Rune Seeker

“Pardon?” Hiral asked, Odi’s words both unbelievable and… not.

“You tried to warn me,” Odi said with a sigh, dust puffing out from between his yellowed teeth. “Urged me to rethink my emperor’s wishes… and I ignored those warnings.”

“You said you needed the Urn to save your people from this,” Wule said. “To cure being undead.”

Odi’s head tilted slightly to the side as he looked at Wule.

“I never said that,” Odi said with a shake of his head.

“You did…” Seena started, but then stopped. “No, you said you needed it to save your people. End sentence. But, if not from this undead curse, what did you need to save your people from?”

“From the squids,” Odi said, and the party first looked at each other, then back at Odi.

“The what now?” Yanily finally asked.

Odi’s head tilted to the other side this time. “You are a… strange group,” the Lizardman said. “Hundreds of years have passed since we last met, and you look exactly the same as that fateful day in the necropolis. And now you act as if you don’t know of the menace that almost wiped our people out… before we did it to ourselves.” He added the last part quietly.

“Humor us,” Seena said. “Who are the squids or whatever you called them? We’re not anywhere near water.”

“The Transcephalomorphs,” Odi said, as if that explained everything.

“That didn’t help,” Yanily said flatly.

“The… the monsters in the rain. The ones hunting and killing every living thing on the planet. The things that’ve driven the humans to the edge of extinction… though they deserve this, since it’s their fault. And the Troblins… they actually really deserved it, so I’m honestly kind of happy about that one…” Odi trailed off.

“You’re talking about the Enemy?” Hiral asked.

“The human name for them? Well, whatever. Yes. Them.” Odi finished by pointing at Hiral.

Hiral tried to process all of what Odi had just said, and it was Nivian who asked the next question.

“Why did you call them squids?” the tank asked.

“What else would you call something that looks like that? That swims through the rain like water? All narrow and tentacley.” He wiggled his undead fingers.

“And the humans, we…” Hiral stopped, realizing Odi must still see them as Lizardmen. “They… they’re the ones who what? What do they have to do with the squids?”

“The ones they call the Fallen, in their greed, opened the door that brought the squids to our world,” Odi said. “We didn’t even realize what they’d done until after they came to the Forge of Ur’Thul, or we never would’ve agreed to helping them. By the time we found out… it was too late for us. For anyone. Even the humans’ own grand plan to create a new magic to fight the squids must’ve failed, because they’re long gone.”

“Long gone? All dead?” Wule asked.

“Yes,” Odi said. “Or so far down in one of their underground cities they might as well be in their own crypts. Though, I guess I’m not one to talk.” Odi looked at his hands and let out a pitiful chuckle.

“How did you think the Urn would save your people?” Hiral asked. “This… this can’t have been your plan,” he added, sheathing his RHC and gesturing to Odi’s… condition.

“The Urn of Ur’Thul was a connection to our ancestors,” Odi said. “A spiritual bridge to their knowledge and power, or so we believed. Like you saw in the Forge, we were able to harness the Urn’s gifts to increase our people’s strength through skills and abilities. We thought we could do that on a larger scale.

“Why did it only have to be the people who passed the trial? Why did entry have to be limited to a few at a time? Why were there those… roadblocks to greater strength?” Odi shrugged, half-turning to look beyond the buildings to the castle towering above in the night. “When the true threat of the squids emerged, the few we sent through the trials within the Forge weren’t enough. The forces we’d used to free ourselves from the Troblin overlords fell like wheat before the scythe to the squids. By the time the atmospheric alterations became apparent, we’d already lost more than a third of our population.

“Just a few short years, and millions dead. After the atmospheric alterations, it only got worse.” The sadness in Odi’s voice was clear, like it’d all just happened.

“Atmospheric alterations?” Seeyela asked.

“The clouds. The rain…” Hiral said. “It’s not natural, is it?”

“Of course not,” Odi said, but there wasn’t any malice in his voice. “The squids used their strange magic to alter the weather of the entire planet.”

“To hide from the sun?” Nivian asked.

Odi looked again at the party like he was surprised they didn’t know any of this. But the fact he was answering meant something was different than with the normal dungeons, even the Lost ones.

This really may not be a dungeon. This could all be… terribly real. And if it is, does that mean we really helped make this happen with what we did in the last two dungeons?

“Like I said, humor us,” Seena said.

“The… the squids don’t fear the sun,” Odi explained. “If anything, they need it just as much as we do. Their magic is also powered by solar energy.”

“They need the rain,” Wule said. “Right?”

“Correct,” Odi said. “Like their namesakes in the oceans, they dry out quickly without the rain. The monsters have no real weakness… other than that. But, at this point, they’ve covered the entire world in rain, so unless you hide underground like the humans tried to, nowhere is safe.”

“Back to my original question, then,” Seena said. “You thought the Urn would let you, I don’t know, power up your entire population all at once?”

“Yes, exactly,” Odi said. “As things got worse and worse—as we realized the rain would eventually cover the whole world… It hadn’t at that point—the emperor charged my research team with learning the secrets of the Forge, and more specifically, the Urn. He… and we, I guess… believed it to be our salvation. An artifact that had already altered the course of our history once. We knew it could do it again. Save us from the squids.

“And it did, just not as we expected it to,” Odi said with another dark chuckle.

“What went wrong?” Hiral prompted.

“Under the emperor’s orders—no, I need to stop laying all the blame at his feet. We went along with the plan willingly. I can’t lie to myself after all these years. Especially not faced with seeing you again. You, who know the truth of what happened. Of how complicit I was.”

“Nobody is blaming you here, Odi,” Hiral said, taking a tentative step towards the undead Lizardman.

“I am,” Odi said. “And I deserve it.”

“Then we all do,” Nivian said. “Did we really do all this?”

“We did,” Odi said.

The weight of the words settled heavy on the party’s shoulders. It was one thing to rampage through a dungeon of creatures that weren’t real. To complete quests that didn’t change anything other than their own power. But, this? Had their actions really doomed an entire people to an eternity of being undead?

How is that even possible? No, that’s not the important thing now. Whether it’s real or not—whether we did this or not—can we fix it?

“Go on with your story, please, Odi,” Seena said. “And, really, we aren’t blaming you. If we’re here, now, with you… then, well, that tells me we can do something about it.”

Odi lifted his head to look at Seena, those same blue flames in his eyes and luminescent tears running down his face. Then he nodded. “Yes, it must be fate that you’re here again, after all these years. It must be… I need it to be.” His voice was just a little bit stronger now.

“So, research,” Seena said. “What happened after that?”

“We… we searched everywhere we could. Dug up every dusty page and record, but there was so little on it. Like I said back in the necropolis, it was as if the Ancestor had purposely hidden any information on the Urn. Now, after everything I’ve seen, I believe that to be exactly the case. She knew how dangerous the Urn could be… would be… if released from the Forge.”

“Do you think she used undead to defeat the Troblins?” Hiral asked.

Odi nodded once. “I do, though I didn’t originally. When we finally pieced together enough of the story, we saw mention of spirits and dead forefathers assisting the Ancestor in the battle. Of the unkillable army she led—and how it vanished after the great victory.

“We’d assumed it was just a figurative reference to the way the Urn taught skills and abilities. That she’d led people like you, who’d passed the trial. Now, I suspect it was very literal. She raised an army of undead and used them to crush the Troblins. After that, she found a way to destroy the undead, seal the Urn, and bury any evidence that could lead back to what had really happened. Probably to prevent anyone from getting greedy for that kind of power.”

“But you found evidence,” Hiral said. “Traced her path back to the necropolis, as well as found a way to unseal the Urn, right?”

“We did, though it took years, and millions more of our people died to the squids in the process,” Odi said.

“Then… who is Ur’Thul?” Seena asked, looking at Li’l Ur floating beside her shoulder.

“I was the first!” Li’l Ur said, rising higher into the air and throwing his arms out wide. “The progenitor of those who came after me. Placed on his world by… by… by the ones who placed… me… on this world…” He trailed off, settling back down at Seena’s side. “What was I saying?” he asked her quietly.

“You were going to tell us why you’re undead,” Seena said.

“Oh, because life is too short, even for one of my kind,” Li’l Ur said matter-of-factly. “With my vast knowledge and limitless power, it was quite simple, really.”

“Then how’d you end up in a pot?” Yanily asked.

“It was an urn,” Li’l Ur snapped at the spearman. “And to answer your question… I have no idea.”

“Okay, back on topic, everybody,” Seena said. They probably wouldn’t get much more out of the amnesiac mini-lich. “After you got the Urn from the necropolis, what happened next?” she asked Odi.

“The ritual in the necropolis removed the shackles that’d been placed on the Urn from its time in the Forge,” Odi said. “We thought that was key to accessing its full power, but really, all it did was release the full intent of what had been trapped inside. To be honest, I don’t know if the Ancestor found the Urn and harnessed its power, or if she was more directly responsible in its creation.”

“You think the Ancestor defeated Ur’Thul and trapped it within the Urn?” Hiral asked.

“Preposterous!” Li’l Ur said. “Only a fellow progenitor would have the power to do that. And the only one who knew of my experiments was my ex-wife. She… she… Oh, shit.”

“Language,” Seena said, scolding the lich. “It doesn’t really change anything, though. Doesn’t matter how Ur’Thul got into the Urn. Did it get back out?”

“Yes,” Odi said. “And not like the remnant you battled back in the necropolis. Once we returned the Urn to the city here, the lich’s full power seeped out over days and weeks, infecting the one closest to it.”

“You?” Hiral asked, but something already told him that wasn’t right.

“No,” Odi said, “not me. The emperor is now the Arch-Lich, Ur’Thul.”

Thunder and lightning chose that moment to crash overhead.