Chương 11: The Red Gem

Elsewhere, far away, but not far away enough to be comforting for anyone who knew the truth. A thing that spoke sat in the darkness. It rested on a dais of black crystal: a gemlike structure, many feet across, roughly hewn, its facets uneven and pitted from centuries of pressure from an unseen force. It was red, a deep red that seemed to come from below the surface of the world, from the places where stone turned liquid. The color was not uniform.

It shifted in slow pulses, darker at the edges, brighter at the center, with a rhythm that suggested that this thing had a heartbeat. Black veins threaded through the gem, branching in fractal patterns, pulsing in time with the light. It was throwing long shadows across a floor carved with symbols no living hand had cut. These symbols seemed to shift when looked at directly and held still only ever at the edge of vision.

The cast shadows moved with the pulse, stretching and snapping back, and some of them moved a half-beat out of time with everything else, as though something inside them was moving on its own, a separate entity altogether. At the far edges of the chamber, where the glow thinned to almost nothing, shapes drifted along the walls: too tall, too thin, or too many-limbed to be trick of the eye, gone the instant they were noticed.

Occasionally a sound rose beneath the vibration of the voice, a dry chittering, a low laugh with no mirth in it, cut off before it could be located.

"Do you know what I am?" The question came from no normal thing, such as a voice, just emerging from the gem. Rather, it came from everywhere at once, filling the air. A second solid figure at the chamber's edge was small against the scale of the cavern, small against the gem, and small against the question. He was human, balding, and wore the badge of the Adventurers' Guild on a leather cord, a small stamped disc of tin that had meant something in a guildhall miles and, it felt, several worlds away.

Down here it meant nothing and so, its owner knew better than to answer the question. Varran Ghost crouched at the edge of the light, knees drawn up, hands pressed against warm stone. Every instinct in his body told him to run, and every instinct in his body also knew there was nowhere safe in this dark that running would take him. His own shadow, thrown long and red across the symbol-carved floor, seemed to hold a stillness his physical body did not have.

It was as if it knew better than the flesh that it was attached to than to make any sudden movements. The heat from the gem radiated through the rock into his knees.

"I am the thing that lives below the places you tread, Varran. I am the reason the roads are dangerous and the nights are long when you find yourself on them in the darkness. I have been here since before your species learned to write, and I will be here after it forgets how." Varran didn't move. He had learned, in the months since the voice first entered his mind, that it didn't require answers. It required an audience, and his job was to listen, understand, and be afraid.

He performed all three with white-knuckled competence, sweat running cold down his spine. Sometimes, the droplets fell from his face and hit cracks in the stone beneath him and sizzled. Varran's eyes flashed as something touched the crown of his head. His sight saw what it saw. A vision. The core's awareness expanded upward, through stone and bedrock, through layers of geological time separating the chamber from the surface. Its perception was branching through the soil like roots.

"I feed on anguish," the core said.

"Pain is my crop. Misery is my harvest. My field is this world." The images came wordless, one after another. A town burning. The fire started in a dry granary from a small spark. The result was a column of smoke and a population who would carry the loss for the rest of their lives. That carrying of sorrow was the point. That was the food, not the fire and death itself. — An imp flew away in the distance. A feud over a ruined field. A farmer's livestock wandered into a neighbor's crop.

The accusation was sharp, the defense sharper, and the argument became a grudge that would poison two families for generations. — A silhouette snuck away from their border.

"No suffering is too small for me to not quench myself from. No anguish too petty." A man's face twisting in rage over a spilled drink, a bumped shoulder. The reaction was disproportionate, because a shape that nobody could see was standing there and whispering in his ear. The anger amplified until it became a conflagration and a fight broke out, blood spilling. Varran flinched, a tremor running through him as the core's awareness brushed against his mind.

"You have seen my work, Varran," it said.

"Everyone has. Yet no one recognizes it. I am the unseen tide, Varran," said the Core.

"I am the churning in your guts when you stare into the mirror and feel that something is wrong inside of your body, even if your rational mind tells you that there is no need to be afraid." The satisfaction in its voice was the quiet, possessive pleasure of a creator displaying what it had made. The vision continued. A succubus slipped into a soldier's dream in a town that didn't matter. He woke with cold eyes, and the knife was in his hand before the woman beside him could speak.

He never understood why he'd done it. He would spend his life in a cell asking a question of himself he would never find an answer to. A dark spirit crouched at a sleeping girl's bedside in a village too small to have a name. It didn't touch her. Its breath carried a frequency her mind read as terror, and she woke screaming and didn't stop. The village needed an explanation for a plague of night-terrors and chose the old woman who lived alone at its edge. She was driven out into the woods.

— And there, she would fear for her life and, at the same time, be feared by the people of the village as a 'witch'. All of it, everywhere, was a dark energy that sank into the wet soil. And as it sank, the core pulsed and swelled, drinking richly from its many sources. It drew droplets from a thousand tiny wells.

"The point is not death," the core said.

"Death is a byproduct. A dead man cannot suffer. A frightened man suffers for a century, and I have many of those still planned." The dungeon gate of the proud city of Weltbaumshaven, far to the northwest, stood open in the night, torchlit, never closed, with dungeon farming operations running in shifts around the clock. Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

"Even the great cities, like this one, bathe in my miasma," the demon core said. A third dungeon beneath the great city of Weltbaumshaven was a subjugated core, a lesser dungeon the demon core had conquered and vassalized into its network a long time ago. Its monsters were the core's monsters by abstraction. So it made sure they were... different. Their reflexes were faster than a standard dungeon creature's. Their eyes tracked movements that their base instinct alone shouldn't have noticed.

Their aggression was tactical and unnervingly intelligent. That was all it wanted. That was the full extent of its demands as an overlord. This third core just continued existing in subjugation. No one, amongst the living, had noticed. The demon core always made sure that the adventurers were scared when they came down into the darkness of the dungeons they held to be familiar. It didn't matter if they killed the monsters or if they were killed by the monsters, as long as they fed into the churning.

All that mattered was that they were afraid.

"The war was my greatest work." The core's tone carried something like nostalgia now, the distant warmth of a memory being savored. It remembered the dark elf-human war. Years of conflict fueled by grievances it had planted and nurtured ever so carefully. It was a yield so vast the demon core had gorged until it was bursting, the closest thing to satisfaction it had ever known. Battlefields. The dead. Refugees carrying what they could and leaving the rest. Torchlit anger in village squares, faces contorted.

A dark elf and a human on opposite sides of a burning border, both wearing the same expression.

"My last harvest... It was abundant. But the seasons have rolled and churned and it is time for a new one now, Varran." The war was over, but the hatred wasn't. The fractures were still there, healing slowly, and the core was watching for the moment it could reopen them or perhaps simply stretch out the wounds to make an entirely new injury. A factory, a printing press. The Grave Report.

Thousands and thousands of papers were flying out of it, filled with anything that could incite more chaos, more distrust, and more anarchy. The editor ran past a table, full of notes. A living shadow clung over him, as if it had hooked into his body, and it was whispering into his ears.

"And then, something new appeared, and I wanted it to suffer too because the screaming of a newborn babe satiates me the same as when his grandmother weeps over his crib with a pillow in her shaking hands." Varran saw the smoke. He saw the silhouette of a large thing, walking through a corridor filled with hacking and coughing shapes, an axe in hand.

"It defended itself against me. That is impossible. And yet." A deep inhalation.

"I am nourished." Visions of goblins, cowering and running in terror. The core shuddered. But the attack was revealing something unexpected. Potential. Just like with the dungeon in Weltbaumshaven, this other could also be taken as a vassal by the demon thing. The goblin warren would become another leg of an endlessly regenerating spider it could pluck and pluck and pluck again for the sake of the anguish it would cause.

The goblin king had taken the weakest species in the world and was trying to turn them into people. The demon core knew this now and it enjoyed it. It wanted him to succeed. Because a person had a much greater capacity for suffering than a beast did. The vision came distant, dreamlike. Varran shook, unable to break free from what it was making him see. It was showing him a future it desired. Goblins with hollow eyes, tearing the living.

Swarms of them running through cities, dragging the screaming innocents into the darkness. Women torn by their hair and men slit on their throats. Children screaming and watching the horror as shadows stood over them, drinking on their fear. A war to surpass even the last one. Terror would reign the world as its new king and master, and all the while, the red thing beneath it all would swell and grow fat on the rich drippings. ENVIRONMENT Demon Core A secretive dungeon core, situated in a hidden location.

It is the heart of evil in the region and home to a malicious power with broad influence over society. The monologue ended. The chamber went quiet, the gem still pulsing, its light breathing across the carved floor in slow red tides. The shadows along the walls had stopped drifting. They hung still, gathered, like an audience waiting to see what happened next.

"Varran." The clerk flinched as though struck, and somewhere out past the edge of the light, something laughed, a single dry note, and went silent again.

"You failed me. I gave you an exceptionally simple chore to prove yourself, because I know that you are an exceptionally simple man," it pulsed.

"Make someone suffer. I did not care who. I did not care how. And yet..." Varran scrambled, his hands sliding on warm stone, the symbols beneath his palms seeming to warm further at his touch, as though the floor itself had taken notice of him.

"I did what you asked. I chose someone! The dark elf woman, even now, I sent men to hurt her."

"The men are dead and taken," the Core said.

"I sent an idiot and that idiot sent three more in his stead."

"... What?" he asked, hearing that news. His face was pale as a ghost, ironically enough.

"N-no-no-no!" pleaded Varran.

"Isn't that good?" he asked.

"If they're hurt? You like that, right?" he said, eagerly, crawling forward.

"The suffering was there!" A vision, his eyes burned. Varran screamed, falling over and clutching his face as he saw what was being shown to him. One hand held another, one person helping another to their feet.

"The woman survived and she can feel… hope. I can sense it… like a pustule on my side. It aches me, Varran." The core reached out, shadows swirling around the clerk.

"It was a simple task, a simple test, and you failed." The shadows danced over him, reaching out and down his way with sharp fingers that never quite managed to touch.

"I have sent men to kill their wives and they obeyed. I have sent teachers to ruin their students, and they obeyed. And I sent you to do anything you pleased, to make the world just a little worse, and you failed at that in a manner I have never once witnessed before in my eternity." Varran shook his head feverishly.

"She survived because goblins helped her," he argued, piecing together the situation now from the vision he had been given. Varran's voice faltered.

"It is not what they do! How could I have known?!"

"It is what this one does," the core said, and the statement was both acknowledgment and accusation.

"Your failure, Varran, is that you are truly unremarkable in every way. You have no capacity for good, nor for evil. You are simply a fixture of a desk." He shook his head.

"Don't worry! Please! I called for help. From the northwest guild branch. After the second party went missing, I reported it onward to Weltbaumshaven. I asked for an investigator, eyes on the region. I figured that way I could force her to—!" Something slammed Varran down, pressing his face against the hot, glowing stones. He screamed, the sizzling searing his face.

"FOOL!" Varran writhed, screaming.

"What does she even matter?!" Varran cried in agony, trying to fight his way out, but couldn't as visions of the dark elf filled his mind.

"She's just some woman!" he shouted.

"That, exactly, is the point."

"Just kill her! I'll kill her! Just let me go and I'll kill her for you!" The chamber shook. The gem's pulse spiked with rage, and the light went from red to something closer to open flame, hot orange-red bleeding through the veins, throwing shadows that no longer merely danced but leapt, whole shapes of dark unfolding from the walls and the floor. The carved symbols underfoot seemed to glow, tracing lines of light through the dark like veins under skin filling with adrenaline.

Shapes with too many joints and shapes with too many teeth fled outward, away from the gem. Varran was, in every sense that mattered, the only human thing left in the chamber.

"Wait! I can still do it. We can still keep our deal!" he pleaded.

"Our bargain was a test, Varran. And you have failed me beyond all measure," said the core, pressing down harder. Varran screamed.

"I have just explained to you that, like a cancer, I thrive in secrecy, and your solution was to bring more eyes to my domain?"

"You're right! You're right!" he pleaded.

"I'll send them a message. I'll call it off!" Varran was begging. Sizzling, whimpering.

"No," said the core, after a moment of contemplation.

"I will simply adapt and use this to my liking, as is my way." It released him, the pressure from his head relenting. Varran tried to sit up. His skin was fused to the stone and it ripped, peeling as he pulled himself upright, crying and holding his face.

"So you'll give me another chance?" he asked.

"You'll give me another chance to become one of your servants?"

"Turn him into ink for the presses. Even I do not want his suffering in my gullet," said the core.

"Goodbye, Varran."

"No, wait! Please! I can fix this!" Two demons seized him. Their grip crushed his arms as they lifted him from the floor, his feet kicking uselessly at the air, his badge swinging and catching red light like a dying coal. His screaming faded with distance, thinning to a whisper, then nothing.