Ghosts of the Past: Teaser Chapter

As they emerged into the sight of the palace, Baldr frowned. He held a hand up.

“What?” Lucien pulled up beside him on his hookwing.

“Something’s not right.” Scowling, Baldr glanced over the doomed palace. Like a chandelier that fallen from the ceiling, it had pancaked and shattered in concentric rings. His eyes roamed the crooked ruins of towers, the blast zone of the castle wall. It was utterly familiar, but something was off. And maddeningly, he had no idea what it was. “They changed it.”

“Who?” Arnaud pulled up on his other side.

“The Architects.” He didn’t like that. Not at all. “Come on. Let’s see what they’ve done to my damn castle.”

The knights and soldiers wound their way down to the ruins of the gate, slipping through a hole made by the collapsed frame. The terrain beyond was a field of shattered stones. They had hit the earth so hard that they had penetrated the ground, and in some places they were so dense that they looked like the overlaid spines of a porcupine. By weaving carefully, they managed to avoid the worst of the razor shards on the way to the entrance. A short corridor of stone led back to a pair of ornate bronze double doors engraved with wings. Baldr almost stepped forward, but some instinct pulled him away. Uneasily, he shifted his boot back off the buckled granite step.

“Commander: do we have anyone who can pick locks?” He asked casually.

Arnaud turned to look back at his men. Two of the footsoldiers raised their hands. “Apparently. You two: go in and get that door open.”

“Yes sir,” they muttered out of sync, breaking from the formation to advance.

“We should make camp here,” Baldr said to the others. “That’ll ensure we respawn close to the palace. I don’t think we can respawn inside the-”

Cries of surprise went up as a thick barred wall slid soundlessly and smoothly from about halfway down the corridor, slamming into the opposite wall. The two soldiers were trapped on the other side of it, pinned into a ten foot box between the bars and the door. 

“What the... help! Someone help us!” The first man cried out.

The other one was feeling frantically over the bars. They were made of the same brassy metal as the door, each bar as thick as a man’s fist. They were spaced just far enough apart that you could see in, but too close together for anything larger than a cat to slide through.

Baldr’s eyes narrowed, and as other soldiers tried to run past him to the aid of their comrades, he threw up an arm. “No! Don’t go in there!”

There was a whir, and then a muffled ‘crunch’ from somewhere inside the walls. The ceiling behind the bars dropped a couple of feet in height, nearly knocking the pair of soldiers to their knees. The pair of men screamed, terrified.

“Oh my god.” Lucien’s nose wrinkled. “Baldr... did you know...?”

“No.” A mist of sweat was clinging to Baldr’s brow as the mechanism inside the wall began to rumble, and the ceiling to slowly descend. “This is new. This is all new.”

He and Arnaud could not stop the soldiers now. They ran to their comrades, shouting over each other as they searched the bars, the walls and floor for any way they could free them or jam up the collapsing ceiling, to no avail. The trapped soldiers wailed as they were driven to their knees, then to their backs. Baldr saw them trying to push the ceiling up with hands and feet, but it was no use. He looked away as the screaming intensified to an intense, hysterical pitch, then garbling as bones cracked and flesh pulped under the enormous weight.

Lucien turned green. He swayed on his feet, took a step to the side, and vomited violently into the rock garden.

“Nice.” Baldr rolled his eyes as he strolled over the Lucien and cuffed him on the back of the head. “You’re a dragon rider now. Nut the fuck up and get your shit together.”

“What the hell just happened there!?” The Staff Sergeant charged back out of the false entry, slashing his hand as he got in Arnaud’s face. “Did we come here to get crushed like roaches!? Is that part of your plan to save the Eyrie?!”

In a flash of motion, Arnaud cocked a fist and decked the man across the jaw. Helmet or no helmet, the inhuman power behind the blow sent him sprawling.

“You mind your tone with me.” The Knight-Commander’s voice quavered with rage. “Remember to whom you speak. No one knew this would happen, and no one wants it to happen again. Now pick yourself up: we move forward.”

The sergeant rubbed the side of his jaw, glaring up at the dragon knight with eyes full of hate.

“NOW.” Arnaud stared back down at him. “Or has one single trap in this dungeon unmanned you?”

“My men are not going into that place.” The soldier picked himself up, spitting blood. “I refuse.”

“Then you will be executed for mutiny to his Honor, the Warden Scandiva.” Arnaud drew his sword with a rasp of steel against metal.

“Now, just hold on a moment,” Baldr said. “Sarge, come on. We couldn’t have known there was a damn trap in there. Do you want their deaths to be in vain?”

The Sergeant’s mustache trembled. “Their names were Clef and Franco.”

“Come on, man. There’s better things worth dying over.” Baldr feigned a sympathetic grimace and clapped him on the shoulder. “Put is aside, soldier. Let’s see if there’s another way in. Me and the others here’ll set up a camp so we can respawn right outside.”

The men milled warily as Baldr, Lucien and Zero laid out sleeping rolls and a fire, then consulted their HUDs and changed their spawn point to the Diamond Palace Ruins: Cham Garai.

“I say we split up and search for doors,” Baldr said to the others.

Zero nodded, and wiggled her fingers. She had magic to help her find a way in.

“Yeah, cast any spell you’ve got.” Baldr jerked his head toward the east. “You go that way. Lucien, look around in the rocks to see if you can find any other less obvious ways inside. And tell me if you spot any traps.”

“S-S-Sure.” The rogue still looked greasy and ill as he stumbled off to obey.

 Baldr set off between the stones, following the curve of the ruins to the west. When he had standing stones between him and the others, he let out a tense breath and activated one of his Spirit Knight abilities, Reveal. Soft light glowed around his hands, then faded and reappeared over an invisible door flush with the walls. He slipped through the rocks to examine the seam. It was tight enough to be invisible, too tight to slide a credit card through.

“You bastards,” he muttered. The Reveal ability only had a short window of time. As the meter rapidly depleted, he swung around, searching for a switch, some way of opening the door. The ability highlighted several of the small, sharp rocks jutting from the ground.

Baldr sauntered over as the light faded, toeing each rock with his boot, but there were no buttons or switches. Frowning, he looked around for some sort of clue. There was none. The only thing he could see was that the stones were all different heights, and they had small holes bored into them. Poking, prying, and stabbing the holes did nothing.

The big man scratched his head, running through his mental catalog of dungeon puzzles. “Hmmmmm.”

One of the rocks - a large, squat rock with a big hole - briefly glowed blue before fading back to normal.

“Oh, shit.” He crouched down in front of it. “Hmmm?”

Another brief glow.

“Hmmmm!” He tried another note, higher-pitched. Another of the stones flared, this time with purple light. A song puzzle. That would be right, wouldn’t it? Everyone at the office had known that he was completely tone-deaf, unable to even whistle his way around a song.

But Baldr wasn’t.

He began to croon a soft melody under his breath, mostly to see what notes activated which rocks. There were six of them, and each one glowed with a different color when he hit on the right tone.  After thinking about it, he tried the theme song of Archemi, the swelling refrain that played during the opening credits. Then he tried the theme song of the Aesari: a short, haunting, vaguely Celtic melody. That was the one that did it. The switches activated in sequence, and the door recessed a couple of inches before sliding silently into the wall, revealing... an entry that looked exactly like the one that had just crushed the pair of soldiers. Same dimensions, same unbreakable brass doors, same everything.

“Fuck.” Even for a player character, being crushed was a miserable death. He rubbed a hand through his hair, and was just about to call ‘fuck it’ and go in anyway when Zero emerged out of the forest of stones, waving her hands and pointing back.

“What?” Baldr turned on her. “I found a door. Did you?”

She nodded enthusiastically.

“Well, how ‘bout we go see what yours is like. This one looks like a flyswatter to me.” Eying the passageway, Baldr followed the sorceress as she wove nimbly between the rocks, passed their nervous companions, and led him to a doorway on the other side of the palace’s entryway. It too was a twenty-by-ten foot passage, with double doors at the end. Zero had solved some kind of magical word puzzle to get in.

Baldr ran a hand back through his hair. “Well, fuck me. They’re the same.”

“Hey, Baldr!” Lucien called out, his voice going further away, then closer as he changed directions. “I found something! I found a trapdoor!”

“Four entrances.” Baldr shook his head. “What do you bet they’re all trapped?”

Zero shrugged.

“I don’t trust any damn trapdoor down here. It probably drops us into a damn pit of spiders.” He crossed his arms, scowling at the unsealed entry. “We’re gonna have to bite the bullet and go in.”

The sorceress shook her head. She stepped back, and began to cast. Mana flowed up the tubing in her spellglove, forming a spiral in her palm that swelled with light, then transmuted to a gas that was consumed by the spell she cast. The light flowed out, and the ceiling inside the entryway began to glow.

“... Right. Crush room.” Baldr shook his head. “Can you cast that on the other chamber?”

Zero nodded, and set off. He followed, resigned to trotting along after her like a dog. Lucien caught up with them there, flushed with excitement.

“I found a trapdoor!” He said again.

“We heard you the first time. Hold your horses.” Baldr waited, tense with anticipation as Zero cast her Detection spell. Her lips moved silently just before she spread her hands. The light flared out... and nothing happened.

“That trapdoor ain’t gonna be anywhere we want to go. Hang on.” Baldr let out a terse breath, then rolled his shoulders and stepped into the corridor. Nothing shifted under his feet. There were no seams in the smooth granite walls he could see. As the others watched with bated breath, he paced slowly down the passage toward the doors. There, he took out a rag and wrapped it around his fist before trying one of the handles.

There was a click as he pulled the lever, and a small dart shot out and buried itself in the rag instead of his hand, staining it a nasty dark green color. The acrid smell of the poison stung his nostrils and made his nose run.

“Jesus. They really don’t want us in here, do they?” Baldr sniffed and chuckled, relaxing a little. “But hey, if this is all they have to throw at us...”

Shoulders shaking with released tension, he pulled open the door and stepped back in case something came lurching out from behind it.

It was a wall. Solid, smooth... just like the others. Baldr’s grin slowly faded.

“Okay. Alright. This is how we’re gonna play, is it?” He took another step back, nostrils flaring.

“So, uh... are we going to try the trapdoor?” Lucien asked sheepishly as he stormed by.

Baldr rounded on him. “Fine, yes! Show me the motherfucking trapdoor!”

Lucien shrunk back a little, even as he smirked. “Ahh... yes, sir. Right this way.”