I was halfway through the first wall of vines when Tomlin shouted something. As I was his creator, he really didn’t need to shout, since we had a telepathic link otherwise known as my core voice.
When I heard the words he shouted, though, I understood why he seemed so panicked.
As a core, there are some things you don’t want to hear from your kobold miner, and this was one of them.
“Huh? Holy demons’ arses! Dark Lord, Dark Lord, come see Tomlin! Oh no. Oh no!”
CHAPTER 10
Tomlin was in a state of agitation in room three. He was wringing his hands, and he could hardly stay still. Even worse, he looked petrified.
That was what worried me most of all. Along with kobold’s territorial instincts, comes a vicious streak. It is well known across the world of Xynnar that an angry kobold will take on anything. A dozen chimeras, an ice troll, a dragon. It doesn’t matter.
So, for me to see my kobold friend with wide eyes, pacing to and fro…it was worrying.
When he saw me appear, he pointed to the wall he’d been mining.
“This is bad, Dark Lord. Look what Tomlin found! Look! No…don’t look. Be careful. Create a trap. Create a troll. Anything.”
It would be at this point that I would hold up a hand and smile gently, two proven ways of calming people down. Since I lacked the hands and face necessary for that, I took a different tack.
“Pull yourself together. Wow, Tomlin. If your litter mates saw you, they’d be ashamed. The Tomlin in the Soul Bard stories is fearless. He doesn’t scream, doesn’t get worried. Maybe I should rename you.”
He pointed a claw again. “Look! Be careful!”
I really couldn’t see what the fuss was about. Just as I had asked, Tomlin had excavated a ten-foot-long tunnel which opened out into a fourth dungeon room. With no lamps, the room was utterly dark. Luckily, being the core of this particular dungeon, I didn’t need light to see inside it.
So…casting my thoughts to my new room four, I discovered what had agitated Tomlin so much.
I looked at the tunnel, and then at Tomlin, my disbelief growing by the second.
“This can’t be right.”
“Tomlin doesn’t lie to you. You see?”
“Did you dig too far or something? Did you tunnel to the surface by mistake? Tomlin, what the hell did you do?”
“Tomlin didn’t do it. I promise you, Dark Lord. Tomlin was mining when he heard a sound. Like rocks crashing. Then a shout. Then, the weakest part of the wall exploded, and…”
“She fell through it. I’m sorry, Tomlin. Underground places like this are full of weak points and tunnels made by moles and that kind of thing. I shouldn’t have blamed you.”
“What do we do?”
“Tomlin…I have absolutely no idea.”
“It’s coming!”
I heard footsteps coming from the room. I saw her leave the room and walk down the tunnel, and then suddenly, there she was.
Standing in the room with us was a little girl with red hair. She was covered in mud, and she held a spade in one hand, and she had a bag strapped to her back. There was a ridiculous metal basin strapped to her head.
“Oh, hey! Can you tell me the way out?” she said.
Tomlin suddenly leaped into the air.
He wasn’t attacking her, though.
No, he leaped up like a scared cat, his eyes bulging, his claws completely tensed. Then he backed away from her, all the way across the room until he hit the wall.
“Pull yourself together, Tomlin,” I said.
Funnily enough, it was Tomlin’s ridiculous fear that helped me keep a calm head even when the strangest of things had happened.
After all, this was peculiar. A little girl finding her way down into a dungeon? A girl who looked like she’d been digging? A girl who showed not even the slightest fear of seeing a dungeon core and a kobold?
This presented me with a problem. Technically, this girl had voluntarily made her way into the dungeon. She wasn’t a core, nor a monster…which meant she was, under the academy’s definition…a hero.
Yup. I knew the definition of a hero off by heart, and there was no mention of age.
A hero: One who is not a core or monster, and finds their way into the core’s dungeon by their own means, for their own motives.
Well, this girl had her own motive for being down here, and according to Tomlin’s testimony, she had burst through the weakened wall.
As she was technically a hero, then I technically had to…well, I had to destroy her.
Damn technicalities to hell!
I was a core. It was in my nature to destroy intruders in my lair, and I knew what I should do.
As I looked at the young human girl that I had classified as a hero, I began to feel sick. Not imaginary sick, but really sick, like the phantom feelings I sometimes got but in a stronger way.
Could I do this?
Did I even have a choice?
If the overseers were watching this right now, and there was a chance they could be, then refusing to destroy a hero would mean instant decommissioning. My evaluation would be over, and I would face the overseer committee, who might vote to grind me to gem dust.
“Can you talk?” said the girl. “I sense that you are alive. What are you, anyway?”
“Tomlin is a kobold!”
“Not you,” said the girl. “I’ve seen a kobold before. Father took me to Retchrief zoo. They really shouldn’t keep kobolds in captivity like that. I mean the stone. You, Mr. Gem.”
“His name is Dark Lord,” said Tomlin, recovering himself enough to talk, yet still pressed back against the wall, as far as he could get from her.
Where the hell are you territorial instincts? I thought. I mean, I didn’t want Tomlin to attack the little kid, but it’d be nice to know he could.
I decided that given this girl was technically a hero, and I was a core, I was duty-bound to do something. But sometimes, heroes escape from dungeons without either dying or conquering them.
So, maybe I could play the Dark Lord for real, and force the girl to flee.
I tried to make my voice really deep. “You dare enter the chamber of the Dark Lord you…pathetic…pathetic…mollusk?”
My voice, though a little deeper, still had that stupid sound that came from being a gem. It echoed around the dungeon now.
The girl looked from Tomlin to me.
Then she laughed. She laughed and laughed, and I began to get rather cross. Come on kid…I’m trying to give you an easy way out! If you’ll just get scared and run, then I won’t have to…
“I might as well abandon the pretense,” she said, her voice now sounding much more mature. “I’m not a total idiot. So you’re the dungeon core, and this is your dungeon? Hmm. Doesn’t look great, Mr. Core.”
“You’re very smart for a ten-year-old.”
“Eleven. I’m not smart, really. My mom is bed-bound, and I had to miss a lot of school to help her. She used to be a university lecturer, so she taught me stuff when she was feeling well enough.”
“How do you know about dungeon cores?” I asked.
“My…my father is a core.”
Another phantom feeling hit me. This was like a knife driven straight into me.
This little girl’s father was a dungeon core? She actually knew about things like this?
When someone became a core, necromancers resurrected them from their dead bodies. Then, the body was burned, and their resurrected soul was put into a core gem. After that, memories of their old life faded quickly.
They sure as hell didn’t remember their family, and they didn’t get the chance to tell their loved ones what had happened.
I had so many questions for this girl.
“Little girl,” I began. “Can you please explain to me how you came to know your father is a dungeon core?”
“Sure. Because I used to be one, too.”
“WHAT???”
“Let me explain.”
CHA
PTER 11
As the red-haired little human told us how she was once a dungeon core, and how she had then come to be an eleven-year-old girl, I couldn’t believe it. But, as hard as it was, I held my disbelief in and listened.
That was a skill I’d had to learn in the academy when Overseer Tocky-Turnbull got sick of me interrupting to ask questions. I employed my hard-earned patience now, and I listened to the girl explain everything.
Vedetta didn’t remember anything of her first life, but she remembered a lot about her second. And her third? Well, she was living that right now.
For a long time, Vedetta thought she was just a normal, slightly-cleverer-than-average girl growing up in a backwater town. She had a mother, father, and three older brothers. Things were nice, if a little boring.
Then, in keeping with every story worthy of remark…disaster!
Actually, disaster and tragedy both striking at once. Though they sound the same, disaster and tragedy are very different, like siblings.
Vedetta’s father, a rug merchant, had been away on a trading trip for three weeks. He did this a lot, and it was just a normal part of their lives. Usually, he’d write them a letter when he reached the Glowing Pumpkin tavern, which marked the end of his journey and the last leg of his return home.
Then, Vedetta would know to wait until two days after receiving the letter, and then she would rise in the morning and go to the edge of town. She’d sit on a wall with a penknife and an apple. There, she’d cut snacks for herself while she waited to see her father’s horse gallop along the road to town.
When Vedetta was seven, she waited on that same wall after receiving one of her father’s letters.
She waited all day, but her father didn’t show.
Well, people could get delayed, couldn’t they? It wasn’t exactly a strange thing to happen. Travel was unpredictable at the best of times, especially these days. Her father always said so.
He didn’t come the next day, though. Or the one after that.
Seeds of worry sprouted into panic. Not just for Vedetta. Her mom and brothers all felt it.
Her brothers were different back then. They were strong and determined. Bill wanted to enlist in the King’s forces as a swordsman, and Lisle wanted to join the mage college. Trevor hadn’t decided yet. He was too much of a free spirit to decide his future at so young an age, but he knew one thing; he’d go with Lisle and Bill to find their father.
They were gone for days. That left Vedetta and her mom alone in the house. Without her father and three brothers, it was so, so quiet. Scarily quiet. Her mom tried to keep busy and tried to keep Vedetta busy too, but Vedetta heard her cry at night, and she sometimes heard her vomiting.
Eight days later, their door opened. Lisle walked in, pale-faced and with a grim expression on his features. Then came Bill, who looked even worse.
Trevor didn’t follow.
Bill sank to his knees and cried. It fell to Lisle to explain what had happened.
“I’m sorry, mother,” he began.
He told them how they had gone from town to town, tavern to tavern, asking for news of their father. Eventually, they learned that he had been waylaid by road bandits, who killed his horses, destroyed his wagon, and stole his goods. They beat him to a pulp and then left him for dead.
A drunk from the town of Zalfari had seen this, and he felt ashamed that he had hidden instead of interceding, so he kept quiet. It was only when he was in the Dancing Cow tavern and he heard three boys asking around for their father, that his guilt overcame him. He told them everything.
So, after hearing his story, Lisle, Bill, and Trevor changed the questions they were asking.
They no longer asked people if they had seen a trader, six feet tall and with kind eyes and a friendly word for anyone.
They now asked people if they knew where the bandits made their camp.
After visiting dozens of inns, shops, and village squares, they learned the truth from a man named Redtuth, who was in the gallows and set to be killed by the town guards for his road crimes.
Now the boys knew that the bandits had taken their father. They knew where the bandits were.
It wasn’t hard to guess what they did next.
That was why, days later, only Bill and Lisle made their way home. The bandits killed Trevor, and the other two brothers somehow escaped with their lives. But their father?
Well, the bandits had no clue where he was. They said as much, and though Lisle had provoked them to hostility by doubting them, Bill and Trevor both believed them.
Their father was gone, and his body was never recovered.
Vedetta’s favorite brother had perished at the hands of bandits.
The remaining two boys abandoned their dreams of swordsmanship and magery. They sank into a deep, dark depression.
Vedetta’s mom became ill, and it was an illness so sudden and so powerful that it seemed to make an old lady of her overnight. It robbed her of her strength until she barely left her bed, let alone her room or the house.
So, Vedetta helped care for her mom while trying to run the house and still study at the town school. Her brothers wouldn’t help, and the town healers, alchemists, and herbalists were at a loss to cure her mom. This went on for years, and so much responsibility made Vedetta mature beyond her time.
Desperate to fix things, Vedetta visited a witch who lived in a hut way out in the forest.
(By the way…cliché much? A witch living in a hut in the forest? Come on! If I didn’t doubt the girl’s honesty, I would have laughed in her face. Which would have been entirely inappropriate given the circumstances.)
The witch, after doing the normal witch things of using a leech to drain Vedetta’s blood for no discernable reason and then casting strange spells of premonition, was able to tell Vedetta a couple of interesting things.
For one, her father had died after the bandits waylaid him, though the bandits left his body on the road.
Two, his body was claimed by a gentleman named Blacke Kyle, who procured bodies for…
…The Dungeon Core Academy.
Yes.
The academy necromancer’s performed their rituals, raising Vedetta’s father’s soul from the dead and forging his soul into a core, where he was presumably living his second life.
“Where is he?” Vedetta asked.
The witch smiled sadly. “You will never find him, sweet one. The world is a vast place, and even vaster under the surface. You could search for centuries and never find him.”
That would have been shocking enough for anyone, let alone a girl. Vedetta had formed a shell as tough as steel by now, and she kept her head when most would have lost theirs.
She listened as the witch explained what a core was, and why such practices were still done even in these enlightened times.
She also listened while the witch laid the most startling fact of all on her…
That she sensed death around Vedetta. That Vedetta had not only died and been turned into a core herself in the past, but she had ascended from her life as a core and had earned the right to be reborn as a human once again.
CHAPTER 12
“You poor thing,” I said, touched by her story. “But I’m sorry to say, that if you don’t leave my dungeon, I’ll have to slaughter you.”
Vedetta nodded. “I understand. After all, I was a core myself. A much better one than you, since I earned my third resurrection and all.”
“We aren’t supposed to remember our past lives,” I said. “Not even if you become a master core and then ascend. The only way you get to remember your life as a core is if they resurrect you to be an overseer. After all, an overseer who couldn’t remember being a core wouldn’t be much use.”
“The witch and I couldn’t access the core part of my memories at first, but we worked on it,” she said. I was all too aware now of how wise she sounded, despite her voice being high pitched and annoying, just like most children.
“The witch helped you remember your
core life?”
“Over months and months, yes. She was so interested that she didn’t even ask for payment. I remember a lot of it, now. Not all, but a lot.”
“Did it ever occur to you that she was lying?”
“You’re cynical.”
“He is not cynical,” said Tomlin, finding his voice again. “He is the Dark Lord. Tomlin is sorry about your struggles, child.”
“Child? You’re an academy hatchling,” said Vedetta. “If you added my three lives together, I’d have almost four hundred years on you.”
“Wow,” I said. “You know about the academy monster breeding. You’re not just spinning stories to stop me from killing you, are you? This is all true?”
Vedetta nodded sadly. With every second I spent with her I could see there was more going on in her head than I’d first thought.
“The witch was able to tell me a vision she had of a pocket watch nestled in some grass on a road near a tavern, miles away from town. So I went there, and I found it. My father’s pocket watch.”
“And that made you trust her enough that you believed her when she said you had once been a core.”
“Yes.”
“That explains why you aren’t scared down here. As a human coming down here, I imagine I’d have been shouting for my mother.”
“There’s only so much fear a person can have. When I started to remember being a core, and the dungeon I’d built…Well, I haven’t known fear for a long time now.”
“Then you won't be scared to find your way out,” said Tomlin. “Go, girl. Tomlin and Dark Lord are busy.”
“Do you always let your kobolds talk for you, Dark Lord?” she asked. I couldn’t help but laugh at her sarcasm. Dark lord really was a crummy name.
“I…uh…run my dungeon a little differently to others.”
“Whistling is allowed in Dark Lord’s dungeon,” said Tomlin.
“Is this true?”
“Yes. Whistling, and singing, to a certain extent.”
“I should have sensed the greenness on you from miles away,” said Vedetta. “You’re a graduate, aren’t you?”
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