Chapter Five Hundred and One - For Want of a Thousand Nails

Chapter Five Hundred and One - For Want of a Thousand Nails

Chapter Five Hundred and One - For Want of a Thousand Nails

I was expecting my new... not-a-friend-yet to lead me to my friends. I didn't expect it to take as long as it did.

Orange's light lit up more of the tunnels as we dove deeper in. Stairs led us down, down far more than a single floor, thin, narrow steps, the middle of which were ground down by time and constant steps.

I followed the shadow of the figure ahead of me until we came to a small landing. There was an open door here, thick wooden boards held together by cold iron straps as wide as my handspan. Strangely, the door was free of both rust and rot, unlike almost everything else I'd seen in the mine.

"Here," he said simply as he passed the door.

I paused, looking for a moment at the space in the wall where the door's latch would be. It was carved out and destroyed.

"Is this where my friends are?" I asked as I followed.

"In a way," he said.

"What way?" I asked.

Instead of answering, the figure disappeared. I felt a chill from behind me and spun around. He was by the door now, and I saw its shadow shift as the door slammed closed. "This is why I'm trapped here. Why I became trapped," he said.

"This room?" I asked. If this is where he was trapped, why did he lead me here? I didn't think he would agree to help me, then take me on a wild goose chase. He didn't seem interested in roundabout plots like that.

"Behind you," he said.

I didn't want to turn around. I felt an instinct to keep an eye on him, but he was so much stronger than me that turning my back on him wasn't going make my position any worse.

I turned.

There was something in the centre of the room. Something still shrouded by the dark until I took a step closer to it. Then I recognized it.

Or, I recognized similar things because I'd seen more than half a dozen by then. A large, perfect sphere on a plinth. The pillar holding it up was covered in thin, careful carvings, each one precise and meaningless to me, but they thrummed with magic, and the ball... the dungeon core, was the same. I could feel the hairs on my arm and the back of my neck rise as I looked at it.

"A dungeon core," I said.

"I think I first came here to destroy it," he said. "To scramble a bit farther up the ladder of power."

"You didn't," I said.

"It enticed me instead. The secret of a tiny, forgotten nation's power. Hidden out of the way, in a mine that no one cared for, a temple hidden from the World itself."

I felt him come closer behind me, Orange's light dimmed.

"Touch it," he ordered.

I swallowed. I was very worried that the order was absolute. There wouldn't be any refusing it. Not easily. So I shuffled Orange in my grip a little, then carefully reached a hand out towards the dungeon core. It didn't feel as alive, as powerful, as a real core. Or maybe it was less that the core was unreal, and more that it was inactive?

My fingertips brushed the core.

It was like I'd shuffled over some shag carpet with socks on, then touched a metal doorknob -- a jolt shot up my arm, up my spine, up through my head until my ears tingled all the way to their tips--

...

...

I saw ... what I saw next ...

It's hard to explain. I'm not even sure it was real.

It happened suddenly. A surprise attack by a Living Diamond Sandstorm on the route that I only barely survived.

But I could help, I could bring them back. Bodies were like puppets, weren't they? So I raised them up, and we kept on going, kept adventuring and being the very best of best friends who never argued unless it was in jest.

I spent more and more time fixing my friends and replacing parts until I needed a small carriage to travel with. When war broke out in the east, I was somehow there.

There were so many parts for my friends on a battlefield...

...

I get lost in the Darkwoods and meet Laine early, becoming a Darkbun Witch and learning old magics.

...

Bastion and I succeed in capturing Rainnewt at the Harpy Ball, putting an end to his badness early.

...

I foiled Rainnewt early, by accident, and so he confronts me early, and we become friends, of a sort. I join him, acting as a restraint on his ambitions and pushing him to be better even as he encourages me to be worse.

...

We never pick up the Beaver Cleaver. Instead, we grab a brand new Albatros Cruiser. A massive warship that marks us as a threat wherever we go. Soon, I'm not a captain, but an admiral.

...

Awen fails to defuse the bomb in Sylphfree. I almost die. The king does. Caprica takes the throne, and in her anger at losing her father, at losing Bastion, she declares war on everyone. The first world war Dirt has ever seen begins, and I take too long healing to stop it.

...

I tell the grenoil party about the Wonderlander dungeon, and how I broke its core. They drag me back to be executed in Port Royal.

...

Bonesy lives... for a certain definition of lives, and my magic combines Cleaning and Necromancy into something holy and not. I make friends with a thousand ghosts, uncovering their pasts and settling their angry souls until they congregate around me as a band of ghostly mercenaries.

...

After talking to Rhawrexdee's mom, I somehow convince Cholondee to join our party. Having a dragon in our group changes the dynamic a whole lot, but it's fun all the same!

...

Another...

Then another, then another.

I gasped as I stumbled back and away from the orb. "No!" I said before shaking my head. There were tears in my eyes, and I only realized then how much my head was splitting.

"Incredible," the old man whispered. Now that I'd seen him, sorta, I could better fit what I was seeing in the shadows to reality. "A thousand possibilities, and yet you so often remain impossibly naive and pure."

"What, what was that?" I asked.

"A test. One that I and so many others failed," he said. "Sit. I will explain."

***