Burrows & Behemoths

by Lee Duckett

  Burrows &

  Behemoths

  Book 2 of the Lairs & Liches Series

  A Young Adult Fantasy Novel

  by

  Lee Duckett

  Burrows & Behemoths: Book II of Lairs & Liches

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either fictitious, or downright made up. Any resemblance to actual persons living, dead, undead, or immortal is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Lee Lodge Duckett IV

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Cover Art by Rainer Petter

  https://rainerpetter.artstation.com/

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my parents, my Godmother, Karen, and to my editor, Cathy Hill, who helped me make my second book much more polished than I could alone.

  And thanks to the readers of my other works, for their

  (usually) constructive feedback that's helped me

  improve myself as a writer

  .

  CONTENTS

  1 The Mourning After

  2 Guild Business

  3 A Shopping We Will Go

  4 Speak Friend, and Get Shot

  5 Bait & Switch

  6 Where Orcs Fear To Tread

  7 Waterslides Are Not Your Friend

  8 On The Necessity Of Lifeguards

  9 Split The Party

  10 Slithers In The Dark

  11 Analysis Paralysis

  12 The Cornerstone Of Magic

  13 Need-To-Know

  14 The Cold Shoulder

  15 Praise The Sun

  16 Forge-ing Ahead

  17 The Best Laid Plans

  18 Through The Fire And Flames

  19 Legacies Of The Lost

  20 Perilous Procrastination

  21 Reservoir Rumble

  22 All That Glitters

  Epilogue: Two Down, One To Go

  Chapter One

  The Mourning After

  Fayne sat at the wooden table of the inn, miffed at how good her breakfast was. By all rights she should have been a miserable mess, but it was hard to get into a good funk eating bacon. Especially when it was medieval bacon, which somehow tasted more like bacon than bacon should, somehow. Looking around the room, with the fire merrily crackling and the townsfolk, battered, bruised, and happy to have survived, she knew that she’d find no help from those around her. If she was going to be in the state of mind that she should be in, a more dedicated approach was required. First, she’d start with the facts of the situation.

  A little less than two days ago she’d been Grace; high school junior enjoying her summer break before the stress of advanced placement classes hit and she was embroiled in the struggle that was academics. Now she was Fayne; third level elven scout and adventurer in a world of high fantasy, and she had no idea how to handle this change.

  When her cousin Max had said he was putting together a group for his tabletop roleplaying game she’d been interested. She’d heard of Lairs & Liches and had always been interested in it: a game that ran, not on computers, but on your imagination and the roll of the die. The other players were Max’s family; his parents and his little brother, and they had all met on Saturday to play for a few hours. Max had made up everyone’s characters off their requests and had the dice and snacks ready to go. In particular, he had a set of d20’s, twenty-sided dice, which were just. . . off. They seemed to be filled with liquid metal, and when rolled together something had happened. In a flash of light they were pulled into the game, and put in the bodies of their characters.

  It honestly sounded like something from bad fanfiction, right up there with “My videogame cartridge is haunted!” and “These two previously straight male characters are gay for each other, and one of them is pregnant!” She almost wished it was something like that, as, after a flash of light which had blinded her, she’d awakened in a body not her own, weak and in agony. She’d been near death from the injuries that the goblins, that had captured her character before she took over her body, had inflicted on her, before the elf had barely escaped. The pain had nearly overwhelmed her, filling her mind as she experienced the injuries that her character had sustained in her backstory in excruciating detail.

  She shivered thinking about it, her magically healed wounds itching at the memory. She’d been told that the pain she felt was less than what she should’ve actually felt, but it was still the worst she’d ever felt. What had happened to her had made sense for plot reasons, and she couldn’t hold it against Max, but it was something she wished to avoid re-experiencing any time soon. If what little she knew of this world was true though, she feared that was one desire that would not be fulfilled.

  After that she’d shot Max’s little brother Isaac, in the body of Rurik Balderk, dwarf samurai. In her defence she didn’t know who it was, just someone who had yelled at her in badly accented Elvish behind a door in a Lair deep underground. Isaac had gone from 6’5” to 4’6” but the sixteen-year-old had gained a full ginger beard, and didn’t seem to mind the change. What he did mind was being shot, even though, in Grace’s opinion, it was totally his own fault.

  Luckily Max’s mother Maggie, who was playing Aria Mozart, aasimar cleric of the sun god Solus, had been able to heal both of them. Maggie loved her new seventeen-year-old body, regaining her youth. Her celestial heritage had just added to her delight in her new form, though she had displayed a level of bloodthirstiness that Grace hadn’t expected from the fifty-year-old nurse. Grace wasn’t sure what being a cleric really meant, other than healing others and destroying the undead, but the blonde woman seemed to be handling it pretty well.

  Maggie’s husband Jack had been less pleased with becoming his character. The gnome wizard Fonkin Folkor, who went by Badger, hadn’t been happy with his character’s physique, coming in at an unimpressive three foot seven in height. Maggie, as Aria, hadn’t seemed to mind the diminutive body of her husband much, so at least they had that going for them.

  Because everyone’s character was at the physical maturity of teenagers, Grace had been glad to have taken Max’s advice to get rooms on the other side of the inn as the one shared by the re-adolescent couple when their first adventure had been completed. Their quest to save this town, while successful, had also demanded a much higher price then Grace had been willing to pay, not that she had a choice. There, she thought, trying to focus on her circumstances and not her taste buds, that should be more than enough to get into a good funk over. She brushed her hair, black and straight instead of the bushy brown she’d had all her life, out of her face and took another bite of breakfast. It was delicious. With her efforts in vain, she continued to consider their circumstances.

  Out of all of them, Max had been the most changed. In addition to running the campaign as ‘Lair Leader’, he’d made a character to help them along in their first adventure. The character he’d made, the, in her opinion, stupidly named Shinobot, had been. . . weird. Grace didn’t like how, well, dehumanizing his character’s name was, even if Max wasn’t human anymore. He was a ‘battleborn’, a living magic robot and he was somehow also a ninja. It was an odd combination, but one that made about as much sense to her as a dwarf samurai. Max’s new body didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, didn’t even breathe, and normal healing magic barely affected him. Without him though, she, along with everyone else, would have probably died several times over.

  Max was the only one that knew the rules that governed this world. While it looked, smelled, and felt real, it was still a game. With a command and a flick of the wrist, each of them could open their character sheets, a record of their abilities, statuses, and possessions. Max’s knowledge was doubly
important because he had ‘homebrewed’ the game settings, changing the underlying rules of the base game he didn’t like for ones that he said would make the gameplay more ‘interesting’.

  As far as she could tell, these changes all seemed to help the group in some way. He’d made cantrips, the weakest of all spells able to be cast over and over indefinitely instead of being used up like normal spells. This let Badger, Maggie’s husband Jack, throw bolts of fire at anything he wanted to and let Aria heal anyone, as long as she had enough time, which thankfully had been the case so far.

  The latter was particularly important since everyone in the party started off at level one, where a single lucky strike could take them down. They gained ‘Health Points,’ or HP, at every level, but even now that number was still low and when they hit zero, they started to ‘bleed out,’ dying if they weren’t healed, or if they weren’t tough enough to stabilize themselves. On one hand, Max had said there were spells that could bring people back from the dead. On the other hand, given their transplanted situation, they weren’t sure if it would bring back the person, or just their character. Aria could heal any injury, slowly, which was almost useless in combat but incredibly useful out of it. Max, Shino now, had warned them not to overuse it, but if someone was injured, did they have a choice?

  Shino’s guidance had been key to surviving. He’d taught the rest of them how to make it as adventurers, though he had been kind of a jerk about it at times. In retrospect, however, it made a horrible kind of sense. Shino had been made as a throwaway character, a one-off mentor, a metallic Obi-Wan to the group’s collective Luke.

  Shino’s plans for the adventure, already changed from the original module from which it was taken, changed even more as they played it. New items and enemies kept showing up that fit what Shino called his ‘Lair Leading style,’ even if he hadn’t thought of them before they were pulled in. One constant, though, was the fact that everything that he had planned still happened, which also meant his own removal from the group was a certainty.

  Shino, the bastard, had known this all along and hadn’t told them until the very end. On an intellectual level Fayne knew that had been the right thing to do. Everyone was so busy getting a handle on their new bodies, powers, and roles in this world that if they’d known what was coming, they’d have never been able to learn everything they needed to before he left. A small part of her thought they still hadn’t.

  She gave a bitter laugh and the townsfolk the next table over gave her a concerned look. She ignored them, biting off another piece of bacon and returning to her brooding, despite the taste. Even without knowing about Shino’s fate, they’d been at each other’s throats, barely able to go an hour without yelling at each other about something silly. They’d floundered their way through at first, somehow getting better and better as they went deeper and deeper into the lair. By the end, when they’d fought the druid Carnab and his giant, evil tree, they’d been an effective team and had handled their enemy adroitly, the injuries they’d picked up during the fight easily healed by Aria.

  Flush from their victory, Shino had brought them down, hard. He’d told them of what was waiting for him, of the riders who they had no hope of beating. On the long walk out he’d given them his gear and told them vaguely what he had planned, of the adventure to Dardenhaven, the lost dwarven colony, though he’d been hesitant to tell them too much.

  He was scared that, if the group was given too many details, then whatever was overseeing their adventure, assuming something even was, would change what obstacles they faced. This, he’d said, was what he would have done as Lair Leader if the group somehow learned exactly what was ahead of them. He’d finally caved and given them vague hints, like “Getting your foot in the door is important”, “Stealth is important”, and “Evil doesn’t always lie,” but not anything really useful. He’d managed to tell them the first enemy was orcs, but that they shouldn’t rely on it, since, because he’d told them, they might not be.

  Fayne had a sinking feeling that the hints he’d given would end up working out like those annoying prophecies that only made sense after the thing they were predicting happened. Either way, he’d been taken by the three battleborn riders as soon as they reached the surface.

  She took a long slow sip of the tea she’d been given, having had to argue with the waitress that she didn’t want ale, and thought about the riders. The one on the red mechanical horse seemed to be the leader, with the ones on the yellow and black horses following his lead. They’d called Shino ‘brother’, which made no sense; battleborn, despite the name, were made.

  She’d ignored Shino’s orders to stay back and had tried to shoot one, but the monster had stopped her arrow in mid-flight with a wave of his hand and shot her with it without even casting a spell. Of the things that she’d been expecting, that had not been one of them. She knew that Shino must have had a reason for telling them not to fight, but she’d had to try something!

  Luckily, the riders hadn’t attacked, they’d just used a spell of the highest order to open a gate into another plane of existence, and had taken Shino with them. The place they’d gone was full of metal and gears, but she had no idea where that could be. For now.

  When they’d gotten back to Cromer, the town they had been sent to save as their preliminary mission to join the adventuring guild of Stet’s Protector’s, the town’s celebrations had been in full swing. While they fought the crazed druid, the tiny wooden abominations spawned by the evil tree Carnab controlled had besieged the town. The townsfolk had been overrun, but the twiggy terrors had died when the party had finished off the terrible timber. She winced at that. I’ve been around Badger too long, she thought, I’m alliterating.

  Aria and Badger had joined in the celebrations, which had only intensified when the adventurers had returned. Rurik had slunk off and gotten blind stinking drunk while Fayne arranged for rooms in the inn and then just sat in hers, not knowing what else to do.

  She’d woken up this morning, sure that she was back home and this whole adventure had just been one crazy dream, but that hadn’t lasted long. All of this left her in her current position, seated a table in the inn’s tavern, trying to moodily munch bacon and pancakes, which was harder than she thought it would be. The fact that she knew the world was fake didn’t make the food taste any worse, which in turn made it harder for her to feel properly bad about the situation.

  Focus, she chided herself. She was determined to get Shino back, though she didn’t know how. He’d told them that, if he escaped, he’d meet them in the town of Firebreach. If that didn’t work, then they’d need to buy a True Resurrection spell, which would cost a bit over twenty thousand gold, a sum that would take some serious adventuring to raise. If that didn’t work, they’d have to find wherever he was being held, break in, and break him out.

  He’d been painstakingly clear on the fact that, before they even attempted to do that, they’d need to be level sixteen, at minimum. Currently, they were level three, and each level was supposed to take more effort to reach then the last, like one of those Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games her older sister loved so much.

  Fayne sipped her tea (There was no way she was going to be drinking alcohol, even if her character was technically one hundred and fifteen years old. It just wasn’t right!) and tried to cheerlessly chew her breakfast. It still didn’t work.

  Looking around, the other patrons of the inn offered a few thankful smiles, which she wasn’t sure how to respond to. For medieval townsfolk they looked much healthier than they should be, historically speaking, and everything was cleaner. They dressed in simple clothing, which matched the basic construction of the inn and the town as a whole.

  Outside she could see that other people were moving around, the town suffering a collective hangover, but moving on. She could hear the distant clop of hoofbeats on cobblestones as horses dragged carts full of construction material to rebuild damaged buildings. She was pleasantly surprised that the town didn�
�t stink as much as she had expected, what with the lack of plumbing, and the enticing scent of breakfast lifted her spirits despite her attempts to the contrary.

  At the thumping of metal clad footsteps, she looked up to see Rurik stomping down the stairs, holding his head. Fayne waved him over, before motioning to the barkeep for some more food. The older man nodded, motioning to someone in the kitchen.

  “Here you go!” a barmaid chirped a moment later, Rurik wincing underneath his steel helmet at her high-pitched squeak.

  “Much obliged lass,” the dwarf brogued, trying to keep from groaning at her fangirlish squeal of, “I’m glad to help a hero of the town!” He waited for her to leave before groaning into his hands. “Why the bloody ‘ell did I drink so much last night?”

  Fayne, while sympathetic to his mood, was less than understanding of his method of dealing with it. “Well, Rurik!” she started, maybe a tad louder than was necessary. “You’ve never been drinking before, so it makes sense you’d overdo it!”

  Rurik flinched at the elf’s statement, before rallying himself. “What are ye talkin’ ‘bout lassie? I’ve been drunk plenty o’ times before!”

  “Rurik has,” she shot back, then dropped her voice as a few heads turned their way. “But Isaac hasn’t, and while you might have his memories, there’s a difference from remembering something from a while ago and experiencing it personally!”

  He glowered at her for a long moment before hanging his head in defeat and starting to eat his breakfast. “This be really good!” he commented after a few bites.

  “I know,” Fayne sighed. “It’s horrible!”

  “Wha’?” asked Rurik, confused.

  Before she could respond Aria and Badger came down the stairs, hand in hand, looking happier than they had any right to be after what happened yesterday. Aria’s Aureole of light not helping the elf’s dark thoughts in the slightest. Fayne did find it amusing though, as the saint-like, circular pattern of radiance didn’t fit with the woman’s worryingly bloodthirsty nature at all. Either way, her figuratively and literally sunny demeanor was at odds with Fayne’s desired mood.