42 – Cal is dying

The wall had five sides, and from every edge a laser beam emitted from a magic stone shot inward towards the pedestal in the middle of the room. The beam then hit a mirror and was reflected and split in a myriad of smaller beams that drew an intricate pattern through the whole room. At the center of the mandala of light, located at the center of the very castle, stood an ornate marble pedestal with a small round gem on it. The gem was of a milky, nebulous white, with streaks like the marble of the pedestal, but it was made of something wildly different from simple, mundane marble. It was cool to the touch, and heavy, its surface impossibly smooth. Julian had reached the center of the laser maze with great difficulty but without triggering it and had to admit that with enough patience the process was very doable. There were still the voices urging him on, whispering in his ears, but they were manageable, he thought. He wiped the sweat from his brow and looked around. He was worried: he had not encountered a single enemy as he infiltrated the black castle, a thing that made him very nervous rather than put him at ease. Something was very wrong here, although it was possible that he hadn’t found anyone yet due to the massive size of the structure and the relatively small party of people surrounding Bel’Oor and Trex’Oor… but it made no sense for them to leave the crystal he was going after unattended. For, and it was clear to him from the moment he had set his eyes on it, this was the Renegade core, an ingredient he desperately needed in his path to power and without which he would be unable to advance past level 100.

And yet most of these thoughts, worrisome as they were, passed by almost without Julian’s conscious mind noticing them. The call of power was too distracting.

The words he heard, unintelligible, grew even louder as he extended a hand out to touch the Core, becoming a cacophony of voices that he could not understand, but seemed to entice him to touch the Core, to take it for himself. They all told him that he deserved it, that it was rightfully his.

And yet he paused. Even in his altered state of perception he knew that something was not right, that it was all too easy. So far, at least. What was going to happen once he touched the stone?

Why is nobody here? His inner voice cut through the chorus. Where is everybody? They can’t have seriously left this thing here unattended, can they?

There was a defense system around the crystal, his mind told him. Perhaps they thought it was going to be enough. Or maybe it was a trap. It didn’t matter. After all the conjectures he realized that he had been standing there in the open for a good minute already, and nobody had showed up. He once again reached for the Core with a hand, feeling the voices stir and increase in volume.

Wait. He stopped, and with narrow eyes looked at the core yet again. Better to put it in the ring without touching it. Who knows what’s going to happen when I touch it, and I can’t afford to waste time now.

He did so, and as soon as the little rotund gemstone disappeared so did the voices. Silence reigned supreme in his mind, and for the first time in days his world was quiet and the beacon that had guided him all the way here was gone. In a way, he felt a bit lost and alone, and the more he thought about it with ever more lucid mind, the more he realized how much of a fool he had been. Immediately he ran towards the dark, dimly lit corridors of the castle and to the stairs that led to the far away towers, trying to put as much distance between himself and the site of the theft as he could.

“Shit.” He cursed, fighting to keep his breath steady, “this is unreal. Have I gone insane? I could have died to get that crystal! And Cal? I need to save Cal!”

Suddenly the void in his mind was even more unbearable. The absence of the voices and of the beacon of light showing him the way made him realize just how alone he was without him. And how selfish and idiotic he had been, wasting so much time to get here, getting sidetracked by the Core. He almost punched the wall, the desire to let all the repressed rage and resentment out of his system almost too strong to suppress. But he did. Instead, with a grimace on his face that contorted his mouth in a grotesque expression of manic rage, he materialized two halves of a device that he had prepared inside his storage rings for the very occasion. The thing, once assembled, was as big as the whole landing of the stairs. Julian looked at it with grim satisfaction and punched the numbers in the display.

Timer: 120 minutes.

Nodding to himself, he climbed up the stairs, leaving the beeping warhead behind, hidden in a remote yet central corner of the castle. This is my revenge, motherfuckers.

Navigating the eerily silent corridors, lit by magical lamps that flickered like they were made of real fire, Julian searched for an entrance to the dungeons. Below, he knew, Cal was being held against his will in a dark cell, as he had seen in his dream. He didn’t know where that dream had come from, or why he had even seen it with such clarity when he could barely remember his actual dreams, but he did and now the closer he got to the cell the more he could recognize little details from the dream that helped him navigate the maze of damp corridors. Moss, crawling on the walls fed by the incessant dripping of water that seeped deep in the black stone, had long overgrown these tunnels. It was black, sick, of a smell fouler than rot. To the right a series of cells were dug in the hill itself and kept close shut by grimy metal bars, rusted over with a black oozing oxidation that was as wet and repulsive as the rest of the place. It reeked of a sickly, rotting odor that even gave Julian a persistent debuff and a status bar for a condition he was not familiar with but that was slowly growing full.

Where is he? The corridors were all the same, an endless repetition of the same room that seemed to defy the laws of physics. Come on! Julian ran as fast as he could, crashing into the doors at the end of the corridors and slamming into the moss infested walls, accelerating the spread of his status ailment. A manic hurry had overcome his mind, and he could somehow sense that Cal was suffering more and more, and that he needed to be quick. Quicker still, because he was running out of time, and Cal could not come back to life like he could. Oh, he had been so stupid to think this was all a game. And now… and now…

He saw something. A sick, pale blue figure inside one of the far cells. He rushed to it and yanked the whole metal grate out of the wall and threw it to the side. The loud clamor woke Cal up, and Julian rushed to him with tears in his eyes as he blinked confusedly and looked around aimlessly. Then his eyes suddenly focused on Julian, and Julian rushed to him and caressed his face.

“I’m here, I’m here now.” He spoke softly.

Cal was scalding hot, dripping with sweat. He was shaking, the shivers coursing through his body like tremors of the earth, and Julian saw black veins pulsing under the thin blue skin of his friend where the shirt had been ripped. The veins snaked around his body, up his neck and his face and they seemed to move ever faster, changing his skin and his body as he grew paler and paler. His eyes, bloodshot purple slowly turned to black.

Julian hastily looked through his storage rings and took out the strongest potions that he had there. Antidotes, healing potions, everything that he had. He fed them to Cal, who only accepted them with a faint mumble, coughing and choking on the foreign liquid that stained Julian’s shirt and made his arms sticky.

“Drink this, dammit!” Julian yelled. “Come on!” he pulled Cal’s mouth open and carefully poured some of the antidote in his mouth.

Finally, the blackness of the blood retreated a bit.

“Drink more.” He said.

Cal mumbled, then looked at the vial. “W-what's this?” he asked weakly.

“An HP potion, mixed with all of the antidotes that I have on me now.”

Cal coughed, weakly shaking his head. “They stopped being effective days ago.”

“There must be something I can do. Some elven treasure, or something from the City of Light!”

Cal smiled, putting a hand on Julian’s face and slowly caressing it. “I—” he began, and Julian felt tears begin to well up in his eyes, and he cried after keeping them locked inside in for so long.

But then Cal suddenly convulsed. “The Hydra. The beast of seven heads!” Cal’s voice was fervent with delirious incoherence, and he grabbed at Julian’s shirt and pulled him close. “Seven heads grew of the tainted body, and from each of the seven heads seven eyes looked upon the worlds in disdain and shuddered, oh they shuddered, and the worlds trembled and died, and space was rent and broken. Then it came, and it saved all.”

“Jesus fuck,” Julian, taken aback, created some distance between them. “What have they done to you? Let’s get you into the Oasis, immediately.”

He began to cast, looking at the convulsing Cal with concern. Barely twenty seconds later, but he could swear that they were the longest twenty seconds of his life, a portal appeared and he almost collapsed from exhaustion. He rushed to Cal, stumbling, and falling over his friend, watching his HP deplete as his stamina didn’t have a chance to recover and yet he ordered his body to move, he commanded it, and he lifted the unconscious body of his friend, once so heavy and now so frighteningly light, and pushed him into the portal. He was about to follow, but he struggled, watching his HP bar go down, and down, and he tried to muster the strength but couldn’t.

He felt a pressure on his back, pushing his face back against the cold floor of the cell. He stopped struggling, and his HP stopped going down while his status bar showed that he too was getting sick with the same sickness Cal had, from contact with the infected floor. With barely 10% of his health left, he didn’t have the strength to fight against whoever was standing on top of him, pressing his body down with a foot. But he could see the other foot, a great blue foot.

Tharlaxian… his mind thought, and then all went slowly black, the world receding in the distance.

Julian had fainted but was still alive. The Oor brothers had him, captured him in their ambitious ambush. They had waited for him to show his hand, to exhaust himself with the Oasis before they moved. Somehow they had managed to warp his mind, to send him visions of Cal as he died in his cell. And now, in his delirious sleep, Julian thought he could make out words of mockery. They mocked him and Cal, their stupidity and naivete. They laughed at how easy it had been to make Cal’Eer, the son of the overlord of Tharlax, speak and how fervently he was willing to tell them all of Julian’s secrets if they only stopped torturing him. They didn’t stop, though. And this filled them with so much pride. Julian was repulsed but had no strength to fight back. They were carrying him somewhere and had done something to him to prevent him from moving. However, he did not struggle, for he knew that Cal hadn’t told the Tharlaxians the whole truth. They thought they were so smart and sly, but they had been played themselves in turn.

Because Julian and Cal had an agreement just for this type of scenario. Knowing that they might get captured, they agreed to share a part of the whole trust under torture but withhold the rest. This way, misled by the partial information, the captors would surely miscalculate the threat and make mistakes. Just so, Julian thought, because right when Trex’Oor was about to wake him up, the nuclear bomb he had planted went off.