Dungeon Lord- Ancient Traditions

by Hugo Huesca

  She stood again nevertheless and, along with Lord Virion, advanced toward Sephar.

  The Akathunians riddled them with darts.

  Ed tried to grab Ryan and run, but Sephar appeared directly in front of him, black spear aimed at his throat and something inhuman wriggling behind his eyes. Ryan whimpered.

  “Isn’t it remarkable how durable a Dungeon Lord with a well-planned character sheet is?” Sephar casually asked Ed. Vaines and her apprentice writhed on the floor as what had to be a lethal dosage of poison coursed through their veins. “Those darts are doused with our own blood, each drop enough to kill any normal human. But these two? Give them a few minutes and I fully believe they’ll be back on their feet. That suits me just fine, since it would be a shame to let Vaines’ marvelous mind go to waste. I admire what she has gone through—identify with it, in fact. She’s not the only one to have lost family and friends to our everlasting war.”

  “So your offer was a lie,” Ed told him. “You intend to kill us and have your creatures steal our very thoughts. And you intend to do the same to all of Ivalis.”

  “Nothing I’ve said is a lie,” Sephar responded bitterly. “Although I suppose I understand where Vaines is coming from. You know the reputation of the mindbrood—better than anyone, it would seem. Don’t think I haven’t noticed how you seeded those Starevosi regions under your hold with spiderlings.”

  Ed blinked, but managed to keep a blank expression, and Sephar went on, “The mindbrood is not what you think, Edward. That body of yours is just… meat. Your very brain is just a vessel for your consciousness. Memories, thoughts, those are what constitute the true Edward Wright. Preserve them and it doesn’t matter what suit of meat you’re wearing. The mindbrood is just another vessel. A better one. True, left alone it is a creature of instinct. It wants to feed and reproduce and does so without regard to the world around it. Isn’t that man’s nature as well, though, barely kept in check by our higher consciousness? We are predators too. It is not the mindbrood’s fault that it is simply better at it than a human. But under my guidance, its nature will be kept in check. Better than what men can manage. Edward, I know you to be a reasonable man, so don’t take my word for it.” He made an enveloping gesture that included himself and his minions. “The truth is right in front of you. The body that Lord Sephar occupied during his first life died when the Knights threw him into the mindbrood pit and set it ablaze. Those like Vaines would argue that he who rose through the smoke afterward was a different creature. However, Objectivity cannot lie. My name is Sephar, and my heart is the heart of a true Dungeon Lord.”

  A bead of sweat ran down Ed’s forehead. He had spent every second of Sephar’s speech using advanced reflexes to find a way out of the tough spot he was in. Surrounded by mindbrood-enhanced Assassins, confronted by an ancient Dungeon Lord that spoke with the passion of a prophet, Gallio bleeding out and Vaines out of commission, far away from any possible reinforcements… Ed couldn’t remember a time when he had been half as screwed as he was now.

  And the fact that he could see sense in Sephar’s words made thinking of opposing him all the harder.

  Jarlen, he realized all of a sudden, a mad spot of hope blossoming inside him. At some point, she had simply disappeared, possibly while the Light had annihilated Everbleed. Being undead, chances were she had been destroyed too, but if she had faked her demise, he could—

  Someone started clapping. Jarlen had materialized a few feet away from Sephar, ignoring the scimitars the Akathunians aimed her way.

  “Magnificent,” she told Sephar. He made a gesture, and the Akathunians lowered their weapons. “I don’t know or care about this new world you wish to build. But the war you have in mind, the war which you promised Vaines, puts to shame the one that Lord Wraith promised me during the forging of our pact. I’m old enough to have seen you in action, my Lord. I am Jarlen of Lotia. If you’ll have me, I would serve you.”

  Ed’s spot of hope vanished as fast as it had appeared.

  Sephar grinned. “You would go against your Regents?”

  “My only loyalty is to myself. I’ll follow a path that ensures my continued existence, but I also prefer one that allows me to thrive,” she said with a shrug. “Serving Lord Wraith was formerly the best way to achieve both, but he has shackled me as a token tribute to a morality unfit of a Dungeon Lord. Your reputation precedes you, Lord Sephar. Under your command, I doubt I’ll be as burdened.” She paused. “Although I must mention that Lord Wraith has taken measures that would destroy my coffin if I were to end my pact with him.”

  “As expected of any cautious man,” Sephar said. He exchanged a quick glance with Malikar. “It won’t be a problem. We have men in Lotia that can provide you with another coffin before you’ll need to worry about sunlight.”

  Jarlen nodded with a triumphant grin. “I figured as much. My only condition for this pact is that you match the previous offers Lord Wraith made me while removing all the nonsensical limitations.”

  Ed gritted his teeth as a black anger bubbled in his veins. “This is really not the time to betray me, Jarlen,” he said.

  “I disagree,” Jarlen said. “Sephar has made it clear he intends no ill-will toward you if you accept his perfectly rational terms. It’s not my fault you’re ridden by the delusion that you’re some kind of hero, Lord Wraith. If we don’t negotiate with Lord Sephar, we will both be destroyed, and our pact cannot force me to pursue a suicidal course of action, which I genuinely believe opposing Sephar to be. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to terminate our pact at all.”

  “Ah, the undead,” Sephar said after a satisfied sigh. “They possess truly delightful minds, just like the mechanism of a clock. If it's finely tuned, you can always know what they’ll do next.” His Evil Eye activated. “I accept your conditions, Nightshade Jarlen. Thus, our pact is forged. Welcome to the fold.”

  At once, Ed could feel the lingering connection between him and Jarlen disappear, leaving only the non-aggression clause that would fade in a few hours. His access to her character sheet vanished, and with it the familiarity. She was just a reanimated corpse with a cruel mind eager for murder and bloodshed. The Lord of the Haunt closed his hands into fists. He had known the sociopath vampire couldn’t be trusted! He should have expected something like this to happen!

  But you thought you had her under control, didn’t you? he told himself. Just like you thought you had the mindbrood situation under control, after no one like Nicolai surfaced in Starevos for years. Just because you found nothing, you thought it was fine to worry about a Dungeon Lord’s problems for a while. Now you made a Dungeon Lord’s mistake: to think you were too smart to be betrayed. Soon enough, you’ll be making speeches like Vandran’s.

  “Lord Edward,” the Lord of the Wetlands said, “I took your Nightshade, and you have my apologies, but the circumstances force my hand. It is extraordinarily difficult to find intelligent undead willing to go against the Regents. I promise that, if you were to join me, I would pay you back her value three times over.” He turned to Malikar and Jarlen, who waited expectantly for the orders of her new master. “Malikar, I’ll take over from here. Get Everbleed statue’s back home—and take Jarlen with you. She cannot act against Edward until the remnants of their pact wear off, which could make things… difficult, if Edward would refuse to cooperate. But surely it won’t come to that.”

  Even now he’s thinking of ways to further push his advantage, Ed thought, close to despair. The magical truce between Dungeon Lord and former minion would’ve been one way to force Jarlen to defend him if Ed were to resist Sephar. Finding a way to release Everbleed had been another.

  The longer Ed stalled for time, it seemed, the more Sephar would reinforce his winning position.

  Malikar nodded. “As you command, my Lord.” He touched the statue and cast a levitation spell on it. The statue hovered a few feet from the ground. Ed watched as the spellcaster and the vampire left the Armory, pushing Everbleed along.

 
Jarlen gave Ed one last glance before disappearing into the darkness. “A word of advice… Edward. Accept the offer. You could thrive under Lord Sephar’s rule, even if you must come to terms with Sephar having different values than yours. Just like I did while serving you.”

  “Fuck off, Jarlen,” Ed told her. “We’ll meet again.” If I survive this, he added to himself. There was no way he would allow the vampire to roam free and unhindered. She was his responsibility.

  The Nightshade smiled without the gesture reaching those dead eyes of hers. Then, she left.

  The Armory felt almost empty, and with the Akathunians keeping well out of sight as the two still-standing Dungeon Lords faced each other, it was easy to believe they were the only two in the room… at least until Ed looked down at all the bodies, or glanced back at Ryan, who was trying to blend in with the wallpaper.

  “I will have your answer now,” Sephar told him. “Tillman’s office awaits. Say the word, and it shall be ours.” His gaze was so intense that Ed had to look away, otherwise it was easy to fall into the gravity well that was Sephar’s will.

  What the hell do I do? The hardest part was, he wasn’t actually sure Sephar was in the wrong.

  Ryan’s words in Vaines’ palace came back to the forefront of Ed’s mind. Ryan claimed Ed had been a violent person since the beginning. Perhaps he had been Dungeon Lord material from the start.

  How the hell could he be sure that Sephar wasn’t right? Would Ed have done anything different in his shoes? Even during the Bane, the most terrible of ancient Sephar’s actions, the Dungeon Lord had been desperate, having lost most of his dungeons—and probably most of his friends. If Ed lost Kes, Alder, Lavy, Klek, and everyone else… he honestly wasn’t sure he wouldn’t lose it and lash out like Sephar had against their killers. There was no way to tell unless he went through something like that.

  Hell, Sephar was actually talking to him, instead of trying to kill him on sight like almost everyone else! It was refreshing. Unlike the Light, who would destroy him like it had done to Everbleed. Unlike the Dark, that manipulated him like a pawn and jumped in delight as he soaked his hands in blood. Unlike the Dungeon Lords that had tried to strong-arm him before even knowing him. Unlike Gallio, lying there in a pool of his own blood. Gallio, who had given up on him the second he found out Ed’s heart was Mantle-black.

  Unlike all of them, the first thing Sephar had done upon meeting with Ed was try and reason with him. Sephar had exposed his own motives and was willing to cooperate. He wanted to share the Standard Factory. He was driven, rational, and smart. He had taken out Everbleed in such a way he made it look easy. Even Vaines feared him. There was no way Ed could oppose someone like that.

  Even if he could… A world without the Light and the Dark, without war, pain, maybe even without death—could it really be that bad? Perhaps if Ed somehow found a way to resist Sephar he would be the true villain of history.

  His gaze lingered on Gallio’s body. It had seemed to twitch for an instant, but now was still.

  The thing about Evil with a capital “E,” Ed thought, was that unlike what he had spent his life back on Earth thinking, it wasn’t easy to discern at a mere glance. Sure, there were entities like the Regents, or Kharon, that were obviously and unrepentantly evil. However, despite their immense power, their behavior actually made them less dangerous, not more. They were cartoonish, almost unreal, a force of nature. They were something that happened to you.

  The most dangerous kind of evil, the Dungeon Lord mused, had good intentions.

  It was the kind of evil that felt right. An infection that disguised itself as a vaccine. Those with the power to act, like Dungeon Lords, or Inquisitors, could never know if they were the heroes, or the disease.

  Just like how a mindbrood operates.

  But there were ways to out a mindbrood. Ed had learned one of those ways during his first encounter with one.

  Thinking of that time brought back memories he would’ve rather remained locked away. Gallio’s body twitched again. And then Ed understood.

  Ed raised his eyes and locked gazes with Sephar. “I am going to ask you a question, Lord Sephar. My answer to your offer depends on your answer.”

  Sephar raised an eyebrow, clearly amused. “Interesting.”

  “Years ago, there existed a village called Burrova. Before Burrova was consumed by flames, there lived a little girl that was consumed by a monster. It grew up thinking it was her. This monster ended up devouring the girl’s father and the rest of her family. She cried for me to save her and I killed her.” The Evil Eye blazed stronger than ever, and its light seemed to vanquish the doubts Ed harbored in his heart. “What was her name?”

  “What?” Sephar blinked. “That’s your question, truly? Not about how I intend to achieve my plans, not what I’ll do with the Factory? Just a little girl’s name?”

  Ed said nothing.

  The ancient Dungeon Lord, the master of the mindbrood, was visibly annoyed. He frowned, and a vein trembled in his temple. “You are not being rational, Edward. My first foray into Starevos was uncalibrated. I brought an egg believing it could sabotage the Inquisition right under their noses. What happened in that village of yours was a disaster. The young mindbrood brought too much attention. If it had lived, it may have alerted the Inquisition about my existence. I was wrong, I know that now! You did me a favor by killing it, so I harbor no ill will toward you. We have both done things we regret. We are fighting a war. Casualties are bound to happen, it—”

  “Say her name, Sephar!”

  Sephar’s Evil Eye burned just as brightly as Ed’s, and their opposing lights cast shadows that danced between the two Dungeon Lords like two clashing armies, like burning fields, like crows feasting over a sea of corpses. Shadows like auguries. Both Dungeon Lords looked like brothers for the briefest of instants as the eldritch glow erased the differences between them.

  But past the Evil Eyes and the danger exuding from both, at the very core of their beings was a glaring difference.

  Inside the older brother was a burning pit with the sky above disappearing under a sea of black horror.

  And inside the younger brother, past all doubts, hopes, and fears, drawn by fire, was a single conversation.

  “You are adventurers,” the monster told them. “You have magic, don’t you? Fix me! Please! Please, I don’t want to be like this anymore!”

  “Don’t you worry,” the Dungeon Lord told the mindbrood as his heart broke. “I will fix you. Don’t be scared.”

  “In a way,” Ed told Sephar, “you created the person who I am today. Perhaps Murmur was right. I was never the best man, even before becoming a Dungeon Lord. But then, because of you, Burrova burned. What I saw there… what I did there… changed me. It changed my fate. And I will never, ever, do to someone what you did to a girl whose name you don’t even know, you fucking monster!”

  Sephar advanced, spear aimed at Ed’s throat, something inhuman shifting inside him. “You would burn the entire world over a child you didn’t even know? The gods have killed thousands, and will kill thousands more unless we stop them! What does a single girl matter in the grand order of things?”

  “Oh, it matters,” Gallio said, spitting blood, shambling toward Sephar while holding his guts in with one hand; Dungeon Lords weren’t the only ones whose character builds allowed them to resist terrible damage by sheer force of will. “It matters all right. It matters to us.”

  The Akathunians shot at him, but Ed stepped into their path. “Barrier!”

  “Her name was Ilena!” Gallio roared, and then, raising a fist to the sky like a challenge, “SUNWAVE!”

  29

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The Enemy of my Enemy

  Although she wasn’t half as wounded as she was hoping Sephar believed her to be, Vaines almost fell unconscious as the brutal power of the sunwave burned into her veins as if her blood had turned into holy fire. Not even the best among the Silver Knights had produced such an att
ack during her time—she could feel it even at this distance!

  But even if the agony was unbearable, the Lady of Vros hadn’t made it to where she was by giving in to pain. She welcomed it instead, even as her talents struggled to protect her vital organs from the poison coursing through her veins.

  She had been waiting for a chance. Edward Wright, somehow, against all odds, had provided one. Now it was her turn.

  Even before her eyesight recovered from the blinding light, she was already up. At some point, someone had kicked her sword away—it didn’t matter, Saint Claire’s weapons weren’t so easily neutralized. Her will called to Eulogy, and the blade answered, appearing in her waiting hands as if drawn from thin air. The arcane glyphs of the meteor steel came to life as the blade drew a deadly arc that neatly severed the head from the nearest Akathunian.

  Try to regenerate from that, Vaines thought, already jumping like a rabid lampagos toward the next enemy. Virion did the same, back to back with her, clearing a path toward Argent Planeshifter.

  “Portal!” Vaines called over her shoulder. “Get us out of here, Argent!” Around her, the creatures that wore the skins of men began to change. Hoods fell to reveal heads splitting open with a sickening crunch into flowers of tongues and teeth; skin cracked and coalesced into black chitin; wet insect wings sprouted from backs like butterflies coming out of their chrysalids. The Dungeon Lady had never seen a mindbrood in the flesh, only in drawings and through Bards’ tales. Here they stood now; huge, not-quite-insect-like monsters that cried out with human voices.

  “My Lady, let’s go!” The Portal was open, leading to somewhere away from the brood. Argent had already crossed, and Virion was midway, gesturing frantically at her to follow.