The Cabin Is Always Hungry

DEAD PACIFICA

Part 7

With Milford and the Society soldiers asleep (and sedated) underground, I began to relax now that I wouldn’t be interrupted by unwanted guests, and eagerly looked forward to my “birthday.”

And also terrified.

And anxious.

But most of all, excited.

I didn’t know why it felt any different to my past birthdays, but maybe it was because I was finally reaching my full year as a Death Core. Back then, I was just human. Did Cores even celebrated their birthdays? Did they do anything fun besides building dungeons, entertaining delvers, and creating traps or monsters 24/7? Did other Death Cores had specific rituals of domesticity?

For me, I just watched a lot of movies and TV, and played video games (yes, even as a Core now that I had bodies to inhabit). And most all was people watching—my new favorite hobby. Oh boy, I did a lot of that. I almost begged Elvis to make an exception by letting me contact the other Cores in my guild, maybe so we could share our stories, but his answer would be a resounding no like most of my suggestions.

So, that was out of the question.

I couldn’t believe that I was looking forward to Cosmic-Con. Although I wished I didn’t have to meet the other Cores once every few years. It’d be nice to have some friends who could relate to my story. You know? Like sharing how they would celebrate their birthdays.

Oh, well. I’m already planning on celebrating by luring a feast my way anyway, I thought.

You know what? I’d take whatever I could get just to make this new reality bearable. I didn’t want to admit it to my archetypes, but being the only Core around was kind of lonely. Don’t get me wrong, they were doing their best to alleviate and improve my mood by getting into plenty of wild shenanigans, including the book club, which was Mother Gertrude’s idea. On all of my birthdays, I was surrounded by my family. Now, they’d visit my grave at the cemetery to spend a part of their afternoon while I feasted on delvers.

Ah, I missed them.

A lot.

I had a different family to spend with now.

There was that quiet stillness that blanketed my domain as soon as a scenario was over. Although no “proper” scenario occurred, the feeling remained the same. The clean-up of the bodies, setting up the props and landmarks on how they used to be, and my archetypes unwinding after a night of chaos—the silence of solitude.

I felt a presence behind me.

“Let me walk you home, my liege,” Lord Zal said after the bodies of the soldiers had been dragged into the tunnels to the Furnace Chamber. There, a massive incinerator would get rid of them without having to waste crystals or magic.

“Thanks, Zal,” I said with a smile. “I don’t want to teleport and use up too much of my energy tonight.”

“It is my pleasure to accompany his lordship. After all, it is a nice night for a walk,” Zal said.

“I’ll go with you too, Zally,” Bolton caught up to us.

Zal grumbled and muttered, “I told you not to call me that.”

Zal gently grabbed my levitating Core from the air and carried me on his hand. It was a quiet walk into the forest for the next few minutes when Bolton broke the silence.

“So! It is kind of nice to see you kill all of those people, my lord. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you fight for real.”

“Has it been that long?”

“Almost a year, I think? That was back at the Yates House. Or maybe your final fight with Coach Hodge? To be honest, I’ve only met a handful of Cores when I was waiting to become their archetypes until I found you. They just stayed underground and refused to leave. It was very ballsy of you to show up face-to-face in front of Milford and his soldiers.”

“It distracted them though. I did just blow up three people. Too much?”

Bolton shrugged. “Cores are the final boss of any dungeon. Once you get older, you’re supposed to be harder to kill. That’s why Death Cores are scarier when they’re ancient.”

“Do you know a Death Core that old?”

Bolton shook his head. “No. But I have heard rumors that they exist.”

“The oldest Death Core I’ve ever known was three hundred years old,” Zal said.

“And what happened to them?” I asked.

“Taken out by a golden dragon and his dragon army. It was a Pyrrhic victory at the cost of the dragon empire’s eventual fall two decades later. War taxes and population decline. Could you believe that killed a thousand-year empire?”

I sighed. “That happens here, too.”

“That proves my point,” Bolton said. “An old Death Core caused that. Still a win in my books even if, well, they’re dead.”

“May I say one thing, my lord?” Zal started. “Don’t think about if you’re doing too much against delvers. Use everything. You don’t care about collecting essences when they are at your front door. You fight to survive against the delvers who made it to your lair because you are the final boss.”

“Doesn’t that make them worthy?” I asked. “Give them a chance to prove themselves.”

“By letting them kill you? No, no. All animals fight to survive, even you, and yes, even The System, for it is the greatest beast of all. If they truly defeated you, then they are worthy of renown, I guess. But to realms where Cores are aplenty, all mortals know that when they reach the final dungeon, they will be in for the fight of their lives. A shame Mr. Milford did not know that. Once you revealed yourself, an average delver would have tucked their tail, picked up their gear, and run! Level up and delve another day. It takes considerable planning to take down a Core, especially a Death Core. Not all delvers have an army behind their backs.”

“Too bad humans on this planet can’t do that,” I said. “You know? Level up?”

“Ah, yes, I forget sometimes that this is a brackish, cesspit, backwater world with no capital and numinous value whatsoever.”

Bolton laughed. “But what happened is much more fun, Zally!”

“Again, not happening, Bolton. That name is not going to stick.”

“I’m just joking around. Gosh, you’re always so serious all the time.”

“I take my work seriously, dear Bolton. It is an honor enough for a lich like myself to serve a Death Core, an equal to the God of Death! And so I must harness the opportunity to sharpen my mind and learn what I can.”

“Ah, well, you forgot to learn how to loosen up.”

Zal glared at him. “Go over there, fiend, and bother someone else. Don’t you know I have our liege on my hand?”

“He just doesn’t want to do the clean-up, Zal,” I said, raising my eyebrow at Bolton.

Bolton didn’t looked at me and let out a whistle. “Jeez. Spider Mama is already telling her brood to do all the cleaning. Can’t I enjoy a nice walk, too?”

Zal grumbled loudly. “Fine. You can stay, but steer your devil horns away from my eyes.”

We reached the Core Tree at last.

A massively vast, gnarled, and twisted tree with roots bursting from the earth in the middle of a clearing. In the past, the crystal gemstone would have rested inside its bulwark, but over the past few months, I had dug several hundred feet deeper into the earth and created a tunnel through its massive roots, creating an entrance to my lair. Mother Gertrude and Lord Zal casted magic around the grove to hide it from prying eyes. A bird, a plane, a satellite, and even a powerful scrying spell could not penetrate through the abjuration shield.

Lord Zal and Bolton walked up to the dark entrance where I carved a cliche warning for all delvers to read: ABANDON HOPE, ALL WHO ENTER HERE.

The stairs began immediately beyond the threshold. Narrow, stone steps spiraling down into a throat of darkness, dropping nearly two hundred feet where I had placed several enchantment, illusions, and transfiguration effects on the brick walls. When a delver descended here, faces of past delvers would swim, crawl, and protrude out of the surface, beckoning and warning them to turn back and run. Some would mock. Others would wail. It was a pretty effective trick that would eat away anyone’s dwindling courage. Bonus points if the illusion created a perfect likeness of a dead delver the person knew.

At the bottom, the stairs spat us out into a broad stone foyer, reminiscent of the Selection Chamber. An hourglass sat on a pedestal overgrown with weeds, surrounded by intricate stone carvings of all my archetypes along the walls, also covered with moss and vegetation. Double doors made out of stone sat in the middle of those carvings, thick enough to stop a siege engine. As Zal and Bolton approached it, the doors opened on its own, revealing a short tunnel to one of my first dedicated trap rooms within my domain, acting as buffer rooms for my lair.

I called it the Pictogram Room.

Here, the delvers had to navigate the correct sequence of block tiles on the floor to reach the other side from these seven pictograms: A dagger, a wolf, a serpent, a cabin, a crystal, an hourglass, and a tree. There was a small glass prism for a single delver to peer in, fixed on a slab of stone at the starting platform that depicted the correct twelve-step sequence to navigate the floor safely, but it would only reveal the sequence once the delvers correctly guessed the first pictogram. After the first, the next step would be revealed through the glass, and so on until they reached the twelfth block tile on the other side of the room. Each day, this sequence would reshuffle—including the floor tiles—so that no delve would ever be the same when playing this room.

And if they stepped out of sequence, well, bad news for them. Turning back to the previous safe tile would also be a big mistake since they were technically still moving out of sequence.

On the other side of the room was a large self-reloading magical crossbow inside a caged box that would shoot fire arrows at the delver standing on the wrong tile. One of the neat tricks about trap rooms of Death Cores: if a delver failed the trap and died, their Resolve plummeted to Red, and I get to collect their essence. But it had to be a perfect balance of timing. Sometimes they might die too early before collection, and so the essence would be wasted. Unfortunately, no one had ever reached the Core Tree before to test out these trap rooms.

If they made it past the Pictogram Room, there were two more trap rooms waiting for them.

Like I said: buffer rooms.

Since there were no delvers, all the traps were inactive. Zal and Bolton just walked across the floor tiles where another corridor beyond sloped sharply downward, polished smooth by hand and spell alike. Sixty feet of steady descent. Drips of water seeped through the rock somewhere unseen, dripping slow and steady. It opened up to another circular foyer—a safe zone for the delvers. Here, five tunnels branched off from the room, evenly spaced like spokes in a wheel.

Three of the tunnels led to nowhere. Short walks that ended in small creepy crypts, each fitted with six coffins arranged neatly side by side. Lord Zal’s skeletons waited inside, folded hands clutching rusted yet still sharp weapons, ready to launch at the delvers who dared to disturb them.

The tunnel to the center right led to the second chamber: The Lake Room.

The cavern opened up suddenly, the space so vast it felt like stepping out onto the edge of the world. The Lake Room was a massive cavern about two thousand feet wide with the ceiling arched high overhead to a hundred feet, and the inky black water dove for a hundred feet deep. Several rocky islands from different elevations dotted the lake, connected by rope bridges or meticulously placed logs. A lesser magical darkness encapsulated the cavern so that the delvers could not see past twenty feet even with flashlights or torches.

For good reason.

The rope bridges and the logs were like a maze. Some routes led forward. Others doubled back. A few stranded you on islands with nowhere to go. Seven of these islands had booby traps placed on them (and there were about thirty-five islands in total). Every minute, the islands would descend into the water by five feet, and the rope bridges and the logs would either go taut, broke apart, got severed, or sank into its depths entirely, including the islands. The delvers would only have about twenty minutes to reach the other side or end up in the water.

And you don’t ever want to end up in the water.

Two months earlier, a semi truck delivering illegal exotic animals from California were being smuggled across the Cascades and got into an accident on the highway nearby (not my doing), and several animals escaped into McLaren Forest. The Sawyers had to round up most of the animals that the police and the game wardens from Fish & Wildlife Service didn’t catch. Most of it they returned to the game wardens, except for one.

A green anaconda.

Back then, the snake was only ten-foot long and weighed about ninety pounds. Unfortunately, it decided to hunt down a rabbit in its warren. And that rabbit unfortunately turned out to be inhabited by The Parasite, one of my infectious and mutagenic slime archetypes.

Ingesting this contagious parasite killed the anaconda within a few minutes, and The Parasite found a suitable host and switched to inhabiting the much larger green anaconda instead, capable of doing so much more than a rabbit could.

That same anaconda now lived in this cavern, mutated to a nightmarish length of one hundred feet and thirteen-hundred pounds of monstrous proportions. Once a delver stepped foot on a rope bridge, the hunt (and the ticking clock of the sinking islands) would begin.