With a clang, the elevator halted and the crew flowed out onto the moist floor. It was a peculiar place, the walls consisted of a hard mud-like substance overgrow with moss. Countless tunnels, most of them too small to walk in, coiled in all directions. A howling wind ran through all of them, carrying an endless supply of humid air and droplets of moisture.

“Where are we?” Icid yelled.

“The howling tunnels.” Bob, replied.

“A network of dustworm nests that would span for miles if Olivier had not cut it off with stone spikes. We better move, staying here is nothing but trouble.”

Pushing against the winds, they crawled from shaft to shaft. Bob lead, as he seemed to know the way, even if to Icid every tunnel looked the same. Him, Rid, Revvel and Jack had to crawl on their knees, something Rowan and Icid were spared of due to their size.

Everyone proceeded quietly and listened to the odd sounds carried by the wind. Clattering, moaning, streaming and tapping. They were occasional, but unsettling. Enough for Icid, who was back of the line along with Rowan, to let her eyes wander wide.

Was that the grunt of an ogre she heard?

She listened again.

Nothing but howling.

Revvel walked in front of them, dragging her knees through the filth with frustration. Rid and Jack were between her and Bob, but the paths were so bendy that they were out of sight most of the time. Not that it mattered, as Jack was so out of shape that his gasps for air were clearly audible.

Everyone carried their own oil lamps. Not the cheap common ones, but an expensive kind that was resistant to most kinds of abuse and that did not leak when held upside down. Unfortunately, they were not half as effective as someone out of an electrically lit world might expect.

The flame was weak and the lamp's metal construction blocked a lot of the light. In the darkness they cast long shadows everywhere, causing an ominous dance of light and dark contrast. The only thing Icid could compare it to was her experience going through a tiny crawlspace with a low-quality flashlight. You only see exactly where the lamp shines, and if you are bent over the lamp in a crawling position, that is very little.

A set of particularly ominous screams echoed through the tunnels. Icid reared around to look, but saw nothing but dark tunnels. Sounds in the dark tend to niggle at that primal part of our brain, the parts that used to keep us safe from wolfs and other dangers lurking in the night. And after another howl nervousness got the better of her and she pulled Rowan aside.

“Just how are we going to deal with that ogre later, won’t they be out for our blood?” She whispered.

Rowan pulled a pained expression.

“Not will be, they already are. Luckily the elevator was one way and takes a long time to get up and down. But we can be sure that they are chasing us as we speak. We can praise the divine that this is a maze, or else would be fighting for our lives now.”

Icid scuttled around in discomfort. Now howling winds now seemed filled with the far-off screams of angry soldiers.

“But how do we get back up? And won’t they recognise us once we return to steal their stuff?”

“Those are problems to be solved when the time comes. All we can do right now is be flexible and keep our eyes open.”

As they talked the pathway opened up and spread out to a set of open chambers. Bob stood still at the edge, his expression hidden behind his helmet.

“Egg chambers…” Rid mumbled.

“Should we have taken the second left after all, Bob?” Revvel asked.

“No, the path was correct, these chambers are new.”

“But how could that be, this place is fully cut off from the other dustworm networks. The last one should have died years ago, there are no adults left to build new nests.” Revvel replied, sounding nervous.

Bob thrust out his lamp to observe the chamber. Thousands of black, pulsing, slimy things covered the floor.

“What the-

Those ain’t dustworm eggs… By the mites, this is bad!”

Those last words reverberated through the open chamber with an unsettling loudness. Bob gasped, fearing what was about to unfold.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The wet sacks pulsed louder, fleshy membranes moving alongside each other. In the uneasy light of the lamps, they seemed to swell. Then they burst with horrible ripping sounds, releasing balls of mangled horror.

“Run!” Bob roared as he dived back into the tunnels.

At the yell hundreds, maybe thousands of other eggs burst open. The room flooded with a coundless moist clicking sounds.

Revel screamed as the floor became a flurry of legs and leapt backwards. She collided with the back wall and slid down onto the ground.

“Icid snap out of it!”

At Rowan’s command, Icid felt herself return to her senses. Jack was already moving and hoisted Revvel up. The sea of horrors flooded close, legs skittering and claws snapping.

“Wall of Flame!” Rid roared.

Blinding light flared as the ground exploded in crimson. Icid scuttled back in the nick of time, and started her run to the pathways. Some of her eyes observed Rid’s, whose expression seemed cold but calm. An odd resoluteness was within them, not unlike after he had zapped her.

This caused something to click inside Icid’s brain, something so obvious that she felt foolish she had not seen it sooner. She should have known when someone as shy and frail as Rid had an occupation as dangerous as dungeon raiding. There was a love behind it, a love for video games, a love for heroes.

Then she roared.

“Get back in formation, rabbit brain! Glass cannons go in the back!”

Rid jolted upright and sprinted into the cave, Jack and Revvel leapt in after and as the flames diminished Rowan and Icid dove in closely behind.

“All here?” Bob yelled.

Five conformations followed in rapid succession. They moved through the caves as fast as they could, which was still horrifyingly slow. Especially Bob, with his heavy armour and large build, had a hard time moving at speed.

Icid had to sit there, looking at Revvel’s behind, while seas of popping sounds came ever closer. And as they moved deeper the noises inside the tunnels changed.

First, there were only the howling winds and the clicking. Then occasional screams from other directions stated flowing in. And as they crawled further the sounds of full-fledged pandemonium echoed through the tunnels.

“What the mites is going on?” Revvel screeched.

“Someone must have infested the tunnels with adult Diggers! We need to get down. They can’t dig inside the Palace of Roots, go right.” Bob roared back.

They crawled through the narrowing tunnels as fast as they could. With every breath the screams and the clicks seemed to come closer. Then, as Icid cast another glance behind, she saw the first reflections of lamplight in countless eyes.

“They’re here!”

The rest threw a panicked glance over their shoulders and hurled themselves into a frantic forward scramble.

“How much further, Bob!” Jack yelled.

“We should hit a clearing soon!”

The clicking and popping mass moved closer and closer, bringing the horrors into clearer view. They seemed to consist of nothing but gaping maws with countless insect legs. Their teeth and mandibles were haphazardly placed around their digestive pits, as if designed by a particularly cruel god.

“Revvel, move it!” Icid yelled.

But it was pointless, the line was stuck, and she could not help that either. Rowan turned, drew her dagger and faced the horde.

“Icid, take the ceiling and give me as much web as you can. We will have to fight!”

Icid stared at the swarm. Countless horrid eyes looked back at her, accompanied by twice as much sickening mandibles and ten times as many sharp fangs. She swallowed and went deep into her mind.

To the red place, the bloody place, where the goat danced atop the pile of corpses. Then the drums set in. She made two sideways hops, putting her upside down with her back turned to the enemy. Rowan dashed underneath, blade at the ready.

Icid pulled a thread, she fanned out a tick batch of it with her hind legs. Then the diggers strated leaping, mouths open wide. Three got sliced by Rowan's blade and two others dug themselves into Icid’s outstretched legs.

With a painful jerk, she managed to get the end of the web loose and into Rowan’s hands. Then Rowan went about hurling it while attached to the fresh corpses. As soon as the blood of the dead horrors struck the horde they started tearing the corpses apart.

Icid’s thread flowed ever outward into the swarming ball of diggers. Rowan separated the stragglers of Icid’s legs using her knife and hurled their corpses atop the coiling mount. It grew and grew, diggers swarming over each other, pulling in more thread. Crushing and choking sounds started to rise from inside.

“Can you walk?” Rowan yelled.

Icid cut the line and shifted her weight onto her front three pairs of legs. Her rear pair of legs burned like there was no tomorrow and grew steadily worsened while the detached mandibles remained inside her wounds.

“No, I will need a hand.”

She detached half her legs from the ceiling and made a painful spin onto the hard floor. Rowan kicked back a new wave of assailants and pulled Icid up around her waist. Icid bit her lip and swallowed the pain. Then, as fast as they could, they rushed down the path.

While ducking and weaving they dove through hallway after hallway, but the others were nowhere to be seen. The tunnels split to countless indistinct branches, all of them filled with the echoes of screams and clicking.

Their frantic escape went on for what felt like hours, encountering nothing but moss and damp soil wherever they went. Then, at the end of a particular narrow tunnel, the floor gave way to a great opening into a large tree root lined chamber.

Icid tested her legs, Lesser Regeneration had managed to push out most of the broken digger fangs.

“Can you carry me down?” Rowan asked.

“Yea, if we go slowly.”

Rowan hopped on her back and they started their descent. As soon as they exited the tunnel the howling winds seemed to die down and with it, the echoing stopped as well. In the sudden quiet the gasping breaths of both Rowan and Icid became clearly audible. When they reached the floor, they spent a moment listening to their own breaths.

After they had calmed down and Icid had managed to get the last pieces of cartilage out of her legs, Rowan took the word.

“That was something special.”

“That is one way to describe it.” Icid replied with a painful smile and then added.

“So what now?”

“I suggest any direction that is not up, preferably something better defendable then this room.”

Icid looked around, the room consisted of naturally created voids between large webs of roots. Entrances and exits were numerous.

“Are we just going to move forward then?” She said.

“I see no other options.”

Rowan took the front, Icid followed closely behind and so they headed deep into the Palace of Roots.