I’d not had much luck with my new adventures on the first floor thus far. The only place left to explore—unless I wanted to brave the demon-mirror (which I didn’t)—was the final exit from the room full of slain mercenaries.
The wooden door lasted less than a second against my onslaught. It revealed a short parallel corridor with a second door to my right on the opposite side.
Though sturdier, this door was also made of wood and soon fell. Unlike the first door it did so with a brilliant flash and the smell of burning sulphur. An instant later there was a deafening clap of thunder which sent me stumbling backward. Thankfully I'd remained hidden behind the far doorway and so other than ringing ears and a throbbing chest, I was unharmed.
I was never opening a door by hand again. Not unless my need was extreme. Not unless I developed counter measure for doing so. The warlocks’ traps were far too dangerous.
Apparently someone was looking out for me, for it soon became apparent I’d nearly travelled through this door before. On the opposite side was the magical pool from which I’d retrieved Tom’s chest.
This meant two very important things:
Firstly, I could now continue exploring the first floor as I pleased. I’d never gone through the door south of the pool and now I found myself with the tools to make all such obstacles safe and trivial to overcome, even if they could throw lightning.
Secondly, as just stated before, I now knew where south was. My large ‘X’ still remained carved in the north wall. Which meant I could determine where north was in the lift room. Which meant I could determine where north was on the floor far below.
I put an X both in the corridor and the lift room before I found myself turned around. Then I circled the pool widdershins, being sure to keep my back to the mirror room the whole while. I returned to the hall of statues through the secret passage with full intention on recording a new spell before sunrise, but found myself sitting with my back against the wall and head spinning instead.
“Ah! Waters fall and lands turn to dust!” That had not been a good idea. Crawling would have been bad enough. Crawling while carrying a small travelling troupe’s worth of gear had nearly torn my chest in half. I was still panting from the pain. The heaving of my chest was not helping the situation.
I retrieved my wax and flipped through my spellbook to the relevant pages. Lesser Heal. Lesser Heal II. Lesser Heal III. Lesser Heal IIII. Lesser Heal V. The pain began to subside. One by one my muscles began to relax.
Lesser Heal VI: The caster’s body heals 31 hours’ worth of injuries over the course of an hour.
Not bad. A full night’s recovery in a single rune, more or less. I’d always found I healed faster at night.
By the end of the recording session the pain of my exertions had entirely dimmed. Just in time for me to crawl back under the tapestry. Hopefully I’d healed enough to make the trip.
***
Lesser Heal VI
“Leave me atop the whitest peak to greet the sunrise with my frozen skull!”
I was sitting against the pool’s retaining wall this time, waiting for my new spell to work its magic. I could have double dipped on the spell if I’d triggered it just before sunrise, but sunrise was such a fluid concept these days I had no way of knowing when that would be.
Something had gone wrong with the spell. Something different.
My wounds were still healing at the expected rate. No worries on that front. The spell was still in my book. It hadn’t been stolen by the dark magic of the dungeon. No, instead, it was glowing.
Glowing strangely.
It provided no light, and the rune itself was as transparent as ever when I looked directly at it. Someone not in the know would think they were staring at a blank page.
It was when I closed the book it became most apparent.
I could still see the rune. I could still feel it there, waiting to be reknewed by the sunrise and called into action by its master.
I turned my head so that my spellbook was completely out of sight and I could still see the rune. It was similar to the runes in my mind in that respect, but unlike them I could focus on it safely.
I released my spellbook. Not by my much. I left it open to the page of Safe Teleport, just a few inches from my hand.
I could still sense the rune.
I moved my hand back. The rune didn’t so much as flicker.
Strange.
And incredibly convenient. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. There was ways mages could avoid carrying around cumbersome spellbooks everywhere, but they typically convoluted and complicated or very fragile. This... If I could replicate this I wouldn’t need to carve spells in my mind even in the dire-est of circumstance. I’d have to see if recording it also recorded its properties.
The pain had subsided enough for me to stand. I did so, and retreated out of the room back through the door which had spat lightning at my swords.
Speaking of which-
Magic Swords III
Four blades came to my service. I’d made a mistake in naming these spells. I should have called it Four Magic Swords for simplicity rather than iterating on the version. Although I supposed technically it was more like Four Magic Swords for a Little Bit then Three and then One for the Rest of My Remaining Time. Also there is Some Lights. And that was far more confusing.
I set the swords to hacking down the southmost door while I retreated into the lightning blasted corridor.
The door put up very little resistance. I circled the pool sunwise once the path was clear. The hallway beyond headed due east and would have been shaped somewhat like a very long letter ‘F’. Two corridors to my right to choose from, each branching in turn.
I took the further branch on the logic that I had to choose one of them, and second guessing myself would have less benefits than simply committing to the first (and closest) path to cross my mind. (Provided neither suggested imminent death.)
I left an X directly north of the corridor to mark my passage, then crossed the thirty or so feet to its next junction.
The corridor ended in a dead end after another thirty feet on the passage to my right, and bent at a right angle to the south on the passage to my left. Carved directly in the mid-point of the right angle turn was rune.
It was not mage rune. I wasn’t even sure if it was a dark magic rune. Not, at least, of the sort of dark magic I was familiar with. Perhaps a bit of sorcerer or the work of an enchanter.
It was evil, whatever the case.
Malice radiated from it. It was so thick I could chew it. A dark promise of pain and despair.
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I recognized the rune even if I didn’t know its name nor the magic which empowered it. It was a rune of the sort used by the Orcneas. Perhaps one written by the very ones I’d met.
They were not, by and large, regarded as friendly creatures. The could be reasoned with, bargained with, but all stories of the living corpses mentioned their darker nature.
My spells were probably enough to overcome their magic, but I didn’t want to become overconfident. They had claimed to be ancient enemies of the warlocks. Those who could survive the trail of centuries against such a foe were not to be underestimated. I’d not deal with that rune unless I ran out of options to explore. As it stood, I had another corridor I could go down on the first floor, and my primary objective was to explore the second.
I marked the north face of the corner where the rune stood, and beneath it drew a crude skull. A reminder to myself, and a warning to others. It was possible that not everyone would sense the rune’s malice.
The other passage was longer, perhaps a hundred feet in total. The route due south ended in a wall, but thirty or so feet before it a door was set in the western wall. I retreated back up the corridor and let my swords open it.
One of the immediate benefits of my map of the eleventh floor was that it had given Conan and I a sense of the size of the various floors of the dungeon. If all floors were similar the dungeon was enormous. Unbelievably so. On the scale of a small city.
In other words, I wasn’t wasting my time exploring the first floor. I’d explored two thirds of it at best, maybe a little more if there was variety between floors. But as long as I kept finding new rooms, Eric could be anywhere.
The sun rose.
It would be a slow search if I stopped every few minutes for an hour to record a new spell. I would do it anyway. Last time I’d been unable to take advantage of the sunrise one of the suns had been devoured by darkness, I wasn’t about to risk losing this opportunity to augment my strength. I’d hardly be of any use to Eric if I was dead. Maybe a sign that there was a trap in the corridor and little more.
That said, I wasn’t about to stop for an hour without knowing my surroundings.
Sparks flew as my swords pierced the door. The wooden door. With very large sparks, which crackled as they burrowed into the walls and ground, leaving scorchmarks to mark their passage.
Another lightning trap, albeit a much tamer one than the last. I gave my swords a few extra minutes to clear the wall and stab at the surrounding doorway.
Just in case.
***
I’d seen pentagons, hexagons, and heptagons. This room was an octagon. A circle for people who didn’t want to commit.
It hadn’t been built that way. Not precisely, for the room was clearly a natural cave, with water running down the walls and stalactites hanging from the ceiling.
No, this room had been carved. Then carved again as the running water and dripping ceiling had slowly eroded its shape. Chisel marks could be seen everywhere, both crude and elegant. Generations of hands maintaining a damp hole in the ground.
Three ruby beetles grazed the ground for lichens and moss, or gnawed on the rotting logs which were scattered about the room. Despite the violence of my forced entry and the sparks of lightning it had released the beetles appeared unfazed. My will-o’-wisps hadn’t even registered when they’d danced into the room to illuminate it. Perhaps the beetles were blind. Which made it all the more unfair when all three stopped at once and growled at me when I tried to enter the room.
“Hey! Woah,” I raised my hands, one wielding the sheath to my sword like a club, the other my book of spells, “easy fellas.”
The growling continued.
My single step into the room had been enough to reveal the entire structure. There were no other doors in the room, no other inhabitants or structures. I’d only missed a stone dais to the south against the wall. Suspicious, perhaps, but I didn’t see how a secret door could be concealed within the natural stone of the wall. Perhaps there was a trap door under the dais, or the dais itself was an anchor for a teleportation ritual, but short of killing a few beetles I wasn’t going to find out.
“Okay. Easy now. I’m leaving,” I kept my hands raised as I slowly left the room.
Raising them had probably done little to deescalate the situation, given that I hadn’t disarmed myself, and beetles might not understand the intricacies of neutrality, but it might have made me look bigger. And I felt better. Some things just came naturally.
My original intention had only been to investigate my surroundings anyway, and in that I’d succeeded. The beetles could watch my back while I wrote my next spell.
Lesser Heal. Lesser Heal II. Lesser Heal III. Lesser Heal IIII. Lesser Heal V. Lesser Heal VI. I remained standing at the end of the corridor, back to the wall, letting myself heal. Scrapes, aches, and bruises faded. My chest itched something fierce the whole time, testing my concentration the whole hour.
Lesser Heal VII: The caster’s body heals 62 hours’ worth of injuries over the course of an hour.
If I watched closely I could see the change on my skin as I watched. I wasn’t about to recover from wounds mid battle, but watching torn skin slowly flatten out and knit back together leaving behind smooth green flesh was still a unique experience (for a variety of reasons).
My swords were gone, of course, but my lights remained. I spread them out about myself and headed back to the lift. The only other readily available unexplored passage was through the room of the demon mirror, meaning it was time to return to exploring the second floor. Better I face a second toad-dragon than lose my mind any further.
A little over ten minutes later saw me back on the second floor in that strange intersection of destroyed and collapsing rooms. I’d had to work the winch the whole way down, a feat only made bearable by casting Lesser Heal VII less than a minute into my descent.
That had been a mistake. The moment I cast the spell it vanished from my spellbook, lost like all the others. On the plus side, unlike the others, I was still keeping the gains from casting the spell. My health continued to improve even if the strength of my spells didn’t.
I risked another spell on touchdown.
Magic Swords III
Thankfully, this one stayed. I set the blades to carving an ‘X’ in the northenmost wall. Sword Storm would have been faster, but the lesson of the dungeon had finally sunk home. Only use my second best spells where possible.
The other three rooms in the strange, explosion-made intersection were all to my south or west. There was also a doorway to the east, but I didn’t fancy smashing through iron when open passages were available. Especially given the chance that the doorway was trapped.
The room to my south was closest, lying just on the other side of half a doorway complete with half a door. It was a wonder the thing hadn’t fallen over.
There was a body in the room, up near its north side. He lay close enough to the explosion that my first thought was that he was another victim of my ill-caution, but closer inspection revealed he’d been dead for far too long.
The wounds were all wrong too. He had scabs about his wrists and ankles, and scars and slices everywhere else. His weapon lay nearby, a mace which had been half dissolved by some sort of acid. He’d been tortured. He’d avoided at least one trap. And he’d died. Possibly from exposure or lack of water.
Another escapee like myself. Poor man.
The room was small by Bleakfort standards, thirty by thirty feet at best, and I quickly searched the rest of it without turning up anything new.
An archway led out of the room to the east and a second door lay directly below it. Two more passages to explore after I finished my investigation of the other two rooms.
I headed directly away from the open archway—west—to the hallway and rooms on the other side.
Room on the side. Singular.
It turned out what had appeared to be two rooms from the outside was actually one large room with a hole in the wall along it’s midpoint. The explosion had left behind two sections of wall within the hole, completing the illusion of a divide, but upon entering the room it was clear they were just free standing pillars.
I set my swords to carving an ‘X’ on a blank patch of the north wall while I studied the rest of the room.
The room contained two sets of objects of note beyond the scattered rubble from its collapsed wall. To my left was several small patches of brightly coloured mushrooms. The mushrooms themselves were also small, which was to say they were of normal mushroom size, as opposed to the ten foot tall Mushroom-Kings. All glowed green under my life site, a reassurance, if not a guarantee, that they weren’t under his control.
The second object was a map, one which took up an entire half of the wall to my right. The detail was intricate. Tiny. It almost looked more like a series of spider webs stacked on top of each rather than a map. Each “web” was a network of little boxes and circles, all connected by thin little lines—in other words, a floor of the dungeon.
A map.
A map of the dungeon.
A map of this dungeon. It had to be. It couldn’t be. I didn’t dare hope it was. My knowledge of the dungeon’s layout from a top down perspective was not such that I could tell if it contained the floor I was on. I’d need Conan’s map to figure that out.
But if—if—this was a map of Bleakfort... the possibilities overwhelmed me. A stirring awoke inside me, one akin to the soul of the dryad, one almost as strong as the feeling of Elysium. Salvation. A way out. No more stumbling in the dark. Stop it, Oswic. I dared not hope, and yet...
No! I dared not.
But if it was... I needed it copied immediately. I spun back the way I’d come, heedless of the pain in my chest from the action. I needed to hurry. I needed to fetch Conan at onc-
I was no longer alone.
Something had heard my carving.
Somethings.