Chapter Twelve

The World Below

Wraith returned home to his dungeon and released his consciousness from its flesh confines and floated back into his core.

Ah, he sighed as he stretched out, metaphorically. It felt good to be able to feel everything going on in his rooms and corridors again. He looked around and smiled inwardly absorbing the goods be had traded for. He had Ember carry the spell pages, trap blueprints, and his own personal notes. He created some stone shelves and moved his three books onto it. He created a stone table and chair and made a body of a skeleton to sit. He operated the skeleton possessing the soul spark inside it and picked up the most exquisite of the books. It had a black shiny surface dotted with specks of light that floated just beneath the surface as if he was looking into a door into another universe. He opened the book and looked at the rows or elegant flowing script but couldn’t make any sense of it.

Ember, what language is this? He asked.

“Looks like elvish, shame you picked a book you couldn’t read instead of one of those fancy runic weapons,” Ember said.

Wraith waved a bony arm at him in dismissal, I recall you telling me something about a dungeon’s instincts. All those others grabbed the weapons because they wanted to add them to their hoard; they were following their instincts, but I was following my intellect. Knowledge, in the long run, will be more powerful than any blade, with one of those blades I could make a thousand more just like it, but with the knowledge, I will craft a thousand types of blades.

“Good speech boss but you aren’t going to get any knowledge when you can’t read the damn book,” Ember pointed out.

I know, Wraith replied annoyed, gritting the skeleton’s teeth. How do I learn it?

“Well I hesitate to suggest it, but you could find an elf and use your mind blade on it, or one of us could go undercover to big nearby town and find a translation guide or a tome to teach you elvish,” Ember suggested.

We are forced to go with the latter for now as I have a shortage of elves. I am sending Cob to do it now, he decided. Wraith created a human body and gave Cob his orders and two hundred gold and a set of light armor and a sword and shield and longbow. If anyone asks, you’re a ranger who killed a band of orcs and looted them, he instructed

Turning aside from the star-covered book he picked up the next one, a wizard’s spell book by the look of it. Flipping through it he found some excellent spells that surpassed the spells in his other spell book in the amount of mana required to cast them and the scope of their abilities. The book was written in common and Wraith cast a few of the spells summoning darkness, lightening an area of silence. The best of them was one that created a storm of lightning with tendrils of some horrible creature that tried to wrap around anyone inside it and drag them down to the ground where the icy effects of the spell would freeze them long enough for the lightning to finish them off.

Turning aside from the spells, for the time being, Wraith looked over his notes evaluating the tricks he had learned from watching how another dungeon defended itself as well as the pattern of the elementals who had defended it. Wraith briefly wondered if he could create an elemental and decided to give it his best shot. It looked simple enough just create runes of magic in the air and flood them with earth or fire mana.

He created a pattern, but it didn’t hold in the air, after several attempts at this he gave up on that approach. Next Wraith tried running the magic runes through a solid object the runes held and the rock gave off a faint glow when he added earth mana but nothing else happened.

Ember why are these patterns useless? He growled to Ember who was currently trying to seduce Amy or Emy, whatever.

“What’s the problem? And why are you making glowing rocks?” Ember asked and reached down to pick up the rock.

Ember’s body was ripped apart as the rock explodes into dust that shot out from the point of origin at such high speeds in shredded everything in its path. Wraith was suddenly glad he had added the mithril cabinet doors to his shelves at the last minute.

“What was that?” Ember asked his spark rising up from the body he had been using. “It really hurt, and that mana even brushed up against my soul, it was scary.”

I was trying to make an elemental, Wraith explained.

“Well that explains it, you can’t make elementals you have to summon them and have your soul sparks possess them, it helps that elementals don’t really have a personality,” Ember said.

Wait I could have summoned bodies for you? Why didn’t you tell me this before? Wraith asked a little peeved.

“You could theoretically do it, neither of us knows how so I never brought it up plus it’s a little lazy and I didn’t want you getting tempted to summon demons,” Ember said.

What’s wrong with doing that? Wraith asked.

“Unlike elementals, we can’t possess demons, they have intelligence and a personality and a particularly nasty and insubordination one,” Ember explained. “You have to give demons very strict instructions and try to cover as many contingencies as possible otherwise they try to twist your words to screw you and get you killed; they can’t help it, it's in their nature.”

I see, that would be very annoying, he agreed. Well at the very least this pattern will make an excellent trap. I should experiment with it using different types of mana.

“You do that, just don’t use me as a demonstration,” Ember said flying off.

Coward, Wraith muttered as he set to work.

A week past as Wraith set to work on expanding the lower floor of his dungeon as well as exploring the tunnel that the kobolds had emerged from. It wasn’t just one tunnel, as Ember and his other minions explored deeper, they found a labyrinthian warren of tunnels where the kobolds had been mining and digging. Wraith wasn’t the only one who set traps, many of his minions fell prey to pit and deadfalls. He slowly expanded his territory downward, monsters that once would have given him trouble either immediately surrendered or were killed by Wraith’s kobolds and ghouls.

There were other more complicated traps. Trip wires launched rows of spears, pressure plates that caved in the passage; once there was even a rolling boulder. Ember fled from the boulder as it rolled towards him it was shiny and black, he jumped a protrusion of rock that came twenty feet before a dead end. The rock protrusion should have merely stopped the boulder but instead, it broke revealing it had been giant round glass vial containing a black acidic slime.

The black slime attacked Ember whose weapons and armor dissolved and soon the slime was soaking up the remains of Ember’s body. Ember floated back to Wraith in dejection and Wraith quickly made him another body. It took the death of fifty ghouls and kobolds to finally kill the slime but at last, Wraith had its pattern. Wraith couldn't add it to anything currently and the slime didn’t absorb the consciousness of a soul spark very easily; luckily it required no intelligence and operated entirely on instinct. He discovered its pattern was very different from the mad slimes who absorbed the bodies of their victims to grow more eyes and mouths for their psychic attacks while the black acrid slime merely needed organic material to grow before splitting off into new creatures. Wraith filled a couple of pit traps with the slimes but using them for combat would endanger his troops as much as an enemy, these would need to be used carefully.

At last, we found our way out of the labyrinth as Ember passed through, he momentarily lost contact with him, his connection to Ember’s soul severed. He panicked for a moment, Wraith ordered every one of his minions to rush the spot where Ember had disappeared. Then just as quickly Ember reappeared.

“Well that was weird,” Ember said.

What happened? Wraith asked.

“If I am not mistaken, I stepped into a portal to the World Below,” Ember said breathless with excitement.

The World Below? Wraith asked.

“Another plane of existence, it links up to the Plane of Earth. Its an endless expanse of caverns and tunnels; you can’t just dig up anywhere to get back to the surface only in places where the World Below touches on points of existence in our world,” Ember explained.

How can I gain access to it? If I send anyone there, I lose contact with them, Wraith asked, bringing up his points of contention.

“Not true, it is just going to take a lot of mana. You need to push your mana through the portal, it's going to seem that you're losing it but it's just forming a doorway. Once it's formed you will be able to continue as normal,” Ember instructed.

Wraith did as Ember had said; the amount of mana it took was frightening but finally when his stores of mana were almost depleted the portal flashed blue and then appeared to be a regular underground tunnel once more. Wraith possessed a body and followed behind a squad of ten minions. There were a few pit and spear traps, but the soul sparks had become adept at spotting them.

They came to a cliff and looked down upon a cavern littered with the ruins of a city. Thousands of stone towers, houses, and mansions with crumbling walls. Glowing lichen and mushroom dimly illuminated the land below. A massive spire carved from the central spire of the cavern stood proud, a bastion overlooking its domain.

There was a roar, and a dragon with steel colored scales stepped out onto the steps that led up to the massive doors of the spire, a contingent of kobolds dresses in black robes slowly ascended the steps bearing wooden bowls filled with gold and silver coins and treasure.

Well, my minions, we have encountered our next goal. We kill a dragon, Wraith said and cackled wildly turning about and returning to the dungeon.

The dragon heard Wraith’s laughter and flew towards them, but he was long gone by the time its hail of razor-sharp stones it spewed out into the mouth of the tunnel, shredding the few kobolds who had been too slow. It was fine, Wraith’s minions could die but not so the dragon’s.