Riband Lake was north of Liberfell, and they elected to walk rather than sit in the garden stone while someone flew. This was in part to walk off the meal, and in part because it was a nice day, though with Isra around, it was almost always a nice day, save for when the garden needed some rain.
The conversation was light and pleasant, and Hannah ended up telling them all about Cairbre, which she didn’t mention all that often.
“Well, I left when I was still young, and I do have to say that the memory fades a bit.” She sighed. “It’s a cold place, but there’s less of a swing in the temperatures than there is in Pucklechurch. We had colder summers but warmer winters. It’s largely heather and gorse, with winter turnips and gelid potatoes for crops, and more sheep than the rest of the world combined, I’d wager. I wouldn’t say it’s a brutal place to live, but I’ve heard others say that, and I wouldn’t disagree too strongly. It’s rocky in most places, with only some scraggly trees that are holdin’ on for dear life. You can look at them and tell which way the pervailin’ winds blow.”
“You must miss it,” said Mizuki. She was walking along with her balance stick, which she seemed to use at even the slightest provocation.
“I think Cairbre is a good place to be from,” said Hannah. “I’m not so sure I’d ever move back, unless my parents were in ill health, or … I don’t know, some other such thing. I write to them less than I should, and now that we’re people of some means, I really should plan a trip, but I have quite a bit goin’ on in my life at the moment.”
“We could take a structured break,” said Alfric. “Scatter to the six winds, then come back together.”
“No way,” said Mizuki. “I want to go to Cairbre, once we have our own flying ship.”
“There’s no real point in a flying ship,” said Alfric. “They’re too slow compared to either a portal or a ley line.”
“Still. I want to meet Hannah’s family,” said Mizuki. “I haven’t met anyone’s family except Alfric’s, and then for not all that long.”
“You’re never going to meet my family,” said Isra. She said it without much emotion.
“You don’t think you’ve got a grandparent floating around out there?” asked Mizuki. “I mean, you might not, but you should have four of them, they can’t all be dead.”
“They could,” said Isra. “But they don’t know I exist, or if they do … they never contacted me.”
“You went hidin’ when people came by your cabin,” said Hannah. “Though I s’pose you couldn’t have been so good at it that someone would just give up, and I imagine they’d have asked around town. Either way, the mysteries of your life still do need to be resolved.”
“I don’t know that they do,” said Isra. “If I’m happy where I am, why does it matter?”
“I s’pose is doesn’t,” said Hannah. “Who am I to tell someone that they need to delve into family history they don’t care about?” She was a cleric, that was who, but even clerics needed to discriminate in what buried emotions they told people to dig up.
“I didn’t say that I don’t care,” said Isra. “I do care. If I could understand who my father was, if I could know the past … I would want to. But I don’t need to spend my life trying to track them down. I don’t know where I’d start. I don’t even have a name.”
“Wow, what’s that building?” asked Mizuki. They had come around a bend and could finally see Riband Lake, which the hex was named after. Across the water, sitting on the shore like a stately white cat surveying its domain, was a tall building of ornate design with a statue of a small boy in an alcove on the upper level. The building seemed to have been built to be viewed from this particular angle, coming up along the river that led to Liberfell, or perhaps from the road to Traeg’s Knob.
“It’s a tomb,” said Alfric. “A famous dungeoneer died here a few centuries ago, when Liberfell was a tenth the size, and this thing was erected in memoriam.”
“How do I not know that?” asked Mizuki.
“I don’t know,” said Alfric. He raised an eyebrow, as though daring her to venture a guess.
“Shouldn’t have too much impact on the dungeon though, should it?” asked Hannah.
“No, it shouldn’t,” said Alfric. “It is built over the dungeon entrance though.”
“Why?” asked Isra.
“Well, this is where he presumably died,” said Alfric. “And I guess they were thinking that dungeoneers would end up seeing this place a lot if they were in the area, though honestly, you could easily miss Riband Lake and not be worse off for it. Enough of the hex is a lake that we might get our first fully flooded dungeon, which would mean that we’d just leave right away and reset the day.”
“But we spent all that time picking entads,” said Mizuki.
“Yes, and now I can just tell Grig what we want and save a trip to Liberfell,” said Alfric.
“Bah,” said Mizuki. “You know that’s not the point of bumbling around the warehouse looking at things.”
“I know,” said Alfric. “But if we keep a drowned dungeon that we bail on, that means one more dungeon in the area that we can never do again.”
“Frankly, it seems as though we’re expandin’ capability to do dungeons faster than we’re runnin’ out of dungeons,” said Hannah. “I’d expect that by the time it becomes an issue we’ll be able to zip across the continent.”
“No,” said Alfric. He continued walking, and they followed after. He was the only one who had studied maps of the area. “We’ve gotten somewhat lucky with travel. And entad chains or synergies, which are already what we’re using, become burdensome. At a certain point we’d be piling in the garden stone for one leg of the trip, piling out to hop through a puddle for another leg, and yes, we’d be saving time, but all the hoops we’d have to jump through would add up. Especially if there are restrictions like the garden stone has, where we need to make special preparations.”
“I don’t think taking off armor is that onerous,” said Verity. “Besides, how many special conditions could there be?”
Alfric laughed for what felt like too long. “They’re entads, Verity. They can be anything, have any strings attached. We could have a travel entad that required us to be wearing metal. We could have one that only works on a sufficiently rainy day. We could have — I mean you get that, right? That we might pick up something that makes us jump through arbitrarily large hoops?”
“I think you mean hoops of arbitrary size,” said Hannah.
“Right,” said Alfric. “Multiple contradictory requirements that would force us to soak up hours of time.”
“What’s the dumbest requirement that we would actually go through with?” asked Mizuki.
“Huh,” said Alfric. “You know, ‘dumb’ isn’t the same as ‘onerous’, and I’d think it would make more sense to talk about how onerous a thing we might use, which would obviously depend on how good it was.”
“You can go anywhere in the world,” said Hannah. “But, you have to stay within one hex of your destination for a week.”
“Arguably usable, depending on the enforcement mechanism,” said Alfric. “Especially if only one person is subject to the penalty.”
“You can go anywhere in the world,” said Mizuki. “But you snap back to where you were if you fart.”
“I don’t understand why they built this thing,” said Isra. She was looking at the building, which stayed in view as they rounded the lake. “Do they come here?”
“They?” asked Hannah.
“The people who built it,” said Isra. “His family.”
“It was built centuries ago,” said Alfric. “If any of his family still lives, my guess is that they forgot about it. But I would also guess that his immediate family, the ones who actually built this place, did come here, at least for a bit.”
“I don’t understand,” said Isra. She seemed insistent on it, as though there was some answer that someone could provide to her. “To spend time and money on a thing like this.”
“It’s somethin’ that people do,” said Hannah. “Death, when it happens, can hit hard. You know that.”
“I do,” said Isra, with solemnity.
“The idea that a person won’t be in this world anymore is difficult,” said Hannah. “They’ll go to the Gates and beyond, but it’s our lot in life for our presence to slowly fade from this world. The things we’ve made will break down, the stories of our life will be forgotten, the memories of us will fade.”
She sighed and looked at the building. It was clean and well-kept, which probably meant magic, unless someone was coming out to do upkeep on the place on a regular basis. But no, they would need scaffolding to clean a place like this, and there was no way that the hex itself was spending the time and money. It was still a creamy white, without any obvious dirt or grime.
“There’s a reason that death is of Kesbin,” Hannah continued. “But some people can’t accept that, and they want a person to last in perpetuity, even if only their name. A statue that will outlast you, that might be found a thousand years down the line, that’s a comfort for some, a way to make an indelible mark on the world, though there are no marks that are truly indelible, try as some people might.”
“It was arrogance,” said Isra. Her eyes were still on the building.
“No,” said Hannah. “Misguided love, I would say, though Alfric said it was centuries ago, and I can’t speak to those people and what they felt. Things were different in the past. We knew less about the world, and it was a more violent place.”
“The dungeons weren’t,” said Alfric. “They’ve always been the same.”
Hannah laughed. “That’s not good history, my friend. The dungeons were much more dangerous. They were dangerous because people didn’t have the trainin’ that they do now. Not just for goin’ into the dungeons, but outside them. Two hundred years ago, let’s say? Clerical integration wasn’t even complete. You couldn’t go into a town like Pucklechurch and expect that it would have six clerics waitin’ for you. Education was worse too, so the people goin’ into dungeons wouldn’t know as much, wouldn’t be trained, wouldn’t be stopped from goin’ into the dungeons if the League deemed them unqualified, because there was no League.”
“The League existed,” said Alfric. “It just wasn’t what it is today. Point taken though, dungeons were different. But it was because of the people, their culture, and their technology, not because of the dungeons themselves.”
“Mmm,” said Mizuki. “Actually that’s still wrong, because dungeons collect ambient magic, and there’s a lot more of that around now than there used to be. So they’re more dangerous.”
“Alright,” sighed Alfric. “Point taken. Though — you know, it’s complicated.”
“We have someone to take care of the dragons if the dungeon runs long, right?” asked Isra. They were approaching the building, which was looming up in front of them. Up close, it was larger than Hannah had thought. The construction of it was deceptive.
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“I spoke with Marsh, yes,” said Hannah. “He’ll come by in the evening, and might stick around there, I hope that’s okay. Might sleep in my room, in fact. But he’ll take care of things.”
“Good guy,” said Mizuki.
Hannah laughed. “He took it very much the wrong way though,” said Hannah. “When I said ‘I need you to take care of the dragons if we don’t come back’, he thought I was talkin’ about mortality, not doin’ chores. So he starts in on comfortin’ me, which was nice, but really not necessary.”
“He knows I’m a chrononaut,” said Alfric.
“It’s a fallible power,” said Hannah.
“It is,” said Alfric. “Under very specific conditions that we’re very unlikely to run into.”
“I think he thinks about his own mortality more than I think about mine,” said Hannah. “Or he just privately worries about me goin’ into dungeons to fight things, because he cares about me.”
“Aw,” said Mizuki.
The building clearly did have some kind of magic, because there were no proper doors on the place, and yet the stone floor wasn’t covered with leaves and dirt as one might expect. There wasn’t all that much on the inside, only a set of stairs that went down to the dungeon entrance. It was, by a wide margin, the best dungeon entrance they’d ever seen.
“The stone is special,” said Isra.
“I thought it might be,” said Hannah. “Too clean.”
“This place will last for a very long time, I’ll give them that,” said Alfric. “But it’s neither here nor there. We need to get ready.”
This took some time. Most of their metal was stored in the chest, along with some heavier pieces like Verity’s lute. Alfric needed time for the thimble armor to expand over him, and Hannah needed some time to get her full plate situated. Eventually they would all have heavy armor, which would make the whole process take even longer.
“You’re going with the lute this time?” asked Alfric, looking at Verity. The armor was up to his chest and creeping higher.
“I am,” said Verity. “Let’s call last time an experiment that didn’t work. It didn’t give me what I needed, and didn’t help the team.” She looked around. “Thank you all for indulging me.”
“Mizuki did basically the entire dungeon herself,” said Hannah.
“I was boosting her with a song,” said Verity. “But yes, last dungeon was … well, not a full dungeon. An aberration.”
“Let’s hope this one isn’t flooded,” said Alfric.
Once everything had been doffed, donned, taken out, or put away, they got into position, with Alfric at the front and Hannah just behind him. The initial entry had the potential to be dangerous, and she wanted to make sure that she was there for backup in case they had to take on a fight right away.
There was a moment in the tunnel, as there always was, when there was a total lack of sound. It lasted for only a heartbeat, but Hannah listened for it every time. There was something ineffably strange about it, something that attracted and repulsed her, and she was certain, from talking to Alfric, that it was the moment of transition from the normal world to the world of the dungeon.
Garos had much to say about reflections, as the God of Symmetry, but there was special attention paid to what was sometimes called the ‘critical moment’, the point at which a thing actually reflected. It was the surface of the mirror, the middle gap between tines on a fork, the crease in a piece of paper. There was something that didn’t feel quite symmetrical about the critical moment to Hannah, something that tarnished symmetry in some sense, that made it so symmetrical things didn’t resolve into true symmetry.
When she was little, she had imagined the world she could see in a mirror as its own other world, real and tangible instead of just a reflection of light. The Mirror Hannah lived in the Mirror Room, playing with her Mirror Dolls, and everything was doubled … except for the mirror itself. The molding around the mirror was doubled, but the plane of reflection was not, sitting aside from the entire process of doubling, its own singular self. When she’d gone to the seminary, she’d thought that there might be some resolution to this seeming paradox, but there were only a multitude of thoughts on the matter, nothing definitive.
In the book Hannah was writing about dungeons, there was to be a chapter on the symmetry of the transition, the way in which the dungeon was like a mirror world. The entrance to the dungeon was that point, the vertex, and she still didn’t entirely understand what, if anything, she was going to say about it.
All those thoughts were pushed to the side when she came out into a stone room, where Alfric was already in the process of fighting a beast, even though she’d been right behind him. She dashed forward, flanking it, and tossed her hammer to the side, laying a hand on it and using symmetry to amplify the wounds that Alfric had already given it. There was little time to register much about the creature, other than it was big, red, and scaled, six arms moving in disarray as it tried to pull Alfric’s bident from its chest. When its head whipped back and forth it sprayed blood and spittle everywhere, and Alfric bore down on it, pushing the bident in further and activating it again.
The creature was dead before the last of their party could come in. Mizuki and Isra were carrying the chest, a necessity because it couldn’t cross the threshold on its own. Alfric had told them to wait for a moment before entering, just in case it was flooded: he’d have come right out and stopped them.
The entryway was made of the same stone as the building they had come in through, and was clearly inspired by it. Hannah wondered how often this same motif was presented to dungeoneers, and whether that was the true lasting legacy of the monument to some long-ago adventurer. There were three hallways branching off from it, and lighting that seemed to come from everywhere at once, an ambience that Alfric had said showed up every now and then. The hallways all had turns to them, making it impossible to see what lay ahead, but Alfric was frowning.
She was right. The creature had sprayed blood in all directions as it wriggled and writhed, and then spread more in its death throes, but the droplets of blood were all gone, and the blood that was leaking from the creature’s wounds was disappearing too.
said Mizuki.
They all checked, but there seemed to be none of the wear that they were all worried about. The stone was eating things, which yes, had the side effect of keeping it spotless, but was worrisome.
They went down the left hallway, with Alfric in the lead and Hannah close behind him. It turned to the right, and they walked a hundred feet toward an open doorway. The musty smell had gotten stronger, and was mixed with something earthy and a bit foul.
said Alfric.
They came to a large room, still made of the same stone, but this time filled with mounds of what very much appeared to be dung. To get that much dung, you’d need to clear out a hundred stables, though the smell was less overpowering than Hannah thought it should be, unpleasant but not smacking them in the nostrils like when a muck room was cleared out.
The piles of dung moved slowly, four of them forming arms and legs as they rose from being lumps in the ground. They were each around ten feet tall, with no identifiable parts aside from the arms, and no legs, just a thick trunk made of more dung. The dung was in pellets, though oversized, each the size of a fist, as though expelled by some enormous animal into this room.
Alfric moved forward with his bident, as he always did, moving into the danger. He somehow managed to make it not feel reckless. The bident sunk easily into the dung, but the explosion it caused was muffled and ineffectual, and the dung golem raised a hand up to smash Alfric. Alfric was too quick, and the dung golem too slow, but as they parted, Hannah had a sinking feeling that the exchange didn’t bode well for their team.
Isra’s arrows pierced straight into one of the dung golems, to no obvious effect, and the result didn’t seem to differ based on where she aimed. For her part, Hannah tried a heavy swing with the hammer, with the weight of magical metal all loaded onto the hammer, but it sunk into the creature and threatened to be swallowed up by it, as useful as slamming a hammer into mud.
They were quickly fighting a retreating battle, the slow-moving dung golems seemingly impervious to their attacks.
said Alfric.
said Alfric. He was the rearguard, making sure that everyone was behind him.
said Isra.
she said.
But even as she spoke, it was clear she was no longer focusing on the conversation, and instead trying to reach out with her druidic power. The way she’d described it, what made sense to Hannah, was that being a druid was a little bit letting nature into you and a little bit pushing yourself into nature. Dungeon madness was the entire reason that Isra couldn’t just instruct the monsters to lay down their weapons and walk away, and it was entirely possible that this was a horrible idea, but as they retreated, it was also clear that they had no real way to hurt the golems.
The first of the golems, the one that Hannah had struck with her hammer, split apart and collapsed in a lump on the ground, and behind it, the others fell as well, all in quick order.
Isra let out a moan, her voice echoing in the hallway rather than in their party chat. She moaned again, louder, and Hannah turned to look. She was clutching her head.
Isra threw up, their lunchtime meal of meats spilling out onto the floor in such a quantity that Hannah was worried there might be some permanent damage to the gut. Isra was hugging the side of the wall, supported by Mizuki. Hannah turned away from them, ready to fight the dung golems, but they were still scattered across the floor.
Verity was pulling it from the chest before Isra was even done saying it, and Isra took a long pull from the waterskin, then another, which she swished around in her mouth and spit out onto the dungeon floor.
Isra waved a hand.
said Isra.
Hannah felt something turn in her stomach. That wasn’t a thing you wanted to hear someone say.
What she didn’t say, but what seemed obvious to Hannah, was that Isra wanted to hurt them, her party. She’d described it as lasting only an instant, but an instant could be a long time if you had unwanted thoughts in your head. There were certain things that, once there, couldn’t come out again. Images could be branded on the brain.
Hannah bit her tongue. It was difficult, when someone obviously did need to process something and didn’t want to talk about it. But people did process things in their own ways, and sometimes that was through silence, or simply forgetting about whatever had upset them, pretending that it hadn’t happened.