I wasn’t getting down the hallway any time soon, but I was pretty sure I could go around the toad-dragon's body using the other corridor. What’s more, the entrance to the cavern hadn’t collapsed on this side. The other exit from that room might still be available to me. I left the body to its fate and headed down to check.

Sure enough, a small passage remained clear, leading into the other room beyond the cavern. The entrance filled with lava had been hopelessly buried. Hopefully the stone around it wouldn’t also melt.

I’d investigate it in a moment, but there was something I’d been putting off since the fireball had first slipped from my mind, and I couldn’t put it off any longer.

I drew both fireballs in as close as I could without burning myself, and studied myself under their light.

I was green.

Not just my hands either, not just my skin. My finger nails were the green of poplar leaves, my skin that of birch. My hair had turned a pale green like juniper berries in early summer. My clothing too had turned green. Darker, in most places. Perhaps the cool green of a spruce tree or the leaves of cranberry in winter. Even the metal of my sword and dagger had been effected, dark and glimmering like a mountain pond. It wasn’t helping my elfen image.

The sun rose.

And then it fell.

And then rose again.

My spells were still refreshed. I could still feel the renewed runes blazing in my mind, but something had swallowed the sun. Tendrils of darkness had enveloped the new sun, taking it back to wherever it had come from. Which meant the new suns weren’t forever, and I needed to take advantage of them as I could. The new room would have to wait a little longer.

I retreated back to the toad-dragon’s lair. It wasn’t the most comfortable room, nor the most dependable, but it offered me a corner which could see all three entrances and unlike the cavern it was cool enough to think in.

Lesser Heal. I focused on myself, my aches, my wounds, everything the toad-dragon had set wrong and my body’s efforts to set them right. On my chest especially, where I’d been most injured, both by its tail and the fire traps before and after it.

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

I took a swig of water as the spell completed. The endless sunrises had ruined my sense of time, but it must have been getting on in the day. I was starting to feel hungry.

I’d only noticed it partway though recording my spell, but the toad-dragon’s lair actually contained a sack, three-quarters buried in the sand. Hopefully it would contain some food, and more reliable food than what the Despair-King’s chest had offered. Beside it was the neck of a tiny vial, a match for the potions on my belt. It was marked with a rune like the others, but it was one I didn’t recognize. Possibly something to do with hearing, but I couldn’t be sure. I added it to my pouch anyway. It was just small enough to fit, and I’d wanted better hearing earlier. I’d almost certainly find a use for it, even if only in trade.

Magic Swords

My luck (at least with spell casting) which had been so good for the last couple hours, failed me now. The swords appeared, and the spell disappeared from my spellbook. I’d begun to wonder if I could lose my spells at all since the rising of the new suns. I’d been wrong.

Wrong, or the devourment of one of the suns had made it possible to lose spells once more. Either way, there was nothing I could do. I still had my swords and I was going to use them.

I’d summoned them to unbury the sack, which I set them to now. I might have avoided the loss of spell if I’d unburied the sack by hand, but an extra hour of healing was unnoticeable in the grand scheme of things. Adding the potion to my pouch had been painful enough as it was.

The sack was rather large. Whatever drawstring the sack had once possessed was gone. Without the sand to hold it in place the neck spilled open, revealing its contents. Its base, and what gave it most of its structure, was a long coiled rope. Everything else had been stacked on top. And on the very top was, next to a fully laid feast, the greatest treasure I could hope to find.

A map.

A map with the words on top: Bleakfort Dungeon, Floor 11.

I didn’t recognize any features or room layouts, even when I rotated the map around a few times, but it was hard to tell from a bird’s eye view. I’d have to compare with the maps Conan was making. My suspicion was still that I had been imprisoned on the first floor, but I couldn’t be sure. With the map, I could be. I folded it carefully and put it into my pouch. I left the dream seed out of my pouch while I worked, in case I found something else worth my time.

The owner of the sack appeared to be a bit of a traveller. Beneath the map was a small whittled statue of a bear, and next to it the dagger used to carve it. The sack must have been here for some time, for when I removed the dagger from its sheath it nearly fell apart. It had been hopelessly corroded. The pouch of herbs next to it had also spoiled.

A much smaller sack of hardtack seemed to be in good condition, and I ate half of them with a liberal amount of my water before continuing.

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There was a small empty vial which I would have taken if I could spare the space, as well as a cutlass which I swapped with my rusted green sword. The adventurer seemed to have come to the dungeon prepared. The shorter blade—designed for fighting below decks on a ship—would be ideal in some of the more cramped corridors of the dungeon. Strange that it was in the sack rather than with the shields. Probably wouldn’t have helped against the toad-dragon though anyway.

Or... instead of prepared, he might have simply been a sailor. The next item was a sailor’s bowl, also called a carriage bowl. They were a local design and a fairly unpopular one at that. They were more or less two bowls nestled atop one another. The bottom bowl was heavy with a thick base to keep it upright. The top bowl contained a series of perforations around the edge, growing wider they higher up they rose. As liquids sloshed and rocked to the top, they’d fall in the holes, and rise back out through a hole in the bottom. From what I’d heard, it almost never worked. Plus they were a pain to clean.

Why the man had brought one to explore a dungeon of all places, I had no idea, but it did suggest he lived in the area. I’d never seen one before, and I doubted anyone from farther afield had even heard of them.

My sailor theory was thrown off by the next item, a book of mythology wrapped in a wide, ribbon-like girdle, of the sort priest or druid might wear ceremonially. Several dog-eared pages in the book showed not only my fire beetle, a rough sketch of the dungeons and caverns below, but also a drawing of the toad-dragon itself, a creature the book called a “Water Leaper”.

There were histories of Bleakfort, zoological works which contained all creatures under the sun, and yet the priest (as I now thought about him) had chosen a book of mythology to be his guide. I’d have to take it with me.

As it turned out, the rope wasn’t the only object at the bottom of the sack. Wrapped in its coils was an iron breastplate, chiselled to resemble a man’s torso. Though it appeared my size at first glance, the metal had been shaped strangely, with a narrower chest and longer torso than my own.

I tried it on anyway, in case there were magical properties to be revealed, but instead only revealed new ways to make my chest wounds scream and tear.

I discarded it with some regret. A proper set of armour would be welcome in this dart obsessed dungeon.

The sack I could use. I’d keep the rope and toss in the book, hardtack, and—since I had the space—the vial I’d previously discarded. I could secure the neck with the girdle, and throw it over my shoulder using the scabbard of my old sword.

To my relief, surprise, and elation, not only did my travelling sack work, I didn’t feel the slightest twinge of pain from the extra weight once it was up on my shoulder, despite the extreme weight of all the ropes. Once again I thanked the dwarf goddess with all my heart.

***

The room beyond the cavern had been hit heavily by the pyroclastic blasts. Cavern rock and dungeon stone and been scattered across the room. Bits of metal were embedded in the walls and ceiling. Great gouges were missing from the floors and walls. Both doors had been blown open, both revealing mangled mechanisms within. More darts, a bellows, and... several giant scythes? What the architects lacked in creativity and structural design they sure made up for in enthusiasm. I was beginning to wonder if every door in the dungeon was trapped and I’d just been lucky.

A low drone emanated from the room, and the floor vibrated slightly from the noise. Occasionally, a low clank would resound from somewhere deep beneath the floor and the sound would echo throughout the room. Like the “bath house”, this room was also covered in alternating black and white tiles. If the bath house was indeed a bath house, than perhaps this was the pump room for it. That would go some way to explain the cluster of explosions. The pumps would have been closest to the hot-spring's reservoir.

There was no evidence of tanks or pipes in the room to support my theory. Just big gears slowly trundling along, half rising out of the floor in some areas, and affixed to the wall in others.

The only other door in the room, the one which had contained the scythes, led into another room which had been effected by the explosions.

Not only had doors been destroyed, but walls had shifted and moved, with gaps wide enough for me to squeeze through. As I sent my lights dancing about the room they revealed half a dozen passageways and doors, though many were still sealed, and I had no doubt some led to the same location.

The far side of the room was entirely taken up with a sloped pit of spikes, much like the one in the room of the headless men. I couldn’t actually be sure I wasn’t back in the room of the headless men, but I was fairly certain the number of doorways were wrong, and that the pit in the headless men room had been along the long side of the room’s rectangle rather than the short like this one.

Still, that room had had a door on the other side of the spike pit as well, it was possible they led to each other. This room had not one door on the far side of the pit, but two, as well as a suspiciously placed statue of a maiden. The gorgon leading from the altar of evil was still fresh in my memory. Unfortunately the depth of the pit was beyond me at the moment. The slope was flush with the doors on the far side, but on the side closest to me it was about twice my height in depth.

I could teleport across, or develop a spell to lower myself into the pit, but I might as well try the other exits first.

A cracked passage through a broken wall was closest, so that was where I started. It was an easy fit right up until the end where I had to drop my travelling sack and squeeze through an opening slightly less wide than I was. I pulled the sack through after me.

I’d ended up in a very hot hallway, with a passage to my right and a door straight ahead. The door was made of wood and the bottom was broken. It had been eaten away by a slowly spreading pile of lava. The door was on fire.

The passage on the right turned right again, and in short order led back around to the room I’d just come from.

That left only a single wooden door, and another of the cracks in the wall, though both seemed to lead to the same place. All my other options out of the room lay on the other side of the spike pit.

I went for the door. Squeezing through the final gap had not been a comfortable experience, especial when I’d had to lean over to move my sack. I stood well back while I let my swords work. I didn’t want even a relatively harmless trap like the fireball trap had been to push me back into the pit. The door was close enough a stuck door and slippery handle could probably do the job.

The door was battered down without incident, revealing a wash of heat which flooded the room. Either the lava had gone everywhere, or, more likely given the path I’d been taking, I was circling a central lava flow.

The lava in this room hadn’t covered everything. In fact there was a passage out of the room if I was willing to make a dash down a ten foot wide, lava-free corridor. I doubted that was enough space. I could barely stand hanging out in the doorway.

Unusually, the far door was ajar, meaning I could teleport through it if I wanted to. And, under the glow of the lava, the reason for the door being ajar soon became clear: Along the wall immediately to my left was scrawled the words “Death is the only exit.”

I’d been here before.