by Zac Gorman
“STOP! I’m Thisby, the gamekeeper! I’m on your side!”
“I know who you are,” laughed the minotaur. “And I’d like my ten thousand gold.”
“Your what?” asked Thisby.
The minotaur’s war hammer whooshed by so close that it brushed her hair on the way down. The shock wave as it struck the stone bridge knocked Thisby off her feet and sent her sprawling. She looked up in time to see the minotaur lifting the hammer again with both hands. This was it.
Thisby closed her eyes tight and thought of the gardens of Lyra Castelis. She pictured the rows of perfect flowers. When she’d first seen them, she’d thought they were so unnecessary. But now, the moment before she’d die, they were all she could think about.
“COME ON! GET UP! GET UP!”
Thisby opened her eyes to find that the minotaur was still there, his war hammer still drawn back, ready to turn her into paste. But he wasn’t moving. She stood up.
From between the minotaur’s legs she could see that Bero was frantically waving her over.
“WE’VE ONLY GOT A FEW SECONDS! HURRY!” he shouted at the top of his voice.
Thisby scrambled forward on all fours, ducking between the minotaur’s wet, hairy legs, trying her best to hold her breath as she did. When she came through the other side, Bero was chanting something from a page in his spell book and holding Vas’s hand. Vas reached out his other one for Thisby.
“TAKE IT!” he shouted.
“I’M SORRY! I’M SORRY I LEFT YOU BEHIND!”
“JUST TAKE IT!” yelled Vas.
“IT WAS A REALLY BAD THING TO DO! AREN’T YOU MAD?”
“JUST TAKE MY HAND!”
Time snapped back into place all at once like a snapped rubber band, and the minotaur released his swing. All his pent-up momentum that had been intended to turn Thisby into a rather unsightly stain was released into the bridge itself. It broke clean in half.
They began to fall. Instantly. There’s a tendency to believe that if someone was standing on a bridge when it began to fall, they might be able to do something like scramble up the sides as it collapses and dive to safety, but that’s not how physics works. When things fall, they fall instantly. Thisby fell instantly.
The next sensation she noticed was someone grabbing her hand, and then her falling began to slow, causing her stomach to lurch. She threw up. For some reason that her panicked brain couldn’t quite comprehend, she knew that something was wrong when her puke began to fall faster than she did. Actually, everything was falling faster than she was. The bridge that had collapsed had collided with other bridges, shattering huge chunks off them, and the pieces of those old stone bridges whizzed by as she drifted slowly down into the void.
When her wits returned for long enough to realize what was happening, Thisby looked over to see that Vas was holding her hand and Bero’s in his other, while Bero continued to chant a spell from his book.
“This-Thisby . . . are we . . . ,” said a terrified Mingus.
“Flying,” said Thisby.
But she knew that wasn’t exactly true. It was more like falling in slow motion. Like sinking through an invisible jelly.
Thisby’s pulse began to gradually return to normal, and she looked up to see the cloud of dust left behind by the fallen bridges parting overhead. It sparkled where it caught the light and was actually quite pretty in a way. The waterfalls, too. She felt their cool mist on her face and almost felt like laughing. It reminded her of a dream. A dream she used to have every night but hadn’t had in at least a year. A dream of falling. Of floating down the ladder that led up to her bedroom at the top of the mountain. All three hundred and four steps. Thisby closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, Vas squeezed her hand to get her attention.
“It’s kind of pretty, isn’t it?” he asked as if reading her mind.
Thisby’s guts twisted up, and she thought she might vomit again.
“Do I have to keep holding your hand?” she asked. “For the spell to work?”
“I’m afraid so. Unless you want to risk the fall,” he said, laughing.
Thisby weighed her options.
Her next realization came all at once. It was a bit like catching on fire and then jumping into a river only to remember that you can’t swim. And the river was full of piranhas.
“Long Lost Lake!” she shouted.
“Hmm?” said Vas. He sounded as casual as someone lazily daydreaming at a picnic, trying to make sense of the shapes of clouds in the sky.
“That’s where we’re landing! Long Lost Lake!”
“So?” he asked.
Thisby shuddered and strained her eyes against the oncoming darkness below them.
“We’ll be fine!” said Vas. “You worry too much!”
And that was the last thing Thisby heard before the spell wore off and she plummeted though pitch blackness, crashed into the freezing-cold water, and saw stars.
When Thisby Thestoop was four years old, Grunda took her to meet with the goblin elders. It was the last night of a sacred goblin holiday known as New Blood Howling, and the elders of Grunda’s tribe had all gathered in the Black Mountain to perform the traditional rites.
The old goblin nudged and prodded Thisby awake in the middle of the night and told her to get up, there was something important they had to do. A proper human mother would’ve carried the sleepy four-year-old to where they were going, but as a rule, goblins never carried their young, not to mention Grunda was not her mother. So the two of them walked side by side from the bedroom Thisby had only recently moved into—four being the age where goblins earned their independence and were expected to be completely self-sufficient—across the wooden gangways and down all three hundred and four rungs of the ladder on their descent into the dungeon.
Her mind still hazy with sleep, Thisby shuffled dreamily into a large room filled with thick smoke streaming from braziers of blue fire. Grunda guided her gently forward, since she couldn’t see more than a foot in front of her face. From somewhere lost within the veil of smoke, she could hear softly beating drums, strange chanting, and the bleating of goats, which—she didn’t realize until she was much older—had likely been brought there for sacrifice. Grunda tugged sharply on the collar of Thisby’s nightgown when she’d walked far enough. Thisby stood there for some time rubbing her smoke-irritated eyes until the curtains of smoke withdrew and the four biggest goblins she’d ever seen emerged before her.
A normal child would have been inconsolable. Most adults, too. But Thisby stood still, only moving to rub her eyes, as the four goblin elders encircled her, examining her as if she were a prize pig up for auction. They bent in and sniffed her with their upturned noses, prodded her with their long, knotty fingers, and mumbled things in their strange, grunting language. When at last they seemed to reach a consensus, they stepped back in a straight line and waited for Grunda to speak. Grunda grunted something at them in Goblin, and they responded in kind before retreating back into the smoke as silently as they’d come.
Without another word, Grunda led Thisby back to her room, tucked her into bed, and left her alone in the dark, wondering if what she’d just experienced was all some sort of strange dream. Thisby was still questioning the reality of the night’s events when Grunda came knocking on her door the next morning.
“I suppose you have questions about what happened last night,” said Grunda.
Thisby nodded and sat up.
Grunda pulled out a chair for herself, the same chair that Thisby still owned, and sat down across from the young girl sitting on her bed.
“Last night, I took you before the goblin elders because I had questions about your future. Their magic is strong. Ancient. Older and more powerful than any magic in all of Nth. You came to this dungeon in a very unusual way, and I wanted to know what fate has in store for you. Do you understand?”
Thisby nodded, although she felt less than confident that she did.
“Now this next question I want
you to think very hard about before you answer.” Grunda took a deep breath. “Do you want to know what they saw? Do you want to know your destiny?”
Thisby nodded again.
Grunda exhaled. “I assumed as much.”
The goblin pulled her chair closer to Thisby, sliding it across the floor so it made an incredibly annoying squealing noise, and looked straight into the four-year-old’s eyes, addressing her like she was an adult and an equal. Grunda cleared her throat.
“You are not remarkable,” she said flatly. “You have no great destiny. There is no hand of fate guiding you on your path to do great things. If you do something great, it will likely be purely by accident.”
Grunda took Thisby’s tiny hand in her own, which wasn’t much bigger.
“But it’s okay, because you’re going to try. Sometimes you’re going to succeed and sometimes you’re going to fail. Your success will be somewhat random and not entirely dependent on your effort, although it couldn’t hurt to try, I suppose. I hope this gives you some peace of mind.”
She patted Thisby’s hand in a way that indicated it was more of a thing she thought she was supposed to do than something she would do naturally. The goblin stood up and slid her chair back to its original spot, repeating the same awful squealing noise.
“Come on,” said Grunda. “Get dressed. There’s work to do.”
The water was so black that there was no way to tell if her eyes were open. She assumed they were, if for no other reason than as a reaction to the terror and shock of being dropped into Long Lost Lake.
Thisby began to swim in a direction she hoped was up. Her chest was hurting from the pressure of holding her breath.
She swam as hard as she could but something was hanging on her, pulling her down. Something was trying to drag her to the depths, grabbing her around the shoulders. She reached a hand back to pry the creature free and realized it was no creature at all but the weight of her backpack. There was no choice but to wriggle free.
Thisby had one arm free of a shoulder strap when the thought pierced her brain like a banshee’s wail . . . Mingus! He was still attached!
She groped blindly until she felt Mingus’s jar. Her hand slid upward, looking for the hook. When she found the clasp, the same easy clasp she’d operated millions of times without thinking or looking, she fumbled with it. Desperate, Thisby tapped on the glass of Mingus’s jar, pleading with him wordlessly as she thrashed her legs to prevent herself from sinking lower. The tapping must have shaken him back from wherever he was because within seconds, Mingus burst with bright blue light and finally she could see him, looking at her. With the help of Mingus’s light, she opened the clasp.
She unhooked Mingus’s jar, shrugged her way out of the final backpack strap, and swam for the surface. Despite the searing pain in her chest, she couldn’t help but take one last look back at her backpack as it drifted down into the depths of Long Lost Lake, finally vanishing beyond the bubble of Mingus’s light. Moments later, Thisby burst through the surface of the water and swallowed big gasps of air that hurt her chest as much as holding her breath had. She’d never been so hungry for air in her life.
Several yards away, Vas was pulling Bero by his collar toward a dark spot afloat on the surface of the water. He dragged Bero’s limp body unceremoniously onto the small island of rocks, which was barely large enough to fit them both, and then helped Thisby out of the water as she came paddling over. Thisby flopped down onto the edge of the island and set Mingus’s lantern down beside her, every muscle in her body straining and sore. She was relieved to hear Bero mumble something, cough, and roll over onto his side. She was less relieved when reality sank in.
“My backpack.”
“What?” said Vas.
“My backpack . . . I lost it . . . ,” she said, trailing off.
It felt as if she’d lost an arm. On her very first day as gamekeeper, Grunda had given her that backpack. Over the years, she’d added pockets and compartments to it, put in so much work to get it exactly the way she liked. In some ways, it was her oldest friend, even older than Mingus. Her backpack had bailed her out of countless jams, had been her home away from home as she’d traveled the dungeon. She knew its every proclivity, the way certain pockets didn’t like to stay closed. She knew its every smell and stain, each one containing a small history of their time together.
Now it was gone. Just gone. Not to mention the number of irreplaceable notebooks and all the other meager treasures she’d acquired while working in the dungeon that were contained within it. There was nothing she could do, as her backpack was likely already at the bottom of Long Lost Lake—the name of which now felt like salt in a fresh wound.
“We’ll get you a new one,” said Vas dismissively.
Thisby didn’t even have the energy to be angry.
“I’m sorry,” said Mingus quietly.
He understood the importance of her backpack at least. She gave her friend a sad little smile and stood up. Things were bad now, but they were about to get much worse if she just lay there. There was work to do.
Thisby lifted Mingus’s lantern high above her head, and the cold black mirror of Long Lost Lake reflected his blue light back at her. The lake stretched as far as she could see, an expanse of merciless water spreading out in every direction until it acquiesced to the darkness, where the fingers of Mingus’s light could no longer touch. She tortured herself momentarily with the thought that there could very well be solid land just beyond the edge of his light, but she didn’t let the feeling consume her. Aside from a few rocky islands like the one they were on, there was no sign of shore.
“There’s nothing,” she said.
Vas helped Bero sit upright and made sure he was okay. It seemed as if the fall had taken a lot out of him or perhaps, more accurately, the spell casting had. Thisby had heard stories of wizards and sorcerers falling into comas or even dying from overexerting themselves magically, but she’d always kind of assumed those were just tall tales.
“What do we do?” asked Vas.
Thisby realized that, when it came right down to it, Vas was as helpless as all nobles were—with the exception of Iphigenia, of course, although she had to admit the Princess had rubbed her the wrong way initially as well.
Bero spoke up, his voice hoarse, and choked, “My books. Where are my books?”
Vas looked ashamed.
“I don’t know. I didn’t see them. The water was so dark. I’m so sorry,” he apologized.
Seeing Vas prostrate himself caught Thisby off guard. Just when she thought she had the noble boy pegged, he always found a way to surprise her. It was like he was doing it on purpose.
“There!” shouted Mingus.
It was the first break they’d had all day. In a nearly impossible coincidence, Bero’s satchel of books had landed on one of the few other rocky islands in the otherwise empty lake. Considering the surface area of the lake compared to the surface area of dry land, the odds that the books would land where they did were infinitesimally small. It also wasn’t a coincidence at all, although nobody besides Bero suspected as much. Magic books had a tendency to survive catastrophic events. It was one of the benefits of containing so much raw magical energy. Regardless, the fact that the books had survived the fall was still good news. There was however, also bad news.
“How do we get them?” asked Vas, knowing full well there was only one possible answer to the question.
Thisby thought of the monsters that she knew inhabited Long Lost Lake: mermaids, kelpies, nixies, water horses (which were far more dangerous than they sounded), catoblepas, vodynoy, sea slimes, water elementals . . . the list went on and on. But there was one monster that she was more worried about than all the others combined, one lone creature that lived near the dead center of Long Lost Lake, one creature that was the reason that Thisby took a step back from the edge of the island. The ammit.
As a rule, Thisby wasn’t afraid of monsters in the dungeon. She respected them, she showed th
em deference when necessary, but it wasn’t fear. Not exactly. With the ammit, it was different. It was fear, pure and simple. Spine-tingly, goose-bumpy, pit-of-your-stomach, lump-in-your-throat fear. The mere thought of the creature turned her legs to jelly and not even stiff jelly . . . runny jelly. Which was sort of ironic in a way, since running was the last thing she could imagine doing with legs made of jelly.
She’d seen the ammit only once, a long time ago when one of her trips around the Floating River inevitably passed through Long Lost Lake. After that, she learned better than to attempt to cross through the center of the lake, but when she was younger and less experienced, she’d made the mistake more than once, until she came face-to-face with the ammit.
There was an island somewhere near the center of the lake, a lonely flat plateau that rose just above the surface of the water, barely breaking its plane. So low that you’d barely notice it from a distance if it weren’t for the ring of tall reeds that surrounded it. Nowhere else in Long Lost Lake did reeds like these grow, except the one tall circle around this particular island, which formed a blind. Years ago, on that fateful trip, when she saw the island surrounded by reeds, Thisby’s curiosity got the best of her, and she wandered too close. That was when she saw it, crouching and peeking out from behind the tall grass.
The ammit’s body was shaped like a hippopotamus, only twice as large, and was covered in bony bumps and scales. It had a ring of bushy reddish hair, like a lion’s mane, that encircled a crocodile’s face out from which shone two gleaming yellow eyes. There was something particularly awful about its construction. Something ancient and primal and cruel. It emanated the dreadful feeling that it was designed for one purpose and one purpose only . . . to devour.
By the time she saw it, it’d already spotted her. It stared at her. Almost through her. She felt time stop. She’d never before, and thankfully never after, experienced such a sense of immense dread. The feeling of wanting to run, wanting to scream, but only being able to watch. And that was what she did. She watched. It was all she could do. It could have walked over and swallowed her whole and she would’ve just kept watching. Never moving. She locked eyes with the ammit, and it just stared back, unblinking, as still as a statue yet horrendously alive. Her boat drifted past. It didn’t try to eat her. It didn’t even attack. It just stared. And that stare alone was enough to ensure that Thisby never ventured anywhere near the center of Long Lost Lake again.