Chapter 45. Mementos

  Bruno’s face contorted in a silent scream. He yanked on his arm to no avail. A low groan escaped him, the sound building in volume to a shout, a roar, a howl of fury.

  “Bruno! Bruno what happened?!” Jeremiah hobbled over to him, but he had no idea what to do.

  “Something just went through my arm!” Bruno shouted, “It was the primary bolt, it shouldn’t have done that! Why did it do that?!” Bruno yanked again and screamed.

  “Because that’s what it was designed to do. Cassidy wants to be remembered, he wants you to leave something behind,” said Jeremiah.

  “Oh, no no no,” Bruno started to shake, “oh come on, no. I can’t lose an arm. I can’t lose an arm.”

  “Can you get yourself out?” said Jeremiah.

  “Yeah, yeah, I can do that,” said Bruno. With his free hand Bruno began sliding a paper thin shim between his arm and the hole. He took deep breaths and closed his eyes, probing with the shiv.

  “ Bruno will get out of this ,” he thought. “ He’ll just pop the trap open and free himself. Any second now .”

  Bruno began tugging on his arm, closing his eyes and attempting to maneuver something inside the hole that Jeremiah couldn’t see.

  Jeremiah was surprised to hear Thurok’s voice come to the forefront of his mind, “This is not a test. This is a debt to be paid. You must understand sacrifice.”

  “The bolt feels loose,” Bruno mumbled, wincing as he pulled, “like it’s not attached to anything.”

  “It might not be,” suggested Jeremiah.

  “What’s the point of that? Then it’d just be stuck. Maybe it broke, hang on…”

  “Bruno, I think it might be working as intended,” said Jeremiah softly. He put a hand on Bruno’s shoulder.

  Bruno suddenly swung his free hand at Jeremiah in an awkward attack. It glanced off Jeremiah’s head as he ducked out of the way, falling to the ground when he tried to stand on his broken foot.

  “You soonuva bitch!” Bruno screamed at him, “This is your fault! One skeleton would have been enough! You selfish bastard!” Bruno kicked at him, and Jeremiah scrambled away, just out of his reach.

  “All that power and you’re worried about you! You’ll save your own skin time and time again but when it’s not you on the line you’re suddenly trying to be a better person!? Bullshit Jay! You think it’s some noble deed that you won’t use necromancy? Because you’re not responsible enough!? Because you might screw up? We keep swords from children because they’re not responsible Jay! You’re a man! A sorry excuse of a coward of a man!”

  Bruno raged and yanked on his arm so hard Jeremiah thought it would tear free. But he was transfixed, no one had ever spoken to him about his decision like that.

  “Bruno, I’m doing the right thing. I-”

  “Oh you piece of shit, you absolute,” Bruno kicked at him again, “You like the little pats on the head you get? You like that everyone congratulates you for being weak? That’s what they’re doing Jay! You’re telling them you’re too weak to handle it, and they pat you on the head and call you a good boy for being honest with yourself! You’re treated like a damn child and you love it! Because it’s safe! Because it’s easy!” Bruno’s face was a mask of fury and disgust. “You’re pathetic Jay! You really are pathetic!”

  Bruno kept screaming. “You think you’re so noble, giving up your power? You’re weak! You try to hide it behind your moral arguments, but you’re just a frightened little boy!”

  His fervor echoed around the chamber. Jeremiah stared, stunned into silence.

  “It’s wasted on you.” Bruno’s voice was low now, venomous. Jeremiah was afraid to listen. “All that power, wasted on someone too scared to use it. You could do so much more, could be so much more than you are.”

  Bruno rested his head against the door, his breathing ragged. Jeremiah, in contrast, held his breath. He was terrified Bruno would start up again.

  “I’m sorry,” said Jeremiah, and in that moment he was. In that moment, all of his moral questions and debates and fear fell away, and he saw himself exactly as Bruno had described—too overwhelmed and too afraid to wield the power he’d once craved. Or, more accurately, too afraid of the responsibility it demanded. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  Bruno remained motionless. His breathing slowed, though still pulled through clenched teeth. Blood seeped from the hole, pooling on the floor blow.

  “Get a rope,” Bruno said again, “and make some heat. I’m going to need you to cauterize…” he swallowed, “something.”

  Jeremiah started on the heating surface first, etching a simple Heat rune into an enchanting plate. His hands moved with practiced efficiency, even though the rest of him was trembling. He charged the plate, bringing it to blue-hot before the enchantment broke, and set it by Bruno’s feet.

  He tied the first rope around Bruno’s trapped arm, as close as possible to the door. The rope cut into his forearm, and Bruno hissed in pain as Jeremiah winched the windlass as tight as he could. He added the second rope around Bruno’s upper arm, hoping to reduce the blood flow as much as possible.

  “You ready?” asked Bruno, nodding toward the sword.

  “Are you?” asked Jeremiah.

  “No,” said Bruno.

  Jeremiah picked up the sword.

  “Okay, just…try to get as much on this side of the door as you can okay?” said Bruno. He grabbed a few scraps of his ruined leather armor and put them between his teeth.

  “Okay, here we go,” said Jeremiah, raising the sword over his head with two hands. It felt so strange; the sword, the situation, what he was about to do.

  “Do it!” shouted Bruno.

  “You ready!?” Jeremiah shouted back.

  “Do it!”

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Bruno screamed. Jeremiah screamed. Jeremiah brought the sword down. The cut wasn’t perfect, but the enchantment did enough of the work to get the job done in a single swing.

  Bruno was free. Bruno dropped and slammed the stump of his arm onto the burning hot metal plate at his feet. Jeremiah jumped down onto him and helped press the stump into the burning metal. Bruno just kept screaming. The hiss of boiling blood and stink of cooking flesh filled Jeremiah’s senses with the white cloud of steam that rose up.

  “Hold it! Hold it!” Jeremiah shouted at Bruno. He didn’t know much about burning wounds shut, but he knew you had to keep it there till the job was done.

  Bruno suddenly went limp in his arms, and Jeremiah struggled to hold him up. Eventually, Jeremiah shoved Bruno off. No further parts of Bruno’s arm came off, save for a blackened circle of blood on the plate.

  Jeremiah wrapped the medical bandages around as much of Bruno’s arm as he could. He was acting on instinct, his mind blank, he was only observing his hands at work. He wrapped and wrapped until there were no bandages left. Bruno remained unconscious, or dead.

  “Please don’t be dead,” thought Jeremiah when he was finished. He fell backwards, laying on the floor of the dungeon, exhaustion suddenly overwhelming him. He felt dizzy, he felt sick. He had hacked apart his friend's arm like an amateur butcher. He closed his eyes. It wasn’t sleep taking him, it was something else. Some part of him that just wanted everything to stop.

  “You die?” Bruno’s voice woke Jeremiah out of whatever stupor he had been in.

  “Huh? Bruno? You okay?” Jeremiah tried to sit up, but just couldn’t bring himself to do it, he felt too weak.

  “Lost an arm and burned it shut. Nah, I’m not okay. You okay?” said Bruno. He was laying where Jeremiah had left him.

  “Cut my friend’s arm off and…coming to terms with the fact that I might be a coward,” said Jeremiah, “also Allison might be dead, and my foot broke in half.”

  “Big day,” said Bruno.

  “Big day,” confirmed Jeremiah.

  They lay like that for a while longer, basking in their various pains.

  “I can still feel my arm,” said Bruno.

  “Oh yeah?” said Jeremiah.

  “Yeah. Hurts.” said Bruno.

  More quiet suffering.

  “Want to see the fabled treasure?” asked Jeremiah.

  “Yeah, yeah I do,” said Bruno. They finally managed to sit up together, Jeremiah couldn’t help but look at Bruno’s red stained stump. Bruno was doing the same.

  “Can a potion fix this?” asked Bruno.

  “No, can’t regrow pieces,” said Jeremiah, “but maybe we can get your arm out of there.”

  Looking at the hole, Jeremiah could see the bloody stump of Bruno’s arm sticking out, the tiny white circles of bone just barely visible. He took the spear and touched the severed arm. As soon as he did, a metal plate snapped down, covering the hole. There was a mechanical chunk sound from inside the door, and a dull grinding noise.

  “I think the door ate your arm,” said Jeremiah.

  “Yeah, that makes sense. Let’s just get out of here.”

  The vault door opened now without resistance, sliding smoothly along a track. The treasure room within could have contained a small house, but it was empty save for a black marble writing desk in the very center.

  Atop the desk were two stacks of papers and a large orange crystal, streaked with blue. As they approached, the colors of the crystal swirled and twisted.

  Jeremiah hadn’t expected Cassidy’s fabled treasure to be a pile of gold and jewels—he hadn’t known what to expect, at this point—but a pile of paperwork was still a surprise. He picked up a stack and leafed through it.

  “These are all legal documents…I’m seeing land deeds, contractual agreements for farming subsidies, credit for agricultural companies. Business licenses and identification papers, too.”

  “It's a new life,” said Bruno, looking through his own stack. “A real way out. There’s a new identity, a new purpose—everything the enterprising street urchin could need, all prepped in advance. True freedom in another life.”

  Jeremiah thumbed through the sheets, wondering at the life-changing power they contained. A thought occurred to him. “I wonder if anyone else ever made it this far?”

  “Could be, right?” said Bruno. “The treasure is that you get to leave your old life behind. Anyone could just disappear as though they’d died, and the legend of the Gilded Vault lives on. I don’t think there’s any way to know for sure.”

  “Not us, though,” said Jeremiah. “The treasure’s just a means to an end for me. Besides,” he turned to the crystal, “that’s the dungeon core. It’s the most interesting thing here.”

  The tiny motes of blue pulsed at Jeremiah’s words.

  “Valuable?” asked Bruno.

  “No idea,” said Jeremiah. The crystal was the size of his palm, but when he moved to pick it up, he found it stuck fast. Further inspection revealed it was built into the marble of the desk.

  “Let’s just smash it,” said Bruno. He gestured the motion with his missing hand, and grimaced.

  Jeremiah had a different idea. With his enchanting tools, he etched the runes Gently Decay into the marble surface around the crystal. Once charged, he began to rub the marble, and the affected section of the massive desk eroded under his hands, revealing more and more of the crystal.

  The dungeon core was larger than it had seemed, plunging below the surface of the desk. Jeremiah needed both hands to lift it from its place, and it rang discordantly when he did, intoning like a warped bell. The colors swirled in a frenzied tempest.

  “I think it’s panicking,” said Jeremiah, holding the dungeon core up to torchlight to watch the colors race.

  “Good. I’m still deciding on whether I’d rather break it.” Bruno’s missing hand reached for the hilt of his sword.

  “Let's keep it for now. But if either of us so much as stumbles on our way out,” he raised his voice to speak to the crystal directly, “we bust it on the nearest rock.”

  They gathered the paperwork bundles. It felt like a light haul for besting a dungeon of legend, but Jeremiah reminded himself that words on a page could be more valuable than any monetary prize—he knew that better than most. He suspected Monty would agree.

  “Exit’s this way,” said Bruno. He pulled a lever that had been camouflaged to match the stone wall and revealed a cramped hallway. “Wouldn’t want to be seen leaving, that’d defeat the whole purpose.”

  The tunnel felt interminable on Jeremiah’s mangled foot. They emerged well outside the city in a patch of arid and dusty land that looked like it had never seen a plant. Jeremiah’s face was already swollen into an unrecognizable mess, so Bruno did not require they take any extreme measures to return to the safe house.

  Unfortunately, the non-extreme measures were still extensive, and by the time they made their way back to the apartment, Jeremiah was on the verge of collapse. As soon as they arrived, Bruno disappeared into the bedroom. Jeremiah thought it tactful to allow him space. He set the Giant’s Bag on the floor and lay down beside it, letting anxiety and exhaustion quarrel over whether or not he should sleep.

  A rustling sound jerked him out of an uneasy slumber. The Giant’s bag was opening.

  At once, Jeremiah was fully awake, on his feet—well, foot—and helping Delilah as she crawled out, hand over hand, to collapse on the floor. She was panting, pale, and sweaty despite having stripped down to her smallclothes. Her hands were red and raw.

  “Alive,” she gasped in answer to Jeremiah’s unspoken question. “She's alive. I don't know how. I swear, nothing can kill that woman. She's the toughest thing I've ever seen.”

  The fear gripping Jeremiah’s heart released and he sank to the floor. “I can’t…Thank you, Delilah. Thank you.” The words felt like empty offerings to the spent husk of a woman before him, but they were all he had.

  “Welcome.” Delilah spoke to the ceiling, eyes half-lidded. “How’d you guys fare? Get the treasure?”

  “We got the treasure,” said Jeremiah. “But we had to cut off Bruno’s hand. It’s okay now, though, we burned it shut.”

  Without looking away from the ceiling, Delilah closed her eyes and began to cry.