I needed to open it.

  I’d been about to destroy it when I came to my senses. I needed to see if the book was also cursed, and let it take me if it was. Not because I wanted to, but because there could be more people like Attar. More trapped souls.

  “Attar!” I called to him, “There is another book of etiquette here. I’m going to open it. Do not be alarmed if it takes me, I shall return, and with whomever is trapped there.”

  Attar paled and threw me a salute, “May you ride along side the Wolf Rider himself.”

  I picked open the book and cracked it open with a single hand. My other was on my spellbook, ready for anything.

  What I wasn’t prepared for was the dreadful state of my outfit.

  I was going around topless and a dress slung around my neck like a pervert.

  I dropped both books in my haste to tear the dreadful thing from my head and cast it on the ground.

  Attar frowned and approached me cautiously, “Oswic, are you alright?”

  “Not at all. I look like a savage, a sailor out at sea.”

  Attar carefully nudged the book of etiquette closed with his sword, “And why do you care?”

  Why did I care? Why care about anything? If you didn’t care about your appearance you didn’t care about yourself. Respect, respect for yourself, mattered.

  And yet, there were times for exceptions. As those sailors at sea, or the men in the deserts of the Delta. Or when no clothes were available because you’d escaped a cell in the deepest dungeon in the world and been warped beyond fitting anything on offer.

  That too, was obvious.

  So why did it feel like my skin was on fire?

  “I think the book effected my mind. Made me care about appearances.”

  “Should we destroy it?”

  I retrieved my spellbook with trepidation. The floor might have gotten it dirty. I could barely contain my gorge at the thought.

  “Can’t hurt to,” I shuddered as my fingers brushed against the back binding. It was like being in the ogre’s waste pit all over again, “can’t hurt to try.”

  Fireball III

  The book was devoured in seconds.

  “Do you feel better?”

  The book was still trying to poison my fingers with its filth, and I still looked like a clown, of course I didn’t feel better! I managed to calm myself with a few breaths before replying.

  “Not yet. Perhaps it takes a moment.”

  A moment passed without improvement, but it also passed without obviously worsening.

  Perhaps the other books would contain answers.

  The problem was, the books were on the ground where all the dirt was, and I wanted that as far away from my face and fingers as possible.

  Disgust warred with my own sense of responsibility. Attar was, at this point, nearly a decade younger than me, and without my protective talents. If he was cursed, or trapped in another book, that might be the end of him, but I’d dealt with more curses than I could remember at this point, and I was more or less impossible to trap.

  Responsibility won out. It had to, there was no other way. I bit down on my lip and held my breath as I gingerly raised a second book to my eyes. Perhaps it would be instructions on clowning. Those would be appropriate with my outfit.

  It was a journal of some sort, one about the construction of mine. Fascination quickly replaced disgust. Not for the topic, though the descriptions and diagrams of the mine might go some way to explain the Bleak Fort’s construction, but for the fact it was written in the Language of the Gods.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Men did not write with such things, it might even be blasphemous. And knowledge of the language was rare. Yet, as I pored over the cramped text—the author had written both vertically and horizontally, and where space didn’t allow, they even wrote in spirals—I realized I’d seen it before.

  The statue of the dwarf goddess. And had not that strange procession of dwarves murmured in the same tongue?

  This then, was a dwarven tome.

  It was invaluable. The dwarven thoughts, the dwarven way of speech, the history and mastercraft contained could alone form its own school.

  Yet I couldn’t take it with me. I didn’t have the room, nor the time to decipher all the texts. For although I could read the language easily enough, the layered scrawl would be difficult to parse in any language.

  With heavy heart (and itching fingers) and gently placed the ancient thing back where I’d found it and took up the final tome.

  This book was simple titled “Prophecy”.

  Why it was titled in the Painted Language I did not know, for upon opening it, I was faced with text in a language I didn’t even recognize.

  My eyes wandered to the dress I’d discarded on the floor.

  No.

  It could stay there. I was done playing the warlocks’ unfashionable games.

  I handed the book to Attar, “Do you recognize this?

  “Never seen the language before in my life. What about your dress scarf thing?”

  “I can’t bear to wear it.”

  He looked at me with concern, “May I give it a go?”

  “By all means,” I waved at the dress.

  Attar picked it up, then let go with a queer look of disgust, “It is not meant for me.”

  I laid the book down on top of it.

  “These will have to keep until I’ve undone whatever effects plague my mind. Our answers will have to wait until then.”

  “At least the room is clean. Far nicer than that other.”

  I pointed to the pile of skulls, “Tell me about it. What do they say?”

  Attar scratched his head, “They aren’t saying anything. It is the strangest thing. They seem... confused more than anything. Sometimes the dead will be angry or frightened. Confused, sure, moments after death, but they figure it out quick enough. But there are a dozen spirits here, and every last one of them is going about in a daze.”

  I approached the dais, “Could the dais be doing something to them?”

  Attar furrowed his brow in concentration, “I’ve been checking, but the whole thing seems to be simple stone.”

  “Can you help them? Free the spirits?”

  “They’re not trapped. Spirits are not souls. They’re more like echoes. Words in a book. You said I, or Attart—however that works—freed a number from an alcove, but that would be a strange exception. Maybe the words crying for help, or the pages turned inward to slice at the author’s hand would be the best way to think about it.”

  I was tempted to disrupt it all the same, just in case, but I remembered the volcanic eruption I’d caused. Besides, I didn’t want to touch a bunch of skulls. It was barbaric. My skin was crawling just looking at them. I might catch something.

  “We’ll leave it,” I decided, “If need be we can always come back to the books and the skulls.”

  Scorch, Sword, Scintillation

  There was only one other exit, one to the north, so that was where I sent my sword while Attar and I hid.

  The door turned out to be more of a portcullis panel. As the wood cracked it fell down and more of the door slid into place. Chewing through it created a terrible racket and by the end my sword had produced a tall pile of woodchips on the floor.

  At last the final piece of door slid to the ground, revealing both a corridor and a burnt out iron chandelier hanging low from the ceiling. How gauche.

  Attar summoned his armour about his feet again, then waited for me to pass him down the corridor. I didn’t begrudge him it in the slightest.

  The ogres disappeared as I passed them, back to the morass of spirits which settled around Attar like a second cloak.

  The corridor went east, which was promising, and ended after thirty or so feet in a north facing wooden door. Attar and I retreated once more while my sword knocked it down. I’d have to be careful in the near future once the sword faded. I only had left the strangely sentient swords which behaved with a mind of their own. They couldn’t be relied upon in the same manner.

  The noise had me looking over both shoulders, but once again, only howls answered in response, which hardly merited a reaction at all. After a month of constant noise, even tortured souls begging for mercy became something I barely noticed. Time made monsters of us all.

  There was... something.

  It hadn’t responded to my sword tearing through the door, not that I’d heard, but as my fireball led the way forward a sort of hissing grew louder. Louder and layered, like a deciduous forest in the wind. Agitated and random, but not random enough to truly come from the forest. The sound of a hive or a den of snakes.

  I only noticed the first one a ways after walking into the room beyond the door. Sadly I noticed it mid air. I’d just torn my eyes away from the strangely textured walls and the pile of treasure at the centre of the room to look upwards. That was when the giant centipede landed on my face.