Temple of Cocidius

by Maxx Whittaker

  Temple

  of

  Cocidius

  Temple of Cocidius: The Complete Adventure is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual places, events, or persons living or deceased, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Maxx Whittaker

  Copyright © 2019 Saving Throw Ink

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Publishing Partner,” at the email address below.

  midnightbookworks@mail.com

  First Printing October 2018

  Contents

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  PART THREE

  PART FOUR

  PART FIVE

  PART ONE

  -The Temple-

  We leave Duke Iden’s camp as the sun touches the horizon, and evening becomes dusk well before the dinner hour. We pass into the Western leighs, our path a blade piercing the immortal trees in a long line straight to our destination. Wagons of ownerless armor, tents, and provisions pass the other way in a sad procession. At their head is an old man, his face drawn, teeth grit in anger. He leads a riderless horse.

  Its saddle wasn’t empty a few hours before.

  “That won’t be you,” says the duke, guiding his mount around the flow of defeated.

  A standard bearer rides a few mounts behind the old man, holding the flag of Loria. Rage heats my guts.

  It won’t be me. He’s fucking right about that.

  Our horses’ hooves crunch the icy mid-winter snow, hard packed by a day of being crossed by aspirants and their entourages, retainers, and servants. Behind us, Iden’s rabble chatter nervously to themselves, sycophants and hangers-on tittering at the novelty of being in the wild, drunk with faux-courage from venturing from his estates to sleep in tents and shit in the woods. Servants trail them, racing up and down the column with refreshments and fur mantles like drab birds. Iden has brought one of the biggest groups today, easily over a hundred.

  I am alone.

  We pass beyond the copse of trees sheltering the encampments and onto a low embankment. Snow-covered fields spread across the valley to the river banding the horizon.

  In the center of it all sits the Temple of Cocidius.

  My obsession for the last year. What I’ve spent every waking hour of my life studying, preparing for.

  The engine that will power my revenge.

  It sits, ageless, a ring of white marble supported by carved stone columns. It seems made from the ice and snow surrounding it. But its center is a lush garden, green and warm against the nighttime winter landscape.

  The temple is a legend, something everyone has heard of, a place I’ve spent a year studying, and I still have questions – ones that can’t be answered by anyone out here. All anyone knows is that, every ten years, and only on the winter solstice, the doors open. For one day, champions assail whatever lies within, dreaming of the artifacts that legend says can be won. Artifacts of unimaginable power, great enough to make or break kingdoms. No one knows what happens after the doors close behind an aspirant, but everyone knows what it means when they reopen: Failure.

  And now it’s my turn.

  No pressure, right?

  There are no bodies, and we cannot hear the clashing of arms, the cries of men, but this is a battlefield nonetheless. Countless men – rogues, warriors, adventurers, have crossed the Peligoth fields today. All groups have returned, less their champions.

  When the second combatant left the camp this morning, I asked Iden how they knew to send the next man. He shrugged. “When the doors open again.”

  The doors stand open now, ready for me, illuminated by torches staked into the earth beyond the steps. The day is waning, almost gone, and I am the last combatant, even if I fail. After today, the doors shut for another decade. This is why the camps were filled with warriors in their prime. Ten years from now anyone with an immediate interest in what the temple holds will be too old to face its trials. I’ll be too old, and I need what’s inside.

  The temple itself gives off no light, but in the growing dark it emits a faint blue glow like moonlight. I’m a big believer in gut feelings, and my gut says run. The stone reels like it radiates awareness.

  And menace.

  This just confirms I’m in the right place, and what’s inside will be worth the reward.

  Iden spurs his mount and we start down the last slope. “Quickly; the doors close for the last time at sundown.”

  I hang a moment. Once the land ahead rolled in from the Amaranth coast in grassland to the river. The temple dominates its expanse now, and from it pour tears, white grave markers chiseled from the local stone. Memorials to a thousand brave, avaricious, over-confident, anonymous men who never occupied the graves made for them.

  It won’t be me.

  I gallop the field, weaving between the gap-teeth of graves. Iden draws up at the edge of a ring of torchlight. Dismounting, I strap on my gear and tuck a few pieces I don’t have room for into the Bottomless Bag I got from the Tiger Mountain monks. Knife, darts, potion pack, rations, lockpicks, poisons - all go in. I’ve packed every remotely useful thing I can think of. Some were donated by Iden, my patron, which I find deliciously ironic.

  Turns out the ‘Bottomless Bag’ has a bottom after all, though. To retrieve an item, I picture it, reach into the bag, and it leaps into my hand. Never gets old. Just one drawback; you can only retrieve what you can remember. The limit is my memory, and though it’s better than most, I still reached my bottom at around seventy-two items. I’m good with it.

  Iden exhales a long breath, frosting the black brush of his mustache and beard. “You understand the artifacts must be intact? I cannot stress that enough.”

  “Right. Don’t pillage the plundder.”

  “King Mynogin is depending on the power of the full collection. He must be the one to activate the relics, and as a set, or they won’t work. Our bargain will be off.”

  I can tell by the way he says off that my head will be, too. There’s no doubt in my mind because he told me as much three times on our journey out to the Fields yesterday. I sling on my dual back-sheaths, imbued steel blade and cold iron blade, their handles jutting above my shoulders like deadly wings.

  “There a reason he didn’t send the Orillyx?” I’ve been asking for a week why the king isn’t sending his Silti twins, the magi and martial terrors that keep his throne ironclad, but Iden hasn’t given up the secret. No know knows where he found them, or how he bound them, but they are the means through which he seized, and keeps, his power.

  Iden is silent a long time, and I figure it’s the same story as before, but then he speaks. “Makes no difference if you know, I suppose. In a few hours you will be successful, or you will be dead.” He sighs. “Mynogin was quite decided on sending one of them. In fact, he did not wish to wait for the solstice. A year ago, he and the Orillyx ventured here, attempted to force their way inside. They were repelled. Forcefully.”

  Aww. I bet that was a disappointment; the twins are impossibly powerful, untouchably so. They have no individual names, known simply as One and Two. One is the warrior, and wields Bloodmoon, an eldritch blade long as he is tall, curved, that boils and crackles in the sunlight. He moves between beats of a man’s heart, faster than the eye. Two is the magic, and no one knows her limit, just that we haven’t seen it yet because her terrors increase. Tales from the Eastern W
astes, where the king first took the Orillyx to war, are few. But even the least embellished accounts confirm entire armies annihilated by two figures, twins dressed in white.

  For the temple to have rebuffed them? Incredible.

  I’ve seen them just once, on the day I lost everything. I’d stood as part of a frothing crowd, the conquered of my country, at a speech by Mynogin. Partway through, my family’s steward, heartbroken by the murder of his charges, had rushed the stage, shouting about false kings, usurpers. His rage was incandescent, but the king, the twins like statues at his sides, didn’t flinch.

  A hot smell of lightning before rain. A hiss and a cloud of smoke that blew away on the crowd’s collective gasp.

  Two had done no more than raise a finger, and the man had melted. Skin, flesh, bone and viscera erased with only the movement of a finger.

  That moment my eyes opened. My vengeance would never come to fruition without something more powerful than I could muster in the mortal world.

  I needed the Temple of Cocidius. And the solstice was only months away. I didn’t have to defeat The Orillyx, not yet. I just had to win Mynogin’s nomination.

  And here I am. So maybe my luck is about to change.

  “No,” Iden is saying when I remember his nattering voice, “you will do as the next best thing. After your performance in the square...this is more than just a reward for saving your king.”

  Oh, it sure is. Where had the twins been then?

  Does he see this on my face?

  Iden shifts in his saddle, looking nervous when I don’t say anything. “And of course, there’s your reward. Lands on the Amaranth coast. Half a million crowns. Duke of Cabhan. And it might interest you to know that Mynogin has added to the contract Princess Esmanth, to do with as you wish. She’s been kept...unspoiled.”

  Cold rage seeps through me, and I take a long breath to control it. It interests me very much and runs off any slight hesitation I had about my ability and what I’m doing here.

  “But she may not remain so forever. You’d be wise to move with alacrity.” He sounds almost bored as he says this, adjusting his gloves, and I hate him, with every part of me. But there isn’t time for me to pummel his nose through the back of his skull. Soon. I’ve held it together for a year; I can wait the length of the temple to settle accounts.

  I meet Iden’s dark eyes. “I swear on my life that I will emerge from the temple, and I swear it will be with the full collection of artifacts.”

  A single gust wind whips through the valley at my vow, and a raven cry splits the silence.

  Iden shivers, looking around the darkening landscape. “See that you do,” he utters. “The punishment for breaking the contract will be carried out by the Orillyx. And there’s no telling what kind of man Esmanth might be given to.”

  I grit my teeth, force down bile. “I swear I’ll do exactly what I promised.”

  Iden nods, takes the reins of my horse and turns back across the Fields.

  I’m really looking forward to sheathing my blade in his throat. I stop at the first step. Energy hums softly, but doesn’t seem harmful, so I mount the steps. It crackles along my skin. I push through an invisible curtain; whatever barrier protects the temple beyond the solstice. It thickens by the second, as the sun dips. I climb the steps faster.

  Just when it feels like I’m plodding against a gale, I plant one foot into the rotunda and a vortex swirls around me. It sucks me through the gaping doors and throws me to the ground. The doors slam with a grating of ancient stone and a boom that deafens me, sending trickles of grit from the ceiling above.

  It’s not really the heroic breaching of the temple I’d imagined.

  I get to my feet, dust myself off, and take the map from inside my cuirass. A map, based on legends from when the temple was new, set down as a gift by Cocidius for anyone who could solve it. A one-hundred-year-old map given to me by a jackass with a title who took it from a peasant he probably burned at the stake. What could go wrong?

  It says there should be a door to my left. It also says the room is a half-circle.

  Well, damn it.

  The room is a rectangle, and the only door is an ornate slab of white stone set in the middle of a row of equally pale statues; men in armor, women in flowing robes. I look down and up and down at the map again, pissed at myself for expecting it to be right.

  I look up again and grab my sword.

  A statue is right in front of me, one that had not been there when I’d glanced down at the map. Now, she looms over me, and hasn’t made a sound.

  I stumble back a step, looking her up and down, calming my galloping heart. She seems so peaceful and could have killed me before I’d realized she was there, but I don’t let myself relax.

  She dresses and looks like a sister of the convent, hair and veil flowing together with no color to set them apart. She’s a head taller than I am, body impossibly long and thin beneath the drape of stone robes. Her face is delicate and serene, ageless, and terrifying in its placid expression.

  “I am the Gardener.”

  The what?

  Her lips move, and she glides toward me, body still. Her fingers rest in the center of my chest piece. “You are Tamlir Kynthelig. Last aspirant of the Gold Leaf cycle,” she declares.

  How? “My friends call me Lir,” I say, trying to cover how off balance I feel.

  “You were sent by King Mynogin to gather the artifacts for him. You swore an oath.”

  This is giving me chills. I did. In blood.

  “Make your vow to the mad god,” instructs the Gardener.

  “My what?”

  “You must declare your quest. Your trials will be based upon it.”

  “I swore to Mynogin that I would gather the artifacts for the King of Loria.”

  An impact knocks the air from my chest, like being punched and a door slamming shut all at once.

  “Your quest is sealed!”

  I wonder what the men who came before me chose. “What happened to the others?”

  The marble circles of her eyes stare on forever, and she’s silent.

  “Do you have a name, besides The Gardener?’

  Silence.

  “Where do I go?”

  She makes a soft grating noise. “You will begin in the North wing,” she hums, not seeming to answer me directly. “After each trial you may enter the Garden. You may exit the temple from each of the four North rooms at any time.”

  This doesn’t make sense, because the outside of the temple is a ring, with no corners or wings. And there are no doors that anyone can see around the ring, aside from the one I used to enter. “Wait, it’s possible to leave? No one ever comes out.”

  “They choose to stay and die with their greed or pride.”

  “And if I leave? Maybe complete a few trials?” I don’t plan to, but I also believe in being as prepared as you can, and then being more prepared than that.

  “If you exit the temple, you forfeit any artifacts you’ve claimed.”

  So, scratch that off the list.

  “What is the Garden?” It’s obviously the lush area at the center of the ring, but that raises more questions than it answers.

  “A burning wasteland of suffering, from which you will likely not escape.”

  I gape. “Oh fuck, that’s the opposite-”

  The statue emits a girlish giggle. At least, I think it’s one, if a millstone can giggle. “After a century, I have come to take some pleasure in small jests.”

  “That is…” Really messed up. “Great! Have to find joy in your work and all that.”

  Her hard frame seems to relax. “The Garden is a place of rest and pleasure, a sanctuary for recovery between the challenges. But it is also one of the trials. Aspirants have become so intoxicated by the Garden that they refuse to proceed, and so they perish.”

  That answers my earlier question.

  “After you exit the fourth chamber, you will rest in the Garden before proceeding to the South wing.” H
er sonorous, muffled voice dims. “Those challenges are beyond the strongest and most cunning. There is no exit from these rooms.”

  Well, that sounds perfectly terrifying. “Can I rest in between?”

  She pauses. “You may rest, but once you are free of the terror of these chambers, you are not likely to reenter.”

  I wait. She doesn’t laugh.

  “What happens when I defeat the eighth chamber?”

  “If,” she corrects.

  “When.”

  “If.”

  I grind my back teeth. “What. Happens?”

  “Irrelevant. No aspirant has ever made it beyond the North wing.”

  I’m not arguing with a statue. “So, you don’t know.”

  Silence.

  “You don’t know,” I confirm. Maybe pissing her off isn’t the best idea, but I have to try for as much information as I can get.

  “If you reach the rear vestibule,” she grinds out, and I grin, unable to believe that my stupid trick worked, “you will face the avatar of Cocidius himself.”

  My grin fades. “A god?”

  “This is a reasonable challenge if one has gathered all the artifacts.”

  “What if-”

  “There are more words of wisdom, but they are not for now.” She slides away like a chess piece. “I will attend you in the garden after each level...should you survive. You may ask more then.”

  “So where do-” A door appears to my left, from a seam so fine that my naked eye can’t detect it. It rattles open with the clang of ancient metal. The Gardner fades into the carved relief, which bends like a mirage into a gentle curve, and she disappears.

  Huh. So, the map was kind of right, after all. Maybe I do have the hang of this place. I draw my steel blade and head in, ready for a fight.

  Metal grates at my back, the iron teeth of a rusted port biting a cloud of dust into the torchlight.

  A slyzard, a dragon, a coven of vampires? Surely creatures only a mad god can imagine. What will it be?

  Sword drawn, I creep through the arch and behold...