by A. J. Markam
“Yes, I promise.”
She nodded grimly. “Everyone will be gone within ten minutes. Will that be enough time?”
“I hope so.”
“Thank you for warning us,” she said, and I watched as she fled with her subjects.
The queen was as good as her word: ten minutes later, there was no one in all of Fathmos but me, Alaria, Meera, and Stig.
We stood there looking at each other.
It all felt a bit… anticlimactic.
“Maybe Nix decided to skip Fathmos?” Alaria suggested.
“No, it was way too important. If he didn’t skip Orlo’s lair, there’s no way he would skip Fathmos.”
“Do you think he’s still on his way?”
“Probably,” I said, “but I don’t know what’s taking him so long. Vos isn’t that far from the ocean.”
“Maybe he went somewhere else first. Maybe that bar we went to?”
She was talking about the Blowhole, the grubby little seaside shack where I’d purchased the Ring of Baloq.
“Not important enough.”
“What about Fioraza?”
She was talking about the town where I’d paid off Varkus at a bank. But that’s about all we’d done.
“No – I mean, after Vos we…”
I trailed off and stared at Alaria in horror.
One hand flew to her mouth as she realized exactly what I was thinking.
“DEEK!” she screamed.
After Vos had imploded, we’d traveled to a seaside cliff where we’d let Deek sink into the ground and begin constructing a new dungeon.
I’d forgotten about it because there was no name attached to the place. It was literally out in the middle of nowhere, far from any towns or villages.
“Oh shit,” I exclaimed, a sick feeling in my stomach.
“We have to go help him!”
“We should fly there – it’s not that far away,” I said, thinking of the precious portal spells, of which I only had two left for the day.
“Ian, he could be getting attacked RIGHT NOW!” Alaria cried out. “We can’t wait, not even a second!”
She was right.
I nodded, pulled up my map, and searched the nearby coast for the right spot.
There it was – a tiny red dot along the seaside.
I opened the portal, we jumped through it to Abaddon, and then I cast the next portal straight into the depths of Deek’s dungeon.
What we found made my heart stop in my chest.
It was his throne room we’d entered – the most elaborate and beautiful room in the entire dungeon.
But instead of polished basalt floors, there were only cracked slabs of ruined stone.
The gorgeous paintings that had once hung on the walls had been burned to cinders.
The glorious statues rivalling Renaissance treasures had been torn off their pedestals and shattered on the floor.
The ceiling was caved in, and above us we could see a glint of blue sky –
Which was really bad, given that we were about 50 stories below ground.
All around us, the corpses of Deek’s dungeon creatures lay on the floor.
Centaurs… fauns… basilisks… harpies… griffins…
All dead.
“NO!” Alaria screamed, then called out in a panic, “DEEK?!”
I looked around… and saw the thing I’d been dreading the most.
Amidst the wreckage were shards of purple crystal.
Deek had stood over two feet tall… but what was left of his crystalline form lay scattered across the ground like broken glass.
Alive, he had glowed a deep purple… but his remains were dark, devoid of any light.
Alaria saw it a second after I did, and she burst into tears.
“DEEK!”
She dropped to her knees and ran her fingers through the shards, sifting through them for something – anything – that might suggest Deek’s consciousness still remained.
But all she could find were dark bits of glass.
She screamed in grief and fury. I sank down behind her and held her as her shoulders heaved with sobs.
That was when I saw the far end of the throne room and the letters burned into the wall:
2
THE FIRST
THE LAST
THE ONLY
25
I gave Alaria a few minutes to grieve, but then we had to move on. There was no other option.
“We have to go,” I said gently.
“I know,” she murmured. “Are we going to the fairies next?”
We were – but first I wanted to see something.
Fathmos was only about 60 or so miles away from the coast. The time it would take for Nix’s fleet to travel there would be relatively short.
Considering that we had evacuated the city before the ships’ arrival, I figured it would be worth it to try to see them. I wanted to know what I was up against.
I took Stig and flew on my magic carpet. Meera and Alaria followed a few feet behind us.
As we rose up, I looked around at the 50 floors of charred ruins. The amount of destruction was jaw-dropping.
Yeah, I know, Nix had taken out the Underneath – but that was only a hundred feet underground at its deepest point.
Deek’s dungeon was over 500 feet deep.
Frankly, it was ridiculous. Nix was so over-powered that it beggared belief. A warlock who could singlehandedly obliterate a dungeon that deep in the ground? I don’t care if Nix did it in one shot or 30 – no Level 110 character of any class had that kind of power.
It was almost like they’d designed him to be an unstoppable force so you fucking had to play his twisted little game, with no chance of beating him otherwise.
I was going to have to have a talk with Satish when I got back – about Nix being ridiculously OP, and about the rogue dungeon. That three-hour battle had been goddamn horrific. If Westek actually let this quest go live in the mainstream game, they were going to get hit with dozens of lawsuits for giving players PTSD.
I was still struggling with my own emotions. My grief over Eluun’s death – and now Deek’s – felt like an open wound.
But I pushed all that down as we reached ground level and rose even farther into the air.
I couldn’t see where Fathmos should have been. After all, it was half a mile underwater. Not only that, but it was 60 miles away, so the site probably lay beyond the curvature of the globe.
But I could see dark storm clouds covering the entire horizon for miles. Flashes of light flickered deep within them.
Lightning?
Or was that the ships bombarding Fathmos?
I didn’t know, and there was no time to go find out.
“Let’s go save the fairies,” I said to the others.
We returned to the ground, where Alaria said her final goodbyes at the edge of the pit… and then I cast the next portal.
Once in Abaddon, I pulled up the map and selected the fairies’ home village.
At some point I wanted to use another Hell as a go-between, but right now I had no interest in exploring or trying new options. I had a job to do, and no time for anything beyond what was absolutely necessary.
We stepped out of the fiery ring into a beautiful forest clearing.
“Wylla!” I cried out. “Mauvia!”
Two tiny glowing lights zipped out of the treetops and circled around us.
“Mistress and Big Thing!” said a familiar feminine voice. “You has come to have fun with us again? Yaaay!”
“Welcome, Ian and Alaria – and what a beautiful friend you have brought!” Mauvia said as she flew around Meera.
“Wylla, Mauvia, listen to me carefully,” I said. “There’s a very bad man coming here, and he’s going to destroy your entire village.”
“What?!” both fairies cried out.
“I need you to get everyone – fairies, pixies, brownies, sprites, everyone – and we have to get as far away from here as possible. I’m
talking miles away. Do you understand?”
“Oh no!” Wylla moaned.
“Wylla – ”
“Yes, yes, we will do’s it, Big Thing!”
“Alright – go!”
Wylla and Mauvia roused the rest of the fairies, who split into three groups. Some went after the pixies, who looked like tiny, flying, purple baby Groots. Others informed the brownies, who resembled miniature hedgehogs. And the final contingent alerted the sprites, who looked like cute Funko Pop versions of green anthropomorphized flame.
The last time we’d met, the other three tribes were warring with the fairies – but they’d been tricked into it by the evil hobgoblin (and Alaria’s seventh ex-master) Hritch.
Apparently they’d since gone back to a peaceful coexistence, because they mobilized quickly and began evacuating from the forest at once.
Every fairy and pixie picked up one of the earthbound brownies or sprites and carried them to safety. Likewise, I used my magic carpet to transport entire groups. Alaria and Meera pitched in and allowed a dozen tiny creatures to ride on their backs at a time.
Within an hour, we had transferred thousands of faerie folk to a distant part of the forest.
Just in time, too.
There was a crack of thunder in the distance. Within minutes the entire sky was overcast, and the bright afternoon turned to twilight.
Alaria and Meera flew me and Stig up to the top of the biggest oak we could find, and we watched as roiling black clouds swept in just a few miles away.
Then the ships appeared.
Black galleons with ragged sails emerged from the clouds. The Revenge was among them, and the only one that didn’t look like it had been rotting for a hundred years – but all of them were surrounded by a faint green glow.
The ships hovered in a circle over the forest. I was fairly sure they were directly above the fairies’ home.
For a moment nothing happened. I wondered if Nix was confused, and maybe considering leaving –
And then all hell broke loose.
Literally.
First came the crash and boom of cannons. Treetops collapsed one by one as their trunks splintered from enemy fire.
Inside the circle formed by the ships, a giant portal opened up.
It was very much like mine: a ring of sparks… except it was as big around as a football field.
And from inside its perimeter, pure hell rained down.
It was like watching a nuclear explosion focused into a single, contained beam… albeit one that was 200 feet wide.
Trees were incinerated in a second, and a blast wave ripped through the surrounding forest.
The devastation was like watching one of those old films of an atomic bomb detonated on an island atoll.
“Acheron,” Alaria whispered in horror.
“What?” I asked. The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
“The most inhospitable of the Seven Hells, a place of fire and torment. It looks like he’s opened a portal to a volcano on Acheron.”
So that’s where I knew the name from. I’d seen it on the list of Hells I could travel to with my new powers.
Why the fuck I would want to go there, though, I had no idea – not after seeing the devastation that Nix’s portal unleashed.
That’s when it dawned on me: Nix’s warlock power was like mine and Hritch’s, but he wasn’t using his portals to travel through.
He was weaponizing them, opening them up to let through a torrent of destruction.
So that’s how he’d destroyed Deek’s dungeon, and Abaddon, and the Underneath, and the Kingdom of Frost.
Jesus Christ… he had a full-blown weapon of mass destruction he could unleash anywhere.
The portal closed after about 30 seconds. The ring of sparks shrank inwards, cutting off the column of fire until there was nothing left –
And then the portal winked out of existence.
But there was one final, rotten cherry on top of the sundae.
A single beam of purple light blasted down from one of the central ships’ main decks. Nix’s signature attack from the palm of his hand – and I was guessing he was using it to carve out a riddle. The burst of energy moved back and forth, lasted about seven or eight seconds, and then cut out completely.
After that the fleet slowly broke out of their circle, settled back into formation, and started flying northeast.
I brought up my map to see what lay to the northeast –
Exardus.
They were heading back to Exardus to wipe it completely off the globe, and there was nothing I could do to stop them.
I had another 22 hours before I could cast my next spell. Until that happened, we were stranded.
I could hear the fairies’ quiet weeping all around me in the tree branches. The sound was heartbreaking.
Nix’s fleet disappeared into the black storm clouds, which rumbled and boiled northeast, allowing the sunshine to break through once again.
Once I was sure the ships were gone, I summoned my magic carpet and stepped onto it.
“Come on,” I said to my crew, “we need to check out the next riddle.”
We flew back to what had once been the fairies’ home. Now it was just a blackened crater in the middle of the forest, ringed with charred trees.
But I had been right: Nix had left behind his telltale signature.
In the center of the crater were glowing words cut deep into the earth:
4
AT THE END
HE WILL BE THERE.
It was Riddle #4 because we hadn’t seen the one from Fathmos yet.
What the fuck it meant, I had no idea.
I mean, yeah – it was obvious the 9th ex-master would be there at the end. Killing him (if that was even possible) would be the end of a months-long quest, so of course he would be there!
How the hell was that a clue to his name, though?!
I stared at the words, then glanced over at Alaria.
She wasn’t looking at me. Instead, she stared at the devastation all around us.
My heart filled simultaneously with overwhelming love and debilitating panic.
I’m not going to be able to guess the answer, a tiny voice whispered in the back of my mind, and it scared me more than any monster I’d encountered inside the rogue dungeon.
As horrible as everything that I’d seen today had been…
…it would be nothing compared to losing her.
And I was terrified beyond words that that was exactly what was going to happen.
26
The pixies, sprites, and brownies left us shortly thereafter. They lived far enough away from the fairies that their homes had largely been spared by the blast. They gave the fairies mournful hugs, but there was nothing else they could do, and so they went back to their normal lives.
If only Wylla, Mauvia, and their tribe could have done the same.
Fortunately, there was one way I could help. We spent the night in a palace I constructed with the pink crystal, far away from the scene of devastation.
At any other time, our arrival would have been cause for celebration – and an orgy of epic proportions. But no one had any interest at all.
The fairies were mourning the loss of their homes…
Alaria was still grieving Deek…
And whenever I closed my eyes, all I could see was Eluun gripping my hand as she died.
I did use my Ring of Diminution, though, to shrink myself down to the fairies’ size. I wanted to see them individually, not as tiny blurs of golden light.
I hugged Wylla first. She looked beautiful as always, a tiny Marilyn Monroe – but the sight of her tearstained face pierced my heart.
Gorgeous Mauvia tried to stay positive, but her haunted eyes betrayed her inner pain. “Thank you for alerting us… thousands would have died if you had not come.”
“I’m just sorry I couldn’t stop them from…”
I trailed off, not wanting to say destroying your hom
e.
Mauvia smiled sadly and shook her head. “We can rebuild anywhere. And we will… in time.”
I included enough room in the palace to house all the fairies. Nothing fancy, just dozens of human-size beds that would easily accommodate a hundred tiny folk each.
But looking out on the tiny figures huddled together in shock, holding each other and crying, was like witnessing a flood of refugees from a war-torn country. It hurt my heart to see it.
When we retired for the night, I held Alaria in my arms as she cried herself to sleep.
I wasn’t quite as lucky. I stayed wide awake for hours, going over the riddles again and again in my mind.
I am the alpha and the omega…
The first, the last, the only…
At the end, he will be there.
They made no more sense now than when I had first seen them.
I wished I could have contacted Luna to get her help, but I didn’t dare.
I was utterly and completely alone on this, with no one to blame but myself if I failed.
27
The next morning, we helped situate the fairies in new makeshift homes while I waited for my portal timer to reach zero.
Ten days ago –
Jesus, was that how long it had been since I’d fought Hritch?! It felt like an eternity.
Anyway, ten days ago Alaria, Stig, and I had traveled via magic carpet from the fairies’ land to Exardus.
It had taken us almost three full days, with stopovers at inns for two nights.
Nix’s fleet wouldn’t need to rest, which meant they could cover in two days what had taken us three.
Actually, since their ships moved faster than my magic carpet, they would probably reach Exardus within 36 hours of their departure. Maybe less.
We’d burned 22 hours waiting for my portal timer to run down, so once we got back to Exardus, we would have 14 hours at MOST to figure out how to stop Nix from destroying the city… and potentially killing Alaria.
I wanted nothing more than to run off with her to another part of the globe, or to one of the Seven Hells – anywhere far from here.