CHAPTER 25 - Detour Force
I ended up taking the third watch, which I hoped would be as uneventful as the first two. It was the longest, uninterrupted, period of time with just me and my brain, with no distractions, that I'd had in ages. That included my time before Fielende: even on the most boring days at work, I had ways to keep myself busy. Puttering around in the small ruin while Ves and Thia slept made me wish I had at least an old magazine from some doctor's office.
Instead, I found myself concerned about every new noise, every sudden movement in the distance, every remotely potential threat. It would have been bad enough if a bandit, or a bear, showed up, but I kept expecting Red Gauze to just walk through the entrance and mutilate everyone without effort. I took a little solace in the fact that Ves and Thia were as horrified by that man as I was, which told me that people like him weren't commonplace in this world.
The rain stopped about halfway through my watch, but since the flooding would take longer to clear out, going through the former dungeon was still our best method of progressing towards Vanndrenvar. I was definitely looking forward to entering a real dungeon, even if it wasn't technically a dungeon anymore. Just the fact that it
used
to be, with monsters, traps, and treasure, was exciting. Thia had explained how the Starting Cave didn't meet all the qualifications to be considered a true dungeon, despite the cave rats that spawned there.
After waking up my party members, we ate some dried travel rations that Ves had purchased in Perrenbrook. Although it made us feel hungrier, we couldn't help but talk about the food we were missing out on at the inn.
Any
inn. I also did my best to describe the worst continental breakfasts I'd experienced at subpar hotels. Partway through attempting to describe miniature perforated cereal boxes, I wondered why I wasn't instead embellishing my past to impress these beautiful women.
The reason, I realized a bit later, was because they made me feel good about myself in the present, and gave me hope for the future.
When we grabbed our gear and decided it was time to head down the stairs, Ves held out her hand and created her mote of light - with only a bit of effort. "I'll handle this." She looked very serious about it, which almost made me laugh. (I'm glad I didn't.)
The cracked stone staircase went straight, leading underground, for nearly 50 feet. At the bottom was a large, reinforced, wooden door, the top half of which appeared to have been partially burned. I noticed just the very edges of a carving that had survived the fire, but it wasn't nearly enough to be able to tell what it once was. The door didn't seem to have any kind of lock or barricade, which I mentioned to my party.
"The door is not meant to keep anyone out - or trap anyone within," Thia explained. "It simply prevents wild animals from entering."
I opened the door with some effort, its loud creaking echoing throughout the dungeon. My breath caught in my throat, excited to see what would lay ahead, as Ves made her light float several feet ahead of us. I exhaled with a disappointed sigh.
Rather than a series of rooms, maybe even a maze, all I could see ahead of us was a long, straight, stone tunnel. Remnants of former walls could be seen along the sides of the tunnel at various intervals, along with doorways and other entrances that had been caved in. "This is it?"
Thia looked around the tunnel. "Yes, it appears so. Many sanctified dungeons are altered for convenience, and to prevent anyone from using the former rooms as living quarters or for any other purpose."
"Damn... I really built this moment up in my mind."
Ves gave me a quick side-hug. "You'll see more than enough dungeons sooner or later."
Regardless of my disappointment, I made sure not to lower my guard. If Red Gauze - or anyone, or anything - showed up suddenly, I wanted to be ready. While we moved forward, I continuously looked all around for anything out of the ordinary.
I noticed that there were multiple sections of the walls in which sections of the stone had been removed or broken. The sections were anywhere between one and three feet in diameter, and reminded me of how a similar-sized portion of the door had been burned.
If I had only seen one or two of these, I probably wouldn't have thought twice about them, but I kept seeing these missing or broken parts of the walls over the course of our walk through the tunnel. I asked the others if they knew what might have happened, but neither had any idea.
"You're probably overthinking it." Ves took a closer look at one of the missing sections of wall, revealing nothing but earth. "Anything could have happened here. Maybe the dungeon's inhabitants did it, maybe adventurers did it, maybe it happened by accident when it was being broken down and sanctified."
Figuring that she was probably right, I tried to forget about it. The trek through the tunnel only took us about ten minutes, which probably made for a pretty damn sizable dungeon if it still had all of its rooms intact. There was another large door at the far end.
Something caught my eye before we reached the door. I split off from Ves and Thia, moving towards one of the caved-in doorways to the side. Up close, I wasn't quite sure what had stood out to me. My eyes darted all over the rocks and dirt, until I found it.
"Hey! There's a chest in here!"
That got Ves's attention. Her footsteps echoed as she ran in my direction. "Where?? Where is it?"
I pointed to what I had found: just a small part of the corner of what must have been a wooden chest. "See it? Must have been caught up in all this rubble when they filled in the rooms."
"Nice find! Let's get it out."
Thia walked over to us. "Is that going to be possible without making a mess?"
Ves was already removing loose stones from around the chest. "Don't worry about it..."
She casually tossed a rock behind her, which I caught with quick reflexes. "We'll at least try to keep everything close by." I dropped the rock by the wall. "How does that sound?"
Thia took a deep breath. "I suppose it will be fine. I doubt it will affect the purpose of the detour, after all."
Ves and I carefully removed rubble, trying to avoid having large sections come crashing down on us, while Thia practiced the cleaning spell to move dirt and smaller rocks so the mess was closer to the wall. We spent more time working on this than we did crossing through the dungeon, but eventually, I was able to see a handle on the side of the chest.
"You two, move away! I'm going to try to pull it out." I pulled lightly on the handle, to see if it might break, but it was pretty sturdy. I used the handle to shake the chest while pulling on it, to help dislodge it from the rest of the rubble.
"You've almost got it!" Ves clapped her hands together in excitement. Thia warned me to be careful.
With one final pull, the chest popped out, but the disruption caused a lot of the rubble and dirt to collapse and slide into the tunnel. I looked at the top of the doorway - whatever area was behind it was still almost completely filled with earth, so we hadn't actually done anything to mess with the tunnel. Except make a mess. I gave the chest, which wasn't much larger than the toaster I had in my apartment, to Ves to open while Thia and I did our best to straighten up the rubble with magic and good old fashioned pushing-stuff-with-our-feet.
"It's locked," Ves groaned. She picked up one of the rocks that had spilled out onto the floor and bashed the lock open. She giggled - well, cackled might be more accurate. "Look at me! I'm a Rogue!"
That just made me wonder if lockpicking was included as one of my class's talents, and then I remembered that Kael had let me keep the set of lockpicks we found on Gev's body. Ves had the right idea, though: why risk breaking the lockpicks when you can just break the lock?
"Ah, damn." Ves held up an old book with pinched fingers, like it was a rotting fish. The cover was entirely black, without any kind of title or images. "No treasure."
I reached out to take the book. "Maybe it's, like, a spellbook, or a collector's item, or something." After wiping off some dirt and dust from the blank cover, I opened it up and carefully flipped through a few pages. It appeared to be someone's journal: most of the pages were still empty, with only a quarter or so of the pages having any amount of writing on them. The language used was completely alien to me, using an alphabet or maybe coded symbols that I had never seen before.
With the book opened, I showed Ves and Thia one of the pages with writing. "Can either of you read this?"
Thia shook her head, and Ves squinted her eyes and looked closer. "Looks made-up to me." She inspected the now-broken, empty chest one more time before tossing it on the pile of rubble.
"Huh, weird." I checked some more pages, in case there was anything else. Maybe the equivalent of a twenty-dollar bill stuck between two pages. The only thing I noticed was a symbol being doodled in the margins of some of the pages. While it didn't look completely identical each time, it was clearly meant to be the same symbol. The frequency, as well as consistency, of the symbol increased as the entries progressed. There didn't seem to be any more doodles after the final entry.
The ladies didn't recognize it, either. I briefly removed my pack to carefully wrap the book within the blanket. "With any luck, it'll be worth something."
The door at the end of the tunnel led us to another staircase. Unlike the first one that we used to enter the tunnel, this one must have been added around the time that the dungeon was sanctified, as part of the conversion into a detour. While it didn't look
new
, it was clearly less aged and worn than the other staircase. The shelter-like structure that it led to aboveground had a similar appearance.
It was still mostly cloudy, but it hadn't started to rain again. The air smelled wonderful with the mixture of rain and trees. We had to be careful not to slip on some of the wet undergrowth, though.
We followed a sign that pointed us to the nearest road, which turned out to not be the same road we were originally traveling along. It went north-to-south, but another helpful sign on the side of the road informed us that it intersected with the road to Vanndrenvar a short ways to the north.
