Downtown Druid

Dantes stayed in Syn’s room for a few more hours, waiting for the coast to clear. He may have failed with his plan, but he was alive and that meant he still had options. Jacopo’s condition remained unchanged. Dantes could no longer feel his lifeforce slipping out, but he also didn’t seem to be improving. Dantes counted the pieces of broken mirror. There were thirteen shards. He could no longer use them to bargain, or to acquire resources for himself, but there was still one option left with them.

He’d tried working within the systems of the underprison to find a way out of his predicament. Since that didn’t work it really left him only one choice, he’d need to upend them. He could no longer keep his head down, he didn’t want to struggle to survive. If he was trapped in the Pit, he wanted to rule it. If it didn’t work out, he’d be dead, but that was the path he was on anyway.

Syn gently shook him, his eyes had been closed while he was thinking and he had dozed off without meaning to.

“Dantes, this is the quietest time in the Undermarket. Now is the time to leave.”

He nodded and sat up. He’d tried to sleep on Syn’s bed, but had wound up sleeping on the floor when the softness of it had proven oddly uncomfortable for him. He wiped the sleep from his eyes and stood.

Syn was in the shape of an old woman wearing a shawl and leaning on a walking stick.

“Never seen you in a form like that.”

She shrugged. “It’s nice to change things up every once in a while. It gets tiring spending most of my time not being able to see my toes past my chest, or not being able to take a form over twenty years old. Though I have a few customers who have more unique preferences…they come with their own issues though.”

“Hmmm, any chance I could pay for information on those customers? Could always use some blackmail material.”

She shook her head. “Can’t tell you, I’m bound by the client pact.”

Dantes shrugged. “Shame.” He drew his jacket closer and pulled up his hood as he walked over to the window she’d pulled him through several hours earlier. He looked back at her, seeing that she was now a homely woman of around forty years, with small features, and a long nose. “Thanks again Syn. I will remember this.”

She nodded, “If you live, come back and do some gambling with us when you get this solved.”

“If”

She shook her head, her eyes turning the same shade of gold as Dantes’. “You’ll either die, or have more than just two names by the end of this. My bet is on the latter.”

Dantes frowned, unsure of how to respond. He slipped gracefully out of the window, wincing as he landed and the bruises from the previous day’s beating pulsed painfully. He moved up along the wall and looked around the Undermarket. Syn was right, it was dead, he noticed only a few drunks sleeping on the ground, and a single corpse riddled with stab wounds in a dark alley as he wove his way toward the exit. In spite of the fact that the sun wasn’t a constant thing in the Pit, everyone still seemed to be most active during the day, and less active at night. The habits of their old lives shaping patterns in their new ones.

Dantes made it to the exit without issue, and walked past the sleepy dwarven guards who didn’t bother to acknowledge him. The Consortium didn’t involve themselves in other gang’s issues, it was bad for business, and neutrality tended to pay much larger dividends.

Once he was out of the undermarket and into the larger network of tunnels he could breathe more easily. He took side tunnels, small passages he needed to crawl under, and even routes covered in cobwebs and crawling with roaches and other small vermin to avoid running into any other prisoners. He could swear he could hear the voices of the vermin speaking faintly as he moved, but when he stopped and paid attention, the voices faded.

Eventually he made it back to his cave. He reached gently into his pocket for Jacopo, and held him in his hands. He was still alive, and his breathing seemed to be steadier than it had been. Dantes laid him down on his bed of rags, gently placing one of them over him like a blanket. Once he was done, he watered his plants and fed his mushrooms, all of which seemed to have grown yet another several inches outward while he’d been gone. There were even a number of small tufts of green and red plants beginning to crop up in other areas of the cave, all of which he took a moment to water. When he reached his senses out to them, he could sense a kind of excitement, a freshness that came with new life.

Once he was done, he ate a small meal and took the pieces of broken mirror out of his jacket and carefully arranged them on a long flat stone. He needed to perform a test. He grabbed the thirteenth shard and stood carefully transferring it between his fingers as if it was a coin. He made his way out of his cavern, grabbing his long metal pole on the way, and went to the cavernous room in which he’d planted the fruit seeds earlier that day.

Inside the room, he found that every single one of the seeds had sprouted. The peach pit Jacopo had asked him to plant had somehow already grown into a sapling that reached his knees. The berry seeds had sprouted into a number of ankle height bushes, and the grapes had spread across the ground as vines. Instead of being green, all of the plant's leaves were a dull red color. When he reached out to them, he could feel strength and vitality radiating off of them, as well as gratitude for his blood along with a hunger for more. He obliged them, pricking his thumb again and giving each of the growing plants a single droplet. He could feel energy moving from him to the plants, but also some of the plants energy shifting to him, as if the strength was being shared rather than given. The gears of his mind began turning as he looked across the spreading red leaves, but he filed those ideas and plans away for another time.

He went deeper into the room, far from his freshly growing garden, and placed the shard of mirror gently on a piece of fallen wall. He stepped away and crouched behind a fallen piece of masonry. He took his still bleeding finger and squeezed several drops of blood onto the tip of his metal rod, then he gently held it over the piece of mirror, trying to minimize his profile as much as possible. He held his breath as a single drop of his blood dripped from the tip of his staff down onto the mirror, and he yanked the rod backward.

Nothing happened for a few seconds, then the mirror began to glow red, Dantes ducked down just as it exploded, the noise of it deafening him as small chunks of debris flew over his head. When he peeked out, he could see black marks where the explosion had hit the ground and walls, and a small crater where the mirror shard had been.

Dantes smiled. This was something he could work with. All he needed was a delivery system and some information. The delivery system relied on Jacopo getting better, and the information he was certain he could dig up, for a price.

He took a bit more time to check on the plants, then returned to his cave. Careful to move as quietly and carefully through even the short distance of tunnels between his new garden and his cave. He’d just made a lot of noise, and while he doubted the elves had sent anyone this far into the Pit, there was no telling what else it might attract.

Once he was back in his cave he immediately checked on Jacopo. His breathing seemed steadier, and Dantes could feel the core of life within him starting to strengthen. He sighed, he’d need Jacopo’s help from here on, so he was stuck until he recovered.

He laid down on the floor next to his ‘bed’ dragging a few of the rags closer to himself so that he could rest his head on them without disturbing his companion, and closed his eyes. Even with the nap he’d taken at Syn’s he was exhausted, and after only a few deep breaths, he fell asleep.