After all this time, Apexus didn’t imagine he would one day search for a crack INTO the mountain. The caverns below, heated by the magma chamber of a volcano that would likely never erupt, were the birthplace of the slime. Where he had just started existing one day and had gone from there. It had been over two years since. A year down there, slowly eating its way up, through insects, clams and tiny dragons, facing ants by the end. How insignificant that now all looked. Ants weren’t even the size of a finger segment anymore.

Then the time out on the mountainside. Finding Aclysia. Whatever had she said back when he awakened her by sheer curiosity of what this mana draining was? He could remember that she had made sounds that, in retrospect, had to be speech. For the slime of him, he couldn’t put those sounds back together, however.

She had broken to save him. He had found Gizmo to fix her. The months with Gizmo. Every day something to learn, however boring it was. Slowly caring more and more about the metal fairy until everything about her seemed just too adorable to ignore. Two years, the slime could only estimate his life to have been so long, since he hadn’t even known what time was for so long of it. A sleepless existence without days made that concept hard to grasp at the start.

Regardless, here he was now, two days after his reuniting with his old mentor, searching for some kind of crack or cave big enough for him. Quadrupedal, Apexus stalked around the mighty tower of grey rock in search of something. Thanks to the thicker membrane around his limbs, the sharp corners of stones only cut into quickly regenerating tissue, if they penetrated at all.

‘Last time I was here, I wasn’t even heavy enough for this to be an issue,’ Apexus thought, bending knees and elbows before jumping down a small cliff. Spread wings beat and before he could crash into the ground, he was up in the air. That area was also without yield.

Apexus didn’t dare to stay in the air for too long, soon landing again close to the base of the mountain, where grey shifted into the emerald of the ever-stretching forest of Ctania. On the mountain and in the air, he was too easily visible. If he flew high enough, people might mistake him for a bird or something, but he wouldn’t be able to see what he was looking there from that height either.

It was best to keep circling the base of the mountain, stay close to the trees and only occasionally venture further up. He would inspect the higher areas and tip of the mountain once he had made the full way around. Although he had to hurry about these things, only five more days until the Day of the First Ascension came, he had to be done before then. It would be best if he could have a day to recover from whatever injuries he might get before then. To batch the thoughts up, he had four more days.

He needed another two.

Many potential caves were found, but all of them were too shallow to be what Gizmo meant. On top of that, they were empty, so that was the dead giveaway. Apexus had grown the nose of a cat in addition to his other, permanent, Growths. A sense of smell wasn’t helpful in this endeavour, but it was good to have the last ‘usual’ sense he was missing at hand.

Rather, a sense of smell shouldn’t have been helpful in the endeavour.

That is, right up until Apexus caught a whiff of carrion. The foul smell was unmistakable, wafted from nearby. Apexus hadn’t guessed to find a cave following that scent, but right there it was, half-hidden under a tree that stretched its roots over the shallow entrance. The second Apexus put his head into the gap, the smell intensified a thousand fold, hot air mixed with sulphur and the stench of dead bodies.

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A human would have been repulsed, might have even emptied their stomachs onto the stone, at the intense smell, but Apexus had not just smelled worse things in his life, he had also eaten much worse. The only reason that odour was irritating to him was that he wasn’t used to strong smells due to seldomly having a nose recently. Thankfully, he was built for quick adaptation to new things.

He needed to crawl in order to move into the cave. Only after a few metres did the ceiling start to rise and give way to dark tunnels. Apexus’ cat-like eyes were good for this environment, however, and the tremor sense allowed him to gauge his rough surrounding just by the reverberations of his steps in the stone. It wasn’t detailed enough to make out were the next corner would exactly be, but he could at least keep detailed track of the wall next to him without having to touch it at all times.

The air got hotter, more humid. Even with the stench, Apexus felt deeply nostalgic the deeper he got. Especially once his eyes picked up the soft glow of a pale, greyish green moss. The light source of his early life lived wherever it was humid or hot enough, it seemed. What started with one patch soon became two, then three, and ever more moss glowed away the darkness of the depths.

Apexus kept looking around as his steps carried him down a slope. Marvelling at the carpet that stretched along the walls. Like he remembered, the moss failed to grow up places that were too slated upside down. The ground was no problem, though, the moss happily covered all of the ground.

SNAP!

There was a loud sound under Apexus’ right hand, something that had been hidden between the moss. His fingers stretched out. At first he tried to just grab whatever that had been with his entire hand, but that just succeeded in slowly ripping out the entire piece of moss. ‘Sorry, little plant,’ Apexus thought, not one to end life until he wanted to eat. To at least halfway fulfil that promise, he lowered the ripped out moss to his stomach. The thin membrane there parted and he spilled around the plant before pulling it inside to digest. It was often easier to eat like that, rather than do it like humans and try to chew things and swallow them afterwards.

He could have just looked down, but at that point this was a learning exercise, Apexus tried to pick up that snapping thing again, this time only using thumb and index finger. It worked and he raised that thing to his face. A fragment of bone, belonging to a creature that Apexus knew only too well, since that was the same kind of bone his skeleton currently was made from. Human bone, he dropped it with a level of disgust.

People had been killed here, he knew that already, but seeing it was another thing. The end of thinking life was bad, worse was that there were other people who would never see who they care about again. That was the aspect of killing that Apexus despised, those left behind. The shocked face of the guard flared in his memories again.

Then he heard something.

It was quiet, a sound that had just started. Apexus’ blue fox ears turned to locate the source of the sound. It was loudest to his right. Like stomping into mud or swirling fluids around, the squelching echoes grew to a certain quiet and stayed there, only noticeable thanks to being the only thing down here to be heard.

Apexus turned his view, walked, the amount of bones grew. The further he went in, the more of them mounted, the closer he got to that sound. Soon the moss covered bones made way for semi-complete skeletons. Jaws parted in death into an endless death scream, cowered into tiny balls or stretched out. They hadn’t died a sudden death, that much was certain. The squelching sound was so close now, Apexus tried to sneak as best he could, but bones snapped under his weight again and again, like a pathway laid with dire twigs.

And at the end of that path sat the Skinwalker.