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Master barks.
“I’m going to hope you mean yes.” I turn my attention back to the door. How do we get in?
Having no other idea what to do, I knock. To my surprise, the small door creaks open like they were expecting us. A flicker of torchlight beams through the crack.
I push with my hand but stay back. I’m not sure what to expect, so I carefully peek inside.
The room isn’t very big in terms of square footage—maybe twenty by twenty—but the ceiling reaches a hundred feet high. The plaster has deep dark cracks everywhere and is a terracotta-brown except in the spots where the torches on the walls have left black tarry stains. The stone floor is covered in muddy footprints trailing in three separate directions, toward three different doorways. One doorway is big enough for a giant topass through, fifty feet high and twenty feet wide. The other two doorways are small, for someone my size and, say, a mouse.
What the hell is this place?
Master steps inside, and I follow. “Hello?”
The air is dank and musty, and there’s a faint smell of something rotting in the air. A cold shiver passes through me. I’m definitely questioning my sanity for coming here. Everything feels off, like I’ve walked into a mortuary instead of a place where knowledge is stored.
Master takes the doorway in the middle, seeming perfectly at ease, which gives me some comfort, but not much. I follow him.
We walk for over twenty minutes, down a zigzagging passageway leading deeper into the earth. Eventually the sharp turns become one long sloped spiral.
“Where is this going?” I ask, noting how the stone walls have collapsed in some spots, exposing the soft dirt. We pass one crack in the wall, and the air fills with a putrid scent. It’s decaying fish or meat.
“Oh, God.” I cover my nose. “What is that?”
Master ignores me and continues until we finally reach another door.
This time, I don’t knock.
It opens, and I gasp at the monster before us.
It’s one of those creatures I encountered on the Blood Lands. From the waist up, they look like large wolves with a shaggy lion’s mane and an elongated snout. The lower part looks like a human man with smooth skin and a man’s penis. I nicknamed it a masterbeast, because the damned thing got turned on by the smell of my fear and began stroking itself. A masturbatory beast.
This masterbeast has part of its upper torso shaved down to a five-o’clock shadow length, but I’d recognize the creature anywhere.
“No. Fuck no.” I turn and start running back up the spiral dirt ramp. “Master, run!” I look over my shoulder, but Master isn’t there.
I stop, realizing I’ve run in a circle, coming out exactly where the beast and Master are still standing.
“What the hell?” I mutter.
“You cannot go out the way you came in,” says the shaved beast. “The passages are constantly moving.”
Moving? “Who are you? What is this place?”
The beast ignores me and looks down at Master. “They are waiting in the grand story room, ready to hear what you have brought back from your travels, Master.”
I swallow hard. “Master? You’re a Scholar Person. And one of those disgusting, rapey creatures?”
“If you are referring to the ones found in the forest, those are our distant cousins,” says the beast-man, “the outcasts born without any intellect. They never progressed beyond what they are today.”
I crinkle my nose. “And yet, you all walk around naked.”
“Clothing is for protection from the elements or predators. We have neither here.”
“So what about Master? How come he’s a Great Dane?”
“He crossed over into your world.”
Meaning his monster genes were filtered out. “So your kind’s basic DNA is a large dog?”
