The First Floor

Just after noon, on the fifth day of Highbright, outside of The Hungry Road tavern, Isha Arashi was in a state of shock. She had just signed a contract putting her in an adventuring party with three idiots and now, as soon as her party member, Dorak Risei, finished his meal, she would be exploring a dungeon that had never been cleared. She wanted to speak up about how insane it would be to go into a dungeon without any preparation, much less a well-developed plan, but no matter what she did, her mind and body were on separate paths.

She was thinking about so many different things: the name of their party being based off of an off-handed comment she made about how this party would make terrible heroes, the fact that that party was now going to explore a dungeon that had ended many adventurer’s careers, and the fact that she was apparently the only intelligent member of this party. However, her body just kept following the other two members of her party, Asyr Moonriver and Hal Sevenoaks. She wanted to react to her situation in so many different ways: frustration, anger, confusion, hopelessness, tiredness, and more, but all of those emotions all overlapped and caused her to simply respond with shock.

The thing that eventually snapped her out of that shock was the pure anger at seeing Dorak carrying another bottle of alcohol, apparently one that he intended to bring with them to The Tomb of The Sands of Time. She had only limited information about the Tomb, but she knew that Dorak would only be a hindrance if he was drunk in the Tomb.

Dorak was obviously the most difficult one in the party. He was incredibly brash, he was aggressively over-confident, and he was simply too loud. The other two had their flaws: Asyr was much too timid and Hal had a tendency to act without thinking too much, but by Isha’s estimations, those two would be more competent than Dorak by leaps and bounds. She prides herself on her ability to analyze situations and find favorable outcomes, but no matter how much she analyzed Dorak and his abilities, she could not determine how he benefited this party.

“Do we have any plan for how we are going to handle the Tomb, or are we just going to go in with Dorak drunk out of his mind?” Isha finally asked. She wanted to believe that at least Hal had some idea of what to do, but her hope didn’t last long.

“We don’t have much in terms of information to go off of, so I believe that going into the tomb would be our best way of performing some reconnaissance,” said Hal, a bit too nonchalant for Isha’s tastes.

“Do you at least have an idea for what we should do if we encounter one of those monsters that you had mentioned?”

The Tomb of The Sands of Time supposedly had a dangerous, unnatural monster on each of the first three floors. Isha and the others all had experiences with monsters. They were fairly common in the places outside of towns on most continents. The Hidden Lands, the continent they were currently on, even had some more dangerous monsters than Aki-Jura, where Isha was born and raised. However, the unnatural nature of these creatures left Isha on edge. The monsters that Isha knew of fell into three categories: animals, which were sometimes dangerous in their own right, monstrosities, which were monsters that were created from magic, but made some sense, usually because they were made from animals or people, and lastly, any other creatures. These other creatures could be dragons, giants, or some creatures that didn’t normally live in the world of Erdenes.

There were a number of worlds outside of Erdenes that Isha was aware of from her studies. There were the Upper Worlds, which were the place that the gods, angelic beings, and all holy beings went, according to the teachings of the Holy Erdeniin Church. Isha typically believed what the church said, though, because she had confirmed those things by speaking with her goddess, Salkhi, the goddess of storms and nature. Salkhi had stopped speaking with Isha in the last ten years as much, but she would regularly talk to her back when Isha was young. The other place that Salkhi had confirmed for Isha was the Lower Worlds, which was where all demons, devils, and unholy creatures stayed. The Upper Worlds and the Lower Worlds were constantly fighting each other for control of Erdenes, but the devil princes couldn’t compare in power to the main gods, the Ariun Erdenes.

There were two other worlds, the Outer Edges, which was where the elemental planes resided, along with the other planes of the things that were used in the creation of Erdenes, and the Inner Worlds, which were worlds that sometimes overlapped with Erdenes, leading to portals appearing around the world. The Inner Worlds were the land of fairies, the land without light, and the land of doors. Isha had learned about the Outer Edges and the Inner Worlds, but most of her studies with the Church were focused on the Upper and Lower Worlds. She did know, though, that each of these worlds were home to various monsters that could sometimes appear in Erdenes, so if adventurers called a monster “unnatural”, it meant that it didn’t follow the same rules as the ones that were more common.

Almost snapping Isha out of her thoughts, Hal said, “Hmm. I guess if we run into a monster, we should try and fight it. We’ll have to fight them sooner or later, so if we can understand how they fight, that will make things easier later.”

Isha was clearly unhappy with this answer, but she had long since given up on trying to change anyone’s mind. She had decided that she would simply see how well this group could work together before she left them. She had been moving from group to group for a number of years at this point, so if this one didn’t prove to be useful, it wasn’t anything new for Isha.

The group began walking towards the edge of town. In the southeastern part of town, there was a place that was surrounded by tall walls that, from a distance, looked almost like a tower. Once the group made it to the walls, they could see a number of other adventuring parties sitting outside of an unimpressive mausoleum-like structure on the inside of those walls. The tomb had a grey brick outside with little in the way of distinguishing itself from any other mausoleum, but this one had a door with an hourglass inlaid in it. A new adventuring party walked up to the door, flipped the hourglass upside-down, and the door opened. Some of the other parties took a quick glance over at the group that was entering the tomb, but after that party had entered the tomb, the door closed and the sand in the hourglass quickly poured out in a matter of a second. The door suddenly reopened and the party walked out, looking suddenly much more tired than when they had entered the second before. The door closed behind them and the onlookers went back to their business.

Hal gathered the group just outside the walls to ask, “Is everyone prepared to go into the tomb?”

Dorak replied, “I’m more than ready!”

Asyr said, “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

Isha muttered to herself, “Gods help me,” before speaking up to say, curtly, “Let’s do this already.”

Hal led the group to the door of the tomb when an old gnomish adventurer noticed them and asked, “Are you a new party?”

Hal responded, “Yes, we’re Yurasha. We’re going to clear this tomb someday.”

The gnomish woman looked them over, incredulously, before saying with a smirk, “I’ll be looking forward to that day. You just turn over the hourglass to open the door. We’ll see you when you come back out.”

As Hal went to flip the hourglass, a number of the adventurers had started watching the group. Hal could feel their eyes on him. He flipped the hourglass and the door opened. He waited for the rest to enter the tomb’s door before he followed behind. The inside of the tomb was unlit, but Asyr raised a hand, which began to glow with a bright white light, illuminating the area around the party. The first corridor was very plain and went downward for only a few hundred feet, toward a large and well-lit room. As the group entered the room, any sense of control over the others that Hal thought he had completely vanished.

The first thing Hal noticed was Asyr walking up to a circle of eight pillars in the center of the room which surrounded a small orb on a pedestal. Then he watched as Dorak rushed to the other side of the room where there was a similar door to the one at the opening of the tomb, yelling, “Where’s this monster at, anyway?” Finally, he noticed as Isha sighed heavily and began looking at the walls of the room, examining some carvings in between sconces. Hal stepped over to join Isha, but noticed that the carvings were of various arcane symbols. Hal had very little knowledge of magic or the arcane, so he passed Isha and went to Dorak.

Dorak was furiously scrambling around the side of the room where the closed door stood in his path. Hal called out to him, “What are you looking for, Dorak?”

“Well, there’s got to be a way to open this door, just like the one at the entrance. If the monster isn’t in this room, it has to be past this door.”

Hal looked around, but the only thing he thought could be a way to open the door was the orb in the center of the room that Asyr was examining. Hal decided to go and help her, but when he saw what Asyr was doing, he doubted how much help he could provide. Asyr had pulled out the book that was at her side and had begun to sketch small symbols in a circle on one of the pages. Hal, trying to feel like he could be of any use to her, asked, “What are these symbols here?”

Asyr looked up, startled, before catching herself, saying, “Oh! Oh. It’s just you, Hal. These are the arcane symbols of the eight material elements. Do you see the pillars around us? Each of the pillars have one of these symbols on them. From the pillar closest to the closed door, going right, they are: fire, light, water, life, wind, darkness, earth, and death. Now, if only I could figure out what we need to do with these.”

Hal was a little bit surprised by how much Asyr knew about magic and arcane symbols, but remembered that she was a spellcaster. Hal only knew how to fight, but Asyr could understand magic. No matter how much he had tried to learn magic, he couldn’t do much more than create a small puff of wind, which was pretty pitiful compared to the average adventurer. Hal, trying to regain his composure, asked, “There were some arcane symbols around the walls of the room. Do you think those could be helpful?”

“I hope so, so I already sent Ulyx to go read them for me,” responded Asyr, just as Ulyx returned with a flap of his large, red, leathery wings. Ulyx landed on Asyr’s shoulder and Asyr appeared to hear something that Hal couldn’t. Asyr then said, “Ulyx just said that the walls have a message written in the ancient language of magic. Apparently, we just have to pour elemental magic of all the types into this orb here, then the door to the next floor will open.”

“That’s great! Do we have the ability to cast magic of all eight types? I can’t do any magic, so I’ll grab the others,” said Hal before calling out to the room, “Dorak, Isha, what types of magic can you cast again?”

Isha began walking over, then noticed the pillars and the symbols on them and said, “I can cast magic with the elements of life, wind, water, and light.”

Dorak ran over, clearly not wanting to be left out, yelling, “I can create fire, water, wind, ice, lightning, and stones.”

“Technically ice and lightning aren’t elements, Dorak,” said Isha, slightly annoyed.

“Okay, then, Sparky, but I also said stones, which you didn’t say, so that’s something, huh?”

“That’s earth, so that means all we have left to cover are death and darkness magic,” interrupted Hal before Isha could get into an argument with Dorak.

“Um, I can sort of cast those types of magic, but it’s something I would prefer not to have to do,” interjected Asyr, who had closed her book and rejoined the others. “Dorak, if you could cast fire magic on that orb, then Isha could continue along the order of the pillars, following him with light magic. Meanwhile, I need to prepare to cast my two spells.”

Hal stood back and watched as the other three were somehow easily handling this situation. He watched as even Dorak was being helpful and following along with the plan without even a word of complaint. Hal felt a strange tightness in his chest as he couldn’t help the others. He felt his breath catch as things were going incredibly smoothly and Asyr cut her palm with a dagger to cast the first of her two spells. He knew that there was supposed to be a monster on this floor, but according to the text that Ulyx had read, the closed door would lead to the next floor. As Dorak finished punching the orb, causing stones to fly off, and as Asyr cut her other palm to cast her other spell, Hal began rapidly searching around the room for wherever the monster could have been hiding. His eyes began scanning the ceilings for wherever the monster could have been, but there was nothing to be found. Hal suddenly felt his breath catch again. “This is too easy.” He muttered it to himself as Asyr cast the final spell on the orb. He quickly grabbed his spear and shield and readied himself for something to appear behind the closed door. “Everyone, be ready for a monster to come out of that door!” Dorak ran over behind a pillar and watched for the door to open. Asyr finished healing her hands and ran to a pillar on the opposite side of the room from the closed door. Isha grabbed her mace from her side and her buckler off her back and rushed up to a pillar near Dorak. The door began to open.

But there was nothing behind the door.

Hal began nervously looking around the room before his vision was engulfed in darkness. He felt a rush of being lifted off the ground before he felt a crushing sensation all around him. He wanted to move, to swing his spear at whatever was crushing him, but it took all of his strength just to avoid having his bones snap beneath the pressure. He suddenly felt a sensation of being turned upside down and pushed downward by the crushing feeling. The crushing stopped as Hal landed in some kind of liquid. The liquid was incredibly cold, but the longer he touched it, the more he felt his skin burning.

Asyr had seen the whole situation. As soon as Isha finished casting the last spell and the door opened, the magic in the orb burst out and upward. A massive sphere of arcane energy floated in the center of the room for but a second before a massive hawk appeared out of that energy. The hawk’s wings were made of five clear, pale blue floating icicles on each side which appeared to trail beneath two bird-like wing edges and they were almost fifteen feet wide. The burst of energy also sent a gust of freezing wind throughout the room. The lights in the sconces of the room turned a dangerous red color. As Asyr was recovering from that gust, the hawk quickly swooped down and engulfed Hal whole with its massive beak. Asyr screamed out in pure panic, “HAL!” Dorak and Isha turned back toward Asyr, but they were too late to do anything to save Hal as the hawk tilted its head back and swallowed Hal.

Asyr could do nothing but run. She ran to the other side of the room, behind the hawk, over to where Dorak and Isha were at. She wanted to help. She thought about what she could do, but her mind kept flashing back to the blur of blue as the ice hawk swooped down at Hal. She wanted to cast something, but her mind couldn’t focus when all she could see was the image of Hal vanishing in an instant into the massive beak of the hawk. She ran because it was the only thing her body would do. It had become an instinct for her long ago, so when her mind kept replaying the moment of Hal being swallowed by the massive creature, her body was simply running.

Dorak and Isha, however, were more hardened to the idea of combat. Isha called out to Dorak, “Distract it! I need a moment to cast a spell!” Dorak seemingly had entirely lost any interest in fighting with Isha and ran up to the ice hawk. He gathered himself into a stance to try and punch the stomach of the massive bird. He was going to need his most powerful stance to try and punch open the bird’s stomach and save Hal. He gathered his breath and released all of his magical energy in a punch. As his fist approached the bird’s stomach, it became surrounded in stones, more and more, before his fist became like a giant stalagmite.

The hawk’s massive wings did not move fast enough, but the icicle feathers moved rapidly to block Dorak’s punch. It was a bizarre vision, the wing edges themselves moving slower than the icicle-like wings. Dorak’s punch connected with two of the massive feathers, shattering them into small crystals of ice. Dorak clicked his tongue as his attack had apparently failed, then called out, “Cast it, now!”

Isha was holding her mace aloft as she softly spoke her incantation, gradually getting louder, “I summon your storms, my goddess. I summon the four winds and the five waters, so that you may bring destruction to this non-believer! HURRICANE!” The room was filled with gale-force winds and pounding rains. The miniature hurricane was the size of the room, almost 100 feet wide, before condensing and surrounding the hawk, threatening to tear any normal creature limb from limb. Dorak and Isha stood by, hoping that the hurricane would deal with this monster as Asyr ran to get cover from the storm, just past the door to the next floor.

Suddenly, in a blast of ice, the storm crashed to the ground in sheets of ice and piles of snow. The hawk held its wings open wide, then, with a freezing gust of wind, flung two of the icicle-like feathers at Dorak and Isha with a flap of its massive wings. Isha held out her shield to block the attack, but the icicle was larger than her shield, so as it hit the shield, she turned her body to redirect the impact away from her. She was able to avoid the brunt of the impact, but her left hand where she held her shield was frozen in a block of ice. As she turned back toward the hawk, she saw a horrifying sight in the edges of her peripheral vision.

She turned to her left to see a massive icicle jutting out of the ground at an angle. The eight-foot long icicle was buried almost two feet into the floor. However, the horror was the sight to be seen halfway along the length of the icicle. Dorak had been impaled through the midsection. The icicle was almost as wide as Dorak’s torso, but there was no hope of removing Dorak’s almost lifeless body from the spear-like icicle. The area around where the icicle impaled him was frozen, just like where Isha’s shield had made contact with the feather. The only parts that were left unfrozen were above Dorak’s shoulders and below his knees. Dorak’s face, though it was normally a more copperish red, was now coated in a deep crimson from all of the blood.

Isha could no longer feel her left arm below the elbow. Dorak was moments from death. Hal was beyond anyone’s reach. Isha cast a quick healing spell on Dorak, chanting, “Ease the pain of this one, o Mother of Storms.” She wanted to do more, but the situation was already hopeless. There was one person she still needed to protect from the ice hawk: Asyr. Isha ran over to Asyr, who was hiding beyond the door to the next floor, tears in her eyes. Isha could feel the numbness moving upwards along her arm. She looked at it and noticed that the ice was expanding, almost crawling up her arm. Isha took her mace, breathed in, and swung down on her arm, shattering her left arm into red crystals of ice. Where her arm would have been was now replaced with a bloody, open stump with shattered bone exposed. Isha would have passed out from the pain, normally, but the adrenaline of the moment caused her only response to be a strangled yelp.

Isha took a quick glance back at the hawk as she ran toward Asyr. The hawk had flown back up into the air, getting ready to dive once again. Isha quickly ducked past the door, barely avoiding being snapped up like Hal had been. However, as Isha passed onto the other side of the door, something strange happened. The lights in the room turned back from that deep red to the regular glow of lanterns. The hawk, which had just almost eaten Isha, appeared to be unable to see or even tell that Isha was there and went back to flying in circles around the room. Isha poked her head back into the room, but the lights went back to that same red and the hawk seemed to immediately tell that Isha was in the room. Isha quickly ducked back to her cover, not wanting to take a moment to process what that must have meant for the situation of Hal and Dorak.

Isha turned to face Asyr who was caught between the throes of hyperventilation and wailing with tears running down her face. Isha cast a healing spell on her mangled arm, only managing to close the open wound. Then, she turned her attention to the more difficult form of healing. She had spent a number of years at a temple where she would meet with people to hear their troubles. She had learned how to comfort others, but it wasn’t something that could be done with a spell. Isha took her mace and hooked it back onto her side, then took her one good arm and hugged Asyr around the neck. Asyr was caught off-guard for a moment, then went into full wails. Isha had noticed her demeanor back when the two had first met in the tavern earlier that day. Isha had seen many people who had the same look in their eyes as Asyr. A life of disconnection. Being surrounded by people, but never feeling like a part of their lives. However, Asyr always wore a look of false contentment, a look like she needed someone to ask how she was doing, but a look like she would only ever say that she was doing good.

As Isha held Asyr, she let her cry and release the tension that she was holding onto. It took a number of minutes, but Isha just held onto her and occasionally said, “It’s okay” or “I’m here for you” or “I’m not going anywhere”. Isha didn’t know which one of those things Asyr needed to hear, but she eventually heard Asyr begin to stop crying. Isha then held Asyr’s face in her hand, turning it to look at her. Her eyes were puffy from crying. Isha finally decided to sit down across from Asyr in the corridor.

“Have you ever been in a real fight, Asyr?”

“No.”

A pause. Asyr took a deep breath in before letting it out with a choked final sob.

“I imagine that you have some reason to be an adventurer. I’m not going to tell you to stop trying to be one, but you know that you will have to be in many bloody battles in that time.”

“I know that, but I’ve never seen someone die before my eyes. I felt so useless.”

“You and I both know that you are not useless. We wouldn’t have gotten this door open if not for you figuring out how to do that. How did you know how to read the symbols on the walls?”

“Ulyx can read the ancient language of magic. All demons and devils can. He reads it to me.”

“That’s incredible. You can do something that I can’t do. So I don’t want to hear you say that you are useless.”

“Okay.”

Another pause.

“Do you want to try and keep going toward the next floor? We’ve spent about fifteen minutes of the hour time limit. If you want to keep going, we can at least see what’s down there. If not, we can sit here and just keep talking until the time runs out.”

Asyr didn’t respond for a while.

“I think I want to go down. I don’t want to keep feeling like this. I know I’m not useless, but I want to prove it to myself.”

Isha grabbed her mace off of her side, then, reaching out, asked, “Could you help me stand, Asyr? I lost quite a bit of blood, so I’m a bit dizzy.”

Asyr stood and grabbed Isha’s hand, pulling her to her feet. Isha wobbled a bit as she stood, but Asyr stood beside her, put her arm around her back to keep her steady, and began walking with her. The two walked down the corridor. Though the corridor was the same dark, plain corridor as the one the group had walked through less than twenty minutes ago, it had a quite different feel to it. The two walked the same distance as the first corridor, but the pace was slower. The two walked as a single unit. The corridor was physically the same, but Asyr and Isha walked it with the full knowledge that there could be death waiting in the room in front of them.

As they approached the next room, Asyr gently set Isha down just outside of the room itself. Asyr looked at the room in front of them and saw a more insidious danger than the one from the first room. Across the floor of the room, there were hundreds of panels, each inscribed with an arcane symbol. Asyr could recognize a few of them, but none of them boded well. Some were inscribed with symbols for one of the eight elements, some were inscribed with symbols for demons. Asyr decided at that moment to simply wait. She had no idea what would await her when their time ran out, but she had no intention of giving up on the tomb that day.

Asyr sat down next to Isha, who had passed out, either from blood loss or from the adrenaline wearing off. Asyr took her bag off her back, pulled out a small amount of rations, and began to eat some. Then, she pulled out her book and began to draw as many of the symbols in the next room as she could. Eventually, ten minutes passed, then twenty, then thirty, and then fourty. Asyr simply waited for the time to run out. She had already done as much as she could.

Suddenly, there was a sound of a deep rumbling, like large stones rubbing against each other. The tomb was bathed in total darkness.

In an instant, there was a light behind her. She turned and could see the open door of the entrance to the tomb. She began to walk out of the tomb. The sound of an old gnomish adventurer calling out to her spooked her slightly, saying, “Two seconds, huh? You made it to the second floor on your first attempt? Color me impressed, kids.”

Hal said, “The second floor? What happened? All I remember is being surrounded in darkness, being crushed, then a burning sensation, but a cold burning.”

Asyr turned to the sound of Hal’s voice. He was standing there beside her, almost unharmed, aside from some acid burns on his face and hands. She turned to her left, where she saw Dorak with some frostbite on his exposed arms. Isha was standing just past him. She met Asyr’s glance and pulled up the sleeve on her left arm, exposing a scar along the point of her arm that she severed. Asyr looked around her, at the people who had all been brutally injured or killed, but saw how time had been rewound.

The gnomish woman called out again and said, “You all should rest up. The first time is always difficult. Be careful getting back to wherever you plan on sleeping, your bodies still take the exhaustion of the experience. Don’t pass out in the street. Also, you may have some dreams or visions from your past. It’s a slight side effect of The Sands of Time. Overall though, you kids did a wonderful job for your first time in the Tomb.”

For some reason, even though Hal and Dorak’s memories were fuzzy, none of the four truly believed that statement.