by A. J. Markam
Either that or he’s just a fucking sadist.
I imagined poor Grung held in place by the black skeletons Meera had mentioned, waiting for the end as Nix went down the line, killing Grung’s friends, one by one…
I shuddered.
But wait – if Nix could permanently destroy my ability to resurrect someone, why hadn’t he killed Meera the same way?
Had the Collar of Gorbolik somehow stopped him?
Then I thought of something else.
If the bodies hadn’t been here, I might have assumed that the demons had just left Orlo’s compound at some point and struck out on their own.
Every time there had been a riddle, there had been corpses nearby.
He’d wanted to make sure we got the message.
I looked around the hangar and found it: words that had been melted into one of the metal walls.
I couldn’t see it well because of the darkness, so I called out, “Alaria, can you come over here and give me some light?”
She walked over and lit up a fireball that illuminated the hangar wall – and the riddle.
5
BACKWARDS, FORWARDS
ALL THE SAME
KNOWN BY OTHERS
NOT BY NAME
“Message received, you son of a bitch,” I muttered.
17
The last time we’d been at Orlo’s lair, the path we’d followed had been pretty slow –mostly because Grung had been a war golem. At 20 feet tall, his gigantic stride had helped counterbalance his lumbering gait, but overall it had been a time-consuming trek.
But now I had a flying mount. What had originally taken us hours of travel only took a quarter of the time.
I took off into the sky with Eluun and Stig on my magic carpet. Alaria and Meera flew on either side of us, exactly like when we’d patrolled back in Exardus.
We passed over a canyon, then the temple and swamps where we’d first encountered Shyvock. I zoomed down to take a look but saw nothing in the way of a riddle.
About an hour later we hit the Plains of Mor-El.
There was definitely something there.
The Orcs we had defeated had long since been picked clean by vultures, leaving behind ten thousand sun-bleached skeletons –
Which were now arranged in giant letters visible from 200 feet up in the air, like a castaway on a desert island spelling out HELP in driftwood.
Oddly, there was no armor on the skeletons. Guess it had been all looted.
6
NO REWARD
FOR KNOWING MINE
REWARD OR LOSS
WILL COME IN TIME
‘No reward for knowing mine’ – I was guessing that meant Nix’s name, or whatever the fuck he called himself.
‘Reward or loss will come in time’ –
What reward?
What loss?
And for what? Guessing correctly?
It was a scrap of information, and nothing truly helpful. The only important thing was that my theory so far was being proved correct: significant spots had riddles.
Which meant there was probably another one at the volcano.
Turned out I was right.
We flew for another two hours over grassy plains, which turned into mountains, which dipped down into the gigantic black crater where Daidonia and her death cult had prepared for the end of the world. Luckily they were wrong and Daidonia was full of shit.
In the center of the crater was a massive volcano. Even 200 feet above the ground, the heat from below was oppressive.
I was wondering how Nix was going to leave the next riddle.
Was he going to somehow magically fetch all the dead elves’ bodies out of the lava, assuming anything was left? And would he then arrange the charred skeletons like blackened matchsticks in 20-foot-tall letters, the same way he’d arranged the orcs?
I got the general idea right, but the materials wrong.
There was a reason there hadn’t been any Orcish armor back on the plains. It had all been brought here to the volcano.
The armor had been arranged on the side of the volcano.
7
ANSWER RIGHT
AND I’LL BE NICE
ANSWER WRONG
AND PAY THE PRICE
What the actual fuck?
The riddles had just enough information to give you the sense that you’d learned something, but not enough to actually help.
Apparently there would be a penalty if I answered the riddle wrong.
Great. Whoop-de-doo.
I was looking forward to finally meeting this asshole so I could get some real answers out of him.
Although part of me was wary. He was a psycho who liked slaughtering, crucifying, arranging skeletons, and leaving riddles.
This might be a bad, bad hombre I was about to encounter.
As we sped over the crater and climbed up over the next mountain range, Alaria flew closer to the carpet. “Any idea what the hell these riddles mean?”
“Not really. They bringing up any memories?”
She shook her head. “No. What should we do now? Fly to Vos or use a portal?”
When we’d made the trip last time, Orlo’s succubus Soraiya had flown me over the terrain. Even with her help, it had still taken over a day of travel and an overnight stay in an inn to reach Vos.
The timer said my next three portal spells would refresh in just under 17 hours.
But it would take 16 or more hours of travel on the magic carpet.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Plus, if we left now, we might just get to Vos ahead of Nix.
“A portal for sure,” I replied.
I lowered the carpet down to a flat area on the mountaintops. Eluun, Stig, and I stepped off onto the ground, and the carpet magically dissolved into smoke. Meera and Alaria alighted just a few feet away, their wings folding up on their backs.
“Shouldn’t we practice flying into one of these portals at some point?” Alaria asked. “Just in case we need to do it in an emergency?”
Everything we’d seen today had probably triggered memories of when she’d been trapped inside a robotic body. She’d had built-in thrusters instead of wings, but had initially resisted learning how to use them because she hadn’t wanted to get used to her metal form. That refusal to learn about her new powers had led to big complications when Shyvock started stalking us.
“That’s a great idea,” I conceded, “but since we’re kind of under the gun, I need to make sure we all get to Vos together. We’ll try it someday when we’re not under so much pressure.”
She nodded, and I cast my last portal of the day. The counter dropped down to 0.5 as we stepped through the fiery ring.
As the others waited amongst the wreckage of Abaddon, I looked at the map to set our next destination.
Vos had been consumed by a rogue dungeon core; last time I’d seen it, the city was little more than a gigantic pit in the ground. If I teleported into the middle of it, we might plummet a thousand feet and fall splat! into a nightmarish dungeon. No thank you. Instead, I chose a point about five miles out from the city, along the path we’d followed when Soraiya had flown me into Vos.
Then I pushed the button. The portal counter dropped to zero, a fiery ring appeared, and we stepped through it into a thickly wooded forest.
Almost 17 hours to go before my spells were replenished.
“Go up to the top of the trees,” I ordered, “but no farther. I don’t want anybody seeing us if we fly too high.”
I summoned the magic carpet again. Stig, Eluun, and I climbed on, and we zoomed up to the top of the forest canopy and stopped. Meera and Alaria flew up beside us and flapped their wings to stay in place.
I immediately saw something a mile away that filled me with dread.
Once the forest stopped, there was a grassy plain – but we couldn’t see the vast pit that Vos had become, because the entire area was ringed with dozens of airships. Half of them were hovering in the air; th
e other half were on the ground, supported by wooden scaffolding keeping them upright.
Strangely enough, none of the ships were moving – and it didn’t look like they were in attack formation, either. If anything, they looked like they were docked.
There was also a bizarre assortment. Half the ships, the ones hovering motionless in the air, had blackened hulls, some of which had been partly stove in. Their black sails were still unfurled, tattered and filled with holes. Even though they were aloft, they looked like they might have been dredged up from the bottom of the sea. The sky was overcast with dark storm clouds, and in the dim light, the black ships seemed to glow with a faint phosphorescence.
The other half of the fleet were sitting on the ground in dry dock. They had beautiful brown hulls that were completely intact. The masts stood tall and straight, and the sails had been rolled up on the yardarms. They weren’t going anywhere, and looked like they had been there awhile.
We couldn’t see what was going on because of the angle and the armada blocking our view, but there were distant sounds of warfare – cannons firing, people yelling, explosions. It all sounded muted and not quite real.
Far beyond the ships, massive plumes of smoke drifted up into the air, much like the smoldering fires in Exardus.
“Those black ships are the ones I saw over Exardus,” Meera whispered fearfully.
“I recognize them, too,” Eluun agreed, her voice quavering.
Made sense. If you were an evil warlock, of course your ships were going to look like the bad guy’s fleet in one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
“What about the brown ones?” I asked.
“I have no idea.”
“Wait – that’s the Revenge!” Alaria cried out and pointed.
Sure enough, one of the floating ships looked damn familiar. I hadn’t taken notice of it because its hull was black – but it was painted black, unlike the others, which seemed as though they’d been rotting at the bottom of a swamp for a hundred years.
The ‘one of these things is not like the other’ ship had three oaken masts with eight black sails – all of them in excellent repair, unlike the other floating airships. It flew the Jolly Roger from the top of its main mast, except the skull was that of some demonic creature with fangs instead of regular teeth. Oddly enough, though, it was surrounded by the same spectral glow that covered the rest of the black fleet.
“Hold on,” I said, “I’m going to take a look with one of my spells.”
I cast All-Seeing Eye and sent it soaring far up above us. As soon as I did, my stomach turned, because now I could see the pit and the rogue dungeon inside it.
It was straight out of a nightmare.
There were organic mounds that looked like somebody had disemboweled a couple dozen giants, thrown the guts in, and painted everything black. Ridges and grooves that looked like the folds of a large intestine, the curve of a kidney, the bulge of a liver.
Out of that mess, jagged spires rose into the air at various angles. You ever seen National Geographic pictures of giant anthills in Africa? They can loom 30 feet tall, and are skinny towers rather than gently sloping mounds. That’s what these spires looked like – except instead of being made out of dirt, they looked like somebody had created them out of black glass. The overall effect was that someone had plucked the quills out of a mountain-sized porcupine and jabbed them haphazardly into the pile of guts.
Even more disturbing was what was crawling atop all that mess. Black creatures that looked like oversized insects scuttled amongst the organic mounds, battling each other with oversized claws and scorpion-like tails.
And then there were the tentacles.
They emerged from the organic mounds like eels from a sandy seafloor. Forty feet long, they coiled through the air, obscenely writhing, seeking out something to grasp. Occasionally they would latch onto one of the insect creatures and lift it into the air. The monster would screech and snap with its claws. Sometimes it won and cut the tentacle in half. Black ichor would spew everywhere, and the monster would drop back onto the ground and scurry away. But other times the tentacle won and crushed the creature’s carapace, sending slimy innards exploding out all over the place.
The smoke I’d seen coiling up into the air came from flames that burned on the surface of the organic mounds. The fires had apparently been started by the thousand men ringing the pit, who fired cannons into the dungeon’s surface, blasted it with magical spells, and beat back the tentacles and insectoid monsters that occasionally tried to crawl up from the edge of the abyss.
Mostly the men prevailed as they fought off the chaos boiling up from the pit… but sometimes the monsters did. A tentacle might snare a human and drag him away screaming… or a giant insect might use its giant pincers to cut off another man’s leg in a gout of blood.
Warriors, paladins, mages, hunters – there were multitudes of them, and every single one wore black armor or robes.
The Dungeon Guild.
They were a self-appointed group who went around destroying chaotic dungeons – sometimes newly born ones that had barely begun their lives. Deek the dungeon core had shown me images of Dungeon Guild members killing baby crystals that never would have harmed a human if they’d just been left alone. But adventurers did love looting dungeons for glory and gold, and so the humans would eventually come.
I’d tangled with the Guild back when I’d been in Vos. Their Grand Inquisitor Quint had nearly killed me until Deek stepped in and rescued my ass. Quint had pursued both of us and unknowingly led his men on a suicide mission straight into the rogue dungeon, which took over Deek’s territory and then destroyed all of Vos. Luckily, I was able to repay Deek by getting him to safety.
The Guild’s whole mission was to wipe out rogue dungeons, and they certainly weren’t going to abide having their Grand Inquisitor slaughtered, so it made sense that they would send even more men to Vos. But it had been months since the city had fallen. Despite throwing considerable resources at the situation, it looked like the Guild was in stalemate at best.
I was assuming the dry-docked, normal-looking ships were the Dungeon Guild’s, and that the black fleet belonged to Nix. But did that mean the black ships were in league with the Dungeon Guild? The ‘Black Robes’ certainly didn’t seem concerned about the potentially hostile fleet’s presence.
The All-Seeing Eye spell would run out after a couple of minutes, so I sent it zooming over the ships – both the brown-hulled ones in dry dock and the spectral black ones floating far about the ground.
I didn’t see a single crew member on any of them.
It made sense for the Dungeon Guild – everyone was busy fighting the rogue dungeon.
But where the fuck were Nix’s men?
I sent the Eye over the Revenge, too, and scoped it out.
No sign of Tarka or anyone else.
After the spell ended, I informed the others about what I’d seen. I ended with, “I want to get up on the Revenge to see if we can find some clues as to what’s going on, but let’s walk there to be safe. Flying might attract unwanted attention.”
We lowered back down to the forest floor, then walked to the edge of the forest.
“Hold on a second,” I told the others before we left the cover of the trees.
I had no idea where the nearest graveyard was; it could have been miles away. Which meant if I died in battle, I would come back to life God knows where.
Better to have a little more control over where I resurrected, so I cast my Gravesite spell.
A window popped up:
Establishing a gravesite here will eradicate the previous gravesite. Accept/Cancel
I hit ‘Accept,’ and tendrils of black energy flowed from my hands to the ground and formed a latticework. Within seconds there was a flash of light, and a tombstone stood there amongst the pines.
I was about to say Let’s go when I heard a Ping! that alerted me I’d received an in-game message.
“Give me another mi
nute,” I said, then walked away from the others and opened up my mail service.
There was a message from Luna. A grin spread over my face as I read it.
Hey Ian,
I didn’t know when I might see you again, and I was curious if you’d found any new riddles.
Let me know if you have. I could research them while you’re in the game – I could be your ‘girl in chair.’
(SPIDERMAN HOMECOMING joke. Please tell me you get it so I don’t feel like a dork, because I’m NOT going to explain it.)
I laughed. I did get it. In the MCU films, it was what Peter Parker’s friend Ned had said he could be: the dude on a headset, surrounded by computer screens, helping the hero from afar.
Anyway, send anything you’ve got.
Sorry if I interrupted you boning.
(No I’m not.)
Luna
I laughed again and dashed off a quick message.
Hey Luna,
Yes, I got the reference, and you can be my ‘girl in chair’ any day.
I thought about putting something in really cheeky, like ‘you can be my girl on other pieces of furniture, too,’ but decided that might be too much. Especially if HR got ahold of it.
Then I listed the various riddles I’d found at Orlo’s lair, the Plains of Mor-El, and the volcano.
Thanks for the help, I appreciate it. I’ll stop by your desk as soon as I log out…
…or I’ll call you.
Talk to you soon.
(And no, you didn’t interrupt me boning. You know I’m telling the truth because I didn’t take the Fifth.)
Then I hit ‘Send’ and walked back over to the group. “Okay, we can go now.”
Alaria was staring at me quizzically. “You’re happy.”
“Um… I guess so, yeah,” I replied.
I felt a little guilty, to tell the truth. Which was crazy, I know.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said defensively.