One night my father woke me with a hand on my shoulder in the middle of the night, said that he needed me to hold a lamp for him. Gods, my hands shook. That lamp that I had held a hundred times by daylight was like a stone in my sweaty palms as I crept along behind him, one hand on the ring of the lantern, the other clutching his pantleg. He didn’t tell me what we were on the look out for, but the old sickle in his hand told me of something, the left side covered in a cake of rust from when Halford had forgotten it out in the rain for three days.
I could hear the rustle right away as we came up to the barn doors, could hear the ponies huffing inside, shifting around in their pens. In a voice no louder than a whisper, I begged my father to let me go back. Halford should be the one with him, shouldn’t he? He was the second man of the house, the big brother; it was his job to see to the scary things in the night. My father ignored me, told me to hold the lantern higher as he worked at the lock on the barn.
The creaking of the door as it slid sideways along its track shot shivers down my spine. Our barn never did look so terrible as it did then, full of shadows and dark corners, the light of the lantern I held in a trembling hand making everything appear washed out. My father caught movement among the hay, darting forward with a grunt. Yellow stalks tossed into the air as he tumbled with something, floating back down in lazy switchbacking arcs. There was a feral growling, screeching, and then he had something in hands, a crazed ball of brown fur and teeth.
“Look here,” he said, beckoning me forward with a hand while his other struggled to hold the thing captive in his other, grip squeezed tight around the back of its neck.
I brought the light, letting it wash over the creep he held up. The knot of snarling was no bigger than a cat really, looking like an oversized rat with four odd arms that scratched at the air while its hind legs danced to find purchase. It twisted itself, crying out in a pitiful way as it bit into the leather of my father’s glove, trying to gnaw his thumb off but finding zero success.
“Here is your robber,” he said, shaking the little monster up and down. “This is all it is. Not so scary now that you can put a face to your nightmare, is it?”
I had to admit then, that it wasn’t. More than terrifying, the screaming creature seemed pitiful, like some misshapen animal rather than the monster. I followed him out of the barn, back to the stump behind where he had me continue holding up the light so he could bring his sickle down neatly. Then it was done, a genuine monster vanquished by my father, just a man with a rusty blade.
The nightmares vanished after that night. Monsters became animals in my mind, misshapen beasts that ought not to be suffered by good folk, and they weren’t. Some were more dangerous than others, big snakes, spiny little dog-like things that bristled with sharp points, and for those kinds specialized people were needed to deal with them. It all made a certain kind of sense to me no matter how much the old woman in the steeple tried to explain about the evil origin of the beasts that seemed to crop up out of nowhere. They were just a kind of vermin, and they needed to be dealt with like vermin. Nothing too horrific about that, nothing to stir up nightmares.
At first, I mistake it for a man, the one that is supposed to meet us here and teach us a lesson about our inadequacy. What comes sliding into view from out of the hole in the center of the room throws that picture askew. A tremor settles in my hand, weakness that I didn’t expect.
Pale shoulders with skin the color of dead flesh rise on the ascending platform of gold, a broad and terrible back filled with twitching muscle. Powerful arms move, holding onto something that it chews on as the platform settles into place in the center of the room, six-fingered hands curled so tight that sinuous muscle cracks through the skin of its knuckles. It pauses as the platform comes to stand still, turning its bald head toward me. It has no face. Three blades of iron split the skin where its face would be, pushing out half a foot from the dead flesh, running down from the top of its skull to its upper lip. In other places along its body, its shoulders, upper arms, the back of its hands, and in two places over its ribs more of the dull blades push up through puckered skin, all leaving wounds that look as if they might start bleeding at any moment. The monster has no eyes in its split head, but I know that it sees me, sees me far better than I see it.
Then I notice what is in its hands as it turns its head back to its meal, an arm. It opens its mouth, white, flat teeth dripping pink saliva as it crunches down onto the weeping wound that had once been a wrist, the hand long chewed away. The arm continues back, connecting to a torso that might once have belonged to a woman–hard to tell with how the head is missing–the toga barely clinging to its body bloody and torn. The body lay back over a gilded railing that circles the golden platform, one arm lying outside, fingers curled in such a way that I might imagine it is beckoning me closer.
???
“No…” a high voice cracks out, and for a second I think it might be my own. An elven man on the opposite end of the chamber falls to his knees, eyes big and staring. “My legs…” he squeaks, face a mask of disbelief, almost a smile on his lips as he digs his nails into his thighs. “I can’t…they aren’t moving. Why can’t they move…I don’t–”
I never even see what happens. One moment he is there, babbling, and the next he has fallen into two pieces on the floor, blood and innards spilling out. Those around the new corpse cringe, but don’t move, the monster in the center of the room never looking up from the corpse it chews on.
A metallic click bounces off the walls. I look down, finding the head of my staff has fallen to the floor. How did that happen? When I look back up, its face is turned toward me once more, the gnawed upon arm in its fingers forgotten for a moment.
My mouth opens of its own accord. I want to apologize for the noise, want more than anything to make some excuse for myself, but the words don’t come. My throat is dry. How do you speak again? How do you breathe?
There is a twitch, the most minor thing in the blade protruding from one of its ribs. My feet move on their own, trying to throw me to the side, but I am nowhere near fast enough. Pain scores through me, my own lunge turned into a spinning slap. I roll into the wall, leaving a long splash and smear of blood behind on the floor, and curl around my hurt. A scream tries to rip out of me, but the sound is so high I cannot even hear it. My hands are red when I look down, afraid of what I will find but needing to look all the same. The breastplate is bent, the fastenings on the side torn free and split open. My side looks like someone took a sword to me, almost cutting to my naval with a single blow. The pain that comes when I try to breath forces black into my vision, and my head lolls to the ground, so cold all of a sudden, so hot all of a sudden.
It is still looking at me, eyeless, watching as I turn the white stone red. It only has a mouth, but I can see the clear displeasure in its face. It wanted to kill me with that, whatever it had been. The monster’s chest expands in a horrific, popping way as it sucks in air. Then, with a screeching bellow that shakes the foundations of the tower itself, it screams, and the world turns red.
“Stop. Stop.” A calming voice, but I can hardly hear it over the pounding of my heart. A hand has mine, squeezing tight, something pressed against my palm. “Hold this. Look at me! Hold this!”
I realize that I can see, almost a surprise to me, my eyes focusing just in front of me. Jor’Mari kneels over me, a crying scratch down the side of his face. My left hand grasps desperately at the collar of his shirt, fingers trembling. I am shaking, staring around eyes wide, the world terrible just beyond my vision. My eyes land on something just past him, a charred arm resting on the gray stone.
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“Look at me!” he says again, urgent, moving slightly to put himself between me and that arm. It is all I can do land my eyes back on his face, there is an intensity there, worry maybe. “Are you there?”
“Where else would I be?” I ask, my voice croaking. A thickness in my throat makes me sputter; it feels as if I have been eating ash. We are bathed in orange light, the fire all around providing warmth to my bare skin. I look down at myself, realizing that there is more bare skin than there should be. My breastplate lay dented just a foot away, securing straps either ripped or cut completely. My blouse and trousers are ripped in several places, half the blouse covered in drying blood, my blood I think. Someone is screaming somewhere, more than just one someone, I think. “What happened?”
“Everything went mad,” he says. He curls my fingers around a stone he keeps pressed into my hand. Between the cracks of my fingers, I recognize the stone as the one he received as a prize from the Stoneball tournament; it is supposed to help protect against mental interference. It glows weakly, ebbing light flashing from its core as if it is in a struggle against an unstoppable force. “You went mad too.”
I push myself to my knees, forcing him to move or be stuck in some awkward half-hug. I lift the end of my blouse, finding a scabbing wound down my left side that had not been there before. I remember the cut that made it, feels like just an instant before, but just now time is an unsettled thing for me. There is no weakness as I make my way to my feet, not at all what I had anticipated. Actually, I feel strong, incredibly so.
We stand at the near top of the chamber, the outlet into the white and gold room just thirty feet overhead. Snakes of fire drip down from two of the three entrances, running like thin rivers down the surface of the ramps, forking, twisting, and merging once more.
The noise in the chamber is a beating drum trying to pound into my head. Everywhere I look there is fighting, indiscriminate, feral almost. On another ramp I see a woman in white robes beating a walking stick on the head of a downed man, screaming something unintelligible all the while, spit flying from her mouth with each strike. In another part of the room, two men grapple each other, each one biting into the shoulder of the other, thumbs hooking into mouths or pressing hard on eyeballs. Down below, the middle of the chamber is clogged with a churning pool of mud and stone that continues to rise, moving slowly, but moving to swallow the entire chamber.
“Madness.” That is the only word for it. Jor’Mari moves with me, always staying on my right side, but that makes me need to look all the more. Black char and red meat in the vague shape of a person lay on the downward slope, one arm and leg bent at impossible angles, eyeless face staring up with a final despairing question.
A crack makes me jump. The woman beating in the head of that poor man stands triumphant, blood and hair sticking to the head of her staff as she yells wordlessly toward the sky. A terrible part of me knows that I had been her, my victim dead by fire instead of having their skull beaten in. The edges of the crystal dig into my palm. I am afraid that I will crack it, but I am more afraid of loosening my grip and having it slip away.
“What is up there?” Jor’Mari asks me, grabbing my shoulder and steering my attention to him.
I cannot help but follow his pointing finger, staring up into the filtering white light. The sight of that faceless head comes back to me, watching flat teeth gnash and gnaw on what had been a person. An ache in my hand forces me to realize I am clutching him again.
“It doesn’t feel like this is what was supposed to happen,” he says. There is an edge in his voice, fear or worry; both are warranted.
“No,” I barely manage to say. “No, it shouldn’t be. There is a thing up there. A monster.”
“A monster is doing this?”
I grab his arm, make him turn away from the light to look at me. “We cannot fight it. We can’t.” The desperation in my voice sways him.
He nods, slowly. “Okay. What can we do?”
“What can we do?”
I look through the chaos, the battle and rising tide of choking mud. I have only ever had one approach to monsters before, but I cannot fight that thing. “We need to run.” All but a whisper.
“Where is the guild?” Jor’Mari asks, looking upward to the chamber above. “If there is some creature in the tower causing all of this, then they should be handling it.”
“I don’t know if they can.” That gets his attention. “It was eating someone when it came. I don’t think they were a part of the trial.” I see a shiver roll over him. “We need to run.”
He nods again, eyes darting around the chamber. “If whatever it is, is killing members of the Willian Guild, running sounds like a good idea.” He throws a hand out to the side. “I don’t see anywhere we can go though, do you?”
“Charlene!”
Before I can answer I hear my voice called over the din. I spin, finding a man panting, dragging two limp bodies up the ramp behind him. Dovik Willian groans as he trudges his way up. His right hand is curled about the back of Adrius’ collar, his left tucked under Macille’s shoulder, both men out cold. Dovik crashes against the wall, breathing hard and dropping the two men he is carrying. “Finally…found you.”
I hurry over, ignoring the man for a moment, and checking over Macille. He lay on his back, a nasty welt across one temple, a trickle of blood running from the reddened skin. He is breathing, thank Exeter, and I find Adrius in much the same state.
“Started attacking each other out of nowhere,” Dovik says, vaguely waving to the two unconscious men. “Wouldn’t stop no matter what I did. Well, until I applied a bit of force to their heads. I’m a bit worried, they should have woken up by now.”
“You know this man?” Jor’Mari asks, walking over with arms crossed, looking Dovik up and down.
“Dovik Willian,” he manages to say, offering a hand up that is left to dangle. “I met the farm girl a few weeks ago and we seemed to work well together. Been looking after her sweety for her.”
“Sweety?” Jor’Mari looks over Macille and scoffs.
“Is this the time to be talking about sweeties?” I snap. I check Macille’s neck, sweaty, but a strong pulse and even breaths. “How long ago did you hit him?”
“About halfway down the ramp. Well, it is probably the bottom of the ramp by now. Time flies away from you when you are dragging so much dead weight up an incline. Do either of you have any idea what is going on?”
“She says–”
“You never did introduce yourself,” Dovik interrupts.
I see the man stifle a growl. “My name is Jor’Mari, a pleasure I am certain. We might exchange lineages with one another and check in on each other’s family registries at another time. If you hadn’t noticed, we are stuck in a chamber and will all be breathing mud for air soon.” He points a clawed finger my way. “She says that there is a monster above.”
“There is a monster above,” I emphasize.
“What kind of monster?” Dovik asks.
“The kind that none of us can face,” I say. “I only saw it for a moment, high rank three I think. It killed a man in an instant, almost killed me too. Then it screamed and…” I trail off, letting the random fighting and chaos in the chamber speak for me.
“High rank three,” Jor’Mari says, barely audible. “You didn’t say that before.”
Dovik sets his head back against the wall with a click. There is the sound of movement up above us, the same snarling and crying out that echoes through the larger room we are in. The drip of liquid fire has all but stopped, not much fuel left for it up there to feed upon.
“There should be a way out up there,” Dovik says eventually. He looks at each of us in turn, eyes landing and boring into me. “We can make for that, or we can wait here and drown.”
“You don’t understand,” I try to tell him, but how can you explain something like what I saw up above to someone? I do not have the words to express what it is, the dread that clenched my heart like a winter vice when it turned its eyeless face my way. “There is no hope in facing that thing.”
“I don’t intend to face it,” he says. “From what I hear, there are people still up above that are not yet dead, so it is not mindlessly slaughtering everyone.”
“No,” I say, and I can hear the ruckus as well. “I don’t know how to describe it, but it didn’t start killing everyone in the room. It might work based on noise, it attacked someone that was talking first, then it attacked me when I made a noise. That doesn’t explain how they are still up there with how loud they are being.”
“If it does work that way, it will become a lot noisier soon,” Jor’Mari says, nodding to the center of the chamber. “Everyone else has gone insane for some reason, but they are all moving up as well. At some point, that rising mud will push everyone into the room above. If this thing is as powerful as you say, it will be a bloodbath once that happens.”
“I still want to see this monster,” Dovik remarks.
“No, you don’t.”
He blows out some air, looking down at Macille and Adrius lying on the stone. “Wish these two bastards would come around and be back to their senses. They are the hero types and would say what needs saying.”
I know what he is thinking because it is what I am thinking as well. “We are the only ones not going insane,” I say. “If anyone is going to find a way out, it will have to be us.”
“I already know the way out,” Dovik says. “This isn’t my first time in the tower. On the dais above there is a lever that will unlock the doors leading out. After that, there are many paths down the mountain. That is the only way out that I can think of.”
“It was standing on the dais,” I say.
“Of course it was.”
“So that means that our options are to stay here and eventually drown or get killed by some mad idiot or go upstairs and get killed by a monster we have no hope of defeating, praying that we can get past it to open the doors out,” Jor’Mari says.
“There is always the possibility that a member of the guild might show up before then to save us,” Dovik supplies, though it is obvious that none of us think that likely.
An awful fear crawls up inside of me, and I can’t seem to stuff it back down. I look for my anger, that usual bonfire that helps me drive away my fear, but the fire seems to have gone out. My hands shake, my fingers so stiff that no matter how many times I clench my fists and open them again I can’t seem to make them comfortable.
“We have to go up then,” I say. Gods, I wish I didn’t have to. They both look at me, solemn, but understanding that it is the truth.
I stare up at the rim of fire circling the white light overhead. There are still cries of anger and grunts of pain coming from that hole, and my mind conjures terrible visions of what might be happening above. I try to push the images away, but only succeed in half-ignoring them. My mind whispers that I am about to die, and I won’t even see the blow coming. It is an extreme effort to keep my breath even. “We have to go up.”
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