I was pathetic. For two reasons. First and foremost, as a human creation I should have been able to protect my mistress.
Instead, she had to be the one repairing me, here in this miserable hole where I had ended up trapping her. I had to look at her helping mold the plates over my soft clay slowly reforming. And she was expending mana for it all.
"I'm sorry to have you do this." I complained.
"Shut up!" She shot back. "I want to fix you, I want to help you! Why do you have to keep playing servant all the time?! I don't need a butler, I need a friend!"
That was the second reason. Clay golems, like most golems really, knew how to fake a friendship. Call their masters whatever they wished, sing and dance at command. So why could I not do it? I was repaired so why could I not indulge her?
She resented everything I was with a passion.
In a better realm, she would have met a lot of wonderful people and forgot all about my existence. But that human was stuck with, well, me.
Now that I was fixed, it was my turn. She wanted to fix my "armor" too but it was just decorative, it could wait. As long as my badger mask was on all would be fine. The wound on her back had priority.
And at the same time I checked the seals on her body. The paint was holding. Keeping her mana in.
"Eh, Kaele..." She asked. "Can we remove them? Just for a bit?"
"Out of question, it would kill you."
"I feel like I'm choking." She insisted. "I think it's bad."
"It means it's working. You are being cut from the realm, of course it doesn't feel nice. Please endure it. For your own sake."
"What good will it do?" The young lady got agitated. "I am going to lose my mana anyway! Sooner or later, what does it change? Let's remove it, please."
"No!"
A clay golem never said no. It could, but not when the master's wish was so clear. I should have obeyed and dutifully exposed her to the starving realm.
"No, I'm not letting you die!" We had agreed she would be fine even without mana. "You can't ask me to do this! I will find an alternative, something but please, for now, bear with it! Just for a while..."
Her wound was closed. I got up and started digging. My duty was to get the mistress out of this hole. She tried to join my digging but as mighty as humans were, there was no beating a clay golem to it.
Also, we were in a dungeon.
That, in the times long lost when magic was plentiful, meant I would have dug for nothing. But now, in this dried out land, hard to tell if it would have been possible to just dig directly to the surface.
Instead, with what little the vibrations would let me see, I was trying to reach one of the dungeon's tunnels. Wherever a section collapsed, another opened. I just had to keep digging. Patiently.
And there it was! Finally!
Some twenty meters ahead, my picking echoed empty. We were close, gained on it, ten then five meters, then two. The new cavern appeared.
This dungeon had been engulfed by magma. When magic vanished, all the creatures relying on those flames had met their fate; the vegetation had been no exception. What massive plants had gorged themselves off of molten rocks now stood still, hollow statues carved on the cave's sides.
The streams where lava had poured, the bridges over them, all had crumbled.
My mistress was in no mood to admire those giant tombs. The rocky stems, the petrified petals. She simply followed with a somber face.
And of course, there were monsters.
Greyhounds even at this depths: the rocky reptiles and their giant maws clinged on the walls for safety. Trudgers, with their massive shells, sheltered in small colonies where they slowly ate each other. A few antlens and because the realm had humor, even a couple caparaces.
In the dark, that fauna looked miserable. Famished and weak. Those who hunted trudged around; those hunted offered little resistance. To me, this was a familiar sight.
But at a cave's entrance a bigger fight had taken place. Two orcs had somehow wandered into these parts. One of them had fallen already. The last one faced three red mantaras.
Orcs and mantaras? Humanoid boars could adapt everywhere but those eight-legged water-spiders... should not even have survived. Not enough mana for their kind, let alone in such an environment.
Still, their struggle would be quickly resolved. The orc was wounded and overwhelmed. Its grey skin cut many times.
So my mistress rushed into the melee.
"Kaele! A weapon!" She yelled at me without even looking back.
I was dismayed, but obedient, cast a morning star from the ground and threw it for her. She picked it just before striking the first mantaras that had turned to meet the human.
One hit was all it took. The mace pierced through the many wobbly eyes the beast bore, all the way to its core that burst out. The acid burst down on the ground, followed by the whole corpse.
The young lady stepped back and held the pain back. Acid up to her wrist, trying and failing to eat at her skin. Her glove had dissolved.
The second mantaras, about to attack her, fell limp, rocky spires piercing it from below.
I was not going to wait on the side!
That left only one of those spiders that tried to deploy its many eyes as a shield while falling back, only to see the human rush through, close the distance and hurl the mace on its core.
"And three!" My mistress rejoiced. "How..."
She had turned toward the orc, but that monster was gone. It had used the distraction to flee.
The young lady looked where the monster had stood, disappointed.
"Why did you try to save it?!" I had rejoined her. "What did you think would happen, you would exchange stories on a fireside?"
"Doesn't matter." She groaned. "He is saved, that's all I care about."
"I don't... It's not saved. It's a monster, it will either heal and kill or get killed somewhere else. To save it helps no one."
"Well it helps me!" She burst. "Sorry you brought a failure to save the world! Saving people is what I do and if that's the wrong then find somebody else! And don't even start with me! I am here, he needed help, that's all I need to know! As long as I am here I will help, that's all! Why does it need to be more complicated than that?!"
She could not help anyone if she was not here anymore.
"What's the point of protecting me if I'm not saving anyone?! Why did you bring me here if I do nothing!? Here I can actually do something for someone! Here I can actually... forget it!"
I was listening to her, I swear I was but there was another monster approaching. It fell from the ceiling and crashed on the ground, almost at our feet.
I had not even bothered to warn my mistress because it was a caparace. Among the weakest of the weak.
The little wretched thing, after its fall, struggled a bit then pushed up. Just a little mass of legs holding a massive chitin plate, that's all it was. Shaking itself to remove the rocks on it.
"So, I kill it or what?" My mistress grunted.
"It's not worth the effort."
Since that thing was still not attacking, my mistress gave me back the stone mace and approached. Poked it with a finger. Her angry face started to mellow and she patted the plate, rubbed it a bit.
"Hello, you." She greeted, curious. "Are you lost? You are kinda cute you know."
No, that was an unholy abomination that reminded the realm there was no justice to be found. But she caressed the triangular, shield-like plate all the same and the monster let her.
Then, it walked away, toward the entrance, stopped and turned to us.
It wanted us to follow.
Okay what?
My mistress caught on and we both silently agreed to do so. It led us through a new tunnel, up and past another cave, to a smaller one where a half-dozen caparaces had gathered. The place was dark but, at our approach, the faint glow of crysals grew.
Okay what?! The caparaces had crystals with mana around and didn't touch it? What!?!
"Kaele?" My mistress called, taken aback.
Not because of the crystals. Her eyes were fixed on the large stelae filling the cave. Most of them broken but the caparaces had gathered around the few intact ones.
We asked the dungeon: how many can you provide? The dungeon said: every moon ten carts of them.
"You didn't write those, right?" She tried to joke. "Monsters didn't write that, right?"
"No. Those are human records."
We told the dungeon: send us a beast for the circus. The dungeon said: I will offer my best.
"What kind of degenerate writes like that?" The young lady huffed. "Can't they use a log to record their conversation?"
"The dungeon didn't really talk. That's just how humans recorded it. Those are ledgers."
We asked the dungeon: how much mana do you have left? The dungeon said: ten to the power of seven. I can still give. I can still provide.
We told the dungeon: we are not coming back. The dungeon said: we will wait.
"Ten to the power of seven." She read aloud. "Is that a lot?"
"I don't know." I somehow knew. "But the dungeon was half-dead already back then. The humans probably gone. The records kept going in their absence."
So, nobody asked the dungeon anything. Human craftsmanship simply recorded the dungeon had mana left to give, to no one because there was no one left to take it. Then that craft recorded when it failed.
A natural reserve exploited to the very end, serving humans as it should.
"I hate it!" The young lady lashed out. Tears on her rugged face. "I hate it so much! How could humans just abandon everyone like that to their fate?! This is too much!"
Humans were more important. That was all there was to it.
Without humans, the realm was lost.
The caparaces had become agitated. They fretted and rubbed their legs, hovered their plate in the air a bit. Wasting energy in that strange spectacle.
One fell of its stele, recovered and ran to my mistress. It didn't attack. It rubbed her shoes, then ran again, to the entrance. It wanted us to follow again.
And as we did, as it led us toward the surface, we heard it. A hiss. That of a furious snake. It was only an echo from the depths, but it was furious and wild. I had no doubt by now that the dungeon's most powerful foe was after us.
Too late. We reached the open air.
Outside the day had been declining for hours. It struggled to move. The realm was slowing down. Soon it would be dusk again, for a very long time.
Behind us the beast's shriek reached the crevice. An almost maddening cry. It wanted us dead. It knew our location, it knew we were escaping and its rage was palpable.
"We can't stay here." I urged my mistress.
The caparace was still leading us, but it was too slow to follow. So the human picked it up, that plate more than half her size, and put it on her back. The legs clutching at her shoulders. I hated it, but it allowed for a faster escape.
The dungeon falling silent far behind us.