The party emerged from the stairs and the bright light took them all by surprise. They had not expected to come through the door into natural sunlight. Yet, here they were. Outside for the first time in nearly a week. They did know better than to think they were safe though. They could, and did, close and barricade the door behind them, which would keep their pursuers busy for a little while they kept moving.
But moving to where? They hadnt expected to come outside, from their perspective, they should still be underground. Either they had lost their way somehow, or the dungeon had changed. Neither presented an optimistic outcome.
The intricate stonework that they had all come to hate since venturing down to the under-levels was present up here too. All around them, the stone city continued as they had seen when they arrived. The size of this place was, as they had come to realise, not impossible, just improbable.
“We could have been going around in circles down there,” the rogue said. She was quietest of them all, but she was usually the first to answer the questions that the others were afraid to ask. Her calm voice hid the frayed nerves that had nearly led them into the waiting weapons of the creatures behind them. “But we should keep going. If only to put space between us and those things.”
“We should fight,” the warrior snorted.
“We killed one of them,” the sorcerer replied dourly. “And it cost us dearly.” In silence the three of them remembered their fallen comrade, his body somewhere behind them.
“I can kill another,” the warrior said.
“And the other dozen or so?” the rogue snapped. “We keep going. Up, remember? The spire.”
“Which is just there,” the sorcerer said, pointing.
Ahead of them, peeking from between the city structures, the sharp, dominating tower that they had been told to ascend stood, closer than any of them had actually realised. Within each of them, not that theyd say it out loud, a forbidden optimism rose. It could actually be possible to escape this labyrinth and get back to the real world.
The rogue was the first to move; with her speed and agility, she was able to clamber up the wall of a nearby building to its roof and, running along its edge, guide her companions towards the spire.
Some distance behind this party, emerging from a window of another structure above the doors they had appeared from, a tendril of black ooze inched its way down the wall. It twitched as it reached the barricaded doors and immediately headed after them, keeping to the grooves between the stones in the ground. With a new scent, it started to move faster.
As it had been before they went underground, the city was empty. But the party found evidence that it hadnt always been. Some skeletons, picked clean, dotted the streets. Some of them human, others not. The sorcerer stopped at a few, seemingly randomly, did some magic to them and, always, came away shaking his head.
“Nothing,” he said. The rogue, adept at picking up on body language watched him carefully.
“What do you mean nothing?”
“I mean there isnt anything here. These people used to be alive; theyre as real as any of us. But theres no life force.”
“Theyre dead,” the rogue said, by way of explanation.
“Theres a residue,” the sorcerer said, once again falling into his ‘explaining magic to non-magic users’ voice. “A whiff of what they were. It lasts forever, until the remains are nothing but dust. I can use this to determine things. For example,” he said, looking around the party at the buildings and into the sky. “What killed them. But here, none of them have anything. Like its been removed.”
“Can that happen naturally?” the rogue asked, receiving a shake of the head in return. “Can you feel any of this life stuff around us?”
“I dont know,” the sorcerer said. “Theres something, two somethings. One ahead, one behind. They feel like life, but theyre both different to how we feel, for example.”
“I will kill them both,” the warrior said. He was slumped against a wall, taking a small whetstone to his broadsword. “Just tell me where to go.”
Once again the rogue eyed the warrior with intent. He was a quiet sort and she had put this down to him not being able to keep up with the two of them when they started talking like this, but every so often he would say something like that and trigger a memory in her head, a previous party she had belonged to. An expedition that had gone wrong in so many ways. She, as she had done before, flagged his behaviour. Right here and now was no time to deal with her suspicions. She considered what the sorcerer had said.
“We go forward,” the rogue eventually said.
“Agreed,” the sorcerer said.
“The quickest way to the spire is through this building,” she said.
“Enter another building?” the sorcerer said sceptically.
“Id rather not,” the rogue agreed. “What about you?” she asked the warrior who simply shrugged. “Unanimous,” she said, nodding. “We go around.”
The doors where the party had emerged from the under-levels were bulging open as if the weight from a dozen or so behemoth monsters were pressing against it. With a crackling of wood and steel and the disintegration of a certain magic spell, the doors exploded outward and the beasts behind spilled out into the street. Like the party before them, they had not expected to see sunlight and each of them, as they stumbled into it, covered the faces with their arms and screamed a pained noise before attempting to push their way back inside.
“Get out there,” a voice said from somewhere in the darkness. “They are ahead of us. Not behind us.”
The owner of the voice, a tall, not-handsome man emerged from the door and stared at the clear sky, frowning. The beasts had all made their way back inside and peered out at him.
“Fine,” he said, catching sight of the black ooze along the road ahead of him. “Stay there. Head back down. I fear they are not finished with us. I shall go on ahead. If I find a place to summon you, I will.”
In an instant, the beasts were gone and the tall man was alone on the street. He could taste the sorcerers spell in the air and wondered how far ahead they could possibly have gotten.
Smirking his usual smirk, he followed the tendril of ooze, looking back to see where it originated, nodding happily when he saw which window it was.
There was nothing between the party and the spire. Each of them hunkered down on a low roof, across from the spire itself. Only a few yards separated them from entering the building.
The spire itself reached extremely high above them. Its peak lost in the low clouds that were starting to form.
Before them was a single door. It was made of the same smooth black stone they had come to recognise as important on this quest. There was yet another carving in the door, but without their fallen companion, a translation could not be attempted.
Some distance above the door, the windows started. Each of them, from their perspective at ground level, appeared to be empty of actual glass, but they all knew that once they got up to those levels, theyd see that the stained glass windows that used to be there would be scattered, shattered on the ground beneath the windows.
“Can you lift us up to the windows?” the rogue asked, a calculating look on her face.
The sorcerer sized up each of them. “I would have to go last,” he replied. “You first, then him. I could do you now, set you on the lowest window, and on the dawn tomorrow, do him. But then I would have to wait until dawn the next day to do me. Repeat that for each time you wanted to do that.”
The rogue considered this information for a moment. “You could lift me up,” she mused. “Then the two of you go the slow way-”
“Do not split the party,” the warrior said, shaking his head. “We already lost two people, we cant lose another.”
Once again, and as randomly as ever, the warrior had spoken a truth the other two had forgotten. A pledge, made lifetimes ago, to stick together. To move forward as one group. He had also mentioned the witch, the traitor, as far as the other two were concerned. Why would he bring her up now?
“You would go mad on those stairs alone,” the sorcerer said. “Theres something about this place that messes with our minds, and we have to consider that. I could do what youre thinking, but it would incur costs and massive risks. I dont want to do that.”
“Fair,” the rogue nodded. “Slow way it is.”
The sorcerer cracked his knuckles and climbed down the stairs that led from the roof to the street. “Just keep going up,” he said. “At the top lay our prize.”
“Not a prize,” the rogue said.
“Our villain,” the warrior said, swinging the bright sword before him. He led the sorcerer and the rogue to the door, which as expected, swung easily open under his hand.
The tall, not-handsome man had caught up to the head of the black ooze tendril. He crouched a small distance away from it and observed its twitchy motion. It clearly had the scent of something, and would be almost unstoppable on its course to get what it pursued.
Somehow, and the tall man was not about to question why or how, it had left his scent behind and was now focused on someone else. Someone in the party ahead, obviously, but which one? And how had this things priority changed? He was sure that none of the people ahead was aware of this creature, if you could even call it that.
He kicked the tendril as it rose what passed for a head and ran off ahead of it. There was one option that hadnt been discounted.
The spire had not contained anything. They had expected traps, or creatures. Something to halt their passage up the stairs. But there was nothing. Just empty halls, the same etched stonework and the same lack of anything. Every so often the sorcerer would comment on the lack of life force, reinforcing the idea that there was still something ahead and something behind.
The warrior, being the head of the group the whole way up, was the first to see it. The door. The final door, or so they hoped. The same smooth carved black stone. The etched, untranslateable symbol on it. Closed up tight.
“Open it,” the sorcerer said. He stood some distance back, preparing a spell just in case.
The warrior looked back at the rogue who nodded slowly, slinking back into a fight or flight position.
The warrior, as he had always done when faced with one of these doors, pressed his hand on the smooth stone, feeling the same throbbing warmth as all the others. The door felt light, easy to push. He turned back to the others.
“Something is behind here,” he said. “It waits for us.”
“Open it,” the sorcerer said again.
The warrior nodded and pushed the door open, each of them waiting in their own way for what lay behind it.