Another non-powered, non-super heroine story, what can I say I blame the fantastic diversity of Mr. X’s DangerBabeCentral site. This story does have a heroine of course and lots of danger and sex and even capes and some masks I believe(well the intent is there I haven’t actually written it yet!?!), but it is decidedly more in the fantasy aspects of the last handful of stories I have been submitting than of the previous masked super heroine stories. I have been using Mr. X’s characters rather shamelessly and stealing his email ideas hand over fist for a quite a while here so maybe I just wanted to give the poor over worked man a break… Nah, I may give back the wallet but you can be sure the damn the thing is going to be empty! I will be back to the tights, tits, tentacles, and tiaras soon enough. If this is not your thing then I apologize and bow and sweep open the curtain so you may be on your way. All smiles, curtseys, and grace… Oh! And don’t forget your wallet! Rook.

KALEIDOSCOPE 

The man was old. With a beard long and gray which he wore tucked into his belt. He was thin and frail with lanky limbs that seemed little more than bone and skin. He was pale but his face was lively and his eyes were bright and he moved with a surprisingly nimble grace as he puttered before his small campfire.

The campfire was contained in a scrimshaw pipe. The bowl large enough to be held cupped in two hands was an intricate twisting carving of some fierce tentacle beast snapping a vessel in half while the stem of the pipe was of a polished marble of swirled white and reds. A small flame licked out of the ivory bowl and tickled the belly of a copper bulb. This almost root looking bulb complete with metal wisps of hair and knotted tendrils was in turn connected to a series of an uprising tower of succeeding alchemic devices that agitatedly bubbled and burbled and wheezed and sputtered. The shuddering vertical pillar of glass twisted bottles and copper tubes and small metal cylinders and spirals of rising and falling strange liquids and gasses looking all the world like a tornado spun of spiders sat above the little pipes fire and hummed.

Alembics, calcinatory, retorts, distilled, combined, condensed, dispersed, transmogrified, transmuted, liquid into gas, gas into liquid, and pip and pop with out-of-tune pipes wreathed its quaking pillar in lassos of colored smoke. While the old man turned a spigot near its base set upon a waist high stone and poured a syrupy concoction into a tankard and tossing back his head drained it fast.

“Hmmm, not bad,” he smacked his lips blowing a rainbow of colored smoke out of his nose and mouth and then suddenly froze with his head cocked. A puzzled look coming over his lined face as his eyes narrowed under his bushy brows and then widen as he turned away from his small camp in rapid strides.

His makeshift camp was set in a small rectangular courtyard of over grown mossy lichen covered stones. The stones were all of a singular bluish color of cut block that made up both the low walls and the paving flagging. It was upon the over turned heap of what was once perhaps a pillar now splayed across the small courtyard that his pipe fumed upon a waist high blue stone round column stone covered in gray and green miter and moss its flame licking up causing the haphazard pile of glass and metal to shake and shudder in its agitated place. Around the base of the lopped off stone cylinder’s piece where leather packs with straps undone and flaps tossed back obviously the more cherished abode of the odd assortment of dancing spasmoditicly to its unturned own music.

The tall lanky old man raced to the eastern edge of the low wall courtyard terrace in great lopping strides and reaching its terminus leapt nimbly up on a collapsed pile of rubble that once made an arch to a long forgotten window and here he placed one foot on top of the walls lip and in a wide sideways stance leaned and looked down from its great height. For the small courtyard sat upon a brow of a maze of ruins of the same blue stone slopping downward in irregular terraces until they reached the lip of a fantastic sheer chasm thousands of feet below. But only a few hundred feet down and separate of the stacked pile of blue stone ruins edging the great chasm ran a long stone bridge of a soft brown and reddish sandstone that began far back to the south from the center of an even higher mountain of blue black ruins and coursed its great length past the smaller mountain of stacked ruins upon which the old man stood and journeyed out over the great abyss bleeding into a singular strand to the faraway distant side of the sheer chasm where more mountains of blue stone ruins piled up in breathtaking mounds for as far as the eye could see.

It was upon this lone stone bridge spanning the depthless black rift that the old man peered his sharp gaze and made out several figures from the dizzying height of his vantage no bigger than his thumb nail though one lumbering brute was as big as his palm. All the figures seemed to dance crazily like leafs on a flooded stream moving in a mad rush with elliptic jerks and leaps zigzagging this way and that but all with a steady dire tread of singular direction along the bridges span. The old man turned his head and looked in front of the dancing drawn out swarm and spied a long small figure racing a few paces head of its spear point head.

The old man grunted and retraced his steps back to the center or the small terraced courtyard and slipped a long withered sapling staff from off his back. Held there by a lone cracked leather thong that was tied at both ends to the slim trunk and through which his right arm was placed so it road as a strap across his chest and he held the staff in his hand in front of him and let go of it. In an instant the withered old gnarled trunk took root and began to grow. The leather strap stretching taunt as the staff became a young green sapling tree. Roots shot out and soon spanned the entire court yard cracking and shoving stones aside and uprooting paving like mole works. From its top long thing limbs rose and leafed spanning steadily until its pale white boughs formed a leafy canopy over the young nodding tree.

The old man peered into the tangle of limbs and spied a nut which before his eyes cracked and turned into a nest with two eggs in it and he plucked one of the eggs pulling it from a green stem of the nest as one would pluck a plumb and holding it in the lined palm of his hand knocked upon it with his knuckle twice. The egg cracked and two small birds rolled out of it. He clutched each bird in either hand and strode back to the wall where he opened one hand upon whence the bird rose up and hovered on humming bird wings and he pointed at the figure now a pale speck being pursued by the river of dark specks and said, “Follow.” And the little brightly hued bird zipped away in a blur. The old man walked back to his camp and gave it a once over look and then held the remaining fist with its clutched bird to his chest and said, “Follow.” And in a shimmering of light he vanished from sight.

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The young girl stumbled again and forced her exhausted limbs to clamber up the rough brownstone and pink gritty stone of the ruins of some long collapsed building. The entire bridges surface was a maze of piles of rooms and stairs and towers and buildings all seemingly randomly placed leaving no direct path across the bridge its self. Instead one had to circumnavigate the alleyways and staircases and often venture into the rooms themselves plunging out open windows and leaping from balconies and running up leaning half collapsed spires to make away forward out of the seemingly endless dead ends.

She looked over her shoulder as she gasped ragged deep breaths her lungs hurt her throat raspy and dry and her head swam and sharp pains stabbed her sides as her hands shook as they instinctively dug for a bloody nail purchase upon the sandpaper coarse stone pile as her burning leaden legs with their bleeding naked swollen feet mechanically positioned for purchase. There was no little humped back gorilla armed black skinned narrow skulled fanged man slathered in swirls of pigmented mud leaping at her with bone knives but she could easily hear the howls of her pursers ringing around in the maze the flat and sharp echoes making them sound everywhere at once. She had certainly not lost them and their manic excited gibbering hinted at no sign of the slacking or their leapfrogging pace or interest in her person.

She looked down in her wake past her shuddering shoulder and saw the bloody footprints she was leaving and up at the swarms of disturbed large blackbirds that ringed and crowned her every move. A blind man could follow her hopeless flight across this endless maze of a bridge! She whined a high pitched note of despair in her small thin nose and returned to the task of dragging herself up the ruins of the collapsed small building that leaned against several other stone structures and noted another stone well half buried in clutter. There were wells spotted all over the bridge as one would expect in a village. All seemingly randomly placed; scattered without rhyme or reason, and all utterly useless for the intent of their purpose. Some of the wells where haphazardly placed on the roofs of buildings and opened down to the floor below them or built out on small ledges or balconies or patios of upper floors or blisters along the sides of towers again their circular openings piercing only the singular floor of their placement yawning down to no possible source of water. A few she had observed in her racing flight across the bridge and constant search for escape were set upon the surface of the bridge its self and these pierced the entire bridge with shafts digging down through hundreds of feet of rock to open out in a pinprick of light on the underside of the miles long singular arch of the bridge to stare unblinking down into the great abyss that fell away beyond sight. Again, no possible visible source or use for retrieving a bucket of water. She did not know if a river ran at the heart of that seemingly unending fall but no rope conceivable could span such a distance or arm strong enough to pull up its bucket sloshing its contents up the miles and miles of wind howling vertigo inducing distance.

The long bridge rose up in a steady half sphere arch, cresting in the center of the abysses span before falling again in its rounded path down to breach the other side of the great divide. So great was the distance spanned that even though the bridge was over a mile wide at its narrowest point of its center the whole structure looked like a slim delicate twig being pressed precariously with impossibly fragile grace in face of the twin sheer cyclopean black walls-like hands it spanned. As if the great walls were pushing the slim strand so it was forced to bend upwards to the point of snapping in half. Its great arched surface was covered in the ruins of a massive stone city that rose in volume as it neared the center of the bridges pitch so that the piles and piles of steps of ever shouldering plateaus of constructions increased into a mighty mountain rising up in buildings, rotundas, plazas, courtyards, stacked upon one another at its very most delicate center. At this point it was no longer possible to wind across the twisting maze of surface alleyways and abruptly right angle maze tortured streets leading up and down and  back and forth or race down dead end boulevards with ribbed raised walkways spanning from building to building or canter up seemingly endless staircases that rose but to fall away again at some fresh sudden direction, but the sky had to be fully abandoned and rooms entered and ways sought through unlit silent passages that shifted and fell and rose from room to room following no law of reason or sensible madness.

Other than the ocean of birds and scattering rodents and the horde of black-skinned man-like creatures who so devilishly pursued her through the ruins of the bridge city; she had seen no resident no citizen no personage no sign other than occasional travelers camps to show any sign of occupation amongst the endless inky black maws of countless stone wrought buildings.

The architecture was far from singular in fact it seemed a bizarre mix of stone work styles and there were decorations and friezes and adornments elaborately done so that each stair riser seemed carved in delicate images or festooned with inlaid tiles and semi-precious stones swirled in odd traces and patterns and entire walls of buildings were covered in enormous mosaics of thumbnail sized uniformly shaped chips of stone depicting fantastic images of battles and heroes and monsters and of people going about their daily lives in markets and fields. It seemed strange that such a laboriously constructed and detailed city would be left to ruin and abandonment unless there was a very good reason.

Most of the wood had rotted away or burnished to an impregnable stone like state petrified and unyielding before only guessed at alcoves and rooms beyond. Statues were rare but haunting and the fountains were bone dry as she thirstily checked each one she had raced past. Was it a lack of water that had driven everyone away? A plague? A war? The place seemed now dotted with tribes of these black squat animalistic crude creatures none of this was made by their hand. They were recent squatters now nothing more. Savage monsters living in the ruins of a once might city, but it seemed unlikely to her that terrifying in her unarmed state they were to her that these leathery skinned demi-humans armed with found weapons or stone knives could threaten a well-armed city guard.

She had reached the center of the bridge now and the increased congestion of the conglomerate of constructs had brought her mad flight to a confused crawl. As such the screams of her pursers were louder than ever and rang out more closely than they had for the past few hours. Giving rise to the hairs on her neck and all the voiceless instinct of survival reason to plunge head long into the doorways ahead, but instead she moved ‘along’ the jumble of the center mound of congestion. Something sinister in the air about those tall door-less portals of stone sitting dark and open atop their long narrow staircases leading into deathly blackness held her back with an almost physical palatable hand of dread. The walls of the irregular rising tiers towering aside her where rimmed in the usual jumble of piles of haphazard buildings and stairs but across the face in an even spaced symmetrical and thus alien layout to this city rose up thin narrow stairs leading up at steep angles to long thin narrow open portals that filled her with dread. She had no desire to enter into any of those endless warrens of inky darkness with her pursuers on her heels.

She ran and jumped and dropped and climbed across the irregular valley that seemed to trace the foot of the great triangular pile of buildings at the bridges heart as her deathly shadow grew closer and closer. She had no real idea where she was going and all views save the one to her right of the looming mountain of cubicles and their unblinking black eyeless sockets of doors and windows and zigzagging staircases was only a jumble of broken angle non-senseical twisting and heaving courtyards and buildings and ruins of rooms open and closed to the environments.

Breathless staggering with leaden limbs mouth a gap sucking razoring breath she sprawled down a pile of rough jumbled stones and fell to her scratched scabbed knees and rubbed raw hands vomiting bile as her body dry heaved and diaphragm violently shuddered.

It was a small open space with large checkerboard tile nestled in the foot of a wall and at the debris pile of a half collapsed single story structure with a patio on its roof its sister room having slumped aside half filling an empty fountain with rubble sitting in the center of the small open square. Angry birds cawed and swarmed about seemingly furious and confused at her strange presence insisting that she leave at once or quickly die and provide them with a meal.

The calliope above broke off its ruckus and she raised a sweaty grit covered brow with mucus strands running form her nose and mouth to see the blurry black figure rise slowly from a pile of stone bricks that clattered about its clawed feet. She blinked the thing into focus and then forced herself up to a sitting position and then to her knees and then to a hunched over stance still absently clutching her searing side that cramped and screamed against her hours of non-stop exertions.

The lone black figure eyed her carefully keeping a rusted bronze dagger between its naked short legged body and her naked long limbed body. When she had first been ambushed upon the bridge by these hairless ape like creatures she had killed or crippled three of them before breaking free and racing off in escape. The thing with its small beady eyes had reason to be cautious of her and it remained upon its pile of rubble its eyes and dagger unmoving.

‘It’s a standoff,’ she mused, but before she could contemplate what to do another and then another and then another of the compact black leathery creatures dropped from the surrounding higher ruins and their number made loud shrieking noises at her as they worked themselves up into a frenzy. She backed away from them now already a dozen and soon to be four times that and moving aggressively toward her now with less and less hesitation.

Behind her was an open space with some kind of waist high stone balustrade running across it bookended with tall walls of buildings leaning out over it or piles of rubble sweeping down toward it on either immediate side of her. She wondered how far it dropped down to the next building as she felt the rough course stone banister strike suddenly against the small of her back bring her backwards progress to a sudden unexpected halt. She glanced over her shoulder and then quickly back. She had seen nothing but the stone railing in the quick glance and in that singular moment the number and agitation of her pursers had doubled. It seemed every possible perch or buttress of vantage was rimmed now in one of the grotesque hairless black gargoyles and amidst their number braver or more worked up by the chase moved rapidly toward her in sideways leaping gaits.

There was nothing for it but to make a blind leap over the railing she could feel some vines, thick gray creepers that covered much of the ruins and she gave these an experimental tug with her hand behind her back. The vines were thick and hairy and cut sharply into her hand but they surely didn’t cut as deep as those knives and fangs would.

One of the creatures was leaping at her seeking to burry its fangs in her throat. She had not seen it before it had sprung. Had it come out of the shadows? Had she looked away without realizing it? Had her tired eyes simply missed judged it’s skipping speed from its brethren who now leapt in its wake? She would never doge the thing or escape its impact her eyes widened at the shock of her own death as it came for her.

The slavering jaws never reached her for it was impacted upon at the apex of its leap with a large chunk of heavy stone and rocketed to the side where it slammed heavily against the stone wall and left a black jelly smear trail as the boulder of masonry slowly slide down the spider web cracked wall and then fell back and clashed upon the bridges surface quaking up her feet into her loins a low sonorous boom. In fact many of the snarling screaming creatures were being swept away in a shower of rubble and stone as a large gray hulking rock looking monster smashed its way through the layers of buildings to look down at her with hundreds more of the long armed simian beasts flocking in immediately around it.

The main body of her pursers had arrived.

“OREEEEEEOLAAAAAAY,” the enormous hulking creature deeply intoned upon seeing her. It repeated the deep rolling thunderous word over and over again and had ever since it had spied her an  joined the pursuit.

The great beast was somewhere between twenty to thirty feet tall. It was a bit hard to say as it ‘stood’ as did its smaller companions stooped though it did not have their extra-long arms and it did not ‘pogo-pronk’ along upon its knuckles and toes as they did. No it lurched in slow strides and the earth trembled at every step for it was thick and heavy and built of nothing but bone and muscle and a scaly heavily horned hide and its small deeply set eyes riveted upon her and glowed.

“OREEEEEEEOOOOOOLAAAAAAAY,” the thing stepped through the gap in the wall it had smashed. Its feet dragging and kicking a new deadly barrage of missile fire of brick and stone that sent the advancing monkey-men into side skirting leaps to avoid the deadly enfilading hail.

Now would have been a great time for her to slip over the stone railing and use the vines to climb down to the next roof top but instead she froze watching the shuddering things approach her wide eyes fixed upon the enormous manhood that swung slowly between its knees. The cock head as big as her own head and then some, slapped like a bell clapper from one knee cap to the other in its flaccid state “OOOOHHHH’LLLEEEE SHIT! That’s a big one!” The great monster seemed to understand the young girl’s fixed stare upon its prodigious member and smiled at her exclamation. “I mean WOW! You’re a big boy aren’t you?!”  The pack of small creatures hesitated gibbering instead of howling bouncing lightly swaying from side to side with cold menacing hungry eyes apparently held in fearful check as the wall of a monster stopped in front of the girl. She looked his enormous appendage up and down and marveled at its myriad of throbbing veins, “A cock as big as my entire body… I have had dreams about this.” The young girl swallowed hard her freckled face blushed almost crimson under her tangle of long flame red hair. She looked up into the creatures face which seemed to raise its eyebrow and then wink at her, “an-an trust me I would really, really love to see how this would turn out but I think my mommy is calling me.” And with that the young woman leapt up on her haunches her full round backside landing hard on the stone railing and in a single smooth motion she had dropped to her side and swung her feet and legs out and over the railing and lowered herself down its stone spindles clutching at the hairy sharp skinned creepers dropping as fast as she dared while still holding firmly as she went.

She climbed down as fast as her legs and reason would allow but then a low booming questioning. “ORRRREEEEOOOOLAAAAY?” above her turned into an explosive, “OREOLAY!” punctuated with pieces of the stone railing that fell in great exploding arcs all around her. She looked up and saw the angry face of the giant half hidden behind the incredible girth of its cock as it peered through the shattered and crumbling remains of the railing.

“Call me sometime! Okay!” and she whistled at the idea of what that thing would look like in full erect taking care of business mode and hurried a little faster down the vines.

The small creatures suddenly filled the rim of ruined railing and returned to their screaming furious leaping about, but they did not rain down on her or past her or leap down onto the vines to pursue her though one did pick up a broken stone and chuck it at her just missing her shoulder and then another copied this but his aim was way off but the two searched for more stones to throw and a third found one and a fourth started fighting him for it and then a half dozen where picking up pieces of the stone railing and dropping them at her which tore huge chunks of the vines away and her almost with it and she looked down to see how much further she had to climb to safety and her heart leapt up into her throat and she froze dead despite the deadly rain of stone coming down all around her…. for she had slipped over the side of the bridge itself and was hanging over the exact center of the bottomless abyss.

Dangling just over the lip of the bridge upon the gray creepers with a new wind rising up around her she looked around her precarious position. She could see the distant other side of the bridge where it arched down into the lip of the crevasse on the other side and she could see that the entire surface of the abyss’s sides were covered in openings and carved lintels and posts and portals and staircases of what must have been enormous size for her to see them from what had to be miles (?) away. Like the city of stone above her the entire surface of both sides of the sheer abysses sides was covered in a wash of haphazard buildings of impossibly conflicting scales and size. As if a thousand builders with a thousand different blue prints all of differing scales had set out at once to cover the same area with their independent tasks. And further down she could see the tiny strings of many other bridges spanning the abyss from one side to the other though some seemed to stop halfway or a third of the way jutting out and ending abruptly over the great nothingness but it was hard to tell as clouds moved slowly beneath her and between her view of those silver and gold threads. But as far as she could tell this was the only bridge she could see going the length of this side of the bridge, its self as the bridge completely blocked any view of the other side of the ongoing deep gash, which spanned the great divide from its upper top to its other upper top. All the other distant bridges were much lower down and would have crossed from within the walls of the abyss into the far wall of the abyss. Their rooted bases entering and exiting into a world of inky black of subterranean passages, this bridge alone seemed to cross the span at the top of both sides passing from one side to the next in full daylight as it were.

A chunk of marble followed by a slab of pink granite and a rain of sandstone broke her of her transfixed revelry and with necessity whipping her on she forced her limbs to continue their descent reaching for vine and protruding brick and worn stone but the climb was slower as her limbs were stiff with fear and her heart continued to beat in her mouth even as she pulled her eyes away and half shut them fast trying to block out the dizzying effect of hanging by a vine miles above nothing.

The side of the bridge was well weathered and afforded many handholds though some of them crumbled at her touch and it was adorned with several gargoyles and carved reliefs and decorative embellishments that gave her places to pause and catch her breath and shielded her from the stones being haltered down upon her.

In fact soon she had enough such jutting buttresses of carved stone guardians that the rain of stone stopped all together and she was able to take increasingly frequent breathers on the stone ledges that held the larger towering figures. She even contemplated sleeping upon one of the larger stone heads and trying to climb back up with nightfall which was rapidly approaching. But the ruckus of the birds whose homes she was invading and their inches thick droppings made her turn up a nose at the idea. Still there seemed no other choice as the climb was hard on her hands and feet and her limbs were already tired from a day spent on the run. She needed rest and food!

Then one of the black ape men screeched past her as he fell to his death and she looked up in horror to see dozens of the ape men descending rapidly after her! For some reason it had never occurred to her that they would continue their chase! Maybe her own dislike at climbing along the side of the bridge above the abyss and its sudden ill-tempered winds had convinced her no one else would venture willingly to do such a thing. But there they were and she narrowed her eyes and cursed at them and then muttering and whining she forced herself to leave her safe haven vantage point and continue to climb down the side of the bridge. For they had showed some tactical forethought and had spread themselves out in their descent so that they had already cut off any hope of her simply climbing sideways along the bridge to escape them, or maybe they simply had been searching for her in the many alcoves and niches and ledges of the statues for now they saw her and their silence exploded into their shrill bloodlust screams!

Though she was climbing down the side of the bridge at its thinnest point it was still a descent from surface to underside that was over a mile in thickness. The howling black fiends were gaining on her and did not slacken as two more of their members plunged to death in their excited haste to leap from projecting carving to carving to get at her first!

She reached the bottom of the bridge driven before the pack just a few yards ahead of the nearest and thinking herself now at bay was astonished at what her eyes beheld. For the underside of the bridge was covered over in the same identical maze of buildings and spires and courtyards and staircases and alleyways and rotundas and plazas and twisting streets and fountains and statues and wells and an almost exact mirror of the piles of surface buildings above it! All of it built upside down! She looked at an upside down world bulging out of the concave as it did above from the convex of the great bridges mighty arc.

‘To what purpose?! For what possible ends?! What good is an upside down city?!’ She thought and then shook her head and using the great web of creepers and the upside down stone railing she made her way to the nearest upside down building. ‘At least there were no piles of rubble here. To rub my feet raw!’ she thought to herself as she grunted and tugged her way across the surface of the upside down city.

It was difficult work for she had to make leaps from one stone door lintel, and then crawl across its ceiling and the up to its window and make another leap across open space to the next walls opening. Luckily the buildings were piled upon one another so as she traversed further in to the upside down city she was jumping downwards for the most part and soon she had many footholds and handholds and choices of gapping maws of pane-less windows and doors-less portals to choose from.

Her pursers continued after her and were much better suited for the task of leaping and climbing and continued to gain upon her though she lost them again and again by hiding inside a small building or pressing her back into a shallow niche or wedging herself between the legs of an upside down statue but this in turn only allowed them to move past her so now she had to keep a watchful eye for them in every possible black inky opening or around every upside down corner. For now she was in their midst and they could come from any direction.

Having lost sight of her they had once again fallen silent as they prodded and probed every conceivable possible hiding space. They snorted the air and snuffed the stones but seemed confused the further they ventured into the increasingly congested city. For her own part now that they surrounded her, the young girl found they had slowed to a painstakingly thorough search and she was forced to continue along best she could to stay ahead of the ones behind her and out of collision of those in front of her and out of sight of those swinging at her sides. It was nerve wracking as their speed even crawling along in cautious search was faster than her safety felt best yet she blindly jumped and swallowed her screams as she slipped and caught herself again and again.

Soon though the smaller outer lying buildings near the railing of the bridge had given way to the towering mass of over layering buildings and many of these were connected within as well as without with hallways and staircases and mazes of disjointed rooms of weird proportions and sizes just as they had on the surface of the bridge above. And even as the above twisting maze of rooms and passages had proven themselves to descend and sink into the very rock of the bridge its self so too did these seem to venter upwards into surface of the bridge above! ‘I bet somewhere the two meet.’ She thought to herself as she studied from an upside door lintel with its jamb above her head the great stone room dimming into darkness before her as the monkey-men chittered unseen behind her naked back.

She had avoided the inky blackness of the buildings that did not immediately have a visible exit back to daylight on the bridge above, but now with everything being upside down and the streets thus impassable for one who obeyed the laws of gravity the only hope she had was to enter one of the buildings and try and make her way down/up its hallways and stairwells escaping the topsy-turvy world she found herself in now and back into the right-side up world above.

Besides it was only a matter of time before her pursuers sniffed her out and she would have no avenue of escape from the mob racing at her from all sides. ‘Still all that darkness…’ the young girl dropped carefully off the lintel to the arched ceiling and made her way across the ribbed vault to an upside down door and stairwell half lost in twilight. ‘This is the most promising room so far as to prospects of leading upwards,’ she bit her lip and climbed up the thankfully coarse stone blocks with plenty of finger and toe holds up to the inky opening of the door above her. She let her eyes adjust as much as possible as she sat on her haunches peering into the gloom of the hallway lying before her. Thankfully it appeared to have a low flat ceiling and many open portals on the sides running its indecipherable length.  She lowered herself down to the ceiling and walked along its center. She could just see at shoulder height into each open portal as she passed but they were only wells of inky blackness and she could decipher nothing of their contents or shape or appearance and walked on into the increasing gloom. ‘This will never do,’ she thought to herself. ‘I shall surely fall to my death if I continue on in utter darkness!’

But on she did stumble until she was on her hands and knees crawling along the surface of the hallway ceiling which had turned now several times as she had knocked her forehead into abrupt walls. And she realized that she was now hopelessly lost when her wide doubting eyes began to distinguish a lessening of the dark at one turning and she aggressively pursued this growing glow hoping she would not fall suddenly down some dark shaft set inexplicably in the ceiling.

The light emulated from a window set in the dead-ending wall and it was a long climb with blind fingers groping that resulted in two butt jarring falls until she reached the open casing upon the third angry try and found the room beyond was dimly illuminated by glowing strands of webbing?! The entire room was covered in the reddish light of the oddly glowing strands. ‘Spiders,’ and she grimaced at the thought, ‘and ones whose webs glow red? Not good.’ She pushed her hand out against the webbing that covered even the face of her window and frowned. It was not like normal spiders webs. The webbing was hard and brittle more like a spun glass than silken strands and it was sticky to the touch but felt... ‘sharp!’ she winced and pulled back her bleeding finger. The webbing strands did not feel round but triangular or square or any kind of sharp angled shape other than a smooth round one. ‘I would hate to see its asshole.’

She gritted her teeth and punched her way through the red strands whose broken exposed centers glowed even brighter than their outer surfaces. They broke almost as easily as glass and they only seemed to slice the skin if one rubbed along the length of their surface. She dropped to the thankfully low ceiling of the elongated room amidst a snapping crashing crunch as the webs angling up the walls corner shattered beneath her bare feet. The webs continued to crunch under her feet like snowpack and prickled against her naked thighs as she walked toward the center of the room. She dropped a protective hand over her thick hairy red bush to protect her sensitive genitals and felt the whispers of broken strands pin and needle her shielding hand and arm as she walked. The center of the room was freer of the sticky sharp webs that gave off a heady spicy smell as they broke like a cinnamon candy apple rotting in the noonday sun. But still the webs in the center of the room were ankle deep and the crack and gentle snap and pop of the fracturing strands made her ankles and feet feel as if she were wadding in nettles. ‘Worse than the rubble! Poor feet!’ She mused to herself, ‘at least the broken strands are making the room much brighter. Considering I have not yet seen the spiders I wonder if that is a good thing?’ she looked around her at all the broken shards of strands and their bright glowing ends and got an idea and set about quickly gathering them up into a large bundle which she managed with some juggling effort to hold as a torch in her left hand. ‘Well it works alright… I think? Better than pitch darkness at any rate though it is hard to tell how well it illuminates since the room is already aglow with all these webs.’

The long room, more a sunken hallway with a few stone treads leading up to open doors at wither end which in turn looked as if they lead into a hallway to her right almost identical to the one she was in or to her left another hallway but which bent almost immediately at a right angle lost from sight. Both avenues were covered in more thick layers of the red glowing webbing and for no other reason than she was a few steps closer and it afforded an open ‘spider-free’ view she chose the right passage and made her cautious way too it on her stained glass snowpack crunching sneaking stride.

The top of the door frames were a bit higher and she tossed her makeshift torch ahead of her into the next hallway as she used both of her small hands to cover her crotch as she stepped over the waist high sill and crunched her way through the ruby webs. On the other side she once again picked up her light brand and made her way along its crunchy length. This hallway was much narrower than the last and had long risers running up three treads along its side with large metal rings set in its sidewalls. The metal rings hung upside down and since the ceiling had the same three step risers at its sides and was just as thick in red webbing as the floor above her head she felt for the first time like she was not upside down and strangely felt a bit dizzy at that. A narrowness of the hallway meant a more thickness of the web and she got some nasty slices on her round thighs and knees and the back of her protective hand and started to re-think turning around and trying the other way instead when she found she was at the end of the hallway which turned abruptly to her left and opened after bashing a wall of webbing into a large room with many collapsed piles of rubble having fallen out of the floor and onto the ceiling. This room was almost web free on the ceiling as it was full of water that as she stepped into it ran icily all the way up to her knees in places. With fewer webbing stands on the celling and confined mostly to the floor above her she saw at once the merits of her sticky glowing torch and smiled at her own cleverness.

The water was clear and nothing seemed to move sluggishly about in it. She moved out of it up onto a small pile of debris and then turned around and squatted down and slaked her thirst. There was an opening perhaps a window covered in a grill of copper-ish metal that she thought she could reach and deal with as there seemed no other openings in the room. The possible door leading out might be buried under the pile of ceiling/floor rubble against a far wall but it was impossible to say the odd architects who had designed this city may simply have left the room a dead end. There seemed no way to reach any of the holes in floor above her though they hinted at enticing vaulted rooms with stone benches and tables obviously carved or fastened to the distant dim ceiling/floor above her. ‘No, it would have to be the window and grillwork.’ It was all she could realistically reach in this room and if that proved impassable then she would try the other hallway and see where it leads.

The reach of the window was easy enough and the grill was more ornamental in nature than practical and slipped out of place with a few hefty tugs. She was happy to see the narrow duct of stone work was web free beyond the grill and she once again gathered up her torch of sticky glowing strands and crawled her way into the shaft.

The stone shaft split off this way and that with vertical as well as horizontal branches and the young girl decided to mark her way with sticky strands pulled off from her web torch though since she had no thought of returning back to anywhere she had been this was a stroke of genius of very questionable worth. For the most part she chose ever ‘upwards’ shaft she could find. She would place her sticky bundle of glowing sticks between her huge breasts and with back against one side of the shaft and feet pressed against the other she would hunch her way past any lack of sure hand and foot holds. As such she ascended up several hundreds of feet into the lumbering depths of the stone city until finally her maze of stone shafts deadened for all practical intent at another copper grate which over looked another large room of stone.

The room seemed more opulent with many stone decorations and lots of stone benches and tables and chairs and though it was again meshed in ruby webs it was not as thickly encased in them and it had an odd look about it that took her several confused moments after kicking out the copper panel and dropping down to its floor to realize what it was. “It’s right-side-up?!” she blurted out loud. And it was too. Somewhere in the shafts she had passed the point where the upside down world turned into the right-side-up world of the city above the stone bridge.

She had now only to find a way out of the maze of passages and rooms and the endless twisting and turning and zigzagging staircases that often inexplicably deadened into nothing but a frustrating backtracking. She moved more cautiously now being this close to something this lucky and good surely meant danger. She passed from one room to another and even though she had no idea where she was she soon felt even more lost as stairs lead this way and that in a seemingly mishmash of nightmarish confusion. ‘At least I have finally lost those dark skinned ape men,’ she wistfully thought to herself as her stomach growled loudly for the umpteen times.

No sooner had the thought died then she heard the familiar growl of one of the ape-men and freezing at first waited until she heard its shuffling bouncing gait and inched forward to a stone railing that ran along the raised passage she had just entered. Crouching low and with her ruby band held far back behind her masked by her own body less it give away her position she peered through the stone spindles and saw the ape man doing his sideways knuckle toe bouncing walk. He was half smashing his way through ruby red webs. Again there were fewer of them than on the lower levels of the upside down city but they were still prevalent enough to cast an odd bloody glow that one could dimly see in. the hallway bellow her sister running balcony hallway above where she sat watching was even more opulent from any see had come across yet. This one had the remains of half rotted wooden book cases with moldering leather bound books and wooden chairs with questionable cracked leather cushions and broken legged tables and tapestries half glued to the mitered dripping walls.

Suddenly the ape beast stopped dead in its tracks and growled. She sucked in her breath and held it cringing back further form the edge of the railing. The creature seemed to sniff the air around it and its head swiveled this way and that rapidly. She frowned and wondered at the strange behavior and then it reared back and gave a coughing yelp as it swung out and lashed its arms and legs. It took her several seconds but she soon realized it was being attacked by spiders! Spiders in ever increasing numbers. The spiders were odd and it took hearing the clanging noise that they made when flung against the stone walls and finally catching sight of them detaching themselves from the walls themselves before she realized they were mechanical in nature.

The now screaming howling ape man threw one such spider so that it smashed into the wall just a few feet across from her and darting her attention to the strange battle bellow and the inert creature sharing her balcony she crept toward it to get a better look.  She touched the spider carefully pushing and prodding it with her torch of strands as much as possible. ‘It seemed dead enough, that is if a machine could ever be considered really alive.’ The thing seemed made out of copper and brass and had a diamond shaped front with all its spider legs folding up neatly behind it where its spinnerets could be found. In the center of the flat diamond shaped front sat a singular gem ‘eye’ this one was read but she realized with horror that she had seen hundreds of these ‘spiders’ in the lower levels only they were silver and had blue gem eyes. They sat embedded in the walls in long straight lines and she had mistook them for simple ornate decorations; a border of metal and stone work set halfway up the hallway walls and rooms. And all this while these were the spiders?!

She had no idea why the spiders set in their wall niches looking all the world like decorations in the hallways and rooms she had traversed had not ‘woken-up’ and launched themselves to attack her as she had ignorantly passed by them? Though as she touched one of the razor sharp points of the dead machines blood dripping ‘feet’ she was very glad they hadn’t!

The sounds of battle had faded down below only to be filled now with the clatter of metallic feet as they raced along the stone floor. She did not need to look to know that the ape man was little more than a pile of ground hamburger or that the strange spiders were now scurrying back to their decorative disguise along the wall borders which she now realized must run through most of the rooms all around her!

The young girl swallowed hard and moved past the dead spider keeping well back from the stone railing and moving quickly on all fours to the door at the far end of the balcony. She needed to find a way out of this place and fast!

The door opened upon a large circular stairwell leading up as well as down. There were no borders; thankfully, of diamond shaped gem faced metal spiders nested in the walls running alongside the broad steps and she hurried up the stair case as fast as her aching feet and legs would carry her. However at random intervals the broad flat steps ran alongside open door-less portals; the long treads of the steps acting as landings. And it was inevitable that her mad dash would pass such a door and awaken the dormant wall spiders within but this did not occur and though she looked in and saw the walls lined here and there with such spiders sleeping behind their red webs none of them made the slightest stir in her fleeing direction.

In fact other than her sore swollen bloody feet and general exhausted state and hunger pained stomach nothing distracted her from her mad rush up the great open spiral staircase that seemed to run up forever pass its spokes of hallways and off shoot-rooms. In fact it was only sidesplitting cramps of exhaustion that brought her doubled up and panting at one landing. When she had recovered enough to glance nervously to her right at the open hallway her eyes widened for there lay piles of gold and jewels running half way up the walls for as far as the eye could see!

She moved cautiously toward the piles of inexplicable wealth and found herself wandering up and over the hard pack slippery drifts of gold coin and gems and small bars of silver and intricately wrought jewelry. She picked up several of the bracelets and necklaces and began putting them on her neck and limbs as fast as possible until the sheer weight seemed to pull her tired body down this way and that with now each awkward step.

The glint of the gold and rays of light captured gems confused her eyes in the dim light and she marveled at a small tiny beam that she passed her hand through. As soon as she had broken the beam a diamond spider almost buried in the piles of gold rustled to life! Luckily it had to struggle with unburying its self and that gave her a few minutes to back away and gather her wits. In backing up though her sinking sliding ankle broke another beam as she lost her balance on the side of a pile and another spider shot out of the wall. It’s the beams, almost invisible, from their eyes that trigger them awake. Walking upside down on the ceiling the decorative band of diamond faced spiders had been too high up for her passing to trigger them to life!

She turned and ran and with each sliding slippery step made even more awkward by the ankle and wrist and necklaces of gold and gems hung thick and heavy upon her lithe frame another spider exploded awake! She was running the wrong way! She looked over her shoulder as she continued to run the growing mob of spiders now between her and the spiral staircase! And she fled down the ski slopes of gold that roller-coaster through the thankfully long hallway but with each racing stride she woke another deadly tireless pursuer.

“OHHHHH CRAP!” she yelled over her shoulder at what now must have been thirty of the blood thirsty buggers! She rounded the corner her hands cupped over her massive boobs for even with the heavy weight of the gold chains her firm opulent bosom threatened to punch her in the face whenever she ran at these sorts of speeds! The turn in the corner was quickly leading to a dead end and she began to seriously panic as she raced to the stone wall rushing toward her! But there impossibly was a little silver rope dangling down from the high ceiling?! No time to question it she leapt at the thin strand found it impossibly held her weight and began to shimmy and climb up the wall alternating between tugging herself up and walking her feet along the back wall as she pulled her upper body up with her hands in her mad scrambling panic!

Bellow her, the spiders zinged and careened off the stone walls unable to stop their mad dash and then leapt high up in the air and a few showing shrewd intelligence tried to climb up the silver strand after her but only rapidly slid down to clank upon the mounds of gold. The young girl did not hesitate in her flight and kept up the long climb until she reached the stone roof panel that had been slightly pulled aside. She grunted and struggled and twisted and pulled to get her large busty upper body through the narrow opening until she was wiggling free into the room and collapsed upon the floor that made up the high ceiling of the hallway bellow her. She lay there catching her breath before venturing a look back down the opening to the hallway floor almost thirty feet below her where to her shock the spiders were busy spinning red webs along the walls. Red webs that they could in turn climb?! “Ohmyohmyohmy!” the girl quickly rose to her knees and yanked up the silver rope as fast as hand over fist could and then tossed it over her shoulder as she pressed and grunted with hands and then feet against the heavy marble slab of flooring until it had slid back into its stone niche with the nearest spider already half way up the wall toward her.

She fell again to deep breaths and sighs, her dizzy head pressed to her knees until she had to turn her head sideways lest she smoother herself in her own huge firm breast flesh. She rolled over on her side and then got back up onto her firm ass with splayed legs and surveyed her surroundings for the first time. It was a small cramped room with a metal door closed in its wall. The floor was of marble set in checkerboard fashion made of dark and white stone. The walls were also of polished marble which was rare with stone empty urns sitting in the corners and stone marble benches running along all the short walls except the one with the door set in it. The sole source of light in the room was a small cylinder of brass and glass which held a long thing blue gem in its center and this gem glowed and filled the room with a bluish light. In fact, it was probably this bluish light that had caught and reflected off the sliver rope and let her see it dangling there at the end of the hallway for she had dropped her torch to put on her layers of jewelry and not managed to pick it back up in her mad scamper for safety.

Though the bluish light illuminated the room far better than he red spider strand torch would have done it still left much in shadows and so it took the young exhausted girl some time to realize one of the shadows under one of the stone benches was in fact a body.

A long dead body at that as she carefully picked over the nearly mummified corpse. It was encased almost entirely in leather; a leather helmet with flaps and buckle for under the chin and leather coat and leather breaches and leather boots all full of straps and buckles and seemingly endless array of pockets.

She looked over her own naked body and at her poor bloody feet, “sorry but you don’t seem to really need these anymore.” And with some gingerly tugging fingers and reactionary squeals she stripped the cadaver of its outer layer of leathers but left its cloth clothing upon its stiff desiccated limbs.  Now as she sat down on the marble bench next to the small glowing lantern and next to the half stripped corpse she yanked on the boots which came all the way up to her upper thighs and felt rather comfortable considering how touchy her feet were at the moment. She pulled tight at the straps at the top of the boots cinching them around her thighs and then pulling and rolling the left over flaps down over the straps to hide them. For some reason the leather pants hadn’t fit? She had tried those first and they just wouldn’t slide over her thighs or her buttocks. ‘It must have been a man or bony legged girl with a no ass what-so-ever!’ she had thought to herself and refused to contemplate that her own pert bubble butt could be at fault. She was over all a very thin lanky girl, tall and slim, with a very narrow waist, her huge boobs and round butt looked almost ‘glued’ on and gave her a chest jutting out bent back butt raised up sort of stance, ‘but there was no way you could say she had a big ass!’ suddenly she hated the dead corpse and gave it an accidental kick as she put on the leather jacket.

Likewise the leather jacket did not fit as well as the boots but it did fit better than the breaches as it was plenty long in the arms and with its pull over double breasted front closure of buttons and several waist belts buckled on the sides she could fasten it tightly upon her narrow waist but it was powerless, despite her exposed rib thinness, to contain her huge round globes. Her breasts just toppled out of the open top of the jacket ‘but at least it was a bit better than being entirely naked,’ she thought and gave up trying to tug the sides of the jacket over her enormous mounds.

She had no idea why the corpse was dead as she could see no wounds upon it though she would not ruffle any further in its cloth clothing out of squeamishness. But the remaining clothes looked unsoiled by dried blood or gore. ‘Maybe the door is stuck shut and it died here… trapped?’ she shuddered at the thought and stood up to try the door but saw a leather satchel at the corpses feet and decided to look in that first. She picked up the hip pouch and undid its double strap front panel and flipped it open and started to look through it. There was a smaller pouch inside with what turned out to be a kit of various lock picks, a third leather pouch contained several foul looking thick metal tubes with screw off tops that housed ugly rancid smelling liquids, then there were several small metal devices of cylinders and gears and wheels which she had no idea what their purpose was for, three carefully wrapped glass cylinders containing identical gems like the one in her bluish light lantern, a sheathed dagger with harness and belt for the thigh, several carefully folded old maps, a leather bound and strapped shut book which after skimming through it she realized was part journal and part a collection of copied materials of various places and more diagrams and maps, and another pouch with a few coins and some rather plain looking rings etched with strange glyphs.

She took out one of the blue gem cylinders and tried to figure out how to swap it out with the one already in there; after all it had obviously been burning for a long time if it had been on all the while this man had been dead? There was a panicky moment when the lighted gem popped out in her hand and the room plunged into darkness and she cursed herself for being so stupid as to not leave well enough alone. But the disconnected gem still glowed faintly as it lost its glimmer and that gave her enough light to match up the prongs on the base of the gem cylinder from the pouch and the top of the brass holder and she pushed and snapped it into place. The gem glowed slowly at first and she thought it must be a used one from before but then it suddenly flared up into a powerful crisp white light that illuminated the room fully. In fact she found herself working at the lanterns base at the odd knobs there until she figured out how to dim the gem down so as not to hurt her eyes that had for so long become accustomed to the darkness of this strange city.

Then she walked over to try the door. Her first fears were realized when it did not budge and resisted every effort she made to force it open and then she noted it was barred from her side with a large metal bolt which she easily pulled back and then light as a feather the bronze door swung outward opening upon a inky black hallway.

She quickly pulled the door shut again and set about preparing for her departure. She found the long sturdy rope where she had tossed it on the floor and coiled it up and placed it back in the pouch, trading it out for the dagger which she attached firmly around her thigh and then pulled the lip of the over flap of her boot over it so it was completely hid from sight and yet at a moment’s notice reach if needed, and then she did the best she could to snug the hip pouch across her belly like a sporran to cover up as much as possible her exposed sex. Her waist was just thin enough for the task and the bag hung there but with every practiced stride it shimmied and bounced and gave glimpses of her hairy pubic mound. “Well can’t be helped and with my knockers on full display I doubt anyone will notice a wink of my pussy.” She picked up her lantern and noticing the ring and strap at the top of the pouch she realized that is where the corresponding ring of the lantern top was supposed to hang and she quickly made it fast there. This gave an odd appearance for it was supposed to hang off the top of the pouch allowing access still to it while that in turn hung at her side. Hanging from the front she could still readily access the pouch but the light gave her firm jutting breasts a weird under light and spotlighted her overgrown hairy red pussy at every hip sway step. All in all it accented her womanly sexuality while casting her own beautiful face into murky shadows. In other words it was perfect. It let her see others and the area before her readily but her huge tits cloaked her face in shadow from ready observation leaving her disguised from her own illumination.

Of course the body that was shown was identifiable enough without seeing the face! ‘There are few girls who ever possessed such an impossible figure as mine!’ The young vixen smiled her big pillow lips and pushed open the door exiting out into the silent pitch dark hallway and moving rapidly along its center noting there was rotted carpets here coughing small clouds of dust at each boot fall and no spider webs at all and no decorative borders of spiders along the walls. She seemed to have made her way clear of their domain and now had only the new unknown monsters of these upper reaches to fear!

As she passed quickly down the hallway her arms held at an angle out from the sides of her hip shaking tit jiggling body with her hands held palms down to the floor and up bent up at the wrists at an angle, the red head teen bombshell unwittingly left behind undiscovered; a leather satchel full of rare magical loot leaning against one of the marble urns, as well as a crossbow and quiver of bolts, a bed roll, a leather canteen, and a leather scabbard bejeweled magic sword worth ten times her tits weight in gold in the small room rapidly disappearing behind her wiggling tight butts wake.

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In a white dancing flash of light the old man suddenly appeared he blinked dazed for a moment or two and then gathered his wits and went into a half crouch of action readiness. He stood with left knee forward and left arm raised across his lower face as he peered over it with eyes narrowed to slits and his teeth bared. Before and bellow him a great huddle of rubble of ruined empty houses teetered and tottered with empty gapping windows and doorways. He was standing at the top of the shattered remains of a collapsed leaning tower. All before him was silence and serene desolation of pink and brown hued stone buildings with the occasional lone cloud blowing across the surface of the great bridge. He left off his aggressive stance and slowly stood up, “Well… where are they? Has that brother of yours gotten us lost again?”

The bird in his fist chirped and he slowly turned around. In the opposite direction lay buildings on fire and billows of acidic black smoke and an ocean of black-skinned simians and red carapace giant crab like creatures and blue glittering carved stone statues with multiple arms swinging enormous blue stone swords and small golden bat creatures swarming about casting lighting from shards of raw gemstone clutched in their small talon hands and roan skinned hounds with eyeless skulls of razor sharp teeth and arms growing on either side of their long muscular necks and in the midst of their forward ranks a lone giant wielding what looked to be some kind of massive wooden club held somehow around its groin perhaps attached to a girdle though it seemed angled up to the right crossing above his shoulder at the ready while both of his massive arms swung at his sides and before this rushing racing horde fled a lone capricious red headed girl heading straight for him a small bird darted above her seeming to encourage her on. “Oh,” the old man said.

The red headed girl raced forward breathing in ragged gasps racing across the largest plaza she had seen yet, ‘of all the rotten luck! Now I get a big open space!’ toward what looked like a tower which had fell almost straight down upon its self in two sort of side by side piles of sections. It looked less inviting for escaping the ever gathering diverse storm of monsters roaring at her heels than the arched boulevards and portals on either side of it. “Are you sure about this?” she wheezed and the humming bird winged creature above her chirped, but she still had doubts. Running up a pile of gently sloping rubble did not seem to be much of a deterrent for such close and aggressive admirers as she had gathered. She leapt for the nearest chunk of worn masonry and began to climb the towers ruins the slavering jaws and claws of one of the dog beasts just grazing her booted ankle. She started to slip and the fiend caught at her feet with the arms growing out of the sides of its extended neck but just then a hand grabbed her wrist and yanked her up onto the stone. An old man stood before her and before she could speak he snatched the humming bird creature out of the air and shoved it into the cleavage of her heaving chest and intoned, “Home.” And everything turned into slow motion and then slowly vanished in increasing white non-blinding light.

The girl found herself dizzy and blinking her head spinning as the man roughly grabbed the small bird from between her mighty breasts which in turn seemed to be smiling broadly at her and then he replaced the now two birds into a nest into an odd tree and they both went immediately to sleep.

She felt very lightheaded and confused her feet did not seem to be attached to anything and she felt like she would just spin in place or drift off at any moment. “Here,” the old man thrust a gray tankard into her hands. “Drink,” and without even space for a thought she surprisingly found herself drinking down the entire draft of the mugs contents. The feeling of drifting and evaporation vanished being replaced by a firm warm solid cozy tingling of fire in her belly but the confusion only seemed to multiply.

“Good, eh?” The old man raised his own tankard and downed it with smacking lips. “I am thinking of calling it Snog. Still needs some work with the spices though.” He took her empty tankard and returned to what seemed a tower of jutting smoking flasks and beakers and glass and metal tubes all stacked up over some small blazing fire seemingly held together with bits of wire and rope netting and turned a spigot near its base and filled both their mugs again and returned hers to her. This time she did not need to be told to drink as she quaffed down the rather delicious sweet tangy ale. “Sit,” he said, a bit less forceful this time and she found a not too uncomfortable looking stone pile and sat down thankfully upon it. “I will make us up something to eat. I think we are both a bit hungry and it is near enough now for supper. I prefer supper in the late afternoon. Never did abide with eating after dark. Just seems unhealthy and well ill-mannered.” The old man began to dig around in a large leather knapsack at the foot of the stone upon which the steaming gurgling glass tower sat and pulled out a few small pots and pans which he set upon the fragile looking tower and started adding wrapped bits and pieces to them that instantly started to smell good.

From the small trunk tree in the center of the small courtyard came the steady rustle of its many leaves and the melodic snoring of the two small birds. Their small nest had now turned into a brightly painted wooden birdhouse and the odd tree it’s self seemed to have its myriad of thin leafy swaying branches full of all kinds of strange items from many dancing ribbons to boxes and to what looked like a portmanteau stuck up in its boughs. She felt no wind herself and studied the many limbs sprouting from the thin tinny trunk like some agitated impossible bushy top on what was little more than a white barked stick. Likewise its roots seemed to have spread out covering the entire courtyard around her in a twisting mesh. Upon the trunk she could see a leather strap stretched taut with its tied loops slightly imbedded into the small trunks girth. As if reading her thoughts the old man spoke without turning around, “that strap keeps it from growing until it would swallow this whole world.” he now turned half around and waved a sauce dripping wooden ladle at the trunk of the slim white tree and then reached down into the large leather bag at his feet and shuffled through it and stood tossing her a towel wadded up around a wash cloth and a cake of soap. “Wash yourself for dinner. You smell a bit ripe. There’s a fountain just up those stairs there. You will feel better after some freshening up. I know I always do.”

“There’s a fountain with water in it up there?” The young girl looked up to the terrace twelve feet above her behind the old man who had returned back to his cooking. She could smell bread baking.

“Wha? Yes, why do you think I chose this spot to make camp? Got to have a lot of fresh water to make a good camp. Don’t worry it is safe I put a ward down on the only door leading to it. Now hurry along you don’t want to be late for supper.”

The young girl stood up from her stone seat paused to sniff herself and frown at the old man’s back and cradling her bundled towel set off for the nearby stone steps that without any kind of railing lead up to the next terrace. The steps were open to a very steep sheer drop built along the edge of the low walled lower courtyard and she could see the distant great bridge running along beneath her as she ascended them.

The small terraced court yard had no wall and was merely a niche of open stone flagging it was backed by the surface of a windowless doorless building that rose for twenty feet or more and blocked out any higher sight other than the sky and its buttery even light. To her right another surface of blue stone identical to the one backing the small terrace rose up except this one was a bit shorter in height and its stone work was somehow older looking and made of smaller bricks with patches of mortal here and there. It had a singular rickety looking old wooden door half leaning on its iron hinges with a large sigil ward glowed faintly across its decayed surface. In the center of the stone square terrace sat a large square fountain that took up almost all the room of the otherwise empty paving.

The fountain was made of a three fountains of increasing size set inside one another from which the smaller highest fountain in its center spouted water up which overflowed its own container and poured down to the next larger square pool to over flow its container to then pour down and fill the last remaining largest square container which when this in turn would overflow ran its water out through special decorative spouts set a few inches lower than its rounded edge into stone vases set at its base. These stone vases turned out to be attached to the paving and had no bottoms and the water poured into them and vanished into the dark bellow.

Though the first square fountain rose up to her waist she was surprised when she sunk an arm into its clear rushing surface that it only went up to her a few inches above her elbow. “Brrr,” she removed her arm from the splashing loud water and her teeth chattered.

“What’s the matter?” The old man’s disembodied voice rose up upon whiffs of sizzling meats.

“The water is very cold,” the girl pouted back at the man’s voice as the height and edge of the stone lip of the terrace hide all but the very far edge of the lower courtyard from view.

“Oh… sorry about that. Here!” suddenly a red bottle round on the bottom and with along spindle delicate neck and glass stopper came spinning up and over the edge of the stone lip of the terrace. She just managed to catch the bottle with her free hand and her sizable breasts. “Use that… sparingly.”

The girl gritted her teeth with the effort but the stubborn stopper came out and she sniffed at the sweet smell. She poured in a few drops and instantly the water foamed into bubbles she scooped up some of the bubbles and giggled as she smelled them too. She poured in some more of the liquid and felt the water it was decidedly deliciously warm to the touch now and nicely oily. She began to strip off her few garments. “Can you read my thoughts? You seem to know what I am thinking.”

“Thoughts? No but I am incredibly empathic. Besides it is easy to see you seem very confused by your surroundings so I am guessing you are a stranger to these parts.” Again the old man’s voice rose up borne along now with the scents of freshly baking apple pie. Her ravished stomach growled.

“Maybe I should wash-up after I eat?” The thin red head clutched at her rumbling tiny tummy.

“Wash-up after you eat? What non-sense. Never heard of such a thing.” The old man humphed and muttered, “Kids these days.”

The girl muttered back her own comments about dirty old perv men these days and finished slipping out of her garments and was about to climb up into her sudsy bath when the old man shouted at her again, “Here! Your apparel smells appallingly of death! Put this on after you finish washing up and wash out your own clothing and bring them down and hang them to dry on the tree.” A folded up robe hit her squarely in the face and unfolded over her head blanketing her.

“Ah, thanks,” was her muffled reply.

“So whatever possess you child to cross the Great Bridge alone?” She scrubbed furiously at her ears and behind them as she added more and more of the liquid until she was neck deep in giggling bubbles. “I didn’t start out that way. I was with some others. And we were ambushed by these black skinned ape creatures.”

“Others? There are more? Taken captive?” the old man seemed concerned.

“No they were all killed only I escaped. I was chained with some other people and I managed to unlock my wrist manacle with one of the keys off the belt from one the of fallen men leading us.” She was aggressively working her wash rag over one of her upraised well-turned calves and was amazed to see her feet were healed up as well as the cuts on her knees and hands and body?! All around her the bubbles seemed to sing and giggle and she added some more of the tingly liquid to her bath. “Say, what is this stuff in the bottle?”

“Faery pee, and don’t use it all up I may want to take a bath too you know. Now you say you were a prisoner? Were the men guards or slavers? And don’t forget to wash behind your ears!”

“Faery pee,” the girl sniffed doubtfully at the sweet smelling giggling bubbled water? “I already did!” She rose up on her knees and began to work the wadded up wash wag over her crotch her face reddening and her eyes rolling back in her head. “This stuff is great!”

“The men? Why were you in chains?” the old man sounded impatient.

“I really don’t remember. In fact I can’t seem to remember anything at all before the ambush and then things only seem to get clearer as time went on from then.” The girl was having a hard time deciding if she should soap up her crotch or her mighty jugs as her hands seemed to leap back and forth between them.

“That’s so utterly convenient,” the old man muttered sarcastically. “And dinner is ready so stop dawdling and get back down here!”

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The sky was darkening into twilight as the girl shoved her third plate or was it fourth plate of piled high food into her mouth. Sopping up the turkey gravy with a large fresh wedge of butter slavered bread and cramming it into her mouth with mechanical precisions. “UHM EDS VEDDY GOO,” she smiled through wads of food, her beaming face plastered in meat grease and her chin dripping wine.

The wide eyed shocked face of the old man simply stared at her and then blinked, “er yes. I am glad you liked it.” The girl belched loudly. “Ah, well I made some pie but I guess after four plates of-“ the girl snatched the offered entire pie out of the old man’s hands and he jerked back his arms and looked at his fingers as if expecting some of them might be missing.

“PIE?! I Love pie!” She swigged down another bottle of wine to help her swallow her masticated stuffed cheeks full of food and then smiled at him, “thank you!” and then she wiggled the empty bottle of wine in her extended hand in front of her seated form as she shoveled the entire pie up to her lips and took a big juicy bite. The old man sighed and dropped his shoulders and snatched the bottle from her hand and went back to the large leather rut sack to find another bottle for her.

The girl looked around her in the waning light as she continued to devour the pie. The tree did not seem to be getting any bigger but some of the ribbons had turned into clothes waving alongside her own damp garments upon a wind only it seemed to feel and the leather trunk portmanteau had somehow turned into a wooden chest of drawers complete with a mirrored headboard.

The old man returned with her bottle of wine and she smiled at him as she took it. “Well you got a healthy appetite I will say that about you. But can you really remember nothing before the attack on your party on the bridge?” The girl grabbed the cork stopper in her perfect white teeth and yanked it out and spit it behind her and shook her head as she took a drink. “Odd. I wonder if you were injured in the head during that attack? May I?” without waiting for a reply the old man walked behind the seated robe wearing girl and began to paw and pry through her long thick locks of red hair. The girl narrowed her eyes and rolled them up and back in his general direction behind her, as his roughly yanking her head this way and that had resulted in her attempt to get another bite of hot apple pie to bury her nose in the filling so she had pie all over her nose and face.

“Ah! What’s this?!” the old man yanked something out of the back of her neck and she winced at the brief stab of pain it caused and the set down her wine bottle and reached back to rub her neck at the insect like after effect tingle.

The old man walked around in front of her studying something in the palm of his hand. “What is it,” Asked the girl trying to peer past his long sleeved robe.

The old man turned and held the black sliver between his forefinger and thumb for her to see, “an ebony shard. Slavers buy these from the swamp wizards in the south. They are carved from a single piece of wood or stone and you use it like a blow gun. You aim, puff, and the shard wipes out all but the most basic memories leaving the poor victim little more than a vegetable.”

The girl dropped her wine bottle and reached around to rub the back of her neck with a growing worried look upon her young face. “This one however,” the old man rolled the rune carved sliver between his fingers, “is not so crude. It was made by a master craftsman somewhere deep in the bowels of the earth. Carved from ebony and designed to ‘steal’ selected memories not erase them all. Again a blow gun or wand device is fabricated from a single source of component and one aims, puffs, and then sucks in the memories ones desires to steal. That is why all your higher mind functions are not impaired but your entire memories of before the ambush are gone. Some one used this dart to steal all your past memories. And if you ever want them back you will need this dart,” he dropped the dart into her open hand. “As well as finding its corresponding wand or blowgun chamber for the each is utterly unique and individual and that dart will act like a key telling you that you have found the right one as well as letting you access your old memories and getting them back.”

The old man sat down on a hump of stone across from her and removed a pipe from his robes and lit it with a flare of flame from his finger tip and sat smoking while watching her keenly.

The girl looked from the shard in her hand back to the man and back to the shard and for a second almost looked like she was about to cry. “But-”

“Make no doubt, that is a very expensive bit of evil tomfoolery there in your hand. No slaver uses one of those. It took a person of some magical skill to even wield it and magical skill is increasingly rare these days I can assure you of that. No, someone went to a great deal of trouble and expense to use that on you and they didn’t do it on the bridge. That dart had been in your neck for some time, days I wager from the way the wound had closed up around it. I would guess that having stolen your memory they put you into some kind of trance and sold you to some band of slavers. It was the battle on the bridge that broke your trance and restarted up your short and long turn memories again. No, the person or persons who did that to you are far from here I would wager.”

“My memories,” The girl seemed more confused than ever?

“There are many who would gladly part with their past memories and for a price too!” The old man chuckled but then winced to see the girls eyes tear up again. “Look here,” he began but then changed his tact. “You remember the common tongue well enough and you remember what things are when you see them. Wine, apple pie, tree,” he pointed with his pipe stem jabbing at the named items around them as he spoke. “Do you remember anything about this world in general? I mean do you even know where you are?”

The girl shook her head and then burst into sobs.

“Alright, alright, now enough of that, now. That won’t solve anything feeling sorry for ourselves. That is a bad way to begin.” He winked at her upturned face as she looked at him questionably. “I have pressing matters to attend to but I will give you a good start upon your way. Oh a few good sturdy bits of groundwork. Now first put that shard away in your pouch there. Don’t lose it. You may come across the device that was used to take your memories from you and you are going to need that to get them back. Now first finish eating up your pie there like a good girl and then wash your face and hands and get a good night’s sleep and fresh tomorrow I will see what I can do to set you upon a proper path and no don’t worry I won’t just shove you off pell-mell no I will make sure you have some appropriate equipment and the skills to use them so you will be a head and shoulder above the dangers of this world. Now that I can promise you. So do as I say and tomorrow we will see things all fresh and new. Right then? Good girl! That’s the sprit! Everything is sunnier on the morn.”

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It was pouring down rain the next morning from a churning overclouded sky but the two of them sat comfortably under the tree limbs out of the wet and most of the side spraying damp. The tree had now grown a very nice settee of a high backed gilt chair with embroidered cushions where the old man sat and a lovely matching foot stool upon which sat the girl.

“Well why we wait out this rain let us cover some of the basic facts of this place and we will move on to the skills with the passing of this storm.” He looked up through the branches covered in items now and looked back at the girl, “storms don’t last long hereabouts this time of year. Not like the great storms to the south and north! No, those are things to be worried about. Though there is a great rolling expanse of vast plains in, er, that direction! Where one must be very careful of the weather indeed.”

“For there a great weather mage named Karatacus took pity on the nomadic people living there. They suffered from sudden inescapable tornados that would devastate their crops and tent towns and kill their people. So Karatcus built these sort of oh lightning rods for tornados. It would catch a tornado and pin it in place holding it transfixed fast and then blow it out like a candle. Great long spindly looking leaning spires they were these tornado rods. About twelve feet in height and about six feet at the base designed for two men to lug it near a twister and then deploy it.”

“Worked marvelously. In fact it worked so well that Karatacus decided to make another version which would not only capture a tornado but then siphon off its energies for the people of the plains to use. No more ox and horse chip smelly fires. Electricity instead! Clever little thing. It pinned a tornado in place and then it used its twisting winds to turn these turbines and the turbines then fed the tornado back some of its own power. So the tornado just sat there stuck in place spinning forever. “

“Of course just one tornado supplied a tremendous amount of energy but the wandering plains people could really only use that power by staying put and that in turn ended up creating the city of Acktosh. Or the Wailing City as it has also been called. Nestled between the hills at the edge of the plain it was ironically the gentle demise of the nomadic way of life of the plains people. They came to increasingly settle down there and the more that settled the more the distant plain was sprouted with these pinned tornados. But it was the greed of men that was the wailing cities downfall. For you see an atriarch forge needs great, great, massive amounts of power to create powerful artifacts of magic. And these in turn can be sold for great sums of money. The people of Acktosh realized their tornado dynamos could generate such powers and so they built such a forge and then another and another and another until the entire plains were a forest of tornados. And the city became known as Atriarch. The creation and selling of magical artifacts and artifices became the principle income of the people who shared the wealth amongst each other as a sort of cooperative though not very equally amongst each other. There were constant bitter squabbles which the various guilds only worsened.”

“Then the mages war came and well… the city was enslaved time and again by the various warlocks and wizards of this city-state or that. Now it is nothing but ruins populated with a few monsters all but one atriarch forge destroyed when the city was finally razed to the ground. The vast plains are still a forest of tornados. You can transverse its wastes if can doge the constant lightning and the hail that falls steadily some lumps the size of that boulder over there. And if you venter too far into the heart of the forest of tornados you will run into the Jin and Din-Jin, great air spirits and genies who now master-less left over relics from the mages war now live in the constantly boiling churning clouds and some of the most powerful ones have turned the tornados into shaped towers of twisting air. Very dangerous place that.”

The two drank deeply of their Snog and licked their spiced tingled lips. “The Mages War,” the young girl asked? Dipping her mug into a tub of the Snog ale and blowing off the foam.

“You don’t remember the mages war? By the covenant, they really took everything from you didn’t they? You must have had something very big in your head for them to take out so much. Humph. Well, everything you see and everything you don’t is the after effect horror of the mages war.”

“This entire world was once a place of magic and beauty and wonder. Every living thing possessed magic’s power and grace. Not just the people but the plants and animals too. Great mages ruled each and every land. There were the usual little ugly misunderstandings here and there but mostly battles where avoided as mages truly love political intrigue and skullduggery and backstabbing to an open line of men marching in rattling armor set against each other. Lot more showmanship and snobbish intellectual pride in out-tricking an opponent through the unfathomable delicate filigree of labyrinthine court posturing and intrigue than lobbing a dragon through their castle window. So no one, not even me, and I am one of the few surviving mages of that war, know how it started or even why. But it escalated in an eye blink building into an insanity of attacks and shifting alliances that went on for decades but when it finally slipped into full total war it only lasted seconds. And all the great mages and cities were dead.”

“That was hundreds of years ago. Now magic still flows, the source is the byproduct of energies that ebbed from the rifts between dimensions, but no one really practices it anymore. They are more like craftsmen magicians, or very low level enchanters, or alchemists… a lot of alchemists these days.” The old man drank form his mug which he seemed to be talking into more and more, he seemed rather tipsy.

“So you are the last of the mage’s from before the war?” The girl was dipping her mug full into the tub three to his every one and other than her bright glowing eyes and red cheeks showed no sign of the powerful intoxicating effect of the ale.

“Wha? No, no, there are still a few named wizards left in the world from before its ruin.”

“So you have a famed name then?” The girl seemed to be giggling at the old man in his simple dowdy robes.

“Of course I have a name! er, wha- Gadfly! That’s it, I am Gadfly the Great! At your service.” He stumbled to his feet and bowed deeply tumbling into a summersault, “Meant to do that. So totally meant to do that.” He got up slowly holding his lower back and walked past the tree to the low wall and motioned the laughing girl to come to join him there. The rain had given up into a wet mist and the clouds seemed to be brooding about not quite sure what they wanted to do while letting large piercing rays of light angle down out of them.

“See that pointed mountain leaning far, far away there in the distance? That is where I am going. That is one of the last great pillars of the world. Not a mountain at all but an enormous tower all ivory white and built by the hands of man and not touched by the wacked spell of Maconacus. Like the rest of this poor world. No, that lone magnificent leaning tower large enough to hold all that remains of the scattered numbers of our race is one of the few last anchor points for the great floating cities! The great sailing cities where magic still prevails and is not looked down upon with fear and derision. And I will finally put my life time of wandering behind me and accept their invitation to join them up there. Up there in the great ivory cities where magic is not frowned upon as it is down here. I have been there you know. Oh yes. Several times I have visited the courts of the cloud cities, ventured to many of the great flying cities and have helped them more than once with their various problems. But always I declined their invitations to stay on the floating islands in the sky. Ha! But this time when Emamortium the greatest of all the wonders of heaven docks at that last pillar of earth and sky to trade I will be there!”

“Hmmm, sounds lovely. Who is Maconacus you seemed to really spit out his name. Did he do you some great harm during the war?”

“Wha-? Maconacus? Harm? My girl Maconacus the Magnificent wouldn’t harm a hair on your head or anybody else’s. No he despised the war as many sane mages did but as was often the case his noble attempts to help the suffering populaces were polluted by the rampant insanity of the war itself and did much more damage than some of the vilest twisted thought up magical military violence unleashed by the evilest of mages. No he was a very powerful mage who seeing the wonton destruction of homes and property all around him sought to heal that devastation with a powerful spell. He summoned up some self-replicating spirit golems to rebuild the shattered cities but as was often the case during that war the spell became… twisted somehow? It was if all good magic was somehow being twisted against its self somehow… Anyway see this and this and that. See how every inch of the world is covered in buildings and stairs and passageways and courtyards and none of it making any sense all of it an endless maze of twisting and turning and dead ends and out of scale perspectives and distorted proportions and such? Well that is what happened. His great spell set loose this ever increasing horde that tried to rebuild all the damaged cities return them to the way they were and somehow… well it all went wrong didn’t it? Even the sea beds are covered in houses and towers and streets and buildings and markets and stables and the deserts and the mountains every inch of the world all swamps all rivers everything. Of course they vanished, all those eventual millions of ghostly builders, with Maronacus death during the war and so now it all just slowly falls into ruin. Survivors here and there scavenge stones to rebuild areas into more logical settlements and sometimes a few great and powerful men take the expense of clearing and rebuilding a passage from one place to another so one can travel in a straight line in a day what before took a week winding ones way up and down and back and forth through mazes of rooms and roads and plazas and such.”

“See there. That long low brown strand there that reaches from that to there? That is the part of the Great Road. It is one of the so called Emperor Quntielleus the Fifth’s Great Restoration Projects. It connects four settlements together with a broad straight street. No twists, no turns, no backtracking this way and that. Just one long boulevard running form his capital at Harbor-Fire to the fortified citadel of Shatterbrow. Built over decades of back breaking work by an army of slaves, of which you no doubt were on your way to join before your ambush. There is no one in this part of the land who uses slaves other than the Empire. Well up here in the upper lands that is, if you descend down into the lands of the Great Dark you will find slavery and worse to be common practice. You asked about surviving mages of the mages war? Well down there in those deep tunnels and warrens you will find several underground kingdoms of mages who survived intact. Evil bastards and insane too. Nasty place that no one goes to or wants to stumble upon the fringes of. You will do well to remember not to venture too deep when you travel better to find another way then disappear into the Great Dark forever. That is where that shard was mined. That dart of yours. It was mined in the ebony mines of the Great Dark, most of the evil metals and devices one stumbles across come from there.”

“What is that light brown cloud over there?” The young girl had moved her gaze from the impressive expanse of the table top of small buildings covering endlessly the other side of the rift which their higher steeped piled up vantage point reveled to them, to now point at a distant vast cloud of rapidly churning brown clouds hugging the surface of the far side of the rift.

“That is one of the left over scars of the mages war. That is a chaos cloud. Had a lot of other names as well but that one will do. It was designed to be unleashed upon an enemy’s lands and anything it engulfed it randomly converted into something else. A home into say a cow. A person into a tree. As the war got nastier the chaos clouds were just re-programed to turn everything into nothing. It just grinds everything up into brown dust. That one is a bit of both. It was pinned in place using one of Karatucus’s tornado devices modified of course and set in the storms heart by the King of the Jin. Who sacrificed his life in the process to save the lives of thousands of others. Now some of the locals that live precariously near it mine some of the chaos rift magic that seeps around its edge. Worth a great deal of money a few bottles of that but I am not sure it is worth losing one’s life over which is what happens to most of them sooner or later who engage in such a dangerous trade. It is rumored by the Jin that in the center of that chaos storm The Great Mage still lives inside the remnants of his shattered palace. It was he who many believe is responsible for starting the mages war.”

“Do you believe that?” The girl looked at the now bleary eyed old man who seemed to have springs for ankles.

“Wha-? That the Great Mage lives in his floating scattered shattered remains of a palace in the heart of a chaos cloud? Or that the once highest mage in all the land started the war that destroyed it?”

“Both.”

The old man who called himself Gadfly looked into his empty mug and tossed it over his shoulder. The young girl smiled and offered her own still half-full mug to him which he took with a rakish grin and began to drain. As the old man tipped his head back to drink off the Snog his whole body very slowly and stiff as a board fell backward so that when he hit the ground he was passed out. The mischievous girl looked shocked for a moment in concern and then giggled as the stretched out old man began to snore.

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The side of the Great Chasm or Great Rift that they found themselves upon seemed to be a high mountain of irregularly stacked tiers of buildings of erratic and irrational design of child stacked blocks that disappeared behind above sloping into the clouds and disappeared in front sloping down to the edge of the chasm and breaking off into the sheer drop of its wall. The further distant side was a much lower flat expanse of sprawling maze of buildings and roads and plazas that was no doubt as equally piled in confusing layers as their side but still seemed somehow less stacked up and more a singular layer of an labyrinth. Beyond the sprawling plain of buildings one could see the great sloping white tower whose top seemed jagged and broken off. There were a range of mountains to the right of it not more than a low rising blue-purple smear rearing up from the left growing rapidly to the right until it overshadowed the buttery golden glow of the plain of buildings beneath it and cut off all further view in that direction.  To the left of the campsite on the farther side was a huge aqueduct looking thing that ran in seven enormous arches before terminating unconnected at both ends. The great white leaning tower lay just beyond the aqueducts farthest end and at its nearest the large brown cloud of the chaos storm spun in place and spit mottled bits of specks around and around its boiling surface which must have been the size of small towns for her to see them from so far away. To the right of the storm and more directly in front of her vantage point was the flaming strand of lava which formed a lake upon which the Empires capital Harbor-Fire sat and the long thin brown streak of its Great road ran like a razor gash in a wickedly straight line across the plain of over-laid buildings and twisting mazes to end upon the far left right at the mass of black twisted spires of what she guessed must be the citadel Shatterbrow.

The young girl lowered the telescope she had plucked from the tree and looked back over her shoulder at the old man and spoke to him, “Gadfly!”

The mage softly groaned in pain and clutched at the side of his head upon which he had tied with a large ribbon a bag of some kind of liquid. “Not so loud child, not so loud. There is nothing worse than a Snog hangover, funny I thought I had brewed that out of the last batch, ohhh.”

“It seems you can see much of the world from this jutting vantage point of our camp,” the girl giggled at the green tinted pale mage’s face.

“Wha-? No. no. no this is but a tiny sliver of the planet. You have great forests that have re-instated themselves over Maconacus Mess lying to north just past the Outer Rim that mountain chain you can just see forming there behind the Empire Plain. Swamps lie behind us and creep around to the right far out of sight. You have the Great Plains I told you of covered in forests of tornados, to the Far East with impassable deserts beyond that though many a lost city still thrives there I have been told visited by the floating cloud cities in their constant migrations. No, no, child this is but one small piece of one small continent on a rather large world. That pompous Empire you see on the other side of the Rift there but commands a small sliver of the villages and the cities I mentioned in the immediate area around the Great Road and of course as far as any of their army in force can reach in a muster. But most of that plain below and certainly what is above it and below it are the domains of various warlords or just empty of people and full of monsters. I am afraid there are very few of us left after the great mages war. Perhaps a few tens of thousands scattered across the globe? The entire population of the Empire I doubt numbers more than a few thousand at a crack. Mostly this is a world of left over monsters bred for the war and which now lord over their immediate surroundings with mindless violence. Of course you could say that about the men down there as well. A lot of wandering bandits and scavengers not too many settled communities but the largest conglomeration of them in these parts would definitely be found on those plains over there as we stand upon the side of the rift known only for its wilds and nasty creatures.”

“How far does this huge chasm in front of us extend? I cannot see either of its ends.” The girl hopped merrily along the edge of the low wall with the telescope to her open eye the other squinted shut.

“It is an oxbow; we are on the jutting promontory of its crescent bend. It actually narrows back down behind this mountain and closes up on either side not that far behind us. A few days journey as the cloud city flies but perhaps a life time traversing the mountain’s deep mazes. That is the way it is here child on this world now. Nothing is in a straight line anymore all paths twist back and forth bent upon themselves and all is utter confusion when one takes but a step in any direction.”

The mage sipped and gagged on some glass beaker of foul smelling amber liquid and winced and clutched his head again. Then he looked at the girl who was now standing on the wall and bending straight legged at the waist turning her telescope to the world immediately below their camp. Since she was now back to wearing her found garments this meant the old man had an unobstructed view of the young girl’s hairy pussy that seemed to glimmer in the midmorning light. He coughed and fidgeted in his brocaded chair and then averting his face but not his eyes spoke, “you know your kind lives to the far north of here. Not on this continent but on an island chain. Rather a reclusive lot. Trades very little. A proud race of warriors all women who shun the company of men.”

The girl spread her legs and looked at him from between her now wide gapping knees which put her pussy even more on display and caused the mage to lose his green pallor for a blushing crimson one. “My kind,” the smiling girl asked? “What do you mean my kind? How do you know I come from there? And how do they survive if there are no men to help them make babies with?”

The mage turned even more in his chair away from the girl and coughed in his fist but his eyes still twisted in their sockets staring transfixed upon her naked wet snatch. “Well, er, I suppose, call it a very educated guess! I mean you have all the traits of those women. The bright red hair the, um, very ample bosom area, these are not generally found outside of their tribes. And as for babies, well there has not been any babies born on this world in hundreds of years! Amongst the animals of course and the plants continue to multiply but one of the results of the mages war was that in order to stop the dying in such masses of people several great spells were cast to make all of us immortal! Of course immortal is a relative term. Immortal from dying of old age not of dying by any kind of violence or poison or accident. We age… very slowly until we simply stop ageing at all. Most of us have just frozen at what age we were when the war ended. You will no doubt stay your age until some great act of violence severs you of life! One of the many side effects of this immortality is sterility. Hence our current dilemma we are immortal and never age or age so imperceptibly as for it to never be noted but we do not reproduce so by sheer reality of living in such a violent world our number perpetually steadily decline. Immediately after the war the survivors numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and now just a few hundred years later it is but a fraction of that.”

“So because of the color of my hair and my big boobies,” the young girl had dropped off the wall and was standing in front of his chair squeezing her tits together, the telescope somehow managing to get its self wedged in her cleavage, as she stared at them perplexed. “You can tell I am from these islands to the north?”

“Humph! You are rather selective and self-centered in your perceptions aren’t you?” The mage snarled as he shot up out of his chair and pushed past the girl.

“So no one fucks anymore?!”

The mage stopped dead in his tracks and then making several sounds like a ready steaming kettle yipped over his shoulder, “well, I, of course they still do. That is they make LOVE! After appropriately being married! And that happening after a long and cautious courtship and then engagement of many, many years! But they no longer can have offspring.”

“No more worries about getting knocked up!?! Awesome!” The young girl jumped up in the air and pumped her first.

The old man rolled his eyes and grabbed the trunk of the tree and raised it up as only he could and the entire tree almost instantly pulled back its laden limbs and long entangling roots back into its self so in an eye blink the mage Gadfly the Great held his wizard staff in his hands. A long bone white weathered sapling trunk with knots of branches at the top and knots of roots at the bottom and a leather strap tied at both ends to the slim trunk and it was through this leather strap he slipped his left arm so the staff lay across his back. “Come on child I promised to show you a few skills to help you along in the world before we part our ways which must be soon if I am to reach the great white pillar and rendezvous with Ememortorium.”

“You keep calling me child and I am not a child!” The girl growled behind the old man’s back.

The old man’s shoulders sagged and he spoke over his shoulder, “no you are not. You are at least several hundred years old. And if your memories had not been stolen from you, you would undoubtedly a much more somber and seasoned and wizened woman.” He turned around and grasped the young girl’s shoulders gently and smiled, “but your memories have been taken and with them much of the caution and fear one should have and the healthy respect for this worlds dangers. Understand this chi- woman, that however took your memories did so for a purpose. And having done this they sent you to be a slave to die upon the empires great projects. I have an uneasy feeling when that person or persons realizes you are now free and wandering in the world they will not rest easy until you are rendered no longer capable of such. I cannot take you into the floating world it is forbidden only those by invitation may dare venture there, but in what little time I have I will show you a few skills and teach you a little magic so you may have a leg up on many in this world as it is. And hopefully when that day comes when you are to cross paths with your past you will have a better than even chance to survive it. Alright?”

The girl nodded and the mage patted her head. “But you are right I can’t keep calling you child. Do you remember your name?”

“Well,” the girl put her finger in her open mouth, something she did whenever she had to think. “When I was being chased on the bridge there was this huge monster with this huge, er, shoulders. And he kept calling me, ‘Oreola’! So maybe that is my name?”

The mage let one hand go of her shoulder and pulled at the opening at the neck of his robe and made a red faced grimace. “Ah, well I doubt that. See, ah, well, remember those women I told you about to the north. You know living on those islands. Well you see they had a famous sorceress living there before the mages war. And her name was Air-Eola Casaba. She too was a red headed woman like yourself and had very larger, er, chesty sort of area. Anyway, she did many splendid things in her life but unfortunately all she is remembered for is trying to stave off the great famine of the northern isles before the mages war by taking one of the few items not affected by the strange blight that still grew freely on the islands, this being a small melon. Which she used her magic upon to increase its size dramatically and which she also caused so that instead of a singular melon growing from a blossom instead a conjoined pair would grow! Two to eat instead of one! Great idea really. And as there was need to ship the melons all over the isles to more populated villages she turned the hard easily split and ruined husks into soft pliable almost flesh like casings.”

“So they looked like two giant tits?” the girl looked back down at her own squeezed together naked boobs.

“Ugh, child your mouth! But yes you are right if not rather crude in your observations. The melons did indeed take on the characteristics of a large pair of mammary glands. The flesh inside being a milky juicy white also did not dissuade this observation. Since both the sorceress responsible was a busty red head and the women living on these wild isles were also busty red heads the melons that were soon traded all over the lands became known as Aireola’s. And this sadly in time became a somewhat derogatory nick name for the women of those isles as well. So you see that creature was not calling you by name, it was in fact-“

 “Saying I was a red head with really, really big tits.” The girl blinked her large wide eyes up at the mage and smiled.

The mage dropped his hands in exasperation and rolled his eyes as she sighed.

“Well I like the name; Oreola. And it would seem that it utterly and completely fits me! So from now on until I change my mind if I so decide to do so. I insist you and everyone else call me Oreola!” the girl jutted up and out her proud chin and then giggled as she shook her enormous tits from side to side.

“Fine, fine, whatever. If you will be so good as to follow me Miss Oreola I will endeavor to show you a thing or two about survival and earning your keep in trading goods to others. And the mage headed toward the door that had been just beyond the sapling tree which it had kept covered in a thick mesh of roots until it had been plucked up and set upon the wizards back.

“What about the camp?” The girl looked back at the glass and metal still set upon the rook and the leather backpack sitting below it.

Gadfly the Great simply snapped his fingers above his shoulder and without looking back intoned, “Come.”

To her astonishment all the glass tubes and beakers and such began to excitedly stuff themselves into the leather bag which had come to life and was walking about in front of the still upon its leather straps as other leather straps quickly snatched up the flying glassware and placed it inside its self. In but a moment the camp was backed away including the ivory pipe still blazing and the leather backpack sealed its self-up and still walking on its leather strap legs proceeded to fall into line behind the girl who all smiles and giggles of excited wonder followed the mage who couldn’t hide his grin of pride as he popped the glowing white sigil seal upon the door which echoed a second loud ‘pop’ of the fountained terrace’s sigil sealed door also being unlocked and he stooped and entered.

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In the black and inky stair case the door opened upon the mage’s staff glowed with a bright white light as soon as Gadfly slipped it off his shoulders and held it before him, and the girl turned on her gem lamp which she still wore on the pouch set hanging over her crotch, so despite the utter darkness they could see very well. The mage had to turn half sideways and bend low to traverse down the first stair case which was thankfully short and emptied into a small square stone room of the ubiquitous blue stone. The young girl, Oreola, also had to stoop a bit to make it down the low ceiling stairs for though she appeared small next to the mage she was in fact six feet in height and that put her a head and shoulder over most of the people left in the wake of the mages war whose males now averaged five feet four and whose females were often half a foot shorter than that. Gadfly was over seven feet in height and an imposing figure despite his rail thin emancipated build.

The busty girl was enjoying herself immensely as she followed the mage who spoke in a low continuous voice about this or that tip and jutted a pipe stem at this or that notable pile of rubbish. Oreola smiled at each bit of information and reached back and scratched the leather back pack that marched in step behind her behind one the ears of its upper flaps and its lower strap leg stamped furiously in place as it rubbed its side up against her naked buttock and thigh causing her to giggle and laugh.

The mage brought them up short before a tangle of black roots that sprouted nodes that glowed and eerie blue. “Now this,” he began in what the girl could now recognize as he lecturer’s voice. “Is the roots of a Medelious tree. Which trunks and limbs must be located somewhere above us out in the open air as it needs some degree of sunlight to exist. Now see that pod there? That is a ripe pod so go ahead and carefully pluck it mind the thorn as they are steeped in deadly poison.”

The girl who was eagerly reaching out to carry out his command suddenly paused at the poisons bit and gave him a sideways look until his gesturing set her carefully to gingerly pluck away the blue glowing pod. It was hard to yank it free and the thorns seemed to almost sense her attempts and brush dangerously close to her knuckles but she came away with the prize.

“Good girl! Now hang onto that and follow me,” the mage lead her and the walking knapsack further into the twisting confusing maze of passages and haphazardly arrayed rooms. “Not always easy to find the true way through with all these side branches and dead ends but the builders mad as they may have been do seem to have understood that people were meant to traverse the areas they built upon for I have very seldom ever found a room completely sealed off or a direction that deadened where there was not another route just a stone throws away. None of the compass points seem to be entirely cut off; just wormed around in a maze of twists and backtrackings.”

The mage stopped at a well without any sides nothing more than a hole in the floor and pointed down it, “often down is the only way up and backward is the only way forward. Keep that in mind and you should never become too stuck in your progress. Just remember that vile things dwell both inside and outside these mazes and they would like nothing more than to, er, well let’s just say most beasts including the men you may meet wouldn’t want to eat you if you catch my meaning, but sate their hungers in other ways upon your body!” With that the mage held out his staff and it instantly grew downward like a great pole and he slid down it calling out after him to her and the dancing in place shuffling leather bag, “come on then!”

The girl gripped the staff and wrapped her arms and legs around it and slide down it with a backwards cast smile at the dancing bag, “you heard him come on slowpoke!”

When all had descended the pole the mage gave it a light shake and it shrunk down to its normal size. The three found themselves in a large room with a stream running through its center entering from one cracked wall and exiting through a half circle barred grill set at the base of the opposite stone wall. At either end wide stone stairs lead up to tall narrow stone thrones whose placement mirrored one another.

“This was built with intent before the mages war. It is the hall of the twin kings who once ruled part of the mountain before they and their people were swallowed up and butchered for parts by the wizards of the Dark below.” The mage held his staff aloft and increased its glow revealing the great hall and its imposing wonders of craved stone and high vaulted ceilings.

“Butchered for parts,” the girl asked both disgusted by the notion and caught in awed wonder at the increasingly revealed enormity of the hall.

“Yes, I am afraid the Dark wizards and sorceresses of the lower cities have always practiced the vile arts of necromancy. When I said the people of this world number but a few tens of thousands at best I meant merely the living. In the Dark realms there is no limit to the ghoulish laborers who toil and mine the expanse of those kingdoms without end. The living and the crypts of the ancient dead have all gone to increase their labor pool.”

The mage lowered his staff and the sapling dimmed, “let us hurry to leave these sad empty halls and make our way back up to the Outer Realm. There is an almost direct path, rare, that leads from here up the buried tower to the surface.” And with that they hurried their step up and out of the echoing stone hallways.

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The Buried Tower proved to be just that a once tall spire which had been built over the top of leaving only its top coned roof and a single open narrow slit of a window exposed from a wall of a courtyard. The stone sills of the window proved a bit difficult for the excessively busty Oreola to squeeze through but with the mage tugging on her wrists and the knapsack pushing on her pert naked bottom she managed to slowly squeeze first one and then the other of her huge round mams through and she popped out like a cork and found herself sprawled upon the mage who was nearly suffocated under her massive tit flesh before she could shake the cobwebs from her conked head and raise herself off him.

The new courtyard they found themselves in had one entire side made into a broad staircase leading down to a second building that had several open arched portals breached out upon the stairs last treads. The small party descended the staircase as both mage and girl noted the nearing of night in the overcast sky. “We have been traversing those underground passages for the better part of the day and we need to find a spot to set up camp or night will find us unprepared.” The mage looked about them and snapped his fingers at the leather backpack which saluted with a strap and began to unpack its self. The mage held his staff in front of him and let it go whereupon it began to leaf out and spread its root rapidly.

“You mean for us to camp here in the middle of these stairs?” The girl looked around frowning.

“It is rare to go an entire day’s journey and not meet one fanged creature. It would be foolish to press our luck any farther this day.” The mage sighed and dug out a mug and filled it from the already burbling still and handed it to the girl who was still frowning at him but eventually accepted it as he then began to fill another for himself.

“You’re just still hung-over,” the girl growled at him and he raised his mug and gave his head a slight nod to the side as he shrugged in mute response. “How far have we come from our camp yesterday?” The girl peered all about them.

The mage whipped foam off his upper lip and pointed with his mug, “do you see the top of the wall from which The Buried Tower juts out? Now look up and over and do you see that next further back wall top? Well you can’t see it because of the angle but back beyond that would be another wall and atop that would be where we made camp last night.”

“But that is hardly any distance at all?! Why don’t we just use your magic staff or my rope and climb down each wall and skip the maze of paths?” The girl seemed very disgusted with their utter lack of progress.

“You can of course… if you want to die. See those perpetual clouds always covering the sky? They are full of things perpetually on the wing. Small leather winged creatures or very hungry insects or wisps or strange buzzing things of metal left magically charged and searching to attack left over from the mages war, and they just hover there constantly looking for an unwary traveler or creature that has rendered its self helpless by climbing down a rope over some great drop and then they swoop down and its lunch time! Few travelers even sleep outdoors. We have the staff which protects us and allows us to sleep outside but most people have to find some small room with only an entrance or two near the surface and barricade themselves inside it in order to make camp. Something when we part ways you should think well upon. I will teach you some simple wards and sigils to lock or block up a door and of course give you what I can spare to help you with your future camps but I would advise you to avoid the outside areas until you get a good eye for choosing safe ground from the arboreal creatures and spirits.”

The girl frowned as the man tapped his temple with his mug and she looked up into the darkening overcast sky and wondered if anything he said was true.

After another hardy supper the mage looking much less shaky and ill became his boisterous self again and drew the young girls attention to a nut bearing vine which he had her remove one of the nuts and retrieve her blue pod from her pouch. “Now I will show you some low level crating magic that will be good for a coin or two. I will show you how to make an echo map. Take that and that and remove this and throw that away from that and now put this in this and hold it in both your hands and press it up to your mouth and say what I taught you earlier. Yes, now carve it like this and like this and another bit here and now repeat the whispering thing but with the second bit. Remember it? Good, good. And there you are. An echo map. That small seed will now remember every step you take until it is full. Wear it on one of those gold bangles on your wrist or around your neck. The more uncovered it is the more it remembers of details around it.”

“Now there is a small fortified settlement on this side of the bridge called Lamodium. A few dozen families and such living there making a living farming terraced courtyards and they have a blacksmith forge there so those travelers or caravans crossing the great bridge often sort of make a last stop before venturing out into the wastes or restocking up before making the last trek across the great bridge into the empires lands. Now those gold bits you are wearing, that you can trade in the larger cities and maybe some of the smaller ones might trade as well for them, but for the most part shiny bobbles just aren’t worth as much as one might think. Magical amulets sure, but a gold bracelet won’t fetch near as much as a fine found weapon. But this, this echo map now that is sure and easy money.”

“Here is what you do with it. Just wear it on your wrist or around your neck and when you reach any settlement or trader you come across you give them the echo map. They will download its information into either a metal box looking thing which can hold thousands of such maps or into one of these.” The mage pulled back the sleeve of his robe and showed a silver thin wire that wound around his wrist and up his forearm be-speckled with gems. “This is an encyclopedium. It contains any kind of information you wish to store in it allowing you latter to retrieve it at your need or leisure.” 

The mage shook his sleeve back down over the device, “in either case the echo map there is destroyed in the process so you will l then have to make another one. The metal boxes are non-magical for the most part more the sort of mechanical devices filling up the world anymore, than the encyclopedium which is almost entirely magical in its being. The great cities of the clouds are where you will find such magical devices. So most towns will have the boxes and only a few travelers or traders will possess a functioning encyclopedium. Now when the gate guard or merchant downloads your echo map you will be then issued credit for that town only or that merchant only. So keep that in mind. And the amount of credit will depend on how valuable the echo map information is to that person or town. The world is constantly changing around us and I mean look at your passage across the great bridge. I remember seeing fire and lots of smoke so I can guess that some extensive damage was done to some of the structures. If you had been wearing an echo map upon your person and it had not been completely full yet then that information would be valuable to anyone who might wish to travel that bridge in the near future. See? Map information can also be purchased from gate guards or travelers and transcribed into or onto an echo map. You can of course also repeat the intonement I taught you at any time and the echo map will project a glowing image of all it has recorded. Very useful if you lose your way.”

“Finding new paths or hidden areas or such always will earn you more credits with a gate guard who will trade your echo maps on behalf of the entire town for credit accepted by the entire town’s merchants, or a lone merchant traveler who will credit you of their wares. Rather useful way to make some quick coin, er, credit as few places really use coin anymore, everything is barter and credit. But you will get the idea easily enough. For now just keep that seed pod upon your person and it will record the areas around you though not your actions or any creatures you might meet. It only records inanimate objects of some stationary stability and with the low level of your current skill it will fill up rather readily and with much lesser detail until through practice you build up your enchanting skill level. You of course can gather up more resources and make up others as you need them. It is up to you. Considering the abundance of jewelry you have about you, I figured you would probably wish to trade that away first as it must be rather cumbersome. I take it you found that lot in the deeper chambers of the great bridge? The treasure of the crystal spiders is legendary.”

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“Do you have a weapon?” Gadfly was hunched over before her and was motioning her up to his side. They had been winding their way through the underground and surface mazes for what felt like days!

Oreola pulled her dagger from under her boot flap and brandished it before her. “Good the mage whispered and he gripped the triangular pointed blade and muttered and incantation and then pulled his hand rapidly so he left his blood smeared upon the blade. “I have given the blade a weak frost enchantment that will for now on do additional damage to your adversary. Not as common as fire enchantments and perhaps not as deadly as poisons but it has a tendency to cause your attacker to ‘pause’ as the muscles freeze up solid for a second or two and that will be of some benefit to you as you develop your combat skills.”

“Now see there across the open space to those shadows? There is a Groud there. A sort of very anemic low level Grunt. He seems to be rather busy stuffing his face with cave wall fungus which has a rather heady effect as well as a pungent effect upon the breath. See if you can get up behind him stealthy like and kill it with a few stabs and slashes?”

The girl gave him a surprised look and he motioned her on. She made her way down the stairs out of the darkness and across the open court yard. She was almost shaking so hard that she felt the dagger would slip out of her hand when it came time to plunge it into the creatures back. But in it went and she quickly jerked it out and stabbed again and again until she was certain the foul smelling thing was dead.

“In the future you may want to turn off or at least lower your lanterns light when sneaking, but otherwise not bad. You also may want to survey your surroundings a bit more but I realize that you naturally assumed since I was leading point that I had spent several seconds looking over the room before calling you up to my side and that is correct but still you should get into the habit of always looking around you and not locking into a tunnel vision upon a lone target.”

“I didn’t’ really enjoy that,” the girl shuddered as she wiped off the icy frost crackling blade on the side of her boot.

“Of course not and I hope you never do but look at what lies beside it there,” the mage lowered his glowing staff to display the gnawed upon bones of something once humanoid. “You are but food or lusted after sex to such creatures, try and not forget that. Now here is the important part, see those tiny glowing spheres lying next to the creature’s body? Touch them with your bare skin, go on. Feel that? That was the things magical presence. We all have such orbs which we drop upon our demise. By picking them up you increase your own magical presence and thus what higher levels of magical spell and incantations you can cast. When you made that echo map you both used up magic and created new magic at the same time the two virtually balancing the other out so any spheres created as surplus would have been too small to see and passed almost unnoticed right back into your skin. Remember to collect any magic spheres you come across both those you earned and those left behind by monsters or the failed dead adventurers or travelers you stumble across. Larger monsters scarf up the spheres and grow stronger but they are for the most part dumb beasts and sometimes in rapid pursuit of an escaping prey leave behind the spheres of an already vanquished adversary-victim. Easy pickings. “

They came across several more of the hairless gray green skinned Grunts with their pointed faces and narrow long skulls and long jagged ears and Gadfly made her practice sneaking past some and attacking and killing others with both frost knife and the ice blast spray spell he taught her. He showed her how using up magic in combat wither as spells or her magical weapon which fed upon her as it was used, weakened her fast and how she desperately needed to scarf up those glowing spheres to replenish it and raise her magical presence at the same time. Seeing her distaste for killing did not slacken he taught her some more complex paralyzing spells that took much longer to invoke but still caused the defeated but still living creature to shed some of its magical spheres and he then taught her the complex betting spells.

These last spells were created by the great arch mage who was said to live on imprisoned in the chaos storm cloud in his shattered floating palace. He was once the highest most powerful mage in all the land before and during the mage war. It was he who unleashed the betting spells. He tapped directly into the source of magical power that existed at the tares between dimensions and he created direct channels to these wells of power guarded by the great sigils of the betting spells. They worked like this; any mage who learned how to intone a betting spell would then wager some of their magical presence that they could perform a task. The amount wagered of course depended upon the difficulty of the task. The more difficult the task the more the betting spell would automatically figure out the mage’s magical presence set to lose and the amount of magical power set to be won. If the mage succeeded in the task it would win the magic and increase their magical presence and if they lost they would lose that magical presence thus wagered.

Gadfly taught her the betting spells that only a few mages left in the world knew how to cast as he explained that with her dislike of combat and killing this was another way other than crafting to increase her magical presence and it was the size of this presence that would allow her to cast more powerful spells or low level spells much more often before it depleted and was empty until filled again with those magical spheres either gained by defeating magical beings or placing betting spells. This was the only way to fill back up her magic and without magic she would slowly ossify and turn to amber stone. For everything on this world needed magic in its being to live.

The betting spells were often not very fair with their house odds. For example Gadfly had her intone a betting spell that she could sneak past two Grunts fighting over some hairy goat like carcass and the amount she would lose if she failed versus what was dropped at her feet when she was victorious was very  disproportionate indeed. But she did earn some magical spheres and it did increase her magical presence and she did not have to kill anything so she liked that.

Latter when they made camp still underground as all her practice had exhausted her to where the long trek up to the surface was beyond her remaining endurance. Gadfly presented her with the last of his parting gifts. He held two encyclopedem’s before her. One was like the one on his arm crafted of thin white gold and silver and slim gems of blue sapphire. That one he told her was forged in the great cities in the sky. That it was new and almost empty with only the most basic information learned in it by having been placed in a basket with other older enclyclopedems where it wriggled and mewed for several years until ready to be weaned to a humanoid. It had never had an owner.

The other was made out of bone. He said it was ancient and almost full and would only be able to hold a few more adventures worth of new knowledge but its storehouse of already learned knowledge was vast. It was crafted deep in the bowels of the Dark Kingdoms and had been fist weaned in a basket full of snakes as that is how they do things down there. It had several past owners but each had died so it was free to bind with a new owner.

The silver white gold bracelet spoke in a woman’s voice light and cheerful and the old bone bracelet spoke in a crusty sarcastic cynical male voice.

Gadfly held them out before her and said, “Choose one.”

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The young vivacious long limbed red head jiggled her way up to the gate house. The leather jacket she wore left her full round breasts exposed serving little more than an demi-cup platform bra as it cinched tight around her waist and pulled her firm breasts up in an attempt to contain them. She wore a pouch over otherwise exposed flame red hairy crotch that bounced in pendulum sways this way and that with each stride ensuring all could see her naked peaking pussy as she proudly strutted up to the heavily fortified gate and walls of the settlement.

Her tight high stiletto heeled boots crunched to a halt before the large closed gate made out of thick slabs of metal crudely bolted and wielded together and placed her hands on her hips and waited and then impatiently kicked at the gate.

A small metal plate slide up far to her left and she strode over to it. Behind the small rough round portal she could just make out some bars and a mouth. “What do you want?” The mouth said in a bored monotone.

“I wana trade!” The young impossibly voluptuous girl leaned down and shouted into the opening causing the mouth to leap back at her shouting and then turn into an eye that widened at her considerable shuddering tits that she was carefully jiggling back and forth in front of the opening.

To the right of this without further word a much smaller disguised gate slowly opened up and she bent over and stepped through it. It closed behind her and she found herself in a very narrow metal passage way. The walls were over twenty feet tall but there was no ceiling and she could see that at the dead end of the passage at the top of the wall, a man in very heavy armor stood behind a large mounted crossbow peering down at her. There were also several small openings in the wall and she had no doubt they were for spears upon compressed gas to shoot out and make a pin cushion out of her should she prove to behave badly. A section of wall to her left pulled up and there behind some very stout looking bars was the man connected to the mouth and eye she had just seen earlier. His eyes widened even more as he got the full effect of her entire package and she smirked at him and winked as he cleared his voice and said, “I am the gate keeper of Lamodieum and have been empowered to extend credit to those I find worthy to be honored by all who dwell here. Now I know I have never seen you before so I know we don’t have any file of credit extended to you. You can’t enter the city proper without some credit file. So tell me girl what do you have to trade with the gate keeper to make me think you are worthy of entering this fine honest establishment?” he raised and eye brow and smirked back at her.

Oreola looked at the bars and realized she would never be able to suck a dick through them and there did not seem to be another round portal opening under the barred window. She shrugged and decided to try Gadfly’s suggestion. “I have an echo map.” She removed the small seed pod from her wrist and tried to hand it to the man but there was no way to fit it through the bars which also had a wire mesh running across them. Suddenly a drawer slid open at her waist and she looked at the man and then shrugging again dropped the seed pod into the open drawer which rapidly closed. She leaned up on her tippy toes and could see the drawer had re-opened on the other side. ‘It slides on rollers.’ She thought to herself.

The man took the seed pod echo map and took it over to a large metal box very old and clunky looking and set about putting the seed into the machine which he then pulled a lever and the seed pod crunched with a snapping popping sound and tendrils of blue wisps rose up and then the shell fragments fell to the ground where a large pile of such pieces of shells already lay.

The man looked into a viewer scope attached to the box and then hummed and reached down to fiddle with some knobs. He pulled away from the machine as a copper inscribed ticket stuck out like a tongue and plucked it and looked at it with a frown. “Well it seems here that you went through the old temple to the north-west of here? No one has been in that place in years. I can give you forty credits.” He waved the copper tablet in between his fingers as he looked at the necklaces and wrist bands of gold she wore and tapped the tablet against his chin. “Room and board for a night is ten credits if you choose to stay in the town you have to understand that once your credits run out so do you. That is the town watch will kick your butt out as soon as you are out of credits. The merchants in this town will be able to view the amount of credits you possess and remove them as you trade with them on machines like this in their shops and some of the vending machines on the streets work in the same way. Now that you have credits you can enter and trade. Hmm, first do you have any weapons upon your person?” Oreola pulled out her frost dagger from under her boot flap. “Oh a magical blade?! Did you find that or make it?”

“I made it myself. Well sort of it was made while showing me how to make such a blade.” Oreola tapped her own chin in thought.

“So you can make magical weapons then, eh? Alright, what’s your name girl?”

“Oreola,” she said proudly as the man looked up from his keyboard set in the metal box and gave her a steady eye and then looked down at her huge tits and shrugged and went back to punching at the keys on the machine. A door below the heavily armored man in plate metal with the mounted crossbow slide open and a dusty stone stair case appeared. “Keep your blade sheathed. There are fines here for brandishing any weapon and you don’t have the credits on file to pay them.” She sheathed her dagger.

“But before you go how about you and I do a bit of trading?” The man took the copper chip and placed it into the large box machine and pulled another lever and it disappeared. “My wife’s birthday is coming up and it is the big five-oh-oh if you know what I mean? So I want to get her something special like that necklace around your neck there. No that one there, yeah with the large blue scarab. She likes those things has several stone ones on the mantle in her sewing room. Look I have swords tons of them. That is what we usually get from wanders, weapons they strip from corpses.”

He turned form her and pulled open a lower cabinet cull of weapons and then tossed open a trunk sitting inside of it and pulled out a sword. “Look e’here at this one. This is an old elven blade from way before the mages war with a malachite gem handle. Now it isn’t much good for a normal sell-sword but a magic user like you who can make echo maps and know the lost skill of enchanting weapons, now you could find this blade very useful. You see it was forged but never finished for use. The elves often did that making blades and setting them aside in great hordes. This one has the gem but no enchantment on the sword itself.”

He held the bare blade weapon in front of the bars so she could see it better. “The beauty of these elven blades is the gem in the handle. It can absorb and hold magic just like we do. You can see the cleverness in that, eh? Instead of a magical weapon feeding off your own magic as you use it and maybe killing you as it sucks up the last bit of magical presence in your body. This here blade has its own store house in the gem. You just put the handle down to one of them glowing spheres you see after you defeat a monster and it swallows it up and charges its self. Of course you don’t increase your own magical presence that way or recharge your own magic in your own body but this way the blade can be used over and over again without draining your own magical reserves. Not very important in a quick bandit raid perhaps but in a large scale battle it can mean being alive in a room piled with foes instead of turning into a statue as you use up the last of your energy being sucked up into your blade as you are trying to kill those foes, eh?”

“Hmmm, I suppose I could use such a blade. It would be nice to have a weapon that does not drain my magic so fast as my dagger now does.” Oreola frowned at the blade the man turned slowly before her, “still I am not sure I-“

The man moved quickly, “and a scabbard of course. Look at this one! All silver and blue gems and such fine work. Not elven mind you but made from the floating cities it was and it fits the sword see?! Fits like a glove. Now sword and scabbard and here a harness comes with it and the belt has extra clips for pouches and all of this for say the necklace and that bracelet with the dragon eating its own tail.”

“Alright,” the girl giggled and removed the necklace from the many she wore and the golden bracelet from the many she had on and dropped them into the loud slamming drawer that had reappeared at her waist. She dropped them in and they were yanked back and picked up by the giddy gate keeper who then carefully set the sword in its sheath and harness into the large drawer and slid them out to her.

“Stop in at Preston’s he runs the odds and ends shop his wife has a birthday coming up as well and check in at the blacksmith Uranda, he might work out some kind of deal if you can enchant some of his blades for him. Always travelers coming through wanting enchanted weapons and armor. Anything for that extra edge.” Oreola nodded as she finished putting on the new blade and harness she was surprised at how light the blade was and she made her way past the open door which closed behind her and she walked up the steep few steps into an open dusty dirt street of the raised city of Lamdoium which seemed to be mostly the upper levels of buildings of only a story or two above ground with all the lower entrances and exits to the deeper levels being heavily sealed off. Many of the buildings thus had facilitated travel by placing boards across from window to window or filling up gaps of sudden courtyards with piles of stone or taking the effort and labor to rebuild or strip away some stone buildings creating a flat open area around it and straight line passage ways within it so that the little town was rather simply laid out and easily traversed from boxy end to boxy irregular end in its elevated high metal wall state.

“I can’t believe you traded away some of your jewelry for a simple elven blade,” the boney old encyclopedium on her wrist wheezed in smug sarcastic growling.

“Shush you. Have you worked out my new magical school yet?” Oreola shielded her eyes from the odd brightness that seemed to come down unimpeded from the perpetually overcast sky as she scanned the eccentric store fronts along the main street. It seemed people lived above their shops if not actually in them.

“Yes, I have worked out the schematics of fine tuning your magical presence to develop the new skill trees as you have desired but again I have to say I find it insane.” The crusty creaking voiced bone wrist band sighed.

“Don’t you worry about it! I know what I am doing.” Oreola was both exasperated by the enclyclopedium and happy that it had managed to figure out how to make her idea work more fully in more detail.

“I seriously doubt that. I mean, a new magical school based on sex?! Please!”

“Based on fucking yes! And it is not stupid it is brilliant! And I have already proven it works haven’t I?”

“UGH, yes I suppose so. I mean you did manage to somehow mingle the betting spells and the paralyzing spells so now you can fuck any creature and when it comes it locks up and falls asleep dropping half its magical presence in glowing balls so you can collect them up. And you did spend the last few weeks wandering the underground and above ground mazes perfecting your new ‘sex magic’ on hundreds of Grunts and Gnomes and giant rats and what have yous. Yes you have fucked just about anything with a penis into a temporary memory erasing catatonic slumber and made off with their magic spheres in giddy dizzy aftermath. You even fucked that entire bandit camp into submission but seriously you can’t imagine that-“

“And don’t forget the temple! I completely fucked the shit out of all those undead bastards I mean I even had some of them breaking their dicks off they were so hot in pounding my snatch! And the serpent men! And those ghost things! And those priests?!? Now that was one heck of an orgy even for my insatiable twat!”

“Ugh, yes alright you have proven you are a slut, well done. But-“

“Hey, what did I tell you about the ‘S’ word? I don’t like you calling me that. One more time and I take you off my wrist and drop you down a hole or into that pig style over there. How would you like to spend the rest of all of time in pig shit?”

“I humbly and deeply apologize if I spoke out of turn mistress. I was just worried that your current plan of creating a sex magic based school of combat is well fucking idiotic.”

“UGH! It is not! I have already created an entire system of allure and glamor spells newly modified so that I steadily can cast a long lasting potent charm of erotica about my person with very little bleed of my magical persona. There isn’t a pecker in a mile radius from me that isn’t rock hard and wanting to nail my sexy ass when I fire that sucker up full bore! Much better than getting eaten or killed I can tell you that! And I don’t like all this killing stuff! That is sad. I like my way of just fucking them silly and collecting up some of their magic and whoosh I am gone! Ha! That is much better now!”

“If you say so madam but I still reserve the right to have doubts though.”

“HUMPH, you would. Ole sour puss. Now did you finish up my plans, for here is the blacksmith’s shop?”

“Yes, one set of blueprints for, eckhem, ‘Whore-War-Armor’; I can upload them into any of their crude schematic observation and credit reader boxes.”

“Excellent! This leather clothing just isn’t revealing enough and it is too restricting I can barely get my ankles behind my head in these thigh high boots!”

“How unfortunate for you ma’am in light of your ceaseless endeavor to meet and win over new friends.”

“Well, I had better cast a low level allure erotica spell now before I go in and have a chat with this blacksmith and see if he can undertake making my armor for me? I just hope he has a much bigger cock than that last lot did!”

“Well they were Gnome school boy’s ma’am out on a field trip.”

“That’s no excuse! Who ever heard of teenagers who weren’t horny and hung?!? And have you translated that old adventures guide I found in the spiders domain?”

“Oh that, now there is something worthy of my talents; perhaps you will have me translate some random roadway signs next. It would seem it is the journal of some great explorer who has ventured into many forgotten realms and made some rather interesting maps. He or she never mentions his or her own name in his or hers writings and notes but he-she-it has apparently been just about anywhere and everywhere in his or hers travels. Including a brief venture to the shattered palace of the great mage in the center of the sandstorm chaos cloud where the individual was poisoned and apparently was seeking the mechanical spider queen for an antidote when the entries end.”

“Whoa, that is awesome. But first things first, the blacksmith and a commission for my new designed armor and maybe some kind of leather tanned back pack I can then make walk and carry my things?  Now can you see my nipples?”

“Uh, yes. I am afraid so.”

“Good! Let’s go trade!”

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Oreola, her red hair once shoulder length now hanging down in great flowing locks tickling past the small of her back and intertwined with magical gems and silver strands that caught the dim light of the strange room and glittered. Her face covered in a fine white eye mask against the blowing sand and her lithe young body encased in white gold chased armor edged in blue that left her enormous firm breasts and hairy red crotch naked and exposed clutched the long black flute looking device from beside the over turned stone table as Gadfly his robes tattered and one eye covered in a patch held his cracking staff in front of him and shouted. “Now place the shard inside the tube and play the melody the Dark Queen taught you!”

Oreola dodged a blast of powerful energy and rolled coming up to her knees and placed the ebony shard into the flute like carved stone construct and began to play it. All around her was violent chaos. Gadfly’s staff was cracking under the powerful blows of the black creature’s clawed hands which were smoteing the glowing protective shield he was trying to encase it inside of as it in turn continued to rain the room with balls of energy that exploded all around them. Meanwhile the Prince of the Jin who had opened the glowing portal to the palace of the Great Mage in the heart of the Chaos Cloud lay dying, his blood evaporating into the either, as he lay pinned under the clawed feet of the three headed beast of all black that was the Great Mage.

Olynix, the sphinx with its ocelot body and young girl’s naked torso and head, shot her bow of drugged ruby tipped arrows at the three headed Great Mage and dodged its bolts of energy providing cover for the sprites, Pussywillow and Foxtail, who struggled to keep the energy portal that was their only hope to escape from the Great Mages sandstorm shrouded tower open now that the Prince of the Jin’s lay bleeding into the air.

The Royal Guard of the last of the cloud cities, Ememortorium, now smoking crippled ruins hanging listless and dead in the blackened sky hovering over the charred wastes of the Empire, it’s puppet-string Emperor Quntielleus, having joined the Dark Kings from the bowels of the Deep enslaving his won people, all in turn ignorant slaves of the Great Mage, all their kingdoms now ruins of ash as the lava beasts and ghouls and walking cadavers roamed freely and unfettered, all those last brave Royal Guard lay dead in the maze of floating rooms of the shattered palace all in the last gamble to stop the mindless destruction of the Great Mage in one last forlorn hope.

Oreola played upon the flute and suddenly she was whisked away into a heady rush of memory. She was knocking on a door. A thin disheveled man in glasses was opening it and looking at her with a frown. She smiled at him. And he reluctantly let her in or she pushed past him she couldn’t really tell as the memories left her dizzy and rushed by so erratically at irregular speeds so that she could not be sure of things as she was left disjointed and severed even as they happened and questioning thought made observation difficult if not impossible as the memories rushed forward with a will utterly their own. Everything felt familiar and true but seemed so strange this was not the world she had known for the past few decades.

She was thin and not very tall and had long black hair and was flat chested with a wide flat butt and she wore expensive clothes and jewelry to compensate for this and held a bottle of champagne and the man did not like her and did not trust her and she knew why but could not stop what was happening.

He was excited about what he had made though and she played to this and he increasingly got caught up in the talk of his work and he foolishly led her to his lab past the encrypted doors and he showed her his invention. It was a floating world, the ultimate game. No virtual reality. No sleeping booths with wires and visors. This world hovering in its blue glow, a globe over thirty feet in diameter was real, solid, physical and the game player could be projected into it to enjoy an adventure. No more costly amusement parks or long drives to parks or places. It was powered by a graviton wave accelerator. A limitless power source and he blushed as he told her of his character and she giggling said she wanted to play upon the world too and she had always wanted to be a big busty adventurer and she held her hands out fully extended in front of her chest to show him the impossible size of breasts she pretended she wanted. The fool had figured out how to re-write the world genome and he had used it to make a fucking toy! She smirked and gave him the champagne. He struggled with the cork and left the room to find something to open it with and get some glasses.

She quickly found the instrument panel she needed out of the hundreds cluttering up the room and inserted the chip and began to flip levers and push buttons and type up command prompts on various keyboards. It was surprisingly easy.

The man returned with the open bottle and two glasses and a wet stain on his shirt. She had called up one of his file creatures a simple generic man. She pushed a button and explained to him as the creature changed into a large muscular nearly mindless hulk how easy it would be to take this obedient man and make him the ultimate laborer. The inventor was very upset.

She told him how stupid he was and how a few thousand of these perfect building drones could be brought into this world as easily as he had formed his toy world in its protective shell into this world and used to work in factories of her company. ‘Why should Wal-mart be the only company allowed to profit from slave labor?’ She heard herself saying. She whimsied that a few thousand nay a few hundred thousand would be a good start and he tried to stop her as she turned back to the key panel. This was a mistake. She shot him in the stomach and he fell down upon the portal pad and slowly went about dying as she continued at the key boards. Three men in black suits entered the room. The board of directors who had promised her the CEO position if she could pull this off they growled about her being sloppy as they stepped over the dying man and she threw the final switch as the inventor reached up and grabbed her ankle and burbled out his last protest as the entire room went white and the three men were drawn and melded into one black three headed body of vile remorseless malignant greed and she spun and fell down and when she woke she was back in the room of the Great Mages palace inside the chaos cloud and Gadfly’s staff had just shattered and he fell to the ground his stomach bleeding but he was no longer an old man he was the young man in glasses and looking up at her and the three headed board of directors smiled at her and laughed. She was still Oreola, still the busty redheaded adventuress.

“Gadfly is dead!” Shouted the young nubile sphinx, “and the Great Mage is breaking free.”

“Did you find the answers to destroy the Great Mage in your past? Is that why he stole your memories?” The sprite Pussywillow called out over the roar of exploding energy blasts as they continued to tare the sandstorm surrounded room into pieces.

“We cannot hold the portal open much longer! The Jin is dead and it is closing fast!” Foxtail yelped as an energy blast struck her and she died.

Oreola saw herself trading herself into slavery in order to have her memories erased by an old crone deep in a pit.

“We must try and flee before the portal collapses if we have failed in our mission perhaps we can return to-“  the sphinx was caught up in the black talon grasp of the three headed black Great Mage and devoured whole.

Pussywillow was struggling to hold the spinning hole in the center of the room open. “I fear he shall escape through the portal and strand us here if we do not do something about it!”

Oreola looked about her through tear blurred eyes and saw the shimmering spinning globe of the world which had been hidden behind the Great Mage from view.

“Is that the ‘other’ world you came from? Is that the ‘Earth’ the old crone told us was your real home?” Pussywillow broke off her screaming questions as the foul black three headed beast advanced upon her helpless form.

“No,” Oreola said quietly. “This is my world. A world of my own creation. A hell of my own making by ignorance and accident I re-made the real world into this. There is no other to go back to this is it transmogrified. The machine did not just make a few hundred thousand builder/labors outward into my world it cast its entire template on top of my world and remade it whole and entire into its own image.” She watched the blue spinning globe stop spinning and turn dark and crack into pieces as the chaos sandstorm cloud spread over it.

And the Great Mage grabbed Pussywillow and stepping backward into the closing portal as he devoured her piecemeal and he said, “Sloppy this, very sloppy.” And the third head smiled as the first two who had spoken through bloody bites laughed as he vanished and the portal closed shut forever.

The end.

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