Astrum Irae

Rigel awoke with a groggy feeling encompassing him. It felt much like a hangover. He looked around his surroundings with half-opened eyes but could hardly see through the fuzzy vision presented to him.

Groaning, Rigel rolled around to his stomach and got up on one knee. He clasped his eyes and rubbed them, trying to wake up, if only partially.

After repeated attempts, Rigel finally felt awake and alive enough to do anything of worth. He looked around, observing his surroundings with mild trepidation.

The first thing he noticed was a dank, musky odor pervading the area. Rigel then noticed the architecture and layout of the room he was in. It was a mostly empty room with a dimly lit rune carved onto the back wall. In the middle, there was a dusty, old table carved from what seemed like just a single piece of rock. It was surrounded by 4 chairs of similar material.

"Another rune," Rigel muttered. He walked up to the roughly carved engraving and inspected it with both his eyes and hands. Of course, Rigel only noticed the rough creation process of the rune, not what kind of rune markings or components that it consisted of.

Rigel stopped and thought about why he was in this room. He had been transported to a dimly lit room just in front of Eureka earlier, no? He was vastly unsure and couldn't trust his own memories, as they were created in a time of extensive exhaustion and desperation.

Groaning, Rigel took a look at the dusty, rock table set in from of him. He took a seat in one of the chairs and grabbed his glabella, thinking hard to rearrange and organize his somewhat hazy memories.

First, he entered the initial room with Eureka. Secondly, they were let through to the second room. Then, the floor opened up and they fell into the water. Finally, Rigel lost sight of Eureka after emptying her head of that black pus and got sucked into the rune, waking up and supposedly seeing Eureka.

Despite the capricious nature of his memories, Rigel believed that he should go look for Eureka. He got up out of the chair and looked at the 2 doorways presented to him. One was in the corner, the other in the middle of the wall.

Rigel furrowed his brows and sighed from exhaustion.

"This stupid dungeon doesn't make any sense," he whined. "It's like it's designed solely to screw with people."

He groaned and hastily jogged down the doorway off to the side. He entered a narrow tunnel, but kept jogging through it.

Rigel soon felt a dense humidity come over him. He wiped the sweat and moisture from his face and felt the bogginess drive him down. Heat, as well, soon converged around Rigel.

The moist air made it troubling to breathe. Rigel frowned and slowed down a bit before suddenly slipping on something slick. He tumbled down into a pit with a radius of about 2 feet that appeared out of nowhere and quickly landed in a dense and warm liquid.

Rigel immediately jumped out of the water and wiped his face clean of the muck that had latched onto it. He also spit out some gunk that he had inhaled.

Rigel took a look around himself and saw nothing but muddy water and trees. The trees' roots grew out of the water like vines and entangled other trees, much like they were eating each other with their roots.

Rigel was unsure if that was the case or not, but regardless stayed on guard against any sudden ambushes from perhaps sentient trees or disrespected beasts.

Climbing out of the swamp water, Rigel gripped onto a vine and swung around the small glade that he had landed in. He looked upwards and only saw more bark and wood. He frowned and tried to climb upwards to get above the canopy. To his surprise, however, he never seemed to get higher than a few tens of feet above the water level.

Rigel begrudgingly dropped down into the water and started wading through the muck. He soon thought the better of this, though, and climbed up onto the trees. He cautiously climbed at a reasonable pace above the water and looked for anything other than wood and water.

The muddy, soaked man stripped off his shoes and clothes except for his underwear, fearing any sort of uncanny fungal rot taking ahold of him.

Rigel did want to take off his underwear as well, but restrained himself for the off chance that he ran into Eureka. It would be disrespectful of him to not take account of her feelings.

Rigel tied his shoes and shirt up in his pants and tied them to his neck, dangling the clothing behind him. He kept climbing through the tropical swamp until his physical exhaustion took over. He quietly rested in some vines shaped like a hammock for a few minutes while he caught his breath.

The miserable swamp made Rigel feel quite aggrieved. He really didn't want to continue traversing through it. Wouldn't it be easier to just give up? There was no way that this was another dream, of that he was sure. It could, however, be an illusion for all he knew.

"Fuck!" Rigel yelled and threw one of his shoes as far as he could. It went a pitiful couple of meters before crashing into a branch and flopping into the water below.

Rigel was fuming. He threw a fireball at the offender and incinerated it. The fireball continued through the branch and crashed into a large tree behind it. The tree was still standing after the powerful blast, but was caught aflame in the process.

Rigel knew this was bad news and jumped down from his perch. He landed on a horizontally laying log and started maneuvering his way away from the fire that was currently spreading, notwithstanding the fact that the dense humidity should have snuffed out a fire in a second.

The density of the wooden limbs was incredibly frustrating for Rigel as he desperately tried to escape. They were either too dense to cross through or not dense enough to traverse over, lest he fall into the water below, where moving would be all the slower.

Unfortunately for him, Rigel soon found himself at a dead end. Just as he was crossing from one tree to another by walking across a single vine that tied them together, the vine snapped and Rigel plummeted into the glade beneath.

He slammed into the ground awkwardly on his shoulders and slightly hurt one of them, but Rigel quickly hopped up onto his feet. As he figured, the water around him was only knee-deep at best.

Rigel turned to slip out of the clearing but noticed that the woodwork around him was extremely dense- completely inhospitable to any traversal. He turned towards where he came from discovered to his dismay that the fire had actually almost caught up to him. It was almost like it was making a beeline for him.

Rigel scampered over to the wall of vines opposing the fire and tried to claw his way up, but the vines were so dense that he could barely get a place to put his fingers. It was comparable to trying to climb a cliff-face: even if, from a distance, it looks like it's possible, reality soon bites that hope in the jugular.

Rigel though that he saw a place that it was maybe possible to climb, but after getting both of his feet out of the water, the muck clinging to them caused him to slip and fall back in.

"Fuck!" he yelled as he fell.

He sloshed around in the water and slowly regained his footing. Rigel was starting to get tired; he could no longer just get right back onto his feet.

Rigel looked back at the fire and saw that it had started to burn down the entrance to this wooden grotto. The miserable-looking man sighed and waded over to the center of the glade, accepting his fate to face this tribulation head-on.

The fire swiftly wrapped around the grotto and spread above it, as well. Rigel braved the heat of the inferno well after overcoming the harsh temperatures of the swamp for a few hours and adjusting to that standard, but the smoke caused him to keel over in a hacking fit.

He remembered that smoke rises due to heat and tried to keep his face just above the water's surface, but the volume of the smoke was so great that even somewhere with such a low magnitude of altitude was affected.

Coughing and wheezing, Rigel eventually decided to not dive under the water in order to be able to see so he could attempt to dodge any falling branches or logs. His decision soon left him teary-eyed and beaten up.

The smoke gnawed at his eyes and irritated them. It affected his lungs in a similar manner, causing him to uncontrollably cough until he could hardly stand. The burning branches and vines dropping around him thus hit the distracted Rigel, causing minor burns and bruising.

Rigel gave up on attempting to dodge the debris and dove under the surface. The shallow water, however, caused him to still be struck by the burning wreckage sporadically.

His poor lungs running out of oxygen quickly due to their previous abuse, Rigel periodically had to come up for air in decreasing increments of time.

Rigel bobbed up and down, desperately trying to survive the onslaught. The fire itself was dying out, but in its stead came a hellstorm of burnt wood, just now crumbling apart. Alongside it, smoke and ash whipped about in a flurry, aggravated by the winds resulting from the inferno.

Being beaten up by a fire of his own creation infuriated Rigel. Hence, he eventually was pushed past his limit and tried to stand up. The beating had taken its toll on him, however, and he fell back down to his knees.

Suddenly, a large log struck him across his neck and knocked him into the water, unconscious.