After leaving Rachana’s suite with the talisman Amondo went to his suite where his squire was waiting with the castle’s collection of books concerning dungeons in general and specifically the Membe one. After dismissing him for the night he spent a few hours going over the books before going to bed.
In the morning after arms practice with his squire and the other knights currently residing at the castle, he visited his sister in law. Finding no change in her condition and after some further research he headed off to Membe dungeon with his squire.
It was located a mile outside the village and it could only be accessed via a single entrance located on the western side of a large artificial earthen mound that unexpectedly rose majestically from the rocky ground that surrounded it. An abandoned shack guarded the entrance and Amondo and his squire hitched their horses round the back of it. He had his squire guard the entrance from the shack while he went inside by himself.
Once he entered the side of the mound, he was faced with a sloping ramp that extended down to the first of the three underground levels that made up the dungeon. Once he reached the end of the ramp, he was presented with two paths. To the right was a smallish maze and to the left a mysterious solid door made from an unknown metal that was barred from the inside.
To enter the door, you first had to make your way to the centre of the maze, killing anything you found there. Well, that was the theory anyway, however unlike most dungeon where you would face any number of different beast and or monsters in such a maze in this one it had been a very long time since anyone entering had to slay a single one. That is if it had ever happened, here to open the door all you had to do was reach the middle of the maze and then answer a riddle. Usually, it wasn’t even a particularly hard to answer riddle such as ‘What runs around a whole village without moving?’.
Well, that is what everyone else thinks anyway but if you know the password you can simply recite it out aloud and then the door will open. As we far as Amondo knows the required password is only to be found in one location, the Membe Family Prayer Book. The last few pages of the book had as custom dictated originally been left blank but the first Malla to be made Baron of Membe had changed all that. Now on the third last page of the prayer book, five odd phrases numbered from one to five had been written in Old Tibous. The only clear memory Amondo had of his previous visit to the dungeon was his father informing him of the existence of the password and how to locate them within the book.
Upon first setting his sights on the door in question Amondo recited the correct phrase in his best old Tibous and a few moments later the door opened. Behind the door was another downward sloping ramp and when Amondo reached the bottom of it he was faced with a second mysterious door on his left and to his right were three different passageways each of which eventually leads to the same chamber.
Under normal dungeon conditions each of the three passageways would always be guarded by different monsters and you would have to pick one of them and only one of them to traverse. Not in this dungeon here on those rare occasions when monsters appeared one would be guarded by a warthog riding goblin, one by a flying harpy and the other by a pair of wolves. Once you defeated the creatures guarding the passageway you had chosen or you traversed it without any appearing you then headed to the main chamber where you had to locate a hidden token, head back the way you came and then place the token in a small box attached to the door.
Amondo again recited the correct phrase in old Tibous to bypass this new door, this time it was to be found amongst four others on the last page of the family prayer book and not the second last as one might expect. Behind this door was yet another downward sloping ramp at the bottom of which Amondo was faced with another mysterious door to his left. This time to his right he had to face a single passageway that was completely blocked by rubble.
According to family lore, this had always been the case, and no one had any idea what if anything might be on the other side. Every attempt over the years to clear the passageway had failed, not even the finest miners a past baron of Membe was able to hire had succeeded.
The only way to enter the third door was to recite the correct phrase from the second last page in the family prayer book. After doing so Amondo walked through the door in question which automatically closed behind him and waited for the other door located behind the now closed one to open.
After a few moments, a greenish light appeared on the ceiling of the small room between the two doors. His father hadn’t mentioned that this would occur as far as he was aware the door was just supposed to open a few moments after the other one closed. This greenish light began to move in a downward direction and seeing this other than trying to open the door in front of him Amondo didn’t panic he just awaited his fate. Others might have laid down on the ground in the hope that the greenish light would eventually stop moving and whatever it did wouldn’t reach them, started praying to the Gods or any number of other things but not him.
He just stood still and waited to see what would happen next, when the light first touched the top of his head, he was expecting all manner of different things to occur. In the end, all that happened was the light simply didn’t affect him at all and just continued moving downwards. Nothing happened when it reached the level of his neck nor when it passed through were his private parts were located, well not as far as he was aware anyway. Just as it was about to reach the level of the top of his shoes it blinked out of existence and was replaced by a reddish light that first appeared on the floor of the room and then moved in an upwards direction but this time more than twice as quickly as the greenish light had descended.
It too blinked out of existence, just after passing above Amondo’s head and nothing else happened for some time. He was no closer to understanding what was going on now than he had been when the first light appeared. At this point, all he could do was the same thing he had always done when he was taking part in a tournament or on the battlefield.
Whatever fear he may have processed beforehand faded nearly into nothing and the only fear that remained was that of failure. This didn’t mean that the fear was in any way replaced by arrogance or anything of the kind but rather the understanding that he had complete faith in his natural abilities and the training he had been provided with over the years which enhanced and supplemented them. He also at the same time embraced his ability to concentrate only upon what was in front of him, not to be distracted by anything outside what was needed to accomplish the task at hand.
He was able to almost calculate to a very precise degree the best way to deal with whatever faced him at any given moment and then implement it with as little fuss as possible. There was, of course, a downside to this ability of his as there is in most things and that was that it mentally drained him, so he could not use it to its fullest extent all the time. Only when he felt it was needed most usually when the unexpected occurred and parodically when things seemed too good to be true.
On this occasion when it was the former that was the case his first thought was that for the first time in a very long time he was in totally unexplored territory and there was no point in doing anything until he had more information at hand.
He was sure that one of three things would occur, firstly the second door would open and his father had simply not mentioned the lights due to some kind of tradition or since he wasn’t the firstborn and his father had never expected him to be in the position he now found himself in. The second possibility was that any moment now some kind of trap would activate, and he would die. The last possibility and what he thought was the most likely one was that something unexpected would occur and that is exactly what happened.
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