***
It didn’t take long to reach the top of the hill before the light tower. The place was wooded, and a bit steep in spots, but it was less a climb than it was a hard stride. And they were determined. Truly determined. It is a hard thing to tire out a truly determined person for it takes more hills than the world has, and a few oceans besides. They’d been hurt and hounded by the god, and they wanted to throw that feeling back at him.
“Burn forev—gak,” squaked a bat, lanced out of the sky by Carric’s crossbow bolt. Tracy, in stride near to him, gave the bard a curious look. He shot a triumphant one back.
It felt longer than it actually was, their youthful patience at achieving this goal working its magic upon their perceptions. But, standing there in the last copse of bare-branched deciduous forest before their ultimate goal, things felt a little different as they surveyed their target.
Things moved upon that tower. They also moved about it. And they gleamed a yellow-white gold. They cast the moon’s rays off of them in a way not dissimilar to how a dog casts water off its fur when shaken. The light of the moon and the long but slowly lightening grayish predawn cascaded back in this way and that, making the figures sparkle with devilish undertones.
“Sard off, rantallion. I’m out of here,” stated Svein with a calm voice.
“Why do foreigners have to speak such nonsense words?” asked Bern with a chuckle. Svein gave him an icy glare.
“Svein, no. We all have a duty to banish these hellish things to another place. Our world is infested with things that don’t belong here. We all know the tales. That mana well in Icegard isn’t all good,” Tracy said with a stern face.
Carric nodded. “The tales of Jerold Frey suggest that many of the beasts we have today came from the divine conquest and destruction of another world. And now our land shines brightly and thickly with the mana of two. It was done in defense, but it is why the gods of so many places are here now, when once, according to Frey, we were a place with a pantheon of twelve.”
“Were the undead here before this thing happened?” Yenrab asked with genuine curiosity on his face. “I never saw one before the crypt so I kinda think, ya know, that they weren’t. But, then again, my place always used to be the woods and clearings.”
“I believe, friend Yenrab, that the undead are not a part of our world naturally but were summoned into existence before the invasion from another world. And the mana well that resulted after,” Carric informed him, his head up and his eyes unfocused as he thought back to his lessons at the academy.
“What you are saying is that the undead will always be here. Then, what are we doing?” Svein asked, his voice guttural and angry.
Yenrab opened his mouth, then scratched his head and closed it. That did seem like a good question.
Tracy, though, stepped in again.
“We’re making things right. Mosquitoes, locusts, wasps, ants . . . they are part of the natural way of things, yet we fight them, infinitely, to keep ourselves healthy and fed,” the half-elf stated, thinking it through out loud. “Svein, we make a difference in fighting these things, no matter how common they are to our world.”
“Yes. I think I understand.” The human nodded. “This is pest control.”
“Yeah, I guess. That’s a strange way to say it though,” Tracy opined. “I was thinking more like this is the Extermination of Things that Hurt Us and Are Really Bad.”
“Or EoTtHUaARB,” she intoned, making sure to say each capital letter with force while almost whispering the littler ones.
Bern chuckled.
“Ee-o-T-t-HU-a-ARB?” he enunciated, tasting each syllable. “Why the hells not? Tracy, you know what, let’s make that the name of our party since we’re all gonna die anyways.”
Yenrab tried it all out in his head but kept messing it up and glared at the assassin. But the rest agreed, and he was outvoted. Tracy beamed with pride, her concept now a part of destiny!
***
The sky was still well dark, discounting the moon, but it was a shade of lighter gray. Their time to move was now or never, since the day would itself only bring greater visibility to adventurers when they made their insertion.
“Alright, look, I know that this is all uphill, but I still think we can charge the place, break through the door, and just rage them all out while they come to fight us,” Yenrab was saying to a grim-faced and disagreeing Svein.
“No, look, I don’t want to be rude, but I have led a few missions, and I know a suicide run when I see one,” he spat back, not with anger, but with concern.
“I can squish them. All of them,” Tracy added. “Not really, but it is a fun thing you can do with your fingers. See, the Grand Sorcan showed us this trick where, when people are far away, you can put your fingers like this and, squish, dead, gone!”
“It’s what you do when you are really mad at someone,” he informed them. “Then the anger spirits can’t make you do something that you will regret later.”
Carric sighed and turned away, looking about at the terrain about them. Something seemed off. He walked away from them and started to think about this place that they were standing in right now.
Meanwhile, Bern threw in his own advice.
“Mates, look, we’ve gotta sneak. Stay down close to the dirt, roll up and around, almost sideways, and take these things out one at a time.” He considered the slowly awakening dawn. “It might hit daylight before we’re done, but it will be a whole lot easier than just smashing in and fighting them all at once.”
“I say we make our presence known, Yenrab and I, while the rest of you stay hidden and fortified on the hill,” Svein promoted, adding a great deal of felt experience to the conversation. “We can hit them with arrows and soften them up as they come, and then finish them up as they scrabble up the sides with their horrid and weird, quite stupid, undeadness.”
“Is undeadness even a word?” Tracy chided.
The tales, Carric thought. So many tales have adventures in which the big baddy has an escape exit. A place where it can get free well away from the entrance. And that stump, over there, it doesn’t look right.
“If undeadness isn’t a word, I believe I can proclaim it one due to noble right,” Svein said with scared humor.
This place right here is distinct and not too far away from the tower. And, you know, if I don’t check it out thoroughly, this is going to bug me all day. Especially since the escape exits always make the heroes fight not one but two epic battles. And they sometimes even spawn a saga.
Carric frowned at that. He didn’t want to be involved in a saga with an evil god.
“As a barbarian of the North, I can just say your whole nobility system is silly,” Yenrab proclaimed, his hands in the air. “It seems so futile.”
That stump. Right over there. That isn’t real, or right, at all.
The bard ambled over and knocked on it. Hollow. Just as I thought.
“Mates, look, we’ve got to move! The sun is not exactly favoring us right now!” Bern exclaimed, trying to kick the party into real action.
Carric Smith, bard of Icegard, stuck up his head as the top of the stump opened with a simple push and release.
“Guys, I just found a secret door.”
Chapter 28: Fond Memories of Grandma
Often adventures are done with a “straightforward assault upon the hill” sort of mentality. Adventurers, like superheroes, charge, or they stand tall in the high grass, firing various missile weapons and magic at their opponents, as if it were just an issue of having superior fire power. They don’t really play up strategy in the way that, as an example, veterans of experienced military campaigns do. They don’t scatter, nor do they seek concealment or low crawl through side terrain to catch the enemy by surprise. And so, often, you’d expect them to fail. Yet many an adventurer who has taken the intelligent route and dragged himself through the mud has simply fallen, while, often, the doofuses who stand tall in the grass, clustered together, win victory. It is
the reason that such people are often given the idiom “gods-anointed.” A word for those who can be foolish and heroic at the same time.
And so, it may both surprise and disappoint to know that these adventurers skirted the trend to their own benefit. They didn’t act foolishly and win anyways. Nor did the enemy act in a stupid fashion and allow them to win. Instead, they avoided the whole situation entirely by finding a door that looked like a stump.
“How in the blazes?” Bern asked, a bit awestruck. “That’s, well, that’s amazing!”
“That is amazing,” Yenrab reaffirmed. He looked about the woods in which they sat. “Why in the seven hells would you have thought to do that?”
“I got bored,” Carric said flippantly. “Something . . . something . . . personal drama, something . . . something . . . it’s gonna be okay. Or whatever you all said. I wasn’t following because I was busy finding us a secret entrance.”
Tracy laughed. “I’d think you would have wanted a bit more action for your ballad before we just go ahead and finish it.”
Svein was solemn. “I guarantee that this ballad is just beginning. I think there would have been more god stuff happening here if this was some sort of easy cheat.”
“Yeah, probably, but look, this beats any of the plans you were all talking about out there, and going underground means that we don’t have to worry about the dawn at all!” Carric said, meanwhile humming victory in his head.
“Yeah,” said Tracy, nodding. “I say we do it. Just take this tunnel and see where it goes and what it nets us.”
“Sounds like a plan,” both Svein and Yenrab said, then paused, looking at each other and breaking into wild grins.
“Someone really is on our side,” said Bern with enthusiasm. “Maybe this destiny stuff isn’t gonna be half bad.”
Carric thought about the sentence in his head. Even with this advantage, they were in for a lot of grief if the ballads were at all worth their salt.
This is just the beginning, the half-elven bard thought, though he kept a jovial and hopeful face. Perhaps we will all burn forever. Jerold Frey, save us all.
***
“All clear,” Bern Sandros sounded. The stump had been a pretty easy clear, all things considered. By looking like a stump and feeling like a stump, it didn’t really have many avenues in which it could be deadly. Where can one put traps in a thing like this? He could think of just a few, and his search for them showed nothing.
“Alright,” Yenrab said, his massive frame a tight fit for the stump. “I’m thinking I should go first so you can all push me through if I get stuck.”
Bern considered it. It wasn’t a bad plan. But he decided against it.
“Yenrab, you old jelly belly,” he jibed, marking back to the words of Tamara the ranger. “I have to go first. I have to check it all out for traps. And, besides, I can pull you just as well as I can jump on your fat head, mate.”
“Yeah,” Carric said with thought. “That really is how this needs to be. We need to be careful.”
Svein looked at Bern and said, “Hey, man. If there are any undead down there, just do me a favor and kill them.”
Bern smiled. “Yeah, man, if they are there, I’ll break their bones. We owe you at least one if not several.”
Svein didn’t quite know what the word meant here, but he felt he didn’t need to. He grinned and saluted the assassin.
“Alright, man, hop on in,” Yenrab spoke, stepping a bit to the side. Bern took a deep breath, and then he jumped on through the hole.
***
It was dark inside, so of course the human moved a bit beyond the entrance and then struck a torch. The oil rag caught the sparks of his flint and steel quite easily, blazing up and showing a long and narrow passageway.
“Yeah, guys, come on in,” he spoke as he surveyed the place this way and that. It certainly didn’t seem to have anything out of the ordinary, though the way the flame’s flickers made the tunnels dance this way and that certainly didn’t help him out any.
Yenrab jumped, plopped, grunted, and squeezed his way through. It turned out he didn’t need any help at all. Bern was happy for that as he thought about the many ways tugging on the overgrown teenager could have ended badly for him.
The barbarian stood at the hole and caught the rest of them as each took the plunge, one by one, into their new adventure.
“Well, the tunnel is going the right way,” Svein noted, winking at Carric. “A well-found treasure, bard. Be proud of it.”
Carric smiled back at him.
“I can see spots where I’m gonna have to look closely, but I think this might well be the easy way!” Bern exclaimed. “Even if there are traps here, I can’t imagine this passage having anything difficult to find and disable. Yeah, Carric, well done, mate!”
The rogue took the lead through the flickering passage, cautioning the party to stop again and again as he checked this nook and that, ensuring a safe passage to wherever they were off to.
“I think our luck is about to change,” the rest of the party remembered Bern saying.
And, indeed, it seemed to have done just that. Sometimes the gap between divination and determination is long and filled with hardship, but when it finally comes to being, the rot between makes it just that much sweeter.
“I still can’t believe that you beat me to finding that door. You know, given the chance, I would have found it.” Bern was in a bit of a state.
“I’m sure,” said Carric. “No worries, my friend. I plan to write you in as the one who found it anyways when I retire back to home and write my ballads.”
Bern paused and thought.
“No, mate. A win is a win. You put yourself into this ballad, and you make them all know full well who found that door. I’d rather have my song sung truthfully than have myself have to remember lies. Just don’t tell them all about . . .”
“I won’t, friend Bern. I won’t.”
***
The tunnel was quite long, dank, and dirty. It wasn’t well-made in an aesthetic sense, but it certainly had been well shored up. No one there questioned the structural integrity therein. It looked like a home project done by a friend where you want to criticize, but you can’t because, despite the horror in display, it is absolutely functional. And so it was with the tunnel.
And, considering the length of it, the thing was quite impressive overall. By standard reckoning, it ran the entire distance from that final copse of trees to exactly where they needed to go.
“Ya know, I don’t think this was part of the original building plan,” Yenrab posited as they continued.
“Yeah, mate, for sure. I mean, look at this all. It makes no sense for a light tower to have a big, long tunnel running out from it. What would they be running from?” Bern reasoned.
Carric chuckled. “Leviathans? Dragon turtles? Scrags? A tsunami? I think there are plenty of reasons for this tunnel to have been included.”
The bard stopped himself short, though, and made sure to add, “But, yeah, this wasn’t part of the original plan. I guarantee it.”
“You shouldn’t guarantee something you didn’t build yourself, Carric,” Tracy warned, her voice solid with reprimand. “The Grand Sorcan told me that in this world outside of Freemeet we have to be sure of what we are signing for.”
Svein harrumphed, a sound the rest weren’t really used to hearing. “For sure, that is good advice. A signature without a good read can end dynasties.”
They all thought on that as they continued forward.
***
At the end of that deep, dark tunnel stood an ugly yet sturdy door of homemade construction. All five of them had had a good chance to think and prepare for the coming encounters, and so they were both cautious and a bit wary. Bern checked over the door, top to bottom, while the rest waited in trepidation.
“Trap-free, guys. Not a problem in sight,” he whispered to them.
“Thank the gods for that,” Svein whispered back in fevered vehemence.
“Yeah, mate, we’ve got at least one rooting for us, huh?” The assassin grinned. “All shush a minute, bros, and let me give this room a listen.”
He put his ear to the door and listened with an intent and concentrated look upon his face. The man waited a full minute and changed positioning three times before he was fully confident.
“Svein, we’re gonna have to cap those torches,” Bern Sandros observed, and then he paused in thought. “But there might be light inside. And if there isn’t, well, just stay close, and we’ll figure it out. Bro, when we have money enough, I’ve got to get myself a cat’s eye lantern!”
His fellow human mumbled in agreement but had no idea what it was. It certainly did sound useful though.
The rogue took care with opening the door, despite his confidence in its trapless state. He wanted to avoid making any of the creaks or quakes inherent to such situations. He did this flawlessly and with joy, for inside the room was indeed a dim lantern, its inner candle burning slowly and casting light off of a mirrored back to shower over the entirety of the room.
“Come on in, friends, and let’s make ourselves at home.” He ushered them with a flourish. It had been a professional job despite how unnecessary it all may have proven to have been.
***
“Is this really a bedroom?” asked Carric with disgust as they picked through the place. He kept his voice low, for there was no telling who was where, doing what, in this vile place.
The room they had entered looked like a bedroom, but one of some absolute slob to whom cleanliness was not a virtue. Over there was a mattress, sunken, filthy, and infested with this sort of vermin or that. A large chest, of good and professional make, sat in a corner among scattered and broken bits of pottery and other junk. It was streaked here and there with the aged reddish-brown bits of bloody handprints. A dull but complex lock held it closed at its lip.
The rest of the room was filled with death. The bones and rotted, uncooked flesh of both animals and humanoids littered the place with a reek that the surprisingly airtight door that led here had blocked out. It was sulfurous.
How to Be an Adventurer- World of Gimmok Page 23