Selected Scenes from the Ecologies of the Labyrinth

At first, he thinks he is mistaken. Then he merely hopes he is mistaken. But no, his head is definitely wet.

Someone has poured wine into the cracks and crevices of the floor above. The wine is trickling down upon his immobile form.

Why ... why would the goblins do that? Of all things, why would they pour wine on him? This indignity is getting out of hand.

Anthar-Kaladon continues intoning his next teleportation spell. Oh, let it take him somewhere useful this time!

VIII

Lunch long past, the fighting moves on. Blood stains the floors and spatters the walls, too much blood. Many ordinary people-volumes of blood. But deep-delving adventurers are far from ordinary. They have spells to sustain themselves, and restorative lineaments, and every manner of healing concoction and decoction and salve. Every time a cruel spider-fang pierces mail, they drink potions, and every time a rot-rimed skeletal hand tears flesh, they drink potions, and every time an ancient trap drives spikes or flames or scything blades into them, they drink potions, and they laugh, and their zest for danger burns as hot as ever and they smash the empty vials of their life-preserving substances on the stone floor behind them. Leaving a trail of blood and bodies and broken glass, they move the battle as drunks might move a party once a particular tavern has been drained of good kegs.

Behind them come the gleaners, of course. But before the gleaners appear, there is the softest whisper of tiny bodies sliding slickly across the stones.

Pharmagast snails are little larger than a human fingernail, shell and all, and they are not slow. In a place like this, relaxation ends family lines. Pharmagasts don’t think that abstractly, of course, nor can they reflect on what time and necessity have done to their glistening lavender forms, which is equip them to survive on the dregs of the alchemical substances that dungeon adventurers litter their surroundings with. Eyestalks nervously swiveling, mouths eagerly pulsing, the pharmagasts climb inside busted phials and suck residues from glass, just as they drain the last thin whiffs of magic from wax stoppers, corks, clay shards, and discarded leather pouches. By the time the footsteps of the approaching gleaners shake the floors, the pharmagasts have vanished back to their crevices, leaving only a faint and fading phosphorescence in their slime trails to mark their revitalization.

In addition to the short-lived visual phenomena that follow a successful feeding, the slime has one other unique property, rarely noted by larger entities. As it dries and flakes away, it becomes just one more invisible powder in a veritable library of dusts, but this powder is particularly nourishing to certain rare kinds of fungi.

IX

“Deliver them to HELL!” yells Akayla Sethrys, brandishing her sword at some manner of crouching thing, some denizen of darkness, some nameless and unidentifiable monstrosity. To be fair, it’s probably quite identifiable, but this is their twenty-sixth room for the day and they’re having far too much fun to pay scholarly attention. Felix prays fervently for the power to sustain them, Gorandal laughs as they pour a healing potion directly into a fresh hole in their neck, and Morladi blazes magical wrath as the blood of other creatures slowly dries brown on her former best set of robes.

Sethrys stands in the ruin of another shattered door, unaware of the faint gray stain threading the warped and rotted grain of the ancient wood, unable to even be aware of the faint puffs of spores drifting up from the soles of her own boots, the underside of her adventuring pack, and the soiled hem of her long leather coat. The organism responsible, which is actually a tight-knit colony of highly specialized organisms, has been with her for some time (most relevantly in her throat and lungs and spine, and in the throats and lungs and spines of her closest friends). Each day in the warm months of the year, Sethrys and her little company have woken up with a fervent eagerness to head back to the low, dark places of the earth, where fortune and glory await, as well as the comfort of low ceilings and moist earth and limited sunlight. These once meant very little to them, emotionally speaking, but have of late begun to seem like markers of home. None of them feel quite so good as they do when they’re on their way, armed and armored, to investigate some new pit full of danger. Never do they seem to have as much furious energy as they do when they’re deep in the dark.