Chapter 56: Penalties
Anarchy.
Goblins ran in all directions through the main halls, some of them shouting orders, some of them just shouting. Lizardmen pounced along the walls in their patrol routes, their heads swivelling with every movement in the corner of their vision. And through all of it, in every corridor, across every floor, down every drainage channel and up every vent, streamed rats.
Thousands of them. Tens of thousands.
They ran through the dungeon in every direction at once, and goblins and adventurers alike reacted to them with the full, undignified panic that the event deserved.
An adventurer who had been fighting for his life in a corner a moment ago screamed and stood on the table, the goblins who had surrounded him just as distracted. Two goblins dropped the supplies they were carrying and climbed each other. A wizard in the cells could be heard requesting immediate release on the grounds of the unsanitary conditions.
"I expect trouble from you two. But I'm disappointed in you," said Barjuchne.
The three princesses sat on their knees, heads lowered, arranged in a small line of contrition. Blibli had already begun to melt, sinking slowly into a glossy puddle of guilt.
"You're supposed to be the smart one, Ei."
Ead lifted her hand. "I- I believe that, actually, I-"
"You're book smart. It's different," snapped Barjuchne, cutting her off.
The ant princess shook her head, her compound eyes steady, her antennae flat. "I was only tunnelling. This is what you asked me to do, my Queen."
"I asked you to tunnel more chambers for the dungeon." Barjuchne stood over them with her hands on her hips. She pointed up at the ceiling, past the stone, past the levels, up toward the living part of the mountain. "We are a good kilometre below where you should be. This is just a shaft punched straight into the heart." She dropped her hand. "Which is, coincidentally, exactly what I'm feeling right now, with you three."
"I was a bad girl..." said Blibli, sadly, her voice bubbling as she melted down further, sinking into the floor in a self-pitying heap.
"Don't you lie to me." Barjuchne pointed at the puddle. "You would never."
The puddle reconstituted itself with an offended wobble. "It's true!" asserted Blibli, pulling her eyes back into place. "I made Ei dig here because I wanted to show her the rats!"
"I was led to believe there was something down here," replied Ei, antennae tilting toward the accusation. "I assumed it would be of interest to you, my Queen."
"I was just taking n-notes," stammered Ead.
"Yeah! Ead was just taking notes!" said Blibli, nodding vigorously enough to make her whole mass shiver. "That's all she did after telling me I should get Ei to dig down here!"
Barjuchne narrowed her eyes at Ead. Ead looked away, tapping her fingertips together in a slow, guilty rhythm.
"You two go upstairs. Help handle the rat issue. I'll deal with you later." Barjuchne gestured toward the shaft. "Now."
"Please don't eat Ead!" said Blibli, as Ei scooped her up in four arms and turned for the tunnel. The slime princess wrapped around the ant's back, stretching a pseudopod out toward the scholar. "She's teaching me to read!"
"You already know how to read," replied Barjuchne.
"Yeah, but now I can read letters too, instead of just words!" Blibli's voice echoed up the shaft, delighted, as Ei carried them both away at speed.
Barjuchne stood there for a moment, working on that. She tried to understand the distinction. She failed and shook her head and looked back at Ead, who was staring at the floor, like usual.
It was quiet for a moment.
"Okay. What the hell am I looking at?"
Ead lifted her eyes, apparently finding it easier to explain something scholastic rather than something normal. "The remains of the last dragon." Ead had already found her footing as an authority on the subject, her fear abandoned somewhere behind her in an instant. "The opportunity this represents cannot be understated. If we could permit a team of researchers to—"
Ead yelped as Barjuchne grabbed her and hoisted her over one shoulder.
"No."
"W-what do you mean, 'no'? This is the discovery of the—"
"Did you gain weight?" interrupted Barjuchne. "It's like gravity affects you differently than others," she muttered.
"...What?"
"Nothing." Barjuchne adjusted her grip and turned toward the tunnel. "You're staying away from this place from now on. Do you understand me?"
"B-B-Barjuchne, this is a world-changing opportunity!" Ead explained from her position, dangling, entirely undeterred. "The data this specimen could provide on monster biology, on arcane mechanics. They could revolutionise society as we know it!"
"Don't care," replied Barjuchne, dryly.
She paused. She looked back behind herself, into the darkness of the cavern they were leaving.
The double lids from her last evolution flicked over her eyes, and the world through them changed. The dark stopped being dark. Shapes resolved. Heat and magic and the faint, slow breath of the deep stone all became visible to her, laid out in faint glows and shifting currents.
She stared into the lightless cavern.
A golden cage hung there, half-swallowed by the rock that had grown around it, suspended from a shard of the dragon's remains. The metal was tarnished and bent. Inside it, a skeleton sat slumped, whatever dress it had worn rotted to nothing.
And inside the skeleton's eye sockets, a slight, soft glow. Faint. There and then not there. As if something had moved inside the skull and had stopped moving when it was looked at.
Barjuchne stared at it for a long moment.
Then she walked off, carrying Ead.
"Wait, where are we going? Why did you want me in particular?" Ead twisted, trying to see behind them.
Ead sighed. There was a clinking of metal.
The collar around her neck clanked as she turned her head to look down the row at the rest of the private corner in the dragon’s hoard. "Did you run out of good princess points too?" she asked.
F.P. sat next to her in a little gilded cage, her arms crossed, her dark-blue hair immaculate as she worked on brushing it. She gazed at the scholar with vague annoyance. "No. I just prefer to be here. It's usually quiet."
"...I'm a criminal," said a dejected voice from the other side.
Ead turned her head the other way.
Blibli sat next to them, her entire slime mass glopped through the ring of a collar that was entirely useless at holding her. The collar floated inside of her, the slime radiating penitence.
"So I'm going to live here now," said Blibli, looking at the two of them and then she stared toward some invisible distance. "I chose this life."
Ead looked forward, then up at the ceiling, then forward again.
"...This is an odd place," she muttered, to nobody.