Chapter 9: Chapter 9 – The Pauper Princess, Part 4

Luci tripped when she took her first step into the Kimaw. If not for Wip catching her arm, she would have tumbled endlessly down the pitch-black stairs. That about set the tone for what was to come.

After she collected herself, she tried to pretend nothing had happened, and Wip was polite enough not to say anything. It went smoother from then on. She began to relax as she climbed further down the Kimaw, but then the light faded, and faded.

Her steps grew slower as she struggled to see the staircase beneath her. She started sliding her feet to make sure they were always connected with the next step. When she was finally swallowed by complete darkness, Luci stopped walking entirely.

Luci turned around to search for the light from the daylight above, hoping to use it to get her bearings. It was gone. She spun around, thinking she’d made a mistake. The light had to be there; it didn’t just disappear like that. As far as Luci could tell, she’d walked in a perfectly straight line. The search, however, only made Luci’s head spin. Without any visual markers to help Luci get her bearings, even standing on the steps was disorienting.

She called out, “Mr. Wip?” No answer. Not even an echo bouncing off the stone walls. “Hello? Are you there?” Her voice sounded muffled to her own ears.

Her heart started to race. Her mind filled with endless possibilities of being trapped on a staircase in eternal darkness, walking in endless circles. Luci swallowed saliva and took deep, slow breaths.

“Okay, calm down, Luci,” she said, her voice quivering slightly. “Remember, there were handrails on the side of the staircase. I don’t know why you didn’t grab one to begin with, but all you have to do is walk across the stairs and you’ll find it.”

Feeling with her feet, Luci shuffled across a long step, seeking out the handrail. She flapped her arm about to try feel out the rail. After a few steps, she smacked the metal rail with her knuckles.

“Ow! Why?” Luci yelped.

“Hey, how come you stopped?”

“Kyaaa!”

Luci dropped her staff and threw herself onto the handrail, hugging it like her life depended upon it.

“Mr. Wip, is that you?” Luci cried. Her hands gripped the handrail like a vice. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”

Luci turned to see him scratching about at his collar. It took her a moment to realise that she could actually see him in spite of the oppressive darkness. The source of the light turned out to be the studs on his collar, which emitted a faint red glow.

“Sorry,” Wip said. “I must have weakened my collar by accident.”

“I—I don’t know what that means, but I don’t think that’s it. Also, how are we supposed to see down here? I know your collar emits some light but”—Luci waved her hand around but she couldn’t make out anything—“it lets me see your face and shoulders and not much else. I’ve read blog posts on how dark the Kimaw was, but this is absurd! Like, how does this darkness even work? It there a way to cut through it?”

As though to answer her question, dim light engulfed Luci. She turned around to see a disembodied ball of light pierce through the darkness like a veil. Following it was a man carrying a carved wooden rod. Its tip housed a crystal that shone brightly; the ball of light it created hovered a half metre above it. Following him were four other dungeoneers. All of them were decked out in expensive looking aftos: armour, weapons, and other strange trinkets. As they passed, they all stared peculiarly at Luci and Wip.

“Urgh! You’re so stupid, Luci,” she berated herself. For once, Luci was thankful of the darkness because it hid the fact that her cheeks were burning. “Just a moment, please, Mr. Wip. My flows are no good and I could really use the practice.”

She pulled enma from her core and onto a fingertip, three strands of it, all shaped as so: two thorny threads, formed from whim, and one smooth ball that felt to her like clay, formed from ease. Slowly, meticulously, she weaved the two whim threads into the ease ball in a particular array, and then compressed it back into one. Thus, she’d completed the simplest of simple melds using only two of the six enma forms.

It started like a drop of water falling from her fingertip, only it moved against gravity, not with it. The drop then coalesced into a pinprick of light on the tip of her finger that lit up a sphere around her in radiant white. Forming the light was the easy part. however. The next part required another two forms.

Luci strung a thread of conform to the pinprick of light. She wrapped a casing around the thread, made of urge, that reminded her of a thick gas. It blended into the thread and made it malleable. She held it like that for a moment, taking careful measure. Too many times Luci had messed this part up in her training and her instructor had berated her endlessly for it.

Holding her breath, Luci pushed blame inside and along the thread itself. The dark enma expanded outwards, causing the thread to hollow out like a needle. It had to be done slowly and precisely; if Luci broke the thread’s form, she’d have to start over from scratch. Fortunately, she got it on the first try. She compressed the two unmelded forms together with the melded light and now she had her tether.

The tether, of course, wasn’t necessary. She could have just left the light on her fingertip. However, she needed the practice and that’s what she did. If her instructor had found her cutting corners by only making light, he would have had Luci lift stones until she collapsed.

Luci pushed the light source away from her by manipulating the tether. She didn’t move her hands like so many other enma practitioners did—using one’s body to manipulate enma did help, but in Luci’s case, anything involving conform felt as natural as breathing. The Path of the Moon specialised in conform, after all.

The ball of light floated up above her and illuminated a small sphere around her and Wip. The whole process took Luci about five seconds, but it would last as long as she maintained a steady flow of enma into the ball of light through her tether.

Maintaining a meld required a steady flow of enma into it, and enma leaving the body weakened exponentially with distance. Therefore, it was more efficient to use a tether than try to pass enma over empty air. Of course, there were exceptions to this rule, and the Path of the Moon housed a few of them.

Luci turned to see Wip towering above her, staring quizzically at her handiwork. She quickly dipped the ball of light behind her back in embarrassment.

“Sorry if it’s not very bright,” Luci said. “I’ve always been somewhat bad at melding with flow. When I was chasing you, I used lots of spikes which only required one form at a time, but light uses two forms split three ways. I know, it’s no excuse. It’s only a three-split flow. Even children can do it. Add to that the fact my enma has some properties such as causing light to curl in itself, and—well, it’s not a very good meld.”

Wip stared at her a moment. Then his face split into a smile. “You needed light, huh? Why didn’t you say so?”

He placed his backpack on the stairs and sifted through it. From it, he drew an afto that looked like a lantern dangling on a chain, small enough to fit into Wip’s palm. Only, the lantern was twisted into a disturbing shape, like a haunted, screaming face where the mouth formed the hollow chamber in which the aftocore was housed.

He held the spooked lantern forward. Luci felt her stomach turn, like she’d been punched in the gut. Red electricity ran along Wip’s arm. The afto flickered once, twice. Then light burst from it as bright as the sun. The oppressive darkness fled and the Kimaw was painted in blinding white.

Luci masked her eyes and curled away like a frightened animal. “Mr. Wip, why did you bring a floodlight into the dungeon? We’re not going to any of the dark floors, are we?”

The light winked out instantly, leaving Luci’s inferior ball of light to tackle the unnatural darkness alone. Compared to the blast of light from before, it was almost sad how weak the ball was. Luci had to rub her eyes a few times to accustom herself to the dimmer light again.

Wip held the tiny lantern up to his face. “But this is just a normal lighty thing. It’s not like the big ones they have on the Dungeon Fort.”

Luci frowned at the afto. “But the aftocore powers itself. We only channel enma into them to activate and control them. The only way a regular light could be so bright is if…”

Realisation struck her. Luci hopped down five whole steps to create distance between the two of them. “Mr. Wip, did you overcharge that afto? You know you’ll get cursed, right?”

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Now on the edge of her light source, Luci could make out Wip scratching at his collar. “Why does everyone think that’s strange? I do it all the time.”

“All—” Luci took a deep breath and turned away. She muttered under her breath. “All the time, he says. Like getting curses is nothing.”

“Luci, are you sad?” Wip asked.

“Well, in a manner of speaking. I’ve been completely out-prepared and outclassed. I mean, you even brought a light-emitting afto, and that’s going to completely surpass my measly little spot of light. And then you overcharged it like it was nothing. So, you know, I want to cry right now.”

Wip flicked the lantern afto on again and light flooded over Luci. Her heart almost leapt out of her chest from the suddenness of it.

“Mr. Wip, why?” she wailed.

“I made light for you,” Wip said. “Now you can see and you won’t be sad anymore.”

The dungeoneering team that had passed them a minute earlier were staring up at them from further down the Kimaw with their jaws fallen to the floor. That only made Luci feel worse, realising she was standing next to an absolute monster. Seriously, overcharging an afto this much was not normal!

“Thank you,” Luci said. “I’m going to find my amplifier now.”

Luci realised that she hadn’t even made it to the first floor yet and she was already making a fool of herself. All she wanted to do at that moment was go back to her tattered tent, huddle up on her ripped mattress, and cry.

Luci spent the walk through the unnatural darkness mumbling to herself. She was too embarrassed and frustrated by her incompetence to hold a conversation. Thankfully, Wip was too excited for conversation so he skipped and sang down the stairs. Luci had no idea what he was singing—he clearly wasn’t using real words.

Unfortunately, Wip’s erratic movements meant that his lantern bobbed rapidly, beaming light everywhere besides where Luci needed to see. She’d refused to drop her light in the meanwhile so she never lost sight of the next step.

The bottom of the stairs came into view and Luci felt both relief and dread. She hurried to the bottom ahead of Wip and came to a stop on the final step. The view before Luci made her gasp.

She’d had seen photos of limestone caves before. Their walls formed strange and wonderous patterns as calcium deposits had shaped them over millennia. Stalactites dripped low, sometimes so low that you could leap up and touch them. They were a wonder, a mystery left over from the world before humans and monsters.

This was not the case with the first floor.

What lay before her was a cavernous chamber. It was at least a hundred metres across, and significantly taller than that. In fact, the ceiling in the first chamber seemed to climb up into perpetual darkness. Luci was certain they hadn’t walked down that far! The walls looked like they’d bled grey then dried before the fluid had reached the bottom. There were no stalactites, no stalagmites, but an abundance of thick columns that had weird lumps bulging out of them.

Light seemed to surround Luci, as though the air itself was illuminated. There were no drafts travelling through the cave; it was dry and still. Cracks dotted the walls. A dungeoneer with a long pole, tipped with a blood-orange crystal, poked each of the cracks on the opposite side of the chamber, testing to see if a monster was about to squeeze out of the wall.

It was all… wrong. Like some cheap imitation of a cave.

Wip hopped up beside Luci and slammed a hand on her shoulder, causing her to groan in pain.

“Pretty cool, isn’t it?” he said.

“Um, yeah. Super cool,” Luci said. Force of habit made her agree with him, even though her heart was screaming that he was so, so wrong.

No longer needing the light, Luci stopped flowing enma into her meld. The light winked out immediately, but the meld itself—the tether and a small, dark blob where the light had been—took a few seconds to turn to odd-coloured smoke and fade to nothing.

Wip stepped out into the first chamber and waited to Luci with a giant smile. Knowing she was expected, Luci sighed and took a deep, trembling breath. She put her foot down onto a stone paving before exhaling.

“Okay, good work, Luci,” she complimented herself. “You haven’t been eaten by a monster yet.”

“That’s because they’re in the next room.” Wip pointed at one of several dark holes in the wall.

“Oh. Thank you, Mr. Wip. That’s… good to know.”

“But they’re too weak for us,” he said cheerily. He dropped into a squat and stretched out his hamstrings. The giant backpack didn’t hinder his movements at all. “We’re going to the fourth floor where there are some really dangerous monsters.”

“Oh. Excellent.”

“They nearly killed me once. Good thing I’m strong, or else they would have torn my arms off.”

“A-ah, yes. T-that sounds w-w-wonderful.” Luci clutched her staff to her body and trembled on the spot.

Wip finished his last stretch, leapt up, and bounced on the spot to get the blood pumping. The backpack on his shoulders made an ominous rattling sound with each bounce. “Alright! Let’s go,” he shouted.

He turned, his legs shot red sparks, and he took off with a boom. Within a couple of seconds, he was across the entrance chamber and in the cavern that led to floor two. A gust of wind carried in his wake, blasting Luci in the face and almost knocking her over.

Luci stared after him, fixed to the spot. It took her a few seconds to perform the mental math. Wip had left her there, all on her own, in a dungeon, where there were monsters. Her options were to, one, run back up the stairs and suffer the dishonour of losing her job on her first day or, two, chase after Wip and risk death. She chose death.

“Mr. Wip, please slow down!” she hollered after him. Then Luci took off into the cave, her fear of monsters replaced by her fear of failure.

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