Beyond the Rim

So it all comes down to this. Thick slab of old wood. Not much of a door really. Was it worth all the bloodshed just to reach it? Looks solid – oak or something – but not really so impressive.

Twelve hours. Walking, crawling, sneaking, descending – always descending – through the realm of the flintlock chieftain and beyond. Blood, sweat, tears, and enough dead flinties to fill a moat.

The rogue’s the closest, of course, crouching low, ears cocked forward like a cat, arms shooing the rest of them back. He owns the approach, after all.

Nearby, the warrior has his sword out but is using it more like a cane, leaning heavily, wearily. He looks beat up and frustrated as about half of the infinite hells.

Next – two or three safe steps back – the casters.

“Look, guys,” says the mage, “I pretty much shot my wad back there, ya know? I got a couple half-assed illusions, not much else. Maybe we should, ya know, wait. Come back another day.”

“Quiet!” The rogue acts like he’s heard something. His jagged nose almost touching the wood of the door now.

“You gonna open it or give it a blow job?” asks the mage. “Tatiana’s tits! You act like Arivold’s mother is on the other side or something.”

Suddenly, the cleric is mumbling, head tilted toward the heavens… well, the low stone ceiling of the passageway actually. “Our Lady of Pure Waters, forgive him. He knows not his own folly. Give me strength for what lies ahead…” On and on.

“Wizard!” The rogue’s dark and shifty eyes lock on the mage’s. He’s trying to whisper, but his angry intensity makes it difficult. “Shut that ugly pie hole of yours! I think I hear movement, and the wood gives off a warmth.”

“Mage,” says the mage wearily. “It’s called the Westmark Mages’ Guild for a reason. It’s not the Westmark wizards’ guild, or the Westmark enchanters’ guild, warlocks’ guild, or fucking conjurers’ guild. Mage, for the 800th gods forsaken time!”

“It’s gonna be dead mage if you don’t shut the fuck up!” The rogue’s hands are on the hilts of both daggers or stilletos or cutlasses (cutli?). Whatever. He doesn’t look very scary though. The warrior sways. He needs that sword the way a tree needs roots. He did take a couple pretty good shots back there.

The map had led them to a large chamber deep underground. It swarmed with angry flinties, but when those were good and dead, the map proved itself true. Secret door not used in a very long time at just the spot indicated, series of narrow tunnels, more secret doors, some nasty traps the rogue handled.

Now finally… the door.

“Oh, stop being so melodramatic,” says the mage. “They aren’t going to open it for us. I’m telling you we had a good run, but now we got nothing. Look at Chop-Chop here, he’s barely standing, and our shining light of the lady’s mercy is speaking in tongues. More importantly, I got my good looks and not much else. That was a hell of a fireball back there though. Did you see that thing? Those flinties lit up like nameday candles!”

“Did I see it?” the rouge asks, rhetorically. “Did I fucking see it? I used to have eyebrows, remember?” He does look a bit singed. The mage suppresses a giggle.

“Yeah, well, you put yourself in the middle of that many enemies, you gotta expect something bad’s gonna happen. I did warn you it was coming.”

“You call yelling, ‘Daddy’s cookin’ up something hot, bitches!’ a warning?”

“Listen, you gotta understand. Style is the ultimate underpinning of great magic. I can’t be yelling shit like, ‘Hey rogue, get your worthless ass out of the way of the fireball,’ and expect meaningful results. Think about Talmudrin the Wise. He didn’t go around saying, ‘um look, I’m about to cast kind of a powerful spell now. I say, perhaps you should get out of the way.’”

“Talmudrin the Wicked,” suddenly the cleric is back with us, “died in the King Archivold III’s dungeons for crimes against nature, man, and all 13 of the gods!”

“I thought there were 12 gods,” says the mage, confusion suddenly clouding his countenance.

“There were 13 at that time! Do you truly not know the history of the divinities?!”

“I tried to learn it, but who can keep track? There’s 13 gods, then there’s 12. It’s like getting a baker’s dozen at the fried bread place. You never know how many you’ll actually end up with.”

The cleric turns his face back toward the ceiling… heavens… whatever. “I am your servant, oh, Tatiana of the bluest seas. Grant me the wisdom of forgiveness in your shining light of purity…” blah, blah.

“Anyways,” says the mage, “I say we knock off, head back to the surface, juice up, return another day. Whatever’s beyond that door’s gonna wipe the floor with our collective ass if we’re not full power.”

“Upon careful reflection,” the cleric interrupts, “I have decided I cannot again adventure with this party unless the ranger also joins.”

The mage bursts out laughing. “Well pickle me in dragon shit! Now we have the truth of it! So much for his vow of chastity, eh boys?”

“Because,” the cleric retorts loudly, “when the lady is present it restrains you from such vulgar and blasphemous language!”

“Oh, but my thoughts are even more impure. If my body could achieve half the sin my mind comes up with when I’m behind her in the marching order, I’d be ready to face whatever spot in the hells the gods have set aside for me. Those leather leggings of swiftness enhance more than just her movement speed, believe me.”

“Rogue!” The warrior’s gruff but commanding voice pierces the banter suddenly. He looks better now, stronger, mental frustration apparently overcoming his bodily hurts. The sword is gripped tightly in his palm now, poised for murder. Even the mage shuts up a minute. “Are you certain this is the correct door, the final one, the one for the key?”

“According to the map.” The rogue begins digging in his belt pouch. The warrior halts him with a gesture.

“Magician, do you truly have only weak illusions left?”

“Magician? Magician?! Now that’s below the belt. These aren’t card tricks, you know. Ever seen a carnival side show hack light up a dozen flinties?”

“Answer the question!” There’s peril in the warrior’s bloodshot eyes. “I grow beyond weary with this day and now this banter. I do not wish to open the door if it will mean our deaths but nor do I wish to turn around after so long and hard a descent. The map led us here unerringly. We all know the great reward said to lie beyond that door and also the certainty of peril. We must assess our strength and vote.”

“Fine,” says the mage. “I have a couple illusions as I said – one of them sound only, by the way – my personal shielding spells of course, one more fireball, and bees.”

The rogue winces and face-palms. “Not the fucking bees.”

“What?! That’s a great spell!”

“From your perspective, perhaps, but they’re not exactly choosy in their targets. Those of us closer to the action would prefer something different. Am I wrong, warrior?”

“C’mon, I just ranked it up. I can put the swarm on a whole big group of baddies. Nothing like a hornet’s stinger in your eyeball to ruin your day.”

“I can tell you from experience,” the rogue says.

“Just don’t go near. They only come off the original targets if you mess with ‘em.”

“They seem to have a particularly low threshold for considering themselves ‘messed with.’”

“Well, they are angry hornets. You want me to summon nice polite ones?”

“Cleric!” Again the warrior is compelled to interrupt. “What of your powers? Can you keep us alive another encounter?”

“I will pray for guidance.” The cleric goes down to his knees. His depraved mumbling is reaching some kind of a crescendo now.

“I’ll go with the consensus of the group – you know I’m a team player,” the mage says with conviction and sincerity, “but when the spells are gone, I’m on wand charges and darts.”

“Don’t bother with those ridiculous darts!” says the warrior. “It does more harm than good to manifest incompetence before the enemy, bolsters their fighting spirit.”

“Hey, I’m getting better with ‘em! Remember the troll?”

“The troll laughed at you after you pierced its upper arm with your eighth throw, and it regenerated the damage before it was even done laughing.”

“Good distraction though…”

“The Lady of the Waters sends no clear message,” says the cleric, returning to his feet. “We must trust to faith in ourselves. My healing powers are diminished but not absent. I believe the reward is worth the risk. We must purge this unholy corruption from the land!”

“What unholy corruption?” says the mage. “We don’t even know what’s back there. You just want the loot like the rest of us.”

“Do you question the purity of my purpose, necromancer?”

“I won’t even dignify that with a response.”

“For one who wields killing magic and whose mind is filled with impurity and darkness… I can think of no better term.”

“It has a very specific magical definition, incense breath. Ever seen me reanimate a corpse, even once? Not that it wouldn’t be cool and damn handy, too, but mages lack the power. It’s you holy rollers who can learn the necromancy. Even you, if you weren’t too self-righteous to pay a little homage to Morgoroth. What d’you have against him anyway?”

“The God of Death is the eternal foe of Tatiana of the Blue Waters, great light of the West! Even now they are locked in eternal combat across the celestial realms. To even imagine paying homage to him or engaging in necromancy would call forth my Lady’s furies of holy retribution to strike me dead, and rightly so!” The cleric looks like he might throw up or cry. Maybe both at once.

“Enough!” Wow, the warrior is actually pissed now. That was loud too, especially the way he slammed down his armored boot. Even the mage gets a little worried about attracting something through the door, although it’s clearly locked, at least from this side, and doesn’t look to have been opened in a very long time.

“We all have some strength remaining,” the warrior says, struggling to keep exasperation out of his voice. “Rogue, I believe you are unscathed – other than the errant fireball?”

“Errant?!” says the mage, cutting off the rogue’s reply. “I took out three-quarters of those flinties with one spell. I don't call that errant.”

The rogue holds up his hands plaintively before the warrior can walk forward to begin strangling the mage with his bare hands. “Please! Please!” Is the rogue really the voice of reason? “I’m able to avoid most damage from area spells. In truth, the fireball did me little harm. I’ve taken a couple other hits but can proceed without significant limitation. I have several potent poisons available, too, although without knowing what enemies await, it’s difficult to know which may be best to pre-apply. Regardless, like the cleric, I vote to proceed.”

“Your call then, warrior,” the mage says. “I’m still on no, and no wins a tie by Adventuring Guild rules. So… your call.”

The warrior stares at him a moment, the weight of decision upon him.

The mage fills the silence with his insightful reasoning, as always. “The map says this door leads to Felston’s lost treasure but nothing else about what’s back there. People have been looking for that treasure a century and a half. Believe me, I want it. I want it bad. My share of course. But it’s not going anywhere if it’s been behind this door a hundred fifty years. Felston hid it all the way down here. No way he left it unguarded. Probably a summoning ward for something real nasty. Summoning wards don’t expire, guys. Duration: permanent. High level ones can trigger multiple times. And that’s just one guess. Supposedly, Felston thought the treasure was too valuable to remain at the surface. Would drive people nuts, start wars. It’s going to be protected seven ways from Saint Auburlan’s day. If we hadn’t found the map in that old tomb and if yours truly had not spent countless hours deciphering the writing, we wouldn’t be here. Look at that door! No one’s opened it since Felston himself locked it!”

The warrior continues staring at the mage, and everyone gets quiet, even the mage. The warrior at last turns and stares at the door. “You have the key, rogue?”

“I have a key,” he says, always cagey. “We found it the same day we found the map but not even in the same room.” He pulls this big complicated key thing out of his pouch and looks at it closely, holds it up next to the lock. “It might fit. Can’t be sure. Don’t see any traps. Can’t be sure.”

“Open it,” says the warrior.

“Fuck me,” says the mage. “This is gonna get real as soon as that thing opens.”

“You’re sure?” says the rogue.

“I am certain,” says the warrior. “Prepare yourselves.”

Already there’s a golden glow from the cleric and a warmth. One of his protection wards is going up.

The rogue moves the key toward the lock, super slow, gets it right up to the key hole and holds it still for like a full minute, staring intently. Then slowly – so painfully slowly – begins pushing it in. When it’s about half way, he lets go and jumps back, and everyone about shits themselves, but nothing happens. He waits, then reaches out and pushes it in two more cunt hairs and jerks back his hand. Nothing. This repeats a dozen more times. Finally, it’s all the way in.

“It fits,” whispers the rogue. “I can see from the mechanism the lock will come open with a turn in a clockward direction.”

They all just stare. The rogue looks at them each in turn, stares everyone in the eyes one good time. They all nod. Ready to roll. The rogue reaches out, grabs the end of the key, and gives a hard turn. The last thing they hear is a precise mechanical click from the lock. Then the door is open, all the way open, but it makes no noise that they can hear, only an incredibly bright blinding light. Then the door is closed. And the key is gone. And the hallway is silent, still, and empty.

“It’s not the destination,” says a voice. “It’s the journey.”

I like the mage, always did. So you’ll forgive me if I slant things a bit in his favor.

I mean it though. You will forgive me. I’m narrating, you’re just one reader. What choice do you have? If we get off on a bad foot, and you get all resentful and reluctant, you’ve only yourself to blame. It’s a one-way conversation, and even if I could hear your thoughts, I wouldn’t care. I’m here to send a message only some of you might comprehend.

Anyhow, I don’t like the mage because he’s foul-mouthed and irreverent. I like him because he’s quick-witted. It’s my favorite thing in humans, the ones I like at least.

I like Felston, too, though he’s quite a different sort. Quick-witted but in a more profound kind of way.

Oh, and here’s another thing you’ll forgive me. I tend to talk always in the present because that’s how I perceive things. You see, everything happens all at once and is over in an instant. It also lasts forever. Your little human brain, evolved for chasing reproductive relations, nuts, berries, and the occasional wooly mammoth, can’t possibly understand. Don’t try.

But in the interests of narrative clarity, for your benefit, I’ll do my best to tell the story in a linear fashion, what you might call chronologically. It doesn’t come naturally. You’ll see what I mean.

The incident with the door is not the end for the mage and his companions, you’re no doubt relieved to hear. In fact it’s the beginning, but it’s such a small piece of the puzzle I have to put together for you, I’m going to have to come back to that in a bit.

Let’s start with Felston (technically Felston the Younger, as you’ll see). Felston was non-concomitant with the mage et al. by, as the mage hinted, about 150 of the Earth’s orbits around the sun…

Okay, fine. I’ll say it in way you’ll understand. He lived a century and a half before. Had lived… was living… should have lived… could have lived… might have lived? Your shades of subtly for describing “the past” elude me sometimes. You seem to have more ways to express past possibilities that never came to fruition than actual events.

Point is, Felston was long-dead enough to have become more legend than fact. Not that his deeds in life were unremarkable. Quite the contrary. It’s just that the greater the actual deeds, the greater still the myths they spawn.

Felston wasn’t a mighty weaver of magic spells as the mage seemed to imply. He was no Talmudrin the Wise (or Wicked). Instead he understood people, what motivated them, what they craved or, when necessary, feared. That was it really, but he sat at such a confluence of influence, the society of humans rarely ever saw such before and certainly not again since.

So when he needed his “lost” treasure, that he himself so carefully hid deep in the Earth, to be protected by various magical wards, he had wizards or mages in his sphere of influence do it for him. In fact, several of them took part in laying a series of magical layers of protection at “the door” and in the complex of adjoined chambers beyond it. (I’m a bit fuzzy on the distinction between a wizard and a mage, by the way. The former apparently involves more book learning, the latter more rote repetition. It’s basically comprehension vs. muscle memory.)

Anyway, the first of these protective layers was the most facile – anyone inserting the key and turning it in a clockward direction, which the lock mechanism had been cleverly designed to make appear correct, would trigger a trivial spell called Blinding Flash and a much more advanced teleportation effect. Blinding flash kept unwanted eyes off what lay beyond the door while the teleportation was given time to do its thing.

So that explains what happened at the door (other than the little editorial comment at the end, which I inserted myself). The mage and companions about two seconds after the key was turned found themselves rubbing blinding sparkles from their dazzled eyes at entirely new locations. Locations? Plural? Yes. As I said the teleportation effect was rather advanced in nature. You might say it was a bit of a doozy. But I’ll come back to that.

Let’s stick with Felston and his treasure.

The mage didn’t exaggerate when he said Felston thought the treasure was too dangerous to leave at the surface, that it might cause great upheaval, even wars. He feared exactly those things. He feared even more that the treasure – a single item it turns out – might fall into malevolent hands capable of understanding its use. The consequences of that would be as bad or perhaps worse than any war.

So what is this dreadful thing exactly? Well, now we’re ready to begin our tale in earnest.

No one knew why the village of Morrow Falls was given that name. There’s no falls. Not even a river. Its only body of water was a stagnant pond of runoff from cow pastures. Townsfolk wisely drank well water from deep underground and did their best to stay upwind from the pond.

Regardless, this agrarian trading post, little more than a convergence of rutted wagon trails, is where our story begins, long before the birth even of Felston the Younger.

You’ll note, by the way, that even I reference the unfortunate village in the past tense, because it’s well and truly gone. Not even a dot on any map. A blank spot where once, at its peak, a few hundred families lived in peace and relative isolation from the outside world.

It was Felston’s grandfather, also named Felston, who started all the trouble, though he didn’t mean to. He just wanted to get rich.

It went like this. The elder Felston was an astute observer of things and happened to notice how well plants seemed to grow around the stagnant, foul-smelling pond, in marked contrast to the rest of the nearby countryside, where sparse grasses forced cowherds to range far and wide to keep their stock adequately nourished. He also paid close attention to the tales and rumors of those occasional travelers from the outside who happened through. He thereby learned at some point, after working several thankless years as a cowherd, that a particular variety of bean had come into high demand in the capital city, Westmark, because of some fashionable new dish that the fabulously well-to-do just couldn’t get enough of.

So Felston took the bold, in the view of most Morrow Falls residents, radical step of traveling to another place in order to obtain enough of these beans to plant a small patch of them in the next crop. Much ridicule ensued when it was learned with what old Felston had returned from his travels, and much more followed when he was seen hauling foul-smelling shovelings from the stagnant pond in barrels and spreading them over the patch of land where he’d planted the beans.

No one was laughing a few months later when he earned about 10 times as much selling beans as he’d have earned working another full year as a cowherd. He acquired more land, more seeds of crops that happened to be in demand, and, after a few repetitions, hired other townsfolk to shovel shit onto his fields for him as he watched from a comfortable chair on the front porch of his ever-enlarging home.

So it went, and before long Felston the Elder (which later when his grandson was named after him became his actual name) lived on a large estate surrounded by copiously fertilized farmland that was worked by people in his employ.

Trouble eventually came his way, though, as it always does.

No shit.

That you see was the problem. When other astute observers noticed the miraculous effects of this whole fertilization trick, they too began planting cash crops and spreading pond sludge on their fields. There was only so much to go around, especially since more and more folk were abandoning cattle herding. No cows, no shit, no crops, no cash. Several lean years ensued, even for Felston, and his fabulous estate grew more weeds and broken dreams than profitable foodstuffs.

Until he found his answer – and also, unwittingly, the doom of Morrow Falls.

It went like this. The pond you see was strange, a low spot in the ground that never seemed to fill all the way up, no matter how much sludge ran off the fields, not even at the heaviest of rains. Nor did it ever go completely dry, not even at the longest of droughts.

Most in the village just shrugged at the pond doing as it always had done, but Felston found it strange, and he decided to investigate, along with his son Freddon, who would, a decade or so later, become father to Felston the Younger.

Together they waded in the pond and swam down to its bottom to poke around. Most of the shit had been scavenged for farm fields, but nonetheless it was an unpleasant business, especially when it turned out they could not actually find any bottom. You see, at its center, the pond didn’t end at a flat sludgy muck patch like it seemed any self-respecting agrarian pond should do. Instead, there was an opening heading straight down. A pipe? A tunnel?

A tunnel.

Freddon was the one who at last proved it, swimming down into it further and further as he trained himself to hold his breath longer and longer. The tunnel, after some yards straight down, turned, curving and curving until, on the very edge of drowning, Freddon surfaced in an underground cavern.

In and of itself, the cavern was no great discovery, and it took Felston and Freddon quite some time just to figure what they had even found. All they could perceive down there was utter blackness, and how exactly were they to get a source of light through 50 yards of sludgy pond water? Eventually, they managed it since they’d little else to do given the state of their struggling agricultural enterprise.

The cave, they found, contained a natural spring of pure water and explained why Morrow Falls’ pond behaved as it did. The cave was an outlet from the pond at times of excess and a source of water flowing back the other way at times of drought. The natural spring, they noticed, gushed out of a hole about half way up one of the cavern’s walls, falling perhaps 20 feet to gather in clear pool at the outlet from the tunnel that connected to the pond. They couldn’t help but wonder if this was how the village got its name, though they found no evidence anyone else had ever discovered the cavern before.

So there they were, in an underground cavern with clean, icy spring waters and which they could only see thanks to tremendous efforts sealing up matches and torches in several layers of tightly wound oil cloth for the long, treacherous trip through the submerged tunnel. Upon thorough exploration, however, they found little cracks and crevasses in the cavern’s darkest corners, one of them just large enough for a particularly skinny, determined, and foolhardy person to slip through and find perhaps further underground places to explore.

Full of that ridiculous bluster called hope that is the ruin of so many humans, they convinced themselves that if they’d discovered secret underground caves, then said caves must surely contain some great treasure, a magical talisman, priceless ruins of an ancient, forgotten civilization or some such. Stories said secret underground caves were exactly the places such things were to be found and desperate adventurers should expect a more or less one-to-one correspondence.

Laughable of course. One would be perfectly justified to perceive the duo at this point of the story with the same amused expectation of failure as aging widows investing in land schemes or inveterate gamblers placing their final coins on the cushioned felt of roulette betting tables.

Here's the thing though. What Felston the Elder and Freddon found upon further exploration was the following: treasure (lots of it), the ruins of an ancient, not-quite forgotten civilization, and a magical talisman of nearly unsurpassed power.

Yep.

This last item, by the way, is what we now call, or rather what the mage and his ilk called “Felston’s lost treasure.”