Samuel Graves and the Akemic Chronicles

... Where Devil's Play?

The basements (or dungeons, as Samuel was rapidly beginning to qualify them as) were like a labyrinth. The halls were all flooded, with either thick patches of slimy mold covering the walls, or more examples of the macabre bone art hammered into spare sections. They all possessed the same twisted sigils that writhed before his eyes whenever he chose to look at them, though none of them were made from skulls, rather, they were all a collection of finger bones and longer, worn down pieces like thighbones and ribs.

This made Samuel more nervous, for some reason.

And he wasn’t the only one, it would seem.

As they sloshed down the hall, Elena could be heard muttering prayers to whoever Mostef was, while Posnev hadn’t stopped whimpering. Skelly was quiet, as was Needles, but Wheeze… he was jumpy.

“Gah, incomin’!” He bellowed as he stepped around a corner, wildly swinging his drawn shortsword as if to ward off the attackers. “Drop tha hammer, Mage!”

Samuel rolled his eyes, holding the torch up higher as he slapped Wheeze on the shoulder to calm him. “Dude, chill!” He cried, trying to calm the panicked warrior. “You walked into a spider web, you i***t!”

Wheeze slowed, pausing with his bloodshot eyes wide and alert. He allowed Samuel to pull the bit of cobwebs off his face, grumbling. “I knew tha’, was jus’… testin’ ya.”

“Right… also, what the Hell do you mean by ‘drop the hammer’?” Samuel asked, shaking his head. “I’m running low on energy, only got a few spells left in me. And I imagine there is going to be something down here that’ll need to eat all of them if we want to live.”

“We press on,” Skelly interrupted them, glaring. “I don’t want to be down here any longer than necessary, and I feel Samuel is correct. Likely, there is something dangerous down here. I doubt it is worrisome as an Infernal, but the whole place… seems off.”

“Yer tellin’ me.” Wheeze grumbled, pushing on down the hall. “Every room we check is jus’ as much a shithole as the last, not even any treasure to swipe.”

Samuel didn’t like that fact either. “That just makes me think there’s something down here even more. Place like this? There should at least be some things left lying around, old weapons or the like. The fact that there’s none? That means something gathered everything up.”

“Could have been a different group, right?” Needles asked. He’d been especially nervous, occasionally clutching his injured side as if it were aching him. When pressed, he said that it was numb but would throb. “I mean, the whole place is was obviously once a Dwarven stronghold, maybe some other adventurers cleaned it out before it started sinking?”

“Unlikely anyone has been here since the place sank, that’s for sure.” Samuel said, pointing down the hall. They’d turned a corner, the next stretch of hall some thirty feet long with four doors, two on either side, and one at the end. All were wooden and looked half-rotted and waterlogged. “We’ve been having to carve these doors out. That means nobody has been exploring since the whole place got flooded.”

Skelly frowned at this. “That… is disconcerting. More evidence that something down here feels comfortable and safe.”

“Yeah,” Samuel nodded. “If it weren’t, it’d have torn the rooms up to make sure it could rest easy. Add to the fact we fought undead and the grisly little art pieces we keep finding? Something down here calls this place home.”

“Mostef guide me, Mostef stay your hand, Mostef protect my soul…” Elena muttered, just loud enough to be heard now that they were kicking up waves as they walked. Samuel looked back at her, taking in her ducked head and the way she was gripping her dagger as if it were a lifeline.

He turned to Skelly and jerked his head at her, voice low. “Who’s Mostef?”

The Druid gave him a skeptical look. “You’re serious? You haven’t heard of the Guide?”

“New here, remember?” Samuel replied. “Not too certain I’m dreaming, but I still don’t have the TLDR on this place, so spill.”

Needles mouthed to Wheeze in confusion “What does TLDR mean?” earning a lazy shrug in response as Skelly heaved a sigh. “The Elven deity of death. Their pantheon is rather grim, to an outsider, but everyone else in Terra is used to it. Mostef is the one that takes all who die to their respective afterlives, for judgement and reward.”

“So he’s, what, the Grim Reaper?” Samuel asked, sparing a glance at Elena. “And why would a Half-Elf worship him?”

Needles spoke up before Skelly could. “Mostef guides everyone on Terra when they die, not just the Elves. We may not all worship him, but we all know we’re going to meet him someday. Never hurts to get on his good side, unless you want him to dump in Jotelf’s realm for being a dick.”

Wheeze gave a rasping laugh. “Yeah, that happened to Rock Hands, right?”

Seeing the question in Samuel’s eyes, Needles decided to speak before he could even ask. “Old friend of ours, kind of an ass. Died when we were attacking some Wildflayers, took a hatchet to the throat. Messy death, but nothing a quick trip to a cleric couldn’t fix. We packed his body up and brought him to Odin’s Throne—”

“The Dwarven capital!” Wheeze supplied, stepping up to the first door in the hall, sword ready in his grip.

“—and paid from his shares to get him back to the realm of the living. He came to freaking out, bitching about chains and fire, and laughing. Took him like three weeks with the Mind Healers, but he finally snapped out of whatever drove him so mad, said he’d been consigned to Jotelf’s realm when he bitched to Mostef about dying.”

“You know he insulted the Guide somehow… Rock Hands is an ass!” Wheeze said, wedging his sword into the seam between the door and doorframe.

“He is… needless to say, we’ve all learned that Mostef gets respect, no matter what happens.” Needles said, running a hand through his short hair. “Nobody wants to go to the Fire Maiden’s realm, place is the very definition of whatever you could imagine Hell would be.”

“She sounds… lovely?” Samuel said. He hadn’t guessed that the gods of this world were so… hands on with their worshippers. He never heard of anything like this in Tolkien’s crap, that’s for sure.

Skelly snorted. “Jotelf is the goddess of chaos, fire, and destruction. She’s the mad dog of the deities and is rarely muzzled. If you pray, make sure to pray to be kept away from her at all costs. Nobody does well whenever she is involved, even her followers -  however few they may be.”

The warped crack split through the hall as Wheeze split the decayed door in half. “Got in!” He declared, smiling. “Bring the light, would you?”

Samuel sloshed up to him and held the torch in the doorway, surprised to find that it wasn’t as empty as the last few rooms they’d stumbled upon.

It was just as flooded, of course, with a few pieces of mold-covered wood floating about aimlessly. The room was maybe ten feet by ten feet, maybe having been a storage room or small bedroom.

Now though?

Now it had an altar in it.

Large as an executive’s desk and just as broad, the thing was hewn from a massive slab of basalt, solid and foreboding. Strange symbols glowed with a pale green light, obviously the same language as the ones carved into the various bones hammered into the walls. A large Trog skull rested in the middle of it, surrounded by unlit tallow candles. It had a pair of iron spikes driven into its eye sockets and bore thousands of small markings that had been painted on with deliberate care.

An opened tome lay to the side, pressed vellum stained with various dark splotches that could only be blood. A small bowl sat next to it, filled with dozens of dust-covered teeth.

“That can’t be good?” Wheeze asked, exasperated. “Can it?”

“No, I imagine not…” Samuel answered, looking back at Skelly. “Hey, grab Elena and head in there, we’ll guard the door. We have an altar to something and I sure as s**t ain’t touching it before you give the all-clear.”

Skelly nodded and broke Elena from her prayer-filled mumbling. “Come along then, we need to check and see if we can figure out if whatever set that up is in there.”

She nodded, eyes wide and cautious, and slipped into the room as quietly as someone could while wading knee-deep in dark water.

They poked about, doing their best to make certain that nothing was in the chamber that would prove to be an immediate threat. Once they’d made certain nothing would emerge to attack them, they stopped by the altar and began checking things over. Elena was tapping the basalt with her hammer, looking for hollow spots, while Skelly was flipping through the old book. Both were frowning, clearly nervous about what they were doing. Wheeze was watching the hall with Needles, sharing a cigarette to calm their nerves, while Samuel was looking over his skills again.

He had roughly six-hundred skill points to spend, but he didn’t know what he wanted. They were in a dungeon, and to be frank, he had no clue what could be coming. Flipping through the available options was fine and all, but nothing leapt out to him in a way that made him smile.

He stopped when he came across the “Equipment” skills, skills that required tools or weapons to use. Thinking back on what he’d been forced to resort to against the Wights, he opened the table and started scanning over his options.

He paused when he found one that seemed useful, especially given the circumstances. With a smile, he selected it and bought the first three ranks, leaving him a scant twenty-five points left in the bank.

He felt the passive effects instantly, his breathing becoming clearer and his thoughts less rushed. He frowned when he realized how dulled his mind had been and decided to say something when Skelly made a startled gasp.

“I found a reference to what we are looking for!” He declared, eyes locked onto the page before him. “Whoever is down here has been down here for a while, and they’ve been studying the relic. It’s a dagger, one of Samp make. Enormously powerful in terms of mystical ability, according to this…”

“Any mention where it is?” Samuel asked, eyes darting to the altar. “Or what that is?”

Skelly shook his head. “This is a journal, part for research, part for the writers thoughts. They have a lab deeper down, through a secret passage in a room that they’ve dubbed ‘the kitchen’. Odds are it’s still down here, as the last time this was written in was years ago.”

“How can you tell?” Elena asked, kneeling in front of the altar as she studied it.

Skelly turned the boom and motioned at the loopy text. “The ink is old, really old. Good number of pages are empty too, plus the whole thing is layered in dust. Whatever uses this place as a lair, it hasn’t been in this room in ages.”

“With how stuck the door was, makes sense…” Samuel muttered, looking back at Wheeze and Needles. “Anything we need to worry about?”

“Whoever is down her is intelligent,” Skelly said, flipping through the pages, a soft smile tugging at his lips. “They know magic as well, half of these notes are arcane in nature.”

“Oh?” Samuel asked. “Anything useful?”

Skelly shook his head. “Not really, not like this is a spellbook or there are scrolls in here. Besides, you’re not a Warlock. Whoever wrote this, was.”

“Not familiar with that class, but they sound bad.”

“They are…” Skelly said, snapping the book closed with a tone of finality. “We’re keeping this. Let’s move on. We need to find this kitchen as soon as we can.”

“I agree.” Needles said from outside. “The sooner we find it and get your magic knife, the sooner we can leave.”