Volume 1, Chapter 39: The Map Is Becoming Increasingly Theoretical (Patreon)

“Are they, you know, um, mad at you?” Bri asked from somewhere behind me.

I was currently squeezing through a crack in the wall, spraying a green line across the rock with my stringpen using one hand. I had to push my hips forward and lean my entire upper body back as I shuffled sideways just to make it through. I doubted Khufu would’ve been able to do the same, although, remembering that cats were practically half liquid, I believed it was possible.

“Nicky is fucking pissed,” I answered.

“Maybe she, you know, um, thinks you’re going to betray her? Like her boyfriend did before, right?” she replied, and I could feel the heat radiating from her behind me.

“She judges others by her own standards.”

I squeezed my way into a slightly larger tunnel, where water trickled down through an opening on one side of the ceiling, smoothing the stone floor beneath it before flowing in a slow stream toward a long but narrow crack in the opposite wall.

I straightened up and stretched, checking whether I’d damaged anything while forcing myself between the rocks. Then I tucked the stringpen into my pocket for a moment and started washing my hands and face under the running water.

As I did, I thought about myself.

As recently as yesterday, I’d been ready to leave Bri behind if doing so benefited me, but the fact that she remained a source of light, warmth, and potentially fire made me want to keep her around. The additional benefit, that I could open my mouth and talk to her every once in a while didn’t hurt either, and although I’d put myself at risk several times to help her, deep down I knew I’d done it more for myself than for her.

So I knew Nicky was right. If I had the chance, I wouldn’t hesitate to take every treasure we found down here for myself—the stone sitting in my pocket was a pretty damn good reminder of that.

Still, her words had stung a little. Maybe precisely because they’d come so close to the truth, or maybe because somewhere deep in my subconscious, I believed that having someone place that kind of blind trust in me would somehow make me a little better. Khufu’s certainly had.

“…and then, um, maybe we could do both. ”Bri finished whatever she had been saying, and I realized that while I’d been lost in thought, she’d apparently been talking to me the entire time.

I looked at her, bared my teeth in an embarrassed grin, and scratched the back of my head.

“Sorry, Bri. Could you repeat that?”

“Arthur,” she replied with a sigh that sent several sparks and little puffs of white smoke spilling from both her mouth and the places where her ears should’ve been.

I was proud of her for using the fake name.

“I said that, um, if we find that toad from the quest first, before we, you know, um, find anything else worth checking out, then we should tell them so they can come too and get the achievement. But, um, if we find something else first—something interesting—then we do that ourselves first, and only after that tell them about the toad, right? That way we get to do both—make them happy and us busy, mhm?”

“Maybe, Bri. Maybe that’s exactly what we’ll do, but you should know it’s not my priority. I’d like to keep Khufu, Nicky, and Sophie as allies, but the truth is that once we’re done with this quest, our paths will probably split completely. So we should be thinking mainly about ourselves—whether that feels nice or not. Like Khufu said, that’s the only way we can give Earth the best chance of surviving.” I was thinking about myself as I said it, but Bri needed to hear something else.

While I was at it, I reached for my waterskin and took a drink, leaning against the wall and letting the water soak me completely. With the temperature inside the mine, I figured I’d dry off soon enough anyway, like I had just moments ago.

Bri visibly paled as she watched me step beneath the vertical stream, then gave the water a very wide berth as she floated toward the direction I intended to take next.

“You’re probably, um, right. I know that my need to, um, help people isn’t rational, like Nicky said. That you can’t always help everyone. I don’t like, um, acting against what I feel is right, but—”

“Sometimes you have to sacrifice someone, or something, Bri, to save more people. It’s cruel, but it’s true,” I interrupted, pushing away from the wall and turning back to refill what I’d just drunk from my waterskin.

“I don’t think I could do that, mhm,” she added before disappearing into the crack.

I followed right after her, slipping the full waterskin back into my pack, pulling out the stringpen, and continuing to mark the wall.

As I went, I checked how the paint sprayed by the device behaved when it came into contact with water.

The stream made it harder to put the paint exactly where I wanted, physically dragging the particles away as I sprayed them, but once the paint actually settled onto the wall, washing it off with water seemed impossible.

With every step, traveling through the tunnel became easier. Despite its winding path, veering first one way and then the other as it continued downward, it gradually grew wider. There weren’t many obstacles blocking the way either. Every now and then, though, we spotted little stones hopping around here and there, just like the ones we had seen shortly after entering the mine. They stopped moving the moment either Bri or I focused our attention on them.

“What’s that?” she asked when, after rounding another bend, we reached a short straight stretch scattered with miners’ helmets fitted with gas lamps on top.

The question was justified, because unlike typical representatives of the headwear family, these moved around like beetles on short little legs that looked more like stiff hairs.

“No idea.” I was already taking off my backpack and reaching inside for the crowbar. As soon as I unwrapped it from the bandages, I gripped it firmly in both hands and stepped forward, planting one foot beside a helmet that was trying to climb onto a rock next to my leg.

Every time it made it halfway up, it lost its grip and tumbled onto its yellow back, where it spent several moments rocking itself from side to side until it managed to flip back onto its strange little legs.

I nudged it slowly with the crowbar, pushing it a few inches away.

Unbothered, it ignored me completely and went right back to trying to climb its rock.

“We keep going,” I told Bri.

Then I started carefully placing my feet between the creatures, which grew more numerous the deeper we went, covering more and more of the ground.

After another few dozen feet and two more turns, they finally began thinning out again. And what waited ahead of Bri and me was something completely different. Without any reason for them being here, minecart rails began growing out of the stone beneath our feet and stretching forward.

They weren’t actually attached to the ground, though and after about twenty feet, one of the rails rose upward and twisted on its side, forming something like a vertical fence that snaked farther into the cavern.

It continued like that throughout the entire sizable chamber we had entered, winding back and forth and forming overlapping layers of increasingly tall walls as the wooden ties between the rails stretched longer and longer. The final layer had grown so large that its wooden slats covered the entire opposite wall of the natural room.

Running through the center of the entire structure, however, was a tunnel formed by the tracks themselves, which curved overhead to create an arch through the whole construction.

Inside, gas lamps hung from the protruding wooden ties, casting light along the passage. And at the very end of that tunnel stood a massive set of steel-and-wood gates.

“Bet knocking won’t be enough?” I said to Bri.

“Maybe if you hadn’t left the, um, staff in the room with the pond, they’d take you for, um, a real traveler?” she replied with a grin.

I couldn’t help returning it.

“Come on. Let’s see if our pessimism is justified.”

I carefully hopped over the little fence made from the rails and headed toward the wall built out of them. It was packed so densely that I couldn’t see what lay beyond it. The tunnel itself widened as it approached the gate, growing taller as well, until right in front of the doors it had to be close to twenty feet high. Along the way, we passed a few lone helmets trying to find their way forward by bumping from one wall to the other.

Once I reached the doors, I inspected them from every angle, noticing that the iron plating covering them was fairly uniform, with only the occasional bolt breaking up the surface.

I knocked several times against the wood, more to test its thickness than because I actually expected an answer.

Then I dragged my fingers across its surface until first one hand and then the other settled on a metal ring hanging roughly at shoulder height. I assumed it was meant for opening the gate, since an identical one hung from the other door.

I braced myself and pulled.

Nothing moved. Not even slightly. I looked at Bri with a smile and tried again.

“Not working?”

“Not even an inch,” I answered.

“And nobody, um, answered the knocking either. Just like you said.”

“Why would we? ”A booming voice rolled through the tunnel.

I instinctively jumped back from the gate and planted my back against the wall made from overlapping rails.

“Who is that, um? Who’s talking?” Bri managed to choke out.

The moment she heard that deep, rumbling bass, her body shrank and she belched out a cloud of black smoke that drifted upward and gathered beneath the ceiling.

“You are not welcome. You have no invitation,” the voice answered.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“We are the gate. ”As the words came, I saw the wood itself vibrate.

“But of course we were invited,” I answered. “The Toad That Dwells wanted us to make it in time for dinner, but we had a small delay involving another toad with a very explosive temper.”

“Not true. You have no invitation,” the doors vibrated again. “If you did, we would open.”

“And who, um, can invite us? Can you do it?”

“The Gatekeeper. Only the Gatekeeper may do so, but he has gone missing somewhere in these mines. Without his permission, we will never open.”

“Maybe you will anyway? I don’t know if you noticed, but my friend here has just about as fiery an outlook on life as that toad I mentioned earlier. And I’ve got a pretty decent relationship with fire myself. Maybe we’ll just burn you down, huh? You probably wouldn’t like that.”

“I, no, um... I don’t want to—”

“Try it!” The doors somehow shouted, and the sheer force of their voice nearly threw me into the wall.

Bri remained exactly where she had been hovering, but her flaming hair flattened backward in the opposite direction.

“If that’s what you want!” I shouted back, then waved for Bri to move farther away with me. “Can you hug them long enough to get them burning?”

“No. I don’t want to, um, hurt them.”

“Bri,” I dragged out her name. “They’re doors. You didn’t have any problem eating wood before...”

“The wood, um, didn’t talk to me...”

“Can you lend me some of your glow?” I asked, extending my hand.

She immediately backed away from me, exactly as I’d expected.

“No. Sorry, but no. I have, um, principles.”

“Fine.”

I reached into my bag for the lighter. I flicked it on, used Pyrography to pull a line of fire from its tiny flame, then extinguished the lighter and started drawing the burning line through the air as I approached the doors again, relying on my Psyche as the fire’s source.

Once I reached them, I pressed my finger to the wood, dragging the burning line behind it as I traced a spiral that curled inward in tighter and tighter circles.

At its center, I lifted my finger from the wood, ducked beneath the line I had drawn through the air, moved to the other door, and repeated the process with a second spiral.

Once I was done, I walked back to the point in the air where I had first started drawing. I took a deep breath. Then I pressed my hand against the line and used Stoke.

The entire shape I had drawn erupted instantly, flames bursting in every direction as both their volume and temperature increased. I backed away, then dropped to one knee to fight off the dizziness while I watched two enormous patches of fire burn across both halves of the gate.

It lasted maybe a few moments before loud laughter suddenly filled the air.

“It tickles! Truly!” Everything vibrated again with their bellowing.“ It really tickles!” The doors shouted, and a wave of air blasted through the tunnel with the sound, extinguishing every bit of fire I had created. For a moment, I felt like if I had possessed more strength, maybe I could have resisted it. Right now, though, there was nothing I could do. My spell scattered into the air. I looked back at the gate itself. There wasn’t even a scorch mark.

“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath as I pushed myself back to my feet. “You really aren’t going to let us through?”

“No. No invitation, no entry.”

“Could you, um, maybe be nice enough—and sorry about my companion here, but I think you heard that I wanted nothing to do with the whole, um, setting-you-on-fire thing—but could you tell me whether the Toad That Dwells is on the other side of you?”

“But of course he is! Who else but he could be king of our kingdom?” the doors shouted back at Bri.

“What an absurd fucking situation,” I whispered under my breath. I was watching a ball of fire have a conversation with a wooden gate inside a tunnel made out of minecart tracks. I started laughing to myself.

“What was that, mhm?”

“Nothing, nothing, Bri. Talking to myself.” I waved a hand dismissively.

“Listen, doors. So if we find your Gatekeeper, there won’t be any problem with letting us inside, right? No hard feelings—you get me?”

“You will enter,” they answered.

[Task’s third objective changed: Get invited to the Toaddom.] Daimon confirmed the change in the quest conditions.