Her robe fit.

  My skin offered far more protection than the simply fabric, but, wearing it, I felt far less vulnerable. A lifetime of experience couldn’t be overwritten in a few weeks.

  Attar took her pack, which contained only food and water, she’d had no weapons or jewels in the end, not even a spare change of clothes. We were both glad for it.

  Her grimoires Attar cast into the campfire of a strange ghost he summoned who seemed to do nothing more than sit in front of it. We had no use bargaining with demons.

  We left the bodies where they lay. With food in our packs and clothes on our back we had no need to loot the dead. I might not have been able to even if I needed to, as the compulsions from the etiquette book still tore at my mind. I’d need to clean my new robes as soon as possible.

  Besides the corpses, the room contained only a faded tapestry. Neither of us wanted to stay here. This room was steeped in too much tragedy and betrayal.

  Only a single other door gave egress, but it was of simple wood. Attar’s ogre knocked it open with a single swing. The armoured ogre ambush had been a boon in the end.

  The room beyond had three additional exits, one wood, two stone. Finally, a choice!

  It was completely empty otherwise.

  “Which way?” asked Attar.

  “I’ve already cast my compass. Until the morrow we will have to guess. The wood door would be easiest.”

  Attar’s ghosts could be injured, and thus we risked them every time we opened the door, unlike my spells which were created anew, but I was running dry on spells, so summoned his ogre once more to knock down the door.

  The door hadn’t been latched, and swung easily from the ogre’s strike, now leading to a perpendicular corridor heading both left and right. Right was a dead end after 60 feet, left led to another wood door which the ogre also opened.

  It was a pitiful sight.

  Another taur, this one female, was chained to the wall. In front of her lay a small mound of things, displayed on a pair of boulders.

  The collection had everything, from an old doll and a pouch of herbs to a wagon wheel and a cloak made from wolf pelts. There was no sign or season to the whole mess, save perhaps that they tormented her.

  She grunted and lowed when we entered and strained against her clanking chains, eyes flashing.

  “She’ll attack us if we free her. She is already trying to kill us with her gaze,” Attar said.

  Had this been where the other taur had been travelling? Had he been coming to free her, or had he been her captor?

  “She’ll die if we don’t.” I went over to the pile of things, searching for a clue. None were in reach of the taur. It served the second purpose of distracting me from her nakedness. It was terribly improper, and I was liable to have a fit if I was forced to look at it any longer.

  Looking at the random collection of items, from blob of iron to a tiny man or child frozen a block of ice, the whole thing had a sense of ritual to it. The man was also naked, for which I would have torn my gaze away immediately, but his eyes were moving. They were locked on mine, pleading with me.

  I recognized the creature at once, for there were few immortal creatures on our plane.

  A pixie.

  A creature as good and kind as hobgoblins were mischievous and cruel.

  “Someone is trapped in here! Attar, bring forth your camp fire at once!”

  Heedless of the ritual I lifted the block and brought it at once to a bare patch of floor, where Attar immediately summoned his ghost.

  The ice began to melt at once. It was a wonder it hadn’t started already. These halls were not freezing. Something snapped at the same time. Not physically, but on a psychic level. A strain left the world. The taur sagged and collapsed against her chains.

  Attar studied her.

  “She’s dead. That ritual, she was part of it. She died when it did. And with it ended,” he frowned, “poisoning?”

  My sensitivity to that ebb and flow of nature transcendent was greater than his own. I could sense the ritual’s purpose now that it had ended.

  “The water. In the Painted Lands as a child I could drink from every clear stream. Now they make you sick unless you boil them. The warlocks were assaulting us.” I replied. I knew I spoke the truth, as surely as if I were an elf. How many more twisted rituals did the warlocks keep alive here? Even if we never escaped, I hoped our actions here were a boon to the world.

  While we waited for the pixie to free itself, I tested the nature of the objects which had constituted the ritual.

  I couldn’t figure out how they were related, how the ritual had been formed, but such was the nature of dark magic. It distorted the natural flows of reality to serve its own purpose, rather than to enhance and gratefully accept what nature had already provided.

  The wagon wheel round, heavy, and rolled, but nothing more. The cloak of wolf pelts stunk and I refused to touch it. Attar sensed nothing after testing it. The iron nugget was not the first I’d seen in these dungeons. It leapt into my hand as if a living thing, but did not do so for Attar. It was my own lode-ic nature which drew it to me. The herbs were a cough suppressant, which I could think of several uses for if necessary. Attar took them in his own newly acquired pack. A pair of candle clocks I took for myself, as a replacement for my crayon should it ever run out. I left the dried meat, as my lifesight revealed some other form of organism had already claimed it as its own.

  The handkerchief was strange. Though it was white and pure, when I rubbed a spot on my hand with it, the spot smudged and grew. Flipping the cloth around and wiping with another clean area merely caused the spot to grow even larger.

  I dropped the cloth in frustration and scrubbed at my left hand, but the mark wouldn’t leave. I clutched at my wrist, as though the stain would spread like an infection without a tourniquet. It didn’t move.

  In a moment of madness I was tempted to cut my hand off in order to protect myself from the—

  —light blossomed beneath the darkness now staining the back of my hand. For a brief instant, the sun shone through, clear as day and then was gone, leaving the patch dull and lifeless once more.

  I took a deep breath, then slowly forced my hand down.

  Next was a small chain curtain, designed to be worn around a woman’s shoulders as far as I could tell. A similar make to the “clothing” of the princess I’d found in that spiders’ lair. Attar tested that one, as it would be far to ridiculous for me to wear. I could hardly stand the embarrassment of seeing him don the thing. Nothing came of it.

  An old doll hung limply while I played with it, and my ears were not pierced so Attar had to test the earring for me.

  A shadow nearly at once engulfed Attar, then stepped aside. Much more like a folk tale of a phantom than the real thing. The shadow quickly solidified into a more ghostly figure however, becoming indistinguishable from reality in a split second.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  A beautiful young woman, the same diminutive size as Attar stood there, wearing the same clothes, with the same surprised expression on her face.

  Attart had returned.

  ***

  I fell to my knees in a brief moment of joy before less willingly hopeful senses and observations assessed the situation.

  As Attar moved and changed the expression of his face, so too did Attart change. My outstretched hand—when had I reached towards her?—felt a deadly cold emanating from her body, and she did not react in the slightest to my presence. She hadn’t moved at all, except for her face.

  Besides, she was too young. She hadn’t been so youthful in appearance when we’d met. I stood, heartbroken despite myself. This wasn’t Attart.

  So what was she?

  “What is she?” Attar echoed my thoughts nearly as I thought them, “She doesn’t move as I move, yet she copies my emotions on her face. Is this Attart? She looks like me.”

  “Attart, or something similar. Can you feel that loathsome chill? I wouldn’t doubt it was that earring which trapped the poor pixie.”

  “Chill? Not at all. Not any more than the dungeon normally provides,” he reached a hand out to touch her shoulder, whereupon his hand passed straight through.

  He jumped back, startled, “She’s not really there at all! I didn’t feel anything!”

  I reached toward her myself, but the painful cold stopped me a fathom away from her form, “Careful with whatever she is. She might kill me if she touched me. Can you move her?”

  Attar frowned, concentrated, and then, easy as a thought, she shot off at a run, looping from the entrance by which we’d came back to Attar’s side, running at the same speed as Attart would have run were she real. On her return, her expression even changed, different from Attar’s own. Her eyes closed and her tongue stuck out like a child.

  “I think she is meant as a decoy of sorts, an echo of the wearer. Perhaps my own past is so tangled that the earring has failed in its purpose and shows the wrong time.”

  Attar’s words had the ring of truth. Even if he didn’t have my same experience, he was still sensitive to magic in all its forms. I suspected he was correct, save for the explanation as too that deadly cold.

  “A decoy and a weapon perhaps. I’ve no doubt her touch is colder than ice in the dark of winter on a windlashed peak. I can hardly stand to be near her.”

  Attart disappeared without apparent effort from Attar. Then reappeared as the shadow which stepped away from him a moment later, then once more disappeared.

  “She seems to come and go as I please. We’ve found a powerful tool, even if it has broken from its original purpose.”

  I suspected the earring wouldn’t properly work for me either. It would probably show me as I was before I was captured by the warlocks, or as my mirrored demonic form that the warlocks seemed to adore in a misguided sense of worship.

  One item remained on the boulders: the head of an old man, frozen in stone. The detail was exquisite, chiselled down to the last pore. Detailed enough to make me believe it might be the work of a curse or enchantment. I had encountered a statue of one of the Gorgons early on in exploration after all.

  I lifted the head in both hands, spoke to it, and met its stony glare. In all aspects it appeared a simple lump of stone.

  Removing the head revealed a Northman rune on the boulder it had been resting on. I recognized the language but didn’t know a word of it. Attar knew even less, having hailed from much further afield.

  “Rest easy on the evergreen fields of Elysium. Your trial is at its end.”

  I bowed to the taur, still sagging in her chains. Attar mirrored me.

  I studied the room while we waited for the pixie to thaw. It besides the ritual and the Bleaktaur there was only a tapestry on the wall opposite the entrance to lend any character to the room. A dead end.

  Or so it would have us believe. I was growing used to the peculiarities of Bleakfort.

  I tugged the tapestry aside. Sure enough, a wooden door awaited us. It was there we would explore next, after I’d written a new spell and freed the pixie.

  I withdrew my wax.

  Then I put it away again. I’d thought better of what needed doing.

  A teleport spell was written on my left arm. A stronger version was written in my spellbook, but I could lose the book. I placed the book down on my lap and instead traced once more the runes on my forearm, this time using my mind rather than a knife.

  _?Safe Teleport?_

  An hour later the spell was safe. Should I need to flee, I could flee.

  The pixie was still frozen. I could have used my frozen flame, perhaps, but I was worried the extreme heat generated by placing it on ice might harm the pixie, even if it couldn’t die, and, supposing I was lucky, I wasn’t sure it would cool enough for me to retrieve after being placed on ice. If I had no other source of fire I’d try it gladly, but Attar’s campfire still burned strong.

  I gestured to the “hidden” door, “Shall we?”

  Attar and I hid behind the boulders while his ogre forced open the door. Ghosts had a delicate enough touch they could unlatch and force what my swords had to instead destroy.

  It was a struggle, but eventually he got it open. Another case where the wood had swollen to the point the door behaved more like a thin section of wall.

  Something was wrong with this door as well.

  For one thing, it led out nearly a foot into the next room. It wasn’t that the doorway protruded—there was nothing to either side of it, it simply started existing a full step further into the room than it should. It was possible to walk around behind the point where we entered without returning to the room where we’d come from.

  The next problem was that the doorway disappeared when we stepped through, leaving behind a stone wall in its place. We weren’t trapped however, as the empty bit of space we’d entered through still led back to the ritual room.

  The new room was roughly hexagonal, though the corridors leading off from it in three directions distorted its shaped into something more amorphous than the honeycombs I was used to.

  At the centre of the room was a largish black metal sphere on a plinth, about the size of my head. The sphere was split down the centre and propped open with a thin bar of metal. Something akin to iron but shinier. Steel perhaps? Though it seemed hard to account that such a valuable substance would be spent ineffectively holding apart the two black halves.

  I approached the structure with caution. It had the air of ritual about it.

  The sphere held a core, also made of metal, though unlike the shining sphere and the rod, the core was grey and pitted, lumpen and ugly. It looked like iron left out in the rain for years, though with a greyish rust instead of orange.

  “Do you recognize this?” I asked of Attar.

  He frowned, “I’ve never seen any of these substances.”

  I pointed to the rod. Closer now, the material was clear to me, “That is steel. The outside is a sort of black emerald, though metallic rather than a gem, which is strange to me. But I’ve seen it before, the Delta people had some significance for the stuff. But the grey metal is unlike any I’ve seen. It looks as though it is rotting.”

  “It’s warm,” Attar said, reaching out a hand, “hot even. Perhaps this is some sort of heater.”

  I followed suit. The core was indeed giving off heat, but it was far cooler than even a small fire would be. I doubted I could boil water over it.

  Stretching out my hand turned out to be a mistake, as the steel? rod spun towards it. I pulled my hand quickly away before the rod fell out of the emerald hemispheres. One of nature’s first laws was to be cautious in disturbing what you didn’t understand. I had no clue what the outcome of disrupting this ritual would be.

  I backed away from the structure.

  There were four exits to the room, not including the strange, invisible teleportal we’d come by—one for each of the cardinal directions.

  I no longer knew which direction I was facing, so I merely pointed at the door straight in front of me, this one of flimsy wood, “That one looks easiest.”

  We ducked back through the teleportal while the ogre forced the door open. It would be a sad day if a trap cost him his gloves.

  The door held. The ogre pushed hard, then checked the frame with his body.

  The door held.

  He slammed against it with all his might and howled, thudded spear and fist against the unyielding wood. It looked so fragile, yet it didn’t even shiver.

  “One moment, dears, I’m just putting up my hair.”

  Attar, myself, and the ogre all froze. An older woman’s voice had just come from the other side of the door. An ogre had been howling outside her door a moment prior, and yet she sounded as calm and delighted as if her grandchildren had just stopped by to visit.

  The door swung open a moment later under no visible means. An older woman, beautiful and tall, straight backed despite her light grey hair stood several paces from the doorway.

  “Ah, you must be Tom’s friends. I’ve been expecting you. Please do come in, my dears. It’s not healthy standing in that room, terrible vapours.”

  Tom’s mother smiled at us and, with a single finger, beckoned us inside.