Why does this adventurer keep braving the dungeon? Honestly, they just really love puzzles.
"It's blood money," the paladin says stonily.
"I know," the archer says. The conversation has been circling this particular sewer-hole for some time and more than several drinks. "Do you see anyone who disagrees?"
The priests of Three Sacred Dimensions watched them come out of their puzzle-prison, clearly expecting Malia to come sweeping out alongside them full of malice and killing magic. Equally clearly, amassed to murder them all; Malia hadn't been wrong.
Somewhat taken aback, but refusing to admit to the slightest shame, they paid the remaining three adventurers a huge sum of money.
"We shouldn't have left her," the paladin says.
"She said—" the archer puts her face in her hands; none of this is newly confessed, none of this is palatable. "She said it wouldn't hold her. That she'd meditate, and magic her way out. The way she does."
"Out of the prison built for her like," the paladin says grimly.
"What was I to do?" the archer says. "I did what she told me. You wanted us all to die fighting an entire bloody geometry cult, instead?"
"We split it four ways," the berserker says, hard and certain, almost the first thing he's said since the Seventh Gate snapped shut and it became clear that Malia would not be joining their hasty exit of the remaining six. "We split it four ways and set hers aside and stay together to keep it safe for when she's done meditating."
None of them want to say but what if....
"The thing I can't understand," the archer says, late and weary around a campfire, months later, "is why she went along with it. She knew. She knew, Arlo."
"Aye," the paladin says, staring into the flames.
"She called herself a feral genius." The archer pokes at dully flame-creviced logs with a stick. "And I believe it. We all saw her, we all saw what she could do, on the spur of the moment with nothing but her wits and pure spite at the world."
"And all the drugs she could fill herself with," the paladin says dryly.
"I half think those were just for fun."
"Well, that's it, isn't it?" He stretches tired legs. "That's why she went along with it. It was obvious bait, but she had such fun with it. Showing off to them just how much their monster she was."
"She could have prepared one of her awful teleport spells," the archer says, shuddering to remember. "Fired it off as the door closed. They wouldn't even know their trap was sprung with nothing in it."
"She said to you she'd get out," the paladin says. "She must have believed it, aye? Not endowed with self-doubt, our Malia. Think she'd have brooked sneaking out, when she could break their prison over her raw intellect and reappear to show off about it? The wizard they couldn't hold."
"If I knew any way to open those gates—" the archer says softly.
It's not a new thought, and it's not newly spoken. If they knew a way to open them, they'd spend the gold on an army to slaughter the priests, and all the wizards they needed to break the prison's locks.
But Malia's the only wizard they know who can do what Malia did. The only wizard anyone knows, as far as their enquiries go.
"I never saw her conjure food or water," the archer says. "I never saw her cast any spell that would let her do without. She was creative in a pinch, but—"
"But it's been a while now."
"She never spoke of any family. No sweetheart, no — nobody before she joined us, that I remember. What would we even do with the money, if one day we all agreed we've no hope she'll be back for it? Nobody to give it to, that we know. A monument to her? Sponsor the maddest little penniless feral bastard we can find to be a student at the most upsetting school of magic?"
"Mountain of glow-in-the-dark wizard drugs," the paladin says, the corners of his mouth turned up ever-so-slightly to say it's a joke.
"Oh, fuck off, you, you wouldn't even have any." She smiles around the melancholy, pokes his boot with her charred stick.
"I think the god would forgive me one line of mind-exploding wizard clag," the paladin says. "You know, as a funeral rite."
