by Ramy Vance
Robyn picked himself up off the floor as Dawn and Dakota both face-palmed. Lindsay ran up behind the rest of the Wordsmiths, a little out of breath but with considerable distance between her and the screeching goblins behind her. “Why’s everyone standing around?” she asked. “Door’s right…oh. Did someone trigger a trap?”
As soon as Lindsay finished speaking, a spear nearly the size of Robyn’s entire body shot out of the wall. Dakota pulled Dawn to the floor. Lindsay grabbed the back of Robyn’s armor and pulled him out of harm’s way as the spear flew through the air.
If they hadn’t moved, the spear would have skewered them against the wall. Everyone was looking at each other in a very self-congratulatory way until the mechanism clicked again.
Dawn looked around to see where the spear was going to come from, and what she noticed was devastating. All the walls and the whole ceiling had holes big enough for spears to pass through.
Now the goblins could literally come from anywhere.
Dawn stood and pulled Dakota along as she motioned for the rest of the Wordsmiths to do the same. “Come on, we just gotta risk it,” she shouted.
As the Wordsmiths ran across the last section of the room, spear after spear shot out from the ceiling. They looked like falling icicles, and the Wordsmiths did everything in their power to avoid being turned into shish kabobs.
The ground began to shake, and the sudden rumbling threw them all off-balance as they approached the door. Only Dawn was able to keep from falling over as another spear shot out of the closest wall. Dawn turned just in time to see it coming toward them. It was flying lower than the rest of the spears and arrows had been, and was the perfect height to take their legs out from under them. Or their heads if they didn’t manage to get off their feet.
Fuck, Dawn thought. Guess this is where we die.
Lindsay raised her wand and made a circular motion before pulling her wand hand back and casting a powerful whirlwind. The whirlwind caught the spear and held it in the air for a few moments before flicking it across the room in the direction of the goblins who were giving chase. The spear kneecapped a few goblins and knocked over the rest.
Dawn watched the chaos with wonder. It was a very well-timed spell, and by the time she returned her focus to the Wordsmiths, everyone was already back on their feet and running after Lindsay, who was leading the way toward the door. Dawn took off after them and crossed the threshold. Once she had passed through, the runes on the frame glowed, and the door sealed behind them. It looked as if there had never been a door there.
Lindsay leaned against the wall and sighed heavily. “That reminds me of episode 106 of this Sci-Fi and Marketing podcast. We had a section on a hundred different ways to die, and we still didn’t come up with this one.”
Dakota was walking around their new surroundings, trying to take it all in and get a feel for the place. It looked as if the room they were in at the moment was a rest area. Perhaps it was a place to recoup after the challenge of the puzzle rooms. “You know, you’d think they would have come up with a more interesting challenge in that last room,” Dakota said.
Robyn was sitting on the floor, wiping blood off his shield. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, the stone thing was pretty cool, but arrows and infinite goblins? And the last one was just an even bigger arrow. Talk about a total snooze-fest!”
Dawn walked over to Dakota, who was playing with his daggers as he spoke. “Yeah, I agree with you about that,” he said. “If I were going to design a puzzle chamber, I’d at least choose an interesting monster to unleash. But I’m glad that we got it out of the way. Better a boring challenge than one that gets us killed.”
Robyn shook his head. “Seriously, guys. Have you not read any of your books? I mean, are you trying to summon a creature to kill us?”
The party laughed, and Dakota waved a hand. “Yeah, I guess. OK, let me put it this way…goblins are the bestest monsters ever. Couldn’t think of anything more interesting to kill us. So, where to next?”
Dawn pointed down the dark hall. “Guess we’re looking for the next door.”
After taking a well-deserved rest, the Wordsmiths made their way down the hall, becoming quite aware of a noxious smell that seemingly came from nowhere. In truth, it could have come from anywhere. The hallway was too dark to make out any details.
Robyn stumbled into something, preferring to keep moving rather than wonder what contributed to covering his hand in a sticky substance, and yelped loudly. “Isn’t there something we can do about this darkness? Lindsay, can’t you magic something for us to see by?” Robyn asked.
Lindsay pulled out her wand and raised it. The tip glowed dull-white and cast a light that bounced off the walls. They could see that there was something growing on the walls, but when Lindsay brought the light closer to the walls, they could hear something scurrying, as if the walls had opened and sucked something inside. “Uh, did any of you see anything move?” Lindsay asked.
Dawn lightly touched Lindsay’s shoulder and smiled. “Let’s just find the next door and try to figure out what we’re supposed to be looking for,” she said. “If something horrible is going to happen, it’s going to happen. Besides, it can’t be much worse than a roomful of murderous goblins.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Let’s keep moving.”
They walked for nearly twenty minutes. The walls of the hallway slowly transformed through their journey until they were similar to the limestone walls the Wordsmiths had seen before. Odd fungi and mushrooms grew along them. It looked as if the mushrooms had turned to face the light, stretching out as if they were starving orphans begging for crumbs of food. Dawn thought they were needlessly freaky and was overjoyed when she saw the next door and its set of runes ahead.
The door had a set of runes that wrapped around its frame, much like the other doors. The difference with this one was there was an image painted on the door—a lovingly rendered giant mushroom surrounded by graves. The detail was exquisite. Even the gravestones contained a mind-numbing amount of detail. There were four gravestones altogether, each bearing the name of one of the Wordsmiths.
Dakota came up to the painting to take a closer look. He clicked his tongue as he ran his finger over the gravestone with his name. “They didn’t even spell my name right,” he grumbled. “What kind of half-ass attempt at foreshadowing is this?”
Dawn stood beside Dakota and looked at the painting. “Spell-check aside, this is unnerving. How the hell does it know who we are?”
“There’s so much magic here, I wouldn’t even worry about it. You know, ‘Fuck it, it’s magic.’ That kind of logic. Worked with Game of Thrones. My disbelief is already suspended. Like, for real. I cannot believe this shit. It’s not even a hard name to spell. Do you guys smell that?”
The stench they had smelled earlier had gotten worse. It was a combination of old cheese and rancid laundry, plus old cum towels and unwashed gym shorts. Dakota scrunched his nose and gagged. “I can’t believe the next room is going to be a high school locker room,” he joked.
“Whatever it is, we should get ready. Wordsmiths, we need a catchphrase or something. You know, so we all know we’re on the same page.”
Lindsay groaned loudly, and Dawn imagined that if Lindsay wasn’t rolling her eyes, she was doing something equally derisive. “Do we really?” she asked, irritation hanging from every word. “I mean, don’t you think they’re kinda corny? We’re not a football team.”
“Okay, no catchphrases then. We’ll just go.”
Dawn knocked twice on the wooden door. It creaked open, wafting the disgusting smell into the hall. The Wordsmiths coughed, each of them pinching their nose as they walked into the next dungeon room.
Meanwhile, on Earth:
Tao was still running, terrified of the creatures that stalked him. It seemed like the halls of the cottage stretched nearly to infinity. There were too many doors to choose from, so he picked one at random and stepped through.
It was an ornate reading room that stretched back much farther than seemed realistic for the small cottage Craig had brought them to for their writers’ retreat. Yet here it was, a reading room that looked as if it had been pulled straight out of an Elizabethan novel. Tao figured Craig was more skilled in magic than he had initially let the other authors in on. That’s what I could use right now, Tao thought. Some fucking magic. Or a sword. Or anything sharp.
Tao walked over to the desk in the center of the room. He went through the drawers and moved around papers and knickknacks. He was hoping to find something sharp, a letter opener or something. The closest thing Tao could find was a pencil. Guess it’s better than nothing, he grumbled as he put the pencil in his pocket. Then he returned to exploring the magical study. For more than a couple of seconds, he had forgotten that he was in a life-and-death situation. It was difficult to remember orcs when he was surrounded by so many fascinating books. But the reality of the situation quickly reasserted itself in his mind, and he started looking for a place to hide.
The more Tao walked around, the bigger the room seemed. This could be more than ideal. He could probably just explore the study until it got so big that he got lost. That would give him tons of room to hide. Tao looked over his shoulder. The door to the hall looked farther away. Tao made a mental note that if he made it out of the cottage alive, he was going to invest in learning how to make a pocket-dimension library.
Tao stopped walking when he heard voices from his left.
There was a seven-foot-tall bookcase with doors that could be opened and closed. Tao looked around when he heard the voices stop. It was kind of odd that all the other bookcases were open for display except for this one.
Tao ripped open the bookcase’s doors. Matthew Sylvester, Andries Louws, and Orlando were crammed on top of each other in the bookcase. They spilled onto the floor once the door opened. Orlando took the fall the worst, landing face-first on the floor. “Jesus, dude,” Orlando complained. “Do you know how long it took us to get in like that? It was like a human game of Tetris, which we all happen to be very good at.”
Andries groaned as he stood up, rubbing his ass where it had connected with the floor. “Seriously, if you say that one more time, I’m going to kill you,” Andries threatened. “At this point, I think I might actually prefer getting killed by an orc to hearing any more of your jokes.”
Matthew shrugged as Tao helped him to his feet. “I didn’t think they were that bad,” Matthew admitted. “Actually, I kinda liked them. They helped pass the time.”
Tao looked around the room as he cleared his throat. “Uh, sorry for ruining your spot. It was just, you know, I’m trying to keep from getting killed too. You’d think a bunch of writers would be better at finding good places to hide.”
Orlando chuckled as he picked cobwebs out of his hair. “It’s all about diminishing returns,” he explained. “You know, like, you can only write the same scenario a dozen times before you start running out of ways to make it interesting. Kinda the same thing with running scenarios where you don’t fucking die. Still, we gotta find a place to lay low. I highly doubt we’re going to be able to get all four of us in that bookcase.”
The writers wandered through the study together, talking about how ideal the place was. Fear of death was taking a backseat to envious wonder. They all had stories they wanted to tell each other about the first time they fell in love with a book or a library. Unfortunately, nostalgia was taking all their attention. None of the writers noticed when a goblin stepped in the study. Nor did they notice the second goblin. Or the other eight that started running toward them, trying to close the distance in the magically elongated study.
One of the goblins tackled Andries, while another one squared up against Orlando. The goblin swung its axe at Orlando, but he managed to step out of the way. “Okay, fuck this,” Orlando shouted as he punched the goblin in the face.
The goblin’s face exploded, sending teeth and brain matter everywhere as the goblin hurtled across the study. Everyone froze.
Orlando looked down at his hand in awe. “I got this!” he shouted. “All those years of training have paid off.”
”That, or goblin faces are made of paper.” Matthew shrugged.
Andries managed to get out from under the goblin. “You’re an asshole, dude,” he muttered as he got to his feet. Another goblin attacked and he kicked it in the chest, sending the runt of a monster flying as well. “We all got super strength,” Andries shouted. “The portal between our world and Middang3ard must be getting wider. That’s why we’re getting stronger.”
Tao thought the idea was fascinating, but he also noticed that the four writers were grossly outnumbered. And, at least in most things Tao had read, super strength was cool, but it rarely came with—
Matthew screamed in pain as a goblin stabbed him through the chest. He fell to the ground and stared at his wound. “Are you serious?” he asked. “Super strength but regular endurance? By that logic, we could be breaking all the bones in our hands every time we hit something.” Those were Matthew’s last words.
Andries, Orlando, and Tao turned and ran as fast as they could. The goblins pulled out bows and arrows, and it wasn’t long until the missiles fell thick as rain. The three authors managed to find a long writing table to cower under. “You know, this is kinda like that scene in 300,” Andries murmured. “Except they were all pretty sick fighters. And you know…we’re kinda getting killed off.”
Orlando placed his hand on Andries’ shoulder. “At least they’ve been pretty spectacular deaths. Hey, looks like they stopped firing.”
The three writers saw their chance, and they took off running. There had to be a way out of this place, and it looked like the goblins had lost interest in them. Now was as good a time as any to try to find a way out of this mess.
At least, that was what Tao thought.
The moment the writers had crawled out from under the table, a goblin popped out of nowhere and swung his axe at Andries.
At the last second, Orlando threw his body between the goblin and Andries, taking the brunt of the attack. He fell to the ground and gripped the haft of the axe that protruded from his chest. “You’re right,” he said softly. “These are some pretty epic-ass deaths.”
Andries took the opportunity to punch the goblin in the face, and it went limp and fell to the floor. There was no time to celebrate, though. More arrows sped through the air. Tao turned and started sprinting down the study. Andries was not as lucky.
When Tao looked over his shoulder, he saw Andries’ body peppered with arrows. Somehow, Andries still managed to give Tao a thumbs-up. Behind Andries, Tao could still see goblins. It looked like they were too far away to determine whether they had killed both of the authors, or maybe they didn’t care. This could all be a game for them. Either way, Tao knew he was going to be able to slip away again.
A sudden sharp pain shot through Tao’s leg—he had been hit. He looked down at where he had felt the pain. There was no arrow. He reached into his pocket, trying not to slow down, and pulled out the pencil. “Now I have to worry about office supplies trying to off me?” he complained as he turned a corner in the study.
There was a large bookcase in front of him. Beside the bookcase was a door. Tao opened the door without bothering to see what was behind it and closed the door tightly.
Chapter Eight
The runic door opened, and the Wordsmiths crossed its threshold. Unlike the hall that the Wordsmiths had just come from, this new area was beautifully lit.
The walls were covered in gold torches with bejeweled handles. Elaborate candelabras covered the ceiling, seeming to float in midair as their candles burned brightly. The limestone walls were gone, replaced by red-hued wood that gave off the smell of a pine forest.
There was no stone floor. Instead, the ground was soft and mossy. Grass grew nearly to shin height, and it was thick and healthy. As Dawn walked farther into the room, she thought she was going to need a machete ju
st to make her way through.
There was a staircase straight ahead, and the second floor split into two separate pathways. The stairs were also covered with grass, but not as thickly, and you could see red carpet beneath it.
The walls of the room were covered with what looked like small, multicolored spores, and as the Wordsmiths walked by, you could see the spores opening as if they were aware that they had guests.
Along with the spores, there were also hundreds of mushrooms. The mushrooms lacked the visual splendor of the spores. They were mostly dull brown or gray. Still, they had their own charm. When the Wordsmiths walked near the mushrooms, the fungi would grow small tendrils that stretched out toward the writers as trying to touch or kiss them.
Lindsay stopped to look at the fungus. Dawn thought it was a bad idea to stop, but she had no idea where they were going or even what they were looking for. Maybe it was about time that they started to pay closer attention to what was going on around them. The chaotic mess of their first room might have been avoided if they had all spent a little more time trying to understand how the room worked. There was a chance that anything terrible could be avoided here. Lindsay probably had the right idea.
As Dawn watched, Lindsay started to prod one of the mushrooms with her wand. She grabbed Lindsay’s wrist. “You think that’s a good idea?”
Lindsay smiled. She had a way of smiling that made you feel like she was questioning your question. Not in a sly or malicious way, just a little curious. “Not a hundred percent certain, but how else are we going to find out?” she replied.
“Find out what?”
“Exactly. There’s a lot to find out. I mean, these could be killer mushrooms just waiting for a taste of human flesh. Who knows? But we gotta find out somehow. I think it’s better than waiting until we’re all caught off-guard, don’t you?”
Dakota nodded in agreement. “Makes sense to me. Poke away.”
Lindsay prepared to prod the mushroom, the little fungus’ tendrils stretching out like thousands of tiny hairs standing on end, preparing to make contact with Lindsay’s wand. When Lindsay’s wand finally connected with the mushroom, nothing happened. After a couple of seconds, the mushroom shrank back from Lindsay’s wand, almost as if it had suddenly become afraid. Lindsay shrugged and wandered away from the mushrooms toward the steps leading upstairs.
