Chapter 26

Chapter 26

Riven hadn’t realized it until just then, but the words coming out of his mouth were not in the English language. He was speaking...something else...and it was downright natural. It was as if he’d known this language his entire life. Confused, and not understanding how or when this particular bunch of knowledge had transplanted itself, he added it to the list of system tomfuckery that’d been going on over the past little while.

With a creak, Riven turned the doorknob and pushed. A dust cloud came up off the ground a few feet into the air as the door came open, and in front of him, a long dark hallway led to a staircase going down.

Not creepy at all. Nope. Nothing about this wonderful joyride had been creepy in the slightest, and this dark, ancient hallway definitely didn’t fit that bill, either.

He walked in silence, only pausing to inspect the immediate surroundings of his hallway. All of this...it was downright fascinating to him. Sure, he might be stuck in hell, but he’d been an atheist all his life. Exploring and sightseeing might not be such a bad idea while he was here, and this ruin seemed as good a place as any to start. There were occasional scratch marks carved into the walls to form crude demonic hieroglyphs. Little skulls of oddly shaped rodents were scattered along one side of the hallway where an alcove into the hallway had been built—or what he assumed to have once been rodents. An ancient halberd rusted with age that’d been snapped in half during a battle millennia past was placed directly in his path along the dust-covered floor—and those were only some of the things in the increasingly clutter-filled hallway. Decayed books, overturned tables, and a charred human skull were added to the list—but nothing of true value other than the ability to stimulate his curiosity was found. Soon he came to the end of the dark, dry, and nearly lightless hallway to peer down the set of stone stairs. At the bottom, about thirty steps down, was yet another hallway that was already partially illuminated from here—this one a lot less cluttered than the one he’d just left.

His boots stepped softly against the ancient stone steps, and he found himself on another path with glass windows that branched out into three different directions straight ahead at a crossing point. The thick glass windows were mostly smudged with layers of dirt and grime, but still high enough above the ground to give him a real view of what he was looking at despite the clouds and occasional layers of mist.

It was not what he’d been expecting when he’d been placed in a dungeon.

The sun above him wasn’t a sun at all, but rather it was a deep red, unblinking, lidless eye wreathed in flame. Above him an abyss of crimson sky spread out from horizon to horizon, with lightning intermittently flashing in the distance many leagues away and giant flying monsters farther off encircling the skyscrapers of an ancient stone city.

He was standing on an enclosed catwalk hundreds of feet above the ground. Far below him, down on the broken cobblestone streets below, were piles of rubble and wreckage from another age. Broken wooden carts covered in mold, crows overhead, scattered skeletons and bones, and pieces of collapsed stone walls were everywhere. There were alien or goth-styled structures such as citadels and temples with high steeples, and far expanses of wreckage in between were in abundance. All about him were the other towering stone skyscrapers opposite his own—some with caved-in rooftops. The red mists and scattered clouds of black smog stretched skyward in various patches. And as he stood there watching, gawking even, the light of the flaming eye was soon overshadowed by one of many slow-moving smog clouds.

More worrying were the lumps of barely recognizable old corpses that’d been strung up and hung in various areas from the rooftops or undersides of buildings. The bodies were of many species that included humans, and they’d been completely skinned. They’d also been eviscerated, leaving their intestines to hang out of their bodies in a gruesome display of malevolence. There were random bouts of flame that cycloned through the air from time to time out of small holes in the ground, but they were far and few between while alien bellows echoed out across the tainted landscape. There was even a large, bloody pentagram drawn on a distant temple front.

Occasionally movement could also be seen in the streets or between buildings, but he couldn’t get a good look at whatever it was that was living down there...and Riven got the eerie feeling that he was being watched.

“Well, fuck me sideways.”

He turned right, looking down the new hallway where it came to a catwalk’s crossroad while giving his staff a tighter grip. Hesitantly walking over and stopping at the intersection, he saw paths continuing out in all three directions...each one disappearing into darkness where they connected with other towering skyscrapers.

But he didn’t see any giant statue of a bearded, axe-wielding man when looking out the windows... So, without further internal debate, he kept on going straight ahead and hoped that he’d chosen well.

What the hell had happened here? To have so many bodies scattered about like this...it must have either been some kind of massacre or some sort of very abnormal and deadly event that he couldn’t quite comprehend. The thing was, most of the bodies had their skeletons intact without any signs of sharp or blunt trauma...sometimes even with their clothes 100 percent intact—and that really weirded him out. Whoever these people had been, it was as if they’d all just simultaneously dropped dead...

To boot, he was absolutely lost.

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“AAAHHHHH! SHIT!” Riven nearly had a heart attack when the high-pitched, feminine voice of an old woman screeched out at him from a little nook in the wall where pieces of brick were missing. There, in the dim light of the crevice, stepped out a familiar figure.

Neon-teal mana rippled along her decaying skin in random intervals. Black ichor leaked out of a goofy smile that was missing most of her teeth. Bandages old and yellowed with time lay wrapped across her body at odd intervals, and matted gray hair came down over the taut gray skin covering her face. However, the finger he’d broken off one of her hands was now replaced again, and the bodily harm he’d done by killing her earlier was nowhere to be seen.

“You again?!” Riven said with a dumbfounded, gawking stare. “And you can talk?!”

“Of course I talk! I sell you goods, yes?!” The zombified woman from whom Riven had originally taken the ring he now wore was standing...no, hovering before him. She drifted slightly off the stone floor with minimal effort, and upon inspecting her more closely, he saw the body she now occupied was very slightly transparent.

Riven blinked twice and took a step back, cocking his head to the side and scratching his head. “Didn’t I kill you once?”

“Yes, death is bad for business. But for you I make special offer, special price!” The zombified ghost’s toothy grin only grew wider, and the ichor leaking out of her mouth dripped onto the floor, only to disappear completely without making contact.

How odd. Nevertheless, going on what he knew, he could assume that it didn’t matter where he went—she’d probably be able to find him.

Shaking his head and stepping over another set of skeletons while praying to God that these things weren’t undead like the haunted zombie he’d come across earlier, he came around and into a large ballroom.

He could tell that it was once a ballroom at first glance just by the look of it. A huge chandelier many times his size lay crashed in the center of the room with pieces of glass scattered across the floor. Broken tables and chairs were littered about the outskirts of the enclosed area, and dim rays of light filtered in through the roof where patches were missing due to what he’d assume was water damage from the mists...though he wouldn’t expect it to rain here anytime soon, given what the outside world looked like.

Glancing up, he noted another human body hanging from a ceiling strut. It was completely still, with a long chain looped around its neck, and unlike the bodies outside, this one was decayed with one leg missing and a small swarm of flies whirling about it.

What in the literal hell were flies doing in a place like this? Then again, he’d seen crows, too. And...flying ghost ladies he’d murdered trying to sell him goods. Hadn’t been expecting that last one, either.

He turned his head right, and then left, seeing another hallway leading out of the ballroom on the opposite end...but also noting a single, closed wooden door to his left. The difference with this one when compared to the others he’d passed, and the thing that caught his attention most, was the gleaming, intact lock along the front.

That kind of thing hadn’t been present on any of the other doors he’d come across thus far, not a single one, and a small smile turned up at the corners of his lips. If that didn’t scream loot, he didn’t know what did.

He nimbly stepped through the haphazard sprawl of shattered glass and debris, passing by the chandelier and moving hastily across the room until he stood at the door. He gingerly took the handle in his grip and then pulled down. It didn’t budge; the lock was definitely still intact. He got down on one knee for a better look; he couldn’t see worth a damn due to the crappy lighting...

He looked about. There was a ray of light nearby, and with a bit of quick thinking he scrambled over to obtain a piece of glass that lay on the floor—one of many pieces of the broken chandelier not far off. Coming back to the door and using the glass to reflect some of the ray’s light into the lock, he began to get an idea of what he was working with.

It wasn’t like the one he’d picked back in the pyramid; this one was more familiar. Back on Earth, he’d had a minor amount of experience picking locks as a hobby...so he was happy to see that this particular lock was just what he expected it to be—and pretty simple upon inspection.

It was just a knob lock—meaning the cylinder for the lock was located in the handle itself. He could go about picking it, and that would have been his choice in any normal situation to avoid any noise, but here...

Here he could simply knock the damn thing off with something heavy.

That, and he didn’t have any lockpicks anyways. Finding or creating a makeshift lockpick would be a real pain in the ass, comparatively. If all else failed, he could try to blast the door off with magic, but it looked rather sturdy, and he wasn’t too confident in that plan.

It only took him a second to find a suitable item to work with. It was a heavy iron bar, thick and short, that had likely once been part of the ceiling’s support structure before falling to the floor below.

Riven smiled at the small victory, then walked back over to the door. Dropping his staff and raising the bar overhead, he quickly brought it down to slam into the handle.

The knob completely broke off on the first strike, tearing out a chunk of the rotting wood and making a loud ringing sound that hurt his ears. He grimaced but dropped the bar and removed what was left of the doorknob from the door. Then, pushing it open, he came into another, smaller and comparatively well-lit rectangular room.

He walked inside.

There was a large, intact window overlooking a river of shimmering red liquid running through the middle of the ancient, ruined city below that stretched out for miles, but he still couldn’t see out into the beyond for too long before the obscuring film of mist shrouded his vision on and off.

Was that a river of blood?

Wow.

Anyways, it was an awe-inspiring sight, even if it was slightly disgusting. Therefore he took a moment to admire the view despite the spooky factor before looking around the room again.

There was a bed on thick wooden stilts, a nightstand about two feet across, an oddly shaped lantern with a bell curve to it, and a boxy chest. It was all in fairly good condition considering what the rest of this place looked like, but still looked rather old. The bed had a wrinkled velvet blanket atop a well-made mattress, and two slightly moth-eaten pillows were laid neatly at the headboard. The nightstand was redwood, just like the bed, and had two books sitting atop its surface next to the metal lantern. Then there was the chest, a container that could have likely fit him inside and made of planks that had a simple clasp to seal it shut.

“Not too shabby.”