For Lotan, it was like discovering Atlantis.
And then he saw something completely different.
A figure in a nearby kelp forest, watching through the green fronds.
A woman.
She had a beautiful face, with long hair that floated around her head in a nimbus of blue. She was naked from the waist up, with small, pert breasts that barely moved in the water.
“Hello?” he called out. Because of his specially adapted vocal cords, his voice was as clear as if he had been speaking in air.
The woman turned and fled.
Lotan chased after her. He raced through the kelp, pushing it aside like curtains – but she was fast.
Once he got clear of the kelp, he saw why.
She was a mermaid – or very similar to it, except that instead of a fish’s bottom half, hers was more like an eel. She had no fins at the end of her body, just an undulating flat tail that tapered to a blunt tip. Her lower body whipped up and down, propelling her quickly through the water.
He swam as fast as he could after her. “Wait – ”
She cried out. Suddenly, from the edge of a steep drop-off, several droths appeared – warriors shaped like Lotan, with webbed feet and hands, and fish-like heads.
Except these droths were considerably larger and more muscular – and they all carried metal tridents that they pointed in Lotan’s direction.
He stopped short and hovered there in the water, wondering if he should pull his sword.
“Hold, brother,” one of them said in a strange tongue that Lotan immediately understood, even though it wasn’t English. “Why are you chasing mer-folk?”
“I’m a stranger here,” he answered instinctively in the droth language. “I have come from a very far distance, and she was the first person I saw.”
The droth warriors glanced at each other, then back at Lotan. “You’re coming from the harbor, though.”
“Yes,” he agreed.
“Why did you go inside the harbor if you came from the sea?”
“I didn’t come from the sea. I flew here by a…” He fumbled for the word, but there wasn’t one for ‘flying horse.’ He settled on “flying creature of the air.”
The droths all stared at him in wonder. “You came from the surface world?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you here?”
“I need to speak to your leaders. There is a great evil in the surface world that threatens to destroy us all.”
The droth warriors glanced at each other. Finally one said, “Come. We will take you to the Elders.”
24
They swam farther out to sea – and the further they went, the more glorious things became.
Ruins gave way to fully intact structures made of marble. Temples, buildings, villas, even palaces, all of them apparently inspired by ancient Greek and Roman architecture. Gardens of brightly colored underwater flora flourished throughout the blocks of residences. Fluorescent creatures gave off a light in the deeper, darker crevices of the landscape. Everywhere he looked was a feast for the eyes.
On the way, one of the droth warriors pulled out a conch shell and blew a deep, rumbling note that reverberated through the water. Lotan wondered what it meant, but when he saw droths peek their heads out of buildings and caverns and start swimming towards the center of the metropolis, he began to figure it out.
They reached the largest building of the droth city, which looked like a smaller version of the Coliseum in Rome. The warriors led Lotan through a side passageway, past a phalanx of guards with tridents and wavy swords.
On one hand, it was amazing to see so many faces that looked like his.
On the other hand, he could have done without all the weapons pointed his way.
The warriors reached the central arena of the Coliseum. At the far end of the ground level sat a tribunal of older droths on a marble dais. All around them, dozens more sat in the tiered balconies surrounding the open center. Hundreds of younger droths stood on the marble floor, waiting to see what would happen.
“Who has summoned this convocation, and why?” the sole female on the tribunal called out from the dais.
One of Lotan’s escorts swam forward. “I Sotar called this meeting, because there is a stranger who claims he has come from the surface world.”
A murmur of discontent rippled through the court.
“Come forth, stranger,” the female ordered.
Lotan swam meekly out into the center by himself.
“What is your name?” one of the male tribunals asked.
“Lotan.”
“You have come from the surface?”
“Yes.”
“Why have you come here to Peralso?”
So that was the name of this underwater city – Peralso.
Lotan told them the story, starting with Eric and the Mines of Alark and ending with the destruction of Blackstone.
“We have to work with the other races in the Shattered Lands,” he finished, “or Blackstone’s fate could be Peralso’s, as well.”
“I think not,” one of the male tribunals said.
Lotan frowned. “You ‘think not’ about which part – that we have to work together with other races, or that Peralso could fall like Blackstone?”
“Both.”
Lotan looked around at the thousands of droth faces watching him, both sitting in the tiered balconies and standing on the same level as him. Because he was human in the real world, and because in the game he had mostly just encountered faces patterned on human features – dwarves, elves, orcs, and of course, humans – it was hard for him to read the emotions of his audience, even though they were his own race. But their impassive stares didn’t bode well.
“I’m sorry, I grew up on the surface world – why wouldn’t you work with other races?” he asked.
“Because we are separate,” the female spoke. “Storath made us so, and so it is.”
Storath.
He was assuming that was a droth god, though he didn’t want to stir up more trouble by asking.
Lotan cleared his throat. “Well, see, in some places in the surface world there’s this thing called ‘separate but equal’ – ”
“They can claim to be equal all they wish, as long as they remain separate. Their problems are theirs, our problems are ours. That is how it has always been, and how it will always be.”
“Actually, no,” Lotan said. “Their problems are going to become ours, and pretty quickly.”
The crowd murmured. Lotan wasn’t sure if it was because he’d said trouble was coming, or because he’d directly contradicted one of their leaders.
He guessed it was the latter, because one of the male tribunals answered brusquely, “You have no basis for saying such a thing.”
“Uh, yeah I do,” Lotan said. “I’ve met Eric. I know what he’s capable of. He thinks this is all just a game – ”
All just a game.
He caught himself too late, after the words had already left his mouth.
But then he realized that even if the Shattered Lands had been 100% real, a villain willing to destroy anything and everything in order to conquer the world would think it was all just a game, too.
“…and everybody’s expendable,” Lotan finished. “There is no such thing as respect for other living creatures, not as far as he’s concerned.”
“There is no respect for living things as far as any surface dweller is concerned,” the second male tribunal said. “They are all selfish and vicious – towards us, and towards each other.”
“That’s not true. I’ve met – ”
“Not true?! Not TRUE?! Since when have the surface dwellers ever cared at all about our race?” the male thundered, then faced the droths lining the balconies of the Coliseum. He was definitely playing to the crowd now, who grew more agitated with every word he pronounced. “Since when have they ever shown a moment’s notice for our kind? They entangle our people in their nets and callously kill us. They pollut
e our waters with their filth. They hunt and kill us for sport, just as they hunt and kill each other over ownership of their ugly, waterless seas. Their conduct is the very definition of lack of respect for other living things.”
Ugly, waterless seas. That was an interesting definition for ‘land.’
“As I was saying,” Lotan continued, “I’ve met really wonderful surface dwellers, and I’ve met some bad ones, too. They’re not all one way or another.”
“They are all surface dwellers,” the female stated. “That is enough for us to refuse to interact with them.”
“But you can’t exactly refuse if they come here,” Lotan pointed out.
“You see?” one of the male tribunals said, pointing at Lotan as though he had caught him in a trap. “You defend surface dwellers, then claim they will invade us! Which is it?”
“Not ALL of them,” Lotan said, getting frustrated. “Just a small number of them are bad.”
“If they are small in number, we shall defeat them easily.”
“I meant comparatively small in number,” Lotan seethed. These fish folk were pretty damn literal. “Only five percent of them are evil, maybe even less – but out of ten million people, that’s hundreds of thousands of bad guys.”
“They are of the surface, and we are of the seas,” the woman stated confidently. “They cannot touch us here.”
“Look, last time I saw, Eric had an army of dead guys and a bunch of soldiers from Hell. The soldiers might not be able to come down here, but dead guys don’t breathe. They’re coming whether you like it or not. What do you think, that once they’ve conquered all the land, they’ll leave the sea alone? No – when they’ve conquered everything else, they’ll come after you. Not only that, Eric can possess things with demons,” Lotan said, shivering as he remembered the darkness that had almost overcome his mind back in the underground caverns of Alark. “He might be able to possess us and make us fight each other.”
“Impossible.”
“It’s not impossible – ”
“Whatever he does, we shall prevail.”
“How do you know that?” Lotan demanded. “How do you know you’ll prevail?”
“Because we always have.”
Lotan snorted in exasperation. “Blackstone was a city with 200-foot walls that had stood thousands of years, but Eric found a way to destroy it – and tens of thousands of people inside, too!”
“Invaders can go over walls,” the female said haughtily. “The surface dwellers were fools to depend upon them.”
Lotan was getting really frustrated now. “Underwater, yes, walls aren’t good protection because the enemy can swim over them – but it doesn’t work like that in the surface world!”
“That is their problem.”
“What, physics is their problem?!”
There apparently wasn’t a word for ‘physics’ in Droth, so it came out as the ‘laws of air and water.’
Which the tribunal immediately capitalized on in their rhetoric.
“Yes, exactly – the laws of air and water are their problem. They are in air, we are in water. That is how it has always been, and how it shall always be.”
“But – ”
“NO MORE!” the female shouted. “We have been more than forbearing as we listened to your nonsense. Air is air, and water is water. Droth is droth, and surface dwellers are their own kind. Neither mix, nor shall they. The surface dwellers can perish on their ugly, waterless seas as long as they never come into our abode. And if they do, they will be destroyed.”
With that, the guards who had brought Lotan into the Coliseum surrounded him and forcefully pulled him away.
As they exited, all the droths in the balconies cheered… though hundreds of others on the floor remained silent.
25
“Well, that was useless,” Lotan muttered.
The guards escorted him through the halls of the underwater coliseum until they reached the outside.
“Don’t try to go back in,” one of them warned.
“What would be the point?” Lotan asked sourly.
As the guards went back inside, a group of droths emerged from the hallways, saw Lotan, and headed straight for him. They looked like the younger adults who had stood on the floor of the coliseum and remained silent throughout most of Lotan’s story and the tribunal’s grandstanding.
Lotan nervously watched them approach. He wondered if they might be some sort of ultra-nationalistic Hitler Youth, pissed off that he had questioned the mighty Droth Nation. He also wondered if maybe he should have his sword ready by the time they got to them.
They started their attack before they even reached him – except the ‘attack’ wasn’t quite what Lotan was expecting.
“Have you really been to the surface?” one of them asked excitedly.
“Have you been inside one of the surface dweller’s castles?” another asked.
“Have you seen a horse up close?”
“Or a cat?”
“Or a dragon?”
Lotan looked at them in confusion as they crowded around him like overeager puppy dogs. “That’s… that’s all you want to know?”
“No,” said the apparent leader of the group, his voice hushed and mysterious. “When surface dwellers pour water from bottles, does it really fall straight down into cups?”
“Do they have different types of water they call ‘wine’ and ‘beer’?”
“How long can you breathe air like the surface dwellers?”
“Tell us everything!” the leader urged him.
“Yes, tell us everything!” the others agreed.
Uh-oh, Lotan thought. I might be here awhile.
26
After three hours of talking – sort of an expanded version of what he’d told the tribunal, with plenty of digressions to explain how things like ‘catapults’ and ‘windmills’ worked – Lotan finally finished his tale. By then he’d drawn a substantial crowd of young droths, all of them hanging on every word he spoke.
“So not all surface dwellers are evil?” one of the droth youth asked.
“No! Not at all. My friends are good people. There were lots and lots of good people in Blackstone.”
“But surface dwellers want us dead,” another droth protested.
“No they don’t – who told you that?”
“The elders.”
“Figures,” Lotan muttered. “Look, I’m not going to tell you that the surface dwellers are all great guys, because they’re not. And maybe the people in Beraldia really are dicks, seeing as how they treat us – ”
“Dicks?” one of the droths asked.
“What is a ‘dick’?” another asked.
A whole chorus of droth voices called out, “Yes, tell us what a dick is!”
Lotan really didn’t want to get into surface dweller anatomy. “Uh, what I meant to say was…”
He struggled to find the correct term. Most insults for churlish, rude people in the Droth tongue included some kind of allusion to surface dwellers, either direct or implied. ‘Air breather.’ ‘Sand walker.’ ‘Wind mouth.’ Hatred of surface dwellers was baked into the language.
The best he could come up with was a term for a fish with diarrhea. Lapanothawap.
The entire group laughed knowingly.
“Don’t swim behind one of THOSE!” someone cried out.
“Exactly,” Lotan said. “And you probably want to avoid Beraldians because of the way they treat you. But that doesn’t mean that all surface dwellers are evil. I got stared at a lot, but very rarely did anybody ever treat me badly.”
“The evil sorcerer did,” one said.
“Yeah, but he treated EVERYBODY badly.”
“So you think we should fight with you against the evil sorcerer?” one of the droths asked.
“Yes, but we really need all the droth kingdom to pitch in. We won’t be able to – ”
“Tell us more about this thing you call ‘fire’!” one of them interrupted.
“Yes, how can it exist in air but not in water?” asked another.
“Tell us, tell us!” the entire group urged.
Lotan sighed.
Recruiting allies was harder than he’d thought.
27
Merridack
A thin figure in a ragged cloak and floppy hat rode his horse out of the limestone gates of Beraldia and into the surrounding coastal plains.
He travelled 30 miles, past the city’s furthest sentry outposts, until he came to a forest. After riding only a few minutes into the trees, a platoon of skull-faced warriors met him and guided him even deeper into the woods.
Korvos was waiting at the base of a giant oak with the other generals he had recruited from Hell. Behind them, tens of thousands of soldiers waited for the call to battle.
“Well? What is your report?” Korvos asked.
“The wine is good and the whores are better,” Merridack said. “There’s one brothel with a two-for-one special before nightfall.”
The horned general just waited silently, as did all the skull-faced generals around him.
“I suppose the wine would go right through you,” Merridack added, “but you could still ‘bone’ the prostitutes. Eh? Eh?”
“When we kill him, I want the pleasure of doing it myself,” one of the generals said, a hulking figure with a dragon-shaped helmet.
“By Azzoth’s balls, you people have no sense of humor,” Merridack grunted.
“The report,” Korvos demanded.
Merridack sighed. “Fine. The city will be easy enough to take – it’s fortified mostly against attacks from the sea. They’ll still give you some resistance when you come in by land, but nothing you can’t handle. From what I saw, I figure they’ve got maybe 15,000 men in their garrison.”
“What about the ships?”
“Roughly a hundred are docked at the moment – schooners, clippers, man-of-wars, merchant and military. Enough for the beginning of your little undead navy.”
Shattered Lands 3 Demon Wars: A LitRPG Series Page 9
