Chapter Text
Langa opens his eyes. He’s lying in the middle of a road, face pressed into the paving stones. It’s a deeply uncomfortable position, and he can’t remember how he got here. He blinks a couple of times, trying to recall the events that led up to him being here but - nope. He was walking along a misty road, he stopped for a second to look at a strangely shaped rock and then… here. On the ground.
Well. In the absence of anything else to do, he figures he may as well get up.
The mist has thickened into a dense fog that stops Langa from seeing more than a few metres in any direction. He can see the rough shape of houses on either side of the road, looming dark and silent. Everywhere is silent, actually. The only sound Langa can hear is the clink of his chainmail, and the only colour he can see is where weeds have thrust their way up between the paving stones.
There’s nothing immediately threatening nearby. Langa pulls his sword out just in case. It still feels unnatural in his hand, the heft of it different to the training swords he’s used to. But he’d rather have it than not, especially when dealing with a new and unfamiliar situation.
He looks around again, but before he can get any new information he’s interrupted by a sudden loud whirring and a voice shouting ‘Danger! Danger!’. Langa whirls around, ready to face whatever danger is approaching, but rather than a monster - or even a person - what he sees is a small bird flying erratically towards him. The voice seems to be emanating from its open mouth. Langa ducks as it flies overhead, but barely has time to be confused before he hears another voice.
'Hey! Could you grab that?'
This voice at least does appear to belong to a person. It takes Langa half a second to process that he does not appear to be a threat before he nods and lunges after the little bird.
For all that it’s flying all over the place, the bird doesn’t make any real attempt to avoid Langa’s hands. He grabs easily enough. It whirrs strangely in between Langa’s palms. Rather than feathers, Langa thinks that he can feel metal shifting as the little creature tries to escape. It’s still crying ‘Danger!’ but the noise is muffled now.
Langa turns from the bird to look at the person.
He’s a human, or at least he looks like one. He's got bright red hair and an even brighter smile, which he flashes when he spots that Langa has caught the bird.
‘Thanks! She almost got away!’ he says, holding his hands out. Langa deposits it carefully in the human’s waiting palms, wary that it’ll fly off again, but as soon as it lands in his hands it stills.
Now that it’s out in the open, Langa sees that he was right about it being metal. The creature isn’t a bird at all, or at least not a real one. It’s a tiny metal construct, the cogs and gears of its inner workings visible through gaps in its frame.
‘You’re not from around here huh?’ he asks. His eyes flick to Langa’s ears as he says it. They aren’t nearly as pointed as his father’s, but they’re the most obvious indicator of his elven heritage when he’s among humans.
‘I don’t think so,’ he replies. ‘Where is here?’
The human definitely looks surprised by that. ‘You’re in Tanegawa. Wow, you must have hit your head pretty hard if you don't remember where you are.'
'Tanegawa...' Langa looks around. The name seems slightly familiar, but he can't place it, and he doesn't think he's ever seen this place before. Then again, it's hard to tell one small town from another after a certain point.
While Langa's been thinking, the human's been talking.
'Well, it's lucky you ran into me then. I'm Reki, I can show you around, there's a lot of danger in this place even if you've got a sword.'
As Reki talks, Langa looks around. The mist is still thick, and there’s no movement apart from Reki's excited hand gestures. Which is why Langa notices immediately when the door to one of the houses opens.
He turns to face it, sword held out defensively in front of him. Reki makes a slightly surprised noise next to him, stumbling back a few steps. There’s no-one else around though: the doorway stands empty, the house beyond it dark and ominous.
And yet.
There’s something about the house that calls to him. Langa takes a step forward before he’s even realised what he’s doing, only notices when he feels a hand on his arm. He jumps at the contact and looks back to Reki.
‘What are you doing?’ Reki asks. ‘Why are you going towards the creepy abandoned house? It's not a good sign when inanimate objects start moving on their own!’
Langa listens to him, then looks back at the house. It’s like the rest of his vision has faded into mist, leaving only the house in focus. Reki’s probably right that it’s a bad idea, but Langa can’t quite shake the feeling...
‘It’s something to do with how I got here,’ he says, and takes a step forward. To his surprise, Reki doesn’t let go of his arm. He just steps forward with him.
'Alright, fine! But if you're going to start exploring all the creepy spots in town you should at least bring along a professional.'
Langa looks up and down the street. Apart from him and Reki, there's no one there.
'I can't see any,' he says. 'So I guess I'll have to go in alone.'
'What? Hey! No, I meant me you dimwit!'
'Oh.'
He looks at Reki again, trying to actually pay attention this time. He can see that Reki is wearing some bits and pieces of armour and carrying a shield. But he doesn’t seem to be armed apart from a basic dagger. And a lot of tools. Langa frowns.
Reki ignores his expression in favour of sighing dramatically. ‘Alright, come on. Let’s go check out the spooky house.’
He sets off in the direction of the door, but Langa grabs him before he can get more than a few steps ahead.
‘I can see in the dark,’ he says. ‘I should go first.’
Reki blinks at him for a few seconds, and then smiles again. 'Sure!' he says, and lets Langa take the lead in through the doorway.
Once they’re inside, the house doesn’t seem quite as oppressively dark as it had from the street. It’s still gloomy though, and the corridor they’re in smells of decay. Langa pulls his shield off his back and holds it in front of him as he inches down the corridor. The walls are lined with faded portraits and old fashioned sets of armour stand guard in the corners.
He’s so focused on anticipating enemies coming from the front that he completely fails to pay attention to where he’s putting his feet. There’s a quiet snck sort of noise, and then a crash as a set of heavy iron bars fall down behind Langa, separating him from Reki. Langa wouldn’t be all that concerned, except that at the same time, one of the sets of armour comes to life. It heads directly towards Langa, swinging its sword around in a wide arc. There’s no room to manoeuvre and even less room to run.
‘Shit!’ Reki mutters, echoing Langa’s sentiments exactly. ‘Hang in there, let me see if I can find the release mechanism.’
It’s not like Langa has much choice. He takes a step forward to get away from the bars so Reki can hopefully get them up, but he doesn’t get further than that before the armour is on him. It brings its sword down in a heavy arc. Langa brings his shield up with both hands, blocking the blow, but the force of the impact still sends a judder through his arms.
He takes a second to collect himself, trying to tune out Reki’s panicked babbling. He hasn’t faced a monster like this before, but he has trained. He’s trained all his life, in fact. He pushes himself forward, swings his own sword.
... The problem with his training, he reflects, is that he's been taught to look for weak points in his enemy's armour. And this thing is entirely armour.
The sword comes down again. Langa isn’t quite fast enough this time and it collides with his arm, metal screeching against the metal of his bracers. His armour means he isn’t bleeding, but the force of the blow is still enough to send pain shooting up his side.
It’s fine. He can push through it.
Rather than trying to stab the armour again, this time Langa tries to shove it with his shield. The metal is firm, but the animating force behind it is weaker than Langa. He knocks the thing back on its arse.
Behind him, Reki yells in triumph. Langa looks back to see the bars coming up, and doesn't hesitate before diving underneath them. He comes up in a roll and Reki grabs his hand, pulling him through a random door at the side of the corridor and slamming it shut.
The two of them lean up against the door, holding it shut as the armour hammers against it. The door is thick though, and the armour eventually gives up. They hear its clanking footsteps retreat across the hallway.
Reki slumps forward into a crouch, laughing breathlessly. ‘Weren’t you checking for traps?’ he asks.
Langa hesitates for a second, embarrassed. ‘I didn’t think of it in a house!’ he replies. ‘Who puts a portcullis in their corridor?’
‘The kind of person who makes a spooky enchanted house in the first place!’ Reki sighs dramatically. ‘Okay, new plan, we turn on a light and I take the lead for now.’
‘Okay.’
Reki pulls a small hammer from his belt and taps on his glove, and it starts to glow. The light doesn’t stretch very far - Langa’s darkvision is a lot more powerful - but it illuminates more of the room they’re in, revealing another door at the far end.
They head towards it without needing to confer. This time, Langa lets Reki take the lead and listen at the door for a few seconds, before he declares it probably safe.
They're a lot more cautious heading through the rest of the house. This very quickly pays off when they manage to duck a poison dart trap, slowly back away from a significant number of spiders, and jump over a pit trap that Reki, curious about the mechanism, triggers with a rock and reveals to be full of nasty looking spikes.
‘Someone doesn't want us here,’ Langa remarks, when they come across the third skeleton of a previous explorer.
‘You think?’ Reki asks. ‘You’re the one who wanted to come here! Still, it's been pretty fun, right?’ He grins and lifts up the skeleton’s hand, making him give Langa a little wave. ‘I think we even made a friend. Look at his grin.’
Langa looks at the skeleton’s grin. It doesn’t look particularly friendly to him, given that it’s a dead body. But Reki seems entertained, so he smiles. Reki grins back.
They’ve explored most of the upper levels by this point. There’s still no clue as to what’s actually going on, just an uneasy feeling in his gut. Langa’s tempted to give up and walk away from the strange tug that he feels in his heart.
But then he sees it.
It’s just a door, tucked away in the corner of a corridor. But Langa knows with absolute certainty that they need to open it. Whatever answers this place holds, they’re behind that door.
‘This way,’ he says, and pushes the door open.
It’s not trapped, fortunately. When opened, it leads to a narrow set of stairs that go far deeper than a normal cellar. The tug in Langa’s heart gets stronger. He feels it in his veins too now: they seem to light up under his skin. He looks down instinctively to see if there’s a difference, but of course he can’t see anything through his armour. Just the gleam of Reki’s little light reflecting off the metal.
By unspoken agreement, Langa goes down first, shield held out in front of him. They go down, down into the darkness, until the corridor opens up into a room lined with alcoves and Langa realises that this isn’t a cellar at all. It’s a crypt.
They walk silently along the corridor underneath the house. The walls are filled with alcoves. Some of them contain coffins, but others are just empty, dark and yawning. Langa shudders. For all his training for battle, he hasn’t learnt to be comfortable with death.
After a while, the corridor opens out into a large room. Langa hesitates on the threshold, squinting out into the darkness. He thinks there might be something on the far wall, but from this far away he can’t make it out.
He steps into the room. There’s a whooshing noise as the torches bracketed on the walls flare to life, filling the room with firelight.
Langa can see, now, that the walls to the room are covered in murals. It seems to be one long, continuous image that wraps around all four walls. There’s a sweeping landscape of mountains and valleys set against a gloomy sky. The valleys are full of monsters - dancing skeletons and giant spiders. On the peak of one of the mountains stands a dark figure, hands outstretched as though he's conducting an orchestra.
As the image stretches around, the mountains give way to an orchard full of apples. Langa sees the same figure as was standing on the mountains - only now he's not alone, he's dancing with someone.
Langa steps forward again, entranced, drawn to the image of the two figures dancing. Even though all the images he's seen so far seem to be human, the dancing figure's ears have a slight point to them, his hair looks pale and shimmery -
He's interrupted by a grinding sound, and looks back, attention immediately drawn away from the painting. The four great sarcophagi that stand in the corners of the room seem to be moving, their heavy stone lids grating as they slide slowly off. Langa looks at Reki and sees his own panicked expression mirrored in his friend's.
'Get back here!' Reki yells. Langa doesn't need to be told twice: he runs to meet him.
The lids fall to the ground with a massive thud. Bony hands reach out of the sarcophagi and Langa feels himself relax a little. They just seem to be skeletons. He can deal with skeletons.
His relief does not last long.
Rather than coming towards Reki and Langa, the skeletons move towards each other instead. Whatever force is holding their bones together seems to shake, and they fall apart - before rejoining into one monstrous entity. Langa feels paralysed, unable to do anything but stare as the bones come together.
Reki is more on it. He shoots a bolt of fire directly at the giant skeleton and hits it squarely in its monstrous chest. Langa can hear the way its bones grind together as it turns, bows down, and lumbers towards them.
The rest of the fight is a little bit of a blur.
Langa's training hasn't prepared him to fight a gigantic composite skeleton monster, but it's a fight nonetheless. There's even a thrill to it, to figuring out the new rhythm of the fight. He chops at the gaps between bones, trying to break their structure. When that doesn't work so well, he resorts to shield bashing the creature, trying to break the bones into dust.
For all that it's large, the creature is slow. Langa is good at ducking and weaving under its flailing limbs. It comes in for another blow and Langa throws himself to the ground, rolling away and up to his knees again, avoiding it entirely.
Reki isn’t quite so lucky: the backswing ends up throwing him across the room.
Langa glances over at him in alarm, but he doesn't have time to go and see if he's okay. The creature is bearing down on him, and he's injured himself from the few strikes he didn't manage to avoid. He takes a second, breathes deeply and forces himself to face the creature head on.
It's looking somewhat worse for wear. There's bones scattered all over the room, little bits and pieces carved off its monstrous form. It lowers its head and starts to charge back towards Langa, who raises his sword at the same time, bringing it down onto the creature's head with all his might.
He feels the bone crumble under his blow. His sword doesn't stop in its arc, not until he's managed to drive it all the way through the cluster of skulls that make up the bone creature's head and all the way down to the ground.
His heart is hammering in his chest, but the skeleton monster lies broken and still on the ground. Langa straightens up carefully, only to be almost knocked over again - this time by Reki.
‘Dude that was incredible! You just chopped that thing in half!’ He doesn’t seem to notice the fact that Langa is covered in bone dust and grime, just grabs him like they’re old friends. Now that the initial shock is over, it’s actually kind of nice to have Reki holding onto him like this, chattering away while Langa tries to recentre himself.
Unfortunately, they don’t get to enjoy the moment for long. A cracking noise echoes through the room, and Langa looks over to see that the plaster on the walls has started to crumble. When he looks up, he can see that cracks have started to appear in the ceiling. He looks back down to Reki. He looks as alarmed as Langa feels.
‘Uh oh.’
Getting out of the house is a lot harder than getting in. Reki is more injured than his initial enthusiastic hug made it seem, and Langa has to half drag, half carry him up the stairs out of the basement. Stairs that are rapidly falling away under their feet. They rush through the house, avoiding bits of falling masonry and ducking under the acrid smoke that has started billowing out of every fireplace.
When they reach the front door, they’re in for another unpleasant surprise. Because things, apparently, can never be simple, what had previously been an open space leading out to the street is now a swirling vortex of knives.
Langa is about to give it his best shot simply charging through and hoping his shield takes the brunt of it, but Reki stops him.
‘Hang on,’ he says. ‘There’s a pattern.’
Langa does as he’s told, watching the knives spin. At first, all he can see is chaos, but after a few seconds he spots it - the movements repeat, and a minute gap appears every few seconds. He looks back to Reki.
‘I’ve got it,’ he says. Reki grins.
‘Alright! Let’s go in three-’
Langa joins him. ‘Two.’
‘One!’
Together, they burst forward. The knives hit Langa’s armour with a clang, and they thud against his shield - but other than that, they both make it through unharmed. At least until Reki steps too hard on his injured leg, and collapses into a heap on the street. Langa drops his shield to run to him.
‘Are you alright?’ he asks, hands hovering over his legs. Reki sits back up.
‘Are you kidding me? That was awesome.’ He holds up a hand, fingers spread, palm out. Langa stares at it for a second, wondering if he’s about to cast a spell. Reki wiggles his fingers. ‘Come on, high five me!’
‘High five you?’
‘Yeah, like, hang on,’ he takes Langa by the wrist, moving his hand up, until their palms are in contact with each other. Then he slaps them together. ‘High five!’
‘Oh, I see. High five!’ Langa replicates the gesture. Reki grins at him again.
‘Well aren’t you just adorable.’
The new voice comes from behind Langa, which means that he sees the blood drain from Reki’s face before he sees the person who spoke. Langa turns around, getting to his feet and grabbing his shield from the ground in one fluid movement.
There’s a man standing in front of him, closer than he expected. Langa stumbles back and almost falls, but the man catches him before he can.
‘Oh dear,’ he says. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you. Here you go.’ He pulls Langa forwards until he’s steady and brushes down his armour. It gives Langa a second to look at him, to take in the mane of blue hair and the aristocratic cut of his jaw. ‘Much better.’
‘Who are you?’ Langa asks, at the same time that Reki shouts ‘Get away from him!’
Langa looks back. Reki’s back on his feet, but he’s not smiling any more. He’s glaring at the man, his hand already glowing hot with a firebolt. The man tuts at him.
‘Now that’s not a very nice way to greet someone. Didn’t your mother ever teach you manners? I’m just here to greet a new visitor to my realm.’ He looks at Langa.
‘To your realm?’ Langa asks. The man smiles widely. There’s something strange about his smile, about the way his lips curl over his teeth. Langa finds himself staring.
‘Of course,’ the man says. He steps back, flourishing his cloak and holding his hands up above his head to indicate the world around them. ‘Welcome to my valley. You know, when I heard that another adventurer had found his way through the mists I thought I’d find another desiccated husk dried up and spat out by that monstrous house. I didn’t dream I’d see someone so promising, so… succulent.’
Langa doesn’t really know how to respond. Reki has no such problems.
‘I said back off! Or I’ll make you.’
The man stops for a second, before turning to Reki for the first time. His smile looks almost indulgent.
‘As if you could,’ he says, then turns back to Langa, lifting up a hand so that the back of his knuckles brush Langa’s cheek. It’s only the lightest of touches, but Langa feels as though he’s been struck by lightning where the man’s hand lingers. ‘And unfortunately, I don’t think that this little morsel could do much either.’ His hand drifts down so that it’s resting on the side of Langa’s neck instead. His index finger rests against Langa’s pulse point, and Langa wonders if the man can feel how fast his heart is beating.
There’s a long moment where Langa can’t move. The man’s hand tightens minutely and Langa thinks: this is it, this is how I die. He stares into the man’s blood-red eyes, waiting.
The moment passes.
The man’s eyes widen a fraction for just a second, then he backs away again, pulling his cloak up over the lower half of his face so that his full expression is concealed. ‘Or… perhaps not today. It’s been a long time since anyone came to this valley who piqued my interest. You’re inexperienced, sure, but you have such potential. It would be a shame to see that spark extinguished so soon.’ He turns away, pacing at a short distance, before turning around with a bright smile, arms outstretched again. ‘Yes, I do think I’ll let you go for now. Your form, your focus… I do look forward to seeing where this goes. Goodbye, little adventurer.’
He winks at Langa and blows him a kiss. Then with a flick of his hand and a crash of thunder, he casts a spell that knocks both Langa and Reki off their feet and into the wall of the house behind them.
Then he dissolves into a cloud of bats that flap off, squeaking, into the gloom. Langa is left staring at the space they just occupied while, beside him, Reki groans.
‘Shit.’