Wrath, page 1
Wrath
The Dinosaur Dungeon Book 1
Alex Raizman
Inkfort Press
Copyright © 2021 Alex Raizman
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 9781234567890
ISBN-10: 1477123456
Cover design by: Getcovers
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018675309
Printed in the United States of America
Chapter 1
You would think that the day Tira was set to be executed would be the worst day of her life, but that would be inaccurate. The worst day might have been when she'd learned she was going to be executed. Or perhaps it was the first time she'd attempted to escape and failed.
Or the second attempt, when they had tortured her as punishment. That had been an extremely bad day. The third failed attempt didn’t make the list, because she'd gotten really close to freedom and had been sure she'd gotten a message out. Despite her overall failure, that day had given her hope for future escape or rescue.
Then came the day she accepted that no rescue would arrive, the same day her companion had been walked to the headsman's axe. That day was definitely high on the list.
Then, of course, there was today, the day she was facing the axe herself.
Honestly, it was hard to rank such a list, and in the end it didn’t really matter. At least there was a certain cold comfort in knowing that today was going to be the last worst day of her life.
Even though she barely even warranted an execution in the first place (an argument that had, shockingly, failed to convince her captors to release her), the whole mess would end today.
Despite her general resignation, Tira couldn’t help prowling her latest cell one last time. She had become intimately familiar with it in the days since the grim faced guards moved her here. It hadn’t been custom-built to hold her - Tira had no illusions she was important enough to justify that level of effort - but it was the most escape-proof room in the entire prison.
The walls were Adamant reinforced Stone, imbued with dungeon purified Earth Mana to make it nearly unbreakable. The bars on her cell door were made of Verithil, a regenerative metal that could heal far quicker than a file could weaken it. The door hinges were also Adamant, but the door itself was Cursed Steel. Anything she tried to do to the door would happen to her, so trying to break out that way was a complex attempt to hasten her death. Sure, it was only as strong as regular steel, but she was only as strong as regular people. Something that could destroy steel was very good at destroying people.
This was a cell meant to hold someone of at least Gold tier. Maybe even platinum.
In a way, Tira was perversely happy with the cell. She'd made herself such a nuisance that her captors had put her in the most expensive room they had.
"Hey, buddy," Tira said, leaning against the door and feeling the cursed steel respond with equal pressure. She studied the guard outside, taking in his gleaming, black-trimmed white armor, stylized eagle's beak helmet, and tabard bearing a gold-trimmed black sun. "Wow, they've got a Gold tier guarding me? I must be important."
The guard ignored her, but his eyes twitched. The grinding of his teeth was unnaturally amplified in the silence of the hall. Seeing an opportunity, she pressed on.
"You know, I figured your bosses would have something more important for someone of your rank to do. Like, oh, just off the top of my head? Literally anything else. That would be a better use of your time than guarding me."
"Silence, spy." The words slipped from the guard's lips, and even though the helmet covered his face, it couldn't hide the way he tensed up when he realized she'd made him speak.
"I'm not a spy. That’s a rogue mastery," Tira said, pressing her face against the Verithil bars to make sure the guard could see her grin. If she could goad him into opening the door, or lashing out at it in fury, it would give her an opening she could use to try and slip free. "Do you... know how classes work? I mean, you're Gold tier, surely you've met someone who can read. If not, I can. You can pick up a book that describes the classes, and I'll help you with the big words, like 'the' and 'he’."
"Another word and I will cut you down!" the guard snarled.
"Oh, you mean you'll kill me now as opposed to once the sun rises? What a terrible thing to do to me. However shall I endure my life being cut...an hour short? Maybe two? Truly, my life has known no greater tragedy. It’s all I have left!" Tira pressed the back of her hand to her head and mock swooned. "C'mon, you’re supposed to be scary. Threaten me with something that's not just 'death, but sooner’."
The guard stepped up to her door, and she could feel his furious breath coming through the slots in his helm. "You have two options. Stay silent of your own accord, or have your tongue seared from your mouth. I would think you'd want to make peace with your dark gods in the time you have left."
Tira stepped back, sweat springing from her brow. "Good threat," she said, and pantomimed buttoning her lips. That last act of defiance lasted until the guard turned his back to her, and then Tira let her knees give way.
"I see you've angered Girard," said a voice from the door, and Tira tensed. It was an odd reaction to such a grandfatherly voice, but Tira had gotten terribly familiar with it over the course of her captivity. He'd never given her a name, but Tira had heard others call him "Father." Father sounded like he wanted you to sit by the fire while he told you tales of his youth, but he was far more likely to throw you into the flames. Then use his power to heal the injuries he caused, so he could repeat the process.
There was a reason Tira feared the rack.
Tira motioned helplessly toward the imaginary button on her mouth in flippant defiance, to cover the fear that her voice would crack if she spoke.
"Ah. Seems the cat's got your tongue, my dear. Well, I can pull it out for you if you'd like, since you don't need it."
Tira shuddered. "Please," she whispered. She didn’t fear death. After so many days of torment, if it was the only escape left to her, she’d leap at it. But more torture? She couldn’t endure that. No one could.
"Please what, my dear?" The old man’s warm eyes and kindly smile belied what Tira knew of his nature, and she began to shake. "Please spare you the axe? Then answer our questions."
"I can't!" Tira shouted, rage gripping her. How dare he sound so reasonable after everything he'd done to her? "I've screamed what I know to the heavens! I shouted until I had no voice, and then you tightened the screws! I bellowed my answers into the void, and you turned up the heat." She hated the reminder of the things she'd admitted to under Father’s ministrations. But she had done it, and there was no point denying that. Caldor had tried to deny he'd spoken. He'd also denied they were actually captives and insisted that he was going to fly from this prison on the back of a giant eagle that spoke to him in his dreams. They'd had to drag him to the execution block. Even Father's magic couldn't heal his mind after what they'd done to him.
Before the axe swung, he had thanked the Headsman.
"You told us only what we already knew, then started repeating variations on 'I know nothing’," Father said in those same poisonously reasonable tones. "Surely you can't expect me to believe that."
"It's the truth!" Tira said.
"Tsk, tsk," Father said in a tone fit for a child with their hand in the cookie jar. Then he smiled at her, making no attempt to refute her. Then she understood. There had never been any chance of release, even if she’d had more information to give them. They were determined to give the people the ancient and sick spectacle of human sacrifice for crowd appeal. Caldor had been right to get it over with quickly.
"Just take me to the block," Tira said, slumping back to the floor. "Be done with me. Just let me die."
"Oh, but my dear," Father said, keys jangling as he slid them into the lock. "That's exactly what I'm here to do."
Tira leaped for the door in a last desperate attempt to escape, but Father was Platinum. She'd be better off trying to dig through a mountain with her teeth. He just held out his hand, and Tira choked as warm and unyielding bands of light wrapped around her neck. "Defiant to the end, I see. I'd expect nothing less from you."
Tira spit in his face. Against a Platinum Saint, her spit was no more effective than her fury. It hit an invisible barrier and sizzled away, leaving her without even petty satisfaction.
"None of that now," he said. "Come with me."
With the light around her neck, she could scarcely do anything else. She walked along with her head high and her steps firm. If she was going to die, it was going to be with some dignity.
As a last desperate measure, she glanced at the back of her right hand. Her prisoner's garb was a simple sleeveless tunic that kept her from hiding any knives or other weapons. However, it didn't stop her from seeing the Compass tattoo that showed her rank: Copper Four. Her blue mana bar was nearly empty, and the green stamina bar had been permanently reduced from the torture she'd endured. She didn't even bother looking at the gold bar that would show her progress toward the next rank. At the bottom, the ultimate point of the compass was not a bar, but a rune for her elemental affinity: Fire.
Most of her abilities required the use of a weapon, but she had one available: a personal healing spell called “Cauterize”. It was a painful but effective way to seal bleeding injuries. Beyond that, it was useless, except as a last desperate move. Immolating herself to escape execution seemed a rather pointless gesture, but in the torture chamber, she had considered it.
Still, wasn’t this the time for desperate moves? Father was counting on her holding on to a last bit of hope, denying the truth even as she knelt before the block, holding on long enough to give a satisfying show. That wasn't where she was going, and even in the face of torture, she hadn't completely let go of hope yet.
Instead, the reality of her situation was finally settling in. No matter what, she was going to die. If dying on her own terms was the only choice she had left, it was still worth something.
And she had just enough mana to pull it off.
***
The execution arena was also used for gladiatorial matches, purification rituals, and basically any kind of bloodsport the Sunborne could think of to appease the masses. The stands contained only a few hundred people, a small fraction of the scores the Sunborne had gathered to their banner. Apparently, the execution of a spy and adventurer wasn't a huge event, but the crowd still raised quite the cheer when they saw her.
Tira kept her head held high and tried not to look at them. It gave her a splendid view of the sky above. The green orb of Casom hung overhead, one sphere of the Woven World, connected to this world and dozens more by strands of silk as thick as cities. Tira could see the strand that connected Casom to this land, although it was far enough away she couldn't see where it met the ground. Just a strand of silk miles thick jutting up from behind the horizon.
Similar strands stretched from Casom. One would connect to Jarathia, but that was behind Tira and she didn't want to give the crowd the satisfaction of turning around to gawk. Another reached out to Berheim, but that blue sphere was hidden behind a cloud. From travelers, Tira had heard Berheim was a land of pure water, with a dense ice core. She'd hoped to visit it one day and explore its depths to see what truly lurked down there. As a fire affinity, she had been even more interested in Jarathia, where great volcanoes constantly spewed molten rock with such violence it sometimes rained down on other spheres like gray snow.
She’d had so many plans.
The crowd's roar attracted several glowing manacores: flickering balls that could absorb a single element type and release it in its refined form. The orbs Tira saw now were either unnaturally dark or putrid greens and yellows. She recognized them as manacores of Elemental Dark and Decay, attracted to this area of death.
How many executions had happened here?
Tira kept her eye out for any fire cores. They were attracted to burning things, and weren't common otherwise, but they appeared sometimes, wandering and searching for a source of flame. If she could put her hand in that field of refined mana, the churning flames would make her flesh sear in a matter of seconds, but she could also absorb every drop. She could then use her affinity to...
The bands on her wrist tugged, and she realized there was absolutely nothing she could do.
At the center of the arena, a large wooden stage. A bloodstained slab of white marble. A basket ready to catch a tumbling head.
"My people!" Father shouted to the adoring crowd. Their cheers swelled, and Tira focused on the reactions rather than the speech itself. At some point the crowd's noise had deepened as cheers turned to jeers and admonishments directed at her. Tira tried a defiant laugh, but the band around her throat tightened, cutting off her ability to make any sound. It forced her neck to bend, eyes directed towards the dirt, giving the appearance she was hanging her head in shame. Her shaking could easily be taken as fear or tears, not the suppressed laughter of the soon to be damned.
It was insanity.
"Thanks," she croaked when the band loosened slightly. "If I'm going to die today, I needed the laugh."
Only Father could have heard her, but if he did, he gave no sign. He was in full swing, riling up the masses with his talk of joining together against a common foe, Tira’s supposed employer, a threat to all they held dear...
Tira stopped listening. If these were her last moments, she wanted to spend them watching the manacores floating through the air. It was rare to see so many of the dancing balls of raw elemental power gathered together. Even the dark and decay cores seemed beautiful to Tira.
A tug at her bonds interrupted her concentration, as she was led up the stairs to die.
The executioner, a hooded giant of a man, had the strength to cut through bone with that axe and had probably sent dozens of heroes to their death. People, like all life, released a burst of experience when they died, and mana would fly back towards whoever had landed the killing blow, even at a distance.
Outside of farming a dungeon, killing other people was the most efficient way to gain ranks. If you weren't a murderer - or an executioner - you could cultivate from the mana released by mana cores or draw ambient mana from the air in unpopulated areas. If, on the other hand, you were open to taking human life, you could gain tiers much faster. The executioner had to be Silver at least. She'd be a light snack for his power.
As Tira’s neck pressed against the bloodstained marble, the bonds tightened around her throat and crept up to cover her mouth, while the ones at her wrists pulled her hands behind her back. Tira came to a decision.
As the headsman raised his axe, she reached deep into herself, grabbing at the little remaining mana, and activated Cauterize. By the time the axe swung forward, the pain was so great Tira was ready to black out, and steam was rising from her pores. She screamed against the bond of Light over her mouth, and if not for the healing energy those bonds contained, she'd already be dead.
As the axe touched her flesh, but before it completed its trip to anything fatal, she burst into flame. Her pain became so great that it stopped mattering altogether, her nerves either shutting down or, more likely, burning out to the point where they couldn't inform her she was dying.
Before she died, she heard a single phrase echo through her mind.
"Reborn... together."
It wouldn’t be inaccurate to say the worst time to try to understand a strange greeting in your head was at the exact second you self-immolated to take control of your own death.
However, there was a certain cold comfort in knowing this would be the last worst time.
Chapter 2
Tira fell far longer than it should have taken to reach the basket. Basket? Why was there a basket? There was the fall. She'd been facing the headsman’s axe, hadn't she? Because of... something. She couldn't piece it together, all jumbled up like it was.
What was she thinking about again?
Ah, that's right. What came after the fall? After the fall, there was-
Plink.
Well, as far as impacts go, plink wasn't particularly impressive. Tira had expected a crash, perhaps, or maybe something more... impactful. She had thought a human head was larger than something that would go plink. Why did she think the correct sound should have been splat? That made little sense - gems don't go splat.
And she was a gem, wasn't she?
No. She was a person. Or she had been. Things weren't adding up. She knew she was a person who was going to die, but she also knew she was a gem. That much was certain. She was hard and crystalline, and she had survived what had felt like a pretty big fall. On the other hand, since the fall had only ended in a plinking sound, maybe it hadn't been much of a fall. The distance from coin purse to cobblestone seems vast to a copper. And she wasn't a copper coin. She was a person...except she was also a gem, but maybe she hadn't always been, and... Tira tried to take a deep breath to calm herself, but she didn't have any lungs to hold air, nor mouth for air to travel through. Instead, something else flowed into her.
Energy. Life. Mana.
For a moment Tira basked in the sensation. It was beautiful, like the warm sun against her skin or a hot meal. Maybe. She couldn’t remember basking in the sun. As far as hot meals went, all the meals she remembered were cold gruel, but those analogies felt right.
