“Gods and goddesses! I am going to write a song about your hair falling out Maximus! Why would you tell me to wear my best for this part?” Bartholomew muttered as he crawled through a tunnel under the Dungeon of Forsaken Hope.

He kept muttering to himself as he made his way through the tight muddy passage. “Only that jerk would send me here. He could have come up with a different way to get what was needed. But no, he had to send the god of the bards to climb through mud in his show clothes as part of the plan.”

Finally, he came up and out of the tunnel into a small room dimly lit by a blue orb. As he came up, he started to brush himself off and looked around. Then the god of bards sighed, “No use brushing myself off with only one way out.”

Bartholomew walked over to the orb. Laying on the pedestal beside the orb was a dust-covered scroll. He shook his head slowly as he picked up the scroll. The dust flew up into the air, and he started to sneeze. After a few moments, he looked off to the side and softly said, “Max, for all of your planning and foresight, why couldn’t you have kept this place dust free.”

Then Bartholomew opened the scroll.

My dear friend.

I am glad you have found your way this far, which means the time is near for you to use the Gate of Seasons. I wish I could have done more for this location so that you wouldn’t be a mess. However, any magic that I used would have brought more attention to this location, and we couldn’t have that.

I hope that you remembered to bring the ring with you as that will let you access the dungeon heart. Once you are in the menus, you will need to go to the tenth tab from the bottom. Once there, you will access additional options and then go into growth and reproduction. From the reproduction option, select Seed.

The core will fracture, which should be funny for everyone inside. You may even get a few good songs out of the mess this will cause.

Take half of the seeds when you go to The Gate of Seasons. You will need them to have enough power to start up the gate. The other half scatter once the gate has been used but not before.

Now the hard part will be getting to the control room of the Gate of Seasons without being detected.

The following steps will get you to where you need to be…

The letter went on with the next location and the rest of the plan, but Batholomew stopped reading it so that he could move on. Instead, he pulled a rather gaudy ruby thumb ring from a small bag on his hip. He took a moment to look at the Ring of Subservient Faith.

Ring of Subservient Faith

Cored Ring Level 12

(Max level 12)

This ring will grant the wearer the faith of the one who created the ring.

While wearing the ring all faith requirements are based off of the faith of the one who created the ring.

Core access LOCKED

Bartholomew slipped the ring on his left thumb and then reached out and grabbed the core. “Max, I hope you know what you are doing with this thing even a god can get eaten by a core,” he whispered.

A few moments later, the god of bards was smiling and whistling a happy tune. He held eighty-four dungeon core seeds in a bag, each no larger than his thumb, billowing off enough energy to cause localized mana fluctuations.

A quick spin around showed the god that there was nothing else for him here. Sadly, it also showed that there was no way out of the core room other than the direction he took to get in. He sighed and started to crawl through the mud cursing his friend that set this all in motion. He would need to take a nice hot bath and get someone to clean his clothes once he got back to town.

***

Two weeks later, Bartholomew was once again making his way through a narrow passage. This time it wasn’t a cave but a hallway that hadn’t seen use in almost 8 thousand years. This time Barth was wearing clothing that seemed more appropriate for an adventurer and less the grand entertainer that he was.

As he pushed through the halls, he heard a sound that he always hated. Ever since the time that Max had sent him to obtain Dark Weaver silk, he had hated spiders. It wasn’t that spiders could do much to him anymore. Instead, it was remembering what they could do to him when he was a new champion.

He slipped his lute off his back and started to strum a merry tune. He was using the passive skill Personal Music to keep his lute from being heard by others. From the sound of it, there were Dark Weavers here and not just a few.

“If only Sam wasn’t still locked up. He would be able to finish them off before this got messy.” He murmured to himself.

Soon a soft light started to glow around the lute and then around him. The light spread out to reach twenty feet in all directions. In The Spotlight was a great active skill that, when leveled, let Bartholomew cut the edge of the light. Making it so only those in the spotlight could see the light. Typically, the skill would be used to make it easier for people to see him. However, through an odd use of the skill, he was able to see like it was daylight while those outside of the area couldn’t tell it was lit. Oddly this made the skill much better than all the other area-of-effect vision spells and active skills.

A few moments later, the first of the Dark Weavers came scuttling into his light. This one was a young adult, only about the size of the horse Barth had ridden just a few hours before. They were some of the most dangerous spiders in the world, more intelligent than the small spiders that inhabited every brewery and tavern. Unfortunately, they were also born the size of a dog and grew to be as big as a draft horse. Worse yet, Dark Weavers were a communal spider, and the queen, if old enough, could be the size of a peasant’s hut.

Barth backed up a little and heard the Dark Waver send out a high-pitched whine. It made the god scrunch up his face as the spider made the sound like a bow being pulled roughly and poorly across the neck of a lute. Then, more spiders started to pour into the lit zone.

“Ugh, that’s awful,” the bard moaned. “Let me show you how music should sound.”

Bartholomew checked around him to make sure they were only coming from one direction and then changed the tempo of his song and started to sing. No longer was he playing just for himself. He had been found, and so it was time to stop trying to hide and have this fight.

He smiled and started to sing in his deep rich, baritone voice. “A spark, A light, A flame so Bright!” As his song hit his last word, his fingers played a lick on his lute, and a pulse of flame shot out the body of the lute.

The spiders in front of him sizzled, and the lead few popped from their insides being superheated. The one that took the brunt of the spell exploded as the wave passed through it.

“Yuck, too close again.” The bard yelled as the gore from the center one landed on him.

He went to take a step forward, only to feel the walls shake. This fight wasn’t over, and his way was forward. He changed his tune and started to thump on his lute as he walked along. His body glowed for a moment, and then the light settled on the middle of his neck.

As his feet squished through the slightly charred innards of the spiders, he was muttering about his hate of the spiders and Max. “…if I thought you had anything to do with this colony being here, I would find a way to get back at you once this was all done. I better not get webbed into a cocoon again, or I might full well leave this whole mess and ascend…”

After a few minutes, he rounded a corner only to have his lute yanked out of his hands by a well-placed shot of web. He stopped singing for a moment, and the light faded out from around him slightly as he took on an expression of shock and disdain.

“Now! That’s wrong! A bard’s instrument is never to be touched, and it truly shouldn’t be handled by the likes of you!” He shouted. Then from his hip, he drew a slightly curved sword.

Bartholomew smiled as he thought of the sword. It was old, older than he was, but it was far more potent than any blade had any right to be. He had borrowed the sword from Max’s equipment cache after the second mission went sideways. It had called out to him when he saw it and he just knew it was right to bring it along.

He stepped into the range of the deer-sized spiders and hacked forward. Bards tended to be poor fighters, and this dumb spider must have thought he was all magic as it wasn’t ready for the weighted front of the sword to cleave its head open. The god of bards spun and, with a flick of his wrist, cut the webbing free from his beloved lute.

He held his lute in his left hand and Max’s sword in his right. He glanced down at the lute and sighed. The strings were gummed up. “I hate spiders!” He growled as he flipped his lute over his back and tightened its strap. “Pipework it is..”

As he moved forward, his left hand slipped into his shirt and pulled out a small set of reed pipes, and he started to play. A song began to fill the air as he moved forward, causing a bright blue glow to form around all the living spiders. Then he changed the tune, and his feet took on a green glow, his hands a red one. A moment later, a third song and his speed went from faster than most mortals to being able to outrun an arrow, then he started to dance with his prey.

The god descended through the webbed halls of the foundation of The Gate of Seasons. The spiders grew in number and size as he approached the control room. He never let up with his complaints and curses about the spiders and his friend. As the minutes turned to hours, and then turned to days, the god, at last, reached the forty-second level of the foundation.

For three days, he had fought without rest. The halls were narrow rows of magically reinforced stone that not even Thamus, the god of sieges and feasts, could have knocked down when he was in his prime. No, Bartholomew, the god of bards and summer beer, had to walk through the halls hacking and blasting apart the Dark Weaver infestation. He hadn’t fought this long since he had been in a shield wall when he was first a Champion for the god of Seasons and Harvests.

At last, Bartholomew came out of the hall and to the service entrance to the Gate of Seasons. He paused his slaughter just long enough to take in the room in front of him. If it hadn’t been for the webbing and the moving of hundreds of thousands of giant spiders, it would have been regal. There were statues of two ladies, each standing over three hundred feet tall on the other end. They were built into the wall, each holding a staff with both hands. Between the staffs was a giant web with a seven-legged Dark Weaver the size of a small castle sitting in the middle.

The bard sighed. “Songs and stories don’t write themselves,” he whispered. Then he slid his sword into his sheath and pulled out his flute. Not any ordinary flute. It was a gift to him from the goddess Nerise before she ascended, inscribed to amplify volume and mesmerize those who heard it. Then a core was added to it, and he had been leveling the thing ever since. Finally, he grinned with a slightly manic smile and started to play and dance.

At first, nothing could be heard as his feet slowly pattered forward. Then slowly, over the sound of the spiders screeching, his song arose. Not the joyful songs that he had played with his lute or the fast songs with his pipe. A haunting piece, slow and low, he played his melody of War and Death.

His feet moved in a dance that gave the cadence of song life, and soon the spiders were all swaying. Those closest to him started to dance with their feet moving in time with the song. So soon as the beat grew louder, the others fell in with them. The only dark weaver not dancing was the queen, and she was growing angry.

Bartholomew kept his song going and wove in with it the notes for fire, and out from the end of his flute, a whip of white and blue flame twenty feet long lashed out. Where it passed, it cut the spiders in half. But, he didn’t stop there, and soon flame was coming out of his feet as he climbed higher in the air.

He played faster as the spiders pressed in close below him. Their beat moved the room as his grin spread. Finally, the music reached a fevered pace as the line of flame from the end of the flute pulled closer and closer to the end. Then the bard snapped the flute away from his mouth with a grim smile and sang out a single word, “BOOM.”

From the bottom of the flute, a huge fireball shot down at the mass of spiders below him. When it hit, their bodies went flying in all directions. The walls of the room shook from the impact as the flame rolled up the walls and came back down into the middle.

The floating bard landed and started to walk forward through the burning piles of dead spiders. In front of him was the queen, the last thing that he had to face before he could finish. His worst nightmare was a spider so giant that it had horse size spiders running across the back of it.

He thought for a moment. His flute’s fire rose was a once-a-day attack. It was great at removing minor problems. Unfortunately, the fire whip wouldn’t be able to get through the carapace of the queen. Nope, if he had it his way, he would use the lute to freeze her then burn her, but the strings were gummed up, and he just hadn’t had the break to clean it. This was going to be a sword fight, as that blade could cut almost anything, living or dead.

Bartholomew drew out Max’s sword and started to move forward. He shook his left arm, and a shield popped out and around. Then he gave a shout and started to charge right at the queen.

Then in a raspy voice, she spoke, “Had I known that a god was coming, we would have stepped aside. Had I known that one carrying that sword would come I would have yielded before now. Please spare my life, and I will serve you in all things for the next thousand years.”

Barth slid to a stop, and a look of confusion and revulsion slid across his face. He scrunched up his eyes and pulled his lips tight. The queen lowered her front legs down and bowed her hideous head to the ground. He hated spiders. They made his skin crawl ever since, spending two weeks in a cocoon. Barth sighed and slowly sheathed his sword.

“By my mantle I accept your offer in the faith and good will it was offered. Your life is spared and is mine to call on for a thousand years. I offer you the lives of your brood if you safeguard this passage.”

The queen rose and clicked her tree-sized mandibles. “My brood will guard this passage and if you call, we will come. Clickic shall go with you if you need us my daughter will tell me. She will be yours in all ways, bonded, if you take her.”

The bard’s head snapped up and looked at the queen. His mind was racing as he tried to figure out how to get out of this. The last thing he wanted was a Dark Weaver to follow him around everywhere. It would kill all of his performances, and he would never get a chance to move unnoticed again.

The bard offered a slight smile and said, “Lady, there is no reason for you to send your daughter with me. Where I go she wouldn’t blend in very well.”

A horse-sized spider jumped from the back of the queen and scurried toward Bartholomew. As it approached, it bowed low to him and arched up on its back two legs. Then in a flash, it changed into a young human lady who then curtsied and said, “My god, what shall I call you?”

The god lowered his head and slowly shook it resigned that he would either have to go back on his word and kill them all, which wasn’t in his nature, or let this one follow him. “You may call me Bartholomew or the god of Bards and Summer beer. Do you have a common name?”

The deceptively pretty spider replied, “I have not ever been given a name in common would you like to name me? Would you like my bond?”

“I will find you a name. I know someone who is good with those, we should ask him when next I see him. As for your bond, I am not one to take bonds, so we will just keep with your word for now.” The bard started to move toward the doorway. As he did, he grimaced as he watched the spiders begin to wrap up their dead to eat later. “Also we will have to see about getting you something to wear. You can’t go around like that while looking like a human….”

“But don’t I look pleasing?” She asked.

“It has nothing to do with how you look. Humans wear clothing and so will you if you are to follow me. Now come, I have a deadline that I must keep.”

Soon the two had made their way into the service room for the Gate of Seasons. There, sitting on the one table, was a scroll that looked like the one that had been in the dungeon heart’s room. Barth walked over to it and opened it, read through a few lines, and moved over to a wall of crystals. He slipped back on his gaudy ruby thumb ring and started to re-slot crystals per the scroll. Then he pulled a swirling green and yellow crystal out of his tunic and slid it into a now open spot.

The bard smiled and whispered, “Max, I hope patch 42 works. A thousand years has been a long time to bide my time.” Then he turned and looked at his new problem. “Okay, Clickic let’s go visit my friend Sam. He can help name you and we can get you something to wear on the way there. If you showed up like that he might die. Which come to think of it might be funny, but Stephine might take it the wrong way and that wouldn’t be as funny.”