Chương 12: Aftermath

Loneliness is On the Rise! Top 3 Reasons YOUR Wings are Out of Style! The Grave Report: Fairy Edition Are you alone? Desperate to be loved? Maybe boys don't like you because your wings are simply OUT OF STYLE! Fairies across the city are waking up to a horrifying truth: while your wingspan may have been the talk of the town a decade ago, experts now warn that dainty, delicate fairy wings could be leaving you SINGLE this mating season, and it's only getting worse!

Our panel of fashionologists has identified the top three wing catastrophes driving fairy girls to a lifetime of lonely lantern-lit evenings: - Number 3: Iridescent is OUT! While shimmering membranes may have caught every eye at the moonlight balls of yesteryear, insiders say today's suitors (human AND fairy alike) are flocking to the matte, understated "moth-chic" look, yes, MOTH! Princesses are out. Bad girls are in this season! - Number 2: Your veins are showing! That intricate tracery you were BORN with? Tacky!

Be sure to book a wing-vein cover-up treatment immediately before they're booked out. And the number one scandal rocking the fairy district? - Number 1: TRANSLUCENCE IS DEAD! Yes, that's right, glassy ladies! Sorry, but if the sunlight still passes through those fluttering appendages, you may as well glue yourself to a mushroom and accept your fate as a spinster! So before you flutter out to the next social, ask yourself: can you really afford NOT to powder-dip, pluck, and press?

Statistics say two in three fairies are DOOMED to die alone*. Don't let it be you! Pick up next week's issue for our exclusive guide: "10 Wing Shapes That SCREAM Desperate!" *Study conducted by The Grave Report's in-house department She had to get ready for work. The fairy sighed, rubbing her face as she turned, looking at the shard of broken glass she was using as a mirror as she looked at her wings in the reflection and then back to the old article, plastered on her wall.

ENVIRONMENT Weltbaumshaven Weltbaumshaven is the capital city of the state region. Boasting a thriving dungeon-based economy, it houses well over three hundred thousand people in its heart. It is home to the headquarters of the national Adventurers' Guild, Pinaclepoint Magical Academy, and several knight houses.

"Two out of three…" she said, lowering her eyes and looking away. Below the dryad tree, the stone opened to become a throat that led down into the world's gullet. Matthew had known it was there since the first day, when he watched the stream vanish into the darkness beneath the ancient root system and felt, through the dungeon sense, the space that existed under the chamber floor.

He had prepared for the possibility that he might need it, because a manager who did not plan for the worst case was a manager who got eaten during the night shift. It wasn't a big concern in his old field, warehouses. But low-income grocery stores or fast food? Very possible. He went down the stream feet first. The passageway swallowed him. It was tight. Centuries of water had worn a channel through the limestone, and the result was a tube just wide enough for someone his size to slide through.

The passage angled steeply, water-smoothed stone carrying him deeper, and the sound of the stream grew heavier and louder by the second. A roar built as he descended. The passage opened up. Lifting his arms, he grabbed the rope pre-emptively strung across the span of the waterway tunnel and swung outward with the momentum as the channel ended, opening into a massive cavity. Dangling from the rope, Matthew dropped onto a ledge, wet and narrow. He was overlooking a void.

The dungeon sense had mapped it in fragments: a cavern, large and natural, its ceiling lost above him. The stream entered from the tube behind him and fell in a clean vertical drop into a pool far below. The roar he had heard was in part from the waterfall. And in part from what it fell into. The water below was a massive whirlpool, spinning in a slow, permanent churn that drained somewhere deeper still. The air down here was full of spray and the cold that lives in places the sun had never reached.

There, o n the ledge, in the spray and the roar, the survivors were waiting for him. They were on both sides of the embankment cliffs, holding ropes and looking down into the chasm below. The ropes were his work, part of the emergency evacuation system he had installed himself: fiber cords anchored to stalagmites and run along the ledge as handholds. The goblins had refused to come down the stream to do the work, which was fair enough. To them, the waters were the entrance to the afterlife.

Frankly, if one fell into the whirlpool, they might not be wrong about that either. But they were here and alive now. That was what mattered. He started with the closest, a goblin pressed flat against the wall with both hands wrapped around the rope and her feet braced against the stone. He pulled her up to the passage entrance, and she scrambled into the tube without looking back. Then the next. When the last one was through, Matthew stood on the ledge and looked down at the black whirlpool in the depths below.

Over centuries, it must have swallowed thousands of goblins, if not more. Tonight, it would eat well. He turned and crawled back up the passage, going after the others as they pulled their way back up along the ropeline that fed back toward their home. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. The warren was a graveyard. Matthew emerged from the hole beneath the tree into a core chamber he could barely recognize. The stone was blackened.

Much of the dungeon-feeding mold was dark and ashen. He saw it twitching here and there. But much of it was flush and rich, feasting on the bodies of their enemies. There was more of it than before, the magical bounty having caused rapid growth. The walls and the floor. They were becoming fuzzy. It felt like walking on patches of grass. The dryad tree was alive.

It was the only thing in the chamber still intact, the ancient trunk scarred but standing, most of its ornaments stripped away by fire and fighting, the bark blackened in places and still firm. Bodies were everywhere. Goblin bodies, small and still, scattered across the chamber floor and in the tunnels and in the chokepoints where the fighting had been heaviest. Some were burned past recognition.

Others lay intact where they had fallen, expressions frozen on the last thing they had felt, weapons still in their hands. Quietly, he gathered the nametags he could find and brought them to the tree, hanging them on the pegs one by one, beside the ones already there. Jacob. Carl. Tom. Mike. Gary. And others. Steve, whose tag was melted, the bark burned to charcoal but the letters were still legible if you tilted it into the light. Phil, whose tag was gone entirely, was consumed by the fire that swept the rat farm.

Paul, whose tag was found in the debris of the collapsed corridor with the string burned through. Sarah, whose tag was still pinned to her chest. For the ones whose tags were destroyed, Matthew made new ones. He sat by the tree with a piece of charcoal and a strip of bark and wrote the names from memory because he knew them all, because he had given every name himself. While the others quietly moved the dead into the water, he hung the tags, new and old, on a branch. Of his forty goblins, nine were alive.

It was like being back at square one all over again. They had survived and the dungeon even gained power from this, but it was a slaughter. His company was thriving now on paper, but he'd lost good people to pay for that. Later. The work was done. Nicole moved to the tree. She was exhausted. She was done fighting. She was done standing. But the tree was producing. The pods had swollen, the tree making more and more goblins. Small and wet and hungry and completely unaware of where they had been born.

Nicole picked them up one by one and carried them to the nursery that Carol and Janet had come out of. She set the newborns in the boxes, arranged the rabbit-fur pads around them and then snarled angrily as one of them started crying. It went quiet. Matthew called the roll.

"Nicole."

"Nicole," grunted a voice.

"Steve." Silence.

"Frank." No response.

"Rick is at the farm," said Matthew, going through his mental list. He rubbed his face, exhausted.

"Linda." She sat against the wall with her spear across her knees, her face streaked with ash and imp blood. The first matured spawn. Alive.

"Linda," she said, the word rough. He went through every name individually. Some answered; most didn't. Nicole. Rick. Linda. Jack. Janet. Audrey. Ben. Sally. Carol. These were the adult survivors. Most of the hunters were dead except for the mangled Janet and Rick was his only hobgoblin. What a mess. The water of the stream splashed as he laid another goblin down into it, watching as the water took Sarah away. Sarah was funny. He'd miss her. Once again, what had gone wrong was magic.

The warren had no counter to it. The fortifications, the chokepoints, the ceiling slits, the mush-mushes. All of it was built for physical threats, and the demon commander had walked right through it. His trick had worked once, but he suspected he would not get to use it twice. The next force that would come would be stronger and more cautious. He was pulling the last corpse, Gary, toward the stream when the voice spoke.

"Tandaradei." Jack stood at the tunnel entrance, dragging two somethings behind him. Human shapes, bound and gagged, wrists tied behind their backs, mouths stuffed with cloth, eyes wide and white in the dim light. The fungus reached for them and they pulled away from the white tendrils, terrified. The two prisoners from the farm. Matthew dropped the body into the water. Gary spun in the current and disappeared.

He wiped his hands on his chest, smearing blood and ash and slime across his skin, and walked over and squatted down in front of the humans. The tall one and the quiet one were side by side on the ground, looking at him with the expression of men who had heard things in the last hour that had fundamentally revised their understanding of what was possible.

"Gentlemen," Matthew said. The corporate voice. The presentation voice.

"Tell me." He looked between them, reading their fear.

"You're men of the world, right? Traveled? Experienced? You know things about dungeons and the region? History, perhaps?" They nodded, fast and emphatic.

"Good." Matthew clapped his hands together once, the sound sharp in the quiet chamber and they flinched, whimpering. His eyes narrowed.

"I have some questions for you." He pulled the gags from their mouths. Sarais knelt by her field with her hands in the dirt and her heart in her boots. An anqa was a large animal. Making a hole big enough for it was a lot of work. Her hand rested on the soil.

"Sorry, boy," she said. The bird had been everything. There was sentiment in it because she had raised it from a chick and fed it by hand and spent months teaching it to pull a plow. The training had been the closest thing to a relationship she had had since arriving on the frontier. There was also just plain arithmetic. Acres of cleared arable soil could not be worked by hand. The plow needed pulling power that she couldn't generate, and without it the field would go untilled.

Untilled fields produced no income, and no income meant the debt grew until the guild took the land. So even if she beat the moment, she didn't beat the situation. Even if the goblins held up their end of the trade, even if Matthew kept his word about protection, a trade deal required product to be protected, and product required a plow. The plow required a bird. She could not afford another bird, nor another loan. So, with the way things looked, she was calculating the end of her farm. The math was simple.

This season would be her last. She would harvest what was in the ground by hand and sell it for whatever the guild would pay. The money would cover the interest and nothing else, and next season there would be no planting and no crop and no farm. She'd have to start all over again somewhere else. That was it. She was done. The deal really didn't matter, because she was out of business.

"Rick!" said a voice behind her. Sarais turned, looking at the freak goblin Matthew had left behind as a bodyguard for the moment. The long goblin was like a rabid animal, constantly twitching and scanning the area. Apparently, this was Rick. It was new to her that goblins had names, but so was this entire situation, so who even knew what was what anymore?

With both arms and great struggle, his knees buckling, Rick picked up the harness, the leather and fiber contraption fitted for a six-hundred-pound bird, and held it a moment, studying it. Then he put it around his own neck with some effort. It did not fit. It was built for something much larger. The straps hung loose with the buckles in the wrong places. He left them where they were.

He dropped forward, almost onto all fours, his long arms reaching the ground, claws digging into the soil for purchase, and he pulled. The plow moved, not much. An anqa was a heavy, powerful thing. But whatever sort of uniquely disgusting monstrosity Rick was, he had a strength coming toward that and endurance to match. Sarais sat beside the fresh grave and watched. Just how smart were these goblins becoming?