Yes, there he was, lying still on the loot room floor, that nightmare blend of collected limbs and body parts that were all rendered useless after a dousing of holy light.
“Poor Karson,” I said. “We didn’t get him out in time.”
Gulliver’s expression flickered for a second. As a scribe, he was used to witnessing all sorts of stuff, and had explained to me that he had long ago learned not to let it affect him. But now, I saw differently.
“Karson,” said Gulliver. “The fella with the top knot?”
“The same.”
He slumped to the ground. “Tarius will be devastated.”
“I don’t think he knows yet. Not properly. I’ll have to explain to him…”
“Dark Lord!” cried Tomlin.
Following his outstretched finger, I saw him point to the image of my loot room, where the Collector stretched out a goblin hand, a dwarf hand, and an eldritch tentacle, and pushed himself to his feet.
“Get in there and finish that graveyard kleptomaniac off,” I commanded. “Tear him apart for Karson. Rip his guts out for Karson. Carve his spleen out with a spoon, and do it for-”
“Karson!” came a multitude of replies shouted by kobolds, jellies, beetles, and the other medley of monsters that I had spawned.
They rushed into the loot room now and quickly swarmed the Collector, who had staggered to his feet.
“This is it, you swine. Your collecting days are over! Brecht? Play us a song, please,” I said.
The kobold bard unslung his tambourine from his shoulder and placed it in front of him. He’d pounded just two beats of his song before the Collector was on him, throttling his neck using two hairy hands he must have taken from an ape.
“Gary!” I said.
My spider-troll-leech hybrid rushed to Brecht’s side and tried to wrap a leg around the Collector’s neck. The Collector struck out with his tentacle, catching Gary full force in the chest and sending the giant beast flying across the room, where he smashed into a wall. Gary wheezed, all the air gone from his chest, and parts of stone dislodged and fell on his head.
With a leg that could only have come from some kind of mutated ostrich, the Collector kicked Wylie, spreading a wicked cut across his chest. While Shadow dragged Wylie to safety, my fire-beetles surged forward and activated Hell Husk, sending sparks of flame up and down their skin.
The Collector kicked them away using two shovel-like feet, flinging Death into the ceiling, and Fight and Kill into a wall near to Gary.
I heard the crack of bones as the Collector punched Tarius.
A groan of pain as Maginhart succumbed to the slap of a tentacle.
The sound of Fight, Death, and Kill, returning to the fray, before getting knocked over like skittles.
Shadow grunted as she charged at the Collector and was swept away with barely a smidgeon of effort.
The Collector focused on Wylie now, looming over him. He raised an arm, brandishing a set of razor-like claws. Wylie looked side to side, eyes wide with panic, but there was no escape for him, and no friends near nor strong enough to come to his aid.
“Don’t look for a retreat,” The Collector said. “We must all face our end sooner or later.”
I had to do something. The Collector, for the time being, had no thoughts about his collection and was set on slaughtering every creature in my dungeon.
I couldn’t let him take Wylie, but what could I do?
Aha!
“Gulliver,” I said. “I need you to distra-”
But the scribe wasn’t in the core room. Instead, he appeared in the loot room, emerging from the shadows in time to grab the Collector’s arm and divert his swing.
The Collector swept the scribe aside, and Gulliver hit the ground with a sickening thump. Wylie, though injured, scampered to his feet and hobbled away, but the Collector pursued him.
“Dolos!” I commanded. “Get into that damn loot room and show this monstrosity just how ugly he is!”
The mimic squelched through the tunnels, soon emerging in the loot room. It took just seconds for his transformation to begin.
The Collector, advancing on Wylie again with claws raised, stopped. He stared at the mimic, whose transparent body had already stretched to eight times its old height. Confusion crossed the Collector’s various faces, as the mimic grew arms, legs, tentacles, claws.
I gave a command.
Activate core control!
With a mental push, I felt my consciousness get ripped from my core self and into the mimic, where I found myself standing eight feet tall, commanding a body of tremendous weight, struggling to control various arms, legs, claws, and even a wing. Although I had practiced with core control, I had never used it on a body such as this.
We stood there then, Collector eyeing mimicked Collector, two freaks pacing around the arena, never letting up in our gazes. He looked ready to attack me, but I still hadn’t gotten used to controlling this new body.
“They told us you were a fable,” I said, trying to buy time. “A story to keep cores alert. To scare us into self-discipline.”
“Every fable has its roots,” said the Collector, his various legs tensed, almost ready to strike.
“You don’t have roots of your own, though, do you? You might be a fable, but your origins are stolen. I’d ask who you are, but the answer is obvious; you’re no-one. Just a monstrosity of stolen body parts. There is no you is there, Collector?”
His nostrils flared. “Butterfly collectors kill their specimens and keep them in jars. Perhaps I ought to change the way I collect things.”
I was beginning to get used to the body now. To its weight, to the multitude of different limbs. The Collector might have been too strong for my creatures, but how could he hope to overpower a copy of himself?
“Yes, I’ll keep you,” he said, prowling. “But the rest of these useless sacks of flesh…well, there might be a limb or two I can use. And the mimic will make a most valuable tool. But the rest…”
Without answering, I launched at him and swiped with one of his own claws. I caught him off guard, barreling into his chest just as I slashed him. Blood sprayed on my face, and I crashed on top of the Collector.
He raised a hoof of some sort and kicked me with such force that I smashed into the ceiling, breaking away some of the already-fragile rocks.
Tarius was right. This place really is a death trap.
I had barely got my balance when the Collector was on me again. I raised a troll-like arm to deflect his claws, but he responded with a furious uppercut from a limb I hadn’t even seen, the force enough to knock me onto my back.
I began to lose control again. I saw that I had been wrong. Dolos might have mimicked the Collector, but he couldn’t imitate years and years of experience in his body, and I couldn’t hope to wield it as a weapon and use it better than he.
When I was almost on my feet, he kicked me back to the ground. He stood over me now, pinning me with two feet.
I heard stirring around me. The sound of creatures shuffling to their feet, of the kobolds and beetles and other monsters preparing to defend me. But there was no way they could. This creature, whatever he was, was just too strong.
The fables were right. He was a nightmare visited upon coredom, a specter of…
And then I spotted it. The hole in the roof, the small gap that Tarius and Karson and Wylie had complained about again and again.
A hole I should have gotten fixed but hadn’t because I had always been putting other things first. Because I had put my own pursuit of the narkleer and freedom over the complaints of my workers.
But the hole…I could see the sky, just about. A sky dark as ink, with the sun having long-since set over the wasteland. I saw a sliver of pale light sitting in the middle of that sea of starry sky.
I knew what I had to do now. The hole had to be widened, but the ceiling was too high up. Nobody could reach it, except perhaps…
In a flash, I used core control to hop from Dolos to Gary. Struggling fo
r control as my ability began to wane, I stumbled over to the hole.
I lashed at it with Gary’s legs, chipping away stone after stone, rock after rock, showering the loot room in dirt.
Pale light shone through, stronger and stronger with every centimeter of stone that I removed. The hole was bigger now, big enough that we could finally see it.
A full moon sitting way above, illuminating everything around it.
“A beautiful night,” said the Collector, grinning.
But as he raised two clawed hands, ready to kill Dolos, something happened.
Moonlight shone into the loot room and covered Dolos entirely, the illumination spreading over his Collector imitation and then seeping deep into him, where it met with the werewolf essence dust that I had fed him.
My core control ended then, flinging me out of Gary’s body and back into my own, where I watched from the core room.
As the werewolf essence activated under the glow of the full moon, Dolos changed. His form was that of the Collector still, but the were part of him flared now, and every limb, every leg, every claw became stronger, larger, growing and stretching until he dwarfed the Collector himself.
The Collector edged away, finally realizing that his collecting days had ended. He looked behind him, where a steel door blocked his exit from the loot room. He could wrench it off, no doubt, but I could see in his eyes that he knew he wouldn’t have time.
“Don’t look for a retreat,” I told him. “We must all face our end sooner or later.”
At least I knew something now. It was one question answered.
When you fed werewolf essence dust to a mimic, it simply became a much stronger version of whatever form it had taken during a full moon. Quite obvious, when you think about it.
And as Dolos, transformed into a were-collector under the shining of the moon, advanced, the rest of us watched the Collector meet his end.
We delighted in his tears, we smiled through his pleading, and we enjoyed every moment until finally, the loot room was silent.
CHAPTER 34
The problem with dishing out copious amounts of alcohol before you give a speech is that people will be too sauced to listen. It’s quite obvious; don’t let people drink themselves into oblivion when you want them to listen to you.
That was the mistake Chief Reginal and First-Leaf Galatee had made today. With naming day preparations complete and the big day finally here, Galatee had approved the use of a spirit brewed in the caverns, nicknamed Cave Rot after the place it was made and what it did to your liver.
And so, with Cave Rot nourishing their insides, the clanspeople made merry under the fading sun. It came as a welcome break after spending all morning draping banners and tying colorful bunting all around the town and hanging it from lodge to lodge.
Now, the drunken clanspeople filled the wide stretch of dirt sandwiched between the two rows of wooden lodges, which had been named, imaginatively, as Main Street, since all towns need a Main Street. Unofficially, many clanspeople called it Jahn’s Row.
Every person of every clan was present under the setting sun, and I had even allowed my dungeon creatures to join the party. Jahn’s Row was alive with chatter, jokes, laughs, and shouts, together with the competing songs of various musical groups. Some clanspeople played string instruments and sang about future glory and harvests, while Gary, Brecht, and the beetles practiced their only, unique form of song which celebrated the sounds heroes make when they die.
There was a distinct lack of tension on the surface today. Nobody was working and nobody was only just finishing work to go to bed, already stressed by thinking about their shift the next day.
Today, the only thing on their minds was the celebration.
“Quiet!” shouted Reginal, standing atop a hastily-erected wooden platform and facing the crowd. He wore a set of robes that looked like rejects from a theatre troupe prop box, and he was clearly unhappy with them. “Quiet!”
The chief was getting red in the face, so Galatee subtly touched his hand. Most people were too drunk to notice, but I saw it.
“Told you,” said Gulliver, nudging me with his elbow and giving me a saucy wink.
A goblin hobbled onto the platform, passed something to Reginal, and then scampered away.
Chief Reginal raised a horn to his lips, and the subsequent eruption of noise blasted through the crowd, stunning them first into a murmur and then into silence.
“Friends, family, dear partners from the Wrotun clan,” he said. “We gather here today to give our town a name. For that is what it is now; not a collection of tents sitting in the dirt, but a town good and true. A town built by your hands and forged with your sweat.”
The crowd cheered, and Reginal waited for it to die down.
“I will first give thanks to cores Beno and Jahn. Jahn, as you know, was instrumental in building our first real homes here, thanks to his growing skills in construction.”
Cheers and whoops and hollers followed.
“And Core Beno recently dealt with an attack, tempting the invaders into his lair and destroying them before they could injure any more of our people.”
Slightly fewer cheers sounded out now, but it was still good to hear the clanspeople calling my name.
“And we must thank Beno and Jahn as one, for their diligence in the last few days has resulted in hope for our town. I am told that, together with our lovely Cynthia, who as well as being a tinker also studied artificery in college, the three may have found a way to make crops grow under the sun. Nay, not grow, but flourish!”
Reginal basked in the resulting whoops of the crowd, but I wished he hadn’t used so much hyperbole.
It was true that, following my discussion with Jahn before the Collector arrived, I started thinking about how essence vines flourish underground, and in fact grow in places that normal plants can’t.
Working with Cynthia, we believed we’d successfully combined essence vines with a carrot plant, and early signs looked good. But it was too soon to start crowing about flourishing and hope and that sort of thing.
For the next two hours, Reginal and Galatee showed great leadership in praising their clanspeople and having them climb one by one to the podium to collect gifts and receive an honor for their labor.
By the end, almost every clansperson had been up there, though the people who received their gifts last had been granted considerably more drinking time, and as such they more staggered on the platform than walked over it. One of them, an orc with rippling muscles, launched into a slurred diatribe about how he loved his mom, and how the honor belonged to her.
Finally, as the drink took its toll and the sun had set completely and the town was lit up by mana lanterns fixed to poles and by small fires hemmed in by rock circles, Reginal addressed the crowd again.
“Be proud of your work, my good people of both clans. Nay, of one clan, for we are one people now. Be proud of yourselves, proud of each other, and take heart in the work still to come. And it is now, with honor that swells my heart, that I name our town for all eternity. I name it Yondersun, after the legendary city of old that stood for thousands of years in the desert its people tamed, under a sun they didn’t bow to.”
The celebrations wound on well into the late hours of the night until the mana lamps burned low and supplies of Cave Rot began to run out, and the stamina of the clanspeople was gone. Most headed to a lodge or the caves underground. Others, who had celebrated so much they had fallen asleep on the ground, were carried away so that they didn’t wake up under a scorching sun and have to add sunburns to their hangover.
“Core Beno?”
I was about to head back to my dungeon when Chief Reginal approached me. He had shed his ceremonial robes as well as his sobriety, walking with slightly more of a sway than was dignified.
When he reached me, though, his eyes seemed focused.
“Core Beno, I forgot to mention something,” he told me. “We will have visitors in a few days. The expected kind.
The welcomed kind. No need to coax them into your lair and do whatever it is that cores do.”
“Visitors already?”
“Geologists, believe it or not. You see, while I had some of my workers dig for signs of those damned thermal pockets, one of them discovered a bone gem buried in the ground. He dug further, and what do you know? Tons of the things.”
“Those are quite expensive, aren’t they?”
Reginal laughed. “Bone gems? They’re worth less than a rubber-bladed sword, Beno. To a trader, anyway. But to a geologist, I am told they are quite the find and can tell us much about the makeup of not just this wasteland, but Xynnar itself. I had one of my assistants go to town and put the feelers out, and a local geologist group made me an offer.”
“They’re paying to come and study here?”
“Paying out of their arse, Beno. And not just to study. They will have to pay for lodgings, tools, perhaps even Cave Rot. As much as thermal pockets can be a nuisance, they can bring fortune, too. I suppose all things can, really. In the right context, you can find a good side to everything. Except for tax collectors.”
“That sounds incredibly naïve of you, Reginal, as much as it’d be a nice sentiment to believe. At least I know something, though; you’re a nice drunk.”
The goblin chief laughed for what seemed the first time in months, and at that moment didn’t look like a goblin struggling under the strain of leadership, but a goblin who was proud of what he’d accomplished.
“I should go and sleep, I suppose,” he said. “We’re heading to the Tasgario oasis in the morning to see if the area around it is a good spot for your essence crops. Take care, Beno.”
“You too, Reginal.”
“And by the way; excuse my threat of the whip. I was under a lot of strain then.”
*
That evening, I held a ceremony of my own. It was in a newly-finished chamber just south of my core room, a place no hero would ever get to. This was a ceremony just for me and my dungeon creatures. And Gulliver, of course.
Gathered there were the usual critters; my kobold miners, angry jellies, Shadow and the pups who followed her everywhere, Gary with his injured tentacle, Wylie with an even bigger chest injury that he loved showing off, and of course Dolos, the hero of the loot room.
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