While the two older men crept slowly downward, Puck released the illusion of the pit. In the darkness, it hardly mattered. To keep the boy from “escaping” and drawing the others back from their path, he tried one of his new spells.
The phantom of pain and sensations of shattered bones fade,
Draw the eye’s thick curtains closed so this mortal may dream until the break of day.
As the dungeon sprite closed the couplet, mana wrapped the youth in a soft blanket of energy and his tense form relaxed into the floor and began to snore softly. Puck landed on the floor and very dramatically stepped over the sleeping body as though it were a great inconvenience, then followed after the men. It was time to see what exactly a dungeon boss could do.
Unaware their progress was being observed, Duncan and Stewart followed the glow down. They paused in the soft light as the doors to Puck’s main room came into sight.
“Ah, Stewart, what do you make o’ this?” Duncan asked in a hushed voice. “Seems strange.” He coughed as quietly as he could. The moist cave air bothered his throat.
Stewart had served with a contingent of dwarven warriors when he was a soldier in the King’s Army. They had been tasked with holding a little used mountain pass between the Kingdom of Traven and the Al-Gazhir desert. A small kobold incursion had risen up from caves in the region as nomadic desert tribes had forced them out out of their traditional haunts during a particularly hot period. The dwarves had worn armor wrought with shapes and symbols and scenes depicting battles they had taken part in, both victories and tragedies to be remembered. The more accomplished the dwarf, the more decorated his or her armor. The doors appeared to be a much older version of that style.
“I think this be a lost dwarven place,” the hunter answered his companion.
“Why do you say lost?” the guardsman asked.
“Tis dark, except for this strange light. And no dwarf would let a gob live long enough to see these doors.”
“Do you think it’ll be dangerous?”
“No more dangerous than huntin’ gobbies in the dark.” Stewart stated dryly.
“Good point. Do you there’s a city behind the doors?”
“I donnae think so. I donnae think dwarf cities have wild caves for halls. Could be a backdoor though.”
“Suppose we should stop gabbin’ and find out, eh?”
“Aye. Lead the way,” the hunter said with a nod.
Duncan moved cautiously, but upright, only ducking to get his head beneath the doorframe. Stewart crouched and made his way forward with more stealth. Both men had their weapons at the ready. Puck trailed unseen behind them.
The guardsman slipped to the side, in awe of the room and the glowing ball of light that floated in the air. He could see no goblins. Stewart slipped in beside him and cast his gaze about the shadows, but saw no traces of the monsters either.
“No gobs I can see, boss. What do you think that is?” Stewart asked, nodding toward the ball of light bobbing mid air near the center of the room. He kept an arrow knocked.
“No idea. Looks like one o’ those will o’ wisps my grandpa used to tell stories about, but no one ever gets this close to them in the tales. You ever heard o’ dwarves with magic lights like that?”
“Nay, the dwarves I ken donnae have such.”
The two men inched their way further into the room, entranced with the light, oblivious to its sentience or the slight spirit that had slipped into the room after them. When they were far enough in, Puck moved off to the right and whispered another glamour spell.
Time, like a river, ever forward flows,
The path behind every man comes with a door that will with every footstep close.
A loud grinding sound echoed through the room and up the tunnel. The heavy dwarven door closed with bang of finality. When the humans glanced back it now appeared be set in the wall five feet to the left of where they had actually entered. They ran to it, trying to pry it open, but found they could not get a good enough grip to assert the kind of strength they needed. Puck watched as they scrambled and cursed, the man in chainmail scraping at a stone wall to no avail while the hunter worked his hands against the closed side of the actual door, pull at it at an angle that would never cause it to open. He laughed aloud at the weakness of their clouded minds and they froze.
“What was that?” Duncan asked.
“Goblin?” Stewart asked in reply, raising his bow and beginning to draw.
“You see anything?”
“What’s that over there?” Stewart asked, noticing a short, barely glowing form to one side.
“Deal with them, Mab,” Puck ordered aloud.
-Yes, Milord,- the Dungeon Spirit Wisp responded as she began to gather mana into a spell. As she did, she began to glow brighter. After a few seconds a ghostly blue shape shot across the room and attached itself to the archer’s chest. Half the size of his torso, a gently glowing incorporeal leech had attached itself to the man through his leather jerkin and azure light coruscated from its mouth to tail once a second. Though the leech caused no damage to his flesh, the man began to panic. Stewart dropped his bow as he started scraping at his chest, screaming, “Get it off, get if off, get it off!”
Duncan was at a loss. The blue glowing light was clearly more than they had thought it was, and some kind of small creature that may or may not be a goblin was in the room with them. Stewart, normally the most level-headed man he knew, was screaming like a child. Duncan was a simple man, who solved most of his problems with a gruff authority or a sword. Giant will o’ wisps, ghost leeches, magically closing doors, and ethereal monsters were beyond his ken.
“I think it’s eatin’ my soul!” Stewart yelled as he tried to crush the leech against the wall to no avail.
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Mab began to glow again and another leech sped away from her, attaching itself to Duncan at the shoulder and neck. The light that began to pulse from its head to tail was weaker and slower than the light from the leech attached to the hunter. Duncan could feel the thing as if it were physically connected to something under the skin. The sensation was unpleasant, but it wasn’t exactly pain, and it didn’t seem to do anything. Making up his mind, he did the only thing he could think of, and with his sword raised over his head he charged the ball of light. Just as he closed on it and swung, it shot up to the ceiling, just out of reach.
“Stewart, there’s nothin’ wrong with you. It can’t really hurt you!” Duncan shouted in frustration at the panicked archer. “Just get your bow and shoot the fuckin’ wisp!”
Duncan’s words were ineffectual at first, but with continued shouting and direction, the frightened man finally came to his senses. Stewart’s eyes were still wild with fear as he leaned down to scoop up his bow. The wisp grew bright again, brighter than the time before. Magic seeped into the hunter’s muscles, his grasp on his bow tightening and becoming clawlike. Every part of his body clamped down at once, and he discovered he could no longer will himself to move. Unable to adjust for balance, he fell over. His head smacked against the stone. Pain shot through his skull, but he had been crouched down already, so he hadn’t fallen far enough to do much damage. Or so he thought. He could still feel everything, his muscles were simply so taut he could not move. In his peripheral, the blue leech continued to drain away whatever it was feeding on.
Puck, who stood off to the side watching the events, was enjoying the show immensely. There was only one problem and he wasn’t certain how to handle it. Short of tricking the humans into killing each other as he had done with the goblins, neither Mab nor Puck had any deadly abilities. With two humans incapacitated and the other helpless to accomplish anything, Puck pulled up his status scroll to review it and come up with ideas.
Name: Puck, Robin Goodfellow, Merry Wanderer of the Night
Level: 5 Classification: Fae Dungeon
Bonds: 0 Fauna: 7 Flora: 2 Rooms: 2
Abilities: Command Lesser Fae, Illusion III, Metawell I, Compulsion I, Potions 1
Spells: Glamour, Sleep, Charm
Treasure: Noble’s Mahogany Bed, Goblin Loincloth, Goblin Short Sword, Bone Mace, Torch, Human Short Sword
Name: Mab
Level: 4 Classification: Dungeon Spirit Wisp [Boss]
Bonds: 0 Fauna: 1 Flora: 0
Abilities: Conjure Creature, Summons I, Improved Metawell I, Command Lesser Fae
Spells: Paralyze, Fae Flames, Cancel Magic, Mana Leech.
He saw nothing that gave him any ideas. As the scrolls faded from his consciousness he found the human in metal armor approaching him with his sword ready. Puck skipped backward, startled, and spit out another Sleep spell.
Too much excitement drains the body’s well,
Rest, Human, for a minute’s spell.
As the human crumpled to the ground, Puck recognized with a sigh that the spell had not been his best work. For providing as much entertainment as they had, particularly on what he intended to be their last day breathing, he felt they deserved better. But he had been in a hurry, so the occasional sloppy rhyme was forgivable. He smiled, content with himself again as the man tossed and turned on the floor, apparently suffering at the hand of troubled dreams. All humans temporarily neutralized, he went back to figuring out his puzzle.
“Mab,” Puck asked, approaching her. “What happens if you touch one of the humans?”
-I believe I am a condensed mana form of pure energy, Milord. To exist as such, it seems to me that I must create a significant amount of heat.-
Puck pondered that. “So you’re a living fireball?” he asked.
-If you’re referring to the Ball of Flame spell, I don’t believe I explode,” she answered.
Clearly, Puck thought, pedanticism was a racial trait, even in evolved Dungeon Pixies.
“Could you kill one of the humans if you touched it?” he asked.
-It is possible, Milord. But I would have to be able to reach one, and I am still quite trapped,- she replied.
“Quite,” Puck agreed, not having gotten very far in his nefarious plan to absorb these humans.
The dungeon was completely unaware that his side of the dialogue was being overheard by Stewart, whose skeletal muscles were frozen but ears and eyes were working just fine. The hunter watched the small ghostly being walk in and out of his line of sight, holding a conversation with the glowing ball of light while receiving no answer in return. Stewart was not a happy man. He had signed up to hunt goblins, not lay on cold stone unable to move while a mad ghost child talked to a magic light that spit out leeches that ate your soul. There was demonic magic at work here, he was certain. If he got out of this alive, he was going straight to the church.
Puck on the other hand, finally had had an idea. It wasn’t a pretty one, but he thought it would work. It was time to summon his first treasure.
A pine in high summer heat, a tool to give man light,
Bearer of flame hungry for darkness, wood and fire to feed on night.
A small portion of his mana left his metawell and condensed into a lit torch lying on the ground next to the hunter. It lay against one sleeve of the shirt beneath his leather jerkin. Slowly, the flame it caught his damp and sweat soaked clothes as the man lay still, completely unable to move. The part of his sleeve closest to the flame smoldered, burning away a large hole. The skin next to it blistered as it burnt. Stewart would have screamed, but not even his throat would function correctly. Puck, Mab, and Stewart all waited expectantly for the man to burn alive. To the surprise of all three, the flame eating away at the cloth sputtered and died.
The three conscious beings were all still and silent, while the torch sparked and smoked and spit. It quickly burned down to the point it no longer was more than warm on the human’s arm. Stewart felt his first muscle begin to twitch.
Puck went back to the drawing board.