The next door was straight ahead from the first. My sentient sword had already knocked it open in an attempt to please me. Personally, I’d have preferred it help protect me from the spider-demons, but the effort was still appreciated.

  The door couldn’t have been locked, as the sturdy iron was barely blemished, yet stood open all the same.

  Straight, straight... left.

  The hallway was tiled, which was a new one. The majority of the tiles were blue, but a brown wall of labyrinths were tiled throughout. It was more fitting for a palace of a sultan than a dungeon far below the painted lands.

  Or it would have been, had the effect not been ruined by a scattering of rotten straw atop the whole thing.

  “What was this place? Before, before whatever happened to it?” Attar asked.

  “I doubt anybody knows. The Bleak Fort is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, structures in the painted lands. The most ancient histories refer to it as ancient still. Some say it was built by a race of flame-haired giants who ruled the lands before humans arrived. You’ve seen that stone chamber. Many have conquered and reconquered it since then. These tiles could be a thousands years old, or laid by the warlocks and abandoned. Or both. It’s unknown how long it has been their fortress.”

  We arrived at a door my magic sword had deigned not to knock down.

  The moment I had the thought I felt the rush of air through my ring as the sword leapt into action. Perhaps it could read a portion of my thoughts.

  The door exploded into splinters so easily it barely made a sound, like an axe splitting a rotten log.

  The room revealed was a charming place. Six hexagonal walls. A ruined ballista in the top right corner. “The short one will betray you” written on the right hand wall in blood.

  I looked down at Attar, “The devious thing is, every group has a person who is shortest.”

  I felt him raise an eyebrow as he walked close enough to read the message. It was easy to forget not everyone had my night vision.

  “I wouldn’t even know where to start,” he said.

  “An offer of freedom from a warlock if you take me down, most likely. The offer doesn’t even have to make sense. Warlocks are oath breakers, their own and others. They can convince anyone of anything given time.”

  “Is it betrayal if it is against my will?”

  “All bonds are broken voluntarily, the warlocks merely facilitate the process. Still, I understand your point. Do not torment yourself overly long if a warlock gets into your mind. Only sufficiently long to feel properly guilty about my death.”

  Attar pointed his cutlass at the message, “Why do you think they wrote it?”

  “More likely it was a prisoner. I don’t think a warlock would need blood to write with. But my guess would be to sew division. Warlocks use dark magic, dark magic makes demands of reality. If you can make demands of nature, there is no natural order, and all is called into question, including the loyalty of your allies. Loyalty requires humility, and warlocks have none.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if this prisoner’s quick thinking earned a warlock or guard a knife in the back.”

  We’d gone right at a fork in the straw covered hallway, meaning, according to my notes, we now needed to take the closest right hand door in this room.

  The door was an open archway, meaning my well meaning sword had nothing to do other than hover anxiously in anticipation.

  The room on the other side of the archway was much smaller than the current room and was square rather than a more interesting shape. The floor was covered in green spirals of stones, much like the yellow and blue we’d seen before. I still had no idea what they represented, but it was starting to look less like a passing fancy.

  The far end of the room held a patch of brilliant green mushrooms, and a second patch of vibrant orange. I’d seen what the purple ones could do. Even fire might not be a safe method of destruction

  Attar’s thought were running along similar lines, “Can we pass them?”

  There was supposedly such a thing as ordinary, harmless mushrooms.

  Not that I believed that.

  I started following along the wall to the right of the door leading to the mushrooms. If there was a non-mushroomy room there, we could tunnel through that way instead.

  The wall was too thick. My ring didn’t penetrate to the other side. Something to do with the strange hexagonal shape of the room.

  “Well?”

  “There was a door visible on the right hand side of the room. That is our destination. I don’t remember the map layout, but odds are high if we drill through the wall here,” I pointed, “we’ll find something on the other side.”

  “Could you teleport to check?”

  “I can’t see far enough. Can you send a ghost to report?”

  “I would need to bind them to something on the other side of the wall. And if I could do that, we wouldn’t need to.”

  I didn’t have the spells to teleport even if I could see the other side of the wall. Not without dipping into my emergency failsafes. And even if I could, and it told me I could dig, I didn’t want to spend the spells.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  I remembered the violet mushrooms burrowing into the rats’ flesh.

  Tunnel VI

  “Get comfortable, we’re going to be here a while.”

  ***

  After the first hour I cast Tunnel V. I kept the tunnel three feet wide because I didn’t know how long it would need to be, and the narrower width gave us significantly more length by my Magi calculations.

  Time is vital. Please, let me help you. Let you help you. You are getting too tired. Working to hard for ideals you don’t understand, with so little result. Please. It would be easy. Just this once, take a break. Take a break or you will break. You’re not invincible. Here.

  Serpent Monolith

  What was I supposed to do with that? Turn the wall into snakes? Snake? The giant centipedes and spiders were bad enough.

  The wall was only about fifteen feet in width, meaning by the time the dark magic had finished seducing me, the way was opened.

  “Me first,” I said. I didn’t know if I could resist those mushrooms, but the odds were on my side rather than Attar’s out of the two of us. Perhaps Astra would have been better suited for dealing with this sort of thing, but the spider-demons would have eaten her.

  The hallway was mercifully empty. Attar was standing by me only a few minutes later with all our gear.

  Straight and left was all that remained if I had it right. A quick journey to the eighth floor. I’d be happy to leave the spider-demon floor behind. The one I’d sent away with my push spell might still be out there.

  Five minutes later and we were at a new staircase down. The map had prove true—

  ?Mental Map?: The caster sees a map of the first six floors of the dungeon for an hour. He may add and remove notes at will.

  We were on the seventh.

  Why had that worked?

  I wasn’t one to question good fortune, but here, seeming boons tended to have a cost. I’d keep an eye out for other spells performing unusually.

  We didn’t have a path back to the fifth floor stairs yet, but given the number of cockatrice we’d seen on the sixth floor, I didn’t want to continue to explore their until my spells refreshed with the rising of the sun.

  The stairs were longer than most, taking over an hour to descend.

  The stair levelled off onto a thankfully empty eighth floor, a hallway with a door straight across from the stairs leading to what I presumed was a room.

  Without a map we’d have to resort to exploring randomly, meaning our progress was once more going to slow to a crawl. The door was as good a place as any to start.

  Sword Storm III

  The wood door blew open easily.

  My light filled the room, which appeared free from threat. A light breeze blew near the entrance, bringing with it fresh air from... somewhere. There was no passage for the air that I could see, and the warlocks had activated the Rift besides.

  I stepped into the room.

  “Have you come to make an offering?”

  As naturally as a fog rolling in, there was suddenly two people standing in front of me, transparent like gauze.

  “An offering?” I asked them.

  One of them pointed. Strangely, I could not tell which one, though I knew that they had pointed and where, “At the flowing stone. Blood, to honour the dead.”

  “I don’t have blood to spare.”

  “It need not be your own.”

  Attar followed into the room behind me. His eyebrows raised. I could feel his eyes darting about, piecing together some puzzle.

  “Necromancer,” called one of the apparitions, “Have you need of a spell of antiquity?”

  “I am taken to believe those all go against nature,” Attar replied. I didn’t know what they were talking about. I hadn’t heard of the spells of antiquity, though I had heard of flowing stones. Every town and village had one to ensure good rainfall.

  “It is natural to ask your ancestors for help. Perhaps if you consorted with gods and elementals it would be different, but we are the honoured dead.”

  Attar pointed to the same place they had, the flowing stone, “And you are dead. Laid to rest. That is a gateway to the underworld.”

  The dead bowed in acknowledgement, “All villages are founded with one. Life cannot begin without death as its foundation.”

  What was that supposed to mean?

  Attar seemed to understand, “May we pass without sacrifice?”

  The dead shook their heads, “Death will be met, through sacrifice or lack thereof.”

  “May we leave the way we came?”

  “Here, and only here, you may.”

  There were layers of crypticness going on which Attar deftly ignored. Or understood. Maybe it was psychopomp thing.

  “Do we need to die to offer sacrifice?”

  Again the translucent people shook their heads, “The games of sand were ever enough. Bleed for the honoured dead, and honour yourself.”

  Attar studied the stone a moment more before touching me at my elbow, “It will be more than a few drops. We could go another way.”

  “Can you bind them?”

  “In the same manner a sorcerer binds. It would bring misfortune.”

  “If I offer blood, can I use my healing spells after?”

  “It would hardly be a sacrifice then,” Attar said.

  “May I offer the spells themselves?”

  “Blood must be given.”

  “Let us find another path.”

  We bowed to the honoured dead and left the—

  We stood with our backs to a ruined door.

  My light filled the room, which appeared free from threat. A light breeze blew near the entrance, bringing with it fresh air from... somewhere. There was no passage for the air that I could see, and the warlocks had activated the Rift besides.

  I felt strangely empty.

  “Have we been this way before? I don’t remember how we came to be turned around.”

  Attar shook his head, “I couldn’t say. Let’s investigate.”

  We turned around and entered the—

  We stood with our backs to a ruined door.

  My light filled the room, which appeared free from threat. A light breeze blew near the entrance, bringing with it fresh air from... somewhere. There was no passage for the air that I could see, and the warlocks had activated the Rift besides.

  How peculiar.

  “I suppose we are not going that way,” said Attar.

  “I suppose not.”

  What couldn’t I remember?