Chapter Eighty-Three - There's No Sense Crying Over Every Mistake

I woke up to find Amaryllis hunched over me, her face nearly pressed up to mine. “Hey,” I said. “Um. I forgot to think of any cool final words. Sorry?”

Amaryllis’ lower lip wobbled, her eyes got teary, then she glared at me. “You idiot. You moron, you half witted, cretinous dolt!” She started to jab the not-pokey side of a talon into my ribs. “Imbecile, dullard, simpleton! Moron!”

“You used that one already,” I pointed out. “Also, oww!”

Amaryllis pulled her talon back, sniffed wetly, then glared even harder. “I’m charging you for those potions I used.”

I blinked. I did feel pretty... normal. Except for my ribs, those kind of hurt. “I’m not going to die?” I asked.

Awen appeared on my other side. “Ah... awa,” was all she said before she crashed onto me and buried her face in my chest. “I thought, I thought you died!” she cried.

“Ah, hey hey,” I said as I patted the back of her head. “It’s okay. I’m fine.”

“You nearly weren’t,” Amaryllis said. “You bled a lot. I’m quite certain humans need most of their blood to stay in their bodies.”

“You’d think that,” I said. “Is Moon Moon okay?”

“Yes yes,” Moon Moon said. I tilted my head back to see the droll sitting next to the device at the end of the corridor. “It’s good you’re not dead.”

He bent forwards, pulled up a... hand mirror, then started to growl and show his teeth at it.

I decided that was a problem for later.

“I agree, being alive is nice,” I said. I wiggled my toes, shifted my hips, and moved all of my fingers. Everything was in place, still. My armour felt a little wet here and there, and sticky, but I could take care of that with some cleaning magic in no time. My bigger problem was Awen. “Hey, sweetie, you’re, uh, heavy?”

Awen lifted her head and I had to hold back a wince. She could have used a spot of cleaning magic too. Her eyes were all puffy and her hair was a tangled mess. “Sorry,” she whispered.

I pulled her back down into a big hug. “It’s okay. I’m fine. But I’m glad you were worried for me,” I said.

Awen sniffed and tucked into the hug, but as with all things it had to end eventually.

Amaryllis helped me to my feet and I took a moment to look around. There was a long red-brown stain running across the ground from the area with the glass spikes all the way to where I was standing now. It was... a lot of blood. Amaryllis was right with that.

I licked my lips and turned away from that, instead focusing on my armour. There were some new tears in it, and a loonie-sized hole around the abdomen that let a bit of cold air in to tickle my tummy. I tsked and fired a strong burst of cleaning magic that turned my not-so-pretty-now dress back to its original sky blue.

“We’re buying you heavier armour if you intend to go around injuring yourself like that again,” Amaryllis said.

“Ah, I didn’t mean to,” I said. “I just got caught off guard.”

She huffed a ‘I don’t like it’ huff. “The moment we’re out of this dungeon we’re starting you on a training regimen. You too Awen. I’ll whip both of you.”

“You mean you’ll whip us into shape?”

“I meant what I said,” the harpy declared.

“R-right,” I said. I noticed a couple of notifications from Mister Menu waiting for my attention, so I let them open up to see what was going on.

Congratulations! You have ruptured Glass Horror, level 7. Due to combating as a team your reward is reduced!

Congratulations! Through repeated actions your Makeshift Weapons Proficiency skill has improved and is now eligible for rank up!

Rank D is a free rank!

“Oh hey, my weapon proficiency made it to rank D!” I said.

“And it only cost you a few pints of blood,” Amaryllis said. She shook her head. “Awen, could you get the door open at the end? We should move on out of here.”

“Awa, ye-yes,” Awen said. She rushed over to the last device in the zig-zagging room and, after setting her big spectacles onto her nose, started to fiddle with the rings controlling it.

“You didn’t level up?” Amaryllis asked.

“Nope,” I said. “It doesn’t... feel like I’m close yet either.”

“Hmph,” Amaryllis said. “I think I’m nearly past my own. Just a little nudge and I should hit level ten.”

“Cool!” I said. “I can’t wait to see how that works.”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s nothing spectacular, I assure you.”

“Awa, I got it!” Awen said. She had one hand up, holding her glasses in place as she waved towards the end of the final corridor.

A door was recessed at the end, big and bulky, the kind of thing you couldn’t just blow past. Above it were three gems that began to glow as Awen used the machine to aim beams of light at them.

The door shifted, a thin cloud of dust pouring off of it a moment before it started to swing ponderously open to reveal the ravine we had entered from.

I stared, then tried to figure out a mental map of the dungeon. The room wasn’t nearly zig-zaggy enough for it to loop back around to the ravine. What’s more, we were lower down than the floor we had entered from.

“Dungeons are weird,” I said.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Amaryllis said.

We all gathered our stuff in a hurry. I found my backpack, and Orange, around the last bend and my spade, which I noticed was a bit warped now, was laying off to one side as though forgotten. The poor thing was taking a beating.

We moved onto the platform just beyond the door, then paused. “That was something,” I said.

“It was,” Amaryllis agreed. “The next floor isn’t as physically taxing, according to what we read.”

“I will not go there,” Moon Moon said.

We all turned to the droll who stood behind us, mirror in hand. “That room is very bad. Lots of droll were lost there.”

“How come?” I asked.

“There are drolls there who look like us, but are mean,” he said. Then he pointed to the mirror. “Like the one in this.”

I stared at the mirror, then looked to Amaryllis for an explanation.

“That was dropped by the glass horror. It’s nice enough. No enchantments that I’d find useful, Awen doesn’t want it, and you’d just use it as a poor weapon. So Moon Moon got it.”

“But it’s just a mirror?” I asked.

“Yes,” She said.

Moon Moon turned it so that I was staring at myself, then he flipped it around and his hackles raised and he started growling. “The other droll is back.”

“Maybe keeping you out of a place with mirror traps is for the best,” I said.

Moon Moon set the mirror aside, scratched behind one ear, then nodded. “Yes yes. I will go wait outside for when you’re done?”

Losing Moon Moon wasn’t nice. He was a good chunk of our fighting power, but if he didn’t want to go on, and if going on was a legitimate danger for him, I couldn’t exactly make him come with us.

“That would be great,” I said. “Do drolls like hugs?” I asked.

Moon Moon tilted his head to the side. “Yes?” he tried.

I glomped him close. “Good! Then we’ll see you in a bit, okay?”

He licked the side of my face which... was a little disgusting. “Yes! You are a very nice person. Please don’t die. You too, chicken girl and moist girl.”

The air around Amaryllis sparked and Awen ‘awa’d most mightily as Moon Moon waved them off and scampered back into the tunnel.

I waved at his departing back, then turned back towards the ravine. “Onwards, then!” I said.

“I would have thought you would be a little hesitant, after what just happened to you,” Amaryllis said.

I shrugged. “I don’t let little things like nearly dying get me down. And besides, I’m better now thanks to you, right? That spell you used in the end was awesome, by the way.”

“It was taxing is what it was. If you weren’t such a moron I wouldn’t have needed to exhaust myself for you.”

I laughed as I brought my spade down on the empty air before me until it clicked on the glass of the bridge.

I bounced a few times on the glass to make sure it could take my weight, then with my spade ahead of me like a blind person’s walking stick, I guided my friends across the chasm.

Some of the terror of walking over nothing across a hundred foot drop into churning waters had faded. Some. Awen walked by my side, and she very timidly poked my hand with hers until I held on as we crossed.

The door for the second floor room was similar to the first, a large round slab of thick glass with a brass mechanism over it to keep it locked shut. We all sort of stood before it for a moment before I stepped up and spun the wheel. “This one is supposed to be mentally tricky, right?” I asked.

“That’s what the compendium said,” Amaryllis replied. She stood with her dagger clutched by her side and her weight shifting from foot to foot.

“Well, let’s see what we have in store.”

The second floor was one long room. I could see a door at the far end just waiting to be opened, and stretching towards that door was a meter-wide stone bridge that spanned the entire distance from the entrance on.

I stepped forwards and looked over the edge of the bridge and into a sea of glass spikes some dozen meters below. A fall down there would be fatal.

“No monsters?” Amaryllis wondered aloud as she stepped in behind me. Awen was next, and she eyed the room with dread and suspicion.

“None that I can see,” I said.

Something clunked and we all froze.

Then, all along the sides of the room, mirrors lowered themselves until they hung a meter or so off the side of the bridge, each one held up by a complex brass assembly. They thunked into place, one after another until the bridge was lined with mirrors every few steps all the way up to the door.

“Okay,” I said. “It's a bit weird, but okay.”

Amaryllis walked up slowly, then looked into the nearest mirror. I saw her eyes darting around, then widening. “Mom?” she whispered before taking a step towards the mirror, then another.

I grabbed her collar and yoinked her back.

She flailed, wings spiralling for a bit before she calmed down. “Damn,” she said.

“You okay?”

“I saw... nevermind. It showed me something I want. More than that, there’s got to be some sort of effect in place to pull you in. It’s subtle magic.” She huffed. “I hate metaphysical aspects.”

“I’m going to look, pull me back if I try something stupid?”

“If I had to pull you back everytime you did something stupid I would do nothing but drag you around all day,” she said.

I laughed and walked to the middle of the bridge then stared into the mirror. It was me. Me with a cleaner, patched up dress, with Amaryllis and Awen and Orange. And I was happy, and with friends.

I smiled at me in the mirror, and she smiled back. So I waved before looking back to my real friends. “Doesn't seem that bad,” I said.

Amaryllis huffed. “It must require a certain level of intellect to work.”

“Can, can I try?” Awen asked.

“Sure,” I said. It was actually sort of fun.

Awen stepped up next to me, then looked into the mirror. She gasped. The girl took one step forwards, and I grabbed her shoulder.

“Awen?”

She brushed me off and started walking. I tugged her back, and her polite shoves turned into desperate clawing in moments. “No! Let me go! I, you need to let me go!” she yelled as she spun and kicked and pushed towards the mirror.

I tackled her to the ground, too close to the edge for my liking, and pinned her down. “No. Awen, Awen!” I snapped.

The girl looked up to me, sobbing. “Let me go! Please!”

***