Sly opened his eyes and saw nothing, only darkness. As he moved the hues of his echolocation sense kicked in, and he detected a passageway with stone walls, and something slick, wet and nonreflective on the ground.

  Vomit, he realized, smelling it.

  His right eye continued to see nothing, as if covered by a patch. To normal sight the passageway was the lightless dark of a crypt.

  He shuddered, the memories of the previous day still raw.

  “The dragons… my face... the pain… It was all real.”

  He was alive, and his head didn’t hurt, but the thought of swallowing that red potion made him flinch.

  “I actually drank it.”

  The realization settled in like a stone in his gut.

  “Taking ancient medicine? Sucking it down? That’s the act of a desperate fool.” His lips twisted into a grimace. “And a fool deserves exactly what he gets.”

  With trepidation, he reached to touch his face.

  As expected, the skin on the left side of his face was undamaged, but his fingers shook as he continued along the line of his face to the burns.

  He gasped, not with horror but… shock. The skin was smoother than before, more sensitive, and lacked facial hair. It was new but it was… him.

  The burns were healed and pain-free.

  He had no idea how he looked. He would have welcomed a light and a mirror, but even if his face were blue, it’d be better than last night’s ghastly bubbled mess.

  “No”, he checked his internal clock. “Not last night.”

  He’d lost two days, not one.

  Frantically, unable to believe what his fingers were telling him, he continued to brush his fingers over his forehead, right to left, until he reached the old scar caused by the skiing accident.

  His fingers froze. Paused, then moved again. Smooth skin over seamless bone. The deep, livid scar simply wasn’t there. He’d lived with the injury for months and for good or ill it had become part of who he saw in the mirror every day.

  Gone. Who was he without the scar?

  How? The crack in his skull had been like a crevasse, millimetres deep and a finger’s width wide. Now there was only smooth skin, a bit sensitive, as though he’d fallen asleep on the beach after tequila with the guys, again.

  Hetlagh said green spores would kill him, not cure every injury he’d ever had. Sly tried to look down at his hands but all he saw was a fuzzy, grainy blur in false shades. When he urgently touched the skin on his right arm, the burnt side, it felt as unmarred as the skin on the left.

  He swore, wishing for enough water so he could quench his thirst. He got unsteadily to his feet, feeling solid, strangely heavy. Looking around, he found the reflective shine of a shallow pool, which was a small miracle in of itself. He moved to the puddle, slumped to his knees and touched the liquid with his lips. Tentatively he drew some into his mouth.

  Water, he concluded, wet and cool with the tang of minerals.

  He sucked at the floor until it was mostly gone. A minute later the puddle was back, and he slurped again, and again, until his thirst was mostly gone. He tipped out the contents of the dead orc’s satchel and thought about collecting water in that but if it had ever been waterproof, it wasn’t now, so he gave up before he began.

  Tipped out, the rest of the dead orc’s possessions were uninteresting, rusted through, or rotten. Only one other piece felt solid enough to keep, and that was covered in brittle burnt crud. He couldn’t tell what the lump was but put it in his pocket anyway. Sly didn’t think he would ever know who the orc was, why he, or she, was wandering this place, or when they died. But he owed them.

  The half of the orc that wasn’t burnt to ash was desiccated, preserved. The body might’ve lain there a few months, or a hundred years. It would need to stay there a little longer.

  "I’ll go back," he said to himself, more of a vow than a thought. "I’ll give the remains the respect they deserve... whatever that means to an orc."

  He wasn’t sure what that would look like—was there a ritual? A prayer? A burial, perhaps, or a pyre, if not too ironic?

  He had no idea. But he knew one thing.

  "I owe them that much."

  Afterwards he began to explore, nervously approaching each door as a room to clear in a kill-house, but over the next two hours he slowly became used to his new sense of weight and solidity.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  He also became convinced the palace was both huge and entirely deserted. He was suddenly so hungryhe wanted to see an animal – any animal, even a rat – so he could run it down, kill it and eat. There was nothing, though, not even old bones.

  He didn’t find stairs or steps, up or down. He progressed from one empty passageway to the next without stumbling over fire-breathing dragons or thieving orcs, dead mice or wandering ghouls.

  Not that his explorations were entirely fruitless.

  Entering one passage, it quickly widened into a hall, and the sound of his footfalls changed. Their echoes grew as the height of the ceiling increased, and the air became chill. The hair on the back of his neck prickled. Unmoving, he paused and stared, willing the Stygian darkness to unveil its mysteries. Seconds later echolocation had provided nothing except a shimmer on the edges of his vision, like ropey strands of ancient cobweb.

  He felt eyes watching him from the far dark corners but knew the vagaries of imagination and willed his legs to move him on, entering the high-roofed chamber.

  One step, then two.

  On the third step a sharp pop sounded from under his shoe, followed by a soft crunch. He froze, then took another step. Another pop and scrunch. He winced, fearing the floor ahead covered by the tiny skulls of long dead rodents, like seashells on a wave-dashed shore.

  An instant later, intense cold billowed up from the floor to numb the tips of his fingers and he sprang back with a curse. Sly’s heart missed a beat, but taking a deep breath, he knelt and gingerly lowered his hand. His fingers brushed against shards of something sharp and crystalline on the floor, a dust that burned his skin with a glacial chill.

  “What the...!”

  The floor was icy around Sly’s feet, but flagstones to either side were only normally cold. Fumbling blind, his fingers brushed against small objects on the floor: spheres that rolled and clinked against others on the stone. He tentatively gathered up a few, relieved they didn’t give him instant frostbite, and rolled them between his fingers. The shells or stones quickly warmed to skin temperature.

  What on earth they could possibly be?

  Each was the size of a large pearl and generally round, but to his relief they were not tiny skulls. Feeling the fragments, Sly concluded several spheres had been crushed underfoot. That implied they were delicate and breaking them had triggered a chemical reaction that had chilled the air – an endothermic reaction, like the chemicals used in instant cold packs. He strained through his memory.

  “Ammonium Nitrate?” he muttered. “Maybe... but surely the amount I crushed was too little to have chilled so much air? Barium Hydroxide, then...?”

  Somehow that didn’t feel right. Did they use these chambers as storerooms, somehow kept cold by the pearls? Had they spilled from some decayed shelf?

  He sighed. He couldn’t see enough to tell.

  He sighed and added three handfuls of the pearls to his satchel. What they were, or why they were scattered across the floor, would have to wait until he had light. Rising, he slid his feet over the paving, carefully brushing aside any other debris, and heading out of the chamber.

  Sly’s fortunes changed an hour before dusk on the twenty-third of October. By then he had explored the endless ruins for nearly two days. For the last hour he had systematically moved from room to room, quickly looking for exits, both obvious and hidden. He’d begun to suspect that the servants of this place had secret ways to move between chambers, like the door from the dragon’s hall which had looked like rock, but he’d not found anything since.

  Finally, he came to one small, dusty anteroom, like a waiting room or reception area, with a single rotten desk, which had once been very large and grand. His suspicions were raised, however, when he couldn’t find the suite of offices for which a receptionist could be the guardian. The place seemed too small to be a destination in its own right, even for the pettiest of bureaucrats.

  “If this is an anteroom,” he muttered to Gus, amusing himself, “where’s the post-room?”

  ‘I believe the term you’re looking for is ‘inner sanctum’,’ Gus’s tickertape wrote. ‘Such a place might otherwise be confused with the mailroom.’

  Sly laughed and began looking around for a secret passage, pulling at anything that looked like a handle or lever. When the wooden ornament he held moved, however, he was astonished. It became unglued from its lever, and Sly toppled backwards even as a false wall behind the desk slid to one side.

  Thick dust rose from the mechanism and Sly coughed, climbing back to his feet. The door had juddered to a stop, halfway open, but he saw enough to know he’d found what he was looking for. Ducking, he went through the gap and through a short passageway into a high, wide space bordered by the planes and hard lines of furniture. Flat shiny reflections came back from what he suspected were glass-fronted cabinets, miraculously intact despite the passing of centuries. Elsewhere the walls were flat but somehow soft to Sly’s sonar-sense, not shiny. He approached curiously and used his hands to grope at what he found.

  Bookcases, and thousands of leatherbound books.

  He abruptly appreciated where he was and slowly turned with new delight. This was a library – a large one on at least three floors, judging by the staircases he glimpsed in the corners of the lower chamber. The air was dry and the temperature cold, perfect conditions to preserve paper for the age since the chambers were last disturbed. Dust lay thick everywhere, like a fresh fall of snow.

  Moving about the rooms Sly felt like an archaeologist opening a tomb. He loved old archives, libraries and museums, any place that displayed ancient collections in cabinets under glass. Sadly, without a proper light he couldn’t read a single written word. Nor could he find what the dusty glass contained without lifting and breaking the fragile lids and fumbling with his hands. With great regret and frustration, he resolved to leave the library and come back when he had a light.

  On the way out he sensed a nook he had missed before, concealing a high table. On it, at the level of his chest, was a device like an oil lamp. This was no instant solution, he had no matches to light a wick, but he lifted the lamp down and through his hands wondering how the mechanism had once worked.

  When his upraised thumb touched a rough spot on its dusty side he was startled when the lantern emitted a low glow. Blinking back instant tears, eyes filled with dancing motes from the sudden brightness, Sly instantly dismissed his sonar-sense. After a few moments to become accustomed to the glare, he looked around with new eyes.

  While the light didn’t illuminate the entire vaulted space, it was enough to see the stairs, cabinets and balconies. All was made from a dark grey wood he suspected was red under the dust, cherry or perhaps a variety of mahogany.

  He eagerly crossed to the cabinets and peered through the dusty glass. The second map he reviewed was of the palace itself, clearly marked with stairs and steps. The whistle he heard was his own exhaled breath and the flutter was his heart. Gus needed only a second to transfer the map to its memory, and he was ready to go.