Chapter 4: Beach Oubliette

I skulked toward the beach-ward trees. Azwold was occupied with his weird agenda, but I had my own need; to dip my toes in the water. I looked back. His tent was only 1/3 complete. Sea foam thoughts pulled me like a hook lure, and I wanted to follow it.

So I did.

The going was rougher than I expected. Shambling around as a spirit inside a skeleton was as clumsy and rattle-ridden as one might imagine. Rocks, shrubs, underbrush, all manner of rooty obstacles stifled any swift progress. I clutched at thinner tree trunks as I went, trying to keep an awareness of the scepter’s distance.

A wolf’s howl keened far away. I remembered Azwold saying predators would have little interest in me, but he may have omitted details. No wolf would shun bones to gnaw.

I strained hard to stay vertical, feeling faint even though no blood pumped through me. I bolstered myself. My need for the last of my lost bones remained hot inside my ribcage.

A shock of pain thrummed where my left hand should have been. A ghostly hand was there now. Tendrils of misty phantom fingers crept out. They flowed like time-slowed runnels to stretch along the forested hill and down toward the beach. The further they crept, the hotter the pain, so intense that I forgot I had forgotten what pain was like.

An ill feeling fell upon me.

I howled, wanting to scramble back uphill to the uncertain safety of the Gremlin. Disgruntled and ailing as I trudged back up the ravine, it became clear Azwold—and the [Hive Scepter]—had left camp. My radial malady grew with each passing foot I ascended, testing the scepter’s range limit. With no other cure for this ill, I required the mage’s help.

I stomped shrubs and dry thorn bushes, trying to surpass my anguish with fury.

I could not estimate accurate distances. Maybe that was the jest of it. My ability to judge lost accuracy as I entered the brink. Perhaps the answer would never be clear lest I pass right over it.

Testing the scepter’s radius could wait for more covert opportunities to arise. This condition sapped my wits. I looked for the mage and scepter, lest I collapse.

But I could not find either. His tent was up, but vacant. As was the motorcar. I stopped and stared at my toes and noticed one was missing. In disbelief, I took a tally of my toes and found them not totally there. Perhaps it fell off. If it did, my other parts might not be safe from detaching. Or maybe one spirit of my graveyard failed to pay their oak bone price? I felt a hollow warmth at the thought; a solitary, faithful servant lingering behind to haunt while a host of traitorous ghosts fled. Either way, I resolved to find the toe once I had my hand.

Frustration built to anger as I stewed on the foolishness of the mage. Why reanimate my muddy old skeleton just to allow me to wander, lost? I needed help simply to find my way in this strange world. I did not want help. If frustration could slay, I would die again.

I peered up. It was midnight, or so the gibbous moon suggested. It hung high and waxen, cloaked within a drift of ocean cloud.

A delirium threatened to take me, so I shambled in a beach-ward direction. I let the hurt be my guide, following my creeping ghostly fingers.

My phantom hand pain grew intolerable as I alighted from the tree paths to beach sand. But the illness I endured due to scepter distance dwindled as I drew nearer. My spectral fingers stretched out across the shore’s gentle slope, crawling along to find the unseen oubliette.

I found the mage scanning the beach, ambling methodically by his tablet’s eerie glow. I hobbled to him, foot bones crunching awkward prints into the sand. Azwold saw the phantom hand creeping like liquid smoke and heard my footfalls. He turned, offered me a casual nod, then darkened his tablet. “Welcome back.”

I clutched my handless wrist and shook it, growling.

“Yes,” Azwold nodded again. “Maybe this is as far as the map gets us. I didn’t know about the ghostly fingers. I guess this part is kinda like an escort quest?”

“Be swift,” I said. “Pain.”

The hand guided us, and we walked.

Many fathoms away at the southern end of a crescent cove, my phantom hand rejoined itself. There was a faint glowing, like the square shape of an invisible blanket stretched out in the sand. Moonlight highlighted the edges, making it stand out just enough to see.

My sensation of pain faded, and I sighed relief.

“This is amazing,” Azwold said, walking over to pick up a long stick of driftwood. “I’m here. At last.”

He dug around in the sand. A red X materialized.

Now there was no question; the spot was marked. Soon he had uncovered an iron hoop handle. He bade me help him tug the ring upward. I thought this was absurd and disrespectfully declined.

The mage struggled alone to raise the door. It looked to be made of banded stonewood. I watched him heave, over and over. The hoop looked iron, but was it grave iron? My thoughts, as always, lingered on collecting my hand. I deigned to assist, but the moment my finger bones touched the metal, my regret was instant.

There was a bright shock, fizzing and cascading through me.

I lost my senses.

When they slithered back to me, I saw the oubliette’s portal was open. A kelp-green liquid rippled below, its stagnation broken by a breeze. If my sniffer worked, I would have wagered the waters smelled ghastly.

“You knew… it was toxic?” I said. “How?”

“I looked into it? Listen, this part isn’t even written into the questline. It’s meant to be one of the last things we do and we’re supposed to discover this place with zero direct clues. An unofficial step toward [Spell: Summon Epic Skeleton]. I happened to figure it out early, so we’re skipping ahead. There were allusions to toxicity in what writings I could find. Maybe it’s not, but I shouldn’t find out. Alright,” he said, tapping on his tablet. “We’ll get a spell that does something like this later, but for now my gadgets provide work-arounds. Gadget Craft is an OP job, IMO.”

I glanced at the screen. There was an image of a skeleton and the words “Equip Minion.” Azwold began strapping something to my skull. I noticed another progress bar in my periphery. It filled within moments.

“This will light your way through the murky muck,” said Azwold. Then a dazzling beam pinged to life above my forehead, illuminating the world in front of me.

I gasped, and swung my neck, shining light out in every which direction. The mage implored me to stop, babbling something about the “lizard-dog-men.” He told me to focus, saying he did not want to draw attention. His words seemed wise. I was not eager to meet chimeric humanoids, or anyone else. I ceased my wobbling and peered into the dungeon’s open door.

Azwold showed the magic lit up tablet to me. It reflected what I saw back at me.

“Your headlamp also records what you see for me,” he had a discernible grin, “so I can watch your progress from up here. Don’t lose it, or we’ll both be blind down there.”

I nodded to him. He tied one end of the rope coiled over his shoulder to my hip bone hoop. I had little to lose and much to gain… so I plunged into the dark green of the oubliette’s door.

I sunk down a fathom or few and looked up. The headlamp lit the portal like a sunken stone chimney.

My foot bones squished into an algae-choked hallway. I peered both directions. Each hall had several doorways down to dark endings. A mild aftershock of phantom ache returned to me and I watched as my spectral knuckles scuttled down the hall to my right. The hand waited in front of a door. Then my ghostly fist floated up to knock, dissipated after, and took my pain away with it.

A distant light source near the hallway’s end intrigued me. Obscured, I saw the last door on the right was open, rammed up against a stone dead-end. A shroud of sand blanketed the hallway, sloping gently into the last cell. I saw, perhaps, skeletal remains; an entire body? Not just a hand.

I trudged toward the barred door my ghost knuckles had knocked on, saving the distant dead-end for later exploration. Each laborious step through the sludge kicked up low clouds of sickly sea-foam grey.

The headlamp illuminated the environs in a manner so surreal. I was underwater, toxic water, or so said the dread mage Azwold. Was it the water itself, the sludge, or the murky, swirling clouds that could kill? Were my bones safe from corrosion? He plunged me into a waterlogged dungeon where my success relied more on faith than on ability.

Without muscles, I contemplated how I was meant to budge the rusted door. Any physical strength I possessed came via the scepter’s enchantment. I peeked through the vertical bars of the door’s square window, into the dark cell, and my lamp illuminated the stone hollow.

There it was. In the room’s center; a skeletal hand upon a glass-covered pedestal. Shocked, I wondered why anyone cared enough about my old severed hand to enshrine it like this. To cage and bury it, but with a twisted reverence?

My darkness deepened. Though the lamp provided more illumination than the cloud-muddled moon through a watery roof hatch, I imagined the trap door clanking down, sealing me in. Worry gnawed at me as the implications of becoming trapped floated through my bones. For the immediate moment, I deemed it wise to focus on retrieving my blasted hand.

The door was likely iron. The handle, however was silver. No expense was spared in this dark place’s construction, I saw. I wondered what hid behind the other doors? If the trapdoor fell, I would have all the time in the world to find out. Until my lamp burned out, that is.

The thought of unending dark and unending undeath spurred me back into action. I grabbed the silver handle and tugged. There was something unmistakably magical about how it groaned open. My strength alone was too meager to overpower the fused rust growing between the door’s edges.

New, dingy colors mixed into the obscuring murk of the water. The bottom edge of the door swept an arch of gooey algae aside. I stepped inside, careful to keep the door wide and ajar.

I pulled on the glass casing, but it did not come up. Inspecting where the diameter of it met the pedestal’s top, I saw that it sat over the hand bones inside, unattached. Perhaps water pressure kept it held fast? The hand rested upon a dry velvet pillow with tassels at each corner.

I tapped on the glass and heard a muted crack. That was all it took. Fractures etched the glass, then I watched the thing implode. Murky whorls scattered the pedestal’s long-held treasure.

When the clouds cleared, my hand was missing. I scanned the floor, and the lamplight burned through the swampy cloud swirls. I spotted it, revealed in the corner. The individual bones had not scattered. Baffled, but relieved, I rushed to snatch it up. There were glass shards mixed in with the bones, and somehow, I sensed I took a little damage. I became vaguely aware of a “healthbar” and that it was no longer pristine, having shaved a sliver of health away. It was my healthbar. Had I invented the term, or had the ‘game’ told me?

In the moment of hands clasping, I beheld a frightening mental image. A system of pulleys and rope, stretched taut, as men struggled to pull a sailor’s limbs from their sockets. It was me; Gnarlroot the Eld, the last time I was alive… and human. The memory shocked me. Is that how I died? Drawn and quartered on the deck of a ship? If I had a stomach, I would have vomited mutinous volumes. My bones rattled with horror and anger, stirring up a cloak of tiny bubbles.

But there was something else. The memory of my limbs being pulled apart; it felt like someone else’s memory. Like the grizzly narrative had overwritten another hazy set of memories. It occurred to me, for the first time, that reacquiring my lost bones may create more questions than answers. My hunger for them stayed alive, even so. Attaining a truer sense of self remained my goal despite complications. A game was afoot, and I intended to keep playing.

Once I shook the nastier bits of the memory’s cling, my next instinct was to reattach my hand. But the bones smacked against my left wrist’s big bare knuckle. It would not take. Azwold knew I would require help in reconnecting it. This agitated me.

I growled airlessly. Sounds were strange down in the poison water.

I peered up toward the oubliette’s entry portal, but averted my gaze. I knew Azwold could see where I looked on his tablet. As I ran a hand over the rope’s knot on my hipbone, I considered the corridor’s dead-end and the faint light.

According to Azwold, he was not the only Spirit Mage in this world. I decided then, if there was another way out, a way to escape the mage, I would find it.

I kicked up all the grey muck I could. My environs roiled into a concealing cloud. I used the ruse to untie my hip rope, letting its tattered end slump in the muck. And if Azwold saw me do it, what then? Let him jump in.