Chapter 35: Tidy

Chapter 35: Tidy

It was, to put it shortly, pure agony to leave behind my beautiful burgeoning fourth floor and pop back up to the others. To look upon their graceless, un-algaed walls, to their primitive lights still clinging to stone. It would have been easy to grow my new variant on the walls, to fill this place with their sublime spores, but, well.

I wanted it to be a surprise.

And my first three floors were still excellent and lovely and I very much appreciated them, thank you. My subconscious retreated a bit.

I finished carving out the last little tunnel snaking its way through the limestone separating my floors; a last air tunnel, connecting to a nondescript den in the Drowned Forest, just to make sure it never ran dry. I had hundreds of the buggers for every floor, all small enough no invader would think twice about snaking their way through and with easily ten times the amount I needed just so I didn't have to worry about a burrowing rat covering the entrance in dug up silt. Back-ups upon back-ups, as it went. I was a fan of contingencies.

One such was the damn near thousand points of awareness I had aimed at my fourth floor.

The algae had kept growing, though admittedly not with the same flashy gusto it had when I originally moved in. It slithered over the walls with all the grace of something truly blind and immobile and dead, flicking its spores and roots with a very pressing awareness. I couldn't have been more proud.

No evolution yet, though. I could wait.

I had other plans.

The first of which was something I had been procrastinating on with all these tunnels.

See, I'd named the Drowned Forest, right? Given it a proper title and all the prestige that came with it. That likened to reason that the name was awfully important. As in something that stood as a marker.

As in, I probably shouldn't add any more creatures to the second floor lest I upset the balance.

But gods, the lichenridge turtles were right there.

Truly, I don't think you understand the agony.

...Rhoborh would tell me if something was wrong, wouldn't he? The Drowned Forest certainly wasn't his but it had a kinship to him now, enough that any invaders would be able to feel his presence and let him bring it to all his latest pissing contests with the other gods. He had no reason to want to see it destroyed.

So he definitely wanted more defenders.

Mind thoroughly made up, I grabbed the near forty points of mana I'd generated and slapped them together into the rough shape of a turtle. The schema flowed through me and almost politely shifted what I'd snagged to the side, gathering a mere eleven to shape as scales and shell popped into existence.

Gods. I'd gotten too twitchy with the cloudskipping wisp. Not every large creature was a mana-sucking bloodhound.

The four turtles I wove together blinked, shaking their lumbering heads from side to side as they lazily drank in their new surroundings; a bit like the bears upstairs, really, although the bears tended to respond with more guttural bellows and clawing when they spotted their brethren instead of another slow blink. Almost embarrassing how long it had taken Rihsu to kill hers.

Although these didn't have the camouflage of their predecessor yet.

Turned out I was remarkably impatient when I didn't have the distraction of a new floor and the looming fear of new invaders; the two new species of moss and lichen hadn't died yet, slowly but steadily browning in the corner I'd shuffled them to, but I was sure that'd go soon. I wasn't willing to risk destabilizing the floor by trying to remove their carbon dioxide or squishing them with a stone—while it'd certainly work, these were two limp, bedraggled plants. Not exactly prime material. They could wait.

It was a new hat, purchased with all the grace that being the first mate of the Golden Ghost and second in command over the Dread Crew allowed him. A fine thing, really; not with the flashy old feather of a common sailor but the more distinguished scarlet strip of wolf fur around the underside, acting as a bandana. It would have cost a normal man a year to earn it.

He was also rapidly ruining it as he kept winding the canine's pelt around his fingers.

It wasn't his fault, really. No one could be expected to stay calm with the stench of agony and raw screams filtering under the crack in the door.

A pleasant enough room for it, he supposed—his time in this position had made him wait for far worse in far worse places. The old gaze-weed run in Leóro, ending in half the crew either dead or wishing they were; or the surprised head of the previous first mate, tumbling away from her equally surprised body after the pitch-shark had reminded her why it was best not to steal from the captain. On paper, they were both worse. This room had expansive couches and a glass-lined table, soothing quartz-lights in carved sockets on the wall and the borwood floor protected by a pelt as soft as silk.

Most places he waited, though, it was because he wasn't waiting—it was fleeing for his life, or dealing with his new and unexpected promotion, or whipping the rest of the crew into shape.

It wasn't waiting. He hated waiting. Bad things always came after a wait.

He twisted his hat more.

And of course, as with all things, it was the moment that he moved onto twisting the brim that the door, a fine polished borwood that looked to have gotten a new varnish of the scarlet hue, banged open and Varcís Bilaro walked out.

Grey trousers, cinched tight at the waist with a frock coat overtop with its sides tied behind him, gentle slippers and gloves over his extremities. His work uniform, then. He had a nasty habit of running through them.

Same for today, if all the blood meant anything.

Varcís stripped his gloves off, tossing them behind him without so much as a glance—there was no final cry for help, no grunt of surprise or panic as the door swung close.

"Clean it up before I get back," Varcís said, bracing his chin on his hands. There was some dark curiosity behind his eyes. "Brus broke like a fat merchant ship. Told me everything, matched what the merrow had said, they both filled in what parts each other didn't know."

Lluc winced. The merrow had taken forever to clean up. "And?"

"Some sort of dungeon. Neither knew whatever deity is sponsoring it, nor what it spawned from—ley line? Eclipse? Shouldn't be anything too powerful."

Two dead for half an answer. Gods if this wasn't why you couldn't know shit in a pirate's town.

Lluc frowned, setting his hat down. "Any chance it's something more alive? If what the merrow was saying about the new entrance is true."

Varcís smiled. It might have been nice if not for the splash of scarlet under his left eye. "Lluc. Do you know of any sentient-born dungeons?"

Ah. Suddenly his legs weren't fond of moving.

"...no?" His breath was tacky in his throat. It couldn't hurt to be polite. "Sir?"

"You're damn right." Varcís splayed his hands with all the serenity of a slit wrist. "That's because they don't survive. The gods don't like them, we certainly don't, and they get killed before they finish half a floor. So go scout it out to see how far along it is, and if it's developed enough to have opened its pathway to the Otherworld, I'll come and take it. Unless that's a problem?"

"No. No sir. Not a problem."