Fortress Al-Mir

The Cursed Forest wasn’t so much a forest as it was a desolate wasteland. The surrounding proper forest went by the name of Langleey Forest, even though it was further away from Langleey than a few other burgs and villages. Like normal forests, it contained all the usual foresty things. Trees, grass, brush, rolling hills, rocks, and plenty of animals and insects and other fauna. But at a certain point in Arkk’s trek, with the sun at his back, the forest thinned out. Thick, healthy trees turned scrawny and leafless. Plants thinned and yellowed. Even the dirt itself went from a healthy brown to a dead gray color, filled with small cracks and larger fissures.

The people of Langleey Village did not venture inside. When visiting Langleey Forest for food or timber, people took a long and roundabout trail to get to the part of the forest where Ilya and Arkk had been hunting. Legends said that those who ventured in would emerge with a taint that poisoned the ground around them with every step.

That wasn’t true. Arkk had been inside before with Ilya when they were children. He didn’t know what caused the Cursed Forest to become the way it was, but he knew that it wasn’t contagious. That was likely a story meant to keep adventurous children from doing just what he and Ilya had done. That said, it wasn’t without its dangers. Loose soil and deep crevasses presented natural hazards. There were always rumors of monsters, even if he had never seen any evidence.

He had to be careful.

Leaping over a wide fissure in the wasteland, Arkk landed mid-stride. He slowed for nothing, not even the largest of the cracks in the ground. While the sun was still up, he wanted to get as far as he could. Once the sun set, he would only have moonlight to guide his way. There wasn’t a cloud in sight and the moon had been bright these last few nights, but he would still have to slow down then.

Arkk considered himself more athletic than most in his village. They were strong, and work had a way of hardening bodies, but the kindest word he could use to describe most of them would be stout. Growing up alongside Ilya gave him far more time running and moving than he wanted. Even still, his heart hammered in his chest and his lungs wanted ten times the air he could give them. Sweat rolled down his face, back, and arms. The constant leaps and hops over flat but unstable terrain were taking its toll on his legs. He had discarded his sword and Ilya’s bow and arrows to move faster, keeping a small dagger for defense. No bow was going to save him if he stumbled into a horde. If he made it to his village, he could reequip for the defense.

Though Ilya might kill him when she learned he left her bow behind. He was pretty sure he could find it again if they retraced their steps, however. At the moment, he didn’t care. He needed to get back.

In a way, he was glad he was in such a rush. Moving with purpose, even a worried purpose, felt good.

With the sun at his back, low in the sky, the shadows ahead of him stretched clear to the horizon. Dodging around a boulder, he walked along its shadow for two dozen paces. A rickety dead tree cast a shadow ten times as long. They were like spikes. Or teeth of some vast monster—though only the lower teeth. If he went slower, he would have had time to process the eerie atmosphere.

Instead, he planted his hands on a fallen tree, vaulting off into a long shadow.

A divot in the shadow snared his foot.

Arkk swung his arms forward, catching himself just before his face met the dirt. He still skidded along the ground for a short distance, slamming his hip and one shoulder into the coarse ground. Sucking in a sharp breath, pain spiking along his side and forearm, he sat in the dirt for a few moments just feeling his own body.

Was he injured? Nothing felt broken. Grateful for the leather gloves saving his hands from being ground to raw meat, he clenched his teeth and focused. His hip stung the most. Pulling up his tunic, he hissed at the long scrapes. From his stomach down to his thigh, blood seeped from thin lines of torn skin. Scrapes that would soon bruise. Nothing more. It would hurt, but he could still run.

There was no time to dress the wound. He had to get to the village. They needed warning. If Ilya failed and a group of orcs and goblins attacked…

He didn’t want to think about what might happen.

Clenching his teeth, Arkk mustered as much willpower as he could to push himself back to his feet. As much as he wanted to rest, if he took even a short break, he would likely find himself too worn to continue.

On his feet, he locked his eyes on the horizon with clenched teeth. One foot in front of the other. Faster and faster, until he was back to his previous speed. He kicked off with his boot, launching into a sprint once again.

He ran, planting one foot on the ground and then the other… until his foot found nothing underneath.

Eyes widening as his stomach flipped, Arkk fell into a fissure shadowed by a small boulder. His back hit the dirt wall after a short distance, grinding down a steep slope. His hands and boots found no purchase to slow him down. He slid a long way until the earthen wall vanished from beneath him. After falling a short distance through open air, Arkk landed with a grunt on something squishy.

Arkk sat still for a long moment. With his hip burning and now his back feeling like he had been raked over hot coals, he needed a bit longer than before. Foolish. After the first fall, he should have been more careful. He had wanted to get as far as he could in the last vestiges of the light, but now he wasn’t moving anywhere at all.

Groaning, Arkk tried to look around but saw nothing. The fissure overhead looked like a jagged crack in the night sky. No light was getting down, however. If the sun had been higher in the sky… He was in some kind of cavern, that much he could tell by the feeling of the air around him. Underneath him… it almost felt like a bed. A bed of somewhat slimy texture, moving like an oversized waterskin pouch.

Something moved beneath him. Whatever he landed on shuddered and began descending. The squishy bed pulled out from beneath him.

That got Arkk to jolt despite his pain.

Nothing lived in the Cursed Forest. Nothing except rumors. And yet something was moving?

Arkk rolled to the side, away from the direction of movement. He ended up on much firmer ground, though still soft. At least this felt more like woven mats than a water-filled sack. Unmoving woven mats. That, he felt, was the key part.

Feeling at his side, his fingers curled around the hilt of his dagger. Glad it hadn’t gotten knocked loose, he slammed it into the woven mat and traced out a small symbol to the best of his ability. It felt like hard stone beneath, but he was far less concerned about his blade’s edge than he was about being able to see.

Symbol complete, Arkk poured the tiniest amount of magic into it, not wanting to have it blow up in his face.

A brilliant yellow flame erupted from the ground instead. Arkk threw himself backward at the unexpected fire, only to realize that it wasn’t spreading. Small mercies. If he remembered the pattern right, a small orb of light should have popped up into the air. As it was, he supposed the column of flame was doing its job of providing light. Not much, but enough to see the rest of the area by.

He had been wrong. This was no cavern. A cavern was a natural structure. Brick walls and a vaulted ceiling didn’t form naturally. Nor did caves form… beds? It looked like the room was filled with rows and rows of beds—not whatever he landed on as these looked like something he might have in his home. None were occupied, thankfully. In fact, with the amount of dust and dirt coating every inch of them, he doubted anyone had touched them in decades upon decades.

There was, he noted, no sign of whatever he landed on. The area beneath the fissure was just empty ground, covered with some kind of woven mat or carpet. The lack of anything soft sent a chill down his spine. What had he landed on?

Shuddering, he looked up at the fissure. The slope didn’t look as steep as he thought it was. If not for his momentum, he might not have slid all the way down. As it was, he could probably climb back out. If he could reach the fissure.

It might be possible to stack up the beds and climb up them, but… that could take all night. And that assumed that there were enough beds to reach the top of the vaulted ceiling. It was quite high up.

Arkk’s eyes lowered to a doorway at the far end of the room. A door implied that there was more to this place. Beds indicated that people lived down here at one point in time. If people had to get in, they could get back out. That meant there should be an alternate way up.

He was losing time.

With a faint limp, he hurried over to the closest wall. There were torches mounted along the walls, many of which still looked oily at the end. Assuming it would work, he pulled one off the wall and swept it through the flames he had made. Sure enough, it roared to life, providing much greater illumination in the dark. Sweeping a foot through his magic circle snuffed the fire he had started.

Pushing open the door took a great deal more effort than he imagined it was supposed to take. It felt more like he was breaking the hinges on the door than operating them. Even still, he pushed open the door and stepped into a long, narrow corridor.

The corridor had collapsed at one end, leaving him only one direction to walk. There were a few more doors in the other direction, but what drew his eye were the bodies.

“I think I found the owners of those beds,” Arkk mumbled to himself.

On both sides of the corridor, periodically slumped against the walls, were at least a dozen corpses. Some might have been wearing armor. For others… it was hard to tell. Perhaps they had simply worn less robust armor, a material that had disintegrated over time. And it had been a great time since whatever happened here. None of the bodies were anything more than bones.

A rush of wind that sounded like whispers at his back caused the torch to flicker. He whirled, breathing heavily with his dagger gripped in his other hand.

The corridor was empty save for the collapsed tunnel and more bones.

“Is someone there?” Arkk called out. Drawing attention to himself might be a poor decision under most circumstances. He was already wandering around with a torch, kicking open doors. The advantage of getting help tipped the scales against alerting something that was going to notice him anyway.

Wondering if he had let in a draft by opening the door, he simply turned back and continued on the only path he could.

He pushed open each door as he passed them, checking what was inside. The first room, closest to the barracks, looked like a king’s armory. Weapons and equipment hung from the walls, though most spots were empty. The gear equipped on all the bodies littering the place went in those slots. Everything looked so old that if he picked them up, they would probably turn to dust. One room looked like it had chicken coops and pig pens along with a small field. That one, in particular, had him pausing. The field actually had plants growing. Considering how dead everything else was in the Cursed Forest, even a small bit of life surprised him.

Passing by training rooms and even a pool, perhaps for bathing or recreation—though Arkk wasn’t sure if that had been the original purpose of the room or if rainwater had simply accumulated in a basin meant for other purposes—he deduced that this place had been some kind of self-sufficient fortress. Despite living not far away, he had never heard even the faintest rumors of such a place. That, combined with the completely decomposed bodies, meant it was probably so ancient that nobody knew about it.

He wanted to explore the place more than merely glancing into each room. He wanted to drag Ilya here and explore it with her. But to do that, he had to get out of here and save the village.

The one thing he had yet to find were stairs.

Coming to a third intersection in the corridor, Arkk started feeling despair settling in. Just how large was this place? The rooms were massive. Half his village could fit within the sleeping quarters and he had found three such rooms so far. The other two intersections had been a full crossroads, allowing him to simply continue stumbling his way forward. This one, however, only had two choices. He could go left or right.

Picking at random, Arkk selected the right path.

The second he took a step, he felt it again. That rush of whispering wind at his back. He whirled around, eyes searching.

In the dark corners of the corridor where the light from his torch failed to reach, he did see something. It looked like the shadows themselves were twisting and writhing. The strangest thing was inside the umbra. Little golden orbs, like miniature suns that failed to provide light. If they had remained where they were, he might have thought they were some ancient magical lighting technique that had since failed. But they didn’t.

The little golden stars winked out of existence, one by one, as the shadows stilled and returned to normal.

It only took a moment. If he hadn’t turned around so quickly, he would have missed it entirely. Now, however, he couldn’t help but feel that something was watching him. Magic or monster, something had made this empty fortress its home. Was it upset at his presence? Or merely curious? It hadn’t attacked him so far, which he was taking as a good sign.

Was this thing in the shadows what he had landed upon? Unless there was something else moving down here…

Abandoning his chosen path, Arkk followed after those shadowy lights. It hadn’t attacked him and he couldn’t help but feel that those whispers were a beckoning, not a warning to stay away. Heading towards it might be foolish, but… above all, he didn’t want those lights at his back.

He kept opening doors along the way. Some of the rooms were so decayed that he couldn’t even guess what their use might have been. It did interest him that there was a library in this fortress, but he didn’t dare touch a book. If he opened one carelessly, it might fall apart. If it didn’t fall apart, he might wind up reading it. That would be even worse; he needed to get back to the village. This detour was already taking far too long. How long had he been wandering? An hour? Maybe even more.

One of the doors was stronger than the rest, made from metal rather than rotted wood. It took real effort to push this one open, not just because the hinges were one fused block of rust. A heavy door meant something worth protecting lay beyond. Hopefully a staircase up to the surface. After struggling for a few minutes, Arkk liberated an old sword from one of the nearby skeletons. Wedging that in the small opening he had made, he started prying the door open.

The sword snapped clean in two, throwing Arkk back as the counter to his weight vanished. He grimaced as his back hit the wall. Slumping down to the ground, Arkk took another short break, holding his hand to his injured hip. Jostling it with that little move hurt.

His efforts did not go to waste. Although the sword broke, it held strong long enough to leverage the door open. It wasn’t fully open but there was space to squeeze through.

There were no stairs inside, much to Arkk’s chagrin. Instead, it was almost the opposite. It was a large room. One of importance with large steps leading up to a dais in the dead center of the room. The dominating feature was a circular pit placed into the dais that seemed to go down forever. A large sphere, with deep grooves forming a maze-like pattern on its surface, looked like it had been knocked aside. Bodies littered the floor of this room more than any other, making it difficult to walk toward the center of the room. He had to take care, not wanting to trip and fall in.

Pulling another torch from a wall, lighting it, and dropping it down the deep pit, Arkk never saw it hit the bottom. The light just kept shrinking into the darkness until he couldn’t see it anymore.

Arkk backed up from the pit, sinking onto the steps leading up to the dais. It wasn’t a very comfortable place to sit. Deep grooves lined the floor and even the walls and ceiling of this room, creating a labyrinthine pattern that spread across every surface. He dropped his head into his hands. All the adrenaline and exhilaration that came from his mad sprint through the Cursed Forest had long since faded. Exhaustion crept into his bones. The injuries he sustained weren’t making it any easier.

This fortress was too large. There could be a stairwell beyond the door on the other side of this pit chamber or there could be yet another corridor. With as many doors as he had opened thus far, it almost felt like he had to stumble across a way up sooner or later. And yet, it felt like he was never going to escape. At what point would it be better to try stacking up furniture to reach that fissure versus continuing in the hopes of finding another way up?

It would have been nice if this fortress had a map somewhere. The tactical disadvantage of a map showing any intruders that saw it how to navigate this place meant that he doubted there would be one. Not to mention, it probably would have rotted away along with the bodies unless its creators carved it into the stone walls.

Arkk’s eyes drifted side to side. He had been avoiding looking too closely at the bodies throughout the ruins—it felt a bit morbid to stare at so many corpses—but now that his explorations had stalled, he couldn’t help but look at some of them.

He noticed now that they weren’t all humanoid. One was a partially crushed exoskeleton with a great many limbs, looking like a giant spider. Another had four arms and two legs. It was hard to tell what it might have looked like if it was more than just bones, but Arkk couldn’t think of a creature that had four arms. A skull a short distance from the rest of a humanoid body had horns. The oddest thing was a cube. A cube of folded layers of metal with long, sharp limbs jutting out at strange angles. Arkk had thought it was merely a sculpture until he realized that one of those sharp limbs was piercing the chest plate of a more humanoid-looking corpse. A battle-axe almost completely bisecting the cube must have been what killed it, but…

He had never seen anything like it.

Staring at it felt strange. Like it had too many angles for being a cube.

Tearing his eyes away, Arkk looked to a shadow in the room where a little golden light glinted in the darkness. For a moment, he thought it was a mere reflection of the torch off a suit of armor. It blinking dispersed that notion.

Arkk launched to his feet, noticing the room.

The entire half of the chamber changed while his back was turned. Dark shadows covered every surface despite his torch. Inside those shadows, stars burned bright, looking like dozens of eyes. Teeth gleamed in the darkness, forming dozens of mouths with lolling black tongues dangling from the shadows. The entire room stared at him.

Arkk’s dagger trembled in his fingers as he tried to steady himself. The room seeming to come alive into some kind of monster shook him. He just about ran. It would likely be useless given that he was trapped down here, but fight or flight instincts didn’t care about details like that.

Before he could, however, someone stepped out of the shadows. Something. It appeared as a woman, but obviously not human, elf, or even orc. No creature he had ever seen before had dark violet skin. Those same starry eyes that now possessed the rest of the room gleamed from its remarkably humanoid face. The majority of its clothes almost matched its skin, save for being a bit darker. A long white segment that ran down its entire front almost made it look like it was wearing an apron of sorts.

He quickly realized that its clothes weren’t clothes at all. They glistened and dripped. More of those golden eyes dotted the shoulders, stomach, wrists, and sides of its dress-like lower body.

This was a monster. Not like a simple orc or goblin, but a true monster. The kind spoken of in ancient tales from before the Calamity ravaged the lands.

And it was here. Staring at him from across the bottomless pit.