by G. Akella
"Why was it so difficult for humans to drop by Ahn Kulad and find out what happened there?"
"Some may have tried," the demoness shrugged, turning to gaze at the tongues of flame dancing over the firewood. "But it's not so simple. Helstaad's borders may be stable, but its interior is transformed every night at midnight. Burial grounds may shift location by hundreds of miles. Without an Eye of Oblivion, an amulet crafted by Master Kiyaret—the founder of Ahn Kulad and the foremost necromancer of the antiquity—and awarded to every adept at the time, you couldn't hope to orient yourself in Helstaad without the help of Hel herself. Neither Kiyaret nor his followers were found anywhere in the Gray Frontier, Hel vanished, and the amulets salvaged from Helstaad stopped functioning. I fear that not even my Mistress knows what really happened here. The gods may be powerful, but they're neither omnipotent nor omniscient."
"Are you trying to tell me that if we head there," I stuck my thumb in the graveyard's direction, "we won't be able to orient ourselves? Not even by the sun?"
"You misunderstood, dar," the demoness said with a sigh. "We'll be able to orient ourselves just fine—we can even cross it whole in about ten days. Locating something specific, on the other hand—that we won't be able to do, alas. Then again, I could be mistaken. Everything I've told you just now, I've learned from my father."
"It would be logical to conjecture," the knight-commander joined the conversation, "that the dungeon transformed by the Twice Cursed God and this ruined university might be one and the same. He is, after all, just as much a ruler of the Gray Frontier as Celphata. And that would explain why not a single necromancer working or studying there was found after the fact. They're all probably still in there, but in another location."
"Right," I rose from the snag I'd been sitting on, rolled my shoulders and gazed over at the mist billowing in from the graveyard. "Let's turn in. Reece has got first watch. Tomorrow morning we set out in search of this university. We don't have much to go on, so might as well follow this lead."
"After hearing the story from my father, I had promised him to someday find Ahn Kulad and learn what really happened," Vaessa said softly, tossing a branch into the fire.
"Promises ought to be kept," Reece added in a perfectly serious tone. "And blessed are those who are given such a chance by Providence."
***
Rage and ennui! That was the best way to characterize my current state.
The rain had ended half an hour ago, but the trees girding the chapel still dripped with cold nastiness. I glanced at my sleeping companions and wide awake dragons, sipped from a cup of now cold tea, rummaged in my bag for a pipe and began to fill it with tobacco, taking my time. Doing this in the pouring rain would have been problematic. Six days! Six unbearable days of roaming aimlessly through this endless burial mound, with its countless tombs, crypts and gravestones! Without a clear destination or any idea what was expected from us by the stupid system and its stupid quests! Where were we going?! What were we looking for?! Who were we supposed to kill?! The pipe finally stuffed, I slipped it into my mouth, took a burning brand and lit up. The flavor of tobacco had a calming effect. Taking a deep drag, I tried to focus and—for the umpteenth time—devise a course of action for our party.
The necromantic university was the only prominent place in Helstaad known to Vaessa, which was why we had decided to look for it. Nobody had any doubt that we needed to look in amid the graves, and not out there in the steppe that stretched out to the very horizon, so we wasted no time after a quick breakfast entering the territory of Helstaad. Looking back, the only advantage to that plan was the fact that the undead dwelling here turned out to be completely non-aggressive—the skeletons we encountered simply froze in their tracks and followed us with their empty eye-sockets radiating a bluish glow. They wouldn't aggro on us even when we had to physically shove them from our path. That could probably be explained by the fact that this territory was still technically under Celphata's rule, and attacking the goddess' high priestess wouldn't be smart even for brainless bags of bones. Not that level 220 skeletons with their measly 200,000 HP would present a serious obstacle to us anyway. Still, we didn't mind their docility—this place was shitty enough as it was.
I never was much of a woodsman in my past life. It was one thing to go for a pleasure walk or to pick some mushrooms or berries, but quite another to go hiking for several days. If nothing else, I was grateful for the trails—faint but still discernible to the amateur eye—and that only a few rare graves were cordoned off behind low stone walls or rusty rods, else I'd run a serious risk of losing my marbles. Perhaps I had grown too soft, too spoiled by relatively normal roads and actually knowing where they led, but here in Helstaad I just couldn't shake the feeling of constant discomfort. And I reckoned that any intelligent being would agree! When your every step entailed shuffling through heaps of rotting dark brown leaves, surrounded by gnarled trees draped with cobwebs and other such foulness, as walking corpses roamed nearby, watching you pass with mindless eyes, keeping sane became a real challenge. But we soldiered on—Hart knew this wasn't our first rodeo. The map only displayed the terrain half a mile out. After our first night here, when our surroundings remained identical upon waking, we initially decided that Vaessa had been mistaken and that the graveyard was static within its borders, but then, after hitting a huge ditch filled with stagnant water the next day and doubling back, we suddenly found ourselves in a totally different area. So, the veracity of Master Diarten's stories to her daughter were proven true, though that hardly gave our party any comfort. Even the brute-force strategy of combing through Helstaad section by section and finding this Hart-forsaken Ahn Kulad wasn't an option anymore.
The graveyard itself was probably unchanged within a particular radius, around each player. All that made perfect sense. Putting aside the realities of patch seventeen, this cluster of zones, the size of a small European country, was a fascinating place for high-level players with hordes of level 230+ undead mobs, and an endless supply of graves and crypts to explore, raising archeology and treasure in the process. We were talking at least a hundred dungeons—with all the loot and bonuses for first completion that came with them. A veritable Klondike! You could scout the area, locate a new dungeon, post about it on the forums, get paid and build a portal to the buyers. Because the terrain remained unchanged, you could lead anyone anywhere without any issues. But that was then. Today, you'd have to be some kind of crazy to attempt anything like it. And there were plenty of people that that fit the bill, only none of them had in their party a high priestess of the goddess of death, which would mean having to weed through all these undead at every turn. On the other hand, the skeletons were no match for a team of seasoned level 200 players, and we had yet to encounter anything more dangerous. Luck, perhaps?
Three gray shapes slowly floated past the chapel, soaking in the raindrops falling from the roof, groaning dryly as they went. This was the fifth time now just during my watch. What a weird pathing. I watched the phantoms pass broodingly. If I'd ended up here half a year ago, no doubt I would be captivated by all this beyond belief. I would examine every inch of those columns, and the strange glowing symbols inscribed on them, and peek into the pedestal at the foot of which Reece was sleeping (though the mage had probably already inspected it). But at the present, I honestly couldn't care less. And then there was the Hart-damned unending rain! Two full days spent under torrential downpour in a boundless graveyard was somewhere beyond the brink of Good and Evil. Our traveling speed had decreased to one third of what it was...
Suddenly, the relative silence was broken by the flapping of wings as a large black bird alighted on the stone pedestal moments later. The same one that had entered Cathella perched on my shoulder. I may not be an expert of avian species, but how could I possibly forget this crow? Also, despite the air all around being saturated with moisture, I couldn't spot a single drop on its feathers. Maybe this wasn't a crow, but some kind of goose? Oh, like it freaking matters
! If it's here, then it wants something from us. So let's hope this nightmare is close to ending.
"Kraaa!" the bird spread its wings, shifted from foot to foot, and cocked its head slightly as it peered into my eyes.
Can't be a goose—no membrane joining the toes, I noted to myself, then said out loud:
"And good health to you as well!"
The bird didn't reply, so I continued:
"Look, I get that you're not a simple crow. How else would you have found us? So, if there's something specific you need from me, I'm ready to do it. As long as it doesn't go against my convictions and my chosen path."
Had anyone ever seen a bird laughing? No? Well, I just had! I didn't know how, but all of a sudden it became clear to me that it was smiling. And there was far more irony in that smile than joy. And I couldn't even ask my wife who this creature was! Taming Lola had apparently taken a lot out of her, as my better half was presently recuperating her already limited strength reserves. Could this really be Morrigan? Oh, she could be Velial himself for all I cared! I wasn't going to refuse help from any source.
The crow seemed to understand me just fine, taking off to a branch of one of the many trees surrounding the chapel, and crying something else to me in its bird tongue.
Was this the System giving me another solution to a dead-end situation? Or, on the contrary, was it luring me into an even deeper hole?
"Yeah, yeah, I'm not an idiot," I said, getting up on my feet. "And nowhere near the idiot I'd have to be to follow you alone."
"Get up! We've got ourselves an escort!" I commanded into the party channel. Then, emptying the remains of my tea into the fire, I put the mug away into inventory, and set to waiting for the others to get ready.
Chapter 9
The four warriors on the steles framing the crypt raised their swords in a victory salute. The crypt itself appeared to have been made out of a whole chunk of dazzling-white marble. The walls stood out in fanciful relief under the triangular roof, with an iron-bound door that bore the pattern of a scowling crowned lion—and all in pristine condition. So stark as the contrast to the platform leading up to the entrance that the crypt seemed to exist in a different dimension from its surroundings. Ten feet out stretched deep pools of ooze that looked and smelled foul, but inside that ten-foot-radius there was only a neat grass carpet. Standing amid the gravestones cracked and slanted with time, and slabs half-sunk into the soil, the crypt was like a chaste ballerina who had somehow gotten mixed up with a band of drunken hobos. Clearly, magic had something to do with it.
We had made it here by the afternoon of the following day. The rain had finally ended shortly after dawn, allowing the sun to peek out from amid the clouds, its rays filtering through the trees, bouncing off the surfaces of rain puddles, and shimmering in the cobwebs draping the branches.
This last leg of our journey had been uneventful, aside from the less-than-pleasant experience of wading through knee-deep muck for several hours that smelled even worse than it looked. The phrase "as the crow flies" made it particularly evident how little birds cared for the ground obstacles facing bipeds that had to follow them from point A to point B. If only Gloom were here, he would probably think he'd died and gone to pig heaven.
The undead kept ignoring us, as before. A few times we could make out large beasts at the edge of visibility, with what looked like extremities peeking out of the water, but nobody drew to within ten yards of us, so I didn't sweat it. As we moved, our feathered escort silently flew from one tree to another, guiding our way. In the former world we could hardly have made this journey without floodlights illuminating our way, but not here—Reece, Vaessa and I on account of our keen demonic vision, Kan and Raena thanks to a spell cast by the priestess. And so we kept moving.
But, of course, every journey must end, and so it was for this one. Alighting on the roof of this very crypt, the crow cried something and simply vanished in the air. Hardly surprising. We hadn't yet encountered a proper dungeon in Helstaad, but I had no doubt that the entrance to the crypt would lead us precisely inside one. The structure was simply too unusual to not be one.
"They say King Erast the Uniter ascended to the halls of Myrt after his death, and became the Light God's companion," Kan said softly behind me. "I never thought I'd be standing before his tomb."
"How do you know it's your king's tomb?" Reece inquired with his unfailing curiosity.
"The crowned lion and those birds on the bas-relief," Raena explained for the knight-commander. "They symbolize Wisdom, Valor, Truth and Objectivity—the principles by which the human dynasty sought to rule. None other than the great king's ancestors could be buried underneath. And the crown's shape suggests that it's the progenitor himself who rests here."
"Well, at least we're not dealing with democracy," I shrugged, carefully inspecting the four birds etched into the bas-relief.
"What's a democracy?" inquired the irrepressible mage.
"Equality and sovereignty of the people—the principles leaders of my former world loved to tout but rarely ever followed."
"What principles did they follow, then? In practice?" Vaessa interjected.
"In practice... Imagine a princedom where every resident is a prince. What principles could possibly rule in such a case? Power, money, utility. Same as here. Only here they don't lie as much. Otherwise, it's all pretty similar. But anyway! You all realize now that we're going to need to head into this royal tomb. We've lost a ton of time already, so let's not dilly-dally. One last thing," I turned to look at Raena and Kan. "I hope we won't violate any global canons by entering it?"
"Well, crawling around tombs isn't exactly a noble endeavor," the knight-commander shook his head. "That said, Raena and I are no strangers to it, so what's another sally? Besides, we won't actually find Erast in there. And if the undead have made a nest in his final resting place, I think he'd be only grateful if he cleaned it out for him."
And if we happen to borrow something, it will only be for a cleaning job well done, I chuckled to myself, but said out loud:
"Excellent! Then buff up! We head inside in three minutes. Standard order. Tick-tock!"
The crypt door opened without creaking. There were no traps, not even a lock, and the hinges had apparently been graciously oiled beforehand—were we entering a great king's tomb or a roadside inn?
After entering, I took a marble staircase down, turned right and ended up in a long wide hallway.
Wall-mounted lamps flickered bashfully through the translucent mist that marked the entrance to the dungeon. And again, no doors in sight. Odd... Then again, to Hart with the oddities. The dungeon was called Erast the Great's Mausoleum, and was recommended for a party of only five. Well, not every dungeon on our path had to be of the raid variety, and I was only happier for it.
"What is it?" Kan asked behind me.
"Nothing special, I would think," I shrugged, turning around. "But keep your guard up just the same."
"Have you ever seen us lower our guard?" Raena parried with a dash of venom.
"Touché," I chuckled. "So, shall we? Once inside, we'll play it by ear."
With a smile to the young woman, I motioned at the mist billowing over the entrance, and stepped into the dungeon.
The darkness breathed incense and decay into my face, and the next moment a mighty blow drove me into the wall. The next blow—this one in the chest—knocked the wind out of me. Covering myself with the shield, I blocked the next few strikes of two-handed swords wielded by the three plate-clad skeletal warriors that had me surrounded, then stepped to the side and drew Ruination. What the Hart! Every dungeon must have an aggro-free area at the entrance! That's an immutable law!
Of course, the dozen or so skeletons in plate crowding the entrance—each level 250 with 8 million HP—didn't give a damn about any laws. The hallway extended another forty or so yards forward, faintly lit by magic lamplight, with twelve vertical sarcophagi along the walls and a stone floor strewn with debris. Registering all t
hese details instantly as I glanced over the battlefield, I kicked back the nearest skeleton that was poised to strike, and gunned forward to clear the way for my party members.
"Move aside, prince!"
Appearing to my immediate right, Kan wasted no time smashing into the undead and spinning into a warrior's Whirlwind. Barely dodging the knight-commander's furious blade, I stepped to the side, popped Infernal Rage, and lunged at the hip of the nearest skeleton.
Crit!
A Spear of Darkness tore into my right side. Blocking the next swing of a two-handed sword with my shield, I broke the vial of a healing potion on my belt, and Stepped through Darkness toward the skeletal mage, hiding behind the skirmishing melee.
The undead caster in a gray robe threw up both hands, hurling a black web toward me which I caught with my shield. Shutting him up with a Silence, I stepped forward and struck out with an Ice Blade.
"Bastard!"
Ruination smashed into the lich's side with a crunch, knocking him back a few paces. Taking advantage of the target's confusion, I threw myself at the mage, knocking him down a butt of the sword to the head. Ice Blade—crit! Tongue of Flame... I didn't fear any attack from the back—the deafening dragons' roar behind me made it evident that I was the last thing on the skeletal warriors' minds. As Silence wore off, the mage Jumped twenty yards forward, spun around and hurled a Dark Cloud at me. I caught the spell with my shield, and the system log blew up with messages of my reflecting a spell of paralysis. I followed with Earth Shackles that bound the feet of the jumpy skeleton, but just then an inhuman pain skewered my chest.