“So our job will be to try to convince everyone to choose the harder option,” Tamsin said.
“Possibly,” Jack said. “The man I met in the forest said that the people here are more real than we’d expect, so I don’t think you’re wrong to worry about this. But these sort of games also have a way of course correcting. It might be possible these trogs exist solely to force us into action. It may just be a roving pack of cannibalistic monsters and all this moral quandary stuff won’t matter.”
“But if we find baby trogs?”
“I will not kill baby anything, Tam,” Jack said. “I got your back.”
“Now who’s the soft touch?” Tamsin said.
“You’ve known me forever,” he said. “I’m a closet pacifist at heart.”
“And yet here you are, armed to the teeth and hunting monsters.”
“Everyone needs an outlet,” Jack said.
Tamsin smirked at him and headed off down the tunnel to join the others. Jack looked down to see Silence the wolf staring up at him. Despite being incapable of human expression, Jack sensed a hint of humor in the wolf’s eyes.
“What,” Jack said.
The wolf made a soft barking noise, more of a huff than a woof, and trotted after Tamsin.
“Great,” Jack said. “My fictional wolf makes fun of me.”
Chapter 10: The fungus has eyes
The group spread out a little bit, Ingo and Eriko in the lead, Morgan hanging back a bit, Jack and Tamsin bringing up the rear. Tobias, seeing an opportunity, tapped Cordelia on the shoulder.
“So, when this is all over, are you doing to push Ingo into a bottomless pit or anything?” he said in a stage whisper.
“What?” Cordelia said. She looked genuinely baffled.
“He’s being a total bigoted jackass to you because you’re an orc,” Tobias said. “I want to push him off a cliff. Or, I mean, give him a stern talking-to about it.”
“Toby, you think I’m not used to that low-level bullshit aggression from old guys like him?” Cordelia said, truly breaking character from her warrior persona for the first time in a long time. “Hell, back home I have people yell at me to go back to Mexico. My parents are from Queens. My grandmother was born an American citizen in Puerto Rico. I’ve been hearing stupid shit like that my whole life.”
“But it doesn’t bother you?”
“Of course it bothers me, because it reminds me of what happens in the real world, but… I mean look, I know you have your own issues with bigots, Tobias.”
“Not like you,” Tobias said. “People just like to tell me I don’t exist or I haven’t made up my mind yet. I’m not…”
“Hate’s hate, kid,” Cordelia said. “All I’m saying is there’s enough hate back home that I’m not going to let some fictional character’s hate for me because I’m a fictional character be the thing that ruins this particular day. Mountain dwarves don’t exist. Orcs don’t exist. And I’m not really in the market for allegory right now. This shit’s hard enough in the real world without acknowledging cheesy, overly symbolic fantasy racism.”
“Gotcha,” Tobias said.
“Thanks for thinking of me, though,” Cordelia said.
“In a ham-handed, insensitive, and uncharacteristically violent way,” Tobias said.
“I’m feeling really forgiving today. I’ll file it under ‘it’s the thought that counts,’” Cordelia said. “And you know I’m not minimizing what you have going on back home either.”
“Not even a little bit,” Tobias said. “You got my back too.”
“Forever and always, doofus,” Cordelia said.
Their conversation was abruptly interrupted as Tobias walked full-speed into Morgan’s broad back. They’d entered a larger cavern, this one better lit by the glowing lichen they’d seen earlier. Huge mushrooms grew here like short, colorful trees.
“This is strange,” Ingo said.
“No kidding, this is strange,” Tobias said. “These mushrooms are eight feet tall. This is like some nightmare version of Alice in Wonderland.”
Ingo drew his axe from its sheath, and Cordelia followed his lead. Eriko, still at the lead of the group, had a hand on each of her daggers.
“If we find a Cheshire Cat, I’m going to just run screaming out of here,” Eriko said. “I’m not even going to pretend to have any dignity if that happens.”
The dwarf looked around at the entire group with a grimace of exhaustion and vague disgust.
“I mean this is strange because this sort of growth is usually deeper underground,” he said. “In the deep caverns, you see fungus oases all the time, but we can’t be more than a few hundred feet below the surface.”
“Can we focus for a minute on the fact that we’re a few hundred feet underground?” Tobias said. “Giant mushrooms or not, that just kicked my anxiety into eleven.”
“Guys,” Cordelia said.
The dwarf grunted. Cordelia pointed just behind him.
“The fungus has eyes,” Cordelia said.
And then one of the giant mushrooms reached out and picked Ingo up off the ground. Colorful tendrils wrapped around the dwarf, lifting him roughly into the air and waving him around like a rag doll.
“No way!” Tobias yelled as the others launched into action. To his left, Morgan lifted his hammer to charge, but his forearms and wrists were entangled in tendrils from another mushroom. Eriko immediately drew her daggers and started cutting Morgan free. The room flared with fiery light, and Tobias whipped his head around to see his sister preparing a fireball spell.
“Do not sauté the mushrooms yet!” Tobias yelled. “Abort, abort!”
And then Tobias felt his feet go out from under him as Cordelia shoved her way quickly past him, knocking him to the ground. He watched, viewing the battle upside-down from his back, as she leapt into the air, two-handed battle axe pulled back, slashing through the tendrils holding Ingo in place. The tentacles had started to choke the dwarf, wrapped around his neck, his eyes bulging as his face turned an alarming shade of red. Three swings from Cordelia’s weapon and the dwarf dropped to the ground with a grunt and a thud as the tendrils, eerily bloodless, writhed and then grew still. Not slowing down, Cordelia planted the blade of her axe between the strange yellow eyes of the mushroom creature, seemingly to no effect.
“Little help!” Jack yelled. Tobias crawled to his feed to see Jack, held only by one ankle, but struggling to swing his sword without hitting his own foot, being dragged into the copse of mushrooms behind him. The bard pulled out his sabre and slashed his friend loose, helping the ranger to his feet. Morgan stomped furiously on a tendril, swearing and sweating, and Eriko cursed out her short blades as she fought off a pair of vines herself.
Cordelia stood between the monstrous fungus and Ingo, who dug into the tendrils around his neck with thick fingers, gasping as his airways opened again.
“Burn,” he rasped.
“Everyone down!” Tamsin yelled. Tobias belly-flopped onto the ground without hesitation as Jack crouched down in a far more dignified way. Cordelia covered the still-struggling Ingo with her own body, and Morgan put his armored arm and shoulder over Eriko’s body, covering his head own with a gauntleted hand.
Tamsin began chanting the incantation and the room burst into flames. The mushroom creatures hissed and crackled as they cooked in Tamsin’s magical fire, the room taking on an earthy, greasy stench. A moment later, the flames sputtered and went out.
“All clear, guys,” Tamsin said.
Tobias looked up to find the mushrooms hadn’t been obliterated so much as cauterized off, leaving rows of fleshy white stumps sticking up from the ground.
“Good job,” Tobias said. “We just defeated a pizza topping.”
Cordelia helped Ingo back to his feet, the old dwarf avoiding eye contact. Eriko absently fixed her fauxhawk. Jack got back on his feet and walked cautiously between the stalks toward something just out of sight.
“What you got, Jack?” Morgan asked.
> “Give me a hand,” Jack said. Morgan joined him, and together, the two dragged something heavy out into the light.
A body.
Human, mostly, and big, though it showed signs of decomposition, almost mummified in places. Three toes on each foot, and the creature’s hands looked almost human as well, but its fingers seemed to have fused together, pinky with ring finger, index with middle, the thumb on each hand unchanged. Its face was man-like, but exaggeratedly square-jawed, with deep set eyes, bushy eyebrows, yellowed teeth filed to points.
“That, my friends, is a trog,” Ingo said.
“Good looking guy,” Morgan said, nudging the corpse with his foot. “Looks like a charmer.”
“Oh good,” Eriko said. “Only have to fight what, two dozen of these?”
“Look on the bright side,” Tamsin said. “They’re not tougher than evil mushrooms, right?”
Chapter 11: The men who would rule this world
Malcolm sat calmly on a log, basking in the midday sun. He could feel the heat burning the places on his scalp where his hair had thinned. Living here, he’d lost a lot of his vanity, for better or for worse. He listened to the birds, to the wind in the leaves.
Somehow, despite everything, this place had become home to him. And that was why this meeting today, as distasteful as he found it, was necessary.
After a while, he saw the man he waited for appear. Dressed all in black, trudging forward reluctantly, as if he found being out among nature uncomfortable, the newcomer leaned on an ornate staff and his face beneath a heavy black cowl.
He was flanked on either side by an armored human skeleton, one carrying a sword and shield, the other a bow and arrow. Their armor was old, and ornate, like a Roman soldier’s in a movie.
The man in black stopped twenty feet away. He drew back his hood, revealing a gaunt face, a well-kept black beard, a tightly shaved scalp covered in tattoos.
“Malcolm,” he said.
“Leo,” Malcolm said. “You really didn’t need to bring an escort.”
“They’re not for you,” Leo said. “There’s worse things than an old druid in these woods and you know it.”
Malcolm shrugged.
“All these years, and you still look at me like a dog left me on your lawn,” Leo said.
“This place changed you,” Malcolm said.
“This place changes everyone,” Leo said.
“You have to admit, you went all in with your role,” Malcolm said.
“We were friends in our home plane,” Leo said. “Do you really think if I knew what would happen I would have chosen to play a necromancer?”
Malcolm laughed.
“You always did like the emo roles,” he said.
Leo shrugged.
“True enough. But this is what I became, and it’s let me do a lot of things none of the rest of us could.”
“Why do I have a feeling you have bad news for me,” Malcolm said.
“Because I never come find you with good news,” Leo said. “I thought I sensed an incursion. Has there finally been a new group to appear here?”
“Yes. I met one them. Observed the others.”
“And?”
“They’re scared, but excited. Like we were. And unlike that group of weird ones who broke the Loophole a little while back, they seem like they’re ordinary people, like us,” Malcolm said.
“I wish I’d met the last group,” Leo said. “They found their way home faster than anyone we’ve ever seen.”
“They had help from the other side. No one ever has help from the other side.”
“But this group is…”
“Exactly what you’d expect. Extraordinarily ordinary,” Malcolm said. “But you didn’t come here to talk about some gaming group who stumbled into this world.”
Leo’s eyes darkened.
“I found a Wound, Malcolm,” he said.
Malcolm felt the skin across his body tighten. His stomach fluttered.
“So, it’s true, then,” he said softly.
“The Belief Engines are going cold, Malcolm,” Leo said. “When was the last time you saw a dragon in flight?”
“Giant, scaly canaries in the coal mine, aren’t they,” Malcolm said. “Right, then. The world is sick. We’re not the ones who can fix it.”
“And to think, we once thought we could rule this world,” Leo said. “Now we’re just a couple of revenants, trying to stir up enough trouble to keep this place from...”
“I know,” Malcolm said. “I’ll do what I can.”
“I’m going to investigate the Wound more closely. Maybe I can figure out some alternate way to close it,” Leo said. “If you never see me again, you know what happened. Try not to be too happy about it.”
“That’s not funny,” Malcolm said. “As much as we disagree on things, you’re the last person here who remembers me from the other side.”
“Did you tell them our companions are all dead?”
“I lied,” Malcolm said. “They don’t need to know our friends are all gone.”
“Do you ever think about the others?” Leo said.
“All the time,” Malcolm said.
Leo looked at his free hand as if it belonged to someone else.
“All this power over life and death and I could never bring them back,” he said.
“You’re not a god, Leo.”
“But I could’ve been,” the necromancer said.
“Maybe in the next campaign,” Malcolm said.
Leo huffed out a laugh that sounded like a tomb door closing.
“That’s a hell of a way to look at mortality, my old friend.”
Chapter 12: Accidental architects of the earth
Cordelia took the lead for a while, her orcish eyes giving her far better sight in the dark than Eriko’s. Ingo joined her at the front of their party. The two shared an awkward, uncomfortable silence, broken here and there by questions from Morgan about what they saw ahead in the dark, an occasional snarky comment from Tobias, and a hushed conversation between Tamsin and Jack in the back. Cordelia shook her head at the two of them. It’d been a while, even before all this happened, since those two had acknowledged a long-standing and unspoken thing between them. The last place Cordelia had expected to see it resurface was here, but, she supposed, enough life or death situations and everyone starts rethinking their personal relationships.
She wasn’t the only one to notice, either, as Tobias caught her eye and made a gagging motion with his finger. Cordelia smiled and turned away, placing her hand on the wall of the cavern. She stopped, noticing an eye-catching, maybe even pretty pattern in the stone.
“Stoneworms,” Ingo said. Cordelia looked over her shoulder at him, surprised to hear him speak.
“What’s that?”
“These tunnels,” Ingo said, joining her by the wall, running a practiced hand along the grooves that caught her eye. “They were made by stoneworms. Big, ugly things. They chew through stone and earth, moving along with these diamond-sharp spines on their skin. They’re a strange thing. They don’t hunt, they don’t intentionally hurt anyone, though they’ve been known to collapse tunnels by accident or hurt a traveler underground.”
“Have you ever seen one?” Cordelia said.
“Once,” Ingo said. “It surfaced in a cavern outside the dwarven city where I was born, like a leviathan rising out of the sea. Couldn’t tell how long it was, just an endless wave of spikes and flesh. They’re mostly gone now, I think. There were never many of them, but they started dying off, a little at a time, and those that lived burrowed deep into the earth and never came back. But much of the honeycomb of tunnels like this all across the world were made by stoneworms. Accidental architects of the earth.”
“Wouldn’t have pegged you for the poetic type,” Cordelia said.
“Funny thing about we dwarves,” Ingo said. “We like to whinge and grump, but there’s more poetry in our hearts than we care to admit.”
Cordelia smiled at the old
dwarf, who cleared his throat.
“Look, I… I owe you an apology,” Ingo said. “You saved my life back there, but that’s not the reason for it. I let my old prejudices get the better of me, and I should have been better than that.”
“Water under the bridge, Ingo,” Cordelia said.
“One of the stereotypes my people live up to,” Ingo said. “Stubborn and rude and unforgiving. It’s no excuse, but… there it is.”
He held out a hand. Cordelia took it, and they shook. Cordelia started to speak, but Eriko interrupted her.
“Hate to break up a moment, but…” Eriko said, pointing ahead with a dagger.
Cordelia and Ingo shared a quizzical look and joined the rogue. The corridor once again opened, up, this time revealing a thin stream of dark water. The tunnel had three visible paths—one directly across the water, and in either direction the small river flowed. The tracks they’d been following ended at the river’s edge, washed away by the water. All around the new chamber hung drifting drapes of cobwebs, thick as silk cloth.
“Not spiders, not spiders, not spiders,” Tobias said. “Literally anything but spiders, please.”
“Then I suppose you’ll only be half-disappointed,” a soft, lyrical voice said.
Tobias immediately drew his sword. The others quickly followed suit.
“There’s no need for violence, little adventurers,” the silky voice said.
“Sis, tell me you have a fireball spell ready,” Tobias said.
“Would you hang on for one minute?” Morgan said. Then, to the voice: “We’re not looking for trouble.”
“Yes, you are,” the voice said. Slowly, methodically, the owner of the voice appeared, crawling down delicately from the ceiling. The lower half of the creature was most certainly a giant spider, though not monstrously large, no more than four feet from head to tail. Where the spider’s head would be, a thin, pale torso emerged, dressed haphazardly in a tunic woven from spider silk. Equally spindly arms gently moved webs out of the way as it approached. The being had the face of a small elf or gnome, gaunt, delicate, almost haunting until the fangs became visible. His eyes were ridiculously big, with distinctly red irises. “Look at all of you. You are the definition of trouble.”
Lost in Revery Page 13
