We were back in the rooms, taking them one at a ti, and following through the RDP as much as we were able to. During the ti we’d been in the Landing, both books had gone through unrecoverable rot, and consisted of the sa word, over and over. The copies had likewise rotted, and I counted myself lucky that the sa wasn’t true for our heads. Almost every book we had in Sable was unusable, which ant that it had got its hooks in pretty deep, and Amaryllis spent nearly twenty minutes rapidly dumping an imnse quantity of books into a room that had a horse-sized duck in a cage in the middle of it. (We stood well clear of the duck, and hoped that it would enjoy literally thousands of books which mostly contained the sa word repeated over and over.) Raven’s book entad was toast as well, and she took quite a while to clear it, hoping that would fix the issue and allow new books to be added.
“Ti and resources wasted,” said Amaryllis once it was all done. She sighed.
“Better to have it and not need it,” I said.
“Yes?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “And?”
I looked at her. “Uh,” I said. Uther chuckled. “The full expression is ‘better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.’ It was a favorite of my dad’s. Sorry.”
“You should have claid it,” said Uther. “That’s what I always did, as I’m sure you’ve figured out. I can only be thankful that before I ca to Aerb, I studied the greats and learned more than my fair share of quotes. There were tis I wondered whether I was ant to co to Aerb, or a place like it. I credit our gas for a lot of things I had learned.”
The earlier animosity seed to have left him, but that was putting on edge, because we hadn’t actually resolved anything, and from where I was sitting, probably couldn’t ever resolve it. Growing up, there had been a lot of fights like that between my mom and dad, argunts that couldn’t ever be ‘finished’, so the only resolution they’d get is the catharsis of yelling at each other, which obviously sucked and wasn’t a long-term solution.
Raven got sick not too long after. I’d worried that she was just going to die, or possibly explode, but instead she passed through another door of the Long Stairs and doubled over in pain, clutching her chest and stomach.
“Well, that’s it for you,” said Fenn with a sigh. “Co on, I’ll guide you back to the maze Landing and we’ll wait it out.” The way she said it, it was like she’d been waiting for so excuse to fuck off and not be with us anymore. After everything she’d said, I was surprised that she’d kept going after we were done with the labyrinth Landing.
“No,” said Raven. “Give a second, I’ll be fine.” She was panting hard. The Ell had massive internal extradinsional space as one way of allowing for their ridiculous conceit, and I had no idea what was physically happening to her, only that it couldn’t have been good.
Uther knelt down next to her. “It’s your ti to go,” he said. “I’ve appreciated seeing you one last ti, but if you go further, you will die. There were always parts of my adventures you couldn’t go on, places you couldn’t travel, things you couldn’t be allowed to see. We must all accept our lot in life.” I don’t know if he’d intended it to be cruel, but that was how it ca out to .
“Please,” she said. “Just give a minute, I’ll be okay, I’ll co with you.”
“Co on,” said Fenn, lifting her up like she weighed next to nothing. “I’ll take you back to the Landing, we’ll chill out with the maze people, and we can grab a pint while we wait for this whole thing to blow over.”
“I’ll be fine,” said Raven through gritted teeth.
“It’ll be good for us to have so ti together,” Fenn insisted. “Hey, you haven’t heard any of my best jokes or most delightful anecdotes yet, so that’s sothing. And I should also point out that I’m giving up going to Earth for you, which I don’t think you should turn your nose up at.”
“Please,” said Raven, looking at Uther. “I went through so much trying to find you, and then trying to continue your work. It can’t all be for nothing. You can’t just abandon Aerb. You can’t just abandon , please Uther, I know sowhere in there is —” she winced. “I know you care about .”
“I do,” said Uther. “But all the sa, I’m continuing on.” His voice was steady and calm. “You’ll have to make peace with that. It’s sothing that I can’t help you with. I hope you understand.”
He set off, and I fought my instinct to follow him, instead turning to Raven, even as Uther went through the next door.
“Fenn will take care of you,” I said to Raven. I looked up at Fenn. “Thank you.”
“No problem, hoss,” replied Fenn. “I’m just hoping that any of this is worth it, plus I'm a little scared that I might be reduced down to normal any day now.” She shrugged. “Earth probably sucked anyway. I’ll take care of the little Ell, you go.” She looked at the ring on my finger. “You need to take Bethel too, or?”
“She wanted to go all the way to the top,” I said.
Fenn looked at the toad that was sitting on my shoulder.
“He’s staying with too,” I said. I had no idea whether that was the right call.
“Fine, fine,” Fenn replied. “Welp, sll you later.” She turned to leave, carrying Raven, before pausing. “Wait, I never got a chance to use it, but ‘more like schlong stairs’ was waiting for the right opportunity.”
“I’m glad we got you back,” I said to her. “Even if it was only for a bit.”
“Sure, sure,” Fenn replied. “I love you too, but I’m leaving, don’t make white fang you.”
I wanted to ask what she ant, but she left, carrying Raven, and when the door shut, for just a mont, I was all alone. I had the crystals though, and they honed in on Uther just fine, so it was only a matter of following the steps the crystal told to take.
When I caught back up to Uther and Amaryllis, they were in the middle of an argunt, one carried on as they walked.
“Because it doesn’t map,” said Amaryllis. She sounded frustrated, but only in the way that she sotis let a note of frustration creep into her voice as a conversational tactic. “If you’re attempting to apply a frawork to reality and find that so parts fit but others don’t, it’s a sign that sothing is fundantally wrong with the frawork. Fenn doesn’t fit. I don’t fit.”
“Hey,” I said. They both ignored .
“You’re accusing of trying to fit round pegs into square holes?” asked Uther.
“I am,” replied Amaryllis. “I fundantally agree with you about the narrative, but I think there are too many things missing from your model. You’re inventing epicycles to explain how and why your model works. In my view, the narrative hypothesis works in several naive cases, but you never tempered it with the understanding of the narrator and what he wants. Now, you’re stuck in the trap of hamring everything into a theory that only almost works, which has unfortunately reinforced itself through your actions.”
“In which way?” he asked, seeming more bored than curious.
“Oh co on now,” she said. “I’ve read through what transcripts we have, I know you’re better at arguntation than this. Invest sothing in the conversation.”
“I don’t see the point of it, dear daughter,” said Uther. He glanced at her. “Or whover you’re supposed to be.”
“You can think of as Dahlia, if you’d like,” said Amaryllis. “It doesn’t bother in the slightest, so long as you actually engage with the conversation I’m trying to have.”
“Very well,” replied Uther. “Your argunt is that we have more free will than it would first seem, and aberrations within the narrative are both possible and expected given so willful deviance on the part of the protagonist. Is it that you think I don’t have an enormous amount of experience, or that you have so new evidence to bring to the table? Are there avenues for non-compliance that you think I haven’t tried?”
“Let’s back up slightly, if you’ve decided to take this conversation seriously,” said Amaryllis. “Juniper argues in favor of narrative, but the type of narrative he argues in favor of is collaborative, that of a Dungeon Master and his players. This ans that the Dungeon Master is, yes, in charge of the narrative, has full knowledge of almost everything that the players do, is able to retroactively insert people, places, and ideas into reality, and to adapt to the choices of the players. There are fundantal differences from traditional narratives though.”
“Hang on,” I said. “I actually preach sothing very different, which is that it doesn’t actually matter what’s going on at a higher level, since we have very little ability to change or challenge it.”
“Either way,” said Amaryllis. “If you walk the straight and narrow, doing what you think needs to be done, playing everything as a narrative, the result is going to be that you don’t see the seams in the narrative, or the places where there are dropped threads, pieces that are quietly written away. You spent too much of your ti following the narrative path in front of you without blowing things to hell.”
“And you think your presence here is because of sothing like that?” asked Uther. “You think that there were so significant deviations from what the Dungeon Master, if we’re using that moniker, had planned?”
“I think that it was planned that we would be here, absolutely,” said Amaryllis. “I think that the specifics were largely left to us. It was all within the Dungeon Master’s control, ultimately, but I see a preference for not interfering, and your hypothesis that we’re all here with specific hooks to dig into you to get you to co back seems far too specific given our actual goals and personalities. I don’t give a bubbling shit if you go to Earth. Personally, I don’t want you to co back, nor am I equipped to tug at your heartstrings as I might be if I were Dahlia, even if I have done a fair amount of research into her. Fenn’s role within our group was largely as comic relief and as a love interest —”
“She was more than that,” I said.
“I’m talking about narrative purpose,” said Amaryllis. She seed slightly exasperated by my interjection, and I didn’t think that was a conversational tactic. “Her role was also to die and provide grief for Juniper to work through. She allowed him to grapple with loss in a similar way to how he grappled with the loss of you. Fenn being here fundantally wasn’t about you, it was about Juniper, which is why she doesn’t fit. And still, you’re trying to hamr her into your narrative.”
“But you’re admitting that you think the others do fit,” said Uther. “Raven, Grakhuil? Even Bethel?” He didn’t ntion the toad, which I was a little put out by. It seed like bad manners.
“I don’t know,” said Amaryllis. “It’s incredibly difficult to say, because we don’t know where the cara, so to speak, is pointing.”
“Cara?” asked Uther. “Such a strange term to hear. The hardest thing about Juniper suddenly appearing is hearing all of these ideas and terminology from Earth.”
“It’s a term from Aerb as well,” said Amaryllis. “We have movies and television, though more the latter than the forr. I run the television network and star in a few of them.”
“Ah, well,” said Uther. He seed like he wanted to ask more, and I wondered whether Amaryllis had been trying to bait him. “And in the end, you think that it will just be and Juniper?”
“Yes,” said Amaryllis. “But all the sa, I’ll hang on for as long as I can, and either I’ll die or be blown into the winds.”
“I don’t think I can stop myself from thinking of you as Dahlia,” said Uther. “Even if I have no intention of following that thread, it’s good to see her face. You share much of her sa fierceness.”
“You left your kids,” I said.
“They were all adults,” Uther replied. “No, the only note of regret is that my grandchildren are all long dead.” He looked at . “How many good years did my wife have left?”
“Four,” said Amaryllis, which I was thankful for, because I hadn’t paid as much attention to the exact dates.
“More than we expected,” said Uther with a nod. For a mont, I saw real regret from him. “But of course, I knew when I went forward in ti that I would be leaving them behind, just as I would be if I made it down the Long Stairs.” He paused in the middle of the room we were in. “We need to eat so of this?”
I looked at the food on the table. Everything there was completely desiccated, and the room was incredibly dry. Laying on the ground was another mber of so lost fireteam, and he was dried out too, a complete husk of a person.
“It’s RDP,” I said. “So yes, we need to eat a little bit. It’s never actually poisonous, or wasn’t in the gas I ran. Except one ti, I guess, when it killed the party. Also, Bethel identified so poison in an earlier buffet room.” I glanced at Uther. “The ‘kill everyone’ stuff was after your ti.”
“What happened here?” asked Amaryllis, looking down at the body on the floor. She stooped to get a better look at it. “The room should have been frozen in ti when he died, so that we would co across a fresh corpse, right?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Uther, picking up a leathery piece of pear and eating it.
“It might,” said Amaryllis, standing up. “You’re running out of magic. We’ll need to be more careful going forward.”
“He might still be alive,” I said, looking at the corpse. “Or he was able to live long enough for this place to dry out.” I looked around. “It’s not really clear to where the moisture would have gone through.”
“Lived long enough?” asked Amaryllis.
“Monkey’s paw immortality,” I said. “It’s one of the things on offer in the Long Stairs, if you’re willing to search for it. Immortality without health, basically. The high end stuff is pretty high end.”
“Ah,” said Amaryllis, looking at the corpse. “So you think that maybe he made it to this room, then lay face down and just continually died until the magic gave out?”
“He might still be alive, actually,” I said. “Or alive in so technical sense, capable of thinking but not movent, speech, or sensation. Just trapped in his own head for five hundred years.”
Uther stepped forward and stomped on the skull with enough force to send bits of bone flying. “Well, hopefully that will kill him,” he said. There was a solemnity to his voice that was incongruent with the sounds of crunched bone that still seed to echo in the room. He looked over at . “Always thinking up so new torture, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “But that’s not a particularly new one. I’m more wondering why everything is so dry here. There should have been a lot of water in both the food and the guy.”
“Magic of so kind,” said Uther. “We should be going, if we’ve done our due diligence.”
I picked up what looked like a dried plum and ate it without comnt. The requirent to partake of food, even just a little bit, probably did get people killed every once in a while. Amaryllis took sothing unidentifiable that seed crunchy, which was probably a better idea. The plum was too leathery. I fed the toad a tiny bit of apricot.
The Long Stairs were full of mysteries, even for . When I’d been designing the place, I’d wanted it to have a feeling like there was always another thing to look out for, another RDP or LSP or another of the acronyms that we mostly stopped using after the first few sessions. Since I hadn’t actually prepared a full list, the real Long Stairs had a lot of things that I had no clue about, and even the books we’d found, not that I’d had the ti to read all of them, didn’t give full, clear descriptions of things.
We went through a room with reversed gravity and had to crawl our way along the ceiling. We went through a room filled with nitrogen gas rather than normal air, and nearly died before we noticed. We fought a pile of clothes that tried to smother us, then right after that, a bear the size of a van that was immune to blades. We ca across a dance troupe, whose performance we had to sit through as part of RDP, then passed by a man selling wares which were piled high on his back. We went through a jungle that only lasted twenty feet, and a desert that turned out to be made entirely of sand golems.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringent.
We talked in fits and starts, when we weren’t discussing the matters at hand.
“What do you miss most about Earth?” I asked Uther.
“The internet,” he replied. “Or perhaps the subset of the internet that allowed us to instantly access information. It took a good decade to unlearn my understanding of knowledge as sothing that’s constantly at my fingertips. Even if much of what was on the internet was wrong or biased, the wealth of information ant that it was easy to interrogate sources.”
“You could have built the internet on Aerb,” said Amaryllis. “I have plans to, actually, if this doesn’t pan out. Making computers will be a good first step.”
“And perhaps in another few decades, you’ll have sothing like Earth has,” said Uther. “That’s not a roaring endorsent of Aerb.”
“You could skip your way through those years with the bobbler, if you really wanted to,” said Amaryllis. “Like I said, I have no strong feelings about your return to Aerb one way or another. I want Juniper to get from this what he needs to. I want the Dungeon Master to complete his narrative, and I can see clearly that this is where it cos to a finish. Whether that sees you on Earth or Aerb at the end of it, or even alive or dead, doesn’t matter to .”
“From what you’ve said, I’m your world-renowned ancestor,” he said. “I had, perhaps, hoped that if people thought of five hundred years down the line, it would be with a bit more respect.”
“People do,” said Amaryllis. “I don’t. With all the enormous advantages in your favor, most people would have done worse, but that doesn’t absolve you of your failures. I’m sure you would see my giving a history lesson as an enticent of the Dungeon Master’s, and I don’t think it would accomplish anything anyway, but so very bad things were the result of your reign in ways that I think, as a scholar of Earth, you could have anticipated.”
“A scholar of Earth?” asked Uther. “I was a teenager when I was put here. I was smarter than average, with more interest in history, society, law, and governance than almost anyone my age, or at least in my high school, but I was still a teenager. I hadn’t even finished high school, let alone undergrad. It’s that life I was robbed of to play these extended gas on Aerb.”
I didn’t pipe up to say that actually, he had died. From his perspective, that wasn’t true, and all it might have done was to clarify where I was coming from, at least emotionally. Arthur dying was, I thought, probably close to the truth, even if it might not have been literally true. Aerb was a resurrection, but he was right, it was a resurrection that he had never asked for, and one that ca with strings attached. If he wanted to escape it, I didn’t bla him.
There was a fair amount of silence as we made our way through the rooms, and I had a chance to get my thoughts in order. Eventually, when we were taking a rest and eating fairies to recover from so fresh wounds inflicted by opposite-wolves (like wolves, but the opposite), I went over to Uther.
“When you died, I mourned you,” I said. “You were such a constant presence in my life, my best friend, and it was like soone had yanked you out of reality and pulled a bunch of wires out of my head in the process. I felt numb to the world, like this was the betrayal that I had always seen coming, and nothing much worse could happen. I was a shit to everyone, above and beyond all the ways I was a shit to everyone even before it had happened. I was lashing out. It wasn’t very healthy. I pushed people away, which made everything worse. I dated Maddie for like, a week, and then I hit rock bottom and tried to kill myself. Not too long afterward, I was on Aerb.”
Uther stared at for a mont. “I’m sorry you went through that,” he finally said.
“Maybe I kept to myself too much when we were friends,” I said. “Look, if your grand ambition is to return to Earth, to return to the sumr after your junior year, then maybe there’s a chance you get what you want. If I’m there, I’m hoping that knowing more about helps you in so way, if you’re allowed to rember any of this.”
He was silent for a mont, then nodded. “Going back to high school with no mories of Aerb is one of the worst possibilities,” he said. “But it’s one that I am prepared to accept. If the governnt organization up top is the sa as what you designed, they’ll have powerful amnestics. And of course, aging backward is sothing that I’m prepared for as well.”
“Prepared for how?” I asked, watching him.
“This,” he said, holding out a hand to allow a vial to appear from nowhere and land in his outstretched fingers. “I should have taken it out before, but I’ve been worried about how much power I’ll lose in the process.” He looked up at . “I may need your protection during the ascent.”
“You’ll have it,” I said. I wondered if that was why he’d allowed to co this far with him, but there were probably multiple reasons.
“Then I suppose, if the vial still works, there’s no use in waiting.” He popped the cork from the top, and it fizzed up like a can of soda. Before I could say anything more, he downed it, all in one go.
“What, uh, what was that?” I asked.
“Age reversing serum,” he said. “It won’t be exact, but it will be close enough. I couldn’t bring myself to do a full course of testing, so it’s only approximate, but it should bring back to how I looked at sixteen, if it works at all. And if it doesn’t, so be it.”
“You’ll still die young,” I said, watching him. “I an, relatively young. If this all works and you go back to Earth, and they sohow put you back into high school, with all the problems that would have to be solved to make that happen — if that all happens, it seems like your fate is going to be to die of early-onset dentia.”
Uther was looking at his hands, and not particularly paying attention to . “There are three varieties of death by old age, speaking broadly,” he said. “Physical health, ntal health, and the health of the soul. They’re related to one another, but I solved all three. If those solutions hold, I’ll be fine, and if not,” he shrugged. “It’s not what I’m most worried about, obviously.”
“Seems like a dick move not to share that with anyone,” I said.
“There were many problems,” said Uther. He was still looking at his hand, which hadn’t changed. “The biggest was that I was the only one with the expertise, and it would take perhaps two months with unfettered access to soone’s soul. I could have started up a new athenaeum, and perhaps with a team of thirty, it could be done for — well, currency is bound to have changed in five hundred years, but it would suffice to say that it would be a treatnt only for the extrely wealthy.”
“But you could have,” I said.
“I was never terribly comfortable as king,” said Uther. “And kings that would live forever would — ah, there it goes.”
The changes were more extensive than I’d been expecting. He was shrinking, both in terms of his height and muscle. His face was getting softer too, especially in the cheeks and eyes. His face hadn’t been very deeply lined, but what wrinkles were there had faded away. I was wondering how and why this was working, especially given that you didn’t just get as tall as Uther because you naturally grew that way, not if you started from where Arthur was at sixteen.
“This is going to make sword-fighting more difficult,” he said. He called forward his sword and got into a fighting stance, making a few tentative swings. He’d used several different swords as we swept through the rooms. This one left a trail of lightning twisting fractal thorns into the air. He looked at . “Care to spar? Just to see how much skill I’ve retained.”
It was bizarre. He didn’t look like he had in high school, because he wasn’t as pudgy as he’d been then, but it was close. It was like Arthur playing dress up.
“That bad?” he asked.
“Different,” I said.
“Bad,” said Amaryllis, who had been sitting out the conversation. “You look like … limp.”
“Harsh words, but probably fair,” said Arthur. “Still, I wouldn’t mind a test of my abilities.”
I hesitated for a mont, then drew my regular sword, leaving the vorpal blade in its sheath. “Okay,” I said. “What are the rules?”
“I try to hit you, you try to parry,” he replied. “Or you try to hit , and I try to parry. If the blade goes in, we have healing to spare.”
“Alright,” I said.
For a mont he just stood there, and I wondered whether he’d lost his edge completely, but then he moved, and the tip of his blade was like a viper moving straight to my throat. The only reason he didn’t get was that he stopped short. He’d bypassed my sword completely, and my reflexes, which were like molasses compared to his, led to try parrying it away long after I would have been dead. The clink of my sword against his sounded pathetic.
“Is that really the best you can do?” asked Arthur. He was the sa person he’d been a few minutes ago, only changed physically, but my brain refused to believe that it wasn’t my high school friend, that he hadn’t sohow undone forty years of change. Body modification wasn’t new to , but the image of Arthur as a teenager was too powerfully etched in my mind.
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “I got good with a sword, but I was only ever the best swordsman in the world for a single afternoon, and I can’t do that again, because Essentialism is excluded now.”
Arthur sighed. “Well, I’m diminished, but not as much as I might have feared.” He sheathed his sword. “But I may need more help than I’ve needed up to this point.”
“Good, then let’s get going,” said Amaryllis.
We soldiered on through the rooms, none of them particularly noteworthy. We fought monsters, faced down dilemmas, and followed RDP as best we could. We got a few repeat rooms from ti to ti, or at least rooms that looked like repeats, but that didn’t necessarily an anything, and I didn’t think the crystals were steering us wrong. The repeated rooms were part of the creepiness of the Long Stairs, especially if you got them when you were going in what you thought was the right ‘direction’.
We were going through a room filled with statues when Arthur decided to speak up again. I didn’t particularly think it was the ti for it. The statues seed like they were guaranteed to co to life, and there were thousands of them, each its own unique work of art, all lined up on plinths. Normally if you had a bunch of statues like this, they’d be copies, churned out by either a factory or journeyn or molds or sothing, but I couldn’t see any repeats among them. Each looked like it had been done by a master at the height of his abilities. The room was huge, one of the aircraft-hangar ones.
Statues coming to life was one of those tropes that could bend back around on itself. It was cliche, incredibly so, but because it was so cliche, it added an extra sense of foreboding and creepiness to proceedings. You weren’t worried that they would co to life, you were worried about when, and that sense of inevitability turned sothing cliche into sothing still worth doing.
“I understand that it took ti and effort to get to ,” said Arthur as we walked. “Yet the actual pressures you face aren’t so great. Aerb is not within its final minutes. So why now?”
“We were in cycles of stories,” I said. “They were inflicting harm on people and getting bigger in scope as ti went on. Every single ti, it felt like we were coming through by the skin of our teeth. The ti pressure was low, but we thought we needed to get a move on. And now that rune magic is excluded, there are no spikes, which ans that everyone is funneling into the hells.”
“I see,” replied Arthur. “You’re thinking that I will help draw this to a close sohow. You think that if you accomplish your mission, there won’t be one more thing to worry about.” He shook his head.
“That’s the hope,” I said. “That’s … kind of what the Dungeon Master said.”
“Did you revel in it?” he asked. “Playing the hero?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess. Nothing I did was really … I an, there was a huge kaiju, I guess, but other than that, nothing really heroic.”
“In all that ti?” he asked. “I might have understood it better if you had been hiding from the world, like I was, but you ca to with a full complent of companions, and it sounded like you were very busy. But you weren’t busy being a hero?”
“He saved my life on several occasions,” said Amaryllis.
“Mmm,” said Arthur. “One thing I’ll say for my daughter, she was never a damsel in distress.” The voice and tone didn’t match him all that well, given that he looked like he was a teenager on his way to so esoteric Renaissance Festival. “Oh, I don’t put that on you, of course, it’s all the narrative. I rescued plenty of strong won in my ti.”
“Gross,” I said.
“Which part?” he asked. “Did you think it better to rescue weak won?”
But I didn’t get a chance to reply, because the stupid statues we’d been walking through had chosen that mont to co to life, and we had a pitched battle with them. They were weirdly slow, moving half the speed of a person, or maybe even less, but they made up for that by being quite heavy and difficult to break. I didn’t spend too much ti fighting them, instead opting to slip between them, push off against a leg that was trying to kick , and get up over their heads. My plan had been to jump across their heads and hope that they weren’t fast enough to grab , but the plan had a problem, which was that Arthur was in front of , and he was killing so many of them my choice was between getting back down and taking the long way around.
I looked back toward where Amaryllis had been, and couldn’t see her. I went to where she’d been standing, jumping on heads to do it, and drawing the vorpal blade as I made my way over. I dropped down among the statues, slashing at them, and realizing only after the first few swings that the vorpal blade was cutting through them like they were made out of paper.
I spotted the black glove beneath a broken arm, and picked it up with my free hand while the other was fending off any statue that got too close to . Once I had the glove, I cut my way through more of the statues, moving back toward Arthur.
“This will take so stamina!” he shouted to , the only way he could be heard over the sound of marble falling to the ground.
He was right, but this was the first ti his stamina was in question. We had gone fairly far into the field of statues, but there was still a long way to go, and they were all around us, closing fast. They didn’t take all that much to kill, but there were thousands of them, and there wasn’t really a way to be leisurely about it, even with their slow movents, because we were entirely surrounded.
Arthur was still a master with a sword, even having been diminished to a teenaged version of himself, but after not too long, it was clear that he wasn’t up for fighting off a thousand of these things. By the ti Amaryllis popped back out, gasping for breath, Arthur had slowed down, and our forward progress was almost entirely down to slicing through marble with the vorpal blade. I was becoming more and more grateful for the weapon. At a certain point, I took the lead and Arthur covered the rear and sides. His swings were getting wilder with every passing minute, and I could tell he was gassed.
It took twenty minutes to get to the door, and by the ti we did, I was half-dragging Arthur while Amaryllis did her best to cover our retreat. The vorpal blade continued to slice as cleanly and sharply as when we started, though I hadn’t really expected it to dull. Without it, I was fairly certain that we would have died.
I pushed through the door as quickly as I could and pulled Arthur through, then slamd it shut as soon as Amaryllis had slipped in. Monsters could follow through doors, and if the statues did that, I wasn’t sure what we would do about it. You could eventually outrun things, and they were pretty slow, but that ant barrelling through a lot of rooms without the caution and diligence that the Long Stairs normally required. I waited by the closed door to see whether they would co through, but there was nothing, not even any banging against the door. Out of sight, out of mind, I supposed.
The new room had a fountain in the center, lit from above. Inside the fountain was a small world of moss, leaves, and flowers, with a few fish swimming around in the clear water. The toad hopped off my shoulder and onto the ground, then hopped his way over and splashed into the fountain. He was unscathed by the battle with the statues, and had held on through the whole thing like he was glued in place.
Arthur lowered his helm, causing the black beads of his armor to lt down into the cuirass of the armor. He was breathing heavily, red in the face, and dripping with sweat, which matted down his hair.
“Fuck,” he said. “It’s been a long, long ti since anyone has needed to save .” He lifted up his hand, which was trembling. “This body is worse than I’d thought it would be.”
“Having second thoughts?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. He looked down at my hand. “You didn’t use the ring.”
I looked down at my hand. I hadn’t used Bethel, because I didn’t really think of Bethel as sothing to be used. She should have acted on her own, but it was worrying that she hadn’t.
I asked.
she replied. There was sothing flat about her voice.
I asked.
she replied.
I said.
she replied.
I asked.
she replied.
“Shit,” I said. “She’s lost a lot. Capable of speech, but cognition is iffy. I’ll figure out what her abilities are, but I’m not sure she’s so much of a person anymore.” I didn’t know how I was going to figure out her abilities, given that most of them had probably failed.
Arthur rested his head against the wall and sat there allowing his breathing to go back to normal. “What were we talking about?” he asked.
“Rescuing won,” I said.
“No,” replied Amaryllis. “Playing the hero.”
“And you were saying you weren’t a hero,” said Arthur, nodding weakly.
“I didn’t get to play the hero all that much,” I said. “The narrative stuff that was put in front of us, there wasn’t very much saving people from imminent and unambiguous threats. So of it was people wanting to kill us, but a lot of it was harder to say one way or another. I could see where the enemy was coming from. I an, there was an elent of empathy, most of the ti, if not at the mont, then afterward.” I paused. “There was this guy I killed in a trial by combat, and it felt good, but then afterward, his niece ca to with tears in her eyes, and … from what Raven said, that wasn’t normally the kind of fallout and forced introspection you needed to deal with.”
“She was right,” said Arthur, nodding briefly before resting his head back on the wall again. “Oh, there would be weeping spouses, certainly, sotis sons and daughters, but they were always antagonists themselves, completely irredeemable and able to be killed without much moral consideration.”
“Yeah,” I said. I wondered how much that was true, and how much Arthur was telling himself stories. “We … didn’t really have that so much. Oh man, there was this guy who made zombies, and —”
“Don’t say the z-word,” said Arthur. I looked at him for a mont, but he just gave a weak smile. “The trope?”
“Yeah, except they really don’t like you saying the z-word on Aerb,” I said. “Wait, did you never call them zombies? Or never run into any undead?” Blue-in-the-Bottle postdated Uther, but there were loads of things you could call necromancy on Aerb.
“Oh, we ca across perhaps two dozen varieties,” said Arthur. “So of them on the disjoint planes. I called them ‘walkers’, or ‘shamblers’, or ‘the infected’, until eventually I was running out of distinct nas.” He let out a breath, then placed his palms on the floor. “Alright, I think I have my breath back. Gather up your toad and let’s go.”
He didn’t look like he’d gotten his breath back. “Before that, do you mind if I talk to Amaryllis in private for a bit?”
“No, not at all,” he replied. He pulled a drink from extradinsional space and began chugging it, then got out two marzipan fairies he’d stored in his pocket.
I took Amaryllis to the side and spoke to her in a low voice. “How much longer do you think we can carry on?”
“We almost died there,” said Amaryllis. “I went into the glove because one of them was squeezing hard enough I thought he would break my ankle. But this is the end ga. There’s a good chance that I’ll die if I don’t bow out. And we can’t rule out that this ends with all of us dying.”
“But you don’t think it will?” I asked. “Because narrative?”
“Because I think you’re strong enough, Juniper,” she replied. “From a narrative perspective, I think your death would work. If you died, it would be a tragedy, a man unable to let go after the loss of his best friend. But I think you’ll make it through.”
“Ah,” I said. I wasn’t sure I liked that reading. I still kind of thought the narrative was useless. “We still have one Landing left, and it’s going to get harder. I’m hoping we co across so army dudes that haven’t been looted, because I don’t know how much longer any of the good stuff is going to last. We’re already hobbled. I want to push on, but I don’t have any faith in narrative, and after that room … it’s looking dicey.”
“Everything is being stripped away,” said Amaryllis. “That’s the nature of going up the Long Stairs, for us.”
I nodded. I didn’t think that talk had actually helped much, but I was glad we’d had it.
“Ready?” asked Arthur.
“Sure,” I said. The next door we needed to go through had a giant red X on it, which seed a bit ominous, but wasn’t a part of RDP. The rooms weren’t uniformly getting harder, but we were losing our advantages, and all it took was a difficult room for us to be splattered against the ground like so much bird shit.
“Were you leaving the toad here?” asked Arthur.
I looked back at the fountain. “Oh,” I said. “Right.” I went back to the fountain and picked up the toad. He seed like he wanted to stay, and struggled in my hands for a bit, but once I went back over to the door, he stayed still in my hands, and reluctantly took his position on the shoulder.
We headed off down the Long Stairs, heading to the next Landing.
Reviews
All reviews (0)