#counting the forge construct + the spirit temple as one entire dungeon

[timegears-moved]

congratulations to the water temple for being dethroned as the worst dungeon in this game

[barbecuedphoenix]

'The Abduction’: Chapter 1

...Because it’s too long to be a simple one-shot. After that last Nevra-centric NFSW piece, I’ve learnt my lesson in trying to squeeze too many words into a single post.  

In my own defense... plot-bunnies are relentless. :( 

So here’s the first part of your long-awaited one-shot custom fic, @mentacomchocolate​. The good stuff will be coming up in a separate post... but I hope this one will at least set the scene. ;)  

Interested in reading more? You can find all the chapters for this request here.

Warning: Some marginal NSFW mentions towards the end of this piece. You can skip over it if you prefer your archaeological digs sans nudity. Though you won’t know what you’re missing... ;) 

Chapter 1: The Spring in the Mountains

The ancient flagstones echoed with the clank of her boots as they stepped onto and off the two hundredth step of the hidden passage, snaking through the mountainside like a vein under the skin. On cue, the nub of chalk in Sofimon's hand flashed twice across the wall on her right, raising two ghost-white streaks along the wave-curl of basalt chips.

Two hundred steps, each ten inches tall on average. That currently placed her at about one hundred and sixty-six feet above the valley, where she first discovered that innocuous door all but hidden by two season's worth of brown-baked summer moss. Now she grinned at her mark on the dark mosaic on the wall, polished chips undulating silver-and-black through the gloom like hydra scales, tasting her sweat at the corners of her lips. A climb this high could only mean one thing for a professional explorer: pay dirt.

Behind her came the rhythmic wheeze that marked her partner's progress up the passage. Which had been climbing up without break just below the spine of the mountain for the last half hour, stringing together the caves caught under the earth's skin.

"Sofi…!" Kero's voice echoed through the tunnel like a plea, finally pinching her smile into wince from how battered he sounded. "For the love of all that's good… please tell me you found the exit…!"

Her chestnut-brown eyes darted again, guiltily, to the twin stripes on the wall. Once upon a time, she would have shared Kero's agony. But a full year in the Obsidian Guard had re-forged her into a swordswoman with piston-like legs, which was one of the better gifts to give an adventurer in the faery realm.

"We are pretty high up… But it couldn't be much further, I think…!" she called back, throwing a smile into her voice that ricocheted down the stone steps.

Then she turned to squint up the passage, at the lightening gloom that wasn't all caused by the glow of her lantern, and sniffed the air. Hints of summer green bloomed on the roof of her mouth. Her tawny lips moved into a broader grin, which lingered as the sodden unicorn—his tunic and poncho joined seamless on his shoulders with sweat– finally caught up with her. Their circles of lamplight shivered and merged over the points of her scaled boots.

"I know neither of us expected a climb like this…" Sofimon began, catching Kero gently by the elbow as he reeled again, "but look on the bright side: whatever is hidden this high above the main complex must be something special."

"Well I'm glad… you're so… eager… about this expedition…" the head archivist returned, sagging against the wall. He drew a limp handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his brow again, then the bridge of his nose where his glasses were sliding perilously. "… …But Black Dog's Bane… hundred-step stairways are why I like studying history in the library… Who would have known that the naiads are fitness-fiends?"

Sofimon laughed and gestured around the narrow passage, the opposite wall just an inch shy from meeting the sweep of her fingertips. "You're saying that when we're on the lip of an ancient bathhouse complex?"

"When the texts said 'bathhouse', I was hoping for a place with a nice little gymnasium next to the swimming pools. On flat ground. With a massage center and dining spot nearby. Wishful thinking, I guess," Kero grimaced, finally peeling his poncho over his head, and catching it on the point of his horn over halfway through. "Oh, blast it…"

Sofimon bit her lip to keep from giggling as the lanky unicorn finally wriggled himself free, glasses askew, and coughed. "…Anyway. Not that there's anything wrong with a little workout from time to time… but it would be nice if there're also some clues waiting for us at the end of this climb. That door didn't look like it was used excessively though, even when this place was still teeming with visitors…"

Her smile finally dropped. "Well we won't know the truth while we're still in the cave." The steel toe of her boot clinked from the next worn step. "But if you want, I can scout ahead…?"

"No, no… I offered to come with you when you found the door; I'll see this through. And get more exercise, I guess…" the archivist sighed, tying his limp poncho around his waist.

"The dungeon-stairs in HQ will be child's play for you after this," Sofimon joked as she turned up the stairs again, at half-pace this time. Kero grumbled something incomprehensible at her back as she resumed the count in her head, her free fingers tracing the nigh-invisible curls of the mosaic running along the walls in peak-and-valley waves, cool to the touch like river stones.

Here was another reason why two hundred-step stairways still hadn't dimmed her spirits. To her human eyes, it was as if she was transported to a patch of Classical Greece from perhaps 2300 years ago. But here in the faery realm, this archaic bathhouse complex—no doubt carved from the rock by the last nymphs of ancient Grecian folklore– had been deserted a little less than two years ago. The past still walked here.

Their team arrived here three days ago, searching for clues on the whereabouts of the regional naiad queen, to confirm if she too fell prey to the environmental changes and scourge of madness that rolled across the Continent on the destruction of the Grand Crystal. So far, from the state of the main bathhouse complex they left two hundred steps below, once said to be the jewel of the queen's many spa villages, the outlook wasn't promising. Whereas the fully-aquatic nereids and oceanids managed to survive the immediate fallout—buffered by the sea itself from the chain reaction of ecological disasters resulting from the malevolent flux of the maana cycle—no one could quite guess what happened to the naiads, who straddled that curious boundary between water and land.

Though related, the naiads were more amphibious than the nereids and oceanids. According to all the literature she read, they were equipped with two legs capable of walking on land. But with those, they developed a way of 'sprinting' through their native marshes, lakes, and rivers that rivaled water skaters and river eels in speed, aided by the push of their webbed digits and the fins sprouting from their long, wiry limbs. Most remarkably, they had the ability to switch between breathing water and dry air like a lungfish. During the perilous dry seasons, when their native waters shrank to a fraction of their size, older naiads voluntarily migrated onto dry land in a ritual 'exile' for months at a time (or even permanently, for the few mavericks who chose to leave the waters for good), returning only when the streams and lakes swelled again from rain and snow melt past the point of dangerous overcrowding. Naiads, after all, were a notoriously territorial people; they almost never migrated from lake to stream once water levels dropped, and food and oxygen levels grew scarce, instead defending the waters where their mothers were born even from land. But each transition from gills to lungs and back again required a slow, careful period of adaptation in marshlands. Or eventually—as naiad culture advanced and discovered that swamps were unnecessarily scarce and fraught with predators waiting to drag off asphyxiated naiads– in constructed bathhouses, such as the one their team was exploring now.

For centuries, these spring-side spa villages were the naiads' toll-gates and highways between land and water, cross-species trading houses, temples for the rites of passage, ritual exile, and return, forums where returning and departing 'exiles' exchanged news, hydrotherapy centers for holistic healing, exercise, and acclimation, and pleasure houses all rolled into one. As Kero had succinctly put it when they arrived, these bathhouse complexes were the cornerstones of modern naiad civilization. So if there was ever a clue to a sudden influx of madness and mutation in their society, they would be found here.

Though if there was anything the past three days proved, it was that theory and practice could sit worlds apart. Sofimon was no archaeologist (ex-philosophy major, in fact; there was no end to the jokes on how to make money with that back where she came from). But what she was sure of was this: the naiads had left this place suddenly. Bone combs, algae-slicked needles, rancid perfume amphorae, fused fish-oil lanterns, chipped ceramic platters, spotted mirrors, and mold-eaten scrolls were strewn around this community bathhouse exactly as they were when the halls still rang with footsteps. Even a rookie could see that it looked like the entire complex got up as one in the middle of dinner, and vanished into the mountain air.

Her fingers skimmed the dark waves of stone chips and suddenly beached against warped wood, startling her from her count. Her next foot rose and fell hard through a step that didn't exist, cutting through the faint sunbeams crossing the black flagstones and jarring her leg to her knee. And Sofimon's trajectory swung her, stumbling, around the final turn of the passage, out of the deep shadow of the doorway and onto a stone promenade raised high above the forest of cypress, plane, and willow, crouched twisted on the mountainside.

Late afternoon light lanced her eyes gold, warming the skin of her hand as she whipped it up to shield her gaze. The air gurgled with the rush of cataracts and the octave-long trills of feral familiars, whistling unseen from the distant green above and below.

When Kero stumbled into her back and winced in his throat, his glasses catching with a clink on the back of her helm, Sofimon obligingly stepped out and to the side of the rectangular, Pi-shaped doorway. "Two hundred and sixty-nine steps," she announced helpfully, bowing a little to present the view to her partner. Kero winced again, and crab-walked gingerly past her to the edge of the wall.

She let him go, taking in the bright mountain air and bringing her dazzled eyes down past the promenade wall to the bend of the first spring, steaming and bouncing down the green-slicked boulders in white arcs to the groove of the ravine below. Far below, the sharp angles and concentric squares of the bathhouse complex rose from the wild summer green like a granite stamp, half-folded improbably up the side of the mountain to catch two whiplash white streams in a series of pools. If she squinted, she could even glimpse the walnut-brown points of their tents, clustered between the fluted pillars of the southern courtyard. Where she knew the third and final member of their party was packing up their notes and recovered artifacts for the return journey tomorrow, with his systematic, straight-faced precision.

He had declined to join her today when she loped back to camp with news of the hidden door, instead citing Kero as the better researcher. That was Valkyon's polite way of admitting he was pessimistic.

"Holy Black Dog!"

"What? What is it?" Sofimon called out, wresting her eyes away from their distant camp, her free hand automatically grasping for the hilt of her broadsword slung across her back.

Kero was standing on the northern corner of the promenade, both hands planted on the wall and staring fixedly down the other side. From the way his head and neck were jutting eight inches over the edge of the wall, shoulders scrunched, whatever he was seeing didn't seem life-threatening. Yet.

She crossed the promenade with the long, loping strides that earned her nickname in the Obsidian Guard, and looked down past the lip of the wall. And her expression stopped setting the better example.

The hidden cataract stood at the height of about three men where the hot spring plunged down a natural precipice behind the turn of the wall, its rich, iron-laced waters still steaming gently in the afternoon air. At the corner of the cataract closest to the promenade, a rectangular pool had been created by artfully walling off both the riverbank and the rest of the cascade with boulders, forcing just one meter of mineral-rich spring water to plummet down into the tiny canal, collecting, deepening, and warming further into a serene pool of water caught between the natural spring and the wall, before the water continued its journey down the mountain over a shallow lip cut on the far wall of the pool. A steep stairway cut through the wall they stood on, zigzagging straight down to the brilliant, dappled water of the pool. Viridian algae lined the stone in a thin girdle where it met the spring water, before climbing up the corner of the wall in mottled blooms, and escaping over the slope of the divided cataract itself, where the headiest clouds of steam had moistened and worn at the rock for centuries.

But what drew Sofimon's stare was the kaleidoscopic colors shivering out from the pool. Each of its sides had been leveled by hand, then inlaid with pale, moon-washed river stones, clusters of technicolored quartz, malachites, and agates, obsidian chips that glistened sharp through the rushing waters like tiny arrows caught below the current, and even warm flashes of what looked like tiny gold nuggets. All set into a five-sided mosaic of what could only be a lost naiad epic: the crazy-limbed, finned, half-naked dancers—both standing and swimming– locked into their dance under the spring waters that rippled and swirled over them ceaselessly.

Kero whistled soundlessly from her side. "…Your hunch was right, all right, Sofi. This must have been the naiad queen's private bathing pool. Spared from looters– thank the Oracle– by how invisible the only viable entrance is to this place."

"See? It never hurts to be optimistic."

They clambered down the stairs, discovery winding up new springs in their knees. Kero stopped four steps shy of the simmering waters that smelled like a forge, fanning himself again with the collar of his tunic, his glasses fogging over from the steam. But Sofimon went right to the water itself, dipping and swirling one hand through the warmth rushing by, just a few degrees above the temperature of her hand. Her wide eyes wandered across the mural: over the twist of limbs and unearthly bodies, both male and female, profiled in nail-sized chips of glass, gem, and river rock along the walls and the floor of the pool.

It wasn't that deep: no more than three feet perhaps. A smooth, enameled bench lined three of the sides, with naiads cleverly depicted stretching themselves above and below the edge of the bench, reaching for their partners reclining across the divide.

Long moments passed, in the sweep of warmth between her fingers and the flicker of glassy lights across the surface of the water, before Kero's somber voice reached her. "There doesn't seem to be anything here either, unfortunately… But the least we could do before leaving is seal off the door leading to this pool. Guarantee that no looters will stumble across this in the future. Because it is a work of art… We might easily be the last ones to see it—in this state at least—for who knows how long. Once we get back to the camp, I'll ask Valkyon to take a look at the door."

At last, Sofimon retracted her hand from the water, sighed, and rose to her feet. "That would be a good idea," she admitted, sweeping aside the black, sweat-slicked bangs under her helmet, iron-tinged water dripping into the cup of her palm.

Still, her eyes continued to rove along the lines of naiads frozen on the faces of the pool: trying to tease apart the braids of impossible limbs through the waters, even as split-second waves were sliced apart by the sunlight, glinting off the spots of gold from an upturned wrist, an opened thigh, a head tossed back with wide-awake eyes leafed in gold. And with a jolt, she suddenly realized what she was seeing. Across all four sides of the mural, there was a particular pattern to the shapely legs scissored together, twined knee around knee; the press of bodies married waist-to-waist; the curve and bend of backs that brought erect, straining breasts and lit eyes pointing to the sky.

Well. Now she could see why this pool was perched two hundred and sixty-nine steps above the village.

The first giggle broke through her teeth, then through the seal of her lips, and past her hand as it clamped hard over her mouth. Kero, mercifully, blinked at her instead of at the pool, his misted glasses half-wrapped in the edge of his tunic.

"What's so funny?"

"…Nothing," Sofimon spluttered out, still grinning helplessly behind her hand. She forced herself to look away from the twined legs and arching bodies stamped across the sides of the pool. "…Do you, uh, want a rendering of the pool, by any chance?"

Kero didn't so much as pause. "Of course. We would love to have a watercolor of this in the archives. That is, only if you don't mind taking some time this afternoon to make a painting, while there's still light. I can ask Valkyon to hold off on blocking the passage–"

"No! Actually, uh… let him work on the door while I start painting. I, uh, don't want to have to walk all the way to camp. Just to let him know he's free to block up the passage. You see?"

Now the archivist was squinting at her, his voice returning slow and incredulous. "…If that's what you want, sure. Though I'm not sure why this is an issue now, after all those stairs you climbed with barely a sweat."

"Look at me: I did sweat. I'm not exactly made of iron, Kero," Sofimon quipped quickly, smiling her thanks. With enough pinch in her cheeks to encourage him to stop talking. She crossed her arms over her chest. "Anyway, since the painting is going to take a bit of time… will you, uh, be all right if I start here and now? I swear, all these details the naiads put it…"

"True," the archivist sighed, glancing once at the pool before he slipped his glasses back on. "No expense was spared for their queen, apparently… All right, feel free to set up, Sofi, and thanks for doing this for us. I'll see you back at the camp. Before it gets too dark, you hear?"

"I'll try my best," Sofimon chuckled, avoiding his eyes as she slung off her satchel and rummaged one-handed through it.

Kero was already halfway up the stairs when she found her codex, scribbled a quick note in charcoal through the back page, ripped it free, and hastily folded it into sixteenths. She loped after him, two steps at a time. "Oh, Kero, wait! I'm sorry about this. But do you, uh, mind taking this to Valkyon?" The next laugh broke out of her, reflexively, "…It looks like I might need more watercolors than what I'm carrying now. It's the queen's private pool; we ought to do it justice, right?"

The unicorn took the finger-sized wad of notepaper with a smile. "Of course, Sofi. Miiko couldn't have known what a good idea it was to send you with us here."

Her grin slipped out well before she could stop it. "No, she couldn't have."

Disclaimer: Sofimon being a painter was my addition to the character. I could imagine that after some time in Eldarya, and given her love of exploring, she might have picked up some new skills to preserve her finds and contribute to El’s library. 

That... and it goes with the setting. :( Apologies to mentacomchocolate if it’s a stretch. 

Disclaimer 2: These randy naiads and their penchant for elaborate baths are entirely my invention. The bathhouse complexes themselves are based off a combination of ancient Hellenistic and Roman influences, though I don’t think any pools have been uncovered quite like the one featured here. For good reason. ;)     

Part 2 will be up shortly. And that’s when things will start to get steamy. No pun intended. :)