This Quest is Bullshit - Chapter 139

(Bumping this up early to make up for the late chapter the other week. See you tuesday!)

Chapter 139 - Down

The passage opened up into a vast vertical cylinder, the path on which the party walked twisting to the right to follow the wall of the space. Through the mist that permeated even this place, Eve could just barely make out where the four other entrances beneath the griffin nest turned into their own roads, creating four separate spiral paths into the deep.

Peering over the crumbling stone guardrail, Eve could only see fog below. Gods knew how far down it went.

“Are we sure these roads are secure?” Preston asked as he took a hesitant step onto the spiral ramp.

“No idea,” Eve replied without moving or looking away from the guardrail. She leaned over it to look down. “But it’s only about fifteen feet to the road below us, so if there’s a collapse we won’t fall too far.”

“Assuming that road can support our weight and the force of this road falling on it,” Preston muttered darkly.

Wes shrugged. “Ride on Reginald’s back if you’re worried. I’m no engineer, but these roads look pretty stable to me, and the fact none of them have collapsed in the last few thousand years makes me pretty confident.”

“None have collapsed that we can see,” Preston answered, scrambling up Reginald’s leg as he did. The ceiling above them proved too low for him to sit comfortably, forcing the Paragon to lie on his stomach in order to fit aboard the flying drake.

As usual, Eve took the lead onto the counterclockwise road, stepping with confidence into the most dangerous dungeon she’d ever seen. This was going to be fun.

“It’s like an inverted tower,” Wes breathed as he stared across the misty shaft at the roads on the other side. “Instead of building up, they dug down. The amount of work it must’ve taken to move this much earth…”

“The amount of Mana,” Eve corrected. “Knowing the Burendians, they probably used a leyline. There’s gotta be a big one down there somewhere.”

“Probably a node,” Preston said. “This is the capital we’re talking about. They would’ve found the spot where as many leylines crossed as they could.”

“That begs the question then,” Wes followed up, “of what happened to all that Mana? I don’t see any enchantments running along these roads.”

“Either whatever enchantments were collecting it fell apart in the last thousand years, or some enchantment somewhere between here and there has. And if another Mana wraith has been drinking it all up…” Eve smirked. “I’ll have to drink it up.”

From his position at the party’s rear, Art sent an overdramatic slurping noise to everyone present.

“Yep,” Eve laughed. “Just like that.”

By the time they’d made three full revolutions around the cylindrical chamber, the indirect glow of daylight could no longer penetrate the thick fog. Eve’s eyes alone lit the way, unfortunately at a wavelength the mist reflected all too well. The result was a blinding wall of white wherever she looked, while the diffuse reflection cast a silver glow everywhere else. She tried dimming her eyes, and managed to pick up an extra few feet of forward visibility for her efforts, but the change cost the others their ability to see anywhere Eve herself wasn’t looking.

In the end, she decided four sets of eyes were better than one, and let her eyes glow at full brightness. The others could point the way while she followed the guidance of her Mana-enhanced ears.

Without vision of the four sunlit entrances above them, the party had no way to mark their progress into the depths. They walked and they walked and they walked, descending for some unknowable amount of time before a new milestone presented itself.

They found their first crossroads.

The wall to their right opened up into a doorway, its wooden door long turned to dust. A signpost similarly hung above it, but whatever sign had once announced this place to the city around it had vanished to the ravages of time. This shop or inn or whatever it had once been marked the first of a series of openings along the cylinder wall, the end of which lay obscured in the mist.

Of course, the presence of shops and taverns and houses along one of the four spiraling road demanded a way to move between one road and another. While Eve was certain there would be multi-level shops that included stairs or ladders to connect the levels and thus the roads, such paths would hardly allow the passage of a carriage.

Which explained the bridges.

To the party’s left, the guardrail stopped to make way for a road perpendicular to the wall, jutting out over the abyss. It met with three identical roads at the cylinder’s center, stretching out to make a city square of sorts suspended over the great fall. For fear of a collapse, Eve explored it alone.

“It’s like a normal city,” Preston muttered once she’d explained her findings. “Four main parallel streets, split up into blocks by the perpendicular streets connecting them. It’s just… twisted on top of itself.”

“Which means you get four parallel streets that are each directly connected to all three of the others,” Eve reasoned. “Except they’re not quite directly next to each other, because a two-story shop or house could be on two streets at once, but only ones directly above or below each other.”

“This is getting too complicated,” Wes said. “Can we just settle on like-a-normal-city-but-also-not-at-all?”

Eve snorted. “Sure. It’s not like the city layout really matters to us. These are Burendians we’re talking about. There’s only one direction all the important stuff is gonna be.”

“Down?”

“Down.” Eve nodded. “As close to the leyline as they can get.”

Even knowing they’d find little of import this high up, the party made sure to check every room they passed on their chosen road. With the enchantments down, none had survived as more than a particularly dusty stone room, but it wasn’t furniture or potential loot that concerned Eve.

It was the denizens of the Dead Fields that might have taken up residence.

The third room they came across—some kind of restaurant if the arcane oven in the back was any sign—housed a mound of dirt arranged like a nest. No eggs nor feathers nor tufts of fur remained to indicate what had once occupied it, but it had clearly been about four feet long and dexterous enough to carry soil all the way down there. The lack of any organic tissue left behind seemed to imply the creature had left or died some time ago, likely to the griffin that had once roosted above.

It wasn’t until the party had lost count of the rooms they’d checked that they found something more recent.

“Is that…” Wes ran a hand along the three-foot-wide thin translucent tube that curled about the floor. “Is that a snakeskin?”

“Certainly looks like it,” Eve replied. “Fresh enough to be intact, too.”

“Looks Managorged though,” Preston said. “Unless there are giant snakes in the Dead Fields that nobody knows about.”

Eve snorted. “I wouldn’t dismiss that as a possibility, but knowing where we are, it being Managorged makes the most sense.”

“Which means either the enchantments went down more recently than we thought, or this thing has been roaming down to the lower levels,” Preston reasoned.

Eve shrugged. “If we find it, we’ll kill it. We’ve beaten Managorged bunnies, a Managorged spider, and a Managorged bear so far. What difference is a Managorged snake?”

Wes shuddered. “Bunnies, spiders, and bears don’t slither.”

“Neither will this when we’re done with it.” Eve flashed a grin.

She gave it an Appraise more for kicks than any real hope the skill would provide useful information, and sure enough, all she got was that they’d found a Rare snakeskin. Whether it was Managorged or just weirdly big would remain a mystery for the time being.

The party traveled on.

Down and down and down they went, searching a never-ending series of empty rooms and open squares, all progress masked by the fog above and below. Only the ever-changing remnants of life they found belied the notion of being caught in an infinite loop. Not all stairways lead to somewhere, after all.

They found nests and burrows and desiccated droppings. Even a few decaying skeletons lay untouched in some of the rooms. Lacking a formal education in the local fauna of the Dead Fields, Eve had no idea what any of the bones belonged to, let alone if they were the appropriate size.

The only recurring theme of the party’s findings was the lack of life itself. Everything a wild animal could possibly leave behind, they found, but not once did a living, breathing animal every reveal itself.

At first Eve suspected it might’ve been a quick or the road they’d chosen, that given how many millennia had passed, there were bound to be more remnants of life than living creatures, and given the layout of the city, they really were only exploring a quarter of the ruins. But the deeper they went and the more time passed without finding a single living soul, the more Eve began to suspect that life within the Crown had come to an end. She suspected the failure of the enchantments had something to do with it.

The adventurers had no way of knowing how long they’d walked nor how many revolutions they’d made around the cylindrical shaft when the corpse first made itself known. Being a corpse and being some unknown number of days old, the smell reached Eve’s nose long before she ever had a chance to lay eyes on it.

She held in the retch.

Preston didn’t.

“What’s wrong?” Wes asked, the nature of his mask leaving unable to smell anything other than whatever was in the air the enchantment had stored years ago.

“Something dead,” Eve said. “Somewhere further down.”

Eve followed her nose as much as she could, a task made easier by enhancing the sense with Mana at the cost of having to smell the rotting flesh more. It wasn’t until she reached what she deemed the epicenter without laying eyes on a carcass that she realized her error.

There were four roads.

“I think it’s below us,” she told the others as she climbed up onto the guardrail. “I’ll be right back.”

Hopping down to the road below was as simple as letting herself fall and Jetting at the right moment. She landed in a bit of a run to make up for the lateral momentum she’d needed from Jet, but the maneuver worked well enough. She looked around.

No snake.

With a sigh, Eve called out her status to the others above her and patiently waited for Jet to come off cooldown. She could, of course, simply dissociate herself and float on down to the lower level—hells it’d probably be the safest way to scout—but that would require leaving her armor behind and then going through the long effort of strapping everything back on later, all of which she’d have to do while smelling the gods-damn corpse.

Eve jumped down.

“I found our snake!” she yelled up to the others as she approached the rotting carcass.

As she carefully looked over the swollen brown scales, the massive fangs dripping with venom, and the several puncture wounds scattered about its body, Eve took in a sharp breath.

She didn’t care about pale lines of white light proving the beast had been Managorged. She didn’t care about the pool dried blood causing her boots to stick to the ground with every step. She didn’t care about the rattle at the tip of the snake’s tail.

Eve cared about the dried root that had inexplicably sprung from the cobblestone street to pierce the beast’s heart, and about the one enchanted spear she knew that could do exactly that.

“Hey guys?” she nervously called out to the others. “I think Alex has been here.”

Next