Our first stop was the frog room. My old room. I’d encountered a few places with empty bottles in the dungeon, but I couldn’t remember exactly which rooms they had been or where they were. By comparison I’d lived in the frog room for weeks and knew its every last detail.

We made the journey quickly, only pausing once to navigate the gas trap and once for Conan to brace himself before we passed through the wailing corner.

“Hate that,” he said as we squeezed around the stone slab which had nearly crushed me, “hate how powerless I feel.”

He was shaking slightly. I didn’t like it either, but I hadn’t given it much thought. Now that Conan had mentioned it, it was creepy. Even the Mushroom-King hadn’t controlled my actions. Not like that. Not that anything could. Not quite.

“If it makes you feel better, I don’t think it’s controlling you. It’s more... the nature of the corner. It exists to produce screams. If no one ever came along it would find another way to scream.

“It’s like gravity. How most things fall down. There’s no control there, it’s just the nature of reality. It’s just what is.”

“A place where rules are different.”

I grunted in agreement. We were silent as we entered the statue room. Conan presumably thinking about the implications of altered natures, myself keeping an eye out for giant beetles. When we about halfway through picking our way across the broken masonry (perhaps fifty feet from each door), Conan broke the silence.

As it turned out, he had not been thinking about the screaming corner.

“I could swear... Is that Caoimhe? And that’s Queen Siobhan. And that’s the Princess in White!” Conan pointed to each in turn, “I’d say they’re all rulers, but the Princess never ruled. She was a poet, a consort to a forgotten king.”

“And that’s Brona and Cwen, the two sisters who went to war to force the other to rule. And Eadgyth the Spinster, wife of Alfred the Third, first of his name,” I added, pointing to them in turn.

“Are they all women? I’d not noticed last time.”

“There are debates about Esla over there, but yes. I suspect it’s a chronology of every female ruler, or ruler’s spouse for the past 500 years. Perhaps more.”

Conan’s eyes went wide. He raised his torch high to view the room anew, “The value of this place. The debates it could settle, the timelines it could resolve; languishing beneath Bleakfort. A dozen other treasures like it no doubt.”

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I lightly touched his shoulder, “Come on.”

He swept his gaze once more over the room then shook his head and followed me through the archway. I couldn’t say what exactly passed behind his eyes then, but I knew this would not be the last expedition Conan guided to this place.

***

Brace greeted us on our return.

“All went well?”

“An incident with a mirror, but I stopped Oswic from doing anything too rash,” Conan said with a wink to me, “And look! Two bottles!”

The “rash” action in question had been me physically removing Conan from the pool room. He had been the one to be ensnared by the mirror this time, not me. Thankfully it had been at a distance, in the dark, unable to even make out the forms save for a faint torchlight reflected in the mirror. It had been enough to pin him to the wall until he’d regained his senses. The call of Elysium in the end had won out.

Live well.

It could be felt anywhere now.

Brace made to accept the proffered potion then stopped, “You’ve got more skill at these things. You should administer it. If you will.”

I could see the steel fill Conan’s spine, brimming up into his eyes, “I will.”

Erin sprung up from where she was sitting, sword in one hand torch in the other. Her movements were desultory, random, but pointed in the right direction. She made it to Rian’s side.

“Ready.”

She swallowed as Conan knelt down beside her to tip the potion down Rian’s throat.

His eyes fluttered for a moment and then were still. A long sigh escaped his lips and then his breathing deepened, becoming slow and steady. Conan checked his pulse, watching him carefully. After five minutes he lowered him gently back to the floor.

“It seems to have eased his breathing somewhat. Eased some tension from his limbs and back too. Beyond that, couldn’t say. Might have just knocked him fully out. No harm in it, at least.”

Stovepipe held out a hand towards me, “If I may?”

I was slow on the uptake, but got it the second time when he inclined his head towards the bottle I was carrying. I handed it over to him.

“Are you sure you want to try that?” Erin asked.

Stovepipe sat on the floor, “Got to see if it is a sleeping potion or something else,” he raised the bottle in a toast and then down its contents in a single pull. He sat for a moment, contemplating.

“Can’t say I feel any different. Don’t feel tired anyway.”

“It could be it simply eased his pain,” Conan said, “Restful sleep could make all the difference in surviving this. And if it doesn’t... it was worth doing anyway.”

The others murmured their agreement, myself included. There wasn’t much more to say.