On the walls were portraits of men and women who looked oddly normal, but the paintings were ten or fifteen feet square, and the stuffy-looking people would’ve been giants. Everything felt off. Everything was the wrong perspective. I wondered what these giants had eaten. How many apples would it take to make a pie?
There were plants in the room. Basically trees in pots. Not just decorative trees, either, but big ol’ real trees. Nicely kept, too. I wondered who watered them and where the water came from.
The bookcases stood against the walls as tall as trees, and the books in them must have taken a forest to create. The hundreds of books were each the size of tables, standing on end or stacked on their sides. Most of them had titles I couldn’t read ~ unfamiliar languages or simply with symbols, but I noticed—amused in even my fear of what was almost assuredly a coming fight—that there were several spicy books on the bottom of one bookcase, with titles written in common. Adventures where women were the slaves of werewolves. Titles like “Queens Bedding Queens,” and “The Hill of Harems.” Books with naked women painted on the spines. What printing press could have—?
“You’ll be the bait,” Gerik said. I realized he’d been talking while I was lost in wonder.
“I’ll be the… what now?”
“Bait. You stand, hmm, about here.” He gestured to a spot in front of one of the monstrous table legs. “Whoever’s following us, they’ll see you immediately. When they do, you hurry behind the chair leg.” He demonstrated hurrying behind the chair leg, as if I were a simpleton who needed visuals to grasp the concept.
“And… what will you be doing?”
“I’ll be in darkness. That way, if and when there’s trouble, we should be able to ambush them. It’s a simple plan. Draw them in. Take them out. Simple plans are best, because fights always descend into chaos. Something always goes wrong.”
“This is encouraging. Great pep talk.”
By then I was speaking to nothing but shadows, as Gerik had activated his abilities. Just as he faded into darkness I could see that he was arming himself with a bow. Where he’d been hiding it the whole time, I had no idea.
And then, the waiting began. At first I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the open door, some fifty feet away. I kept waiting for someone to peek around the corner, or to rush inside. My breath was quick. My sweat was frequent.
My ears strained to hear any voices or footsteps, but the roaring crackle of fire in the gargantuan fireplace covered anything else there was to hear, if indeed there was anything else to hear, which I knew there was, because I could feel it on the back of my neck.
The heat from the fireplace was immense. It felt like an actual push against me. A constant shove of heat against my flesh.
While at first I couldn’t look away from the door, after a couple minutes I found myself looking behind me, sometimes turning as quickly as possible, wanting to catch whoever was watching me by surprise. I couldn’t decide if I should have my back against the table leg or not. If I did, then nobody could stab me in the back. But what they could do, in that case, was to more easily sneak around from behind and stab me in the stomach.
The wait continued. The heat from the fireplace contributed to at least sixty percent of the sweat trickling down my back. I clutched my dagger, thinking of my Trip Ring and also remembering that I was a man who could cast lightning bolts. I was a threat. I kept repeating the truth of that in my head. I was a threat. I was dangerous. And despite what it looked like, I wasn’t alone.
When Pig-Face poked his head around the corner, I wasn’t sure if I was imagining him t. It was just a quick flicker. One moment there was nothing in the doorway. Then his face peered out from around the corner. Then he was gone.
“Pig-Face?” I whispered. He peeked out again. Longer this time. A full second. And then he pulled his head back. I tried to act like good bait. A vulnerable lamb. Oblivious.
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Then everything turned to shit.
Instead of Pig-Face poking his head back out around the corner, this time three mastiffs raced into the room, their claws skittering and scraping on the stone floor, all three of them with a full head of steam and having obviously been trained all their lives to kill anything named Josh Hester.
“What the fuck?” I hissed out, and apparently that was enough for my Stat Divination skill, which set about answering my question by having the dogs’ stats appear over their heads.
Mastiff
Level: 2 Health points: 18
Attack Class: 3 Defense Class: 2
Attack: 1d4+2 (bite)
Special Attacks: Lockjaw (if bite lands, next round is an
automatic hit unless victim rolls a strength check: upon a successful
hit, the mastiff can Shake for an additional 1d4 points of damage)
I froze and failed. Precious moments passed in foolish indecision. My first thought was to cast Lightning Bolt, but I didn’t want to hurt a dog. So I used my Trip Ring, resulting in one of the mastiffs falling flat on his face and tumbling along the floor, robbing him of the sight of the lead mastiff reaching me as I backed up against the immense chair leg, with the dog leaping to the attack, going for my throat, latching onto my shoulder as I turned. His teeth sank deep.
I panicked and hit him with a lightning bolt after all. It ripped through him and turned him into little more than bloody fragments, but it was as if I’d tossed a grenade at an enemy position only inches away, so the resulting blast picked me off my feet and tossed me to one side after a short encounter with the chair leg, which wasn’t interested in moving.
I felt my ribs snap and my flesh sear. I got myself a serious case of road rash as I bounced along the floor, skidding to a stop just in time to see the dog I’d tripped regain his feet and come charging forward.
I couldn’t hear shit. My eardrums had burst. I tried to stand but found that my left hand was flopping in useless fashion. When I tried to brace my hand on the floor, I felt moving parts where there aren’t supposed to be any. I screamed, but it came out muffled to my ears, like a scream beneath water.
Halfway through a leap, the charging mastiff grew an arrow from one of its eyes. The dog crumpled in midair, dead before it hit the floor, but it still knocked me over, sweeping my feet out from under me. My head collided with the floor and I almost passed out.
Pig-Face and five others came racing into the room. Two of them were women. Both in robes. One rather revealing. I wondered if I was hallucinating her. She cast a spell that sent a basketball-sized fireball soaring toward my face. I was caught out in the open and didn’t have any shelter excepting a mastiff with an arrow in its eye. I heaved the dog’s carcass up in front of me and it took the brunt of the blast, which was powerful enough to rip the dead beast from my hands and flip it up and over my head, looking more like a flaming blanket than a dog.
I rolled behind the massive chair leg and yelled, “Fuck!” It still sounded muffled. I couldn’t hear shit. The whole room felt like it was pulsing. A heartbeat. Full of heat from the fireplace. Seconds ticked away with peaks and valleys, frozen for one moment, jerking forward the next. I risked a peek and saw two arrows come to a sudden mid-air stop no more than a yard from the woman who’d tried to barbecue me. The arrows glowed for a bit, burst into flames, and fell to ash. She barely had time to smile before another arrow slammed through her forehead.
A man in leather armor let out a scream as he watched her die, an anguished bellow that even my damaged ears could hear. Pig-Face grabbed him by the shoulder and the two of them scrambled forward, along with the other woman and two other men, spreading out in an attack formation.
It was plain that my current strategy of agonized hiding wasn’t going to work. It was temporary at best, and the time was clicking away with every beat of the hard boot heels coming forward. The whole of my left arm stung. I could grasp properly with the hand. My ears were still muddled, muffled, beneath water.
I risked another glance. They were closer, flickering through the sweat dripping into my eyes. Pig-Face barked out something I couldn’t understand and then one of the men made a gesture. A flash of white light from his hand and then what seemed to be beams of sunlight began impossibly shining down from above, centering on Gerik, picking out his position despite his field of shadows, tracking him as he moved.
“A plan,” I whispered. “I need a plan. We need a plan.” But all the plans I could think of tilted dramatically in the favor of Pig-Face. Hiding wasn’t working. It was too late to run. We seemed past the point of negotiation. All that was left was fighting, and I was bad at that when I was at my best, and I felt at my worst as I heard that group of hard-soled boots clicking forward faster, Pig-Face and his men picking up speed.
I watched the beams of magical sunlight, tracking Gerik, veer with a wide turn. He’d realized there was no hiding left. He was racing toward the men in a more than likely suicide charge. I stood up, feeling I might as well do the same, although it would be more of a suicide stumble, in my case.
It was then that I felt the floor jar. A shockwave. Everybody came to a sudden, confused stop. Pig-Face and the others seemed to be hearing something I wasn’t. The floor trembled again. Gerik appeared out of his shadows and waved madly for me to get back, to find better cover. He was casting shadows across the floor thanks to the beams of sunlight that were following him around. The shadows were elongated, twisted, monstrous.
But not as monstrous as the man who came through the door.