The Crafter's Dungeon: A Dungeon Core Novel (Dungeon Crafting Book 1) by Jonathan Brooks (literature books to read TXT) 📕

felt…right.  Sandra controlled the Sentinel again when everything seemed to be in place, and then tested both of her creations out.

They worked as perfectly as they were intended.

“Wow!  I’m impressed!  The other Fairies are not going to believe me when I tell them about this.”  Winxa had been watching from the edge of the room, wary lest the trap become a failure and accidentally explode.  Which, when Sandra thought about it, was a real possibility.

Thanks!  Now all I have to do is finish my transportation system, and I’ll be all ready to start crafting again.

There was so much she wanted to do, but she wanted to make sure that her current projects were finished up before she started anything else big.  To that end, she focused all her efforts in finishing up her central transportation column, as boring as it was.  All the while, though, she kept an eye on the second room, watching and waiting for Kelerim to finally wake up.

Chapter 30

Kelerim startled awake, the thought of being crushed in the jaws of a massive beast at the forefront of his thoughts.  Fortunately, he managed to hold his scream inside as his eyes opened and stared ahead at a plain stone surface, the joins between the blocks so smooth that they were indecipherable.  Or…there weren’t any joins keeping the stone blocks together, and the entire surface he was looking at was one whole piece.  Either way, he was somewhere he had never been before and obviously didn’t recognize, which meant…he wasn’t quite sure what that meant.

The last thing the former Blacksmith remembered was being chased into the wasteland by Razochek and his warband for nothing other than existing, where he then found shelter of sorts for the night.  The next morning was a little fuzzy, but he remembered being extremely hungry and thirsty, and he started wandering through the wasteland on a mission to find food and water.  Then there were some scary-looking beasts that he had stumbled across, followed by running for his life, and then chasing after a weird…something into a cave.  Anything after that was all darkness – he couldn’t remember what happened next.

Kelerim was a little worried that the beasts – Bearlings, he suddenly remembered what they were called – had caught him and dragged him back to their cave and were holding him as a meal for later.  He wasn’t sure if they even did that, but he couldn’t think of any reason why he was still alive.  And – staying as still as he could to prevent the aforementioned Bearlings from seeing that he was awake – he realized that his side didn’t hurt anymore when he breathed.

The room was lit with a gentle glow that illuminated everything just enough that he could see slight details using his eyes, but he couldn’t see the source from his prone position staring upwards.  Before he moved and alerted whatever was nearby, Kelerim waited for a while to see if he could hear anything; the silence was instead so great that he swore he could hear his heartbeat in his chest.  Another minute or two passed by as he strained his ears for anything, when he finally heard the very faint sound of metal striking metal.

At first, he thought it might just be some sort of hallucination, which he had heard that those who hadn’t had anything to drink in days suffered from, but the more he listened, he was convinced that the sound was someone striking metal at a forge.  The sound was quite unmistakable, as was the repetitiveness of it, and he recognized it from his many hours and days working at his own smithy.  Well, not my smithy – at least, not anymore since Razochek chased me off.  Blast him!

Kelerim was still angry at the warband leader for doing that to him, but he buried those feelings down as he started to take stock of his situation.  With nothing living nearby that he could hear or otherwise sense, he took the chance to move his head to the left.  Unsurprisingly, he was looking at another stone wall very similar to the ceiling, though when it connected to the floor, he could see that it indeed appeared to be all of one piece.  What…how?

He figured that he would puzzle it out later – if there was a later, of course.  He turned his head the other way and saw more of the same stone walls, but he could see a tunnel of some sort leading somewhere else.  Where am I?  He hadn’t heard of any place near the Orc village where he had spent the last year that had any place like what he was seeing, nor did he remember stonework this well-done during his time with the Dwarves.  Even the larger Orc cities toward the interior of Orcrim didn’t have anything remotely like the strange room he found himself in.

On the floor, Kelerim could see some two-foot long metal poles with blades scattered haphazardly around, as if someone had dropped them and would come back to fetch them when they had time.  Is that what woke me up?  Did someone – or something – drop those poles and is coming back for them?  Everything was confusing and just invited even more questions, but the main thing he wanted to know was how – and why – was he still alive?

Although he wanted to find out the answer to that, he thought it would be more prudent to get out of wherever he was before something came back for him.  He was lucky he hadn’t been killed or eaten while he had been…he assumed “sleeping”…in that room, but that luck would only go so far.  Kelerim needed to take control of the situation now, and escape before something stopped him.

He sat up cautiously, the previous pain in his side indeed completely gone – how long was I out?