Fight the tentacle monster

Using your {if@ sword = true}sword{elseif mace = true}mace{elseif spear = true}spear{endif} as support, you push yourself to your feet. Countless black tentacles are hovering in the air around you, working out the best position to attack from. Ahead is the giant red eye, wide open and staring directly at you. You ready your weapon, and suddenly the tentacles spring into action.

You do your best to bat away tentacles with your buckler{if@ sword = true} and slice them apart with your sword{elseif mace = true} and smash them with your mace until they go limp{endif}, but you otherwise don’t have much of a plan.{if spear = true} A couple of times, you’re able to find an opening to lunge forward and stab at the eye with your spear.{endif} After about twenty seconds of fierce struggle, though, the tentacle beast manages to grab an arm, then a leg, and then it wrenches your {if@ sword = true}sword{elseif mace = true}mace{elseif spear = true}spear{endif} from your hand and snaps it to pieces right in front of you.

Goodbye rusty {if@ sword = true}sword{elseif mace = true}mace{elseif spear = true}spear{endif}, you think. I hardly knew ye.

Pulling against the tentacles buys you some time before you’re fully restrained, so you put up as much resistance as you can. Both your legs are now tightly wrapped by the monster’s tentacles, as is one arm. You spot a tentacle looking to capture your last remaining appendage, and manage to dodge its strike and grab it instead. Not really thinking about it, you pull as hard as you can and are met with resistance. Are these things only so long, or does he just not want me holding it? Watching the eye, you pull the tentacle as far up and behind you as you can, and suddenly the beast lets loose another of its floor-shaking roars. The roar becomes a terrible shrieking as you see white flames travel down the tentacle in your grasp and spread all the way into the shadows. Curiously, the flame doesn’t spread its light past a certain point, and instead more flames appear on other tentacles and spread to the ends of them. Finally, the giant eye itself is lit ablaze, and it shakes and thrashes about wildly as its tentacles start to disintegrate.

As the red eye begins to sear, it presses forward into the light. As it approaches, it shrinks, until it falls to the ground and rolls over to you as a golf ball sized object engulfed in white flames. The flames scorch it black, and then peter out, allowing you to investigate the remains of the monster. The object is cool to the touch, hard, smooth, and glossy, like a marble. It’s all black, but as you hold it in your hand it lightens to a full white. On one side is a red iris surrounding a black pupil. It dropped a glass eye version of itself? Weird, but I’ll take it, you think. Maybe it’s got some magical uses.

You drop the glass eye in your rucksack and turn to face the object that just saved your life. The white torch burns proudly on the wall. Lia mentioned that this was a part of a popular myth. “The Fulco riddle,” she called it. You have my thanks, Fulco, whoever you are. Looking around, you can tell that this isn’t your Fulco riddle section: there are no scorch marks on the walls, at least none that weren’t put there just now by burning tentacles.

“Where am I?” you say aloud. “Probably Lia or Blythe’s starting point, if I had to guess.”

“That is correct,” says a voice you recognize immediately. “This was my starting location.”