Instead, I stared at a long, narrow, torch-lit hallway. All the torches burned a bright, yellow flame. It should’ve been sweltering inside, but the ambient temperature was barely higher than outside. The only spaces where the torches were unlit were those where the wall behind them was blackened and cracked, a thick sludge dripping down to the floor from the cracks.
I reached my hands to a torch and discovered the flame burned cold. I could pass my fingers through it and feel nothing but a slight chill on my skin. Neat.
The hallway went on for a few paces, then took a sharp left turn that descended down a narrow, corkscrewing stairwell. I grabbed one of the torches off its socket on the wall and followed the path. At this point I could either go down, or try and poke up at the guys atop the portal. That didn’t seem like a lucrative idea.
[NODE #132151 HAS BEEN SEALED]
The message popped up in my sight the moment I stepped onto the stairs.
“Okay,” I answered. “And what does that mean?”
[YOU CANNOT ACCESS NODE CORE WITHOUT PROPER CLEARANCE]
Hello! I got actual information. If I thought back to the first dungeon, I remembered the message noting something about now having access to dungeon and interface information. Seemed like it had been honest about that.
“What’s that mean? How do I get clearance?”
[CLEARANCE IS GRANTED BY APPROPRIATE KEY]
[A CLEARANCE KEY HAS BEEN GENERATED WITHIN THE NODE]
[ONLY [REDACTED] MAY TOUCH A CLEARANCE KEY OR USE IT]
And redacted meant me actually. If I needed any more proof that Eternity talked out of its scaly ass, this was it. My existence on Oresstria wasn’t random. I actually had a role to play in something. Was Eternity consciously trying to lead me away from what I had to do? Or was it some sort of fucked up protocol it had to follow?
Don’t give the dolt any information and hope he stumbles onto his mission somehow. That sounded like poor logic, if not straight up insane. But, then again, who knew how the mind of a literal god worked? Much as Eternity insisted it wasn’t one, I hadn’t yet seen any proof to contradict the idea.
Anyway, find key, open core, destroy corruption. That sounded straightforward enough for the time being.
Then I reached the bottom of the stairs and stared at spider webs. As far as the eye could see, shining and twinkling so peacefully in the torchlight that one could be forgiven for thinking they looked pretty.
I only had to touch the first one to realise they were the cutting variety. And they were everywhere!
I made a growling sound in my throat, then immediately regretted it.
Where there are webs, there are spiders. And the place was too narrow and the ceiling too low to make for a proper fighting arena against those frightening things.
But what choice did I actually have? With every moment I spent thinking about doing shit, Crystal and Tusk were one moment deeper into danger. So I cut off the first batch of webs, bracing for the kind of sonic assault I’d endured the first time around. Nothing happened. The webs shattered and clinked to the ground, but there were no insane echoes or amplified noises.
Thank God for small mercies.
The corridor went on for a while, slightly curving to the left, only to go down another set of stairs, this time in a straight line.
“Dungeons make no fucking sense.” I added to the file as I descended. This one was already far larger than the one in Carmill Hill and its layout so far promised even more fuckery afoot. I mean, one doesn’t fill two corridors with torches and spider webs only for them to lead out to a single room, right?
And the walls were entirely different. Where the first dungeon had a kind of… I’d call it even modern aesthetic—as modern as blank walls with goo on them and sliding door could get—this one was, quite literally, a dungeon. Walls of bare, black stone, and the floor was a just as uneven and cracked. It reminded me a lot of some of the medieval castles from Romania’s countryside. Neam? Citadel maybe?
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
And then I exited inside a temple. I don’t use the term loosely. The following room had every aspect of a temple that you could imagine. Benches littered the room from back to front, arrayed in two neat rows. The ceiling was high and supported by thick, round columns. And on the far side a dais dominated the view. A bloody altar sat atop it, just beneath the gaze of a strange statue of a woman.
I don’t know if it was human, but it was stark naked, with arms extended as if for an embrace. Her face was twisted grotesquely, eyes bulging, jaw distended, teeth sharpened to points. The whole thing was well over five metres tall. For a moment, I had the flash of Scrat the squirrel chasing me through the Brightleaf. I shook my head to clear the absurd memory.
The moment I stepped in, a door dropped heavily into place and sealed me inside with a heavy stone-on-stone noise. The sudden shift in air pressure made my ears pop.
“Okay, this got creepy fast.”
Why was there a temple in a dungeon? It wasn’t as if anyone could actually get in there aside from myself, far as I knew, so what was the point? Who worshipped at the bloody altar?
No gods. No masters. Only time. Those had been Eternity’s greeting words. Someone didn’t seem to have gotten the fucking memo.
I already missed the comfort of my pack, and most of all the comfort of having access to Ielup’s salves and tonics. Without them, I would really, really need to pay attention to how badly I got hurt.
Still, no guardian… yet. I advanced and kept both my sword and torch up, tensed for an ambush that didn’t yet come. Nothing moved in the cavernous room. Nothing even stirred. Webs crowded in the corners and on the ceiling, but they were mostly too far to test if they were the same kind of razor wire as before or not. It was probably best not to touch them.
My steps echoed on the bare stone floor. And the room was warm, almost unpleasantly so. There was also a kind of hole above the statue, letting in a stab of light that illuminated the thing. There were a few more torches attached to the pillars, but that was all the light in there.
I tried to keep away from the shadows. Not an easy thing to do when they were absolutely everywhere, crowding every corner and every little nook and cranny. I expected red eyes behind every pillar and beneath every bench.
My heart thumped in my throat and I wished I had eyes in the back of my bloody head. Every time I turned my gaze away from the statue, I could swear it moved.
Where could a key be hidden? Atop the altar was my first guess, since that’s where you’d go first in a temple. It took a while to make my way there, what with obsessively checking every possible hiding place a monster could be lurking in.
Where there are webs, there are spiders. I ran the words through my mind constantly, trying to watch both the floor, the ceiling, and the opposite walls at the same time. I envied the humble chameleon for its fucked up eyes.
For all my paranoia, the only movement remained the flickering of the shadows, moving in sync with the dance of the cold flames. I could smell mildew and dust, and also that heavy, coppery scent of dried blood. I knew it from how my grandparents’ backyard used to stink for days after they sacrificed the Christmas pig. The blood got into the ground, dried, and just stank up the place until snow cleared it away.
That was definitely the same aroma in here.
Was the statue staring at me? I stopped dead and stared back, daring it to slip up. As immobile as stone should be. Even from afar I could see that it glistened, as if it sweated.
My heart thundered in my ears as I got closer to the dais, close enough to properly take in the bloody stone slab that served as altar. Nothing rested atop it, but that could mean anything. Maybe there was a pressure plate at the top. Or maybe some groove I couldn’t see from the floor level. Whatever the case, I kept going, wearily leaving behind the safety of the wall to make my way up the blood-stained stairs.
Closer still, the statue’s eyes settled on me as I approached, a nifty trick of shadow and flickering light. The eyes were really detailed. They really made the whole thing seem far more lifelike than was reasonable, and doubly as terrifying.
It wasn’t of a human woman… I think. She had that pouncing pose, with legs splayed out, knees bent, arms wide. Her fingers were tipped with claws the size of my knife. Her hair was a wild mane that framed a narrow, feral face caught in an expression of pure rage. Demon came to mind, especially given the oddly jointed legs, like a dog’s hind limbs. It was, however, missing the wings and tail of one, but their absence only made her far more imposing.
I swallowed the lump in my throat, made the sign of the cross—long habit, impossible to break—and got closer.
I found nothing at the top. No key. No footprints in the blood. No stirred dust around the statue’s feet.
The only weird bit there was a thin slit carved right in the centre of the altar. It was maybe five centimetres long and a couple millimetres wide, too perfectly cut to be a crack. Maybe the size of a VISA card back home.
I scratched at the edge of the slit and a message popped up.
[CLEARANCE KEY REQUIRED FOR CORE ACCESS]
“Well, shit,” I groaned. At least I now knew where the key was supposed to go, and had a vague idea of what shape it would be. Now… where the heck was I gonna find a card in a temple?!
Behind the very anatomically correct statue there was a small, crooked door covered in more webs.
A tap of the sword revealed they were just normal webs. And I learned immediately after that a single test was not enough, when I reached for the handle and cut myself to almost to the bone on a near-invisible thread. I stuck my bloody hand in my mouth again, cursing around it.
I made it a mission to clear every web before doing anything else. The first spider I’d see I’d kick in the eyes, with good reason and whole lot of rage.
More stairs. Less torches. The next corridor headed down, the stairway twisting as it went. The darkness breathed. I held my breath and listened, straining my ears, and then my focus to overcome the thunder of my own heartbeat.
Something in the dark drew in rasping breaths, followed by whistling exhalations. It probably should’ve unnerved me. Instead, I felt a kind of calm wash over me now that I finally found a first sign of life. Whatever the creature waiting down there, it couldn’t be worse than the oppressive silence thus far.
With torch and sword in hand, I descended. My steps made soft scraping noises on the smooth stone steps. The breathing never became louder.
The heat, however, went from uncomfortable, to sweltering, to fucking unbearable.