The Chained Maiden: Bound by Fate

by Ian Rodgers

  “Well, that was odd,” Glast said after a moment, staring at the golem. “Never seen it do that before!”

  “What did it say, Dora?” Enrai asked her. “Sounded like the Elder Tongue to me.”

  “It said, ‘Not the master,’ and then turned itself off,” Dora said, as confused as Glast was.

  “I suppose that this isn’t what you’re looking for either, then,” the Elemental said after recovering from his shock.

  “No, afraid not,” Dora said, shaking her head.

  “Alright, then let’s see what else we have that might interest you!” Glast replied cheerfully, not put off by the lack of progress. “Please, follow me! Perhaps a Glitterweb Spider is what you are after? Their carapaces mimic the look and feel of various gemstones, and their webs are absolutely dazzling! You’ll never find a finer silk product anywhere in all of Gaeum!”

  As the man made of marble continued to show them around, he ended up leading the quartet past an empty cell, one large enough to hold a hunting dog, or canine of similar size.

  Dora froze midstep upon encountering the cage, her eyes immediately locking onto it. Her soul thrummed loudly, divine music soaring in her ears.

  “This,” she said abruptly, cutting off Glast’s sales pitch for a metallic looking cat. “What was in this cage?”

  “Oh?” the Elemental mused to himself as he walked back towards her. “What exactly made this empty cell stick out to you?”

  “Whatever was in here… I can feel it. The lingering essence calls out to me,” the half-orc revealed.

  “That could be a problem,” Glast said slowly. “See, what was in there was an Elemental Tail. A rare creature, even for trans-dimensional entities. And it’s already been sold to another customer.”

  “How did you acquire one?” Dora demanded, feeling the Goddess of Love stir through the connection they shared, the deity feeding her information through visions. “No… there were two… you stole two of them!”

  “Who are you?” Glast demanded, eyes narrowing, the Elemental’s facial features moving for the first time.

  “Dora Halfmoon, Chosen One of Nia,” she said, a trickle of holy silver light spilling out of her eyes.

  At that, Glast turned away and broke into a run, but did not manage to get far. Enrai pounced, a swift kick to the back sending the statue-esque man sprawling. He hopped right back up, but had been slowed down enough for Dora to rush up and grab ahold of him by the toga.

  “Where are they?” Dora demanded, but her voice was not her own. A different woman’s voice left her lips as she interrogated the slave merchant.

  “I already sold them!” he protested.

  “To whom?” the divinely possessed Healer asked, silvery flames seeping from the corners of her eyes.

  Glast refused to answer, instead releasing dozens of marble spikes from his body. Three of them impaled Dora: one in her chest, one in her right arm, and the last in her left leg. She fell back with a cry of pain, blood gushing from the wounds.

  The Marble Elemental rose to his feet, only to have a fist wreathed in flames smash into his face. Glast staggered back, stunned. A faint clattering sound rang out, and everyone watched, mesmerized, as his finely chiseled nose fell off of his face. It bounced across the metal walkway for a moment, before slipping through the cracks and plummeting down into the lowest reaches of the Delving City far below them.

  “My nose… you broke my beautiful nose!” Glast screamed, and his face distorted into a hideous expression of rage. His body bulged, and he rapidly grew in size until the statue stood eleven feet tall, and resembled an ancient warrior. He even had a marble sword and shield to compliment his new form.

  “I’LL KILL YOU!” Glast roared, and he charged at Enrai. The Monk simply smirked, before nodding at Ain, who nodded back and unsheathed his new blade: a saber forged from a sparkling yellow metal.

  The two charged at the enraged Marble Elemental, clashing against it violently. Meanwhile, Dora shook her head and grabbed Long-Tail-Shadow’s hand and dragged her away from the erupting carnage.

  “We need to find where Glast’s stall is,” the Healer informed the Rakkar, the former’s eyes still gleaming with silver, though her voice was her own again. “He’s got to have information on who has the Elemental Tails!”

  “Are they what you’ve been seeking-desiring?” Long-Tail-Shadow inquired, and the half-orc nodded.

  “As soon as I saw that cage and felt those traces of energy, I knew it had to be them that I was after,” Dora replied. “Oh, and if you happen to find Glast’s keys, be sure to let me know. I’ll have a surprise for him later on!”

  The duo scurried around the rapidly emptying slave market, heading for where they’d first met Glast. Due to his violent clash against Enrai and Ain, the various customers were trying to flee as fast as they could to avoid getting caught up in it. Even some of the vendors were ditching the place, all but abandoning their wares in their flight.

  “There!” Long-Tail shouted, pointing at a tent. It was a dull ivory in color, and had several marble pillars supporting it, some small ones even acting as stakes holding it down. No doubt this belonged to the Marble Elemental!

  Dora and Long-Tail darted inside. The interior was bigger than it appeared from outside. It was also furnished in varying shades of the color white. From the eggshell colored carpet, to the alabaster furniture, the décor was dreary beyond all measure.

  “Jeez, Glast really loves any color that reminds him of his own marble body,” the half-orc noted with a snort of amused disgust.

  “Such vanity,” Long-Tail-Shadow agreed, already rummaging through a vanilla white chest.

  Dora wasted no time tearing apart his cream-colored desk for any incriminating paperwork. Even a receipt would be nice!

  “No… no… ‘Invoice for the purchase of seven snowfox pelts?’ Also no!” she muttered as she went through his books and files. “No… nooo… Wait! ‘Buyers and Sellers List!’”

  She flipped the pages open to the latest entries, eyes darting across the text within. “Lady Nia had been telling me to find the Elemental Tails for a few months back when I was in Erafore. So, they can’t have been missing for more than a year my time. No idea how that correlates to Gaeum’s timeline, though, but the seller can’t be too… oh, Hells no!”

  Her gaze had alighted on an entry near the end of the book. “‘Bought: Two Elemental Tails (Kits), for the price of Five Hundred Thousand Souls each, paid to Naliot, God of Chains?!’”

  “Son of a sword!” Dora swore loudly and angrily, punching the book. “That… that…! Argh! Did he try and convert me to his side because he didn’t want Nia looking for her stolen pets? Or did he steal Nia’s Elemental Tails because he wanted to trade them back to her in exchange for me? Or… Damn it!”

  “What is going on here?” Dora wondered, glaring at the pages in Glast’s notebook. “Why are two gods fighting over me? Why did I have to be a Chosen One?”

  No answers came to her as her eyes continued to bore holes through the slave shop’s records. Eventually Dora’s confusion and anger burnt out, leaving her with only a heart full of sighs.

  “There’s time later to figure this out. Right now I have something else to be looking for,” she muttered to herself, flipping further towards the back of the book of information. “Ah-ha! Here we go! ‘Two Elemental Tails (kits) sold to…’ OH FOR THE LOVE OF NIA!”

  She flipped back several pages, glaring at certain entries she’d previously skipped over. The more she read, the angrier she became. Teeth gritted in rage, she looked through the collection of receipts the Elemental had kept with growing disgust.

  Dora’s wrath fully reignited, she viciously tore the page she needed out of the book. To further add insult to injury, she threw the collection of records out of the tent. She had no idea if it would slide off the walkway and plunge to the bottom of Down, and she didn’t particularly care. Her ire had been invoked.

  The blonde half-orc stood up and glared ar
ound the room. “Long-Tail! Where are you? Did you find anything?”

  “Right here!” Long-Tail-Shadow said, eagerly waving around a large ring with keys on it. The jangling sound brought a smile to Dora’s face, though the expression made the Rakkar flinch back when she caught sight of it.

  “Perfect,” Dora purred evilly. She then walked over to the rat-woman and held onto her shoulders, looking her straight in the eyes.

  “I have an important job for you. I need you to unlock every single cage you can, and free every single slave Glast has,” the Healer ordered, and Long-Tail-Shadow bobbed her head, whiskers wobbling in excitement.

  “I can-will!” the Rakkar woman replied, a grin stretching onto her muzzle.

  “Go!” she ordered, and the rat-woman scurried out of the tent. Dora remained inside for a bit longer, staring at the scrap of parchment in her grasp.

  “How am I going to tell the others where we have to go next?” she mumbled despondently. “Who in their right minds would go to this place?”

  She stuffed the page into a pocket, and then glanced around the interior of Glast’s tent. After a moment of thought, she began to loot it. The act of stealing everything of value from the wretched Elemental made her feel slightly better. And once she’d stuffed her backpack with everything she could, Dora walked out into the perpetual twilight of the underground city.

  Exiting the tent, she winced as a loud ‘Boom!’ and angry roars shook the air, and she turned her gaze towards where a much larger Glast than before was rampaging. Flashes of lightning and fire licked against the marble flesh of the Elemental, doing no visible damage.

  “Guess I’d better help them out,” she mused. “Plus, Long-Tail needs a distraction to get the cages open, so this works on two levels.”

  She hurried over to where Enrai and Ain were still holding off the enraged Earth Elemental, and fired off a Burst Flare spell right at Glast’s face. The blinding explosion of light sent the enormous slaver staggering back in surprise, allowing Dora to rush over to the closest of her friends, who turned out to be Ain.

  The Grand Elf had a black eye that took up the majority of his left side of the face, and a busted lip still seeping a little bit of blood. Holding his chest, he blinked blearily at Dora as she approached and raised her hands to heal.

  “You’ve taken a beating,” she noted as she repaired the damage to his head, as well as some fractured ribs.

  “Enrai’s taken a lot more of one,” the Spellsword replied, spitting a tooth out with a grimace. Dora quickly grew him a new one using one of Lady Dramhyda’s spells. “That damned Elemental is immune is most of our attacks! Spells do little against him, only physical attacks seem to phase him! But the more we hurt him, the bigger and madder he gets! He’s some sort of berserker!”

  “And where is Enrai?” Dora inquired. In response, Ain pointed over to Glast, where a figure with flaming wings was swooping around, delivering heavy blows against the towering Elemental.

  Looking closer, Enrai was panting heavily, yet refused to back down. Dora could see long trails of blood all over the front of his clothes, and the back of his head looked, for lack of a better term, squashed.

  Glast, however, was not showing many signs of weakness. He had seemingly unlimited stamina, and though his chest and legs were riddled with cracks from Ain and Enrai’s attacks, they didn’t slow him down or appear to cause any pain. Indeed, he looked to be getting stronger with every passing second. He was missing his large marble sword and shield, though, forcing him to rely on his fists and sheer size to hurt her friends.

  “Get Enrai over here!” Dora ordered Ain.

  “Yeah, I can do that,” the Grand Elf assured her. He picked up his saber and darted back into the fray, streaks of lightning and plasma scorching the limbs of Glast and giving his human friend a chance to retreat.

  “Gods, Enrai, you look terrible!” Dora gasped as the Monk fluttered over to her.

  “Peas in the gravy punch stuff,” Enrai slurred, wobbling a bit on his feet after landing. The Healer winced as she saw that most of the back of his head had been smashed open, revealing bits of his brain.

  “Oh, crap, that’s not good,” she muttered as she began to flood his wounded body with Healing magic. “I might have to use Restore on you!”

  In the end she didn’t, but Dora did have to chug a few Mana Potions to recover the magical energy she expended on Enrai.

  “Wow, the colors are back!” Enrai said cheerfully, looking around in surprise. His gaze turned downwards next. “Hey, neat, I don’t see that bone that was sticking out of my right leg anymore!”

  “Yeah, I pushed that back in,” Dora replied, wiping some of Enrai’s blood off of her hands. “Had to do the same with a few of your internal organs as well. They’d been rearranged somehow. If Lady Dramhyda hadn’t taught me some tricks with Water magic and moving body parts back into alignment, I’d have needed to use much more powerful spells to repair the damage.”

  “Must have been when he punched me into the ceiling,” the Monk mused, rubbing his stomach. “Or it could have been when I slammed into that Golem from earlier. It broke free, by the way, and ran off to help rescue more slaves. In case you were wondering.”

  “Why are you so beat up?” Dora inquired incredulously. “I thought you had some sort of special technique that made your body unbreakable, or something?”

  “I wasn’t aware you wanted the guy dead,” Enrai replied simply. “For the past couple of minutes Ain and I were just trying to hold him off and distract him while you did whatever. That technique is lethal, I only use it if I want something to stop being a problem permanently.”

  “At first, I was not sure I wanted him to die. But some of the entries in his book of records have changed my mind. Go nuts, kill the giant bastard,” Dora replied grimly.

  Enrai blinked in surprise at the venom in her words, but nodded slowly in understanding. He then turned towards the growling titan Ain was keeping distracted.

  “I am a mountain, immoveable,” he chanted solemnly. “I am faith, inviolable. I am the shield that cannot be broken. For I am beyond stone. Beyond belief. Kneel before the wrath of the world! Tremble! Rejoice! Pay homage to truth of existence! Gaze upon the peak you cannot reach! Divine Jeweled Armament!”

  The mana in the air screeched discordantly as energy began to churn within Enrai. The tattoos all along his flesh squirmed and writhed before growing to cover the rest of his body. The ink turned gold in some places, and the segments of skin not wrapped in tattoos turned a deep bronze color.

  He looked like a divine champion, descending from the Heavens to smite his foes. And with a blur of speed, he vanished from his spot next to Dora and appeared in the air in front of Glast’s humongous form.

  “Shatter,” Enrai said disdainfully as he slammed an open palm against the Elemental’s chest. Huge cracks exploded out from the blow, and Glast howled in pain, before staggering and falling to one knee.

  “WORM!” he snarled at Enrai, lifting a fist to try and punch the Monk into paste.

  The fist fell like an avalanche towards the human, but Enrai caught it with one hand before it could strike him, barely even straining to hold the massive limb above his head.

  A cruel smirk spread across Enrai’s face, and he squeezed hard. Glast’s fist exploded into hundreds of fragments, and the massive slaver tumbled backwards as he screamed in pain, holding the stump of his left arm close to his chest. Several cages were smashed and battered about, creating a loud, harsh ringing sound that echoed through the abandoned slave market.

  “YOU-YOU LITTLE WRETCH?! DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?!” Glast bellowed as he tried to wobble back up onto his feet.

  “I AM GLAST THE IMMACULATE! I’M THE ONE WHO RULES THIS MARKET! I’M THE LORD OF SLAVERS IN DOWN! YOU THINK YOU CAN CHALLENGE ME?! I SHALL SEE YOU BROKEN AND IN CHAINS FOR THIS!”

  “Can’t really get revenge for us if you’re dead,” Enrai pointed out. He then looked around. “And I can’t say much about
being the boss of the slavers if you don’t actually have any slaves.”

  “WHAT?” The booming thunder that was the Elemental’s voice sounded confused, and Glast too took a quick look around his precious market.

  “NO… NO!” The Marble Elemental suddenly realized that countless cages were empty, their contents fled. His trembling gaze fell onto Long-Tail-Shadow as she desperately tried to unlock the last of the cages: the golden one filled with hundreds of Carbuncles.

  “GET AWAY FROM THERE!” he roared, stomping towards the Rakkar. She flinched, but kept fiddling with the lock until a tiny, barely audible ‘click!’ rang out, and the door to the cage was flung open as a rainbow-colored stream of tiny jeweled fairies gushed out, cheering and laughing in joy at their freedom.

  With a screech of inarticulate rage, Glast tried to crush the small rat-woman beneath his right foot, only for Enrai to dart in front of her to protect her from such a fate.

  “Nice try, ugly!” the Monk laughed, before winding his arm back and punching the sole of the giant Elemental’s foot as it descended.

  It, and everything below Glast’s right knee, cracked and shattered in a violent explosion of marble dust and chips. Howling in pain, Glast fell backwards once more.

  “YOU! YOU!!!” Glast screamed furiously, thrashing around in anger at having lost a leg. Countless cages and cells were smashed in his tantrum, many of them crushed and sent plummeting down below.

  “I WILL ENSLAVE YOU AND YOUR FAMILIES! I WILL SELL YOU TO DEMONS AND LET THEM FEAST ON YOUR SOULS FOR ALL ETERNITY!” he vowed.

  Enrai shook his head and jumped up onto Glast’s chest, before walking casually across his giant body to stare him in the eye sockets.

  “No,” the Monk said simply. He then jumped into the air and cocked his fist back before driving it down onto the Elemental’s forehead. His bronzed fist drove through the marble with contemptuous ease, and for a scant few seconds Glast just stared cross-eyed at the human who’d punched a hole in his brain.

  The moment of silence passed, and the Marble Elemental’s head exploded, chunks of stone flying everywhere. Some ricocheted off of cages, others flew so far they pinged off the very walls of the endless downwards tunnel shaft the city was built into.