“-Let go the shadows, and behold the sun!

  The Light has come, as ever it must.

  Behold the new day!”

  The stone bowls in everyone’s hands were held up to the sun from the edges of the wall. The Salute ended as ever it did, just as the sun crested the horizon. A light breeze blew past us as the first rays caressed everyone, eyes closing to receive the blessing of a new day, invigoration, banishing of sleepiness, a pep in the step and new energy.

  Stupid morning rituals aren’t so stupid in a magical world.

  Madam Kleoh was clearly shocked to be receiving the Blessing with everyone else, and like everyone, felt the distant and faint power behind the Salute, the most delicate touch of a greatness beyond mortal comprehension.

  It was the quietest and gentlest touches of the Divine, and it was real. This was no power born of mortal making, and was given without rancor or restrictions… although folk merely seeking to do it for its power gained nothing from it at all, as was normal for an Aligned effect.

  Princess Kristie’s Chittick Jambalya dropped into all those bowls, hot in more ways than one, and the faint cheers that followed the Salute were matched by immediate grabbing of the stone spoons and the commencement of much slurping.

  “Oh! Oh, gods an’ demons,” Madam Kleoh blurted out, tears already starting to drip down from eyes and nose. “Dis, dis be So Damn Good-!” she barely managed to get out around her spoonful of joyous exploding mouth.

  The Mick’s Disk bumped the older woman in the back of her skinny knees, and she reflexively collapsed into the patient Disk waiting there.

  She was far from the only one having that reaction. Of course, me having Cast Feast of Heroes on the cauldron of heavenly gumption might have had something to do with it, but high-end QL 40 Alchemical cooking was absolutely the best material component for the spell, there was no doubt of that!

  They were not small bowls, so nobody was getting shorted. Men and women had their legs buckle and were down on their butts, either leaning up against the parapets on the walls above or with their feet dangling over the sides, some looking up in the sky and trying not to sob at whatever they were experiencing and remembering some deeply personal moments with a clarity they’d never experienced in their lives.

  That included Tim, who was hunched up against the wall, the massive monuga’s bowl up close to his lips, slobbering and crying as much as anyone else there, small rivers of tears and snot coming down from his eyes and flat nose as he mumbled things nobody understood. His triple stacked eyes alternated between looking at the blue sky and down at his culinary transcendence, but he didn’t eat any faster, sticking with the unfamiliar spoon and putting every mouthful in one by one slowly and gratefully.

  “Gor, I’m remembering every great stew an’ soup I ever ate,” the Mick snorted and sniffled around his tears. “Me mouth be on fire and me guts burning and me blood be singing and this is So Damn Good…” He took another spoonful helplessly.

  “I think it’s the Obsidian Chitticks. The smaller versions wouldn’t work so well in the stew,” I mumbled around the explosions in my mouth.

  How many people would waste the Feats, Masteries, and Ranks to get a +30 Cooking check? Especially combat-crazy fighter types like a Rantha Hag? Well, they didn’t know how important good knife technique was to a cook, and how useful that could be to a blade specialist.

  Cooking was part of the Sama Rantha Sword Grandmastery Sagedom! Of course she was ridiculously good at it...

  Kris and Briggs were sitting over there, heads together and feeding one another, giggling and sniffling like everyone else as they did so.

  Further conversations were put on hold as we ate the first meal of the day, and it was So Damn Good.

  -------

  As the Mick had informed us, the Halls of the Tusker King were plenty big.

  Originally it had been a set of five stacked Dungeon Levels, each pretty sizable in their own ways, Portals connecting them in a downward linkage, no easy way to come back up, only ever down. Powerful tuskers occupied every level, with one level actually devoted to the raising of Obsidian Chitticks, arguably the favored prey of the tuskers beyond fruits and the like.

  Outsiders had fought or run the gauntlets of halls and chambers down to Bobo, delivering him his King’s Crown Infusion and thus earning the chance to beat up Mowen Udaun, the Champion of the Tuskers, and get cracked on the head by the stone ball Bobo had used to replace the first he’d lost battling Tim so as to use the magic of the Monkey Paw from the Tusker Shrines there, earning much Quest Karma.

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  Whether such things still worked now was completely up in the air, and nobody felt like fighting their way down there to figure it all out.

  Happily, we had Madam Kleoh with us to walk us down, and walking with us was the towering form of the biggest tusker we’d seen yet, the magnificently black-furred and inordinately heavily-armored tusker named Mowen Udaun.

  He recognized the Mick immediately.

  “Ho! A former challenger!” the tusker grunted in extremely deep and surprisingly clear Isparian. “Come to test your might in the arena against me, furless one?” he asked, dipping his huge head down to stare right into the Mick’s eyes with total confidence.

  “One better,” the Mick said, leaning forward to stare into the bloodshot eyes of the massive tusker. “I come t’ race ya t’ the kill on Mudmouth, soon’s we see him! Think a big hulking galoot like ye can beat me to that?” he challenged the big tusker.

  Mowen went up on two legs and pounded on his chest like they were war drums, shaking the stones of the repurposed Empyrean hall around us. It was occupied by a score of massive Assailers and Devastators in far more armor than any Summoned Tuskers wore, along with two dozen Summoned Isparians wearing little more than shifts and skirts, but also brimming with some really potent Casting ability they’d no doubt honed tremendously holding this first chamber from invading tuskers coming down.

  It looked like when a Summons died, they’d simply move the real armor to the next Summons that had come in to reinforce the entryway, doing it enough times that the Summons actually started reappearing with duplicates of the armor already equipped. The living tuskers naturally had to wear it on their own, but there were only three of them here, all of them heavily scarred, with Mowen naturally in command.

  “Mudmouth is coming?” the Champion of the Tuskers growled out loudly, cocking his ear and listening to some of the echoes coming down from the passage behind the waterfall.

  “Ye lasses go on ahead. I’ll escort the big fellow up an’ outside so he can listen to the shouts an’ see what be happening.”

  -You just want to see his face when he sees Tim and gets lifted up to the top of the wall like a cub!- Kris /laughed at him, violet eyes dancing but face otherwise impassive. Kleoh, I noticed, wasn’t saying anything about the great monuga being out there, either.

  We started down after watching the two of them go. Briggs was still outside and in command of everyone as the teams of Knights and Royal Guards swept out there to clear more of the local spawns, particularly focusing on a path down to the beach to the west so we’d have easier access to the water for coming in and out of here in numbers, and retreating out of range of the Summons as needed.

  Neither of us was much worried about things, Kleoh walking along without much speed, but steady and implacable, utterly confident in her invulnerability to the Summons… and she was right.

  “This looks like it used to be a temple to the patron of the Shades,” Kris remarked, eyeing the iconography all around us, which the tuskers hadn’t bothered to change much, even after all these years.

  “Dat be what we t’ink, too, girlie,” the old Gharu’n woman nodded, her tone more respectful than her words after that meal. Kris had vibes like a hunting cat ready to strike, always hanging on the edge of exploding into combat… and she could cook So Damn Good.

  Hard not to be respectful of a combination like that, right?

  “Any idea what cleared them out?” I asked, eyeing one of the fiendish stone statues so reminiscent of the ones kept in unholy places by Bael’Zharon’s fellows before we headed down a side tunnel. The tuskers and Isparian minions standing around completely ignored us.

  Naturally none of the close Spawn Points by the entry were being used. They’d be the first reinforcements sent in when the defenders there fell. All of the tuskers were fully armored, far more than any we’d seen outside. Their Isparian Summoned minions weren’t wearing anything more substantial than their palm-leaf fiber shifts and skirts, although all of them had shortswords of decent style, if crude make.

  The top Dungeon level seemed to once have been some sort of Shade worship area. The area leading past it down one of the sloped ramps that seemed to be typical of these layered Dungeons led down to what was obviously a form of living quarters or barracks. There was a living nature to the smell here that indicated a lot more real tuskers were around, and indeed some came racing up to investigate Madam Kleoh curiously when she came down into there open area with guests, hooting and calling for news of what was going on up above.

  The news that the waters up above were purified and Mudmouth’s diseased tuskers had all been slain was cause for celebration, and soon smaller tuskers were racing eagerly all about in very loud and fervent jubilation. None of them were allowed upstairs as yet, as Mudmouth itself, or its fake Bobo, had not been brought down yet.

  The level down after that was appropriately the sewage level, where the detritus of the upper levels fell through and somehow accumulated into food for the very uncaring palates of the Obsidian Chitticks and Jungle Reedsharks raised there, even though the tuskers ate very little compared to what they would need outside these chambers.

  The chitticks and reedsharks were the main meat sources for the tuskers, and one reason why the new generation of tuskers was in pretty good health and size, all things told. They still had to regulate how many pups they had so as not to strain their food sources, but they weren’t in danger of going extinct or anything here, that was certain.

  We walked past open sewer grates that stank with an eye-watering miasma. Those were the places the eight-foot black chitticks were most attracted to, as if the stench alone was enough to feed them, and it very well might have been.

  Some of the creatures were Summons, and seemed essential to the fecundity of the level in some way, Kleoh informed us, tolerating the smell as we made our way through the maze of chambers and hallways where tuskers, reedsharks, and chitticks seemed to roam without a care for one another. One of the massive gray-white Devastators was ordered in front of us by Kleoh, and he quickly and roughly tossed aside any bugs or sharks who didn’t get out of our way fast enough as we headed down to the next level.

  That Dungeon level had been set up as a kind of entry hall to the Tusker King, with crude signs displaying his personal history. It had also revealed a whole new subsection of Dungeons with areas concealed from previous runners, most of which had been taken over by the free-willed Isparians who had fled here from the tuskers all over the islands hunting them mercilessly.

  It was also the area with the arena where Mowen Udaun had fought for cheering crowds of tuskers, and where a lot of very young tuskers were being raised near Isparians.

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