by Deck Davis
Was this really it? Or was it tougher than it looked? Was this a joke?
He didn’t waste any time answering the questions.
“Kill it.”
He swung with his flail. Jon’s bow thwacked when he let an arrow loose.
Tripp felt the force reverberate into his knuckles as he missed the creature and hit the marble square instead. Jon’s arrow landed likewise, harming nothing and skittering off to the side and out of the checkerboard.
The creature zipped through the air, crossing the room and hovering close to the corner of the roof. Before Tripp could even think about navigating his way back through the trap-strewn checkerboard, the creature found a hole in the ceiling and disappeared through it, leaving the room.
It was hard to gauge his feelings now. The room was silent save dim whispers from the torch flames over by the walls, and the fading smell of manus was the only evidence the creature had even been there. He didn’t feel cheated, didn’t feel angry, nor even disappointed. Just a little empty. Four gold keys, all that preparation, and for what? A creature smaller than a rat, that fled at first sight of them?
“What now?” said Jon. “We were supposed to kill that thing to get the chest, right?”
“That’s the only reasonable answer.”
“We could chase it?”
“The doors are still locked. We’re not getting out of here without finishing the room or dying.”
Jon retraced his path off the checkerboard squares, and Tripp followed, deep in thought. An idea was trying to move free in his head, but something was stuck in the cogs and stopping them from turning.
“We need to kill it to complete the dungeon, but we can’t leave the room to chase it without completing the dungeon. Clive, can you check out the hole it escaped from? Looks too small, but it’s worth trying.”
“Certainly,” said Clive, and swooped through the air, stopping in the furthermost corner and hovering near the escape hole. “No such luck,” he called back.
They were standing on the outskirts of the board now, safe from traps. He looked at the room with its squares and murals and couldn’t help a flicker of anguish at how badly he’d gotten it wrong, but at the same time wondered if the solution had changed on the fly. This was Boxe, after all.
“Either I was somehow supposed to know what would appear when we turned the keys, and have something ready to trap it, or Boxe made this impossible,” said Tripp.
“Or, there’s something we’re missing,” said Jon, staring around the room.
Clive floated back to them and, without being asked, began telekinetically moving their shields and swords from the checkerboard and to the sides of the room. With metal clanging as Clive slowly made a pile beside them, Tripp tried to think. He closed his eyes, willing an idea to come. Anything. A shred of inspiration, even just the smoke from a long-dead ideas pyre.
Nothing came. He was walking into a tunnel without a torch. Driving without headlights of inspiration. What had he missed?
When his inner thoughts gave him nothing, he opened his eyes. This time he looked around the room; at the checkerboard and the statues that had crumbled when they had turned the keys and were scattered over the marble. At the torches fixed on the outskirts, and flames burning within, casting an orange light on the walls and the murals, and the story of Godden and how he claimed the Reach, and…
Then he saw it, and the bubble of inspiration was so quick and strong that he had to wait for his head to clear.
“The murals,” he said.
Until now, he had seen them as a rather grave decoration, there to give the final room of the labyrinth the appropriate mood. They were exquisitely carved, so much that they seemed to bulge out of the walls and almost become real, but he hadn’t seen anything useful in the aesthetics.
But a desperate mind clings to any handhold when it is losing its grip on the mountainside, and Tripp latched onto this and pulled himself up, every thought a step until he stood on the peak. He could see clearly now, he could see the mural for what it was.
“It’s a clue,” he said. “The mural.”
“For us?”
“About us,” said Tripp.
It was the answer. Stone and marble chipped into the shapes of clues. Not just Godden’s story, but maybe Tripp’s, too, because he saw familiarity in the pantomime of stone now.
There was Godden on his horse with a procession of riders behind him. All soldiers at first glance, but looking carefully, Tripp saw others; a hairless elf with a great bow slung over his shoulder. A grey tusk with a warhammer poking over her back. A cleric holding the reins of his horse with one hand, tapping the book strapped to his thigh with the other.
Then, behind them and blended into the rest of the procession so he was almost hidden, there was an orc. Bulky in his steel armor, with his head bowed so that Tripp could only just see the artificer’s goggles on his face, but there all the same.
That had to be a sign. Excitement made the veins in his temple throb.
“Have you got something?” said Jon.
Tripp could hardly get his words out. “Maybe. Just maybe.”
He took out his artificery goggles and strapped them over his eyes, and he looked around the room under the dim film that overlaid his vision.
The checkerboard was the same, the ceiling the same, but now the walls shone with color. The green of the plains, the red blood stains on Godden’s metal shoulder plates, the cascade of sunlight bursting through the gap in the rain clouds overhead. Viewed through his goggles, the murals looked so real he felt like he was there, that he had been there.
“Tripp?” said Jon.
Tripp thought of how to explain this, wondering if letting Jon wear the goggles would allow him to see for himself. Beyond all, he had to work out what it meant.
But then he saw two things, and the meaning of it all split through his indecision with laser focus.
The first thing was a new part of the mural, uncovered when he wore his goggles. This was in the biggest part, the center mural that depicted Godden in the thick of battle against the weavers. With his goggles on, Tripp saw a new addition to the scene, and his breath stuck in his throat.
There, towering over the slaughter, was the creature that had fled the labyrinth; the nightmare blend of frorargs, sleel, hornfel, eisschwarm. Only this was man-sized. No, that was too weak a word. When Tripp realized the perspective the mural had been carved in, it was clear that the monster was taller than Godden, taller even than some of the mounted riders, who were riding the outskirts of the battleground with giant wooden poles in their hands.
The longer he looked, the more details he saw that weren’t there without the goggles. A hooded man standing in a cart, gripping a crossbow that was big enough for a giant and fixed to a platform behind him. Near him was a pile of arachnid corpses, with a man who appeared to be dancing on top of them.
But the sight of the creature was what trapped Tripp’s breath in his chest, because the creature was beside Godden. It wasn’t attacking him. The mural, even though it was still, captured a sense of the feeling between them.
Tripp instinctively knew that the creature was on Godden’s side. That it was with him against the weavers. Not only that, but dozens of weavers seemed to cower around it.
“It isn’t our enemy,” said Tripp.
“Huh?”
He took off his goggles and handed them to Jon. “Put these on and tell me what you see.”
The goggles were too big for Jon since Tripp’s big, orcish head had stretched them out. He tightened them as best he could and held them in place, then said, “Nothing. Just the room, but dark as shit.”
“Figures. Guess you need the artificery skill to get the slightest use out of them. Okay, here’s the thing…”
Tripp explained what he saw as best he could. He’d never been much of a wordsmith, really, but he tried to share the heat of battle, the fear in the weaver’s faces as they dared not approach the creature next to Godden
.
“There’s something else, too,” he said.
He skirted around the room until he reached another part of the mural. This was the second thing that had caught his attention.
This mural section was two panels to the left of the battle, depicting Godden on his knees in front of Old Kimby. A strange light shone down from the mountain, not sunlight but something different, something divine.
Godden held his arms out, and an object appeared to be coming down through the light and toward Godden, where he waited to receive it.
Where his hands should be, Tripp saw an alcove in the wall. This was a shallow, curved hole. It wasn’t a chip in the stone, it wasn’t the result of any damage. The shape was so precise, the placement so perfectly where Godden’s hands would be, that he knew it was important. Not only that, but he hadn’t seen it until he wore his goggles. His attention wasn’t just nagging at him now, it was screaming in his ear.
He paused in front of it. Up close, the alcove was actually a hollow cylindrical shape, barely bigger than the span of his hand. And hands were the key here because the hollow was where Godden’s hands should be.
“I have to give Godden something,” he said.
Jon joined him and studied the wall, his forehead more tightly creased than when he’d tried to solve all the rune riddles.
“Did we miss something? Maybe something that gets dropped when the creature dies? But that would bring us back to the fact we can’t leave here to chase it.”
“No, this is something else. I just can’t-”
It was a lightning strike in his head. It burned away every thought but one, casting an image in his mind.
The picture of a small, metal cylinder.
He dug around in his inventory bag and took out Konrad’s Stash, the cylinder that he’d gotten in room one. The strangest thing happened; where it had just been a cylinder of steel that he thought he had to complete somehow, now it had changed.
It was the same shape, the same color. But it thrummed with energy when he held it in front of the mural.
He moved it close to the alcove, the vibrating quickened until he felt it tremor along his hand and forearm.
“This is it,” he said.
He clicked the cylinder into place in the alcove in the wall.
“What the fuck is that?” cried a voice.
Gilla ducked to avoid the strike of a pincer. Something smashed into her back, but she dug her feet into the now-boggy plains and stayed standing. She looked for who had asked the question but it was hard to see anyone now amidst the writhing of weaver legs and the darkened forms of people, whether dead or undead.
The worst thing was the noise. The screech of the weavers. They had two screeches, one a high-pitched squeal they made when they died and another deeper one that burst its way through your ears and into your head, rattling your brain. This was the sound they made before they attacked.
Unlike their arachnid allies, the undead didn’t speak. They looked like the players they had once been; wearing their leathers, steels, tunics, shirts. Holding their axes, gathering rays of manus on their hands to cast primitive versions of their old spells. But it was clear that Boxe controlled them now, the players long-gone. The only sounds they made were low, throaty grunts and rasps.
Every time she looked at them, a shockwave of dread burst through her. Everyone who died in the Reach over the last few days has come back against us.
Her arms ached and her head throbbed as if she had been fighting for hours. She’d drunk so many health potions that the once-sweet taste was now sickly and it clung to the back of her throat.
There were no carts with humongous crossbows now. No fire arrows. The sound and smells of cast spells had steadily disappeared as the spellcasters ran out of manus.
She hadn’t checked her map since storming into the weaver ranks and swinging her sword. The lower-level players had to all be dead. Dead, or hiding. Only the elite would remain. How many was that? A dozen, maybe?
Penny was gone. She’d seen a weaver stick its pincer through his throat. He screamed, but the sound died out seconds after it began.
Zayne had died pushing a flame-haired woman out of the way of a strike from the Fell Lord’s Frost Carver, taking the blow for himself. The ice sword had frozen the giant wound on his chest almost as soon as it had caused it.
Violetta had met her end a suicide run. JoJo told Gilla that Violetta had removed her mask for the first time, but he had been standing on the wrong side of her. At any rate, she held Abyssal Shard up to the gods and then charged, slaughtering as many weavers as she could before their pincers stabbed the life out of her.
All Penny, Zayne, and Violetta’s guildies would be fighting without leadership now. They were ripe for recruiting, were it not for the wave of death they had to hack through.
Gilla felt something against her back. She was going to strike when she smelled sweat and then heard a grunt she recognized. It was JoJo, from her guild.
“Have you seen the Fell Lord?” asked Gilla.
“Nope. But there’s a grey tusk swinging a warhammer big enough to concuss a rhino.”
“Just keep going. One weaver after another, okay?”
Her soothing words died on her tongue when she saw four weavers burst up into the air, their limbs snapped, bellies popped open. Guts rained down from the weaver piñata, creating a slop on the grass.
A creature followed them, gliding upwards so fast that the wind made its wings flap and its tentacles wave around. Slime fell from its body in globules that burst when they hit the ground, letting off a putrid stink.
Turning sharply right, the monster smashed into a falling weaver, shattering it with its skull of stone. As the weaver burst into pieces under what must have been a tremendous force, the creature opened its mouth and swallowed the falling flesh and bits of limb like a whale gorging on plankton.
No sooner had it swallowed, then the creature grew. Its body extended, its wings spread wider, and the crackle of ice clouds around it scaled to match.
Was this real?
Gilla couldn’t believe what she was seeing, and nor could those around her, whether they were weaver or player. Arachnids scattered at the approach of the beast, and Gill felt a flood of joy in her heart until she saw the monster land next to a player and tear his head off with one clean bite.
It wasn’t an ally, but it was slaughtering weaver after weaver, undead after undead. The enemy of your enemy could still be an enemy. In fact, they could be much, much worse.
And this thing was.
It could shock with its tentacles, freeze with the cloud swirling around it. Fire trembled over its wings and scorched any weaver stupid enough to attack from behind, while its most brutal method of murder was using its rock head to pulverize its victim. It was a creature engineered for death.
This thing wasn’t their savior. It was another opponent; one who grew bigger and stronger by devouring whatever was stupid enough to be in its path.
Even when all the weavers were gone, they would still have to fight it.
With just the weavers and the undead to fight, death had been probable. Now it was certain.
A wooden chest with three things inside it: a slip of yellowed parchment, a bone, and a sword.
That was what waited for Tripp when he placed Konrad’s stash cylinder in the alcove where Godden’s hands should have been. He heard a mechanism click, and then a rumbling sound that grew louder and louder until a square of the moral slid down, disappearing into the floor.
Jon had eyed it suspiciously. “I thought gold keys meant a gold chest?” he said.
Tripp shrugged. “We haven’t solved anything. The monster got out, and all I did was wear some goggles. Give me a hand.”
He’d expected the chest to be heavier, but he was able to drag it out by himself. The reason was clear once he opened it and saw the paper, bone, and sword waiting inside.
As he was about to reach into the chest, he stopped. “Clive, an
y illusions?”
Clive shot a pulse of blue light in the chest, where it swirled around inside until draining away. “I guess not.”
“Check twice, pay once,” said Tripp. He cast underlay and then waited for the results to appear in front of him.
Underlay Analysis
Paper
Bone
Steel
Wood
Satisfied it was trap free, he picked up the parchment scroll first. It was so weathered that he unraveled it carefully, scared that he might accidentally poke a hole through it. Fully stretched out, he saw that it had been torn from a book. The ink was faded, the handwriting so curved and packed tightly together that he had to squint, but there was something familiar about it.
He’d seen this handwriting. He was sure of it. Familiarity was blasting him in the face, but he couldn’t focus.
Wait.
This was the missing page from the book he’d found in the library, the one he’d used to find out about sleels.
His curiosity heightening almost to desperation, he read it.
Dawnfreak
Often kept as pets in places that are tropical in climate and manus-heavy. Ideal breeding grounds for mega-rachnids and other humongous insects.
Dawnfreaks are known for their ferocity and hunting instincts, but perhaps most famous for their sudden and limitless growth when fed venom.
When kept captive in such tropical environments, dawnfreaks are used to moderate mega-rachnid populations and deter flesh-eating strains of mega-rachnids from building habitats close to villages and towns.
As well as venom, dawnfreaks are known to grow in mass when they ingest dead flesh, as early settlers of the Sterile Yonders found to their cost when their dead relatives were dug out from the ground and consumed.