Running. It always came down to running. Nothing good ever prompted Talia to run. If there had ever been a chance of her drawing any enjoyment from it, then that chance had been dashed against an outcrop of sharp rocks. Brained, disembowelled, and subsequently eviscerated.
Her breath came in sharp bursts as she sprinted down dilapidated staircases. Pebbles and stray rubble skittering across empty roads. All of it muffled by the unceasing drone of the immense waterfall at the back of the cavern.
The buildings and staircases of Karzurkul blurred past her. A continuous stream of flowing metal and eroding stone that wound its way across the cavern wall the city was dug into. Her right arm flopped painfully against her chest, uncaring of her efforts to restrain it. The injury had gotten worse over the past week, contrary to what Lazarus had hoped. But that wasn’t important right now.
Talia was being hunted.
She could feel the creature’s malice in her mindsense as it flowed across the cityscape in pursuit, always two steps behind her. As if it was revelling in the hunt. Even if by rights, it shouldn’t be. Its movements were whisper quiet, and it never seemed to lose her.
When she’d first sensed it, she’d assumed it to be a chellicoi. The giant centipedes—while menacing in appearance—were, simply put, dumber than a bag of nails. Not to mention incredibly vulnerable to the whole host of deadly abilities and arcanics Talia had at her disposal. The Dead City just so happened to be infested with them, to the point that not much else lived there.
The beast that was chasing her seemed to be the exception, both in terms of vulnerability, and choice of lodging. Its sinuous form was terrifyingly agile and infuriatingly relentless.
The mage had been making her way across some switchbacks in the Karzurkul equivalent of the mid quarter, seeking a working lift shaft to the upper reaches, or even the high quarter—which, apparently was far too much to ask—when she’d felt its approach.
Believing it to be yet another centipede, Talia had stood her ground, force lance ready to crush the brainless beast to paste. Her presumption had been born from carelessness or arrogance. Or both. Either way, the result had been the same. Upon turning around, she’d been greeted by a sight straight out of the hells. Mottled, grey skin stretched thin across an emaciated frame that was a cross of feline and canine but too far removed from either to be truly categorized as such. An oversized, triangular snout the length of her leg from hip to heel, with a trio of beady black eyes sunk deep into its skull and large, bat-like ears. Quadrupedal, with a pair of vestigial arms adorned with delicate clawed fingers nestled up to its throat.
A depths stalker.
It’d looked like it had seen better days, hells, better years, likely. Half-starved, the whites of its eyes jaundiced and bulging, its rib cage poking out and rasping with strained breaths. Combined with its greasy, grey hide, it had looked just a step away from being mummified.
The bestial intent in its mind, however, had been sharp. And hungry.
Without a second thought, Talia had blasted it with a sharpened burst of telekinesis.
Her opening salvo hadn’t gone exactly to plan. Sure, the bolt had hit, but instead of breaking bones and sending it flying, the stalker had rolled with gelatinous resilience under the glancing blow. Looking back, Talia could’ve sworn that it’d tensed moments before she’d even fired the blast, preparing for an attack that it couldn’t have possibly known to expect.
The uncanny prescience had been a recurring theme in their oddly one-sided fight. It had slipped through the field of spikes conjured from her wand like they weren’t even there and skipped backwards mere instants before the follow-up bolt of electricity should’ve struck. Remaining calm, Talia had reached out with her psionics, intending to end the fight before it could go any further. When its mind had slipped from her grasp like a bar of wet soap, that calm had evaporated, replaced by fear.
The depth stalker had hissed, and Talia could’ve sworn it was mocking her.
Then it had pounced.
Jerking backward and raising her arm, Talia had flinched as razor-sharp claws skittered a trail of sparks across her adamite-scaled armour. She’d had bare moments to recognize that her dominant hand hadn’t responded before she’d been sent flying off the side of the ledge she’d been navigating across.
Panic flittered across her mind, but she was able to quell it just fast enough to build the image for the force net she’d been diligently practicing ever since the Chasm of the Lost, when she’d watched a beastkin woman throw herself off the edge in a fit of madness. The spell bent to absorb her momentum before sagging and then finally snapping.
Already, she’d been able to sense the stalker scuttling down the vertical wall in pursuit like some kind of demon spider, likely surprised at her survival, but unwilling to let her go.
With all her offensive options apparently off the table, Talia had been left with one option.
Run.
Because nothing can ever be easy, or simple.
The depths stalker had taken to the chase with something akin to glee, sliding from rooftop to rooftop in Talia’s mindsense. A shadow among shadows. Nothing she’d done had managed to shake it. Hence her current predicament, pinned down a straight avenue of staggered stairs, her only hope being that she could make it to the haven before it decided to stop toying with her.
“It’s a depths stalker,” Torval whispered from down the street, “It’s tracking you by sound. Through your footfalls. Your breath. It won’t stop either, you know that.”
Fat load of good knowing that does me, when I can’t kill it. Actually…
For all that the ghosts were aggravating at times, the apparition had brought up a good point. It tracked with sound. Maybe, if she was clever, she could deafen it. Snaking her left hand into a pouch at her waist, Talia jerked her head left and right, looking for the right place to pull off her gambit.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
There!
Skidding off into a side street, Talia watched with her mindsense, simultaneously channelling mana into the handful of spiked iron balls in her palm. A low whistle of displaced air accompanied the depths stalker’s leap across the street.
As soon as it landed, Talia clumsily tossed the fistful of caltrops behind her and burst into a sprint, pulling her scaled cloak over her head and trusting it to protect her from errant shrapnel.
Bang-pop-pop-PING
The iron balls shattered, filling the air with the deafening racket of metal rending itself asunder. Little bits of the caltrops pinged off the back of her cloak as Talia twisted into a nearby alleyway, tall three-to-four-story buildings looming around her. The sound like a ball bearing falling down a steel pipe continued for a few precious seconds, hopefully confusing the creature. Or popping whatever it had that passed for eardrums. Either way, Talia wouldn’t complain.
Unfortunately, given it was tracking her even with the omnipresent sound of rushing water that echoed off of Karzurkul’s walls, it seemed that all her gambit had done was slow it down.
Grasping at straws, she reached out with her psionics once more, hoping to re-enact what she’d done to Zaric on the much more deserving creature. Praying that her previous failure was a fluke.
No luck.
Gods damnit! What’s it gonna take to kill this thing?!
Though she could sense it, even determine its emotional state to some extent, any time she tried to infiltrate its primitive mindscape, it slipped from her grasp. Realizing it was futile, Talia switched tacks, opting to blast broad, low-powered force lances behind and above her in an effort to slow it down. It worked, to her surprise. Just like the attack with the caltrops, the stalker seemed unwilling to take her attacks head-on, dipping back and weaving around the trajectory of her shots, allowing her to widen the gap between them.
Then she tripped, sticking out her arm to catch herself—
And fell right down a flight of stairs, landing straight on her face as the traitorous limb did nothing more than twitch painfully. Immediately, she realized she wouldn’t have time to get up.
“Knife!” Torval barked in her ear, but Talia was already ahead of him, rolling onto her back, the forearm-length blade clutched awkwardly in her left hand.
Ooof—
Her breath was pummelled out of her lungs, and it was all she could to stab at the reedy form of the stalker snarling above her. It jerked backward too late, jaw snapping shut, its prescience failing it now that it had committed to the kill. The instinct to dodge was ultimately what spelled its doom, shifting it out of a position where it could do any real damage.
Vestigial claws tugged at the scaled cloak around Talia’s neck for a few moments, blood splattering across her face as the arcanically sharpened blade found frantic purchase in its flesh. The mage kept stabbing at the beast until her blade caught in its skull and it slumped over her lower half like a puppet with its strings cut.
After confirming that its mind had gone dark, Talia just lay there and heaved for a moment, feeling the blood rush in her ears.
Fucking depths stalker. Fucking arm. Fucking delvers. Fucking lifts. Fucking fuuuck.
“Just laying there seems like a good way to become some passing beast’s next meal, you know,” Zaric quipped, crouched by her head.
“I don’t know… if she’s careful and quiet like she should’ve been in the first place—” Torval said.
“Why would she do that? She’s clearly got a death wish. Just seems a shame to die to chellicoi of all things, if you ask me. Depths stalkers at least have an infamous and storied history. Going out to one has a certain panache, you know,” Zaric mused, “Overgrown bugs on the other—”
Talia groaned.
“Shut. Up.”
Fucking ghosts.
The two men peered down at her, blocking her view of the cavern ceiling, smirking.
“Why, Tals,” Torval began, “If you didn’t want us around—”
“You should’ve just said so,” Zaric finished.
The pair chuckled as they faded away, gone in the blink of an eye. Talia sighed. As the weeks had gone by, the apparitions had become less and less like the men she knew in life, twisting into some vile caricature of her own subconscious and conscience.
The fact that she found them infinitely irritating said…a lot. Luckily, an effort of will was usually all it took to banish them back to whatever dark, broken part of her mind they inhabited when they weren’t endlessly nitpicking her admittedly poor choices.
Probably something to be concerned about in all of this, but…ugh. Later.
Levering the dead sack of meat and bones from off her legs took some doing with only her offhand, but soon enough, Talia was standing above the stalker’s corpse. Battered and bruised, but whole and victorious. Her dagger made a squelching, sucking sound as she pulled it from her would-be hunter’s skull.
Now that it was dead, she had to admit that it looked pitiful. Her first guess of starvation was likely not far from the mark. While her bestiary noted that they always looked like their bones were about to pop out of their skin, this one looked particularly hungry. It had not a gram of fat on its whole body and was mostly composed of thin, sinuous muscle.
Wonder why it wasn’t hunting chellicoi. Aversion to bug meat maybe?
It was possible that in its weakened state, it was no match for the dumb brutes. For all that the bestiary extolled its deadliness and sharp senses, there was surprisingly little on the beast’s feeding habits. Except that it was a notorious manhunter. A depths stalker pack in its prime was on the short list of creatures that justified the extreme silence imposed on delves, if Orvall’s documentation was to be believed. The ugly beasts were supposedly able to pinpoint the sound of voices in a tunnel from kilometres away.
The mage spat on the damned thing’s corpse and left it for the bugs, gingerly making her way down the staircase and into the familiar streets that surrounded Karurkul haven. Sweeps of her mindsense reassured her that she was alone. For one reason or another, the chellicoi abhorred the ground level. After the encounter she’d just had, however, it wouldn’t hurt to be careful.
From everything Talia knew, one thing was clear: she’d gotten lucky. Extremely lucky. Usually, as the name implied, stalker packs stalked their prey in groups, silently picking off stragglers with no one the wiser until they did a headcount. Usually when it was already too late.
But luck or not, Talia had survived. Her biggest concern now was for her mission. If a pack had moved into the ruined city…
There go the days of wandering around alone.
Which meant somehow convincing enough delvers to get off their cowardly arses and help her get the job done. Considering the dispirited pall that had been hanging over the camp since the battle of the bridge, she had her work cut out for her.
The other officers were little help. Darkclaw had his hands full keeping a semblance of order and Dhustrun was busy minding all the finicky details that kept the haven running. Lazarus was in the same boat, managing the trauma that inevitably came with the realization that half the expedition was dead, most of them to a tide of horrors that came straight out of their worst nightmares. Already a pair of delvers had shown signs of…cracking. And Calisto? Well… she tried. At least, Talia wanted to believe she did, but the slurring of words and the episodes drunken of moping made it seem more and more like she’d given up, just like the rest of them. Talia shook her head as she recalled the smattering of explosive fights they’d had in the past few weeks. Usually around the very topic of an exploratory team. So far, she’d had no luck convincing the new delvemaster, and was losing sympathy for the previously composed woman by the day. Osra was likely her best choice for help, but the girl was in a similar predicament to Dhustrun: running around the camp serving as a glorified mana battery.
But those were problems for tomorrow. Right now, all Talia wanted was a warm meal and her bed. Maybe some play time with Menace. Worst case scenario, she’d take the mirage lynx out with her on her next trek. He’d gotten pretty big over the past month and could now remain invisible for indefinite amounts of time if he had to. If anything, the company would be a welcome change.
Anything other than the ghosts of dead men, and the drone water rushing through the cavern.