---Maddy---
Stepping past the curtain, Maddy and her two friends blinked as they found themselves in an oppressive-looking room. Directly in the middle of the chamber, a massive Steele sat covered in archaic looking writing.
Crumbling letters carved into stone and weathered by countless years – as soon as they set eyes on this artifact, a blue box slid into view in front of each of them.
The surroundings were a light grey stone covered in marbled lines of blue and all sign of the floating city and rules against looking down were gone. The group finished making sure the room looked safe then read the message they had been sent by the dungeon.
The watchful eye of fate.
You who have entered fates domain rejoice. Today you are lucky enough to discover just how strong the grand designs you have been ignoring really are. Fate's Auditor keeps a careful eye on the weaves of destiny, and all’s position in it. Noncompliance with the grand design will result in pruning.
Ignorance of destiny is no excuse for actions against it. Fate is the most benevolent god however! Tools have been provided such that all may know the future. The holy rune inscribed near the bottom of this note is a start, but alternatives may be hidden should his lord’s teachings not reach you. Drink of the lesson held partway through the passage if you wish to survive the days to come.
In fate we trust.
Near the bottom of the Steele a single symbol stood out prominently. It was a complicated rune with what looked like an hourglass in the middle and two eyes on the sides each blending into their own hourglass. Not terribly complicated in terms of a drawing but annoyingly detailed in comparison to most runes Maddy had to deal with. Not only was there plenty of separate lines but notches about the outside. Either those evenly marked lines were part of the rune…or what Maddy was guessing they were an exact ratio that needed to be followed between different parts. What happened if you didn’t draw the rune perfectly or why the ratios mattered was unclear but…might as well copy this down while she could?
Pulling out a wooden slate, Maddy quickly sketched and set the rune before the group continued on.
Carefully they stepped down the hallway. Jess led the way her glowing golden shield held at the ready.
Just a buff Maddy had designed to help turn a shield into a torch, nothing special or expensive although it did combine with the floating shield shaped barrier in a pleasing way.
They didn’t have long before they reached the ‘pool’. A stone pedestal covered in swirling patterns connected to the same rune they had seen near the entrance.
“Are we drinking this? How much do we trust the dungeon and how likely is it to be poison” Jess spoke staring down into the water below.
“Feel like ignoring the dungeons commandments is a bad place to start the delve off on,” Maddy responded after a small pause.
“Alright, I’ll drink – heal me if its poison” Jess spoke then cupped her hands together and plunged them into the pool below. Pulling them up she drank, then tilted her head to the side. “Tastes ashy, like a barbeque? Don’t think the water is very clean,” She relayed. Jess continued to think eyes moving about herself and the surroundings as she tried to figure out the effects of the potion.
After a moment she jumped back slightly then stepped forward and pushed a thin wall into being in front of them the barrier sealing off the entire corridor.
“Do you see that?” Jess whispered pointing ahead.
Maddy didn’t see anything. Flicking mana into her mind, she shifted through light and dark then life and death but continued to see nothing but an empty passage ahead.
“No…What do you see?” Maddy asked carefully looking at her friend.
“Us… we are slowly walking away” Jess responded slowly eyes tracking some invisible illusion.
Maddy weighed her options then looked at Troy and nodded. He reached towards the bowl but she stopped him quickly. "I'll drink as well, stay our sober driver alright?" Maddy joked. Troy stopped, nodded and then as if trying to be better about his verbalization problem responded. "if thats alcohol I don't think I want the responsibility of getting stuck with two drunk chicks. I think you would be the most responsible DD. As party introvert I call the mind altering-"
Maddy stuck her tongue out and drank quickly causing him to laugh and trail off. He was getting better at talking – less and less worried he would say something to drive them away.
It was a good look on him.
Maddy looked about about for this supposed illusion only Jess could see. If they had the same hallucination there was a better chance of it not simply being a random hallucinogenic after all.
Slowly in the completely empty hallway a swirl of smoke began to cover the floor appearing from thin air and swirling about the ground. Three figures pushed up out of the smoke and solidified slightly – their colors matching the trio.
The three smoky figures seemed to be looking at something in front of them as they walked – and as they continued down the hall the real group followed, tracking their movements.
After around a hundred steps the misty trio stopped dead. They waited a second then jumped back quickly as directly ahead of them the smoke shook.
The real group paused to see what had happened and after a few seconds of no longer walking, the passage directly in front of them fell like a trash compactor – the reverberating crash of stone on stone loud enough to make Maddy’s ears hurt.
If they had continued blindly walking forward they would have been squished. Could Jess have defended against that? Probably not.
So…the smoky apparitions had shown them the trap? Had they been shown the future?
Slowly the passage in front of them raised up again – sliding into the ceiling above.
After nodding the misty version of Jess seemed to say something. This was followed by Maddy’s ghost nodding and responding. They then walked down the passage unharmed disappearing slightly as they faded with each step.
“So…do we follow them?” Jess asked.
The group stood there for a second as an ominous feeling began creeping up on them.
Maddy nodded after a hesitant pause. “It seems so. This…was the tutorial I guess? A lesson the stone writing said.”
The group continued blindly following their future selves down the hall. As soon as they started to move, the ominous feeling disappeared like it had never existed at all. Just less than a hundred feet later and the canaries were gone.
Another bend in the stone passage and suddenly everything opened up.
The group stepped out into sunlight and stared about in awe.
“Is…is this really a dungeon?” Jess breathed.
…
The group had exited what looked like a cave mouth, the mountain behind them trailing up into the clouds in a sheer cliff face. It was so high the upper edge of the cliff faded away into blue, almost melting into the sky itself. Distant dots swirled about as if birds or dragons or something were flying a kilometer or two up – and the entire wall looked steep and slippery with no means to climb it.
Directly in front of them was a field of grass and a few hundred feet away they could see the edge of what looked like a village.
On one side of the village a forest of short trees extended out as far as the eye could see – not comedically short, but small for trees, the tops of the pine and oak styled trunks only a few feet higher than Maddy’s head. The other direction held several farmlands the endless rows of wheat and strange purple vegetables disappearing out of sight they were so long.
Walking towards the village the group maintained a careful lookout while trying to consider what they had learned.
“So…from what I can tell, stuff will happen and the only way we can react to it is by seeing the future?” Jess asked as they walked.
“…yes.” Maddy responded then tilted her head slightly. “We were given a rune and…It shouldn’t be able to do anything. I’m the one who works with actual runes but this isn’t mine. Runes are personal things right? Even if I draw this perfectly it shouldn’t do anything – just be a pretty picture. It still feels like the dungeon hinted I should try so… Want me to try using it to knock it off the list? I can test it out before we get too far and then if it doesn’t work well…well I’m going to assume we need to bring this drawing to someone who can help us? First step in the dungeon might be finding someone in the village who can use this rune.” Maddy went through her thoughts out loud stopping to stand in the middle of the path. Directly in front of them a small wooden fence wrapped around the village – not one that could prevent much from getting through it almost looked like it was falling apart with age. Nothing more than a boundary line around the village.
Her two friends stood guard glancing about and fingering their weapons as they waited. It was slightly ominious – the sun was bright and the surroundings cheerful but the town in front of them seemed cast in shadows despite that. A low murmur and the sound of people talking reached their ears from deep in the village but beyond that it looked almost empty.
Maddy crouched and – rather than potentially mess up her quick sketch – pulled out a second slate and began to carefully copy down the rune. She made sure to keep the ratios the same and fill in every line no matter how meaningless it might be.
When using her own concepts she could feel a slight resonance when she drew them. A slight feedback that ‘this was correct’ ‘this is a concept yes’. Copying this sketch down…it gave her nothing. That was one of the main reasons she assumed it wouldn’t work – unlike all her system given concepts the rune gave her nothing.
Once she finished sketching, Maddy added a simple sentence to the side and began pushing light mana towards the spell.
“With light and this copied rune, please reveal the future if you can.” Maddy evocated. Her spell was as noncomited as she was and she really didn't expect it to work.
Glowing slightly the slate accepted her mana but did not do anything else.
Welp, it was good to check before dismissing that.
Maddy moved to drop the spell but then paused as what looked like her shadow shifted.
When dropping the spell, her light mana relaxed as it faded to the default neutral. A fade from +1 down to zero the fade mixing with the -1 of dark mana. In that second of fade something had happened.
Flickering to dark mana quickly before the spell completely ended, Maddy pushed her mana in the other direction and saw her shadow begin to step away – even as it faded to nothing as if banished by the lack of light.
…dark mana worked better than light mana for 'some reason' and yet the concept of light was what allowed her to say ‘reveal’ and hope the idea of light shining and illuminating the darkness would help…
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Dark mana didn’t work like that. The idea of darkness did not seem like something you would use for sight and the innate concept of darkness broke the implicit sight concept of light because of that. The fuel was correct but the structure broke…
And yet it 'had' worked slightly – at least it did do 'something' before it failed…Maddy had been expecting nothing at all.
“Sorry, give me a bit longer” She called to her friends and went back to looking at her sheet.
Wiping away the short sentence she tapped her fingers slightly and then began sketching lines and arrows about, adding and erasing words as she thought and ‘designed’ a new spell. Maddy could only push a pool in one direction at once – the idea of drawing light and dark from the same pool was fundamentally impossible with what she knew and felt from mana. She could pull out mana completely balanced between the sides – neutral ‘zero’ mana but that pure mana had neither light nor dark in it and was as weak as water.
She could try to pull out some light mana, cut it off from her pool and hold it from decaying…then pull out dark mana and use that as well…but that might not work after she’d put in the practice to do the exact opposite of that. Her seed spell flipped her mana after it was already in play after all – the spell turning into a damage or life portion as she shifted its alignment outside of her body. Besides – even if this idea of shifting and then pulling out the opposite alignment might work Maddy had a easier option available.
Making two separate sections on the sheet, Maddy took a deep breath and pushed light mana into the revealing portion – she drew an eye and imagined the shape of the eyes she had already spent ages designing for her scouts.
Then, pulling dark-life from her second pool, she directed the opposite mana through the other section of the spell. A river of deep greenish mana swirled and pooled as it passed through the hourglass eye and deposited itself in her eye drawing. An illusion of a lifelike eye flickered as light mana flashed through the viewing portion of the spell and then coated the darklife inner eye.
This whole working pulled and twisted. The wood she was using for a sheet of paper jerked and bunched slightly, the living darkness pulled it up into itself. The inner eye almost looked like it was trying to hide under the light.
This whole spell dragged at Maddy. She felt both her light pool and her darklife pool rush and strain to complete the working – dragging every last drop to achieve its purpose.
Maddy mentally sighed but didn’t stop the pull allowing the spell to complete with as much fuel as possible. In only a few seconds the spell finished and Maddy stared down at her handy work. A single glowing eye appearing to grow out of the wood – behind its lid swirling sand fell and rose in the pupil.
The basis of this spell was Maddy’s sentry template using the more disorienting version where she could link her sight instead of being told what the eye saw. Closing her ‘real’ eyes Maddy trickled the last scraps of her darklife mana into her mind. As soon as the mana activated her foundation her perception shifted. She could see the tether of her spell floating to a previously unknown part of her and down to the board in front of her. Mentally grabbing that tether and dragging it more purposfully towards her ‘mind’ Maddy felt the tether connect and begin dumping information.
A second was all it took for her mind to being parsing the feedback and soon a view of the world pulled itself into being. A view from a lowered perspective – the view of her own body from a disorienting upward angle.
Maddy opened her ‘real’ eyes. Her mind didn’t have any trouble dealing with the multiple perspectives its only problem had been how disorienting the location had been. Having her normal vision helped her mind sort the second vision as ‘other’ and soon the disorientation faded.
Twisting her wooden panel about like she was holding a camera Maddy saw Jess, Troy and then herself.
…herself. Spinning it forward she saw the 'her' holding the panel and spinning it back she saw the 'her' standing across from her.
As soon as she accepted that mirrored version of her was not her body it faded slightly turning from solid to a wavering illusion. Maddy watched herself flicker and move just barely there.
This mirrored image of her seemed to be trying to tell Maddy something.
I wish I knew sign language. Am I really this bad at conveying my thoughts through gestures?
This other Maddy made some movements as if pulling out her own invisible board and began sketching quickly with a slight squint of concentration. Rubbing her fingers across the invisible slate this other Maddy activated a spell and suddenly a blue box appeared – but not a standard one.
This blue box wavered and flickered rapidly – as if just under the water of a pool someone was dropping rocks into.
It was also only visible using her current spell – the box appearing in her magic eye but not her normal ones.
We don’t have much time. Do not under any circumstances let Jess try and crash the wedding that’s currently happening. You can’t let her die with a fate correction. I’ll add what I remember being added to your spell but you need to fix it as well. In the next few days being able to hear the destined whispers is vital. Also swap the mana order to light-life inner workings and dark mana outsides. You’ll thank yourself later.
As Maddy read the note to herself, future her stepped forward and with an intense look of focus sketched something on the board Maddy was holding up.
In less time than Maddy needed, the mana broke apart and her spell faded. Blinking back to her regular sight she looked down on the board.
The eye had broken but the board remained warped by her magic. Her drawn runes and shaping text looked different from what she had written – both because of the ‘paper’ being scrunched but also because of the added sections.
What looked like faint aged lines completely covered the ancient wooded paper equivalent. Most looked like squiggles but quite a few looked like backward words or purposeful runes Maddy had never seen before. Mirrored sentences and arrows and dashes – it looked like more than should have been added in such a short amount of time. The additions were thick.
“Did something happen?” Jess asked her leaning in slightly to look at the squiggles. Maddy would have jumped if a portion of her attention hadn’t been watching the surroundings – as is she paused as her mind flickered and tried to sync with the portion that had been focusing on her friends.
“Yes…I’m supposed to tell you not to stop the wedding from happening.” Maddy responded tracing the letters. The way the wood was warped looked ever so slightly like how she could ‘kill’ wood with death mana…but warped somehow by the passage through time? The words looked like old scar wounds or strange wooden birthmarks. Leaving a faint part of her attention to focus on studying the spell the majority of Maddy focused on her friends with a smile as she gestured to continue on.
“What wedding? Why would I want to stop it?” Jess asked as she stepped into the village proper.
“No clue, its probably happening in the town. Want to go check it out?” Maddy responded.
“I’ll follow from the roof.” Troy muttered. The archer bent his legs and jumped – somehow landing on the edge of the roof above then scrambling to a position near the top.
Not knowing exactly what was happening, the pair watched their friend hop to another roof out of sight and then stepped through the gate and began to follow.
Maddy fingered the side of her robes mentally urging her two spent pools to refill. She had a whole pool of life and death mana she could use to heal or attack with and was holding a finger to the relevant attack spells as they continued on.
The path went between two houses and then bisected a road of sorts wrapping around to the side. Turning the group walked along the cobblestones stopping only to watch what looked like a small child covered in a cloak run out of a building.
They watched in tense silence as the small clocked figure used chalk to draw a scribbly circle on the cobblestones and then run away.
“Don’t step in the circle” Maddy said after a moment. “That could be one of the dungeon monsters…the circle looks like its just a scribble but it could be a trap.”
“You’re the boss.” Jess stopped her steps towards the circle and the pair continued on down the curving street spotting and avoiding a second and third chalk circle as they walked.
The sound of people talking rose as they grew closer to the village center. Soon the backs of ‘human’ heads became visible; a crowd of figures standing around a sort of stage in the village center.
The heads…looked off.
As Maddy grew closer and could see both the sides and fronts of some of these ‘people’s’ heads she narrowed in on what felt off about them. It felt racist to admit they didn’t seem human with just a few changes but Maddy was punched with an uncanny valley when observing the characters in front of her.
The group was humanoid in all senses of the word but several things were ‘off’ in a slight way. Their eyes were slightly too big – not quite anime exaggeration levels but far larger than felt real based on any human Maddy had seen before. Their average height was lower than most people but not in a exaggerated way – most of the figures were 5’ tall several closer to 4’-6” making Maddy taller than all but a few of the tallest people.
Their heads were large in a not quite exaggerated way but because of their smaller size the effect gave everyone a slight bobblehead look. Finally everyone had thin hands longer than Maddy was used to. Not enough to be alien in shape – just enough that it stood out as different than ‘normal’.
Besides those very slight but significant traits the figures looked ‘normal’. Something Maddy did note was how varied their skin tones were – not because any of the skin tones were weird on their own but because of how varied they were for what looked like a medieval village.
For such a small village the fact that no two people had the same skin tone – everyone tinted a shade of bronze or pink, yellow or gold, dark brown or black…it felt strange in a period sort of way. It was like a tv series was attempting to show multiculturalism at the cost of ‘period’ accuracy or – more accurately like the village had been founded by people from all areas of the world.
The crowd wore simple dresses and old fashioned looking suits, while on the stage a woman in a brilliant grey and sparkling outfit stood. Directly behind her was a tall woman with a top hat – tall for both the ‘short’ race as well as tall for regular humans she towered in at at least 6’-6”. On the same stage a blacksmith and nervous looking man stood near the back wiping a cloth nervously across his hammer.
The sparkling dress women was held gently but firmly by the top hat women. This bride looked…somewhat forced into this wedding if Maddy had to guess based on the surroundings. Her face had a pained looking smile and the arm being gripped by the top hat woman trembled slightly. The presumed groom tightened his robe and stepped forward to some polite whoops and shook fists from the crowd.
One or two villagers glanced at Maddy and Jess as they approached but seemed to pay them no mind as the wedding continued.
Maddy couldn’t understand a word being said but she got the gist of things. The top hat women was sort of like an officiant? There was a speech and then the groom responded and then another short speech.
Maddy wasn’t sure what the blacksmith was doing here yet. He sat slightly to the back wearing a dirty smock and spinning his hammer in a nervous fidget. To his side sat a large anvil and a sealed box.
With both hands raised the top hat woman’s voice changed – becoming deeper and almost fervent as she shouted a phrase at the sky.
Then the officiant pulled the unresisting bride towards the anvil beside her.
The box was carefully opened and its two items were held up high enough for the crowd to see. It was hard to fully tell without a closer look but there seemed to be a spiked gem and a simple metal ring? There was a deep green gem attached to what looked like a needle covered in tiny fishhook barbs.
Sliding the ring onto the brides hand, Maddy caught a glimpse of a single hole where the centerpiece should be.
…oh.
Placing the brides finger on the anvil then pulling the spiked gem around, the officient positioned it on top of the brides finger like a nail being driven into wood even as Maddy realized what was about to happen.
Raising his hammer with a grim expression on his face, the blacksmith nodded once to the top hat woman then with a flash stuck the gem down his hammer being swung with a practiced ease towards the gem nail.
The bride screamed.
Beside her, Maddy noticed Jess stepping forward and managed to reach out and hold her back.
“That’s messed up,” Jess whispered to her allowing herself to be held but only just. A hard glint was in her eyes and she flexed her hands as if she wanted to start throwing barriers everywhere.
Maddy nodded then continued to watch the proceedings.
The bride was no longer restrained – her wedding ring was properly nailed into her finger, blood trickling down her hand and onto the ground where she stood… but no one seemed to pay it or her any mind. The blacksmith seemed determined to wipe every last drop of blood off his hammer and anvil – an oily rag being rubbed over everything as fast as he could even as he dragged it off the stage.
Most of the crowd seemed excited but a few faces looked grim and resigned.
Pulling sticks of incense out of her pocket, the top hat woman walked about the stage and began to light the sticks carefully. Each stick when lit wafted a single thin line of smoke into the air and as the circle was complete it looked like a ring of pillars surrounded the stage.
The crowd grew still as they all tracked the woman in silence. As the ninth and final stick was lit a strange feeling began building in Maddy’s stomach.
The smoke swirled through the air on an invisible breeze the pillars warping and dispersing when the women began to hum. Maddy felt the barest twinge of recognition. A vague kinship with that hum – a sense of adjacent concepts that pulled her into and then rejected her. A use of sound and magic…
The woman’s eyes snapped shut then open – audibly snapped Maddy could hear it from her position in the back – and when they opened they were suddenly completely grey.
It looked like the officiant had rolled her eyes up into the top of her head but also made them clearer and filled them with smoke.
Hash words rose up into the air as the shaman spoke. It was hard to tell but it sounded almost like a different language this time her words following a guttural tone full of rasps and barks. Her top hat fell to the ground below her, causing all the hair that had been stuffed inside of it to unwrap and fall to the ground below.
The woman had hair all the way down to the ground – ashy crumpled grey hair that made her look old despite her face looking young.
With a snap the shaman loudly blinked once more and finished her prophecy – the crowd seeming relived by her words.
Looking incredibly tired the woman bent to pick up her fallen top hat and began slowly winding her hair up and shoving it into the hat before flipping it back onto her head.
“What’s happening?” Jess muttered and Maddy shook her head.
“I know. We…we need some way of translating what they are saying soon. I feel like we just missed something important.”
“Important lore for the dungeon.” Jess laughed a tense look on her face.
The wedding really had taken a lot out of her and Maddy felt that.
Maddy reached out and squeezed her hand. She knew Jess had made a point to say dungeon as if reminding herself this wasn’t real. Jess squeezed back her grip much tighter than Maddy’s had been.
The two watched in silence as the defeated looking bride was led away by her new husband and the crowd began to disperse.
Seeming to slip almost magically through the crowd the top hat woman appeared in front of them without saying anything and beckoned the pair to follow her.
Glancing at one another and surreptitiously noting Troy training his bow on them from the roof, the two agreed.
This dungeon...was definitely going to be different than the combat focused one they had been grinding the past few days.
Only time would tell if that was a good or bad thing.