I crouched down again, set my feet, and tried with everything I had to push at my body. It felt for moment slightly solid, but my spirit was not strong enough to move it. So what were my feet bracing against, then? I looked back and was surprised to see that the answer was: nothing. I was standing in the rising water as if it were solid ground, and as soon as I realized it, my feet began to sink into the swirling water. I hastily turned my attention away; if I just didn’t think about it, maybe I could keep walking around as normal. I looked back down at my body, suspended in the water, hair waving softly and weightlessly, obscuring my face. I wondered if it counted as self pity that I thought it looked so uncomfortable. I’m so tiny, from the outside. And then, incredulously: Is that how everyone ELSE sees me?
I wondered why Keen hadn’t just done his little floaty trick, come on down here, and hauled it back up to the lair, before realizing he probably couldn’t see beneath the surface of the water. He has no idea how deep this is. He might not even know I’m dead.
The rising tide must have finally made some kind of connection, as my gold hair stopped billowing aimlessly around my head and was instead blown downward, leading into a current running tangential to the shaft above.
The water tugged me down, into the unknown. Behind me, the bright light faded, dwindled, and winked out.
I drifted. I drifted through the submerged tunnels of old Triport; a maze of ancient sewers, shafts and pipes, the dwarven stonework still holding after all these centuries. I drifted past older, stranger architecture still, and remembered Sarah saying there had been civilizations here, mining the Stormshade Mountains for magic, since long before the Leonite Empire came and founded a city over top of their ruins. I wondered if Sarah was still waiting tables at La Baleine, still studying for her exams... Still going about the tasks of the living while I was dead. I wondered if she missed me. Not likely.
I drifted through stone corridors I didn’t recognize, and past drowned temples to gods I’d never heard of. There were statues in some of them, faces worn away or covered in barnacles, and lumps of rusted gears that must have once been giant machines of unimaginable purpose. Not all of the machines were decrepit; here and there, obdurate adamantine and incorruptible gold sat gently under layers of silt, waiting, dreaming the slow and patient dreams of made things.
Once a school of phosphorescent fishes came over to investigate, darting in and out of my waving hair, adding almost real color to the strange not-light that I saw by. They paid no attention to spirit-me, but I was sad when they left. Voice came and went.
I had no real notion of the passage of time. Without my lungs to measure the air by minutes, or my stomach to pester me for meals, it might have been hours, or days. Once I saw a staircase running upwards, out of the water, and I ran my spirit over there to see where it led, but quickly found out that I could not leave the small clearing centered around my corporeal remains. The Forest of the Night was thick, and dense, and cold, and I was unable to make myself pass its barriers. The two worlds were superimposed upon each other; the Forest stayed stationary, while the “real” world moved through my little clearing, becoming briefly visible to me in the vicinity of my body, before fading into the trees as my body moved along. Once or twice I thought I saw things moving in the Forest’s darkness, and I stayed close to my body.
My corpse eventually became buoyant again, and Voice was more than happy to explain why.
“Arrrgg!” I stuck my fingers in my ears, which had never had any effect on blocking out Voice even when I was corporeal, and continued to have no effect now. “I don’t care why it’s floating, and I don’t want to hear about it! I don’t even want to think about it!”
“La la la la la! I can’t hear you! La LA LA!”
I was bored too. My body had washed up in a sloping tunnel carved of natural stone rather than worked masonry, and the high tide had left it on immobile ground, like a piece of golden haired driftwood. I had explored the tunnel as far as my spirit could reach, which wasn’t very far. I tried to shake the feeling that the clearing was shrinking, what had once been fifteen or twenty feet was now ten or fifteen. Maybe less.
I heard a sound from up the tunnel. I ran to the edge of my clearing and pushed as hard as I dared at the edge of the forest, trying to gain back lost ground, willing it to part for me so I could see what was going on… and there, at a t-shaped intersection, shapes faded just into view—a goblin scouting party. There were four of them, squat creatures that looked like giant toads crossed with lizards; bipedal and long tailed, and the one in the lead was wearing a familiar bone necklace.
“Smart Mouth!” I cried, and his head turned this way.
Did he hear me?
Sure enough, Smart Mouth bobbed his head like a bird and took several deep whiffs of the damp sewer air, then turned towards his companions. “I know that smell!” He told them. “This way!”
“Smart Mouth!” I cried again, “It’s me! Sam!” He gave no evidence noticing me what-so-ever. “Look, something terrible has happened…”
Smart Mouth and crew cautiously approached my body, hopping and sniffing.
“Squishy-skin!” One of them announced.
“Dead squishy-skin.” Another commented.
“Special squishy-skin.” Smart Mouth corrected. “Killed Old Boss, killed rats, killed many goblins. Very bad ass!” This declaration of bravery was received with solemn, approving nods all around, and I was reminded that goblins weren’t exactly sentimental.
“Then what happened?” asked one of his cronies, displaying an unusual level of curiosity.
Smart Mouth leaned his head way down, bone necklace brushing against the floor, and gave a long, deep sniff. “Something very bad.”
“You don’t know the half of it.” I muttered at him.
I took my own version of a long, deep breath, determined to somehow make him hear me, when Smart Mouth straightened up, shook his head, and announced, “Oh well!”
He then bent forward once more, grabbed my corporeal left arm in his mouth, and with a chomp of his wickedly sharp grin, ripped it off at the elbow. The other goblins squealed in glee and fell upon my body, fighting amongst themselves for first servings.
“I want the guts!” One of them declared.
“My guts!”
“You got guts last time!”
“I want brains!”
“You need brains, stupid!”
“Yeah! Wait, huh?”
“What are you little monsters doing?” I screamed at them. “That’s my body down there! HEY! You can’t eat that, that’s ME!” I ran over and swiped at them, tearing at their shortened faces and too many teeth and scaly, reptilian skins. My spirit hands went through them like a candle through the mist, only with less effect. “Stop that, right now!”
Smart Mouth tilted his head back and swallowed my arm whole, choking it down like a sun-lizard trying to gulp a quails egg.
“Smart Mouth, you useless piece of sewage-licking rat-bait! You better stop this right now or I’m going to haunt your scaly overgrown lizard hide for the rest of forever!”
And all of a sudden, Smart Mouth’s eyes seemed to focus on me, as if I had mysteriously materialized in front of him.
“Dragon Boss!” He yelped, clearly remembering the way I’d looked after swa
llowing a Light spell during our last encounter. “EeeyyEEE! It’s Dragon Boss, not dead for reals! Not dead!”
“Wait, you can see me?” I asked, losing my rage in perplexity. “You couldn’t see me a moment ago!”
The rest of the goblins paused in their squabbling over who got to eat my guts in order to stare in amazement at Smart Mouth. But not at me, I realized.
“Err, New Boss?” Asked the curious one. “You talking to us?”
“Forgive me, mighty Dragon Boss!” Smart Mouth threw himself flat on the ground in front of me, wailing and kowtowing. “New Boss, err, Smart Mouth, didn’t mean to eat you! It was, uhh, accident!”
“Who is Dragon Boss?” whispered one.
“Dunno, maybe New Boss is seeing things?”
“That happen to me one time. Was really hungry, ate some mushrooms, was chased all over by big, hungry ghosts. Nobody else saw.”
“Stupid, don’t eat mushrooms!”
“Yeah, mushrooms is vegetables…”
The goblins began to back away from my body, in case it was a vegetable too.
“An accident, huh?” I crossed my arms over my chest and gave Smart Mouth my best Dragon Boss Glare. “Just because you couldn’t see me didn’t mean I couldn’t see you! You ate my arm on purpose!”
“Aaayyyeeee! Sorry Dragon Boss! Here! Have magic arm back! Smart Mouth no want!” And the goblin began retching, jaws wide and tongue hanging out, looking for all the world like a cat that had just changed its mind about dinner. The other goblins, watching this, now retreated to the other side of the tunnel, away from both my body and their hallucinating boss.
Wait, MAGIC arm?
“In that case, you may absolutely not sick it back up!” I leapt forward and grabbed his snout, forcing his jaws back together, and only after I had done it did it occur to me that my hands had not passed right through him as they had everything else. Smart Mouth made an “ulg” noise and his bulging eyes rolled in their sockets. “I, Dragon Boss, hereby forbid you to… to… do anything at all with my arm! Including digest it!” I added, in case he got any clever ideas about reswallowing it into one of his other stomachs. Goblins had four of them, as I recalled.
“Mmm k, ss!” Smart Mouth said, which I took to be ‘Ok, boss!’ in half-strangled goblin.
“All right, here’s what we’re going to do…” I began, letting go of his snout. He looked like he wanted to bolt. “Don’t worry, I have a plan.”
“Noooo!” he wailed. “Not another PLAN!”
The other goblins had been steadily creeping away, but this exclamation was one piece of the uncanny too much for them, and led by Curious, they turned tail and ran. Smart Mouth took off after them.
“No, wait! That’s not the plan!” I yelled. “Hey, come back here!”
My spirit clearing was disappearing along with Smart Mouth, and so I ran after them too, trying to yell for Smart Mouth to stop over the panicked cries of “Bad vegetables! Yucky vegetables!” and “No more plans! Smart Mouth hate rat fishing!” I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I did not tire or run out of breath. After a few turns through the tunnels, the goblins splashed through a short flooded section, but my own feet made neither sound nor ripples as the water failed to slow me down.
So, if I can go right through the water, why not the walls?
Experimentally, I stuck my hand out and trailed it through the stone wall. So long as I didn’t think about it, I didn’t even notice it was there. Ok, here goes nothing. Bracing myself, I leapt at the walls just before another one of those t-intersections. The solid stone temporarily blinded, but did not impede, me as I shortcut the corner and intercepted Smart Mouth.
“Eeep!” He skidded to a halt as I appeared out of the masonry, then pivoted about and ran the other way.
“Smart Mouth!” I loped along beside him. “I can keep this up all day, and I’m not going anywhere until I get resurrected, and hold still! Look, you need to take me back to the Temple and if you just do that I’ll stop haunting you and I’ll pay you instead!” I finished in a rush.
At either the wisdom of my suggestion or the fact that he had run completely out of breath, Smart Mouth finally came to a halt. The other goblins were nowhere in sight.
“Dragon Boss pay?” Smart Mouth’s eyes glittered with greed. “How much?”
“Err, what do you want?”
“Want…” His eyes unfocused, seeming to stare at some inner vision, while his foreclaws waved vaguely in the air. “Want shinies. Lots of shinies!” A mischievous smile stole across his too-wide mouth. “Want… more shinies than Shaman Bisquik!”
“Ok.” I hazarded, trying to gauge how I was going to pull this off.
Good point. “Right. Ok, then. You get me to the Temple, and once I’m resurrected, I’ll find a way to get you a whole lot of, err, shinies. Deal?”
Smart Mouth nodded eagerly, and then looked at me expectantly, like I was about to perform a trick.
“Well?” I told him. “Let’s go!”
Smart Mouth nodded again. “Sure thing boss! Err, where is ‘Temple’?”
I sighed, and wondered if you could get headaches when you were dead, or if it just felt like it.
We only got lost seven or eight times as I managed to get Smart Mouth to take me back to the area near where we had first met, and from there to the drain I had used to sneak into the sewers. I scouted out traps to avoid as best as I could in this dim half-light of the dead, and more than once Smart Mouth refused point blank to traverse likely looking tunnels that belonged to rival goblins, but after a patient eternity we were staring upwards at the dim moonlight filtering through from street level.
“It’s clear.” I called back down, hoping the goblin wouldn’t remember that I could only see the world of the living for a radius of maybe fifteen feet, centered around him. With a leap as light as a bird he joined me at the mouth of the storm drain, and then nimbly squeezed through it, and as the radius recentered I recognized the alley on Temple Hill. It was maybe an hour short of midnight, judging by the moon, and the streets were nearly deserted. I led Smart Mouth out through the alley and towards the torchlit Temple Square.
“The main entrance is over here. What you need to do is find a cleric and tell them—”
Temple Square was filled with half mile long line of petitioners, shuffling and sleepy, and sick enough to spend the night here in hopes of getting through the doors by dawn. The rat plague. I had forgotten how many people were sick, and even with the evil altar destroyed, the infection was still outstripping everyone’s resources.
One of them turned. “Hey, hey! What’s that?”
“Blast it, that’s a goblin! Kill it!”
“Wait, no, Smart Mouth, you can talk your way out of this!” I tried to say, but he panicked and bolted.
[Charisma check1: Failed]
“Blasted goblins!” I yelled after his retreating form, but the Forest was catching up with me. I followed him around the corner, but we just about ran into a city guard summoned by the yelling behind us. She pulled her sword and took a swing at Smart Mouth.
“Dirty little baby-snatcher!” she snarled. “You picked the wrong neighborhood to go scavenging in this time!”
“All of you all stop it!” I yelled futilely at everyone. “He’s not trying to steal anything, he’s trying to help me!”
“Kill the goblin!” advised the unseen bystander from before.
“Yeah, kill it and burn it! That’ll teach those slimy lizards to come sneakin’ into our houses at night!”
“No!” I rather doubted they’d give Smart Mouth a trial, never mind an autopsy, before this frenzied bonfire, and if they caught him... I had a horrible vision of standing helplessly by whi
le the little goblin was beaten, bound, and tied to a stake, all the while protesting his good intentions to his hostile, jaded jury. All for the crime of trying to do something good for a change.
Smart Mouth did not stick around to plead his case; he leapt over the guard in a single bound, and bolted for a side street, away from her partner, who was drawing his own weapon as he caught up.
“No, Smart Mouth, that leads to the arena! Full of people with weapons! Here, this way!” I led the way down another alley that wound its way down to the slummier ‘self protected’ neighborhoods, where we might get away from homicidal guards and bloodthirsty mobs.
The potential mob didn’t give chase, but the guards proved more tenacious than I would have expected. We ran past closed up shops and market stalls, past other markets still open and doing rowdy business, past houses boarded up for the night or spilling warm, candlelit conversation into the streets. We dodged through alleyways, wiggled through holes in hedges, and stayed one step ahead of the watchmen while my brain went into overdrive to try and navigate our escape with a visibility range of less than a dozen paces. Voice chimed in periodically with terse instructions that I suspected were sometimes just lucky guesses, until our luck ran out in a blind alley closed off by a large, thick planked gate on the back end.
The gate was flush with the arch above it, upon which the endlessly creative, space-starved citizens of Triport had built a covered, connecting causeway between the multi-storied buildings on either side.
And if I could have just seen it, I would have turned right instead of left, and now it was too late. “Being dead is stupid.” I grumbled.
Smart Mouth shot me an indecipherable look. “Squishy-skins is stupid.” he opined, and tensed his legs for another leap.
A jump over a human guard was one thing; I had just dodged around the obstacle and stayed in my clearing (which is NOT getting smaller, I tried to convince myself) but I had seen the way goblins could bound up vertical surfaces, and I knew there was no way I could climb fast enough to keep up. Neither can I ask him to stay and face the guards.
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