Chapter 27: The Mother Of Them All

  I tried to push the door open without making a sound, hoping to catch the cultists unaware. It took a bit of effort but I did manage it in the end. If they were trying to subdue the boss then we could probably stab them in the back if they didn't notice us.

  The arena actually did look like a crater, sloping rock walls in an almost perfect circle, but the ground was what truly surprised me. Where the entire floor had been covered in shallow water with occasional isnds full of flowers breaking up the endless blue, the boss room was a giant flowery meadow, so green that it actually stung my eyes after all the blue we'd seen the st two days.

  Much more important was the boss looming over everything and one look at it told me that we were screwed. It looked exactly as Annabel's journal had said it would, the leafy crown atop its branches just as vibrantly green as the meadow it was standing in, but the unborn child was missing from the statue's womb. The transparent womb instead held a thoroughly mutated cultist whose body had started sending out tendrils all over the boss monster. The bark of the tree body was already developing bck splotches and unduting maws were breaking out of those spots like knotholes. Bck tears were running down the statue's cheeks even though the eyes themselves were hidden underneath the bark.

  There had been groaning noises since I'd opened the door but the groaning suddenly turned into intelligible words. They were unbelievably loud and it quickly became apparent why. They were coming from the enormous boss monster.

  “Kiiiilllllllll iiinnntrrrrrruuuuderrrrrrrsss... Eeeexpeeeeellll taaaaaaaaiiinnnnnt...”

  “You have to fight it!" the one cultist who remained alive and standing yelled at it. “Don't let it win! We need you, Randolph! The Maiden needs you!”

  The cultist had the hood of his cloak pulled up and from where I stood I could just see that he was wearing a mask to cover his face, marking him as the head cultist Syr had seen. His voice sounded... young. Way too young to be the leader of a band of merciless cultists that mutated and defiled all in their path, but what did I know about cultists. For all I knew the guy was pushing ninety and had bathed in gallons of virgin blood to appear young again.

  “Crrrrrruuushhhhh deeeespooooooiiilllleeeeerssssss..." the cultist inside the boss groaned.

  Apparently their takeover of the boss monster wasn't going as swimmingly as they had expected. That meant we still had a chance to nip this in the bud.

  I quietly gestured for Annabel to fire an arrow at the lead cultist and she nodded and took aim. No need to draw this out.

  She let out a breath and then let loose the arrow. It whistled through the air, perfectly aimed to hit the bastard in the back of the head... and pinged off a shield bubble surrounding the cultist, colorful ripples traveling outward from the point of impact.

  He paused in his yells and turned around to face us. The mask was white and smooth, featureless except for the eye holes, which had been painted so that they looked like bck tears were running down the cheeks. It covered the entire face and all we could see of him were a pair of unremarkable brown eyes.

  “Well," he said, in that same youthful voice. “I hadn't expected company so soon. Then again, I always knew that you were rather adept at dungeon diving, Princess Annabel.”

  “You," Anna growled. “Who are you?”

  The cultist chuckled. “Well, wouldn't you like to know?" he taunted. “No matter. My little prank after the dinner party didn't quite work out, but that just means you'll be the first to die to the Mother's creations.”

  He only barely got the st word out before a cascade of tornado nces and fire snakes smmed into him.

  It didn't quite break his shield but the bubble was wobbling rather armingly and he grunted with the effort of keeping it from popping. Behind him the boss groaned.

  “Muuuuuuuusssssssttt deeeeessssstrooooyy deeeeessssssspoooooileeeers.... Nooooo... Muuuussssssstt heeeeeeellllp maaaaaasterrrrrr... Muuuuuusssssssssst...”

  The cultist looked from us back to the monster, then back to us. “Well, you aren't entirely inept, I suppose. But it doesn't matter. The takeover will soon be complete. And while I would love to stay and watch the Mother destroy you, I really should be getting back to my Lady.”

  “There's not going to be any takeover, bub," I called out. “And you're staying right here.”

  “Promises, promises," he chuckled and this time when another barrage of spells came his way he summoned up an oval shield made of Darklight to defend himself.

  “Oi," I said. “You're reporting to the Holy Maiden, aren't you?”

  That gave him pause. “Well, you are rather better informed than I had anticipated," he said. “Who was it that tattled?”

  I considered lying but there was no telling how the Maiden would react if I made up some bullshit story. The Dark Lord's demise, meanwhile, was something she should know by now. “We killed her Dark Lord and torched his research," I said. “No more experiments with the red milk for you.”

  He considered that. “Well, that would expin why she hasn't been getting any more updates from him tely. I suppose I must thank you for the information, and for taking out the trash. So, as a little thank you, here's a tip: If you somehow survive The Mother Of Them All you're going to love our next little prank.” And then his silhouette shimmered and he was gone.

  Or I thought he was gone because Yume shimmered as well and vanished, using her fsh step. It was only when I heard the cng of steel striking steel that I looked up and saw her bearing down on the cultist with her sword, both of them standing atop the branches of the boss, locking bdes. Had he used a fsh step as well to get there?

  “You're quite tenacious, aren't you?" he said and then shed out with a nce of Darklight.

  Yume fsh stepped away and in the moment it took her to get her bearings again the cultist crushed a spell crystal, a prepared spell stuck inside a gem, same as my dismantling gem, except with a different payload. Blinding light engulfed him and when it disappeared he was gone.

  “He... knew me," Annabel said quietly.

  I wanted to sit down with her and talk about it, to try and figure out who he might be, but the groaning in front of us told us we had bigger problems. Namely the hundred-foot-tall tree beast that was slowly changing in accordance with the Bck Goat's corruption. The tooth-filled knotholes had spread over maybe a fifth of its body, but I didn't know if that meant that the cultist was winning or that he was struggling to corrupt the thing any further.

  The thing kept alternating between wanting to crush us and wanting to cleanse itself, but clearly whatever identity crisis it had didn't stop it from sending out a wave of energy, green limned in bck, that traveled towards us and caused grass bdes to explode in size, detach from the ground and hurtle towards us.

  Alisha immediately summoned a barrier with a muttered prayer and from the sound of impact the bdes of grass made I had no doubt they were as hard and sharp as swords.

  “What do we do?" Selene asked, sounding worried. I couldn't fault her. This thing was way bigger than anything we'd fought so far and could use magic. Our only chance was to kill it before the cultist could take full control.

  “We need to kill it while it's still fighting itself!" I called out. “Alisha, Anna, try to hit the cultist!”

  “Understood," Annabel said and lined up a shot.

  “Got it," Alisha said, charging up a trio of tornado nces.

  Annabel let her arrow loose first. The transparent womb of the statue looked soft and bent with the cultist's movements so I was hoping it would be soft enough to pierce, but I didn't get to find out. A barrier, the same kind the lead cultist had had, fshed up as Anna's arrow hit it, dispersing the force of the attack.

  “Selene! With me!" I called and the padin and I charged at the monster. “We'll attack the roots!”

  As we charged at it the boss threw wave upon wave of magic at us to try and stop us. Snaring roots, grass bdes, vampire flowers, everything, but I noticed that the overall feel of the attacks began to change, becoming a little more vile with each cast. It began with the second flurry of grass bdes, which left trails of blood behind even though they didn't hit anyone. The vampire flowers had started out looking like small red flowers with a tiny tooth-filled maw in the center that flew at us by fpping their leaves like wings, but by the end they looked more like clumps of bck ooze held roughly in the shape of a flower.

  Between our enhanced senses, enhanced bodies and Alisha's blessing we managed to dodge everything and finally we reached the boss' roots and started hacking at them. Selene's bde bit into them easily and my sword seemed to find fault lines with shocking ease, sinking deep into the wood on each swing, though the creature was too fresh for the fire enchantment of my sword to have any sting effects except for charring the bark.

  “Kiiiiiiillllll," the beast groaned and lifted up the clump of roots I'd been hacking away at, intending to stomp down on me, but Alisha and Yume took advantage of it like I knew they would.

  They fired spell after spell at it, each rocking the beast back a little bit and as the boss was about to fall over backwards I noticed a bck ulcer underneath it and I took a chance, dashing in and stabbing at it. But I didn't use Helios Edge. I used the enchanted sword that turned off the Bck Goat's regeneration. I had no illusions that one stab would have the same effect on this thing that it had on the Flower Wolf and the jellyfish, but it was a start.

  I Qi Dashed out again to avoid the stomp and everyone in the boss room stumbled as the ground shook. Selene was hit the worst and actually managed to fall but righted herself and Qi Dashed away before the boss could send a flurry of roots to tie her down.

  Alisha, Yume and Annabel were busy pumping more and more damage into the shield bubble but so far it seemed to be holding up.

  Ever-so-slowly the corruption was spreading over the boss and we were running out of time. I chewed my lip and considered my options. I could run in again and hack at its roots, maybe make it fall over this time. But there was another option.

  I dashed behind the barrier miracle that was still hovering in the air, a clear pane that looked like gss but wasn't, and pulled out the stand for my ballista, then dropped my crossbow on it and waved around the magic wand that would scale it back up to its proper size.

  Selene was hacking away at the roots on her own but I didn't run in to help her this time. I'd learned my lesson. She was tough enough and could handle herself for a while, especially since Alisha, Yume and Anna kept the boss busy with their spells.

  The ballista grew to its full size and I pulled out one of the big bolts for it. I carefully aimed at the transparent bubble the cultist was hiding in and fired. The massive projectile shredded through the shield but lost just enough momentum that it only just punctured the statue's womb, which truly had been soft as I had expected.

  Randolph shrieked in rage and pain. At first I found it gratifying to note that the scream only seemed to come from him and not from the giant boss surrounding him, but then I saw dark tendrils shooting out of the cultist's body and into the boss, the dark corruption spreading by leaps and bounds, and then something horrible happened.

  All over the boss' lower half bck knotholes opened up. Unlike the others they weren't filled with teeth, but instead beings began to crawl out of them. They were covered in bck sludge but it was just possible to make out the general shape beneath the goo. They were beings made of twisted roots, thin and spindly, with almost skeletal goat heads on top and gnarled branches twisted into cws for hands.

  And they kept coming.

  Selene kept swinging at the monsters in a mad rush but they were quickly swarming her and no matter how many Alisha and Yume bsted and burned they just kept coming.

  I aimed another bolt at the cultist and I could see the smirk on his twisted face. Yeah, he was going to drown us in bodies until we were too busy dealing with them to hurt him.

  “Selene!" I bellowed. “Back!”

  Thankfully she didn't question me and simply used a Qi Dash to get out of the crowd of enemies, swinging her sword to bisect those that wouldn't get out of her way.

  “Alisha," I snapped and without even needing to say it she began casting her Cleanse miracle.

  The four of us fought off the horde until our priestess finished the rather long incantation and when she did orange light exploded out of her, burning the monsters around us to charred husks but leaving us completely untouched. Even the boss recoiled before the power of her miracle. It could do nothing but hurt Outsider corruption, but boy did it do that well.

  “Yume," I asked. “If the cultist and the boss are currently struggling with each other, can you try to futz with their minds and see if you can help the boss win?”

  “Already tried it," the little fox said with disgust. “The boss' mind is too heavily warded to do that and because of how much they've fused the warding also protects him.”

  “Worth a shot," I said and then used the momentary reprieve from the spawned creatures to line up another bolt with the ballista, but before I could fire we were already surrounded by these things again and Alisha immediately began invoking her miracle again.

  Gods but they bred like crazy. No wonder Annabel's great-grandfather had lost so many men to these if they just kept on coming. I voiced as much and Anna answered:

  “Actually, if I'm reading this correctly, these monsters are spawning much slower than what my great-grandfather had to deal with. I guess the struggle between them is slowing the spawning down.”

  “Then we just need to get rid of them again and unload," I said. “Everyone, be ready to strike once Alisha finishes.”

  Then I aimed the ballista and let the bolt fly before Alisha's miracle was even finished. The bolt flew true and skewered the cultist in what would have been his gut if he hadn't been so horribly mutated. Now instead of dealing him a mortal wound it simply damaged him very badly and for a moment I could see the spread of bck all over the boss halting. A moment ter I couldn't see anything at all for a couple seconds as Alisha's miracle washed over the arena and burned away another wave of spawns and a few of the bck spots on the boss.

  But in all the excitement I had forgotten something crucial. So far we'd only been fighting dungeon bosses. And while those bosses were slightly smarter than normal dungeon monsters they were still only monsters created by a dungeon. But this thing wasn't. This thing was part human. Or at least a part of it had been human once. And it could think like a human.

  The first time Alisha had cast her Cleanse miracle the field had been clear afterwards save for a pile of rapidly disintegrating charred remains, but this time when the light faded something was still there. Four foot tall tulips that walked on their roots stood in a half circle in front of us. They had been minimally corrupted and therefore they had been left unharmed by the miracle save for a few charred spots.

  And they had used the goo monsters as a distraction to get within range.

  “Beware of tulips," I heard Athena's cryptic warning mocking me.

  Their flower bulbs had been closed before but now they exploded outward, each releasing a cloud of green and yellow spores that spilled over us. I tried to cover my face but the spores had a mind of their own, sticking to my face and sinking into my skin.

  Damn you, Athena.

  I could feel a corruption burning through my body, both a poison that would kill and another that would paralyze. My body was going numb and my breaths were getting shallower and as my eyes darted around I could see that everyone else was doing just as badly. I needed to reach the universal antidote on my belt, but my arms wouldn't obey. Towering over us I saw the cultist sneering at us and a sphere of Darklight began forming above him, likely a beam that would completely obliterate us.

  No. Fuck this. This isn't how it ends, I thought and then I felt it.

  There was a warmth spreading out from my throat and for a moment I couldn't figure out what it was, but then it hit me. The Moon Sapphire! The little charm I'd bought for Selene and me, the one that warded off poison. It was slow to act. Much slower than Alisha's miracle. But slowly, gradually, the feeling returned to my limbs.

  The sphere of Darklight was growing and I knew it was going to be a big one. The moment I could move my hands again I grabbed the universal antidote from my belt and took a sip, then ran over to dump the rest down Alisha's throat. She sputtered and coughed but the mere fact that she could do that was proof that it was working. Selene, having the same charm as me, was simirly moving again and had immediately given Annabel the rest of her potion. Alisha got to work casting her Protective Warmth miracle while I pulled a trio of throwing knives out of my bag of holding. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Annabel giving Yume a potion, freeing her from the paralysis as well.

  Knives made for terrible throwing weapons normally. They tumbled end over end, they didn't fly in straight lines and actually hitting something pointy end first was more an art than a science. But throwing knives were built differently. They were weighted so they would fly in a straight line, kind of like the darts people threw at boards in taverns. I had already found out that pebbles thrown with Qi Burst hit like shots from dwarven muskets. But throwing knives? They were devastating. So I aimed, charged up my Qi and threw the first, then repeated for the second and third. The first hit the cultist in what I would generously describe as his right arm, the second missed and splintered the bark to the left of his head, but the third hit the bastard straight in the eye.

  The Darklight construct dissipated, his concentration broken, and Annabel hit him in the gut with an arrow for good measure.

  Then Yume drew her sword and I could feel rivers of Qi rushing into her bde before she swung her bde once in a vertical arc and three enormous Qi Projections hurtled towards the cultist, cutting deeply into his flesh.

  Like the wolf and the jellyfish his flesh bubbled and knitted back together but we'd done so much damage to him that the process was getting rather slow. I was certain that if I could nd one more hit with the enchanted sword that we could take him down for good.

  Another wave of goo monsters spawned, mingling with the few tulip monsters Selene hadn't cut down yet, but then Alisha's defensive miracle snapped into reality and cut us off from them.

  “What now?" Selene asked.

  I expined my theory about the enchanted sword.

  “Then all we need to do is get you into a position to strike at it, right?" she asked.

  “Right. I'd say..." I thought about it. “Alisha, how many miracles do you have left?”

  “Four," she said.

  “Alright. Then you'll start casting Cleanse again. The moment the light from that dies down we...”

  **

  Everyone knew what to do and so all that was left was to do it.

  Alisha was going through the lengthy incantation, but clearly she'd been getting practice with it because the words rolled off her tongue a lot quicker than before and finally she finished it with:

  “Cleanse!”

  For the third time a wave of orange light bsted out from her, colpsing the shield of the Protective Warmth miracle and incinerating anything touched by the Outsider taint. Right as that wave of light appeared Selene sent out her ice storm miracle, aimed straight ahead to kill the tulip monsters, whatever else the cultist had thought of to spawn, and then the boss itself. Annabel was creating as many sapphire swords as she could without keeling over so she could hit the cultist the moment I'd turned off his healing and Yume was surrounded by a blue glow, casting a spell.

  When the light faded it revealed another batch of tulip monsters was dead on the ground, hoarfrost covering their broken bodies, and I noticed that they looked slightly more charred than the previous ones. Apparently the taint was spreading.

  The boss, too, was covered in a yer of frost and I was sprinting right at it, the sword drawn to skewer him and end this farce. The boss threw everything it had at me, grass bdes, snaring roots and vampire flowers and I made a valiant effort to dodge each and every one but was finally overcome and buried under a tide of pnt creatures.

  Except I wasn't.

  The illusion the boss had been attacking exploded into a cloud of blue mist and the invisibility Yume had put on my real body only sloughed off when I buried the enchanted sword into the cultist's chest, managing to slide it right between two ribs.

  “Sucker," I growled and twisted the bde around before I kicked off the bastard, sheathed the enchanted sword and sent a plume of fire at him with Helios Edge.

  I'd flung myself away quite a ways and Yume jumped through the air to catch me. Being cradled like a princess by a woman a foot and a half shorter than me was weird but kind of endearing, but I was more focused on the half dozen sapphire swords that nded right in the cultist's body.

  And then Selene sent her icicle crash miracle at him for good measure while Alisha chanted another Cleanse miracle.

  We kept peppering the cultist's cancerous body with projectiles until Alisha was finished and another explosion of light bsted outward, burning away the st of the bastard.

  According to Annabel's notebook killing the unborn being inside the boss' womb would have killed the boss, so for a moment I wondered if we had to run from or fight the boss now, but then it split down the middle and colpsed in two massive pieces.

  “We... we did it," Yume breathed.

  “We did it!" Selene cheered.

  “The beast that killed over fifty trained soldiers," Annabel whispered in awe. “And we killed it with just the five of us...”

  I wanted to tell her that we likely wouldn't have beaten it at all if it hadn't been for the cultist corrupting it from the inside, but honestly I was too busy cheering along. Even quiet little reserved Yume was ecstatic about our victory. And of course Alisha took that moment to throw herself at everyone within arm's reach, wrapping her arms around them and giving them passionate kisses. She started with Selene, then Yume, then me and then, without hesitation, she threw herself at Annabel and kissed her hard. The princess stiffened at first, but then moaned into the kiss and wrapped her arms around the elf's waist.

  Yume was watching the two of them, her tails wagging, and even Selene was slightly impressed with how forward Alisha was being. Was the elf thinking that... oh dear, that could be awkward. Then again, after the conversation I'd had with Anna two days ago, maybe not.

  **

  “I never knew you were so close to one of the Olympians," Annabel said.

  I'd just finished ranting about Athena's cryptic warning, the one about tulips. The one I'd dismissed as her mocking me. And apparently Anna had gotten entirely the wrong idea about it.

  “We are NOT close," I insisted. “The bitch is... grah!” I couldn't help it. Even just thinking of Athena made me mad.

  “They have a history together," Alisha expined. “And very little of it is good.”

  “That's a euphemism, isn't it?" Annabel asked, realization dawning.

  “It is," I said. I'd calmed down some, enough to be articute again. “I begged her to give me the strength to avenge my home town. She ignored me. Then she sent some pompous twat to kill the Dark Lord right when I set out to kill him myself. The twat died. I killed the Dark Lord. Then I found all of his artifacts, all of them blessed by Athena and I... desecrated them. She hasn't forgiven me for that and I haven't forgiven her for ignoring my prayers for years. But somehow, the bitch can't leave me alone. She just can't deal with the fact that I beat Dark Lords for a living even though none of the gods ever chose me.” I looked at the princess. “Are the gods this petty to your mother?”

  “Yes," she said. “Every week at least one of them makes demands of her, apparently forgetting that we're only pretending to be subservient to them to keep up appearances. And the Olympians are by far the worst.”

  “What about Hephaestus and Hades?" I asked carefully. I respected those two a lot more than the other Olympians and I was worried my high opinion of them was undeserved.

  “Never them," she insisted. “Now that I think of it, Aphrodite has never been an issue either. Most of it comes from Hera, Zeus, Demeter, Poseidon and Ares, though Thor and Baldr of the Aesir aren't far behind them.”

  “What about the Tuatha Dé Danann?" Alisha asked.

  “The only one who has ever made overt demands of mother was Bres. She ughed him out of her court.”

  Alisha smiled and, at her reaction, so did I. Even ardent worshipers of the Tuatha didn't like Bres.

  Hmm.

  “So allegedly the Holy Maiden has an ally among the gods, right?" I thought aloud. “Any chance it could be Bres?”

  “Why would you think that?" Annabel asked.

  “Well, he clearly gets no respect from anyone and nobody likes him, despite the fact that he is married to the head goddess of the Tuatha Dé. So if any god has something to gain from selling out this world to the Outsiders, wouldn't it be him?”

  Alisha looked worried. “I am going to bring this up with my goddess the next time we commune.”

  “Any other possibilities?" Yume asked. “Any chance it could be Ares?”

  “Why do you say that?" I asked. “Do you have suspicions?”

  She shook her head. “No, but if he were the traitor, we would have cause to oppose him.”

  “We already have cause to oppose Ares," I said. “He wronged my little fox.” Yume gave me a quick smile. “But I doubt he's involved with this. He did, after all, send a Chosen One to kill the Bck Goat's Dark Lord.”

  “Who then promptly betrayed everyone to join forces with said Dark Lord," Selene reminded us.

  “True, but he betrayed Ares as well, didn't he?" I asked. “Look, I'm not saying Ares can't be the traitor among the gods. All I'm saying is that just because he's a scumbag who's got a lot to answer for doesn't mean he's involved with this mess.”

  “Sadly true," Yume said.

  **

  Once everyone had calmed down a little I chucked a dismantling gem at the boss and it split apart into a ton of magically charged lumber and some very high quality marble from the statue. At first I wasn't sure whether to even take that stuff along, but Annabel told me that both the wood and the stone were extremely high quality and that her great-grandfather had used both to build some of the core parts of the pace. She assured us that her mother would pay a premium for more of the material, so I took it along. And after hauling that much wood and stone around I was very gd that bags of holding didn't get heavier as you filled them.

  The moment the dismantling gem had hit, a door had opened up on the far side of the arena with a stairway leading down. We headed there and found ourselves in the now familiar treasure chamber. Once again it had a small mountain of gems and a grove of trees, but no artifacts for us to loot.

  But there was another thing that was even more shocking: A stairway leading down to the next floor. Logically we'd known that the dungeon kept expanding but when Annabel's great-grandfather had explored this dungeon, there had been a dead end at the end of that chamber. And now, who even knew how much deeper it could go? But clearly my little fox was fixated on something else.

  “It can't be," Yume whispered as she stared at the trees.

  “What's wrong?" I asked. The fruits looked weird. They looked a little like melons, but they were transparent like gemstones, with a golden color that didn't exist in real gems.

  “These are the same fruits I fought a dragon for before," she said, plucking one of them and staring at it in wonder.

  “The ones that power up your Qi?" I asked, getting excited.

  “Exactly," she said and then plucked more and handed them over to everyone.

  Their skins were edible, same as any other fruit we'd found in this dungeon so far, and they tasted very simir to a honeydew melon, except even sweeter. I'd called the dragonberries ambrosia before, but these were just as delicious and the almost orgasmic sounds Alisha made underscored the point. Only then, as we were eating these fruits, did it finally hit me.

  We were finally done with the dungeon. We'd found the cultists and we'd stopped their pns. One of them had escaped and yes, he knew Annabel on sight and was apparently the one who'd tried to kill her after the seafood dinner, but we were done with being down here. There were still things to do, but we could do them up above ground, under actual sunlight.

  And even better, we were no longer under a time limit and could rex, at least a little bit.

  Just then the effects of the fruit began to take hold and I suddenly felt short of breath. I knew the pool of Qi inside me. I'd gotten used to it. I had managed to convince myself that I would need to work hard to make it grow even the tiniest bit. But suddenly that little pond of life force inside me grew deeper and deeper until I felt like my body was containing an entire ke of power. It still wasn't quite the same as the ocean I'd felt inside Yume, but it was an order of magnitude bigger than what it had been. Around me the girls all seemed to be feeling the same, clutching their dantian with looks of awe on their faces.

  “I am shocked these were down here, though," I said.

  “So am I," Yume said. “If these are found on the fifth floor, I shudder to imagine what treasures we would find if we headed deeper.”

  “Deeper?" Anna asked and then it suddenly dawned on her. “The stairs...”

  “Yeah," I said. “Apparently this isn't the final floor any longer.”

  “We could explore it," Selene suggested.

  “Honestly, I'd love to," Annabel said. “But not today. Now that we've been down here we can return here whenever we'd like. And I want to see the sun again.”

  “Me too," Alisha said.

  “I guess it's decided then," I said. “We'll go outside again, report to the queen if she's back and enjoy the time outside. But once we have some free time we will come down here again and explore the sixth floor, as the first people ever.”

  ChrisLensman

  Hebba. It's a strange name, isn't it? And yet, you all know the name, just not this way to spell or pronounce it. It's the original Hebrew version of the name 'Eve'.

  You see, Hebrew is a strange nguage. There are many dead nguages but few of them are as dead as Ancient Hebrew. In Hebrew writing you generally only write down the consonants because they don't have proper symbols for the vowels. There used to be a system for what vowels go where in what situation but we have lost that system. Ancient Hebrew was passed down orally for centuries and spoken only as a ritual nguage. And because nobody ever bothered to write these rules down we can no longer be sure exactly what they are. The best we can do is infer those rules.

  These days the schors have created a system of dots and dashes underneath the consonants to denote the vowels. In the same vein, this system allows us to denote stressed consonants with a dot in the center. For example, this ? is a "b" while this ? is a "v". Incidentally, pcing these letters here is making Scribble Hub's text editor break into tears because it really can't handle combining a nguage that's written left to right with one that's written right to left.

  And that is relevant for us because this is how "Hebba" became "Eve". Thanks to our incomplete understanding of Ancient Hebrew we ended up turning what was meant to be a 'b' into a 'v'. In fact, there are a lot of Christian names that are really just bastardized versions of Jewish names. One of my favorite exchanges in all of fiction is based on this. The protagonist in Charles Stross' Laundry Files is quite prone to swearing and at one point when he curses: "Jesus Christ!" his boss replies: "Yeshua Ben-Yusuf can't help you, boy."

  Because yeah, Jesus is not called Jesus in Hebrew. The name is Yeshua. And Joseph is really just a bastardized version of Yusuf. The 'Ben' part merely means 'son'. So, Yeshua, son of Yusuf. Because that's how the Jews used to write their names: X, son/daughter of Y.

  That's also why a lot of Jews these days have st names like Goldberg, Schreier or Weissman. German authorities forced them to take "proper" st names because their ck of st names was driving bureaucrats crazy.

  Anyway, tangent over, back to our boss. So, Hebba is really just 'Eve', which, as we've already discussed back in Chapter 20, means 'life'. Her title, The Origin of Life, is a nod to Ys VIII, an action game you should really py some time, if only for its spectacur soundtrack.

  And what about The Mother Of Them All? Well, all I'm gonna say on the subject is that for once the thing I'm referencing is actually more disturbing than what I turned it into.

  [colpse]

  But now the dungeon dive is finally over and our heroes get to live their lives above ground again and they're going to make up for lost time. So please look forward to the next chapter.