Malcolm

  Just why did I recoil at the princess' touch, I should like to know. It really isn't that I dislike women or anything, or spellcasters for that matter, so why did I flinch when first she used Comprehension on me? What was that memory that flashed, whose voice did I hear at the time? It came out of nowhere and gave me pause. Ah!

  "Don't come close!"

  Huh? What was that just now? I shook my head. Could that have been a memory? Someone trying to push me away, while my heart screamed. The bedroom had been covered in blood and a strange black liquid too, all from their lungs - from Lord and Lady Kavian. It wasn't the touch, it was what she'd said! Yes, when her highness reached out, she had said something which reminded me of that time I had said the same thing and been rebuked, a flash of memory.

  "May I." That's what it had been. I was pleading earnestly, but what was I asking for exactly? I may have dreamed it for I thought I saw someone - only to learn later that she was dead. That was the time, I think, where all color drained from the world. My last pleasant memory before the end was when some kind soul helped me, a lad who was waiting for his growth spurt, to reach a book on the highest shelf. What even was that book, and, damn it, through the haze of uncertainty why couldn't I recall her name or face. Yes, a woman's voice coming through the fog. But whose? Drat!

  The world still seemed muted, to me, but leastways I was beginning to regain a modicum of confidence in myself. Victor and her highness were doing their best to provide me with succor. My old self would have questioned why anyone would bother, or perhaps even thought that they were trying to trick me so that they could mock me later. But! Thanks to Victor’s delightful mental exercises, whenever I’m in doubt I do what we practiced!

  He’d said, “Look in that mirror, Mal, tell me what you see.”

  To which I retorted, “I see a dejected man with world-weary eyes.”

  At which point, he gave an inspiring speech with fist-pumping punctuation. I am almost certain he was quoting one of those “motion pictures” of his - he does this odd thing where he tries really hard not to smile while speaking with a straight face when it happens. Her highness noticed it first and the two of us have been keeping an eye out for it ever since we discussed it on our delightful little shopping trip. Quotation or not, he was speaking earnestly and I wasn’t about to stop him. Once he’d explained the meaning of the idiom at the end of the speech, I substituted my own with the selfsame meaning and did as he did. Much to my surprise, it worked! I mean I still had the undertow of sadness afterward but in a pinch I thought it could at least help me get over a hill metaphorically speaking.

  Anyroad, we were all of us now looking at the face of a cliff, rather, a cleft between foliage-tangled cliffs long ago filled in by either erosion, or by careful engineering of the landscape. I had heard it used to be a military fort of some sort, something that the Black Order had refurbished. It suited their purposes well, given that it was hidden and protected by stone. There were already large enough chambers for a large barracks, a training center, a storage room, and an assembly hall for them to work with, plus there was the even more fortified underworks of the place, which even I had never seen. Nope, "only top brass" as Victor paraphrased, and he was kind enough to tell me the origins of the expression. As far as I knew, only council members and a select few elite persons were allowed inside the basement; and I also knew that it was full of booby traps and false passages we would need to be aware of. Yes, that is where my expertise came in. Indeed - the Black Order had made this place into a dungeon. Some of the traps were new, but others were built long ago and had either persevered due to sturdy construction or had been restored to their full functionality. I think that the original owners, whoever they may have been, were guarding some secret or other.

  Oh, but where are my manners, here I am rambling on and on in the middle of a combat situation! The four of us weren't exactly alone at the entrance, you see, for at that exact moment four of them came dashing out, not really expecting anything. I do love a fun coincidence. Look at them!

  "I-intruders," one cried before catching the business end of one of my daggers, you don't even want to know about the pleasure end.

  Captain Bravado, that is, the dark elf, didn't even need to use her sword. She rushed forward and took another one down with her shield - PATONG! Victor also wasted no time in surging forward, feinting, and nailing another with his knife; the one which he assures me wasn't named after the same chap from one of his compact discs. Good, good, by now he'd learned where to strike on the warrior types; they probably shouldn't have told me the brand of armor they use. Finally, her highness did the last one in with a decisive shot from her longbow; ah, she used that twirly whirlwind spell to decrease projectile drop! Well, that was that, and we burst through the front door.

  We caught one guy in his pajamas on his way from the privy, and proceeded to clear out the halls in a most unexciting way - quite simply, we went from room to room and fought a number of skirmishes until we were satisfied that the floor was cleared out. My three companions stood in what Victor called a Macedonian phalanx, while I kept up the rear and made sure nobody was followi- oopsie, there's one, nevermind, got him! All told we'd met up with twenty-five of them, all using some masterfully crafted equipment. But none of the super elites were among them, which meant that the more dangerous foes were below us.

  It didn't take me long to find the secret passage down below, further into the darkness.

  Victor

  Our first dungeon. Sounds like something you'd put in a family album, doesn't it? Ha, you better believe I was taking pictures - the car could charge my smartphone but I reckoned I'd need to seek another method to power it up at some point. The hallway leading to a spiral stone staircase was only wide enough to allow us to walk two-by-two. The stone on the basement floor wasn't the same polished brick that we'd seen upstairs; it was ancient stone work with corrugated columns. The bricks were of some black marble, and the columns were off-white bordering on gray- actually they sort of resembled concrete and the style seemed almost Greco-Roman. If it didn't have an aura of oppressive evil, I might have appreciated the contrast. The hallway was dimly lit by some torches on sconces - hey wait!

  "Shouldn't we be concerned about carbon monoxide," I said, pointing at one of the torches.

  Crap, they looked confused; I shoulda known.

  Mal raised a quizzical eyebrow. "You're concerned about the flames? Ah, you must mean miner's bane. Not to worry!"

  He casually ran his hands through one of the flames, the princess and I yelped, but Charlean was unreadable as usual. Huh? No damage?

  Mal said, "Magic torches, you see, they aren't real flames so much as permanent light spells crafted with a smattering of pattern magic to make them look like fire, see." Mal imitated the effect on his other hand and then casually threw the flame away and it continued to illuminate the ground, "I can do it too, I just don't have any powdered copper to sacrifice to make a permanent one."

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  The princess said, "even magical fire would be safe here since it consumes mana rather than the air; unless there were a lot of things to burn. But I can always use wind magic to protect us if it comes down to it."

  I nodded, "All right, so, what's through that door there?"

  "Beats me," said Mal. "But please, let me check it out." He took on a more serious expression, though his body language was still in full circus performer mode. "Wrought iron, nice choice, not locked, but ah-ha, there's a nasty trap!" He brought out his tools and began tinkering with some unseen panel. I heard something click into place. "Done!"

  Having conquered the challenge of the front door we gathered, our party, and ventured forth. It was quiet, eerily so. The air was stagnant too. The hallway we entered split off into two directions. If anyone down here had heard our clangorous approach, they weren't making themselves known. Hmm. They're cornered, no doubt, they'll rely on their traps and false passages to slow us down and make a stand - we'd be in for a truly fierce battle. I'd gotten decent at fighting human-sized foes up close but anything especially big and tough might require the Colt. There was a maneuver I'd been dying to try, maybe I'd get a chance here. Two choices, left or right, Mal stood in the middle looking thoughtful.

  "Hmm. There's an inner sanctum inside, where Fayd resides. One passage, I think, leads to naught but a dead end - perhaps even a captive guard monster, and the other leads to our destination, alternatively." He pressed his ear to the wall. The princess joined him and concentrated. "No, no secret passages that I can find, and I take it you didn't hear anything yourself, your highness?"

  The princess shook her head, ah, I get it, there'd be subtle acoustic differences between a solid wall and a secret door that I supposed elves could just kind of "notice". How good were those ears, anyway? Well, moving on, it didn't matter which way we went first, so we flipped a silver helm and it landed on "go left." The corridor seemed to follow a serpentine pattern, going left and right but ultimately going in one direction until it led to a larger hallway.

  This one had a vaulted ceiling with a black marble floor, except for the ten-foot wide stripe of red stone in the center evocative of a red carpet. Though we were underground there were also window frames set with crimson glass that glowed with eldritch light; more for atmosphere than practicality I supposed. It reminded me of some kind of gothic cathedral - if the pope were Count Dracula. Charlean, who had rushed in first, stepped on a pressure plate and nearly got hit square in the face with a bolt of fire; luckily she ducked at the right moment, and she proceeded more carefully from that point on. Mal took point and disabled three, no, four more of those things. At the end of the hall was a tall set of thick iron doors, these would swing outward by the look of the hinges. That door opened into a circular chamber with yet another door at the far end. We entered the room, and took a look around.

  "Looks safe, come," said our darkborn warrior, as she prepared to open the opposite door.

  Mal cried "Wait!"

  Charlean clicked her tongue, "what? I see no danger."

  Mal smirked, wryly, "well, well, madam of the third gluteal muscle lodged squarely twixt her lovely ears, allow me to elucidate: that little room is a trap - the whole thing."

  I crossed my arms, "How do you know?"

  "I've seen this design before, oh it is very nasty indeed. But look at the floor, around us"

  The princess said, "Oh, there's a groove running along the ground."

  I scratched the back of my head, "So is it like one of those things where the ceiling collapses on you or the floor sends you into iron spikes?"

  "Nothing so crude," said Mal with a wag of his finger, "But nasty all the same. The trap remains dormant until someone tries to open that door, at which point the other passage is blocked with a force screen. Then before you even have time to register that, the room fills with nasty gas."

  Charlean snarled, "Poison? Gah. Cowards."

  "Oh, you wish it was merely poison, no, it is far worse. You see, the floor beneath you rises. The air turns really bad. Sure you might suffocate, but only if the trap would give you the dubious courtesy of permitting you to live long enough to inhale enough of it. Look up," Mal snapped his fingers and an orb of light rose to the ceiling.

  We did, I didn't see any spikes but, huh, what were those four protrusions? They looked like staves or wands or something to that effect.

  "Your highness," said Mal, "your magic detection can reach up there, yes? I fear that mine is just shy."

  The princess nodded, her eyes glowed blue and she glanced upward, "I see four strong magic auras - yes, those are magic devices of some sort. What's this, two radiate lightning aspected magic, while that oblong one with the metal tube, that, that one is conjuration and creation."

  Mal nodded, "as I thought. The chamber permits no air to escape, hence the use of force magic.

  "Above us is a conjuration tool used to create flammable gas that fills the room. The floor then rises rapidly, and once it reaches the top, not high enough to crush the victims mind you, the lightning wands activate and ignite the gas. There's a lethal explosion, then a drop, then it rises again to force the resulting vaporized human effluence through a chimney-like structure above. Only then does the force wall drop. Doubtless it is designed so that any stragglers can witness the horrible aftermath."

  Charlean and the princess both held their mouths, clearly nauseous. Oh I was disgusted too, but, I couldn't contain my jubilation at the implications. This is what I was looking for!

  "Mal, are you telling me that it's possible to conjure flammable gases with magic tools?"

  He raised an eyebrow, "Hmm? That was your takeaway? You seem far more excited than you should be, old boy."

  "You better believe it," I said with a flick of my hat. "Would it be possible to disarm the trap?"

  Mal smiled, "Naturally."

  "Could you remove those implements, without damaging them?"

  The princess said, "Wait, why would you want them?"

  "Research, princess, research," I said. It was finally my turn to use the lecture finger, eyes closed, other hand smugly on my hips.

  Mal showed clear signs of thinking, and shrugged, "I can't see why not, normally I would mess about with the activation mechanism and the floor itself but directly pilfering the magical tools isn't out of the question either."

  I grinned widely, and we worked out the next steps: first, earth magic to foul the raising mechanism. Then the princess used even more earth magic to build a makeshift stairway up to the top, Mal carefully extricated the magic tools, and I stuffed them into my rucksack with relish.

  "Suck, squeeze, bang, blow," I said, as I recalled what the trap reminded me of.

  Charlean shook her head, "This is no time for a powwow, human. Come, we have skulls to break!"

  I hung my head in shame as we opened the next door - sure enough, a dead end. This whole stinking elaborate hallway was a booby trap. Damn the sons of bitches even put a plaque inside that taunted anyone who got that far, in three languages!

  “Congratulations on making this far, intruder. But now your friends are dead and it’s all your fault - and what have you to show for it? Nothing! There is no treasure down this hall, only death and despair!”

  These guys were sick. It may have worked out to being a dead end but I wouldn't call it a waste of time - is it wrong to get inspiration in a dungeon? If so then I don't wanna be right! I needed to speak to a magic item maker as soon as possible! But we still had business down here, and I was determined to reach the end. Yeah, there was still something, no, someone we had to deal with.

  A gaslightin’ asshole lurkin’ in the darkness.

  "A buried memory, words forgotten, lost in the mists of time"