It was strange, but he found that the more beer he drank that night, the more courage he had. Yes, it was a curious turn of events. It was as if the beer was enchanted, or something.
Soon, it enchanted him enough that he approached them, announced his name, and asked, “Would any of you fine fellows like a drink?”
That was all it took.
And that was how he found himself leaving town with the heroes in their wagon, traveling east for days and days until they reached a plain of empty wasteland that stretched as far as he could see.
This was a forgotten part of Xynnar. No grass, no buildings, no hint of a duke nor whisper of an earl. It was as untouched as an ocean pearl, yet dry and desolate for as far as the eye could see.
There, in the wastes, the rogue in the hero party started to get a feeling. And you always trusted rogues and their feelings.
The rogue, a half-faun, sniffed the air like a dog.
“Something’s here,” he said. “I smells it. I tastes it. There’s a tomb or cave or dungeon or crypt or pit or cove nearby. I knows it.”
And so the party had clambered out of the wagon and inspected the wilderness, even getting down on their hands and knees to look for whatever was hidden.
“Is this what heroes do?” asked the teenager. “Crawl around?”
Their leader, a knight, grunted. “No hero’s above getting on his knees and lookin’ for secrets.”
Eventually, the rogue narrowed his feeling down to one part of the wasteland in particular.
“It’s here! I senses it.”
“Out of the way, out of the way,” said the mage, whose tone of voice always made it sound like words were being stolen from his throat as he spoke them.
He used a disillusionment spell, and that was when they had found a door cut into the ground.
“Wonders be!” exclaimed the teenager.
This lame choice of words earned him an eye roll, a death stare, and a grunt from the others. Heroes hid their enthusiasm; that was what made them so cool.
The boy was amazed but also a little scared, because when they opened the door and saw a set of stone steps leading deep underground, it made it all seem real. This was a dungeon, proper and true, and he was a hero…sort of.
But that all seemed so long ago.
The four heroes he had come down here with were dead now. He’d watched them get slaughtered, he knew that, but when he tried to recall what did it, his mind felt fogged.
He looked at the darkness around him, and he saw eyes blinking from it. Dozens of them. No, fifty of them! Eyes all around him, watching him.
Or did he? Was his mind imagining them, were they born from fear?
No. Heroes didn’t get scared. He wasn’t worried.
And then a voice spoke.
“I could spare you.”
It seemed to come from above him and around him. From the walls, the ceiling. Echoing from side to side, up and down, creeping into his ears and waltzing through his head and then tip-tapping down his spine.
“If you dance for me, hero, you may leave this place with your life.”
He looked around. That voice; there was something strange about it. Something…playful.
“Dance?” he said.
“Yes. You know. Where you move your body in strange shapes that seem to have no reason to them. I will provide the music.”
A drumbeat sounded.
Thump-bomp-bump. Thump-bomp-bump.
Over and over again.
“Dance, hero. Dance as if your life depended on it.”
Oh, gods, he thought.
“Well?” asked the voice.
The hero was not long beyond his seventeenth birthday. He didn’t want to die yet. Not before he’d finally known a woman. After all, no use pretending now, was there? No use lying about silly things like that.
It all seemed so pointless now, all those boasts. He’d told the guys at the mill that he’d already become a man.
“Oh yeah? Who is she?” they asked.
“She…uh…she lives in another town.”
So, as the ominous drumbeat got louder and louder, he began to dance.
Arms in the air, legs lifting up and down. It was a stupid dance, the only dance he knew.
“I need to see more hips,” said the voice.
And so he swiveled his hips, he gyrated to that drumbeat from the shadows, he waggled his midriff as if each movement would help him stay alive.
Then he heard someone laughing.
Four figures stepped out of the shadows. Four people who he had watched die not long before. They were laughing at him, chortling so much they had to hold their bellies to contain their mirth.
“But you died…I saw your blood…What did you…” he began, every sentence slipping from his grasp.
“Pig guts!” said the knight, holding a string of blood-drenched intestines.
“Syrup and tomato juice!” said the rogue, wiping glop off his face.
“I cast an illusion on you, made you think you had watched us die!” said the mage, laughing.
The ranger held up a wooden hand now. “And I lost this hand when I was a kid.”
The hero felt nauseated. “So this was all just a pran-”
He couldn’t finish his sentence, because his nausea had suddenly caught him with the speed and force of a shooting star. Vomit flew from his mouth now, splattering out like a cosmic star trail.
A hand clapped his back. “Easy now, lad. We’ve all felt like this at one point in our lives. This was an initiation for you, nothing more.”
Another hand patted his back. “Cheer up. You just joined the League of Quite Good Adventurers.”
Yet another hand slapped him. “Welcome to the club, green cheeks. Come on lads, we’ve had our fun. Let’s get our arses back on the wagon and get out of this desert.”
“Would you,” the young hero said, getting his breath. “Would you stop slapping my back, please?”
It was a second before his logical brain returned to him. This had all been an initiation?
Never mind. He wasn’t going to die. That was the main thing.
“So this isn’t a dungeon?”
“No, boy. We’re in the middle of nowhere! Just a crypt, or somethin’. Or a mine, or a bunch of disused vaults.”
“I’d like to leave.”
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” said a voice.
The voice sounded like it had come from above them, below them, all around them like some unseen god.
“Huh?”
Now this…that was a menacing voice if ever he heard one. The sound of it seeped deep into him, chilling his bones. Even the prankster adventurers seemed worried.
“What was that?” said the mage, spinning around to find the source of it.
A great sigh came from all around them. “The voice of the dungeon, donkey brains. What else would it be? A god?”
“I thought this wasn’t really a dungeon?” said the young, newly-initiated hero.
The voice sighed again. “I suppose I should be happy you are all idiots because it makes things easier for me. I am Beno, the dungeon core. It’s only fair that you know my name before you die.”
And then came the sound of a dozen doors slamming shut, and locks slicking into place, and then…
…then came the snarls.
Snarls and footsteps seeming to come from all around them. The heroes bunched together, forming a circle in the center of the room.
The mage raised his staff and tapped it once, twice, three times on the ground. A cone of yellow light seemed to unravel from the top, before forming a tight coil all around the group, then drifting into their mouths when they inhaled.
The young hero felt his stomach tighten up, his chest puff out, his brain unfog. The dungeon didn’t scare him as much now. Was it a spell of courage?
Three separate schwing sounds echoed out as the rogue pulled twin daggers from his belt, and the knight drew a great sword.
Thi
s was it. This was what heroes were all about.
Fighting! Adventure! Just wait until the guys back home heard about this…
“Argh!”
That was the last sound the rogue made as an arrow pierced his throat. Just like that, he was gone. He hadn’t made a misstep, there was no mistiming of a strike that lead to his death. Just one bolt shot from the darkness.
A creature stepped out from the shadows. Wolf-like, with a lizard’s scales. It was holding a crossbow that looked way too big for it.
“Ssso nice of you to come and sssee us,” it hissed. “A pity your ssstay won’t be a long one.”
It leaned its weapon tip-first against the ground, put a claw on it to hold it steady, and tried to cock the bow. Its wolf face strained with effort, and try as it might, it wasn’t strong enough to properly pull the string back.
“Err, Gary,” said the monster. “Can you entertain our guessstsss while I reload?”
Now just four in number, the heroes packed closer together. The knight, burly and with the best chest armor of the group, faced forward. The ranger and mage guarded their sides, while the young hero was at the back, armorless and weaponless, clueless and courageless.
He could smell sweat and urine, and though he claimed the sweat as his own, he was unsure about the second smell. People lost control of themselves when they died, didn’t they?
Yes, it was the dead rogue’s bladder that had loosened, not his own. It had to be.
“Just a kobold,” whispered the knight. “Easily killed. Watch.”
As the creature struggled with the crossbow, the knight charged forward, holding his sword horizontally and at shoulder length to give himself a perfect chance to strike.
Nearing the monster, he yelled and tensed up, ready to land a killing blow.
That was when another beast emerged, its great form crashing out of the shadows and looming before him.
A giant spider made of stone, with leeches for legs.
Holy hells!
That’s right; leeches for legs. Big, squirming slug-like things with rows of jagged teeth. It was a monstrosity plucked straight from the bowels of hell, with its hideous spidery body and its cracked, darkened skin. The young hero felt a chill spread through him as he stared at this spawn of the Underworlds Below.
“Delighted to meet you,” said the monster. “Or should I say eat you?”
With terrifying speed and brutal strength, the spider-troll-leech beast tore the knight in two, beginning with his ribcage and peeling it apart like a pastry with a fruit filling.
Soon it turned its attention to the mage, who was busy uttering an incantation for a spell of some sort. He was interrupted by a giant leech leg slapping his face, latching on to him with its teeth.
The ranger was the next to react, but she took only a single step before there was a clicking sound.
She looked down.
Her face conveyed the emotions rampaging through her mind, and her words finished the picture.
“Oh, gods.”
She had stepped on a tile of some sort, and the click could only come from a trap.
As the knight bled out on the floor, as the mage screamed and batted at the leech leg covering his face, as the ranger lay flattened by a boulder that fell from a compartment in the ceiling above, the young hero began to regret coming here.
He wished he’d never stepped foot in the wagon.
Never gotten drunk.
Never gone to the Portly Pig, in fact. It was a crappy tavern anyway. Argyle never cleaned his pumps.
He’d give anything to be home. No more adventuring for him. Finish his work at the mill, go home, and settle down with a nice book. Find a nice girl, build or buy a simple house, have some well-behaved kids, and then die an old man, having never set foot in anything dungeon-like for the rest of his life.
Please, gods, if you’re listening, he thought, just let me go home…
The gods weren’t listening to him, it seemed, but somebody was.
“Okay, that’s enough,” said a voice.
It was him again. The dungeon.
The hideous leech monster pulled a leech leg away from the mage’s face, though the damage was done, and the man was dead.
“Boy,” said the voice from above.
“Y…yes?”
“Honest opinion; how tough was my dungeon?”
He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Honest opinion? What?
“Come on, don’t be shy about giving constructive criticism.”
The young hero sensed a way out. A chance. If the dungeon wanted to kill him, surely he’d be dead by now, like the others?
A memory flickered in the recesses of his mind.
Dungeons were tricksters, weren’t they? Some of them, at least. He’d read about it in the diary of Vasilio Redscar, a hero with an ego as big as his body count, who’d paid for a vanity publisher to make copies of his memoirs.
Yes, dungeons could be vain, deceptive, vulnerable to flattery, and could even be tricked themselves.
“It was…” he began, desperately trying to think of the right thing to say. “It was great.”
“Great??”
Wrong word. Damn. Time to try another tack.
“Horrible, I mean. Mur…murderous. Foul. Disgusting.”
“Do you really mean that?”
“I do! I do.”
The voice was silent then, which made him all the more aware of the dungeon sounds around him. The noise of the spider’s leech legs sticking and unsticking on the floor with a slurp. The kobold breathing heavily, its tongue rattling against its lips.
He tried to avoid looking at the dead heroes. It was only a shock response and willful refusal to look at their bodies that kept him sane.
Just keep it together, and there might be a break for him to…
“It seems it is your lucky day,” said the dungeon.
The young hero, aware of the mage with his half-eaten face lying nearby, aware of the ranger who’d been crushed by a giant stone, was hesitant to agree about good fortune.
“You may leave this place,” carried on the dungeon. “But you must tell everyone you meet about the horrors you faced here.”
“Tell them about this place?”
“Tell your parents. Your friends. Your barber. Your butcher. Everyone you ever come within speaking distance of, I want you to tell them of the dungeon you found in the wasteland. Tell them about a dungeon core named Beno, and how he and his dungeon creatures slaughtered your party. Tell them that Beno’s dungeon was sprawling, and filled with traps and treasures.”
The young hero was momentarily confused. Why would the dungeon want news of his lair to spread?
But wait. Wasn’t that how it worked? When dungeons opened, hero guilds always found out about them, somehow.
Did that mean there was value for the dungeon in people learning of its existence?
The young hero suddenly found himself thinking thoughts too stupid to speak. Thinking about opportunity, reward…gold.
“Supposing I spread the word for you,” he said. “What can I expect in return?”
Where was his confidence coming from? Was the mage’s spell still working in him? Or had he discovered a selfish side, part of his psyche that overrode his fear?
Whatever the answer, he found himself regretting the words as soon as he said them. A chill shuddered through him, and he clenched his fists.
He’d just turned his chance of safety into a death warrant. He’d put his head on the gallows for the sake of greed.
A great laughing sound filled the dungeon now, creeping from every wall, booming from every crevice, bursting from every shadow.
“You have balls,” said the dungeon. “I like that. Not your balls, I mean; I don’t like those. Just the fact that you have them. Get out of here and spread the word about my dungeon, before I change my mind.”
The young hero fled from the dungeon, knowing he had a story he could tell for the rest of his life, and
that it was sure to earn him a free ale or two.
CHAPTER 2
Nobody ever forgets the first time they hear a kobold screaming. You just don’t. If you’ve never had the displeasure of hearing it before, you’ll have to trust me on that.
“What was that ghastly sound?” asked Gulliver.
At six feet tall and with a complexion white as snow and eyes darker than crow feathers, it wasn’t hard to see the Nacturn part of Gulliver’s ancestry. According to him, women found it so intriguing that he was impossible to resist, and maids all over Xynnar mourned his absence when he left town. This, I had learned, was as exaggerated as most of his bragging.
The scribe couldn’t have looked more out of place in a dungeon if he’d tried. He wore a shirt with puffy arms, nobleman’s style, made from material that cost more than most peasants earned in a month. The colors clashed with my walls tremendously. Bright yellows and screaming blues don’t fit into a dungeon aesthetic.
“It was the sound of trouble,” I said. “That, my friend, was a kobold scream.”
“Sounded more like the warble of a bogbadug on a warm autumn afternoon.”
“It was a kobold.”
“Or the din of jonk-bear pups playing in a forest, as their mother watches on with doleful eyes.”
“Kobold.”
“Or perhaps,” continued Gulliver, tapping his lip with his finger, eyes deep in thought. “the sound of pain and anguish as one of your dungeon creatures drops a pickaxe on their toes. Or perchance burns their delicate digits when changing an empty mana lantern. You ought to buy your creatures better equipment. This dungeon is a bloody deathtrap.”
Gulliver seemed to miss the point of a dungeon’s purpose. Then again, he often missed the purpose of everything. He seemed to live in his own imagination, where everything was more than it really was. To him, rain wasn’t just rain; it was probably something grandiose like the tears from an unhappy god.
I had come to know the nacturn scribe well after spending so much time with him over the past month. We were fast becoming friends, but it wasn’t like this at first.
He had arrived in the wasteland one morning, appearing as a lone blot in the distance and striding across the wasteland with such an easy air of confidence that you’d think he was strolling through a park.
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