That’s right. He remembered now. Much of the details had blurred. But he’d been blown away. He’d been eaten. There was a gastropod stuck to his head. Head? Head…

Dimrat grimaced.

‘Head!’, he blurted, ‘I’m nought but a bloody head!’ He looked down upon his personage, and watched the illusion of his body begin to break away into ash. He’d run out of time.

That’s right. Dimrat was just a head. His trial had ended abruptly. How had these memories escaped him? He loosened with relief. There was a way. He had a purpose. He was not lost. He was not alone. Not yet.

[Cursed Head transformations]:

[Cursed Dreg](Rare) - trial ended

[Cursed Levitating Skull](Rare) - trial ended

But now he had a more pressing concern.

‘Legs!’

Perhaps one memory he could have done without. Dimrat wanted legs. But there was an issue. He leaned to one side with crossed arms that crumbled into the wind, and began to tap his foot with an anxious rhythm. Although the Dreg was a bipedal humanoid, it was also too weak to move with a giant undead snail stuck to its skull. The moment he chose the Dreg, that gloopy dungeon sweeper would devour him, and this time there was no trial to save him. This was it. His last chance. He recalled the levitating skull, and how it at least could float, no matter how much of a struggle. Choices, choices.

‘Needs trump wants. I will find another way. I must. If I’m to return to my… Return…’ It was no good, he could not remember. His enthusiasm for some cause had diminished. He was unsure whether this was his true self or not. He so desperately wanted there to be another way. To find another answer, but the longer he lingered there, the more he forgot himself. He may yet come to regret it, but he came to a decision.

‘Bah. I choose the Cursed Levitating Skull!’

[Transforming into Cursed Levitating Skull(Rare)]

A part of him hoped he’d remember once he returned. That it could all just be a bad dream. Yes, he would wake, and his way would be clear. His consciousness slipped away on the wind, and with it the hymn petered out, and was never heard again.

--

Dimrat blinked. Before him several Dreg’s gnawed at the remains of bards inside the dreary haunt of Coldstone Keep. The largest one glanced up at him wearing a necklace, a comically sized bone lodged down its throat.

Then his mind bolted into overload.

Sight, sound, smell, hearing, touch, cold, emotions, memories, his consciousness, it all collided like a thunderstorm in a bottle. His eyes surged red and blasted cursed energy uncontrollably.

[99.99% evil energy dispersed into the dungeon]

Whatever cursed energy that got dispersed swept the ground clean behind him with the backdraft, like the gust of a cannon; the alpha dreg took one to the torso and flew back against the shattered stonework with a high pitched shriek. Blood burst from its every orifice on impact, then it fell limp to the ground gargling its own fluids while the beads of its plundered necklace bounced about the floor. The other dregs' heads swung after their leader, then back towards Dimrat. Then they scarpered.

[You’ve slain a lvl 9 Dreg]

[Experience awarded]

[Cursed Eyes reached level 2!]

Then a familiar threatening presence approached. The head levitated off the ground and began to turn with all its mental might, the heavy undead snail swinging below, then he yelled in hoarse ghastly tones, “lady Vellom, we must escape! Lest we’re eaten again!

He’d almost turned to face the window, when to his shock Vellom stood still before him, silent and menacing. Her aura blunted considerably. The miasmic glow in her eyes animated a confusion that Dimrat simply had no time to explain.

[Carnivorous Rotwood Weeping Willowmare “Vellom”(XV)] lvl: ???

[Fallen Champion (ranked 3rd)]

‘Sister!’ he strained, ‘the sweeper has come for us! We must flee!’

‘How did you..’ the words barely left Vellom’s lips, when her eyes slit.

She squatted, and brambles erupted from her back, then with immense physical strength she boosted into the air, just as the face of the dungeon sweeper emerged from its hiding and fell into the room in the hopes to snag them.

Dimrat huffed with everything he had. His eyes screamed at the window frame, while Vellom landed on top of it. From there she sprung out of sight. It was almost impossible to see, but a thin thorny vine lashed back in through the window and snatched Dimrat up, and he was gone. Vellom had him. Snail and all.

She bound through the night and across the meadows at reassuring but envious speeds. Her eyes met his for a curious moment, when he noticed he wasn’t the only passenger. The Dregs he presumed had escaped were entangled within her brambles like thorny prisoners.

This unnerved him. ‘Why would she bother? ...no’, thought the head, ‘she couldn’t know?’

Then the moonlight got snuffed like a candle. They had fled somewhere darker.

The sting of trees and bushes whipped him numb. For a moment he imagined himself saved, when Vellom’s grip tightened around his skull close to cracking and choked the Dregs to quell their racket. He thought to speak, but did not have the gall. A dreary and sodden woodland canopy loomed overhead, where they fled in silent contemplation.

[Through your curse, a lvl 11 Guardsman has been slain]

[Association experience awarded]

Close to an hour had passed before they finally slowed down.

Vellom landed on a rotten stump with a crunch. For a moment he looked upon a moonlit glade surrounded by a crooked treeline that jingled with eerie chimes, before Vellom crawled on all fours deep into the ground through a moist hole.

Down they went, deeper and deeper, twist after turn through warrens old. More than once he heard the rush of cavernous waters, the melodic echoes and earthen smells of the underground.

Light still lingered there. Occasionally he caught faint illuminations, the spots of unknown mushrooms, strange plantlife; there were even creatures that were visible in their own lustre.

There were Ghostly crystalline formations that dripped in their own lightsource, the scarce peppering of ore nodes here and there that seemed to hum in response to their passing, it all whooshed by without a chance to maintain his bearing, and many other strange and wondrous oddities. Depths he had never gone before, places he had no desire to trespass. Yet his journey was painfully brief. Vellom’s pace had hardly decreased underground. Then at some point they arrived.

The snail got torn from his skull with a sharp pain of exasperated relief. A bitter joy that lasted no longer than the time it took for Vellom to toss him into a muddy spin towards the back of some den alongside the Dregs and the gastropod, and there they bunched with baited breath.

[WARNING]: Realm boundary reached [Subterranean Warrens of Lost Edinnor]

Faction: [Undead]

Connected territory: [no connected territory]

[Turn back]

The unrecognisable bumps and clanks of impatient rummaging and the occasional tut followed the dull green shimmer of Vellom’s eyes about the darkness.

The pack of dregs had been loosed around him. They clawed and scraped at the floor with an irritating fervour that covered him in dirt. A scolding was in order, but now was not the time. It seemed his captor had found what she searched for...

From deep within the murky sway of ancient webbing, a bright green lamp flickered to life. Vellom held it on high, where she glowered at him from above.

He realised it now more than ever, a mere levitating head, stuck in the mud and not nearly brave enough to move from it. Lost at the bottom of somewhere unexplored in perhaps hundreds of years, perhaps never - while giant spiders twice his size scurried away from the light through a diverse parliament of hidden eyes all lured by curiosity and hunger - while cornered by a creature so deadly he could never hope to resist, and whom he had so mercilessly betrayed. Here in this would-be tomb, he had exchanged the frying pan for the fire.

‘Speak.’

‘..m-my lady, I--’

‘You would dare?’

‘I would not’

Her eyes narrowed.

‘You know my name. How?’

That stumped him. He had righted a personal wrong by saving her - a necessary risk for redemption - but wanted to avoid going down any roads of truth, as all roads lead to his betrayal.

‘..I was informed so by the system’

Vellom’s eyes drew closer, and her dreadful aura tightened around his neck like a noose. It was a warning. like the sound of a rattlesnake in the fern; do not test me.

Dimrat suffered the urge to panic. He tried to speak, when she interjected with a single word that would have froze his veins.

‘Traitor.’

He panicked.

‘The lady is confused! I would not dare!’

Her aura sharpened. More and more green lamps wafted awake, strewn about on dusty wooden crates and coiled by vines up and down the den walls, while her ever-narrowing eyes drew closer, when his stubbornness gave way. Something about the accusation - although true - irritated him. It pushed through his fear to the forefront, long enough for him to show a backbone and land a few pointed words.

‘I must protest. Would a gracious host mistake gratitude for slander?’

‘...would a clever guest parley wit at the tip of a knife?’

He huffed, ‘and for what but good intentions would this one spring a trap before the hare’s snared?!’

She did not respond. Instead she snatched a Dreg with her roots and mercilessly broke it.

‘..the lady plucks petals while I stand accused?’

‘One of these Dregs wronged me. I’m not sure how, but I know it’

Dimrat felt a chill. If the accusation of traitor didn’t confirm his suspicions, then this did. Vellom knew. But she did not seem to have all the pieces.

Her roots slithered towards the next Dreg. This time she flayed it alive with one motion then threw it back to his side.

‘...I’m listening, little head’

‘I would never betray the Fallen’

He observed her clearly in the light. No longer had she the feminine form but instead resembled a writhing mass of thorny string that shot off into the tunnel depths; roots that snared and twisted everything that moved into wrangled pulp, while the orchestra of the warrens composed a bloodcurdling symphony of despair. She had executed their audience on impulse, and who knew how many more lay broken or chased out of sight.

Her true self had been exposed to him and he shuddered with awe. Quickly she withdrew herself and reformed into the shape of a womanthing, her gaze just as fierce. Then her voice cut through the background din.

‘...prove it.’

Dimrat feigned outrage, then huffed ‘how?!’

‘I confess, little head. I don’t recall your treachery. Not yet. But, I know you have stabbed me in the back. My instincts are never wrong. I am filled with resentment for you. Fallen, you say? Fallen?!’ She became crazed. ‘Why is that word an insult from your mouth?! Confess, little head!’

Dimrat’s eyes surged red. Cursed winds eddied around him ominously enough to give her pause for concern. It was curious. It seemed Vellom held sway over her feelings despite the dungeon master’s meddling. A privilege and a reservation that filled him with bitterness.

Dimrat scowled.

[99.99% evil energy dispersed into the dungeon]