The Starry Skies of Darkaan (Realm of Arkon Book 6)

by G. Akella

  "Bitch!" Noticing the debuff afflicting me, I pushed through the pain, slowly making my way toward the immobilized mage. A Spear of Darkness broke against my shield as my vision began to swam, when at last my Jump came off cooldown. Just then a soft push knocks me down to the slabs, and the next Spear of Darkness shattered against the chest of the dragon that took my place. Dragons had a base eighty percent resistance to all magic, and this one was one and a half times higher level to boot, which rendered any hostile spell a notch below harmless. Still roaring terribly, George gunned toward the shackled skeleton, clutched him in his jaws, tore the poor bastard off the ground with visible effort, and hurled him against the wall. What the... Did he just rip him out of Earth Shackles?! An Ice Spear that followed moments after drove the skeleton as he tried to scramble to his feet into the sarcophagus behind him. But it was Kan, after Charging this improvised volleyball, who ended up getting the final blow.

  "Next time, would you mind not running off like that?!" Raena's angry whisper sounded in the party channel just as her heal fell onto my shoulders. "I understand your battle rage and all, but I'm not a doe to keep prancing after you!"

  "I've always pictured you more like a mountain goat..." Reece's voice, transformed by the combat form, still managed to sound dreamlike somehow.

  "And you, keep your mouth shut!" the sorceress snapped at him.

  "I'll try," I growled, rising from the slabs and offering a placating gesture, then taking a look at the skeletal remains scattered around the entrance. The fight had ended a little too quickly... Then again, Kan's Whirlwind dealt five attacks to as many as seven opponents at once, and the skeletons had been all bunched up together like that. The better question was, why the hell had they attacked us prematurely in the first place? Too bad they couldn't answer that question anymore. But whatever. I was more bothered by the fact that I had just served as a punching bag in yet another fight. An Elder Demon, Lord Yllial's Slayer, yadda yadda yadda... The truth was, if it weren't for Kan, Vaessa and Raena, we would never have gotten even this far. On the other hand, it was I who had saved the day by taking out the reapings the last time around, and I would have dispensed with this lich without a problem if I hadn't gotten jumped right at the entrance. So, no, I was hardly some useless parasite riding anyone's coattails... Indeed, self-suggestion was a powerful thing!

  I looked around the hallway contemplatively, the walls bearing all kinds of strange symbols. Then my eyes fell on Vaessa, frozen a bit to the side—her pose rigid, her eyes half-closed. Had Celphata made contact, or was she communicating mentally with her dragons? Sensing me looking, the necromancer's daughter started, then found me with her eyes, and motioned at a barely visible passageway in the left wall, all the way at the end of the hallway.

  "There, just ahead... Daye..."

  "Excellent! Unfortunately, I haven't graduated any local universities. So, maybe you could school me on what exactly that is?"

  "The daye are classified as elder material undead. Under certain circumstances, it is capable of camouflage and weak mental influence. Also, unlike the reapings, its consciousness is free and amorphous, so—"

  "Wait," I stopped her with a gesture, nodding at the bones at the entrance. "The legends above these said they were skeletal warriors."

  "You shouldn't trust everything you see, dar," the magus smiled. "Reapings are warriors who have fully retained their combat and magic skills, in addition to most of their mental capacity, at a minimum. These can be liches or regular soldiers. Brains, initiative—everything except free will. This bunch was bound to this place by a control spell—I reckon they were the king's guard to the monarch buried here. Or, rather, their material remains, since the soldiers themselves had long reincarnated." Vaessa caressed Lola's muzzle as the dragon purred, then gestured again to the end of the hallway. "The daye appear outside abandoned or defiled crypts or barrows, and since this cemetery is almost entirely abandoned... This particular one has been here for a while now. And I can tell you for a fact that someone has been here before, in this tomb, after its appearance."

  "Twelve warriors of the king's guard would have wiped the floor with us," the knight-commander said with a healthy dose of skepticism. "But, wait... Did you just say we're not the first to visit this tomb?" He looked up from the silver vial he'd just extracted from the lich's corpse, fixing Vaessa with an incredulous look.

  "See for yourself," the magus shrugged. "Why would they all crawl out of their sarcophagi otherwise? No, these were the king's guard. Or maybe bodyguards. Their skills remain, but their bodies undergo a major transformation that weakens their combat skills quite significantly."

  "Interesting..." passing the vial to Raena, the knight-commander turned in the direction indicated by Vaessa. "You didn't say what we should expect from this thing."

  "It hasn't attacked us yet, so, nothing serious," Vaessa said. "Four spider legs, two pairs of forelegs, one of which looks like bone sickles. Special abilities vary. It's probably sitting up on that ceiling, or maybe on one of the columns, if they're still intact. It'll attack as soon as one of us draws near the king's sarcophagus."

  "Well, then, let's go take a look at this daye of yours..."

  Taking a pink vial from my bag, I slid it into an empty slot on my belt, and headed toward the faintly lit passageway.

  The king's tomb was propped up by eight massive stone columns, dividing it into roughly three even sections. Scowling lion muzzles stood out in relief, underneath faintly glowing runes, underneath whimsical patterns decorating the ceiling—all of it illuminated by the orange glow of wall-mounted magic lanterns. On the whole, the ambiance in the burial vault was anything but dreary. It was like a large, well-lit gymnasium—and no more. The sarcophagus itself stood on a three-step stone pedestal by the far wall, looking more like an integral element of the interior than the centerpiece that it actually was. Do these runes actually mean anything? Anything at all? Or were my former colleagues just doodling? I couldn't help but wonder. Probably the latter. But the funniest thing was that in animating this world, RP-17 must have been forced to imbue these inscriptions with some kind of sacral meaning. And so another mysterious ancient tongue was born...

  We had arrived here after taking the well-lit stone stairwell down four flights, stopping at the entrance to check out the interior of the hall before entering. The daye's natural ability to blend into its environment, as described by Vaessa, bypassed my high mental resistance, making the mob extremely difficult to make out in advance. The magus' claim that we weren't the crypt's first visitors was proven true the moment we descended and discovered the corpse of some hapless tomb raider lying under the sarcophagus. And it was a corpse, rather than just a heap of rags, as evidenced by a boot sticking out from under a strange-looking cloak. One of the locals, then. Good. It wasn't that I was happy that a sentient being had perished—I hadn't lost all my humanity yet, praise Hart—but this meant I was still the first player to have been here, which meant the bonus for being the first to complete the dungeon was mine to lose. Of course, how could any other player have gotten here before me? Plenty of my compatriots—and I still felt like I could refer to them as such—would have no problem completing this small dungeon... If only they could find it. And I doubted that any player had even been to this cemetery yet, let alone in this dungeon.

  "There, behind the fourth column," Vaessa walked inside, stepped to her left, and motioned forward with her hand.

  I walked over to the necromancer's daughter and looked to where she was pointing... Ha! Like we even needed Vaessa to notice this monstrosity. Defying all conceivable laws of physics, the creature, roughly the size of a grown bull, had somehow stuck itself to the back of the far left column, hanging some fifteen feet off the stone floor. I couldn't make out any particular details of its appearance from here—the thing was completely still, blending into the pattern engraved on the wall of the tomb, with only its head and partial torso visible. At level 250 and with 140 million HP, it had to be
the official boss of this modest dungeon. It wasn't even named, and shouldn't take a decently geared party more than five-ten minutes to take down. And for us, it should take a whole lot less. So, there was no point guessing any of its special abilities.

  "Kan, grab it and pull it back to the sarcophagus steps, ass to us. Or whatever it's got for an ass," returning to the central passage, I drew my sword. "Buffs are still in effect, so let's begin."

  With a shrug of his broad shoulders, the warrior produced a small throwing knife from his belt, and hurled it at the daye in one fluid motion, then took off toward the sarcophagus. The creature responded with a sound that chilled the blood in my veins. I never did like hearing children cry, but when a child's cry sounded in a place like this...

  The daye's appearance resembled that of a huge gray spider, augmented by the artist's rich imagination with a half-rotten simian torso, ear-less canine snout, and spindly triple-jointed forelegs with hypertrophied tips shaped like a scythe. An actual scythe, the kind my grandpa used to cut the grass with at his summer house.

  Hopping off its makeshift roost, the beast immediately attacked the warrior with a double-strike of its forelegs. Were I in Kan's position, I'd have absolutely no chance at blocking essentially two spears flying at me from two different directions, but that was me, and Kan was Kan. At the last possible moment the warrior turned sideways, letting the right extremely swish harmlessly through the air while blocking the left with his shield and instantly countering with a couple of slicing strikes. The beast from the Gray Frontier changed its tune at once, going from soft sobbing to furious roaring. A couple of Ice Spears crashed into the daye's side, the pair of dragons roared as they rushed into battle, and I, suddenly afraid that the party might end before I could get in on the fun, shifted into combat form and gunned toward the boss. Once upon the target, I popped Infernal Rage. Ice Blade—crit! Tongue of Flame... An Ice Spear suddenly hit me in the back, heaving me forward. I tripped over one of the beast's legs, then slipped on a chunk of ice scattered over the floor, and came tumbling down to the slabs. The next moment, I saw a scowling canine snout blocking my field of vision, followed by a crushing double blow to the chest that dented my mithril cuirass. A flash of horrid pain gripped my body as my vision began to swim.

  "Mother..."

  The dragons came to my rescue, literally shoving the daye—which had somehow reset all aggro—off of me.

  Rage burst into my consciousness, displacing the pain to a large degree. I rolled to the side and got up on my right knee, raising my shield in time to block another Ice Spear. Reece, still in combat form, was red to me. The mage's eyes looked distant, the bluish mist of another nascent Ice Spear billowing around his wrists. Vaessa had mentioned something about the boss' mental abilities... And no heals yet because the bastard had gagged Raena with a Silence! That explained why the daye had shifted aggro!

  Slay the traitor! the thought flashed through my mind.

  Shut him up with a Silence! One Step through Darkness and... The human in me prevailed over the Elder Demon at the last moment. Knocking down Reece just as the mage had pulled out his dagger, I picked him up overhead and threw him as hard as I could toward the exit leading to the staircase. Mental control only worked within a particular range. The mage lost more than half his HP crashing into the door, but I wasn't worried—Raena would top him off soon enough.

  "Prince, I couldn't..." the magus' voice sounded just as a healing spell washed over my body pleasantly, dispersing the red fog blurring my vision.

  "I know, don't worry about it," I dismissed her. "Watch Reece."

  Attention! You've earned a unique achievement, First in Erast the Great's Mausoleum. You and your allies have been granted a permanent 3% increase to your physical and magic damage.

  What the... A moment ago the boss still had enough HP to allow me to unleash all of my pent-up rage on his miserable self!

  Kan appeared to share my sentiments. Bending over the daye, he patted the corpse on the mug and poked it with his blade, then straightened and gave Vaessa a perplexed look.

  "Is it dead?"

  "Seems to be," she shrugged, calling off George and Lola before turning her face to me. "Care to explain?" she inquired with a dash of sarcasm.

  "You're asking me?!" I had shifted back into humanoid form in hopes that the rage pulsing in my temples would subside. Turning around and seeing our resident mage—looking somewhat battered but now perfectly healthy—I drew a heavy sigh. "Maybe it just expired... From old age?"

  "The undead don't expire," the demoness said insinuatingly.

  "Well, then, how..." I began to speak, and then it dawned on me.

  Psychic Thorns—of course! Reece had been the first target the daye had taken control of, and the mage was almost twenty levels below me. That trick probably wouldn't have worked with Vaessa, Raena or Kan—not with their level difference. So, upon losing control when his puppet had been hurled out of range, the daye must have tried to take me under control instead... What if Vill or Cheney were to try it? I wondered. Would they too lose thirty percent HP after the first failed attempt, and straight up croak after the second? No! That would be too easy! I will make sure those bastards die a very slow, very painful death!

  "He tried taking me under control," I explained to my friends. "And that kind of shenanigans is fraught with certain deadly risks as of late..."

  "Krian... dar..." Walking up to within ten feet of me, Reece halted, his head hanging low. "I didn't—"

  "I'm over it," I cut him off at once. "But I'm not over the fact that you hadn't shifted into your form in time. And for that you're going to be shifting with every cooldown for the next day—in the interest of forming good habits. Now let's go see what that crow wanted us to do down here."

  Chapter 10

  The large holes gaped in the cloak that covered the corpse lying on the steps—the daye must have ambushed its prey by falling on its back. The cloak looked to be in relatively good shape. It had an unusual cut, almost resembling a bearskin—if only the fur were replaced with yellowed autumn leaves. The boot sticking out from underneath the cloak looked more like a leather sock, missing both a sole and a heel. This kind of gear was probably optimal for camouflage and stealth while moving about woody terrain, though not only. Was this an elf? A servant of Morrigan? Or maybe a human ranger? Oh well, it doesn't matter now. I carefully turned the corpse over on its back. Unsurprisingly, time hadn't been kind to the dead flesh, as the body now resembled a desiccated mummy. The skull's eye-sockets gaped eerily, the face seemingly frozen in an unnatural smile, with patches of skin the color of brown parchment. I was no forensics expert, but to me the body appeared to have been male in life.

  I leaned over and touched the corpse, peeking in... And chuckled. Why am I not surprised? Waiting for me were a small leather pouch tied with black string, a map rolled into a tube, and a silver square-shaped amulet. After the daye had given up only gold, a few scrolls and three rare rings—aside from a bunch of junk not worth mentioning—I couldn't help but feel a tad worried about a certain feathered creature possibly playing a nasty trick on us, but this here explained everything.

  You've accessed the quest: The Dispatch.

  Quest type: unique.

  Deliver the missive recovered from Phantom Leamien's corpse to Morrigan, the Goddess of Stealth and Military Cunning, or any of her phantoms or companions.

  Reward: experience, unknown.

  Morrigan's phantoms? Right, I recalled Kan mentioned them. They were supposedly pretty badass, something akin to ninjas back on Earth. Only select few had ever seen them, or only when the phantoms themselves allowed it. What about her companions? Nobody knew who they were, aside from Morrigan herself and maybe a few of her servants. Oh well. With a shrug, I stashed the pouch into my bag. The quest didn't say anything about me looking at the contents, so I wasn't going to bother—I had my own secrets to spare, and could do without taking on someone else's. Could the bird that had led us here be Morrig
an, or least one of her companions? I found it unlikely that a simple servant could appear in a dungeon with a group of players. Not that it changed anything for us. I took the amulet off the corpse, and began to examine it carefully.

  Eye of Oblivion.

  Accessory; charm.

  Durability: 3/10.

  And that was it. Hanging off a gold gain, the small sheet fashioned from what appeared to be silver alloy bore an engraving of the infinity symbol. This was the charm that, according to Vaessa, should allow one to travel through this endless graveyard without losing one's way. Let's hope she knows how to use it... Displaying the charm to the other party members, I put it into inventory, and reached for the map.

  Map of Helstaad.

  Epic.

  Changes every 24 hours.

  Makes it possible find and make one's way through the Great Cemetery of Karn. Combined with certain charged accessories, allows a portal to be built anywhere in the cemetery.

  Just what the doctor ordered! And the charm's "durability" probably indicated the number of charges left, meaning three. Three! All we needed was one. And there was Ahn Kulad—roughly eighty miles north of our current position. Thank you, Crow! I could kiss you on the beak! I produced the charm from my bag, and handed it to Vaessa, along with the map.

  "Take it. I don't know how to use it, but you should. And I hope you can build that portal for us."

  "Thank you, dar," there were notes of reverence in Vaessa's hushed tone.

  The magus drew closer and accepted the proffered items.

  "And yes, of course I can," she said in an estranged manner, slipped the chained charm around her neck, and was still. Like giving a doll to a little girl, I chuckled, watching the magus transfixed by bliss, then turned around and sighed. The image of her reminded me of Alyona. Her eleventh birthday, the smiling faces of our parents, the doll house I'd given her as a present... Hart!