NOVEL NEXT 116 - The Void Calls. Fall Forever.
"It's not fair," Archmund said. He gazed at an endless blue window, at tiny spikes that could have been distant inverted skyscrapers hanging like stalactites.
What wasn't fair?
Back in his old life, there was a game about mining and building using blocks. You could play alone or with friends, and reshape the entire world to your visions. In that game, the world was yours to craft.
But if you played alone, you had to do everything yourself — gathering all materials, building all structures, and doing all exploration. With friends, you could delegate and advance far further.
The world was yours, and so you had to live with yourself.
This whole adventure reminded him of that. Except his companions were… well, they just didn't agree with him on what was best for them. For all of them.
They were at a point where basic low-level improvements could still give them a meaningful increase in their abilities, but he needed more. He needed to find Gear that gave him better techniques, or Gems that unlocked whole new domains of power (like Raehel's elemental Gems), or a Gem of Worldsoul, or the next Awakening.
This was the trap of the gifted: you hit a peak early. If you were content with that, you would stay there, and then everyone else you'd once surpassed would catch up and surpass you.
It wasn't fair.
But then again, life never was.
He gazed out at the inverted cityscape. Above him, towers and skyscrapers dangled from a distant ceiling, blue and gray and green and purple, the colors of the sky refracted.
He could fight his way up through the Dungeon and never reach those crystal spires. Space was weird here. Those towers were symbols, or illusions. Probably. He didn't know for sure.
Gemmy might. But he didn't want to ask Gemmy. What if those towers were actual places he could reach? How long could he spend fighting through this place, chasing power alone? How much of his life could he spend here before he needed to return to the light of the sun?
Before him, the endless blue, stretching into forever.
And below him, the blue of the sky — but it changed colors. It got deeper, becoming the blue of night. But at the same time, the orange and pink of dusk and dawn, yet also still that same clear blue sky.
If the glass were to vanish, he could just step out.
He'd thought of these things before. In his past life, trapped in the pointless spreadsheets, between defining cell formats and adjusting decimal point displays and fixing comma splices in the memos that explained the numbers. In the dark of night, he would press his forehead against the glass and imagine what it might be like if the glass vanished, and he were to go tumbling through, become a crimson stain on pavement that glittered like stars.
It horrified him that he considered such a thing. The work had been hard, and boring, and miserable, to keep him up at 2 in the morning making sense of spreadsheets. In the morning, when others came to share in his misery, with their shared complaints about the spreadsheets, as the sun filtered in through those windows, those thoughts vanished entirely. But in the dark, the void called him.
Here he wouldn't splatter against the pavement. He would fall forever, tumbling through eternity. Through the blue and bright and dark, forever, until he died of thirst.
If he could die. The magic in his Gems would sustain him a while. And he was interlinked with the Dungeon, so perhaps the Dungeon would keep him alive, even as he fell further and faster into forever. Or perhaps he would pass a threshold from the living world to the Underworld, yet keep falling, spending even his afterlife falling forever.
Like in the ancient Greek myths. Seven days to fall from heaven to earth, seven days to fall from earth to the underworld, seven days to fall from the underworld to the pits of Tartarus.
What a horrible thought. It was funny, though. No matter how your life changed, you couldn't escape yourself.
And then, a sudden wind.
His hair blown back. The curtains blown wide open. The papers on his desk, scattered across the room.
The glass had vanished, and the blue stood there, tempting.
He staggered back.
Why had the window opened before him?
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This Dungeon was his, wasn't it? He was in control, wasn't he?
Unless he wasn't?
No. Easier to take control. To accept he had some responsibility in his current circumstances, rather than being pushed into it.
He'd thought this. He'd willed this.
He'd pushed people away again by being better than them, or at least by acting like it. He'd tried to bring them up to his level by giving him a blueprint that had worked for him, without considering that it might not work for them or that it might be actively harmful. And when they refused him, he'd sent them away.
And then he'd hit a wall that he could not overcome by himself, and he had no one to back him up.
He had nothing. This was his low point. All his companions were gone. He had no friends.
Dying would be horrible. But it might not be the end. He was living proof of that.
He had to turn this around. There had to be a way he could salvage this whole operation. He still had the Gems and his new techniques. He was scrappy, and there was surely a way he could do this by himself.
But did he have to? Was he the best person to?
"Gemmy, what should I do?" he muttered, as he leaned on the desk, safely away from the edge of the window.
"Whatever you want! I will never act against you!"
Sighing, Archmund sat down at his desk and looked at his Gemstone Tablet. Gemmy was a useful assistant, but it simply wasn't any good at actual conversation. It was an echo.
He looked upon the Gemstone Tablet.
Though he knew he should've known better, he felt a warmth grip his heart: the numbers had gone up. Like a perfect score on a standardized test, like a GPA, like a salary, they had gone up.
But not as much as they could have, he suspected, as he'd hit that point of diminishing returns. He navigated to the "personnel management screen", to compare. And then he remembered. His name was there, and so was Mary's, but there were great big gaping holes where the entries for his other friends had been.
Beatrice, his cousin. Quick with her wit, sarcastic, blamed herself, and hated losing. In many ways, she was just like him.
Rory, Beatrice's minder. Self-sacrificing to a fault, filled with dreams of chivalry and knighthood, an idealist who looked for the best in others, willing to bear hard burdens on his own. In many ways, he was just like him.
Gelias, the elf. Mysteriously knowledgeable, a begrudging leader, wise beyond his years, powerful yet thinking of uplifting others to match his strength. In many ways, he was just like him.
He had no doubt their numbers had gone up — but that wasn't any good to him if they weren't willing to fight with him, was it?
They didn't have to be equal to him or as good as him to be worth spending time with.
They had been more than willing to be his friend. He just hadn't taken their outstretched hands.
And could he do anything about that now? What could he do about that now? What manner of planning, of SMART goals, of influencing people could mend a bridge created in part by unfair and undue influence?
Mary moaned in her sleep.
He wasn't going to jump. It seemed like a horrible way to spend eternity. And anyways, he had to make sure Mary would stay alive.
If anything, it was time to wake her up.
Mary. Oh, Mary.
He'd thought she was an idiot. Wanting to stay by his side, being loyal to him, accepting all of his plans for her — except the one to send her away. He'd made her smarter through level grinding and gear, and he realized that part of him was trying to accelerate the point at which she'd come to her senses and leave him.
But he didn't want her to. He didn't want any of them to, not really. But he'd all but forced Beatrice and Rory away on flimsy pretenses.
And she hadn't, through any of that, doubted him.
Well, she had been unconscious. But he knew she hadn't doubted him, and wouldn't doubt him even when she woke.
Garth had told him to turn back the second any of them were injured. He hadn't.
"I didn't want any of them to leave, not really," he muttered. "It was irrational. It's never a good idea to burn bridges and alienate people. But I thought if they were going to anyways… I might as well make it on my terms."
What a foolish way to think.
Because on top of the cold logic of needing allies, he was also a kid who wanted friends.
He knelt by Mary and grasped her hand. Her blood pulsed steadily, neither too fast or too slow, but had her hands always been this cold?
"I don't want you to leave," he said. "Not like this."
He allowed his magic to flow over her, embracing her like a blanket. Her status and health didn't change. She was stable, that much was sure, but he knew two things. He couldn't bring her with him, wherever he went, and he didn't trust the idea of leaving Monsters to guard her. The Dungeon itself seemed bad for her. She was inert, unchanging. The Dungeon's power was tied and wrapped around her, the same way it was wrapped around him, the same way it had been wrapped around Rory and Beatrice. Something he hadn't thought to even take into consideration.
"Gemmy?" he said.
"What do you need help with?"
"How can I heal her and get her awake with minimal lasting damage?"
"If you bring her into the sunlight, the miasma will dispel slowly over the course of a few days, but the longer she's down here without full treatment, the higher the likelihood of lasting effects—"
"I want to do it here," he said. "So that she can come up next to us, not carried by us."
It seemed unwieldly to lug her half-conscious body up two tiers of the Dungeon, even if he could skip to Tier 1. It would still take several hours to traverse that by foot, even if he did send Beatrice or someone to call for help.
"You'll need help!" Gemmy said. "A power that can rouse the mind, even if it's veiled or protected by a high Wisdom! Senses attuned to the flow of magic but that won't lodge in her soul! And control over the poisonous dark!"
He knew where he could find those.
Rory's Skill to Inspire was designed to aid allies, and so it would be useless if it could be wholly resisted through mental fortitude. Gelias's elven nature allowed him to feel the flow of magic around him and manipulate it, but that same nature prevented him from interfacing and lodging into Gems the way human magic did. And Beatrice… she bore the same wand that had inflicted Mary with this wound, but she her own power drew upon a completely different form of darkness.
He could almost see the vision, almost put the puzzle pieces together that would heal her. If they were in front of him, emitting their magic into the soulspace, he knew he'd find that final link.
Hopefully, they would come with him.
Hopefully, he could forgive them, and they him.