyone to agree.

She pulled the door open, and leapt through, into the wide open prairie of their last dungeon trial. No one hesitated to follow her through, and as soon as Amara passed through the door, it vanished leaving them alone in an empty field, alarms still buzzing in their pockets.

“Can somebody turn that blasted sound off!” Rakin asked in a loud whisper.

“Why?” Kole asked.

“Because we’re not alone!” Rakin said, pointing to behind Kole, where a large tent encampment was visible, illuminated by the light of hundreds of magical floating flames.

Everyone dropped to the ground, laying flat in the prairie grass.

“Done,” Amara whispered, having done something to the detector to silence all the buzzing.

“What do we do?” A wide eyed Amara asked the others.

“Which way is it pointing?” Kole asked her.

It was easy to forget that the tracker had actually pointed to Amara’s sister this whole time, and not the portals itself.

In answer, she pointed straight at the camp.

Cursing ensued.