Well, that was fun. Put this together during the pre-Teq wait and the following few world bosses. Definitely not one of my best (to put it mildly), but I think it’s a fair result given the time, relative inattention, and complete lack of editing. And that it’s primarily dialogue. Oh, how I hate dialogue.
“Really, Rel? You’re in here for all of thirty seconds, and you already sprung a trap.”
Throwing her hands up in the air in protest, Rel said, “Hey, it’s not my fault. It just came down out of nowhere.”
A heavy iron portcullis, rusted through with age, but still a formidable barrier, stood between the two.
“Yes, traps tend to be like that,” Era said with a flat expression. “What were you doing running ahead like that anyways?”
“I could hear voices ahead.”
With heavily lidded eyes closed to slits, Era glared at her companion. “We’re entering a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. Every. Sound. Echoes.” Punctuating the point, her last three words resounded in the tunnels, shaking dust from the aged masonry. “See the dust on the walls, the sand, the lack of footprints? Nobody’s been here in years.”
Rel kicked a pebble in embarrassment and watched it skitter down the tunnel, leaving a sinuous trail in its wake.
“Hold,” she said, her fingers brushing lightly along the haft of her axe. “No footprints, but graveling spoor.”
Era shook her head. “No surprise there. Ascalon is crawling with ghosts. What do you think happens to a ghost after they get drained of their essence? I mean, normally, they come back in a few days after we, er, kill them.”
“I don’t know, they come back in a few days?” answered Rel distractedly.
Pause.
“Hey, stop theorizing and get me out of here,” she hissed, throwing a reproachful glance over her shoulder.
“Don’t worry, they only eat spiritual essence.”
“And I’d rather not have that extracted before I’m dead.”
“So it’s okay after you die.”
“No, it isn’t!”
“Picky, aren’t you.”
The gate screeched loudly as a sharp metal edge belonging to an axe swung by a frustrated Rel scraped across its surface, leaving a gleaming streak of clean metal.
“That was excessive,” observed Era coolly, “and if your concentration is lax enough to dull your blade like that, that means you know as well as I that you’re in no real danger.”
Standing with her back against the obstruction, Rel resumed standing guard with a slightly petulant air about her. “Fine,” she groused, “just hurry it up back there.”
“Tut. You can’t rush good work,” said Era, waggling a scolding finger at Rel’s back. “Especially when it comes to explosives.”
“The damp is making my nose twitchy.”
“Good. Maybe it’ll smell something before you do. Okay, here you go.”
A thin metallic spike with a blue lead poked through a gap between the bars.
“Jab that into the wall at about chest height. Into a crack, that is.”
Bringing it in for closer look, Rel wrinkled her nose in disgust. “It smells like magmacyte. This isn’t your design, is it?”
“Platt’s. A bigger boom seemed—”
“Wait,” Rel interjected, eying the node suspiciously, “Isn’t Platt red-blue colorblind?”
“No, no, he’s just absentminded. The demonstration at Camp Resolve was a fluke.”
Era shifted her weight to her other foot. After several seconds, she shifted it back. “Well, I hope,” she added.
Their eyes met through an awkward silence, interrupted by a portcullis.
“Okaaay,” announced Era loudly, causing Rel to startle, “just shove it in, and hit the floor on one.”
“Wait—”
“One.”
——
“Well, this isn’t quite what I expected to happen,” said Rel, leaning against the wall in the fetal position.
“It’s not surprising. Most of the masonry on our way down was already crumbling, if not outright collapsed. Everything metal, like the fences, spears, gates, and even the machinery that controls it, was still intact.” She flicked a claw against the metal. “Listen to that. Clear as a tuning fork.” Her ear twitched slightly. “Hrmph. Clearer than mine, even. Must get a better one.”
“Their ironwork lasted three hundred years while their masonry crumbled into rubble?” asked Rel incredulously.
Shrugging apathetically, Era surveyed the remains of the tunnel. “See for yourself. Gate’s intact while a little kaboom managed to knock out the walls around it.”
Rel crossed her arms and leaned back against the wall. “A flawless rescue,” she said with transcendent sincerity, “if you didn’t take down the ceilings too.”
Word Count: 691
I’ll cry if you don’t.