Chapter 1: The Dungeon Where He Should Have Died
The blood was warm. That was the thing that kept circling through Kaelen's mind as he dragged himself through the corridor—not the pain, not the wet click of bones echoing somewhere in the dark ahead, but the warmth of his own blood seeping between his fingers, pulsing out of him with every heartbeat. His heartbeat. Still going. For now.
The walls wept black ichor. It ran in slow, viscous rivulets down the slick stone, catching the torchlight in ways that made his stomach turn. The torches themselves were dying—he'd watched three sputter out in the last twenty minutes, their flames guttering like candles in a storm before surrendering to darkness. The shadows they left behind had teeth. He was sure of it.
His boots slipped on something soft. He didn't look down. Didn't need to.
"Come on," he muttered through clenched teeth, pressing harder against the wound in his gut. The words came out wet, bubbling. Not a good sign. "Come on, you bastard. Move."
Six years of tower raiding. Six years of crawling through dungeons just like this one, of dodging traps and cutting down horrors that shouldn't exist, of stitching himself back together with shaking hands and dirty needles. Six years, and this was how it ended. Not in some grand final battle, not facing down a dragon or a lich or whatever nightmare the Sunken Crown had spawned in its depths this time.
No. A fucking spear trap. A rusty, poison-tipped spear trap that he'd walked right into because he was tired and sloppy and thinking about the payout instead of watching his goddamn feet.
The irony wasn't lost on him. It just wasn't funny.
Kaelen's shoulder hit the wall and he let himself slide down it, leaving a dark smear on the stone. His legs had stopped cooperating about fifty meters back. He'd been running on stubbornness and spite since then, but even that had limits. The floor was cold against his back. Wet. He could feel something squirming beneath his thigh—small, maybe worms, maybe worse—but he couldn't bring himself to care.
His hand fell away from the wound. No point anymore. The blood had slowed to a trickle, which should have been a relief except it meant he was running out. His fingers were sticky and red, trembling slightly. He stared at them for a long moment, then let his head fall back against the wall.
The ceiling was a nightmare of claw marks and old bloodstains. Skeletal hands—dozens of them—reached down from the darkness above, frozen in various stages of grasping. Reaching. Waiting.
"Not today," he told them. His voice came out thin. "Not fucking today."
One of the hands seemed to twitch. He closed his eyes.
The memories came unbidden, the way they always did when he was too tired to hold them back. Reyes, bleeding out in his arms three floors up, whispering about his daughter. Marisol, whose leg had been crushed by a collapsing pillar, who'd begged him to leave her behind. He had. He'd left her. The screaming had followed him for two floors before it stopped.
He'd been a medic before all this. Before the towers rose from the earth like infected teeth, before the world learned to live alongside monsters and magic and things that defied explanation. He'd taken an oath once, some version of it anyway. First, do no harm. Save lives. He'd broken that oath so many times now that the words felt like a joke.
The dungeon groaned around him. Somewhere in the deep, something large shifted and settled, and the vibration rattled through the floor and up into his bones.
Kaelen opened his eyes.
The corridor stretched ahead of him, dark and wrong, and he knew—with the bone-deep certainty of a man who'd spent too long in places like this—that he wasn't going to make it out. Not this time. The exit was four floors up, through halls he'd already cleared on the way down. He'd never climb those stairs. He'd never see the sun again, never feel rain on his face, never drink shitty tavern ale or argue with merchants over the price of potions or—
Something moved in the corner of his vision.
He turned his head,slow and heavy, and watched a figure emerge from a side passage he hadn't noticed before. Small. Slender. Moving with an odd, almost stumbling gait that suggested either injury or extreme exhaustion.
Great. Another dying raider. Just what he needed.
Except—
The torchlight caught her, and Kaelen's breath stopped.
Green skin. Patches of it, anyway, where the flesh hadn't rotted away or peeled back to reveal the bone beneath. Her left arm was skeletal, bare bones held together by something that wasn't quite sinew, fingers clicking softly against each other as she walked. Half her face was gone, the left side a ruin of exposed teeth and empty socket, but the right side—the right side was almost normal, pale and smooth except for the greenish tint. Long brown hair fell in uneven curtains around her shoulders, bangs cut straight across her forehead in a style that might have been fashionable a decade ago.
And she was wearing the most ridiculous dress he'd ever seen.
Crimson and white and pink, ruffled and bowed and covered in what looked like embroidered strawberries. A corset cinched her waist, silver laces gleaming in the torchlight. The skirt was massive, layered, absurdly impractical for a dungeon crawl. Doll-style stockings. Black doll shoes.
Kaelen blinked. Then blinked again.
He was hallucinating. Had to be. The blood loss had finally caught up with him, and now his dying brain was cooking up some bizarre fever dream involving undead girls in strawberry dresses. It was almost funny. Almost.
"Hey!" The girl waved her skeletal hand—the bones clattered together—and hurried toward him with that same clumsy, stumbling gait. "Hey, you're bleeding! Like, a lot. That's a lot of blood."
Her voice was bright. Cheerful. Completely at odds with the corpse-like horror of her appearance.
Kaelen tried to speak, but all that came out was a wet cough.
"Oh no, no, no, don't do that." She dropped to her knees beside him, and he caught a whiff of something unexpected—sugar. Vanilla. Fresh bread. "Okay, okay, hold on. I've got something. Where did I put it?"
She patted at her dress with her intact hand—patting a dress that had no visible pockets—while her skeletal fingers continued to click and twitch at her side. Muttering to herself. Something about scones. Something about a basket.
"You're not real," Kaelen managed. His voice was barely a whisper. "You're—I'm dying. You're a hallucination."
The girl looked up at him, and her one remaining eye—brown, he noticed, warm and brown—narrowed in what might have been offense.
"I'm not a hallucination," she said. "I'm Merumii. And you're not dying. Not if I have anything to say about it."
She reached behind her, into the voluminous folds of her skirt, and produced—impossibly—a small woven basket. Where it had been hiding, Kaelen had no idea. The dress didn't have pockets. He was almost certain of that. But the basket was there, and inside it were scones. Golden-brown, studded with what looked like bits of strawberry, still steaming slightly despite the damp chill of the dungeon air.
"Here," Merumii said, pulling one out. "Eat this."
Kaelen stared at the scone. Then at her. Then back at the scone.
"I'm not eating that."
"You have to."
"I'm not—" He coughed again, and this time the blood that came up was darker. More worrying. "I'm not eating anything a zombie hands me in a dungeon."
Merumii's face—the half that could still emote, anyway—did something complicated. Something between exasperation and hurt.
"I'm not a zombie," she said. "I mean, technically, I am. But I'm a person. I'm still me. And this scone will heal you. I promise."
Her eye was earnest. Her voice was sincere. She was, without question, the strangest thing Kaelen had ever encountered in six years of raiding towers, and he had once fought a creature made entirely of teeth.
"You're a zombie," he repeated. "You're a zombie in a strawberry dress, and you're trying to feed me a scone."
"Yes."
"In a dungeon."
"Yes."
"While I'm bleeding out."
"Ideally before you finish bleeding out, yes." She pushed the scone toward his mouth. "Please eat it. I worked really hard on these."
Kaelen's vision was starting to blur at the edges. The wound in his gut had gone from agonizing to numb, which he knew from experience was the last stage before the real end. A minute. Maybe two. Not enough time to get help. Not enough time for anything except dying in the dark, another corpse among thousands, another name that no one would remember—
The scone brushed against his lips.
It smelled like the bakery his mother used to take him to as a child. Like Sunday mornings and warm kitchens and a life that hadn't yet learned to be cruel. His mouth opened before he could think about it, and Merumii pushed the scone inside.
He bit down.
Flavor exploded across his tongue—strawberry and butter and something else, something that wasn't quite food but wasn't quite magic either. Warmth flooded through him, fierce and immediate, rushing down his throat and into his chest and spreading out to every corner of his body like liquid fire. He felt his heartbeat stutter, then strengthen. Felt the wound in his gut twitch and pull and knit itself back together, flesh meeting flesh, torn skin reforming.
He gasped. Then he grabbed the rest of the scone and shoved it into his mouth, chewing furiously, swallowing the hope that tasted like strawberries.
Merumii sat back on her heels and watched him with a satisfied smile. The expression was lopsided—it only fully manifested on the right side of her face—but it was unmistakably genuine.
"See?" she said. "Told you."
Kaelen pressed his hand against his stomach. The wound was gone. Not healed over—gone. No scar, no tenderness, no evidence that he'd been minutes away from bleeding out on a dungeon floor. He lifted his shirt and stared at the unbroken skin, smooth and whole.
"What the hell," he said.
"You're welcome!"
"How did you—" He looked up at her, and the full reality of what he was looking at finally hit him. A zombie. An actual, genuine zombie, with bones showing through her arm and half her face missing, wearing a dress that wouldn't look out of place at a tea party, sitting in a monster-infested dungeon like it was a Sunday picnic. "How did you even get down here? And what the hell are you wearing?"
Merumii's smile faded slightly. She looked down at herself, at the elaborate dress with its ruffles and bows and strawberry embroidery.
"Is it too much?" she asked. "I thought it would be nice, since I don't get out often, but I wasn't sure about the bows. Sometimes I think the bows are a bit much."
"That's—" Kaelen shook his head, then laughed. It came out sharp and startled, the laugh of a man who'd just been pulled back from the edge of death by a pastry. "That's what you're worried about? The bows?"
"I like the bows," she said defensively. "I made them myself. Well, I made the whole dress. Sewing is kind of my thing. Also baking. And... um. Healing. Apparently."
"Apparently." Kaelen rose to his feet, testing his body for any lingering damage. Nothing. He felt better than he had in months—stronger, lighter, like someone had taken all the accumulated exhaustion of six years of raiding and scrubbed it clean. "What are you doing down here anyway? This is a monster-infested tower. There are things in here that would eat you alive."
"'Alive' is kind of relative for me," Merumii said, getting to her feet with considerably less grace than he had. She stumbled, caught herself on the wall, and left a streak of greenish residue on the ichor-slick stones. "Sorry. Balance issues. One of the ears—the inner ear, I mean—isn't really... there anymore."
"So you decided to just wander into a dungeon?"
"I was looking for ingredients."
"For recipes?"
"For potions. Well, healing. I can bake things that heal, but I need specific ingredients. Moonflower petals. Silverroot. Dried flamewort." She gestured vaguely deeper into the corridor. "There's a garden on the fifth floor. The tower grows things that don't grow anywhere else. I thought I could grab some before anyone missed them."
Kaelen stared at her.
"You came into a monster-infested tower," he said slowly, "to steal from a garden."
"Not steal. Borrow."
"You're going to die. Again. Permanently."
"I'll be fine." She waved her skeletal hand dismissively, the bones rattling. "The monsters don't bother me. I think they can tell I'm already dead. It takes the fun out of it."
"That's not how—" Kaelen stopped himself. Took a breath. Then another. He'd just been healed by a zombie's magic scone. He was in no position to argue about the rules of reality. "Look. Merumii, right?"
"Mm-hmm!"
"What were you planning to do after you got your garden ingredients?"
"Go home. Bake a cake. Maybe some cookies, if I had time."
"And what was your plan for the way out?"
She was quiet for a moment. Her one eye flickered to the side, then down, then everywhere except his face.
"I'll think of something," she said.
She had no plan. She'd come into a killing field with no plan, no weapons, no combat training, and a dress with too many bows, just to raid a garden for baking ingredients.
Kaelen ran a hand through his hair. Looked at the corridor stretching ahead—dark and ugly and full of things that wanted to eat him. Looked at the corridor behind—the one that led up, toward the surface, toward safety and sunlight and a life he'd nearly thrown away.
Looked at the zombie girl in her absurd dress, standing there all bones and greenish skin and hopeful, lopsided eyes.
"I'm Kaelen," he said finally. "Kaelen Ashford. I'm a raider. Former medic." He paused. "And if you're going to keep doing shit like this, you're going to need someone watching your back."
Merumii tilted her head. The movement exposed a gap in her cheek, and he caught a glimpse of teeth where teeth shouldn't be visible.
"Is that... a job offer?" she asked.
"Call it a partnership." He bent down and retrieved the knife he'd dropped somewhere in his frantic stumble through the corridor, testing its weight in his hand. "You bake things that heal. I know how to survive places like this. You get someone to keep you from getting eaten back to real death, and I get... whatever this is."
"The scones?"
"I was going to say 'a reason to keep living,' but sure. The scones work too."
Merumii's face did that complicated thing again—something between joy and relief and the early stages of tears, though her one eye stayed dry. Probably couldn't produce tears anymore, Kaelen thought. Probably one of the many small agonies of being a zombie.
"I've never had a partner before," she said. "I've never had anyone offer to... to defend me. Most people run away when they see me."
"Most people are idiots."
"You don't think I'm horrifying?"
Kaelen looked at her. The greenish skin. The exposed bone. The missing eye and the gap in her cheek and the skeletal arm that clicked when she moved. The dress that looked like something a child would wear to a birthday party, complete with strawberry chains hanging off the hem.
"I think," he said slowly, "you just saved my life. And I think that counts for more than what you look like."
Merumii was quiet for a long moment. Then she smiled again—that lopsided, half-formed smile—and extended her skeletal hand toward him.
"Partners, then," she said.
Kaelen took it. The bones were cold and light, held together by whatever magic kept her upright. He shook carefully, afraid he might accidentally snap something off.
"Partners," he agreed. Then he glanced down the corridor, toward the deeper darkness and the distant click of bones in the dark. "Now. You said something about a garden on the fifth floor?"
"Mm-hmm!"
"Lead the way. But if anything tries to eat us, you're staying behind me."
"I can help!" she protested. "I can—I can throw bones. I have a lot of them."
"I'm sure you do. Let's try to keep them attached for now."
They started down the corridor together—the dying raider and the undead baker, walking side by side through the dark. And Kaelen realized, with a strange, floating feeling in his chest that he hadn't felt in years, that he was actually looking forward to whatever came next.