The activation of a Dungeon Heart was a fairly rare event, witnessed by only a small handful of individuals - most of them current or soon-to-be Keepers, who were seldom keen on sharing their observations with others. Warlocks, witches, and wizards alike would have sacrificed gold, magical items, and fresh souls for the opportunity to observe the process, hoping to gain even the merest, fleeting glimpse into the inner workings of the powerful relics. That the Dungeon Heart now being activated was not powered by the Dark Gods, nor even the Light, but a heretofore unknown deific faction, would merely have upped the stakes in the bidding war for front row seats to the event. Whosoever triumphed in the ensuing epic clash of the magic geeks would surely go down in history as the man, woman, or other-gendered whose genius and hard work revolutionized the fields of modern magical theory and artifact creation.
This is, of course, assuming that the would-be observers managed to survive the chamber's sudden and violent abundance of various states of water.
More-or-less protected within his cold coffin, Horny watched with some interest as a roaring geyser erupted from the Dungeon Heart, shattering its stone cover and casting off steaming rivulets in all directions as it surged up to smash against the ceiling, while a hissing cloud of thick, billowing vapor exploded outwards with the speed of an avalanche. As the guttering torchlight was briefly blotted out, allowing darkness to momentarily reclaim the room, the Reaper's keen ears could hear a sudden surge of hisses and crackles. It took him a moment to realize that the waterspout he'd taken to be superheated was actually just the opposite, a gusher of liquid so cold that only the violence of its upward motion kept it from freezing solid, while the spreading "steam-bank" was in fact the outer edge of a cold front intense enough to convert the water vapor in the air directly to ice.
As the temperature dropped past merely "cold" and began to close in on "abyssal," tinting his red skin blue and producing an atrocious shade of purple normally only found on badly-designed giant biomechanoids and musically-inclined plush saurian abominations, the Reaper had a brief vision of being trapped in this frozen shell for the rest of eternity.
The hell with that, he thought, summoning up as much of his fire-aspected magic as he could, and releasing it in a single blast. Conjured into a humid, sub-zero environment without words or gestures to guide it, the resulting explosion was decidedly substandard, but it sufficed to shatter Horny's makeshift prison and return a healthy infernal hue to his flesh. Dusting ice-chips and powdery snow off of his armor, the demon took in the results of the runaway elemental magic.
Every visible surface had frozen over. The previously unworked stone floor was now a sheet of pure black ice with the reflective sheen of glass, and snow had piled up several inches deep against the walls, already half-hidden behind glacial stalagmites and networks of frost that spread over them like runaway ivy. Crystal-clear spheres glittered pale blue atop the torches, just beginning to sweat with the promise of potential melt as the heat apparently trapped within warred with its prison, just as Horny himself had. A veritable forest of icicles now dangled from the roof, but disappointingly, all of them were far too small and fragile to pose any kind of threat to an intruder. All in all, there was a rough, unfinished look to the arctic splendor, hinting at the chaotic, uncontrolled nature of its creation.
The only thing in the chamber that gave any indication of being constructed by an intelligent agency was the Dungeon Heart itself, and this had taken on a form quite unusual in Horny's long and storied experience with Keepers. The expected triple-archways were present, but formed from sculpted ice rather than the expected stone, and between them, where there should have been three truncated walkways rising over a deep pit with a fleshy, throbbing membrane at the bottom, there was instead a three-step circular stair, leading down to a pool of crystal-clear water. Even in this strange form, the Dungeon Heart still beat, and each pulse caused the surface of the pool to bubble and froth, releasing nebulous tendrils of sparking turquoise that formed a small but persistent blanket of mist above and about the pool. High overhead, carved into the peak of each archway, was that odd rune Horny had seen on the blue-haired girl's handheld magic device: a circle above a small cross, topped by two small, horn-like curves.
The Reaper scowled. The current temperature was like something out of a polar winter, and though the flash-freeze had sucked the moisture from the air, leaving it as painfully parched as any lava-filled chamber in the Underworld, the churning water within the Dungeon Heart-turned-magic spring and the runoff from the torches would eventually restore the lost humidity. The end result, Horny knew, would be a cave much cooler and more damp than it had started out.
He hated conditions like that.
"Right," the demon growled, hefting his scythe and pointedly ignoring how slowly the iced-over blade snapped out to readiness. "Where's the landlady? I want to register a complaint..."
Read the comments on this episode
(Posted Tue, 24 Aug 2010 22:27)
Questions? Problems? Suggestions?
Send a mail to addventure@bast-enterprises.de
or use the contact form.
らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
All other series and their characters are © by their respective creators or owners. No claims of ownership of these characters are implied by the authors of this Addventure, or should be inferred.
The Anime Addventure is a non-profit site.