by Zac Gorman
From where he stood, he was quite comfortable. The air was nice and cool on his freshly bathed skin, his robes had been recently laundered and smelled of lavender, and his personal servant would be back any moment with a warm beverage. His current comfort level clashed dramatically with what he was watching unfold in the Black Mountain, far below his slippered feet.
The violence was incredible. Monsters and adventurers battled at every turn. He watched a pack of wolf moths carry off a pitchfork-wielding farmer. He saw a slughemoth swallow three adventurers whole. On one screen, he watched a minotaur who had seized control of a bridge in Giant’s Crossing swatting off anyone who attempted to cross, and on another, he spied a quartet of unwary adventurers as they walked brazenly into a room full of creeping death vines, mistaking them for normal plants. They didn’t walk out again. He almost threw up when he saw what the acidic oozes had done. Worst of all, he was beginning to think that maybe Overseer Marl had been right all along: nobody was going to win this thing—and it wasn’t just because of her “foolproof” plan, but because nobody would even make it to the castle gates alive.
There was a knock on the door, and the Master eagerly turned away from the screens, happy to be done with them for a moment. He was less happy when he heard Marl’s voice mewling from the other side.
“Open the door, this instant!” demanded Marl.
The Master paused for a deliberately long time.
“No,” he said at last.
“You open this door, right now!”
The Master paused again, relishing every sweet second.
“We had an agreement. You have complete access to every room in the dungeon, except the blackdoor room. I need someplace for peace and quiet.”
“Open the door right now, you little worm! I—” Marl cut herself off.
The Master listened to Marl’s huffing and puffing from the other side of the thick metal door until her breath slowed and became inaudible.
“I completely understand your need for solitude,” said Marl, who’d clearly decided to try honey where vinegar had failed. “But in light of recent circumstances, I’m afraid I require access to the blackdoor machine.”
“And what might those circumstances be?” said the Master. Every question he asked from his side of the door was like a tiny gift for himself.
On the other side of the door, Marl gritted her teeth. The Master could almost hear it through six solid inches of metal.
“You know very well what those circumstances are! Your gamekeeper has entered the Wretched Scrattle, and in doing so, she’s endangered the whole operation. Now let me in!”
The Master waited as long as it took to quit grinning before he finally relented and opened the door. As the door slowly opened, he found himself face-to-face with a version of the Overseer that he wasn’t prepared for. His grin returned in spite of himself.
Her tangled green hair was like an overgrown weedy garden, and it was obvious from both the look and smell of her that she hadn’t changed her robes in days. Her lapels were spotted with stains from the strange red tea she always drank, and it’d left quite an unpleasant crimson residue on her teeth as well. The Master had expected her to burst into the room like a wailing banshee the moment he opened the door, but she clearly didn’t have the energy for that. If he’d had to pick a verb, he would’ve probably said that she “slouched” into the room more than anything. The Master almost felt bad for her . . . almost.
“My, my, my—” he began, but Marl interrupted him with a wave of her hand.
“Save it,” she said.
Marl walked in and slumped down in the only seat in the house, the lowered bucket seat that attached to an arm that could be raised to access any portion of the blackdoor machine.
“This is bad. This is really, really bad,” she groaned.
The Master leaned against a railing and studied her.
“Why?” he prodded. He wasn’t ready to play his hand, but she seemed more than eager to play hers, so for now, simple questions were best.
“Why?” she mocked, lifting her face from where she’d buried it in her long, elegant fingers. “Frankly, I don’t know why you’re not worried. Don’t you understand what happens if that gamekeeper wins the Wretched Scrattle? You can have your fun at my expense, but if that gamekeeper wins, you’re out of a job, too!”
“Aren’t you the one who wanted to entice people with the promise of them taking my job if they won? You’ll have to excuse me for not being too sympathetic,” said the Master.
“You know that nobody was ever supposed to actually win,” she said. “You knew the plan.”
“Oh, I knew the plan,” he said.
And he did. Better than she thought he did. He’d seen the bags of gold littering her office through the scrying spheres. He’d known that the minute she’d made enough money, she’d disappear into the night. Only, she hadn’t. The money had piled up but she’d stuck around. The Master knew there was only one reason a thief sticks around after they should’ve cut and run and that was because there was a bigger score coming just around the corner.
Odds were, Marl had decided she wanted the Black Mountain for herself. If that was true, the Master knew she’d just be waiting for the chance to off him or whoever won the Wretched Scrattle the second their back was turned. He’d be the easier target, he supposed, since she already had access to him and Castle Grimstone. If somebody else won, it presented too many unknown variables. And if the gamekeeper won, that would be the worst possible situation. Marl might have been going a little crazy as of late, but she wasn’t blind. She knew that many of the monsters in the dungeon loved the gamekeeper. Thisby would be much harder to get rid of without risking a full-on monster revolt.
“You worry too much. Look at me. Do I look worried?” said the Master.
Marl’s eyes darted over to him, a new alertness appearing behind her heavy purple lids.
“You have a point. Why aren’t you worried?” she asked.
The Master rubbed his chin. “You just said it yourself. Nobody will win the Wretched Scrattle. Do you doubt your own plans?”
“Of course not!” barked the Overseer, standing up. Her ire was rising again. It seemed to be her last source of strength. She pointed an angry finger at the Master’s face.
“But let’s say the gamekeeper does win . . . or someone does! You’ve said yourself that these things have a way of blowing up in your face!”
“Oh, and now you listen to me!” laughed the Master.
“You think this is funny? What do you think will happen to you if somebody wins the Wretched Scrattle? You think you’ll just walk away? Live out your days on a farm somewhere? Nobody has ever retired from being Master of the Black Mountain. The job is a death sentence. You know that. The old Master dies. That’s the way it is.”
“I’m not one for tradition,” said the Master.
“You think you have a choice?” Her words were more threat than question.
“There’s always a choice. You just have to be smart enough to see it.”
Something changed in the room. An obvious thing to say would be, “the room grew colder,” only that wasn’t exactly it. It was more like the room had always been cold and the people inside it had finally just given up on pretending that it wasn’t.
“You want her to win,” snarled Marl.
The Master frowned at her disingenuously. “Now why would I possibly want that?”
“You’ve struck some sort of deal with the gamekeeper. Is that it? You help her win the Wretched Scrattle and she spares your life? You coward! You’ll ruin everything!”
With that, the Overseer, who’d seemed so frail only a moment ago, stood up tall and straight like a cobra ready to strike. The Master took a step back.
“The Wretched Scrattle was your idea!” exclaimed the Master, suddenly realizing he was quite sweaty.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You’re wrong. You’re wrong. You’re wrong. It was never my idea, but I took i
t anyway. I was so stupid. I should’ve taken the money and run when I had the chance, but the opportunity was too good. I got greedy. I could’ve had it all if you’d just played your part. I should have just left. I should have just left.”
With a flick of her wrist, Marl withdrew an alchemist’s bottle from the sleeve of her robe and dangled it between her thumb and forefinger.
“Marl, stop! You can still leave! You’ve got your money! You don’t need to do this! Just take the money and go!”
“It’s too late now.”
Marl flung the bottle at the Master’s feet. The bottle shattered upon impact, and within seconds the purple goo that had spilled out had multiplied in size and was constraining his ankles. In another few seconds, it had grown up past his waist and was squeezing his legs so tightly he could no longer feel his feet.
“You can’t do this!” he shouted. “I’m the Master!”
“You’re nobody,” Marl cooed, an awful smile curling the corner of her mouth.
The purple ooze had climbed up to his neck and was beginning to constrict his throat, making it hard to breathe.
“You don’t understand! The girl needs to win! You’ll start a war! You idiot! You—”
His screams were choked off as the goo entered his mouth and nose. Moments later, it covered his entire body, leaving him fighting for breath on the floor, entombed in a cocoon of vile purple mucus. The Master writhed and struggled until he no longer could, and then everything went dark.
“Not that way,” said Thisby.
Donato sighed, backtracked to the fork in the tunnel, and took the left path instead.
“Not that way, either,” said Thisby.
The hunter stopped and leaned against the crumbling stone wall with one outstretched hand, hanging his head as he did.
“There’s only two ways,” he said.
Thisby stepped forward and began feeling around the wall, knocking on seemingly random stone blocks and putting her ear up against them.
“I swear there used to be a secret passage here. I wonder if the Overseer had it filled in.”
Donato waved his arm down the left passage. “We could spend another hour looking . . . like we did at the last fork . . . or we could keep going this way.”
Thisby ignored him and continued her search.
“That way leads to death bears,” said Mingus, swaying gently in his lantern.
Everybody froze.
“It talks?” said Vas as a huge, doofy grin rapidly consumed his face.
Mingus turned bright pink with embarrassment.
“Yes, I talk! And I’d appreciate not being called ‘it,’ thank you very much!”
Vas was unconcerned with his faux pas and had already swooped in and pressed his face against Mingus’s lantern, causing the poor slime to recoil in horror. This also put Vas much closer to Thisby than she felt comfortable with. She was about to suggest he back off, but something about the fading pine-needle scent of his soap was actually quite nice and made the words get lost somewhere between her brain and mouth.
“What’s his name?” he asked Thisby—who was suddenly acutely aware that she might not smell as pleasant as he did.
“My name is Mingus,” said Mingus. “We just covered that I can talk, so why are you asking her?”
It took Vas reaching up a curious finger to tap on Mingus’s jar for Thisby to realize that things had gone too far. She grabbed Vas by the shoulders and guided him away.
“He doesn’t like that,” she said.
“Oh,” said Vas.
“Fascinating,” said Bero, who’d been fairly quiet up until this point, walking at the back of the group and reading his spell books.
“Yeah, that’s all very interesting,” said Donato. “But can we pick a way and just go? We’ve only got a few more hours left until nightfall.”
Thisby knew he was right and understood his urgency. To the untrained adventurer, day and night made no difference inside a mountain, but just as it was outside, everything in here had its own natural rhythm. And even inside the Black Mountain, just like the rest of the world, the most dangerous things always came out at night. The trick now was figuring out which way to go. Mingus was right that they shouldn’t go anywhere near the death bears, but the opposite way led them below Hangman’s Falls, and Thisby was almost certain, based on what she’d seen so far, that that way would be full of traps. Still, when faced with a probable trap or imminent doom, there was really only one choice to make.
“We go right,” she said. “Away from the death bears.”
“Fantastic,” said Donato, who’d already begun walking that way, grumbling to himself the entire time.
Thisby could only catch bits and pieces of what he was saying, but she could’ve sworn there was an air of disappointment that he wasn’t getting a chance to square off against death bears. It hadn’t taken her long upon meeting him to realize that Donato wasn’t like the run-of-the-mill adventurers competing in the Wretched Scrattle. She briefly considered taking him up on the earlier offer of picking his brain about monsters, but it seemed like, at least for now, he was in no mood to talk shop. It was a shame. Thisby had always been curious about monsters that lived outside the dungeon.
The dungeon had far and away the widest selection of monsters anywhere in the world, but that didn’t mean there weren’t places where monsters still roamed free; they were just increasingly rare. Most monsters had been driven out of their natural habitats by the rapid advancement of humans, but there were still pockets of them here and there. Some of them were even quite famous, such as the troll communities along the Hyrion River or the imps who lived on the edge of the Yule Woods.
The latter had even given rise to a story that was frequently repeated among monsters of the dungeon: the story about a city of monsters located deep in the heart of the Yule Woods that dwarfed—no pun intended—the capital city of Nth. The city, as the story went depending on who was telling it, was governed completely by monsters, and their only irrevocable law was that no human was ever permitted inside the city walls. It was a tall tale, of course, and nobody with any sense truly believed it, but it was a nice story that made the monsters who heard it feel better about their lot in life, and as Thisby knew well, those were the kinds of stories that tended to stick around.
Thisby hung near the back of the group, distancing herself from the irritable hunter. As they walked, she noticed that Bero had closed his spell book and was gazing at Mingus. When Mingus noticed, he turned away and proceeded to glow a deep, angry red.
“I’m sorry for staring, Mingus,” muttered Bero. “But you really are quite fascinating.”
Mingus made a disinterested hmpf noise, but Bero sped up his pace anyway. With his big frame, it proved impossible for him to fit side by side next to Thisby in the narrow hallways, so he stayed one step behind, speaking directly into the lantern as if Thisby wasn’t there.
“It’s just . . . I thought your kind were only a legend,” said Bero enthusiastically.
This was enough to get Mingus’s attention. He turned around and his hue changed to a curious mauve.
“Huh? What do you mean, ‘my kind’? Thisby, slow down.”
Bero smiled at Mingus, showcasing his bright red cheeks, which were getting deeper red by the second as he struggled to keep up with Thisby’s brisk pace. Thankfully, Thisby slowed down as per Mingus’s request, and Bero nodded appreciatively.
“You know what you are, don’t you?” said Bero gently. “You’re not an ordinary slime. You have to know that much.”
“I know I came from the Deep Down,” said Mingus.
“The Deep Down?” snorted Bero before bursting into full-blown laughter.
It was a pleasant laugh, one without an ounce of cruelty or spite, but Mingus was growing impatient regardless. Donato, far ahead at the front of the line, turned his head to shush the conjurer but quickly abandoned the cause.
“What’s so funny?” asked Mingus.
“I just ca
n’t think of anything further from the truth! The Deep Down!” laughed Bero. “You’re a pewder sér. Or, as they’re more commonly known . . . a star jelly.”
Mingus turned white.
“Although there’s nothing ‘common’ about you, and you’re not from ‘down’ anywhere. You, my rare friend, come from as far ‘up’ as it goes! Beyond the stars.”
Thisby looked back at Mingus to make sure her friend was okay. He was almost translucent.
“A . . . star jelly? How?” asked Mingus, struggling to find the words.
“That part you’d have to tell me! How a star jelly ended up in the deepest, darkest part of the Black Mountain . . . well, that’s a total mystery, isn’t it? Before we met, I thought star jellies were just a myth. But you’re real enough! You probably have some questions for me, and I’d be happy to answer them to the best of my ability, but I have some questions I’d love to ask you as well! Once you’ve had time to, um, digest this, of course.”
“Right. Sure,” said Mingus.
Thisby was about to say something comforting but instead began to scream. The ground had given out from under her and she began to plummet.
Thisby hated traps. Nine out of ten times they were just as likely to hurt a monster as they were to stop an adventurer, although seeing as how she was now technically an adventurer herself, it seemed as if she’d stumbled upon the elusive one out of ten times when it’d worked exactly as intended. Despite this success, or perhaps in spite of it, her opinion of traps wasn’t set to change anytime soon.
It was a small comfort, but when she hit her head during the fall, she’d been so momentarily stunned that she didn’t even feel her arm break when she hit the ground. The instant she’d gathered her wits, however, she absolutely felt it . . . hence it being only a small comfort.
Lying on the ground, in hysterical pain, her right forearm visibly broken, Thisby scanned her immediate surroundings and tried her best to focus. The room she’d landed in was big, much more so than the hallway they’d just been in, and above her she could see light spilling down through the hole. It was the lone source of light in the room, a single beam cutting down into the darkened chamber as dust motes danced in the shaft. Her eyes began to adjust.