The hospital is a reflection of its real-world counterpart; a familiar face peering back at you from a shallow pool of oil. The temperature skirts freezing, the gurneys and tools are rusted to the point of inoperability, the smell of mould in the still air is pervasive despite attempts to camouflage the olfactory landscape with cleaning chemicals.
Five figures march grimly through the wards. The first, a Dragonborn. He’s used to the cold, so it can’t be the temperature that’s got him so uncomfortable. He hears breathing, calm, distant. Getting closer.
The second, an Elf. She wants to get out. They all do, of course, but the Elf feels as though she is suffocating. There’s no life in this place, no natural world to connect to, nothing outside the hospital walls.
After her is a Tiefling – not a Royal. The distinction is important. She has only just regained her body, and now wonders if it would have been better to stay incorporeal. She isn’t quite panicking yet, but she’s on a hair trigger. And she’s got some really good panic saved up.
Bringing up the rear are two more Tieflings, Royal ones this time. One walks cautiously, weapon drawn, the light from its blade muted and wan in the encroaching dark. She can’t help but think of a dying candle as the air that feeds its flame runs out.
The other walks casually, perhaps a bit groggy. There is a barely-healed wound on his throat, which he scratches at absent-mindedly. An observant bystander would see that his feet didn’t quite touch the ground, but there weren’t any bystanders.
Just the five of them.
*
Diafani had been alive for, uh… about 4,000 years now? She’d spent more than half of that time in a single chamber below the Plane of Life’s tower, battling with one of the last tendrils of the Leviathan that had still been pinned. When it had broken free in the other planes, that was just because she’d given up too soon. So she’d stayed, and fought, and fought.
She’d never felt as close to death as she did now.
Her companions were the ones directly responsible for her new freedom. They’d released the Leviathan, yes, and she’d been quite at odds with them at first… but she’d since learned that they really were doing everything they could to make things better.
They still didn’t have much of a grasp on the big picture. To Diafani, it seemed they were more motivated by anger than any higher principle. But then, it was hardly her place to adjudicate the wrath of the downtrodden, was it?
Well, three of her companions were downtrodden. Banafsaji, or ‘Shallows’ as he seemed to prefer these days, was a more recent addition to the group – like Diafani herself – and had been similarly away from the other Royals. Though in contrast, his exile was self-imposed.
And rather than fighting for centuries against a monster older than creation, he’d set up a smuggling operation and lounged about on a throne, eating grapes. It was both frustrating and reassuring that he was the same mercurial libertine she remembered from millennia ago.
Cranzalar was talking, rousing her from cogitation. ‘Oh,’ she said when she realised he’d been talking to her. ‘I know my way around the real-world hospital, but I don’t know if this version will be different,’ she offered. Cranzalar was wanting to head deeper into the phylactery. Try to find an exit.
It seemed as good a plan as any.
‘If it were laid out like the real hospital, then our fastest way to Argat’s, uhm, inner sanctum…’ She pointed toward a door with a heavy looking bar across it. ‘Would be through there. There’s other routes, of course, but—’
Firuzeh had already marched toward the door, rolling up the sleeves of the mass of shawls she wore. They slipped back down within seconds, but it didn’t seem to put her off. Without a trace of magic Diafani could detect, Firuzeh hefted the bar across the door, wrenching it from the brackets it had been stuck in.
‘Lift with your legs, Uzi, not your back,’ said Vi.
Firuzeh just gave a jagged grin as the door swung outwards.
The space beyond it was dark enough that the only indication of its scale was a vague feeling in the air. A path stretched forward; the same off-green hospital tiles they stood on now, lit by no source. Ostensibly, there was nothing supporting it, and no way of telling how far it went.
It was also so narrow as to necessitate single file.
‘Right,’ said Firuzeh, buoyed by her earlier momentum. She dropped to her hands and knees, scuttling out onto the path.
Both Vi and Cranzalar stayed squarely on their side of the doorframe – though closer than either Diafani or Shallows. Vi, lowering herself with a little more grace than Firuzeh, reached a hand out under the path. It was thin as a razorblade. When Cranzalar called out, his voice did not come back.
Which meant that either A) the room didn’t have walls or a floor for the sound to echo from, or B) there was something in the darkness pressing inwards, muting the sound.
Neither was encouraging.
Firuzeh had stopped about fifteen feet from the door and was now scurrying hastily backwards from the abyss. Her friends pulled her out as soon as she was in reach, and with that same unexpected strength from before, she slammed the door shut and jammed the bar back into place.
There was a brief moment of panting as she tried to collect herself. ‘Yeah, fuck that,’ she said between breaths. ‘Is there another way?’
*
After piling a stack of rusted gurneys in front of the door,the group found themselves in a long hallway. It was flanked by more bare greenish doors, each with a wire mesh glass window, the rooms within unlit. Diafani couldn’t see the corridor’s end.
Cranzalar had paused for a moment as he’d gone in, looking over his shoulder as if someone had spoken to him. There hadn’t been a sound. Whatever it had been that caught his attention, Cranzalar apparently didn’t feel the need to share it with the group. It mustn’t have been important, right?
Firuzeh was peering through a window, hands cupped around her eyes to better see in the dark. The room she was looking into was small, more of a cupboard really – but as she backed away, Diafani saw a figure inside, slowly turning on the spot, shuffling its feet in clumsy rotation. It didn’t have a face. As it turned toward them, where its features should have been there was instead just a blank patch of mottled grey skin.
It continued to turn. It hadn’t noticed them. Diafani didn’t know how it could have noticed them, but she was relieved nonetheless.
Other rooms they passed were similarly occupied. One contained a woman eating from a once-lavish banquet spread, picking out teeth that had been embedded in the rotten food. Another, a group of figures dressed in gore-spattered scrubs performed bare-handed surgery on a screaming patient, resorting to their teeth to make incisions. Once the patient’s agonised movements had gone still, the head surgeon pulled a scalpel from within. Other implements followed.
When the corpse was empty, the surgeon giddily began forcing the tools down its own throat before laying on the operating table. He began to scream as the others went to work.
Diafani and the others were already moving on by then.
‘I think they’re maybe memories?’ Vi wondered aloud. She’d been through something similar recently, having only just exiled the thing known as the Weaver from her own mind. Her musings were worth considering. ‘I mean, each room seems to be on a loop. Could they be Argat’s past experiments?’
‘A phylactery contains the lich’s soul, though, not its mind,’ said Cranzalar. Diafani had noticed that when Cranzalar frowned, his horns would sometimes twitch just slightly, like a human’s ears. He sounded more thoughtful than doubtful.
‘What if they’re important enough to him that they are part of his soul?’
‘Vi might have a point there,’ said Shallows. ‘Sometimes, there are memories that even my very impressive psionic abilities cannot access; the ones that define a person. If they were held elsewhere than the brain, that would explain how they were beyond psionic reach.’
He paused by a door that contained a surgeon grafting thin, spindly spider legs onto a puppy. ‘Of course, these are usually memories of love, not… this.’
Firuzeh and Cranzalar were blinking at him. He actually looked away first. ‘I’m not being cheesy,’ said Shallows. ‘The soul is where love comes from. I’m serious.’
Cranzalar’s horns twitched again.
Firuzeh was pulling the strange book she kept out from her robes. ‘Right. Right, if these are experiments, then what if the Archive can pull the information?’ She flicked through a few pages, muttering as she did so.
‘Oh,’ she said, after a moment of quiet. ‘It won’t work unless we’re in the rooms. Uh. I’m gonna… uh.’
She opened the next door they came to, after checking there was nothing that would try to kill them inside. All the room contained was a lot of equipment, some piles of notes, and a roughly three-foot-wide hole in the wall.
Diafani eyed the door as Firuzeh relayed what the Archive was telling her. It didn’t have the same green shade as the others, instead it was a murky brownish shade. The mesh in the window was tarnished and decayed in places. In fact, the other rooms were getting that way the further down the corridor they went.
‘I’ve noticed it too,’ said Vi, quietly. ‘If the doors are getting older, we must be getting further back. There’s got to be an end to them.’
Firuzeh slammed the book shut. ‘This was an experiment with putting artificial divine sparks into subjects. They all dissolved or melted or whatever, except for three of them.They escaped.’
There came a crash from the distance. It sounded like… well, like a pile of gurneys crashing to the floor as a door was forced open. Then a cacophony in the corridor, sounds of screaming metal and roaring wind racing toward them.
‘Run,’ said Cranzalar.
The five of them sprinted away from the coming thing. If it caught up to them, that would be the end. The thing was so much faster than they could move, but they’d already come so far down the corridor. It was getting closer. There still wasn’t an end to the hallway. It was getting closer.
And then they were through the last door. Diafani wasn’t sure how. She’d tripped, but someone had pulled her up and kept her going. Cranzalar had drawn his glass sword, she’d heard the distinctive ghostly shing it made when it left its sheath.
They were in a version of the hospital, but older. From the state of Floodwall, it looked to be centuries ago; Diafani wasn’t great with history, what with her imprisonment-by-combat, but this was probably when the hospital had first been built, right?
‘Are we all here?’ asked Cranzalar. ‘All intact?’
It seemed to be so. They crept down through the corridors – not nightmarishly warped in this memory – and soon found themselves back in the main atrium. A red ribbon was stretched across the doors, and Argat stood before it, speaking with an animated crowd.
A flash from Cranzalar’s eyes told the others he was using his eldritch sight. ‘It would appear that the entryway is rigged to feed the phylactery. Once the ribbon’s been cut, anyone that crossed the threshold will…’
‘We’ve gotta stop it then,’ said Firuzeh.
‘I don’t think we can affect the…’ Diafani began, but Firuzeh had already marched off.
‘Look what you’ve done to Benjamin!’ she wailed., bursting through the doors to gasps from the crowd. It looked like she may be in need of a fainting couch or something.
‘What is she even trying to–’ Diafani began, before realising that both Vi and Cranzalar had rushed out to join her.
Cranzalar had employed one of his many faces to take on the role of Benjamin. He was a human man, dressed in a foppish outfit with lace emerging from the sleeves. More noticeable, however, was the fact that his skin was fizzing away like a carbonated drink.
Argat, stunned to silence, simply gaped at them. Firuzeh’s assault continued.
‘The experiments he put poor Benjamin through! The ghastly things he did!’ She addressed the crowd. ‘Do not go in there! Don’t end up like Benjamin!!’
“Benjamin” keeled over with a sort of ‘Ueeegghhh?’ noise. Cranzalar didn’t need to breathe, but Benjamin probably did. His perfect stillness was disconcerting.
Also, he’d started to smell. Vi was getting increasingly nuanced with this particular effect of her Druidcraft; after a brief snap of her fingers, she’d got Benjamin’s “corpse” smelling like his cause of death was ‘asphyxiation on shit from a baby that had only ever eaten curry’.
Diafani kept her distance, trying not to gag.
Their gambit had actually worked. The crowd was dispersing, and the memory of Argat stared at the three with horror. ‘This… isn’t how it went. You aren’t supposed to be here.’ His eyes widened, like someone coming into the realisation that they’re still dreaming.
‘Get. Out,’ he said.
*
The five of them awoke, back on the floor of the regular, real-world hospital. Argat watched them coldly from the mezzanine, only taking a step back when Vi, Firuzeh, and Cranzalar rushed for him.
A wall flashed up behind them. Diafani and Shallows were cut off.
*
Cranzalar is first up the stairs. He sees Argat about to enter the labyrinthine network of passages built into the hospital. They’d lose hours trying to track him down in there, if they found him at all. That wouldn’t do.
He whipped out a lightning lash, a solid bolt of energy that crackled through the air and fastened itself around Argat’sforearm. Argat had a second to grimace before he was yanked across the room, to land at Cranzalar’s feet. The ensuing scuffle, once Vi and Uzi joined him, ended up with Argat being thrown around the room like a tennis ball before being polymorphed into a snail.
‘Right, we’ve got questions,’ said Cranzalar, picking Argat up by the shell.
‘You’ve got answers,’ said Firuzeh.
Argat’s eyestalks shrank back into his body.
*
While Snail Argat wallowed in a jar, Cranzlar, Vi, and Firuzeh set about disrupting the spell that had been carved above the hospital doors.
Before heading out, Cranzalar’s mask of many faces let him take on the form of Argat, and he bluffed his way to making an announcement over the farspeech intercoms.
‘Attention all patients and staff members. This is Argat.’ His German accent wasn’t very good, but that was okay because neither was Argat’s. ‘The hospital is about to explode. Everybody out. This is not a drill.’
Destroying the sigil… took a few attempts. Initially, Vi was trying to leap up and hit it with a dispel. It became apparent quite quickly – after slamming her face into the ground – that it was a little too high for that. Cranzalar tried to lift her. They both fell, slamming faces into the ground. Vi leapt with both Firuzeh and Cranzalar cupping their hands as a springboard. Faces, ground. Truly, this was the greatest challenge they’d ever faced.
After what felt like eighteen months, they remembered that there was a flying carpet in Cranzalar’s haversack.
Once it was hit by the green-purple flash of Vi’s magic, the sigil above the door ran dry, blood imbuing it coagulating before shrivelling to ash. And the whole hospital’s façade slid away from the rest of the building, the structure crumbling.
*
Firuzeh stood before Aurifar. Her physical body was asleep on the flying carpet, as the others flew to find a place to interrogate Argat.
‘Why haven’t you killed him yet?’ asked the God.
‘That wasn’t our deal,’ said Firuzeh. ‘I said I’d get the sparks. That doesn’t mean I have to kill them.’
‘Killing the Royals is the simplest, most effective way to do so. And you’re not alone in your hunt now.’
‘I’m not?’ Firuzeh was caught a bit off guard by that comment.
‘No, you are not. Your ally. The Leviathan’s Disciple. He’ll be claiming sparks for his patron now.’
*
Argat came to with two arms and two legs again. He couldn’t move them at the moment, but it was more a question of potential. Time spent as a gastropod made one grateful for the little things, like not being covered in mucus all the time.
He couldn’t move because he’d been tied to a tree. The three that had come to kill him, it seemed, had changed their minds. Argat wondered idly if they’d attempted to interrogate Lilla before they’d kill her.
The blue one was talking. She seemed to be the one with the largest stake in his questioning.
‘Right. Cooperate,’ she said through gritted teeth, ‘And maybe we can work things out so you don’t have to die.’
The problem with starting out at ‘cooperate or die’, thought Argat, was that it left you very little room to manoeuvre afterwards.
‘Well, this certainly is interesting,’ he said aloud. ‘If it was information you wanted, you should have stayed in the phylactery. Lots to learn in there.’
‘Just answer our questions,’ said the blue one.
‘You want to negotiate, do you not?’ asked Argat. ‘In that case, why don’t we hold an equal exchange of ideas? An answer for an answer. I promise you it will be the simplest way of ensuring I tell you the truth.’ He plastered a bemused smile across his face, while in the back of his mind, beginning to recite the forms to cast Power Word: Kill.
Had he not already flared his spark today he could have simply spoken it now, three times, and be done already. Unfortunately, he needed time.
‘Fine,’ spat the blue one. This seemed personal for her. Interesting.
‘Excellent,’ smiled Argat, leaning back against the tree. ‘What was your question?’
‘Your experiments. There was one in the past, working on artificially creating divine sparks and implanting them. Your notes said that three subjects survived, and escaped. What were they?’
…Argat hadn’t been expecting that. The other two, the Dragonborn and the Elf, were looking uncomfortably off to the side.
Oh. This was what was personal.
Argat grinned. ‘Ohhh,’ he said, not bothering to cover his delight. It’d be easy to stall for enough time if this was the reason they’d captured him. ‘You think that you might have been involved?’
‘Answer the question,’ said the Dragonborn, calmly.
Argat sighed. ‘The three surviving subjects were a rat, a dog, and an ape. I never got around to human testing; too many subjects would melt. I suspect it was an issue with the artificial sparks as opposed to the implantation process.’
‘How did you create fake sparks?’ asked the blue one.
Argat clicked his tongue. ‘Wait your turn,’ he said, and turned to the elf. ‘You. What’s your stake in all this? I see that your turquoise friend is obviously quite close to the issue, and the Dragonborn looks to be an ex-churchguard. But what about you? Are they manipulating you in some way?’
The elf didn’t appreciate being singled out, but she at least gave an answer. ‘I’m here because I want to be,’ she said. ‘These are my friends.’
She wouldn’t be baited, then. Not to worry. ‘Was your question about the artificial sparks, then?’ he asked of the blue one, whose wave of relief after leaning she wasn’t a lab experiment seemed to be ebbing.
‘…Not exactly,’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘How does the transfer process work? How did you take your spark from Aurifar?’
‘He gave it to us. Right, my turn–’
‘Wait. Explain.’
Argat let out a theatrical sigh. ‘Aurifar chose to pass his spark on to a group of his disciples. The other Royals and I. His plan was that we’d pass them down to others as we grew old – a truly Royal family. But, when you have a sliver of divinity to fuel you, it’s not a pleasant thought to give that kind of power up. So instead, we used that power to keep ourselves alive.’
The look on the blue one’s face was very amusing. ‘You’re saying that you can just give away your spark?’
‘Oh, yes. It has to be freely given, too. Can’t be taken. Believe me, I’ve tried. Now, Dragonborn. Why did you leave the Church?’
The Dragonborn fixed eyes on him. ‘My God called to me, despite your church’s teachings. He granted me the power to resist. To try and change this corrupted city.’
‘Oh? How’s that working out for you?’
The Dragonborn looked toward Argat’s bonds. ‘You tell me.’
‘Will you give up your spark?’ asked the blue one.
Argat scoffed. ‘Absolutely not. Now, it can’t just be the three of you. What about the person in charge? Do you know your cause to be just?’
‘Of course we do,’ said the elf. She turned to the others. ‘Look, maybe this is a lost cause. He’s getting cagier with his questions. Maybe we should just kill him.’
‘No,’ said the blue one. ‘He knows too much to just kill him.’
Yes, you tell them, thought Argat. I just need a few more minutes and I’ll have the Power Word prepared. ‘Is it you that’s the leader, then?’ he asked the blue one. ‘I’d be willing to bet there’s someone pulling the strings. Why is they’re so interested in killing us?’
The blue one shifted uncomfortably. He’d struck a nerve.
‘Is it another religious zealot?’ Argat went on, inclining his head toward the Dragonborn. ‘Surely it isn’t simple revenge. What do they gain from this? Do you even know?’
The blue one darted towards him, ramming a knife she suddenly held down into his foot. Argat rocked violently in his bindings. It hurt. It hurt a lot. They’d destroyed his phylactery, then.
‘You’re supposed to be cooperating,’ snarled the blue one. ‘You’re getting off topic.’
‘Yes, well.’ Argat took a deep breath. It wasn’t an affectation this time. ‘You have my attention. But you couldhave just answered me. Or said you didn’t know.’
The pain had broken his concentration on the Power Word. He needed more time.
‘I’ve got a question,’ said the Elf. ‘Back in the lab. What did you do with Diafani and Shallows?’
…What? Argat’s concentration slipped again. Damn it.
‘Diafani? She’s alive?’
‘You answer first,’ said the Elf.
‘Oh. Your companions back in the hospital? All I did was seal them out of the room. Divide and conquer, etc. I didn’t realise… So, Diafani’s back, and she’s running this, is she? So, you’re all working for Aurifar. Fascinating.’
‘How do you know Aurifar has a hand in this?’ asked the blue one.
‘Diafani always was his favourite.’ Argat probably shouldn’t be talking so much, but he needed to kerb their interruptions. It would be maybe three minutes before he could use the Power Word. ‘When Aurifar was distributing his sparks, he split them by their nature – mine, as you know, is Abjuration. Lilla’s was Necromancy, etc. But the only nature of Diafani’s is… the shape of Aurifar’s divinity. You imagine an empty bowl? Her spark is the container for the others.’
Argat’s captors conferred with each other, discussing this revelation.
‘Is Bailiff doing this for Aurifar?’
‘We’ll need to see how they react. If they know about Diafani, then that’s a bad sign…’
‘He’s stalling for time, isn’t he?’
‘This means Aurifar’s going to have us try to kill Diafani.’
‘Who does this one then? If I do it, that’s a point for Aurifar, but if Cranzalar…’
‘I’ll do this one. Keep it even.’
Argat listened to what he could and gave the three a warm smile as they returned. He’d kill the blue one first. She’d stabbed him in the foot, after all. ‘Now, this has been enlightening,’ he began. His spell was ready.
‘But I’d like to ask you to kindly die,’ was what he’d been about to say.
He couldn’t get the words out for some reason. The Dragonborn, now oddly translucent, was sheathing a sword with a stained glass blade.
Argat felt his head topple from his shoulders. His last,dreamlike thought was about how useful it would be to have a scalpel that sharp.
*
Vi returned to the Regicider tree, allies in tow, Cranzalar carrying Argat’s body.
‘Shit, bloody hell!’ came Bailiff’s voice in her mind. ‘I heard what happened to the hospital. Bloody hell, I’m glad you’re all okay!’
‘Bailiff…’ said Vi, making sure they could see her lips as she spoke. It had been decided that Vi would be the one to bring up Diafani. ‘We came across a name in Aurifar’sresearch, and we didn’t know if you’d heard anything about it. Uh. Diafani?’
Bailiff – to Vi’s relief – just gave that blank expression they always gave to mean ‘I don’t really understand, this might be a bit beyond my ability to grasp’. ‘Uh,’ they said. Since Bailiff didn’t hedge unless they were trying to ‘sound’ more natural, the uh held a lot of meaning.
‘Uh, I don’t know, sorry. Is it something you think is important?’
‘Oh, we weren’t sure,’ said Vi, trying not to sound too hasty. ‘It’s probably nothing.’
‘I’m putting this body in storage, Bailey,’ said Cranzalar. ‘I want to make sure nothing happens to it.’
Later on, Cranzalar would incinerate the body and redeploy his Argat disguise, lying in its place. He’d be waiting to check that Bailiff wasn’t doing anything sinister behind their backs. Bailiff, in a mild act of revenge, would creep into where the body was being kept in the night, and kick it in the balls. The next day, Cranzalar would decline to explain why he was sitting funny.
*
Argat awoke. He knew where he’d be, after dying with his spark intact. His eyes hadn’t quite adjusted yet, but he recognised that featureless expanse.
‘Aurifar,’ he said. ‘Really, I think you were awfully short-sighted when you gave your power away.’
There was no response. There was no Aurifar.
Argat realised that he wasn’t in the featureless white space Aurifar had retreated to. His eyes were fine. This was simply the darkness found in the crushing depths of the ocean.
‘What the hell is going on?’ he tried to say, but he couldn’t breathe. Brine filled his lungs.
And something was below him. Something massive, darker than the inky waters, something so colossal he’d initially thought it to be the sea bed. Tendrils thick as cathedral spires rose to his level..
The Leviathan’s maw closed around him.
Roll History 