Reluctant Necromancer

We stayed there resting for about an hour. Eventually Ashley and I had to change positions when my legs began to fall asleep. But we continued the cuddly vibes until the end. I had just started to let myself relax into a light doze when someone’s alarm went off on their phone.

I looked around and Oliver smiled back shyly while sliding his phone back in his pack. At least someone was here to keep us on track. Not that Mara wasn’t doing an excellent job, but sometimes you needed a little more stability than her gut decisions.

Mara stood up then and clapped her hands together. “Alright, let’s head on out of here. We need to make it through this dungeon.”

“Safely,” Oliver added.

“Yes, safely,” Mara rolled her eyes. “And also explosively…”

“Those don’t tend to go together,” I pointed out.

Mara just blew a raspberry at me and waved it all away. Ashley hopped up from the ground beside me. She reached back down and offered me her hand. I smiled up at her as I put my hand in hers. She carefully pulled me up so we ended up toe to toe with each other. She leaned down and pressed a final kiss against my lips before spinning away and falling into line with the others. I shook my head, trying to shake off the daze she easily left me in.

We quickly got back into formation and headed toward the light curtain that was our only obvious way forward. Similarly to the goblin’s village. Though with such a small room it wasn’t hard to decipher the exit. It had popped into existence shortly after the final troll had fallen.

I stepped through the curtain of light and was once more introduced to a hallway of stone. Unlike the last few though, this one was short and ended within sight of our next entrance. Maybe twenty feet from where we passed though the light curtain the corridor ended with a brightly lit room.

I couldn’t tell much more than that from where I stood. My undead troll minions were standing at the edge of the hallway, blocking most of the view.

We quietly made our way forward and I finally sent the trolls forward again. The room beyond the corridor was quite large. Easily a hundred feet across with ceilings that stretched upward twenty feet. Mismatched pillars stood around the room supporting the ceiling. Some were round, some square. Some had fancy crowning or whatever, others were smooth from floor to ceiling.

In the center of the room was a small pile of rubble and clay. There didn’t appear to be any monsters, so this was probably a puzzle room. Yay…

We walked slowly into the room, taking in our surroundings as we went. It was lit by hanging oil lamps from several sides of each pillar, casting quite a bit of light around the room. As we neared the center of the room there was a slight rumbling beneath our feet. There was also a low grumbling, grinding noise that started coming from the pile of debris.

Small pieces of the rubble, rocks, and clay or mud or whatever began to shift. Except they were shifting against gravity and moving upward. The closer we came to the center, the taller and leaner the pile became. The muddy clay seeped between the rocks and rubble until there was a smooth surface over the fifteen foot tall lump.

We were a quarter of the way in the room when the lump stood up and opened its empty eyes. Arms separated from the rest of the body, and suddenly in front of us was a large mud/rock monster. A golem, maybe? I don’t know, but it was silent except for the stomping steps it began to take toward us.

Mara shoved up imaginary sleeves on her shirt and grinned at us all. She faced the large, lumbering, slow golem and got into her anime stance. Her arms extended, wrists together, palms facing each other. A glow built up between her palms and she screamed her stupid anime thing again. “Kamehameha!”

A broad beam of energy shot forward, blinding me temporarily. I blinked my vision back a few moments later. The monster had a large, gaping, glowing hole dead center of its chest. It took a stumbling step back.

Then rocks and mud began to shift upward and downward and covered the damage it had sustained. Steam rose from the newly covered area. The golem might have been a foot or so shorter, but it still had most of its mass. And now it seemed angry.

“Ummm, how many of those have you got in the tank?” I asked quickly as we began to all shuffle backward.

“A few,” Mara took a deep breath and admitted something that must have really hurt her. “But not enough to shrink it down to anything much smaller if that was any indication.”

The golem was closing the distance to us in a deceptively fast manner. It moved slowly and ponderously, but each of its steps ate up the ground. There was still several dozen feet between us and it, but that was quickly shrinking.

John shrugged his mithril coated shoulders and then charged forward. His arms reshaping into something resembling shovels. He of course bellowed the entire way. If I was less worried I would have rolled my eyes. I urged my minions to charge the golem as well.

As John reached the golem, it bent forward and with a sweep of its arm sent John tumbling ass over kettle along the ground until he slid to a stop a dozen feet away. Oliver let out a gasp behind us. But before he could charge over and see to his idiot husband, John stood back up. A little wobblier than before, but still determined.

The golem made the same attack against the trolls. It knocked one over and it bounced a few feet away. The second troll though managed to reach the golem’s body and began just tearing chunks off of it and flinging them away.

“Oliver, I need some darkness to work with. Put out some of the lamps,” I called out.

“You know oil and water don’t mix. I could just make things worse,” he answered.

I angrily gestured at the golem and his husband going for round two while my second troll came in from the side and started ripping out more material.

“Ok,” he held up his hands in defeat. Oliver made some flowy waterbender moves and water seemed to materialize in the air and followed his movements. It was a little disconcerting to see such a large, muscled man moving like a dancer. Smooth and controlled.

He flung a glob of water at one of the lamps near the golem. It hit with a shattering force and exploded burning oil all over the side of the pillar and the floor beneath. “See!” he shouted.

“Goddess damnit. I guess I’ll have to make do.” I gathered as much darkness as I could from the small shadows around us and flung a pair of chains out to wrap around the golem’s legs. The links weren’t as black-hole-dark or as large as the first time I used them, but they shot forward and wrapped around the golem.

The golem came to an abrupt halt and almost fell over as it reached the end of the slack in the chains. John finally caught a break and reached the body of the golem and dug in. But as much damage as they all seemed to be doing, the body didn’t appear to be shrinking. Then I noticed the rubble and clay creeping back into the body as it filled itself back in. They weren’t making lasting damage. And I could see the shifting clay seeping over and around the chains. They wouldn’t hold forever either.

“Look around! We need to figure out the trick to this. Just beating it up isn’t working,” I yelled to the others.

“Oliver, see if you can’t melt the mud down with your water while we look,” Mara ordered. He saluted her playfully and then began his avatar routine again, shaping water into another glob to fling at the golem.

I ran toward the fight and edged around it, angling for the center of the room where the golem had originated. Oliver’s mud washing attacks didn’t seem to be any more effective than the other attacks. The clay just flowed back up the golem and left a puddle behind.

I looked around as I ran. There was nothing on the walls or the pillars from what I could see. I continued to hustle forward, looking at everything.

I skidded to a stop around where the debris pile had been earlier. There was nothing there either! I looked around frantically, “I can’t find anything!”

“Me neither!” Mara yelled from across the room.

“Uh, guys…” Ashley called and we all hurried back toward her. She was pointing up at the golem as I skidded up beside her. The golem already had one of its legs free of my chains. “Up there, something is written on the golem,” she pointed to the golem’s head.

I looked up at the golem and only then realized there was something barely decipherable written into the brow of the golem. It was hard to see without a lot of definition in the clay. And it wasn’t large enough to read from where we were standing out of the way.

Ashley flipped her hunting rifle into her hands and settled it against her shoulder. Her cheek rested against the wood stock or butt or something and she looked through the scope. “Carved on his forehead is the word BASH.”

“Oh…” Mara muttered. “I think I know what we need to do. As long as the dungeon isn’t fucking with us again. But, we don’t have anything else to try.”

“What?” I wanted to shake her by the shoulders.

“We have to remove one of the letters to make a new word,” her voice gained strength.

“How?” I asked. She just shrugged her shoulders. I looked over at Ashley and she had the same look of contemplation on her face. “Great,” I muttered.

“So, if we get rid of the ‘B,’” Oliver called out, “it should spell ASH and that’ll beat it?”

Mara seemed less confident this time, “Yes…”

Oliver nodded at us with a grim expression on his face. He darted forward until he was just outside of the golem’s sweeping arms’ reach. Then he started his twisting, dancing steps again. This time his water formed into a sharp lash that he flung out at the golem’s head.

For a moment the entire scene seemed to freeze. The golem froze in the act of smashing one of my bedraggled trolls. A mouth split wide on the golem’s expressionless face and a deep wail echoed out into the room.

The clay seemed to harden in place and turned an ashen grey color. Then the entire golem seemed to just collapse in on itself. A cloud of ash burst out from the new pile where the golem had just stood. There was coughing all around as the ash took a while to settle back down. I pulled my shirt over my nose and mouth and tried to use it to filter the air.

We moved away from the ash cloud, near the edges of the room to wait until the air cleared. “At least it should be easy to find any essence or whatever,” Mara ventured quietly. I rolled my eyes at her and pulled out a bottle of water to rinse out my mouth.

“Yeah, even you guys could do it,” Ashley teased. The others still weren’t very keen to help with core retrievals. Not that there were enough knives to go around anyways.

“Whatever, I guess I’ll get this one,” Mara sulked.

I looked at Ashley and chuckled quietly. She took out a rag and wet it with her own bottle of water. With gentle swipes she began to clean my face. I leaned into the touch. I’d return the favor as soon as she was done.