by Eric Ugland
“Motor?” Emeline asked.
“Dumb things,” Ragnar said, already pulling Emeline along down the stairs. “He says dumb things. All the time.”
Chapter 130
As soon as we came through the door at the bottom of the stairs, it disappeared, and we were in what I can only describe as a bedroom. There was a door on one wall, leading to an empty closet, and a door on the opposite wall. Which, when opened, revealed grey brick. Neither door provided us with an exit. One wall had a large bed against it, as well as a small vanity with makeup and perfume bottles spread across it. The last wall was missing. We were high on a hill, overlooking a massive labyrinth with a tower smack dab in the middle. And even from where I was, I could see a glint of color at the top, a slight bit of light reflecting off a vibrant blue gem.
Right then, we all got a notification.
Congratulations unto you, traveler, for your party has bested the first level of the Dungeon of the Ancients.
You gain 1000 XP.
You gain the first ring of the Dungeons of the Ancients Indicium. Complete the Indicium for a bonus.
Warnings unto you, for each level is more punishing than the last. But the rewards are greater.
“You level up?” I asked Nikolai.
His eyes were that peculiar type of unfocused that told me he was busy reading something. It was a look I’d never seen before coming to Vuldranni, but saw frequently now.
“You said something?” he asked.
“I asked if you had leveled up.”
“Yes,” he said, firmly enough that I knew not to ask any more questions.
The bedroom was nice, with a soft bed and a hint of safety. Anything hoping to attack us would need to come uphill to get us, and we’d get plenty of warning.
“Can we rest here?” I asked Nikolai.
“I have no idea,” he replied dismissively.
“Dude,” I interjected, “you clearly know something about Dungeons — you’ve been ordering us around nonstop since we got here. So now I’m asking your advice, I’m asking for you to make a guess. Do you think we’ll be okay here?”
He took a breath, looked around, and shrugged.
“Maybe.”
“Okay, well, I think we ought to rest here. There’s a bed, easy to guard—”
“There is no telling what might come for us.”
“Dude, how about we sit down here, have a talk about Dungeons and why you seem to know so much about the motherfuckers, and have a tactical rest?”
He shook his head. “As a duke, you need to improve your vocabulary considerably, else you bring shame upon your house.”
“Fuck you.”
“I see I have work to do as your mentor.”
“Yeah. Well, we both fucking do.”
He took the chair from the vanity and spun it around so he could look down at the hill and the labyrinth.
“Dungeons are a rarity these days,” Nikolai said. “And I ask that what I am about to tell you all remains within this party.”
“Of course,” I said, looking at Ragnar and Skeld.
“You are part of the hirð,” Nikolai snapped. “That is for our companions.”
Emeline scoffed. “We are all going to die in here. Who would I tell?”
“I talk to no one,” Donner said.
“Great,” Nikolai said, “completely confident in everything remaining a secret now.”
“Just fucking go on with whatever you’re going to say.”
I got a dirty look, but he nodded.
“There is a single Dungeon within the bounds of the Empire—”
“This makes two,” Ragnar said.
“He really hates it when you interrupt,” I said.
Nikolai’s hand shot out, aiming for my head. But with a slight tilt, it flew on by. I was faster than him now. Which felt weird.
“This is…” Nikolai searched for the right word, “unpleasant. Anyway, Dungeons. There is one in Glaton, south, but that is all I will say. The location is a guarded secret. One of my first duties after joining the Thingmen was going to the Dungeon with the Emperor, though this was when his father still ruled. We marched from the capital to the Dungeon, The Dungeon of the Lost, as a full company. An army of men and wagons and tents. We set up an entire city outside the Dungeon, and the Emperor held a tournament to see which of the Thingmen would join him in this grand adventure. The taming of the Dungeon.”
“Seems a bit cavalier to me,” I said.
“It was. But you must understand, the legends surrounding Dungeons are mostly of riches and glory. Of treasures beyond wild imagination, gaining godlike powers. But the realities are different.
“There are few who make it through the Dungeon. Certainly not all eight levels. There are even fewer who know the location of Dungeons. The Dungeon of the Lost was only discovered a few years prior to our journey. Scholars were brought to the tent city, to give advice, but they were all speaking from books, not experience. Save one man, a wild man from far to the west. He spoke of a Dungeon he had visited, the dangers inside. That we were fools to consider going in with the Emperor. That we would all die because we were all warriors, we were bringing no magic users, no healers, no rogues or thieves to check for traps or open locks. That we were not thinking enough about the realities of the Dungeon. We laughed him off, and he was driven out of the camps.
“A party of five went in. The traditional number. I was the lowest leveled, but I had the most skill with the blade. I was there as direct bodyguard to the emperor, to give my life for his. We entered at dawn, and we were optimistic. Headstrong. Foolish. We fought through throngs of undead on the first level, more enemies than I’d ever seen in my time with the Legion, and it was a real challenge. We suffered wounds and we burned through our potions at a distressing rate. But we beat the first level.
“The second level was more difficult. We were in a hallway that was only lit by flickering candles. There were shadows everywhere, moving shadows. And doors. Doors where we heard things. Cries of terror. And though our Emperor told us not to open the doors, Vendross heard his mother calling for him, and he could not help it. He opened the door and was devoured by a creature which still haunts me. We fought the creature as best we could, eventually beating it down, losing another brave soul to the monster. The three of us, wounded, we limped along as the cries grew worse. More believable. More terrible. The doors would open, and we would see the horrors inside, sisters being defiled, fathers being tortured, loved ones of all kinds subject to the worst you can imagine as well as all sorts of foul deeds beyond your conception. At the end of this hall, there was a tower of bones. It soared taller than anything I had seen. Creatures formed out of the bones, over and over again. New horrors would emerge, and we would fight and fight and fight. Swords broke. Back up weapons broke. I knew I would die — I bled from a hundred wounds. The Emperor bled next to me. And then, we saw it. The jewel to the next level. Shofie Rhen dove into the tower of bones, his body shredded before our eyes, but before he died, he threw the gem to us. His blood turned its white glow crimson.
“The Emperor grabbed the gem, and we thought the danger would pause. But the bones pressed us, and I fought to keep the man alive. I know he debated, I know he thought about continuing on, so I turned, and I struck the man across the face, knocking him unconscious, and I took the gem. I made the choice. The choice to exit. We were deposited where we entered, all our belongings stripped. Naked with a single hitpoint and not one experience point above our last level. Nor any of the experience we gained in the dungeon. We were wholly defeated. None of the magical gear we went into the dungeon with remained. Precious artifacts were lost. The prince and his four best men had only managed to get to the end of the second level. Three men died for him. The Emperor and I never spoke about what happened there. And I have never revealed anything about that misadventure to anyone else until now. The Dungeon knew what it was doing. It knew how to break us. It is a thing, a living thing of some kind.
“I became obsessed with understanding it. I spent all my free time, the little I had, learning of the Dungeon. Of Dungeons. I read of the days when Dungeons were built. I tracked down the mad man, and I spoke to him at length. And I learned. But the more I learned, the less I knew.”
Our group sat in silence for a moment. Emeline sat down on the bed, and pulled her knees up to her chest. Her bravado seemed to have disappeared while Nikolai spoke. Donner squatted on the edge of the bedroom, staring out at the labyrinth, and the sky above. It didn’t look real — it looked painted. As if someone painted the biggest dome that had ever been conceived.
“Dungeons were built?” Emeline asked.
Nikolai nodded, eating a handful of the trail mix stuff.
“I cannot say who built this one, the Dungeon of the Ancients, likely whomever built Osterstadt before it was Osterstadt. The exact rituals to make a Dungeon have been lost, but there are a few texts which speak of the act. And it requires a terrible price.”
“What does that mean?”
“The Dungeon demands sacrifice. It requires feeding to start. Thousands must be killed for the Dungeon to grow strong enough to do that which it is built to do.”
“Which is?” she asked, somewhere between curious and horrified.
“Protect whatever it is those who have power treasure. The Dungeon’s core is summoned, and it is planted, then it is watered in blood and fed in flesh. The more blood, the more power.”
“Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” I said. “Why go through all the trouble to hide your treasure in the Dungeon? Don’t you need to go through the whole thing when you want to get your own treasure?”
“No. That would be stupid. There are magical means to get to the treasure room, controlled by those who build the Dungeons.”
“So wouldn’t it be easier to just, like, take that method to get to the treasure?”
“It might be. If you are able to use that means. It might be tied directly to the magic of the king. So you would need to take over the king to get the treasure. Or, go through the Dungeon. And, the Dungeon itself offers immeasurable treasures. The treasure the dungeon protects and the treasure the Dungeon creates. As you’ve seen here. Magical weapons, armor, and plenty of coin, just from a single layer. The easiest layer. I never earned as much coin as those two levels of the Dungeon. And legend says conquering a Dungeon brings great power.”
“Your tone makes me think you disagree,” Skeld said.
“I tend to think it is all a ruse to attract fools. More food for the Dungeon. The Dungeon must be fed to grow, and that is all the Dungeon wants — to grow, to be bigger, to gain power.”
“Are they, like, evil?” I asked. “Should we be destroying them?”
Nikolai leaned back in the chair, and I could see the cogs in his brain turning.
“Dungeons themselves, I hesitate to call them evil, at least as you or I might believe. They just are. They are as they are intended to be. They are as evil as we let them be. Do I feel we need to defeat them? No. But nor do I think we should aim to make more of them, nor should we continue to feed them. Whatever power or treasure they may offer the individual, that power is born of the blood of others. I feel, and I am not sure you will wind up agreeing, there is little gained in the destruction of Dungeons.”
“Noted,” I said. “Leave Dungeons alone. Good rule. Also, um, if we exit, we lose everything?”
“Everything.”
“And we’ll be back in the prison?”
“Yes.”
“That seems less than ideal.”
“It might be more ideal than death.”
Chapter 131
The light never changed outside. It was always that vague sort of late afternoon, early evening when the sun was threatening to go down, but hadn’t quite yet. The air was still. More warm than cold. And it smelled stale.
We rested in the room above the labyrinth for what I guessed was an hour. Time was nearly impossible to track there. Long enough to pull out some actual rations. We ate some dried meat, drank some water, and stretched our muscles. Donner didn’t do any stretching or eating or talking, rather, he just looked at us like we were crazy.
I pulled some parchment out and did my best to draw an approximation of what I could see of the labyrinth from above. I had no idea if it’d do us any good inside the maze, but any help was something. And inside a maze, well, if there was a little something something that could prevent me from getting lost forever, I’d take it.
Emeline took some time to change out of the original ball gown into the next ballgown I pulled out of the bag. The initial one was covered with slime from the underside of the creature that tried to eat the party, as well as the blood from Duskalk’s beheading. The creature slime was increasing in stickiness as it dried, and the dress was basically gluing itself together.
I pulled a piece of mostly intact chainmail out of the bag and put it on. I thought about pulling out a shield as well, but that just didn’t seem like the wisest of choices. I didn’t have a whole lot of ass left for Nikolai to chew, and no reason to become known as Montana the ButtLess.
We stood in a line: myself in the middle, Ragnar and Skeld to my left, Nikolai, Emeline, and Donner to my right. I noticed that Donner and Emeline were never particularly happy to be near the Lutra. They’d always find a way to put more space between them and the otters. One more problem to tackle once we were free of the dungeon. I tried to think how bad it would be, to lose everything I had and to start back in the prison. Pretty bad. Mostly the prison part, because while I could get out of the prison exploiting the whole dying and respawning thing, it’d take me a long fucking time to get all the way across the Empire, especially through winter and a war. No way that Nikolai or the Lutra would last that long. So the only way out was through.
Great.
I took the first step, plunging my foot out of the weird bedroom and onto the dusty, dry grass of the hill. The moment I hit the dirt, it was as if a ripple shot out through reality itself. Reality, obviously, in quotes of sorts, because who knows what the fuck was real in this stupid fucking Dungeon. A prismatic wave rolled around everything: sky, ground, labyrinth, everything. It was as if, at that moment, the dungeon came alive again. As if the game was back on. We’d been given a respite, and now it was no holds barred.
“That can’t be good,” I said.
“It never is with you,” came Nikolai’s inevitable insulting reply.
He was already moving though, hiking down the hill.
I’d managed to get left behind.
Again.
Whatever.
I brought up the rear, walking behind my party, watching everything around us. The labyrinth was at the base of the hill. There wasn’t a single entrance to the place — there were many. From our view, the maze as a whole looked mostly round, that we could mosey all the way about the place looking for the perfect entrance, or seeing if there was just a straight shot on the other side, some particularly easy way to the middle, to the goal. The walls were high, thirty or forty feet, and made of a blue-grey stone with a surprising amount of growth on them. Lichen or mold in a prismatic hue. There were a few trees on the landscape between the top of the hill and the start of the maze, but they were closer to dead than alive, their leaves few and far between, and most decidedly not green. Everywhere outside the maze was muted in color. And life. Frankly, at that point, I hadn’t seen much in the way of life inside the maze either.
Nikolai was first at the labyrinth entrance, the one that had been directly at the bottom of the hill, and there he waited. Looking in, but not breaking the threshold.
“You think this is the entrance we should take?” I asked.
“I think the first entrance is likely the worst entrance,” he replied. “It seems too easy. Unless…”
Silence for a moment. I think we were all waiting for Nikolai to finish his sentence, but, instead, he let it hang in the air.
“You’re thinking,” I st
arted, “that they might offer the best entrance first, knowing we’d never take it.”
“Right, but—”
“But, then they’d think we’d think the first entrance is good because we’d think they’d think we’d think it would be bad, and so they’d make it bad.”
“I think I follow you,” Nikolai said, “but—”
“But by knowing that they’d think we’d think the first entrance is bad because they’d think we’d think the first entrance is good because they’d think we’d think the first entrance is bad, they’d make the first entrance good to throw us off.”
“I see,” Emeline said. “He does say stupid shit all the time.”
“He does,” Ragnar said.
I frowned. “I don’t think I say that much stupid stuff.”
“You do,” Ragnar replied.
“I am glad you all feel comfortable enough to joke around,” Nikolai said, “but bear in mind we are still in a dungeon. Death is imminent as long as we are inside. Montana, you take point. If there is immediate danger, you are most likely to survive it.”
“Or we’ll miss him least,” Emeline sniped with a smile.
No one else smiled.
“We will have no chance without him,” Nikolai said, his face especially grim. “Right now, you are the least of our party.”
“Oooooh, burn,” I said, smiling.
“Just because you are vital to our survival does not mean you should be talking,” Nikolai said. “Go.”
I shook my head, but started towards the entrance. I had my axe out, and I was ready. Again, as soon as my foot stepped onto the other side, I could sense a change come over the world. I can’t explain it outright, but things felt different. Fundamentally. Like the air was, well, thicker I guess.
The interior of the maze was immediately intense. The walls seemed like they were, at least originally, at right angles to each other. How that translated into a circular maze, I don’t know. Dirt spilled a little from the entrance onto the stone floor, but after about ten feet, there was nothing but stone. Well, stone and the bits of vegetation that were growing up through the cracks. Twenty feet in, I stopped and looked over my shoulder. Ragnar was watching me from the entrance.
