by Ramy Vance
Right now, the skeleton fountain had to be dealt with.
Dakota followed close on Robyn’s heels, firing arrows as they moved, careful to stay out of the way of the steadily growing river of hot slime periodically erupting from the half-dozen skulls that had dug themselves out of the vomiting mess of the skeleton fountain.
Robyn unsheathed his sword and leapt, shouting, “Iron Skin!” as he hit the skeleton fountain with a bone-crunching thud. He and the fountain went skidding across the slime-covered ground.
Smoke rose from Robyn’s body as he lay there, trying to get to his feet. Dakota didn’t have time to look after Robyn, though. Since the skeleton fountain had been knocked over, he could see that there was a large, fleshy underbelly at the bottom. There couldn’t have been a more perfect bullseye. Dakota nocked an arrow, took aim, held his breath, and let it fly.
The arrow pierced the underbelly of the skeleton fountain, passing all the way through it and out through the top of a skull. The fountain shivered as its bones clattered and then fell apart, sending bones and bits of clay fountain soaked in acidic slime skidding across the floor.
Dakota ran over to Robyn, careful not to step in the slime. Surprisingly, Robyn was on his feet. His armor was slightly burned and he was still smoking, but other than that, he looked perfectly okay. “How the hell did you walk away from that?” Dakota asked.
Robyn smiled as he sheathed his sword. “I figure if everyone else has passive abilities to go along with their class, so must I. What better passive skill for a warrior than a thick hide? I also saw that Iron Skin skill when I was going through my HUD earlier, and, well, add those two things together, and you got a human wrecking ball. Besides, I love Miley Cyrus. I mean, love her, dude.”
“That’s an odd thing to admit here. And how’d you know about the soft underbelly?”
“The what?”
Dakota laughed as the slime on the ground began to evaporate. A door appeared in front of the two writers. “Never mind.”
Dakota continued to chuckle.
Dawn thrashed in the pool of water as her zombie doppelganger tried to drag her deeper into the pool. She struggled, but the zombie was strong. Water washed over her face, and she spat it out while kicking, a scream welling up in her from a place of fear she hadn’t been aware existed.
Lindsay stared at her zombie as it rose from the pool, half of its face eaten away by maggots, some of which were still moving through her eye socket. The zombie’s hair was missing in giant patches, and its jaw hung loose and limp as it shuffled out of the pool. It was as decrepit as death itself, yet somehow more terrible, rooting Lindsay to the ground as her eyes glazed over with horror.
She weakly held up her wand as the zombie lunged for her, knocking the wand to the ground as they toppled over each other like some grotesque mirror in which the struggles of all humanity where at once shown and demystified.
All Lindsay could do was scream and try to bat away the zombie’s gnashing teeth.
In the pool, Dawn was choking on water and the smell of the dead. The zombie’s drool splattered on her face as it chomped its decomposing jaws, its teeth practically breaking off in its mouth. The spit woke Dawn up from her existential crisis.
This zombie was not her.
She pulled away, pushing the zombie down before standing, soaking wet and screaming like a child. There was no room for children in Middang3ard. Dawn summoned all her strength and kicked the zombie in the crotch, breaking its pubic bone. The zombie fell back into the water, and Dawn took the chance to draw her bow. She fired three arrows into the zombie’s chest as she backed out of the pool.
The Dawn zombie rose again like a perverse water monster, moss and algae clinging to its body in mockery of the dead thing reaching out with murderous intent. “Uh, Lindsay, you got any of that magic handy?” Dawn asked as she stumbled backward, tripping over Lindsay and landing in a tangle of limbs both dead and alive.
Lindsay was still screaming and attempting to crawl away from the zombie, which promptly took hold of her legs and tried to pull itself up Lindsay’s body to sink its teeth into her throat. Dawn, still tangled up with the two Lindsays, kicked the zombie in the face and detached its jaw, which flew off into the darkness of the room. Dawn scrambled away, grabbing Lindsay’s hand and dragging her along. “Magic, Lindsay!” Dawn shouted. “Magic now!”
Lindsay raised an empty hand. She looked down at her fingers, her eyes glassy and detached. “Huh. I don’t know where my wand went,” Lindsay murmured.
Lindsay’s zombie lunged again as Dawn’s shuffled closer. Dawn unsheathed her daggers and took two fast swipes at the zombie. Her daggers stuck in the zombie’s sickly flesh, and she had to pull hard to detach them. “They must be… I don’t know. What the fuck kills zombies?” Dawn asked.
“Fire. I don’t think zombies like fire.”
“It would be really fucking swell if we had some right now, wouldn’t it?”
Lindsay turned to Dawn. Madness was creeping into her eyes. “Dawn, I am not dead, am I?” she asked.
Dawn didn’t know how to answer. This wasn’t the time for an existential conversation, nor was it time to muse about their flimsy ideas of mortality. Instead, she slapped Lindsay across the face and shouted, “Fire, now!”
The pain was enough to remind Lindsay that she was in fact alive. She extended her hand, and her wand flew to her from across the room. She grasped it firmly and raised it, the tip glowing like a flame. That flame floated from Lindsay’s wand to Dawn’s daggers and bow. The thief pulled out her bow and nocked an arrow, its tip instantly igniting. “That’s what I’m talking about, Lindsay!” she exclaimed as she fired. At her side, Lindsay was charging a fireball in her hand as her wand sparked little flickers of flame.
The zombies stopped in their tracks and looked at each other for a moment. As they stared at each other, their skin started to look more alive. Color came back to their cheeks, and the decomposition began to reverse itself.
Lindsay’s wand arm dropped as she stumbled while walking backward. “What are they doing?” she asked.
Dawn fired another arrow at her zombie and it pierced the zombie’s leg, setting the zombie’s lower body on fire. “They’re just trying to trick us!” Dawn shouted.
“Do I really look like that?”
“For the time being, you look a lot less dead, but that’s going to change if you don’t do something about that zombie!”
“Right!”
Lindsay lobbed the fireball at her zombie and it exploded, setting the zombie aflame. The bright light illuminated the dim room.
Dawn seized her chance. She sprinted forward, daggers raised, and slashed her zombie across the chest. Then she flipped over the zombie and brought the daggers down on its shoulders. The flames spread over both undead as they stumbled around, trying to help each other but only spreading the flames faster. They let out agonized screeches as they fell to the ground and burned to ash.
The lights in the room popped on like someone had flipped a switch. Lindsay nervously laughed. “Is that what I’m going to sound like when I die?” she asked.
Dawn sheathed her daggers as a door materialized in front of them. “I think that is a question better left unanswered, dear.” She sighed. “Now, you ready to see how the boys did?”
Lindsay opened the door, and the two writers walked through it.
When the door closed behind them, they were back in the main hall, where Robyn and Dakota were waiting for them. They were both covered with a generous layer of slime. Dawn scrunched her face when she saw the disgusting mess. “How’d you boys fare?” she asked.
Robyn tried to wipe some of the green goop off his face. “We’re alive, aren’t we?” he answered. “And you two?”
Lindsay chuckled, cracking her knuckles. “Got to see zombie versions of ourselves. It was fun. In fact, this whole place is fun.”
“Did you talk to them at all?” Dakota asked. “Did they tell you about the afterlife?”
“You know, you’ve really got to stop trying to befriend everything that’s trying to kill us in this daft dungeon.”
Dakota leaned over so he could see Dawn. “That was some nice alliteration right there.” He chuckled.
“I am not in the mood right now, Dakota, but thank you for noticing.”
A large door appeared before them all, covered in runes. It was larger than any of the doors they had seen before, and the runes shone more brightly. Dawn sighed as she rested her hand on the door. “How many more of these things are there going to be?” she asked.
Robyn helped her push the gargantuan doors open. “You know how dungeons go,” he said. “People always write them so much bigger than they have to be.”
The Wordsmiths crossed the door’s threshold, and it closed silently behind them.
Chapter Nine
The door opened to nothing.
That was their initial first impression of the waters. Upon looking closer, though, they could see that there was, in fact, something in the room—if you could call it a room. A more appropriate description would be “chasm,” and this chasm, as the Wordsmiths found after briefly looking over its edge, stretched down into what looked to be the core of the world.
It was hard to say how far that was, but one could easily see the molten lava at the bottom. They could feel the heat. The lava was no doubt far away, but the heat was intense. The Wordsmiths were sweating within a few seconds.
In addition to the chasm, there was a door at the far end of the room. It was covered in runes that glowed brightly and could be seen from across the chasm. None of the Wordsmiths were particularly good with distance or spatial understanding, so no one could guess how far the door was.
That wasn’t too much of a problem, though, because getting to the door seemed downright impossible. There was only one option for crossing the chasm—a tightrope that was strung precariously from a rickety set of hooks dangling from the ceiling. (The word “tightrope” is only used loosely.)
The rope was not in any way tight.
“Slack rope is more like it,” Dawn muttered under her breath as she approached the rope. “How the hell are we going to cross on this thing? It looks like a wind could blow the whole thing away, sending me and whoever else is stupid enough to try this falling to our flaming deaths.”
Lindsay paced as she scratched her head with her wand. “You know, this reminds me of an anecdote I heard at a conference once,” she mused. “The whole conference was about marketing. The speaker was talking about how after you finish writing your book, you have to move on to marketing, and for a lot of us, that feels like walking a tightrope across a volcano. On one end, you have the book, and on the other, you have happy fans. The rope is the marketing. I think. And the lava was…oh, darn, I can’t remember. It wasn’t a particularly good analogy. Or conference, for that matter.”
The Wordsmiths looked at Lindsay. Most of their eyebrows were raised. Dakota looked as if he were ready to throw her off the ledge. Dawn, on the other hand, was beyond words, and her expression conveyed as much.
Robyn, unsurprisingly, looked like he was ready to ask Lindsay a couple of questions concerning the conference. He was just about to open his mouth when Dawn reached over and cupped her hand over his word-hole before he could speak. “Exactly how does that help us right now?” Dawn asked.
Lindsay shrugged. “Oh, I didn’t know we were brainstorming. If I’d known that, I would have come up with something more helpful and less meandering.”
“I wish whoever designed this dungeon had been more helpful and less meandering. I swear to God, if I have to walk through one more room to find another door, I’m going to devote my life to never having a door in any dungeon crawl I write.”
Dakota pulled on the rope to test its strength. “Seriously,” he muttered. “I feel like this whole situation was dreamed up by some writer trying to hit a word count. Mark Twain would be rolling in his grave.”
“Wasn’t Mark Twain paid by the word?” Robyn asked.
“No, you’re thinking of Dickens. Twain was the one who talked shit about writers who got paid by the word.”
“Well, obviously Mark Twain had no problem being late on his bills. Shit, that would be a relief. Being burned alive in the center of the earth would mean I could stop worrying about rent.” Robyn sighed. “Which is due tomorrow, I think. Yeah, I’d much rather be dead. So, who wants to be the first one to cross?”
There were no volunteers.
Even though Dawn was trying her best to keep the tone of their adventure light, even she was worried about crossing the chasm. The tasks that were being set for them were getting harder and more deadly. She was still shaken up by the zombified version of herself she had sent to its final rest. If this had been that kind of novel, she might have spent the better part of an hour pondering what it means to kill a version of herself. Was it a spell? Was this an alternate universe? Was it a promise of things to come?
Luckily for Dawn, it was not that kind of novel. Instead of losing herself to vague musings on the luck of the living and her terror of the dead, she resolved to figure out how to cross the not-so-tight rope as fast as possible.
The rest of the Wordsmiths seemed to be devoting the same amount of attention to the rope, at least.
Lindsay and Robyn were searching the walls for another way to cross. They hadn’t found anything other than a pile of rope in the corner near the door. It seemed like the only way to get across was to cross the loose rope.
Dawn hoped this wasn’t one of those dungeons that put an impossible balancing platform front and center, only to have you be attacked by tons of enemies at once, as if crossing a loosely-tied rope wasn’t harrowing enough. She looked around to see if there were any discernible spawning points before realizing that since she had come to Middang3ard, she hadn’t seen any spawning points at all. It seemed like most of the enemies they had come across had been deliberately placed. If that held up for the rest of the dungeon, it was safe to say this room was a rope and lava and nothing more. Somehow, that idea was not the least bit comforting.
Dakota had sat down and was flicking through his HUD menus. He had the trace of a grin on his lips as he stood up and pumped his fist. “Dudes, I got it. I just checked my HUD, and it looks like I have a button of dexterity. When I looked at my success odds on my HUD, I was at 100% for crossing. I can get to the other side and see if there’s anything over there that can help, then come back for you guys.”
Dawn pulled up her HUD, figuring that if she was a thief or strider, she should have just as much, if not more, dexterity as Dakota. When she got to her attributes, she found out she was right. Her dexterity was over 100%. She looked at the rope and saw that her chances for success sat at a whopping 130%. Finally, some good news for a change. “I’ll go with you. I have a pretty decent chance of getting out of this alive too. What kind of percentages are you two looking at?”
Lindsay shrugged as she checked her HUD. She squealed with delight and clapped her hands. “Looks like I have a 75%,” she exclaimed. “My dexterity isn’t great, but my magic is high enough that I might be able to…I don’t know, levitate across or something.”
“Cool. That just leaves you, Robyn. How’s it looking for you?”
Robyn frowned as he pulled back his HUD. “Negative 45%,” he grumbled.
“Yikes. Guess you’re going to be the first casualty. Or we could always send someone back to get you later.”
“Are you kidding me?”
Dawn chuckled. “Of course, I’m kidding you. We’re not going to leave you behind. We’ll cross and then figure out something for you, sound good? I think between the three of us, we’ll be able to figure something out. Dakota and I will go first. Come on, Arrow-boy.”
Dakota trailed after Dawn, muttering under his breath, “It’s Arrow-man…”
“What was that? I couldn’t hear anything over the shattering of your fragile masculine ego.”
“Oh,
nice ‘woke’ burn. Way to capitalize on social justice language to make your friend feel like shit.”
Dawn smiled brightly as she brushed her shoulders off. “Just doing what I can for some pointed, potentially thought-provoking comedic relief. Now, let’s hustle over this thing before we both catch on fire. You want first dibs?”
“Yeah, let’s get this shit over with.”
Dakota walked to the rope and took a deep breath before gingerly putting one foot on it.
Then the other.
He balanced himself on the rope as sweat dripped down his forehead. The rope swayed as if a breeze had pushed it. Below, in the chasm, there was rumbling, as if something angry were waking up. The sound must have scared Dakota because he stopped standing still and worrying about how he was going to keep his balance. He started to cross the rope with the expertise of a trapeze artist. The man didn’t bother looking at his feet once. The fear had moved him to action. Once he was on the other side, he waved to the other Wordsmiths. “It’s not so bad,” he shouted. “A little bit hot, but not bad at all.”
Dawn cupped her mouth so she could be heard. “Good! Now see if you can find something to help Robyn across!” she shouted.
“Gotcha! I’m on it!”
Dawn motioned for Lindsay to step up on the rope and the magician complied, wiping the sweat from her forehead before checking the stains under her armpits. “Did you find anything that’ll work for you?” Dawn asked.
Lindsay nodded as she produced her wand. She spun in a circle as she spun her wand above her head. Her feet lifted off the ground, and she hovered a few feet above it. “I figured if I can float across the floor, why not float across a rope? I doubt magic is discerning enough to worry about surface area,” she explained.
“For your sake, I hope so.”
Lindsay floated over to the rope and took a measured breath, intentionally inhaling and exhaling at a comfortable pace. Then she floated over the rope, staying still for a second to see if there were any complications.
