Riloth the 19th the 76th

“Wake up! You’re burning daylight!” Dagmar’s voice woke me from my sleep. “Stupid saying. Daylight’s the thing that burns us.”

She emphasized her disdain for the sun by spitting. I should mention that, by the end of the two-hour cart ride in the setting sun, Dagmar had become badly sunburned. Unsurprisingly, a subterranean race is not well adapted to the sun’s rays. Luckily—for some of us—the resets returned us to the same hungover burn free state each morning.

Groggily, I rose from my bed and went through the motions of getting ready. After dressing myself, I found my potions on the desk and downed them in two quick gulps. The taste had yet to grow easier to stomach.

Now fully alert, I looked at Dagmar. She paced impatiently across the modestly sized room, anxious to get at the day.

“So, how are you with a crossbow?” I asked her.

An hour, many grumpy shopkeepers, and one Simon later, we were on our cart heading south towards the harpy. It was still only seven in the morning; Dagmar woke somewhere between five and six each reset, giving us plenty of extra time to start our day.

The cart’s horse was able to match Ian’s leisurely pace from my earlier trips south towards the dwarven fort, and we made it to the dead tree along the road in under an hour. It occurred to me during this journey that I’d never named the cart horse, so fixated had I been on recovering you that the trivial thoughts that usually flicker through my mind had not found purchase. I dubbed her Gretchen, and surprisingly, Dagmar didn’t hate the name

“Aye, I can see it,” was all she said before returning to her silence, only broken by her muttered complaints about the sun and insects.

For her consideration, I conjured a light Gale for the journey. It kicked up some dust from the dry road, but the breeze kept the bugs away, another nice use for magic my lifelong secrecy had robbed me of enjoying.

At the tree, I led Gretchen to the side of the road and staked her to the ground with a long lead. We would hopefully survive to need her later. If everything went to plan, we wouldn't be in close quarters combat. As part of our supplies for the day, we had purchased the giant crossbow from Hilroy. A quick examination by Dagmar revealed that the runes were meant to allow for fast reloading by pulling the string back when the wielder powered them. She managed to repair them during our cart ride, but assured me the work was crude and would not last. According to her, in the same way imperfectly imbued Will seeps out of runes, correctly imbued Will forced through a crude rune deteriorated it causing them to wear. As she explained it, the power is not properly harnessed once it enters our Realm, and a large portion of it is sent into the material with destructive results. This is why you couldn’t simply imbue a stick with the proper Will and turn it into a wand. The Will would draw unfocused power from the Fonts and disintegrate the stick into nothingness. As such, she judged she could only use the runes once or twice before the integrity of the crossbow failed.

I wore the crossbow on my back as we trekked through the forest. The trip was much improved from previous such treks. Mage Armor made the trip free of snagging branches, and I allowed Dagmar to use my sword as a machete to clear her own path. She took the opportunity to enact vengeance on the nature that she felt had so wronged her. Her complaints turned to taunts and boasts against the foliage.

When we reached Gerald’s camp, we stopped to plug our ears. I elected for simple beeswax earplugs, this time. Levar’s bee venom trick seemed like overkill for what I hoped would be a quick skirmish and not a drawn out battle. Plus, I doubt Dagmar would have gone for it.

From there, we set out at a more cautious pace and only stopped once we’d reached the edge of the clearing for the outpost. The fort’s four towers gave the former inhabitants visibility of all approaches, but luckily for us, only one was manned—or vulture-womaned. We circled our destination towards the east through the woods. Once the northeast tower blocked the harpy’s view, we broke from cover and charged for cover.

Once at the wall, I handed Dagmar the crossbow, which she loaded gingerly with the crank, saving the limited rune use for more urgent reloads. I should note that it is very difficult to remain silent when you cannot hear your own movements. Each contact of your boot to the ground leaves you second guessing. Each hard step causes you to wonder if something on your person may have jingled. We snuck along the wall, hugging it closely, the crenelations partially obscuring our view of the roost, and more importantly its view of us. At the rubble of the gate, Dagmar positioned herself with a clear view of the ogres. This morning, she’d taken a few practice shots at a watermelon at a similar distance and hit the target on her third try, and from then on repeated the feat with every attempt. We then had a morning snack of a particularly wonderful watermelon, and I resolved to find that same one again on another occasion, so I could enjoy it with a more presentable preparation.

The ogres were still at vigil, along with the knight and Gerald. Dagmar looked to me, and I gave her a nod signalling my readiness. She loosed the first bolt, and the ogre collapsed, the shaft passing clean through its head and hitting the wall of the central fort building behind him. The crossbow sounded like a faint thud through the earplugs, but the remaining men and the harpy heard it clearly. As soon as the first bolt had left her weapon, Dagmar was at work drawing the string back with an infusion of Will into the stock. The string came back, seemingly of its own accord, though in my Willsight I saw Dagmar’s amber Will fill the runes. Unlike my poor attempts to imbue a rune, Dagmar’s Will conformed perfectly to the intended shape, but when they had filled the whole pattern and the string began to move back, a pulse of amber went through the weapon as the energy it drew from the Arcane Realm ran through the stock uncontained.

When I saw the first shot, I turned to the tower and watched as the harpy took flight into the sky. Before she made it fully into the air, Dagmar had already loaded the second bolt, and sent it flying towards the remaining ogre. The force of shooting was too great for the now weakened weapon, and it shattered into splinters as the bolt left the cable. Despite the destruction it left behind, the bolt struck true at the monster’s chest, and the ogre fell alongside its companion. Per the plan, Dagmar and I ran away from the charging men, leaving the crossbow’s remains behind.

The harpy began to circle above us as we stood in the open field. With no ranged weapons at hand, she perceived us as no threat and came in close for a better look. When she got within range, I cast Gust upon her, pushing her towards the ground in an unnaturally fast descent, pink pulses of magic emanating off her in my Willsight all the way as she fell. At the sight of their mistress’ apparent death, the two men collapsed to their knees and wept, but only for a moment. The fall did not kill her instantly as we’d hoped, and it took a little while for the pink emanations of her Will to cease filling the air. When it had, they seemed to come to themselves and rose to their feet with confusion clear on their faces.

I approached the men, and spoke in what I hoped was a reassuring manner, “Gerald, your wife sent me to save you, rest for a time and head back to your camp to recover.”

I left him with a pack of food and water, while Dagmar and I continued into the fort, ignoring their confused questions.

Dagmar pulled the large door to the center building open with ease, the grass blocking the path being only a small hindrance to her. Her short four-foot body had to weigh more than me, and hid surprising strength. Once inside, she touched a gemstone set in the wall near the entrance. I watched as her amber Will traced out the runes along the wall, illuminating the room with a clean, stable, white light each time it reached a specific rune laid out in regular intervals.

I was right! I thought, reveling in the validation of my prior supposition.

I closed my eyes briefly, banished my Willsight, and sighed in relief as the pressure it caused to build in my head relented.

Together, we explored the rooms. In a decidedly un-Dagmar fashion, my companion described the functions of all the devices I'd seen before. A flammable gas ran through the walls to each lantern, a remnant from before the people of Torc had learned the art of runes. The kitchen and baths were also equipped with these gas pipes.

"From the presence of these pipes, I estimate this place to have been built two to three thousand years ago. During what you Waatin call the Age of Kings. That's before we learned to power runes with soul stones, and began incorporating them into all our structures," she mused during the tour.

Three thousand years! They have had runes and gas piping for three thousand years, and we've never learned of the art? How long ago was this place lost? Could the rustproof metal be as old? The people of Torc sure can keep a secret.

In the armory, Dagmar walked by the racks of equipment, marveling at it all. The gear was laid out in neat rows. Each rack was filled with armor and weapons. The armor consisted of a barbute helm—a stout cylinder that covered the head fully, with a T-shaped opening for eyes and nose—a simple breastplate sized for a dwarf, a tower shield, pauldrons and gauntlets. At first glance, they were free of all adornment and flourish. Only after Dagmar began to wipe a breastplate clean did I see the fine, intricate runes etched all over the armor.

I grabbed a gauntlet and turned it over in my hand. Runes covered it as well. Inside the gauntlet above the wrist, a small ruby was set, surrounded by fine and complex runes orders of magnitude more intricate than any rune I’d seen thus far. Each piece of armor and weapon had a gem similarly set in it. I am not very familiar with gems and the judging of their quality, but even to my untrained eye, I could tell each was cut with the skill and precision of a master. Valuable beyond my wildest estimates, despite their small size, each being the size of a pea.

Noticing my attention, Dagmar explained, “Those gemstones act as a reservoir. You imbue it with your Will, and to activate the effect you power a secondary rune which draws it and converts it to the proper intent and shape required to power the runes. It’s much easier to manage in the heat of battle.”

Having recent experience with the matter, I could easily see the value of such a thing, even if it required a gem of extreme value to craft.

She demonstrated by putting on a gauntlet and picking up a sword from the rack. Holding her hand out before her, palm down, she released her grip on the sword, but the sword did not fall.

She continued, “There is a rune in the gauntlet to keep you from losing your weapon. It also acts to channel some magical attacks away from the wielder and shunt the magic back into the Arcane Realm—much like an ensouled item could do, but far less efficient, requiring a measure of your own Will equal to the power of the spell you shunt away.”

She ran down a quick summary of the rest of the equipment. Each piece of armor had reinforcement runes in them, granting increased strength to the metal, along with friction-reducing runes that made attacks more likely to deflect off of them. In addition, they all had magical and physical shunting runes to further protect the wearer from attacks. The helmets also had runes near the ears that allowed sound to pass through the metal easier, or block it out entirely. That would have been useful against the harpy.

An army of Dagmars, all equipped in this gear, would be unstoppable.

The weapon racks were not as uniform as the armor. Most held at least a short sword, a dagger, and a collection of throwing knives, but each had a mix of other weapons as well: battle-axes, war picks, smaller throwing axes, longer swords, and war hammers. These weapons all had a mixture of runes that made them better able to cut, pierce, or break their targets, depending on the weapon’s method of destruction.

Taking a war pick from a rack, I practiced filling the gem with Will. Using an amount I judged equal to casting Light, I went to the wall and took a swing. The war pick hit the wall with a deafening ping and sent a shock through my hands, causing me to cry out in surprise.

“Activate the secondary rune,” came Dagmar’s voice from down the hall. She followed up the advice with a low “stone skull” that I chose to ignore.

This time, the pick dug deep into the stone of the wall, and I succeeded in removing a large chunk of stone. There was very little shock to my hands from the impact, and the pick freed itself of the stone easily. Activating the secondary rune took little more than thinking about it, allowing your attention to imbue a slight amount of Will to trigger the runes’ effect. I was able to repeat the attack ten times before the gem was exhausted of Will and the shocking stings of impact returned.

“Great job!” Dagmar encouraged me when he saw the damage I’d done to the wall. “If the golems stand still and let you attack them, we should have the Dahn in short order.”

Maybe not encouragement, then.

Dagmar was now dressed fully in the armor from a rack. She approached me, and after staring at my head for a moment, walked up and down the racks of equipment until she settled on one that fit her needs. Grabbing the helmet off the top, she brought it to me,

“Here,” she said, handing it over. “You can’t wear the rest of the armor, the runes will interfere with your magic and your magic will wreak havoc on the runes, but this helm should keep you safe from a glancing blow.”

“Thanks,” I replied, taking it and checking the fit. It was a little loose around the brim, but the built-in padding and strap secured it nicely.

“Follow me, if we are lucky, we won't have to travel overland to get to the Dahn.”

I followed her back to the hallway, and she led me to the end where the floor met a bare wall. Now that the illumination runes were lit, I saw that not all the runes on the wall served that purpose. In a circular patch the size of my head, sat a spiral of runes that looked vaguely familiar. In the center of this tangle lay a small socket, the size of a grape. Dagmar reached out, and stuck her finger in the hole.

After a moment of silence, the sound of stone grating on stone rumbled out through the fortress as the wall rose, disappearing into the ceiling.

“Hmm,” came Dagmar’s grunt I’d marked as one of triumph.

Behind the wall lay a continuation of the hall. The runed track on the left side continued on into the darkness. Dagmar strode forward confidently into the dark. As we walked, the runes on either side of her lit in response to her presence. I followed, and once past the threshold, I saw that crates lined the wall of the newly revealed room. After a hundred-foot walk, we reached another blank wall. This one had no socket, but instead a small room set to the side of it. Inside there was a control room similar to the one I’d used with my friends to open the main gate at the Hardune outpost near Edgewater, though somehow it looked cruder. The runes were carved with larger, wider lines, and not as densely packed. Dagmar inspected the equipment and gave a satisfactory grunt before leaving the room. She felt along the wall until he found what she was seeking. With a quick gesture, she pulled down a four by six foot metal sheet and dragged it toward the runed section of the floor.

Standing on the sheet of metal, she spread his arms wide and said, “Welcome to the Kituh.” At her words, the metal plate rose three inches off the ground. “Please keep your arms, legs, and gabbing jaws within the boundary of the vehicle at all times.”

Despite myself, I laughed.

“Did you just make a joke?” I asked.

“The only joke here is whatever you were doing with the war pick earlier. Come on. Get on, we need to get going.”

“Two jokes?” I asked incredulously as I complied with her demands. “I must be rubbing off on you.”

“If you touch me, let alone rub me, I will cut off whatever you used to do it and feed it to you.”

Three jokes?! I thought silently. Maybe the weapons put her in a good mood.

Once I was settled on the floating plate, she walked over to the control room, pulled the lever, and ran back to me. While she was gone, I examined the plate. The side we sat on was nearly unadorned, but had an emerald set in it near the front. From that were connected a series of runes that looked like the control runes I’d seen on the gauntlet, only there were many more of them and they, like the control room, were less delicately drawn.

Once Dagmar was seated, the wall before us rose into the ceiling.

“Hold on!” she shouted, and we took off into the darkness.

Never had I moved so quickly or suddenly in my life. There was a gut-wrenching sensation, like falling, that persisted for the first ten seconds. The wind buffeted all around us and I had to activate the sound dampening feature of my helm to dull the pain it was causing my ears. When Dagmar had shouted “hold on,” I’d reflexively grabbed onto the plate in front of me, and now I was finding that I could not remove my hands from where they touched it. A good thing, for without this feature I would have been thrown off at the start.

We traveled through the darkness, the lights turning on before us and shutting off as we passed. It was hard to gauge time; in the tunnel reality seemed to only exist in a small bubble around us. At times, forks appeared, but each time Dagmar confidently chose a direction. Before leaving town, we’d consulted a map, and I’d provided my best guesses for the locations of the Dahn and the fortress.

I hope she's better at navigating underground than she is above.

I was completely unaware of the pace we were traveling until we passed a group of forsaken traveling down the tunnel. In the brief moment they were lit by our passing, I saw a group of dark elves with weapons drawn. We passed them so quickly, they didn't have a chance to swing.

Beyond them, we passed a section of the tunnel where the lights didn't work. Dagmar slowed to inspect it and there discovered a large hole broken open in the wall leading into the Torack. After passing the first, they became more regular and Dagmar did something so that the lights no longer activated as we ran.

I activated my Willsight to combat the darkness, as the amber glow of Dagmar’s Will infused the runes before and behind us. The walls appeared to me as a featureless gray void, and if the wind had ceased I’d have thought we lay motionless on a net of amber webs.

We continued to pass enemies with increasing frequency, but none could react fast enough to do us harm. Each group became visible when they entered into the limits of my Willsight, glowing sickly purples and greens, and passing by as quickly as they appeared. To be safe, I activated my Mage Armor, and discovered to my delight that it reduced the force of the wind on my body and took very little Will to do so.

After an indeterminate amount of time, and half dozen groups of forsaken, Dagmar stopped. She hopped off the metal plate and it fell the three inches to the ground. Now free of the binding magic, I was able to stand.

"How was I supposed to disengage the safety binding runes?" I asked.

"Bah! Those weren't safety runes. They were for securing cargo!"

"Well, thanks, I guess. I would've fallen off for certain without them."

Dagmar started inspecting the wall where we'd stopped. After only a moment, she found what she was looking for—another small socket where she could imbue her Will. At a touch, her amber light infused the wall and drew out a door frame. The wall parted at these lines, revealing a narrow stairway. I dismissed my Willsight, illuminated the passage with a Glow from my palm, and we climbed up together.

The light revealed the ceiling just above my stooped head. Unlike the Kituh tunnel, the roof here was uneven and covered in dangling roots that had worked their way through cracks in the stone. We ascended a dozen feet before we reached a ladder cut into the wall which Dagmar climbed wordlessly. At the top she encountered a trap door set with yet another rune. She activated it and pushed it open and in doing so flooded the narrow tunnel with dust and debris.

I climbed up after her, coughing through the dust, and found myself in a small cave barely tall enough for Dagmar to stand in. Dagmar was already crawling through it when I got up and I followed.

The tunnel was secured by a grate of the rustproof steel and was just large enough for a grown dwarf to crawl through on all fours. Dwarves being stockier than humans, the tunnel was plenty wide for me to crawl through.

To my relief, this grate finally let out into the forest after a short downward crawl, on the side of a small hill from which a large gnarled tree grew atop of. Conveniently a tree I recognized from my walk to the Dahn with Perfon.

"Riloth's balls," I muttered to myself. "I know where we are, and the Dahn is close."

"Of course it's close," came Dagmar's reply, almost sounding offended. "Do you think I just blindly chose paths? If it wasn't near the Dahn, it'd be because of your pisspoor map, not my navigation."

I led her due east for ten minutes, and there sat the door, illuminated in the clearing by the noonday sun. I reviewed the day and marveled at the speed we must have traveled in the Kituh to get here so quickly.

It must have taken less than an hour to travel what would have been three or four by horse. What other wonders could Dagmar be hiding?

Outside the Dahn, I performed some practice swings with my war pick against a small boulder just outside the clearing. With my Will, the pick pierced deeply into the stone, as if I was striking wet clay. The boulder split cleanly after only two hits. The vibrations of the impact reverberated through the shaft, but it was bearable.

“I’m ready,” I told Dagmar, as I downed a clarity potion. Unlike coffee, the taste of deep whale excrement did not grow on you.

We stepped through the door, and I smelled the putrid stink of death, which had started to return to the Dahn as our bodies began to decay. We positioned ourselves as close to our targets as we could manage during the counting and when Dagmar made her failed passphrase attempt the golems broke into motion.

Dagmar reached Timothy before I got into range of Jimothy, allowing me to witness her clean strike against the golem’s “calf” before jumping out of its return attack. The pick pierced deeper into the stone than before, but not nearly as deep as my boulder test led me to expect. Instead, when the weapon hit, a web of runes lit up in my Willsight, starting from the point of impact and spreading over the body of the golem, sapping some magic from the attack.

“Fauell’s whores!” came Dagmar’s curse.

In the end, her attack did as much damage as the makeshift runed weapon she'd made on our previous attempt, showing her to be a master of the art of imbuing runes.

In the instant I took all this in, Jimothy closed the distance between us. He swung at me with an overhead crushing attack and I attempted a new trick I’d been considering. I was not fast enough to dodge their attacks, but I had other strengths. I reached into the Arcane Realm, and summoned a Gust centered on myself. The Willsight induced headache delayed my casting by a fraction of a second, but even with that, the Gust pushed me away from Jimothy far faster than I could have under my own bodily power. The air around me became dark with my multi-hued aura as my Will filled the air. I cut the spell short as soon as I felt its pressure against me, and immediately the air began to clear.

To my shock and delight, I witnessed Jimothy’s arm clip the brim of my helm, narrowly missing a killing blow and crashing into the floor.

With that close call I resolved not to use Willsight to compensate for the darkness. Light had served me well enough before and I didn’t need to rely on my new talent for everything.

While the stone fist was still moving, I swung. The pick, filled with my Will and with all my strength behind it, made contact with the arm when it hit the floor. The attack was far more effective than my swing with the mundane pick and I left a divot the size of a coin in the stone—a vast improvement over my first attempt.

After making contact, I turned to Timothy and cast Blink with no target in mind. The magical anchor brought me before the golem as it was reorienting to attack Dagmar, who had moved to its side. As soon as I appeared, I attacked the golem, getting a solid hit to its chest. I then Gust—Gusted?—myself away. During my brief appearance, the golem reoriented to attack me, and Dagmar was able to make two more strikes.

Sailing backwards out of the way, my feet stumbled over the ground and I tried to regain my footing as I flew. I fell and my spell continued to push me across the ground. I released the spell and tried to get to my feet, but the golem towered over me and time seemed to slow. Before the blow struck, I had a moment to notice that the damage from Dagmar’s attacks from the day before had begun to smooth out.

And then, my part for the day was over.