The mausoleum was guarded by a ferocious sphinx who presented her three riddles. If they were to fail to answer them, she would eat them. Our heroes assured her the infants were sincere in their answering.
The sphinx having perished from eating poisoned infants, our heroes entered the tomb, to unfortunately be separated by living walls. Our hero, carrying the healer delirious with pain, tried everything in his power to move the obstacles, but finally felt the strength leave him from intense thirst. As he had suffered from deprivation before, he felt twice as much fear, and felt twice as powerless. He sat, contemplating that this was the doom of himself and the healer.
From the darkness shuffled the immortal bodies of kings past. Embalmed alive using arcane sorceries, they lived eternally but were very bored of long living quite early into it. The flame in their eyes went out and the spark of intelligence left their heads. They moved toward our hero with the urges that sustained them while living. Our hero tried to resist, but strengthened by dark magic they pinned him, moved his head to their organs, and satisfied themselves as they would with their mistresses in the past life. Came flooding in were happy memories of themselves and their concubines that they relieved every last drop of life into the act, and finally exited this life to the thereafter, if any existed for them. In-between kings, our hero took every second liquid and poured it into the healer’s mouth.
Having relieved his thirst by several lineages of scions, he gathered his strength and found the kings had came from a door dim in the darkness of the tomb. Two dwarves greeted him as they rested on their anvils. They had been buried with the kings as a reward for their skillful work, and found the glory of the afterlife quite stale. Our hero had never seen a dwarf before and supposed their race rare. The dwarf replied that his father and his grandfather had lived in the mountains, forging ingenious tools, and he himself came to the city for work when times were difficult. As for the other, he was a very short man.
The dwarf and the dwarf led our hero to the treasure. In this room was all of the kings’ glorious treasure, things they cherished in life, as weapons, armor and ornaments. Loyal in this life and loyal in their death, the living walls, which the kings kept as pets, guarded the treasure as our heroes approached it.
The healer’s nose twitched. He leapt from our hero’s shoulders and, in an incredible show of strength, crushed the walls between his fingers. Here too were barrel racks of vintage wine.
As the other heroes had arrived, they decided to rest, eat, and take as much loot as possible. Fully armed, even the remaining infants, they felt prepared to face the dragon and were thus in a cheerful mood. They even found jollity by the healer’s drunken ramblings. As he was far more inebriated than he had been used to, and very gay as a result of long suffering, he invented an amusing yarn that he had once lived in another world, been married there with a child, and had deceased in an untimely fashion only to return to live in this world as an adventurer. His life, in his words, was a neverending nightmare originating from a devil in disguise as a goddess, and most horrible was his having experienced loss twice in the form of an adventuring party that had become a second family to him. Indeed nothing could ruin our heroes’ hopes for the future.
© 2025 François-Marie Lee