I tensed, but just as the closest creeper crossed the threshold of the doorway, the entire stone slab crashed down with a monstrous boom, rattling the entire cave and sending rock chips flying in every direction. I hissed as a piece of shrapnel cut my leg, and I stumbled back into a wall.
My body was drenched with sweat from exertion, terror, and rage. I was covered in blood, ichor, and less pleasant things. With a thought, I released my vib-blade ability from my sword and let it clatter to the ground. I bent over, and moisture gathered at the tip of my nose before slowly dripping.
I was alive. Shaken, but alive. With a groan, I stood up straight and gently rested my head against the rock behind me.
“Who’s there?” I wheezed.
Sharp Words
In my exhausted state, it took me a while to process what I’d just heard, then my jaw dropped. I looked down at my belt.
At first, I didn’t know what to say. Then I blurted, “Why are you a knife?” I felt stupid even as I heard myself speak, but the words had already been said.
The voice was silent for a bit, but then it sighed and said,
Despite my exhaustion and the sheer oddness of the situation, I bristled. I was exhausted, so it took two tries and a cough, but I eventually got out, “I am an educated woman! The last decade of my life has been difficult, but I had schooling before that!”
“Wait, what—” I began, but the voice cut through my mind, overriding me.
My eyes narrowed at the tone and the words. I had heard similar sentiments before. If I hadn’t been sure that the voice was Areva before, now I had no doubt. The pointy-eared, petite, joyless people always had a lot of say about Terrans. Curling my lip, despite my sore throat, I wheezed, “Oh, really now? You are pretty high and mighty for a knife that has been lying around in the dark for Creator knows how long.”
This time I cut the voice off, grabbing the dagger from my belt and dangling it by my thumb and forefinger. I snarled, “I could drop you here right now. If I did, how long would it take anyone to find you? Maybe never, right?"
I slowly chewed every word as I ordered, “You will never talk to me like that again. Your warning right before the creeper attack probably saved my life, which is why you are getting this chance, but I will not put up with being chewed out like this by anyone—much less a tool.”
I let my threat hang in the air for a moment, but the dagger didn’t say anything else. Nodding tiredly, I placed the weapon back in my belt and shook my head. Talking daggers with Areva voices were strange, but I needed to escape the dungeon. Everything else could wait.
Especially when the talking dagger was a complete bitch.
That thought made me chuckle wearily, and I began walking again, heading deeper into Dingeramat, the elite dungeon.
***
A few minutes later, I realized I had a serious problem. Well, more than one.
First, the fact my dagger had been speaking to me had actually registered. I was either going crazy, or I had found a powerful, enchanted weapon. The problem was, every story I’d ever heard of with talking weapons usually ended badly for the adventurers. I’d probably be better off if I were just losing my mind.
I was also bleeding. A lot. The blood I’d noticed on myself had definitely been mine, and it wasn’t stopping. In fact, I was bleeding badly enough that I’d needed to sit down immediately and try to do something about it.
My back tensed as I grabbed my dagger, but it didn’t say anything as I cut up the bottom of my tunic and used my last rag to create dirty, makeshift bandages. I hissed as I examined the wounds, and made a face as they began hurting. My adrenaline was probably wearing off. Great. Rot, this was going to hurt.
I had a deep cut on the top of my left leg. The tip of a crawler’s bladed arm must have nicked me. The wound was deep but extremely clean. Those claws must have been wicked sharp.
The other large cut I’d taken started on the back of my arm and traveled a ways down my back. I shuddered to think what might have happened if the injury had been deeper. The wound on my back was extremely difficult to dress, and when I was done, I’d also used up the bottom of my trousers to fashion crude bandages. The result wasn’t great, but it was the best I could do.
Unfortunately, all my wounds were really starting to hurt, and I was feeling weak from blood loss. I gritted my teeth and leaned against the tunnel wall for a moment, focusing on ignoring the burning, searing sensation from my deeper injuries.
I’d been hurt this badly before a few times. Of course, one time had been when I’d been speared through the gut in the middle of a road recently, though. This was bad. Very bad.
I closed my eyes and breathed deeply; the ancient dust from the abandoned dungeon tickled my lungs, but I ignored it. This was probably the end. I was probably going to die here. The thought had been on the corner of my consciousness ever since I found myself in Dingeramat, but I finally let myself really examine the idea.
I was probably going to die.
My fading adrenaline made my stomach feel like it was falling, and I gasped, fighting down my gorge. No. No, I had gone through too much to let myself be beaten by my own mind. I was stronger than this.
As terrifying as it was, I turned off my magic torch and just panted in the silent darkness for a while. I didn’t want to waste my m-stone power on light while I stood in one place and pondered death. Standing in the dark gave perspective to my problems, too.
It could always be worse, and I really, really wanted to get out of this place.
The despair, the darkness, it reminded me of the first few nights I had spent on the street as a girl after my first-ma vanished and left me to fend for myself. I’d been lost, afraid, cold, and hungry. Worst of all, I’d been powerless.
When I’d wandered into some street kids’ turf, and they’d hit me, even throwing rocks at me as I’d run away, I hadn’t understood why. In my world, up to that point, violence had been part of war, or adventures, or self-defense—not just a way of life.
But I’d learned since then, grown, and I was not a defenseless little girl anymore. No. I’d been strong then, and I would be strong now. My fists balled, I drew in a deep breath and re-centered myself.
“There, that’s better,” I said, turning my light back on.
The voice spoke in my mind again.
Maybe it was the pain I was feeling, or the shock of having just fought for my life, or the hopelessness I’d just avoided, but for a second time, I just adapted to the fact I was speaking to my knife. “Vistvis, right? Are you going to be nicer now?”
“Okay, fine. How can you see, anyway? You’re a knife.” I was so tired, so very tired.
“Oh.” I quickly lowered my voice and said again, “Oh.”
With that, Vistvis’ voice faded, and I was all alone again, standing in my little pool of light.
Well, that explained why the dagger was worried. I was her third owner. If a fourth person tried to take control of any enchanted item on Ludus, it crumbled to dust. Nobody knew why, but that was how things worked. I really was Vistvis’ last hope now.
My injuries ached, and I really had no idea what I was going to do. Did I need to worry about infection? I had my ‘Bonded powers, but I wasn’t sure how powerful they actually were. Did I need to train my healing ability like I had started with my Vibration abilities?
I put my hand over my eyes, and for just a moment, my spine tensed, I felt weight in my neck, and I resisted the urge to cry. All the problems just kept adding up.
About a week ago I had had to kill my best friend. Since then, I’d been chased, stabbed, forced into servitude, and even fought monsters in the dark. Now my best hope for survival was wisdom imparted by a talking dagger.
But deep inside myself, I felt something change. Something I’d pushed down and kept hidden while young had been fighting to the surface lately. In that moment, it finally broke free.
My head snapped up, and my eyes blazed. I was not helpless. I’d been victimized in the past, but I was nobody’s victim, not even my own. My lip curled, and I began slowly placing one foot in front of the other. I refused to bow down and give in.
With a heavy heart but fiery will, I journeyed deeper into the darkness. I silently made a vow to myself that if I escaped this hell, I would stop trying to be something I was not, and I’d give the rotting world the Hazardous Nora they had named me.
My eyes narrowed, and I picked up the pace of my walk, slowly approaching something like normal speed. I kept my footsteps as quiet as I could, though. My heart burned with determination, but Vistvis’ warning echoed in my mind.
Startling Vision
As I walked, it was clear that the tunnel was rapidly widening. Then I began noticing disturbing scratches in the stone wall. They looked like they might have been made by something seriously sharp in the distant past, like creeper forearms.
With both dread and curiosity, I scanned the tunnel around me for more of these marks and noticed some were even on the ceiling. The way the marks were formed made it seem that creepers had been pulled—pulled in the direction I was headed.
After another couple of minutes of painful limping, I noticed the tunnel was growing even wider. Most of my time in Dingeramat had been punctuated by heavy, stale air full of ancient dust, but as I continued, I also began smelling something bad, something rotten. The tunnel kept widening as I walked until my little pool of light dimmed, expanding outward into a large chamber. That was when I discovered what the crawlers had been afraid of.
I didn’t quite gasp, but I stopped and stared for a moment. In my surprise and growing dread, even the pain from my injuries was briefly forgotten.
In the center of the large chamber was a pond, actually more of a small lake. The water was black. Growths of lichen or mold heaped together on the ground near the edge of the dark water and the mouth of the tunnel I was leaving. Near one shore of the small lake stood a massive, empty shell.
I slowly limped around the lake, trying to be as silent as possible. The large underground chamber had four connecting tunnels. Three of them had scratches in the stone and masses of moss just like the one I had come out of. The smallest tunnel didn’t have any moss or scratches, looking far plainer in general.
When I bent closer to examine the strange growths on the ground, I grimaced. Small shards, remains of what had once been ancient bones were still visible. At one point, this entire cavern must have been a huge graveyard.
I quietly ambled over to the huge shell but kept away from the lake. There was no guarantee that there was no danger in the dead dungeon, a fact I had learned first-hand with the creeper demons. Up close to the huge shell, its sheer size was even more amazing. I shook my head.
Glancing around the cavern from that point, it was even more obvious what had happened, or what this area had been in the distant past. The giant shell must have belonged to some monster that had had massive tentacles or other long limbs. I could faintly see lines of moss where the huge creature had eventually died, and its limbs had rotted away.
The huge creature had preyed upon and eaten other monsters in the dungeon. I felt a chill and slowly backed farther away from the water. There could still be dark, evil things lurking in this lake, and I wanted no part of it. Luckily, I thought I might know where to go.
I headed towards the smallest tunnel with no moss in front of it. Vistvis’ warning about the golem monster was still fresh in my mind, and I had a feeling that such a thing could be next in an elite dungeon. Most adventuring parties would probably try to bypass or sneak by a shelled monstrosity with reaching tentacles. Ludus dungeons seemed to always spring traps or surprises on adventurers in that sort of scenario.
The tunnel was a tight fit at first and stayed fairly narrow for some distance. I limped along, my steps becoming more painful as my wounds kept opening and weeping trickles of blood. Despite the pain, I felt lucky. I’d remembered the sheen of venom I’d seen on the creepers’ mouths. At least my wounds were relatively clean.
I shook my head as I thought of how many ways I could be dead right now. No, no, enough of that, I thought. The little light from my magic torch gave me a bit of comfort as I painfully moved forward. I forced myself to remember that I could be doing all of this without any light...or I could be dead. Head shaking at my dark thoughts again, I glanced up and stopped in my tracks.
The tunnel above my head and back a ways had been widened. Jagged edges and scrapes in the stone made it obvious that the change had been deliberate and was not natural. Great craters of stone had been removed, and now that I was looking for it, there were rocks at my feet, too. Whoever or whatever had been opening the tunnel had been carting the resulting mess out of the way.
I slowly raised my magic torch above my head, set in its wide-angle config
uration, and just stared. Further ahead, the tunnel widened even further. I thought I knew what might have done it, and I felt a chill as I understood the implication.
Something had been trying to escape, making the tunnel larger. This something had probably been the golem demon that the dagger Vistvis had told me about.
I gulped, lowered my light, and slowly moved backward until I was firmly back in the narrow portion of the tunnel again. This time, I knew of my problem ahead of time, so I could hopefully think of a solution. I sure as hell didn’t want to be surprised by whatever had been widening the tunnel in the dark.
Nope, I didn’t want that at all.
After a few moments of deep thought, I regretfully turned off my magic torch. I didn’t need light to ponder, after all. I sat in the dark that way, aching, trying to come up with some clever solution to my problem.
I could go back and explore the other tunnels from the lake, but who knew what kind of horrors I’d find there. Previous events had proven that some things still lived in this Creator-damned dungeon. Creating clever combinations using items from my pack wasn’t exactly possible, either. I really didn’t have anything to combine or any interesting tools to use. The most valuable item I owned was a racist dagger with a hard-to-remember name.
My mind continued to race, but I wasn’t able to come up with any solutions. I propped myself up, resting my back against the rough tunnel wall, and I drifted off to troubled sleep.
***
In my dream, I sat at a table in a Jackal common house with Arren. She laughed, her eyes sparkling as she told me the story again about scamming a grumpy fishmonger out of food when she’d been young.
Suddenly, Arren leaned forward and said, “Nora, listen. You know what happened to me wasn’t your fault. There are huge powers moving, things going on that you can’t even understand right now. I want you to live, so don’t forget our promise, right?”
Her words brought back a few flashing memories of my terrible flight from Bittertown. I shook my head and muttered, “I’m so sorry, Arren. I’m not like you. It should have been me.”
Mitigating Risk Page 14
