I still had teleports left. I could try to reason with the Trogodytes. Bribes, gifts, a simple vow of truce. If they attacked me I could evacuate.

It was an idea worth trying, if only I could communicate with them. But without eyes I doubted we could even do a mummer’s show.

That didn’t mean they didn’t have a way of sensing the world. They noticed me. They’d moved together with little to no communication. They’d noticed when their companion was wounded. They hadn’t noticed me moving my spear or pointing at them. So not the spider sense. A heat sense or life sense maybe.

Maybe by the time I headed back to that room the traps would have chased them all off, or they would have taken the treasure and left. Maybe the Dead King’s spear would be prize enough for them. Hopefully he wouldn’t mind me losing it so early.

If I did have to chase them down after that, I could do so once the sun rose. That way I’d have a—

The sun rose.

—chance of... give me warm fires and sturdy doors, clear windows and soft rugs.

It had happened with the ogre as well. And the toad dragon. I seemed to get my spells back faster when I fought. That seemed wrong. Why would the sun be attracted to violence? The sun was the life giver, it was soil which ever demanded death.

Then again, the sun was underground. Perhaps it was deity of the earth more than the sky at this point. What had Life said? The Corpse in the Sky, the Sun Underground? Something like that.

I glanced behind me. He hadn’t spoken since I’d arrived. Maybe he’d sensed I didn’t want to talk, both for dislike of how he’d changed me, and for fear of alerting the Trogodytes. Maybe he’d just been offended by my threats.

Will-o-Wisp II

Life’s altar lit up the room, but not the hallway beyond as it rounded the corner. I needed to be ready for the Trogodytes should they arrive.

I sent my will-o-wisps forward while I sidled through the broken door to keep an eye down the hall. Even the small movement made my arm ache.

Regenerate

*whooOOMPF*

The sound was like a fire suddenly starting. Red light blazed behind me, casting a long shadow onto the wall beside me. Much like a sudden fire, the light dimmed, but did not disappear. Red, purple, and orange light swirled around my feet, too dim to keep my shadow alit.

I spun back to the orb altar room (Rains have mercy my arm! I thought I was done with this). Had the Trogodytes found a way to send my fireballs after me? Had my spell backfired somehow? I wasn’t healing any faster than I had been before I’d cast my second Regenerate.

The light was strongest directly above Life’s orb. The sky had gone ablaze. A roiling mass of bruised clouds at sunrise, though far less healthy looking. They pulsed and surged as fast as the sea. The speed was such that a wind was picking up in the chamber, adding its own howl to the dungeon.

Heavy purple smoke was pouring off the orb atop the plinth, rolling down onto the altar and cascading down the steps with little splashes.

It looked dangerous.

I—I was lying on my back with my arm on fire. Figuratively on fire. I must have fallen, but I didn’t remember doing so. I’d just being trying to move my leg... move it. How did I move my legs? I’d done it before. I was sure of it.

I tried to think but the pain was distracting me. The liquid welling up from my face wasn’t helping either. It was blue, and bright like a star. Not the twinkling of a star in darkness, the bright shimmer of liquid when viewed through a telescope. I tried to use my uninjured hand to wipe it off, but it gathered faster than I could remove it.

I could still breathe through it. Somehow. Bubbles formed on my lips when I exhaled, but nothing entered my mouth on the inhale. If anything, more of the liquid was coming out of my mouth.

I rolled over onto my right side, and then onto my knees to support myself with my good arm. Shining liquid dripped off of my nose and onto the floor. It was all gathering there in a puddle. Less than you’d think. Enough to fill a large goblet.

The flow stemmed.

I spat free some more liquid from my lips. It didn’t taste like anything, but it was sticky. My whole head was plastered with my own hair at this point.

The flow stopped.

The liquid didn’t. Once gathered on the floor beneath me, it began to slowly trickle its way toward the puddle in the corner of the room.

The sky was still blazing. The orb was still smoking. The room was starting to look like a fog had settled in. I was already inside the mist. It wasn’t harming me. Didn’t mean it wouldn’t. It might have already been what had caused me to fall over. Maybe it made that strange shining liquid leak from my face.

The pain was getting to be unbearable. Even though it was healing, the sudden motions and changes in elevation hadn’t been good for my arm. Plus I was getting tired of the pain.

Greater Heal IIII

It would help.

It wasn’t ideal, but at least I hadn’t lost Regenerate.

Something had gone wrong, but it was hard to say what. I’d cast spells in the orb chamber before. I’d cast Regenerate before. I’d cast while injured before. The orb was supposed to protect me from the ogres’ corruption.

The best I could imagine was a random fluctuation of dark magic from the dungeon. Nothing under my control, nothing I could avoid or plan around other than to be sparing with my spells.

I stood. Staying in this fog wasn’t doing me any favours. I’d been lucky the Trogodytes hadn’t taken appeared to take advantage of me while I was distracted but...

I wanted to move back into the hallway proper, rather than standing in the door, but my legs wouldn’t move.

I looked down at them.

They looked fine. Same as ever even beneath my trousers. My ring said so. So why couldn’t I walk into the hall?

I bent my knee experimentally on the spot. That went fine. Then I bent my other. I could even wiggle my toes. I could even kick my leg forward. It was only the act of walking where my mind drew a blank.

I watched the blue the liquid—my knowledge and memories?—swirl away in the puddle. It looked like the stream slowed, but kept going under the wall opposite the grill. The smoke from the orb was dancing across the puddle’s surface now, looking like morning mist caught in a storm. The bruised-orange helped accentuate the glow. All in all, the colours weren’t pleasant to look at.

I still didn’t dare call to Life to ask what was going on. The Trogodytes might hear me. One or more of their other senses must have been extraordinary to make up for their vision. Especially since they’d been able to sense my invisible swords and their companion’s “death”.

I returned to a kneeling. The hard stone was unpleasant against my knees, especially with the weight of my lungs pressing down on them, but maybe I could shuffled forward that way.

No such luck.

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I might have lost a tooth to the floor if I hadn’t been ready with my good arm.

Fine.

Since I was down here anyway, I’d try crawling.

Crawling still worked.

It hurt. Especially with my stabbed shoulder, but it would have hurt a little bit anyway. The floor was cold stone and I was far heavier than I had any right to be. I was stronger too, but it didn’t seem to matter as much crawling as it did standing. Trying to watch the path in front of me while I crawled also felt unnatural. My neck wasn’t meant to be craning at that angle.

My two healing spells made up for the pain in my knees and neck before they became real problems, but the not-quite-pain constant discomfort feeling was unpleasant in its own right.

I rocked back around to a sitting position once I was fully into the hallway and mostly out of the mist coming off the orb. It was a losing battle, the corridor itself was slowly filling, but it was moving almost as fast as I crawled and I didn’t fancy running into the Trogodytes if I could avoid it.

They’d almost killed me, the mist potentially hadn’t done anything. I was pretty sure the memory loss had because of my spell somehow, but I wasn’t sure why.

I fumbled a while with my pouch before I was able to open it one handed and retrieve my spellbook. I wanted more healing, maybe to protect one of my more valuable spells, but what I needed was more strength of arms.

☼Sword Storm II☼. I could have summoned more blades to join the three provided by the spell but I didn’t for two reasons. The first was simplicity. ☼Sword Storm II☼’s blades hit harder than any of my others. Combining it with other spells would make the already messy timings and strengths of the spell even harder to keep track of, which could be important in a fight. More importantly, I had to cast the spells I wanted to duplicate, and that meant using them up over the course of the next hour. If I was attacked after the recording was complete, I didn’t want to be down my entire spell book except for one spell which may or may not work when I called upon it. Spell casting had been becoming more and more unstable.

Sword Storm III: Three invisible blades dance and strike with the base force of 968 lbs. One for half an hour, one for 45 minutes, and one more for an hour. A fireball appears in the centre. One light, twice as bright as a candles, swirl about them, rising into existence just before the blade appears for the first time and dying an hour after it vanishes. Another light joins in at the end of the first hour, and end an hour after the first light fades, providing 3 hours of light total. All move independently following the whims of their master.

My lights all went out. The next will-o-wisp in the spell sparked to life in the same moment.

The protection on my spell hadn’t carried over to Sword Storm III. I was disappointed, but not surprised. If anything, it would have made sense to lose the protection on ☼Sword Storm II☼ by trying to cast it. That hadn’t happened either, as welcome as the breeze.

Four sword spells. Three of them ready to cast. Add in BiteII and that was four offensive spells total. It might be enough to defeat the Trogodytes. If I was lucky. And if they didn’t have any other powers I wasn’t aware of. And I took them by surprise. And I understood how their vague powers work. And, upon understanding, I was also correct about their limitations.

Easy.

They didn’t stand a chance.

I pushed myself back to my feet. At least my arm had stopped hurting. The two sets of healing had been more than enough.

Which meant—

I caught myself on the wall before I fell. The healing hadn’t fixed my ability to walk.

No other liquids had poured off me since the sky turned wrathful even though I’d become completely submerged in the orb’s smoke while writing.

Maybe I could force it. Trick myself into remembering.

I leapt into a sprint back toward the puddle which had stolen my memory. Safer than the hallway which might be hiding Trogodytes.

I didn’t fall.

My legs carried me as easily as ever to the water’s edge. Just before the water I slowed into a jog and then a stroll—

My feet locked to the ground as if glued there. I was ready for it this time. I wrenched my shoulders back before the whiplash of stopping so suddenly sent me diving head first into the water.

Ow.

I think I pulled something, but my hunch was becoming a full fledged hypothesis.

If I was right I should be able to—yep, jogging over to Life’s smoking pillar was no effort at all. I stopped well before I arrived. There was a pit of spikes over there, I wasn’t going to mess around on that side of the room.

I tried and failed to turn around on the spot by shuffling my feet. It was only when I started picking up my knees and jogging in place that I was able to turn.

I couldn’t walk, but I could run.

How peculiar.

I jogged over to the side of the pool. I didn’t fancy sticking my head in every bit of water I came across, but I had healing spells for a reason. My life sense didn’t sense an amount of algae life which was higher or lower than expected, and my ring senses showed the occasional insect and water life skittering through the water, but not in abundance. There was a current here, hidden beneath the deceptively still surface. More of a widening of the stream than a true pond or puddle.

I activated my ring taste. On the plus side, the water tasted like water. I wasn’t about to scoop up a pool of acid or molten glass. On the negative side, the water tasted like water. I didn’t taste, smell, or see any memories floating around in the pond, which was the whole point of the exercise.

I was still going to try. Not being able to walk would cause me all sorts of problems and this was the best I could think of to fix my problem.

I knelt, cupped a small handful of the water, and drank.

My ring hadn’t lied. The water was as clean and as pure as could be hoped for in the depths of the dungeon.

I didn’t feel any different, so I crawled over closer to where I thought the memories had slipped into the pond and tried again there. I didn’t want to drink too much of the water in one go, in case the illness came later, but my sips were small. I would be willing to risk one more.

Nothing.

I rocked back on my heels. The memories would have flown down stream, to the north-east edge of the corner. I should be try there instead.

“All are subject to the river’s whims. Even fish need rest.”

A merman had told me that. The only merman I’d ever met. I’d been five years old and completely failing at fishing. I’d been having a fun time throwing my lure into the midst of a rocky shallow, but not a single fish had swum by. I could tell, because I could see straight down all 2 inches to the bottom. I’d figured it would be easier if I could see the fish. Not that I had seen any.

The merman had emerged from the forest to my left.

“The fish won’t swim there young man. It’s too shallow for them.”

“But I can’t see them any where else.”

“Trust yourself. And trust them. All you need is a little knowledge. It will be the light in your mind, even when it is too dark to see.”

“What knowledge?”

“If you know the fish, you will know where they sleep. All are subject to the river’s whims. Even fish need rest.”

I shook my head.

“Strike me with lightning on a cloudy day,” I whispered.

I still remembered the merman, of course. It wasn’t every day you met something straight out of the legends. But thinking about him right now, I could remember the conversation word for word. I could close my eyes and count the number of leaves on the trees, the number of pebbles in the stream.

I tried my other memories: a conversation with my father when I was of a similar age. My meeting with Brace and her crew; the memories were memories, nothing more. I could remember the gist of them, but not the exact words.

I bent and took another sip.

Push floated through my mind, as clear as the day I’d written it. The first spell I’d carved into my brain. The first I’d cast in the dungeon.

Push

It didn’t cast. Merely a memory. A memory as bright as the Fast Teleport still dancing around my brain.

The waters restored my memory. All of it? Some of it? One per sip?

I stood and tried walking a few steps toward the altar.

It worked.

I knelt back on my heels and studied the water. How much could I remember? How much did I want to remember? Would remembering everything drive me insane? The rune was kind of annoying already, given that I couldn’t cast it.

One more.

This time it was a far more recent memory. The carving of the map I’d encountered on the second floor. It was all there in exquisite, tiny detail. Finding my place on the map would take a while, I could barely make out the rooms in my memory, but with enough time I could plot out the whole first six floors of the dungeon without need for Conan’s map.

I wondered how long the memories would last. If they didn’t fade the rune was annoying, but the map was a massive boon. Either way I was a winner.

It was tempting to take another sip, to keep sipping until I was met with another failure, but if I stopped now I came out ahead of the game. I was sure there were some memories I didn’t want to remember in perfect detail.

I moved back out into the hallway. I walked. I could always come back later if there was something important I thought was missing from my mind.

Besides, I hadn’t confirmed yet that the water wasn’t rancid.