VIII

As more and more of the enormous crabs rise from the city streets, you realize that you didn’t sign on for this. You’d apologize to Samanda if you could, but your mouth is full of magic rock. Even as you dart past her, the claw of the enormous crab fastens around her waist, and the pebble is squeezed from her mouth. You take comfort in the knowledge that she’ll probably drown before the crabs can tear her apart.

The crabs are surprisingly quick for such huge beasts, and several times you have to deflect snapping claws with the blade of your sword. At the end of the lane, a creature so massive that it makes its brethren look regular-sized rises up before you, the entire end of the street yawning upward into a gargantuan blue carapace. Your blade licks out and slices off a wavering eyestalk, and then you’re stepping atop the monster even as it levers itself upward, and using its height to boost you onto the avenue above.

You find yourself in a broad thoroughfare lined with cyclopean pillars that must have once reached to the heavens, if this city ever existed above the waves. At its far end, you see the gates of some temple or fane. As you pass through, you discover that the interior is not an interior at all, but that some ancient cataclysm has rent the building, destroying the roof and bringing down most of the walls, so that the temple is now open to the sea and to a massive chasm that splits the seabed behind it. Here you find the throne of the Yellow King, and the King himself asleep upon it. Samanda was right when she hypothesized that the King might not be a man. What lies upon the throne is an enormous worm, fat as a maggot, its yellow flesh the color of infection.

Next to the throne is a heap of gold and jewels, and atop the heap the treasure that you seek, what can only be the Shining Trapezohedron. Black and shot through with red, it seems to call out to you, and you slip noiselessly across the temple floor toward your prize. You had believed that you might need Samanda’s skills to steal the stone, but it seems now that you may be stealthy enough after all, and you reach the pile of treasure without the King so much as stirring.

You reach out one shaking hand, close your fist around the Trapezohedron, and as you do so, you hear a sound behind you, a sound out of place in the soundless depths of the ocean. You turn, and you see that the worm that is the Yellow King terminates in a human face, and that face is directing its mocking laughter at you, and you realize that, while you’ve gotten what you came for, you’ve also fallen into a trap.

 

If you cast the Shining Trapezohedron away, refer to passage X.

If you gaze into the Shining Trapezohedron, refer to passage XI.