Kingdom Come

by James Osiris Baldwin

  I went into my Inventory. No torches, but I had something that worked just as well: my [Blindfighter's Fold]. It didn't allow me to see as such, working more like sonar than darkvision. I equipped it and looked around, feeling the environment map on my other senses. I was in a narrow cave, a crack only about twenty feet across that led forward and backward through a narrow crevasse. Wreckage was scattered all around. The Warsinger’s hand had torn off, the fingers lying limp on bare stone. 'Looking' up, I sensed that the ground was very, very far away.

  "Shit." I hissed under my breath and crawled across the Warsinger’s palm to examine a nearby hunk of smoking metal. It was one of the Warsinger's clawed fingers. I picked it up, and got a [Trophy of Nocturne Lament]. "Nocturne Lament? Was that its name? Yikes, this thing weighs fifty pounds."

  [Quests Updated: Supply Train, Reality at All Costs. Take your Trophy back to Fort Koronya and show it to the Baru, Vash Dorha]

  "Sure. I'll get right on that." Muttering aloud here felt like swearing in church. My shoulders hunched against the pressure of the velvet darkness against my body.

  I held off on healing and took a minute to assess the situation. Probably the easiest solution was to kill myself. I would have to make a corpse run, but you didn’t drop Quest Items when you died, and I’d have the Spear. I could drink a bunch of poison, stab myself, or beat my head on a wall until I died. Maybe all three, just to be sure.

  Exploration was the second possibility. Something about this place was calling me on a gut level. It felt... Matiry. Hallowed, somehow, like the crypt where I'd found the Blindfighter's Fold and my other Tuun gear. That was odd, because as I moved forward, there was nothing to indicate this was anything other than a really deep hole. The crack went for about fifty, sixty feet, then contracted to a point too narrow to squeeze through. Just the thought of trying left me slightly breathless. I stuck my arm in there, moved it up and down. It got wider the lower I went, and when I dropped to my knees, I found a space just large enough for a full-grown man to crawl through. It wasn't a natural, irregular hole, either. It was round, like a pipe. Patting around, I could feel the rough stone giving way to a smooth chiseled surface.

  "Well... it's either this, or cap yourself." Suicide was starting to look like the better option. Tight spaces were not my jam. I was a 'wind in the hair, sun on your face' kind of guy. It was one thing to do some whacky stunt and off myself some way that I could laugh about later; quite another to die alone in the dark, trapped beneath a billion tons of rock in a tunnel too small to turn in.

  But someone had made this place. If it led somewhere, who knew what was at the other end? Treasure? A mine full of resources? Monsters that had 1 HP but gave 200 EXP each? Or maybe just the satisfaction of confronting something that, realistically, scared the shit out of me. I didn't like to be scared, but I hated being overcome by my fears.

  I let out a tense breath, stowed the Spear in my Inventory, and flopped down onto my belly to start crawling before I could think about it too much.

  Within twenty yards, I knew I’d made a terrible mistake.

  "Cock." The tunnel was just wide enough that I could push my pack ahead of myself and commando crawl forward, my armor scraping noisily with every movement. The stone was smooth, but not that smooth. I unequipped my gear down to my underwear, but couldn't lift my butt high enough to get traction. My feet could push me forward, but not pull me back. "Cock!"

  The darkness seemed to beat against my skin as I crawled arm over arm. A hundred yards, a hundred and fifty… and then my stamina gave out and I collapsed in the grit. My shoulders were jammed against the walls to either side, slick and itchy with sweat. I tried to look around and bumped my head. My temples began to pound. My throat tightened with sudden panic.

  It's just a game, man. It was the refrain I'd used during every VR I'd ever played. I closed my eyes and swallowed, waiting for my stamina to refill. Just a game. Come on.

  Another hundred yards, another rest, and the shaft began to slant down. I pushed my pack, and felt it leave the reach of my fingers, sliding down a steep grade just ahead. I steeled myself to die like a teenager in a horror movie and edged forward. The decline made it easier to crawl, but the roof was lower here, forcing my face sideways. The rock pressed down on my back, scraping my skin raw. I was under the mountains somewhere, lost. As I panted with barely controlled panic, I squeezed forward, and ran straight into my pack. It was jammed inside the tunnel.

  "No! Come on!" I nearly swallowed a mouthful of dust and grit. My face poured with sweat, dripping to the floor. I clawed the backpack to one side, searching to see if there was anything other than a dead end. A tiny breeze ghosted by, cooling my right cheek.

  “Calm, calm, I am so calm.” I reached out with my hand, searching, banging my shoulders and butt against the top of the shaft as I felt for the end of the tunnel wall on that side. There was a space there. Relief flooded my body in a blissful, shuddering wave.

  I found that I could wiggle back to get a small amount of reverse traction, enough to push my gear forward, then drag myself around the corner. It was a sharp ninety-degree turn. The sharp stone edge scraped my ribs, leaving a burning cold gash of pain and drawing a gasp from my throat. But as I crawled, choking and gagging on the dust, the roof began to get higher. The walls a little wider. My stamina was pulsing red by the time I could push myself onto my hands and knees, gasping for breath. Another ten feet, and I slithered out of the shaft and tumbled a short distance to a cold, smooth stone floor.

  I rolled onto my back and lay there, gasping and quaking. When I opened up my HUD to reequip my armor, I saw the ordeal had been nearly an hour from start to finish. My HP had dropped fifty points, and my skin was shredded. My right-side ribs throbbed, and when I reached down, I found them sticky with blood. "Fuck. Just... fuck."

  The wind moaned softly in this place. I clambered to my feet, swaying in the perfect darkness, and re-equipped my armor and weapons. Everything sounded unnaturally loud. I took a couple of steps forward before equipping the blindfold, but paused when a mirrored tracery of light wound around in a ghostly pattern ahead of me. Another step, and they appeared again, flaring brighter.

  Cautiously, I advanced... and the flickering took on a pattern that cast a dim glow across an intricately tiled floor, a buttressed ceiling, and murals. The light was swirling along the walls, weaving through the paintings and highlighting them in strange, haunting ways. It would caress the wise face of a dragon, winking out inside of its eyes, or surround a black sphere with a thin corona of light, like an eclipse. My steps began to cause light to rise and splash on the floor, and when I looked down, I saw that the mosaic tiles were styled to look like flowing water, with liquid mana rippling through the glass.

  "Wow." The light led me forward, swimming through the floor and the walls, winding around a dazzling array of painted frescos. The first was a forest scene, depicting a brilliant white dragon with a bright red heart seized in her jaws. Hatchlings hunted rabbits around her feet. Clouds of brilliantly colored butterflies seemed to morph out of the edges of her wings, rising into the air. The mana beneath the tiles flowed into a short column of text in three different scripts: one looping and spiraling like musical notes, one the cuneiform Draconic script, which I couldn't read… and the Tuun script, which I could.

  Hail, Veela

  Mistress of the Hunt

  Mother of Rivers

  Your servants ask that you

  Protect us in this place of death.

  “Place of death…?” I followed the path cautiously now, wary of traps. The forest scene with Veela blended into a different mural. A crowd of dragons and smaller, graceful-looking winged creatures - part gazelle, part greyhound, part bird - were gathered around a dragon of incredible size and beauty. She was cream and gold and wreathed in white mist. Her body was long and slender, her neck as graceful as a swan's. She had strange, angular horns that formed a diamond shape over her head. She ministered to the others gathered around he
r, radiating light from her crest. The script beside her pulsed, the engravings beckoning to be touched. Hesitantly, I brushed my fingers over the words.

  “When the Black Sun rose in the south, the Chrysanthemum Queen convened with the Circle and united them with the counsel of Matir” I murmured. “To her people, they spoke: ‘We must give our land, given so that the Worldeaters should not consume it all. We must give our blood, given so that the Worldeaters might shed no more of it. We must give our Gods, so that our hatchlings might see the birth of a new dawn.’

  The words were heavy upon Lahati's shoulders and upon the shoulders of all the clans of the world. With claws bleeding and heads bowed, we mourn what was lost, with great grief and great joy.”

  The hair rose on the back of my neck. Swallowing, I stepped back, and continued walking until I found the next inscription. The cuneiform was engraved beside the image of a great silver dragon who stood in a ritual pose: two clawed fingers raised, his wings concealing his eyes, an hourglass in his other hand.

  Hail, Veles

  Miracle worker, Master of the Wind and Sky

  Father of the Gods

  Lord of all things known and unknown.

  The door had a puzzle lock: three concentric rings covered in symbols, like a giant dial. There were nine symbols around the edge of each ring. I recognized one of them easily: it was the nine-pointed chaos star of the Matir. The others were not so familiar. One was a crude hourglass, two triangles sitting point to point. There was a symbol that resembled a long-horn bull’s skull, one that looked like a hammer - Khors - and one that looked like a four-sided diamond with rays of light coming off it. One looked like the outline of an anatomical heart, another like a sun with many arms coming off it in the shape of sickles. The last two were of a dragon with eight wings, and a hexagon with a cross drawn through it.

  “A puzzle.” I looked up at the fresco of Veles. He gleamed in the magical light, the paint overlaid with peeling gold and silver leaf.

  I retraced my steps and examined the paintings again, noting which order the scenes appeared. Veela was first, and the heart was probably her symbol. The second one mentioned Matir. The third symbol would be that of Veles, which would be the hourglass. Simple.

  I went back to the door and began pushing buttons. I set the outermost ring to Veela’s Heart, the center ring to Matir’s Star, and the inner ring to Vele’s Hourglass, then pushed against the door.

  Nothing happened.

  “Uhh…” I tried the combination in reverse, but didn’t get anywhere with that, either. Annoyed, I went back to look at the paintings in more detail. Veela, Lahati – who wasn’t a goddess, as far as I knew – and Veles. I stared at each one in turn, until finally, it clicked. The dragon’s horns formed a diamond.

  With a grunt of satisfaction, I returned to the door and set the middle ring to the diamond-and-light beams symbol. There was a heavy clunk inside the lock, and then it split down the middle and retracted into the walls to either side, admitting me into the biggest crypt I had ever seen.

  Chapter 37

  The vast, echoing vault was the heart of a hollowed-out mountain. I stepped out onto a slender spiral walkway. There was no railing, nothing to stop someone from plummeting to their death in the black abyss below. At the center of the great chamber was a tall dais lit by a single piercing beam of light from far above my head. Great carved pillars supported recessed alcoves, like nests. Each alcove contained the mummified body of a dragon. There were hundreds of them, stretching up far over my head and down far below my feet.

  My mouth hung open as I took in the view. There were so many dragons here. Some massive, some small. They were posed to look like they were sleeping, just like the three I had found in the Lethos Cellar system of Taltos. Unlike the Taltos dragons, their biers were not bare. In fact, every mummy here was dripping in jewelry. The corpses were surrounded by banded trunks full of treasure, masterwork tools and tapestries, barely faded by time in this dark, dry place. They were also accompanied by smaller mummies, who were arranged around the dragons in poses of vigilance. Some of the mummies were quadrupeds larger than horses but smaller than elephants, their forms suggesting the lean, winged, horned and feathered creatures I’d seen in the murals. Others were clearly humanoid.

  “Wow.” I whispered as I moved down the ramp, heading for the nearest funerary nook. A great dragon lay there, his dried, scaled skin stretched tightly over his bones. The scales were a brilliant scarlet, like a carpet of rubies. He was surrounded by jeweled chariots, long fans, racks of weapons, shelves of canopic jars, chests still bearing their rope and wax seals. Half a dozen quadrupedal mummies rested around him like a harem, almost. One human-sized mummy was propped up against the dragon’s forearm in a painted coffin. It depicted what was clearly a Tuun man, by his hair and features. In the painting, he was almost nude, dressed only in a loincloth and bearing a spear.

  Swallowing – and keeping a close eye on the bodies – I hopped up onto the bier. There was a plaque near the edge.

  Here lies Köroğlu and his Bonded, Zhatuung,

  Warrior and Royal Consort, Lost in the Battle of Three Rivers.

  May their art please the Gods

  May their Whyme bring them pleasure for all eternity.

  “Whyme? What the hell is a Whyme?” I scratched my head, then queried the ArchemiWiki.

  [No such entry found. Did you mean: Winery?]

  That was weird. When I hit up the Wiki, it would always tell me if an entry was locked. I’d never seen something in the game and had it tell me the article didn’t exist.

  I closed my HUD and moved to gawk at the grave goods. Any gamer worth his salt would be jumping for joy at the amount of treasure in this place, but I was hesitant to touch any of it. Swallowing nervously, I sidled over to the nearest chest and reached out toward the rope that bound it closed. But in my peripheral vision, I could see the dragon’s skull pointed toward me. The eye sockets were empty, full of dust, but the sensation of being watched was overpowering.

  “Better not.” I backed away and hopped back down to the walkway, neck crawling with the feeling of unseen eyes tracking – and judging – my every move.

  I went down first, then up. Every plaque gave a brief insight into the dragons and other beings who had been laid to rest there. Many were warriors with bonded riders, slaves, and their grave goods. There was enough wealth here to make my hands feel very itchy indeed, but I decided to try and find a way to investigate the dais before I risked awakening several hundred pissed off dead dragons. A number of the big pillars had toppled with time, and as I went up, I saw that several of them could be used as a walkway by someone capable of leaping thirty feet from standing. I hopped across them like river stones, barely making the last one. I ended up catching myself with Spider Climb and crawling up to the stone circle above.

  The altar – it couldn’t be anything else – was sized for Solonkratsu. A ring of nine straight, black, rough-hewn hexagonal stones surrounded a huge six-sided platform at the center of the dais. The sides of it were engraved with symbols of life and death: draconic skulls, eggs, wings, and Matir’s star. I hopped up onto the edge of the platform, and nearly fell face-first over the edge of it into a black void of space. I had mistaken it for an altar with a black stone top. In fact, it was an open-mouthed well.

  “Well, damn.” I frowned, peering down the mouth of the well to see if anything was inside. It was smooth walled on the inside, with no clue as to its purpose. So what was I supposed to do here? Anything?

  “What do you usually do at wells?” I muttered softly. Even a whisper seemed loud in this place. “Draw water? Make an offering? Sacrifices?”

  Given that Matir was the god of death, the sacrifice thing wasn’t out of the question. But what could I give up? Blood? Herbs? I remembered Matir toying with a stem of King’s Sorrow in his hands when last I had talked to him, a virulently toxic plant that had stalks like veins, each one full of a bright red, sticky, bitter-smelling sa
p. Maybe that was a suitable offering.

  Restlessly, I crossed the pillar bridge and went back to the nearest bier, searching for clues. All I found instead was temptation. There were all kinds of grave goods just sitting here, just as they had for thousands of years. There were sets of armor and weapons, rings and necklaces, piles of stacked silver ingots, intricately carved skulls of dinosaurs and cattle... all of it too obvious a trap for greedy players.

  “Don’t be a pig, man.” I turned my nose up and continued on.

  Half an hour later, I was starting to get worried. I found a couple more doors, some dusty empty rooms, a few ventilation shafts too small to enter. There were exactly one hundred biers. Tired and frustrated, I returned to the altar to see if there had been any change. There hadn’t.

  “Fine.” I sighed. “Let’s try the obvious first.”

  I pulled my glove off and lay my bare branded hand on the altar. It was cool and pleasant, smooth, like jade or soapstone. When nothing happened, I took my knife and pricked the side of my wrist until a bead of blood welled up, then ran down to drip into the hole.

  Nothing happened.

  “Jeez.” I stood back, and paused as a chilly gust of wind kissed my face. I waited tensely for a couple of minutes, but there was nothing except the sensation of being observed.

  I took a jar with [Kings Sorrow Sap] and threw that down next. I strained my ears for the eventual crash and tinkle of broken glass, but there was nothing but velvet silence.

  Fuck it. I didn’t have the carrying capacity for the treasure or enough potions to risk an undead battle royale, and I didn’t have enough time to wait here - not when the Demon was barely six days away from smashing the Prezyemi Line. Annoyed, I climbed up onto the edge of the well. If I jumped and went splat, I’d wake up in Fort Korona with the Spear and my quest items, including the Warsinger piece. Karalti and I would be free to fly back and make the corpse run. But even knowing I would respawn, it was difficult to look down into that black abyss and just… jump.