Andrew Rowe - On the Shoulders of Titans

Sheridan conjured another pair of walls inside the wheel, but Marissa lost her grip with her injured hand and dropped the ball a moment too soon.

It landed in the “Mystery!” slot.

Then all the light in the room was gone, and I was falling.

Marissa and I screamed at the same time.

That was nice. At least we had company while we fell rapidly into a seemingly endless abyss.

After a moment, I realized my falling had slowed down because of the ring.

Marissa had no such advantage. Her screaming told me that she was below me, now.

I needed to think fast in case there was a bottom here to hit.

I reached into my bag. “Retrieve: Lantern.”

The magic lantern appeared in my hand, and I activated it immediately.

We were falling down a cylindrical shaft. I still couldn’t see a bottom, but I could see Marissa below — barely.

I didn’t have much time to think about a perfect solution.

I pulled off the ring of jumping, and I began to fall faster. I kept a tight grip on it with one hand, while holding the lantern in my other.

Marissa was still far below me, but she’d flown toward a side wall and now she was trying to slow herself down by grabbing onto it. It wasn’t working.

I pointed my hand upward and focused, then unleashed a spherical burst of transference mana.

The explosion pushed me down .

Below, I thought I could finally start to see the ground, and Marissa was still edging closer to it rapidly.

The “ground” wasn’t a solid floor, of course. That would have been too simple. It was a green, bubbling liquid.

Almost certainly acid.

Possibly acid that was also on fire.

I pushed more mana out of my hand, blasting myself downward faster and faster.

Until I passed her.

I lost my grip on the lantern. Fortunately, it stayed on, even as it plummeted.

I slipped the ring back on.

My movement slowed as it reactivated. Fortunately, the pressure was evenly distributed throughout my body, and it felt more like an upward gust of wind than anything else.

Marissa crashed into me from above. That part hurt.

For a moment, we flailed ineffectively until we caught hold of each other.

The ring slowed us both. This was good, because I saw the lantern continue to drop past us, and then I heard the splash and fizzle as it hit the liquid.

It was dark again, except for a light far above us.

I couldn’t see the source, but at least it let me orient myself to be sure I was facing up.

“Hold on!”

A fall was almost certainly going to be fatal. I couldn’t let us down gradually and just try to climb after we’d rested.

My circlet was an option now that I was physically in contact with Mara, but I wasn’t going to give up this soon, and I wasn’t sure it would work.

Jump.

That took us upward a bit, but nowhere near enough.

I repeated it three more times before the ring ran out of mana and ceased to work.

But the ring was just using transference mana. Sure, it had special functions to make sure it emitted from below me, but I’d already proven I could guide myself downward with mana.

How hard could going upward be?

Pretty darn hard, it turned out.

I managed to blast us into the wall, rather than upward.

As we thudded against the wall, though, Marissa formed a blade around her good hand and slammed it into the wall. It made a hole.

She buried her arm in deeper as we began to slip back downward, then held us both in place with just that one arm. I had to cling to her, since she wasn’t in any position to hold onto me.

I was worried her arm was going to break — it certainly would have if she’d tried this on her way down. Fortunately, the ring’s slow falling function was still active, and she still had her own strength-enhancing ring on.

Still, holding us in place with one arm couldn’t have been comfortable.

“Don’t let go,” she instructed me.

“That’s pretty obvious, yeah.”

I’d like to say I came up with some kind of brilliant solution, but in reality, we huddled there against the wall for a solid ten minutes before Patrick finally managed to levitate himself all the way down to us, then made a gust of wind that lifted us back up the shaft.

“Sorry for taking so long. We had to fight the monsters that appeared up there.”

When we finally arrived back on solid ground, we found that the room was once again lit, and a dozen monster corpses were pinned to the walls with spears of bone.

A few of them also looked like they’d been burned.

One of them somehow had been crushed with the single remaining sphere. I wondered how they’d managed that one, but for the moment, Mara and I were both too busy recovering from our terror to say almost anything.

Marissa and I scrambled as quickly as possible away from the edge of the pit, then just sat down with our backs to the wall, next to each other. Breathing. Just breathing.

It took me another minute to realize that aside from the monsters, we had one new addition to the room — a human-sized cube with a question mark written on it, near the door. It had a crease in the middle and a keyhole.

Patrick lifted up a key which was also shaped like a question mark. “Want to see what’s in there?”

“No.” Marissa and I responded immediately.

“Aww.”

I sighed. “Give us five minutes.”

They gave us a good hour. With the clock stopped and the monsters dead, there were no further threats here. No obvious ones, anyway.

I still felt incredibly nervous about the box. I didn’t trust anything in this spire.

I drew my sword before Patrick moved to the keyhole, and Sheridan set up a cage of bone around most of the box — just in case it exploded.

Patrick insisted on being the one to open it. Sheridan left just enough room in her bone cage for him to stick his hand in and turn the key.

There was a click, then nothing. No traps.

Patrick extracted his hand, then pushed on the top half of the box. It fell open.

We couldn’t see through the bone wall, but Patrick could see through the hole he’d reached through.

His eyes widened.

“We’re going to be rich.”

Most of the contents of the box turned out to be coins. Gold, silver, and copper.

Money was always good, but the items inside interested all of us more.

There were six of them, presumably because the spire was designed for six people.

The first was a spear, leaned up against one of the walls of the box. It looked like a single piece of wood that had grown naturally into a spear shape, rather than cut. At the center, the bottom, and the tip of the spear, blue gleaming crystals were embedded in the wood, and light seemed to radiate outward from them like veins.

The second was a shirt of greenish metallic leaves. It proved to be both lightweight and extremely resilient. Also, shiny.

The third was a pair of completely ordinary looking boots. They looked a little small for me.

The fourth was a hatchet made out of polished blue stone with a leather grip.

The fifth was a classic longbow with a dozen golden runes etched into the wood.

The last was an unlabeled potion bottle filled with blue liquid.

All six of them glowed with Citrine-level auras.

“This might actually be worth almost dying.” Mara leaned forward, focusing on inspecting the weapons.

Sheridan looked at me. “Can you identify items yet?”

“Only a little. I can cast a Lesser Identify spell, but it doesn’t tell me much.”

After we confirmed there were no hidden traps in the box, we extracted the items and laid them down. I spent a few minutes inspecting the runes I could find on each, as well as casting the Lesser Identify spell on each of them.