In the days of its operation, every cave in the Lyrique mines required a warden to go down with the workers. No man would plunge the depths without one. Feelings of fear and exhaustion injected into the walls of the cave mixed with the elemental spirits of metal and stone. Even if the djinn were long gone, their magic had cursed the world with gwyll. Their creation was unstoppable.

Wardens could often extinguish this malicious spirits before they assumed a physical host. A living vessel for their purposes. But, when the caves were abandoned, the spirits remained. They fermented in the forgotten rock and hollowed guts of the earth. They found hosts. Their hosts found prey.

“You two are possessed, right?” Cyril asked Wakahn and Piper. “Abine ever actually take you monster hunting?”

“Well…” Wakahn fumbled to answer the question.

“She said it was ‘unsafe.’” Piper said.

“Of course it’s unsafe. That’s why it pays so damn good!”

Thirty yards away, monsters emerged from the deep blackness of a cave mouth. Monsters often resembled the form of their original living host with some horrifying alterations. They were morphed by the magic of what possessed them. Gwyll made their hosts more terrifying, or more attractive or more discrete, whatever served their purposes best. In this case, the spirits must have wanted to scare them.

The biggest monster was a green-scaled snake. Its size swelled to the thickness of a tree and its face was like that of a woman’s. Its features were flat and its fangs obvious, but its dark eyes tracked Cyril with an obsession.

From another cave emerged two smaller, more flighty monsters. They were about the size of Cyril’s head. Their flesh blended with the gray rock, but six limbs and insectoid wings flapped around frenetically.

With them came another came another. A human, bare of flesh. Its bones had turned black and were animated by the possessing spirit. Inside the ribs were trapped flighty back birds. From the mouth of its skull came a horrible and unending hissing sound. Something like gas escaping a leak.

Cyril judged which might be best to tackle first, but didn’t end up having a choice in the matter. The two small ones zipped around the quarry and separated. Their size and color made them difficult to track, but for an incessant giggling that bounced off the many cave mouths. He had assumed the gwyll were composed of stone spirits, but that laughing indicated some relationship with a sound attribute. Small monsters liked to play little, deadly deceptions like that.

The human-faced snake was the most direct. It was very clear about trying to kill Cyril. He ignored the laughing sound and moved to intercept it. Again, he was fighting monsters without a denizen. Bu would be furious.

Cyril dashed towards the snake. It reared back, raising the human face above Cyril, only to descend upon him. He sidestepped the dive. The monster moved fast. Too fast. It seemed like it would crash into the ground, but its spellcraft prevented it. The solid earth turned soft at the point of impact and the snake dove beneath the surface.

“I’m stuck!” Soraya said. Not like she was scared, more like she was complaining. She should have been scared too.

The earth around the riverbed morphed into a soft mud and her legs had sunk into it. Piper and Wakahn had moved away. Cyril realized he messed up. Bad. In his mind, the three were wardens, not civilians. He felt no pressure about leaving them unguarded. But, they just had stupid badges. Their stupid rich parents had just paid stupid tuition. Stupid, stupid, Cyril had been so stupid. He tried to run back for the young girl, but needed his strength just to move through the thick mud.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

Unhinged human jaws broke the surface beneath Soraya’s feet. It aimed to swallow the girl whole.

Piper wouldn’t allow it. A flash of multicolored fire scorched the snake and it meekly retreated beneath the mud. Wakahn wrenched Soraya free of the mire, asking after her condition no less than three times.

Piper wasn’t just possessed, she could summon her denizen to a small extent. The gwyll manifested as a third arm extending out of her right shoulder. Its skin was crimson and its nails long. The transformation turned part of her face red too. Faint trails of steam wafted off of her body.

The snake reemerged, lunging for Piper instead. Her extra arm sizzled and brewed a luminous, compact package. Spellcraft bound fire tightly together into an explosive. Piper hurled the fireball, but the snake easily dodged, rearing up into the air. Piper’s fireball exploded with a cute pop and the fireball changed direction. It accelerated up and towards the falling snake’s face. Fire and smoke smothered the jaw of the monster. It yowled in pain.

Cyril surmised the girl’s gwyll commanded fire and light. It fashioned incendiary packages that could trigger minor explosions to change direction and speed. Her compatibility with the denizen impressed Cyril.

But, not the snake. It rallied from the attack and dove underground again. Cyril finally freed himself from the mud. In time for black-boned skeleton to be upon him. Its movements were slow, but it made a jerky swipe at grabbing Cyril’s arm. He whirled around the limb and brought his leg through its exposed vertebrae. The skull flew off the skeleton, but it kept clambering after Cyril. He stifled a groan. Monsters in the form of the undead always had some vexing gimmick to keep them going. His sense of pride demanded he not struggle in front of these rookies.

The laughing sound returned. Cyril made space between him and the skeleton, sliding away from it. He scanned the sky for the little gray monsters, but they weren’t after him. The devils attacked Wakahn. Their many limbs ended in metal blades that dug parallel slices into his back.

Cyril sprinted to aid him. The devils ascended out of reach. Cyril tried jumping up towards the pair, but the monsters only giggled and flew higher. The skeleton shambled towards him, Wakahn and Soraya. Its black-boned feet touched the grass of the riverbed. Contact flattened the life, turning it brown and dry. Cyril couldn’t let it get tangled up with the kids if just one touch could kill them.

Wakahn seemed to pick up on this line of thinking without a word.

“Don’t worry, Master Cyril,” he said. “I won’t get in your way.” The boy summoned his denizen, and the power transformed him. Blue-gray dorsal fins grew from his elbows like curved blades. His hands grew hollow spaces in the palms. Cyril also noticed the boy’s ears grew into long points.

From the holes in his hands, Wakahn slowly emitted bubbles. They grew in to about the size of his torso before separating from his hands and orbiting around him and Soraya. Defensive spellcraft, Cyril surmised. The iridescent bubbles made a loose net about Wakahn and Soraya. Fine, that would work for a little bit.

Piper lobbed another bolt of fire at the human-faced snake. The attack hit, but again failed to stop the monster. Cyril still decided the most pressing matter was this skeleton. The amplified giggling drowned out the soft cries of the three birds it kept trapped in its ribcage. Cyril figured that without a head, that would probably be the next best thing to target.

Cyril pulled off his tunic and knotted it around his arm. Its death touch hadn’t affected him through his clothes. The skeleton shambled towards him and Cyril feinted forward. Its arms jerked unnaturally fast. The monster disguised its speed to bait enemies into getting close. But, even its real movements couldn’t compare to the warden. Cyril forced his arm through the rib cage, pulverizing one of the trapped birds. He showed no mercy toward any part of the monster.

Wakahn strafed around Soraya, watching his bubbles for any sighting of the flighty devils.

“If you don’t let me fight one of these things, I’m going to die of boredom instead,” Soraya complained. Wakhn didn’t laugh.

One of the gray monsters found a gap in Wakahn’s network of bubbles. As the globes floated and bounced off one another, the spaces between came and went. The monsters were only waiting for the right opening. Wakahn noticed it too. He clapped his hollowed hands and two bubbles pinched the monster between them. They merged into a larger prison for the monster, helplessly ricocheting off of the inside of the walls.

“One down,” Wakahn celebrated. He was confident the girl at his back would stand impressed.

“So lame…” she whined instead.