“Anyone want a drink before we start?” Aaron asked, holding open the fridge door so the three delvers could see inside.
Only Kiara declined and he spent a minute pouring soft drinks for Albert, Griffin, and himself. After the drinks were on the table and Aaron had taken a seat, Albert gave his cup a flick with one finger.
“Didn’t Griff talk you into buying a bunch of nice glassware?” he asked.
Aaron waved towards the communal area, where most of his new clothes were piled on the couch and numerous boxes had been stacked around the room.
“I’ve been so busy with all this magic and memory stuff in the evenings I haven’t had time to unpack everything,” Aaron replied. “It didn’t seem all that important in comparison, you know? Especially since all that remodeling is happening soon. Anyways, tell me about these dungeons! That’s one of the wildest things I’ve heard about since this whole thing started.”
“You have no idea,” Albert said.
“Of course I don’t; isn’t that why we’re here?”
Griffin guffawed and smacked Albert on the back. “He got you there!”
Even Kiara smiled at the comeback — perhaps just glad to see Albert get verbally smacked around a little — but she quickly turned back to business.
“We talked about dungeons a little when we visited Ekwiyakink, but we didn’t even really scratch the surface,” she said.
“Nice,” Griffin said with a chuckle.
“Right. You said they were ruined or forgotten places that had monsters and treasure, like the old stories about the pyramids and stuff. And you mentioned something about echoes when we were talking to Barrett yesterday, unless I’m misremembering.”
“You’re not,” Kiara said. “Let’s take it from the top.”
“Nice,” Albert said, shooting her the finger guns.
“Enough from the peanut gallery, otherwise this will take forever,” she chastised her fellow delvers. “Dungeons are defined by two things: stratum and severity.”
“All this magic shit seems to have an awful lot of alliteration,” Aaron observed.
“It only really happens in modern English and, believe me, it takes a lot of work,” Griffin said. “Sometimes you can tell when generations of scholars have spent a long time trying to find a word that fits and either lowered their standards or just given up.”
Kiara huffed a sigh, raising her voice slightly. “As I was saying — dungeons are defined by two things: their stratum and their severity. Sometimes they’re called classification and complexity.”
“So that would be like their type and level if real life worked like some kind of video game, right?” Aaron asked.
“That’s basically right, yeah,” Kiara agreed.
“He’s some kinda mythic prodigy,” Albert said, clapping Aaron on the shoulder.
Griffin regarded Aaron more thoughtfully. “It’s sorta apparent from the terms, but what if you’re channeling some degree of inherited memory on eidolon society? Can you guess the letter that’s used in the next alliteration?”
“Well, I had definitely guessed there was going to be more alliteration, but a specific letter?” Aaron paused and gave it some thought.
No specific idea came to him as he did. Not as far as he could tell. Naturally, he considered using the Wheel of Fortune shortcut and picking one from R, S, T, L, N, or E, but that would have defeated the purpose of the exercise.
Although, now that he was thinking about it, there was something that might have been inspiration percolating in his mind. There was a letter that kept creeping into the edges of his thoughts more than any of the others. It seemed like it was worth a shot.
“Is it T?” he guessed.
Griffin’s lips puckered. “Ah, no. It’s C again, although it was kind of a trick question. The strata of dungeons — their type, like you said — are corporeal, conceptual, and portal.”
“I mean… It’s not really alliteration with just two words, is it?”
“That’s the trick,” Griffin replied.
“Hold on a second,” Kiara said. “He’s technically correct.”
“The best kind of correct,” Albert noted.
“The formal terms used for dungeon strata are temporal, transcendental, and threshold, all starting with T,” Kiara explained.
Griffin waved a hand in the air. “Okay, but who actually says it like that?”
“Scholars, you vapid dolt,” she spat back. “It’s the terminology used by anyone who seriously studies this stuff.”
“Those wads are all obsessed over theory,” Albert complained. “The people who put out guides that are actually practical don’t get all up their own asses with two dollar words. We’ve had this argument already.”
Kiara slapped the table. “And I agreed you two didn’t have to read those books to have the knowledge needed for our delving. That doesn’t mean Aaron is wrong, especially considering his most recent inherited memories would be over two hundred years old.”
Albert and Griffin shared a considering look, then the big man shrugged. “Okay, point. That’s fair.”
“So is anyone going to explain what these words mean?” Aaron asked. “Or do we keep playing guessing games? It’s not that I mind, I just feel out of my element and it would probably be easier to explain things directly.”
Kiara gave Albert and Griffin the stink eye before she continued her explanation.
A temporal, or corporeal, dungeon was the simplest and most common form dungeons took. They were physical places that had usually been built with some purpose in mind. Most of the ruins and monuments that Aaron was likely to think of when he thought of dungeons were — or had started as — temporal dungeons.
Transcendental, or conceptual, dungeons often formed naturally. They were usually contained in a dimensionally-altered physical space, but their nature was formed or influenced by some abstract idea, or sometimes more than one.
The last stratum, threshold and portal dungeons, were either incredibly rare in the modern era or outright extinct. They were said to lead to other dimensions, realities, or planes of existence. Stories about the afterlife, fae realms, and so on were thought to originate from threshold dungeons, despite the few credible surviving records all agreeing such dungeons weren’t very large.
“What about the echoes you mentioned?” Aaron asked.
“Echo dungeons,” Kiara said. “It’s possible they’re the last stable remnants of the thresholds, but most see them as a sub-type of the transcendental stratum. Simply put, they’re the echo of a specific event in history.”
“They’re like traveling through time?”
Kiara shook her head. “No, just a phantom of perception and pathos. They can be wildly inaccurate representations of what actually happened. Most echoes only cover a handful of days around their key event, but some can last for weeks. They’re still interesting and entertaining, not to mention profitable because of their severity.”
“Severity is their level,” Albert reminded Aaron.
“Right,” Kiara continued. “There are way too many different scales that try to measure severity, so we use four very broad categories based on a dungeon’s relation to aetheric currents.”
“Which you might know better as ‘ley lines,’” Griffin added.
“The simplest dungeons are artificial or temporary; they have little aether beyond what went into making them. Empowered dungeons draw power from a connection with an aetheric current. They usually start as constructs and grow over time. Nexus dungeons exist near the intersection of several aetheric currents. They can be built, but they’re naturally-occurring more often than not. The last are the endless dungeons, found on truly massive wells of aetheric power. They’re the rarest, as well as being the most perilous and profitable.”
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“She’s doing her own alliterations now,” Albert snickered.
Aaron held up two fingers. “Not enough words for proper alliteration.”
“That’s not a rule,” the smaller man groused.
“What about the dungeon we’re going to? It sounded like there’s more than one.”
“The place we’re going is downtown and it’s called the Buttonwood Gate,” Griffin said. “That’ll get us into a conceptual dungeon called the Well. There are three echoes that can be accessed from the bottom of the Well and that’s probably where we’ll spend most of our delve.”
Aaron looked between the three drakus, trying to find some hint of who was going to elaborate on that. After a few seconds, it became clear none of them were going to provide any more details, so he decided to press the issue.
“Surely that’s not all you’re going to tell me,” he said. “What should I expect in the Well? What time period are these echoes?”
The delvers shared an infuriating — no, not infuriating; just mildly annoying — smile between them. Albert mimed locking his lips and swallowing the key, then winked at him.
“We don’t want to spoil it with too many details,” Griffin said.
“Come on,” Aaron pleaded. “What am I, eight? You’re screwing with me, right?”
Kiara was the one to answer. “We’re not. We talked it over and we want you to experience the whole thing with fresh eyes. If you go in with a bunch of expectations, it could undermine the entire point of the exercise.”
“And that point is… ?”
“We can’t tell you that, either, because it might create expectations,” Kiara said.
“You’re shitting me,” Aaron complained. “That’s true of practically anything depending on how you look at it.”
“I know, right?” Albert said, smirking.
“What the hell happened to ‘forewarned is forearmed,’ you dicks?”
Aaron cajoled the delvers a while longer, but to no avail. Frustrated, Aaron decided to do a load of laundry as an excuse to shoo them out of the apartment. He wasn’t mad at them, not really. In fact, he recognized they probably had good reasons for keeping him in the dark about their upcoming delve. He was annoyed with them, nonetheless.
Besides, it was already five o’clock. There was only so much time available before Tia came by for more magic instruction. A little time to himself would be a welcome reprieve.
Up until he’d almost been assassinated a week earlier, Aaron had spent most of the previous year practically as a shut-in. All the socializing with Tia and the delvers was welcome and wonderful, but it was also a bit draining. Plus, there was also a teddy bear who needed — nay, demanded — a share of his attention.
He was able to spend nearly an hour playing with Baby Bear before Tia messaged him to arrange their nightly meeting. She had already made arrangements for dinner and showed up half an hour later laden with several reusable grocery bags filled with plastic bags from a dozen or more restaurants.
“It’s sticks and sacks night!” she declared, transferring the food to the dinette table.
“What the hell are ‘sticks and sacks?’”
The sticks turned out to be long, thin, rolled foods from different cuisines. Anything that vaguely resembled a stick, basically. Various egg and spring rolls made up the bulk of the options, but there were lumpia, flautas, and taquitos, as well. The sacks followed the same naming convention and were mostly different kinds of dumplings — potstickers and gyoza, pierogi, empanadas, samosas, gnocchi, and a host of others Aaron couldn’t identify. Tia had come well-prepared for such an odd meal, armed with an outlandish number of different sauces to go with the appetizers.
They spent the evening discussing magic, Aaron’s efforts to recover memories about the sceptre or the mysterious bluff-top manor, and anything else that came up. He tried to probe her for information about the dungeon, as well, but Tia knew even less than he did about them.
Baby Bear came and went as the mood struck him, sometimes just to observe and others to be a playful nuisance. They made arrangements for Bear to spend a few days in Tia’s apartment while Aaron was in the dungeon. Bear was reluctant to give up on having the apartment to himself until he learned other people would be in and out of the apartment for the remodeling.
After that, he was much more agreeable to staying with Tia. Better to spend time at her place than having to play possum for hours at a time or worrying about some worker being overcome with avarice and trying to steal him after they ‘beheld his cuteness.’
Alice stopped by later in the evening to double-check the protections she’d put in place. That included refreshing the various ingredients to be burned in the braziers — which Aaron had learned were effective enough to let him smoke inside if he wanted to — and making sure his hair was still affixed to the poppet in her oubliette of dreams.
Once she had departed to her perch on the roof, Aaron had a cigarette on the fire escape with the delvers, wished them good night, and went back inside to get ready for bed.
The imminent dungeon dive took pride of place in his thoughts as he lay down and spending time with Baby Bear was just the thing he needed to smooth over the rough edges of his nerves.
Besides, a good night’s sleep was just the thing to make sure he was rested and ready for whatever waited for him tomorrow beyond the Buttonwood Gate. Whatever the hell that was.
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Aaron stood in a small park. It was unlike any park he had ever been to, yet it was vaguely familiar.
A cobblestone path meandered through the park, wending this way and that, lined with small flower beds and well-trimmed grass.
Healthy trees — ash, oak, sycamore, willows, and the occasional pine; all trees he knew from home — grew as densely as their roots would allow. The canopy overhead cast the ground in green-tinged shadow, blocking enough light that the space between the trees was mostly free of large underbrush.
Lacking anything else to do, Aaron followed the path.
There was nothing to say he couldn’t venture out into the trees, but he couldn’t see a reason to do so. Without a purpose, leaving the path seemed rather, well, pointless. He could always explore later if he wanted to, but paths usually went somewhere and that could be worth exploring, too.
After a few minutes strolling through the cool shade of the foliage overhead, he reached a circular plaza fifty feet across. It was lined with low stone benches and more path radiated from the edges like the spokes of a wheel. He made his way around the plaza, looking down each of the paths in turn.
There were eight in total, if you included the one he’d arrived by, and they seemed to be laid out like the points of a compass. The four at what Aaron assumed were the cardinal directions were wider and their routes didn’t wind as much as the smaller lanes separating them.
They were so broad he could see all the way to where they ended, hundreds of feet away. Each of the broad roads ran into a pair of great, iron-banded wood doors. These doors were set into walls made of massive stones, placed with such precision even the mortar seemed uniform. They were the kind of walls you might see on an ancient castle.
Aaron knew what waited beyond those doors. He had no interest in going back into those hellish tunnels and dealing with whatever had been in there with him. He glanced instead up at the sky, visible only because the canopy didn’t encroach far beyond the edge of the plaza.
The velvet darkness of the night sky spread above him, an endless expanse of nothing. It was so vast it felt like the weight of it would pull him free of the ground if he looked too long. There were more stars in that sky than he’d ever seen, except perhaps for the time he’d gone to summer camp somewhere near the redwoods.
It was just the number of stars that was unusual. Something else about that black sky and its pinpoints of light was alien and strange. Aaron looked, trying to figure out what it was, for several long seconds. Then he felt a kind of weightlessness settle into his body and began to sway in place. He wrenched his eyes back to the earth before he could fall down or, worse, up.
That was nonsense, of course, and yet…
Aaron turned his attention back to the ground and the odd park around him. He had no interest in the main roads or the hassle beyond the doors at their end, but he was curious what he might find down the routes between them. There hadn’t been much to see on the one he’d followed to reach the plaza, but that didn’t mean they were all empty. He picked one of the ordinal paths at random and began walking.
After the first few slight twists in the path, it was like he was in an entirely different place. The trees had grown even closer together, their boughs lower and more dense. The shadows beneath the canopy were thicker and something like a chill had settled in the air.
Ahead, a small dirt path split off from the cobblestone. A small structure stood at its end, just twenty or so feet away from the paving stones. It was barely ten feet across and not much higher, made of dark stone crawling with ivy. A wrought iron fence, waist-high, surrounded the tiny building, and an ornate archway stood over the path.
Aaron knew the building was a crypt at first sight. It was the kind of iconic, stylized structure he’d seen in the digital graveyards of half a dozen video games or more. He knew there’d be a stairway leading down into the earth before he had stepped off the cobblestones and wasn’t disappointed when he got close enough to see past the pillars framing the crypt.
What he hadn’t expected to find was a staircase that was blocked. After descending only half a dozen steps, the stairs reached a landing where the path was barred by a strange round wooden door.
Any number of things could be waiting for him behind that unusual door. If this were a video game, anyways. He didn’t know if undead hordes or bestial monsters were even a thing in the new magic world he’d been thrust into. Would such creatures even pose a threat to the bullshit badassery dragons seemed to enjoy?
The most curious thing, however, was the door. It was the oddest door he’d ever seen. The shape reminded Aaron of a hobbit hole, like he’d seen in movies, yet that was where the similarities ended. He climbed down the stairs to examine it more closely.
Even without touching it, Aaron had the sense that the wood was rather… thin. Not that it was fragile or brittle, necessarily, but nothing like the sense of sturdiness he expected of a door as large as this one. It was more like the bedroom door of an apartment than the front door.
The whole thing had been made from a single piece of lumber, as well, instead of planks or boards worked together like you'd expect from a door as wide as it was tall. Aaron could actually see the splash of darker grain running across the entire thing. The tree needed to cut a piece of lumber that size must have been immense.
That still wasn’t the strangest thing about it.
The edge of the door — not the frame, but the edge of the door itself — had a thick, rounded lip running its entire circumference. Moreover, there was no handle or knob as far as Aaron could see. Instead, there were four evenly-spaced holes drilled right through the wood around its center.
It was the weirdest damn door Aaron had ever seen, yet it was also terribly familiar. He stood, staring at it for several minutes, trying to reconcile those two ideas. He scratched his head. He rubbed his chin. He even put his hands on his hips and rocked on the balls of his feet trying to figure it out.
Finally, he reached out to touch the edge of the door, curious if he could find a way to open it. As soon as his finger touched the smooth wooden lip of the door, he knew exactly what the door was and why it was so familiar. After all, hadn’t he been fiddling with the smaller cousins and siblings of the thing practically as long as he could walk?
“It’s a damn button,” he said incredulously. “A giant wooden button. What the hell is that about?”
He wanted to see if he could open the wood button door and find out what was in the crypt behind it, but he stopped short when his heart leapt into his throat. Up above, in the unusually spooky forest, something was coming through the underbrush. Leaves were crunching, twigs snapping, and, beneath all of that, he could hear the huffing of an animal’s breath. Whatever it was, it was coming fast.