I spent a few minutes nervously staring into the dark, and then many more minutes being very bored. Listening was more important than looking, so mostly I was just sitting in silence. The goggles were helping, but I could still only see a very short distance, and even then only in black and white, before it all faded to impenetrable darkness.

  And it was a strange darkness as well. There was no sky, no moon or stars, and nothing to let you know what time of day it was. Someone had just gone out and turned down the lights. They’d set the rendering distance to minimum, and surrounded us with a deep, black fog.

  Having nothing else to do, my mind began to wander. I’d like to say it wandered somewhere deep and meaningful, reflecting on the revelations of the day, but it just didn’t do that at all. It was daydreaming, or thinking about various personal projects I had going on, or trying to make shapes from the silhouettes out in the dark city – like when you look at clouds and go “hey that one looks like a lion if you squint a bit and contort your neck and pretend really hard.” Of course, I didn’t know what a lion was back then, but you get the picture. This went on for what felt like 3 days, but was probably close to 1 hour (I require stimulation, OK?), before anything changed.

  I think it was a combination of the mind-numbing boredom and the fact that I was actively inventing things that weren’t there which had me failing to notice the thing that was there. Also, it appeared out of nowhere as far as I could tell. One second I was trying to decide if a ruined doorway looked like a pair of horns, and the next I was getting jumpscared by a thing that just… loomed.

  It was a humanoid thing, but I wouldn’t call it a person. It had arms, legs, head and torso, but no skin, face, or clothing. It was just this swirling mass of inky darkness (which camouflaged it damn well) the size and shape of a grown man, doing nothing except standing there. Menacingly.

  Without taking my eyes off it, I reached for the half-sphere of wood and metal strapped to my hip (that turret from earlier – remember it?). I didn’t get it out yet, but it was reassuring to know it was there at the very least. My stave was also next to me, unloaded but in arms’ reach. I didn’t want to make any sudden movements that might set it off, and I had no idea why it was there. My mouth felt dry, and an unmistakable current of nervousness was working its way outwards from my stomach.

  And then it was gone. I swear I hadn’t even had time to blink, it just wasn’t there anymore. There was darkness, and rubble, and ruined city, but no shadow-person. Worrying, I won’t lie. The obvious questions played through my mind. What was that, where did it go, what did it want, etc. The other question I was finding it tricky to answer was whether I’d imagined the whole thing. I didn’t think I was going mad, but I’m also fairly sure that mad people don’t think they’re mad, so I shelved that line of inquiry.

  All in all, I was disconcerted. Apprehensive. Spooked, one could say. My boredom fled, replaced with a single-minded focus I wish I could replicate on command. I scoured every inch I could see about ten times over. I was twitchy and on-edge, but damn, I was paying attention.

  After a while my tiredness began to catch up with me. I could feel the adrenaline being filtered out of my system, my eyelids becoming heavy. I wouldn’t be much good as a watcher for much longer. Picking the next person completely at random and definitely not for any reasons of personal glee, I went over and prodded Alf with my foot, resisting the urge to give him a swift kick just to see what would happen. I’m not that mean.

  “Wakey-wakey,” I whispered, “naptime’s over, you’re up.” He gave a couple of classic old man snorts as he woke up, and after a moment to presumably think something unkind about me – {Alf here: it’s true. I did think something unkind about them} – he got up and had a quick stretch.

  “How polite and charming you are as always, sprog,” he said. I grinned. “Anything to report?” I chose to trust myself, and quickly filled him in on the appearance and disappearance of the shadow-person. “Curious, worrying, and unsurprising,” he summarised dejectedly. “We knew it was going to be bad in here. Hopefully it hasn’t gone off to find more friends.” I gulped nervously, not having thought of that. “Still, thanks for the warning,” he waved me off, “now, you get some rest. Children your age are lazy enough as it is, I dread to imagine how they are without enough sleep.” I grumbled a bit, mostly for show, but still lay down and closed my eyes. I barely had time to realise just how exhausted I was before sleep claimed me.

  /-/

  The sounds of crashing waves and a sea in storm. Visions of a world tinted orange. The far-off shape of a lighthouse, miles from the shore and beckoning to me. A longing for home. The desire to walk into that storm-wracked ocean, and once again embrace the tempest.

  Those were my dreams that night. I’ll be completely honest: they made as much sense to me as they probably do to you.

  /-/

  It was still dark when I woke, but I could see that everyone else was already up. Their murmured conversation ended as they noticed me waking up. I was grateful for the lie-in, but it still felt awkward to know that they’d all been watching me sleep. “Sorry,” I yawned, “guess I was quite tired.”

  “Nothing to apologise for,” Nalfis said. “We’re hardly in a rush.”

  “Eh? I thought we wanted to be out of here ASAP?” (Fine, that acronym didn’t exist then, but I’m translating and paraphrasing everything anyway because I somehow doubt you speak Ancient Midgardian)

  Nalfis chuckled softly, nodding towards the window. I felt around for my goggles, strapped them on, and looked where he was indicating. My heart sank. I turned to Alf. “Looks like you were right,” I said.

  “And I never thought I’d be so sad about that,” he said, wryly.

  For context, there were now about a dozen of these oversized shadow-people lurking just outside. “Have they done anything?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Tove replied, “they’ve just been gathering. Last one was about an hour ago, so I assume these are the last we’re getting for now. We’ve been thinking about next steps.”

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “Did you come to a decision?”

  “Run as fast as we can, fight them if they chase us, hope for the best, and keep running.” I grimaced. It definitely wasn’t a great plan, but as was so often the case, it was the only one we really had. I felt fairly confident that I could sneak my way through a lot of this city – I’m quite sneaky and there were lots of hiding places – but I doubted they could. If you can sneak successfully it’s great, but if you try to sneak and fail, then all you’ve done is walk slowly, making it the worst of both worlds. I figured as well that if they felt they could sneak, they would have suggested it. Then again, Alf hardly seemed like much of a runner either.

  I looked over these things again, and started running through some mental computations. “How do you fight these… whatever these are? I asked. I’d never seen them before, but given that they looked a bit incorporeal, I felt like there’d be something strange. Alf huffed and Tove scowled. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “Not wrong,” Nalfis stepped in, “just… unfortunate. We’re extrapolating here, but with dark, shadowy things like these, the answer is usually light. That is, magical light, divine light; the sort of light that burns without heat. As you can probably imagine, that sort of thing is especially useful against foes like these.”

  I didn’t know their capabilities, but I knew Alf was a priest of Sól, goddess of the sun, and I’d seen Tove with that glowing string earlier. Surely ‘burning light’ would be exactly their sort of thing? “Sooooo, I take it that’s something we can’t do?” There was the same pair of annoyed reactions from the two Dwarves, leaving Nalfis to continue.

  “Normally, those two quite excel at it,” he explained. “They’re just dismayed, because it appears that their abilities are…” he paused to find the right word, “dampened, here.”

  “There’s a fucking darkness curse,” Tove summarised. I’d describe her as being more ‘cross’ than ‘angry’. It was kind of cute. Luckily, Alf had more than enough abject, sarcastic misery to balance that out. At least, that was the impression I got from his vitriolic, ranting tirade about how unfair and annoying this was (I’m dialling down the strength of the language he used).

  The point is, neither of them were completely useless, but they were heavily curtailed, where normally they would have been our best weapons. Nalfis still seemed confident in his capabilities (“bringing the world to life,” as he called it – whatever that meant) and I was operating at normal levels. The discussion moved on to what we could do, and it was gratifying to hear that most other kinds of magic should still work. We could fight, just imperfectly.

  All that said, we figured that more talk wouldn’t get us anywhere, and we’d have to get moving. Step one was to actually get out of the head, which was complicated by the fact it was upside-down. That gave us the options of either trying to smash the glass of the eyes, or finding a way up to the ‘ceiling’ and opening the hatch there. After a quick chat, we decided to try for the hatch first, given how much noise would be created if we did manage to smash our way out. Of course, if we made it out that way then we’d have to figure out how to get back down to the ground, but let’s go one problem at a time.

  Our first strategy was to try and make a ‘human’ ladder. The early attempts went about as poorly as you’d expect with 2 Dwarves and 2 weaklings. Let’s say we were all very grateful that there was padding on the floor, and leave it at that. More through luck than design, we managed to get Nalfis high enough to take a swipe at the latch of the trapdoor, and it swung open as we all crashed back down. At the very least, we had a skylight.

  Now, some of you might be thinking ‘hey, Indy, I thought you had magic that specifically allows you to get up to high places earlier like you used on the leg of the Colossus?’, and you’d be right. I wasn’t getting that out immediately though because firstly, I didn’t want to waste magic if I could help it; and secondly, what then? Getting myself out of here would be trivial, but I had to do this whole ‘teamwork’ thing now, and that meant getting the others out too. I had a rope, but there was no way I could lift them out or even stand my ground as they climbed, and I didn’t know if it would be long enough to reach them once I’d found an anchor to tie it onto. Plus, I didn’t fancy blundering around looking for said anchor on my own, in the dark, with all the spooky things I could barely see. Basically, I had my (good) reasons.

  It was Tove who came up with the plan, after a few other non-starters had been brought up and shot down (‘blanket trampoline’ was a standout in the list of bad ideas). The concept was pretty neat, it’s just the execution we expected to be a huge pain in the ass. And wouldn’t you know it, we were right. It revolved around the fact the mangled remains of the ladder were still attached to the outside of the head, and a few of the rungs were intact. Tove’s idea was to toss the rope so that it looped over one of those rungs, and create the world’s most basic pulley. Like I said, simple idea. It’s just that ‘loop the rope over a rung’ was more difficult than it sounded. Not impossible by any stretch, just something that we’d only achieve by fluke. That was fine by us though, so we got throwing.

  I’m not going to admit how many tries it took. Let’s just leave it at ‘too many’, and move on. Suffice it to say, we now had two ends of a rope on the ground, and our pivot at the top. There was then a bit of a debate on what order we should go up. We decided Nalfis would go first since he had the best night vision and could be our scout. I ended up last, which I felt was down to some sort of ‘protect the youngster’ urge they didn’t want to admit to. I wasn’t thrilled, but I preferred it to going first so I kept my thoughts about it to myself. I did have a good thought however, so I shared that. Since we were all carrying heavy packs, if we left them down here, I could tie them onto the rope once the other three were at the top. Then they could be lifted, untied, and the rope sent back down for yours truly. Of course, that meant that not only would I be left by myself in here, depending on their kindness to lift me out, I’d also be trusting them with my stuff in the meantime. And I’m quite attached to my stuff. Still, in for a penny ‘n’ all that, and it was a sensible idea at any rate.

  A few moments later, Alf, Tove and I were hauling on the rope, and Nalfis was clutching tightly to the other end, being dragged up towards the hatch. I’m pleased to say we actually managed a reasonable pace, but I think that was more down to Nalfis being light than us being strong. Once at the top, he hauled himself over the lip and flopped over it, like getting out of a swimming pool. There were a few tense seconds while he looked around, before stage-whispering back down. “Nothing coming this way,” he hissed. “They’re still just standing there.”

  That was good enough for us, so Tove and I set about lifting the lump that is Alf. This took a considerable amount of time longer, even with Nalfis trying to help from the other end. I’m not even insulting Alf when I say this, but Dwarves are dense. It’s just part of their physique. The average Dwarf is just over a foot (or just over 30cm for all my metric bois) shorter than the average Human, but the two will weigh the same. The inverse is true for Elves, who are pretty much the same height as Humans, but 75% or so of the weight. I don’t know why, maybe they have hollow bones or something.

  OK I got a bit sidetracked there, but I’m just trying to justify why it was that I was coated in sweat a few minutes later. Luckily, we got him up there eventually, and Tove and I could take a breather. It was her turn next, and the most I could do to help was give her a bit of a boost up to a slightly higher starting point, after which the men lifted her the rest of the way while I stood around being useless. She made it up, the rope came back, I tied the bags on, the bags went up, the rope came back, I held on, I got lifted up. It wasn’t that interesting.

  Even so, we were all now finally out of the head, leaving that chapter of our adventure behind, and starting one that already looked like it was going to be horrifying for a whole different set of reasons.

  Sammy, xx