by DB King
“Raaah!” Ella roared in mock ferocity. The tiny faerie smacked the flat of her palm into the stone wall and the whole corridor shook. A little cloud of rock dust fell from the ceiling.
“Take it easy!” Marcus ordered sternly. “You want to bring the whole corridor down? Something amazing just happened, but new power always brings with it responsibility. Take a breath, Ella, and let’s think about this for a minute.”
Now that the trap was defeated, the pressure was off. They knew that the bladehand still awaited them—assuming there were no more traps—but Marcus was blown away by what had just happened and needed to stop and think. To his eyes, Ella was glowing with a reddish light, but as he watched her the light faded, and she looked at her hands, obviously a little disappointed.
“I was… so strong!” she said, sounding sad that it had passed.
“It will be easy enough to apply the boost to you again,” Marcus reassured her, and he was pleased to see her face brighten at that. He suggested they take a break, and everyone agreed that was a good idea. Kairn shared out some dried fruits and a bag of sweet hazelnuts that he’d brought, and Anja passed a skin of water around.
Dirk, smiling at everyone, sat himself down with his back against a wall, and the others followed his example, sitting down in a semi-circle around Marcus.
Marcus wasn’t sure how much detail he wanted to go into about what he’d just experienced. He needed to explain, but he also needed to think. Ella was the only person who he fully confided in about the dungeons and their effect on him, and he felt like he wanted to talk with her privately about this new discovery before he shared the details with the others.
At the same time, this new ability to augment his companions with his own spells was likely to be critically useful in the coming fight. The thought of Kairn with a Hero’s Might augmentation, or Anja under the effect of Fleetfoot made him smile. Dirk would likely be unstoppable under the influence of Ultimate Stealth. This had the potential to change everything.
But it came with many questions. His eyes moved back to Anja. When Marcus had first met Anja, she had been cagey about her origins. Her companion, Ben, had openly said that he was from Kraken City, but when he’d started to say where Anja was from she had cut him off and said only, “Somewhere else.”
The question had never been raised again, but when Marcus had looked at her just now in his new augmentation view, her species had been read as Human / Darkling Hybrid. Marcus had never heard of a Darkling before and had no idea what it might be, but he figured this was why Anja had been reluctant to talk about where she was originally from.
Marcus was a man who respected people’s right to privacy. In the Gutter Gang in the early days, everyone had a shameful or tragic tale about the circumstances that had led them down into their lives in the Underway. Marcus had been no exception—his expulsion from the thieves’ guild was something he was not eager to tell people about—and so he had learned not to pry. If Anja didn’t want people to know that she was a Darkling hybrid—whatever that was—then Marcus didn’t want to blurt out that he had just found out about it through his magic.
I’ll talk to her about it later, he resolved, in private, and after I’ve had a chance to talk to Ella in more detail about this new power. But I’ll need to say something now.
Everyone was looking at him expectantly, so he smiled, took a breath, and explained simply that he had discovered a way to quickly apply his spells to his companions.
“Yes,” he said in answer to a question, “I think I can apply spells to any of you. It’s exciting, and I’m sure it’ll be useful during the battle.”
Ella spoke up. “When you applied the spell to me, Marcus, I felt it happen and I knew very clearly what you had done. It was as if I had a new sense, like taste or touch, that had been activated. It was… exhilarating.” She looked at him consideringly. It was an odd look, as if she was looking at him with new eyes and had never really seen him before. Marcus smiled at her, and she smiled and quickly looked away. Her big eyes and her strange, pinched, elfin features were always difficult for Marcus to read.
Kairn broke in, his voice thrumming with excitement. “Can you apply a spell to me, Marcus? I would like to feel what it’s like to have an augmentation. We dwarves are not great users of magic. Oh, we have our sages and temple priests, of course, but they are wise elders and masters of healing and medicine rather than spell-weavers. Dwarves generally despise magic, preferring to rely on the works of our hands, but I’ve seen enough of life since the day I left my home to know that’s a narrow view of the world. I’d like to experience the thrill of magical augmentation.” His eyes gleamed as he looked expectantly at Marcus.
Marcus laughed, and gestured around him at the dungeon corridor in which they sat. “You’re experiencing magic right now, my friend,” he said. “But I understand your desire. You’ll get the chance, no doubt. I’ll need to practice getting into the mental state where I can share the power of my spells. I need to be careful—this may come with a cost, and I may have to ration my power, but I think you’ll all get the chance to experience magical augmentation before this adventure is finished.”
“Good, good!” Kairn laughed, taking a swig of water and handing the skin back to Anja. “Well, if everyone has had enough rest, I suggest we go on. I’m keen to see what else this dungeon has to offer!”
“Yes,” Anja added. “I’m keen to find out what it feels like to have the magic of the dungeon master added to my skills as well.”
She smiled as she spoke, but Marcus thought he caught a curious, almost suspicious look from the corner of her eye as she said it. The moment passed so quickly that he couldn’t be sure. The moment passed, but it left an uncomfortable impression. Did Anja suspect that Marcus’s power had accidently allowed him to probe the secret of her origins?
Well, there would be time for that later. They all stood, dusted themselves off, and set their faces toward their path again. They were ready to fight, and the bladehand awaited them.
Chapter 5
When Marcus had first created the Bladehand chamber, it had taken the form of a long, narrow room lined with torches. The bladehand itself had been wide enough to fill the whole space, and a lot of the challenge involved getting past the monster to a place where it couldn’t deal damage with its massive sword hands.
After seeing how grandly the traps had evolved, Marcus was expecting the chamber to be significantly different this time around. He was not disappointed.
The five adventurers came around the final corner and stood, staring in wonder at the chamber beyond. It was big, much bigger than the old version, and though it was still a roughly rectangular space, there was much more room to move than there had been before.
The corridor ended in a narrow flight of twenty steps that led down to a flagged floor of smooth granite slabs. This flagged floor extended thirty feet to left and right, ending in walls of huge gray stone blocks that soared up to a high roof hidden in shadow.
In front of them, the edge beginning fifty feet from the base of the corridor stairs, there was a straight trench in the floor, six feet deep and ten across. It cut across the chamber from left to right in a perfectly straight line, as clean as an axe-cut in firm sand. There was nothing in this trench as far as they could see, and yet there was also no apparent way to cross it. The walls of the trench were stone, and they were sheer. With effort, a tall man who’d fallen in might be able to make a leap for the edge and clamber out, but if there was anything in there with him…
Beyond the further edge of the trench, the hall opened out into a cathedral-like space. Twin rows of gray stone pillars, impossibly tall, marched off toward a flight of massive stone stairs that climbed up to a wide stone dais at the far end of the hall. Above the dais, three enormously tall windows of stained glass let in a flood of bright light. The windows were a triptych, three panels each decorated with pictures of the bladehand. In the leftmost window there was a picture of the bladehand as it ha
d been, a monster of iron and gold, black and gray and ruddy firelit red. It had an expressionless golden mask for a face, and in the picture it was surrounded by piles of dead ratmen. Gazing at the scene, Marcus immediately recognized it as being an image of the bladehand fighting in the battle of the Underway.
He turned his attention to the middle picture. Here, the scene was different. A huge figure, still recognizably the bladehand, filled most of the scene. It was different this time, however. No longer was it a creature of rusty iron and fiery gold, now it seemed white and streamlined, and elaborate representations of leaping flames filled the background of the image. Around the feet of the monster this time were dark shapes, frightening creatures of shadow, like oversized dogs with something subtly wrong about the shapes of their heads.
The third window seemed impossible to make out. Here, in the center, there was a strange symbol, an arrangement of vertical lines that looked somehow like a face, but also somehow like a rune. Marcus tilted his head, trying to make sense of it, but he could not. The colored plates of glass behind this symbol seemed entirely abstract, mostly green and gold with a few lines of white and red scattered seemingly at random throughout.
The three high windows threw three shafts of bright sunlight across the floor of the hall. They were so tall that this light stretched from the foot of the dais steps to the wall that the corridor gave out into. The light from the windows crossed the central floor trench at three almost equidistant points.
There was no sign of any enemies… yet.
“Ready?” Marcus said to his companions in a low voice.
Everyone nodded or whispered that they were. There was something about this massive, temple-like chamber that caused them all to keep their voices low, and yet they found that every word echoed off the high walls and shade-hidden roof.
“When we step through this door, the way back will almost certainly be shut against us,” Marcus warned. “We’ll need to clear this dungeon before we can get out again. Stick to your talents, look out for each other, look out for opportunities and improvise, and be ready for augmentations. Together, we’ll defeat whatever it throws at us.”
With that, Marcus stepped out of the doorway and his companions followed.
The steps were narrow, and they went in single file down into the hall, Marcus first with Ella at his shoulder, then Anja, her sword drawn in her hand. Dirk came next, glancing keenly from side to side, and Kairn with his enormous axe brought up the rear.
Their footsteps clattered on the stone as they ran down into the chamber. At first, nothing happened, but, as Kairn’s feet hit the floor of the main hall, they all heard the clang of the gate from above.
As Marcus had said, a gate of crossed iron bars had slammed into place over the exit from the dungeon. That was it. They were committed.
The reverberation of the gate closing rang through the hall, an incredibly loud sound in the still space. It boomed back and forth off the walls and rang off the ceiling, and with that, the whole chamber sprang into life.
The adventurer team stood in a loose line at the foot of the steps, their weapons ready, waiting to see what would happen. As the clang of the gate faded, there was a sudden pop, pop, pop, noise from the long trench, then a crackle like the crunch of dead leaves under foot. With a loud whoosh, the trench filled with fire.
Flames leaped up all along the length of it, blue flames with red and green tips. They hissed and became stable, and there was a smell in the air that reminded Marcus of coal dust.
“What is that smell?” Marcus asked.
“It reminds me of the great forges of my home,” Kairn said. “In the dwarf kingdom, the deepest mines would sometimes hit places where naturally flammable gas rose up from the ground. It was very dangerous at first, but we sealed off the chambers where it was leaking out and used pipes to transport it up to the forges, where we found it produces a stable flame. Later, we learned that we could produce a similar substance by burning coal… but now’s not the time for that lesson. The gas we produced burned like that,” he pointed to the trench, “with a hot, stable blue flame, and a similar smell.”
Marcus nodded. He’d heard of the gas forges of the dwarves, but the Dwarven Realm was so far away and stories became confused as they crossed long distances. The flames in the trench certainly looked like nothing Marcus had seen before. The blue flames hissed steadily, a thick bank of them filling the trench and lighting the area around with an eerie, otherworldly blue glow.
A clanking noise from both sides of the hall echoed through the chamber. Marcus glanced left and right, and saw that panels of stone in the walls had slammed open, falling forward and shattering into thousands of pieces on the stone floor. Each one revealed an alcove about the height of a man, and from each alcove came a threatening figure.
“Enemies!” shouted Anja, raising her sword and getting ready to fight. Dirk stood at her back, looking wary, but Kairn gave a great shout and raised his axe, ready to charge at the first opportunity.
Marcus glanced from left to right, looking at the new enemies. This was an entirely new development—in the old Bladehand chamber, there had only been one enemy. Now, the chamber came with minions.
The alcove spaces behind the stone panels had contained tall, thin, almost skeletal figures. They were humanoid, with two legs and two arms, and heads on long sinuous necks, but they were far from human. They were made entirely of metal. Their left hands were made from jointed golden links, and in these hands they held thick round shields. Instead of a right hand, however, each creatures’ right arm terminated in a short, gold-bladed war axe.
In some ways, they reminded Marcus of the original bladehand. They seemed to be constructed from rusty and ragged-edged iron plates that formed an armored outer hide over a mess of wiring and golden gears.
Their heads were like iron cannon-balls on the top of long necks made from interlocking plates of black iron. On the front of these, they had golden face-like masks that stared expressionlessly out at the world.
They moved with jerky, erratic motions, their heads swinging from side to side, their heavy feet clanking as they connected with the ground. Two had come from either side, and as soon as they spotted the adventurers they moved forward.
“Let’s smash these axe-handed weaklings!” Kairn roared.
Marcus glanced around the rest of the chamber. There was no sign of any other enemies, at least not on this side of the chamber. “Let’s do it!” Marcus agreed. “Kairn, get ready for a boost!”
“Yes!” the dwarf growled.
Marcus called to mind his Hero’s Might spell. It was as if he were just about to speak the words, but not quite. He held the spell there in the front of his mind, powered by his intention, and just like that everything slipped into place and he found himself in what he was beginning to think of as his augmentation view.
Taking the opportunity to have a look around at his surroundings in this view, he saw that as before time had slowed right down. Slowed right down, yes, but not stopped. Everything was moving perceptibly still, just very slowly. Kairn was mid stride toward the axehand minions nearest his side. Anja’s hair seemed suspended in mid-air as she whipped her head around to look toward Marcus.
And that was when it struck him. He could move perfectly normally. Marcus turned his head from side to side, raised his hand, and took a step. Ah. That was where the limitation kicked in. He could not lift his feet.
“Well,” he said wryly. “That would have given me an unfair advantage, I suppose.” At least like this I’ll be able to duck projectiles easily. I wonder if…”
“Marcus,” said a voice. He turned his head. It was Ella! She hung suspended in the air, in the same spot as she had been when he’d slipped into his augmentation view. But unlike the others, she was not slowed down. She was moving her head and hands, just the same as he was.
“You’re able to be in this view too?” Marcus said, amazed.
Ella nodded excitedly. “It seems so! This is
unheard of. There’s nothing in my experience to explain this.”
“But, Ella, do you have any augmentation options?” Marcus asked urgently.
“What do you mean?” she said.
“I mean,” Marcus replied, “when you look at the others, do you see any words, any information?”
“Words?” Ella said, obviously confused. “Words? I don’t know… oh! Oh, Marcus, yes, I see it, I see it!”
Despite the slowed time, time was still passing. Marcus glanced around—Kairn was closing distance with the nearest enemy, his axe raised up in a two-handed grip.
“Tell me what you see,” Marcus said urgently.
Ella thought briefly before she spoke. “I see… It's like a bright light forming words in front of everyone. There’s a name, a species marker, skills, but I don’t see anything about augmentations.”
“Not at the bottom of that list?”
“No,” Ella said, turning to look at him. She opened her eyes wide and cried out, “you have it, Marcus! At the bottom of your list, it says Augmentation Slot: (empty).”
“Hah!” Marcus cried. “That works! What options do you have to augment me?”
“I don’t know…” she said, thinking. She looked distracted, glancing around. “Marcus, did you see Anja’s species marker?”
“I did. Do you know what that means?”
“No idea, but I guess now’s not the time to discuss it in detail. What do I have here… it just says Augmentation: Ally’s Power. Do you think that’s a buff?”
“It certainly sounds like it,” Marcus said. “Try it!” he urged.
Ella concentrated for a moment and, with a twist of her mouth, Marcus felt, rather than saw, her apply the spell. His own magical senses tingled, and power rushed through him. It was just a general augmentation that she was able to give him, but it made everything clearer and more powerful.
“That’s how we need to do it!” Marcus cried, enjoying the feeling of power rushing through him. He turned and slammed the Hero’s Might spell onto Kairn’s Augmentation Slot. As he did so, he let the augmentation view slip away and the whole scene sped up again.
