Selected Scenes from the Ecologies of the Labyrinth

VIII

Lunch long past, the fighting moves on. Blood stains the floors and spatters the walls, too much blood. Many ordinary people-volumes of blood. But deep-delving adventurers are far from ordinary. They have spells to sustain themselves, and restorative lineaments, and every manner of healing concoction and decoction and salve. Every time a cruel spider-fang pierces mail, they drink potions, and every time a rot-rimed skeletal hand tears flesh, they drink potions, and every time an ancient trap drives spikes or flames or scything blades into them, they drink potions, and they laugh, and their zest for danger burns as hot as ever and they smash the empty vials of their life-preserving substances on the stone floor behind them. Leaving a trail of blood and bodies and broken glass, they move the battle as drunks might move a party once a particular tavern has been drained of good kegs.

Behind them come the gleaners, of course. But before the gleaners appear, there is the softest whisper of tiny bodies sliding slickly across the stones.

Pharmagast snails are little larger than a human fingernail, shell and all, and they are not slow. In a place like this, relaxation ends family lines. Pharmagasts don’t think that abstractly, of course, nor can they reflect on what time and necessity have done to their glistening lavender forms, which is equip them to survive on the dregs of the alchemical substances that dungeon adventurers litter their surroundings with. Eyestalks nervously swiveling, mouths eagerly pulsing, the pharmagasts climb inside busted phials and suck residues from glass, just as they drain the last thin whiffs of magic from wax stoppers, corks, clay shards, and discarded leather pouches. By the time the footsteps of the approaching gleaners shake the floors, the pharmagasts have vanished back to their crevices, leaving only a faint and fading phosphorescence in their slime trails to mark their revitalization.

In addition to the short-lived visual phenomena that follow a successful feeding, the slime has one other unique property, rarely noted by larger entities. As it dries and flakes away, it becomes just one more invisible powder in a veritable library of dusts, but this powder is particularly nourishing to certain rare kinds of fungi.