Alvor woke up to the worst nightmare of any of the wards. He lay tied to a stretcher of sorts, his wrists and ankles bound. Long-buried fear built up in his chest and he panicked. His fit rolled him off the moving structure. He fell onto a hard stone, his captors easily taking notice of him as he cried out, his body erupting in pain. The world around him was dark, slowly getting brighter as his eyes adjusted to the dim light surrounding him. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from but it was just bright enough for him to make out details.
The first thing he took notice of was the strange, deer-like beast he was being dragged by. It was familiar, and yet alien, with four, pronged horns instead of antlers and hooves that weren’t quite hooves.
Then his captors began to move towards him, demanding his attention. Their eyes seemed to almost glow in the dim light, greens and yellows. He saw long, triangular ears twist and twitch at every sound he made. In the dim light, their skin looked ghostly and they wore strange clothing that seemed to wrap around their bodies. They each carried a wicked-looking curved sword and a bow sheathed in a quiver strapped to their belts.
Two shot each other several series of hand signs, each complex and completely nonsensical. Another, a woman, moved towards Alvor, slowly. She had one hand out, the palm open to him, and a finger to her lips softly shushing him like a babe.
Her approach calmed Alvor a bit. As she drew closer, she pulled a knife from her belt. Alvor’s eyes widened, but she gestured to his hands, saying something in a strange language.
She cut the bindings on his wrists and ankles and offered him water. Alvor suddenly realized he was parched and nodded his head to the strange-looking woman as he took the water skin. After downing a mouthful of water, he began to notice just how much pain he was in. The pain sparked his memory of what Jakov had done.
His face grew red with anger, but Alvor decided it best to leave for later.
He struggled to stand, only to find his right leg had been bound and splinted. The woman offered her hand and he took it. The Asqarii winced as he was pulled up and felt the bindings around his ribs.
It would seem more than my leg was broken.
After quickly checking over his own injuries, Alvor looked around for the rest of his team. He saw two more stretchers, one bearing Jori with a bandage covering half his face, and another with Makael who seemed to have gotten the worst beating of his life. He looked around for a fourth, but his eyes landed on the tarp-bound form of a body draped across the back of one of the strange beasts.
A hand landed on his shoulder, the woman saying something, the sing-song language rolling off her tongue.
Alvor looked at her in confusion.
She made a gesture to their party, which couldn’t have been made up of more than ten people. Then walked her fingers across her palm. They had to move.
Alvor nodded but looked at his splinted leg. The woman pointed at the stretcher, which he now realized looked more like a sled. He tenderly lowered himself onto the craft and watched the other alien men smirk at him as they continued their journey.
Apparently, Jori had been right. It was a road they’d found.
<<>>
Graiscon had definitely been walking for weeks. He didn’t know how many, but that much he was certain. The fuzz on his jaw had thickened to an irritating level, and his hair had definitely grown a bit. He was exhausted, hungry, and worst of all, thirsty.
After he had gotten the hang of recalling his knife, he entertained himself by throwing it like a ball. Though each time left him with a searing pain down his arm, he pushed through it. He had also tried imbuing his “breath”, as he had come to call it, into some of the runes on the tablets. He found some took more out of him than others, the more complex the spell, the more breath he needed to put into it. Each attempt left him doubled over with pain, but he found two spells he’d particularly liked, and one he would definitely never use again.
The boy skipped along the stone cavern and imbued the rune he’d come to associate with making his body more light. At first, he thought the pain wasn’t worth it, but he eventually changed his mind as he found the cavern to be never-ending.
The second runic spell he’d come to rely on was some kind of push of force. He’d encountered a bug of some kind of shelled bug that was half as big as him, he’d missed his dagger throw and pulled the rune out of his pocket by chance. The spell punched into the bug with so much force it cooked it. He’d been starving at the time and, after reluctantly trying it, found the meat inside its shell was sweet and fairly delicious. His biggest regret was not rationing the meat better.
His second encounter with not-so-friendly life had ended in him pulling a spell he hadn’t tried before. A great blast of lightning left him rolling on the ground and his intended dinner, a charred husk on the cavern floor.
As he breezed along the cavern, following the flow of the ethereal mottes, he began to his environment. Instead of the inky blackness he expected, he was met with an ever more apparent gray. Curious, Graiscon quickened his pace, though he’d cut off his spell since he could feel it draining him, and the pain was becoming less than bearable.
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As he drew closer, the gray became a wall. Graiscon’s eyes lit up and he bounded on whatever little energy he had left. To his complete joy, not only did the wall of the cavern loom over his head, but a crack in it suggested that there might be a way out. His suspicions only gained merit as the rivers of light drifted towards the crack in the wall.
Graiscon found himself happily dunking in a freezing cold stream he’d happened upon. He’d left the massive cavern a while ago and was exploring more moderate, four-man high caverns that seemed more like massive tunnels. To his luck, he’d not only found more of the strange bugs, but also a stream in which he promptly dunked his head.
The cavern was covered in lichen and mushrooms that emitted a bright glow that lit up the beautiful cave. Though, Graiscon supposed the glow could be as dim as an ember and he’d just grown so used to the pitch blackness that was the massive cavern from before.
Thankful for the light, Graiscon looked at his bedraggled appearance in the water’s reflection. He had a scraggly, rather patchy beard, and his hair had grown out of control. If he had to guess on his appearance alone, he’d been in the depths of the mountain for at least a couple of months.
He sighed. Breathing in the damp, musky air. A large improvement from the lack of smell in the titanic cavern before.
“Time to get to work, I guess.” He said to no one and began to haphazardly shave off the uncomfortable facial hair.
He’d ended up nicking himself quite a few times, the blade was impossibly sharp and he wasn’t exactly a steady hand.
After cleaning himself up, he dined on an unconventionally cooked cave-bug and began to peel off mats of lichen and arrange them on the floor, where he had the best sleep he’d had in weeks.
Graiscon woke to the sound of an animal sniffing his ear. The breath sounded like a roaring waterfall. His eyes shot open and his head shot around in alarm, only to find nothing around him except the glow of the mushrooms and his coat hanging in the air before him.
Wait, his coat was hanging in the air?
The boy jumped to his feet and grabbed his coat out of the air, revealing a figure behind it. Which only startled him more, causing him to trip over himself and fall back onto the lichen bed he’d made.
A woman, no, a girl, watched him calmly and curiously. Her amethyst eyes took note of his every action. Her skin was ashen white, her cat-like face highlighted by hair that looked like it was spun from copper. Long, aniears stood out on either side of her head, twitching at every sound he made.
She asked him something, though the sing-song language wasn’t like any Graiscon had heard before.
Rolling her eyes at the boy’s confusion, the girl pointed at herself. “Uil’Lysen.”
She gestured to Graiscon.
Vaguely understanding, the ward pointed to himself. “G-Graiscon.”
The girl huffed a laugh.
She asked him another question, pointing at the knife he hadn’t realized he’d drawn. Quickly, he returned the blade to its sheath.
A chuff sounded from the shadows. The girl, Uil, seemed to stiffen at the sound, then sighed.
The girl's playful demeanor had melted away and she now looked the part of a warrior that Graiscon had been fearful of when he first saw her. Standing, she pulled out a rope from behind her back and gave Graiscon a command in that sing-song language he had previously found pleasant. She gestured to his hands, then the rope she held out to him.
Her hand rested on the hilt of a strange sword, and the boy could see a quiver and bow peek out from behind her back.
Graiscon, unnerved, carefully pulled the coat over his arms.
“I-I don’t know what you’re saying.” He stammered, confused as the girl continued to order him around, and growing frustrated at his lack of comprehension.
Suddenly, a figure broke from a shadow. The strangest beast he’d ever seen. It was covered in scales like those of a bird’s legs and had a long, muscled tail that flicked around behind it. Its beady yellow eyes were fixed on Uil, its long, flat head was shaped like a diamond, its neck flared out like a great hood. It stalked on legs corded with muscle and its claws were the size of daggers. The thing was easily the size of a bear.
It lashed out with a hiss, its mouth opening to reveal rows of gleaming white teeth and fangs as big as Graiscon’s forearm. As it pounced, it was met with a blur of darkness that bore it to the ground.
Uil whipped around with a flash of metal as she drew her sword. The beast had managed to throw its attacker off, though the assailant was nowhere to be seen. Its eyes flicked around warily for the black mass but neither the beast nor Graiscon had any idea where it had gone.
The beast’s eyes landed on Graiscon as he stared dumbly at the creature. It darted forward, only to be intercepted by a flash of silver from Uil’s blade.
It reeled back from the blow, and a new cut on its face began to ooze black blood. It eyed Uil as the larger threat but glanced back at the easier prey who was fumbling in his coat pockets.
Graiscon pulled out the most powerful spell he’d know he had. The rune was etched out like a tree, straight lines branching at impossibly sharp angles. He focused on his breath and drew it to the rune he now held in his hand and pointed at the beast.
The heat grew in his back, racing along his arm, growing into searing pain as it poured into the rune tablet.
The rune glowed for a moment, and then a blinding shock of lightning arched into the beast. A strange, revolting smell filled the air as its body convulsed and burned. It was dead before it could let loose a sound, its body writhing on the ground. After a moment, it stilled, its body charred and lifeless.
Graiscon looked on at it, stunned. The backlash hit him the next second as he doubled over in pain. His head throbbed, his arms burned.
He was vaguely aware of someone calling his name, heavily accented. A chuff of another animal. His coat and tunic were peeled off his now-sweating skin.