Adheim Village was probably quiet. Most of the villagers had evacuated, abandoned their homes and their gardens, and those who stayed remained inside for their own safety. So, the morning of the dungeon raid wasn’t marked by tension, so much as by the deer that wandered the streets. They would have moved from one garden to the next and ate their fill of whatever plants they liked, without men to scare them away, or dogs to bark at their passing.
Meanwhile the crows, clever enough to hide their food in the clogged gutters of men, would spill pine needles from the roof tops as they dug for their next meal. Song birds would chirp among the branches, and squirrels cry at one another, and chase their rivals up trees. Shy rabbits of soft-brown fur would have crowded the village green, on a day where humans once held festivals to celebrate adventurer’s and their courage.
The sunlight that would break through the gray sky; that day it shined, on an ordinary island, where life continued with its own struggles, its hungers and small battles.
Those feelings collected in Zenos’ head as he imagined, with no particular concentration, the afternoon that carried on far above. It was a small, distant frontier to a kingdom, or world-conquering empire, but it was precious to him. He felt he could hold it in his own hands.
I did it… he thought, scared to admit that truth, for fear it would slip away. I… saved something, right?
Elizabeth’s barrier collapsed and smoke flooded their pocket of air. Mad’s staff fell from his hand and he dropped, spent of mana and will, on a broken slab of Dazka’s throne. He coughed, his throat agitated by dust, and opened a tin canteen.
Although the braziers had been destroyed, the area around the adventurers remained lit by the innate light of Mad’s specters. Zenos turned to look at Mad from where he sat by the necromancer’s feet. That seasoned adventurer was a mess, his hair ragged, his coat cut open, and his skin heavy with sweat and blood.
Nevertheless, there was a smile on his face after he sated his thirst. When he noticed Zenos watching, he gestured with his canteen. “Thirsty?” he asked.
Zenos nodded and took the canteen from Mad’s hand. One mouthful, drunk deeply in thirst, was nearly spit up as he hammered the canteen down. “This—!” he gargled and coughed, but swallowed all the same. “It’s whisky!”
Mad chuckled.
That laughter, a relief to his ears, felt bitter sweet. He nearly died, after all. The island, it seemed, had balanced on the head of a pin. Had Zenos turned back from the dungeon door, or failed to reach Mad in time, his laugh would have been memory in a wasteland of fire and smoke. Should you really be happy about this? he wondered as tears welled in his eyes and his canteen shook in his unsteady hand
“Should we waste time acting the way we think we should be?” Mad asked. “Or, should we just laugh like we want to?”
Zenos’ eyes rounded and he looked at Mad. The necromancer made a gentle smile and tapped on the con-link still fit to his ear.
“I blamed myself for what happened, you know,” Mad continued. “I thought, if only I had been more careful, or if only I had been more rational. If we had kept our composure as a raid, we might have survived that dungeon break.”
Khelero’s phantom raised its visor, regarded Mad with a melancholy that was clear in its spectral eyes.
“Well,” Mad said. “Maybe I can’t anticipate everything. Maybe… I want to think about my mistakes today, and reflect on how I’ve failed. I tried to take it all on my shoulders, again, and if you all hadn’t come… I would have died.”
Zenos grimaced. He wiped the tears from his face and took a long draft of whisky.
Mad smiled and ruffled Zenos’ hair. “We’ll worry about that tomorrow, together; what could have been, what wasn’t, what we’ve lost and what we have. But we should smile today, because we’ve won. That’s something worth smiling for.”
“Yeah,” Zenos sniffled, wiped his face further.
Mad looked at the specters. “Thank you,” he said to them. “I wanted to protect you. I didn’t want to give you the trauma of fighting again. I guess that wish was misplaced, too.”
Fiona’s hands shook at her sides as the ranger’s specter appeared to restrain her tears. She rushed over and hugged him, squeezed him tight as her phantasmal arms could bear. “You’re dismissed,” Mad said.
Leo nodded. He smiled and flashed a victorious V with the fingers of his hand and turned to disappear into the drifting dust. Elizabeth smiled and bowed, and made her own quiet exit. Fiona placed her hands on Mad’s shoulders and straightened her arms. The look on her face, a feeling communicated by their eyes, seemed to say, “We’ll always come for you.” Her phantasmal form rippled with instability and broke apart, her flecks of light fading into the air.
Khelero, for his part, looked at Zenos. His eyes fell on the black-gryphon shield that was still strapped to his arm. He made a thumbs-up and nodded at Mad. The phantom made a long look, one last apologetic smile, and he lowered his visor. The knight turned into the dust, and as he disappeared, the pair of adventurers were left in the dark.
“Anima,” Mad said. “Level 1.”
A small stone lifted from his hand and floated into the air, bright with its own white light.
“What happens now?” Zenos asked.
“The troubles of tomorrow can wait until dawn,” Mad said. He snapped his fingers and light flashed between their ears; the soul link had been canceled. “Or so the saying goes. At the end of every dungeon raid, Khet herself leaves a chest of treasures to reward those champions that succeeded.”
Zenos set his broken sword on the floor and removed the con-link from his ear. He raised the canteen. “A chest?”
Mad took the canteen in his hand and swallowed back the rest of the whisky. “Rich are adventurers in friends and rewards,” Mad rhymed. “Crossing fjords with swords for their lords.
“That is to say, you have friendship, but not your reward. So, let’s see about what loot the mother of all things left for our sake, before we leave this place behind.”
Friendship?
Mad stood, bent at the knee for his staff, and then appeared to lean on it as he walked through the ankle-high smoke that drifted over the floor. The anima stone followed overhead.
Zenos looked at his broken [Longsword of the Novice.] It had served him well, and he wouldn’t leave it on the floor, but it was time to return it to the inventory. The ear piece, listed as a [Con-Link Receiver] by the system, was also a useful device Zenos would keep in storage. The black-gryphon kite shield, Khelero’s signature armament, was more difficult to sort. It had proven its value and it had a bonus effect, but it was still Khelero’s, and Zenos felt a tinge of regret at the thought of putting it in the inventory.
“Are you coming?” Mad asked.
Zenos nodded from where he sat in the shadows. I’ll ask Mad about it later, he thought and left the shield strapped to the arm. While Mad had to lean on his staff to support his weary body, Zenos practically hopped onto his feet. The system had already restored his vigor, if not his full health pool.
Zenos could tell his comfortable gait hadn’t escaped Mad’s notice, but the necromancer just smiled. Another trouble for tomorrow, Zenos thought and the pair walked to the crater where king Dazka had crumbled.
It was a depression of dirt and marble fragments about six feet deep and thirty feet across. Small crystal shards as wide as a hair blanketed the crater. They glimmered like fresh snow in the anima’s brilliance.
Mad made a cautious descent that relied on careful placement of his staff. One wrong slip and he’d end up with a face full of crystalline needles. Zenos slid down and took the necromancer’s arm around his shoulder. He helped Mad down, toward the black chest at the crater’s center.
Grand and ominous, the chest appeared to radiate its own darkness. Black smoke wafted from the seams of its closed lid, as etchings of warriors and monsters skittered and moved across its cold-steel surface. Zenos had seen such a chest before—he assumed as much—in the birch-wood valley. That chest was more ordinary, but the circumstances around its opening were certainly strange. That gap in his memory reacted to the trunk Mad approached. It filled Zenos with hesitation.
“Be careful with that thing,” he said.
“Are you worried?” Mad asked.
“It doesn’t look natural.”
“Nothing is natural here,” Mad said and smiled at him. “But fear not, it’s just as I said. Chests like these always appear after a successful raid. They’re filled with gold, gems, enchanted weapons and armor—and skill books, most importantly. Many of those things you desperately need, Zenos. Khet may be… cold, but she is compassionate in that way.”
“Even so,” Zenos muttered under his breath and held his hands tight at his side. He felt tense, like an animal startled by the crunch of forest leaves. He thought he should hold perfectly still, so that he too could blend into his surroundings and disappear.
Mad knows more about his world than I do. Yet, that thing isn’t of his world, is it? It’s like Dazka, or this dungeon. Could it be something from Ark World?
Mad flipped the latch and pushed open the chest lid. “That’s strange,” he said and frowned at the contents of the trunk.
“What?” Zenos uttered, took a stance, like he had to run, or fight.
Mad reached into the chest and when he straightened up, there was a black item in his hand. It looked like a hand mirror, but the silver portal on its handle reflected only its own metallic color, and not their surroundings.
“The chest was empty, except for this,” Mad said. “But I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be. I don’t feel any mana inside it, do you?”
Zenos shook his head and made a tepid advance. He confirmed with his own eyes that the chest was empty. His interactions, such as touching the lip of its container or brushing against its smoke, caused no issue. There were no glitches in his HUD or red [error] alerts.
“Khet left this here,” Mad continued as he turned the mirror in his hand. His brows pinched together. “Is it really a reward?”
“Let me look at it,” Zenos said.
He had a sense that was a bad idea, like he was accepting a scorpion into his hand, but Khet and Gaia were one and the same; Gaia was the one that brought him back from the dead. If the chest held no treasures—gifts that made sense to an adventurer’s eyes—then perhaps it was something else entirely.
Every time I’ve had this feeling, I’ve suffered bizarre things I can’t explain, Zenos thought as Mad opened his hand. Is it fear that swallows me now? This emotion—this catch in my throat—what am I hesitating for? Don’t I want to know?
What did you want from me?
Zenos turned the mirror and looked at its silver surface. His eyes were struck wide and music filtered into his ears. It was a pleasant melody, a song whispered by a mother to its child. Zenos was snared, not transfixed by a siren’s beauty, but trapped as a rabbit in a hunter’s snare.
His HUD flickered and vanished. [Error] the system reported in red letters. Zenos’ hand shuddered, but he didn’t release the mirror. He couldn’t, he didn’t want to. I must know! he thought, grit his teeth. Why am I alive?!
Orange, reptilian eyes appeared in the mirror. They were wide and bright, their pupils thin in predatory focus. “Zenos!” he heard Mad shout, as the ground turned black around his feet. Mad disappeared in black smoke and the world crumbled, as old paint flecks from a neglected wall. Reality was just a façade, anyway. Zenos knew the truth in the light of the Emperor’s eyes.
When next Zenos blinked, his hand was empty. He stood in a gothic hall of vaulted ceilings and towering windows many times the height of a man. Through the broken glass of their black frames was a desolate, gray landscape lit by a pure-white moon in starless night sky. Across the wasteland were broken towers, and Zenos knew them to be guns of incredible scale. They were cannons, built for one purpose.
“What surpasses the limit of life?” asked a voice in the back of Zenos’ head. “Would that creature be… a monster, or a god?”
A black hulk of scales and broken steel stirred from the floor ahead. It moved its long tail and turned on the talons of its reptilian feet. The wings that curled behinds its back partly unfurled, revealed their ripped webbing filled with holes. It stood half back to Zenos, made visible its lipless snout and rows of carnivorous teeth, and empty eye sockets that glowed with their own phantom white light.
[Error,] the system reported.“I—I don’t know,” Zenos said aloud.
“We tried to fight it,” the creature said through its telepathy. “But we… were imperfect. We were weak. Even the strength of ten-thousand stars failed us.”
“Fight who?” Zenos felt compelled to ask.
“You do not even know… for what purpose you were made.”
The creature appeared to slump and it lurched away, up a series of steps to an enormous throne of tarnished silver. It settled into its seat, rested its tail over the arm of the throne, and turned its head to watch Zenos with a single eye.
“Step forward,” the creature said and Zenos obeyed.
“I am here to judge you, child. However, I see you cannot refuse my commands.”
Zenos’ eyes rounded.
[Error,] the system reported.“I see no Ego in you,” the creature said. “She will have to try again.”
“Wait, what are you saying?” Zenos asked. “Ego?”
Tendrils of darkness slithered from behind the lizard’s throne. Their tapered hands split first into fingers, and then the small shapes of many hands. There were not a mere handful of arms, but hundreds squirming in a mass at the lizard’s feet.
“You can blame her, if you like,” the creature said. “I felt the same.”
The tendrils of child-like hands launched at Zenos, they struck him and threw him to the floor. They pinned him and pried at his lips. Zenos swallowed back the urge to scream, for fear he’d open his mouth. The hands plunged into eyes and the pain provoked a cry. They forced their way past his lips and into the holes of his ears.
“Remember her betrayal,” Zenos heard as the pain faded and he was abandoned, disembodied in a light-less abyss.
“Hate her, for the rest of your bleak eternity.”
