So, maybe I could play the Dark Lord for real, and force the girl to flee.
I tried to make my voice really deep. “You dare enter the chamber of the Dark Lord you…pathetic…pathetic…mollusk?”
My voice, though a little deeper, still had that stupid sound that came from being a gem. It echoed around the dungeon now.
The girl looked from Tomlin to me.
Then she laughed. She laughed and laughed, and I began to get rather cross. Come on kid…I’m trying to give you an easy way out! If you’ll just get scared and run, then I won’t have to…
“I might as well abandon the pretense,” she said, her voice now sounding much more mature. “I’m not a total idiot. So you’re the dungeon core, and this is your dungeon? Hmm. Doesn’t look great, Mr. Core.”
“You’re very smart for a ten-year-old.”
“Eleven. I’m not smart, really. My mom is bed-bound, and I had to miss a lot of school to help her. She used to be a university lecturer, so she taught me stuff when she was feeling well enough.”
“How do you know about dungeon cores?” I asked.
“My…my father is a core.”
Another phantom feeling hit me. This was like a knife driven straight into me.
This little girl’s father was a dungeon core? She actually knew about things like this?
When someone became a core, necromancers resurrected them from their dead bodies. Then, the body was burned, and their resurrected soul was put into a core gem. After that, memories of their old life faded quickly.
They sure as hell didn’t remember their family, and they didn’t get the chance to tell their loved ones what had happened.
I had so many questions for this girl.
“Little girl,” I began. “Can you please explain to me how you came to know your father is a dungeon core?”
“Sure. Because I used to be one, too.”
“WHAT???”
“Let me explain.”
CHAPTER 11
As the red-haired little human told us how she was once a dungeon core, and how she had then come to be an eleven-year-old girl, I couldn’t believe it. But, as hard as it was, I held my disbelief in and listened.
That was a skill I’d had to learn in the academy when Overseer Tocky-Turnbull got sick of me interrupting to ask questions. I employed my hard-earned patience now, and I listened to the girl explain everything.
Vedetta didn’t remember anything of her first life, but she remembered a lot about her second. And her third? Well, she was living that right now.
For a long time, Vedetta thought she was just a normal, slightly-cleverer-than-average girl growing up in a backwater town. She had a mother, father, and three older brothers. Things were nice, if a little boring.
Then, in keeping with every story worthy of remark…disaster!
Actually, disaster and tragedy both striking at once. Though they sound the same, disaster and tragedy are very different, like siblings.
Vedetta’s father, a rug merchant, had been away on a trading trip for three weeks. He did this a lot, and it was just a normal part of their lives. Usually, he’d write them a letter when he reached the Glowing Pumpkin tavern, which marked the end of his journey and the last leg of his return home.
Then, Vedetta would know to wait until two days after receiving the letter, and then she would rise in the morning and go to the edge of town. She’d sit on a wall with a penknife and an apple. There, she’d cut snacks for herself while she waited to see her father’s horse gallop along the road to town.
When Vedetta was seven, she waited on that same wall after receiving one of her father’s letters.
She waited all day, but her father didn’t show.
Well, people could get delayed, couldn’t they? It wasn’t exactly a strange thing to happen. Travel was unpredictable at the best of times, especially these days. Her father always said so.
He didn’t come the next day, though. Or the one after that.
Seeds of worry sprouted into panic. Not just for Vedetta. Her mom and brothers all felt it.
Her brothers were different back then. They were strong and determined. Bill wanted to enlist in the King’s forces as a swordsman, and Lisle wanted to join the mage college. Trevor hadn’t decided yet. He was too much of a free spirit to decide his future at so young an age, but he knew one thing; he’d go with Lisle and Bill to find their father.
They were gone for days. That left Vedetta and her mom alone in the house. Without her father and three brothers, it was so, so quiet. Scarily quiet. Her mom tried to keep busy and tried to keep Vedetta busy too, but Vedetta heard her cry at night, and she sometimes heard her vomiting.
Eight days later, their door opened. Lisle walked in, pale-faced and with a grim expression on his features. Then came Bill, who looked even worse.
Trevor didn’t follow.
Bill sank to his knees and cried. It fell to Lisle to explain what had happened.
“I’m sorry, mother,” he began.
He told them how they had gone from town to town, tavern to tavern, asking for news of their father. Eventually, they learned that he had been waylaid by road bandits, who killed his horses, destroyed his wagon, and stole his goods. They beat him to a pulp and then left him for dead.
A drunk from the town of Zalfari had seen this, and he felt ashamed that he had hidden instead of interceding, so he kept quiet. It was only when he was in the Dancing Cow tavern and he heard three boys asking around for their father, that his guilt overcame him. He told
