by Alston Sleet
I considered that answer for a moment until I got it. I wasn’t actually moving anything, it was like how I made more room on the inside than on the outside of things. I was expanding, twisting, turning, and collapsing the space, not the stuff in the space.
Just because I used the matter around the space to hold it once I distorted it, changed nothing. The human analogy would be picking up a cup with my hand then putting my hand against the wall to hold it steady. The wall isn’t holding the cup, it was just a reference to make it easier to keep it in the same spot.
Pushing my domain out around my door further, I grabbed a hold of all of the space. Tucking the space into the tiniest point I could, all below the surface, I pushed the space out to my [Far Seeing] point and then expanded it again. It left an infinitely thin line of space back to my entrance, all of which twisted and turned through some unseen other direction. At my entrance’s new location, there wasn’t even a pop or rustle of the air. One moment there had been nothing, the next, a large arch of stone.
The entire effect had been very pleasing to me and I felt like strutting but Denda’s snide comment about a rooster calmed me down.
While there had been silence at the appearance of the stone doorway, the martial response from the dwarves was instantaneous. Metal clad dwarves, using everything from maces to halberds, surrounded my entrance. All of them seemed prepared to destroy my entrance. The dead silence, beyond the shift of metal armor and leather, was creepy. These little guys seemed ready to rock and roll.
No one moved, they just stood there ready to attack without hesitation. Weird.
After about thirty minutes the doors further into the castle opened and a squad of soldiers pushed through. These guys, and my vision noticed, a couple ladies, were very well equipped. They wore black leather covered by chainmail with metal gauntlets and armored helmets. The metal looked sort of like steel but with an odd ivory like undertone. One of the ladies in the back of the group was sporting a huge staff with a glowing blue stone and flowing red robes. Wizard, definitely a wizard.
I was seriously concerned with the lady, the metal swinging brutes wouldn’t be getting through my one-way doorways and tricks. A wizard though? That was a concern.
After walking around my entrance, the flat stone back raising more than a few eyebrows in the elites, they formed up and slowly made their way in through my entrance.
I had been right, the looks when they gone down the stairs and after noticing the high ceiling, was awesome.
Once they had entered my domain I noticed something odd. My magical senses still ‘saw’ them, but the taste of them, the sense of them magically, faded out a bit away from their body. My instincts were telling me that I couldn’t affect them, and even the room they were in was mostly running on auto-pilot. If I hadn’t set up the [Will of the World] beforehand, I wasn’t changing anything now.
Sometime after I had transported my door, but before the elites had entered, Denda had slipped away.
Moving in formation the six dwarves stopped in front of the portrait and plaque, though only the lead dwarf moved forward to read it. The others kept a wary eye out as he started to read my plaque out loud. When he reached the end I noticed that Denda had added on her own plaque which was embedded into the wall.
I left a secret here also! - Denda, Goddess of Fate, [Thieves], and Cunning.
Once the dwarves read the plaque they all seemed to collectively calm down and start to wander around the entrance and comment on the portrait. I was finding it hard to concentrate on what they were saying because all I could think was a refrain I found myself saying a lot.
Shit! Shit! Shit!
CHAPTER TWELVE
Crab Apple and Cherry
Hanging over the edge of her bunk Renda stared at her bunkmate Mela until she couldn’t pretend to ignore her anymore.
“What? ok, what?” Mela asked with an aggrieved voice.
“You going to try out Rens again? I heard he had fun with you.”
Scrunching up her face, Mela shook her head, then noticed Renda was not going to let it go without more information. That had been a trend in their friendship, Renda would never allow a bit of nonverbal deflection go.
“Look, the guy is nice enough, but he has [Enhanced Strength] and no idea about gentleness. It was like being crotch punched by a blacksmith, all right?”
Renda’s face scrunched up before bursting into insane giggling, nearly falling off her bunk. Her loud laughter drew the attention of the rest of the Ravager team, but it was a common enough occurrence that the guys returned to their card game.
On the hunt or when defending a location, Renda was always at the back, waiting to cast down spells on their enemies or offer up what little healing she could. Mela was the scout of the team, so her place was always at the opposite end of any engagement. Despite the lack of direct interaction while working, on the off hours the two spent most of their time together.
Renda finally calmed down, but the grin before her next question said what was coming.
“Det, the scout from Ravager Three, has [Enhanced Endurance] just like you do, maybe you should try him out aye?”
The sound of some kind of commotion in the castle cut short their banter. While it wasn’t certain they would be needed, training drilled preparedness into their heads. When Felt, the Captain, and old-timer of the team stomped through the door twenty minutes later, all he did was a nod to indicate he was proud of their readiness. Everyone had grabbed their gear and ate a bit of food, and they were all sitting around ready to go.
“Form up, we got some magic-fuckery going on. Deploy in the castle training yard in ten minutes. Renda, get your tier one components.”
Everyone trooped out of the room and moved towards the training yard, leaving only Mela to guard Renda while she broke out her keys to unlock the high-level spell components. Tier one spell components were generally reserved for large-scale combat; sieges, invasions, giants, dragons, eldritch. Whatever was going on had Felt wanting to be ready for anything.
Once Mela and Renda met back up with the team, Mela took her normal position ahead of the rest of the team. Entering the training yard she saw the recruits surrounding a large stone arch which had not been there even a few hours earlier. The recruits had been fresh just eight months before, but they had only a couple weeks left in their training before they would be shipped out under the mountain and off to the borders. The silence, a standard practice whenever you couldn’t be sure a caster hadn’t put out some kind of voice command triggered spell, spoke well of their training.
It was unlikely whoever had made this arch had been able to set up magical traps like that, but if you had asked Mela earlier, she would have said no one would have been able to drop such a thing in the middle of the best-guarded castle in Vetter’s Reach either. Moving around the arch Mela could see that unlike the back side, the front of the arch had the words ‘Challenge Dungeon’ in Common. The words had been odd, but the view through the arch was genuinely distracting. It was like a portal into another world, one of solid stone, lit with an eerie soft white light, totally unlike glow stones or candlelight.
After the rest of the team formed up behind her, the recruits moving out of the way but still remaining ready to defend the keep, Mela slowly moved it. Carefully watching for traps or anything that would hint at a magical trigger. Like most scouts, she lacked any kind of magical detection tool or skills which would help with magical traps. Usually, it wouldn’t be a worry, her job was mostly to trigger goblin traps or the occasional wild kobold clans traps. Standard operating procedure in the case of a magical trap was to let the scout lead and find the traps, usually by triggering them.
Somehow Mela figured she might be at a slightly higher chance of going up against magic here. The archway alone screamed how capable with magic the infiltrator was, let alone the unheard of pocket-world that opened before her.
Flipping her hand down to signal to wait, she moved around checking for any ob
vious triggers, ignoring the eye-catching portraits and plaque on the far wall. Something that drew the eye that much was either the point of the room or the easiest way to draw a dwarf into a trap. If it were the first, they would get to it eventually, if the later, they would rather avoid it. After checking around the edges of the giant room, she signaled quickly to move forward but to stay away from the walls, as they had not been tested yet.
Once she was sure that the main room was safe, she moved over to point position for her team while Fend moved forward to check the fresco on the wall. After silently reading it over he waited a moment then his deep voice boomed from his white beard reading the plaque out loud. By the end, everyone had relaxed. Denda was known for her trickery, but never being malicious. The story of her robbing King Talon Stonebreaker’s Treasury three times was well known. Each time she returned the treasure, it was all to beef up the [Kings] defenses before an invasion from goblins. Even if she might prank someone, she almost always did it for positive reasons. The idea of someone faking her involvement was not a pretty thought, the revenge a goddess of Fate and Cunning could pull off? No, not pretty at all.
While Fend and Lieutenant Gord stepped aside to discuss what to do next the rest of the team wandered over to the painting and plaque.
“Look at that. I wouldn’t mind climbing that tall tree if you know what I mean. Wings are a bit odd, but still, I like a challenge,” bragged Fetteck, the team's large ax specialist.
Renda sidled up to Fetteck then poked her staff into his large metal belly plate, before scolding him, “Don’t you know melons don’t grow on trees?”
Pointing her staff over at Captain Fend then over to the youngest team member, their archer Turt, she continued, “Trees have crab apples or cherries.”
For a moment the hall only had the deep rumbling of Captain Fend and Lieutenant Gord before the entire team burst into laughter. Except of course Fetteck and Turt, both of them had looks of offense from the joke at their expense.
Mela caught herself before she started laughing. She never liked her laugh. Once she got going, she had a tendency to snort along with her giggles and the teasing as a girl had been horrendous. The teasing had been one of the reasons she spent so much time as a little girl in the forest and had started her on her journey as a scout.
“Gather up!” Gorn called out as Captain Fend looked at the two main hallways labeled ‘Mind’ and ‘Physical,’ again using the common script. The third hallway was labeled ‘Hall of Champions,’ but it was a short hallway that dead-ended just a few feet off of the main vestibule.
Mela was strapping down the last of her loose belt since she knew what was coming. Doctrine said that casters retreated first, attacked last, and were protected above everything else. They were just too rare and too useful to be treated any other way. Scouts, on the other hand, their job was to test the way, and sometimes they did that with their own skin. She could see how things were going, and she decided to volunteer before she was voluntold.
Quickly saluting, Mela straightened up before saying, “Sir, permission to scout the Physical Challenge?”
Yanking on his white beard a bit Fend nodded before gesturing her forward.
Walking about ten feet in front of the team she kept a close eye on the hallway and glanced back at the rest of the Ravagers every few steps. After she had gone roughly fifteen feet down the hall, she looked back to see a solid wall and her team nowhere in sight. The wall looked solid, and no dust had been disturbed around it to show how it had moved into place. There was no sound and no movement of the air, one moment there had been a clear hallway back and the next a wall. Pushing on the wall didn’t allow it to budge in any way and hitting it showed it to be just as real as it appeared.
Pulling her Denko, a long thin blade the length her forearm that had a sizeable solid pommel, Mela returned to carefully stepping down the hallway. On more than one occasion she looked back only to see a new wall had somehow silently appeared behind her when she wasn’t looking. The silent movement of the walls was more than disturbing for a woman who had trained her [Enhanced Senses] skill to the point where she knew what the kitchen staff was making without leaving the barracks.
After fifty feet the hallway turned, the way lit by odd red burning wall sconces, the only decoration in the entire place beyond the fresco and plaque. Beyond the turn was a large chamber with multiple doorways, each adorned with text above them the same as every other door had been so far.
Wiping her sweaty forehead off on her sleeve Mela looked through each doorway. Through each door, there was a short hallway with a view cut off by a ninety-degree turn right after. More of the odd pocket world magic had to be going on since each door was closely aligned to each other, each at most a foot distance between them, but the hallways had turns which implied the new halls came together. Why go to the trouble of setting up different named challenge doors but have them go to the same place?
Mela’s [Direction Sense] had been going wild ever since she had walked into the challenge hall. Whatever was going on, her skill was entirely useless.
Looking over her options, Mela decided to go for the hallway marked ‘Agility.’ A few feet in her way back was gone again. Mela’s scout training was causing the hair on the back of her neck to stand up. Being herded like this usually only meant a quick death.
After the turn in the hallway, the room opened up into a domed room. The floor a few feet into the room was breaking up with gaps between large stone islands. The gaps were irregular with short spaces on her end of the room and growing as they approached the other side. The stone door and pedestal on the other side of the divide the only other feature of the room. The room even lacked the ever burning torches that had decorated the hallways.
The challenge seemed natural enough to Mela. It was no more difficult then scrambling across cliff faces as a kid if truth be told. Before she started jumping she did her duty as a scout, checking around the edges and dropping a glow-stone down into the depths. The glow-stone bounced around a few times in the ever-narrowing walls before finally coming to rest pressed up against the two surfaces. After a few minutes of watching the glow stone faded away, an effect that Mela’s training on Dungeons had covered, but she had never actually had a chance to see before.
“Whelp! Going have to do some jumpin', glad I didn’t take Rens up on his invite last night. I wouldn’t have wanted to jump around while sore,” Mela muttered to herself before she began jumping across.
She paused more than once on her traversal to check the sides of the walls, even going so far as to move from one of the side walls to the other to see if they were just as dull as they appeared. Only the last few jumps were at all difficult. She never even bothered to put away her Denko, keeping the naked blade ready in case of attack.
Once Mela landed on the far platform she heard the first non-dwarven sound in the Dungeon of Challenges. The sound of coppers plinking against stone came from the pedestal that stood before the exit door. Keeping her eyes peeled Mela shuffled forward and looked over the large copper coins resting on the pedestal. Five coins in total rested on the stand, each engraved with the entrance arch and the face of Coldona. The edges of each coin had tiny ridges, unlike any other currency she had seen before. The effort put into each coin resembled the work that master metal smiths had put into producing some clan crests.
Scooping up her prize Mela continued on to the exit hall, ignoring the signal from the Voice of the World in the back of her mind. The new hallway she found herself in continued to do the odd instant appearing wall trick until she came back around into the large vestibule from before. Her team was standing around in the main hallway until Renda noticed her and pointed her out to the rest of the team.
“Report,” Captain Feld said as a subtle look of relief passed over his white-bearded face. Mela had figured out the trick to reading Captain Feld's face. It was all in the white eyebrows. The rest of his face was stoic, his hands may fiddle with his beard and show concer
n, but his eyebrows, oh his eyebrows were like flags signaling everyone around him.
“Sir, I moved forward until I was cut off by a wall from the rest of the Ravagers. I continued on until I entered a stone room with six doorways labeled ‘Agility, Strength, Dodge, Melee, Ranged.’ I was unable to see further than the hallways into each challenge. I believe that each would remove the option of moving backward like before. I selected the Challenge of Agility sir.”
Nodding to show his agreement with the choice, agility being a prime trait of most scouts. Dwarven scouts rarely gained [Enhanced Agility], most earned [Enhanced Endurance] or [Will to Continue], but it wasn’t an unreasonable choice considering the other options. Mela was a scout, and so Strength wasn’t something she excelled in beyond her normal dwarven physique while Dodge, Melee, and Ranged all indicated a more dangerous choice.
“Good choice, continue.”
With a quick smile, Mela continued her tale.
“I then entered a large room with multiple gaps in the floor, I used one glow stone to check the depth of these gaps. The fall might not be directly lethal, but the smooth walls and lack of handholds would mean without assistance it would probably be a death sentence. Sir, my glow stone disappeared after a few minutes.”
The rest of the team shuffled nervously over that announcement. The disappearing glow-stone meant only one thing; however odd, this was a dungeon. While the entrance had said it was the ‘Dungeon of Challenge’ it was unlike any dungeon anyone had heard of before. No traps, no monsters, clean and comfortable. Dungeons were known for being horrific death traps that slaughtered hundreds for every one or two that survived.
“Once I traversed the platforms and reached the other side, these…coins…appeared on the pedestal that was before the exit. I then exited and appeared through the Hallway of Champions doorway. Sir, my [Direction Sense] was going wild all over the place. Everything says I should be about fifty feet north of this room, I should never have been able to go through that hallway. I’m lost, Sir.”