The Monolith

by Stephen Roark

  “How’s your head, son?” That’s what Rathborne would have asked if he were with us.

  “Not fantastic,” I whispered.

  “You are strong,” he’d say. Something like that. “But don’t neglect yourself.”

  “Can’t worry about myself right now,” I told him. “There’s no time.”

  “There’s always time to worry about yourself, boy.”

  Great, I thought. Now you’re talking to a ghost.

  I spun my axe, fidgeting anxiously as we passed the first intersection. I glanced to my right and saw more shadows, a collapsed wagon and several splintered barrels amidst a scattered clump of mustard colored hay. Beyond that, something with thick fur and four arms moved in the shadows making sounds like a dying dog. I saw the gleam of a double set of teeth. We continued on.

  Wrought iron bars covered the ground floor windows like jail cell doors. Some were softly illuminated, but most were dark. Ahead of us, one glowed with a pale yellow light and I thought I saw something move within. As we reached it, I heard a voice inside, so soft I wasn’t really sure it wasn’t just the wind whistling through the city.

  “Is—is someone out there?” The voice belonged to a young boy the best I could tell—most likely no older than the age of ten. It was barely a whisper, as though he were afraid someone would hear him talking—someone who shouldn’t. My time in Quelan and the rest of the world had me on edge, and my eyes quickly searched the area for signs of a trap. My companions did the same, but if anything was going to happen to us, it wasn’t obvious.

  “We’re here,” I replied, stepping up to the window.

  “Oh, thank God!” the voice replied, stronger and warmer than before. “Are you—are you Seekers?”

  “We are,” I told him, trying to peer through the window to get a glimpse of him, but the pane was decorated with a diamond pattern with alternating segments of fogged glass, and made it impossible. I was able to see that the soft glow came from a fire burning on the far wall of the room.

  The house itself looked like it may have once been expensive, owned by someone rich and powerful. Two gardens, now dead and covered with rot and grime, flanked a set of granite steps that led up to a strong mahogany door with thick, reinforced hinges obviously designed to keep people out. A brass knocker hung off kilter from a single nail. It looked like it was ready to finally surrender and drop to the ground.

  What is he doing living here alone?

  “Can you help me?” the little boy asked. “I’ve been told to remain here and wait for my father to return, but he left some time ago and I have not seen or heard from him. I fear something horrible has happened to him.”

  “A quest?” Altarus asked quietly behind me.

  “Probably,” I replied. It was a strange game—this didn’t feel like a quest to me, as I knew that this boy, despite being a piece of complex code stored on a server somewhere, was a real boy, with his own thoughts, history, motivations and emotions, and even if this had all been laid out in a way to benefit me, I couldn’t help but feel as though this was simply a lost child looking for help—because he was.

  “Where did your father go?”

  “To the Old City, sir,” the boy said sadly. “But he’s been gone so long now…could you tell him I’m scared, please? That I’d like for him to come home?”

  I knew I was drawing false comparisons, perhaps being overly sentimental, but my thoughts were immediately drawn to Rathborne and the tiny grave behind his home. This boy had lost his father the way Rathborne had lost his son. For the first time since the bridge, I was glad the old Seeker was no longer with us. He didn’t need to see this.

  “How will we know him?” I asked him. “This is a big city.”

  “He wears a violet scarf!” the boy said eagerly, obviously excited at the possibility that someone was willing to help him. He coughed suddenly, violently—I could hear the sickness in his chest—and I understood now why his father had gone out; his boy was ill and he was bringing back medicine.

  “This is awful,” Fujiko remarked, folding her arms angrily across her chest. “Awful and cruel.”

  Can’t argue with that.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the window.

  “Benjamin,” the boy replied. “Benjamin Glacier!”

  “Okay, Benjamin Glacier.” I smiled for his sake. “If we find your dad, we’ll tell him what you told us.”

  “Thank you, thank you!” he replied gleefully. A screeching sound came from the window and a tiny panel revealed itself. It swung open and a child’s pale hand emerged, holding a small blue box. “Take this! It will help you in the city!”

  I reached out and took the box from him. His hand quickly withdrew and the small glass pane snapped shut, securing his fortress once again.

  “What is it?” Fujiko asked as I heard the sound of the item entering my inventory. I opened the box and saw a small rune, as blue as the wood of the box, with what looked like horns.

  Rune of The Old Hunters of Quelan—Once a shining beacon of civilization and hope, Quelan’s fall into darkness is unparalleled. Once the scourge descended on the city, the Old Hunters used these to pass through the streets without being noticed by the beasts prowling for their next meal.

  Grants the wearer a substantially less probability of being detected by enemies while in the City of Quelan.

  “What is it?” Altarus asked.

  I smiled and tossed it to him. “See for yourself. You or Fujiko should use it. I’ll let you decide who.”

  55

  The Headless Wet Nurse of Quelan

  “It was soon after the infection, the mollusks and marrow-sucking beasts, that the children began to change, emerging distorted and mutated beyond belief. Midwives and mothers would cry out in despair, and I was brought in to do what they were unable to do themselves—dispense with the monstrosity,”

  —Kalian Shade, wet nurse to the Quelan aristocracy

  Quelan was a city you felt deep down. As we moved on down the street, more cries and sounds of beasts rang out through the cold, silvery night like warnings, a deadly crescendo leading toward some terrible conclusion that would end with us lying beaten and dead on the cold ground, blood pouring from our segmented bodies into the hungry gutters beside us.

  We took a left and the swollen buildings seemed to close in around us as though either side of the street was leaning toward the other like lovers reaching out to embrace. Another fallen wagon lay ahead of us, and beneath the spilled mountain of hay, I saw something moving. I signaled to my companions, raising my Blunderbuss above my shoulder as I tried to get a good view of what lay in wait before us.

  For a second I thought it was some kind of dog, but as it moved again, I saw it was a man—or at least, it had been.

  He moved on all fours, dragging his immense body across the stone, a thick chain fastened to his wide neck and clinking along the cobblestones as he tugged himself forward. Patches of purple spotted his pale skin like an infection or disease, and long folds of skin hung off him like the flesh beneath had melted or turned to liquid. As he moved, I felt sick, wondering if they were about to tear off of him.

  Quelan Wagon Man—Level 35

  “Shit,” I cursed, looking around for another way past. But there wasn’t any. The doors to the buildings on either side of us were locked, the windows were barred and dark, and there wasn’t a single side street we could take for a detour.

  You should never have let them come with you, I thought. You’re just going to get them killed anyway.

  I was almost level 20, and knew this monster was too much for me to handle. The hay shifted again, bloated, then cascaded off the hulking, bulbous back of another man, more sickly than the other. He groaned like a dying livestock beast, grabbing the other man’s ankle in an effort to pull himself along the ground. My stomach turned as his loose flesh threatened to tear and burst as he moved. It was like a nightmare.

  “I’m gonna hurl,” Fujiko announced softly.


  “We cannot go through them,” Altarus said simply.

  “Nope,” I sighed, looking for an opening between the two men, but they were so large they took up the entire street like some fleshy blockade.

  They’re slow. You might be able to just jump them and keep running.

  “Mayoi’s friends are up ahead,” Altarus suggested. “Perhaps they can assist us.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “We don’t even know if they’re friendly. We pull these guys over there and they’ll just hit us a couple of times and finish us off, loot us and we’ll be back at Ebonmire with death penalty and missing some of our items.”

  “What do we do then?” Fujiko asked. I grimaced, looked back behind us, but the streets of Quelan were so cramped together that it was almost as though the row houses were bulwarks against the rest of the city, dams to keep the wretched mobs from their doors. If we went back to the last intersection and took another route, we’d be headed away from the Old City, away from the spider, away from the monolith.

  “They’re slow,” I said as I watched them move, clawing their gelatinous shells across the ground like possessed cadavers, minds lost in the void of death, struggling to return to whatever lives they had once lived. “We jump them.”

  “We what?” Fujiko snapped, snatching me by the arm and spinning me around to face her. “Are you fucking with us?”

  “If you have a better idea, I’m all ears, Fujiko,” I replied firmly. “If not, we run at them and we jump over them before they can grab us! We can’t go back, and we can’t fight them.”

  Fujiko only stared back at me as the city groaned once more, a choir of haunted, tortured voices—how many of them citizens and how many of them monsters? Or were they now one and the same? Altarus stepped up and examined the cursed men blocking our path.

  “We must be quick,” he said, thinking out loud. “We must go together. There cannot be any space between us for them to react.”

  “Rand can just Shadowstep them,” Fujiko said. “He should go first and distract them.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “Then they’ll be facing me and be ready to grab you when you jump. No, you go first. Then I’ll step through. Agreed?”

  “What about your rune, Fujiko?” Altarus asked.

  “Substantially less probability of detection?” she replied skeptically. “I dunno…this seems pretty tight to me.”

  “Agreed,” Altarus grumbled.

  “Yeah,” Fujiko sighed, obviously not happy with our plan.

  “Okay,” I said, watching the men as they moved. One of them had reached the other side of the street and was doing his best to turn around, while the other simply crawled in his direction. He coughed, spraying sickly sputum across the ground and his companion’s feet and began a hacking coughing fit. “NOW!”

  Altarus dashed forward and vaulted high into the air, slapping the stone beside him with a hand for a bit of extra boost. The first wagon man barely had time to raise his head before Altarus landed easily on the other side. He snarled in defeat as Fujiko raced toward them and jumped. A hideous hand reached out for her, catching her pant leg but failing to take hold.

  “Shit!” she cursed as she landed safely beside Altarus, but as I moved to Shadowstep to join them, something unexpected happened.

  The first man yelped. His mouth opened with a snap like a strong branch breaking in half. His lower jaw dropped impossibly far, the skin and flesh stretching with it, tearing holes around the exposed muscle and tendons as a strong coiled tentacle exploded out of his throat and latched onto Fujiko’s angle, wrapping up the bottom half of her leg and tugging her to the ground. She hit hard. I heard her breath escape her lungs as the wagon man began pulling her toward his open mouth, which now seemed wide enough to swallow four people. Beside him, his grotesque partner seemed to be laughing.

  “Deeeeelissshissss!” he muttered, as though suffering from some kind of infliction.

  “Fuck! Rand, help!” Fujiko shouted as Altarus began firing as fast as he could, pumping the man full of as many rounds as he was able to fire. The lead seemed to bounce off the man’s soft skin, barely even registering any damage. He was simply too high level for them—probably even for me. But still, I had to do something.

  Drawing my axe, I stepped forward and sliced up across the man’s back—

  21

  Shit!

  Then back down with all my might, scoring what would have been a massive attack on anything my level.

  27

  The tiniest sliver of health dropped from his bar. He ignored me, but his buddy did not. He reacted this time with incredible speed, and I watched as his right hand swept toward me, morphing into a claw of razor sharp nails, and slashed across my chest from collar bone to groin.

  -724

  “Shit!” I howled as I Shadowstepped to the other side. There was no choice. One more hit and I was done for. As I popped a Soothing Syrup, I cursed Mizaguchi for not including healing spells in this game and not having a healer class with me.

  +248

  “Rand, help!” Fujiko shouted again. I looked back to see her fighting with everything she had, her free foot braced against the wagon man’s top jaw as he hissed and gurgled angrily, hungrily as he fought to wrestle her into his jaws.

  “Din-din-dinner!” his companion snarled, clambering over his companion to get in on the action. Fujiko’s attacker tried to reply, but with his tongue wrapped around her leg, his words were barely even words.

  “Geth yur owwnnnn!”

  Altarus fired, this time aiming for the man’s tongue. His bullet sprayed blood but the damage was still almost imperceptible. I leapt forward and drove my axe into the man’s forehead.

  18

  “Rand!” Fujiko howled.

  “I can’t hurt him!” I roared, bringing my blade down again.

  17

  The second wagon man reached out for me, forcing me to leap back to avoid another claw attack that would have ended me. I downed another Soothing Syrup as Fujiko’s free leg twisted and slipped from the man’s upper jaw and plunged into his mouth.

  “Yeth yeth yeth!” the man hissed as his tongue flexed and contracted. Fujiko had seconds before she became this carnivorous cadaver’s meal. A flash of inspiration rushed through my mind, and I quickly snatched a Firebomb from my inventory and threw it with as much precision as I could muster.

  The tiny ball of flame found its mark, plunging deep into the wagon man’s mouth. It burst, exploding and almost tearing his jaw apart. He howled and coughed, spraying flames everywhere—all over Fujiko and all over his horrid companion.

  “Shit!” Fujiko cried out as she began to burn, but my strategy had worked; the man’s tongue let go of her and she was able to leap away.

  Waves of flames spilled over the horrible men, charring their skin and flooding the air with the stench of scorched flesh. Fujiko, slapping at the flames rising up one half of her body, tripped and fell, dangerously close to the wagon men. Altarus leapt forward and snatched her by the hair and tugged her up the street as she howled in pain.

  “Fire fire!” one of the men cried out, swatting at his body with his clawed hands, involuntarily scratching deep lacerations into his pruned skin.

  “Put it out! Pu-pu-put it out!”

  Damage ticked down. It wasn’t much, but that didn’t matter. We didn’t have to kill them, we just had to get away. Beside me, Fujiko struggled to her feet, staggered back and pressed her back to a wall, swatting away the flames as they began to fade, and slopping a Soothing Syrup into her mouth.

  “Fuck!” she cursed, pressing a hand to her chest.

  “Out out out!” the wagon men cursed as the flames persisted.

  “Let’s get out of here!” I shouted, dashing forward and downing another Soothing Syrup to restore my health to full.

  The walls blurred around me as I ran, passing dark glass, glowing windows, wrought iron bars and corpse vegetation. Countless doors and homes swept through the corners of my vision a
s I pressed forward, the city’s countless howls and cries the soundtrack to my journey as I ran deeper into the crazed metropolis.

  The city widened and spat us out into the square Mayoi warned us about.

  “Blood orange!” I cried out as I cast my eyes on the battle raging before us.

  A tremendous cathedral flanked one side of the square, and a row of shanty homes lay on the other. Spilling down the steps from the shattered wooden doors of the church was a horde of headless women clad in rotting corsets, staggering forward on three legs, their voluptuous chests completely exposed like an erotic movie gone terribly, terribly wrong, their feet stuffed into horrible heeled shoes as they advanced on a group of Seekers, Mayoi and Rumble’s group no doubt, attacking with knives, short swords and terrible claws. In the back, at the head of the steps, one of the twisted women aimed a thin bone wand and fired.

  A web of purple flesh-like sludge swept forth with the sound of low bass, like a giant vomiting up the remains of a lung infection.

  “Down!” one of the Seekers shouted as the spell swept over them. They all dropped to the ground instantly—all but one of them.

  A young looking seeker with a head of shaggy blonde hair took the spell to the face, his mouth open in shock like he was doing his best to snatch the putrid mess from the air and swallow it whole in a misguided, valiant attempt to save the others. His health plummeted to merely a sliver, and one slash from one of the headless women finished him off. His body toppled backward like a fallen tree.

  “Charles!” someone from the group shouted as he died. I quickly gazed over the relentless horde of attackers with which the Seekers were facing off.

  Headless Wet Nurse of Quelan—Level 21

  Gunshots filled the air. Axes, swords, hammers and knives cut and bashed the swarm of advancing women, who swayed back and forth and side to side on their awkward pale legs that seemed ready to snap at any moment.