by A. J. Markam
A lot of people know that Apocalypse Now is based on the book Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. In Conrad’s story, Marlow – working for a Belgian trading company – goes up the Congo River to retrieve the insane ivory trader Kurtz, who has committed the ultimate sin in Victorian England: blasphemy. The jungle natives worship Kurtz as a god, and he does nothing to dissuade them. Marlow isn’t tasked with killing Kurtz, but bringing him back to civilization to account for his crimes.
But John Milius, the screenwriter who wrote Apocalypse Now, didn’t just adapt Heart of Darkness. He also used elements from Homer’s Odyssey.
Col. Kilgore, portrayed by Robert Duvall, is the cyclops – and gave us the immortal line, I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like… victory.
The Playboy bunnies who drive the men wild at the USO show are the sirens.
A scene cut from the theatrical version of the film made the Odyssey connection much clearer. Willard encounters a group of French colonists on a rubber plantation, disconnected from the war, living in nostalgia, pining for a time when France still ruled Vietnam. They’re the movie’s version of the lotus eaters.
The Do Lung Bridge was essentially the scene where Odysseus descends into the underworld to get information from the dead, including Achilles, who died in the Trojan War. The famous warrior tells his still-living comrade that I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground, than king over all the dead.
The most striking moment at Do Lung Bridge is where an unseen Viet Cong soldier is taunting the American soldiers from across the river.
Fuck you, Joe! Fuck yoouuuuu!
An American machine-gunner is trying to take the guy out and failing miserably.
Willard walks up and asks, Who’s the commanding officer here?
The stressed-out soldier asks in bewilderment, Ain’t you?
Then the gunner summons a stoned G.I. named Roach. In a drugged-out haze, Roach listens to the VC’s shouts for a moment… slowly aims his grenade launcher… then takes out the enemy with a single shot.
Astounded by the feat, Willard asks him, Soldier – do you know who’s in charge here?
And Roach, staring back at him with glassy eyes and a slightly unhinged smile, says…
…yeah.
And then he walks away.
In the movie, it was clear who was in charge:
No one.
If anything ruled the Do Lung Bridge, it was Madness with a capital ‘M.’
It was pretty much the same here in what remained of Vos, except that the insanity was embodied by the writhing, horrific thing at the center of the pit.
The Dungeon Guild were just hapless soldiers in the midst of a war, struggling to keep a Band-aid on a severed artery.
The scarred mage led us past the firing cannons and screaming wounded to a massive, 15-foot-diameter hole in the ground. The entrance was lined with roughly cut stones like a cathedral arch, and I could see lanterns lighting the tunnel as it angled down into the earth.
From what I could tell, the passageway was aimed directly at the very deepest part of the pit.
You know, the one currently inhabited by a nightmarish rogue dungeon.
“Whoa,” I said, stopping short, “you’re not making us go down there!”
The scarred mage turned around and snarled, “No… we’re taking you.”
He and the other Black Robes each grabbed a lantern from the wall – and then they led me, Alaria, Stig, Meera, and Eluun down into the depths.
Our own heart of darkness, you might say.
It was like the OtherWorld version of a coal mine. Wooden beams braced the ceiling, and black-robed workers used both pickaxes and magic to hack at the stone walls.
Except every so often, something would burst in from the other side.
We watched in horror as a small portion of the tunnel caved in and a five-foot-long scorpion tail impaled one of the workers and lifted him into the air.
Other men rushed over, screaming and cursing, and hacked at the monster with swords and picks until they pulled their comrade off the stinger.
The barb had completely run him through, though, and he bled out on the ground as we passed by.
Neither the mage nor the guards escorting us took any mind. They just forced us deeper into the tunnel.
The farther we went, the more the stone around us was spotted with black organic matter, like slimy pustules infecting the rock.
Occasionally something horrifying would burst through. A footlong black maggot with teeth erupted from one of the spots and attacked one of the black-robed workers. The man flung it to the ground, grinded it into a pulp beneath his boot, then kept on chipping away at the rock.
Jesus Christ…
I was beginning to wonder exactly how far down we were going to go when the tunnel leveled off and we reached our final destination: a bit of Deek’s old dungeon that the rogue core hadn’t obliterated yet. There was an arched doorway set into a stone wall, over which was inscribed the words, Abandon hope all ye who enter here.
Dante’s Inferno.
The game writers are really ladling it on thick, I thought, but the hairs on the back of my neck stood up nonetheless.
The room beyond the archway was filled with towering pillars and cathedral ceilings – except the crumbling stone walls were covered with a creeping lacework of black tendrils, like offshoots from a cancerous tumor seen under a microscope. In the dim light of the lanterns, it looked like something out of an Indiana Jones movie from hell. There were muffled, unearthly shrieks from the other side of the walls that reminded me just how close we were to the rogue dungeon’s horrors.
“Here he is,” the scarred mage announced.
An eerie voice answered from the shadows, and my balls shriveled up into my body as soon as I heard it.
“Goooood. So glad you could finally join us, Mr. Hertzfelder.”
21
The voice was both familiar and alien at the same time. It reminded me of Hugo Weaving in The Matrix – that sort of formal, clipped diction Agent Smith has: MISter ANderson. But the voice was just slightly too high… too breathy.
I was reminded of an episode of the TV show Atlanta, created by Donald Glover.
You know – Childish Gambino? “This Is America”? Young Lando Calrissian in Solo?
In the episode, one of the show’s main characters (played by the awesome Lakeith Stanfield) goes to a mansion to pick up a piano he finds offered for free on the internet. When he rings the doorbell, Lakeith meets an eccentric recluse named Teddy Perkins, who looks like Michael Jackson in his final months: a delicate, frail Black man with bleached, ghostly skin. Shit gets a whole lot weirder when you find out what’s locked away in the attic.
Teddy is played by Donald Glover in whiteface, and he speaks all his lines in this weird, singsong, high-pitched delivery. It’s a supremely creepy performance.
Well, this fucker sounded like a combination of Agent Smith and Teddy Perkins, and it made my skin crawl.
“So nice to finally MEET you, Mr. Hertzfelder. I’ve heard so much about you… mostly from people who are now dead.”
I glanced over at Alaria to see if she finally recognized her ex-master’s voice.
She looked confused, like there was something familiar, but she couldn’t quite place it.
“By the way, you won’t be needing those manacles anymore,” the voice said – and all of a sudden the nightmare got worse.
Hundreds of skeletons walked out of the shadows. Their skulls were all black, and they wore black seafaring clothes – open-necked shirts, bandanas, tri-corner hats, trousers and boots. But the thing was, neither their bones nor the clothes were naturally black. They looked like they had been coated in tar, and their clothes were slimy, full of holes, and falling apart from decomposition. They looked like they had been dredged up from the bottom of a swamp where they’d been rotting the last 50 years.
The skeletons surrounded us. Me, Stig, the
women – and the Black Robes, too.
The Dungeon Guild guys were obviously on edge, and looked to Scar for guidance.
He gave the barest shake of his head. No.
So the Black Robes stood still and didn’t resist.
One skeleton walked up to me and stared right into my face. I swore I could see something squirming deep in the shadows of its empty sockets.
I shivered as it touched my skin with fingers as damp and wet and cold as the grave.
As it unlocked the manacles on my wrists, I selected it and checked out its stats.
Shadow Skeleton
Level 80 Warrior
620,000 Hit Points
Shit.
If the others around him were that powerful, we were in serious trouble.
Peenocchio’s men had been the same Level, but we’d had a plan to deal with them.
I had no plan for these guys.
Other skeletons released the women and unwrapped the chains from Meera’s and Alaria’s wings. Stig had no manacles on, so he just cowered by my boots.
When they were finished, the skeletons stepped back and parted so that I could see the front of the room.
A giant hole gaped in the stone wall. Inside was only darkness.
Suddenly two round, glowing lights bloomed in the shadows.
They appeared first as slits, then changed into ovals, then finally circles.
I realized that they were eyes. Nix had had his back towards us, which is why they had changed shape as he turned.
Tarka was right – they looked like tiny moons.
“Good… now that THAT is taken care of… we can finally talk face to face.”
And then something horrible stepped out of the shadows.
In fact, it seemed to be made of shadows – darkness solidified. Except for those two glowing eyes, the rest of the creature was dark as outer space.
Black mist drifted off the surface of its ‘skin,’ like it was constantly in a state of forming and reforming between solid and gas.
It was humanoid in shape, but it definitely wasn’t human. It had two arms, two legs, a torso, and a head, but their proportions were all wrong. The arms and legs were anorexic, thin as bamboo. The fingers on the hands were ten-inch spikes that twitched continually like the legs of a monstrous cockroach. The torso was much thinner than it should have been, no more than a foot wide.
Worst of all, the body was… twisted. It wouldn’t be right to call him a hunchback, because there wasn’t a bulge on one of his shoulders. Instead, his torso was curved like a fishhook. The straight part of the hook was his back, the curved part was his shoulders, and his head was where the pointed tip would be.
You know how General Grievous from Revenge of the Sith is hunched over most of the time? Drop his head down another foot or two without moving his shoulders, and you have Nix’s posture.
He looked like some horrific puppet with its head two feet lower than the shoulders.
There were no features on the jet-black head – no mouth, no nose, no hair, no ears. Just those two, small, glowing circles, which never altered in shape. No eyebrows to scowl, no eyelids to help discern emotions. Only his voice could do that… but it was always faintly mocking, and stayed within a narrow range. He rarely varied it more than a few notes above or below a monotone.
As soon as he stepped out of the shadows and was fully visible, Alaria cried out in horror. She tried to move backwards, but she ran up against three skeletons who formed an impervious wall behind her.
“Ah… I see you recognize me now, my dear.”
The thing lurched over to her, then reached out and touched her face with its long, spindly fingers. It was like watching a gigantic black widow crawl across her face.
“Leave her alone!” I shouted. I raised my arm to cast a spell, but four skeletons grabbed me from behind.
“Relax, Mr. Hertzfelder, she’s not in any danger… YET.” The thing looked at Alaria as it continued to caress her cheek. “Do you remember my name, darling child?”
“Master Xin!” she cried out, wincing and shying away from the loathsome fingers.
She pronounced it gzin rather than just zin.
“Yes, that is the one I TOLD you… except it’s not my TRUE name. Have you guessed it, Mr. Hertzfelder?”
He turned to stare at me with those two glowing, moon-like eyes.
“Nix,” I replied.
“Very good! Of course, you COULD have guessed solely from what Alaria just said – IF you remembered all the clues. ‘Backwards, Forwards, All The Same… Known By Others, Not By Name.’”
“I already knew it when I walked in here.”
“No doubt, no doubt.” Nix turned away from Alaria and shuffled over to me. He leaned in until those glowing eyes were only ten inches away from my own. “But then, it was designed to be easy. To introduce you to the game. You’ve won the first half… but the next part will be much, MUCH harder.”
“You call slaughtering people a game?” I asked angrily, thinking back to the demons in Abaddon and the frost elves in the North.
Nix cocked his head slightly.
“…of course.”
His voice was completely unconcerned, though slightly mystified, as though I had asked the most obvious question in the world.
“So is this where you kill us?” I snarled.
“Oh NO, Mr. Hertzfelder – THAT wouldn’t be any fun. No, I don’t want to KILL you… I want you to PLAY.”
Before I could say anything else, Nix turned to the scarred mage. “You and your men may leave now, Captain.”
“I want what you promised,” the mage demanded.
“And you shall have it, all in good time.”
Nix started to walk away when the scarred mage yelled, “You promised you’d destroy this damn dungeon!”
Ah.
So that was the deal they’d made: deliver me, and Nix would do the job they couldn’t finish on their own.
The warlock swung back around and got all up in the mage’s face.
“EVENTUALLY. I agreed to EVENTUALLY destroy it – as I clearly stated when we made the arrangement. Now go… or I shall become quite cross.”
That wasn’t good enough for Scar.
“You black-magic bastard,” he shouted, “I’m not your fucking servant!”
Nix’s hand suddenly whipped through the air and grabbed the side of the mage’s head.
“No, Captain – ”
A violet light sparked inside Nix’s palm –
Then turned into an eruption from the surface of a star.
Energy blasted into the mage’s ear, and he screamed in agony as his skull lit up from the inside. Violet light blasted out both of his eyes.
When Nix finally stopped, there was a six-inch crater in the side of Scar’s head… and smoke boiled out of his empty eye sockets.
The long, spiky fingers released the mage, and he crumpled into a pile on the ground.
“…you’re DEAD.”
I realized in horror that I had just witnessed what must have happened to Grung and the other demons we’d found in Orlo’s lair.
Not only had they been forced to listen as their friends died screaming…
…not only had they had to wait in terror for their own turns to come…
…but whatever Nix had just done, it was permanent.
Anyone killed by that blast was gone forever, unable to be resurrected.
Nix looked down at the dead mage dispassionately, then turned to Scar’s comrades. “Any other objections?”
Six-foot-six warriors with battleaxes shook their heads like frightened little children.
“Then LEAVE. But set down the lanterns on the floor before you go.”
The Guild members did as instructed and hastily beat a retreat back through the tunnel.
As soon as they were gone, Nix turned to me. “Did you enjoy your little interlude with Tarka?”
“Yeah – thanks,” I said sarcastically.
“You’re
welcome. I needed to stall you for reasons that will soon become apparent. I figured you would respond most favorably to fornication, so I instructed her to ‘detain’ you with her charms. Best if she could make you think it was YOUR idea.”
I stared at him, my mouth slightly open.
Son of a bitch.
But there was something in his statement that bothered me more than the rest.
“What reasons?” I asked.
“As I said, they will soon become apparent. All will be revealed. Don’t become impatient like our poor, unfortunate Captain here.” Nix nudged the mage’s corpse with his foot, then interlaced his fingers behind his back and began to pace. “But first we must discuss what comes next. You see, there will be slightly different rules that govern the next portion of the game…”
While he was talking, I selected him.
Nix
Wraith
Level 110 Warlock
2,500,000 Hit Points
Jesus fucking Christ.
Even Hritch had only had 1.1 million hit points. This guy was virtually fucking invincible – at least for me at my current Level of 40.
As for the ‘wraith’ part, they must have been some sort of monster in OtherWorld, but I’d never encountered one before. If all of them were like Nix, I hoped I never encountered another.
Suddenly he paused in his speech, then turned and stared at me.
“It’s impolite to look at someone else’s private information without ASKING, Mr. Hertzfelder. I imagine it would be much like rummaging around in your pants for your genitals, unwanted and unbidden. Don’t do it again.”
I stared at him.
What the fuck had just happened?!
Selecting an enemy to see his stats, especially his Level and hit points, was a routine part of the game. You had to do it in order to know how hard it would be to kill him.
It was almost an extra sense, like seeing or hearing.
No NPC ever commented on it.
But this one had.
Until that moment, I’d never even considered the NPCs might be aware you were doing it.