Chapter 1

In practice, flickering torchlight does little to calm one's nerves.

Logically, it should. When the alternative is pitch-black darkness, the faint crawling of spiders some unknown distance away, and the possibility of running into a trap with every step, torchlight theoretically sounds rather nice.

But King Barstol wasn’t feeling any of that warmth—except for the physical kind, of course.

“We’re here.” The King gently brushed away the thin webs blocking their path. “Oliver, any updates?”

“About our pursuers? We lost them five turns ago.” His spunky voice echoed like a cannonball in the dimly lit cave. “Nothing a few arrows can’t fix.”

“And thank the gods for that… We may still need a few more well placed shots.”

King Barstol caught his breath.

A single wooden door lay in his path. By itself it wasn't particularly remarkable, made of solid oak logs with hand-forged iron strips running across the wood. Any castle within a thousand mile radius would have similar.

But those doors weren’t buried deep under the earth.

“The rumors are looking pretty hard to deny now, Your Majesty.” Oliver said. “But what kind of magic—”

“The kind we don’t want to run into. We’re here for his treasure, nothing else.” The king scowled. “There are only a few forces in the world that could sink an entire castle into the ground.”

“Still sounds insane, right? I’d thought it was some drunkard's talk the first time I heard that King Marcus’s castle fell.”

“So did I.” King Barstol gripped the cool iron latch. “But Marcus is dead, and we need to fulfill our promise."

He turned the latch, and the door swung wide open.

Inside, dimly lit torches still burned on the stone walls. Skeletons in well-dented armour littered the floor, with the metal still showing faint signs of polishing. Most were human, but every once in a while there were signs of grotesque, mangled figures mixed in.

King Barstol ignored them as they moved forward.

The next room, the high tower kitchens, was more of the same. With discarded pots and pans tossed around, and the faint smell of mold leaving an undercurrent to the sleek smell of metal.

“What else did the rumors say, Oliver?”

“Let me think?” He crossed his arms. “Marcus’s territory was attacked, we both know that to be a fact, and because his opponent has the charisma of a slug, he couldn’t get more than a few battalions whipped up.”

“Sounds about right.”

“Then…” Oliver thought for a second. “I heard several different rumors about the second part. Some say he made a contract with one of the gods, another says he simply used an artifact. Doesn’t really matter how, does it. Anyway, he created an army of some kind—not human—and eventually overwhelmed the place.”

“And then the castle fell.” The King gently rested his free hand on his waist, where his sword sat ready to be drawn.

“But what could have sunk this place? There's barely twenty people on this planet with the magic to do that, and not a single one of them is on the continent.”

“Doesn’t matter. At least, until we run into them.”

“Respectfully, Your Majesty, what a boring way of looking at things.” Olver sighed. “But whatever. We just have to get that treasure and get out, right? Did that letter of yours ever mention what the treasure is?”

“No.”

“Fair enough.”

The conversation died out after that.

Truthfully, even King Barstol was a bit confused about what exactly they were looking for. He’d gotten the letter randomly last month, right before news of the castle falling had reached his ears. Marcus hadn’t ever been one for details.

The rushed message was barely three lines long. Hello, old friends, if you’re reading this, that assuredly means that I’ve passed away. Please don’t grieve. But I do have an important favor to ask. I hid away a treasure near the bottom of the castle, I need you to recover it for me. You’ll know it when you see it. Oh, also, I wouldn’t bring many men along. The monsters aren’t particularly big on those.

“I’ll know it when I see it?” King Barstol muttered. “I hope you're right, Marcus.”

They found the stars soon after that. The skeletons from before had dispersed a bit—presumably because they’d fallen out of the windows back when this place was still above ground.

Water dripped from the ceiling as they slowly descended down. Both King Barstol and Oliver knew the layout well, it was far from their first time inside the castle, but typically they didn’t enter from the top.

Typically there weren’t corpses littering the ground either, but the King found that part easier to ignore.

“Here we go…” As they descended to the next floor down, the king drew his sword. “Stay on guard, Oliver.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice.”

The change in the air was obvious from the very first step. Upstairs felt musty and decrepit. The smell of blood was ripe down here.

The source revealed itself one room over.

Scales ran along its back, white and jagged like the teeth of a carnivore. The beast looked around with its three eyes that rolled around like bowling balls, all with blood slowly dripping from every orifice.

“That’s one hell of a creature." Oliver glanced up. Even at a conservative estimate, it was twice his height. “It would be cool to hang its head back home.”

“Careful. We’re not here to hunt game.”

Truly, the beast in front of them was far from the typical beast. But to the king and Oliver, that didn’t mean much. It was their target.

“Go.”

The king dashed forward, lighting his sword with the buzz of electricity, and gave a tepid swing.

Unfortunately, the beast was smart enough to dodge.

It screeched, and leaped ten feet into the air, right over King Barstol’s blade. The creature's scales shot into the ceiling like arrows as it hung there, eyes directly on the king.

“Foolish mistake.” The king pointed his blade at the creature, and let a blast of electricity fly.

“RAHHH!” The beast hollered in pain, but shook off the blast with a shudder.

Unfortunately for the beast, that hesitation would turn out to be the death of it.

Arrows pierced its skin from Oliver’s bow, sharp and hot, they glowed a bright red as they cooked the beast's skin with every shot. One, then ten arrows in total stuck from its scales like a porcupine.

“It’s ready!”

“Good work, Oliver.” King Barstol pointed his sword up again, but this time he pointed it toward the closest of Oliver’s arrows, and let another blast fly.

This time, the blast didn’t make the beast scream in agony. Instead, the blast made the creature jolt once, then plummet from the ceiling and land onto the ground with a thud.

It didn’t move again.

“We can’t hope to assume they’ll all be this easy.” The king sheathed his sword. Truly, compared to the average monster above ground, that thing was the kind of beast that could single-handedly destroy a walled village.

But the king and Oliver weren’t exactly ordinary fighters either.

“Do you think that’s the kind of beast that they destroyed the castle with, Your Majesty?” Oliver asked, picking the arrows out of the monster’s corpse.

“Maybe?” King Barstol frowned. “Certainly, waves of those would cause an issue for any army in the world. But not for Marcus.”

“So there's a chance that’s the easiest thing we’ll be facing today.” Oliver sighed. “Just when I thought things could be easy.”

“There won’t be a single easy fight in here. Do us both a favor and throw that notion away.”

“Fine, fine.” Oliver rolled his eyes. “You can’t make it illegal to be a bit hopeful.”

“The question is, how much is down here?” King Barstol said. “We’ll harvest this if we have time, the scales can be used for weapons, but let us not burden ourselves carrying it.”

Oliver nodded as he kicked open the door out.

Marcus’s castle was the kind of building that drew every person’s eyes just by existing. It was massive, with each floor down being twice the size of the last, and there were more floors than anyone knew.

Even Marcus hadn’t known the exact floor count.

But King Barstol had a feeling that wherever this treasure was, they wouldn’t find it without descending down to the depths.

The next few rooms were more of the same, abandoned messes littered with armor and skeletons. The floors got cleaner, and the number of corpses lessened, but it still told the same story of a siege very well.

“I do wonder,” Oliver muttered. “The castle sank after King Marcus’s defeat, right?”

“That’s the official story, yes.”

“Well then, Your Majesty, wouldn't the corpses be getting more numerous as we went down? It feels like the opposite is happening.”

“Maybe.” King Barstol frowned. “They could have simply been taking cover in the upper rooms, using the distance as a barrier, then the monsters broke in one by one and killed them all. It would explain why the first room had the most corpses.”

“I guess…” Oliver didn’t sound convinced.

“Come on. If we want answers, we’ll have to keep going.

* * *

The next four floors didn’t differ much. Down here, the floors were exponentially cleaner, but that didn't keep the signs of battle away.

Admits the scurrying of the rats, crimson blood, well dried with age, stained the walls in several places, and bones still littered the ground, Just, less connected than on the upper floors.

The rooms down here also had different signs of wear.

The armory they passed through didn’t have a single piece of armor on the walls, the bedrooms were all ransacked, and what were supposed to be offices looked more like garbage dumps.

“They didn’t spare a single room…”

“More like they weren’t given a choice.” The king said.

The lower they got, the clearer the story became. Monsters had burst through the front entrance, causing the knights to keep retreating from floor to floor, until there were no floors to retreat to.

At least, that was the king's best guess.

After an hour or so on the fourth floor, they finally found the stairwell down to the fifth. It wasn’t particularly different from any of the others, with the wooden door blocking it off having been shattered into a million pieces.

But the smell of blood was more prevalent than ever.

“We should take this slowly, Your Majesty." Oliver knelt and traced his finger against the ground. “What we’ve faced so far feels like a trial run.”

“For that, I agree.” The king scowled. Not because of what Oliver said, but because a small glimmer had caught his eye. “Our pursuers from earlier, do you remember exactly what they were wearing?”

“Red leather armor with shiny steel straps.” Oliver tilted his head. “Typically what you’d expect from Kells.”

“Just what I thought.” The king ripped off a piece of discarded leather from a random spike in the wall.

Red leather.

“We’ve been passed, come on.”

“But—”

“I don’t know what our pursuers want, but they know about Marcus’s treasure. We can’t let them have it.” King Barstol said. “Move it.”