Chapter 95: Into the Dark
The portal in front of Simon led into a dark wood. Well, he thought it was a dark wood. As soon as he whispered the words of lesser light, though, he saw it was something else. They weren’t trees he was walking through. They were stone pillars, and what he’d thought was leaf clutter, and branches were actually long spiderwebs. He wasn’t even outside, he figured out after a few minutes of walking. There was no breeze.
That means I have to be, what, underground? He wondered.
“I guess that means I finally get to find my first fantasy race?” he whispered to himself as he tried to search out any signs that these were, in fact, dwarvish and not human structures. He found nothing that said that definitively, though, besides the strange location. There were human sized doors in the structures, and the bones he saw seemed to be about the right size for men. All he could say for certain was that he was lost in a dark place with only dusty ruins and spider webs to keep him company.
Most of the webs that obscured the details of the structures were thin, gauzy things that he could push through easily, but some of the major strands that anchored the larger webs were thicker than a pencil, and a few of the largest ones were thicker than his fingers. He shuddered at that, but it wasn’t enough to make him panic.
Indeed, after a couple of minutes, it became clear this would be an easy level to bypass, at least, if that’s what he wanted to do. This whole place seemed to be a tomb, and in the distance, he could see the bright light of an illuminated doorway. While it was possible that such a thing was a way to the surface or an occupied building of some kind, in Simon’s mind, it was almost certainly the portal to the next level.
While he was still too far away to say for sure, he hoped that would be the case. A nice daylight level would do him some good after all the creepy dark places the Goddess had been sending him for the last few levels.
Still, none of those pleasant thoughts were enough to take his mind off of just how dangerous this place felt. Here and there, he saw desiccated corpses hanging in cocoons, and occasionally, he would hear distant noises that might be the sound of giant spiders skittering across their enormous web.
In his tiny receding bubble of light, though, Simon was alone as he made his way toward the light. Halfway there, he recast minor light, and when he was close enough to see waving stalks of grain through the portal, he smiled. It looked like a nice day, and it had been a while since he’d had one of those.
That was also about the spot where the larger strands started to get really thick. The first two times he went down a ruined street that was blocked with more strands than he could maneuver between, he went back and circled around until he found a clearer route.