The Isle of Terror: Final Part

As much as we wished to immediately start licking our wounds, there was still a final push to be made before we could allow our emotions to surface. We checked for survivors among the fallen. The only one still breathing was Gandor, critically wounded and unconscious, but alive. Rhombus wasn’t so lucky. His ribcage was crushed, and there were four holes in the chest, where the demon’s claws penetrated his armor. Just like that, half of the squad that spent years going through thick and thin was gone.

I briefed the remaining survivors about the nature of the altar room and how what we banished at such a great cost was merely a guardian, protecting an evil power that could only peer into our world, but was thankfully unable to exert direct influence anywhere outside. This was the entity that revealed many secrets to the young, ambitious wizard Arthacyros, whose empire was now doing its bidding. What the archdemon’s endgame was, however, I had no idea.

We had the grim task of taking our fallen comrades back to the surface ahead of us. It carried the risk of the evil entity summoning some other creature from the bowels of hell to torment us, but we hated the idea of leaving them to rot in these evil hallways too much to act pragmatically. The only one we couldn’t retrieve was the unfortunate sapper who blew himself up. This was grueling work, since the dead outnumbered the living. Annabel in particular pushed her telekinetic abilities to the absolute limit, barely capable of standing upright by the time we reached the surface. No new horrors awaited us, thankfully; we wouldn’t have stood a chance.

The celestian sailors greeted our grim procession with a look of shock on their faces. Without asking anything, they started packing our things – including the chest of magic tomes we had found earlier – and loading the bodies onto the sky barge. In the meantime, the surviving sapper mined the cave mouth, collapsing the only known entrance to that accursed hellhole. Annabel applied first aid to the wounded. Within a few hours, we were airborne.

It was only then that we finally allowed our minds to comprehend the tragedy that had struck. The soldiers who had come with us, proud to join the heroes who retrieved the Twice-Enchanted Blade, trusting us to lead them to another triumph, got slaughtered nearly to a man. Rhombus wouldn’t get to inherit his father’s title. He would never fight another duel again, and for the first time, I regretted never having humored his requests. As for Civet and Iocasta, they wouldn’t get the chance to retire from adventuring, get married, and perhaps tell their children grand stories of their exploits. We had so many close brushes with death together, always prevailing, that I became guilty of that great human folly: assuming we couldn’t possibly get killed. I should’ve known better, especially since I had been taken before my time once in the past. But we had become, by this point, living legends, and I was beginning to buy into the hype myself. We were the best the Royal Treasure hunters had to offer, and no task was beyond us. Then reality sucker punched me in the face, and I found myself sitting in the same dark cargo hold with the bodies of my comrades.

Annabel, having managed to finish her medical duties without breaking down, was sitting on the floor bawling her eyes out. This was the first time I saw her cry since the first expedition we went on together, but this time I couldn’t even attempt to console her. I was almost completely catatonic, staring blankly at the wall for most of the journey, trying to come to terms with what had happened. The soldier and the sapper, too, were sporting thousand-yard stares. For the entirety of the trip, no sound could be heard except for the howling of the wind outside and Annabel’s sobs.

Our return to Hieropolis was far from the end of our troubles. Once word got out about our fiasco, the capital found itself in an uproar. The loudest of all was, quite expectedly, the Duke of Tetrahedron. Grief-stricken after the death of his only son, he flew into a fury and demanded blood, considering us responsible for his son’s demise. His Majesty was, of course, aware that his requests were unreasonable and that, legally speaking, we were not guilty. He could not simply brush off the powerful noble, however, so we were placed under arrest until a proper investigation could determine our guilt. The King made this move in an effort to postpone proceedings until the Duke calmed down, and he personally apologized to us for making this decision. In our current mental conditions, we didn’t care about it either way; on the contrary, I found isolation preferable to dealing with the curious mob outside.

We were held in a tower in the palace, which was, for a prison, reasonably comfortable. Each of us had a room to ourselves, in addition to a common room we could socialize in, and we were kept well-fed. The soldier and the sapper were, too, arrested, but they asked to be kept separate from us. Understandable, really; if I were in their place, I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with the Royal Treasure Hunters either.

The intent was to keep us here until the Duke’s anger blew over, after which we would be acquitted in a formal trial, while a supposed investigation was going on in the meantime. Another incident, however, took place before that could be arranged. It would cut our stay in prison short and set my fate once again on a path that would intersect with the necromancer Arthacyros.