by Zac Gorman
Thisby shouldered her way between two sweaty ghouls and gazed down the mountainside. There, way, way down at the base of the mountain, hundreds, perhaps thousands of people had gathered. Tents of all shapes, colors, and sizes dotted the landscape, like somebody had dropped a bag of multicolored sprinkles from on high and people were swarming like ants between them.
“What’s going on?” Thisby shouted over the thrum of the crowd.
A few ghouls down, Jono’s bony head squeezed through the tightly packed wall of onlookers to answer her. “It’s the Wretched Scrattle!”
Thisby cocked her head toward him.
“People keep saying that! But what is it?”
A ghoul whose armpit was far too close to Thisby’s face chimed in, “It’s like a contest. The Overseer has invited adventurers from all over Nth to test their luck in the dungeon! There’s going to be new monsters, fabulous prizes, the whole deal! Isn’t it great?”
Thisby turned suspiciously toward the ghoul.
“What’s the catch?”
“Catch? There’s no catch.”
The ghoul paused to rethink his statement.
“Oh, well, there is this one thing . . . If you somehow make it to the Master’s chamber in Castle Grimstone, you become the new Master of the Black Mountain. But I can’t really see that happening, can you? I mean, what are the odds?”
Thisby sighed.
What were the odds?
What were the odds that she would be the one to clean up the mess? What were the odds that after this all was said and done, the dungeon would never be the same again? What were the odds, indeed.
Ever since Thisby’s run-in with the Eyes in the Dark, she’d been certain that the end of the dungeon would be his doing. That the mountain would crumble to dust beneath his massive claws, that his flaming breath would melt Castle Grimstone into a roiling, acrid pool of liquified stone and iron. The last thing that she’d expected was some green-haired woman with a penchant for unnecessary rules and bureaucracy to be its downfall. Even if Thisby had been warned, she never would have believed it. After all, what were the odds?
Thisby retreated into the crowd and walked back through the castle without saying another word to Jono, who muttered something to her about meeting up later to help clean up a mess some bugbears had made near the crystal caverns. She was barely listening, anyway. Thisby left the castle through the gates through which she’d entered and made her way to the long, familiar ladder into the dungeon. Regardless of whatever insanity was going on in the dungeon tomorrow, there were still chores to be done today.
The carousing and storytelling had become quite the lively party in and of itself.
The camps at the foot of the Black Mountain stretched out for miles in every direction, forming a semicircle that wrapped around the base of the central peak until the tents bumped up against the smaller foothills that surrounded it. Most of the campers settled on the softer grassy fields to the southwest, not wishing to sleep on the rocky terrain of the mountains or eager to take their chances with Umberfallian raiders, who liked to murder and rob unsuspecting travelers who traveled too far east of the Black Mountain. The mountain range technically belonged to the kingdom of Nth, but Umberfall butted up against the back side to the northeast, and raiders weren’t always great at recognizing borders. It wasn’t entirely their fault. In the real world, it wasn’t as if there were solid white lines drawn on the ground, despite what maps would have you believe.
The tents stretched from the base of the Black Mountain all the way to Three Fingers, which had been enjoying the most prosperous few weeks in the history of the chronically downtrodden village. For the first time in a century, the inns were full, the bars were packed, and the merchants couldn’t restock goods as fast as they could sell them. At first, it’d been hard to convince people to stay overnight in the village until somehow, mysteriously—in what would eventually go down in history as the smartest decision the Three Fingers city council ever made—the Beware Huge Rats sign vanished from the front gates in the middle of the night and was replaced with one proclaiming Normal-Size Rats. It was a stretch of the truth, to say the least. The city council, however, slept easily knowing that they had a fairly secure loophole in that “normal” was a matter of opinion, and the people of Three Fingers had lived with rats the size of dogs their entire lives.
The Wretched Scrattle wasn’t set to begin for several weeks still, but news of the event had traveled like wildfire throughout the country. Out in the field of tents were people from all walks of life: professional adventurers with scars and dented broadswords, hunters with crossbows and dogs, farmers who’d scraped together their life savings for a chance to hopefully steal a little more treasure than it’d cost to enter, and opportunistic merchants selling and trading goods with anybody who’d give them the time of day. There were large, ornate tents with well-armored guards stationed around them, housing lower-tier nobility and other upper-class people who’d come for the sport of the whole thing, and these luxurious tents sat right alongside the lean-tos and ragged blankets of Nthians desperate for an opportunity to turn their lives around.
Men in black cloaks wove through the sea of tents, ringing bells and collecting the twenty-five gold fee in exchange for entry forms. They were accompanied by an envoy of soldiers carrying tall flags that bore the sigil of the royal family of Nth, both to foreshadow their arrival and to symbolize that they were indeed authentic collectors who’d been hand-selected by the royal family itself. The men in black, or “buzzards” as the crowd had taken to calling them, were low-level hedge wizards in the employ of the crown, there to ensure that only those who paid through the proper channels were admitted into the Wretched Scrattle by cosigning the magically protected entry slips once sufficient gold was provided. Though they did little more than sign a piece of paper and collect money, it was a service for which the King insisted on a payment of five of every twenty-five gold collected and to which Marl ruefully agreed.
Through the middle of the camp ran one long strip of unoccupied road down which the dungeon could move supplies into and out of the Black Mountain. Marl had ordered the construction of a stone arch that sat against the side of the mountain at its base and looked something like a doorframe in which someone had forgotten to place a door. The arch was tall enough for a giant to walk through without crouching and twice as wide, and once per day, typically in the very early hours of the morning, a team of wagons would come down the road and stop before it. The wagon master would shout up his command, and as if by magic—which, of course, it was—the empty doorframe would fill with a glowing blackdoor portal that allowed the wagons to pass through. The moment they were inside the mountain, the portal snapped shut behind them.
People camped near the base of the mountain occasionally attempted to sneak through the blackdoor before it closed in hopes of getting a head start, but the guards who accompanied the wagons usually caught them before they got very far. The few who did manage to slip through the cracks were never heard from again. The dungeon was fairly self-correcting that way.
It was also common for people to attempt to sneak a peek into the wagons as they came and went from the mountain, in hopes that if they could only get a glimpse of what sort of monsters they might be dealing with inside the dungeon, or what sort of traps might await them, they would have an advantage. The guards, however, were extremely vigilant, and only once in the month that led up to the Wretched Scrattle did a woman manage to outfox them and sneak a peek beneath a tarp. When she returned to her campsite, she was ghostly white and barely able to speak. Without another word to her fellow adventurers, she packed up her tent and went home. Nobody ever found out the truth about what she’d seen.
Still, the mood in the camp was optimistic. At night, the crackling campfires were alive with stories of adventures past. People sang songs and laughed and strategized as to how they planned to conquer the legendary Black Mountain once and for all—not to mention what they’d do on
ce they became the new Master of the Black Mountain. It was the sort of revelry that adventurers truly lived for, despite what they might claim.
Adventuring as a lifestyle—and it was, in fact, the fifth most common profession in all of Nth1—was very different from the common perception. The average adventurer spent far more time sitting around campfires and inns telling stories than they did out in the world coming up with new ones. Most of the adventurers in Nth could’ve done without the actual adventure at all. The sharing of stories was what drove them, what made them feel alive. If it’d been about the money, they’d have become thieves. If it’d been about the thrill of battle, they’d have become soldiers. No, adventurers lived for the time spent telling stories, so naturally, when you got a crowd of them together as large as there was at the base of the Black Mountain, the carousing and storytelling had become quite the lively party in and of itself.
Inside the dungeon, however, the mood was quite different.
There was no time for frivolity in the dungeon. From the day that Thisby first saw the crowd at the foot of the Black Mountain, the dungeon had exploded into a frenzy of activity that never seemed to stop. Ghouls, goblins, and skeletons worked all through the night, taking shifts and picking up where the others left off: building traps, placing treasure, moving around monsters, introducing new ones, cleaning certain rooms while messing up others; it was a complete overhaul of the dungeon, and Thisby had never been present for anything more upsetting in her life.
For one thing, they were doing it all wrong. Perhaps more frustratingly, nobody wanted to listen to her. Before Marl’s interference, despite its rather haphazard appearance, the dungeon had been a well-oiled machine. It may have seemed coincidental that the ogres were next to the fire bats or that the mermaids were cordoned off from certain sections of the river, but it was those fine details that maintained the delicate balance of micro-ecologies and biomes necessary to keep the dungeon from flying entirely out of whack. Now, thanks to Marl, everything was falling apart. The gears were coming loose from the great big machine, and there was nothing Thisby could do about it.
She tried to get in to speak with the Overseer in person, but it was no use. Pox wasn’t watching the gates anymore, the guards changed every day now, and the passage token situation had gone from bad to worse. Nothing short of a blackdoor bead was going to get Thisby into the castle, and even if she’d had one, she wasn’t sure it would’ve mattered. Marl was seemingly wholly unconcerned with the dungeon in the long term. As long as the Wretched Scrattle brought in more adventurers, who cared about the future of the dungeon? More often than not, it seemed to Thisby as if she was the only one.
Furthermore, the more she tried to correct the problems Marl was causing, the more she found herself being pushed out. The vast majority of her duties had been reassigned to untrained ghouls who no longer seemed to serve under her authority but under Marl’s—or at least under whomever Marl had appointed as their authority for the time being. Marl’s version of the dungeon consisted of layers upon layers of bosses and mid-bosses and under-mid-bosses to the point where Thisby could no longer tell who worked for whom or why anybody was doing whatever it was they were doing. When she confronted a ghoul who was digging a pit in the gnoll den and asked him why he was doing it, he could only shrug. Somebody had told him to. Why? Another shrug. It was absolutely infuriating.
The only person who seemed to listen to Thisby anymore was Jono, and it was through him that she obtained all her information about what was happening inside Castle Grimstone. As a skeleton who primarily worked in the castle, Jono had been granted a sort of permanent passage token that he wore around his neck, which allowed him to come and go as he pleased. Most nights, he would stop by her room and report any rumors he’d heard that day. As much as she came to value Jono’s company, their meetings were getting more frustrating every day as she’d become a passive observer to the gradual dismantling of her home.
Thisby’s door was locked now. Over the last few weeks there’d been more than one confused ghoul who didn’t know up from down, barging into her bedroom in the middle of the night looking for a bathroom.
Mingus was fast asleep in his small glass aquarium. It seemed that no matter what sort of disaster was going on around him, he could always sleep through the night. Last year, when the three of them, Thisby, Iphigenia, and Mingus, had been wandering through the dungeon, she remembered how easily he’d slept even in the face of certain doom. Even in the Deep Down, Mingus had never gotten less than a full nine hours of sleep each night. She envied that about him. It always seemed to her that good sleep was a privilege of people—or in Mingus’s case, slimes—who felt comfortable with their place in the world. Before last year, before Iphigenia and Ingo and the Eyes in the Dark, she’d slept pretty well herself. Now it was all she could do to keep her eyes closed for more than a few minutes before her mind started racing.
Thisby crawled out of bed and went over to her desk.
By candlelight, she began to flip through her last notebook where she’d left off, cross-referencing her notes with one of the few damaged bestiaries she’d inherited from Grunda back when she was still learning the ropes as gamekeeper. With the Wretched Scrattle looming, there were so many new monsters in the dungeon that she couldn’t keep up with them all. Just two days ago, she’d had to rush in at the last moment to stop a group of overworked ghouls from freeing a gorgon too close to a basilisk nest. Either they hadn’t realized that the two were natural enemies or they were too tired to care. That was far from the worst of it.
At least Thisby knew what a gorgon was, even if she’d never seen one before in person. What frightened her more were the monsters being released every day that neither Thisby, nor anybody else, seemed to know anything about at all. Wandering the halls of the dungeon over the last few days, she’d encountered a group of sentient mushrooms with legs and fangs, a very angry crab the size of a horse, and a particularly frustrating monster who had camouflaged itself to look like a wall and insisted on using this power to hide doorways from her, causing what should have been a simple excursion to take hours longer than it should have. These creatures were like nothing she’d ever heard of, and she suspected that there was a good chance they’d either been shipped in from across the Nameless Sea or smuggled in from Umberfall.
She thought it was likely that the dungeon’s mystery killer also fell into that category. The killer was still on the loose and claiming more victims with each passing day. The good news was that since she’d been stripped of most of her other responsibilities as gamekeeper, Thisby had had plenty of time to investigate the mysterious creature. The bad news was that she’d made absolutely no progress whatsoever.
There was a knock on the door.
“Bos—Thisby? It’s me.”
Thisby answered the door to see a filthy-looking Jono, smiling his perpetual, toothy skeleton smile.
“You’re a mess,” Thisby stated bluntly, as if there were some chance he wasn’t aware of it himself. “Don’t you know what time it is?”
“No,” he said, ignoring the implication. “Can I come in?”
“What are you doing here? Can’t this wait until tomorrow? It’s late.”
“Hmm. Right. Okay.”
Jono turned and began to walk away.
“Jono, wait,” said Thisby.
He stopped.
“Just tell me. I’m already up.”
With that, she waved the skeleton into her room and closed the door. Jono yanked a roll of parchment free from his belt where it’d been tucked—and smooshed more than a little—and handed it to Thisby.
“I found this letter on my walk back through Castle Grimstone after speaking with the Overseer tonight. It was addressed to me, but it’s clearly intended for you. Here. Read it,” he said.
Thisby unrolled the parchment and furrowed her brow at what had to be the tiniest handwriting she’d ever seen. The writing was an alternating combination of tight cursive script and chop
py, messy scribbles, which did itself no favors in the legibility department.
“What is this?” she asked.
Jono grinned, which, to be fair, he always did.
“Don’t just look at it! Read it!” he blurted.
Thisby held the note an inch from her nose, but she could only make out every other word. Jono. Please. Thisby. Need. Help. Thisby strained her eyes, trying her hardest to make heads or tails of the note, but it almost seemed as if it had been written by two people fighting over the same pen. The pain in her forehead was intensifying, so she shoved the parchment back into Jono’s hands instead.
“I’m tired. Please just read it to me,” groaned Thisby.
Jono took the parchment and began to read.
“It says, ‘Jono, please tell Thisby we need her help. She must come to Three Fingers. The Drowned Frog. Can’t say more now but all will be explained. The dungeon is counting on you. Sincerely, Grunda.’”
Jono flipped the parchment around and proudly pointed to the words he’d just read. Thisby waved it away, afraid that even looking at the writing again would cause her headache to return.
“That’s not Grunda’s handwriting,” said Thisby, unwilling to let the excitement inside her show. “It’s a fake. Somebody’s trying to trick us.”
“Just because someone else wrote it doesn’t mean it’s not from her! She said the dungeon is counting on you!”
“Jono, don’t get excited. It could be a trap.”
Jono studied the letter. If he’d had a brow, it probably would’ve been furrowed.
“Who do you think she meant by ‘we’?” he asked.
Thisby’s eyes lit up as she felt the exhaustion that had been weighing her down lift from her body.
“Iphigenia!” she yelled instinctively. She immediately blushed at her uncontrollable outburst.
