Progress was slow. Lynn insisted they check for traps every step of the way, concerned as she was about what had killed at least three delvers, and it slowed them to a crawl. She would pause every few steps to check the ground with the butt of her spear before moving another few steps forward just to do it again.
Chess was starting to think that the delvers might’ve died from boredom. If it wasn’t for the odd skeletal interruption, she would’ve fallen asleep doing her slow shuffle walk behind the skunkkin. The weight of her weapons started to tell and she eventually stored Sprig and the arrows.
These interruptions always started the same, with growing unease and terror, before the group backed up to an already cleared section of the tunnel to fight the approaching undead. Usually alone or in pairs, the undead always fixated on whoever was the largest immediate threat, generally Lynn, before falling to Chess' bone-crushing mace blows once Lynn had tripped it up or Chess managed to take out a leg by flanking it.
Eventually, even these scattered interruptions became part of the tedium, and Chess only drew satisfaction from the feeling of fielding a crushing home run swing to the spines of their adversaries.
“This is the 15th delver’s remains we've fought. I’m starting to wonder how they're still intact like this. I mean, the worst we’ve seen so far is the missing foot of the first one,” Chess observed, looking to spark up a conversation, any conversation, to dispel the tedium.
Lynn scowled back at her and made a silencing gesture.
“What? It’s not like they can hear very well. If they could, we would’ve seen a larger group long before now. It’s not like we're exactly quiet when we kill them," Chess reasoned while tapping her mace against her heel as they waited for Lynn to finish painstakingly checking another stretch of tunnel.
“At this rate, all this so-called dungeon is going to provide us is an inventory overfilled with Delver’s skulls, old polearms, and rotten armor. I mean I thought Delvers were rich, where is all the enchanted stuff? Other than your spearhead all we’ve found is that moonsteel halberd head and that piece of junk is one blow away from falling to dust,” she complained.
“It could be anything from flesh-eating magic to bad air, most of which could be part of a trap,” Lynn said with a sigh. “There is no point in speculating further without more information. And you're right, delvers are generally richer than this but things like rings don’t tend to stay on fleshless fingers. Most of the useful stuff is likely waiting wherever they perished,” she explained. “Also we don't know how long they've been down here. Only good or well-refined enchantments, like the keen on this spear, hold up over centuries without maintenance. And it's possible it's been even longer than that considering where we are. Time flows differently in dungeon rifts, especially unexplored ones,” Lynn continued and Chess thought she heard an edge of unease in the Kin woman's voice.
“Different how?” Chess prompted, suddenly concerned.
Lynn shrugged, “When compared to Astra, sometimes it's slower and sometimes it's faster. It's one of the many dangers of being a Delver. There’s a song that tells of a team that spent a week in a newfound dungeon but came out to find that 50 years had passed. There is a Brother based in Portheel that studies the phenomenon extensively. He's obsessed with the idea that it's the real answer to prolonging life. I'll introduce you when we get back if you're interested; if he’s still around,” she said.
“I may do that. I appreciate your confidence in us escaping. The barrenness of this place is starting to get under my skin, and if we don’t find some way to get food soon…” Chess let her words trail off before adding, “you should teach me that song by the way, it would at least help pass the time.”
“I can do that,” Lynn capitulated and cleared her throat before starting to sing. The butt of her spear took on an accompanying beat as she got into the song proper. Chess mentally cringed at the off-key and scratchy singing voice but soon lost herself in the sad story of a band of brave men and women who, after a harrowing and tragic delve, returned home to find their families had moved or passed on. It was a cautionary tale of the dangers of the delver's life at its core and Chess fell into silent contemplation. I don’t know if Delving is the life for me. Though Ashley seems to want to pursue it, I’ve repeatedly proven to myself that I'm severely lacking in the necessary skills for it. I should’ve taken Sholer’s offer, Ashely and I wouldn't be in this situation if I had. She shook her head at her rambling thoughts. No, the ‘what if’ game is dangerous. Concentrate on the now and learn as much as you can, she admonished herself.
“Thanks, that was sad but poignant. I’ll have to get you to repeat that when we are in a more secure place so I can commit it to memory,” Chess said, overcome with a feeling of melancholy. “Do you want to let me do the pokey thing for a while?” she asked, pointing to Lynn’s continued trap-checking.
“No, you’ve admitted you don’t know what to look for,” Lynn shook her furry head.
“Are you sure? This slow pace is painful in the same way standing around watching someone else shop for clothes is painful; my legs are killing me,” Chess muttered, removing a greave and using her mace to rub an aching calf. It and her other pains were very evident now that she had the time to notice them. Her cheek, where she’d been struck by Graventy, especially ached and she imagined she had a real doozy of a bruise but she hadn’t asked the others to verify that.
“Yeah, can’t we go any faster?” Ashley added, clearly just as bored as Chess. The girl didn’t even have the satisfaction of hitting things because Lynn insisted she had to ‘watch and learn’ while she could. She’d taken to summoning camp items to pass the time. Her greaves were currently unsummoned and she held a long tent pole instead, matching Chess by digging at her leg with the sharp end.
“If I didn’t know better, I would say you two were actual blood relatives,” Lynn grumbled before returning to her work, tapping at every stone in the center of the tunnel. Lynn went back to completely ignoring their complaints, for a while.
“You’ve got to admit she’s right though; this is boring,” Ashley said, egging the kin woman on. “The stories never talk about boredom, where’s the adventure?”
“Boring is good, it’s better to be safe. We still don’t know what killed all these delvers,” Lynn said in an exasperated tone. It wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation in the past few hours.
“Yeah, yeah, that doesn't make this any less boring,” Ashley said with a yawn before taking a seat with her back against the cavern wall. She dismissed her tent pole and started a new summon. The section they were in was a good hundred yards long and Chess figured they’d be here for an hour at this rate.
“Maybe they starved to death like we’re about to,” Chess postulated jokingly to her daughter while lowering herself to sit beside her.
“No, it was definitely boredom,” Ashley responded with a giggle.
“Incoming,” Lynn called back to the lounging pair a few minutes later.
“Why don’t you take this one,” Chess offered her daughter.
“What about ‘watch and learn’?” Ashley asked, getting to her feet excitedly. She started to summon new leg armor first, and the frying pan she had summoned quickly turned to toffee and then vapor as she dismissed it.
“Stick your tongue out at her or something. Yell if there is more than one, I’ll play rear guard for now,” Chess offered with a shrug, tapping a knuckle on her mace.
Ashley and Lynn made quick work of the new undead, with Lynn distracting it and Ashley breaking its legs then back. Chess leveraged herself to her feet to go collect its skull. More skulls for my necropolis, she cackled in her mind.
“I think part of the problem is that their aura tells us long before they show up, it’s taken part of the danger out of it. It just makes it more exhausting,” Chess said as she approached the pair.
“That exhaustion is dangerous when they are in larger numbers,” Lynn tempered, giving her a nod. “We’ve been lucky to only encounter singles or pairs, but we need to stay vigilant. We still don’t know if there are other dangerous creatures here,” she added.
“Fair enough,” Chess acknowledged. “I’m going to run out of inventory space if this keeps up, though. We'll have to get rid of something if we keep collecting heads. Unless you know of a better way to stack them? Their shape isn’t exactly ideal,” Chess grumbled. “Wait, I have an idea that will kill two birds with one stone,” Chess said, clapping her hands together.
“What birds?” Ashley took the bait, looking at Chess with a frown.
“Boredom birds,” Chess quipped while taking out one of the polearms they’d collected from the undead and using her magic removed its already halved wooden haft. She’d had to split them so that they would fit in her four-foot cubed vault. Unlike her spear which she bent double with her magic for it to fit. Grabbing a skull from her inventory, she stuck the pole into the bottom and willed it to flow in and fill the interior cavity of the skull. Then using the remaining wood, she created a flat base and top before adding protrusions and indentations to the top and bottom like a certain children's toy. She smiled at her morbid building block.
“Look! Wood for brains, they even stack! You could make a castle from them,” she joked to her daughter, proudly showing off the results.
Ashley slowly shook her head. “That’s not funny.”
“Sure it is; you just don’t get it,” Chess responded with a deadpan look on her face.
“You’re strange when you're bored, and that's disrespectful to the dead," Ashley observed staring at Chess' creepy creation.
“Don't be a Debby Downer, at least we’re trying to return them to their families. They're dead, what do they care? I bet at least one of them would find this funny as hell if they were still alive. Besides, they tried to kill us,” Chess reasoned.
Chess continued her morbid task, with the odd glance up now and then to check Lynn’s progress and to take a few shuffling steps forward, until she had converted all the skulls to creepy blocks that would take up less room in the vault. Earlier she'd fixed and adjusted one of the three shields they acquired for Ashley, but now she used the remaining two to fill in any gaps in her block project. Her work done, she was left with two short ash boards that she returned to her vault.
“It’s not fair, I want crafting magic,” Ashley complained while watching Chess convert each skull in turn to her new blocks. Chess was currently building a wall from her morbid building blocks at the back of her vault and reorganizing the rest of her items to maximize the rapidly shrinking space.
“But you do! You can create sundry camp items, armor, and weapons,” Chess pointed out.
“It’s not the same,” Ashley said with a sigh.
“How about a song?” Chess asked, summoning her guitar once she finished reorganizing her vault. I should have thought of this sooner, maybe I can lull the dead to their final sleep. Nah, crushing them is more fun. Well, as long as Lynn continues to play distraction at least. I don’t want to get stabbed again even if my armor stops it, she thought. Remembering the blow to her back drew her attention to her bruised and battered body’s aches and pains yet again. She shook her head and concentrated on her instrument.
“Oh, Freya please,” Ashley enthused, and Chess smiled at her daughter's use of the goddess’s name.
“What to play, what to play, oh!” Chess mused before a sarcastic song popped into her head and she started playing. I haven’t thought of this band in years, she thought before launching into Flowers, by Hurt; the lyrics and music floating across her vision. She chuckled ruefully after finishing the weirdly comforting song.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
“What’s so funny? It sounded like a nice song,” Ashley asked.
“Wait, I'll see how well it works in Brastian,” Chess said, holding up a finger before whispering under her breath for a minute, changing some lyrics, then launching into the hastily translated version.
“Music makes this much better. I don’t see what's so funny though, it was kind of a sad song,” Ashley observed as they moved closer to Lynn once more.
“It’s, I don’t know how to explain it, the silliness of making a song about it?” Chess shrugged before playing the translated version a handful of times more to see if it would pop up in her vision from musical memory. Satisfied with the results when it did, she moved on to other songs to kill the boredom, including Ironic by Alanis Morissette, until she started to get hoarse an hour later.
Ashley held up an amber-glass cookpot that she had summoned for Chess to see and Chess gave her a thumbs up in return.
Lynn called ‘incoming’ again and Chess put her guitar down, hefting her mace to take on the next music-hating undead. This one carried a wooden club and a large triangular kite shield that was missing a few of its boards. Lynn tripped it up by pulling its feet out from under it with her spear before it could attack. Then she kept the struggling bones pinned to the ground by planting the head of her spear into the center of its shield and leaning on it while Chess dismantled it with two-handed blows from her mace.
----------------------------------------
“Do you hear that?” Lynn asked a few turns of the winding tunnel later. A fresh scent had started to permeate the dark tunnel, pushing back the stale air.
“Yeah, like a low droning sound,” Chess confirmed after listening for a moment.
“It sounds like the waterfall back in Reaverpass,” Ashley added.
“Water was my thought too, my fur has been getting heavier; the humidity has been increasing,” Lynn said before continuing her slow trap checking pace towards the sound.
“And the moss,” Chess added pointing at the growths on the walls. I wonder if I can use it to grow berries somehow.
“I think we are getting close; the sound is coming from around that corner,” Chess observed, nodding at the turn ahead a short time later. At this point, she had to raise her voice to be heard over the sound of crashing water which was quickly becoming overwhelming. She and Ashley were sticking close to Lynn, all of them curious to finally see the source of all the noise.
Lynn nodded her agreement and, counter to her practice thus far, picked up the pace: tapping the stones with fast hard blows until they reached the turn.
Lynn gasped and took a step back after taking a peek around the corner. Chess hurried to look over her shoulder and Lynn grabbed her arm for balance as they registered the sight before them.
The tunnel ended in a small lichen-covered balcony with a short knee-high wall of stone. The glare was overwhelming after so much time spent in the dimly lit tunnels and it took a minute for Chess to adjust to the sudden and drastic difference. Still blinking against the glare, Chess approached the precipice and the pair looked out and down at the immense wall of glowing water that thundered into a large lake basin far below.
The sunlight penetrating the water cast it into brilliant hues and filled the half-sphere cavern, reflecting further rainbows from the water and crystal-studded stalactites above in an amazing kaleidoscope of color and beauty. It looked like someone had created a hollow ball and cut it in half with an enormous wall of water and shone a light through the water to light it. Their small balcony was situated at the far back of the remaining sphere.
The sound was deafening.
“Wow,” Ashley yelled behind them.
“Don’t get too close! The ledge is slick!” Lynn cautioned Ashley, screaming to be heard over the pounding of the water.
“That’s a long drop,” Chess said in Lynn’s ear, looking down into the lake below and felt a wave of vertigo, the fall was a good 200 feet. “I can’t see how deep it is though, so jumping in is definitely out,” she added.
They all took in the view for a while longer before they retreated to a point where they could hear each other again without yelling.
“We should’ve gone right,” Lynn said.
“Oh, I don’t know, it's beautiful,” Chess countered, and Ashley nodded in agreement. “But you’re right, we need to retrace our steps.”
“Can we go faster this time?” Ashley asked hopefully.
"Yes, at least until we've retraced our steps," Lynn capitulated. "Just stay to the center of the path," she added.
"Was that an exit? I mean that was sunlight, right?" Chess asked.
"It's possible but unlikely. Most dungeon rifts are more like tiny worlds of their own. Many have their own suns and moons or are pieces of other realms that have them. Besides, a waterfall that size in the dryad woods would be known," Lynn explained.
"Huh, I thought dungeons would be more, I don't know dungeony? You know dark and unwelcoming like this tunnel. If they are full of things like that waterfall I can see part of the appeal in this lifestyle," Chess said, waving at the corridor around them.
"Yes, exploration and money are the main reasons people choose to be delvers," Lynn said.
The trip back to the landing cavern was uneventful and they decided to rest for the night. Despite their diminishing food supplies, it was still best to rest before taking on the other tunnel. Chess took the first watch, letting the others crawl into the uncured furs to get some much-needed sleep.
Chess lounged against the cavern wall cradling Lynn's faint light stone in her lap. She gave Ashley's sleeping form a fond smile and soon lost herself in thought; her fondness was something she'd never experienced before, and it made her draw her brows together. I'm really starting to change, aren't I? And yet not in some ways. At the same time, I desperately need to accept that people will try to take advantage of me or plain take me because of how I look now. Slavery is a thing here, she hugged herself. I'm not sure my looks are the blessing Freya intended them to be. Same with her removal of the sense of dysmorphia. It's strange not feeling strongly about the change and being this comfortable as a woman. It may even be affecting my ability to adjust my behavior. I need to stop acting like one of the guys and be warier of men instead. Twice now I've found myself in a terrible situation because of my lack of caution and emotional overload. It’s so hard to get my head around accepting the necessity. Thank Freya, I managed to escape. She shuddered.
I have Ashley to take care of now too. She sighed. Who am I? The thought threw her thoughts into silence for a time. I can't be who I was, likely ever again, at least not in this life. That doesn't mean I lost who I was. I'm still Chester but now also Chess. Who is Chess? She thumped her head against the wall in frustration. My brain hurts. The confusion made her want to scream. I wish I had someone to talk to. Why did you have to go get yourself killed, Kan? I could use the friend you were becoming. Tears threatened unbidden, and she thumped her helmeted head against the wall again in an attempt to dispel the emotions.
She frowned, searching for a distraction, before pulling out the remaining wood from her earlier skull-block making. She also retrieved the broken remains of the large kite shield they'd gotten from the last skeleton, and laid them both before her. Her earlier creation of detailed bracers for Ashley floated in the back of her mind, making her feel she should do something to represent her lost friend.
Didn't he say he had some bearkin in him? I need a shield of my own, and a Grizzly bear is as good a symbol as any. The irony, Alanis style, of a bear-kin gay man wasn't lost on her as she set to work creating herself a shield from the remains.
In the end, her new creation came together quite handily. First, she removed the well-preserved straps, studying them for a second while hoping to get an inspect window, but no dice. Must be from the skeleton's preservative aura, she rationalized, before setting out to remove rot and weakness from the remaining wood. With that done, Chess also removed the remaining protecting fabric from the front, leaving her with bare wood to work with. The majority of the old shield was made from a dark walnut-colored hardwood joined with a lighter colored softer wood near the upper edges. She removed the rest of the rotten softwood and any damaged walnut before laying the good boards out before her. Like her previous repairs, she employed dovetails to join the old boards, making use of the lighter boards she’d saved from before. Next came randomizing the grains of the wood to remove evident weakness, and she repeated what she had done with the edge of Lynn’s shield, making it weaker to easily trap a blade.
Now left with a blank kite-shield canvas, Chess tapped her chin in thought, before eventually deciding on bringing her desired bear head shape out in relief from the center. She spent the entirety of her remaining Gem timer refining the picture and the effect was startlingly realistic. The open maw of the bear looked ready to bite down on her enemies and she’d even added a raised paw, ready to strike, at the base of the triangle. The mix of light and dark woods allowed for significant contrast in the image. Fuck that’s cool. Being able to smooth out mistakes feels like cheating, she thought, feeling better despite a bit of strain building behind her eyes. She rose to her feet with a yawn and approached her sleeping companions.
"You fixed the shield. It's beautiful. It’s a shame we don’t have the linen and paint to finish it. Is the bear part of your family's heraldry?" Lynn asked when Chess woke her for her watch.
“No? But I guess I’ll need my own now that I have no way to return to them, and I like bears,” Chess said with a shrug and a yawn. She took Lynn’s old spot in the musty and slightly ripe furs, snuggling into the collective warmth that both the furs and her daughter provided.
“Or take on your future husband’s,” Lynn observed, taking her spot on watch.
Chess suppressed a cringe and sighed instead. “Or that,” she conceded. “Though I’m in no hurry to marry. I have many youthful years ahead of me if I’m careful,” Chess reasoned before closing her eyes.
“If you want safety outside of marriage, I suggest you set yourself up as a specialty woodworker then. You have an immense natural talent for it. Being a traveling bard or delver are both dangerous professions,” Lynn reasoned.
“I’ll think about it if we make it out of here alive,” Chess responded. Safe won't spread Freya’s faith, she told herself. She didn’t hear Lynn's answer because sleep claimed her.
Lynn woke her for the third watch what felt only moments later, and Chess sat staring blurrily into the darkness, blissfully thinking about nothing important for a long time.
I miss coffee, she thought, smacking her unbruised cheek to get the blood flowing. She sipped from her waterskin and studied the darkness as the minutes dragged out, lost in thought about her choices and what had happened since she arrived in this dangerous world.
A new tightness started building in her chest that wasn't because of her swirling thoughts, and she sighed in relief at the impending distraction.
Chess waited a minute before climbing to her feet and taking her shield from against the wall. She moved to take up her place by the remaining tunnel with the reassuring weight of her mace resting on her shoulder. I can do this! No need to wake the others, she told herself.
Shit, never mind! She thought with just a touch of panic when her opponent lumbered into view. The now-familiar bleached bones were wearing a very much unfamiliar pristine blue shirt, with matching white pants, and carried a gleaming rapier in one hand while a small bronze buckler occupied the other.
"Uh," she said intelligently, taking a step back, then yelling. "Lynn! Attack!"
"What?" She heard a blurry Lynn ask behind her as the skeleton moved in to take the first strike.
Chess blocked the thrust with the shield only to gape in horror when the blade passed through her barrier like it was soft cheese; only missing her shield arm and side by inches. She tried to move the shield quickly to the side to disarm the skeleton but it was faster and took a step back withdrawing the blade from the wood.
"Lynn!" She screamed this time. "Enchanted weapon!" Looking at the weapon caused a window to pop up but she willed it away, only catching the word “enchanted” from the front of the name as she took another step back.
There was cursing and shuffling behind her as Lynn scrambled to her feet and armed herself. The skeleton struck again, penetrating her shield lower this time, and Chess barely turned her hips away from the blow. She couldn’t dodge the attack entirely and the blow caught her breastplate, leaving a neat, clean, line in the ironwood.
“Fucking hurry!” Chess begged in horror. This time she managed to pull her enemy off-balance before it withdrew its weapon; leaving an even larger hole than the last in her new shield.
“Don’t let it thrust with that thing; you need to get in close or knock it aside,” Lynn said all business, as she joined Chess. Lynn struck at the bottom edge of the skeleton’s shield, knocking it to the side, before making another quick thrust at its head that did little damage but pushed it back a step. The skeleton responded by swinging at the haft of her spear with its blade but its weapon didn’t leave so much as a scratch; the rapier being nearly useless for anything besides a thrust.
“Ashley, get over here! We’ll need your mace as well,” Lynn ordered as she expertly tripped up the skeleton with a sweep of her spear. It crashed to the floor but nimbly rolled back to its feet and into a crouch. Chess decided to make use of the opening and moved to strike but fear slowed her step a fraction and the skeleton thrust its rapier forward viper quick.
The weapon passed through Chess’ shield like butter continuing through her forearm, her breastplate, and finally slamming into her left breast, poking hard between her ribs and tightening the straps on her bra, and forcing her back a step before remaining stuck in her forearm. The attack was done in one smooth blindingly fast movement with not a second for her to respond. Chess gasped in shocked disbelief, eyes widening with abject horror, and her breath seized in her chest. The sight of her transfixed arm was hardly registered in her mind before she stumbled back to fall hard on her butt. The fall removed the weapon from her flesh with a disconcerting squelch. Even after the fall, she sat blinking in confusion at her arm, her body not obeying her, only able to sit there frozen in shock and take fast, shallow breaths as blood seeped out of her gaping arm wound in a steady stream.
She slowly looked up and watched detachedly as Lynn pinned the skeleton to the ground, laying atop it while Ashley viciously smashed its bones with her mace. Her heart thundered in her ears, drowning out the world around her.
One moment she was watching her companions finish off the skeleton, and the next she suddenly found a kneeling Lynn beside her. Her lips moved, but Chess couldn’t hear her words over her own thundering heart. She cocked her head slightly and stared at Lynn in confusion.
“What?” Chess asked weakly, the word coming out with difficulty. Lynn chose not to try again and instead the skunkkin made to carefully remove Chess’s shield and poke at the hole in her bracer and then her breastplate before miming the action of taking them off. Blood soaked the white fur around the pads of Lynn's fingers from where she had touched. Chess followed the girl's hands slowly and frowned, obeying automatically, and removed the items with a simple flex of her magic.
It was then that the pain hit her and the world slipped from her grasp.