Strange Similarities.

In a strange way, attacking the keep of Dornwich felt a lot like raiding dungeons in video games to John. Aside from how it made his stomach turn every time he had to fight an enemy, there were so many similarities to the fight that he couldn’t even list them all. The most prominent things he noticed were how the Elves worked. It made sense when he thought about how their minds were connected and how the magic might have functioned, but the similarities were eerie. Anytime he or one of his allies were noticed, it was like some kind of magic alarm went off throughout the city. Every warrior in and out of the keep seemed to know his exact location when an Elf laid eyes on him, and if he didn’t manage to go completely unnoticed, then it meant he could hear people banging on the walls as he moved, screaming at him to surrender and leave. If it had just been a video game, he would have been fine… but it made him shiver whenever he noticed that someone seemed to have a voice similar to that of his mother’s… or Michel’s.

The second similarity he noticed were the waves of enemies. When they were noticed traveling through the halls, they were noticed by everyone in the area. Every zombie, every elemental, every Elf within range immediately took to their duties when they realized he was near and charged after him. Thankfully, everyone he encountered seemed to be of a lower level than he was. When he sent the majority of Kennedy’s armed forces to the gates, the Elves seemed to respond in kind. Everyone and everything that he met came from the dregs of Dornwich’s military ****, like maids, slaves, or newly spawned beacons. Strangely, despite the fact that there were so many people in the city, there weren’t many rooms devoted to decoration that John could find. Trophy rooms and galleries didn’t exist in the heart of Dornwich. Instead, those pockets of space were devoted to the various workshops and laboratories that the mages of the city needed. Rooms full of dull amethyst rocks, sapphire chunks, and tables littered with alchemy sets filled most of the spaces that John found. On a rare occasion, he spotted a space for living quarters or two, but he and the others tried to avoid those to stop more enemies from converging in on them.

Even in the case of a servant’s quarters, however, John noticed that each one seemed to have tables set up that were littered with various alembics, mortars, and the corresponding pestles. Journals for each elf were left strewn about, half-open and forgotten about until the time came for their studies to resume, and the quarters stunk distinctly of rotten eggs and other types of chemicals when John passed by. The rooms less focused on alchemy had to be the worst though. When John found the first room focused on necromancy, he nearly unleashed whatever food was left in his stomach all over the stone floor. Somehow, it didn’t smell like blood, despite the fact that every surface in the room seemed to be spattered with it in some way.

Instead, when John came across the rooms they left open for dark magic, the scent of rot filled his nose. The dark, musty tunnel he had entered the castle from seemed like it would have been nirvana compared to the smoke he found filling his lungs when he made his way to the throne room, and John made a note in the back of his mind to outlaw any kind of corpse debasement if he managed to take the city. He could have been a happy man if he never had to acknowledge the scent of burning skin ever again.

Thankfully, the throne room wasn’t hard to find. When John, Urga, Kennedy, and Ms. Lask finally came across it, there were only a few of their soldiers left traveling the halls with them. The castle shook and rumbled every few seconds by the time they reached the floor with the throne room on it, but the Gamer hardly noticed. His attention was pulled to the ground and walls around him, to the way the stone had been split and cracked open more and more as he got closer to the throne room. He wasn’t the only one.

The way the rock had been parted drew everyone’s gaze to the floor and the cracks that seemed to glow from something deeper in the earth, everyone but Urga’s. The Orcess was the only one who didn’t notice the way the cracks in the ground pulsed with a sickly purple light. At first, there were only a few cracks to be found. The other noticed nothing more than the occasional glowing vein of light in the ground that pointed them down specific hallways and through various rooms until those veins met up with more cracks and more light. The splits in the ground converged and continued on in wider paths, but the cracks never seemed to get wider than a drinking straw. When they got really close, more and more of them appeared until the ground was littered with purple light. It became impossible to traverse ahead without stepping on the purple light as they rounded one last corner and stepped into what might have been the largest room that John had ever entered.

From the front entrance all the way over to the back wall opposite of where John stood, the room seemed to be as big as an oversized airplane hangar. It looked like it dwarfed entire football fields and had more balconies along its walls than any opera house that John had ever seen. Thick, titanic, grand drapes were bound and bunched up between each and every balcony, ready to be untied to fall loose and hide the walls within a moment’s notice. The drapes might have even worked if they had been in a better condition, but like everything else in Dornwich, they too were decaying and full of holes. Most of the drapes barely reached the ground, but each one stretched all the way up to the ceiling nearly a hundred feet above them. Arches and pillars stretched out from the earth and the walls all around them to try and help bear the load of such a tremendous room, but they didn’t reach all the way to the top. Most of them just went high enough to get within a couple of dozen feet and then stopped abruptly. Large, white crystals lit up the ceiling ahead and hummed ever so faintly as some kind of magic kept the roof from falling in… but whatever reason the ceiling had been lit up for had long since faded away. The faintest traces of paint and clay could be made out around the edges of the roof above but left no discernable design.

For the most part, there was no furniture in the room, not even in the balconies. There were many other doors for entering the throne hall, especially up in the balconies, but they all remained closed and only visible at the highest levels of the room because of the glowing cracks that slipped out from beneath and around each entrance and fed down to the purple web of light on the throne hall’s floor. Light that led up and around the dusty marble walkway in the center of the room and all the way over to the heart of Dornwich, the throne of the Sapphire city.

Sapphire was what it was made out of too, perhaps entirely at first, but the generations of decay and corruption in the city had long since marred Dornwich’s mighty throne. Where once there had been a blue and crystal throne cut from magic and by the finest artisans available, now there was only a dark and dusty seat. The articulate runes and designs carved in the side of each surface had long since faded away and the sculpture of a dragon’s head at the top of the throne’s back had since been broken and was now disfigured. The sapphire head now had a horn missing from the top of its jagged mane where there had once been two sitting prominently, and lines of purple light had grown up into the sides of the sculpture’s head and dashed through the one eye that remained on it. The armrests of the seat suffered the most from time’s decay. Whatever design had once been cut into place on them for a ruler to rest upon was now missing, and only two handholds of jagged, glowing, purple rock remained. The seat was empty and, judging by the layers of dust covering it, probably had been for some time…

… but the room wasn’t.

When John and the others completely stepped over the boundary into the room, they were met by the two warriors who had been left behind to guard it. A man and a woman, the first was armed with a black metal spear while the latter wielded a staff with a large purple crystal on the top of it. The room was so poorly lit that John wouldn’t have even noticed them at first without the help of the glowing cracks in the ground that provided him with an outline of two pairs of bare, dark-skinned feet that came rushing at him.