Brian grimaced. “We need a plan, Randy.”
“We know nothing. We only know we need to kill a wizard and take his junk. How do we plan for that?”
“Let’s decide on the point of entry, at least.”
Randolph shrugged. “Can’t we just knock on the door?”
Brian rolled his eyes. “We came this far. I lost an arm, asshole. Take this seriously.”
Randolph’s face contorted with guilt.
“There are several towers that seem to have open parapets. Let’s fly up to the nearest. We can try to open the doors for my Shamblers later if there’s an opportunity.”
Brian nodded. “Thank you. At least that’s something.”
“And what if there’s some kind of forcefield around the castle? Or the entrance to the balcony?” Randolph asked with his arms crossed. He seemed to eye Liam with aggravation.
“I can try to dispel it,” Brian said. “You know how to dispel, too. With the two of us, we have a shot.”
Randolph finally grunted in agreement.
“No matter what, though, stay together,” Brian insisted.
“Got it,” said Liam.
“Right,” acknowledged Randolph.
Everyone gathered their familiars again. Uther towered over the others at this point, but they were useful for their ability to twin cast with their masters—an ability that Brian and Randolph had Liam to thank for.
“I’ll never get used to how much Uther looks like Dahlia,” Randolph said with a sigh.
“I have some updates on that front,” Liam muttered, half under his breath but loud enough for Brian and Randolph to hear.
“Do tell!” Randolph said, dramatically placing his hand on his chin and raising an eyebrow with interest.
Brian elbowed Randolph with his one remaining elbow. “There’s time for that after we successfully avoid dying,” he said with a look that could kill. Randolph shrank under his glare.
Wordlessly, they took off to the sky once again, flying toward the turret tower above. As they approached, it focused into view, and they had a far better idea of what it was they were up against.
Nightgaunts, not stony gargoyles, perched over the balcony rail. They remained perfectly still for the moment, but having seen them, the three sorcerers tentatively slowed to a halt, hovering in place to have words.
“Okay, now what?” Liam asked.
The parapet of this spired turret was as black as any other part of the structure, but it was apparently also heavily guarded. As they approached, they noted just how ornate it seemed to be, even at the expense of other parts of the castle. There was something unique about this one in particular.
“It might be the master’s chambers,” noted Randolph. “If we’re quiet and lethal, we could finish this fast.”
“Lethal, yes,” Brian agreed. “But we’re going to piss off those Nightgaunts if we get any closer.”
Liam nodded, plotting quietly in his head.
“What’ve you got, Liam?” Brian asked.
“I say we go in loud and lethal,” Liam said. “Make a scene. Let’s see what comes for us. If it’s more than we can handle, we just fly out and regroup with the army.”
Randolph smiled at that. “Even better.”
Brian sighed. “Okay then, loud and lethal it is.”
They flew at high speed directly toward the Nightgaunts, hurling deadly spells from the word “Go”. The defenders were not ready for the assault, and one of them was immediately destroyed by an intense searing blast from Randolph.
Liam’s first flaming skull missed his target, but it erupted nearby, knocking it from the balcony, plunging toward the ground. It had to pull off an aerial recovery that cost it much time, and in that time Brian’s Star-spawn and two of Liam’s undead Nightgaunts had flown in and ripped it limb from limb.
Meanwhile, the third enemy Nightgaunt was faring much better. It flew up into the air, showing no signs of fear or dismay, and flew directly toward Liam, slashing at his Star-spawn, taking out a wing. They began nose-diving toward the ground, and the unfriendly Nightgaunt followed in pursuit. Brian saw this and dove to intercept. Liam leaped off the back of his Star-spawn, and Brian caught him by the wrist, pulling him up onto the back of his own Star-spawn with his one muscular arm. Liam’s ride, though, hit the ground with a hard, gooey thud.
Brian and Liam made for the third Nightgaunt, flying upward at a velocity that surprised Brian. Meanwhile, Randolph flung magic missiles from the tip of his rapier as he soared overhead, shouting his fury with each swipe. His familiar, a white dove named Bosco, twinned each missile he fired to devastating effect.
Each missile made contact with the Nightgaunt, slowing it, disturbing its flight path, but apparently doing little actual damage. That was fine, though. Brian just needed to catch up to it, and catch up he did. Thanks to the assist from Randolph, Brian and Liam’s Star-spawn was able to collide with the beast, hurling it into the side of the castle, where the three Nightgaunts Liam controlled were waiting to tear it asunder.
With that business concluded, the three sorcerers headed to the parapet, landing delicately on the turret’s surface. The rails were knotted and carved with an unfamiliar pattern. The floor tile was a glimmering black, like onyx. The castle's structure appeared to be made up of some kind of super-durable variant of obsidian, much tougher and less brittle than the obsidian from Liam’s Earth, but the texture was the same.
The balcony led to an open chamber. A white bed was visible, even from this vantage point. Green torches lit the interior chamber with a ghostly light.
“Shall we?” Liam asked. No reinforcements seemed to be coming after them.
Without so much as a nod, the three of them, their familiars, and Liam’s minions all proceeded into the chamber.
“It’s basically empty,” Randolph said, gawking over barren shelves and a trunk that hung open at the foot of the bed.
“He knew we were coming, obviously,” said Brian.
“Do you think he left?” Liam asked.
Randolph shook his head. “No way. He is powerful, but he couldn’t flee with all his artifacts and valuables. And he wouldn’t leave the castle for us to totally demolish.”
Brian had to agree. “He’s here. Somewhere. Hiding everything from us, maybe getting ready for an ambush.”
“Good,” Liam replied gruffly. He cracked his knuckles and started toward the nearest door. “I’m not ready to go home yet.”
“Hold on!” Brian shouted. “Don’t touch that door!”
Liam stopped dead in his tracks.
“Let your minions do it.”
One of the Nightgaunts walked up to the door and pulled the handle. Sure enough, as the door swung open, a fire trap exploded inward from the other side, incinerating the Nightgaunt all at once.
“Well shit,” Liam uttered.
Brian looked through to the other side of the door. A fire rune was carved into the ground.
“No way of knowing just how many traps there are,” Brian said. “We need to proceed with caution.”
“You think?” Randolph said with a snarky bit of side-eye.
They exited the parapet chambers into a corridor that snaked through to yet another door.
“I don’t want to sacrifice a different minion for every door,” Liam said. “We need to be able to fly out if we have to.”
“Agreed. Let me try something,” Randolph said. He mumbled a few words and pointed his sword toward the door. Then he moved, pointing it all around them. “Okay, no runic energy coming from the other side of the door, so if there are any traps, they’re physically-based.”
Brian snorted. “Something tells me that’s not this dude’s style.”
With another swipe of his rapier, the doors burst open from ten paces away.
“You mean we could have done that with the last door and saved me a minion?” Liam whined, crossing his arms in irritation.
“No,” Randolph grinned. “That was a pull door. This
one was a push door.”
Brian and Liam exchanged bewildered looks.
They walked through the door and found themselves in an ovular room full of winding staircases that led up to multiple levels. Paintings and statues lined the walls everywhere, and they ranged thematically from the mundane to the obscene to the straight-up confusing.
“Which way do we go?” Liam asked, tossing his hands up with a groan. There were dozens of staircases to choose from, and each path they took likely led to several more.”
Now it was Brian’s turn to be helpful. “I know a bit of Divination,” he said. “I might be able to get some glances at what each of these paths leads to.”
“Go for it, dude,” Randolph said. “We’re not exactly made of time here.”
The others kept vigil while Brian sat on the ground and uttered his spell. He felt his third eye appear at the center of his forehead. He tried to grasp for an impression of what each staircase led to—libraries, dance halls, bedrooms, dining rooms, kitchens, dungeons… and then one pathway that he couldn’t see through, obscured by a mist that clouded his third sight.
“It’s this way,” he said, gesturing in one specific direction.
“What did you see?” Liam asked.
“Nothing,” said Brian. “Meaning that’s the way that he’s obscured from me.”
“Meaning that’s where the wizard is,” Randolph concluded. “Right then.”
Liam grinned. “It’s settled, then. Let’s bag us a space wizard, boys.”
Chapter 19
RANDOLPH: Wizard Slayers
Randolph’s strength was already partially depleted from the skirmish outside. Now the trio and their posse of magical familiars and undead fiends made their way through the labyrinthine stairwell, their path ultimately giving way to door after door, hallway after hallway, room after room. Three more traps were detected, and all but one of them were successfully avoided. With a flash of necrotic energy that rotted a Star-spawn down to its skeleton, they seemed to be down by one more minion.
But the skeleton still stood and followed them. It lacked its strength and the ability to fly, but it still might be of some use. Bits of rot-sludge still dripped from its bones as they plodded through the snaking corridors, leading ever downwards into what must’ve been, by that point, the underbelly dungeons of the castle.
“You sure it’s this way?” Liam asked.
“We must be close,” Brian said.
Randolph sighed. They’d been walking a while, but he knew Brian well enough not to doubt him, so he nodded and they pressed on.
The deeper into the dungeons they got, the less it looked like a magical obsidian castle, and the more it looked like a dank, disgusting, unhygienic nightmare of medieval engineering. Desiccated corpses, long dead, littered the floors in piles in some rooms. Usually they were in pieces, making it difficult for Liam to use them. Sometimes the piles were organized by body part.
The stench was foul. The smell of death was enough to cause all three of the men to pinch their noses at some point, even Liam, who had developed an affinity for death in the last week.
Finally, they entered another immaculate chamber. Stonework walls and floors framed a relatively uninteresting room, except that there was an empty pedestal at the center of it. A red carpet stretched from the pedestal into a doorway on the opposite side of the room.
Randolph looked around. “Not so much as a spider web in here,” he said.
“This place makes no sense,” Liam agreed. “Bodies everywhere up to this point, but this room all of a sudden is clean as a whistle?”
The same green torches that they found on the parapet and its attached corridor were here as well. They were close. They took a step into the room, in the general direction of the pedestal, but before they could cover much distance, a white-cloaked figure walked out from the door on the opposite end of the room, its face obscured in shadow, the bottoms of its robe billowing black smoke.
Randolph raised an arm to halt the others, and they all stared, waiting for something to happen. The white figure lifted a book from its side and opened it. Randolph didn’t see a reason to wait any longer.
The three familiars, Bosco, Uther, and Raven, acted first, flying and leaping into combat and were used as twinning focuses for their masters’ offensive spells. Magic missiles flew from the tip of Randolph’s rapier and his dove’s beak, but they couldn’t make purchase on their target. In the milliseconds it took for his projectiles to cross the chamber, green fissures opened up in the room. They were everywhere—the walls, the ceilings, the floors, even some paradoxically seemed to hang in mid-air. And from those fissures emerged thick, black tentacles, each teeming with a monstrous collection of eyes and mouths. These tentacles caught Randolph’s missiles and seemed to absorb them.
“Now what!?” Liam shouted.
“Run away?” Brian suggested as he and Raven hurled bolts of lightning at the tentacles. But it was too late even to flee. Hungry tentacles wrapped themselves around Brian, Liam, the familiars, and the minions and began constricting almost immediately. Only Randolph dodged the assault, tumbling out of the way of one, two, three different groping tentacles. He pierced one with his magic rapier, and it appeared to have some effect. The monstrous appendage sizzled and hesitated, but before a moment had come and gone, Randolph found himself on the defensive again.
He charged the pedestal and leaped through the air, flipping gracefully through a whirling barrage of inky grasping limbs and landed flawlessly atop the pedestal where he had the high ground against the blasphemous chanting wizard before him.
With much of the gap closed, he flashed his rapier, blasting an incendiary beam of fire that caught the wizard in the hand, causing him to drop the book and yelp in pain.
It was the turning of the tide. The tentacles all dropped whoever or whatever it was that they had been holding and constricting so tightly, and suddenly the wizard was the center of their attention. Each of the tentacles found something on the wizard’s body to latch onto—his head, an arm, a leg, his waist—and they all began pulling, gently at first, and then with fury and power. The wizard screamed a shrill and horrifying scream that, Randolph felt, seemed perfectly appropriate for his situation.
Within moments, the wizard was ripped into half a dozen bloody pieces or more, and he kept on screaming as the tentacles all retreated back into the green fissures with their chunks of him. One last tentacle groped for the book on the floor as the fissures closed, but Liam’s final remaining Nightgaunt managed to sever it in time to save the tome from vanishing into the green portal as well.
Liam, Brian, Randolph, and the familiars all fell to the floor, desperately trying to catch their breaths as the adrenaline continued to surge in them. Randolph looked at the other two, relieved to see they were okay. Well, mainly relieved Brian was okay, anyway.
“Holy fuck,” Randolph said. “Did you see me flip onto the pedestal like acrobatic Jesus and blast that piece-of-shit?!”
Brian and Liam both shook their heads. Randolph groaned.
“I was badass,” he said.
“I don’t doubt that,” Liam said, punching him in the shoulder gently. “I could tell at least that whatever you did was the reason we won.” Randolph smiled a bit at the admission.
“I’m glad I didn’t turn out to be useless next to your army of the dead,” Randolph jabbed.
Liam looked around. “I don’t see any army of the dead in here, do you?”
Brian laughed. “Randy, we all did our part. No need for an inferiority complex.”
Randolph relaxed a bit, finally catching his breath, and they looked around the room for anything they missed. “Grab the book,” Liam said. Randolph did. “Only one thing left to do,” Liam continued, pointing at the open door the wizard came through.
They walked through the doorway and were treated to a sight that made it all worth it. Ornate swords, daggers, masks, spell books, amulets, rings, talismans, and more were haphazardly scatt
ered all over the room in piles. Magic items galore.
“Oh, bitch, we gon’ get some mana!” Randolph said, his fist pumping the air.
“I’ve never seen so much fucking loot!” Brian exclaimed. “Not to mention the cores of the Nightgaunts and Star-spawn!”
“We, uh, might have to go looking for a couple of those where they dropped,” Liam pointed out, but his triumphant smile didn’t fizzle.
Uther and the other familiars were dancing atop piles of artifacts and gold.
“How the hell are we going to get this shit back?” Randolph asked.
“Wait ten minutes,” Liam said. “My army can be our loot mule.”
Randolph beamed at Liam. Those words were probably the most welcome sound he’d heard all day. “Well, Necromancer, maybe you’re not so bad after all.”
Chapter 20
LIAM: Memento Morikawa
I pushed the button on the elevator marked with a Roman numeral for three. I was still sore from the perilous wizard-slaying assignment of the previous night. At the moment, my room was so full of loot that I worried about leaving it there unattended. There was no way to hide it. If anyone made their way into my room, it’d just be all out in the open for them to see.
I shoved that paranoid thought aside. I stretched as the elevator door opened and walked out into the dining hall, sitting alone at the table in the corner where I knew that my friends would be plopping themselves down soon enough. I was a bit earlier than usual.
After helping myself to a lavish breakfast of meats and cheeses with a side of toast and apples, I reseated myself at the table, waiting for the arrival of my cohorts. I soon noticed the slinky figure of Carmilla exiting the elevator. She crossed over to me and sat down directly to my left.
“Good morning, lover,” she grinned through her fangs. She also had a tired look in her eyes. “Mind if I have just a teensy-weensy bite?”
I half-smiled and passed my wrist over like it was a salt shaker or a bottle of ketchup. No sooner had I done that than had Randolph Carter III sat down directly across from us. He looked as though he was about to jump out of his skin in surprise at what we were doing.
Esoterica 1: Liam's Awakening: A Lovecraftian Fantasy Harem Adventure (Esoterica Chronicles) Page 16