Rescue

by R. A. Mejia

  Poor Race, who never even struck a blow during the fight, looks downright ashamed as he walks over to us. “I’m sorry that I did not help you fight. I am in your debt for saving me.”

  I almost tell the man that he doesn’t need to worry about it, but Sonya speaks first. “Yes, you should be ashamed.” I’m surprised by her sharp words, but her hand snakes out and grabs the man’s shoulder. “But we all must face fear on the battlefield. Learn from this. Do not let fear keep you from doing your duty again.”

  Race nods at the rebuke, but his shoulders straighten in determination not to let fear guide his actions again.

  By the time I’ve finished healing up Sonya, Ammit’s body has disappeared in a flash of light. Race goes to recover the loot and comes back with a large, red gem in the shape of a heart.

  Heart of Ammit

  A precious gem that represents the power and majesty of Ammit - Eater of Hearts.

  Durability 30/30

  Race hands the gem over to me, and after exchanging a few words with Sonya, we decide that I’ll hold on to the gem for now. We can sell it in the next city we come to and split the money we get.

  The sound of stone grinding against stone catches our attention, and a doorway appears in the wall across from us. It leads to another room, and the three of us cautiously walk through. Again, once we’re past the threshold, the doorway disappears, and the three of us tensely prepare for another monster to appear. Instead, the voice returns. Race listens intently and translates, “Ka, the life force.”

  The light becomes brighter, revealing a coffin in the middle of the room. There are detailed drawings of funerals and various people participating in events with a variety of fantastic creatures all along the walls, and there are tables covered with a wide variety of items. Weapons, armor, gold, and jewels are among the most expensive objects, but there are also more mundane items like cups, plates, musical instruments, and tablets with writing on them. The whole scene looks like a pawn shop exploded, and the contents ended up here.

  While I’m intrigued by the sheer amount of loot on the tables, it doesn’t feel like we’re being given a prize. I approach the coffin, look inside, and find the preserved remains of a man. His body is wrapped in layers of cloth, and there’s the faint smell of some herb. For all intents and purposes, he looks like a mummy.

  “I don’t get it. Are we supposed to kill the guy in the coffin?” I ask, confused.

  Sonya, sword and shield in hand, approaches the coffin from the other side. “I don’t think it’s going to get up. Even if it did, the wrappings would hamper its movement.”

  Race quickly runs up to her side and puts a hand on her sword arm, lowering the weapon. “No, do not attack the dead. It is not the purpose of this place.”

  Sonya and I look at each other, surprised that Race knows what is going on. I ask him, “So, what are we supposed to do?”

  He looks embarrassed by the attention but responds, “Well, I’m not sure, but this reminds me of the ceremonies the tribes have when someone dies. We prepare the body in special herbs and oils and then wrap it up in cloth. We burn the body with the person’s possessions and things we think they will like in the afterlife.” He gestures to the items on the table. “I think we have to decide which items to place in the coffin.”

  “So, it’s like a test?”

  He nods slowly. “Yes, I think we are being tested.”

  Sonya asks, “What happens if we fail?”

  Race shrugs, clearly not sure of the consequences of either success or failure.

  “Well, if we’re going to get out of here, we’ll just have to do our best to pass then,” I say.

  I walk to the tables to examine all our options before we make any choices. I ask Race, “Uh . . . what kinds of things do you normally put in with your dead?”

  Race confidently starts to pick up items. “Oh, most of it is simple: some personal items the person loved or just some food to nourish them on their journey.” He picks up the plate, cups, a leather bag, and places them in the coffin. I look around the tables and see a colorful piece of fruit and pick it up. It turns out to be wooden fruit that has been painted, and Race nods at my choice, so I place the item in the box. We ignore the jewels and armor since Race points out that the body is in a very plain coffin, and any noble or warrior would have something much fancier. The three of us place in every item we think the man would need, and when Race places the last one, the coffin begins to glow. It seems to catch fire, and the three of us step back, not wanting to be near the blue flames coming off the coffin. A ghostly blue figure rises from the flames with a backpack on his back full of the items we placed in the coffin. He eats a piece of fruit, nods to us, and walks off, disappearing when he passes through a wall. Then, with a groan, the wall opens up, and the three of us quickly walk through, not wanting to be near the still-burning body.

  The room closes, and we’re faced with our next challenge, which turns out to be a picture puzzle. Race tells us this room is called Ba. He pronounces it like the sound a sheep makes. The three of us slide fragments of a painting around on tracks in the wall until a picture of a human-headed bird creature forms.

  Once it’s finished, a new door appears, and we walk into the next room and see two statues next to two open pathways. The statue on the left is of a tall and thin human dressed in a short sleeved tunic. He’s holding a stone plate with stone fruit on it. The statue on the right is of a short and chubby man with a pot belly. He has beady little eyes and a pinched nose. As we approach, each comes to life and tries to tell us which path is the correct one while calling the other a conniving liar. I’m reminded of that scene from Labyrinth with the two door knockers.

  Not knowing who to trust, we pick one at random and end up in a room lit by braziers attached to the walls. When the last of us enters the room, the entryway is closed off by a large stone slab. We turn at the sound, but the lights go out. A multitude of small scratching sounds comes from all around us.

  Sonya activates her necklace with the light spell and the room takes on a low glow. I activate [Dark Vision] and almost wish I hadn’t. Swarms of bone-thin skeletal rats are pouring from openings in the walls. Sonya’s light doesn’t provide enough illumination to see more than three to four feet in front of her, but she knows something is coming and has her sword out. Race stands behind Sonya, his eyes peering fearfully into the shadows of the room.

  Before I can warn either of them, the swarm acts as one and charges. What seems like hundreds of undead rodents scurry across the stone floor towards us. The instant the first rats come into the pool of light, Sonya activates [Taunt], and the swarm makes a beeline for her. Sonya slashes with her blade, cutting three and four of the creatures in half with each movement, but the foul-smelling rodents are so numerous that the losses are barely noticed. Instead, the creatures start to crawl up her legs, and soon, she’s almost completely covered with them.

  Race and I panic at the sight and begin grabbing handfuls of the undead rats to pull them off her. The creatures bite us for one or two points of damage as we grab them, but Sonya yells, “Don’t worry about me! I’m not getting hurt. Focus on destroying as many as you can while my taunt still holds their attention.”

  A quick look at her health bar confirms that she’s right: her superior armor is preventing the rats from actually harming her. I take a moment to spellwrite the arcane symbols for my knuckle busters and see the stone from the floor gather around my fists. Then Race and I stomp, punch, and destroy as many skeletal rodents as we can. We clear enough to free Sonya’s sword arm, and between the three of us, we decimate the swarm of undead rats.

  You’ve helped kill an Undead Rat Swarm lvl 6. You receive 45 XP.

  Sonya picks a few rat bones from her hair and throws them on the ground with the rest of the skeletons. I unconsciously shiver at the thought of those creatures crawling all over me and getting into my hair. The hallway out of the room unseals, and we all gladly leave the room.

&nbs
p; After backtracking, we find the two statues chatting genially about how nice it is to have visitors again, but when they see us, they resume their obviously-forced rivalry. We take the other pathway into the next room, a test with piles of incomplete metallic parts. Race says the voice describes it as Akh, but he doesn’t know what the word means. It takes us hours of random testing to figure out that we have to combine the parts to form something. In the end, we put enough pieces together to see that it’s supposed to form the shape of a man. From there, it’s just time and digging through the piles of parts.

  The room after is called Sahu and Sechem, and it’s my favorite one. It’s a room filled with cushions, with a table of food and drink in the center. I’ve never seen most of the dishes presented, but they smell wonderful. Combinations of some kind of cooked bird with vegetables, rice, and colorful sauces. The drinks are some kind of rice wine by the smell. Unsure if the food is poisoned, Race volunteers to test it out since I have magic that can hopefully cure him. He’s okay, and we all dig in, thankful that we have some good grub. It feels like we’ve been down here for at least a day running through all these tunnels, fighting, and solving puzzles. So, after eating and drinking, it’s understandable why we all feel pretty tired and decide to sleep for a while. We’re talking about who’s going to take the first watch when my head starts to get fuzzy, and I feel myself flopping over asleep on the cushions on the floor.

  I’m having a wonderful dream about Sonya and I getting pizza from this great place I used to go to around the corner from where I lived on Earth. It was this great New York style pizza place with the greasiest and most delicious pizza I’ve ever had, and having Sonya there with me in the dream makes it that much better. The only downside to the dream is the blue ghost creature screaming at me. I try to ignore it and enjoy the pizza, but it’s impossible. When I finally turn to look at it, I see that it looks like Krillin from Dragon Ball Z. He’s trying to tell me something, but I can’t understand what he’s saying, and his bald, blue head is just so distracting. Ghost Krillin finally starts to pantomime sleeping and then waking. He’s moving things around on the floor and then lifting something heavy to reveal . . . Well, I’m not sure what he’s revealing, but he seems really determined that I do it. He repeats his actions two times just to emphasize what he wants me to do. I nod in the dream, assuring my friend Krillin that I’ll do it, and then I pat him on his bald head. Why? ‘Cause I’ve always wanted to, and it’s a dream, after all. He doesn’t appreciate it and creates a spinning Destructo Disc that he throws at me. It’s just about to cut me in half when I wake up.

  I scratch my own bald head and realize that dream me still had hair. Oh well. Looking around the room, I see that Sonya and Race are both asleep, tossing and turning as if having a bad dream. I shake Sonya, and she wakes up.

  “I had the oddest dream. My father was forcing me to dig a tunnel underground so that the two of us could escape an evil warlord. But my dad was blue and see-through for some reason.”

  I recount my own strange dream, also with a blue ghost. We wake Race and find he has a similar dream with a blue entity trying to tell him something. Only, he completely ignored it and enjoyed his harem dream.

  “It can’t be a coincidence that we all had a dream about digging. Why don’t we look around the room to see what we can find?”

  The two agree, and we all move the mounds of pillows until we get to the solid rock floor. It takes us a bit longer to find the stone block and the pickaxes, though. I suggest that we work to move the block so that we can see where it leads since there aren’t any ways out of this room. I’m able to use spellwriting to soften up the solid stone block using ‘remove’ ‘earth,’ but it still takes a lot of hard work to chip away at it and remove it from the floor. But, once we do, we find a square tunnel leading into the dark. Not having much else to do, we follow the tunnel until it leads up some stairs and into another room.

  Once we leave the tunnel, it closes up after us. The voice we’ve been hearing says something, but this time, we don’t need Race to translate. The voice says clearly, “Ab, final judgment.”

  Chapter 21

  Finally, we see the creature behind all these tests. In the center of the massive room is a dais with a creature sitting on a golden throne. It shines with an inner light that illuminates the entire area. The being that sits upon it is thin, almost emaciated, and wears heavily-embroidered robes that seem to weigh the poor being down. It is wearing a golden crown with wings, and just above that, there is an engraving of a golden sun, giving the creature a golden halo. The strange entity has the pink face of a hairless cat but the body of a man.

  As we examine it, the creature examines us. Its slitted cat eyes seem to almost peer through us as its clawed hands tap on the arms of its throne. “Welcome, worshipers. Long has it been since the last envoy has passed through these halls. It took time for my magic to let me learn your language, but still I welcome you.”

  Looking up at the cat creature, I ask, “Who are you?”

  The creature hisses, and its claws dig gouges into the armrests of the throne. “How dare you? Do you not recognize your god, Ranut, Lord of Sun and Sky?”

  I hear Race gulp and turn to see his eyes wide and his skin ashen. “What’s wrong, Race?”

  With a noticeable quiver in his voice, he answers, “Ranut is an ancient god from the myths of the desert people. Stories of his fury are told to children to frighten them into obedience. They say ‘Ranut will come to eat your heart if you are not good.’ If this is truly the Lord of Sun and Sky, then we are doomed.”

  The creature on the throne purrs in pleasure. “At least one of you shows proper respect.” Ranut steeples his fingers and continues, “Now, shall we continue with the last part of the ritual of judgment?”

  Sonya’s left hand falls on the hilt of her sword as she asks, “What ritual of judgment?”

  Ranut tilts his head while studying her. “Why, the one you’ve been going through since you came into my temple. At my altar, you passed the test of greed, which divides the truly devoted from those that only care for monetary gain. Then, you passed through each of the rooms which tested you on the aspects of the body and soul. Had you failed at any of those trials, my temple would have devoured your unworthy spirit, and I would have used the energy to grow stronger. But you passed, so you may now stand before me and ask for a boon. Should I judge you worthy, you shall receive it. Should you not be found worthy, you’ll be killed, and I will devour your spirit.”

  Sonya looks like she’s puzzling something out while she listens to Ranut speak. When he’s done, a look of disgust comes over her. “A series of tests and battles? Devour our spirit to grow stronger? You’re nothing but a dungeon in disguise!” She turns to me, equipping her shield and sword. “I’ve heard of tribes in the far north worshiping dungeons as gods. There are even old stories about benevolent dungeons giving gifts to those that sacrifice to them. But, no matter the story, it’s always the same: dungeon levels with traps and monsters where the experience points of the fallen are used to increase the dungeon’s power.”

  An angry growl brings my attention back to Ranut. He’s no longer sitting, but is now standing in front of his throne and looking down on us. When he speaks, his voice is filled with fury. “Do not compare me with those foolish dungeon entities! For a thousand years, I was the most powerful being for leagues. Through my power and will, I turned a group of roaming camel herders into a nation. I gave them every resource that they needed to create the city above: food, water, stone, weapons, and even magic.”

  Sonya points her blade at Ranut. “And all you asked for were their lives, right?”

  “Sacrifices! I feed and grow off the souls of others. After all that I gave them, it was only right for them to sacrifice. I provided them with everything they needed. Everything!” With slow deliberation, Ranut brings his voice under control before continuing, “And now, you three shall either become my new worshipers or become my next meal. Jud
gment comes.”

  Before any of us can speak or move, Ranut’s eyes light up, and a beam of energy envelops us all.

  The world disappears around me, and I’m watching my whole life play out in front of me. Every moment of my existence flashes by, like I’m watching a documentary about my life on fast forward. I’m an embryo growing in my mother’s womb. I’m being born, and I see my beautiful mother again. There is so much love in her eyes for me, and I reach out to try to touch her, but the images move forward again. I’m a baby crawling towards my kneeling father. I’m wobbling around the apartment trying to walk. My dad takes me to my first day of kindergarten. I’m learning my ABCs. I’m sitting in the back seat of our car when something crashes into us. I wake up in pain, calling for my mother. I feel the tears flow down my cheeks and my heart breaks all over again as I watch the nurse tell me that my parents are dead, and I know my life will never be the same. Then the memories shift again, and I move from home to home, shuffled around like an unwanted pet. Some are good; others, not so much. I learn to take care of myself. I learn to adapt and make the most out of each school I’m sent to. Then I’m here on Terra, and the months of violence and struggle play out in front of me.