He had no sense of how long he stayed like that, but eventually he pushed himself unsteadily to his feet. He walked over to the bloody knife and picked it up.
Item: [Seal Knife] (bronze rank, common)
A dagger with the Vane family seal on the pommel. (weapon, tool).
Requirements: Bronze rank [Speed], bronze rank [Spirit]
Effect: When used to imprint a wax seal on a letter, the letter will be destroyed if opened by anyone other than the addressee.
Jason stared at the bloody knife in his equally bloody hand. After a few moments there was an unusual tingling, slowly rising to become pain. He tightened his grip until the pain became too much and the dagger clattered to the floor.
You do not meet the requirements to use this item.
Finally, he turned to the body. Its eyes were open, face frozen in a final expression of surprise.
The room was still and silent, Jason’s eyes locked on the corpse.
“You did this,” he accused it. “You did this.”
He didn’t sound convincing, even to himself.
Jason’s mind was nothing but white noise as he stood over the body. When a new sound broke him out of his trance he didn’t know if it had been seconds, minutes or hours. The sound came from above, a metal ventilation pipe in the ceiling. There was a hollow, echoing timbre to the sound and it took Jason a moment to recognise it as a hissing noise. It was coming from the hole.
He watched the hole, eyes unfocused and disoriented. His mind was still on the knife, as he watched absently. He could feel it, even after it fell back to the floor. He could taste the hot blood spilling out of the wizard’s neck. His gaze sharpened when something came out of the hole in the ceiling. It was an enormous, pitch-black snake, head barely small enough to pass through the aperture.
Jason and the snake looked at each other, frozen for a moment. Jason could sense intelligence in its eyes, although he may well have been imagining it. Then the snake hissed at Jason and continued emerging from the vent shaft, body dangling down from the ceiling. Jason sprinted for the door back to the cave, snatching up the lamp as he moved.
New Quest: [Time to Run]
The familiar of the Builder Cultist sensed its master’s death and has come to investigate.
Objective: Escape [Umbral Mountain Snake] 0/1.
Reward: Iron-rank (rare) magical dagger.
Jason almost stumbled as the window popped up, flailing wildly at it as he willed it closed. He bolted through the metal door, dropped his lamp and grabbed onto the wheeled handle, hauling back with adrenaline-fuelled strength. The rusty hinges groaned shut and Jason yanked on the wheel to latch the door. There was another wheel on the other side, but snakes didn’t have thumbs.
Jason let out a breath he didn’t realise he’d been holding and reached down to pick up the lamp. He would need to go back up the well, but he’d rather dodge cannibals than fight a giant snake. The danger at least snapped him out of the daze he had been left in after killing a man. He was making his way along the pathway when he heard the grinding of metal behind him and had a horrifying thought:
What if monster snakes do have thumbs?
As he ran along the pathway, forgetting his previous caution turned out to be a mistake. His sandalled foot slipped on a slick section of plank and he tumbled over. He landed hard on the walkway, the sandy coating scraping on his naked torso. Lamp still clutched in a death-grip, he ignored the pain to get up and keep moving. Going as quickly as he dared, he reached the end of the walkway and ducked straight into the tunnel, dropping the lamp that would slow his crawl.
His hands and knees hammered into the hard surface of the narrow passage, shoulders and head banging against the side and top. He didn’t let it slow him down, scrambling forwards until he saw the dim light at the bottom of the well. Crawling out, he fumbled straight for the rungs set into the side. Hand over hand, he yanked himself upwards. Only after he was a good way up the inside of the well did he let himself pause to look down. The snake shouldn’t be able to climb up, but it shouldn’t have been able to open a door, either.
He was just turning back to resume climbing when he heard the hiss from below. The snake emerged from the tunnel, pausing to look up at Jason before sliding more of its body into the space at the bottom of the well. Jason watched in horror as its body started climbing up and around the outside of the well like the thread of a screw. Despite the wet and slippery surface of the well, the snake started winding its way up, as if adhered to the sides.
Jason resumed his climb, more energetically than ever. The snake was fast, but its circuitous path around the sides was long. Jason clambered up as fast as he could, but panic made him rush and more than once a foot slipped before getting proper purchase. He kept pushing upwards, every hand and foothold a step closer to the outside.
The final rung was set into the brickwork that sat above ground, but just as Jason’s hand gripped it, he felt something slip around his leg. The snake was as thick as Jason’s thigh and he hadn’t even seen the full length of it. The weight of it prevented him from pulling himself any higher and it only got worse as the creature wrapped around his torso.
He couldn’t pull himself any further up but he clenched onto the top rung. Hands clammy and quickly tiring, his fingers threatened to give out at any moment. But in the end, it wasn’t his fingers that crumbled. The mortar in the bricks gave out, the whole side of the well collapsing. Jason, the snake and a rain of masonry fell backwards into the dark.
6
Potent Potable
Jason, as a rule, enjoyed waking up. He loved the brief hazy moment between dream and reality, shrouded in warm, soft bedding. Even awaking in the soft grass of the hedge maze hadn’t been a wholly unpleasant experience. It was very different from regaining consciousness at the bottom of a dark well, soaked in filthy water and entangled in the corpse of a dead snake. He ignored the screens that had popped-up while he was unconscious. They shrank away to hover inconspicuously in the periphery of his vision.
His left arm was pinned under some rubble, a chunk of fallen masonry from the well wall above. He didn’t feel any pain from it, which was good, then realised he didn’t feel anything at all from it, which was bad. When he tried pulling it free the pain arrived in full force, his screams reverberating up through the well.
Holding his left arm as still as he could, he rolled the chunk of masonry off with his right. It wasn’t insurmountably heavy, but he had to hold back more screaming with gritted teeth. He couldn’t examine the freed arm properly in the dark, but it was hot and swollen to the touch. Even probing it gently with the fingers of his good hand sent ripples of pain radiating through it. He was confident it was broken and started carefully applying all the healing ointment he had left. The swelling reduced and the skin cooled, but the arm was still delicate and painful to move. The ointment didn’t seem effective on the bone-deep injury it couldn’t reach.
There was so much of the snake corpse that he was laying on it rather than the bottom of the well. Jerking his foot free of its coils sent fresh pain spiking through his arm. It took multiple attempts to struggle to his feet, using his good arm to yank himself upright with one of the wall rungs. Each time he achieved some precarious stability, his stomach roiled and he threw up, dropping to his knees. Vomit spewed out in fits and starts, even as the motion drove new pain into his injured arm.