The beast pens were massive. Shallow wide stairs led steadily downward and the ceiling remained level, slipping away into darkness above us, even to my supernatural vision. Cages ranging in size from merely large enough to hold a person up to the size of a mobile home lined the wide entryway and their occupants hooted, snarled, and gibbered as we fled deeper. My excitement mounted as I felt us nearing the site of death energy, although it was still below us.

The sounds of fighting broke out behind us and my last clear view through the open doorway showed one of the guardsman being eating by the troll’s arm which seemed to have reformed itself into a rather normal sized troll only slightly larger than a big man. I shuddered as it truly sunk in how incredibly unfair that fight would have been through any conventional means. Even squashed flatter than a pancake, that troll was still alive.

*Wraghk* *Krgh* Myrkai rasped. He was still trying to get the troll blood out of his throat I guessed.

We were deep enough now and the path had angled far enough that the doorway was no longer visible. Bia seemed to be repeating a word under her breath, less like a spell and more like the nonsense words you use for mediation, although it wasn’t “Om”. Her eyes began to glow like headlights lighting her way. I was just glad to see proof she hadn’t lost all her powers with the loss of her staff.

Although the beast pens were deep, they were limited by the outer wall of arena, and we had reached it, I saw. The largest cage in the pens had to be located here in the deepest part because it was tall enough to comfortably accommodate the troll with space above it for feeding from beyond the reach of his unnaturally long arms. I could even see the hoist and the crane they must use to drop him whole cattle.

“Now what?” Bia asked without the typical honorifics. I guess I was falling in her estimation. Well, it was bound to happen eventually.

Eric, Samantha, Ham, I called mentally. There was something about the city? How old it is? I could almost remember it, but the information seemed incomplete. Unlike some of the knowledge I’d gained from them, like Eric’s clear understanding of law or Ham’s mastery of the language, this felt like I was pulling at incomplete chunks from multiple places. I struggled to piece it together as words and concepts, not just formless and incomplete ideas.

“My Lord,” Bia’Keres interrupted. “What are we to do?”

I couldn’t get a fix on it. I needed to talk to them face to face, not sift through their memories for something they didn’t know they even knew. I could feel the death energy almost directly below us.

“Teach me to meditate,” I demanded.

“Now?!” Bia’keres asked. “My Lord” she added belatedly. “Meditation takes time – years to master. I can’t teach it to you in the next 30 seconds!”

I cast about for an answer. In the distance, I heard the measured tread of booted feet slowly approaching. The sound carried well to us, so they might still be minutes away, but she was obviously right. We didn’t have time for lessons on the metaphysical.

“Then, knock me out!” I said. Almost before the words had left my mouth, her petite fist smashed into me right at the point of my jaw and whipped my head around then slammed into my jaw and temple twice more in rapid succession. Darkness swept in from the limits of my vision.

You have been knocked unconscious.

Do you wish to override this status Y/N?

No, that’s fine, I thought.

“As you wish, my Lord,” I heard Bia say. She sounds a little too satisfied with herself, and that thought followed me into the darkness.

I found myself seated in a dimly lit chamber with a bare electric bulb overhead, similar to the interrogation scenes you see in the movies. I was seated in a cheap metal folding chair at a similarly cheap folding card table just big enough for four. Samantha faced me from across the way with Eric to my left and Ham to my right.

“Alright, I need answers and I need ‘em now,” I growled, channeling every hardboiled gumshoe that ever was.

Samantha looked around fearfully at the darkness. Eric just seemed confused. Ham, on the other hand, reached up to touch the bare light bulb and predictably burnt his fingers. Those things are hot, after all.

I rattled my brain to get the idiot out. “Everyone, focus please. I need to know about the history of the city.”

“Ak’har?” Samantha asked timidly.

“Right, Ak’Har,” I encouraged. “There’s something about its history. Something collectively that we know, but each of you only know parts.”

“It’s… really really old,” Eric supplied somewhat unhelpfully.

“Right, and?” I pushed.

“’Sabout that whole destruction thing that happened?” Ham asked.

“The city was destroyed?” I asked.

“No,” Eric replied, “This city is built on the ruins of one before.”

“Right!” Samantha chimed in, “It was rebuilt over the top of the old city.”

“That’s where it gets its nickname,” Ham supplied, “The City of Bone… or was it the City of Bones?”

“But that’s not what Ak’Har means,” Eric said. “The name is older than that, from before… before the current city. I guess it should really be called New Ak’Har, at least that’s clear from some of the oldest legal documents.”

“I jus’ know there’s no decent work, cause nobody’ll build nothin’ new,” Ham says. “It’s all repair work and patchwork and cover-ups.”

“There’s no new work?” I asked. “This is a large city. There should always be new construction. Things fall apart, as a poet once said.”

“Not Ak’Har,” Samantha argued. “Ak’Har just seems to last forever. Only the houses in the poorer quarters have to be fixed very much. All the nicer buildings just don’t seem to wear out at all.”

“The poorer quarter…” I tried to imagine the lay of the land. To the south were the slums which Ham’s memory supplied images of their crapped quarters. Streets completely covered over with makeshift tents and whole sections of the area given over to crude paths atop irremovable rubble or shifted stone. Eric and Samantha’s mind showed me the middle and upper class districts, even a glimpse of the houses in the noble sector looking like polished ivory and apparently indestructible through common means. Yet at the center of all this stood the arena, a massive stone edifice clearly built from conventional materials. A massive… empty… space with a roughly oval plaza surrounding it. I filled in the gaps and tried to picture it from above. An oval shaped space with greater amounts of destruction in one direction and intact buildings to the North. It was a crater. The arena was built in a crater.

“How old?” I asked.

The three spirits only looked at me quizzically. Suddenly I felt a presence behind me and the fiery blast of the forges heat on my skin. “How old?” muttered Bagwil. “Why, laddie, it’s the City of Bone. As old as the very bones of the earth.”

The darkened room seemed to shimmer and I saw beast cages around me. “Wake up,” Ham said slapped me across the face.

“Wait,” I said, trying to hold back his hand.

“Wake up,” insisted Eric, slapping me from the other side.

“It’s there,” I argued. “I can feel it. There’s an answer in what we’ve said.”

“Wake up,” ordered a woman’s voice.

“Wake up.” *Smack* “Wake up.” *Smack* “Wa-“

“I’m awake!” I said. I hid behind my arm and peeked at the one responsible for turning my dreamtime strategy meeting weird. Bia’Keres had been leaning over me saying “wake up” and slapping me so hard my teeth tingled for who knows how long. She must have been alternating sides, too, because I could feel both sides burning. “How long was I out?”

“My Lord, you were unconscious for nearly 5 minutes. The soldiers will be here momentarily,” she answered. Not even a false apology for smacking me around. That heart to heart we needed was rapidly moving up my list of priorities. Number one was still getting out of here alive, however.

“They sure are taking their time,” I commented.

“Why shouldn’t they. We have nowhere to go,” she answered and there was more than a hint of bitterness in her voice. As if to underscore her pessimism, Myrkai started hacking and coughing again like a drowning victim. He sounded like he was getting worse, and the fact that I could hear the difference in less than half an hour meant his ailment wasn’t natural.

I tried to remember everything my spirits had told me. Especially Bagwil chiming in with his moment of insight. The old city went as deep as the bones of the earth. There must be old dead here, then. Dead from long, long ago, unless such spirits had simply faded from existence. I couldn’t be sure how the process worked.

“Skills,” I muttered under my breath and examined the one I was thinking of.

Death SenseThe Necromancer is the master of the dead. He instinctively knows when someone is about to die and the major cause of death. He can also sense the aura of death on places and objects that have seen much death or are haunted by spirits or the undead.

Trial and error has shown that violent death is very hard to predict and only shown once it becomes inevitable, such as after falling off a cliff, failing to dodge a slash, or in the face of an insurmountable enemy with no escape.

Constant

Mana Cost: 0

Of course, I’d been periodically ignoring this thing ever since we first came to the arena because there were the ghosts of the dead and the smell of old and new death laying thicker than flies in a maggoty corpse. For the first time, I began to really pay attention to it the way I did the first night when I found Ham. For an instant, it felt like I was underwater. So much death washed over me. The beasts in these pens weren’t treated any better than bare survival dictated. Men were dying as we spoke just up the hallway in the arena stadium. Men reeking of killing intent were headed this way. But underneath all of this, like a vintage wine, a sediment of death so thick and solid I had been feeling it without even really feeling. Dead by the hundreds, the thousands, or more. Dead, right here, at ground zero to an apocalypse. That was the source of the death energy.

My vision actually became hazy with the leftover death in the air and the number of angry animals in the pens nearly tripled with the unsettled souls of their kin unable to escape their imprisonment even now. I gazed blindly through the fog and there, like a willow-o-wisp, I saw the spirit of a woman.

Her soul was faded, worn, more than transparent. Her washed out attire bespoke the fashion of another era, but it was regal. She stood in the air, oblivious to the laws of physics. When she saw me seeing her, she beckoned me forward and I followed. Dimly, I heard Myrkai’s rasping gurgling cough as he and Bia’Keres followed me.

The queen, for so I believed her to be, descended her illusory staircase and reach the bottom in the furthest corner of the troll giant’s cage. Her gestures hurried me on, even as her mouth failed to make a sound, even to my extrasensory perception. Her movements made a show of prying up a slab out of the floor. I searched around and soon found the edge of a slab of not-quite-stone. The material was pearl or ivory colored. Myrkai collapsed to the ground and cough like he would spit out organs. Bia scrabbled in the dirt and refuse of the troll’s chamber to find the other edges of the slab. I went to lift it with her aid, but it was beyond my strength.

For the first time, deliberately, I activated another of my powers, “Manifest.”

The queen seemed to bleed into reality, into color, like paint spilled on paper until she stood in full regal presence before us. “Please, help us,” I asked. She glanced around, but her gaze soon found what she was seeking. With magic of a kind surely lost to the eons, she blasted away the grime and offal to reveal the slab, and a very precise distance away, she likewise cleared a durable lever, set into the floor. With surprising strength, she pulled the release and nodded to us. Together, Bia and I lifted the slab again and it opened, not easily, but clearly by design.

“In we go,” I ordered. The light of the guards lanterns lapped over me and I heard their cries of alarm. The sound of their feet came running this way. Myrkai more or less leaned over and fell into the hole. Bia jumped in feet first. I took one last look at the spirit. “You have saved us,” I told her. She smiled brilliantly, then with an uttered word of power, she snapped off the lever. I jumped into the hole, the broken handle of the lever falling in after me. With a heavy thud, the slab fell shut after us, sealing us into the ruins of a dead city.

You have fled an arena battle, besmirching your honor as a Gladiator.

Gladiator Title Lost.

You have survived a battle with the Gargantuan Troll Grimhaus.

You have gained 500 experience points.

You have discovered Old Ak’Har.

You have gained 2000 experience.

You have gained a title: Blessed of the Old Royalty

Her blessing goes with you.

The little blue windows popped into being before I hit the ground and marred my landing. I ended up tripping and falling on Bia, and I came to rest on a pleasant soft place. She immediately shoved me off, and I think there was a punch thrown in, but she missed in the darkness.

I sat up and slowly my eyes began to acclimate to the truly stygian darkness down here. I wasn’t sure why Bia wasn’t using a light herself. As it stood, only the glow of the green tattoos along my forearms provided any light. My vision didn’t reach beyond my two companions and the floor. The fall hadn’t been bad, but Myrkai sounded absolutely awful. He was coughing almost continually. Bia looked alien in the greenish tint.

“We’ll rest in place,” I said quietly, not for fear of discovery, but because this place seemed to demand the graveyard respect of whispered voices and muffled steps. “Can you do anything for Myrkai?”

“I’ll check, my Lord,” Bia replied. She crawled over to him and began working her magic.

“I will rest, then,” I said. “I feel I am close to drained.” In fact, my vision was all sorts of wonky and I was trying to reign in Death Sense to a level that was still useful without being overwhelming. I’d learn my lesson about turning it completely off, but walking through a haze of deathly energy so thick it interfered with normal sight wasn’t helpful either. Perhaps I could switch it on full power for just a little while each day? Soon, I was fast asleep.

Bia’Keres couldn’t help but scowl as she followed her Master away from the battle. First he chooses to fight in the arena, awash in confidence. Now, only now, after paying for it with her staff, he chooses to run! She saw him glance over his shoulder and she struggled to keep up dragging Myrkai along. Troll blood, in small doses, was used for medicinal purposes, but being doused and drowned in the stuff couldn’t be good for him.

She scowled harder as the party reached the back of the beast pens. Every fiber of her being was urging her to say “I told you so,” but she managed to restrain herself.

“Now what?” she asked instead, biting off the end of her words, lest she utter words unbecoming. Her master simply stared about, seemingly lost in thought.

“My Lord,” she corrected herself. “What are we to do?” The act of calling upon him highlighted the lack of appropriate honorific during her first question. It had been lost with the suppressed vitriol of her thoughts.

“Teach me to meditate,” he suddenly demanded like some wet behind the ears youth.

“Now?!” Bia’keres asked appalled. “My Lord” she added belatedly. “Meditation takes time – years to master. I can’t teach it to you in the next 30 seconds!”

“Then, knock me out!” he said.

Her hands almost moved on their own and the satisfaction of punching him in the face, under orders or no, frightened her with its intensity. He passed out instantly. She wondered if she could do that anytime? There was a clear difference in martial prowess between the two of them, after all. Perhaps he didn’t deserve to be her master.

“Bia’keres,” Myrkai rasped. She looked to him. “If worst comes to worst,” the blood drenched cat creature paused for a series of gurgling hacking coughs. “If we’re caught,” he continued, “we should surrender. They won’t be justified in killing us outright… I hope.”

“Destruction of arena property and cowardice in the face of an enemy?” sneered Bia’Keres with equal parts self loathing and resignation. “They’ll kill us for the crowd.”

Myrkai made no reply. He was too caught up in his misery. Bia considered trying to help him now, but what did it really matter? It was time to wake her Master up, she decided. She tried shaking him, but that brought no result. Arguing that it was mere necessity, she slapped him, hard, across the face. “Wake up.” Once again, hitting him was almost like a drug, it felt so good. She hadn’t felt this way when they were sparring, but back then he hadn’t led her to utter ruin, had he? She slapped him again and again, a little harder each time, until her palm went numb.

“I’m awake!” he said, curling his arm across his face protectively. “How long was I out?”

“My Lord, you were unconscious for nearly 5 minutes. The soldiers will be here momentarily,” she answered. She was disappointed he’d woken up.

“They sure are taking their time,” he commented.

“Why shouldn’t they. We have nowhere to go,” she answered and there was more than a hint of bitterness in her voice. She glared at him as he proceeded to mumble under his breath and his eyes grew distant, like someone looking into another world. Then he walked purposefully to the back corner of the troll’s cage, like someone under orders, and began to paw through the filth on the floor. For a moment, Bia’keres thought he had legitimately lost it, until she saw him clear away the refuse from the corner of a slab. It looked like the material some of the buildings of the nobility were made of which was said to be more durable than stone or steel. It was no good, the slab could not be lifted. The torchlight of the soldiers approached ever closer.

“Materialize,” he commanded and I saw the spirit of a dead queen from a bygone era appear at his behest. With a smile on her lips and urgency in her movements, she cleared the slab and the lever that would let us lift it.

We dropped into the grave with the millennial dead and the grave shut up after us. Ker’haros fell on Bia’keres as he landed and she shoved him away. Her mind was awhirl with thoughts.

“We’ll rest in place,” he said quietly. “Can you do anything for Myrkai?”

“I’ll check, my Lord,” Bia’keres answered his command. The faint green glow of his divine markings were just enough to move to Myrkai’s side. She couldn’t make light and heal at the same time.

“I will rest, then,” I said. “I feel I am close to drained.” He fell almost instantly to sleep.

Myrkai’s condition was worrying, but she could do little but make him more comfortable. Her powers were not fine tuned enough to deal with such a unique ailment, but she managed to calm his ferocious cough and he quickly fell into exhausted sleep as well.

Bia’Keres sat alone in the near pitch blackness. Her gaze was continually drawn to the only thing visible. Ker’Haros had fallen asleep cradling his head on his arms. The glow of his markings back lit his features in green light. His face looked strange and alien with sharp shadows that transformed it. His black skin was slightly reflective, such that he seemed to have a halo about him.

What had she been thinking? She clearly recalled her feelings. She had been all but openly rebelling against her Master! Her words and actions had been defeatist and pessimistic. Was her faith in her Lord really so fragile? It really was, she suddenly realized. She was a poor servant. She put her head in her hands as tears began to run freely. The destruction of her staff was a sign. She was not worthy to be Bia’Keres. She had tried, Gods she had tried, but she simply wasn’t good enough. All those years of training, but the test was so different from anything she had been taught to expect. She had expected physical hardship, yes, but such strange emotions assaulted her at every turn. With horror, she remembered mere hours ago when she awoke wrapped around her master like a two bit whore throwing herself into the bed of a nobleman.

She found herself on her feet, scrabbling in the darkness. She was too distraught for a moment to even focus on the simplest of powers she had struggled so long ago to master and silently she derided herself for it with infinite venom. She cleared her thoughts just enough to manifest her powers as light from her eyes, although the color refused to follow her will.

She looked around only enough to find the exit. She gazed over her shoulder. Myrkai and her Master slept peacefully. She would not inflict her presence on them anymore, she decided. Dripping tears on the ancient floor, she silently walked away.

I passed rapidly into true sleep. The stresses of threatened death not only for me but for Bia and Myrkai had worn me out more mentally and emotionally than physically. I woke to the sound of Myrkai’s lung purging cough and a little blue window.

You gained a level.

Your maximum and current hit points will increase by 12.

Your maximum and current mana will increase by 10.

You have gain a +1 to strength!

Well, that was a very welcome development. I was a little irked that stumbling into this hole was worth more experience than smashing Grimhaus, but I suppose he wasn’t out of the fight when we left, so perhaps that was fair. I suppose the art of door dropping wasn’t something that would be likely to help me in future battles, either.

“How are you holding up, Myrkai,” I asked. Sleeping on the hard floor didn’t agree with me and my body declared it loudly as I sat up.

“I’ll live, my Lord,” Myrkai rasped. His throat was so raw from his constant cough, I wouldn’t be surprised if he went completely mute soon.

“That’s good news, my friend,” I said. I rose and looked round in the dim glow of my tattoos. My eyes were completely accustomed to the dim conditions, yet I could still only see a dozen feet. The darkness down here was thick with old memories and the dust of corpses.

“Where’s Bia at?”

Myrkai merely shook his head, resisting the urge to cough. I frowned. “Perhaps she went to scout,” Myrkai suggested.

“That’s not like her,” I argued. “She would keep watch.” I took a deep breath and steeled myself to break the tomblike quiet of the dead city. “BIA! BIA’KERES!”

My words echoed and with them I felt a surge of energy roll back to me like heat off a mirror. The voices of the long dead washed over me – weeping and the clash of battle. In the distance, I thought I heard a woman’s scream.

“Did you hear that Myrkai?”

His struggle to rise to his feet was all the answer I needed. I helped him up the rest of the way and happened to see the two foot length of broken off lever tossed down into the hole after us. “Here,” I said as I handed it to Myrkai. “This should make a decent club. Put your arm over my shoulder and let me take your weight.”

Myrkai’s weight bothered me not at all, though I was supporting him so much his feet hardly touched the ground. My free hand stayed on my sword hilt and together we plunged into the darkness to find our missing companion.