§134 Double Dare I (Patreon)

Princess Mariella — Underground

Mariella woke up in complete darkness. She lay on rough, hard stone. The air was thick and warm. She had a pain behind her eyes, like that time her older half-sisters convinced her to drink too much wine. Somewhere, liquid dripped periodically. The suggestion of water nearby her desperately thirsty, moreso than she had ever been since entering the palace.

Her hands swept around wildly in an attempt to cast off whatever blanket she was tangled in, but there wasn't anything. She learned her hands were bound and heavy with metal. She touched her face: she wasn't wearing a blindfold or a hood.

"Where am I?" Muggy, dusty air scratched at her throat.

"Under the Dimmik Rim," said another voice. It was female, tired. "Or somewhere close."

The voice was familiar. If only she could get a drink of water.

"How did I get here?" Mariella croaked.

"One of the mindless brought you. That's what I call them."

She would never end up here if Eterine were alive. There was one other possibility… "Was she tall, raven-haired, in blue skirts, and a white healer's aide jacket?"

"I was asleep when you got here. They had a light, but they were gone before I got a good look. My apologies."

A shock passed through Mariella's arms. Her muscles clenched in brutal pain, and her fists flew up and hit her in the face. Bones in her arms and hands vibrated. If she hadn't already been on the ground, she would have fallen. The pain lasted for several seconds. She screamed. The pain left her as suddenly as it had come, and she sobbed.

"Shackles of Obstruction. Don't use magic. I've tried."

"I didn't do anything!"

"Then it was your class. Don't try to open a panel or anything. You'll get punished again."

"I didn't do anything," she repeated, but it wasn't true. She had tried to open a panel to check on Eterine's status. "They could have at least given us a light."

"Our host is not overly concerned with our comfort." The disembodied voice giggled as if she'd said something funny. "I have water over here. It smells funny, but it hasn't made me sick so far."

Mariella crawled toward the voice full of weary encouragement. It was much farther than she expected, or maybe her perception was affected by the dark. The cave floor hurt her knees and bound hands. She startled when her hands touched living flesh, another girl's hands, dirty. She had callouses, skillfully smoothed by regular care. The stranger's hands guided hers to where water dripped from above. 

One warm drop. Some seconds later, another. Eventually, another. Each one vanished when it touched her parched tongue. The slow pace was maddening.

Throughout the crawling and drinking, Mariella waited for another punishment. She feared it, but there was nothing she could do to stop it, other than not use magic. There were stories about strong-willed magicians who endured the pain and used their magic anyway. In the stories, they achieved their goals at a high price. Loss of magic. Disfigurement. Death.

"Who are you?" asked her fellow prisoner.

Should she say? Did it matter? They were both prisoner. "You aren't going to believe this. My name is Mariella, Imperial Princess and daughter of Emperor Osmund."

They both laughed. A little desperate. A little wild. It was too absurd.

"You are correct. I can scarcely believe my ears."

"May I ask your name?"

"Me?" asked the voice. "You won't believe this. I am Lindastra Prevost, First Princess of Dimmik."

Silence. One fat drop of water splashed near them. They had met before, at some palace event or other.

"Considering the informality of our situation, may I call you Lindsey?"

"I may allow it, if you permit me to call you Mary."

The girls grasped hands in the dark.

"Two princesses, chained in a dungeon," observed Linsey, "I wonder if our captor knows what he's done."

"We'll be rescued for sure," agreed Mariella.

Mariella had never known such darkness. Complete. Unyielding. Maddening. Her eyes, desperate for stimulation, chased phantoms and imagined circles of light where none existed. Closing them improved the situation slightly. At least then, her eyes knew they weren't supposed to be seeing anything. She had only Lindsey's hands to anchor her, and the slow drips of water they shared.

"I have a small domain of my own, on our border with Estfold," Lindsey explained. "The soil is poor, and it has too many monsters. The mineral wealth was used up ages ago. So, naturally, it's our traditional training ground for the next sovereign. I came down from school for the summer break to conduct the usual oversight. You know how it is."

Mariella didn't know. Until recently, she was focused purely on her Healer class. Any governance knowledge she had was learned in passing, absorbed from the palace's atmosphere and the minimum of instruction her tutors would let her get away with.

"There's been strange monster activity, and people have been disappearing. To be honest, we thought Estfold had found something valuable in the old shafts and was mining it across the border. It wouldn't be the first time. I took a detachment to investigate. Well, you must know what we found."

"Mana beasts that can tame people and monsters. I've seen them, too. So far, we've been unable to restore the tamed people."

"That's unfortunate." Lindsey's hands shook in hers. "Some of my men were taken. Dimmik is proud of its knights, but we're not a populous country. We can't spend them stupidly. Having them turned against us is even worse."

"Don't give up hope just yet. The tamed stop following orders if their tamers are killed, and we've learned how to stabilize them afterward so they don't die from the corruption. Once free, they fall into a deep sleep. Imperial healers are working on reviving them, and there's a chance they'll wake on their own, given enough time. People are working on it."

Linsey's hands released hers and felt around her wrists.

"What are you doing?"

"Looking for the lock. These are anti-magic shackles, right? There has to be a way to open them mechanically."

"We don't have any tools. Wait," Mariella pulled her hands away and searched herself. Her outfit had hidden pockets, magically expanded. She checked every pocket twice.

"Well?"

"Empty. You?"

"Same. If only we could see," said Linsey.

Mariella didn't think about it. She needed light, so she made some. She made sure it was dim and not too close, so as not to blind them after their time in the pitch black. Objects leaped into existence. A young woman about her own age, in tooled leather dyed in vivid Dimmik colors. A small chamber carved from rock. One exit, blocked by a wooden door. A milky-white drop of water fell from above and splatted onto the floor. There was a pale accretion of mineral where the drops landed.

"What did you do?"

At first, Mariella didn't understand what she had done.

Lindsey's eyes were surprised and wide, her face smudged with dirt, her hair lank. In another day, Mariella would look just like her new friend. "You didn't get punished. Why not?"

"I don't know." She stared at the shackles and was confronted with dense rings of characters. "Spellscript," she said wonderingly. "They're keyed to Spellscript." She twisted herself around to look at the manacles from all angles. "And Knexenk, so we can't use skills."

"They must not work against innate magic," explained Linsey.

"Non-systematized," Mariella corrected her. "It can be learned."

"Really? What else can you do? Think you can open these? I don't see a keyhole."

Mariella inspected her restraints again. There was a mechanism, but it was physically sealed inside the shackles, where the bulky hinge would normally be. It had to be moved by a minor telekenesis, a trivial spell for many practitioners, but impossible for someone wearing the restraints. She grinned.

"New question. If we can escape, what's the plan? We're deep underground, surrounded by enemies."

"I'm a fair swordswoman, and I have explorer skills. I can plot our way out here. Can you fight?"

"No. I can heal and enhance. I have some attack magic, but it isn't anything special."

Linsey scooted closer to her, eager. "We'll be coming up on our enemies from behind, and we know to hit the tamers first. They won't expect us to get loose. They're not even guarding the door. How are you on mana?"

Mariella had forgotten about her belt, the one with red mana stones embedded in it. "I'm at half, but they overlooked my reserves. I'm not sure about this. People are probably coming for us."

"True," the Dimmik princess reasoned, "but how many men are you willing to let die when you have your own way out? As a healer, this argument should appeal to you."

"Very much so. What's your real reason?"

"I want to learn what happens when two princesses rescue each other. As far as I know, it has never happened in recorded history. Do you know what the multiple is for original events?"

"No idea." Mariella had to admit the idea had appeal. And, it might save lives. She hadn't studied the rescue-grinding quests available to princesses, but it sounded like Lindsey had.

"Want to find out?" Lindsey held out her shackled hands.

The mechanisms could only be worked by telekenesis, but they were otherwise trivial. Mariella had them both free in moments. Their jail door was held by a simple bar, even easier than the shackles.

The first thing Mariella did after freeing Lindsey was check her class. Eterine's name was missing from her roster, leaving her with an empty minion list. Mariella pushed away the hopeless feeling in her chest. Her attendant wasn't dead, necessarily. If she were enslaved by a mana beast, Knexenk would record the event as if she left service. She didn't have to go back very far in her logs to find it: Eterine had been turned and enslaved. It wasn't a favorable situation, but she was alive.

Her Dimmik counterpart withdrew a sword, three daggers, canteens of water, and travel rations from her inventory.  They dined and talked about their plans. Lindsey spoke glowingly of the hot springs in her domain and fully expected them to rest at her castle when the ordeal was over.

"Maybe we should focus on the quest at hand and save the celebrations for after?"

"I'm just motivating my partner."

They licked their fingers, not at all like self-respecting ladies of any court, and checked their class logs. Each of them was offered the other's A Princess In Need Is A Princess Indeed quest.

"Ready?"

Mariella took a deep breath. The queasiness and anxiety were just jitters, the same symptoms she had in her early days working at the clinics. Once she was busy with the problem instead of thinking about it from afar, she would feel better.

"Let's do it."

They accepted each other's quest.

Original Event: [Double Daring Princesses]. A princess can save herself. Multiple princesses may be rescued in a single event. But never have multiple princesses saved each other. Reach safety before another party renders aid, and receive moderate rewards for both quests. On completion, a 10x Originality multiplier will be added to your rewards.

"Boost, please," grinned Lindsay.

"Coming right up."

Instead of lighting their way normally, which would have attracted every menace in the area, Mariela enchanted parts of their clothing to shine with a light normally invisible to humans, beastkin, and most animals, and then enhanced their vision to see by that peculiar light. Miss Wibbles had not been content for her to master a basic light spell as non-systematized magic, but insisted she “learn something about the subject matter.” The technique colored the world in strange ways, transposing the normally invisible light into colors their eyes could understand. Lindsey pulled a cloak from her inventory that muffled sound.

Mariela badly wanted an inventory skill. It was learnable as innate magic, in theory, but she had many steps to go through first. That, or take a complicated series of field-medic quests that would give her the Emergency Supply Bag skill. Watching the Dimmik princess pull one useful thing after another out of empty air fueled her envy.

The area immediately around their cell was a very rough barracks for enslaved workers. They had thin blankets for bedding, a tiny pool fed by a thin stream of water from above, and boxes of travel rations. It smelled of unwashed bodies. They passed two cells like their own, barred from the outside and empty.

Lindsey led them south, or so she said, choosing the most level turn at each branch.

“Shouldn’t we be going up?”

“Soon,” Lindsey promised. “I guess they carried me a long way.”

She led them along three more turns, one of which was a shaft that ended suddenly. They had to reverse course and try another branch, which unexpectedly began to climb. Their hopes had just begun to rise when they discovered another large chamber. Still shapes lingered in the dark, either sitting or crouched. They looked cleaner and healthier than the miners who attacked Iredale, and most of them were women and children. Their faces were pale, blank shapes in Mariella’s altered light.

She didn’t see the mana beast that attacked Lindsey, not properly. A darkness peeled itself from the cavern's wall, opened its mouth rimmed in a row of jagged white teeth. It wore a cloak, but they could see its face all too well: it could have been a beastkin, if it weren’t for the pale scales and a mouth wide enough to swallow a turkey whole. 

Linsdey thrust her sword through its eye, causing the hood to fall back and reveal stubby ears. Mariela thought it was dead. Surely it had to be with a foot of good steel run through its brain, but it surprised them both.

The beast impaled itself further on the sword to grab a fistful of the Dimmik princess’s hair, but she retreated while twisting her weapon viciously. Mariela barely got out of the way in time for her to yank her sword out and bring the blade down over the top of its head, where it cleaved halfway down to its neck and stuck. It reached for Lindsey again. She kicked the tamer in his chest (assuming it was a he, or had any gender at all), pushing him back and regaining her sword.

“Mana beasts,” she said through gritted teeth. “I hate these things.”

The beast's arms flailed and threw a sharp spine at Lindsey, but the blind throw went wide. The many people in the cavern stirred. They began to stand and turn around as if looking for something in the dark.

The beast’s core was easy to spot for someone who had honed their mana sense at Miss Wibble’s

metaphorical knee. Mariella put a Spear of Light through its belly, right at the nexus where its mana stone lived. The cloak collapsed, half-empty, with a sound of bones clacking against stone. Its flesh had vanished immediately upon death, but the bone would take longer to dissipate.

Mariella held the magic ready in case she needed it again, but the monster remains didn’t so much as twitch.

Some of the people in the cavern sat down, like dogs waiting for their masters. Others began to mill around, arms spread wide, like the game of blind man that kids in her neighborhood used to play.

She was just starting to congratulate herself on using the darkness to their advantage when all the slaves turned toward her and Lindsey. They didn’t need to see if they all rushed in the same direction.