I can defend you. If you are willing.

My heart sunk. I glanced back through the newly open door. I’d made a complete circle. The Mushroom-King and his harem waited beyond.

The rats had slowed their advance. Not stopped, but they were wary, careful. Cunning. Dangerous in that sideways rodent way. Willing to fight, but always coming at you from the shadows, striking when attention was elsewhere.

“For what price?”

The same as before. We make a trade. Knowledge for knowledge. Knowledge for desire. Healing? I can sense that you are wounded.

I sent my lights among the rats, which caused them to shy back, and snap at the will-o’-wisps. Perhaps a dozen rats. No-- thirteen. It would be thirteen in a warlock’s dungeon.

I could take thirteen on my own.

Magic Swords

There was a tug. A swirling black sun gnawed and pulled at the edges of reality, and then spun away into a burning corona of shadows. My spell leapt from my book and then returned, victorious in an unseen struggle.

The swords appeared as well. The spell was cast, but it had nearly been lost. Something had saved it. The druid stone?

Whatever the cause, I now had four invisible blades at my disposal against thirteen rats. The rats were large, averaging two feet long, some of them two and a half. An unarmoured man would been in danger even in a well lit open space. An armed and armoured man might slay them, but later succumb to their bites.

My swords destroyed them in four passes.

I see. The offer of safety still stands. Of water? I can exert some influence over the sloth across the hall.

I looked behind me at the Mushroom-King, and then down the hall to where the other Mushroom-King was. Across the hall indeed. They were less than a hundred feet apart. There had only been the one on the first floor, but at least three here. I wondered what attracted them to an area. Did they have a choice? The outline of the “sloth” Mushroom-King flickered briefly in my life sight.

The sun rose.

I jumped. My mind was still on the rats, still twitching and dying in front of me. I hadn’t even had a chance to write a new spell.

“Can you feel that?”

The Mushroom-King... well he didn’t really raise an eyebrow seeing as he didn’t have any. His eye widened and his brow furled on one side, which conveyed the same idea.

The endless risings of the sun? Only through your mind. You want to know if they are real. If time truly is passing.

My mind. He could read my mind. I knew that. Why was that-

I retreated. Ran from him without so much as a backwards glance. I’d had an idea. One which couldn’t be shared. He’d atta- no best not to think even that yet.

I ran ‘round the corner and down the hall to the secret entrance of the ice fogged room. The door had reset, so I pulled on the rope once more, and squeezed through the still opening gap before it finished.

I’d died when I’d met the first Mushroom-King. My spells had failed me, put a hole in my brain. The Mushroom-King had brought me back. He’d brought me back by putting a mycilial mesh in my brain. The mind reading had reminded me of it. He was a master of the mind, able to dominate where the warlocks instead severed bonds.

I’d escaped his control by eating the dryad. Taking control of the patch in my brain. The druid stone had later integrated it into my being.

What I’d realized in the Mushroom-King’s harem, what I’d dared not think until now, was that the mycelium had been part of him. A miniature Mushroom-King all my own in a way. In fact, all the Mushroom-Kings may have at one point been other beings who had made similar bargains to mine. Now there was a terrifying thought.

I was dancing around the issue. Afraid to even admit it, lest he somehow hear me, but if he had he already had all the pieces he needed to put it together. I could control the Mushroom-King with my dryad-like powers, even if I couldn’t see him. I could make him wither away, or cut him off at the roots. I could force him to use his own powers against himself, collapse the ceiling on his head, tear himself apart. At least, I thought I could. It may be that his own control over his body would override mine, or that the fruiting body in the seat of his power was different from the tiny structure in my brain, but I had a chance there.

And that was only part of the reason I’d fled.

The deal had been another. He hadn’t offered a deal, but he’d been about to, I was sure of it. Knowledge of the many suns in exchange for something. Something trivial on my part for something magnanimous on his end. I knew how these deals went. It didn’t matter what he offered if he lied, or didn’t intend to keep it. That was the downside to megalomania. Even if you gave no indication of duplicitousness, there was no reason for people to suspect otherwise. He acted in his interest and his interest alone. Or at least the first one had, and the others were still part of that same whole.

That led to third reason I’d fled. Another method for dealing with the Mushroom-King. The sad one, not the harem one. The risk was that the harem one could alert the sad one. It was getting a little confusing to keep track of them all. The Despair-King perhaps. And the Harem-King, counter-respectively. I still thought of the first as the original Mushroom-King. That or the Slave-King. He’d left an impression. The rats had given me the idea, as had nearly losing the spell. Warlocks. What did warlocks have? Dark magic. What did I have? Hasting Stasis.

If I understood dark magic right, I could give the Despair-King all the time alone he desired, and still have as much time as I needed to draw water from the well and even help myself to his treasure. The treasure in front of him, anyway. I probably wasn’t above theft. Not when the stakes were so high. Not from the creature who had tried to make me its eternal slave. But that assumed he owned it the first place. That the Mushroom-King didn’t simply sprout up where he pleased and take the room for himself. I doubted the warlocks would have left him alone, and I likewise doubted he’d carried that treasure there himself after they’d severed the connection between Bleakfort and the rest of the dungeon.

I wanted to be ready before I faced him, wanted to take advantage of these endless suns. It had been ingrained in me from a young age to record one spell a day, rain or shine. Missing even one of these false suns like I had didn’t sit right with me. Maybe it didn’t matter as much when there was three suns an hour (or so it seemed, they weren’t consistent), but maybe taking advantage of each of them was the only way I’d survive the lower reaches of the dungeon. It would only get more dangerous from here.

That and I had a huge backlog of spells to create.

I cast Clothes’ Hanger and Safe Teleport in quick succession. I teleported across the room, steering wide of the pyramid. When I reappeared, my clothing was still on me, my spell book still in hand, my sword still at my belt.

True Teleport: The caster and his gear moves 150 ft over the course of eight seconds, but does not exist in the intervening space.

Finally. It was still a slow teleport, but that was one of the harder details to manage without a horse or very carefully jumping off a cliff. If I truly thought it necessary I could try the well or that elevator shaft the emperor’s knights had risen up.

I returned to the hall outside the room of the Despair-King.

Magic Swords

I was ready. The swords were insurance, not truly part of the plan. I also held my rusted blade in my left hand on the off chance my spells failed me. My right held my spellbook.

I moved until I was hugging the wall and then peeked slowly around the frame. The Despair-King was faced away from me, cap twisted, looking down. Faint whispering mutterers, separate from the voices of the dark magic in my head, danced with the rune behind my eyes. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Not without concentrating. I didn’t know how his mind reading worked, but it seemed like focusing on him would be a bad idea.

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Hasting Stasis

I called the words into my mind. Coaxed them. Feed them like I’d feed kindling into a fire. Like a fire the flames grew. Swelled. Faster and faster, spreading in every direction. My mind was aflame. The humming of the druid stone within me screamed as my being caught fire, as it was consumed by dark magic.

The feeling faded as suddenly as it had appeared. It was new. I’d not felt that before when casting spells. It had left something in it’s wake. A black stain across my mind. A dark flame burned there. Whispers leapt from it. Called to me. Begged for release. A font of magic. Each whisper a new spell I could call into being at will.

Convenient, but there would be a price. There was always a price. You couldn’t reach into a fire without being burned.

I don’t think the change, whatever it was, had affected my mind. Not directly. Instead, it felt like the dark magic, one ephemeral and evanescent, had taken root in my mind. I’d had the option to ignore it before, but I’d used it, again and again, and that had carved channels in my brain. At least, that was my suspicion. The whole thing could have been a last minute attack by the Mushroom-King. The lashing out of whichever parts of him were unaffected by the stasis.

And the stasis had worked despite the surge of dark magic. The Despair-King was rocking about rapidly in place, lunging from position to position, a dozen hours passing for every second outside his prison. And prison it seemed to be. He never turned to face me, never changed tack or command the earth about him. The colour of his golden body slowly faded. Aging, I supposed. He never even seemed to notice.

I forced myself to stop watching. I didn’t know how long the stasis would last or if it would alert the other aspects of the Mushroom-King. Hopefully it would just give him the time alone he claimed he desired. I wasn’t going to count on it.

The well, while possessing both winch and rope, turned out to be lacking the most vital component: the bucket. A quick search of the room turned up nothing leaving me with the options of fashioning my own from the Despair-King or his chest of treasure. Given that the Despair-King probably wouldn’t fit down the well, and I wasn’t sure even my enhance strength could lift him, I decided to try the chest first.

First I’d need to empty it.

The top layer was jewels and gold as I’d seen before—wonderful in other circumstances, worthless here. Stuck (suspiciously mind you) to some of the gold was another lodestone, a smaller version of the one I already possessed. it skittered away from my fingers when I reached for it, spun about about on top of the pile of treasure, and then leapt into my fingers.

I’d forgotten about that.

I didn’t have much use for another lode stone, but not only was this one smaller, it appeared to be stronger than the one in my pouch. I managed to open my pouch and set the dream seed aside without spilling everything or breaking open the newly forming scabs on my chest. I tried briefly to shake the large lodestone free from my fingers, and after the stars cleared I decided to scrape the lodestones free instead. One with the flap of my pouch and the other with the side of the chest—in order to avoid any sort of throwing motion.

The initial layer of treasures concealed the true treasure of the chest: Someone’s lunch. A large haunch of smoked meat, a pouch of eggs, several large mushrooms, and a chain of sausages all tumbled about freely with the rest of the chests contents. The sausages and the eggs looked like they’d gone off, but the others were in good condition. I wasn’t sure if I was brave enough to try them, but it had been a while since I’d eaten anything but salted fish.

No.

No I couldn’t risk them. Not yet. It had only been... my sense of time had been completely disregulated by the endless sunrises, near death experiences, and erupting volcano, but it had probably only been a quarter of a day since I’d last eaten. I set the food outside the Despair-King’s layer just in case. He had the means to retrieve it, but if he didn’t, and I ended up not finding other food or my way back, it was there. I could only hope the rotting eggs wouldn’t taint my water.

Next I emptied a large brass bell and a small metal whistle. Neither were of use to me as making sound was in general the opposite of what I should be striving to do, even if I had failed in that endeavour.

That left two bottles, a heavy coin wrapped in a map, and a grappling hook.

Convenient. I could use the hook to attach the chest to the rope.

Somehow.

My first thought was to embed the hooks into the chest with my magic swords and then tie the rope to the loop at the back of the grapple, but I wasn’t sure if it would hold. Then I realized I was being silly and I could just tie the rope around the handles and ignore the hook altogether. Then I realized that the handles of the chest had been broken at some point. The hinge was still quite strong, so I fed the rope between chest and lid, and then secured it to the grappling hook on the other end.

Now all I had to do was carry the heavy chest to the well, throw it in, and winch it out, all with two holes in my chest.

Levitate

I’d never truly appreciated the exercise of recording my everyday activities until now. My master had (tried) to drill into my head that I wouldn’t always be able to do things I did now. Best to save them while I could so I’d have them when I was older. There must have been hundreds of actives in my spell book, saved for that rainy day in the far off future when I grew too old and my body failed me. All lost now.

The sun rose.

I nearly teleported in surprise. You’d think I’d be getting used to that by now, but the experience was so alien I didn’t have a frame of reference to adapt to. The rising and setting of the sun was foundational. Even on the darkest days the sun still rose, even during my blackest moods it still shone. That was gone.

It was happening frequently enough though that I could take advantage of it. Healing spells were normally a nightmare to make, and the nature of the dungeon destroying my spell progress had made that fact doubly so, but now I had a chance.

I glanced at the Despair-King. The stasis was still holding, but I couldn’t be sure for how much longer. I’d get my water first. I might miss a sunrise in the process, but it would be worth it.

***

By my best estimate it took less than half an hour to empty my water flasks, rinse them out, and fill them with water from my leaky and levitating bucket. My chest and arms were burning by the end of it. My chest for obvious reasons, and my arms because of the awkward angles I was compelled to hold them at while manipulating the waterskins in order to reduce pain to my chest.

I left the chest just outside the door of the room along with the meats, in case I needed to return for more water. The map and two vials I took into my hands along with my spellbook to be studied further.

I didn’t go far. The room with the torture pearamid and shattered stone was my destination. The sun could rise again at any moment. It had already been half an hour, and in the previous hour the sun had risen what felt like three times. I needed to write my next spell before then.

I placed my map and vials on the floor and withdrew my wax crayon.

I sat, keenly aware of the throbbing in my chest. I focused on it, let the pain wash over. Let the pain be. It wasn’t my intention, but my pain actually faded a little as a result, as if it had needed to be experienced, demanded my attention, and, having received it, left me, content in a job well done. It rose again a moment later, and I felt it again, and it receded. Waves crashing on the shore. In and out with the tide. Fight the tide and I’d be destroyed, overwhelmed with pain, ride it, and relief and pain would come in their own time. An hour passed slowly, yet I never once grew restless or bored. Voices called to me from the darkness, whispers screamed in my mind, and I ignored them. In and out. In and out.

Lesser Heal: The caster’s body heals an hour’s worth of injuries over the course of an hour.

The whispers had returned early on while I was recording. They weren’t harder to ignore (They were by no means easy to ignore) but they were more... solid? It was the best word I had for it. There had been a price for casting that stasis spell.

Plasma Torrent

It was a suggestion more than a demand. The spell before it had been much the same. I could have chosen not to take on the burden of either spell. The more spells I held in my mind, the more I became aware of a sort of pressure. I wasn’t sure what the nature of the pressure was, but I bet the warlocks did. There had to be a reason they were known for casting their magic about so freely. But Plasma Torrent put me in mind of my Lightning Cascade and that seemed like something I wanted to have stored for winter. Plus I’d been recording at the time. Rather than think about the decision it had been easier to accept the whispers much like I’d accepted the pain and focus my concentration on my Lesser Heal instead.

Like my Clothes’ Hanger before it, the spell did little on it’s own. It would be in the coming days, or coming sunrises, that I’d truly start gaining ground with the spell.

I turned my attention to the objects I’d brought with me from the chest. The map was the most exciting and the most disappointing. I’d hoped for even the barest hint of an outline of my surroundings, but it quickly became clear the map was of the Delta.

The coin was large and had a silver-white sheen to it. While while it did tug on my hand very gently, it didn’t manage to stick to it. I didn’t have enough experience with riches to be sure, but it might have been made of platinum. Worth a fortune, I was sure, but too heavy to bring with me if it didn’t reveal other properties, which it didn’t.

The potion of “Pincers” I put into the space switching lodestones had provided in my pouch. The other bottle I unstoppered and carefully wafted towards my face. Alcohol. Liquor of some kind. I poured a bit on the floor to no reaction. Perhaps if I tasted it, it would reveal magical properties. Perhaps I’d keel over dead and go blind. I left the bottle on the floor.

The chests contents had been disappointing, but the water, the water was strength; I could wet my lips, stretch aching muscles, the water was thought; I could ease the pounding in my head, let myself think, the water was magic; I could stop and record whatever spells I needed to overcome whatever obstacles the dungeon threw at me. The water was a wealth beyond compare.

The water was life.