Stepping Wild, CH 66 (Patreon)

Based on the stories Tibs had gathered over the week in the village, he’d made the right decision in coming there, even if it had just been because it was the closest to the city the caravan had stopped at.

While there hadn’t been any incident in over four generations, when people had ventured into the forest and returned with stories, they spoke of deep within it as days, and not weeks or months. Which meant that if there was something, it wouldn’t be so far in that returning to the village would be difficult to explain. He’d told them he was used to the wilderness, but they thought of him as a scholar. And those weren’t known for stepping outside university walls.

And it was an ‘if’, as far as Tibs was concerned. Four generations were a lot of years during which a dungeon would grow, their influence stretching closer to the village. That should have meant more encounters, as even if the village folks didn’t venture any further than they thought it was safe, eventually, it wouldn’t be safe anymore.

There were reasons why it hadn’t happened. The most likely one was that there wasn’t a dungeon there. That every encounter was what they claimed. Some wild animal, distorted by fear and memory. Then there was the dungeon, deciding to limit their interactions with people.

The problem there, in Tibs’s opinion, was that he couldn’t think of why a dungeon wouldn’t want to draw more people in. They were an easy way to grow in power, and they didn’t come with an understanding of what it meant to be a person. Even with Ganny to educate him, Sto hadn’t understood that the Runners were people in a similar way they were until Tibs had been able to speak with them.

Then, an adventurer might have come because of the stories and destroyed it. But the problem there was that they would have reported to the guild. And if the guild learned of dungeons that weren’t in mountains, they would have hunted all the wild ones and enslaved them.

So he was probably wasting his time. There probably had never been a dungeon here.

But he’d stay until he knew for certain. If nothing else, his return after weeks in the forest with confirmation there was nothing there would let the village folks know they could venture as deep as they felt the need to.

And if there was a dungeon?

Tibs couldn’t keep the excitement entirely under control. A dungeon which had been around for over four generations had to have deeper floors. He’d get to train, push through, rank up and finally unlock suffusing himself again.

It was that possibility that kept him going over the days and weeks, as he searched for an indication there was a dungeon within the forest. He knew what to pay attention to how the essence that made dungeon trees compared to normal ones felt, but while his sense stretched far, he only got that level of precision as far as halfway.

With the stories only speaking of days deep, he’d expected to have found it by now. There was only so far village folks could go, even in a week of being lost in the forest. And he’d been as systematic in his search as he knew how.

Speaking with a scholar, years ago, they’d went on about how they’d been part of a group that had documented a keep older than the adventurer’s guild. Tibs had only asked about how it had been before they existed, but getting that answer had meant listening to how the scholars had gone about finding out. And that had meant a lot of exploring of ruins older than the guilds, and the scholar, being a scholar, had spent far too much time talking about how that exploring was done.

What Tibs had been managed to recall was that they made grids to ensure they didn’t waste time going over an area they, or someone else on the team, had already studied.

He couldn’t use ropes with the size of the forest. He couldn’t even use essence, since the lines would be etchings, and he’d have to stay focused on each of them, otherwise they’d dissipated. The best he could do was small reshaping of the essence within an object. With items made almost exclusively of one element, like metal nails and knifes, he could change their shapes and they’d hold it. Anything made of many elements was beyond his ability to reshape them because then, it wasn’t just about moving the elements around, but how they were connected to each other, and that fell into the area of weaving, which, he hadn’t read nearly enough about to even attempt it.

What he settled on, was increasing the density of wood essence within the trees in a way that resembled how dungeon made trees felt. By giving that concentration the form of an arrow pointing in the direction he walked, it would also serve as a way to keep from getting lost. They would dissipate over time, but he made them dense enough he expected that to be in months, so he’d be able to sense it if he walked by one, and he would refresh their density.

And that was what he’d spent the last week doing. Walking in a line and making an arrow every hundred pace while sensing for the dungeon. He’d made his lines as aligned with the sunset and sunrise as he could, but he didn’t have a way to keep track of it if it was above the tree line, or the canopy was too thick.

He’d done his best, and he’d made it as far as three days’ straight walk from the edge of the forest. He knew, because he’d just returned from his weekly trip to the village. For supplies, as far as he told them, but he did it so they knew the scholar had survived. When asked, he told them he hadn’t made it too deep yet.

Three weeks to make a square, about three days walk in each direction. If he considered the furthers a village folk could have gone was a week’s walk, he was going to be at this a long time.

    *

Tibs swam to the surface of the lake and floated there, looking at the darkening sky.

How did scholars do this? Searching for weeks and months without finding anything and staying with it? He’d only been at this five weeks and this wasn’t the first time he considered quitting.

 A month, and giving up on his goal didn’t seem like a bad trade-off. He missed the roofs. The ability to run as fast as he wanted without interruption. Windows with locks that challenged him.

Loot.

He laughed. Jackal would never let him forget this, if he knew, but Tibs missed the loot he’d find cracking a noble’s safe.

He swam at the bottom the length of the lake, then exited and readied himself for sleep. It wasn’t the same as running, but swimming tired him too. Made him feel like he’d accomplished something, instead of walking around for nothing.

But he’d go back to his search in the morning.

He wasn’t giving up.

Not yet, anyway.

    *

“Come on,” Tibs taunted the large cat. “I’m right here. I’m an easy meal. Just pounce.”

It was the third time he’d encountered the cat, half his height at the shoulder, sleek under golden fur so short it felt rough when Tibs ran his hand against it in the wrong direction. It had almost bitten off his hand when he’d done that. A blast of air had sent it away before the teeth had sunk in.

He could hurt the cat to the point it would leave him alone. He could kill it and make it his meal for a while. But Tibs was bored, and the cat’s attempts to kill him were fun, a distraction.

“Fine,” he said, turning his back to it with a shrug. “I guess you’ve given—” he tuned to face it, grinning as it was in the air, and Tibs was sure he read surprise and annoyance on the cat’s face as he caught it, fell back, then launched it away. If it could talk, he’d expect a ‘Not again,’ out of it.

It righted itself before landing, then sat and groomed itself.

“Oh, sure. You knew I’d do that. It was all how you planned it, wasn’t it?” Tibs rolled his eyes. “You are so full of it. I tricked you and you know it.”

The cat rose, turned, and with a flick of the tail, walked away.

“Really? That’s it? Just letting me win? You like going hungry? Is that it?”

The cat ignored his taunts this time, and Tibs returned to his search for a dungeon he was more and more certain didn’t exist.

    *

Tibs really hated himself.

And the cat.

He glared at the cat.

“You knew that was there this entire time, and you just led me here now?”

The cat had surprised him in the middle of the night. He’d woken up with a weight landing on his chest and had reflexively thrown the cat off him. Then, the chase had been on. Tibs had run after the cat, the cat had run after him. As agreed, he pulled in his sense, and only used essence if the cat was about to bite into him. Tibs had told it over and over that biting hurt, but it didn’t care. So that had been the compromised.

As the sun has shed light through the trees, Tibs had sensed something in the distance, and of course, as it had intended, the cat made use of the surprise and pounced. More chasing had resulted and now, with enough light to see well, but not be able to tell anything was different, Tibs stood at a line of dungeon made trees.

The cat sat paces away, smug.

“Hello?” he called, and the cat looked at him. “Not you. I’m trying to get the dungeon’s attention. I think they might be busy elsewhere. What do you think? We brave it? They’re going to notice two Runners like us breezing through the traps. And the level one mobs aren’t going to be that much problem. I’ve dealt with them before.”

Tibs stepped between the trees, then noticed he was along.

“Come on,” he told the cat, still sitting away from the trees. “Don’t be a scardy cat—and don’t give me that look, you’re a cat, and obviously you’re scared. And I’ll grant you it was justified, but I’m here now, and I’ve run enough dungeon floors; I know all the trick. I made it to a fourth floor, you know. But that was before all my essence was taken from me by the guild. Don’t get mixed up with them.”

The cat didn’t move.

“Okay, but I’m warning you. If this is just so you get to pounce me when I’m dealing with traps or creatures, we are going to have a talk about how we play.” He turned back into the dungeon. “I’ll be back in a while. Don’t wait up.”

Tibs knew there was something wrong before he reached what would have been the first room. He could sense ordinary plants growing there. He could imagine a dungeon letting plants grow normally as part of the theme they went for, but they were growing through cracks in the floor, and around dungeon made trees.

The layout of the room reminded Tibs of Sto’s boulder room. Runners would have to make their way through all the trees, and creatures would attack. This would be more complicated because they couldn’t have the archer and sorcerer shoot anything that climbed over the boulders.

Immediately beyond that room was another one. This one would be trapped, by the way parts of the floor had broken and revealed wooden assembly that resembled roots as much as trigger parts.

The third room had space for a fight, and no exit. The boss room. Winning would reveal the loot chest, or the exit, if there was a second floor.

It didn’t look like there was one, but Tibs sensed the corridors under him, and the hollow trunk. There were no mechanisms to open it, so Tibs undid the wood essence that made it. If the dungeon had been alive, they would have kept him from managing it.

Instead of stairs, it was a ladder.

Something had happened on this floor.

The dungeon had brought the theme of trees down, but they were made of earth. And something had shredded them. The gouges were deep and nagged at Tibs enough he proceeded with extra care, sword in a hand, and shield on the other arm. He couldn’t sense anything that wasn’t normal scurrying animals or the usual life he sensed within the ground, but those gouges unnerved him. Claws that big…

He advanced through a room of earthy brambles that had been destroyed by something crashing through them.

The incongruity struck him then. There was no destruction on the first floor, just evidence of the passage of time after the dungeon died. Whatever had done this had managed to make it down before the dungeon had mounted a defense.

Or had been let down here first.

He couldn’t sense a third floor.

“What did you do?” he whispered. What could a dungeon so far from anything do that would bring one of the Them here to enact punishment?

He found the dungeon’s core room by the destroyed wall.

The inside was what he expected from his memory of the destruction the Them had wrought in Sto’s core room. The walls and floors clawed. The cradle in the far wall raked and something had been ripped from its center.

He found what was left of the dungeon’s core at its feet. Dull shard of crystals that looked like something heavy had stumped on it. He remembered the myriad of colors that Sto’s core contained, and the lack if it here made him more than sad, it made him sick; angry.

What had been the justification? Had there been one? He remembered the Them as hateful, vindictive. They’d been sent to pushing Sto because he’d help Kragle Rock. He’d helped people. If something could kill for helping others, did they need a reason at all? What had they done to the dungeon’s helper? Had they been sent back where they were before they became helpers?

Ganny had talked of being taught how to be a helper, that implied a place where that happened.

Had the Them killed the helper for their part in whatever they felt the dungeon had done to deserve death?

What should he do with the shards?

Leaving them here felt… he didn’t want what was left of the dungeon to be alone anymore, but to take them with him ran the risk of them falling into other’s hands. If he thought he could go back to Sto, he’d take them there, but he couldn’t go to Kragle Rock. The guild had to have increase the security after what he’d almost accomplished.

Firmen? They were so young, they only had stories of the Them. He didn’t want to show them the result of one such visit.

Would the shard burn?

He could make his fire hot enough to burn even dungeon walls, so he doubted there would be anything left.

Anything left of the dungeon. Of someone who’d only lived to test people, to push them to get stronger, smarter, wiser.

He couldn’t destroy more of that, even if there was no life left.

He made his way to the first floor, then filled the trunk with stone and a top layer of earth. He didn’t feel the need to do anything to this floor. Nature was already asserting itself. If someone found this place, it might look odd, but there was nothing here to make them suspicious, and they’d need to know there was a second floor before thinking they might dig there. And once they encountered the stone, they’d have no reason to continue.

“No one will bother you anymore,” he whispered and headed out of the dungeon’s remains.

The cat had found a patch of sun to lie in. “You don’t have to worry anymore. I’m leaving.”

It looked at him with a ‘finally’ expression and went back to sunning itself.

“It was fun,” Tibs called out as he left.

Author’s comments

• What I had to work from

It takes a lot of searching, but Tibs does find the dungeon. He finds it because dungeons are constructed with intent from essence in ways that are off compared to nature. But what is even more off is the damage and the silence. It will likely be on only the second floor that Tibs discovers the broken dungeon core.

Nearly all of this came from the need to ‘fill time’ to reach the dungeon

But I’m still very happy with the results.