“I gave the map to Zunzu and asked him to flee and I myself ran in a different direction in order to distract the hooded female and her followers. But some of the followers saw Zunzu take off and they stopped chasing me and went after Zunzu instead.
“Before giving Zunzu the map, I had asked him to give the map to my brother Minnata as he was one of the very few people I trusted, even though Minnata was not of the adventuring kind of people. This became the greatest mistake of my life and cost me my brother’s life.
“Zunzu returned to me after many days with the news that Minnata was no more and I swore that I would complete the quest because of which my brother had lost his life. But Zunzu had lost the map and I could recall only one location on it: Cragor. So in a journey that took countless days I came here. I searched about the desert for anything that would seem to have some relation with the quest and I chose to explore the pyramid when I came across it three days ago.
“I used a one-time-only spell that I had received after completing a quest in the past to remove the stone slab blocking the entrance to the pyramid. When I entered, I faced the chamber with the black liquid and I could have died there. But Zunzu who can fly was somehow able to save me, flapping his little wings as hard as he could while pulling my entire weight with the muscles of his tiny arm.
“Then came the many-eyed monster. I didn’t battle the monster. I posess an intricate sleeping spell that can be used only once a year and I used this spell on the monster and put it to sleep for a few hours. Upon finding the trap door I descended it and come to the hall. Seeing the skeletons inside the cages, I was terrified, but I moved too quickly and placed a foot on one of the jinxed stone slabs and found myself inside one of the cages. I used my best spells on the bars of the cage but in vain. Until a few hours ago, I was certain that I and my good friend Zunzu would perish. But the gods have been kind to us. Had you good people not come here today, I am sure the fate of the other skeletons in the cages awaited me. I cannot express my thanks enough to you three.”
“Express your thanks later,” I said to Gulor. “We are not outside the pyramid yet. Who knows what lies next?”
“I do not care what lies next, but you three are invincible, that is clear to me,” Gulor said.
“I think we should get moving now,” Julia said, “I cannot wait to see Dragonia, if she indeed is inside this great pyramid.”
Chapter 37
We moved down the steps that the door led to. The steps led down to more steps, and so it went on for some time, until we were sure that we had descended at least half a kilometre down the earth. But the steps just kept appearing, leading down all the time.
“When are we going to reach anywhere?” Gnaria said, letting out a sigh. “These steps are endless!”
And they in fact turned out to be endless.
An hour passed and our legs grew weary. But still we only found that there were even more steps that led down. I was sure by now that we were kilometres under the surface of the earth. All of the stone slabs that formed the steps were perfectly cut such that each step was the same as the one below it. There were also torches on the walls which thankfully illuminated our way as we went further down.
“I don’t feel like there is something quite right with this,” Gulor said.
“Maybe it’s a test of endurance?” I found myself saying. “The wife lives such a long way down that it would take real determination for anyone to reach her.”
Half an hour later I was thinking over what I had spoken and I disagreed with myself. There had to be something wrong here. The steps couldn’t keep leading down to the centre of the world, could they?
More out of boredom than anything, I activated the rope spell and shot the spell at one of the torches, such that ropes appeared around the bottom of the torch. I grimaced, feeling like an idiot at having spent mana unnecessarily. I reckoned the real purpose of the wife living such a long way down (if indeed she lived inside the pyramid) was to make anyone who wanted to meet her less capable of thinking clearly, so that they would agree with anything she said with more ease.
And then as we kept moving downwards, I saw what was easily the most frightening thing in my life: the torch with my rope. At first I refused to believe the rope coiled around the lower part of the torch, because I had used the rope spell at a torch that was many steps above this one.
I came to a standstill.
“Can move no more?” Gnaria asked me.
Instead, I pointed a shivering paw at the torch with the rope. The others had missed when I had earlier used the spell. I explained to them the true horror of our situation.
“There is some really disturbing magic here then,” Gulor said. Zunzu was on his shoulder, still asleep. “We have been walking the same steps for hours!”
“Then let’s go back up to the hall,” Julia said and without waiting for the others she ran up the stairs. For some reason the rest of us didn’t move. Imagine our surprise when we saw her come running from below the steps only a few minutes later. When she saw us she gasped and put a hand to her mouth, her facial muscles convulsing with extreme emotion.
“H.. how can this be…?” she said, “We are trapped!”
We had been in traps before. But this situation had a certain sense of claustrophobia about it. No spell we knew was going to work in this situation.
All of us stood at the same place as we accepted our situation. Each one of us was lost in our own thoughts. Gnaria put her head against my chest.
“Oh, Timmy,” she said, “when we were in the hall I felt like my flying spell could get us out of all dangerous situations!”
I knew that feeling. I had experienced it before. But a part of me deep inside was actually glad that Gnaria was experiencing that feeling of hopelessness. It was good to feel hopeless sometimes. It made you strong once you overcame it.
As we stood without a clue what we could do, words began to appear on the wall, just below the torch with the rope. Words of fire.
Link me to myself, or meet you end.
“Link me to myself?” I said. Gnaria who had been leaning against me with her eyes closed opened her eyes and let out a gasp as she saw the words on the wall.
“Is this a riddle of sorts?” Gulor said.
“If it is then I have not a clue what it means,” Julia said.
I noticed that the ‘e’ from ‘me’ had a rather elongated end compared to the ‘e’s in ‘myself’, ‘meet’ and ‘end.’ A thought came to me. I found my legs taking me closer to the wall, to look at the words more closely. I realised the words were not really formed of fire. It was really a kind of light which had some liquid-like characters making it seem like fire. Curious, I put my paw at the end of the ‘e’ from ‘me’.
“Careful! It can be dangerous!” Gnaria said.
I felt not burning sensation. The hair of my paw didn’t curl up and catch fire. I was right. The words were not formed of fire. I drew my paw down, not removing it from the wall. The others gasped as the end of the letter ‘e’ further elongated as I pulled my paw down. I could have linked the end with the ‘m’ from ‘myself’, but I considered the nature of the steps. I began to walk further down the steps, never taking my paw from the wall, the end of the letter ‘e’ kept elongating as it came with my paw. The others didn’t follow me down. Ten minutes passed and I must have descended at least a couple of hundred steps when I saw my friends down below me, and I couldn’t help but smile to myself. They looked up at me as they heard me approaching. I went down to them and then I finally connected the end of the letter ‘e’ to the letter ‘m’ from ‘myself’, since that was basically what the sentence ‘Link me to myself’ meant. The moment I did so that the colour of the words turned green and then they disappeared.
I felt a funny feeling take hold of me, even as I gained a level.
Congratulations!
You have solved a unique riddle!
You level up!
This was followed by a second messag
e.
You receive a new spell!
Liquefy
With this spell you can assume the form of a liquid and go into places where a solid body cannot go. Be careful not to use this spell when you are in an extremely hot or extremely cold place as you can evaporate or turn to ice.
Yet another weird spell. I certainly didn’t want to evaporate. But one thing was clear:
“The riddle is solved,” I declared to the others.
“How do you know?” Julia asked.
Heck, I had just been awarded the weirdest spell because of solving the riddle.
“Let’s keep walking down the steps to see if the riddle has indeed been solved,” I said, “Maybe we’ll come across Dragonia instead of going down the same steps?”
Five minutes later it was clear that the riddle had indeed been solved because we could now see the bottom of the stairs and it led to yet another chamber, one that hopefully had the butterfly wife of the goat king. We rushed down the stairs
However, when we arrived at the chamber, the best news didn't await us.
The chamber was mostly empty, except for a sarcophagus at the middle of the chamber. There was a plate on it that read:
“Here lies Dragonia, lady of the butterflies and wife of King Vabek. May she prosper in the other world to which she has departed.”
We stood in shock looking at the sarcophagus. We had braved so many difficulties just to find disappointment at the end of our efforts. I had always imagined the life of an adventurer as one in which you got great rewards for doing great things. I did not know the reward of the quest inside the pyramid was the dead wife.
Wait a minute, King Vabek? That wasn’t the goat king for sure. Could this be a different Dragonia? I turned at Julia, who was reading the plate over and over again.
“I thought a wife of the goat king couldn’t die as long as the goat king himself was dead,” I said to Julia. I was recalling what Hoovemine the goat lady had said to me. Of course, Hoovemine had only been a concubine of the goat king, but still, similar rules would apply on concubines and wives, right?
“That is indeed true,” Julia replied, though she still continued to read the plate over and over. “But there were some rumours that Dragonia often snuck away to meet some lover of hers, even when she was living with the goat king. If that was indeed true and she had no real love for the goat king and in fact had later on married this person called King Vabek, then she was free to die. There was nothing stopping her. Age must have taken its toll on her once it came to know that her heart did not beat for the goat king alone. So here we are…”
Silence prevailed for a few moments.
Each of us felt a sense of defeat. I recalled the fuzzy feeling I had experienced only moments before upon levelling up. Was it that we were unlucky? Should we even continue with the quest? The quest apparently hated us. When we were always mere inches away from success, success was taken away from us.
“So I endured those three days inside the cage for nothing?” Gulor wondered aloud.
“Cragor was the last place mentioned in the map, right, that had a relation with the quest of the goat king?” Gnaria said to me.
I nodded. We had been to all the places that were mentioned in the half of the map that I had with me. We could never find out where the last wife of the goat king was, and as such we could never get the second part of the code that could lead us to the goat king. It was almost like the quest wanted us to give up.
General Information
Name: Timmy
Level: 7
Sex: Male
Race: Cat
Health: 566
Mana: 220
Strength: 65
Stamina: 75
Luck: 59
Chapter 38
Julia put her hands on the sarcophagus. There was a very focused expression on her face as though she was trying to remember something.
“When I first married the goat king,” she said, “the goat king told me that if ever I was in a situation when I needed to meet another wife of his and I didn’t know where the particular wife was, then I could find out where she was if I meet the other three wives of the goat king and use a spell. I have met three of the goat king’s wives. Glosis, Oli and Dragonia. Regardless of whether Dragonia is alive I have met her by coming to this place. I wonder if it would be possible for me to know the location of the last wife, Loria.”
So maybe the quest didn’t want us to give up? Not just yet?
“Well, our main priority now would be to get out of this castle,” Gnaria said. But barely did she utter these words that a rectangle the size of a door appeared on one of the walls of the chamber. The stone slabs inside the rectangle disappeared revealing daylight.
Gnaria gasped and said.
“Well, that was easy.”
Apparently it was hard to get inside the pyramid, but getting out was easy after you had met Dragonia, dead or alive. There was nothing we could do staying in the chamber, so we went out through the doorway. We found ourselves at the very top of the pyramid. The doorway behind us disappeared.
There was the sprawling desert all around us. After having spent so much time inside the pyramid this was a good change of scenery.
“I never recall climbing up,” Gulor said as we carefully descended the side of the pyramid. If we tripped and fell we would break a few bones for sure.
Zunzu woke up along the way to Nerok’s village where we had left the other cats. He still looked pale and weak. The time in the cage had really taken a toll on him. But he looked very surprised on seeing me and on realising that he was no longer in the cage. Gulor explained to him in as few words as possible that we had saved the two of them.
We stayed at the village for the night. I observed that the cats we had freed from the catmen had become rather attached to the womenfolk of the village. And next morning as I was sipping tea Nerok came to me and sat down near me.
“Um, there is something that I wanted to say to you,” he said to me. I had been observing one of the cats a short distance away. He was talking to one of the ladies of the village as though the two of them were in love. The lady was giggling a lot for sure.
“Go on,” I said to Nerok.
“Will it be okay if the cats remain with us?”
I stopped sipping the tea and looked at him.
“Like, forever?”
“Well, as long as they want to at least,” Nerok said. “If they want to become a part of our village by marrying the women of our village they are free to do so.”
I thought over it. It was clear that the village needed male cats, otherwise the village would perish in the near future. Nerok was old enough that he couldn’t father any more children and the women of the village would grow old and soon the village would become a thing of the past and so would the other tribes that dwelt in the desert. I reckoned now this was the reason why Nerok and the women of the village had seemed very eager to please us all.
Plus, the cats had endured way too many hardships. Unlike me they had never signed up for a life of adventure. They had been made slaves and used against their will for years. If they wanted to take wives from the village and settle down and lead normal lives they were free to do so. I told this to Nerok and he burst into tears. That noon the village prepared a great feast for us with the few resources that they had. The cats thanked me a final time for saving them from the catmen and then we left Nerok’s village and headed for the island.
The island still had the few cats that we had left to take care of the unconscious Oli in our absence. I told them that if they wanted then they too could go to Nerok’s village and settle down like the other cats. But they refused and said that they would stay with us and aid us in our quest and only once the quest had been completed would they think about returning to a normal life.
The next few days Julia took up the task of trying to find out the location of the last wife, whose name she told to be Loria, and who was a dogman female. The island g
rew considerably quiet and lonely without the majority of the cats. Both Gulor and Zunzu regained some weight and both of them looked livelier now with the good food that the island provided.
It was about a week after we had returned to the island that something happened, which I had not expected at all. My father, King Kitty, finally sent a reply to the message that I had sent to him so many days ago.
Dear Timmy,
Son, I hope that you are all right. I also hope that you might be able to forgive me for all that I have done to you. I have never given you the love that any son would want from his father. When you were growing up I tried to raise you as a prince by being too strict with you. I was so wrong in doing that. I forgot along the way that I myself had never been a prince. It was my adventures and the quest to save the life of my real world master that had ultimately created a king out of me. Questing is in our blood, how I forgot that I do not know. Had you been born to me while I was still in my youth, then perhaps I would have treated you with more love. I have wronged you and I am truly sorry for that.
Even when you sent me your last message, I decided to ignore it. I had declared to everyone that I had disowned you and you are no longer my son, and if anyone should try to find out your whereabouts they will be banished from Abhaya forever. When I received your message, I was shaken. I had never thought you thought the way you did. I was frightened for I had seen a side of you in the message, a very mature one, which I had never thought existed. Your brother might be the son of a king, but you are the son of an adventurer. I did not speak about the message I had received from you for many days to anyone. But I always had an unsettling feeling inside of me. Then the other day your mother had a breakdown for she misses you terribly. That day was the worst day of my life as I realised all my faults. But I have finally gathered some guts and spoken to your mother and to Nitty about the message that I received from you. As expected they were horrified that I could behave in such a stone-hearted manner and ignore your message completely and not tell them about it to them. But I have assured them that I am going to correct my mistakes.
Catheroes Page 44
