Chapter 25

The One That Breathes a Tepid Wind.

“Well, we can’t say that we’re surprised, am I right?” Arris said.

We had reached a dead end in the dungeon tunnel. There had been no other corridors. No possible way but forward. Robern checked for traps, for mechanisms, for any sign that we might find a way through the wall in front of us. It was simply a dead end.

“The poem says that ‘The fourth ends plain,’” Arris continued, “and here we are. Then it says ‘The fifth is earned from grate and lane.’ We passed many grates and it would make sense that one of them would lead us to the fifth dungeon, right?”

“Let me see,” Pelle said, and Arris handed the parchment with the poem to her.

“One lane will win,” Pelle read. “The one that breathes a tepid wind. Each day is marked by a sleeping master. Beyond the trap, torches burn faster.”

“I’m lost,” Vynk said.

“I think you’re right, Arris,” said Robern, still facing the wall, this time akimbo. “I noticed some of the grates were loose as we walked over them. Most of them were solid and unmoving though.”

I thought about what everyone had said. It made sense to me that we should inspect the grates, and see where they led us. The poem wasn’t difficult to decipher. It sounded as though only one of the grates would lead us down the right lane. The question remained: would the other ones lead us to certain death? Did we only have one chance to figure out which lane was the correct one? There was only one thing left to do.

“Let’s go see if there’s any tepid wind coming from the grates,” I said. “Do you want to lead us, Robern?”

“Yea, I’d better, I guess,” he said. “Who knows if traps will reset or whatever.”

We returned down the tunnel, still wary of dangers, but more at ease. The stench of spider corpses was beginning to hang in the air like a haze. The running blood beneath our feet had become somewhat sticky.

Before long, we came upon the first grates. They were immovable and no wind seemed to come from them. We passed several others that seemed to be exactly the same.

I began to notice that the grates were placed in one of three places on the dungeon floor. On either side, or the middle. They occasionally filled the tunnel from wall to wall, and we took a closer look at those ones. The tunnel beneath the grate was divided into three sections. One in the middle and one on either side, delineated by dungeon walls that came up just beneath the grate.

“Filo,” Robern said. “Can you reach a hand through the grate?”

“I’ll give it a try, why?”

“I don’t feel any wind coming up out of the grate, but I wonder if we could feel anything flowing in the tunnel instead.”

Filo put her hand through one of the grate holes and paused for a moment.

“I feel the wind,” she said.

“Nice!” Vynk said. “Way to go, Robern! You figured it out. It’s the middle tunnel. So now we need to just find a way down there, right?”

“Well, hold on a second,” Robern said. “Filo, can you put your hand into the right and left tunnels too?”

Filo found that each tunnel had a wind slowly flowing through it.

“So it’s not just about the wind then,” I said. “We’re missing something.”

“We can think about it while we continue looking for those grates you said were loose,” Lep said. “There’s probably a reason they’re loose.”

While we continued, I thought about the poem some more. “One lane will win. The one that breathes a tepid wind.” I kept repeating those lines in my head as I thought deeply. Perhaps tepid was a key word so I asked Filo about it.

“Hmm. You guys will have to tell me what you think when we try again,” she said. “I don’t recall feeling anything different from any of the tunnels. The wind felt tepid in each one—I think.”

Finding the loose grates was easy enough. They were mere meters apart from one another. The first one Robern found was on the left side of the tunnel if we were facing forward. The one after that was on the right, and the last one was in the middle. The grates were quite heavy but we managed to lift them off and drag them to the side.

After carefully peeking into the tunnels, each of us stuck an arm down to feel the wind.

“They’re each tepid,” I said.

“Breathes,” Arris said. “Breathes a tepid wind.”

“It’s this one,” Filo said. She was on the right one a few meters ahead of us.

“How do you know?” I said.

“Because the wind stops every ten seconds or so. It sort of dies down for a moment before picking up again.”

“Do the other ones do that too?” Pelle said.

It turned out that Filo was right. The other tunnels had a constant wind, whereas the right one seemed to breathe. It took us an hour of testing back and forth because the change in wind was so slight, and we wanted to be 100% certain.

“Wait,” Lep said before we decided to leap down. “What comes next?”

“‘Each day is marked by a sleeping master. Beyond the trap, the torches burn faster.’ That’s the last bit,” Arris said.

We leapt down into our best guess at the correct tunnel. With torches flickering wildly, within a narrow space, we went forth.

At some point I was certain we’d passed beneath where the dead end above us had been. I had a hunch that everyone else felt the same way too. We’d each grown quiet and I felt a sense of collective anxiety. I couldn’t ignore the feeling so I checked our health bars for a moment.

“I knew I was feeling something odd. Pelle check it out,” I said.

She came over to look at our health bars at the bottom of my mana bar. Each of our health bars had a symbol of chattering teeth with bits of flying debris flying from them.

“It had to be a form of nervosity,” Pelle said. “I feel like I’ve seen this symbol before.”

“Anything we can do for it?” Lep said.

“That, I don’t know,” Pelle said, then looked at me as though I knew how to solve the affliction.

“Me either,'' I said. “I’ll keep an eye on it. Best I can do.”

Robern was far enough ahead of us that I heard him utter something under his breath, but couldn’t hear quite what it was.

“Enh, we’ll be fine!” Vynk said, slapping me on the back and walking off to help lead us forward.

The tunnel was uneventful and unending. After a few hours, the tunnel widened into twice the size as any of the tunnels we’d traveled through before.

We traveled for so long that we decided to stop for a meal and a night's rest. I cast a Spectre Sentinel in front and behind us and we all took turns watching out for the party. The Sentinels held the torches for a bit of light so that whomever’s watch it was didn't have to keep holding one.

The next day, we continued our journey. The afflictions we’d had, had disappeared. True to the poem, for whatever reason, our torches burned faster. I thought it might have been because of the constant light wind.

Then we came to an odd artifact floating in midair, right in the middle of the dungeon. It was a massive mask made from the bark of a tree that seemed to have been forced into the shape of a face. The features were expressionless.

Robern brought out his crossbow, conjured a bolt then fired at the mask. The bolt sank into the cheek of the mask.

“Robern!” Pelle said.

“What?” Robern said.

“Careful!”

Before Robern could remark, the eyes of the mask glowed a piercing white.

We fell back simultaneously and Arris said, “this must be the sleeping master.”

A dungeon boss health bar appeared at the top corner of my mana bar and I cursed under my breath. It would have been nice to strategize our approach. Instead, we were thrust into a disorganized defense.