382 days until the Arkon Shield falls

1 day, 21 hours until Dungeon Purge

High Shaman,

I hear and obey. I have doubled the strength of our patrols. If the human is in my sector, I will hear of it soon. I will not fail you, I promise. — Chief Zel Foghorn, commander of the northwest quadrant, Human Dominion.

I had nearly reached the bottom staircase when the dwarf shouted, “Wait!”

I stopped and turned around. Regna still hadn’t stepped out of his cage, I saw. I looked at him questioningly.

“How did you do that?” the dwarf asked.

My brows drew down. “Do what?”

“Melt the lock.”

“I’m a mage,” I answered simply.

With a wave of his hand, Regna dismissed my response. “That much is obvious,” he said. “But what you did shouldn’t have been possible.”

I scratched my head. “Why not?”

The dwarf stared at me from across the room, seemingly mystified by my response. He pointed to the puddle at his feet. “That is zelium too. It is one of the hardest metals in Overworld and beyond the ability of any Trainee’s spell to damage.”

“Really?” I walked back across the room to study the pool of cooled metal. Melted down, the ore shone a rosy pink. Kneeling down, I examined it more closely.

You have identified the metal: zelium. Zelium is an epic metal found only in the deepest mines. It is prized for its unusual toughness and durability.

“Interesting,” I murmured and glanced at the other cages in the chamber. Their padlocks, too, were made of the same substance. And according to Regna, the crates stacked on the right wall were also loaded with the zelium ore. There could be a fortune here. It was a pity I didn’t have the means to carry much of it out.

Still melting the locks of the other cages and taking their metal should be feasible. I’ll do that, I decided, but only after I completed the dungeon.

“How did you do it?” Regna asked again.

I stood upright and smiled mysteriously. “Magic.”

Regna’s lips tightened in frustration.

I tilted my head to study him curiously. “If you didn’t think I could melt the lock, how were you expecting me to free you?”

The dwarf gestured irritably to the other end of the room. “The keys are somewhere there.”

“Ah, I see. Well, then, I guess I better get—”

“All right,” Regna said.

I broke off and stared at him blankly. “All right what?”

The dwarf folded his arms. “I’ll try doing it your way.” He blew out an explosive breath. “I’ll help you clear the dungeon. Then we’ll see what happens.” He lowered his head. “Smiths, help me if you’re wrong.”

I smiled. “Excellent.” With the dwarf’s aid, finishing the dungeon would be much easier. I waved him out. “Well, come on then. Get out of there, and let’s get going. Time’s a-wastin.”

Muttering something under his breath that I didn’t quite catch, Regna strode forward. But just as his foot stepped over the threshold of the open cage door, he froze.

I rolled my eyes. Now what? About to hurry the dwarf along, I caught sight of his expression.

Regna’s eyes had rounded in shock, and his mouth hung open, working soundlessly as his pupils darted from left to right, reading something only he could see.

My own smile faded, and dread curdled in my stomach. The dwarf had received a message from the Trials. And from the look of it, it was nothing good. “What’s wrong?” I whispered.

The dwarf didn’t answer. Crashing to his knees, Regna hung his head. “I shouldn’t have listened to you,” he wheezed.

I swallowed. Tears rolled down the dwarf’s face. What could the Trials have told him that was causing him such despair?

This is my fault, I thought. If I hadn’t—

An alert from the Trials pulsed for my attention. Knowing it couldn’t be anything good, I opened it reluctantly.

Jameson (Jamie) Sinclair, the player Regna Redmayne has been coopted as a minion of the rank 1 dungeon, the Primal Keep. Given the circumstances in which you found him, he is no longer deemed an acceptable dungeon creature.

Alternative activated: Regna Redmayne will be placed in servitude.

My own face drained of color. “No,” I whispered. This was not at all what I wanted. This was an obscenity.

The rest of the message scrolled through my vision.

Contract initiated: You have been offered a minion. If you accept this contract, Regna Redmayne will be placed in your service as a slave. Agreeing to the contract shall bind him to serve you in perpetuity. In return, you bear him no obligation.

As a slave, Regna Redmayne’s free will shall be leashed. If he disobeys you, attempts to abdicate his oath, or earns your wrath, he shall be punished by debilitating negative Traits.

Do you accept Regna Redmayne’s contract of service? If you refuse this contract, Regna will be placed in stasis to await subsequent dungeon entrants.

I bowed my head in horror. “Damnit,” I growled. The dwarf had been right. Why hadn’t I listened? Now, I either took him on as my slave or killed him. I certainly wasn’t going to leave him to the mercy of the next entrants.

I drew my knife. “Forgive me,” I said as I stepped up to the kneeling dwarf’s side.

Regna raised his head and glanced from the dagger in my hand to me. His eyes were devoid of hope. “It’s useless,” he breathed. “The Trials will not allow me to escape the fate it has decreed for me that easily. You cannot kill me now.”

I didn’t believe him. Tightening my grip on the knife, I thrust it forward.

But I had barely propelled the blade a few inches forward before it disappeared from my hand.

Weapon destroyed. Warning: The minion, Regna Redmayne, is protected and may not be harmed until his contract is accepted.

Ahh...

I dropped to my knees, dismayed by what I had done. “I’m sorry, Regna,” I mumbled. “I should have listened to you.”

He smiled sadly. “It’s too late for that now. Go on, accept the contract.” His smile twisted. “Better you than some other stranger.”

I ducked my head, unable to look at him. This was my fault, and I had to fix it somehow. But how? Even as I racked my mind for a solution, another thought intruded.

Are you really going to give up on this opportunity, Jamie? Think! Regna is nearly a Seasoned player. With him by your side, you could clear this dungeon and the next, too.

No! I squeezed my eyes shut, refuting the voice of temptation.

Don’t you want revenge for Ma? Regna is a means to that end.

I rocked back and forth on my knees. There was a lot I was willing to do in the name of vengeance. But not this. Never this. I couldn’t enslave Regna.

You’re being foolish! You can be the best of masters. You can even let Regna seek the death he desires once you leave the dungeon. But don’t spurn the contract. Use the dwarf. In this dungeon, at least.

I opened my eyes.

I won’t do it, I vowed, banishing temptation.

I couldn’t make Regna a slave, no matter how noble my intentions or how much I rationalized my actions. Doing so would make me no better than the orcs.

There has to be another solution.

I refused to believe the dwarf’s free will could be so easily stolen or that there were no other options. I could still give Regna the death he wished by accepting the contract and killing him, but even that seemed unjust.

The Trials, I thought. This is all the Trials doing. The Trials had placed Regna in this predicament, so it was to the Trials that I had to appeal.

Turning my gaze inwards, I studied the Trials core within me. When the Trials sent me alerts, it spoke—if not to me, then at least at me—through the core. It usually felt as if some nebulous machine was dropping messages in my mind. Then, too, there was the brush I’d felt at the edges of my mind when the core had first embedded itself in me.

To my mind, all of this was evidence that whatever the Trials was, it possessed intelligence. It had to.

It must be able to think for itself, and if it can do that, then it can be reasoned with too.

“Human?” Regna asked. “What are you doing? Did you hear me? Why aren’t—”

I stopped listening. For what I was about to attempt, I needed absolute concentration. Squeezing my eyes shut again, I blocked out my awareness of the outside world, cutting myself off from all sights and sounds while I probed at the core within me.

Then I did what I had never done before: I spoke back to the Trials.

“Trials, do you hear me?”

I didn’t know how else to address it. Projecting the words into my Trials core, I willed them to reach the vast awareness I had felt only once before.

Nothing, not even the tiniest flicker of a response.

“Trials. Here me, please.”

My voice soared through the caverns of my mind, resonating with my plea.

Nothing.

I didn’t let the silence dissuade me. I was just getting started. I tried again, letting my words reverberate, harsher and more demanding this time.

“Trials, if you are—”

A presence flooded into my awareness the way an ocean would spill into a teacup.

I shrieked. Clutching the side of my head, I thrashed on the floor. I felt overwhelmed as if my mind was being crushed under a weight too great to bear. Somehow, though, I retained my connection to the ocean sitting atop me.

SPEAK ELDALUK. YOU CANNOT ENDURE THIS FOR LONG.

Eldaluk?

It sounded almost like a title. But I ignored the strange address; the Trials was in me, and more importantly, it was listening. Fighting to hold my concentration against the throbbing pressure, I forced out the words I wanted.

“The terms of the contract, I wish to change them.”

A heartbeat of stark silence.

Then thankfully, a response.

HOW?

I framed my requirements and willed them to the Trials.

A second passed, then another, and still there was no reply. I began to despair. I couldn’t bear much more of the Trials presence, and if it didn’t respond soon, it wouldn’t matter how it decided.

More words appeared in my mind.

YOUR TERMS ARE ACCEPTABLE, ELDALUK.

As quickly as it arrived, the Trials vanished, taking with it the crushing pressure. Gasping in relief, I opened my eyes.

It took a while for my gaze to refocus and, when it did, it was to the sight of Regna hovering over me. “What’s wrong?” he asked, eyeing me worriedly. “Why were you thrashing about like that? Are you sick?”

“Perhaps I am,” I said with a weary chuckle. “We’ll soon find out.”

“What does that—” Regna began before breaking off as his eyes glazed over. I assumed a Trials message had opened in his mind. One had appeared in mine too.

Special contract initiated: You have been offered a party member. If you accept this contract, Regna Redmayne will be a junior member of your party for the duration of your dungeon run.

He will not gain experience, traits, or bonuses from the dungeon run, nor can he remove any items from it. In the event you die or fail to complete the dungeon, Regna Redmayne will be found in breach of contract and transformed into a dungeon creature.

If you vanquish the dungeon, it will relinquish all claim it has over Regna Redmayne, and when you leave, he will be returned to his home domain.

Do you accept Regna Redmayne’s contract of service?

The new contract was not exactly what I had requested from the Trials, but its terms were kinder than the original.

This, I can live with, I thought in relief. But can Regna? I glanced at the dwarf to see his reaction.

He was staring at me aghast. “How did you do that?”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said, lying without a second’s thought. “I rejected the contract, and it seems the Trials saw fit to offer new terms in its place.”

The dwarf’s expression didn’t change, and I wasn’t sure if he believed me or even if he had heard me. “Is this contract better?” I asked, prompting him. “Can you live with this?”

Regna blinked. “I don’t know how you did it. And I don’t think I want to know.” He shook his head in amazement. “There is something strange about you. You’re different, even from the other mages I’ve seen…” He took a deep breath. “But the new terms are more than fair and far better than I could have hoped for. Thank you, human.”

On the tail end of the dwarf’s words, another message dropped in my mind.

Terms accepted by both parties. Contract concluded.

I grinned in relief. “You’re welcome. Oh, and call me Jamie.”

✽✽✽

Before we left the basement, I strode to the right side of the room and inspected the contents of the crates. Each was filled to the brim with burnished rose silver ingots. I whistled soundlessly in silent appreciation. “How much is all this worth?” I asked the dwarf, who had stepped up beside me.

“A fortune,” he grunted. “The clan elders will not be pleased to hear of this theft.”

“What will happen to it?”

He looked at me blankly.

“When the dungeon is purged,” I explained. “Will it just vanish?”

“No, it won’t,” Regna said. “The purge only destroys living things. This will all remain.” He chuckled. “Consider it yours.”

I shot him a startled look.

“Or the spoils of the next entrants,” he added. “It belongs to whoever can carry it out of the dungeon now.”

I pursed my lips, considering the implications of that. “Is it normal for so many items of value to be found in a dungeon?”

Regna laughed again. “Ah, I forgot, yours is a new domain. Is it still under an Arkon Shield?”

I nodded.

“And you’re the first to enter this dungeon?”

I nodded again.

“Well then, to answer your question, when the Trials chooses a region in the deadlands as a location for a new dungeon, it does not sanitize the area. Everything in that region becomes part of the dungeon. As you can imagine, depending on the location, what you will find in it can vary wildly. But of course, as successive parties pass through a dungeon, it gets picked clean of anything of value.”

He thumped me across the shoulder. “You, though, are the first in this dungeon, so I guess that means you get the pick of the loot. Make good use of the opportunity. You’re not guaranteed to find anything, though,” he warned. “I got the feeling that the bastards who kidnapped me were using this place as a base for a long time. By now, they must have scoured it clean. I doubt you’ll find anything of value that they themselves didn’t leave.”

“I see,” I murmured, not particularly disappointed by the thought of not finding anything else of value. With the elemental fragments and the zelium, I thought I’d already been more fortunate in what I’d found than I had any right to expect.

“Now, before we go up there,” Regna said, gesturing to the stairs leading up, “what can you tell me about the dungeon?”

Over the next hour, I took Regna through my journey in the dungeon, describing its layout and the foes I had encountered.

“Elementals,” Regna muttered when I was done. He had spent the last hour inspecting his armor while I spoke. Despite his time in the cage, the dwarf’s gear appeared in good working order.

As for himself, Regna had insisted he, too, was hale enough to continue. As skeptical as I was of this claim, I’d found no reason to dispute it. The prospect of escaping the dungeon had reinvigorated the dwarf, and his excitement to get moving shone through clearly.

“What do you know about them?” I asked.

“They’re not the easiest foes,” he allowed, “but manageable.” He thumped his warhammer against the floor. “Especially with a weapon like this beauty.” The dwarf glanced up at me. “Where did you lose your party? It was at the drawbridge, I bet.”

I hesitated a moment, then nodded, deciding to maintain my deception. I didn’t distrust Regna, but the less he knew of my abilities, the better.

The dwarf accepted my response without comment. “Well,” Regna mused while he tried to comb the dirt out of his beard, “seeing as how this is a green-ranked dungeon only and you’ve killed eight of its critters, I suspect half the dungeon has already been cleared.”

“That’s good,” I said. Glancing inwards, I queried the Trials core. “We have one day and twenty hours left.”

Regna grunted. “Should be plenty of time.”

“Let’s get going then.” Turning around, I led the way back to the stairs.

✽✽✽

Regna followed me out of the basement and back to the ground level, his steps firm and confident, which did much to reassure me. I still wasn’t convinced my new companion was fighting fit yet.

Back in the central passage, I paused at the top of the steps. “You remember any of this?” I asked in a lowered voice.

Regna shook his head. “I was unconscious when they carried me into the castle,” he replied in a hoarse whisper.

I pointed out the gilded double doors at the end of the corridor. “We leave that for last.” I gestured to the open entryway on the left. “We clear the rest of the floor through there first. Agreed?”

“All right,” Regna replied, “but let me take the lead.”

I frowned. The dwarf was better equipped than me to withstand damage, but with all the armor covering him, I didn’t see him being any good at sneaking, and I suspected a large part of my success so far was because I had retained the initiative.

Seeing my conflicted expression, Regna spoke up. “If you die, I die.” He smiled wryly. “And besides, a mage’s place is never on the frontlines. It’s my job to keep you alive. Let me.”

I nodded reluctantly and beckoned him forward.

The dwarf didn’t move, and from his expression, he clearly had something on his mind. “What is it?” I asked.

Regna’s gaze darted to my leg. “What happened to your foot?”

“Childhood injury,” I said brusquely.

Regna’s brows drew down at the curtness of my response, but he didn’t remark on it. “Will it be a problem?”

I sighed. If we were going to fight together, the dwarf had a right to know about my limitations. “Yes. Don’t expect me to be fleeing any encounters.”

Regna was silent for a moment as he digested this. Then he clamped a mailed first around my arm. “Understood, Jamie,” he replied and stepped into the waiting corridor.