I ran home, all the way. There were a few hitches first of course, a handful of inconveniences I had to deal with. Will’s fingers were still knotted around me, and I wasn’t too gentle about prying them free to let myself take off at a sprint. Then I did. I had no idea whether the thing below could follow us up into the daylight, and I had no intention of staying around to find out. I ran so long and so hard that I think I set a new personal record for crossing the thousand yards to my father’s estate, even with how fatigued I already was.

  When I reached my estate, Jeevs was rather curious about me. I ignored him, headed up to my rooms and had a bath drawn for myself to wash off the sweat, blood and piss. My body ached, now that the frenzy of combat was past me, and I felt the sting of a dozen minor wounds I hadn’t noticed myself take. There was a big bruise on my ribs right beneath a bunch of broken chain links on my armour—the point where a spear would have run me clean through were it not for my protection. I’d not even noticed.

  I scrubbed myself, waited for the hot water to cool and then climbed out and slumped down into bed. Then I cried until I went to sleep.

  Sleep didn’t come nicely either. I tossed and turned in the night, periodically awoke midway through dreams of grinning skulls and rusted iron. I pissed myself again, and changed my own sheets for fear of being humiliated as the servants found out. For ten hours I lay retreated into my room and coiled around my own misery, but I doubt I actually got even five hours of rest amid it all. Evening turned to night, then night to dawn. I awoke a final time when my mother knocked upon my door.

  “Come in.” I groaned the words out, groggier than I’d been at midnight, and watched as she entered.

  She did come in, as graceful as ever. My mother had not been married for her brains, whores tended not to be. Nonetheless, she had a lot of them. Whores who got themselves married to rich merchants tended to. She’d aged gracefully—helped in no part to her being less than double my age by then—and had long since mastered the art of getting what she wanted.

  Right now, it seemed, she wanted answers. And I was far too distracted to appreciate how deftly she ended up coaxing them out of me.

  “I heard you explored the Dungeon.” She opened the conversation up without an accusation, merely a statement of fact. I winced all the same.

  “It wasn’t my idea, Vara—”

  —”Vara probably saw you looking all stoic and manly, decided that you were just putting on airs, and thought she’d have a bit of fun with you by gently needling you into doing it. Am I right?”

  “No!” I growled, because I was still young and stupid enough to miss all the obvious ways in which a person used to being dismissed could toy with a person too used to being favoured.

  My mother smiled, lips thin and unimpressed. She was, in hindsight, remarkably patient with me.

  “What happened down there?” She asked me at last, and I met her eyes for one, long moment. Then I broke down and started blubbering.

  My mother always got what she wanted, and I had long since learned that lesson deeply enough to know better than trying to obscure the truth from her. She, alone, and always, I could be honest with. I loved her for that.

  She sat there and listened to her snooty, arrogant, pathetic moron of a son while he whinged and burbled about every mild inconvenience to come his way. She nodded, showed sympathy, and when it was done she came over and hugged me, let me shiver and shake against her until the worst of my shock was past.

  Then she made it all worse.

  “Do you know what the town has been saying?” She asked me, drawing back to meet my eyes. I went cold at that, suddenly thinking back to all the idiot things I’d done underground. I didn’t know what they’d been saying, and somehow I didn’t want to.

  She told me at that, and she could have suddenly snapped a chairleg across my head without warning and still shaken me less than her words did.

  It wasn’t long after that that I left the house, reluctantly enough, to make my way into town.

  My choice would have been to keep sulking at home, of course, but I didn’t really have a choice. No, father had heard what happened and he wanted me wandering around town as soon as possible to ensure my legend spread. It was good for business, you see. Greedy old fucker.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  I dreaded it, and my dread soon came to pass. I wasn’t ten paces past the town’s outer walls before being recognised, the swarms of people came soon after. Staring, asking their questions, all wide eyed and half-disbelieving. It was a look I would get used to in later years. But not yet.

  Try as I might, my answers didn’t seem to dissuade any of them. Indeed, I seemed to be getting more answers than any of the people bombarding me with so many unrelenting questions. It was surreal, that first time, hearing my own story warped to such ridiculous extremes, distorted like my own reflection in the surface of a pond when ripples moved through it.

  Apparently, our encounter with the undead had begun with me being struck clean across the temple when the first one ambushed us—only to somehow survive the blow and quickly skewer it through the eye with my rapier after getting up. We had then been attacked by ten more, which had threatened to overwhelm Laryck before he could barge the door open until I single-handedly leapt forth to hold all of them off in a minute-long sword fight.

  You will be as surprised as I was to hear of how I had taken off several of the creatures limbs, grinning all the while, before we were finally able to barr the door behind them and await their losing interest in the pursuit. Likewise, it will shock you to hear how I had sprinted ahead of the others—with athleticism I had never demonstrated before—carrying Will on my back, fighting a path through the undead when we encountered them later and staying behind to ward off whatever unseen horror had chased us out of the place with one hand while dragging my and Will’s bodies back up the rope with my other.

  That many of these supposed feats had required the use of blatantly superhuman powers I’d never demonstrated before, or that they were solely corroborated by the village idiot mid-panic-attack or a boy who’d spent most of the affair bleeding to death, apparently did little to convince anyone they were exaggerated.

  I was an epic hero, almost. Like one of the true Heroes from the stories. Like Vory the Flamesmith, Hangrit the Orc-hammer. Like King Willias himself.

  Not really though. A hero, not a Hero. I had done something very impressive, and everyone believed it to be absurdly so, but there was a far cry from that and the true Heroic blood. That, any child could tell you, had dried up centuries ago.

  By the time I’d made my way through the unrelenting wall of awe that met me everywhere I went, close to half an hour had passed. I wasn’t really sure where I was going. The tavern, at first, but before long I received a summons to meet somewhere more particular— the town hall.

  A lot has changed since I was a lad, so I should give some information on how things operated in Sheppleberry. Back then, though the town was technically under the rule of our Baron Levoir, its day-to-day management was left to a handful of the elder folk from among its people. Exclusively having our society governed by those who had lived the longest, and thus were the least familiar with new and changing affairs, may seem like a bad idea. Anyway, I headed there as best I could.

  Once I finished nothing-short-of-punching my way through the crowd, and stumbled into the old building, I had hoped to be met with rather more reason. In a way, I was. A lot more anger too. The village’s elders were a perpetually grumpy set of men, whose bitterness was matched only by my own father’s endless amount—a response to his long-standing failures at buying himself into the position.

  Not a single one was any younger than fifty, and like all old men they had a searing hatred for youth. I didn’t know this at the time, of course, being the shitty little youthful fuck I was.

  “Good afternoon.” I forced a smile, right up until Old Bolg, the eldest of the elders, strode across the room and punched me right in the face.

  He was three quarters my weight at most, but much of that was the hard muscle and sinew that had survived so many decades of farming. And the old monster knew how to punch. Despite my size I went stumbling, blinking and dazed. Shaken, though not that hurt.

  “What in the world were you thinking you dumb little fucker!” He roared, voice sounding very much like a firing cannon.

  I was quite affronted by that, and my anger came quickly.

  “Care to be more specific?” I snapped.

  It was another of the elders who spoke next, Grig. Not as old as Bolg, but almost as mean.

  “You delved into the Dungeon,” he said, as if I was in someway requiring a reminder, “despite everything you grew up being told about it—despite all the common sense in the world—you led your stupid friends and that snooty whore into the Dungeon, and now it’s everyone’s problem.”

  I froze at that, suddenly feeling the anger knocked clean out of me by that. Everyone’s problem? That didn’t sound good, that didn’t sound good at all. I was part of everyone.

  “Since you came up there, we’ve been hearing noises from the Dungeon. There have been strange lights in the night, and a foreboding on the air.” Bolg said it all with a heavy tongue, as if his own words were reluctant to come out. “We’ve doubled the guard at each gate, though none have yet seen anything.”

  “Hang on.” I frowned. “You’re talking as if this is some pattern of behaviour. ‘There have been strange lights in the night’ ? It’s been one fucking night! You saw strange lights once, is what you’re telling me, yes?”

  More glares followed that, because if there’s anything frightened people hate in all this world it is logic.

  “How many nights do you want us to observe?” Grig glowered. “It’s only been a single one, yes, but do you think it’s coincidence that all this started immediately after you delved down there?”

  I was torn between a sudden hate for his logic and the struggle of suppressing my own fright. These men saw me as nothing more than a dumb young lad—because I was. Compared to them my seventeen years were no years at all. The urge to show them otherwise ended up triumphant among all the thoughts in my head.

  “What I want to know is why we’re wasting time bickering instead of planning a defence!” I snapped.

  The room was silenced instantly, and I felt suddenly certain that I’d just made a terrible mistake.

  As a matter of fact, I had.