Fel Dungeon. Day 09.

  Weaver peered over the ledge, looking down at the water beneath them. Aliyah had dropped three glowing white crystals into the water. It was deep, but had a rather gradual slope up to the beach beyond.

  “Tanks first. I'll make sure it's safe.” Weaver grinned as he unequipped his clothing. He leapt from the ledge, dropping into the water with a splash. He surfaced a moment later, spitting water from his mouth and shook out his long hair. “It's warm! Come on in!”

  Sparrow, JonJon, and AnnaLee jumped in next.

  “Why not?” Halzy shrugged at Singapura and both immediately unequipped their armor and jumped in after.

  Alyx gave Aliyah a pleading look and the Elementalist just laughed with a shake of the head. “Go ahead.”

  Both Alyx and Lynn handed their tunics to their mother and jumped in next with a loud “Whoo!”

  Aliyah placed their clothing in her bag and began casting. Mana of earthen browns and greens swirled around her hands as the wall of the ledge began to shake. A set of stairs poked out from the wall, leading all the way down to the water. She walked down them and those who hadn't jumped in, including Sinnamon, followed behind.

  At the water's edge, Aliyah blew white and blue mana from her lips, creating an ice bridge all the way to the beach.

  Sinnamon watched Alyx and Lynn splashing around with Sparrow and JonJon. When the four had found out they were both sets of twins, that became about all they talked about; ranging talks of twin telepathy to which two, older or younger, were the better. AnnaLee was fighting for her life to avoid picking a side.

  Hogweed Le Burn met them at the rightmost cave entrance. The Rogue wasn't much for words, but he took his scouting duty seriously. He'd gone ahead of the rest of the group to scout each of the three tunnels. Logan had said they were using the left-most tunnel, but no one liked the prospect of having something coming up behind them.

  His face was a tangled mass of green vines where a beard and hair would be, leaving only his eyes visible. And they bore a grim resolve. “Tunnel opens up into a large room with three levels and even more rooms branching off. Packed with goblins. Weird ones, covered in crystals poking out of their skin. At least thirty. All over level 101. I advise we don’t fight them.”

  “I can seal the cave with stone,” Aliyah suggested.

  “And I can put a ward down, inside and outside. That’ll tell us if they break through,” Sinnamon added. Ward spells were some of the first Casters unlocked. At low levels, they were detection-only, but at Sinnamon’s level of sixty, she could attach a variety of effects to them ranging from debuffs to damage to even buffs for her allies who walked over them.

  Sinnamon ultimately placed two wards in the tunnel and another two just inside the cavern after Aliyah sealed it. The intention was to use the beach as a fallback if they needed it. To aid in that, Aliyah had sculpted several earthen breastworks and similar fortifications to buy them time to retreat across the lake and back up the cliff.

  “Weaver and I will lead a ways ahead. Singapura will bring up the rear a ways back. Everyone else will stay in the middle. Hogweed and Yentel will continue to scout ahead of us.” Halzy equipped his forest green armor and began passing out potions to the nonplayers. “These are the highest quality healing potions I can craft. Don't be afraid to use them, I've got plenty more.”

  They coordinated their movements with the party chat, pausing to allow Hogweed and Yentel to snipe at goblins with their bows before the rest of them moved forward. Occasionally, Weaver and Halzy would help in clearing a room, but otherwise it was a slow, methodic room clear by the two Rogues.

  Hogweed ran the same subclass as Sinnamon’s friend, Jack O’Lantern, the Trickster subclass. It allowed him to create up to three copies of himself, his health bar divided equally amongst his copies. He used to subclass to have two of himself with Yentel, one with Sinnamon and Aliyah, and the third trailed much further back. No one wanted to be surprised if any of the goblins they killed respawned when they got far enough away.

  Hogweed had a habit of humming a tune in his head that occasionally carried through to the party chat. Each time he hit a sharp note coinciding with a kill, because that's when Sinnamon saw her own experience counter go up.

  Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  “Sinnamon, Singapura, come here. Bring Logan, Gavriel, and Yentel with you,” Halzy said through the group chat after clearing another room.

  Sinnamon passed along the message and walked forward with those Halzy had asked for. The dungeon’s terrain changed from a cave with tight passages and the occasional multi-level room to brick walls and cobblestone floors, opening into an expansive cave that housed an entire underground city. Buildings, street signs, and even trash lay untouched by time. The crystal street lamps gave off a dull glow just a touch colder than candlelight.

  “What is this place?” Sinnamon whispered to Gavriel.

  “Fel's undercity. While the Ikhwezi and Revi were preparing to confront Isiphelo, these caves and underground cities were built to house the increased population of warriors and their families,” Gavriel answered. He continued walking down the street and turned the corner. “And this is also where Lohk kept his army of goblins he used to ransack the city.”

  “There used to be more of us. The Watch,” Yentel pointed to the patch on her armor, Sonnet Entertainment’s logo and also the symbol of the Revi. “Reylynn handpicked many of our predecessors with the intent of watching over the crystal cities and keeping the Remnants hidden, but accessible when Anathi’s army came. We lived here between assignments around Terre. Until Lohk and some followers of his tried to seize the power of the Remnants for his own shortsighted bid for power.”

  Sinnamon saw the reason Halzy had asked only for the adults. There wasn’t just the goblins they had cleared out, but the aftermath of a battle fought long ago. Many wore the emblem of the Revi on their armor. And they weren’t just variants of Serethi and humans, either. Sinnamon saw the multi-armed exoskeletons with eight eyes of the Spiderlings and long, slender skeletons that looked like a human’s torso placed on a snake’s body.

  It didn't take long to clear the town square and create a small camp where they could rest. Aliyah sealed the path behind them while Yentel and Hogweed continued to scout ahead and into the passages leading to Fel’s surface city. Logan had said they were within a mile of the entrance to Fel proper. It would be the first time anyone had been there in hundreds of years.

  Sinnamon sat beside Gavriel. She'd studied some of the goblins they passed. None of them looked like any goblins she had seen. Black, jagged crystals stuck through their bodies like rocky tumors and where pupils and irises should have been, was only a sea of white. Why were these goblins so different from the ones found in the wilds around Navorinelle?

  “You ever wonder why only Guardians use the crystal transport gates?” He answered with a question of his own.

  Weaver set down his bowl of stew and swallowed quickly. “As a matter of fact, I did. They would make moving people and goods much faster, yet even the Serethi queen still travels by carriage.”

  “Caer sickness. A fracturing of the mind and body brought about by too much exposure to the mana within Caer Siddi. Your bodies were designed to handle it. Ours weren’t. Lohk foolishly believed the Remnants would offer some form of protection from it. He was wrong and now all of Terre lives with the consequences of his actions.”

  Sinnamon sat confused for a moment, trying to put together what Gavriel had said. “Are you saying the goblins were people once?”

  “Once,” Gavriel affirmed.

  “But our mom told us the goblins came after Araedi rebelled against the queen. That they were created because they knew they lost when they were destroyed by Ilsylvania, Rielle, and the other city-states,” Lynn said. She and Alyx had been listening intently to Gavriel’s story.

  “You know your history very well.” Gavriel gave a nod in Aliyah’s direction. “But that isn’t the exact truth. The Serethi civil war didn’t end with Araedi’s destruction, but its duplication.”

  Gavriel pulled his book from his bag and thumbed through the pages, then he began reciting passages from it. After Lohk had stolen one of the Remnants and killed just about every member of the Watch living in Fel’s Undercity at the time, a group was dispatched to kill Lohk, recover the stolen Remnant, and reactivate Araedi’s barrier.

  The lone survivor, a woman named Aida, had indeed reactivated the barrier, but when the cannons could no longer bombard the city and people entered to see the aftermath, they found Araedi completely empty. Aida’s messages continued to appear in the books for a couple days afterward, but no one could find her or the monsters she described inside. Given how completely empty the city was, they believed she had accidentally activated Araedi’s last-resort defensive measure from Isiphelo and placed it in its own pocket reality, cut off from everything and everyone.

  “Exactly like how the instanced dungeons work!” Weaver shouted with revelation.

  “Yes. Once Aida created the first one, more—” Suddenly Gavriel stood, looking in the direction of the entrance to Fel proper. There was a flash of pain on Gavriel’s face like the man had just been punched in the gut.

  At the same instant Gavriel stood, Hogweed Le Burn cursed loudly through the group chat as a full three-quarters of his health disappeared in an instant. The treant Rogue dropped to the ground from where his fourth body had been perched above them, gasping for breath. “They killed all three of my doppelgangers. And… And they got Yentel!”

  A low rumbling filled the undercity, echoing off the buildings and growing louder, resolving into hundreds of distant, sprinting footsteps. But there was another, far louder and painful sound happening right beside them.

  Gavriel cried out Yentel’s name with the grief-filled wail of a man who had just learned the worst thing imaginable had just happened: the woman he'd spent over five centuries alongside was now gone; swept up by the horde of goblins now running their way.