Collecting The Goddess (Chronicles Of KieraFreya Book 1)

by Michael Anderle

  Sure, Chloe thought. Just don’t ask what he thinks about you.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chloe poked her head around the hut. Torches cast ghostly glows, making the shadows of the tribespeople dance and sway.

  There were a lot more of them now. Mantari’s figure was a foot taller than the rest of them as small groups of two and three reported back and were sent on their way again. Chloe couldn’t help but feel a small note of hurt at how hard they were looking for her. What did they plan to do if they found her again?

  When they find you again, KieraFreya offered.

  For they surely would. This plan was ludicrous.

  Chloe felt the presence of the shaman around them but could no longer see any sign of the strange man or the wisp. The bright white orb would have brought way too much attention to them, so Chloe had somehow agreed that the shaman would be tucked away in her satchel.

  Another bug to report, Chloe had mused, looking at the disruption and distortion of cells and blocks as the space that held the wisp displayed a series of lines of error code that ran into the blocks around it. She wondered at that point if she would be able to pull the wisp back out, or if it was now imprisoned in unhealthy lines of zeroes and ones until someone had the wherewithal to fix it.

  Chloe crept forward, going as far as she dared toward the bundle of bodies in the center of town. Behind them, Chloe could see a strange collection of sacks and bags piled high. A little closer and she saw the respawn point, stars etched into the ground. Her target. Their mark.

  The growl of some creature rang in the distance, and several of the tribespeople drew their weapons and disappeared. Mantari clucked instructions to others, who headed in the opposite direction.

  Now was her chance.

  Moving swiftly, Chloe hopped across the shadows and moved toward a closer building. Another round of maneuvers and she was within sprinting distance. Just there, behind Mantari’s back.

  Chloe took a series of steadying breaths, remembering the shaman’s plan.

  Okay, here we go…

  Chloe tore open her satchel and the wisp launched out. Like a whirlwind, the orb whipped in a wide circle around the respawn point, snatching the light from the torches and plunging the townspeople into darkness.

  Taking advantage of the cover, Chloe charged over to the respawn point, crouching. She heard cries of alarm as figures rushed into the clearing. Mantari’s silhouetted figure whirled about, following the blazing trail of white light.

  “Now!” Chloe shouted, and the wisp tore back toward her and embedded itself in the ground. The light was bright beneath her, and Mantari’s face melted from anger to fear to disbelief.

  “Chloe? You have returned?”

  He sounded almost...happy. Relieved, even. Chloe hadn’t been sure of what to expect when she made her presence known, but she should have believed that Mantari would be pleased. His smile lit up his face, if only for a second, before it clouded with worry.

  “Chloe? What is happening to you?”

  The star shone in bright whites and blues, pulsing in light that looked like flames. Chloe felt herself being pulled out of this reality, although now that she had seen Mantari and the others, she wanted a moment to explain herself. To clear up what was happening.

  “I wasn’t sure I was welcome anymore,” Chloe shouted as the flames began to take her. “You sent us on our way. Told us we were taking your resources.”

  Mantari laughed, head shaking. “You are more than welcome whenever you like, Blessed Chloe. Just, your fat little friend can no longer eat us out of house and home.”

  Tears pricked Chloe’s cheeks as the heat of the flames lifted. The wisp began to chant unspeakable words into the dirt. She could even hear KieraFreya grimacing from the power of it all.

  Mantari reached forward.

  “No!” Chloe shouted. “This is what I want. This is the way I have to go.”

  “To go where?”

  Chloe thought about that, struggling to arrange her thoughts as the pressure built. “Nowhere. Home. It’s one and the same. You can call off your men now. We’ll be gone soon.”

  “Call off my… We were hunting, Chloe,” Mantari said, the grin returning to his face. “There are beasts in the wood that are scarier than you.”

  “You haven’t seen me when I’m angry.” Chloe winked.

  And then it happened. The chanting voice reached a crescendo, the voice seeming to be a thousand-person choir. The flames erupted into a series of mystic flames of red, blue, purple, black, and green. Chloe watched as the village of Oakston was ripped away from beneath her feet, Mantari’s face melting into nothing. What Chloe had mistaken as a pile of sacks and bags blinked at her with shining eyes, and Chloe realized then that Mukkah had somehow known all along and had lent her power to the shaman for safe passage. The blubbery woman’s face showed the faintest trace of a smile in the etheric glow of the flames.

  Chloe felt the blaze wash over her. Felt her skin prickle but not burn. Her hair whipped around her as she gritted her teeth, holding onto what remained of the earth for dear life. Wishing and hoping that everything would come back to her, and she wouldn’t have to feel the searing pain of death as she—

  Chloe grunted as the floor began firm once more. The flames vanished. The roaring sound of magic died.

  She panted as she pulled herself up from the floor. “Well, that was intense. You could’ve warned me.”

  “Would you have gone through with it if I had?” the wisp asked, adopting the form of the shaman once more.

  KieraFreya scoffed. “I don’t see what the problem was. A little fire never hurt anybody. You should have heard yourself: Arrrgh! Ohhhh! Noooo! Help me! I’m a poor defenseless girl who can’t stand the heat!”

  “I did not say that,” Chloe growled, crossing her arms.

  “You might as well have.”

  Chloe huffed, choosing to ignore KieraFreya, and for the first time trying to work out exactly where they were.

  They were standing in what appeared to be a room carved out of gray rock. For a second, Chloe panicked, expecting to see the Seat of the World in the center and tumbled rocks on either side.

  Instead, what she saw was walls lined along their length with decaying bookcases. Dusty, crumbling tomes sat at odd angles on the shelves, gently frosted in cobwebs. There were work benches with strange empty vials and flasks, and in the center of the room was the star-shaped symbol of a respawn point, which now glowed a faint white.

  “You can choose to bind yourself to this space if you wish,” the shaman explained. “Bind points are sigils loaded with magic that cause the blessed to automatically resurrect to whichever point they’ve chosen. As I understand it, your current bind point is set at Oakston since that was the first location you discovered which housed safety and citizens. Now that you have one set, you can select any number of others when you find them, though be warned, there is no way to re-select a deselected respawn point unless you’re within physical distance of the mark.”

  “But the travel point at the shrine told me I could fast-travel to them at any time. You’re saying I can’t do that here?”

  KieraFreya sighed, clearly tired of having to explain things to Chloe. “Respawn points and fast-travel points are completely different. One is a forced resurrection space, but the other you can use whenever you like.”

  “Aw, man,” Chloe moaned. “It would be more useful if they both acted the same.”

  The shaman nodded, wiping a finger over the dusty bench and leaving a trail behind him. “Indeed, it would. Fast-travel is a gift granted only by the gods. One must make the sacrifice and be blessed in travel in order to use the functionality.”

  Chloe glared at KieraFreya, remembering that she had almost considered chopping her hand off, thanks to her.

  Chloe shook her head. “So where are we now?”

  It was a rhetorical question, really. Chloe pulled up her map, spotting her icon in her field of vision with a lit
tle legend that read Kingsholme Cave.

  “Great. Another cave. Just what we needed,” KieraFreya complained. “Give it a few minutes, and we’ll be swimming in skellies again. Hey, Chloe! You remember that, right? When you chose to commit suicide instead of running to safety. I would take it personally, thinking that you’re coming up with any excuse to get away from me. But, y’know, you keep coming back, so I guess I can’t be all that bad.”

  “I don’t think we’ll have to worry about skellies this time,” Chloe said, pointing toward an open door where the piles of skeleton bones were laid. She looked back at the shaman with questioning eyes.

  The shaman nodded back, enough confirmation for Chloe to run off ahead.

  “Hey! Slow down! You don’t know what dangers are ahead,” KieraFreya yowled. “Do you know how boring it is waiting for your ass to respawn while I’m just hovering somewhere in the etheric? Ridiculously boring! And then you just come back as if nothing ever happened…”

  KieraFreya’s words were drowned out as Chloe ran, fueled by excitement. Guided by the series of torches that were lit along the tunnel wall and mildly aware of the wisp now floating at speed behind her, adding his own light, she turned down tunnels, narrowly avoiding slipping on rocks, and followed the trail of the dead until she reached a large stone door that was standing slightly ajar.

  “What’s gotten into you?” KieraFreya asked, somehow sounding out of breath herself.

  Chloe squeezed through the gap in the door and found herself in a large chamber. A set of stairs ran along the far wall leading to an overwatch that skirted around the entire room. There were crypts all around that had been smashed open, and skeletons littered the floor.

  Chloe continued on ahead, smiling as she saw the scorch marks on the wall—blackened stars of ash from recent fireballs. They were in the right place.

  At the top of the stairs, they turned back on themselves, and she found a door on the upper levels with black carvings on its front. Chloe entered through into a secondary chamber, this one with glowing green fungus lining the walls. Great mushrooms added a sickly glow. In the center of this larger room was a large treasure chest, its top already open and the contents looted. But that wasn’t what Chloe was staring at.

  “They really did it,” she murmured, marveling at the rotting corpse of what she presumed was the skeleton overlord. The skeleton wore a dark, thin helmet, and sported a set of rudimentary armor that the others must have deemed not worth looting. Chloe moved closer, noticing a dent in the center of the skeleton’s chest where someone had sat at some point.

  Me and the guys found the sickest dungeon. We managed to take down a small army of skeletons between us and got massive gains from it. Right now we’re taking a quick break in the main chamber. I’m sitting on the skeleton overlord! Lol.

  The message returned unbidden to her memory. The words had come from Gideon a short while ago. She wondered if he had already received her message, or if it had reached him during one of his log-off times. If it had reached him, surely he would be here, waiting for her in this room.

  Unless his friends didn’t want to retrace their steps on account of some girl who thought she was better off doing her own thing.

  Chloe shook her head, not quite sure if that had been her thoughts or KieraFreya’s.

  “Well, they’re not here.” She sighed, nudging the skeleton with her toes. “Looks like they did a heck of a job clearing out this dungeon, though.”

  There was a small flash of light as the wisp returned to shaman form. “And what makes you think this dungeon has been cleared?”

  “Erm, maybe the surrounding piles of bones and the big boss man that’s currently at our feet?”

  The shaman laughed, although there was no humor in there. “This overlord is but one checkpoint on the journey to dungeon completion. Your conversations with your friend are where your knowledge draws its line. Expect the unexpected and prepare for battle. There is more to come.”

  Chloe sighed deeply, starting once again for the door ahead. She nudged the heavy door open a tad further, spotting more torches lighting the darkened corridor.

  Man, why is it that everyone can read my mind? Where the hell is the privacy anymore?

  You want privacy, you’ll have to pay for the Pro Membership, KieraFreya teased.

  Do you even know what that means?

  Nope, but it sounded funny to me.

  Chloe tried her best to empty her head and set off into the dark.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Y’know, I thought it would be a lot more glamorous than this,” Chloe whined, the slime from the rock walls coating her skin as she squeezed through a crevice.

  They had been walking for what felt like hours in silence and now Chloe had thrown away all pretense, her mind going back to lazy afternoons cuddling with Blake on the sofa while the ignorant pig focused more on his in-game character than showing any kind of affection.

  “What do you mean?” KieraFreya retorted. “What’s not glamorous about this? You’re practically glowing. Who knew the secret to beauty was sweat, rock slime, and not bathing in over a week?”

  Chloe sniffed her pits and instantly recoiled. Damn, she had a point. Where the hell do you bathe in a place like this?

  “When Blake played, he spent time in towns and cities around normal folk. Where’s the civility here? Where’s the domesticity? So far all I’ve managed to do is hop from forest to bog to mountain. I’ve fought enemies. I’ve died, and I’ve learned spells, but really all I want is a nice warm bath and to sit in a tavern for a few hours with a—” beep ”—cosmo.”

  “What’s a cosmo?” KieraFreya asked.

  Chloe sighed, explaining the delectable sweetness of the cosmo and the effects the alcohol had on her body.

  “Sounds like a good way to hide your problems,” KieraFreya said when Chloe had finished. Behind them, the wisp floated along like a buoy over waves. “Numbing yourself and erasing all memories of the night before.”

  Chloe eyed her bracers suspiciously. “Did the doc put you up to this?”

  “Seriously, who’s the doc?” KieraFreya replied. “Why do you keep assuming I know things from your world? Moreover, why do you assume I care?”

  They approached another steady downslope in the tunnel. This time the path wound into unknown territory. Chloe gripped the walls, learning from her previous mistake in which she had run a little too eagerly, letting gravity speed her journey, only to find that a steady drip of water filtering through the rock had made the floor slippery.

  Chloe had smacked down on her backside, grimacing from the pain and taking a second to recover as she slid and whirled a few feet down the slope without effort. The rock was freezing on her backside.

  KieraFreya had laughed.

  The shaman had not.

  “But seriously,” Chloe continued, ignoring KieraFreya as she worked her way down, passing the body of another large rat lying limply on the floor. “There’s got to be more to this game than dungeon-hopping and chasing our tail. Tell me, Wispy-boy. You must know of the cities?”

  The shaman’s voice appeared in her head. I know of the cities, but I have never been to one. I’ve lived my life with the Oakston people, and the limit of my adventures was the woods and dark places that bordered our lands.

  “Damn. What about you, KF? Surely you must have some knowledge of the cities, having watched them for years from way up in your ivory tower in the clouds?”

  “Okay, first of all, ‘KF?’”

  Chloe shrugged. “I’m just trying it out. KieraFreya...well, it’s just a bit of a mouthful, y’know?”

  “It’s my name.”

  “So?”

  “It’s a goddess’ name.”

  “And? People give nicknames to gods all the time in my world. Jesus, for example. I’ve heard all kinds of people switch his name up. ‘The Son,’ ‘Christ,’ ‘JC,’ ‘J-bomb.’ You always give nicknames to the people you love.”

  Chloe deli
berately chose not to look at her bracers in case KieraFreya spotted the fib in her eyes. Who was she to know that Chloe was telling a little white lie?

  “You’re saying you love me?” KieraFreya repeated, disgust clear in her voice.

  Chloe bit her lip. “I mean, I guess so. As much as anyone can love someone they’re stuck with in a realm they’ve been thrown into. You are one of my closest friends both literally and figuratively, and we have already been through some shit. So, yeah, I guess on some level I do love you.”

  Chloe felt her bracers shudder on her wrists.

  “Hey!”

  “Secondly,” KieraFreya retorted before Chloe could continue speaking, “what makes you think I had nothing better to do than watch the people in Obsidian go about their daily lives? Sure, I’d take a peek from time-to-time, but there’s just as much drama with the gods as there is with lowly folk. You think you’ve seen drama down here? Wait until you see what the gods have to offer. They may keep themselves hidden and out of arm’s reach, but it’s like a whole ’nother level of theatrics up there.”

  They finally reached the bottom of the spiral. Chloe opened her mouth to reply to KieraFreya but stopped when she saw the blood splatters glistening on the golden doors that lay ahead.

  In the center of the doors was a large lock in the shape of a flame. Chloe was impressed to see that a decorative object of the same shape was already embedded in the door, a key the others must have found on their travels to allow them safe passage.

  Chloe placed her ear to the door. She could hear people talking on the other side, muted words through the rock. Her heart skipped a beat.

  With a smile, Chloe winked at the wisp and shoved the door wide open.

  “Don’t worry, boys. The party is here! Err…”

  Chloe cut her words short, her breath catching as she saw the monstrous creature lying in the center of the room.

  The troll was enormous. Even lying on its back, it was double Chloe’s height. In its boulder-sized head was a cavernous mouth, with two tusks set into its lower jaw. There was a club lying just out of its reach that was the size of a small tree.