Volume 1, Chapter 19: Down Is a Sad Direction (Patreon)

“Are you sure this is, um, a good idea?” Bri asked, looking at the empty wooden bucket I had dragged over and set beside the opening leading down.

“I’m about ninety percent sure it’s an idea,” I laughed. “Whether it’s a good one, even in my own head the jury’s still out.”

I was sitting at the edge of that narrow, tunnel-like drop with my legs hanging over the side, eyeing one of the gas lanterns I had taken down from the hook above. Both lanterns now sat on the ground beside me while I worked on a way to hang them from myself.

“That doesn’t sound, um, very reassuring.”

“Listen, Bri. You said yourself you’re almost certain you’ll die if you fall from too great a height. I, on the other hand, am completely certain you’ll burn my ladder in the process, so the only option we have left is transporting you in something that lets me hold you for as long as possible without damaging my body. And the only thing we have on hand is a wooden bucket.”

I pushed one of the steel rods through an opening in the sleeveless part of my shirt. I had already cut a hole in the longer sleeve, allowing me to secure the piece of iron across my shoulders without significantly restricting my movement. I had stuffed my hoodie into the backpack, which was already back on my shoulders and now helped press the rod firmly against my body.

“Yeah, but… won’t the wood, um, burn if it touches me?”

“Try to keep your flames under control,” I said with a laugh.

“You think this is funny?” She expanded until she nearly filled the bucket, forcing me to pull it farther away before she scorched the rim.

“A little. What else am I supposed to do? This whole situation is absurd, don’t you think?”

I started fastening the first gas lantern to the end of the rod protruding from my left side using one of my neckties. Then I began hanging the second lantern from the opposite side of my shoulders, tying it to the rod with one hand while holding it steady with the other.

“I’ll try to climb down as fast as possible, and if you manage to scorch the bucket badly enough that it becomes unusable, I’ll grab you in one hand and carry you the rest of the way down like that.”

“Trying doesn’t exactly, um, inspire much confidence,” Bri replied.

“My dear, I’m already screwed with your worshippers anyway, so what difference does it make if I offend their religious sensibilities by putting the object of their devotion in a bucket? I’m ready by the way.” I rolled my shoulders and watched the two lanterns swing while remaining securely attached to me. I also climbed onto the ladder, and when it seemed to hold my weight without much trouble, I returned to the edge and pointed Bri toward the bucket waiting for her.

“Are you sure you don’t want to try using, um, bandages?”

“I told you, that’s a bad idea. The bandages will catch fire faster than the wood and you’ll just fall. We’re doing this my way.”

Bri first squeezed her eyes completely shut, leaving only two narrow black slits, then took a breath, shuddered through her entire fiery body, and quickly jumped into the bucket lined with dry soil.

I grabbed it by the handle, feeling her hot flames brush against my skin, and quickly hooked the handle over my foot, pointing my toes upward as much as I could so that only my bare heel—my shoe was in the backpack—was exposed to the heat radiating from her.

Prepared like that, I grabbed the ladder with both hands, stepped onto it with one foot, and began descending quickly and methodically, skipping three or four rungs at a time. I clung tightly to the side ropes with my hands and landed with my single free foot on a rung whenever I needed to slow my fall.

“Fuck. You’re hot, girl!” I shouted down to her, feeling my skin begin to scorch. “And that was the first time I’d ever used those words in exactly that context!”

I gritted my teeth and continued descending, making sure the stone walls of the mostly wide shaft didn’t interfere by catching the metal rod protruding from either side of me. The lanterns I carried illuminated the way perfectly. After several seconds of moving like that, I passed an opening from which water began trickling out of one of the walls, cascading down the uneven rock.

I took advantage of it by putting my foot beneath the stream, and the cold water running down my leg cooled the skin Bri had been scorching.

“Hey!” she protested when the same stream poured over her and hissed into steam against her flames.

“Don’t be dramatic,” I said through clenched teeth as I continued climbing rapidly lower and lower. “I’m the one suffering here,” I added, feeling a cramp seize my foot from keeping it constantly flexed to stop the bucket from slipping off.

At the same time, I noticed that the dirt I had smeared around the bucket up above had stopped providing enough insulation after getting soaked by the water a moment earlier. The whole thing had begun conducting heat much more efficiently, allowing some of Bri’s flames to lick through the wooden sides.

“Is it, um, much farther?” Bri hovered closer to my shoulder, keeping her eyes on the passage ahead.

At that exact moment, I planted my free foot on the ground, grabbed the container, and threw it away from myself toward the wall of the chamber we had reached. The bucket rolled across the floor several times before coming to rest beneath a boulder jutting from the wall.

Meanwhile, I rushed toward a small pool of water that had collected at the bottom and plunged my burned foot into it, immediately producing a hiss of steam rising from the surface.

“You could’ve, um, said we were already there,” Bri complained as she climbed out of the overturned bucket and rose unsteadily into the air in a wide semicircle.

“Sorry, I didn’t have time. And I apologize about the throw, but you seriously roasted me.”

“I’d really appreciate it if you, you know, tried not to throw me around, but other than that, well, it wasn’t so bad.” Bri winked at me, blowing smoke out the other side of her mouth as she flew over to the pool where I had my foot soaking. There, she began admiring her reflection.

I spent the next few minutes on a brief reorganization session, during which I took the lamps and rod off myself so I could dig a sock, a shoe, and my sweatshirt out of the backpack, put everything on, and prepared my rod once again—this time with both lamps attached to one end. All the while, I had to listen to Bri’s endless questions about what I had seen along the way, while she tried on different faces.

“Seriously, there was nothing interesting there? Not even some rock with an intriguing shape?”

“Bri…” I replied, drawing out her name. “Rocks are about as interesting to me as watching paint dry.”

“And what does that, um… look like?”

“It’s an expression. It means something is extremely boring,” I replied as I approached the crack in the wall that served as the exit tunnel from the chamber.

As I passed one of the rocks, I noticed the paint marking the stones here. Brownish streaks left by fingers. I gently ran my own hand over them, feeling the uneven surface and remembering my first attempts at painting walls, which usually ended with me running from the police, an enraged shop owner, or railway station security.

I smiled to myself and ducked beneath the stalactites, careful not to let my steel staff with its two lamps strike any piece of rock jutting from the wall.

Moving through this passage was much more difficult than through any part of the cave above. Numerous stalagmites rose from the ground with only narrow gaps between them, larger boulders  made squeezing through even harder, but most importantly, there was simply far less room to move than in the open cavern overhead.

Even so, after only a few minutes of following the twisting tunnel, I reached a sheet of leather hanging across its end, completely blocking the light from the other side.

“The exit?” Bri asked.

“Looks like the orc didn’t want anyone knowing about this passage,” I replied.

I stepped closer to the hide, grabbed its lower edge, and pulled it aside despite its weight. Curiously, the farther I lifted it, the lighter it seemed to become, and I heard water splashing onto the ground.

Only after Bri quickly flew through at my urging and I slipped after her, letting the hide fall back into place behind us, did I understand why.

From this side, the piece of leather blended into a section of rock wall completely overgrown with blue grass. Apparently, the grass had spread across the covering as well and was still capable of holding water within itself, which spilled out when I disturbed the entire construction.

Even a jaw made of flame could not resist dropping at the sight spread out before us, and whether I wanted to or not, I had to agree with her. What we were looking at was extraordinary.

First of all, while both the lamps and Bri remained useful sources of light, they were no longer necessary. Above us stretched a darkness like a moonless, starless night, but it did not begin until roughly ten feet over our heads, because below that almost everything around us seemed to compete in providing illumination of its own.

Among the blue grass I had just been examining moved tiny creatures roughly the size of insects, though up close their gelatinous bodies suggested a closer relation to miniature squid, octopuses, and even jellyfish. Each of their little forms was covered in countless tiny points giving off bioluminescent incandescence, making the blue wall resemble a night sky filled with constantly moving stars that brightened and dimmed as they wandered across it.

Aside from the wall separating us from the section we had come through, we seemed to be standing in some sort of enclosed underground valley, because once again we found ourselves in a forest. This one, however, was made entirely from enormous mushrooms of every imaginable kind.

Some produced their own light from between the wrinkled gills beneath their caps. Others released a delicate, equally luminous mist from miniature tubes packed tightly beside one another, making the entire surface resemble a soft sponge. The glowing haze spilled down along the mushroom trunks toward the ground, where smaller, more familiar fungi grew between stones from the damp soil.

Small lizards raced across the caps, membranes stretched between their legs. They spread them whenever they jumped from one unusual tree to another, or glided across greater distances before landing on the ground to snatch the strange invertebrate creatures crawling there, among which I also spotted snails.

Some of those flying animals hid inside hollows they had carved both into the mushroom trunks and their caps, while high in the canopy of this strange forest, gelatinous garlands stretched between one mushroom and the next like plant vines.

From somewhere in the distance came the rhythmic, overlapping croaking of frogs and the rushing sound of something I sincerely hoped was water and not because I was thirsty, but due to my growing disdain for the sand.

After a few moments of being dazed by the sheer strangeness of the sight, during which I slowly turned in place and wandered from one spot to another near the passage that had brought us here, simply taking everything in, I realized that Bri had done much the same thing and, without paying attention to me, had drifted farther into the forest.

“Wait,” I said as loudly as I could without raising my voice to a shout. At the same time, I quickened my pace to catch up with her.

“It feels, um… strange. I realize now that, you know, I’ve only been alive for a moment compared with, well, you, but at the same time I somehow know, deep inside, what is… um… natural for the Earth I came from.” She spoke with her eyes stretched almost impossibly wide, nearly filled with the fire of her enlarged pupils as she absorbed everything around her. “Because of that, for example, when I see, um… all of this, I can’t help being amazed by how different it is. Do you understand what I mean?”

“I think so,” I replied, listening to sounds coming from somewhere in the distance that resembled shouting and the clash of steel against steel.

“Quiet,” I told Bri, raising one hand when she looked at me and coming to a stop.

I cupped my open hands behind my ears and listened more carefully.

“It sounds like, um… people?” she asked.

I nodded in response, pressing a finger to my lips at the same time to suggest that she actually follow my request and remain quiet.

A moment later, I started moving lightly in the direction the sounds were coming from, careful not to step on anything that might snap shut around me in a steel trap, explode, or respond to the pressure of my foot by biting or clawing me.

After a few short moments, we reached a thinning among the mushroom trunks, where light and noise spilled through from a small encampment.

The first thing that caught our attention were the draft animals tied with ropes to several of the larger mushrooms. They calmly chewed on mash left for them in small wooden troughs, among which I could make out pieces of blue grass as well as smaller fungi.

The animals themselves resembled buffalo, with enormous, heavy backs, but they were unmistakably reptilian. Their thick legs ended in two large claws, while short tails terminated in fans of colorful feathers. The rest of their bodies were covered in brown-and-burgundy scales, and at the opposite end sat broad jaws resembling those of an Earth iguana.

Just beyond them stood several canvas tents. There was clearly some kind of light inside, but the tents blocked our view deeper into the camp, so Bri and I quietly moved along the line of mushroom trees until I could drop to the ground and peek over a small rise toward the central square.

There, I saw people moving about, dressed in hides, pieces of steel armor and chain mail, or shirts and cloaks. Every one of them carried some kind of melee weapon at their belt, ranging from swords, sabers, and rapiers to clubs, hatchets, and maces.

I also spotted a shorter, stockier figure with a long beard carrying a bucket of water farther into the camp.

On a patch of packed earth just outside the main encampment, training—or perhaps duels—were taking place. Two combatants stood back-to-back, walked several paces apart, reached for their weapons, then charged one another and crossed blades.

“For fuck’s sake!” A massive man shouted as he kicked away an animal resembling a dog-sized chameleon on the far side of this enclosure.

The creature yelped as it rolled across the dirt, then crawled away from him, extending its long tongue to lick the part of its body that hurt. The man spat in its direction and slammed the baseball bat he held against the ground.

With a typical baseball cap on his head and a white-and-red team jersey beneath a cloak that barely fit over his heavily muscled frame, he looked far more like someone from my Earth than someone who belonged here.

After scratching his ass, he looked in my direction, giving me a full view of his square-jawed face. Several days’ worth of stubble framed a large nose, small eyes, and an expression that somehow managed to combine a grin with irritation.

“Rodrick, for fuck’s sake! When are we leaving!?” he shouted toward someone.

He leaned his bat against one of the stakes holding up a nearby tent, then pulled out a cigarette and lit it, shielding the flame with one hand from a wind that did not exist.