by J. A. Hunter
“No idea,” Abby replied, though she tightened her hand around her staff as though something horrendous was bound to drop down on us any second. Experience had prepared her well.
“Cutter,” I said slowly—quietly—feeling the presence of the strange room pressing down on us as though it were a palpable force. “You see any traps? Maybe a hidden door somewhere?”
He squinted and dropped into a crouch, fingers pressed up against the black tiles. He pulled free one of his daggers and placed it tip down, slowly spinning it with one hand. Whisk, whisk, whisk—the sound of metal scraping over stone. “No traps,” he finally declared. “But there’s a physical mechanism built into that slab there.” He gestured to the stone table with the dagger. “At a guess, I’d say there’s a descending staircase. Might be it opens up whenever you trigger the function of the slab. Not so different from that bastard statue in the last room.”
I nodded and inched my way closer, stepping gingerly despite his reassurances that the floor itself was not trapped or otherwise warded. So far, this place had thrown us some nasty curveballs, so it made sense to play it safe. Nothing happened as I drew near to the table, though. It seemed our resident thief was right on the money. Abby crept up on my left, Cutter on my right, while Carl circled around to the far side of the slab.
No one spoke as we all examined the table. And for good reason...
It wasn’t a table, but an altar.
The top was carefully engraved—carved into the rough shape of a person. It reminded me of the chalk outline of a murder victim at a crime scene. A host of complicated runes were worked across the stone, and thanks to my limited training with Betty the Arcane Scrivener, I could pick up at least the general purpose of the marks: life absorption. More foreboding even than the runes, however, were the deep channels gouged into the stone. Three of them in total.
The first channel, an inch deep and half an inch wide, ran directly across the throat of the person-shaped outline. That channel ran horizontally to the edges of the table, where it connected with a pair of similar vertical channels, which ran down either side of the altar. Together the marks seemed to form a large horseshoe. Both of the vertical channels ended at a hole, about the size of a quarter, which vanished into the slab. Drainage holes.
Before anyone could say anything, I pulled a Health regen potion from my belt, unstopped the bottle, and dumped the red liquid onto the deep line carved across the outline’s throat. The liquid pooled only for a moment before the channel filled completely, and the liquid overflowed into the grooves running down either side of the slab, burbling and disappearing into the holes.
Nothing happened, of course, but it was obvious why nothing happened.
The altar wasn’t thirsty for a Health regen potion. It was thirsty for something else—something red and coppery. No one spoke, since we all knew what was expected here. And, as if I needed any further confirmation, the knife adorning the top of the altar told me everything that needed to be said. This was a place built for death. I picked it up, the silvery metal rasping against the stony surface. The weapon was perfectly ordinary—no magical stats, no awesome buffs, not even of superior quality—but there were words etched along the length of the blade.
My throat was hot and scratchy—it was incredibly hard to breathe, even worse than when the toxic gas from the first chamber had been killing me by inches—but I read the words out loud all the same. “‘Sometimes there is no winning. To save the world, you must first give up that which matters most in your world. Only love’s sacrifice will warm a heart grown cold.’”
I dropped the dagger, letting it clatter on the altar, nausea rising in my gut. This was one riddle I didn’t need any help deciphering, and that’s because it was plain as day: this damned place expected one of my party members to lie down... and it expected me to slit their throat. To bleed them like a stuck pig, the life draining from them in fits and spurts, filling the deep grooves in the altar, opening the door from this place.
Worse, I had the sneaking suspicion it wasn’t any random party member, but the party member I loved most. I stole a quick look at Abby. My world. Was I willing to slit her throat to move on and complete the quest? True, it wouldn’t be the end for her. She would respawn in eight hours, but dying wasn’t a pleasant thing by any stretch of the imagination. Even in V.G.O. dying was agony, torture, nightmares, and reoccurring PTSD. Osmark had told me once that dying too often had some distressing, long-term psychological effects. And having been on the receiving end of my own sacrificial death—the Spider Queen impaling me through the heart still haunted my dreams—I knew that to be the gospel truth.
“I’ll do it,” Cutter said, plucking up the ritual dagger, then plopping down onto the edge of the altar. He tossed me the dagger with an uneasy grin and a quick wink. “Can’t bloody well be Jack, and that sod Carl can’t die. And it wouldn’t bloody be right to ask a lady to do it. So, might as well be me, eh?” He swung his legs up and lay back, wiggling his shoulders and adjusting his arms until his body filled out the outline. “Besides, what’s the bloody point of being a Traveler if I don’t take a few risks and see what it’s like on the other side?”
“That’s surprisingly noble of you,” Abby said, touching his forearm with her fingers. “But it also doesn’t make any sense.” With a flick of her hand, bonds of fire blossomed, wrapping around the thief, gently lifting him from the altar and setting him back on his feet. “This might be the last trial, but there’s an even money chance that there are still traps or secret doors ahead. Makes way more sense for me to take the plunge than you.”
She paused, glancing between me and the altar. “Besides, it’s possible this thing won’t accept you. ‘To save the world, you must first give up that which matters most in your world,’ that’s what the dagger said. Seems pretty obvious that Jack’s the one who’s supposed to perform the ritual—since he’s the one trying to assemble the weapon—and as touching as your bromance is, I feel like this is the role I’m supposed to play.” She released Cutter from the Flame of Holding and, with a grimace, climbed onto the table. She let out a sigh, muttering something about a “girlfriend in a fridge,” but made no move to get up.
“Holy shit, this is messed up,” Carl said, running a hand along his beard, breaking into a nervous pace. “I haven’t done many quests, but man... Seriously. This is fucked.”
I agreed with him wholeheartedly, but I also knew that this was no ordinary mission—and not just because I was playing on Death-Head mode. No, this was a mission that had the potential to change everything. The Overminds had created this weapon to fundamentally tweak the game, to shape reality from within, so it made a sick kind of sense that they would ensure that whoever wielded the weapon had to pay a damned steep price to do so.
“Yeah, it is,” I said, slipping around to the far side of the altar, positioning myself near Abby’s head. I licked my lips—mouth suddenly dry, throat parched—and took her hand in mine. “Are you sure about this?” I said, not feeling at all sure about it myself.
“You know I am,” she said, sounding confident. But I knew her well enough to hear the wobble beneath the words—to see the tightness around her mouth and the fear burning in her eyes. “Death is nothing here. Not to us. Not unless we fail to stop Thanatos. Just try to make it clean, okay?”
“You know I will,” I replied, giving her hand a firm squeeze. “Now close your eyes. It’ll be easier that way. Quicker if you don’t see it coming.”
Her lips formed a tight line, but she nodded and complied, pressing her eyes shut, her body going rigid with tension. She was subconsciously waiting for the blow to fall. I took the ritual dagger in my hand, knuckles white as I squeezed the handle and lifted it above my shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, driving the blade straight down, triggering Black Caress for any bit of extra damage. I couldn’t bring myself to actually slice her throat, but, thanks to my massive Strength stat and Abby’s relatively low Armor Rating, the blade punched i
nto her neck as though it were nothing more than fine gauze.
Critical Hit.
A strangled gurgle of frothy blood erupted from her lips, body spasming, arms thrashing wildly, eyes open, though mercifully only for the briefest moment. Her erratic jerking was over as quickly as it had started, her limbs going slack, her eyes quickly glazing over as blood ran from her neck and trailed down from the corners of her mouth.
I discarded the bloody knife in my hand, tossing it onto the floor, turned my head to the side and dry heaved, over and over again. Nothing came out, but I couldn’t stop myself.
In front of me, the altar began to glow, to pulse with an eerie red light while the blood drained from the neck channel and into the dual vertical grooves running down the sides. Cutter didn’t speak, the normally sarcastic thief ironically robbed of words, but he dropped a hand onto my shoulder and squeezed, fingers digging down—the gesture reassuring and oddly comforting. His hand fell away a second later as Abby’s blood finished draining into the collection holes, eliciting a click and a deep earthy groan as the floor wobbled and shifted beneath us.
“Something’s happening,” Carl shouted, scrabbling toward the edges of the room. Cutter and I followed suit, getting clear as the floor around the barbaric slab bearing Abby’s body shifted and dropped away, revealing a circular spiral staircase in the center of the room. Still, I waited, watching until Abby’s body shattered like a dropped wineglass, breaking apart in a shower of digitized light, leaving the altar empty, though coated liberally with blood, thanks to her death spasms. It had been the right thing to do—the only thing to do—but I still felt sick.
Even if she didn’t have recurrent PTSD about the incident, I would dream about it every night for the rest of my life, I was sure.
I shivered, wrapping my arms around my chest. More than just feeling sick, I felt tired. Tired of being forced to play this high-stakes game. Tired of running and jumping through the hoops Sophia had laid out for me. Tired of having to do the right thing when the right thing was so hard. So painful. So costly. Not for the first time, I found myself wishing I could just retire, maybe run a pizza shop like Frank or buckle down in the Crafter’s Guild and learn a trade like Betty. Be normal. But no, that wasn’t in the cards. Not anymore.
Whatever we—me and Abby and Cutter and Amara and Vlad and, hell, even Carl—had once been, we were something else now. The only ones who could do what needed doing.
And what we needed to do now was to find Khalkeús. I drew my warhammer and made for the stairs. Time to finish this thing.
Transmuted Flesh
THE WINDING STAIRCASE deposited us at an entry gate, twenty feet tall, made entirely of gold and studded with enough cut gemstones to choke a horse. And I’m not talking gold-plated; this thing was the real deal—though when I thudded my fist against it, clang, clang, clang, it sounded oddly hollow. Cutter’s eyes nearly popped out of his skull when he saw the enormous monstrosity, which had to weigh an even ton. Despite the death and the chaos that had come before, our intrepid thief schemed for a full ten minutes about how we might pry the door off its hinges and port it back to Darkshard with us when—well, if—we managed to take Khalkeús down.
Needless to say, he was far more optimistic than me. “I could build an entire house out of this, Jack,” he’d pleaded, wringing his hands as he looked forlornly at the thing.
I ignored him, instead studying the monolithic barrier barring our way. This was the first time since entering the Judgment that we’d found a locked door leading into a new section instead of leading out of one.
Inset directly into the gaudy gate were three keyholes, except these were unlike any keyholes I’d ever seen—each one was irregularly shaped and sunk deep into the metal. Cutter took one look at those and threw up his hands in frustration, declaring them “impossibly unpickable locks,” just like “every other bloody lock in this gods-forsaken place.” Everyone else was at a loss about how to proceed. Everyone but me. Thankfully, I’d stared at those particular shapes long enough and often enough to know I had the keys tucked safely away inside my inventory.
With trembling hands, I pulled the first Doom-Forged relic from my bag and wiggled it into the corresponding space.
I let out a shaky sigh of sheer relief. It fit like a glove. The door issued an unearthly clanking groan, the clamor of metal pipes rattling inside an iron cage, followed by a hiss of piping-hot steam, which gushed out from beneath the gate’s bottom edge.
I set the second item in place, triggering another series of clanks and groans accompanied by more steam jettisoning into the air, the door damn near vibrating beneath my hand—pent up with anxious, restless energy. Something seemed to shift in the atmosphere. Crackling power built around us as the steam eddied and whirled, the air thick with tension like an overcast sky a moment before a thunderstorm breaks. As I pulled the final piece from my inventory, the Doom-Forged Pommel, the door emitted a deep whine. The metal buckled and fractured in places, thin cracks and shallow fissures slithering their way up the surface in anticipation.
Cutter and Carl both took a few steps back as though expecting the door to explode when I shoved the third piece into place. Honestly, I couldn’t blame them considering everything else this place had thrown at us.
I licked my lips, trying to steady the thunderous beating of my heart. My shirt stuck to my chest thanks to the combination of heat and steam, and sweat trickled down my forehead, dripping into my eyes. I pushed all that away to the back corner of my mind while carefully working the pommel into place. One final click and the door cracked like a bomb blast, split right down the middle by an enormous lightning-bolt-shaped fissure. For a moment I just stood there, flabbergasted, then I recoiled as the jagged fissure began to bleed. Dark flows of crimson raced down the surface of the gate, leaving velvety smears across the face of the metal, coating the gate’s many gaudy jewels.
Just what in the hell is going on here? I thought, backpedaling to a safe—well, safer—distance while raising one hand, ready to cast Dark Shield in case this thing went nuclear.
The metal squeaked and squealed in further protest, the door shaking and tottering in its stone frame as if it were actually a living thing. Finally, it tipped backward, slamming into the ground with a thud that I felt in my bones. A cloud of debris kicked up from the impact and bits of dust and chips of rock rained down on us from above. After a second, I noticed something else was raining down too: more blood. There was a fist-sized hole drilled into the bottom of the archway, going up, up, up and out of sight; blood was dribbling from that hole like a leaky faucet, forming a little puddle of red on the floor.
Drip, drip, drip...
Something clicked inside my head. No. Couldn’t be. Or could it?
I did a little mental math and realized the altar from the last room was now directly above the archway, which meant that was Abby’s blood. It hadn’t merely disappeared into the drainage holes, it had actually served a purpose, though a strange one. The golden gate, now keeled over on the ground, had been hollow after all, and Abby’s blood had filled the damned thing up. That was the only way to explain the copious amounts of red bubbling up from the jagged furrow running down the door’s front. This whole thing was weird as hell and sent shivers racing along my arms, then looping back around to take another lap down the length of my spine.
But we’d come so far that a little wonkiness wasn’t about to stop me. Cautiously, I ghosted forward, scanning the room beyond for any sign of Khalkeús, but he was nowhere to be seen. The room was exactly as I remembered it from Eitri’s journal. Same mosaic floor, same enormous Phoenix statue, same pool of lava, same jewel-encrusted walls. Even the black obsidian anvil from the vision remained the same. The only thing missing was the hulking Aspect himself.
I didn’t have long to process, however, because the door was melting in front of my eyes.
The formerly hard edges were mushy and soft, seeping out, while the gold and the blood bubbled and churned,
mixing together as steam wafted straight up.
Faster and faster the slab melted, turning into a puddle. The Doom-Forged relics disappeared into the goopy mess, and then, before I could even start to come up with a game plan, the liquid began to flow away from us. Crawling and slithering in bursts of erratic motion across the floor like some enormous slug, it headed straight for the pool of magma, burbling merrily away beneath the feet of the enormous stone Phoenix protruding from the far wall. I only then noticed the bird’s maw was open and that a faint trail of molten metal oozed from its beak, splattering into the pool below.
Huh. That was odd. Though admittedly not more odd than the giant golden slime oozing away from me. Before I could fully form the thought and put all the dots together, the writhing mass of gold disappeared over the lip of the pool, plunging directly into the lava pit.
“Uh, was that supposed to happen?” Carl asked. “Because, yeah, I feel like that wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Much as I hate to admit it,” Cutter said, slipping into the room beside me, “I have to agree with Carl. Unless I’m bloody mad, that sodding gate just pilfered the Doom-Forged relics from us. A right arsehole move, that. As a thief, I respect it, but still. Arsehole move. Especially ballsy considering it’s an inanimate object.” He paused, hands planted on his hips, glowering at everything in sight. He was probably as perturbed about the loss of so much gold as he was about the loss of the relics. “Well, what in the nine hells do we do now, eh?” he finally asked, one eyebrow cocked.
I frowned, shrugging one shoulder. “Guess we should head in? Maybe there’s some sort of switch or lever that will get things rolling?” That sounded stupid even to my own ears, but I was at a complete loss about what was supposed to happen. None of the clues had prepared me for this. None of them. Everything Carl had offered us revolved around getting to the Doom Forge, but now that we were here, we’d have to improvise. Slowly, I padded forward, Cutter shadowing me from a few feet behind, scanning for any traps or pressure plates that might trigger if I set a foot wrong.