Elysium's Multiverse

Chapter 3

[Two hundred participants have reached the pyramid’s summit; 1,472 people have been disqualified and are now set to be executed if they have not died already. Part one of three in the Chalgathi’s Lineage Quest line is now over.]

Screams of agony and terror rippled across all four sides of the pyramid, and rays of white light began illuminating the corpses of the fallen. The still-living, still-climbing participants outside the gray sheen of the veil begged and pleaded, clawing at a translucent veil in front of Riven that now seemed impenetrable to them. He even tried to reach through, to pull them in, but found that it was as if a force field had been erected there…

So he could only sit and watch, dumbstruck and horrified, as the men and women in front of him and down the pyramid’s face began to wither and rot. Then the rot accelerated amid more flashes of white light that burned them from the inside out.

And in only a minute more of that torturous, evil display of power, they were simply gone…evaporating into the air as wisps of blackened ash that set upon the wind to be carried away into the great expanse of the dead forest about them.

“Holy shit…” He shook his head, not sure what to make of all this. What was the purpose? Why had he been one of the people selected to undertake this “quest line”? Where was he?

His answers would have to wait for another time, because in a great burst of green flame, the pillar exploded in all directions and enveloped everyone atop the pyramid in a searing, heat-filled rush. As his body burned away, he felt his soul twist and roil until he, too, had disappeared from the pyramid’s top as if he’d never been there to begin with.

Fortunately, he hadn’t died after all. He found himself in an odd, dome-shaped room along with many of the others who’d reached the top, materializing right in front of his eyes with puffs of sickly green mana until their flames all died out simultaneously.

He began to look around.

The ceiling was a mosaic, picturing various skeletal warriors praying to a robed figure that held a green-tinted lantern in one hand and a great scythe in the other. With more scrutinizing detail of the mosaic, he saw a crooked jaw that made the skeleton look like he was grinning out at the vast crowd while perched upon a throne of bones, and behind him a city burned. And all around the room, along the walls, were a series of torches in racks that flickered ominously, casting shadows about the center where the crowd of people now stood.

Who or what the hell was Chalgathi?

A grating sound quickly accompanied this new message as twenty large doors previously hidden within the stone walls surrounding them began to sink into the stone floors—causing Riven to snap out of his confusion and whip his head around to take in the sight on reflex.

A larger, bald man probably a good six inches taller than he was, nearly knocked Riven over with a disgusted scoff as he made his way toward the door. “Move it.”

Riven stared blankly at the back of the guy who’d pushed past him, seriously considering breaking the man right there and then. But he quelled his irritation, deciding there were more important things to do than pick fights right now. His life was on the line, and he needed to get moving.

Others had the same idea and started for the doorways. Unfortunately he was centered amid the crowd of suddenly shoving, kicking, and yelling people as they tried to dash toward the doors—which were only large enough to let a couple people in at a time. There was fighting, brawling, and screaming that picked up in the choke points as fortunate others ran through at breakneck speed while trying to be in the leading group to complete the trial.

Riven watched in displeasure as he saw one man completely beat in the head of a smaller teenager before whipping around and marching through the doors. It occurred to him there and then, as that young man bled out on the floor with a caved-in skull: If he wasn’t careful, he could just as easily end up in the “deceased” category before reaching the end of the labyrinth. No doubt many of the others wouldn’t balk at killing in order to whittle down the numbers for a greater chance at survival and making it to the top one hundred spots. Not after what they’d seen on the pyramid just over the last hour.

He probably shouldn’t have been so surprised about their behavior. He was a dog in a cage filled with other rabid animals, and they were all out for their own survival.

Wishing he had a set of clothes and really disliking the way things were going, Riven pushed both hands up through his short brown hair with a snort—his defined musculature now dried after being vaporized by the green fire a minute earlier.

He had so many questions…but at least things were getting interesting. His heart was pounding like it hadn’t in years, and for the first time in a long, long time…he felt alive.

The crowd thinned over time, and eventually it slowed to a trickle with only four other people aside from himself still remaining in the chamber with the ceiling mural. Three trampled bodies remained limp and dead on the floor, but they did not garner Riven’s attention. Instead, he remained to study the artwork overhead.

“This time, you will be tested on your wit… Failure follows those who charge headlong with reckless abandon… Success follows a sharpened mind.” He repeated the words aloud. To him it was an obvious clue for what not to do, and another balding man nearby glanced his way with a wry smile.

“You caught that, too, did ya?” the man stated while clapping his hands onto his outstretched belly. “It told us not to rush headlong, literally, and then they all did it. Absurd.”

Two of the others, an elderly woman with thinning hair and another younger man in his late teen years, both nodded their agreement. The last of them, a middle-aged Chinese man with dragon tattoos, plucked at his neatly trimmed beard with a concerned expression.

Riven, meanwhile, turned his gaze back to the artwork, looking for something that could provide any further clues as to what that phrase had meant. “There’s got to be something here, some other clue that we can home in on…and the only things I see are—”

He stopped short as the torches along the perimeter began to flare, and the previously blank stone walls holding them now began to change. The mural from the domed roof spread and began to morph, with the skeletal robed figure growing new arms. The robed figure now had four in total, and all four arms pointed beyond the depictions of skeletal warriors and burning city toward symbols along four of the twenty corridors leading out. They were positioned over each of the four doors and gleamed in brilliant neon-green. One corridor depicted a skull with a long, serpentine tongue snaking out of it. Another depicted twin daggers crossed over one another dripping blood. The next depicted a burning flame. The last was a picture of a bird in flight.

After that the walls filled in more with additional murals until the entire room was encompassed, and very quickly Riven found it to be telling a story. The others no doubt had figured this out themselves, but to what extent each of them understood it relative to each other was up in the air.

The story started with a crow that soared across the heavens, observing people far below as they worked their farms and lived simple lives. Then a stranger appeared in their village, a hooded man with a skull face and serpentine tongue. The pictures showed him bargaining with them, or attempting to, but they cast him out of the village. It showed the man leaving, but after having tied up and kidnapped one of the villagers to bring him away. The skull-faced man was depicted sacrificing the prisoner with two bloody daggers, and still the crow watched from overhead. The villagers scoured the landscape, looking for their lost comrade, but they could not find the skull-faced man or their lost kin until the crow showed them the way. With makeshift weapons and a stampede of men, the villagers were taken to the spot where the skull-faced man was feasting upon the corpse of his sacrifice, but when he looked up, they all fell into a trap and were burned alive with scorching flames.

All except the crow.

The villagers had been led into an ambush, and the skull-faced man thanked the crow with a blessing. Red sparks erupted from the crow’s wings, and it found itself flying faster and higher than it ever could before. The crow left the village to contend with the skull-faced man alone, and they soon succumbed to his two daggers and balls of fire until he’d raised an army of the dead—skeletal minions forming from the remnants of the villagers while he sat atop a throne of bones.

Riven’s eyes rested on the end of the mural, only for his eyes to drift up again toward the robed, four-armed skeleton pointing toward the four passages adorned with symbols.

“Interesting,” Riven stated slowly, coming up closer to the nearest of the passageways. This one was adorned with that of the bird in flight, likely the crow that’d been depicted along the murals. And as he inspected the archway and took a step forward, the hallway leading out began to change. Space warped in front of him, sucking him into a completely different passageway with a WHOOSH.

He staggered to a stop, then looked over his shoulder to stare blankly back at a stone wall—the room he’d been in was now gone. It was a dead end; the people that’d been there with him were now all gone, and he slowly turned his head forward again to see a stone statue depicting an old woman with a crow perched on her shoulder and a small hole in the stone at her feet. Four stone walls encompassed a moderately sized room with a single lantern emitting a dull green light from overhead. In front of the statue was a pool of softly sizzling acid a couple yards in diameter; a pair of odd-looking tongs as large as his right arm were chained to the near side, and a small rowboat floated in the middle of the pool.

Riven hesitantly took a step forward, unsure what to make of this odd scenario. He walked over to the edge of the pool, then looked across at the statue. Curiously he circled the pool and inspected the statue more thoroughly, though there wasn’t any clue of what he was supposed to do here—until he saw words inscribed onto the back of the old stone woman.

He read the words aloud. “Let the acid gently pour between my feet, and thou shalt receive my blessing.”

Huh.

He circled back around again. There was indeed a small pathway carved into the stone leading into the statue’s base from the pool of acid, however, the sizzling acid was at a level where it wouldn’t be high enough to glide across the carved pathway.

Riven was very hesitant to try and push any of that acid, either. He plucked some hairs off his head just to make sure it actually was acid and let them fall. The hairs hit the sizzling liquid with instantaneous eradication, and Riven quickly backed up so he wasn’t so close to the vile stuff.

He thought about it, looking over to where the metal tongs were chained to the far side of the pool across from the statue. Then he looked to the wooden boat that was mysteriously not taking any acidic damage. Curiously enough, he also noted another set of chains from that same position next to the tongs—only he hadn’t seen these chains before, because they were attached to the boat and scaling along the bottom of the pool. There was also an odd black ball at the bottom of the pool, and it looked to be made of metal.

If the chains weren’t being eaten, perhaps he could break off the tongs and use them to scoop acid into the small, elevated pathway leading toward the statue of the crow and the old woman?

He circled around again, coming to where the tongs were placed, and gave the chains three sturdy yanks. They held firm, and he tried dipping the binding chains in acid for a while before trying again to no avail. In fact, the acid seemed to slip off the metal without any problem.

“Hmm.”

He pulled on the chain connected to the rowboat, yanking the wooden construct over to him. It drifted silently back, coming to nuzzle against the edge of the stone pool but completely evading his grasp when his fingers slipped right through it.

He tried grasping the boat again, only to see his hand pass right through the boat like it was some kind of ghost ship.

Puzzled, he began to think of other ways to try and get acid into the pathway on the opposite side leading toward the statue’s base. He tried splashing some of it across the pool with his tongs but only cursed when a small droplet of it got on his skin and ate a small, shallow hole into his forearm. He tried pushing the boat across the pool to make waves, but that didn’t work out very well, either. Grabbing the tongs and grasping the metal ball at the bottom of the pool with them was somewhat of a struggle because of the weight of the object; he took the black ball out and rested it against the stone floor.

Immediately the level of the pool dropped by nearly an inch.

“Well, that’s the opposite of what I want…”

Riven rubbed his chin thoughtfully. He lowered the ball back into the acidic pool and watched the level rise again, repeating this action a couple times to see if he could create waves that way.

He couldn’t. Was there anything else to put into the pool to displace more of the acid, causing the level to rise so it could move into the carved path between the statue’s feet?

A sinking feeling overcame him. There was his body, or parts of his body, but nothing else.

Frowning and shaking his head in adamant refusal, he tried a few more times, but it was only when he accidentally nudged the boat when taking out the black ball that he considered another idea.

He’d originally thought the boat to be some kind of ethereal construct, only to be touched by the chains and acid—but the ball also made contact and was able to push the boat away with a slight nudge.

“That’s it.” A relieved and victorious smile overcame Riven’s features. Though taking the ball out of the pool actually lowered the fluid level, metal was far denser than wood. It was a pretty neat physics concept and reminded him of a riddle his old physics teacher had once described. Due to the density, the ball should theoretically displace less water—or in this case, acid—than it would if it were in a container like the boat. It would be heavier, pushing the boat down and causing the level to rise far more than if the ball had just been sitting down there at the bottom.

And it sure as hell beat sacrificing an arm or leg.

Quickly he grasped the metal ball with his tongs again, and then he dropped the object into the boat with an audible thunk.

Immediately the boat lowered, and the fluid level of the pool rose. Acid began to flow into the carved divot on the opposite end where the statue remained and flowed through the shallow passage toward a hole at the bottom of the statue’s feet.

A pulse of energy radiated outward from the statue, and the eyes of the crow and the old woman both turned a vibrant red—changing the tone of the sickly green to a more sinister hue across the room in an instant. In the back of the room, a hidden door swung open—revealing a passageway that led off into the dark.

Riven was frozen in place, and his eyes went wide when he felt his body go cold. Black and gray miasma began to billow out in front of the statue before being interlaced with crimson, and an electrical current pulsed out about a baseball-size globe of energy while Riven failed to react despite his body screaming at him to run.

In a blinding flash, the power erupted and tore into Riven’s body. He felt currents of cold and hot fluctuations course through his muscles, over his skin, and through his veins, but it wasn’t painful. It surprised him enough to cause him to yell out in alarm and stumble back…but the energy felt good. Really good…and it was as if his body was…was on fire? He felt pumped!

He blinked. He could assume that pillars were categories of magic? If what this notification said about affinities was true, it was a no-brainer. This wasn’t the first time the trial had informed him of his extremely high affinity toward Unholy magics, either. Without much further ado, he selected yes.