Throne Hunters Book 2, Chapter 12

Harald prowled the 27th Level.

He did so carefully, cautiously, quietly. At times, when forced to, he lit his scale lantern, keeping the Copper light at its lowest ebb. He moved slowly down dark corridors, trying to divine their logic as they twisted or turned abruptly. Sometimes he stumbled upon staircases descending precipitously to new depths, or climbing steeply to narrow walkways that skirted the faces of actual chasms.

These voids were only briefly visited. Never did a walkway follow their length for long, always turning back to dive into the bedrock after only a few dozen yards.

Occasionally, Harald found windows in small rooms off the corridors that looked out into these chasms as well. Or perhaps they were all the same chasm, approached at different heights and angles? Nothing moved within its dark depths, however. No coils, no great winged shapes.

Everything had an air of abandon and decay. Stone crumbled under his touch. Ledges were precarious, prone to cracking. Some hub chambers were barely navigable, filled in by collapsed walls and ceilings. Others were even more arresting for hinting at being used in the distant past.

Harald lost track of time.

He felt himself a ghost, haunting the denizens of the 27th. Early on, he came across two of the scarecrows, both hunched together at the base of a fountain, excavating its roots and no doubt uncovering scales.

Two was too much, so he beat a quiet retreat.

A span of time passed without his finding anyone else, but slowly the conviction grew that he was being tracked.

It was nothing definite. Nothing so obvious as catching sight of a pursuer. But his instincts warned him that the darkness beyond his lantern light was no longer empty.

Not a scarecrow, he guessed. Something told him that wasn’t their nature, to simply follow him through this barren maze. They were more likely to assault his mind, impatient to crack his consciousness like a nut.

No, this felt like something primal, a predator, a beast of some kind.

Something waiting for him to let his guard down.

The moment it appeared, Harald decided, he’d summon the Goldchops.

Finally, he found opportune prey in a dismal and alarming hub chamber. He’d come to name all large nexuses of corridors as hubs. They were often accessed by eight or more tunnels that opened up on several balconied levels, and felt grandiose and massive after the cramped nature of the corridors.

This one had been a jail.

Harald couldn’t determine any other purpose for the barred stone alcoves that ringed its first and second floors. Horizontal bars of rusted iron were buried into the rectangular door frames, beyond which lay a square yard of space, little more than an empty closet. Most of the bars yet stood firm, but a handful of them had rusted so badly as to fall apart.

None of these cells had occupants.

Why then had they been barred? No means of opening them presented themselves.

The chamber itself was on the smaller end of the hub scale; rectangular as always, but maybe six yards wide, some fifteen deep. Almost the size of a large room one might find in a manor house.

Were it not for the jail cells, that was, or the crude second floor walkway with no railing. Blooms of orange rust covered the gray walls. The air tasted of dust.

The scarecrow crouched at one end of the hall, its tattered robes obscuring its body, its head bent as if in contemplation, its clawed hands hidden within its sleeves. What made this disconcerting was the faded crimson armchair right beside it. Though covered in dust and mold, it still seemed perfectly serviceable.

Yet the scarecrow stared at the flagstone before it, one as common as any other, and even as Harald watched it, reached out to tap the stone with one claw before returning its hand to its sleeves to become immobile once more.

Fucking weird.

Still. Harald had emerged upon the second level. He could creep out, sneak along the walkway, then drop upon it from above, Dawnblade slashing.

The scarecrow would no doubt hear him coming. It would blink away, assault his mind. Harald would resist, and once it realized it couldn’t break him, it would close, probably trying to appear from behind.

Then Harald would hit it with Aura of the Aching Depths and cut it down.

It was a plan.

And if all went wrong, he’d summon the Goldchops.

He carefully removed his unlit lantern, set it against the wall, then unshouldered his pack.

Unencumbered, he took a deep breath, steadied his nerves, then ghosted out of his narrow portal to creep along the walkway.

Which was difficult. Its pitted surface was covered in grit and debris. Harald forced himself to move with excruciating care, picking each next step before even lifting his foot. He only had to cross some three yards to reach his chosen spot, but it felt like half a mile. His gaze kept flicking down to the scarecrow then back to the ledge.

How was it not hearing the sound of his heart?

His next step betrayed him. There was no clear spot to step on, so he lowered his boot with a wince on a scree of gravel which made a whispery scratching sound.

The scarecrow vanished.

Where? Harald straightened, raked the hub room for some sign of - there!

It had appeared within a prison cell, cloistered in the shadows, protected by the horizontal bars.

Only its burning red eyes gave it away.

It assaulted his mind even as Harald raced around the walkway toward it. It felt like a Goldchop had buried its edge in his skull. Harald felt his gorge rise from the pain, and his sight grew watery, as if he were suddenly submerged. Invisible clawtips sank into his thoughts and sought to wrest them asunder.

Breathing strenuously through his nose, gritting his jaw tight, Harald threw off the attack as he leaped the corner, briefly flying out over the three-yard drop. The scarecrow glared at him and vanished just as Harald stabbed through the bars.

He held off on the Aching Depths and Abyssal Attunement. Those were his aces in the hole. He’d known the scarecrow would blink away.

The monster stood on the far side of the hall, upon the second level with him, studying him as it stood motionless.

Fuck, but he needed ranged weaponry.

The urge to summon the Goldchops was overwhelming.

Harald fought to catch his breath. He was too worked up. There was no reason for him to be gasping. The pain had relented.

Wary, blade out by his side, Harald watched the scarecrow. Why was it just standing there?

“Why are you just standing there?”

Movement to his right.

A black wolf the size of a pony was prowling out of a doorway, smoke wreathing its shaggy coat.

“Oh. That’s why.”

The wolf’s shoulders were waist high on Harald, its head boxy, snout snub like a mastiff, its jaws massive to the point of deformity. It wasn’t smoke boiling off its hide but actual shadows, so that it moved in a miasma of darkness, making it hard to read its intentions.

Red eyes burned just like the scarecrow’s, and a deep, clotted snarl resonated from within its chest, a sound so primal, so terrifying, that Harald felt the hairs on the nape of his neck and down his arm prickle.

He glanced at the scarecrow. It was just watching. Why not? Maybe it would just observe as the shadow hound did all the work, then blink in to kill him at the most opportune moment.

And then the scarecrow started to make this rapid clicking sound, its shoulders rising and falling.

The fucker was laughing.

“Oh yeah?” Harald licked his lower lip as he watched the shadow hound prowl ever closer. It moved in the deliberate manner of stalking predators everywhere, slow and coiled. “See how funny you think this is.”

And he summoned the Goldchops.

The shadow hound realized the danger as both hatchets began materializing. It bayed and lunged at Harald, and its howl was no normal sound - it was an attack in and of itself, echoing within Harald’s very essence, seizing his mind and shaking it, filling him with dread and numbing horror.

For a brief moment Harald felt his limbs grow stiff, his thoughts mired in gelid panic, but then his Ego 23 fought off the mind-affecting attack and he simply hopped forward to drop to the ground floor as the shadow hound pounced into the waiting Goldchops.

The Masterwork Artifact got to work.

The scarecrow also recognized the danger, and it must have identified Harald as the weak link because it appeared behind him just as he landed on the flagstones.

Harald unleashed Aura of the Aching Depths.

The full might of both the Throne of Harmony and the Throne of Shadows empowered his aura so that a pall fell over the room.

But the scarecrow was a Level 27 foe. It struck with a great overhand slash, its splayed talons swiping at Harald’s back.

Who managed to spin away. He’d expected a rear assault, but didn’t react quite in time. The talons raked his back, tore through the leather armor, and opened trails of red fire from his left shoulder to right hip.

Gasping, Harald swept the Dawnblade up, its length engulfed by Abyssal Attunement.

The scarecrow hopped back right as a Goldchop hit it from above like a meteor, burying its golden head where shoulder met neck.

The scarecrow hissed as it buckled beneath the sheer strength of the attack, and Harald lunged forward to skewer it in the chest. The power of the abyss flowed into the monster, enervating it, poisoning the wound, even as the Depths drained it further.

Above him, the shadow hound leaped from where it had been dodging and retreating before the Goldchop right across the chamber to land on the far walkway, only for the gilded ax to fly right after.

The scarecrow was wounded but not dead. It slashed at Harald’s sword arm, but he tore his blade free, swayed away, gasping at the pain in his back, and reversed a lateral slash right across the monster’s wooden face, hewing off its beak and leaving a black spreading stain across its visage.

The scarecrow rose to its feet, reached for the buried Goldchop, but the Artifact burst free and began flying around the monster’s head, blade whipping around to slash at it again and again and again.

The scarecrow blinked away.

Wincing, blood soaking into his back, Harald scanned the room just in time to see one of the Goldchops cleave the shadow hound’s head in twain. The scarecrow had disappeared, but the second Goldchop shot up to a prison cell, its vertical rotation becoming horizontal as it flew without hesitation between the bars and disappeared into the shadows within.

Harald dug out a couple of Golden Dawns and absorbed them into his palm. Healing radiance flowed through his body as he took in the scales’ power, and he felt the wounds in his back knit up. How to return to the second floor? He dismissed the Dawnblade, shoved the red armchair so that it sat beneath the lip of the closest walkway, stepped onto its seat and launched himself up. Caught hold of the rough edge and hauled himself up, the pain in his back receding into a deep ache.

Wincing, he climbed up all the way and summoned the Dawnblade.

The scarecrow had blinked away one last time. It appeared on the ground floor and took three long strides toward a tunnel mouth before the Goldchop that had slain the wolf simply flew straight down to cleave it in the back of the head.

The monster scrabbled at the embedded ax, twisted about, took four steps into the center of the chamber, and came within reach of Harald.

Who leaped down, Dawnblade reversed, and sank his longsword two-handed into the scarecrow’s chest.

It collapsed before him as Harald crashed to the ground, and lay still.

“Finally,” whispered Harald. He sank into a crouch, sweat stinging his face. His back still ached, so he dug another Golden Dawn from the first scarecrow’s pouch and absorbed it as well.

The pain receded altogether.

That blow had been a bad one.

Six Golden Dawns appeared above the scarecrow corpse, while only three appeared above the shadow hound.

But something else manifested beside those three glorious scales above the brutalized black dog: a spinning black diamond the size of Harald’s fist.

Harald froze.

He’d never seen one before, but he’d heard about such a thousand times.

A Servitor Crystal.

He rose to his feet and jogged over to the armchair, and once again leaped up to the walkway. He ran around the hub’s perimeter until he reached the slain hound. It was so large that it lay precariously balanced upon the walkway, its forelegs and ruined head lolling over the edge to drip blood and brains to the floor below.

Harald hesitated, then snatched up the three Golden Dawns, dropping them in the scarecrow pouch more to get them out of the way than anything else.

The Servitor Crystal rotated slowly, a simple diamond composed of eight triangular faces. It looked to be made of tinted glass, and within roiled black shadows out of which peered twin red eyes.

They were staring up at him.

Harald shivered.

The Goldchops reached him, moving slowly now like sated hunters, their blades clean and gleaming. They assumed their positions beside his shoulders.

“All right,” whispered Harald, rubbing his hands together. “OK. Here we go.”

And he reached out and closed his fist around the crystal.

A flash of power raced through him, giddying and fierce, and the crystal disappeared.

But it wasn’t gone.

With a spiritual sense Harald had never fully understood, realized, or appreciated before, he could feel its presence within him, deep within, down, down inside his Cosmos.

He knew what to do next. It wasn’t necessary, but like hell was he going to skip this step. Backing away from the corpse, he found one of the cells with broken bars and carefully slipped inside. He sat against the back wall, hidden in the gloom, and willed the Goldchops to hover in the air before him like watchdogs.

Then he closed his eyes and dove into his Cosmos.

Down he flew, eager and filled with trepidation. Down through the darkness, that ink-black sea that gave way to glittering stars and the Fallen Angel herself.

There she was, as vast as a mountain range, asleep with her head bent. Her billion scales flickered and glimmered upon her armature, and in her palms and hidden amongst her wings burned his Ascended Thrones.

But Harald wrested his attention from this heavenly glory to consider his immediate environs. To one side hovered the Goldchop and Dawnblade, both vividly illuminated in the dark as if by spotlights. But where…?

A shape was prowling around the very edges of his Cosmos. Feral and massive, its hide matted and so dark that it was more an absence of stars than a presence, the Shadow Mastiff paced as if learning the scope of its new home.

Harald stilled.

He sensed no menace from it now. Gone were the snarls, that coiled energy that preceded a leap. Now it was but a monstrous dog, albeit one with massive jaws and shadows melting off its fur.

No wonder he’d not been able to detect it before while it had hunted him. It had to have shadow Abilities, a means to hide perfectly in the dark.

Harald abruptly summoned his window, giddy with delight:

Name: Harald Darrowdelve

Soul Nature: Insatiable Void

Soul Rank: Divine

Soul Ability: Condemnation of Success

Class: Abyssal Initiate 1

Class Actives: Abyssal Attunement

Class Passives: Aura of the Aching Depths

Endowments: Demon Seed

Strength: 11

Dexterity: 10

Constitution: 12

Ego: 23

Presence: 9

Thrones: 2/7 (Throne of Harmony, Throne of Shadow)

Scales: 576,574/1,000,000

Artifacts: Dawnblade (Common), Goldchop (Masterwork)

Servitors: Shadow Mastiff (Uncommon)

Uncommon. He’d been hoping for Rare, but as impressive as Level 27 felt to him, not only was the Shadow Mastiff not the most dangerous monster here, it was as nothing compared to what awaited him in the greater depths.

His new Servitor ignored him, continuing to sniff around the perimeter of the Cosmos, occasionally ambling away, growing a little smaller, then returning. All the tales spoke of heroes summoning their vanquished foes to fight for them in battle, but none of them went into detail about what the Servitors did while in the Cosmos.

They weren’t actually alive. They didn’t need to eat, to sleep, nor to rest. If slain, they would become dormant for a span of days as their essence reknit itself. The Seraphites, of course, had their doctrine on Servitors, but it had always sounded very convoluted to Harald. In the raiding texts they were simply described as having been “transferred” to the raider by the Fallen Angel herself.

Which had always confused Harald, because wasn’t she supposed to be dead?

Metaphysics. Maybe he shouldn’t have avoided the subject as much as he had.

Regardless, the Shadow Mastiff didn’t pad up to him to make friends. It ignored him, continuing to pace the perimeter and sniff at the stars.

Harald swam back up to waking. The Goldchops still hung before him, but they were at the end of their tether. He couldn’t keep them summoned forever. The more powerful he became the longer he’d be able to manifest them, but with only two Thrones they wouldn’t last much longer without a rest.

So he dismissed them, stood, and peered around the hub before stepping out warily onto the walkway.

Then just like summoning his Artifacts, Harald extended his might, reached into his personal Cosmos, and summoned his Shadow Mastiff.

It appeared a few paces off to his left, massive and fell, shadows wisping off its shaggy coat like mist off a dawn lake. It cast about, sniffing, and then, having ascertained no immediate threat, turned to regard him with its burning crimson eyes, as if say, What? What did you summon me for?

“Just experimenting,” said Harald. Servitors were self-willed, but they were supposed to obey commands. So Harald looked at a tunnel mouth at the far end of the room and willed the Mastiff to go examine it.

The huge black hound padded off, thick tail swinging from side to side, and with easy lopes followed the walkway and slowed as it reached the doorway in question. There it sniffed and peered into the darkness, then looked back at Harald over its massive shoulder as if to say, Yes. It’s a fucking tunnel.

Harald felt laughter bubble up in his chest, exhilaration over having a Servitor while still only Level 1. Not just that, but one acquired a good third of the way down into the dungeon. It would still possess its supernatural baying assault, and be able to blend in with the shadows.

But like his Artifacts, it couldn’t remain by his side interminably. The Mastiff couldn’t be tasked with watching over him while he slept, nor could it explore the level with him for long. There was a simple rubric for how long a Servitor could remained summoned: 5 minutes at one Throne, 10 at two, 20 at three, and so on, doubling right up to just over five hours supposedly if anyone ever Ascended to their seventh.

Ten minutes for now. Same as his Artifacts.

The Mastiff was watching him.

Its gaze wasn’t friendly, but nor was it actively inimical. If anything, it had the look of an annoyed older brother who loathed having his time wasted.

“Fine,” said Harald, dismissing the Mastiff back to his Cosmos. “Rest up.”

The Mastiff hadn’t sensed any threats in the room, and its senses were undoubtedly better than Harald’s own, so he dropped to the ground floor without too much concern. He walked up to the fallen scarecrow and collected the six Golden Dawns that hovered over its corpse.

Then, as before, he took a pouch from its side in which he found eight more Golden Dawns.

Combined with what he’d already taken and absorbed, and the 27th Level was proving to be a goldmine.

He poured the scales into the first pouch, tossed the new one away, then paused. Considered. A thought occurred to him, and he stepped over to the flagstone the scarecrow had been examining, and squatted to examine it in turn.

He couldn’t sense anything different about the broad stone tile. It was cemented in place, and looked to be of common gray stone, a thin patina of rust smeared over it. Harald rapped his knuckles on the rock, then tapped the pommel of his dagger.

Nothing.

It would take him ages to chip away the crumbling cement and then find a way to lever it out of the ground. Ages he didn’t have.

But still. The scarecrows were harvesting scales from caches. Why? Neither of the monsters’ pouches had carried so many scales as to indicate they carried their earnings upon them at all times. And given their cunning intellect, it was clear they were capable of thought.

So it stood to reason that they taking their loot somewhere, right?

Harald turned to the corpse.

Time to use the Dawnblade’s tracking power.