114 – Cursed Crossroad
Crossing the chamber’s threshold brought Zelsys through a bizarrely winding hallway with multiple full loops and downward stairways, then to an intermediate chamber about four meters wide and twice as long.
The door at the other side wouldn’t open at her rather brisk approach, its glyphs lighting up only halfway. In the short while she spent standing there waiting in the hopes it would open, she noticed the glyphs filling each time she heard the dungeon’s mechanisms rumbling.
After a solid ten seconds of waiting, she grew frustrated and decided to examine the rest of the chamber. Besides its pristine surfaces and fully functioning lightgems, the sole centerpiece was a familiar glyph plastered on one wall, underneath which was a small alcove in the wall. The alcove itself only held a bar with ergonomic grooves.
Unlike the door, the wall glyph lit up like the night sky the moment she stepped foot within arm’s reach of it, without any procedural increase in brightness. At this proximity, it became obvious why the glyph was familiar - it closely resembled the projection glyphs on her Tablet, at least in general construction. It flickered blue for a moment, then turned red and displayed a message in the same colour.
You’ve callously butchered enough of my children.
Enjoy starving to death in this chamber, homunculus.
Raising an eyebrow, Zelsys reached in and took hold of the handle under the assumption it would let her exert her will over the glyph, as she did with her Tablet. Warm buzzing crawled up her arm, and the message flickered. A spark of will, a command to the arcane device.
Warm buzzing became pins and needles.
“Open the door,” she commanded in her inner monologue. Pins and needles became piercing pain, now as if thousands of needles pierced the skin that touched the handle every second. Zelsys fought it off with a breath of fog and a snarling grin, staring into the projection as she gathered every bit of mental fortitude she could muster.
There was a presence behind the red text, a presence other than the one that instructed her in the first chamber. Her deathgrip on the handle turned her knuckles stark white and made the joints of her fingers pop as sensation vanished from her forearm, a thumping numbness overtaking continuous pain.
Red words became red static as the glyph began to flicker in hypnotic patterns. The chamber’s lightgems went out one by one, until only the glyph’s blood-coloured strobing illuminated the chamber.
“So be it. Enter the chamber ahead and face your doom,” echoed a many-layered voice in Zel’s head, a stomach-turning image flashing in her mind’s eye at the same time. A Pateirian woman’s head, her lower jaw split and her face stretched to a sickening degree, deep red stretch marks covering her cheeks and forehead. It was the Red Mantis’s polar opposite - both were equally transformed, yet where one maintained a bizarre beauty throughout the transformation, the other only became more hideous. Perhaps it was merely the luck of the draw, or the person’s mental state influenced the process - she didn’t know, and didn’t care.
She would kill them both.
When the voice and image both faded, the glyph on the wall flickered out only to return in bright blue, the lightgems slowly coming back on as the projection took form. A staccato of messages, flickering in then changing the moment Zelsys had read them.
The Parasite was not meant to have influence here.
Her hatred for you granted her the resolve to reach this far from the core chamber.
She will render her children more aggressive, more dangerous.
I can compensate, but a sacrifice is required.
You possess a wendigo’s Azoth stone.
It will be a suitable sacrifice.
A hole opened at the bottom of the alcove and Zel felt a mental pulse from the handle, beseeching her to let go. After stretching her wrist and doing a few hand exercises to make sure she hadn’t completely lost sensation in her forearm, she reached behind her back and retrieved her Tablet. Its familiar warmth spread through her palm as it came alive, as reliable as ever. With a few swipes and taps, she reached the item in question and retrieved it from the vortex.
This small, bulbous gem, born from the self-destruction of a desperate human life. Who knew how many the man-eater had murdered, how many souls had been snuffed out to forge this thing. It was only right to let the dead live on as another facet of her strength.
Zelsys dropped the stone into the hole, watching it disappear before the hole shut without a seam. The glyph came alive again, ominous clacking and thumping resounding from beyond the wall.
A message, one that hung there until she complied.
Grab the handle.
A pang of hesitation, suffocated by her trust of the machine’s inherently truthful nature. The dungeon didn’t lie. It told her it would try to kill her, and it had.
It told her the Lightning Butcher would wait for her in the chamber ahead, and she trusted that claim too. She took hold of the handle, gripped it tight, felt a thrumming sensation spreading through her arm. Thrumming became numbness, all feeling fading.
The wendigo is a beast of vengeance,
an ancient guerilla sicced on invaders.
I will refine this unholy might, make it pure.
From the black stone emerged a hypodermic needle of the very same material, tremendously thick and with a point finer than any blade. Zelsys watched it sink into her forearm, its angle shifting ever so subtly as it found a vein.
Her hand went cold, the device draining who knew how much blood before a second tube came out, just above the needle, stopping above the point where needle pierced skin. Out came a small glob of black substance with the consistency of molten asphalt, after which both tools slowly retreated back into the wall.
The projection changed one last time as sensation returned to her arm, a wrenching ache thumping through it. The goo quickly solidified into a rubbery consistency, sticking to her skin.
Two more flashed messages.
I know not how long it will take,
to make a boon of this.
I can only promise it will be ready,
before you reach the core chamber.