Creation Mage 6 by Dante King (red scrolls of magic .TXT) 📗

“Is anyone getting that uneasy feeling that, I think, the poets would describe as boding ill?” Leah asked casually.

“A little,” Mallory admitted.

Privately, my sense of foreboding was coming more from the copious amount of stairs that we were going to have to climb. Eleven-hundred steps was no small feat, especially when I considered that, most likely, we were going to have to fight something fairly dangerous at the end of them. I doubted the second relic would be attained by simply completing a trial of intense cardiovascular exercise.

Eleven-hundred and eleven steps… The Empire State building had roughly fifteen hundred if my memory served.

“There’s nothing to be gained by waiting around, I guess,” I said. “Let’s get on.”

All three of us were puffed and aching when we reached the top of the stairs. We stood, breathing heavily for a moment, hands on knees. Even Mallory, who was usually composure personified, dabbed the back of her hand to her forehead to wick away a bit of perspiration.

“Jeez, you’d have calves of steel if you worked that into your daily workout routine,” I said.

“Ew,” Leah said, “don’t mention the r-word around me, if you’d be so kind, honey-nuts. It’s the antithesis of my being.”

Mallory gave a little breathless laugh. “That should be the Chaosbane aphorism,” she said. “‘Clan Chaosbane: The Antithesis of Routine.’”

“I’ll talk to Great Granddaddy Gorlbadock about it,” Leah said. “It would look good on a seal, wouldn’t it?”

“Speaking of aphorisms,” I said, pointing behind the two women, “how does that one strike you?”

Mallory and Leah swiveled their heads.

Behind them, set into the wall where a door should have been, was a thin crack. Above this crack, which passed as the entrance to a passage that I presumed must lead to this Garden of Ward and Curse, was a short, cheerful message cut into the stone:

LONELINESS IS LIFE’S GREATEST CURSE.

LONELINESS MAKES EVEN GIANTS SMALL.

“That sounds hopeful,” Leah said acidly.

I reread the inscription above the looming crack. It did not, as the poets might have said, bode well.

I started to wonder what it might mean. It was not as if these sorts of legends were carved into stonework on a whim. There had to be a reason for it.

I sighed. It didn’t take too much imagination to guess what the words might allude to. I looked at the crack in the wall. I was fairly broad and tall, and it would probably give me just enough room to maneuver my way through. The ladies would fit easily enough, but there was no chance that any of us would be able to walk abreast down there.

“Loneliness is life’s greatest curse,” I muttered,

Not much could be seen down the passageway from the entrance of the crack. It was too meandering, and the view was quickly obscured.

Still, if I had learned one thing from my time in the magical world of Avalonia, it was that shit rarely got less hectic just because you waited around to think about it a little more. Better to rip off the bandaid, even if it might turn out to be attached to your nutsack with superglue.

“Allow me to go first, ladies,” I said.

I stepped sideways into the crack in the wall and wormed my way into the space beyond.

Immediately, a horizontal portcullis of slithering metal vines, which looked more like razor wire than anything organic, snaked out from one side of the crack’s opening. The vines squirmed across the aperture and anchored themselves in the rock of the other side, cutting me off from my two companions.

Leah looked up at the inscription above the crack and snapped her fingers. “Loneliness,” she said. “Loneliness is a bitch.”

I turned to face the unknown of the rough-hewn corridor. I conjured my black crystal staff into my hand with a thought.

“I’m going on,” I said to the two women over my shoulder.  “See you when I see you. Any last words of wisdom for me?”

“Yes,” Mallory said solemnly. “Know that caution isn’t just for the timid. It can be a useful tool. But like any tool, you have to know when to use it and when to drop it.”

“Yeah,” Leah said. “I always find it helpful to remember that there’s just no fun in tiptoeing through life just so that you reach death nice and safely at the end of it, is there? Was that helpful?”

“As a trapdoor on a canoe,” I said. “Be right back.”

I squeezed myself through the narrow passageway, the ends of my staff scraping and tapping along the stone. It was a very narrow ravine alright, tight and winding.

“Designed so that cocky idiots like you can get in,” I said to myself, “but whatever the hell’s lurking down here can’t get out, I bet.”

I could feel the tension starting to rise in my guts. I wasn’t afraid, mind you. I hadn’t been properly scared for a long time. Ever since I landed in this insane world, really. However, there was definitely a familiar blend of excitement and curiosity beginning to spread out from my stomach.

My imagination, regardless of all I could do, began ruminating and hypothesizing on what exactly might be lurking in wait for me at the end of this damned skinny passageway. It was one of the crosses that anyone living in Avalonia had to bear, I supposed, knowing and being able to picture a whole smorgasbord of giant, hairy, slimy, toothy, multi-legged pains in the asses that would like nothing better than to gobble you down.

Being scared of monsters, though, in this fantastically dangerous environment, would be like a gynecologist having an aversion to bearded clams.

A glimmer of light up ahead hinted at the narrow fissure coming to an end. Sure enough, when I