Chapter Thirty-Five
Churning whitewater surrounded their sphere and Vester braced himself. The glass was picked up, spun, and thunked twice off the stairs before the water reversed course and sucked them through the entrance.
Vester hadn’t tried to make their mobile shelter wider than the current fifteen-foot-diameter because the doorway was twenty-five feet tall, and twenty feet wide. The globe struck off one of the doorway walls, and everyone held their breath.
Fortunately, the glass held.
Stage Two Quest Complete.
Stage Three: Navigate the Channel of Growth and Decay.
Vester grimaced at the message—not because he wasn’t glad to have finished the second stage, but because it made it clear they were in for something truly unpleasant. When he looked around, that fear was reinforced: everywhere—like the most horrific aquarium he could imagine.
The corridor had swiftly transformed into a tunnel: one choked with bony coral and cancerous anemones that seemed to be grasping for everything around them. The mix of rampantly surging flesh, rotting tissue, and stark-ivory bones was disturbing on a number of levels.
What made it worse was that there were things for those mutated lifeforms to reach for; swimming through the water were animals that made no sense to Vester’s eyes. The most prevalent of them looked like they might have started as octopus.
Nine tumor-riddled tentacles emerged from a skull-like shell.
Vester couldn’t tell if those bony domes were part of the animals or just something they’d collected, like hermit crabs.
They seemed to come in all shapes and sizes, though most of them resembled human skulls.
The tentacles themselves were tipped with hook-shaped talons, and had additional claws emerging from their red flesh.
One caught a smaller creature and after a vicious, water-churning battle, the larger beast unhinged its central body like a lamprey and sucked its target down in a single chomp that bloated the body to the point its flesh was bulging out of its bony shell.
But if those twisted things weren’t bad enough, Vester also saw creatures that looked like underwater scorpions—if someone had constructed them from bones scorpions shouldn’t have.
What appeared to be human spines, bones, and bits had been put together to form scorpion bodies that were wired together with black, throbbing, cancerous tendons.
There were a few central nodes that looked like rotting brains scattered along the scorpion bodies, and the tendons expanded out from those points. That led to a brief discussion in the group on whether the bones were alive at all, or just some kind of framework built by the slimy creatures.
The idea of a cancer cell growing tendrils to build themselves bodies was horrifying—yet it also fit the creatures they were witnessing.
There were other creatures too, but most of them acted like prey animals. Cancer-torn fish, eels covered in bony scales, small crabs with swollen joints. All of them scurried in and out of the coral and hid from the fleshy anemones.
None of the warped flora seemed particularly interested in the glass sphere, aside from moving away when the large orb passed too close to them.
But one thing the Party noticed was that the tunnel branched off regularly.
Some of the openings were huge, others too small for their improvised vessel to fit down.
“We’re in a maze,” Kora noted with a frown.
“Worse, a maze we can’t fit through without changing our vehicle.
On top of that, the environment we’re in is toxic to the extreme and one we’re not suited to at all.
We did not prepare for an extended time underwater, nor to be drenched in continual poisons. ”
“This is even worse than the lake,” Li observed, staring out through the glass wall and observing the animals moving around them.
“The lake rotted all the organic material it touched… but this water seems to also be stimulating growth at the same time. Every beast I can see has some kind of cancer on it.”
“It’s horrible,” Krysta said with a shiver.
“A perversion of life,” Reve agreed. The bat-winged woman looked personally offended, and Vester wasn’t sure he blamed her. She was the Avatar of Life, which connected her to beginnings and preserving life—and this place seemed to mock those tenets entirely.
“There’s also a strong undercurrent of necromancy here,” Vester said.
He was still exhausted, so he didn’t move much, but he raised his cane to point at one of the skeletal scorpions.
“Those are definitely human spines. Some of these creatures are likely undead with living parasites. Others are living creatures using bones for building materials. The water might not kill us… but if we get soaked, we’ll probably wish it had. ”
The idea of living the rest of their lives as cancer-riddled monstrosities likely crossed everyone’s mind, at least going by the solemn gazes. Vester alone would be immune to that fate, yet he had no intention of letting his lovers become warped beasts.
“Which just means we’ll have to figure out how to navigate this maze through the larger tunnels,” he decided. “Reve, how bad is your energy draining moving us around?”
“It’s not extreme,” Reve reported. “So far, I’ve just been nudging us away from those bony plants and keeping us in the central corridor. The weight isn’t oppressive and the water actually lifts us slightly, though I’m not sure why.”
“Air density,” Krysta offered. “If we were solid glass we’d sink like a stone, but there’s a lot of air trapped in here and it’s very light.
Our bodies add to our overall weight, but we’re still much lighter than a normal sphere of this diameter.
We must be reaching the point of neutral buoyancy for the water. ”
Everyone stared at the pandali, who blushed and fidgeted. She reached up to adjust her glasses, then wrapped her tail around her torso and hugged it. “What?” she asked. “We learned about buoyancy at the academy!”
Kora reached out and rubbed Krysta’s shoulder. “No need to be embarrassed,” the kitsune reassured her. “I think that was just a more complete answer than any of us were expecting.” The older woman paused, a small frown on her lips. “I think you are, by far, the best educated of all of us.”
“Since Vester is the only other person here to attend a school of higher learning, that’s definitely true,” Skylar pointed out with a snort. “Though his education is mostly useless Earth stuff.”
“Hey,” Vester protested, then he paused. “Okay, fair. Civics and philosophy course aren’t really going to us any good in a dungeon. Besides, I was a terrible student, and Krysta was obviously top of her class. There’s no comparison.”
The byplay saw Krysta preening at the compliments, and the distraction had eased everyone’s nerves. Whether intentional or not, all of them were more relaxed now that they’d focused on something other than their surroundings for a few moments.
“Li… can you map this?” Vester asked, turning to their expert on all things wilderness. “Ordinarily I’d say we treat this like a regular maze, but I’m worried we won’t be able to tell where we’ve been before with the way these tumorous plants are growing.”
The Wilderness Sage turned her attention out through the glass wall and frowned. She raised a hand, adjusting the way her hat rubbed at the base of her horns, then grimaced. For the normally stoic oni, it was quite a display of emotion.
“It’ll be hard,” she decided. “Reve, can you telekinetically slash the stone near that opening?” she asked while pointing at one of the wider tunnel mouths.
Reve focused, and the nearby water churned.
Something invisible cut through the water like a blade and carved a line in the stone, then a burst of raw red flesh exploded out of the opening to form a twisted knot of tendrils.
“I was afraid of that,” Li Ra said with a sigh.
“I don’t think we can use landmark navigation.
The walls are alive and will react to being touched.
I can try and record our twists and turns, but it’s hard to gauge the distance we’re traveling without landmarks.
My sense of motion isn’t good in this bubble. ”
“What if I do this?” Vester asked, then caused a bright gold torch to appear where Reve had slashed the stone.
The illusory piece flickered like real flames, and Vester found it took no effort to hold it there.
“Takes almost no mana, and I can keep them in place with minimal concentration. If I mark the path, do you think you can get us through?”
Li Ra’s pink eyes sparked. “I can,” she confirmed.
Then she was pulling out a thick notebook and a pack of charcoal sticks.
The oni grabbed Krysta and drew the pandali to her side.
“But you’re going to help, Krysta. Your handwriting is better than mine.
I’ll draw the map, and you record the notes I give you. ”
“Okay,” Krysta agreed with a firm nod. She settled in, hip to hip, and immediately accepted the writing supplies pushed onto her lap.
Skylar, meanwhile, was looking dejected.
“There’s nothing I can really do to assist with all of this,” she muttered.
The djinn didn’t even have room to spread out her materials and begin working on her next golem, since the bubble only contained a bare minimum of space for everyone. “I think I’ll try and nap.”
“As will I,” Kora said. “The wind-effect on my weapon will last while we rest, so we should take shifts.” It was unfortunate that Reve was the only one of them who could reliably move the glass bubble, because it left her the sole member who couldn’t get any sleep.
Krysta and Li Ra would be able to take turns so long as they were careful, and Vester could catnap between illusions, but Reve had no one to take her place. She was their only hope for controlled movement in this watery labyrinth.