We left town, ready to drop the hammer on anyone who had been behaving in a way that warranted it. I could tell that Aurora, at least, was ready to mete justice upon those who had been behind the disappearances.
The first hour or so of the trip was fairly uneventful. Applejack kept indicating that she saw something out of the ordinary, but none of my companions nor the other horses seemed to notice it, nor could I spot anything either.
We reached a bridge and as we crossed we heard the sound of an animal in pain. It sounded like some kind of large cat. We decided that we could afford to spare the time to look into it and followed the sound into the woods.
In a lightly wooded area, we found a fire-pelt cougar in a bear trap. I reflexively looked around for hobgoblins. We agreed to try to release it and tend to its wounds.
Disney princess Aurora did what she could to calm the poor creature while Lenn and Geo worked to free it. Once it was free, Paulie tended to its wounds with a bit of magic and I cleaned the dirt and blood out of its fur with magic of my own.
It was at that point that I heard the sound of dogs barking maybe a quarter mile away. They were coming our way. I wasn’t the only one to hear them. Aurora told the cougar to stay back behind us. It sat down as if it had been trained to follow commands. She mounted up and we formed a line, prepared to defend the cougar from the coming pack of dogs, which we figured was almost certainly followed by a hunter.
Our intent was to scare off the man, or perhaps reason with him, but we weren’t really prepared for what came bounding out of the trees. He was almost as tall as Lenn and, for lack of a better term, was a mutant. I’m serious. He would have been at home in the sewers of New New York. But he wasn’t mutated by the waste of a city living above him, radioactive or otherwise.
He had ogre blood in him. It seems we had found the Grauls.
He looked kinda like what I imagine the offspring of an anthropomorphic naked mole rat and a human would look like. His teeth were positively British and he was covered in scars and tumors. He also had one really long finger.
“Git on outta here!” he shouted. “We hunting kitty! But if you don’t leave, we hunt yous!”
Geo and I exchanged a glance like “He can’t be serious.” I mean, the dogs were large, about the size of mastiffs, though I couldn’t place the breed, but they were still just dogs. Lenn roared in defiance and Aurora pointed at him and made a “Bring it.” motion with her hand.
The mutant roared and loosed the dogs. They charged us and met a wall of meat and steel. I jumped out from behind Shalelu and unleashed a shotgun blast of conjured material as hard as diamonds, shredding several dogs. Lenn, Geo and Shalelu cut down dogs and Paulie launched an arrow at the mutant.
Realizing that he was outmatched, the mutant sped off into the woods. Aurora squeezed Starbrite’s flanks with her legs and they gave chase, as did the cougar. The woods certainly weren’t so thick as to even the playing field between a mounted knight and a man on foot.
Unencumbered by armor and rider, the cougar reached him first, biting at him. Realizing that flight wouldn’t save him, he struck at the cat, doing a bit of damage, only to be struck by arrows from our people on foot, one of my blinding flashes of magical light and finally brought down by a mighty slash from Aurora’s blade.
After tending to the wounds the cougar had suffered from the fight, we searched the corpse. In addition to his smaller than normal but still massive ogre hook, he also carried a blanket with several insignias sewn to it. Shalelu recognized the insignias immediately as belonging to the Black Arrows. It seemed that the Grauls had captured some of Fort Rannick’s defenders.
The only other thing of note that he was carrying was a small scrap of cloth pinned to his skin with a word on it. “Rukus,” I read aloud. “No relation.” No one got the joke.
The cougar kept trying to get us to follow it. Since it seemed to want to go in the same direction as the ogre had been running, we figured it couldn’t be a coincidence. We decided to follow it. Less than ten minutes later, we found ourselves at a clearing. In the clearing was a run-down looking farm straight out of my nightmares. It was far too sunny out for us to be approaching this place. I expected it to become overcast any second.
Patrolling around the farm was another mutant carrying yet another ogre hook. We pulled back from the clearing to discuss a plan. An awesomely horrible idea began to form in my head. “Paulie, you still have that scroll I gave you before we stormed the tower?” Catching my intent, Paulie began to grin.
About a minute later, an invisible Lenn and Geo rushed into the clearing. The mutant realized that something was amiss once the zone of magical silence blocked out all sound around him. He stopped walking and looked around, confused, then the two were upon him. It took almost no time before he collapsed to the ground, his cries for aid completely lost in the magical silence. He never had a chance. I almost felt sorry for him. Almost.
We were going to have to get more of those scrolls. Or maybe a wand.
We quickly and quietly looted the corpse and approached the house, leaving the horses back in the woods. I worried a bit about Applejack, but it’s not like we could risk bringing them with us.
The farmhouse’s porch was trapped all to hell. Geo quietly pried a board off the front of the porch and disabled one of the traps from below, then took care of the spiked wind chimes from on the porch. Once it was safe, we made our way inside, despite the horrible smells wafting from the house and the creepy carvings made from human bones lining the porch.
Inside, we spotted a couch made of what appeared to be human flesh stitched to other animal flesh. It also appeared to be trapped. If we had sat on it, or perhaps even approached it, we would have triggered the floor to collapse. I imagined that a pit of feces covered spikes waited below. It’s a good thing that the couch was too disgusting to even consider sitting on.
Geo scouted ahead, returning from down the hall a few moments later saying he had found a room with a disgusting woman and several sewn up corpses that looked to be animated. That meant to us that the woman was likely some kind of caster.
We prepared a plan and Geo threw open the door. Paulie filled the room with writhing black tentacles and I launched another blinding blast of light. The tentacles tore apart the zombies and the woman struggled with them, unable to do much beyond futilely curse and call out to others of her clan, blinded and grappled as she was. She tried to teleport out of the room, but was limited by line of effect, ending up in the doorway. Lenn charged into the tentacles and embedded his axe in her face.
Once the tentacles dispersed, I found her spell book and looked it over. Had she known we were coming, that could have been one heck of a fight. However, with our stealthy approach and shock and awe tactics, she never stood a chance. As it was, it was almost as one sided as the fight with the patrol.
Once we were sure the others in the house weren’t reacting, we continued searching. The first room we looked into was filled with the corpses of numerous babies. I assumed that it was due to miscarriages caused by inbreeding and mutation, but a further inspection revealed it to be much more sinister.
All the corpses were female. The woman we had just killed had been getting rid of the competition for the affections of her sons. I almost retched at the thought and moved into a corner, kneeling down and holding my head in my hands, doing my best to both not throw up and not cry. I still feel ill thinking about it.
The next room we entered was a dining room. The chairs were made of human flesh and were adorned with skulls. In the center of the table was a rotting human head with red hair still clinging to it. Involuntarily, I imagined that the head might belong to my youngest sister or younger brother, both of whom are as red-headed as a Weasley. I began to get angrier than I’ve ever been. Aurora’s hand on my shoulder was all that pulled me back from torching the house then and there.
Geo went to look into another room and sprung a trap. A razor sharp scythe sliced him and the shock sent him mutating into Old Lenn once more. “What are we doing here?” he asked in a whisper. We quickly explained and he nodded his understanding before once again checking the door.
I don’t know what he saw inside, but he rushed right in and I heard some horrifying sounds. Children were screaming. I could hear joints being torn from their sockets and the wet sound of meat hitting the floor. I looked at Aurora. From her expression, I could tell I was looking sick again. “I’m not going in there,” was all I said. She nodded.
A few moments later, Old Lenn walked out of the room, covered in gore and viscera. He was admiring his tentacles. “I think I kinda like these,” he said. I shuddered and Aurora looked ill as well.
Lenn laughed. “Killed some giants?”
“Yep.” The two shared a laugh that chilled me to the core. He checked the other door, which was trap free, and found that it led to a kitchen. When the door was opened, the stench within was visible. There were literal stink lines. Old Lenn went in and came back in a few moments. “There are stairs going down and a door to the outside.”
Aurora looked inside and came back to me. “We’ll go downstairs.” She took my hand. “Close your eyes and hold your breath,” she said. I nodded and did as I was told. She led me through the kitchen and down the stairs as quickly as was safe.
Downstairs, we went into a room that appeared to be where the Grauls were skinning their victims. A recently removed skin hung from hooks on the ceiling to dry. Its creepy face was staring at me. You know, if this was okay for me to see, I don’t think I want to know what was in the kitchen.
Down the hall, I heard fighting. “Wait here,” Aurora told me, rushing off to help and leaving me with horrifying skin of the man still staring at me. Once it was over, they asked me to come search for magic. The other room was a bedroom of sorts, with the corpses of several large rats that looked to have been pets and the body of another mutant. This one had the corpse of his stillborn twin brother growing out of his side.
I had to do something to take my mind off of it all. “Quaid! QUAID!” I said in my best Kuato impersonation. No one got the reference, once again, and we continued searching. In the room, we found a tin filled with severed noses and some coins. Nothing magical.
The next room was a store room, filled with dusty, broken farm equipment. Nothing of real interest within, so we moved through the room to the next, where we found a massive plant monster, which I recognized as a Tendriculos. We made short work of it.
I didn’t want to think about how it had gotten there, so I looked at the ceiling. I could see light streaming down from right above where the monster was. A bit of quick math and I was confident I understood. “That’s where the couch is,” I said, pointing at the holes.
“That could have been nasty,” Shalelu said with a nod.
In that room, we found a closet with a chest inside. Within the chest was a number of weapons and armor. Shalelu recognized one bow as having belonged to Jakardros and became alarmed. “There’s no evidence that he isn’t still tied up somewhere around here,” Aurora said to her. The elven woman nodded her thanks and we went back upstairs. Once again, Aurora pulled me through the kitchen.
In the attic, we found a room with a number of filthy beds adorned with human skulls and an obviously trapped treasure chest. I summoned a magical servant, who opened the chest with no incident. When it moved the sack within, however, it sprung a pressure plate and would have lost a finger to the slicing razor if it had any real fingers to lose. A quick search of the other room revealed it to be a workshop of sorts, where the mastermind behind the traps had done his work. We did a quick search for anything useful, taking only some flasks of acid before moving on.
We made our way downstairs and out the front door before heading towards the barn. I could only imagine what fresh hell awaited us within. Old Lenn went and checked it out. When he returned, he told us that there were three more of the mutants within. We agreed to use our normal tactics. The door flung open, I blinded two of the mutants and my companions charged in.
It went as it usually does when we have the drop on our foes. One fell, then another. I probably wouldn’t mention more of it, but I saw something I almost never see. I got to see the Hero of Taldor in action. Aurora slashed once, twice, thrice and again, a veritable whirlwind of blades. On her fifth and final strike, she thrust one of her blades up through the chin of the mutant. It pierced all the way through the skull, coming out of the top of its head about an inch. I don’t think it was intentional, but she struck a pose in the process.
But that’s not the best part. The best part was when, as she stood there, her back to the mutant and crouched with the blade coming over her shoulder, the four earlier slashes produced their results. I watched in a combination of admiration and horror as each of the mutant’s limbs fell off, one by one, as if this were one of those samurai movies.
With no more effort than I might toss aside a bag of flour, Aurora dislodged the corpse from her blade and flung it to the ground. It hit with a wet thud.
I moved into the room and cleaned each end of Aurora’s blade and her armor with magic. Inside the room was another large door that appeared to have been boarded up as well as stairs leading up to some catwalks around the top of the barn. No idea why there were catwalks around the top of the barn. I’m sure they serve some sort of purpose, but I’m a city boy, more or less, so no idea what they were.
Old Lenn headed up onto a catwalk to look into the other room if he could. Moments after he headed up, he shouted down to us. “Bust down the door and get in here quick!” I heard the sound of him landing in the next room. Lenn burst the door down with a single mighty slash of his axe.
In the next room, we found Old Lenn tending to some emaciated men. They had obviously gone through a lot of torture at the hands of the mutants. Upon seeing one of them, Shalelu rushed to his side immediately. It seemed we had found the Black Arrows.
As Paulie went to heal their wounds with magic, the rest of us dealt with the sudden appearance of a large spider. It had been hiding in the rafters. I won’t go into detail, but let’s suffice it to say that I used a lot of magical cleaning to get the ichor off of everyone after the fight.
Looking at the men that Paulie was tending to, I recalled information I had learned some time back about the Black Arrows. They were much like Game of Throne’s Night Watch, comprised not just of volunteers, but also of criminals facing the option of execution or conscription. I had no idea if any of the men here were criminals, but we had to be wary. One or more of these men could be a murderer, rapist or some otherwise dangerous thug.
My suspicions seemed well founded when Old Lenn found one with a sihedron tattoo on his leg. We did a quick check on the other one, but found nothing. We didn’t worry about Shalelu’s stepfather. We trusted her judgment on him.
Once they had been awoken, we got a picture of what had happened. Jakardros had been leading his men on patrol when they had been delayed by some minor problems. Because of this, they hadn’t made it back in time to be at the fort when it had been attacked by ogres of the Kreeg clan. Without the men out on patrol, the fort had fallen. This had all happened about three weeks ago.
Jak’s patrol of around two dozen men had been captured. The three of them were all that remained. He seemed to feel his torment had been just punishment for his failure to protect the fort. We did our best to try to talk him out of it. Shalelu did better at that than we could, though he still seemed upset. Can’t blame him.
We learned more of Shalelu and Jak’s past. Apparently he had been a member of a band of adventurers who had protected a small elven settlement from a green dragon and its minions. They succeeded in slaying the dragon, but had been grievously wounded. An elven priestess nursed him back to health and they fell in love.
Three years later, the priestess was killed when the dragon was revived. Brokenhearted at his failure to save the priestess, Jak had joined the Black Arrows to atone for his failure.
We also learned a bit more about the other two soldiers as they ate. The first, Vale, had lost his parents a long time back. His brothers had been at the fort when it fell, so he was eager for some payback. We would have to keep an eye on him. His heart might be in the right place, but his anger could make him unpredictable.
The other man, Kaven – the one with the tattoo – had the kind of story I expected. He had been a troublemaker and was forced to join the Black Arrows by his father for his petty crimes. Specifically, one of the people he mugged turned out to be a family friend. In some ways, it seemed that the Arrows had been good for him. He looked to be turning his life around.
When we asked him about the tattoo, he tried to deny it, but after what I’d seen within the main house, I wasn’t in the mood for any shit. He could sense it, so he tried to give us as much information as he thought we needed to get off his back, telling us that he had indeed been to the casino with several of the other members of his unit, but that it had only been the one time.
I didn’t believe him for a second. Paulie didn’t either. He pulled me aside. “I could pull the information from his mind,” he said a bit too loudly, a grin spreading over his face.
“Well, now that’s up to him,” I said, turning to face Kaven. “I’m going to give you one chance and one chance only. Tell us everything or my friend will quite painfully pry the information directly from your mind. The information you’re hiding could mean the difference between success and failure for us. It could also be worthless. Either way, that’s not your call, not at this point. So, will you speak, or do I hand you over to the grinning cat man here?”
His eyes filled with terror and he looked from me to Jakardros and back again. I recalled that the Black Arrows had a zero tolerance policy for any shenanigans. They had to, with their number being made up of so many dangerous criminals.
He decided that Jakardros would only kill him, but he had no idea just what we would do. He began to spill the beans. “Look, okay, I went back more than once. I got into some bad habits, stealing from some of my comrades to fund my gambling. That’s it, I swear!”
I grabbed his shirt and lifted him up to my face. “STOP LYING TO ME! I swear to any god that will listen that if you tell me one more lie I WILL INFLICT SUCH PAIN UPON YOU THAT YOU WILL BEG TO BE RETURNED TO THE GRAULS! You will beg for death. Oh how you will beg for death. But. It. Will. Not. Come.”
At that point, he pissed himself. “I’m sorry! Lucrecia asked me for information on the Fort and our patrol schedule. I told her everything I knew. I didn’t think any harm could come from it. That’s everything, I swear! Please! I’m sorry! Don’t hurt me!” He began sobbing.
I let him drop to the ground. Jakardros nocked an arrow. “Get on your feet and die like a man.”
Kaven would be dead right now had Geo’s transformation not worn off. “Wait,” he said, putting himself between Jakardros and Kaven. “There is a possibility that Lucrecia is a magic user. She may even be the sister of the Lamia we encountered earlier. If that’s the case, might it not be possible that he was under a magical spell subtly compelling him to do what he did, just as Ironbriar was?” That last bit was aimed at me.
I groaned. “Yes, I suppose that it’s possible. It’s been too long for the residual magic to be detected, so there’s no way of being certain.”
Aurora gently pushed Jakardro’s bow aside. “Then perhaps we should consider a compromise,” she said. “We can’t just execute a man who may be innocent. So let us give him a single chance to redeem himself. He will fight with all his might to help us retake the fort. Until then, you can keep him chained up. If there’s so much as a hint of anything further out of him, then you may execute him in good conscience. But until then, let us not stain our hands with the blood of a man who could very well be a true bound member of your order and one of its staunchest defenders.”
Jakardros seemed convinced. He didn’t like it, but he seemed convinced to give the man one more chance. “Kaven, if you so much as backtalk me, I’ll mount your head on Fort Rannick’s gate. Do you understand?” Kaven nodded.
We took a bit of time to set the house on fire, collected the horses and began making our way back to Turtleback Ferry. If the fort truly had been under ogre control for three weeks, one more day wouldn’t hurt and we desperately needed a plan.
On the way back, Applejack spotted something on the edge of the woods. I looked where she was looking and caught a glimpse of a terrifying, statuesque figure. When I blinked, it was gone. I told the others and we took a moment to search for signs that something had been there, but there were none. It had either been an illusion or a projection. Or maybe a hallucination. I didn’t want to consider that possibility, though.
That night, I had a strange dream. I was back on Earth. It was when I met Samantha, but instead of choosing to go with her, I decided it was a prank of some sort and opted out. In snippets and flashes, I saw the next ten years or so of my life. I graduated from college with two Bachelor’s degrees, went on to a prestigious school and saw two more graduations, one with a master’s, then another with a doctorate.
I met a wonderful young woman while in graduate school and we were married. By the time I was thirty, I had two wonderful kids, with another on the way.
Through a lot of hard work and utilizing my connections, I worked my way into NASA, fulfilling my dream of becoming an astronaut. I was on the moon, in a lander, just about to step out the hatch. My wife and children were watching via a live feed. I opened the hatch…
…And was back on the Graul farm. I saw every one of the horrors once more, but this time we weren’t invading. I was an observer, watching everything happening to the people around me as the hideous mutants tortured and butchered them. Then one of the Grauls grabbed me and tossed me onto a table. He grinned wickedly as he raised a large knife.
I was awakened by the sound of my own scream. I bolted upright and sat, cradling my head in my hands. “This can’t be real,” I whispered over and over, desperately wanting it to be true.
Aurora had also been woken up by my scream. I didn’t hear her as she got up from her bed and walked over to me, but I did feel her hand on my shoulder. “Kyle, what’s wrong?”
I couldn’t respond. I just kept chanting my mantra, wanting it all to go away. Then suddenly, a thought came to mind. It was something I had considered several times during my time on Golarion, but up until that point, it had always been academic. Now, however, I was desperate. I needed something, anything, and this was perhaps the only logical answer.
In fact, it was more logical than the possibility that I was really on a world half a galaxy away from home. It required only some minor technological leaps on the part of humanity, not violation of Einsteinian physics by a mystical creature. Occam’s razor seemed to apply.
I began to laugh. “It’s so simple,” I said. “We aren’t here. This isn’t real.”
Aurora sounded concerned for my sanity. “What?”
“This is a virtual world. It’s a construct facilitated by a computer and projected into our minds. The world isn’t really like this. It’s just a narrative dreamt up by a single twisted mind.”
I had explained the concept of a lotus eater machine to Aurora once long ago, so she understood what I was talking about, more or less. “Then what of our memories? I remember my whole life. What of that?”
“Fabrications. They gave you false memories to see what you would do. It’s a giant psychological experiment.”
“Then why do you remember your home?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I suspect that either they had trouble changing my memories, or simply wanted to see how I’d react.”
She thought about it for a bit. “It does make a certain sense. And I guess it wouldn’t be all bad. It might be nice to think that I have parents who love me waiting back home. So, what does it change?”
“Very little,” I said. “We still have work to do. Either we don’t get out of here until we beat the scenario, or we’re stuck here. And the others inside may be real people, or they could be NPCs. If we go with the assumption that as few as one in ten is a real person, then it’s a good possibility that our actions can save hundreds of real lives. We have no choice but to continue forward.”
“Then why does it matter?”
“If this is real, then I don’t know if I can handle it. But if it’s a virtual world? If it’s a game? I can handle that. I’ve been training for that my whole life.”
“I see,” she said, giving me an appraising look. “Then let’s go with that.”
I nodded. This was nothing but a messed up game. Real people had probably died in the most horrible ways possible for someone’s sick experiment. And God help me, I could live with that more than I could the alternative. I felt guilty for feeling relieved that their deaths had little meaning, but a guilty conscience was a small price to pay to continue functioning. So I will learn to live with it.
Because I can live with it. I CAN live with it.
Computer, erase those last two sentences.