Crowned in Black: Chapter 45

I vanished backwards, anticipating a hit—but it didn’t come. Karalti squawked as the whatever-it-was flew overhead and around, then hit the ground with a rumble that shook dust from the roof of the cavern and up from the floor. The dust clouds briefly framed the shape of something that looked almost like a giant cat… or a lizard, I thought, as the monster dropped its head and padded toward us.

Karalti drew back to my side, fists raised, but I held a hand up and narrowed my eyes as the now semi-invisible beast snorted, then turned from us and began to pace around the arena. Almost as if we weren’t there.

“The fuck…?” I tried to focus my HUD on what was clearly a boss monster, but only got a blank [ ] of space over its HP ring. A blank space with a black skull symbol and a ‘9’ next to it. This motherfucker was so far over our level that it could wipe Karalti and I both in a single swipe. But it wasn’t charging.

“Karalti, can you Bioscan this thing?” I backed up as it advanced, watching the… Manticore?… as it flickered into view, revealing three long, whiplike tails that ended in barbed stingers.

“Hmm…” Karalti pursed her lips and concentrated.

[Spectral Manticore is unaffected by magic.]

“Uhh… huh.” I frowned, circling warily to the side as the manticore paused to sniff the air. “Spectral Manticore, huh? Is it glitched?”

“I dunno.” Karalti stuck close by me, sniffing back.

The Manticore groaned under its breath, and turned to stare at us with weird, faceted eyes. I saw its empty nameplate and HP ring activate again, this time without me needing to focus on it. That name and HP activation was something that happened in boss battles when the monster aggro’d. But after a wavering pause, it padded on past, tails swishing—and as it wove around us to avoid collision, I realized that it could definitely see us. It just… wasn’t engaging.

“So like I was saying, it’s definitely creepier when there’s either no monsters, or really powerful monsters that don’t try to kill you.” I shuddered. It was hard to say why this was wigging me so badly, only that it was. It didn’t have a Squalor vibe, because I wasn’t getting any of the ‘void draws near’ shit, but something was definitely fucky.

“Yeah. Gotta say, this is making me feel mildly uncomfortable.” Karalti was already sidling toward the stairs. “How about we leave Mr. Manticore alone, huh?”

“Lets.” I crab-stepped after her, and the pair of us scuttled down the stairs.

[You have entered Lirenian’s Abyss.]

The same thing happened with other monsters as we picked our way down the side of the cliff wall. Three and four-skull lizards with ridiculous HP, attack and other stats for their levels scattered from us, not engaging. At the base of the cliffs, we set up our campsite, but as soon as I threw my bedroll down, I got an error message: [ALERT: You cannot set this location as a respawn point. {ERRORNO 13}].

Okaaay. As I looked around the campsite, I spotted a small green frog, throat pouch bulging as it hopped across the broken tiles. It looked harmless enough. I decided to experiment. “Karalti: Hold my beer.”

“What?” Karalti’s head turned in alarm. “What dumb thing are you about to-”

“AHHHHH!” I let out my best bloodcurdling war cry of excellence, and ran right toward the tiny frog. “DEATH TO AMPHIBIANS! FOR ISENGARD!”

I Jumped at it. Jump VI did x4 damage on landing. On an unarmored enemy with no elemental weaknesses or resistances, that translated to about 3000 points of smackdown, give or take a few.

[You deal 1424 damage to Frog. HP: 23,576/25,000]

Alllrighty then. This thing had more HP than most bosses, plus over 50% damage resistance. I braced for death, but the Uberfrog, which I was pretty sure was actually capable of kicking my ass if it turned hostile, didn’t retaliate at all. Instead, it hopped away as fast as it could.

“Oh no you don’t.” I pounced after it as Karalti watched on. “Karalti! Help me kill this thing!”

“Uhhh… suuuure.” Karalti sighed, rolled her shoulders, and ran into the fray.

It took a good fifteen minutes of both of us pummeling the passive creature until it finally died. At no point did the frog fight back. Karalti landed the final blow, stomping the poor thing until it lost its last HP. Navigail announced the murder as cheerfully as always:

[You have killed Frogger. You gain 0 EXP.]

“What the fuck?” I blinked a couple of times as the frog’s tiny corpse dissolved into a loot bag. Curious, I crouched down and brought up the contents.

• 1 x Barghest Feces

And then, somehow, it finally clicked. I started to laugh so hard that Karalti’s head shot up in alarm. “What?”

“This whole place... this entire dungeon leading into Solnetsi’s Dragon Gate? It’s one huge fucking villain trap.” I left the dog poop baggie where it sat. “Not for us. For Ororgael. This has Steve written all over it.”

“Really? That’s... huh.” Karalti wrinkled her nose. “But they’ve been through here before. Oral Gel and his friends, I mean.”

“Huh? How do you know?” I frowned, looking back at her.

“I dunno. My blood tells me that the Void was here.” Karalti ruffled her shoulders. “C’mon. I want to get this over with. This whole place makes my veins crawl.”

She had a point. Even with the realization that none of the mobs here were going to target us, I also had a crawling sensation on the back of my neck as we picked our way through shattered roads and crushed buildings. The ruins were so old that there was no evidence of the dead—even their skeletons had long since moldered into dust. We found a crack in the blast zone of the Guardian Ward, slipping into a field of shattered stones. Spikes of molten metal and crystal had hit the ground so hard they’d churned the ground and penetrated solid granite, and were so dense in some places that they looked like the overlaid spikes of a porcupine. By weaving carefully, we managed to avoid the worst of the razor edges, and made our way into the combined castle-cathedral ruin.

It was grand and terrifying all at once: the aurum and granite of Garai mashed into the white and gold marble of this structure, the [Temple of the Just/Diamond Palace Ruins]. Weird magical fires still sputtered here and there, jagged crystal outgrowths rimed with flames and venting stale mana gas into the cavernous rooms. The ceiling, forty feet above our heads, hung with a dim blue haze. I didn’t get any toxicity warnings as we picked our way through, following small pathing cues, until we reached an ornate rotunda. As soon as we stepped out into it, I realized Karalti had been right. Ororgael and the others had been here. The corpses of Ilian soldiers were scattered around. They were old, but not THAT old. Archemi generally spared players the details of decomposition, replacing the eye-water reek and Christmas colors and fluids with milder visuals, but these guys were still pretty nasty, bloated up and partly eaten. I walked up to one of them and noticed that part of his body had been voided out into a shifting, blurry field of pixel fuzz. When I tried to bring up a HUD tooltip on him, I got an error.

“Yeah, you’re right. Oreo and his goons were down here.” I looked to the entryway to the [Sanctum of Light]—double aurum doors engraved with stylized dragons. They were the entry to Solnetsi’s Dragon Gate, surely. One of the doors was partly voided, fritzing and glitching. There were two completely crushed bodies inside the threshold, along with a barred gate that looked like it closed from either side. I glanced up inside the doorway: above the corpses was a section of ceiling stained with months-old viscera. “Okay, so this door is a trap. Some of their minions found that out the hard way. It might be a legit entry... I have a feeling that Lord Orifice brute-forced his way through the doors.”

“He might have, but I don’t think it’s the right entry. It’s too obvious.” Karalti stared up at a cluster of strange colored crystals set into a large metal inlay. It looked like the rose window of a cathedral, save that it wasn’t see-through. “There’s some other way in, I’m sure of it. And these are magical… and tuned to music!”

“Music?” I wandered over. “What do you mean?”

“I was humming, and one of them lit up. Look.” Karalti tuned her voice to a soft C note, and one of the crystals—the pink one—lit up. “We might have to sing our way in, huh?”

“Yeah. But what’s the song?” I frowned. “Don’t suppose your magical blood has any hymns to the Goddess of Light, does it? Ororgael and friends must have worked it out, somehow.”

“Nope. Give me a few minutes, though.” Karalti began to hum different notes, watching as the different crystals lit up on each one. Then she strung the effective ones together. After a few tries, she had a soft, haunting, wordless tune... and as she sang it aloud with a dragon’s vocal chords, we heard a clunk and a thump from the structure at the center of the rotunda. The entire thing haltingly rotated, the outer wall of it sliding around to conceal the false door and reveal the real one.

“Weirdly simple trap, if they were trying to keep Oro out. But it apparently worked.” I headed for the new door, which looked almost identical to the other one: about ten feet tall, aurum with dragons. There were no gates, though, and no obvious smashing-crushing ceiling. “Maybe the guy couldn’t hold a tune or something. Hopefully he went into the fake door, got his ass handed to him, and didn’t make it inside.”

“I dunno. They managed to get the Diamond Pact transferred to them so they could control the dragons.” Karalti sounded uncertain as she followed me down the stairs behind the door, which opened easily to the touch. “Hopefully we’re right and the site of the geas is in here, and not in the Eyrie.”

I brought up the Darkness Shines in Light Places quest description. “‘You must get to the root of the problem, the geas itself. The answers lie in the fallen Aesari city of Cham Garai.’ I’m pretty sure we’re in the right place.”

We came down to a portal room. It would have been brightly lit once, but the mage lights that had lit the place were sputtering. As I approached the portal, though, the Pearl of Glorious Dawn began to glow, connecting to the portal ring just before it activated.

“Here goes nothing.” Drawing a deep breath, I stepped through.

Light briefly blinded me on the way through, leaving my eyes dancing with spots as I stepped out onto a narrow bridge of tiles, arranged in water-like spirals and sealed with gold. The room ahead was a great sphere, a mosaic dome arcing over my head and under my feet, studded with glowing orbs. At the center of the room was what looked like an hourglass-shaped pool, and on the other side

[You have entered the Hall of Reflection.]

“Woah...” I took a few steps forward, and experimentally poked the butt of the Spear at the space beyond the walkway. To my surprise, the metal cracked off a solid-sounding floor. Every instinct I had told me not to get off the two-foot wide path, but as Karalti joined me—also sticking to the path—I risked taking a step out. The vertigo was intense, but there was a floor. The whole thing was an incredible optical illusion.

“I would uh... stick to the path anyway,” Karalti said nervously.

The door at the end of the Hall of Reflection was deceptively far away, everything distorted by the polished glass and lights. I stuck my head over the wall of the pool curiously, but it was empty. When we eventually reached the doors, I saw that they unlocked with the Keystone. Holding the Spear to it caused the lock to turn, and as the doors swung open, the reverberating double-thump of Solnetsi’s heartbeat rumbled through the floors and walls... and then again, out of tempo and too fast. I froze as a dim, furious roar split the air, adding another level of vibration to the chamber as the heartbeat pounded erratically, rolling the ground under our feet.

“Uhh... that’s not good.” There was a weird, oppressive sense of wrongness hanging in the air of the beautifully wrought crystal tunnel ahead. As we stepped through and the doors behind us boomed shut, the back of my neck crawled with the sensation of being watched, judged... and found to be wanting. “Is Solnetsi...?”

“Awake?” Karalti finished, looking around anxiously. “Uhh... yeah. I think she might be. She feels kind of pissed off too, huh?”

“Just a little.” The ambient sensation of fury became more and more oppressive as we walked, until it was hard to breathe. The stench of decay was in the air, too. This corridor twisted and turned and split like a hall of mirrors, and as we rounded one corner, the smell of the dead suddenly became stronger as we lit onto the sight of several more Ilian soldiers skewered on activated spike traps. There were so many from the walls, floors, and ceiling that the corridor was impassable. Yet as we walked toward them, the spikes slid back into their hiding places with a soft ‘shick’, pulling off the bodies and dropping them to the floor.

“It’s almost like the place is inviting us in,” I thought back to Karalti. “As if... it recognizes us. But I don’t feel like Solnetsi wants ANYONE here.”

“Yeah… she feels pretty angy.” Karalti followed me uncertainly. “She shouldn’t be awake. From the descriptions of things, the Aesari broke this Dragon Gate to use Solnetsi’s power for their flying city… but didn’t the last Triad fix things?”

The kaleidoscopic maze had more evidence of Ororgael and his men having been through here. Countless activated traps, as deadly as Matir’s freaking meat maze, were littered through the bifurcating tunnels. All of them deactivated or reset as we passed, deferring to our presence. At the end, the tunnel opened up into a huge chamber flanking by sweeping crystal staircases, which spiraled up to the familiar five-petaled door... a door that looked like it had been blown in with a warhead. Blasted and twisted pieces of metal were scattered on the cracked ground in front of it. At the center of the structure was a crackling pinpoint of pure, deepest black that hurt to look at. I recognized it immediately.

“Fuck. I know this room.” I wandered forward, turning my head to stare open-mouthed at the surrounds. “I dreamed about this place. Well, Matir showed it to me. Ororgael, Lucien and Violetta, with Arnaud and a bunch of soldiers… They fought a giant ogre or something here.” Even as I spoke, I heard another roar—closer and louder, this time. “I am NOT looking forward to what we’re going to find at the end of this Dragon Gate.”

Like the Gate of Endless Night, Solnetsi’s dungeon was fairly linear—but it was fucked six ways to Sunday. Every room we entered had black, fizzing gaps in space, or places where my HUD highlighted empty spaces and the names of enemies who never appeared. It got eerier and eerier as we pressed deeper, past destroyed puzzles and other challenges that hadn’t reset like they were supposed to. Ororgael had blasted his way through the place in a tantrum.

“I really want to know where he gets that fucking Void Ray thing from,” I thought to Karalti as we climbed over the remains of a floor trap. “He channels it through Hyperion somehow.”

Karalti looked uncomfortable as we headed for a brilliant platinum door, inset with lines of different colored crystal. “What if... Hyperion died the way that Ororgael died? Over and over again. And Squalor took over? Or maybe like, just a bit of Squalor. I mean, it’s like God here, right? It could do that sort of thing.”

The doors opened into a hallway of pure light, and the erratic double heartbeat became thunderous as we closed our eyes and felt our way forward, coughing as the bitter almond stench of decaying mana bored into our sinuses. This passage opened up into a natural cathedral of gigantic crystals that lanced from the walls and ceilings in all directions. The crystals glowed deep within their cores, casting soft golden light across a vast, hourglass-shaped expanse of polished gold-veined marble. Towering statues lined the walls: the Aesari’s idealized imagery of themselves, angelic and humanoid, with long pointed ears and huge liquid eyes. Rows of them stood with heads bowed, wings folded, slim lances resting in their clawed hands. And between them…

“Holy fuck,” I breathed. “It’s Lirenian.”