This is the second chapter of a novel that I'm writing for my patrons and reposting here a few weeks after each chapter drops on Patreon. It takes place in The Undercroft, a game world I'm developing for Creepy Assassin Game's upcoming ImagCard RPG and each chapter will be very poorly illustrated by myself. Enjoy!
"The Daylight Tree," sketch from the journal of Commander Dante Fean
Everyone stared as they entered. Not obviously, not in a way that would be noticed unless someone was in the mood to notice, and neither of the two people who stepped in through the thick double-doors were interested in noticing. What these people thought of them was their own business.
The card games continued, the conversations carried on, the drinking and eating went unabated, but every eye shifted just slightly towards them, watching them as they made their way into the room.
They stood out. Him far more than her, at least she had the appropriate attitude of a local if not the wardrobe, but either way they stood out even in this place.
The Daylight Tree had been built intentionally within The Great Tower nearest to Fretraci. Two massive skyscrapers of The Old World that stretched from foundations someplace deep in The Dark Labyrinth to ceilings a few dozen feet above The Surface, The Great Towers’ reach across the strata made them a kind of unofficial no man’s land. No one wanted to lay official claim to the multitude of levels within and only the truest of The Undercroft’s outcasts made them their home. The only presence of recognizable civilization whatsoever was The Daylight itself, a small pub built into a portion of the original structure in which a tree had taken root long ago. It stretched up into the balconied atrium that made up the last several dozen floors of the Tower and towards the Surface light that shone in through the windows at the atrium’s top.
During the daytime it was the brightest place in the entirety of The Undercroft, even outshining The Crystal Tower with its multitude of tiny electrical lights, and on a clear evening you could just barely see the stars through the glass ceiling above. It seemed natural that The Daylight be just as neutral as The Towers themselves, and this made the place a visual cross-section of all the subcultures of The Undercroft.
Just the tattoos alone told the story of the temporary peace that would last from the moment the tree was in view until the moment it was no longer visible. The man could see the factions written on their skin and the temporary truce written in their actions. A group of Laughing Skulls were bellied up to the bar next to a handful of Triple Triangles, three Red Squares shared a table and a bottle of something nearly brown that almost certainly wasn’t “wine” by any traditional definition with a pair of Cackle Boxes, a couple of Three-Nines were standing in the middle of the room trading war stories with a Nine-Nine-Six leaning against a supporting beam, in the corner a Bite Mark was haggling out a trade with a Night Eye, both digging through their bags of assorted ArchTech findings to come to a fair barter. And in the middle of all this chatter and trade and sharing and peaceful chaos that flew in the face of nearly two-thousand years of branching out and severing ties and falling outs and fresh treaties and broken alliances, sat a single man with a squatty glass cup of something yellowish-orange in front of him.
The cup, Sem assumed, was meant to be a tumbler, though it ultimately ended up being nothing more than a mockery of one with its misshapen design and almost complete lack of craftsmanship; the liquid, Sem knew from experience, was an equal mockery of whisky that burned all the way down and then on its way out the other end several hours later; and the man, who when standing was only 4’ tall but when sitting looked average-height enough for that fact to go almost entirely unnoticed, was Dante.
As soon as they spotted the short man and started towards his table, the glances started to drift away. Sem could practically hear their thoughts as some shrugged and others rolled their eyes: “Just more of Dante’s weirdos.”
Both men stood out in equal and matching ways in this room and it didn’t take much effort for people to link them together with little more than a few quick glances.
Both wore long camel-colored overcoats that remained crisp and sharp against the years of mud and grease and blood, Dante’s decorated on one shoulder with a patch of a green mushroom below one of a black triangle pointing upwards; both wore simple collarless cotton shirts with three buttons from chest to neck, the top two unbuttoned to display their complete and utter lack of chest hair; both wore dark blue denim pants caked with mud around the hems but otherwise pristinely clean; both wore heavy leather boots, Dante’s showing much more wear and the obvious signs of resolings done by a poorly skilled cobbler; Dante’s hair was shaved up the sides with a tight topknot of long hair held up with a length of leather at the back of his head while Sem’s was shaved almost all the way down to the scalp at the sides with a short mohawk of marginally longer hair running across the top of his head.
As soon as the other patrons saw the two men as two parts of a whole, they understood perfectly what they were seeing: two Citadel men in Citadel clothes with Citadel jackets and Citadel hair. Once they spotted the shared heritage of the two men, it was impossible for them not to see it.
Even their attitudes matched. Dante leaned back in his chair casually, one hand in his pants pocket and the other holding a paperback novel he was gazing at. Sem casually sauntered through the room, one hand in his coat pocket while the other swung at his side with each step. It was as if both men were equally under the impression they owned not just this place but every place that ever was or ever would be and were walking through the world with the same confidence of a man walking through his own living room.
Mahyu was more cautious, watching the room, scanning it for potential dangers, for those who might choose not to respect the unspoken truce tonight. A Citadelian was a tempting target for anyone, two was like a jackpot being dropped in your lap.
She fit in better here than either man did with the various grey and black tones across her mismatched outfit of pockets and pouches. The combination of various pocketed clothing items that she wore was one of the more common CobTech “devices” carried by the local merchants; it was known as a “Utility Suit” and was a favorite among everyone from servicemen to delvers to thieves, anyone who wore one was making a clear statement about their lifestyle and its need for more crap to be readily available than any normal person would ever require. But, to some degree even she stood out. Her outfit had a degree of “intention” to it, as if she had planned it as best as she could from the parts available rather than simply found things and tossed them on as she went.
Sem couldn’t help but smirk to himself as he made his way through the room. He knew what the Lowborn thought of him, but sometimes he couldn’t help but wonder what they thought of his most consistent companion. Third-gen Citadel escapee who’s mostly forgotten her ancestors’ ways but still retained some of her grandmother’s old teachings on presentation? Lowers girl made good? Fretraci bodyguard dressed up for show by her Citadel employers? Glowgirl adoptee taken in by a Keep family and raised as one of their own? You could take the girl out of the Glow, afterall, but taking the Glow out of the girl was a hell of a lot more difficult, or so everyone said. Labyrinth throwback from some long-lost yesteryear when Lowborn looked and acted so much more like Highborn? It happened on occasion that some random Old World family would suddenly appear from the depths nearly unchanged for all the generations that had passed.
Some of these were true enough, but he still wondered which ones ran through people’s heads in the moments between the stares that brought attention their way and the eyerolls that took it back.
“Lovely to see you two again,” Dante stated without looking up from his novel. “Please, have a seat,” he continued as he casually gestured towards the other chairs clustered around the table with the hand that had been in his pocket before turning to the next page and finally resting the hand loosely around the half-filled glass cup in front of him.
The book was old and dog-eared, permanently frayed at the edges with a significant portion of its cover torn off. The front only showed the remaining bottom-half of a painting of a forest, the text on the back had faded entirely into its own background and it was impossible to discern for sure if it was actually text or just an old stain from the multitude of dirty fingers that had touched it over the years, but the title was still just visible on the spine even through the deep creases from being opened and closed too many times. “The Hobbit,” Sem could vaguely remember reading it as a child. His grandfather had a copy in his study, along with several hundred other books from The Old World, but he couldn’t really recall what it was about. Something to do with a group of midget warriors on a quest to recover their lost gold or land or something.
He could see why Dante might be drawn to such a tale on more than the superficial level of holding similar features to the characters. As one of the last Glowkeepers still alive after the fall of The GlowKeep, the loss of both wealth and land were well-known to the older man.
“Dante,” Sem stated in greeting with a nod before he pulled out a chair and sat down, copying the older man’s casual pose nearly perfectly without entirely intending to. He had never figured out exactly how old the man was, though the last time a member of the Fean family had lived in The Citadel before their mutations had forced them into The GlowKeep had been over a thousand years ago according to The Genealogies that tracked the history of every family under The Agate Dome.
That had been the policy since the beginning of time. The Citadel had been established as a place safe and free from the horrors that had ended The Old World and when a family began to experience genetic mutations that endangered the continuity of the genomes preserved under The Agate Dome, they were exiled to The Citadel’s farthest official holding: The GlowKeep deep within the swampy bioluminescence of the GlowGrotto. There they would act as both a continuation of The Citadel’s influence placed at the deepest level of known society and a protection against whatever lay deeper yet within The Dark Labyrinth. Life down there was dangerous and dark and those who survived did so by becoming militaristic, violent, and quick to action.
Dante’s hair was still thick with most of its light-brown color, though a hint of grey had snuck in at the temples, and his face was rough but not wrinkled. Sem had seen the older man without a shirt more than once and he knew that his body at least showed no signs of the ravages of age, though he was startlingly scarred from too many battles.
“Commander Fean,” Mahyu said with just the slightest hint of reverence as she performed an unconscious dipping maneuver with her body like a sloppy attempt at a curtsey before sitting as well. She slouched into her sit, her ass going back into the deep of her chair and her arms stretching forward and crossing over the table.
Dante smirked wryly as he glanced up over his novel for a quick second to witness her awkward bow before returning his gaze to the book. It was hard to tell if he approved of the action, disapproved of it, or was simply tired of the consistent nods to his former station that he received from nearly everyone he ever interacted with.
“Not a Commander,” he stated simply in his dry, droll drawl. “Not since long before you were born.”
She shrugged and gave an awkward smile. “You’ll always be a Commander to me, Dante,” she stated as she nervously worked her hands into the sleeves of her long, black undershirt and pushed her thumbs into two little holes that had been torn into its ribbing so that the sleeves became something like unofficial gloves.
He couldn’t help but smile, his eyes twinkling with something between delight and amusement as he shook his head and sighed.
“I’ve taken the liberty of ordering for you,” he continued as he held the book in his other hand for a moment and gestured towards the bartender scanning the room for potential trouble from behind his protective 2-feet of wood plank. He was a large, elderly man. Tall and fat in his mid-section and face, which he hid well behind a bushy grey beard, with arms thickened with layers of tight muscle. Long, white hair sprouted from the top of his head and cascaded coarsely down its sides from a relatively uniform center-part. Like most people in the bar, he wore a miscellaneous selection of clothing he had found throughout his life, though he covered it all with a faded, threadbare brown suit jacket to give the outfit a certain sense of “class.” The elbows had clearly been patched multiple times throughout the jacket’s long life.
The movement Dante made was something like a quick hooking motion, a silent “c’mere.”
He returned the book to the original hand and turned the page again while the bartender prepared an order he had clearly memorized earlier and brought it over on a wooden tray that appeared to have been made from the top of an old end-table.
“I’ve got a mint tea for you mi’Lord,” the old bartender stated as he set down a large bowl with a handle on the side of it in front of Sem. It counted as a “cup” out here and was filled to an inch from its brim with a thick light-brown liquid that had already clearly had both milk and honey added to it.
“Not a Lord,” Sem stated with a smile before he rested his hands against the sides of the “cup” and stated “Thank you” while the warm steam of its liquid poured over his face and into his nostrils, bringing sweetness deep into his nose and the back of his throat.
“Aye,” the older man returned with a polite nod before continuing. “A refill for you, Commander,” he said as he put a second glass of the same yellow liquid in front of Dante while the shorter man finished what remained in the previous one in a single swig and a grimace before placing it on the tray where the new one had been.
“Not a Commander,” Dante stated in a faux irritated tone through his playful smile. He didn’t bother to thank the man and simply gave a simple salute in acknowledgement.
“Course not,” the fatter man stated as he gave a similar salute in return with his free hand before he continued “And an ouzo and a mug of cocoa for you, Mahyu,” he finished as he placed a nearly pristine shotglass of clear liquid in front of her and a simple, lumpy clay mug filled with a thick brown liquid next to it. Sem could smell both easily, one stinking of licorice while the other smelled heavily sweet.
The little shotglass had a representation of what looked like some sort of animal hoof printed on its side above the word “Indiana.” Sem could vaguely remember having seen the word before, on some old map or another hung in his grandfather’s study, but couldn’t remember anything distinct about it. He thought maybe it had once been a small country somewhere.
“I wasn’t sure which one you’d want,” Dante explained with a casual wave towards the two drinks.
“Both,” Mahyu stated before downing the ouzo in a quick gulp without even so much as a grimace against what must have been its intense flavor, placing the little glass back onto the tray, and clutching the small mug in both hands.
“And, I believe you mean ‘mi’Lady, Nikolas’” she corrected the bartender as a wide smile beamed across her face, which was rapidly reddening at her cheeks from the alcohol.
“Heh,” the older man let out in a half-grunt, half-laugh before stating “Sure, sure, kiddo, whatever you say,” as he turned back towards the bar.
“Aw, c’mon!” she shouted towards his back with an exaggerated defeated shrug.
“Can’t get any respect around here,” she continued to herself.
