The room was black. The walls draped in sticky gray webs. It crawled with eight legs and a million eyes.
A dirty metal ball rolled across the floor. More eyes dropped down from the ceiling, swarming over the little blue dot that blinked on its side.
BADA-BOOM!
Four soldiers stormed the room, decked out in silver dwarven armor and guns blazing. Spider guts painted the walls green.
“Ten o’clock!” Colonel Phrónēsis barked. “Reload, lads, an’ I’ll cover yeh!”
Rifles roared, lighting up the room with every fatal shot. Spiders screamed and crumpled onto their backs. Their million eyes were replaced by a million holes, oozing green liquid that stuck to the bottom of heavy moonsteel boots.
“Clear,” Captain Dikaiosýnē shouted, her light sweeping away the shadows.
Phrónēsis grinned with delight. His plan had worked like a charm. Of course it did. He didn’t become colonel by losing soldiers and wasting ammo. He was prudent in everything, but especially in combat. And the smoldering spider remains showed it.
Dikaiosýnē kept a stern face. Life had been taken this day. But it was violent, corrupted life. The kind of life that only knew how to take others. She wasn’t one to follow orders blindly. But putting these spiders down was in accordance with both her morals and intergalactic space law. In her mind, justice had stormed the room and put the eight-legged beasts out of their misery.
Lieutenant Andreía was the only one to take off his helmet. He watched as the arachnoid legs bent inward like a closing hand. Nothing scared him. And certainly not spiders. He’d played with the smaller multi-legged pests as a wee lad. Even ate them. Raw and tickling the back of his throat as he swallowed. He was the very definition of fortitude.
“’Neone be needin’ a potion?” Lieutenant Sōphrosýnē asked. He was in charge of the stash. Potions were helpful—could bring a dwarf at death’s door back on his feet in no time—but they were also highly addicting. Sōphrosýnē could always be counted on having a clinking collection of blue, green, and red bottles in his pack. He had never cared much for the taste of the potions himself, or anything else for that matter. Be it sprite sugar or orcish brandy, for him, temperance came easy.
Colonel Phrónēsis approached the metal chest in the middle of the room. It was bulletproof and apparently couldn’t be damaged by grenades either. Therefore, blowing it open with explosives was out of the question. Just wasting a sticky bomb alone would be a squander of resources.
Instead, the colonel looked at Lieutenant Andreía.
“On it!” the lieutenant said, squatting in front of the chest with his splicer. It was open in seconds.
Captain Dikaiosýnē stood back, knowing the contents of the chest didn’t concern her. Lieutenant Sōphrosýnē also stood away, softly quelling the urge to know what was within.
Colonel Phrónēsis squinted. Was this it? The light on his gun illuminated the inside of the chest. The others could see the gold letters reflecting off his helmet. What did they say?
“Cure mortality,” Captain Dikaiosýnē read out loud. Even though the hieroglyphics appeared backward on her superior’s face, she had studied the elvish tongue in space academy. The image was carved into what looked like a broken shard of pottery.
Phrónēsis looked up. “Then we’ve a’ last found what the king has sent us fer.”
Lieutenant Sōphrosýnē stepped up to the chest at once, opening his pack. He was also the keeper of any and all artifacts they ran across on their mission.
But Phrónēsis raised his hand. “We all know what the king’ll do with this, arigh’. But should he?” he said, his eyes hard and still. “We ventured deep into the fairyverse ter find this, we did. But I didn’ come all this way ter give His Majesty more power than he can handle. It’ll drive him ter madness, it will, as it has ter its elvish masters.”
Captain Dikaiosýnē nodded enthusiastically. Immortality would corrupt their king. It was the most common curse in history. She had studied that in space academy too. It was too dangerous for the king as well. The funny thing about those elves is that the relics they left behind were often boobytrapped in a very magical sense. A phrase that came close enough to the right one would still work—but with unintended effects. It was like those two-for-one targets you could get at Wally’s Wizard World. If you hit the bullseye, you win. If you hit anything else, you get turned to stone.
Lieutenants Andreía and Sōphrosýnē had no say in the matter. But they knew in their hearts that this was the right decision.
Phrónēsis clutched the relic in his glove. With a mental wink to the neuron sensor, he activated the cups on his fingers, building one hundred times the pressure of the gravity back on their dwarf planet. But before crumbling the forbidden text into a billion microscopic pieces, he whispered the magic words to himself . . . unaware that his mic picked it up.
It should now be disclosed that Phrónēsis didn’t study elvish in space academy. Instead of uttering “cure mortality,” he instead spoke the words: “cure morality.”
Colonel Phrónēsis looked up. The particles of the relic mixed with spider blood into a green paste. “We shall r’turn ter the kingdom—an’ take the throne fer ourselves!”
Captain Dikaiosýnē nodded again. “Laws don’ apply ter those who make ’em!”
Again, Lieutenants Andreía and Sōphrosýnē had no say in the matter. But Andreía trembled at the sight of the spiders. He quickly put his helmet on, hiding his pale face from the others. Sōphrosýnē, on the other hand, decided he could use a pick-me-up and downed one, two, or three of those red cherry-tasting potions. Mmm. Delicious!
Phrónēsis wiped the slime off his gauntlet and led the way, marching with the power of the seven gods in his every stride. He had no need to check for spiders. He was immortal! And this false pretense blinded him from the cage-like shadow that sank down from the ceiling.
“Git it off! Git it off!” he screamed. “Obey meh! I be a god!”
“Serves ’m right!” Dikaiosýnē laughed.
“Ahh! Spider!” Andreía cried.
Sōphrosýnē hiccupped. “Cheers, mates!”
This story was a writing exercise based on the following prompt: An ancient alien artifact with hieroglyphics on it was mistranslated to read, “Cures Mortality.” However, the actual translation is, “Cures Morality.”
