As she was technically a hero, then I technically had to…well, I had to destroy her.
Damn technicalities to hell!
I can sense you’re getting a little uneasy about me right now. You know that I’m a core, you know my nature, you know what I have to do. You’re already preparing yourself to hate me, aren’t you?
I don’t blame you.
There, looking at the young human girl I had classified as a hero, I began to feel sick. Not imaginary sick, but really sick, like the phantom feelings I told you about.
Could I do this?
Did I even have a choice?
If the overseers were watching this right now, and there was a chance they could be, then refusing to destroy a hero would mean instant decommissioning. My evaluation would be over, and I would face the overseer committee, who might vote to grind me to gem dust.
“Can you talk?” said the girl. “I sense that you are alive. What are you, anyway?”
“Tomlin is a kobold!”
“Not you,” said the girl. “I’ve seen a kobold before. Father took me to Retchrief zoo. They really shouldn’t keep kobolds in captivity like that. I mean the green stone. You, Mr. Gem.”
“His name is Dark Lord,” said Tomlin, recovering himself enough to talk, yet still pressed back against the wall, as far as he could get from her.
Where the hell are you territorial instincts? I thought. I mean, I didn’t want Tomlin to attack the little kid, but it’d be nice to know he could.
I decided that given this girl was the technical definition of a hero, and I was a core, I was duty-bound to do something. But sometimes, heroes escaped dungeons without dying or conquering them. So, maybe I could play the Dark Lord for real.
I tried to make my voice really deep. “You dare enter the chamber of the Dark Lord you…pathetic…pathetic…mollusk?”
My voice, though a little deeper, still had that stupid sound that came from being a gem. It echoed around the dungeon now.
The girl looked from Tomlin to me.
Then she laughed. She laughed and laughed, and I began to get rather cross. Come on kid…I’m trying to give you an easy way out! If you’ll just get scared and run, then I won’t have to…
“I might as well abandon the pretense,” she said, her voice now sounding much more mature. “So you’re the dungeon core, and this is your dungeon? Hmm. Doesn’t look great, Mr. Core.”
“You’re very smart for a ten-year-old.”
“Eleven. I’m not smart, really. My mom is bed-bound, and I had to miss a lot of school to help her. She used to be a university lecturer, so she taught me stuff when she was feeling well enough.”
“How do you know about dungeon cores?” I asked.
“My…my father is a core.”
Another phantom feeling hit me. This was like a knife driven straight into me.
This little girl’s father was a dungeon core? She actually knew about it?
When someone became a core, necromancers resurrected them from their dead bodies. Then, the body was burned, and their resurrected soul was put into a core gem. As I already told you, memories of your old life faded quickly.
You sure as hell didn’t remember your family, and you didn’t get the chance to tell your loved ones what had happened.
I had so many questions for this girl.
“Little girl,” I began. “Can you please explain to me how you came to know your father is a dungeon core?”
“Sure. Because I used to be one.”
“WHAT???”
“Let me explain.”
CHAPTER 11
As the red-haired little human told us how she was once a dungeon core, and how she had then come to be an eleven-year-old girl, I couldn’t believe it. But, as hard as it was, I held my disbelief in and listened.
That was a skill I’d had to learn in the academy when Overseer Tocky-Turnbull got sick of me interrupting to ask questions.
I employed my hard-earned patience now, and I listened to the girl, Vedetta, explain everything.
Vedetta didn’t remember anything of her first life, but she remembered a lot about her second. And her third? Well, she was living that right now.
For a long time, Vedetta thought she was just a normal, slightly-cleverer-than-average girl growing up in a backwater town. She had a mother, father, and three older brothers. Things were nice, if a little boring.
Then, in keeping with every story worthy of remark…disaster!
Actually, disaster and tragedy both striking at once. Though they sound the same, disaster and tragedy are very different, like siblings.
Vedetta’s father, a rug merchant, had been away on a trading trip for three weeks. He did this a lot, and it was just a normal part of their lives. Usually, he’d write them a letter when he reached the Glowing Pumpkin tavern, which marked the end of his journey and the last leg of his return home.
Then, Vedetta would know to wait until 2 days after receiving the letter, and then she would rise in the morning and go to the edge of town. She’d sit on a wall with a penknife and an apple. There, she’d cut snacks for herself while she waited to see her father’s horse gallop along the road to town.
When Vedetta was seven, she waited on that same wall after receiving one of her father’s letters.
She waited all day, but her father didn’t show.
Well, people could get delayed, couldn’t they? It wasn’t exactly a strange thing to happen. Travel was unpredictable at the best of times, especially these days. Her father always said so.
He didn’t come the next day, though. Or the one after that.
Seeds of worry sprouted into panic. Not just for Vedetta. Her mom and brothers all felt it.
Her brothers were different back then. They were strong and determined. Bill wanted to enlist in the King’s forces as a swordsman, and Lisle wanted to join the mage colleague. Trevor hadn’t decided yet. He was too much of a free spirit to decide his future at so young an age, but he knew one thing; he’d go with Lisle and Bill to find their father.
They were gone for days. That left Vedetta and her mom alone in the house. Without her father and three brothers, it was so, so quiet. Scarily quiet. Her mom tried to keep busy, tried to keep Vedetta busy too, but Vedetta heard her cry at night, and she heard her vomit sometimes.
Eight days later, their door opened. Lisle walked in, pale-faced, a grim expression on his features. Then Bill, who looked even worse.
Bill sank to his knees and cried. It fell to Lisle to explain what had happened.
“I’m sorry, mother,” he began.
He told them how they had gone from town to town, tavern to tavern, asking for news of their father. Eventually, they learned that he had been waylaid by road bandits, who killed his horses, destroyed his wagon, and stole his goods. They beat him to a pulp and then left him for dead.
A drunk from the town of Zalfari had seen this, and he felt ashamed that he had hidden instead of interceding, so he kept quiet. It was only when he was in the Dancing Cow tavern and he heard three boys asking around for their father, that his guilt overcame him. He told them everything.
So, after hearing his story, Lisle, Bill, and Trevor changed the questions they were asking.
They no longer asked people if they had seen a trader, six feet tall and with kind eyes and a friendly word for anyone.
They now asked people if they knew where the bandits made camp.
After visiting dozens of inns, shops, and village squares, they learned the truth from a man named Redtuth, who was in the gallows and set to be killed by the town guards for his road crimes.
Now the boys knew that the bandits had taken their father. They knew where the bandits were.
You can imagine their subsequent actions.
That was why, days later, only Bill and Lisle made their way home. The bandits killed Trevor, and the other two brothers somehow escaped with their lives. But their father?
Well, the bandits had no clue where he was. They
said as much, and though Lisle had provoked them to hostility by doubting them, Bill and Trevor both believed them.
Their father was gone, and his body was never recovered.
Vedetta’s favorite brother had perished at the hands of bandits.
The remaining two boys abandoned their dreams of swordsmanship and magery. They sank into a deep, dark depression.
Vedetta’s mom became ill, and it was an illness so sudden and so powerful that it made an old lady of her overnight. It robbed her of her strength until she barely left her bed, let alone her room or the house.
So, Vedetta helped care for her mom while trying to run the house and still study at the town school. Her brothers wouldn’t help, and the town healers, alchemists, and herbalists were at a loss to cure her mom. This went on for years, and so much responsibility made Vedetta mature beyond her time.
Desperate to fix things, Vedetta visited a witch who lived in a hut way out in the forest.
(By the way…cliché much? A witch living in a hut in the forest? Come on! If I didn’t doubt the girl’s honesty, I would have laughed in her face. Which would have been entirely inappropriate given the circumstances.)
The witch, after doing the normal witch things of using a leech to drain Vedetta’s blood, then casting strange spells of premonition, was able to tell Vedetta a couple of interesting things.
For one, her father had died after the bandits waylaid him, though the bandits left his body on the road.
Two, his body was claimed by a gentleman named Blacke Kyle, who procured bodies for…
…The Royal Academy of Dungeon Cores.
Yes.
The academy necromancer’s performed their rituals, raising Vedetta’s father’s soul from the dead and placing him in a core, where he was presumably living his second life.
“Where is he?” Vedetta asked.
The witch smiled sadly. “You will never find him, sweet one. The world is a vast place, and even vaster under the surface. You could search for centuries and never find him.”
That would have been shocking enough for anyone, let alone a girl. Vedetta had formed a shell as tough as steel by now, and she kept her head when most would have lost theirs.
She listened as the witch explained what a core was, and why such practices were still done, even in these enlightened times.
She also listened while the witch laid the most startling fact of all on her…
That she sensed death around Vedetta. That Vedetta had not only died and been turned into a core herself in the past, but she had ascended from her life as a core and had earned the right to be reborn again.
CHAPTER 12
“You poor thing,” I said, touched by her story. “But I’m sorry to say, that if you don’t leave my dungeon, I’ll have to destroy you.”
Vedetta nodded. “I understand. After all, I was a core myself. A much better one than you.”
“We aren’t supposed to remember our past lives,” I said. “Not even if you become a master core and then ascend. The only way you get to remember your life as a core is if they resurrect you to be an overseer. After all, an overseer who couldn’t remember being a core wouldn’t be much use.”
“The witch and I couldn’t access that part of my memories,” she said. I was all too aware now of how wise she sounded, despite her voice being high pitched and annoying, just like most children.
“The witch helped you remember your core life?”
“Over months and months, yes. I remember a lot of it, now. Not all, but a lot.”
“Did it ever occur to you that she was lying? You paid her for answers, and she gave you answers that kept you coming back.”
“You’re cynical.”
“He is not cynical,” said Tomlin, finding his voice again. “He is the Dark Lord. Tomlin is sorry about your struggles, child.”
“Child? You’re an academy hatchling,” said Vedetta. “If you added my three lives together, I’d have almost four hundred years on you.”
“Wow,” I said .”You know about the academy monster breeding. You’re not just spinning stories to stop me killing you, are you? This is all true?”
Vedetta nodded sadly. More and more I could see there was more going on in her head than I’d first thought.
“The witch was able to tell me a vision she had of a pocket watch nestled in some grass on a road near a tavern, miles away from town. So I went there, and I found it. My father’s pocket watch.”
“So, you trusted her enough that you believed when she said you had once been a core.”
“Yes.”
“That explains why you aren’t scared down here. As a human coming own here, I imagine I’d have been shouting for my mother.”
“There’s only so much fear a person can have. When I started to remember being a core, and the dungeon I’d built…Well, I haven’t known fear for a long time.”
“Then you won't be scared to find your way out,” said Tomlin. “Go, girl. Tomlin and Dark Lord are busy.”
“Do you always let your kobolds talk for you, Dark Lord?” she asked. I couldn’t help but laugh at her sarcasm. Dark lord really was a crummy name.
“I…uh…run my dungeon a little differently to others.”
“Whistling allowed in Dark Lord’s dungeon,” said Tomlin.
“Is this true?”
“Yes. Whistling, and singing, to a certain extent.”
“If you weren’t already fully green, I would have sensed the greenness on you from miles away,” said Vedetta. “You’re a graduate, aren’t you?”
“First dungeon. Already had an evaluation, from which I earned perfect marks.”
“Yes, I can tell you’re as green as they come. You’ve made the kobold a mining specialist, haven’t you? Psh. Kobolds make terrible miners. He’s done an awful job making this room.”
“Yes, he…uh…did a poor job making the room. This is awful, Tomlin. Absolutely awful.”
The kobold looked at me, hurt. “Tomlin didn’t-”
“Hush!” I said, in my most commanding voice. “Do you make a habit of interrupting your dark lord?”
“Tomlin didn’t-” he began.
Vedetta shook her head now. She saw straight through me. Tomlin looked upset, and I felt bad.
“Fine. What a pair you are. Tomlin didn’t do the crappy digging, okay? I carved out most of the dungeon myself, and Tomlin only dug the tunnel ahead. Tomlin did a fine job.”
“A core should always be honest with himself,” said the girl.
Tomlin smiled at her now, and I got the feeling that I wouldn’t have an easy life if the two of them got friendlier. I was the core around here, damn it! If anyone was going to rebuke anyone, it’d be me. This was my rebukedom.
And I was being an ass.
As soon as I had the diva-ish thoughts, I knew what an ass I was being. As well as that, I had things to do.
“Well, Vedetta,” I said. “It was nice to meet you. But despite your past lives, you are a human girl in this instant, and you still meet the technicalities of being a hero. I’m sure you know that I’m duty-bound to try and kill you, unless you run for your life.”
“The old evaluation thing, huh? Those overseers, listening in to everything.”
“Annoying, right? Still, you’ll need to at least pretend to flee here, preferably screaming.”
“Or, there’s another way,” said Vedetta.
“Hmm?”
“I remember back to my first dungeon. That horrible evaluation period when at least 75% of cores get scrapped and ground to dust. It’d be nice to feel like that wasn’t a risk, wouldn’t it?”
“What are you saying, child?”
“Perhaps it would be helpful for you to have an adviser. One who was such a great core in one life, that she ascended. One who could even procure things from the surface, things you could use in your dungeon.”
Ah. She was onto something here. Every successful core needed to find him or herself a surface liaison. I just ne
ver expected an eleven-year-old, former core to be mine.
“I’d have thought you would have spent enough time in dark, horrible pits. Why not enjoy a life on the surface?”
“Because somewhere down here, core, somewhere underground, there is a material I need. One that the alchemist says could cure my mom’s illness. Despite how much I changed when I learned about my past, despite how much learning this has aged me, she is still my mom.”
This was so, so strange. When she talked about her mother, she sounded like a kid again. Just a normal, nice little girl. When she talked about core stuff, you’d swear she was hundreds of years old.
I thought about what she said. She was right about the core-failure rate during the evaluation season. She was right that it would be incredibly useful to have her around. What’s more, I was the kind of guy who would take any advantage he could get.
But, there was a problem.
“We’ll have to come up with a way of getting the overseers to accept this arrangement,” I said. “Having a fellow core advising me is against the rules. So is allowing a human free reign in the dungeon.”
“Quite a conundrum.”
“Here’s the deal,” I told her. “I’d be grateful to get your advice, and as such I will accept your proposal. You can dig in parts of the dungeon to find the materials you need. You’ll have to tell me what you’re looking for, and we will need to agree where exactly you can dig. I won’t compromise the structural integrity of my dungeon. Actually, Tomlin will do the digging, but only when I can spare him.”
“Structural integrity….ha. Fine, Core.”
“Secondly, you will have to flee from my dungeon, screaming in terror, in precisely five minutes. Thus satisfying my requirement on hero protocol. Tomlin here will chase you and pretend to be a territorial kobold.”
“I’m sure I can act that way.”
“Finally, how did you even get down here?”
“I have been digging in a spot marked by the witch, getting further and further into the ground. I have made my own series of tunnels. Today I dug through a wall and then fell straight through it.”
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