It was only her face that brought some of the old Cleft to the surface, and he knew then that he would spare his old clansmen. That his place would never be with them, but nor would he destroy them.
“Live in peace,” he told them.
Pendras stared at him for what seemed like hours. “What have you become?”
Cleft said nothing; they wouldn’t understand.
And he began to walk away, his gaze fixed on the distance, thoughts swimming with the possibilities of his new power and what he might do with it.
He had taken just ten steps when he heard a sound. Just one at first, but then many sounds.
Turning around, he saw the three dozen now-freed Lonehills all casting spells.
He didn’t need to ask why; he had seen it in Pendras’ face. Pendras had realized what Cleft had become, and he had told the others.
Too late, Cleft saw the flames of hrr-chare burning from three dozen palms.
There was nothing he could do. No time to react before the flames of so many spells engulfed him, and Cleft burned alive.
But that wasn’t for the end.
Time moved in circles around him. Endless swirls that carried him through the darkness.
How much time passed as he floated in this nothingness?
Years?
He couldn’t say. All that he knew was that at some point in this eternal floating, he saw a light in the darkness. He floated closer to it until he saw that the light was like a window, a great window with a vast landscape beyond it.
Cleft floated through it, finding himself back in the wilds he knew so well.
Reborn, then. That must have been it.
He was reborn, back in the wilds, alone.
Or was he alone? He still had his medallion. He still had his new friends, should he wish to summon them. And now, Cleft had a purpose for his new powers.
He would find the Lonehills and make them understand the price their sacred rules had brought them.
CHAPTER 43 – The Lock & the Letter
I crossed the cavern, sprinting over the stone where the rune and the demons had been not long before. I reached the tunnel and headed into the darkness.
And then the ground gave way from under me.
I heard stone crumble, and suddenly there was nothing beneath me, and I was falling down, down, down. I waved my arms around and tried to grab something, but there was nothing, and I was hurtling into darkness.
My head smashed into something and agony tore through me just as something else crushed my chest and sucked my breath from me, and then I crashed into a pool of water.
The freezing water felt like a giant hand wrapping around me and crushing my chest so that I couldn’t breathe. My body temperature plummeted in an instant, and my shock response kicked in. I tried to swim but I realized I couldn’t move, and I felt myself get drowsy. I tried flailing my legs, but I was so numb I couldn’t even tell if I was doing anything.
This was hypothermia. The water was freezing, and my body was giving up to its icy grasp. If I let myself black out now, I’d drown.
With every bit of mental strength I had, I forced myself to stay calm, to stay awake. That was the first battle in icy waters; don’t let the cold consume you, paralyze you. I took long, deep breaths, tilting my head to keep it above the water.
A glimmer of feeling returned to my hands and then my arms. Not fully, more like an echo of sensation that the real thing. I commanded my arms to move, and I slowly swam through the waters to a rocky embankment. Groaning, I hoisted myself out of the water and onto dry land, where I lay on my back.
Man, my skull was pounding so much that I felt like I was going to be sick. I held in nausea and breathed through it, and soon dim outlines began to emerge around me. Walls. A ceiling way above. Stone. Lots and lots of stone.
Where was everyone?
I realized that I was shaking now. I was sopping wet and frozen, and If I let myself stay in this state I’d be done for. I had to get warm.
I battled into a sitting position. My inventory bag had become wrapped around my neck so that it was on my back. I untangled myself and put in front of me and looked for red alchemooze.
Green…blue…yellow…
Damn it, we’d used all the red!
I couldn’t stop my teeth chattering, and my body felt like one great block of ice. Waves of drowsiness came at me, and no sooner would I force alertness on myself then the feeling would come back like a tide.
Need something to burn….
As I rummaged through my bag, I was beyond thankful that this was a Lonehill bag, and thus not only was it much deeper than physically possible, but it kept the contents perfectly protected from the elementals.
I took out whatever I felt like I could burn. As a hoarder, I didn’t want to destroy my stuff, but I had no choice.
In the end, I made a pile of my snow robes, my old hrr-chare spellbook, and the book for the hrr-spee spell.
Focusing on these, I forced my frozen body into the stances needed for hrr-chare, and I sent a roar of flames at the pile.
[Fire] discipline improved by 5%!
Rank: Grey 60.00%
The fire licked over the robes, burning through them. This fire wouldn’t last long. I stripped completely naked and stood by the fire as I changed into a spare set of shirt and trousers, and then I slipped my geld-deer robes over them. After that, I sat by the fire and enjoyed every shred of heat it gave me until the robes and books were completely burned.
At least I was dry now, even if I still felt cold. And now, with that taken care of, my body hit me with another wave of crap; a pounding head from where I must have hit something on my fall.
I rummaged through my bag and took out some green alchemooze. This was supposed to heal wounds, and I figured it was worth a shot. The problem was that the throbbing resided inside my skull. I rubbed some of the ooze on my nostrils, hoping the fumes would help when I breathed them in.
I felt my skull ache when I touched my forehead. A lump had already formed, so I rubbed some alchemooze over it, and gradually the pain began to subside.
My next problem was my legs. Shifting position slightly made pain flare up and down them, so I pulled my trousers down and rubbed alchemooze over my skin. It wasn’t the most dignified few minutes of my life.
Now able to stand, I got to my feet. I was alone, I realized that much straight away. I looked up and saw nothing but darkness above me. I remembered walking across the cavern and into a tunnel, and the ground giving way.
I wanted to shout for the others, but I stopped myself.
I had already taken a risk by lighting a fire, but that had been a choice of freezing or dying. But if I started hollering, I was bound to draw the dwellers to me.
Besides, the silence down here was so perfect that if the others were directly above me, I would hear them. They would have been calling for me, unless they were as wary of the dwellers as I was. Either that or they would have given some kind of sign. Made a light of some sort.
Perhaps I wasn’t directly underneath them anymore. It could be that when I fell into the pool of water, I’d drifted away a little, maybe the waters had carried me deeper into the mines.
Damn it.
Feeling isolated, expecting to hear the scuttling of a dweller at any second, I knew I couldn’t stay here. I had to find a way back up to the others.
Looking around, I saw that I had a choice of two tunnels; one to my left, another to my right. Given I had no clue where to go, and because the fall had completely disorientated me, it was a tough one.
I went to each tunnel and stood at the entrance for a while, letting the air meet my face. When I breathed it, the buff I had got from the dweller meat fed images into my brain.
The first tunnel extended for a while, maybe three hundred meters, and there, the powers of the buff faded, and I couldn’t form a mental picture of what was beyond it.
The second tunnel was much shorter. And when I saw where it led, I knew
I had made my choice.
I made my way warily down the tunnel, pausing every few seconds to heighten my sense of what was around me, making sure nothing lay ahead or lurked behind. When I finally reached the end of the tunnel, I saw what had helped me make up my mind; there was another door.
This one was made of steel and it was only slightly taller than me. There was no circle etchings on it; instead, there was something even stranger.
There, set at head height, were two red dots.
They were like laser pointers, and it wasn’t lost on me that they were set at eye-width apart.
Retinal scanners?
It seemed almost ludicrous, but what else could I think? Someone had put the door here, and I already knew the gnomes had never mined in this place.
I stepped forward and moved so that my eyes were level with the dots.
Something within the door clanked. It was a great groaning sound, like metal scraping on metal. And then there was a final sound; a lock unlatching.
The door swung open.
My heart pounded then.
I was right; the dots had opened when I stared at them. But that could mean so many things.
Was it truly some kind of retinal scanner technology? That would imply there was something modern about this place. Or, were the dots similar to the circle etchings that only permitted circle children to enter the mines? That brought further thoughts; why had the doors permitted me to enter?
I pulled the door open and stepped across the threshold. The door clanked again, and it shut behind me.
With a pounding heart, I rummaged in my bag and took out three tins of alchemooze. I opened one after the other and dipped my finger into the paste until I got the desired effect; on the third tin, I dipped my finger into the ooze and pulled it out, and the ooze glowed yellow.
Now, I took my hunting knife from my belt and spread the yellow alchemooze over it until it was covered enough to glow as brightly as a torch. With that illumination, my eyes adjusted to the rest of the darkness, and I saw the room before me.
“Holy hell.”
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, and I felt like I needed more light so I could really comprehend it.
I smeared patches of yellow alchemooze on each wall, lighting up what I now saw a long, rectangular room.
At the far end were bunkbeds. Simple, metal ones stacked in rows so that the room could house sixteen people. Opposite them was a bank of lockers.
Near me, there were lots of different shelves lined against one wall and a long, wooden workbench against the other. There were all kinds of things scattered around the floor; empty chocolate wrappers, crushed aluminum cans, discarded garments that looked like lab coats.
The implications of it were staggering to me. I guessed I had become so accustomed to living in a world where everything was new, that seeing any kind of reminder of another world was jarring.
People had been here. Not lately, by the state of abandonment and buildup of dust on the workbenches, but at some point. Humans had been here!
It was hard to know what to make of it all, and even harder to know where to start. I walked to the shelves nearest to me.
The first row of shelves was stacked with glass jars, and each jar had pellets inside. They looked like dog kibble. No clue what they were.
On the shelf next to them were more jars, but these had something I recognized inside.
“This can’t be right.”
Inside each jar were elementals.
Twelve jars, all filled to the brim with elementals. I blinked, disbelieving that I found such a bounty. After hoarding things so long, using spells only when necessary because I knew how precious elementals were…and here was a trove of them.
Priority number one flashed in my mind, and I opened my bag and began tipping the contents of the jars into it.
Elementals Received:
[Fire] x20 [Total:27]
[Ice] x15 [Total:23]
[Speed] x20 [Total:24]
[Mapping] x10 [Total:14]
[Sight] x10 [Total:12]
[Corruption] x6 [Total:10]
[Kinetic] x15 [Total: 20]
[Barrer] x20 [Total:27]
[Transfiguration] x5 [Total:6]
[Force] x14 [Total:20]
So, so many elementals. More than I could cast for a long time. Who could have left them here?
This made me think about the pellets next. Whoever had organized this room left elementals in jars, obviously storing them because of their importance. That meant the pellets were important, too.
I grabbed one jar of pellets and opened it. An aroma met my nostrils; faint, but unmistakably meaty, like jerky.
Was this…
I took one pellet and sniffed it. I wasn’t just imagining this; there was something meaty about the smell. At first, I thought that maybe this really was jerky, but that wouldn’t make sense. Even jerky could only last a couple of months, and this place looked like it had been abandoned for a while.
To me, it looked like someone had found a way to preserve meat without freezing it. Some kind of process that made it look like this. If they had, then their methods were advanced.
But there could only be a couple of reasons for doing that. The first was to store a food supply. The second…well, the presence of elementals in here made my second guess the most likely.
These little pellets had once been meat but had been processed to last longer. These little pellets were buffs.
I wasted no time in stuffing them all in my bag, pushing its magic capacity to the limit.
Buffs Received:
[Wolf] x6 [Total:10]
[Bear] x4 [Total:4]
[Ogre] x5 [Total:5]
[Gnome] x7 [Total:7]
[Fox] x10 [Total:10]
[Hare] x26 [Total:26]
[Squirrel] x30 [Total:30]
[Bat] x9 [Total:9]
Holy hell, this was like a bug-out bunker, only made by someone preparing for an apocalypse in a completely alien world.
I walked across the room now, buzzing with excitement. I forced myself to pay attention to everything. I saw signs on the walls.
Leaving for the outside? Always remember your BEF’s.
B – Buffs. Never leave without them.
E – Elementals. Use them to trade with the clans.
F – Food. Because you never know how long you might be out there for.
A paper map was spread out on one wall, showing a map of the wilds. There were hundreds of different colored dots on it, along with a legend showing what each meant. A grey dot, for instance, signified a gnome camp. Red meant ogre. Blue dots showed spots where you can find fresh water.
I grabbed a chair from beside the workbench and placed it in front of the map. Standing on it, I reached up and carefully removed the pins holding it to the wall, and I took down the map and rolled it up.
Item Received:
Annotated map of the wilds
Elementals? Buffs? A map with notes in English? My head was both throbbing and spinning now, and I started to feel a little faint. I guessed that I hadn’t eaten in hours, and Cleavon’s powder might keep me awake but it didn’t help my stomach. As well as that, I had recently fought a bunch of spider-things, summoned some demons, and almost drowned. Tough day.
I walked across the room and to the bunk beds. Each of them had a mattress and a green bedsheet. God, a mattress. How long had it been since I’d slept on one?
The beds were pushed up against the wall, and the old occupants had pinned things to the wall. Discolored photographs of wives, husbands, children, dogs. Posters of movies and video games. On one bunk, someone had stuffed a copy of a mystery novel under their pillow.
Yep, this place had been lived in by up to sixteen people, and then it had been abandoned.
I had about a thousand questions now, but I guessed chief among them was, who were these guys, and where did they go?
My next stop was to the lockers. There was a bank of twelve, whic
h didn’t tally up with the number of bunk beds. I wasn’t sure what that meant. Maybe there were only meant to be twelve people here, but they included four extra bunk beds just in case? Hard to say based on no information.
The lockers were all numbered and named, and all of them were padlocked.
Guess I would just have to leave them be. No getting around a padlock.
Yeah, right.
I looked around the room for something heavy to bust the locks with. Over by the workbench on the far end of the room, I found a blue toolkit with a screwdriver, tape measure, hammer, and nails inside. I grabbed the hammer. It wasn’t heavy, but it would do that job.
Back by the lockers, I eyed them. I could just start at the first, bust it open and see what was inside. Or I could look at the names written on them and decide that way. You know, make it a little more fun. Make it a surprise.
This was like Christmas!
“Let’s see…” I said, pacing. “Adam, Venquist, Tommy, Isaa…”
I stopped pacing.
A shudder ran through me.
There, printed on the third locker from the left, were the letters Issa written in black sharpie. There might have been a C after them, but someone had stuck a sticker on the locker that read ‘I’m a jackass!’.
I peeled back the sticker, my pulse racing. As was my luck, the sticker didn’t come away cleanly, so I had to scrape it off. Then, as the flecks fell to the floor, a black C began to appear.
I dropped the hammer. The clang echoes through the room, but I didn’t care.
Isaac.
My name was on this locker.
I grabbed the hammer again and smashed the padlock, putting all my strength into it. The first blow rattled it and made a racket. The second weakened it. The third bust it off completely, and the lock skittered across the floor.
This was my locker! I had to see what was inside.
I gripped the door and wrenched it open.
Only to find it empty, save for a thick, padded coat with a fur hood.
Nothing else. Nothing to indicate if this was really mine, or if it was just a coincidence that two guys in this weird, weird world were named Isaac.
Everything Is Worth Killing- Isaac's Tale Page 47