“I can get behind that plan,” Morgan said.
Cordelia nodded to Jack.
“Hey, can I get your help with something? You too, Morgan,” she said.
Both men followed her over to where Ingo’s body sat, brutalized but strangely at peace.
“I guess we won,” Tobias said. “I mean, our path to the surface is buried in rubble and our dwarven guide is dead so we’re all going to die down here unless we can find our way to the surface on our own…”
“I can help with that,” Orsun said.
Tobias felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He looked around frantically or the creepy little spider-thing, and spotted him in the tunnel Jack and Tamsin had emerged from, hanging from the ceiling. Like a spider. A creepy spider.
“How long have you been there!” Tobias said. “Why are you stalking us!”
“Tobias, Orsun saved us,” Tamsin said.
“In order to eat you later?” Tobias said.
“I have no desire to eat you. You are profitable adventurers and bring prosperity to my caves,” Orsun said.
“He gets creepier every time he talks,” Tobias said.
Orsun looked almost upset, his eyes falling. Which was even weirder, Tobias noticed, because, upside down and sticking to the ceiling, looking “down” meant looking “up,” and the entire scenario made Tobias’ stomach churn.
“You can help us get back to the surface?” Tamsin said.
“Yes, yes, I can show you the way,” Orsun said.
“What do you want in return?” Tobias said.
Orsun shrugged. It was so human, so mundanely casual, Tobias didn’t know if he wanted to cry or scream.
“What if my brother writes you a song?” Tamsin said.
“I’m not writing a song for Spider-Gollum,” Tobias said.
“I would love a song!” Orsun said. “Teach it to me. I will sing your song about me throughout the caverns. They have such great acoustics.”
Tobias just shook his head.
“I got nothing. I have no way of disputing that,” Tobias said. “He’s right. The sound in these caves is amazing.”
Chapter 19: So much below the surface
Tamsin watched her friends build a cairn for Ingo and realized she was proud of them.
Tobias had muttered something upon seeing them construct a tomb from the fallen stones about how Ingo hadn’t been their friend, that he’d been unkind to Cordelia. But Tamsin knew her brother better than that, and knew his defensive tells. He was feeling what they all were feeling. Until now they hadn’t lost anyone who felt “real.”
They’d fought, yes, and killed, but those had been obstacles, wordless monsters presenting a clear threat. They hadn’t lost an ally, not someone who had spoken to them as people do, and a fictional character or not, a nice man or not. Ingo’s passing felt real, and for some of them, it felt partially their fault. It’s easy to feel immortal until you’ve lost someone, Tamsin knew. Until a voice in your life was silenced forever.
Cordelia seemed angry and disappointed. Morgan was quiet and kept looking up, as if awaiting an answer that never came. Eriko stayed away from everyone, watching the makeshift funeral, absently moving a handful of coins she’d taken from the corpses of the trogs back and forth between her hands. Jack seemed far more concerned about the welfare of the living than the dead, eyes darting from one friend to another to observe them as he scratched Silence behind the ear. He caught her watching them and smiled. Tamsin smiled back.
“Okay, Orsun,” she said, beckoning the spider-creature to her side. “What’s your price for guiding us to the surface again?”
The little monster waved a hand.
“One song is enough. One song and the promise of a future favor. One favor, if you ever come back to my caves,” he said. “Is that fair?”
“One song, one favor. I think so,” Tamsin said. “Lead on.”
It was no short journey Orsun took them on. They had to go deeper into the caves to get around the cave-in, down into a vast opening where a river of red magma drifted by, hot and silent. They passed cave drawings sketched in phosphorescent ink, found the corpses of a team of explorers who had died without a visible sign of a struggle, and Tamsin wondered if perhaps they had just wandered too deep and never found their way home.
They passed the bones of an impossibly large dragon so big the remains formed the structure of an entire cavern, ribs like stalactites, a massive skull that seemed to look at them as they came close.
Orsun stopped their progress at one point, then guided them forward, silently. He pointed. Up ahead, the path opened into a larger space, where tiny lights played and swam through the air. The lights made noise as they flittered about, like a song that never ended. Tamsin realized that Orsun had wanted them to see these lights, to share with them something no other living creature had seen with him.
He must be very lonely down here in the dark, Tamsin thought. There is so much below the surface he sees every day, and there’s not a soul he can talk about it with.
They crossed through a chamber where diamonds were scattered like snowflakes. The space looked like a blanket of stars that went on far beyond where her eyes could see.
Orsun silenced them again, later, placing the palm of his hand against the cave floor. Seeing Tamsin watching him, he took her hand and placed it next to his. She felt vibrations in the stone, something writhing below them. Orsun gestured for the group to crouch down, and they complied. A moment later they saw a serpentine creature burrow up through the soil and crest like a whale surfacing from the ocean before disappearing into the darkness again.
Hours passed, but then Tamsin sensed it—fresh air, cool and light, invading the stuffy denseness of the caves. They moved faster now, the tantalizing closeness of the sky begging them to rush. The ascent was so sharp Tamsin felt her ears pop, like on an airplane. But then she could see it, blue sky, the literal light at the end of the tunnel.
“I cannot go any further,” Orsun said. “The light, it hurts.”
Tamsin knelt beside him and took his hands in hers.
“You will always have a friend in me, Orsun,” she said. Tamsin heard her brother exhale disapprovingly, but she ignored him. “I see kindness in you. And I think you know more about the world than you let on.”
The spider-creature blushed and looked down at his segmented legs bashfully.
“Be safe, lady wizard,” Orsun said. “Come back to my caves someday. I have so much to show you all.”
“We will, Orsun. You be safe,” Tamsin said.
The adventurers started for the surface, Cordelia leading the way. Tamsin looked back over her shoulder to see Orsun standing alone in the dark, watching them disappear. She held a hand up and he returned the gesture. And then he was gone.
“You okay?” Jack asked, keeping pace beside her.
“I feel bad leaving him here,” she said. “I think that just broke my heart. What was he?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said. “I’ve never seen anything like it in any game. I guess he’s a bit like a drider—a spider-centaur—but that size, all alone, that benign… I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe he’s one of a kind.”
“I don’t know that I’d ever want to be the only one of me in the universe,” Tamsin said.
“Spoken like a true twin,” Jack said. “But I think we’re all alone, in our own way. Orsun’s place in the world is just lonely in a more profoundly literal way.”
Finally, they reached the end of the cavern and stepped into broad daylight. The sun burned Tamsin’s eyes. How long were we below the surface? She thought to herself. A day? A week? A few hours?
They arrived in a landscape they didn’t recognize, along the side of a mountain—not treacherously high up, but heavily wooded, and without any hint how far away they’d ranged from Moderate Expectations.
“It’s like the end if the Descent, but less depressing,” Tobias said.
“Where the hell are we?” M
organ said.
“I guess it’s a good thing we have a ranger?” Eriko said.
“I only play a ranger on TV,” Jack said. “I really have no idea where we are.”
“Well, we can’t stay here,” Cordelia said. “I’m not camping out unless we figure out where we are.”
Jack looked around at the group.
“Any suggestions where we go from here?” Jack said.
“East,” Cordelia said.
The group looked at her questioningly.
“We owe a terrible old man one last favor,” she said. “If we’re not going back to Moderate Expectations, we should go east.”
“Fair enough,” Morgan said. “East it is. You can figure out which way east is, right Jack?”
“I could do that even back in the real world, city boy or not,” Jack said. “Follow me.”
And so, bloody, battered, but victorious, the adventurers left the underworld behind, with no way of knowing what the next day would have in store.
Chapter 20: To the ends of the world
Leo the necromancer. He hated thinking of himself that way. When he arrived in this world with his friends, he’d been called Mordecai the Unholy, and he’d enjoyed playing that character. He reveled in it. Leo would dress all in black, adorning himself with bones and red stones reminiscent of blood. He would stare at people until they could no longer make eye contact, and speak in a whisper that forced the listener to stand uncomfortably close. His friends were heroic figures. Leo, as Mordecai, was their shadow, the monster they brought along to do the things they could not.
But now most of his friends were dead, and Leo found himself forced to be a hero. Someone had to do it. That was the story of Mordecai the Unholy, after all. Where good men failed, the monster would rise to save the world using whatever means necessary.
I should’ve played a monk, Leo thought. I might be dead by now, but I wouldn’t be dealing with this shit.
“This shit,” in this case, was the looming darkness on the edge of the mapped lands of this world. Like a cancer, this darkness seemed to drain whatever it touched of life, leaving nothing but ash and shadow behind.
Leo had been a necromancer for decades now. He had no issue with death or darkness. But even evil men need a world in which to be evil, and this darkness, this cancer, it felt as though it might consume the entire fictional world. There is no darkness without light, Leo thought, quoting an annoying old priest his group had run into in their younger days. A priest of the Sun God, as good a man as you would ever find, and he looked on Leo, on Mordecai, not as an abomination, but as a counterpoint to a conversation the world had been having since the dawn of time. Leo had found him sanctimonious and obnoxious, and over the years, Leo realized he would never have a better friend.
The priest died in a way Leo and his friends almost never saw in this world: of old age. Natural causes. No one died of natural causes here. The world was too violent.
“I wish you were here, old friend,” Leo thought. Malcolm was a good sounding board, but Malcolm’s magic was tied to nature, and whatever this was, it was not natural. Leo had his theories and suspicions. And those theories were beginning to prove… if not correct, at least not unfounded, as he found a small bubble of land re-growing some of the life that had been drained of it.
Just a small circle, but it was green, and flowering, and it had been dead as the dust in the bottom of a coffin days ago.
Leo cursed Malcolm for playing so coy with the new players to this game. We need them, Leo thought. Though, as he pondered the situation, he was not sure exactly how much they should know, or how aware they needed to be of how precarious the health of this game world truly was.
Faith in the players. Faith in the game to make them into the heroes they needed to be. Faith in the few remaining player characters still trapped here to maintain their own faith in this magical construct.
Leo studied the grim landscape at the edge of the world.
I’ve long wanted to live out the rest of my life here, the necromancer thought. But I never really thought about how I don’t want to die here.
Epilogue: This town is a graveyard
They worked their way east from the mountains for almost a full day before they saw anything remotely resembling civilization. Tobias had already started complaining—“a bard needs an audience! What am I going to do, busk for bears and chipmunks?”—but after their adventure underground, Jack, leading the way with Silence, was happy for the reprieve from violence.
“I wonder what kind of reward we would have been given by Moderate Expectations if we made it back there,” Eriko wondered out loud.
“Considering their farmlands and livestock were devastated by the raid, I’d have trouble accepting much by way of payment,” Morgan said.
“And that’s why you’re the cleric, and I’m the rogue,” Eriko said.
Eventually Jack sensed, in that strange sixth-sense way his ranger abilities worked here, that the landscape had begun to change; the plants grew less feral, the ground itself seemed tamer. He followed that sense until he led them to a small village, less than half the size of Moderate Expectations.
“Hey, it’s Very Low Expectations,” Tobias said.
Jack cocked his head and listened. Tobias kept rambling, amusing himself with alternative names for the town, but Jack waved his hand at him.
“Guys… I don’t think there’s anyone here,” he said.
Eriko gave him a quizzical look, then darted ahead.
“Hey, please don’t…” Morgan said. “Split the party. She always splits the party.”
Wordlessly, Cordelia shouldered her way past everyone else and walked slowly after Eriko, letting the rogue take a healthy lead.
Because of the quiet, Jack expected to find ruin—burned-out buildings, bodies in the street, the remnants of some sort of attack. But there was nothing. The town was pristine, if perhaps a little run down, but there were simply no signs of life. Not even a stray dog or cat wandering the main thoroughfare.
“We really shouldn’t stay here,” Tamsin said.
“What do you think?” Morgan said. “Plague? Did they just move on and abandon the town?”
“Um, guys?” Eriko said from somewhere just out of sight. Her friends rushed to catch up to her and found the rogue standing in front of the town’s central building. The windows had been boarded up, the doors chained from the outside.
“So, in game terminology, I think this offers us a choice,” Eriko said. “We can open this door.”
“Or we could absolutely, definitely, in no way, shape or form, open this door,” Cordelia said.
“I think we should open the door,” Eriko said.
“You would,” Cordelia said.
“Okay, everyone in favor of opening the ‘Do Not Open, Dead Inside’ style barricaded door, raise their hand,” Tobias said.
Only Eriko raised her hand.
“Seriously, guys, you are no fun. You need to step outside your comfort zone once in a while,” she said.
“All in favor of getting out of this creepy-ass town as soon as possible?” Tobias asked.
Everyone raised their hands except Eriko, who eventually, and reluctantly, raised her as well.
“Fine. Ignore the opportunity to delve into a medieval ghost town,” Eriko said. “Man, you guys are so boring.”
“C’mon, Rouge,” Jack said. “I’m sure if we walk long enough we’ll find you something to stab and loot.”
He turned, giving wide berth to the boarded-up building, and lead his people from the village. They passed by abandoned carts, windows covered up by dust, and a well, long unused.
Leaving no trace, they left the unnamed ghost town, undisturbed.
But had any of them looked back, they might have seen a single, gray-skinned hand reach up out of the well, clawing to escape.
Book 3:
The Ghoul Slayer’s Guidebook
Chapter 1: Far from home
It might have been a
beautiful hike under other circumstances. Tall evergreen trees launched into the sky like green daggers all around the party. The road they journeyed upon was worn by time, but sturdy and even. The air had a hint of a chill to it but was pleasant and cool, and the sun, just on the verge of setting, had been with them all day, casting an elegant golden light on the wandering adventurers.
Unfortunately, the wandering adventurers had ended up untold miles from their home town, bumbling up out of a dungeon filled with horrors and wonder into a foreign landscape. Being lost and battle-battered sort of took the joy out of a leisurely stroll.
“We have… not even a slight clue how far we are from Moderate Expectations, do we?” Morgan said. The cleric looked miserable, clanking in his heavy armor, his massive war hammer clearly growing heavier with each passing mile.
“Nope,” Cordelia said. She honestly felt bad for him. He was, after all, the only party member wearing heavy armor, and while the physics in this fictional world they were trapped in often skewed in their favor, making them stronger, more durable, and more skilled than they were back in the real world, metal armor was metal armor. Stuff got heavy after a while, game-gifted athletic endurance or no.
“I can scout things out, see if I can get an idea of where we are,” Jack said. The ranger had his hood up, as usual, partially hiding his scarred face, while his wolf companion, Silence, shadowed him as soundlessly as his name implied. They’d been trapped in the game for weeks and Cordelia still found it hysterical that Jack, a city boy born and raised whom she knew had always been squeamish about things like camping, had chosen to play a ranger that first night and was now their best and most skilled woodsman. The only thing about the character Jack played here that was reminiscent of him in the real world was his soft spot for dogs.
“No, you don’t have to do that,” Morgan said. “Probably best we all stay together anyway.”
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