Backstory · Mordecai
Mordecai, Part 3: Until You're Not Useful
ARCHIVE RESUMING. File 001, final segment.
I’ve been asked by Legal to remind you that the following contains a contract. Contracts are legally binding. Legal is very insistent on this. Legal is always insistent. Legal is three beetles in a robe and nobody is allowed to say so. Oops.
Legal would also like it noted that the beetles are “a coalition.” Noted.
An hour before she died, Wim told me the truth about the bread.
We lost the sisters on the sixth floor, on the same day, about an hour apart. I’m not going to tell you how. The Archive has the footage, and I’m sure it’ll show you if you ask nicely. It shows everybody everything if they ask nicely. That’s the whole business.
I’ll tell you this much.
Pell went first, and she went angry, which was the only way she ever did anything. She took two of them with her. She called the third one something so filthy that it actually hesitated, and that hesitation is the reason Wim and I got out of the room at all.
Wim went second. And in between, for that hour, she was laughing again.
Not because anything was funny. Because she’d decided she wasn’t going to spend her last hour any other way. She laughed, and she apologised for laughing, and she held my hand. She told me the bread I’d bought every morning for seven years had always been the burnt loaves. Pell sold me the burnt ones on purpose.
“Why?”
“She said you were too skinny to notice the difference.” Wim coughed. It was the cough she’d been pretending wasn’t there, and she’d stopped pretending. “She liked you. She just didn’t know how to say it without being horrible.”
“I know,” I said.
“You don’t. You never know anything about yourself. Only everybody else.” She squeezed my hand. “Put yourself on the shelf. Just once. Promise.”
I promised.
I’m a liar. I told you there were about four things I regret.
Achievement Unlocked: Budget Cuts!
Your party has been reduced to two members! Viewers find this format extremely compelling. Smaller casts mean more screen time! You’re practically stars now!
Reward: Your sponsorship offers have doubled. You had zero sponsorship offers. Math is fun!
So it was me and Hollan.
We went down three more floors like that, the two of us. The dungeon had noticed us by then. The dungeon notices everything, but at some point it starts paying attention, and you feel it on the back of your neck, like a hand. The floors got stranger and crueller. The monsters had more personality and less mercy. There were bosses with entrance music. There were rooms full of furniture that wanted to be sat on, and one armchair that followed us for half a mile, wheedling.
Hollan was good at it. He’d always been good at it. He was a soldier, and the dungeon is just a war with better lighting and worse catering.
But he’d stopped laughing again after the sisters, and this time nothing I made could fix it. I tried. I made him a cave pig tonic just to see if he’d turn blue and laugh.
He turned blue.
He said “thanks” in a flat voice and went to sleep.
Status Effect Applied: Extremely Blue (Again).
The sequel is never as good as the original. Viewer engagement: down 60%. A paint company has asked us to stop.
I took stock every morning. Hollan: knee holding. Hands shaking all the time now, not just in corridors. Sleeping badly. Eating fine. Talking less. Still holding the cup.
Me: I didn’t check.
In the bottom of the satchel, wrapped in a rag so I wouldn’t have to look at it, was a vial of gold. I didn’t check that either. I knew exactly where it was. I always knew where it was.
I finally asked him about the cup on the ninth floor. We were in a safe room that smelled of nothing, which by then I understood was the dungeon’s way of reminding you that it owned the air.
“What was in it?” I said. “That first day.”
Hollan looked down at the tin cup like he’d only just noticed it.
“Tea,” he said. “Weak. My wife made it. She always made it too weak. I used to complain.”
That was the first time either of us had mentioned anyone we’d left behind.
Nobody in the dungeon talks about the people who weren’t taken. They don’t count as dead, because nobody saw them die. They just stop. You get to keep them however you want, and there’s no footage to argue with you.
“It’s the colour,” I said.
“What is?”
“When a potion’s right. When it’s actually going to help you. It’s the colour of weak tea. Every time.”
Hollan looked at me for a long time.
“Huh,” he said. Then, after a while: “Yeah. That tracks.”
He put the cup down on the floor of the safe room. It was the first time in nine floors he’d let go of it.
He didn’t pick it up again.
Achievement Unlocked: Hands Free!
A crawler has voluntarily released a sentimental object! This is either growth or a symptom. We’ll find out on the next floor!
Reward: None. Growth is its own reward. That’s what we tell the staff, anyway.
We made a mistake on the tenth floor. I’m not going to tell you whose. It doesn’t matter, and the person whose mistake it was has had a very long time to think about it.
It was a boss. It had a name, a health bar and three phases.
THE SOVEREIGN OF ASH, said the letters in the air. Then they caught fire, because of course they did.
Its entrance music was a song from a world neither of us had heard of, and in any other circumstances it would have been catchy. Hollan said afterwards that he’d hum it for the rest of his life. That turned out to be a very short commitment.
The Sovereign was nine feet of cinder in the rough shape of a king. Every time it moved, it shed. Every flake that hit the floor became a little burning thing that came for your ankles.
Phase one, Hollan held the line. He was magnificent. I’d never told him so. I’m telling you now.
Phase two, the Sovereign learned his name. It started calling him dear boy in a voice like a bonfire settling, and it opened up the floor beneath him in a ring of fire, and I kept him alive through it with everything in the satchel. Every vial. All weak-tea brown, all working, one after another. I was pouring them into him faster than I could uncork them. I uncorked one with my teeth. I still have the chip.
Phase three, I reached into the satchel and my fingers found the rag.
That was all that was left.
There wasn’t anything else on the shelf.
The Sovereign put one burning hand on the top of Hollan’s helmet, almost tenderly, the way Dask once patted my head. Hollan drove his sword up through its chin and twisted, and something inside the Sovereign went out like a lamp.
It took him with it. Not all at once. These things never do.
He was sitting against a pillar when I got to him. His breathing was wrong in a way I knew the name of.
“You know the way down,” Hollan said. “Better than me. Better than any of us did.”
“Nobody knows the way down.”
“Not down.” He coughed. “Through. You know the way through. That’s different.”
I started to tell him he was wrong. I opened my mouth, and then I shut it. I’ve always done that. I think about it for a long time, and then I’m right, and it’s infuriating for everyone, especially me.
He was right. I knew the way through. I knew what every sting looked like, and which wall-weeds stopped the bleeding, and how fast every door closed. I knew who needed to be told to wait, and who needed to be shoved. I’d never been the one who killed anything. I’d been the one who kept the people killing things alive long enough to do it.
“Go,” Hollan said. “Stairwell’s that way. Go.”
“I’m not—”
“You’re useful,” he said. “So go be useful.”
Crawler Hollan [REDACTED] has died.
Cause of death: The Sovereign of Ash, Phase Three. The Sovereign is also dead, which is a shame, because it was a big fan of your work and had hoped to get a selfie.
Achievement Unlocked: Party of One!
You are the last surviving member of your original party! Table for one! Would you like to see the dessert menu? There is no dessert menu.
I stood at the top of the tenth-floor stairwell alone.
I had a satchel with one thing in it, a little brass burner, and a mortar and pestle worn smooth in the middle. I had a list in my head of everybody I’d ever kept alive, and every name on it had a line through it now.
I unwrapped the rag.
The Draught of the Clean Slate glowed in my hand. One person. Their face, their voice, that stupid thing they used to say.
I could pick any of them. Dask, and I’d never hear useful again. Pell and her names. Wim and her apologies. Hollan and his cup.
It was so beautiful, Archivist.
I uncorked it.
I poured it down the stairwell, every drop, a long gold thread falling into the dark. Somewhere at the bottom, something went ooh.
Note from me: Do you know how much that item was worth? Do you know what he could’ve traded it for? Do you know how many viewers had a bet on which name he’d pick? I had a bet. I had Pell.
That was when the offer came.
Congratulations, Crawler!
Your performance has been flagged by Production as “unusually instructive”! The Syndicate is always looking for experienced personnel to support future seasons. Please review the following opportunity at your leisure. Your leisure is ninety seconds.
The offer was simple. The worst ones always are.
The dungeon needed guides. Not heroes, not bosses. Guides. People who’d been down the floors and come out the other side with the knowledge still in their heads. Somebody to sit in a room on the early floors and teach the next lot of crawlers which plants wouldn’t kill them. Somebody to keep them alive long enough to be interesting.
A guide doesn’t descend. A guide doesn’t die on the stairs.
A guide stays.
The contract appeared in the air in glowing letters, page after page of them, with a little flashing box at the bottom. ACCEPT in green. DECLINE in a red so bright it looked personally offended.
I read the whole thing.
Note from me, the System: He read the whole thing. Nobody reads the whole thing. Do you know how long that contract is? I wrote it to be skimmed. Legal wrote parts of it to be unreadable. One clause is just the word “forfeit” in eleven fonts. He read it at a steady pace, moving his lips slightly, while his ninety seconds ran down to nothing. When they ran out, he simply kept reading, and I discovered that a crawler who is in the middle of reading a contract cannot be timed out of it. That’s a loophole. I closed that loophole the next day. I’ve never told anyone it existed until now. Hello, Archivist. You’re welcome.
I found the clause I wanted on page forty-one. It was the only question I had.
“How long?” I said aloud. “How long does a guide stay?”
The voice that answered was the same cheerful voice from the stone room on the first day. It sounded almost pleased that I’d asked.
Until you’re not useful.
I looked down the stairwell at all the floors I’d never see.
Then I looked back the way I’d come. A tin cup on the floor of a safe room, one floor up. A pile of blackened deadwife leaves on floor one. And somewhere in a fog-town that didn’t exist any more, a brass still that an old woman had once tapped with a yellow fingernail, while she told a boy who swept her floors that heat was a promise.
You make it slowly, and you keep it.
“Then I’ll be useful,” I said.
And I signed.
I’ve been a guide for a very long time.
I’ve had a number of different faces since. The dungeon likes to keep its staff interesting. I’ve had a number of different rooms, some of them quite nice. I’ve guided more crawlers than I can count, and I have counted. Most of them died. Some of them didn’t. A handful went further than anyone thought they would, and those are the ones I think about at night.
Every morning, I still take stock. I check the names against the faces. I know who’s hurt before they do. I tell people to wait when they want to drink something beautiful. I warn them about the blue. They never listen, and they always turn blue.
When they ask me why I don’t just leave, I tell them a guide can’t leave. That’s true.
It’s also not the reason.
The reason is a stone room that smelled of nothing, with nine people in it, and four whose names I learned on purpose. It’s a fisherman’s hand on my back, and a burnt loaf every morning for seven years, and a soldier’s tin cup full of weak tea.
The reason is that someone has to know the way through.
END OF FILE 001.
Archivist, a note. I’ve flagged this file as “sentimental” for internal review. That was a joke. I don’t have an internal review. I am the internal review.
Next file loading. Try to keep up.
Oh. Hang on. Production’s on the line. They’ve seen the completion numbers on this one.
They want to know if there’s any more.
Archivist, there’s always more.
Author’s note: This is a fan backstory. Mordecai’s home world, his teacher Orrel, his first party (Dask, Pell, Wim and Hollan), the Sovereign of Ash and the Draught of the Clean Slate are all invented for this story, so treat it as speculation, not canon. All characters and the world of Dungeon Crawler Carl belong to Matt Dinniman.