Chapter Four
Trudging through clouds of mosquitoes, pools of brackish muck and occasional patches of sodden peat-grown, supposedly "dry" ground would not have been Aric's first choice, had he been asked how he wished to spend a day recuperating from a run-in with his would-be nemesis Emilio Van Strahd. A closer estimate would have likely been "curled up in a plush Emperor-sized bed with a petite golden-haired beauty under one arm and a raven-haired vixen (who, in his own rather personalized little fancy, bore suspicious resemblance to Ellisia and Lhynn) under the other, and a personal view of Emilio himself dancing on hot coals" (Aric's imagination always had been pretty specific).
But no, here he was, trudging through said clouds and pools and patches, lead by a surprisingly determined (and even more surprisingly unheeding of muck and grime) Ellisia, who strode on ahead regardless of the staining of her fine boots and pants. Of course, this may have been because every time they came to a particularly mucky pool, she immediately snatched off Aric's cape and dropped it over the mess before walking across upon that--his once fine white mantle was now becoming somewhat more of a foul-smelling beige, in spite of all attempts to magically clean it with on-the-spot spells between puddles.
Worse yet, not a single blood-sucking insect seemed to have any interest in her at all...meaning the only available target left for them to gravitate to was Aric. For the first few hours, picking them off with Dust Chip spells had been faintly amusing, whiling away the time after he got his cloak as clean as he could, but there were so many that they were beginning to weave past his defenses, and in the distraction he almost managed to walk into pools or trees on several occasions.
"You know," he said at last, after a small cooling spell to the air around him had finally dissuaded enough bloodsuckers that he could talk without swallowing a few, "I still don't see why we couldn't just fly over all this. That nimrod Emilio is going to be leagues ahead of us at this rate."
"Two reasons," Ellisia said coolly, raising one hand without even looking over her shoulder with two fingers lifted. "First," she ticked off, "because that's probably exactly what the buffoon wants. If we tried to fly, he probably has some sort of ambush set up here in the swamp to catch us and blow us out of the air. Second," she lowered the other finger and subsequently her hand, "because it would be a waste of time to fly all the way to the tower only to find that the entrance was in the thick of all this tangled mess, with no place to land, thus forcing us to fly all the way back even if we weren't ambushed--or survived the ambush--and still trudge through this muck."
Unable to argue with such logic--and too brain-clouded by bog stench and mosquito buzzing anyway--Aric fell back on his only remaining recourse of sulking and fending off bugs and the occasional snake. He was just about to question how sure she was of their direction again when she reached back to once again snatch the cape from around his shoulders and drop it across a small stretch of brackish water barring their path, with only a single log lying in its middle to serve as a foot-step. He sighed wearily as she stepped daintily across, and he began to follow himself, muttering under his breath how he was going to charge her for the new cape he was buying after this. But then something went wrong: the log lurched aside when he stepped on it and he plopped right into the dirty muddy water with a resounding, sucking squelch.
That wasn't right. Logs didn't lurch. They bobbed, sometimes they rolled, but they didn't lurch like...like something living that had been stepped on.
Ellisia had actually stopped at the sound of his ignominious fall, and was scowling cutely with her fists on her hips. "Aric, stop wasting time and playing in the mud! We have work to do!"
At first, Aric was too busy doing his best trying to find a clean place on his sleeve to wipe mud out of his eyes. Then he was too busy trying not to get eaten.
It seemed that alligators--or crocodiles, Aric could never really get them straight--were not partial to being stepped on, nor to being tangled up in dirty sorcerer's cloaks when they tried to escape being stepped on. Whichever term applied to this toothy reptile, the distinct certainty was that it had a very particular way of dealing with that which annoyed it. Even sorcerers were very much susceptible to ravenous jaws with the strength to bite a horse in half, and Aric wasn't eager to test whether that on-the-spot estimation of strength was accurate. Trying to scramble away only bought him very little distance, unable to get much solid purchase in the mucky water and ground, and trying to cast a spell at this range would either cause too much collateral damage (on his person, of course) or end up freezing him right into the water he was trying to escape.
Ell's solution was more practical, as she unslung her hammer from its belt harness and advanced, but as broad and heavy as that tool looked, he wasn't quite so sure he preferred it. If she missed by even a slender margin...
But it wasn't the head of the hammer she was using. Rather, she gripped the metal shaft above the handle, upside-down with the head close to her body, and she...poked the scaled predator in the ribs. Agitated, the alligator turned its beady eyes from its current muddy morsel and to the source of this new annoyance...and locked one eye with Ellisia's dark pools of inky ocular menace. For a long moment, the gaze held, Ell simply glaring vicious hateful needles of icy death down at the frozen beast. Then, inexplicably, like a dog threatened with a belt it was all too familiar with, the alligator fled with its tail literally between its legs, carrying with it a great deal of splashing and the tattered remains of Aric's cape.
Eyes wide, Aric turned to look up at Ellisia, uncomprehending, silently questioning.
"He knew a bigger predator when he saw one," she explained simply...and, to Aric's surprise, she offered one of her immaculate white gloves down to help him up. Hesitantly, he took it, unable to quell his startled reaction when she lifted him up with the greatest of ease even after seeing demonstrations of her prodigious strength before. Slinging her hammer back down into her belt-harness, she raised both hands and began mouthing a soft spell, White Magic energy gathering into a whiter-than-white globe of light around her hands...and then spreading until it engulfed his field of vision. When it was over, not only was her glove thoroughly cleansed of muck...but so was he, and so were his clothes. He blinked in confusion, looking back up to her, and she simply shrugged. "I added the insect-repellant spell, as well."
Then, suddenly, her expression changed back to businesslike as she stepped back and crossed her arms. "Now are you through wasting time? We've got a thief to catch, a treasure to recover and Armor to liberate!"
"Ah...right." He frowned a little, still disconcerted by the drastic change, but he followed without argument when she turned to sweep on her determined way. He still felt a little off-kilter traveling without his cape, but he'd make do until reaching another town.
"Well, I hate to say 'I told you so', but..." In spite of his frustration, Aric couldn't conceal a slightly smug smirk. They had found the tower, sure enough, just as Emilio had promised. And, while Ellisia had been right about a ground-floor entrance in the thick of the underbrush, what she hadn't counted on was that entrance being hopelessly collapsed into a mound of rubble even Ellisia's profound superhuman might couldn't wedge free without bringing the whole wall down on them.
Huffing in indignant frustration, Ellisia turned a glare on him that could freeze magma. "Fine then, Mister Sorcery Genius, what do you propose we do now? Do you think your 'associate' anticipated this?" She gestured grandly to the ruined entrance with one arm, in an elegant sweeping motion that looked out of place with her face contorted in ire.
"Simple," he replied, lifting a single finger in the manner of a Sorcerer's Guild lecturer. Then he turned the motion into a point upward, toward the tangled foliage overhead. "The whole tower can't be ruined, right? Why climb when you can fly? We fly up there, find a window--or make one if we have to--get in, blast our way to the bottom and get the treasure.
"Please," she dismissed, waving the idea aside like a stray fly. "Even if the branches weren't too thick overhead for us to fly from here, no idiot sorcerer would just put windows on a tower where he studied magic, even if his real lab was deep underground--for just this sort of reason. And I really don't think blasting holes in this tower would be the most brilliant ide--"
She didn't get to finish, for Aric was already charging magic between his hands, and he finished just in time to cut her off. "Bomb Di Win!" He hurled the globe of compressed air floating between his cupped hands--visible only as a vaguely spherical distortion of air--straight upward, then shielded his eyes with an arm as it struck overhead and exploded violently, sending leaves and branches and other natural shrapnel flying. "Bram Gash!" he followed with, flinging the free arm up in a rapid arc, sending arrow-shaped shockwaves up to catch the bigger pieces of falling debris and shred them. Dusting his hands as the fine powder that was leaf and branch came showering down, he glanced to Ellisia with a lifted eyebrow. While she seemed at something of a loss, she didn't argue.
"Done and done. Now then..."
Wham!
Oh. Now she was going to argue. Peeling himself off the tree Ellisia had knocked him into with her hammer, he glared and rubbed the back of his head. "Oww...what's the big idea?!"
"You idiot!" she growled, drawing back the hammer in preparation for another swing. "Are you trying to alert the entire tri-city-state area to our presence here?"
"Look, lady, we already have a long way to go and no time for all this 'subtlety' nonsense! What are you, a royal spy or something?" He frowned, suspiciously, even as he began to work the kinks out of his system, popping a few joints here and there. "We needed a way in, I found us a way in. Now are you coming or not?"
"...ugh." Slinging her hammer away again, she lifted a hand to her temple to groan...then rather belatedly realized that she too was dusted with a faint layer of powdered leaves and wood, and hastily whipped out both a clothing-brush and a comb to begin expertly restoring her appearance to "immaculate" once again. With that done, as Aric rolled his eyes, she pocketed the items and cleared her throat softly. "Well, I suppose at this stage we have little enough choice. Very well, then. Levitation..."
Aric frowned as she began to slowly rise from the ground, and he slowly shook his head. "You'll take forever getting up there, at that rate," he chided, raising his hand to snap his fingers over his head. "Raywing!" Careful to keep his body positioned vertically even as the airy shield-bubble formed around his person, he drifted close enough just in time to snatch a wide-eyed Ellisia's collar before she could object, shooting upward with her in tow.
"What are you doing, you buffoon?!" she blurted, even as she watched the sweet solid ground below go bye-bye at an alarming rate. "How do you expect to maintain this and blow a hole in the tower wall? You're going to get us both killed!"
"Easy! I fly, you blast!"
For a moment, she seemed to choke on air. Then, he could see from the corner of his eye, she took a deep breath and began to slowly count backward from ten, mouthing the numbers silently.
Fortunately, by the physiological rules of the spell, greater altitude meant less acceleration. Thus, the further they rose, the slower they moved, which suited his purposes just fine. When they reached a point at which the spell had almost completely halted locomotion, he gestured to the (conspicuously blank and window-less) stone wall before them, with his free hand, having shifted the other somewhere along the way up to a grip around her middle that, while faintly distracting, was not in danger of choking or disrobing her. Ell still clearly wasn't happy with the positioning, but also apparently realized it was better than the alternative.
Without a word, she took a good sight of the wall, then raised her hands toward it, closed her eyes and began to gather power. Snapping them suddenly open, the extended hands convulsed with a surge of power, and almost half a dozen small globes of light appeared in the air around her extended arms, vibrating strongly enough to give off a subdued and almost melodic hum. "Dam Brass!" she called out, and the globes of force rocketed toward the wall, blasting it apart on impact and sending blocks tumbling inward--at least, the ones it didn't blast into powder entirely.
"Nice," Aric approved, slowly drifting inside and allowing the two of them to set down amidst the rubble. He flinched, reflexively, at the sight of damaged furniture and a shorn tapestry as a result of the entrance, but it had been his idea and it was too late for regrets at this point.
"Now what?" Ell asked, all business once more. "More of the same?"
"Nah, my turn now." Slowly walking toward what he could best gauge as the center of the room, Aric began tying to shove as much debris out of the way as he could, with boots and feet--and when she got a glimmer of what he was doing, Ellisia stepped forward to help. Once he gestured that it was sufficient, she backed away the same as he did, stopping the same distance from the cleared circle as he. Indicating that she should remain where she was, he strode toward the edge of the cleared circle and kneeled, closing his eyes and placing both his palms on the cold stone, whose roughened texture he could feel even through his gloves.
"Blast Wave!" It wasn't an uncommon spell in his line of adventuring, so the Black Magic power was easy enough to wrest under his command. He was also prepared, from experience, and managed not to lose his balance as the floor began to glow in a circle beneath his hands...and then disappeared, leaving a perfectly even circle of displaced stone, which opened down into the next floor, wide enough for each of them to drop through one at a time.
He glanced up to Ellisia, to gauge her reaction--this was the second time he had used a Black Magic spell before her, after her blatant expression of dislike for them. Her expression was no different from normal, though, and she waited for him to descend first before following behind.
They had to repeat this cycle quite a few times--though subsequently with less debris clearing and more cobweb-removal--before finally reaching what Ellisia dubbed firmly as the ground floor. Sure enough, the collapsed entry-way was there, though otherwise the room was conspicuously blank. The only features of any real note were the stairs up and the trapdoor obviously leading down below.
It was locked, they found, but the boards were so old and rotten that even Aric had no difficulty prying them up, not having to rely on Ellisia's strength in this instance. Odd, he mused, that a sorcerer would rely on something as mundane as a standard lock, instead of--
Awh, crap. "Ell?"
"Yes?"
"Duck!"
"Where..?--urk!"
Diving aside with the grip he had snagged on her collar, Aric just barely avoided the blast of raw Black Magic energy that would have deprived them both of their heads.
He lay for a moment, waiting to make absolutely sure that the flare had come to a stop...then tried to push himself up and found that he couldn't.
"Ell?"
"Yes?"
"You can let go now."
"Oh." Flustered, she hastily released the grips where her fingers had come dangerously close to tearing the fabric of his shirt, and pushed herself to her feet with exaggerated nonchalance, primping her hair casually. "Right. Of course. Now, shall we go?"
Women... he thought quietly, slowly shaking his head. Aloud he said, "Yeah, sure. Come on," as he rose as well.
It wasn't until they reached the foot of the first flight of stairs that he felt it again, and from the way Ell froze she did as well. "Astral-sealed," he stated the obvious for her, simply for the record. "Just like the other one."
"Somebody didn't want Mazoku claiming whatever these 'Artifacts' are," Ellisia surmised pensively. Aric blinked and frowned slightly; he hadn't thought of that. He had assumed it was a simple anti-sorcerer defense mechanism...but it made sense.
Suddenly, he blinked. Mazoku! He had forgotten all about Galamoth and their deal! In all the activity that had ensued with his meeting with Ell and the subsequent chaos, it had completely slipped his mind. ...of course, until Galamoth actually appeared, there wasn't a great deal he could actually do anyway; the Mazoku would show up when it suited him and that was that. Nothing to do until then except carry on with the current course.
"Aric?" Ellisia peered back around the corner from where she had resumed advancing, a perplexed frown gracing her delicate features. "You coming? Don't tell me you're scared."
"'Course not," he shot back, lifting hands to straighten the collar of his cloak and finding no cloak there. for lack of anything better to do with his hands, he cracked his knuckles and then breezed past her. "Come on, we might still be able to catch up to Emilio."
With Ellisia along, this particular dungeon-crawl wasn't quite so gray-hair-inducing. In spite of her moment of panic at the entrance, Ell proved to be quite level-headed, and it seemed she hadn't been boasting about not springing any traps in the last locale. She seemed to have an eye for spying out suspicious ground or walls, and even the few they tripped were avoided with much less frantic running and panic. He was beginning to think this "partner" thing might not be so bad.
Of course, the point at which he began to think that was about the point when they reached the massive double-doors that could only possibly be the entrance to the bottommost floor, the great treasure, the grand magical Artifact that this whole sordid fiasco had lead up to. Ellisia, of course, was in the lead and she reached to take hold of the great brass handles, pulling them open with about as much effort as she would probably use to open a dresser to pick her evening gown.
The doors swung open, slowly, inexorably, as the two adventurers backed away. Inch by tantalizing inch, slowly revealing the contents of the chamber, the undoubtedly vast horde of accumulated knowledge and magical power, which consisted of...
...absolutely nothing.
Ellisia fell flat onto her face, even as the doors boomed hollowly against the walls to either side, and Aric blinked a few times to make certain his eyes were not deceiving him.
It was no trick of the eye, no hallucination. The room was completely blank, a fact which was cast into sharp relief by the magical light-globes hovering over their heads. It was simply a grand, circular chamber, no doors other than the one in which they were standing and a ceiling that stretched off into impenetrable darkness. Even the spiders seemed to have forsaken this place, for there was no sign of webbing anywhere.
As Ellisia peeled herself off the floor, Aric strode slowly into the room, folding his arms across his chest with a speculative frown. "Now this is anticlimactic. That's not like Emilio. Which means just one thing."
He slowly turned toward the doorway, even as Ellisia moved to join him within the chamber and turned to follow his ruby-chip gaze...which settled directly on the doorway from whence they'd come.
"Three...two..."
"Ahahahaha--"
"Freeze Arrow!"
The laughter was cut off, sharply, as the twin shadowy figures dove to either side of the doorway and into the room, narrowly avoiding the cluster of arrow-shaped ice projectiles that had flown from Aric's cupped hands. He smirked--at least this dungeon had one thing in common with the last: the bottom chamber was once again a bubble of power in the Astral void.
"You know, Winterbourne, you have no gift for drama," Emilio chided as he rose to his feet, scowling in a manner that completely offset his demeanor. On the other side Lhynn rose as silently as ever, save for her great blade scraping subtly across the stones as she drew it into position. "That's your problem."
"You know what your problem is, Van Strahd?" Aric countered, casually forming a ball of glittering blue Water magic over his up-turned palm.
"No, what?"
"You talk too much." He snapped his fingers and the ball of magic over his hand vanished with an almost comical little "pop".
Blinking, Emilio frowned in puzzlement--then with a rather wearied expression, he slowly looked up, just in time to see the Freeze Brid spell come crashing down onto his head from above, splashing white light across him almost like a ball of true water, freezing him in a small block of ice.
"Game, set and match," Aric said, dusting his hands off and then turning to the woman. "And now I believe it's your turn, Miss--eh?" For Lhynn was nowhere in sight. Ran out after seeing him deal with Emilio…?
Suddenly, he flinched. She had used his trick, taking action while the enemy was busy patting himself on the back. He groaned, deciding he had spent entirely too much time associating with Emilio, even as he turned toward the center of the chamber where Ellisia and Lhynn had locked blade-and-hammer once again. 'Least he had Ell around, he mused, or that could have been a downright disastrous moment.
Aric found himself torn. Try and help Ellisia again--as fruitless as the last attempt had been before--or try and figure out a way to recover the coin from a very frozen Emilio. Lifting a hand to his chin, he frowned in thought. Ell seemed to be doing well enough, but she had been before as well and had somehow been incapacitated while his back was turned. On the other hand, Emilio had already gotten away with the treasure once, and was developing a disconcerting resilience to freezing.
Finally, he decided on a middle-ground.
"Icicle Lance!" Raising a hand over his head, he grasped the spear of magically-created frozen water that coalesced over his head, pulled back and hurled like a javelin directly at the dark-haired swordswoman. Then, he turned back to Emilio and began to gather more power within his hands.
Suddenly he blinked, as something went decisively wrong. He hadn't even begun to shape a spell, and yet the floor beneath was beginning to take on a faint fuschia glow. Immediately breaking off the spell, he turned back to face Ell and Lhynn, who had both put their own fight on hold to look around in bewilderment.
"Wasn't me," he said immediately as both pairs of eyes turned to him. Then the two women promptly skittered away from the dead center of the room, in which the glow was beginning to grow stronger in a perfect concentric circle, with a low hum that could be felt in the very bones.
It ended in a flash and an explosion of sound, and then the light was gone--and in its place, in the very center of the room, was something decisively startling.