They knew they screwed up right at the beginning.
There could not have been a worse omen than a nearly failed first challenge. The energy they put into it and the unprovoked stress were bound to have consequences.
They dreaded the mirror in the back of the elevator, as their entire bodies had been drenched in unholy liquids several times over. They had almost gotten used to the smell but did not look too keen on staying close to one another in fear of their clothes and armor sticking together.
"This must never happen again," said Nean, crouched up against the wall. "Or we might as well hand over our heads on a platter."
"Let's all agree on one thing first," said Crow, kicking a gnome's ear from her shoulder, so hard it bounced off the wall and landed on Flarion's shoe. "No one does anything unsupervised. I am not chopping up a greasy gnome ever again. Urgh, I've been scarred for life."
"It was a bit too graphic, towards the end, when you-" Kama began, as the ridges of his nose began to dance, and his whiskers wiggled. He tried his best not to sneeze.
He failed.
"Please," said Bax in a depressing tone, as his skin grew pale with nausea. "No more talk of gnomes and grease or anything that starts with a 'g'. I need some reprieve."
"Sorry," Kama insisted. "Let's move on to more uplifting topics."
"How long, do you think?" said Flarion. "How long would it take to win in this place?"
"Isn't that the fun part?" Crow returned cracking up a smirk. "Jokes aside, I don't think anyone really talks about that. And this place is seriously obscure on the account of rules and regulations."
"Rules in the Citadel?" Bax mocked. "I doubt such a thing even exists."
"Six is as one, in life and in death," whispered Dot, remembering the lines from the scroll. They came to him from the pool of memory he did not think existed so clearly in his mind.
"What was that?" Crow said speaking closer to his ear, like a bully asking for a challenge.
"The rules of the Citadel," he repeated louder. "Six is as one, in life and in death. Do not wish for what is not yours to have. And uh… Do not stray from the path."
"You're joking, right?" she piped. "Right?"
"He isn't," said Nean, now fully wrapped in her cloak, like a black burrito. "The scroll, it came to you, didn't it?"
"What scroll?" insisted Bax. "Where? When?"
"You know about it?" Dot returned wide-eyed.
"I heard about it," returned Nean. She coughed and touched the tips of her fingers with her thumb one by one like she was practising motor skills. "Though I can't say what it means. Perhaps the tower likes to play favorites."
"Favorites, with him?" Crow laughed, clapping her hands. "Seriously?"
"Six is as one…" Kama wondered, "Does that relate to the six of us?"
"In life and in death? That's odd," added Flarion. "Sounds like we're linked in some way we don't know about."
"Bound," intruded Nean. "The proper term is bound. Yes, I've heard of such a thing as well."
"Does that mean what I think it means?" asked Kama, now nervously licking his paw and then remembering why she shouldn't do that.
"Of course I was right. I told you this was going to be a shit show, didn't I? We're screwed." Crow shook her head like a watermelon merchant being offered a bad price, followed by a sour look on her face.
"You seem to know a lot about it Nean," said Flarion in a suspicious tone. "Could it be because you've been here already?"
"I am a lot of things, but stupid isn't one of them. A long time ago I met one of the Heroes of the land-" Nean began in a raspy voice, still keeping her eyes hidden. "Someone who survived the Citadel."
"By the Creator," Kama gawked. "Who? Was it Justia the Wise? Ekahton of the Blue Isle? Sanari?"
"What I learned was simple - everyone goes through this alone. Even if a hundred people entered together, each would face an entirely different world."
"Is that why the stories never added up?" Flarion concluded.
"It's probably because most of them were made up," Crow added. "I could write a book about the people who claimed to have come through here but were instead freezing their buttocks inside the Ring the whole time."
"If you could write," murmured Nean, so quietly only Dot could hear her properly. He took it as a good sign she was going to be alright.
"What's the Ring?" he asked, partially because he wanted to turn the conversation away from the scroll.
Bax shifted in his corner, like a pig before the slaughter. "A prison. We were all in it, before… before we chose this as our only way out."
"Then why are we all together?" asked Dot, desperately trying to make himself as invisible as he could. He feared they would be quick to blame him for all of it. "Why are we not doing this on our own? I do not belong in your world."
"Why are we here together?" Nean repeated, now in a fading tone.
"That is the question isn't it," Crow said. "BOUND?" she croaked as the word had only now reached the right part of her brain. "What kind of a joke is that? So what, if one dies, we all die?"
"It's actually more like, If Dot dies, we all die," Kama corrected.
"Because he got the SCROLL?"
"I didn't ask for any of this!" Dot proclaimed, finally angry enough to face her accusations, but before he had a chance to fight for his own justice, his eyes were caught on the red letters above the door.
The inscriptions changed, but it was not just numbers any more. It shifted from some unintelligible symbols to letters and pixelated pictures of utterly random things. Eventually, it settled to a single line.
Level 1
So it is true…
~~DING~~
"Let's just get out of here," said Flarion taking Dot by the shoulders and pushing him forward. "There has to be water around here. I need a bath."
Before the door fully opened, Dot glanced at where Flarion used to stand. The panel where the floor numbers used to be had something else in its place. It was a worn-out poster, stained with whatever Flarion had on his back, and probably created as an advertisement for some sort.
Instead of an exotic paradise with beaches, cocktails and palm trees, there was only a shabby old building with the letters Journey's End Inn written above it.
He would have paid it little mind, had the sketch not included a goose painted on a board outside. It was ugly and poorly drawn but he knew who it was.
He did not want to talk about it though.
"Achoo. Oh by the Creator, what is that?" Kama's nose danced again as a peculiar smell reached them from the outside.
"Please tell me that smell isn't what I think it is," Bax followed behind Kama with his nose pinched. "It burns my eyes."
The acrid smell of the new level shocked their senses and they could not tell if it smelled more like spoiled milk or rotten eggs. When their eyes adjusted to the dark, the level revealed itself to be a closed chamber with no windows or ventilation. The stone walls gleamed with a greenish luminous substance, that dripped from the ceiling in long strands, like a proper goo.
"Careful, this thing will dissolve anything if it lingers too long," Bax warned, and his boots sizzled with every step.
"Where the hell are we?" said Flarion, as he tried to shake the putrid liquid off his already soiled shoes. He'd just discovered they also featured an ear, so he shook harder until he resorted to using his dagger to pry it away.
"Well, dear fate-bound companions, we are officially sentenced to die in goo. I declare this to be the worst day in my life, and I have done some regrettable things in my time." Crow had already accepted the disgusting nature of everything around her and marched through the room, unbothered by its uninviting nature.
"If we get past the aesthetics, it doesn't look like there's anything here," said Bax, kicking a few empty crates and other garbage that populated the floor. "Nothing but trash."
The stone walls and all the slime covering them were probably the most interesting features of the interior.
"Tiny stinky room, and six people bound by fate to the WEAKEST among them," Crow yelled, but the walls were not acoustic enough to echo her words. She did not seem to get past that part of the problem and looked like she needed something to break just to calm her nerves.
"Enough of that now," said Nean walking slowly as her black cape stayed somehow lifted from the floor and made her look almost invisible. "Let's focus on where we are first and how to get out.."
"Are you good enough for a fight?" asked Flarion. "Because if it comes to that, I think you should stay behind."
"That would be foolish," she returned. "I'm fine. My affliction will pass."
"You actually seem worse than before," said Dot. "I know it's not my place, but should you be exhausting yourself like that? Does magic really do that to you?"
She laughed, though without much energy. "Everything has a price you know."
"I think I found something," shouted Crow while scraping the toxic goo off the walls with the tip of her battleaxe. "Looks like a keyhole."
They gathered around a perfectly round stone, slightly extruded from the wall. The goo around it was denser, and a bit brighter than the rest. The hole at the center of the stone had a clear shape of a key.
"All right, looks simple enough," said Kama dropping his hammer as his cat eyes scanned everything in the room. "Just need to find the key now. How hard can that be?"
Had it been a bigger room, it would have posed a challenge, but the place was so barren of anything useful, that there literally wasn't a single decent place to hide anything.
"Don't suppose it's an invisible key," Flarion joked, tiptoeing around the floor, using anything he could climb on, just to stay away from it. "Because I don't see anything of interest here."
"Check for the lines in between the stones, and the cracks behind the goo. I doubt it would be obvious," Nean said.
Come on. It's just a key.
The glow of the goo was not nearly bright enough to illuminate everything and Dot resorted to using his phone to light up his search.
"What sorcery is that?" said Crow following the bright light.
"A light stone?" asked Nean as the beam caught her attention as well. "Perhaps an energy crystal?"
"No, sorry," returned Dot, nearly slipping as he got up. "Just a regular smartphone. And very low on battery, I'm afraid."
"Nothing you just said makes any sense," Crow brushed him off and went on to investigate the ceiling, knocking on the stones one by one, as she stepped over all the things below.
"Shame," returned Nean, visibly disappointed, as she sat on the only decent enough chair in the far corner by the elevator. Slowly she began to fade, while everyone was busy looking through the rubble.
"Anything?" said Flarion, examining a rusty lantern, and throwing it away when he realized it was as worthless as all else. It landed on a stack of crates, scattering them even further.
The crash flushed something out of the pile, and it zapped past Dot, just under the spotlight. He could have sworn he saw a green blob.
With the light in his hand, he traced the wall until he reached the corner where, behind a small collection of empty milk bottles, something moved.
What… is… that thing?
"Guys," he said in a loud whisper. "Something's here. Something alive."
He leaned closer and rolled one of the bottles back to his feet, only to reveal a creature made entirely of goo hiding behind them. It had at least a dozen eyes, placed without any order or logic on its amorphous body. It had the same greenish color as the goo on the walls, but almost none of the glow.
One could see what was inside it as well as behind it.
"A gooey monster?" said Flarion. "I've never seen one this big. Hey little fella." He waved at it like it was a child not a lump of toxic jello.
"It does look… kind of cute," Dot remarked with a nervous chuckle. The creature blinked, one eye at a time before it slid further behind the rubble and then all the way to the other wall. It was so quick they had no time to react.
"Don't let it get away," Dot hissed trying to get a swing at it, failing every time "That thing has the key inside it."
"You've got to be kidding me. Kill it. Kill it now!" cried Crow, running after the creature, trampling everything in her path. When she went left the creature ran to the right and vice versa. When Flarion tried to poke it with a chair leg, he missed, and when Dot tried to capture it in a box, the creature was already ten steps ahead.
"How is it so fast," cried Bax, catching his breath. They'd broken everything there was to break and were now walking on broken glass, splinters and acid.
"Kill it!" Crow screamed again like it was a battle cry.
They had lost sight of it.
Somewhere, in the corner of everyone's eye, they saw the small gooey creature climb another wall and push itself through the cracks in between the stones. By then it was too late.
It's happening again. I'm messing things up. Well, shit.
"Where did it go?" exclaimed Bax hovering his hand over the stones, not daring to touch them with bare hands.
"A moment, please," said Kama as he put his whiskers close to the point of escape. He waited a few seconds and then wiped them clean of the goo. "There's something behind this wall. It's drafty. The goo hides it well but it cannot hide from me," he purred. "I'd wager there's some secret way to open it."
"I know a secret way," said Crow, already berserk herself. "May I?" she grabbed the hammer off Kama's back before he could protest.
"Guess that'll work too."
The first time she hit it, only the slime slid off, forming a murky puddle below. The second time she managed to knock one of the stones out, and it crashed to the other side, bringing a breath of equally bad air into the room.
The third time she made an even bigger hole, after which it was easy to pull them all aside.
"This hammer does wonders," she said kicking the last pieces out of place. "Do you use it to hammer some faith into people?"
"I would if their heads weren't so hard," Kama returned with a warm smile.
She giggled as she handed it back to him.
"Thank you kitty cat. Oi wizard? Are you still with us?"
Nean was not responding and her head hung low, threatening to pull her off the chair.
Dot rushed to set her straight and lean her back against a more solid background, where she remained, motionless, snoring quietly.
"Is everything alright?" Bax asked as they prepared to cross into a new stinky hell.
I have no idea.
"Yes," Dot returned confidently. "But I think we'll be a wizard short on this one."