Chapter 142 – Relicarium

They all hesitated at the threshold of the final door.

“Does it… is it going to reactivate?” Beatrice asked, peering out into the forest.

“I don’t know. Levitation wands at the ready, though,” Mirian said. The weight of the relicarium in her pack reassured her. Tentatively, she took a step out the door, ready to start incinerating any branch or leaf that so much as twitched funny.

The forest was still.

“Maybe we get a reprieve,” Aelius said cautiously. “We studied the… well, they were third-hand accounts at least, but they implied that victors get a reprieve at the end. Wands out to be safe, though.”

They walked with their heads on swivels, everyone tensed and ready to start casting, but the forest was quiet.

Then they got back to the entrance to the corridor.

“That’s… a different door, isn’t it?” Cediri asked. “I’m not crazy? The door was further to the left, hmm?”

Beatrice stared at it. “Yeah. Ah, shit. But that means Grimald and the others have to go back on their own. I hope they know to do that. We didn’t plan a contingency… I mean, we have the general contingencies, so he should know.”

“My crew has been instructed to attempt to open the door first, and retreat if they can’t,” Aelius said. “The way is clear. They should be able to make it back. They may already be on their way.”

The new door opened up into several long corridors. Every so often, the corridor would bend. They took four right turns, but their path didn’t take them to the entrance. Instead, they exited back into the Labyrinth.

“Where did we come out?” Mirian asked.

“I was hoping you knew,” Beatrice said. “Aelius? I believe you have the most divination.”

He nodded, and started paging through his spellbook. A few spells later he said, “My aura’s nearly gone. But I think we’re still on the third level. Obviously I can’t give direction, but this area doesn’t look too complex. Cediri, can you start mapping for us?”

Cediri nodded, face grim. He began with the first room, measuring its length and width, noting it precisely on his map. They moved to the next room. It was empty, but it offered a choice of paths.

“Left or right?” Cediri asked.

“Doesn’t matter. Left,” Aelius said.

They were loaded down with their takings from the Vault, lost, hungry, and exhausted. When Beatrice first said, “Is that shadow moving?” Mirian thought she was probably just tired. After all, shadows did tend to move when a light source passed by.

Then she looked again. The shadows in one of the corners of the room looked too dark, like it was a big coil of darkness that had been piled up on top of itself. Then she saw what looked like an arm emerge from that pile.

Aelius was the one who recognized it. “Slithering swarm!” he said, just as the shadow-beast leapt forward.

Mirian sent a beam of fire at it, but the fire passed right through it. Aelius raised an aegis, and just in time. The shadowy mass cracked against the shield, the aegis glowing, and then the light from it was consumed by the python-like coil of shadows. Meanwhile, two dark arms reached out and grabbed Aelius, sending his spellbook and wand flying.

She shot again, this time with greater lightning, but the bolt seemed to get lost in the shadows.

“Shit!” said Beatrice, flipping through her spellbook.

“What’s it weak to?” Mirian called out.

“You have to light it up first!” Cediri shouted. “Otherwise you’ll never find its actual body!” He was clutching his notebook to his chest; left unspoken was that he clearly didn’t have the mana to do it himself.

Mirian cast a simple light spell, since she didn’t have anything special, pouring all the mana she could into it. At first the shadow-python ate it, a dark mass in an otherwise blindingly lit room. It continued to pull at Aelius as his kinetic shield shattered, dragging him forward into a gaping hole of darkness in the center of the mass. Then it let out a hissing sound as the light ate into it. Mirian vaguely remembered Viridian mentioning it used a natural light displacement spell—and she had just overwhelmed it.

Exposed, the slithering swarm was made of thin wires of black bone, those wires twisting and moving constantly. When Aelius tried to swat at it, the bones shifted away from his fist, then reformed when it left. Meanwhile, its hands were nothing—just shadows. It was using telekinesis to grab him, and there was a faint line of light where the spell dug into his soul, consuming the mana.

Beatrice started using the blunt force of a kinetic blow spell to smash at the creature’s skeletal body. Finally, it dropped Aelius, leaving deep gashes on his arm and torso where it had grabbed him. As it retreated, it dragged his spellbook with it.

Mirian didn’t have any bludgeoning force spells, so she tried slashing at it with force blades like the sorcerer was doing, but both of their efforts were useless. The thin cable-like bones sparked slightly when a blade hit them, but otherwise remained intact.

The slithering swarm crawled up into a tiny hole in the ceiling, bringing the spellbook with it. That spellbook, Mirian saw, as the swarm pulled it inside the hole, was sparking as the pages were dissolved. It was eating it.

Then the last piece of the creature disappeared back into the ceiling.

Mirian released the light spell. Then, realizing they were all blind without it now, she cast it again, just at a lower intensity.

“If there are more of those down here, we’re fucked,” Aelius said simply. “We can’t afford to go slowly. We need to get out of here fast. If we can rendezvous with the other team, good. Otherwise, we’re no use to them dead.”

They picked up the pace, with Cediri doing a cursory estimation of each room before they picked a path. Mirian kept an eye on their rear, with Beatrice and Aelius checking corners and ceilings and the Ennecus sorcerer keeping an eye on the front. There was a scraping sound in the room behind them, but Mirian intensified her light. They heard a screech, then skittering fading away, then nothing.

Mirian rushed over to heal Aelius. He let out a breath as the deep cuts mended, and said, “Thank you.”

When they stepped into another room an hour later, Cediri said, “Damnit, we’ve been here. This was the right entrance to room 28. That means… let me check… alright. Back to room 34, and we take a left instead. Let’s go.”

They followed him, still wary of ambushes. A few labyrinthine horrors found them, but they died easily enough. An attack of that magnitude was almost relaxing.

Finally, they came across a passage up. The rock face wasn’t quite sheer, but it was close enough.

“Everyone still have enough mana to levitate?” Mirian asked.

Cediri shook his head.

“Then I’ve got you. Wands out.” Mirian put her arm around Cediri and under his armpit, using Lone Pine for a bit of extra endurance.

They cast, flying the forty feet up easily enough. “My aura’s nearly gone,” the Ennecus sorcerer said.

“Mine as well,” Aelius said.

Mirian’s own was starting to waver. She’d been casting spells for hours by now. Behind them, two slithering swarms emerged. She whirled and brightened her light. “Beatrice!” she called.

Beatrice turned and smashed her bludgeon into them. One of them backed away, hissing, but the other charged.

This time, Mirian drew her rapier. Resist this, she thought, and embraced the Dusk Waves. Her slash came faster than the exposed skeleton of the creature could evade. It screamed as she cut through an entire section of it. The other one slithered out the door then down a passage, the shadows reforming around it as it gained distance from Mirian’s light.

“That blade of yours is something else,” Aelius said.

Mirian nodded, adrenaline still running through her.

Aelius peeled his eyes off the door where the slithering swarm had gone and got out his own map to compare notes with Cediri. He shook his head. “None of these rooms match up. I don’t know where we are on the second floor.”

“We keep going,” Cediri said. “Can’t really rest until we make it back. Nothing to lose.” He glanced at their packs. “Well, everything to lose. But you get the idea.” He gave a nervous laugh, and they kept going.

Stolen story; please report.

It took another hour for them to find a staircase going up. The stairs were overgrown with a tangled fungus, and on the other side of the door was a small econode. Thankfully, most of the organisms appeared to be harmless, except for a few cockatrice. The cockatrice scolded them from one of the high branches of a tree, but didn’t actually attack. It was a welcome reprieve.

Finally, nine rooms later, the Labyrinth had mercy on them. “These two rooms line up with the outer edge of my first level map,” Aelius said. “If I’m right, that next room should have two doors and three alcoves on the north side.”

When it did, the palpable tension they were all holding finally faded. Beatrice let out a sigh of relief. A few dozen more rooms, and they were in the elevator room.

Only when the elevator rumbled to a halt at the top of the shaft did Mirian finally let her guard drop.

At the top, the guards said, “Thank the Gods. We were worried. Ah… where are the others?”

Beatrice’s face fell. “They didn’t make it back yet?”