<~> CHAPTER 15

Maxwell was leading us to the dungeon stairs he had seen when we were clearing out the goblins. After their conversation, they concluded that with the group like it was, we could afford to go a little deeper. The deciding factor, I had been told, was my own regeneration. If I could get nearly bisected and still stand up from it then I wouldn't need much of Piper's healing. I had noticed pretty early on that I was healing quickly since things started changing for me but the incident with the goblin king showed me how far it actually went.

And so we reached a stone stairway that tunneled deep into the ground. I had seen these stairs when we were walking through here before but I didn't think anything of them. I had no way of knowing that these were magic stairs and would take us to another floor of this so-called dungeon.

I ran my hands across the smooth polished stone of the stairs. They looked carved from a solid block of dark-colored marble. Impossibly pristine and seamless the stone traveled deeper into the ground as if the entire stairwell was made from a single piece. Above the stairs was a similar slanted ceiling made of the same marble, I could just reach it in my transformed state. The stairwell would make me a bit claustrophobic but I wouldn't have to worry about actually getting stuck.

("Maxwell says that he doesn't know much about the seventeenth floor, he hadn't expected us to go past this floor with our previous teammate. We're going to be scouting this new floor out carefully but we'll come back up the stairs to camp. Now that the goblin king is dead, the area near the stairs should remain clear of goblins for a while, making it one of the safer places in the dungeon at the moment.)

I nodded. I headed down the stairs first, the combination of my regeneration and enhanced senses made me the ideal person to take point. I also didn't need an additional light to see like my friends behind me, in fact, their torches made it harder for me to see. My gait in my taller form made going down the stairs a little awkward, it felt more comfortable to take two stairs at a time but it meant I couldn't go too fast or else the ones following me would fall behind.

After about ten straight minutes of stairs, I could smell pine trees. I took a deep breath, a bit confused by the smell but no, it was obviously pine trees. I was curious what I would find up ahead so I let myself speed up a little and scout ahead. When I finally reached the end of the stairs, they opened up into a... forest?

The pine trees that surrounded me were tall, at least three or four stories tall. That wasn't so weird but the way the stairs just led to a spooky forest was. It was dark out, not quite pitch black if I had to guess but my eyes made it a bit hard to tell how much ambient light there was. It couldn't have been any darker than the lightless caves I woke up in. On top of that, there was a lot of fog so even with my eyes I couldn't see that far, maybe fifty feet ahead. I glanced back at the stairs, they came out of an archway that stood alone in the middle of nothing, behind the stairs was a flat surface that couldn't exist as far as I was concerned. The other side of the stairs should be there, not just a flat wall. I just chalked it up to more dungeon weirdness as I watched my surroundings while my friends caught up with me.

It was quiet here. The only thing that could be heard was the rustling of trees in the wind, no birds, no insects, just wind. I closed my eyes for a minute and focused on my sense of smell. I grew up in a desert but I have been to the East Coast before, I was familiar with some of the smells of a forest. My new senses made everything sharp though, I could smell the pine needles, the subtle rot of the ones that were on the ground, the humidity in the air, sweet smells from flowers, and musky ones from animals. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect but I could tell there were actual animals around despite the dead silence. I would think the birds were just sleeping but like the moonlit lake, I didn't expect there to be a sunrise here.

Maxwell reached the bottom of the stairs and looked around with a grimace. I listened to him carefully trying to pick up his words. They still sounded foreign to me but I tried hard to listen to everyone talk whenever I could. Maybe if I listened enough I would start to pick things up.

He waved for the two others to follow us down after determining it was safe enough at the base of the stairs. I turned to keep watch as they came down the rest of the way.

("Helena, do you see anything?") Luna asked.

("No. I do smell animals but I haven't seen any since I've come down here. The fog is thick enough that I can't see too far out either.)

I looked behind me just in time to catch a grimace as she dug at the ground.

("What's wrong?") I asked.

She gave a scratchy sigh. ("I won't be able to write in the ground here, the dirt is too packed to write in the sand and dirt like I did on the upper floor. It will be a lot harder to relay messages for a while.")

I frowned and nodded.

The motion caught her attention. ("The fog makes your eyes light up big cones in front of you. Between that and the torches, it'll be impossible to sneak up on things on this floor.")

I looked as far into the distance as I could through the trees I could tell what she meant. It was like my eyes were giant headlights in front of me and unlike the torches, I couldn't turn them off, at least as long as I wanted to see things ahead of me.

("How dark is it? It's hard for me to tell since my eyes changed,") I asked her. I closed my eyes to let her look around.

("It's dark out but manageable with the torches. ...your eyes might be making it harder to see. The fog is making them look a lot brighter than normal and it's reflecting the light back.")

I grimaced. That was bad news but not entirely unexpected from my own observations.

("Can you see farther in the fog with my eyes closed?")

("...Unfortunately, it seems so,") Luna replied.

I frowned. ("It seems like I won't be that useful as a scout on this floor.")

("Maybe. We're not sure what kind of monsters are on this floor though so it might not be needed anyway. Goblins are most dangerous when you don't detect them, other kinds of monsters aren't always the same.")

Maxwell said something to Luna and she shook her head and poked at the ground. Piper said something to her next and she nodded in reply. After a little while Maxwell had picked a direction that we would head.

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("How are we going to keep track of where we're going in the forest?") I asked Luna.

She smiled. ("The same way you kept track in the caves. Like the caves on the previous floor, the trees heal over time so we have to make sure to reapply our marks as time goes on.") She pointed to Maxwell just as he was taking out a knife to carve a symbol into one of the trees.

I stepped up to Maxwell and looked over the symbol. ("What does this symbol mean?") I asked Luna.

("That's the south mark with a numeral under it. It's customary to count the dungeon entrance as 'north' for the purposes of dungeon delving. We use south marks as we go further from the stairs. We don't normally use the other marks, just south marks. But if you're told to go 'east' or 'west,' that means perpendicular to the last southmark that's been placed in the dungeon, and 'north' means back to the entrance,") she explained.

("How do you know if you're getting further away from the dungeon entrance? It would be easy to get turned around in a place like this.")

She shrugged. ("It doesn't really matter. We just try to follow the numerals back on the previous path. That's the best we can do since there are no stars and the sun doesn't change down here.")

("What about a compass?") I asked.

("A sun compass can be useful when the sun is visible but doesn't help at night or when it's foggy. It's so unreliable that most people just use the marks.")

I furrowed my brows. ("No, I meant a magnetic compass.")

("Magnetic? I don't know what that means.")

Huh... ("Like metal or rocks that attract metal?")

("Oh! You mean a lodestone? I'm not sure how that relates to a sun compass... Lodestones are kind of rare but alchemists tend to use them in their work. Sometimes we come across them in the dungeon. They're usually worth taking back because they're pretty valuable.")

I hesitantly nodded. Was a lodestone a natural magnet? I think I had heard the name before but I wasn't really sure. I guess it didn't matter, they didn't seem to have compasses yet. Or at least magnetized compasses, I've never heard of a 'sun compass' before.

I suddenly heard a noise that caught my attention and I turned to face it. Whatever I had heard had frozen in place off in the direction I was facing.

("Luna, there's something in that direction.") I said pointing.

("I'll tell Piper.")

Piper turned to look at me and I continued to point in the direction I was facing, I still didn't see any movement but my eyes made seeing at all difficult in this foggy forest. Maxwell lifted his shield and started pushing through the brush in that direction.

There was a loud groan that shook my nerves to the core. The sound came right out of a horror movie, I couldn't even describe the strange noise, I didn't know what to compare it to. Something like pained groaning but much louder than it should be, the noise verged on the edge of being shrill but didn't quite make it there.

Off in the distance and all around us, I could hear more of the noises create a refrain. The thing was calling out to others and they were echoing back their wailing groans. Maxwell bolted forward as soon as he heard the refrain, the idea of this thing calling more was enough to get him moving.

("Helena, close your eyes,") Luna quickly asked.

I closed my eyes and focused on my hearing. Other than the wind and the clinking of Maxwell's armor I couldn't hear anything else around us yet. I lowered to the ground and started taking short sniffs to see if I could smell anything that would indicate danger. I picked up the scent of the thing that Maxwell was headed toward. Rotting flesh.

I felt the heat of Luna's fire come to life around us just as Maxwell made contact with the monster I had yet to see. Its wailing groan pitched up and turned to a crying scream as Maxwell hacked into it.

Another noise! Behind us!

I spun around and opened my eyes just in time to see something bolting at us. It looked like the corpse of a rotting deer, animated and bounding towards us. On its head was the skull of a wolf, with the undead deer's crooked horns pushing through unnatural holes in the skull, below the upper jaw of the skull were long sharp teeth that looked out of place on the creature.

As it got closer I ducked down and leaped up at it just in time to catch the thing midair. My muscles strained as I redirected its momentum and threw it at the ground, which elicited another pained scream that matched the thing Maxwell was fighting. The monster started thrashing, its hooves and horns made it hard for me to get any closer as it flailed on its side, trying to scrabble back to its hooves.

Luna's floating balls of fire that had been circling our group converged on the monster and lit it up, the disgusting smell of burning rotting flesh filled the forest. I reeled back from the heat and the smell, putting a little distance between the two of us. The monster took the opportunity the fire gave it to stumble back to its feet and get away from me. Its howling screams carried through the forest as it ran away. Maxwell reappeared from the brush, a dark stain of blood coating his blade.

He yelled something that I could tell meant something along the lines of RUN without any kind of translation. We ran back the way we came, following the marks that Maxwell had been leaving on the trees. Nine, eight, seven, we moved from mark to mark until finally, the dark marble stairs came back into view. The wailing groans were getting closer, converging on our position even as we made it to the stairs.

Maxwell yelled something to us and Luna translated for me. ("He says to go up the stairs in reverse formation! He'll follow us in last with his shield!")

That meant I was in second to last. I positioned myself next to the entrance of the stairway and looked out for the creatures. First Piper, then Luna started heading up the stairs. I could now see the things in the trees, tall partially skeletal animated animal corpses were gathering all around us. I headed up the stairs backward, just in case I needed to help Maxwell out if things got bad. Once I was headed up the stairs Maxwell followed behind and continued to be a bulwark for the creatures and the rest of our group.

The wailing screams and groans faded as we ascended the stairs, none of the tall horrifying creatures followed us as we made our way back up.