There wasn’t anything left down there that could be a threat. I’d seen that. Melenith’s words came back to me, about checking on her people and if they were safe.
I hadn’t seen anyone there, except the shattered crystals. It didn’t really take a huge leap of the imagination to correlate the two but I hoped I was wrong.
Melenith knelt by the shattered clusters when I reached the bottom. She had her forehead pressed to the crystal remains, tears streaming down her cheeks, hand balled into a fist among the sharp-edged shards. Blood pooled beneath her.
“What happened?” I asked.
Wracking sobs shook her, followed by a near silent snarl of anger, then more sobbing.
[CORE REQUIRES ASSISTANCE]
The message showed up spelled in golden letters.
[[REDACTED], WILL YOU RENDER ASSISTANCE?]
“Uh… sure,” I said, still staring at Melenith’s back, unsure what else to do.
The core floated on its pedestal, completely freed from corruption. It bobbed up and down gently. When I got closer, an interface showed up in front of it, two-dimensional, just hovering there. It wasn’t tied to my retina this time, as it didn’t move when I looked away.
Problem one: I couldn’t make heads or tails of what I was seeing. The whole thing flashed purple and red in various areas, and the words were in a language I’ve never seen.
Problem two: when I tried touching the menu, it shocked me.
[INSIGHT LEVEL INSUFFICIENT]
[ACCESS IS DENIED]
Alright. I tried again, on a different area of the interface. It wouldn’t have asked for my support if I couldn’t actually do something with the thing. Right?
Now that the corruption was gone, I was keenly aware that I still needed to solve the issue of the villagers above. I’d entirely lost track of time while going through the mines, so I could only hope that Crystal and Tusk were still alive and alright. Heading out was a bad idea if I didn’t follow through with what Eternity had suggested, especially since I expected the villagers would still be in that weird trance state.
No way was my luck good enough to ensure I could just walk out without any other surprises. Part of me couldn’t calm down, still expecting the other side of the coin. I’d met furnar drones, furnar gatherers, and a blacksmith. I still expected, somehow, to face warriors and maybe a queen.
That part kept me hopped up on a steady drip of adrenaline and dread that sent my whole body quaking.
“This would be so much easier to do if I understood what any of this meant,” I grumbled as I tried to figure which of the squiggles I could touch.
To my surprise, the text on the interface changed. First to some gobbledegook set of varying symbols, as if cycling through available language packs. It kept going until I finally began recognising letters. It stopped changing when I could read the words, though I didn’t actually know the letters that made them up. I could read them, sure, but I didn’t know them, which I assumed was some other weird kink of the interface.
[LIMITATIONS APPLY]
[TEMPORARY TRANSLATION DEPLOYED]
[FOR MORE FUNCTIONALITY, PLEASE SYNCHRONISE WITH MAIN CONSCIOUSNESS]
Ah. Didn’t have the time for that, but at least I could read some stuff now.
It looked like a pie chart with a round centre that read “TOXICITY: MODERATE”. The bottom left corner showed “MANA CONTROL”, while the bottom right was “GUARDIAN SUMMON”.
I looked at Melenith who had quieted down and just knelt there, tears dripping off her chin to the floor, the fire of her prosthetic limbs reduced to a dull glow. Was she the guardian indeed? Would she be able to tell me anything of what I could do there?
Intruding on her personal misery felt a callous thing to do, so I soldiered on my own. The top-right corned was the one that had refused me access, and read “WORLD FORGE”. If that didn’t sound ominous, I don’t know what would. The final slice was just “CONTAINMENT”. It also refused me access.
But I did have access to the mana control tab, so I tapped that. Access, as it happened, was indicated by a little symbol of a hand. You gotta love intuitive interfaces.
I got a whole list of commands and graphs once the screen changed. On first glance it looked like nothing at all that I could understand. Squiggles everywhere and various bloops and bleeps in visual form.
“Translation, please,” I demanded.
And that was how I learned that my interface, running on the local instance—my skull—communicated directly with the dungeon core. Because what I got back once the whole thing stopped its seizure was an honest to goodness Siemens HMI screen, with a wonderfully familiar interface that anyone in my field of work would manage to operate.
“Show off,” I grumbled.
Finding the purge command was, very literally, just a matter of time. I dug through the menus until I found a big, grey button with the word PURGE on it. I tapped it.
[CORE MANA PURGE INITIATED]
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
[DO YOU WISH TO PROCEED?]
This showed up on my own interface and waited for an answer on my side.
“Go ahead.”
[STAND BY]
The whole room went pitch black save for the dull ember glow coming off Melenith. The other light in the room came from the panel in front of the core.
She stirred when the dark returned.
“What are you doing, human?” Her voice sounded hollow and scratchy. “What have you done?”
“Eternity told me the mana is corrupted here,” I answered, glancing at her, the only light left in there. The shattered crystals were only glittering dust now, reflecting her fire. “I’m trying to fix whatever’s happened here. I’m doing a purge.”
“That—” She swallowed thickly as tears threatened to overcome her again. “That… That will knock out everyone within this node’s area of influence.”
Her voice had taken on a strange, almost robotic quality. She shook her head a moment later, looking confused.
A weight lifted off my chest at the words.
“Just knock out, yes?” I asked.
It was too late to take back what I’d done. The interface just showed the stand by request now.
“Yes.” She approached unsteadily and towered over me. “Yes, I think that’s what will happen. I don’t know how I know that.” She squinted down at my interface. “I cannot read what is written there.”
I looked over my shoulder, aware that my head was just high enough for her claws to dig into the back of my skull if she wanted. I held back a shudder.
“It’s changed to something from my home,” I said. “I think it adapts to my knowledge.”
Her eyes were red rimmed in the faint glow of the panel. I assumed she wanted to talk so I talked. “This is what we used back home in automation. Well, in my general area of the world at least. There’s like dozens of different brands and they all have their own software and programming tools.” I knew I was yammering, but it felt like the right thing to do. She looked as if she wanted to think about anything else but what those shattered crystals meant to her.
“Where do you come from, human?” she asked after a while of me talking stupidly about automation standards in the automotive industry in Romania. I don’t think she heard a word in three, but at least she wasn’t looking over to the shards.
“I’m from Romania,” I said, then thought better of it. “Earth, actually. My world is called Earth. Romania is just the country where I lived.”
“Ah.” She drew in a long breath then sighed it out in a long, thin whisper.
Whatever the dungeon was doing, it was taking its sweet time. The word didn’t change on the panel. I turned and faced Melenith properly and she slowly lowered herself on her haunches, her face almost level with mine.
I knew the look on her face. I remembered it staring back at me from the mirror, years before. In grief, some people liked to talk, to bury the pain in words until it suffocated and withered and went away. It never worked, but we tried regardless. It was better than the alternative.
She swallowed thickly, then began speaking.
“My world was called Elles Ta Maarnum. She who is Mother. It was beautiful, and it was home… and now it is gone.”
“It had a beautiful name,” I said, holding Melenith’s gaze. “What happened to it?”
“She who Hungers found us in the dark between stars. Our world was lonely. We spun around our small, white star. We called it Illit Sas Nerra. He who Holds. It was our only point of light in the sky, until she arrived to our world and brought the mind-net to my people.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
Melenith merely tapped a clawed finger to her head. “The words that only you see, that give power and health and knowledge.”
“The interface?” I took a moment, finally processing what she said. “She who Hungers… is Eternity?”
“Yes. That is another name for the creature that brought us the wonders of a universe we knew nothing about.” Melenith’s hands, both real and flame, balled into near fists and her lips curled in a grimace of anger. Then she caught herself and let out a slow breath. “She gave us wonders we could not have dreamed of before. My people were given long life, strong arms, quick minds, and a wealth of knowledge that fired up their ambitions. Elles Ta Maarnum was transformed. Diseases were cured. War was forgotten. The world itself sang with the joy and beauty of magic. It didn’t last.”
She let out another sigh and cast a quick glance to her crystals. It took a while for her to speak again, the silence filled only with the sound of our twin breaths.
“Where She who Hungers travels, She who Devours follows. Our age of wonder ended in a single night. Millions dead to the first blow come from the dark above. Taken. Transformed. Set loose upon the rest of us. She who Devours took my sons and remade them into monsters. I was forced to kill them a first and a second time. I had to, or they would have devoured all we’d built in centuries.”
I felt my heart in my throat, trying to sort through the questions I had. I settled on, “How did you end up here?”
Melenith sighed and lowered her head. “I called for aid. She who Hungers offered salvation in the form of a choice. We could be preserved, held forever in her embrace, memories written in crystal.” She shuddered with wracking sob. “Or she could transport those that remained to a new world for us to build our lives anew. She could not oppose her sister. It goes against her nature to fight to destroy. I chose…” She swept her fire arm through the darkness. “I chose this, to fall into memory and never awaken to the pain of our loss. More fool I.”
My head felt ready to explode and I stumbled over the reveals and the new questions. Eternity had a sister? Eternity was a she? Were all the dungeons seeds of people that had perished? Were the crystals people?
“Are… were those…” I gingerly pointed at the ruined crystals. “Your people?” The vines had smashed them to near nothing, seemed to sprout straight up from them.
“I’m sorry,” I said when Melenith didn’t answer. “I’m just trying to understand. Nobody tells me anything. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“They were my people,” she finally said. “And now I am the last of my world, the last who likely remembers Elles Ta Maarnum.”
“You were their queen?”
“I was their goddess,” Melenith corrected me. “And I was a fool. If we hadn’t accepted the gifts, maybe our existence would’ve remained as it was, quiet and unknown, just one more mote of dust in a universe that never would’ve cared about us.”
I didn’t know enough of her circumstances, and even less about Eternity overall, so decided it best to keep my gob shut and allow Melenith her silence. Just in time as the room grew bright again, the light seemingly emanating out of the walls.
[PURGE SUCCESSFUL]
[WARNING: ENERGY REGENERATION WITHIN CONTROL ZONE REDUCED BY 76%]
[TIME TO FULL CHARGE: 65.1 hours]
“Melenith, I need to go out and see if my friends are all right,” I said as I blinked away the notification. There were more in my sight, flashing for attention, but I didn’t have the spoons just then to deal with anything new. I barely still had enough energy to stay on my feet. “I’ll be back. I promise.”
She sat back down among the detritus of her loss and waved me off. I was determined to come back and be here for her. Not because I owed her something, or out of some misplaced demand on my honour. I simply understood how hard it is to find yourself alone in the world all over again.
I tried to keep that thought out of my head as I stepped onto the altar platform and was taken back up. My shield had cooled but looked dented and warped from all I’d demanded of it. I strapped it to my arm and hoped the ancient warrior it had belonged to wasn’t too upset with how I’d abused his possession.
My first obstacle was the closed door at the end of the temple room. I had no idea how to lift something that looked like it weighed tonnes, but it turned out I didn’t need to. A message popped up.
[WOULD YOU LIKE TO EXIT THE MAIN SEED?]
“Would be lovely, yep.” The door slid noiselessly up.
The portal room was full of rocks strew across the floor. The furnars seemed like they’d enthusiastically wanted to make sure I couldn’t get out. A whole pile of rocks was heaped on the floor, reaching almost up to the portal.
A rope hung down from above. I approached it cautiously and dared a look through the gateway. Blue sky above and dazzling light. No furnars around the lip of the well.
I tested the rope, ready to duck back at any moment.
Crystal’s ugly face poked over the edge of the well. I almost dropped on my ass, relief flooding through me like a wave.
Then someone else came into view next to Crystal, and signalled me to climb.
“No elves on Oresstria, my ass,” I groused as I grabbed the rope.