Chapter 290: Magical Reconnaissance

Alex sat on the edge of the hill, chewing his bottom lip while his mind chewed over the Chosen of Uldar. Before too long, Cedric would be heading down into the depths of a Ravener dungeon with him and the rest of his team.

But first, the Wizard’s Eyes would have to explore the underground, inspecting every nook and cranny concealed in the darkness.

Meanwhile, Alex’s team waited tensely, sitting around him in silence, mentally preparing for what was to come. Other teams paced and readied themselves, while the more experienced wizards prepared to cast Wizard’s Eyes.

He looked up at his golem standing there: solid, loyal and silent. Would he be alright down there? He was the first construct with a golem core made from the remains of a dungeon core, as far as Alex knew. The black substance was what was used to make the Heroes’ equipment for generations now, and there’d never been any talk of their equipment going rogue when it came in proximity to an active dungeon. ‘Even Cedric’s, Drestra’s and Hart’s weapons weren’t acting like they had minds of their own.’ Alex thought, carefully assessing each Hero.

But maybe blades were different from golems.

After all, swords couldn’t go berserk.

…at least not normally.

When he was building Claygon, Jules and Baelin had talked about a couple of strange cases where weapons became sentient then went absolutely berserk. What were their names again? Storm edge? Soulbringer?

Something like that.

But what had happened with those swords was different from his situation since they hadn’t had anything to do with a dungeon core, they’d been cursed. Claygon’s core was powered by core remains, and if he went berserk down in an underground tunnel, it would be a catastrophe for everyone down there with him. Alex remembered the golem rampaging through Shale’s Workshop; a scene he’d prefer not to see repeated. Especially with Claygon.

What would happen if being near a living dungeon core triggered that somehow? He thought back to the core in the Cave of the Traveller. It seemed to have an intelligence and will, considering how hard it had fought him. He remembered the strange sights that had whirled through his mind: dark spheres, blasted landscapes and monsters in the dark. To this day, he had no idea what any of that was.

‘Memories, maybe? Were they something the dungeon core had experienced in the past? Can they even have memories? Or were they things it was…connected to?’ He’d wondered about that more than a few times in the past year, but had never reached any conclusions.

Blood Magic could bridge the gap between life-forces and mana, while Claygon had a permanent mental connection to him. There were spells that could craft telepathic bonds, reaching between minds to allow one to speak to someone else through pure mana and mental connection. Maybe the dungeon core had something similar within it.

If it did…then what would happen if it sensed the core remains powering Claygon? There was a sort of sapience in his golem, would a dungeon core sense it? Would it try to communicate with him? What about himself? Would it recognize that he’d briefly taken control of one of its…siblings? Was siblings even the right word?

“Ugh, so many unknowns,” he muttered, his eyes drifting to the Chosen standing talking to Drestra. If something does happen, Cedric was the last person he wanted witnessing it.

Time for a plan. His mind began working through different scenarios. If something happened and Cedric was right there, then Alex would need plausible deniability. Battles were always chaotic, so he might be able to use—

“Worried?” Theresa’s voice broke through his musings.

He nearly jumped out of his skin: he’d been so deep in thought, he’d almost forgotten she was sitting beside him.

“Yeah,” he admitted quietly. “But, I’m trying not to go crazy with it.” He held her gaze. “Speaking of worry, I nearly lost it when we heard you’d found not just one, but two dungeons. I thought…well, never mind what I thought since you’re okay. …but how the hell did you guys find them, anyway?”

“It was Brutus and Vesuvius that found them,” she said. “We were passing the hills—like always—when Brutus suddenly stopped and started barking like he’d scented a pack of wolves over the next hill.”

On hearing his name, the cerberus perked up and put one of his massive heads in Theresa’s lap. She stroked behind his ears. “He was jumping around like crazy, then he led us to the blood-drak hill, and when we got close enough, Grimloch and Thundar smelled something nasty. Then I smelled it too.” She made a face. “It must’ve been their blood: you wouldn’t believe the stench.”

She glanced over at the wizards casting Wizard’s Eyes. Having finished their spells, they’d begun sending the Eyes toward the dungeons. “Khalik immediately put Orbs of Air on those of us who can’t cast spells, otherwise I don’t think we would’ve made it. It was so bad, Alex. I’ve never smelled anything that bad in my life…not even the smell from days old carrion baking in the sun smells that bad.” She made a face of disgust.

“Then what happened?”

“Tyris had Vesuvius climb the hill and stomp on the spot we were checking. Thoomp!” She made a pounding noise, then a punching motion with her fist. “Part of the hilltop fell in, and there was this tunnel underneath. That’s when we realised what we’d found so we pulled back to a third hill, then lit a flare and sent an urgent message back to camp. Some of the teams surveying near here came in to back us up, but the monsters attacked before anyone else could get here. We just fought until you guys came.”

She glanced at the Heroes. “But, I didn’t expect them.”

“Yeah, they were literally Uldar-sent,” Alex said. “But, I don’t think we would’ve gotten through so much Ravener-spawn without a lot more blood being spilled if they hadn’t been here.”

“Agreed,” Khalik jumped in. He was leaning back against the hill on Alex’s other side, looking at Cedric, Drestra and Hart. “Such power is humbling. The might shown by Cedric…that’s the dream of any warrior. Hart’s strength is something I would love to have.” He flexed his own thick arm. “Though I know I could never grow that much on my own. Not naturally. As for Drestra? I think the Sage’s spells could overpower those of most of our professors.”

“You ain’t kidding,” Thundar polished one of his horns. “I wouldn’t want to fight ‘em, let me tell you.”

He threw Alex a meaningful look.

Alex nodded, then glanced at Theresa.

The huntress looked away. Rather quickly.

“This is what I mean,” Alex whispered. “If I was an enemy of their enemies,” he made sure to use very general, hypothetical terms. “I’d make sure that anyone I knew got out of their way. No one should fight them. They’re toopowerful.”

“Mmm,” was all she said, with a little resentful nod of agreement.

“Right then,” Cedric’s jovial voice called out.

The group startled: the Chosen was sauntering over, leaving Drestra talking to Hart. “Good to be workin’ with all o’ yous. All together we’ll give this bloody dungeon core a right good thumpin’, then be back to camp in time for an’ early supper, by my reckonin’. ”

“You think so?” Prince Khalik asked, appraising the leader of the Heroes. “You will not have your usual…powerful reinforcements, though I do not mean to dismiss our own abilities. As you’ve seen, we hold our own, but we are not divinely selected instruments of destruction like you three.” He gave the Chosen a slight smile.

“Aye, but we’ve worked with knights, rangers an’ the Thameish army,” Cedric said. “We know how to work with others. My partners’ll be nearby on other teams if’n things go wrong. And you all can handle yourselves, that’s a sure thing. Trust me: we cud only dream o’ havin’ this many wizards in one spot. Most o’ the few we’ve been workin’ with are academic fuddy duddies, not too big on battle magic.” He gave a wistful smile. “We wouldn’t say no ta havin’ this much battle magic with us everytime we go divin’ into dungeons.”

“Well, we’re academics too, don’t get us wrong,” Alex said. “It—”

“The Wizard’s Eyes are now in the dungeons,” a wizard announced, cutting their conversation short. “We’ll be creating illusions so we can follow their progress in real-time.”

There was a mad scramble to surround the illusions. Multiple ‘windows’ had been conjured, showing the point of view of each invisible Wizard’s Eye floating up the hills toward the entrances to the dungeon’s tunnels.

In a few heartbeats, they sank into the darkness.

“Adjusting for the light,” one of their controllers said.

There was a flash as the illusions brightened to a blinding white, then dimmed until each provided a greyscale view of the dungeons’ tunnels. Seeing the Eyes floating through the dark brought Alex back to his family's own experience in the Cave of the Traveller.

‘If only I’d had something like this back then,’ he thought. ‘We could’ve checked things out from a safe distance and maybe avoided spiders that wanted to eat us and statues that wanted to roast us…that’s if we didn’t step on tiles in the chamber with the statues. Then again, if I’d been able to cast fourth-tier spells back then, we could probably have just blasted our way to safety. Oh well, better late than never: that’ll be the fourth-tier spell that I learn right after Planar Doorway…and a bunch of summoning spells.’

As one of the Wizard’s Eyes turned a corner in the dungeon, it revealed chitterer corpses clustered together: the fallen ones who’d succumbed to their wounds as they fled back into their lair.

“Ach, I hate it when they do that,” Cedric said. “They use the dead ones as barricades. Sometimes—if some clever ones get spawned—they even set traps. Or, they even regularly jus’ leave scraps from their feedings in the tunnels as a warnin.’”

A memory came back to Alex: the image of Brutus picking up a dead delver’s skeletal hand from off the ground in the Cave of the Traveller. There hadn’t been any more of the skeleton lying in the dirt: probably completely devoured by silence-spiders. He remembered how terrifying seeing the hand of a dead person had been back then. They’d seen worse since, a lot worse, but now, they were much better equipped to deal with whatever came.

The invisibility of the Wizard’s Eyes was letting them move through the massive tunnel complex freely, though they hadn’t spotted any living chitters yet. It truly was a massive space. The two dungeon cores were well-concealed, which had allowed them plenty of time to not only remain undetected, but to also build up their lairs and forces. Beneath the hills, a dizzying network of chambers and shafts constructed to confuse and frustrate anyone trying to attack the cores, had flourished. It’d be easy for someone to get lost down there, trapped in the dark with endless horrors surrounding them.

Trapped to meet a gruesome fate…one that some had already suffered. An expedition member gasped as the answer to where the chitterers’ equipment had come from was revealed.

A Wizard’s Eye floating along entered what had the sinister look of an abandoned abattoir within a high ceilinged smooth-walled cave piled with skeletons and discarded equipment. It looked like the dungeon had been busy catching prey for sometime, long before the expedition had arrived in Greymoor. The bodies—for the most part—had been stripped down to the bone.

Some were partially eaten.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” one of the wizards turned and walked away from the illusion, dry-heaving as he went.

“It’s only going to get worse,” Hart grunted.

“Look.” Thundar pointed at the illusion. “Some of those bodies ain’t human. There’s some beast-goblins…and…what the hell are those?”

His finger levelled at smaller corpses. They’d been chewed up, but Alex caught sight of pointed ears and…wings, maybe? They’d been too torn apart for him to confirm what they were with any certainty.

“They look like fae.” Drestra grimaced. “But, I can’t really tell what kind they were.”

“I thought the fae were safe from the Ravener,” Khalik wondered out loud.

“Aye, mostly,” Cedric said. “But a few stragglers get caught up. They don’t get taken in the numbers we mortals do, though. Not all the time.”

“Wolves,” Theresa said.

“Sorry?” the Chosen asked.

“The dungeons are wolf packs,” the huntress said. “We tell stories of people being killed by wolves all the time, but there’s really only a few folks that actually get taken by wolf packs. There’s wolves all over the Coille; I think only one person got taken in all my years growing up there.”

She thumbed her knife. “Wolves are smart: they know that we’re tough prey: we hunt them more than they hunt us. So they know to fear and leave us alone, unless they’re starving or they can catch one of us alone, or injured. Leave a wolf pack to themselves, and they’ll be happy to fill up on deer, boar and the occasional sheep. I’d bet it’s the same for the dungeons: they target us as their preferred prey, but they only take the fae now and then. Likely when an opportunity presents itself.”

“S’fair theory,” Cedric said.

Regardless of theories and fae, the Wizard’s Eyes moved on. The deeper they probed, the more living chitterers they found moving through the tunnels. It wasn’t unexpected that they’d find a small army of them lurking down there, but the Wizard’s Eyes scouting was giving the wizards a bigger advantage over them.

“Hmmm,” Watcher Shaw noted. “There’s still a good few of them down there to be sure, but we withered their numbers down pretty good. We’ll have to get them in the tunnels—where they can’t surround us—and rip them apart. Send the Wizard’s Eyes down deeper.”

“Careful,” one of the Watchers said to the wizards controlling the illusions. “When we dissected some of the dead ones we found sensory organs in them, and experiments on live ones we caught showed us they can sense things cloaked in invisibility. Wizard’s Eyes aren’t physical things, but we might be in for a scare if those monsters detect them, or if we use invisibility when we get down there.”

“Speakin’ of scares, can your magic eyes find hidden things? Like secret tunnels?” Cedric asked. “Chitterers like to make ‘em and spring out at’cha from the sides or the back if you’re not bein’ too careful. Their hiding places ain’t easy ta’ spot in dark places, unless you move real slow and careful-like.”

“Hey, I think there’s one over there,” a wizard said, pointing. He drifted the spell closer to a wall. “I think that looks like a seal—”

Something suddenly blurred in front of the Eye’s field of vision, filling the illusionary view and drawing gasps.

“—Oh hells!” the controller swore, whirling the spell around.

A group of chitterers had ‘cornered’ the invisible spell, trying to eliminate it. Hideous, snarling mouths snapped and chomped at it repeatedly. Sharp claws tore at the Eye.

“Aaaan’ there’s the scare,” Cedric said.

“We’ve got scares of our own,” Watcher Shaw said. “We’ll see how they deal with a fistful of demons shoved down their throats. Alright, keep scouting and take notice of all the concealed tunnels the Eyes find, then find those dungeon cores. They’re our end goal people.”

Though the chitterers kept trying to attack the magical sensors, the controllers kept finding their hidden passages; Watcher Shaw had the map-makers keep adding onto rough maps of the dungeons they were making for each strike team.

They would continue updating the maps until the Wizard’s Eyes found the dungeon cores.

And, they finally did. Located at the very bottom of each lair: orbs as dark as midnight were pressed into walls guarded by monsters. Alex gulped when he saw them waiting there, forbidding anyone to come near: but soon, he’d be down there, looking to destroy them.

“No sign of the chitterer’s commander,” one of the wizards reported, a note of hope in her voice.

“Oh, it’ll be there, don’t you worry about that,” Cedric said.

“Well, the chitterers know we’re watching them,” Watcher Shaw said. “So let’s get a move on. Start summoning.”