From years of movies, I’d expected to find myself choking on dirt as I fell into the hole. Or in an ancient, decommissioned bowling alley filled with kangaroo mutants. Instead, I opened my eyes once the dirt had parted from around me and choked on what I saw.
Bones lay across the walls, embedded in the soil as if they’d been carefully plastered in. The rank odor of spoiled meat and pierced intestines filled the room. Bile rose in the back of my throat and I had to choke it down lest I spill the contents of my stomach over the whole area. The tendrils that dragged me down into the bone hallway retracted before I opened my eyes.
I wasn’t sure what provoked them or what had caused them to stop curling around my ankles, but I wasn’t going to protest their removal. Above me, the ceiling had taken on an almost chitinous aspect, as if a massive insect lay above me, but upside down.
Opening my mouth, I almost gave the standard horror heroine’s death call: “Hello?” But what if that brought the tentacles back somehow? I kept my mouth covered and tried not to breathe through my nose as much as possible. A loud banging stopped me in my tracks before I’d taken a single step.
Something was trying to bash its way through the ceiling. I hoped it was my companions. As the banging continued, the hallway began to move and rock. I wasn’t so sure I stood in a hallway anymore. I felt the definite inertial push of movement, but nothing around me appeared to move. The banging fell back behind me and I started to run to keep just under the sound. If those were my friends, it wouldn’t do to get myself separated from them.
As I jogged, the hallway twisted and forked. At the junction, a pair of figures rose up from the floor. They appeared to be covered with tendrils, mummified much the same way I appeared, only these wore slimy tentacles rather than soft white cotton strips.
They raised their hands at the banging and the tendrils parted from around their heads. Faces covered with bits of muck and slime appeared, screaming as they released twin pulses of pure magical energy at the ceiling. It opened right in time for the pulses to shoot through and try to blast through the people on the other side. A small cascade of dirt fell through the temporary hole in the ceiling, but no blood or people joined them.
Both figures waited with their arms raised toward the disturbance to see if it resumed. The tentacles had slipped back over their faces in the meantime. That suited me fine because their screams sent chills through my whole body and made my teeth ache.
With a fit of inspiration, I opened my void eye and tried to stare at the figures. I could see light seeping through the tendrils, but the dark blue of the tendrils absorbed the light before it reached much further than a few gaps.
At the same time my vision fell into the void, the figures faced me and resumed their screaming. Rather than firing bolts of magic at me, tendrils flew off of them and slithered through the air toward me.
As an instinct, I raised my blue barrier against the tendrils. They careened off of my shield and into the walls, without doing any damage to the skeletons trapped within. When my shield appeared, the screaming from the two people grew louder and more tentacles rose up and wiggled from their forms.
I turned and ran, darting to the right as a mass of tentacles shot from the two figures toward me. They flew wild, wiggling and flailing as if to try and snatch me up with their frenetic movements. None of them touched me, though they did manage to sling bits of slime over my cheeks and the side of my neck.
Skin crawling in response, I flung the slime away and continued running. I’d wanted to stay near where I thought my companions were trying to breach, but I wanted to stay near the two magical tentacle zombie people even less.
When the screaming finally ended, I stopped running and dropped my hands onto my knees. No more tentacles pursued me here, but I was back in the plain halls I’d started in. The air continued to smell rank here, but I thought I detected a slightly older scent here than I’d noticed back at the junction.
Rising up on my tip-toes, I examined the bodies in the walls. None of them looked elven, but I didn’t really know what I was looking for. The fact they appeared to be human didn’t help especially in this case. I was no archeologist, so I could not say how long these bodies had been embedded in the walls.
I opened my void eyes again to check. No souls or intelligence lingered among these bones, so that part was reassuring. Neither did the bones open their mouths for me to explain where they came from or how long they’d been gathered there. As I studied them, a dark blue glow alerted me to danger right before a series of tentacles darted out of the walls toward me.
If not for Garaghan and the maiden’s constant efforts to impale my feet I would have been snatched up in a moment. I danced away from the tentacles with mad footwork, but they tracked me through the halls with the relentless attacks of a hunter.
Rather than nab my feet, one of the tentacles managed to ensnare my arm. At the shock of contact with the tentacle, I dropped out of the void and tried to pull it off. Right away, the tentacle unraveled itself and fell off as if it had lost interest in me.
The void, it can sense my magic.
It made sense; the two screaming people had tracked me while I’d used magic too. When the ground opened up, I’d been staring at a magical projection device, one that had not been activated since Yierie had been sucked into this place.
Did she count as inherently magical? Did all elves? I doubted it and it was the only thread of hope that kept me from collapsing into a heap of tears. Neither of the two screamers had been tall enough to be elves, which was promising, perhaps that meant the beast or whatever hunted me didn’t just consume elves.
I hunched down against a wall, in between the skeletal remains of a person. Whatever this place was, it made no sense. Either it wanted me for my magic or it wanted me for some other purpose. If for my magic, then why did it give up when I shut my power off? The only other purpose I could imagine involved joining the hapless souls on the walls. I assumed the beast digested them, but I wasn’t going to run my fingers over the bones to see if they were smooth or pocked and I definitely wasn’t going to sniff or taste them. Too bad I left my junior chemistry set back at home when I was twelve.
My only other choice was to get up and walk. The idea scared me enough that I’d been stuck huddled there in the hallway trying to come up with alternatives. I had no other defenses aside from magic and I had every reason to believe that the tunnels responded to my magic with an alien hunger.
Forcing myself to my feet, I shook my head and wrapped Roo over my mouth. That would help filter out the terrible scents of the tunnels and push me forward. At least I hoped so.
Roo smelled of honeysuckle and mint, it did shield me from the bulk of the horrific stenches of the tunnels. Once my mouth and nose were covered and I wasn’t inhaling liquified people, I felt a good deal better about my life.
Despair behind me where I’d collapsed against the wall, I moved forward while I kept the lessons Garaghan had taught me firmly in mind. My posture and steps became light and swift, faster than I would have been back before I discovered my proper body.
I returned to the junction in the halls to find the mummy people missing. Fissures, pits, and other imperfections in the floor could have hidden their chamber. Or for all I knew, the monster’s who gullet I’d found myself in transported its captive defenders with some kind of vascular system.
The thought sent a tremor through me and I shook my head. As far as I could tell, the two people only came out here, otherwise, why wouldn’t they have attacked back when the banging began. Due to that awareness, I stayed away from the center of the junction where the people had emerged.
Crawling around the walls of the junction, I avoided triggering the people. Now the question was to take the right or left fork. The roleplayer in my heart demanded I take the left-hand passage. Rather than concede to the standard answer, I slid myself over to both of them so I could examine them most closely.
They looked like extensions of the previous hallway, grown from the original. I dropped Roo off of my nose and sniffed at the air down the tunnels. The right-most tunnel had a sweeter smell, though the offal and rotten meat stench lingered. Checking the left-most passage, I found nothing new. It smelled much as the place I stood. Neither of them had a wind or any kind of fresh air.
If not for the fact that my eyes had changed, I would not have been able to see anything in here. Nothing glowed and no light source offered itself to my vision. As that fact occurred to me, I realized I also had my ears and they were more sensitive than any other sense now that I possessed this new body.
I stilled myself and cupped my ear as I stood in the mouth of the right-hand tunnel. The whole area was quiet as a mountain snow. Only my breathing echoed out and gave this underground work any kind of auditory texture. I held my breath and waited for any kind of sign or indication of others in those tunnels.
Nothing.
Repeating the same steps with the left tunnel, I waited and prayed to find something, an indication of where to go or where I might run in order to escape this place. Holding my breath, I was ready to give up my sonar pinging, when a soft humming-like sound reached my ears. It wasn’t the wind, there was no wind. It sounded like it might be voices.
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With that, I took off into the left hand tunnel and stayed low. Everything in this place made me nervous. Tendrils began to appear, hanging from the ceiling when they did. I crouched down even lower to keep them from brushing my head, but they grew denser and longer the further I walked.
At the same time, the talking grew louder.
Crawling along my belly, I could almost make out the words being spoken, no louder than a whisper. They were Elven words and made my heart leap at the promise of finding Yierie or her hunter band.
Praying for her safety, I slid under the tendrils looking for any sign of Yierie. When my foot or hand scraped across the uneven ground, the tendrils shook as if they smelled my passage. Or as if they were alert to sound.
At once the voices whispering grew much louder and came from my left side. I scooted around to face them. The space beneath the tendrils had shrunk so that I might not be able to clear the gap under them to find out what lay beyond.
But one of those whispers might belong to Yierie. Hope drove me onward. I pressed myself agains the ground, as flat as I could.
When I was able to make out the words.
“…can’t just run, or do you have a solution to the vines?”
“I did not suggest we merely run, I suggested we chance an escape under the cover of magical attack.” It was Yierie’s voice, my fingers scrabbled against the ground to push myself further. “We know magic draws in the tendrils, but also that magic is the best way to destroy them.”
“With you and Krayth injured… what was that?”
Light flashed over me and the assembled elves gasped. “Is it one of the Bound Ones?” The male voice was familiar to me somehow. “Get ready to blast it and reset the field!”
“Wait, stop!” Above me the tendrils shook and stretched themselves out to brush against my back. I couldn’t say if Roo kept them from touching me or if I was just lucky, but I wasn’t going to linger. “It’s me, Harriet!”
“Harriet, what are you doing down here?” Yierie called out to me and my heart did a little dance. She sounded like she might be in pain, but she was whole. That was all that mattered.
“Hush, this could be a sending or a new trick from the Bedrock Wyrm.” That male voice needed to shut the hell up.
“Um, my sister is Tia. She’s waiting for you with my trainer, Garaghan.” I waited a second to continue while the tendrils shook. “How do I make my way to you?”
The elves lowered their voices to the point where I could barely hear them. I wanted them to shout for me rather than consult amongst themselves. But for he time being, all I could do was wait in relative silence.
“She can heal, Jarahn. Stop being an asshole.” Yierie raised her voice when she spoke and I smiled at her words. “With her help, we might be able to escape.”
“You have to know I’ll do what I can to help!”
“Where is the Goshaan?” The jerk male elf spoke with half his voice filled with scorn and half filled with hope.
“I’m not sure, I fell into this…” I sighed and the tendrils brushed against my back. “Hey, is there anywhere safer where I can talk to you guys?”
More muffled speech and then Yierie raised her voice to speak to me. “Stay low and be ready to run for your life, Harriet.”
“This is an idiot’s plan…” I hoped Jarahn’s jerk-ish words would not be the last I’d ever hear in my life.
I couldn’t press myself much harder into the ground, but I did my very best in staying low and still. Fires roared over me with a blast that rang my ears and washed me with the impact from the explosion. Flaming tendrils dropped down on me as the fire washed passed me. As soon as it stopped, I jumped up and raced toward the origin of the blast.
Yierie and three elves beckoned me forward, into a black convex disk that parted in the center for me to pass. I dove through the small central gap in the disk and rolled. Once again, I was thankful for Garaghan’s lessons. Without them, I might have broken my back.
I spun and rolled onto my feet and looked out of the black sphere around us. Tendrils wriggled and chased toward the gap as black wisps of power streamed out of their hands and re-filled the hole in the sphere.
Yierie stood, but only with the help of the jerk elf from her hunting party: Jarahn. The way she’d draped herself over him made me want to poison his cornflakes at the first opportunity. Then I noticed her foot. Half of it was missing, starting at the bridge of her foot.
She dispelled the jealousy in my heart with a tilt of her head and an unsteady lurch in my direction. I raced to her and caught her. Yierie kissed me and I fell into her embrace. Her balance was off, so I helped with keeping us upright as much as she did, but for a fleeting moment, the rest of the hellish nightmare I’d found myself in faded away.
“I am so glad to see you well.” Yierie ran a finger over my hair, brushing a few stray strands off of my forehead as she did.
“Me too, we were starting to worry.” I laughed at myself as I looked around us. “I guess we were right to worry, huh?”
Yierie winced. “Yes…”
“Look as much as I want to sit in this slowly shrinking prison and watch you two fornicate, could we discuss leaving this place now? Please?” Jarahn stuck his face close to both of us, his breath reeked of acidic vomit.
Wrinkling my noise, I drew away from him and covered my face with Roo. A black sphere enclosed us, holding out the tendrils and whatever else the monster who’s gullet we occupied could throw our way.
“What is this thing?” I stared out of the black sphere; the only way I could see anything was the direction from which I’d come.
“The monster is a Bedrock Wyrm.” Yierie turned her back to Jarahn and motioned around her in a circle. “The sphere we are in is a static magical construct.”
“Why aren’t the mummy-people attacking?”
Yierie cocked her head to the left. “You mean the Wyrm Revenants, yes?”
“The magical blasting people covered with the tendrils, yeah.”
One of the other elves, who’d been sitting on the ground with her eyes closed meditating opened one eye and said, “The sphere is not subject to their attacks. In fact, the hostile magical attacks feed the Void Sphere. We think the Bedrock Wyrm’s immune system figured out that it was helping us so it stopped attacking.”
“They’re intelligent?” I’d known that, or guessed it. But having the others confirm my guess with nodded heads made the whole situation a little worse. “What do we do?”
Yierie held her arm out to an elf who lay on his back with a dirty white bandage wrapped over his chest. “Can you heal Wiyam?”
“I can try.” I unfurled part of Roo, “right now?”
Yierie looked down at my shawl, narrowing her eyes as if she intended to ask me a question, but shook it off. “Yes, sooner would be better.”
I glanced at her foot and considered offering. But so far, no one had asked, so I remained silent. Kneeling down at Wiyam’s side, I bowed my head and let my eyes lose their focus. I waited for the Wyrm to tremble or do something else, but nothing happened as my sight faded.
Wiyam’s void body shone with a vibrant green light that reminded me of green or leaves. When Roo touched him, his eyes opened in the Void and he floated nearer to me. He patted my cheek and whispered into my ear. “Thank you, but my time has come. Ask the others to carry my bones to the Ancestors. Please.”
“Wait, I think we need you…”
Wiyam shook his head in the void. “I am afraid that is impossible. I hung on as long as I have because I have been buttressing Sharla and her sphere. But you can replace me now.” His image wavered in the void. “Please take care of my bones and give my love to Jarahn. Tell him, tell him I only regret the nights we were apart. Please?” He begged me and I nodded. This strange elf I’d never met before sighed and focused his eyes on mine in the void. “I will give you this final gift, here.”
Green light streamed into me through the void. Flashes of Wiyam’s life flipped through my mind, too many images shined through the blackness for me to track them all. But I could tell he was a healer and that he was older than everyone in his hunting group. As if he could focus what I saw, my mind latched onto a series of healing and defensive runes I’d never seen before. Wiyam’s ghost grabbed my fingers and ran them through the complex motions the runes required. In moments I could repeat those spells and use them myself.
When I regained my sight, Wiyam’s body shuddered and he took his final breath. I lowered my voice and whispered. “May you rejoin the Ancestors in death.”
“What happened?” Jarahn grabbed a handful of Roo and shook me. “What did you do?”
“He was dying, he said he wants his body returned to the Ancestors, to the stone in the middle of the willow grove.”
Tears flew from Jarahn’s eyes as he continued to shake me. “You’re lying! He can’t be dead!”
I strained my memory, so many things had flown through my mind in too short a time. “He also said his only regrets were the nights he did not spend with you.” Jarahn let me go and dropped to his knees beside me. A green figure rose from Wiyam’s corpse and he cupped Jarahn’s cheek with a wistful look.
“Damnit Wiyam, this is a good distance short of forever.” Jarahn wiped his eyes and nose as he tried to steady his voice. Before he did, he jumped to his feet and turned a rage-filled scowl on me. “So you couldn’t heal him, could you? Useless!” We did not have much room in the black sphere, but he stomped to the other side and folded his arms.
I ignored him and turned to Yierie. “He said he was helping Sharla with the Void Sphere. Can I help with that? Is anyone else injured?”
My void sight returned at once and I could see that all three of the remaining elves were malnourished, tired, and Jarahn was developing a fever. Sharla raised her hand and pointed to Yierie’s foot. “Can you heal that?”
“I can try.” I turned around on my knees, surprised at how soft the black walls of the sphere felt.
“Careful she doesn’t accidentally kill you too…” Jarahn scowled at me as he spoke.
In a different life, I might have called him out for that. But I could feel his hurt like a blazing flame smoking up the tiny sphere protecting us. Yierie laid a gentle hand on my shoulder while she raised the stump of her foot into my arms. A shadow followed her flesh as I watched from the void. Her injury was fresh, and if Wiyam had been whole, he would have been able to heal her.
Dipping into his memories, I found the rune combination I needed. It was complex and more than any other rune phrase I’d tried to use before. But with one body and three exhausted elves, we needed to eliminate every possible hurdle to escaping this place.
“Give me a moment, this rune is complicated.” I murmured the words to myself as I focused on Yierie’s foot and wrapped Roo around the ruins of her flesh. The shawl fit around her phantom limb without hugging the injury, which I found tremendously odd.
Ignoring it, I moved my fingers in the pattern needed to call on the magic. The power flooded my chest, building up and preparing itself for a major act of healing. I had to trace the runes twice before I managed to get the pattern correct. When I did, pure white magical energy streamed from my shawl into Yierie’s foot and leg. She screamed and lost her balance as the energy penetrated her flesh.
Sharla caught Yierie before she fell and lowered her to the floor, something I would have done if I’d know this would happen.
“Is she okay?” Jarahn stood over Yierie with this hand behind his back. He’d moved with the usual elven speed to loom over the two of us.
“No, back off and let her work, Jarahn.” Sharla snapped at him and pointed. “And resheath that dagger, you jerk.”
He took two stutter steps back, his hand on his chest as he put the blade away. I had no idea what he intended to do with it, but I guessed as Yierie panted. In my arms, her foot began to writhe unnaturally as parts of it that had been missing began to regrow.
Energy flooded out of me then, draining into Yierie who screamed a second time as her foot re-knit. It soon refilled the area of her shadow foot and Yierie passed out.
Jarahn growled as she fell unconscious and approached me again. This time, I didn’t let Sharla defend me. All three of the elves were exhausted and needed a break. Strands of Roo shot out from me and connected with both of them. I pumped invigorating energy into both of the upright elves and into Yierie.
At the same time, I watched the void sphere and the slight opening we might have taken through the drooping tendrils. It sealed itself up as if the tendrils had finally managed to close the gap between the floor and the ceiling.
Jarahn collapsed onto the ground next to the other two elves and I froze. If I blew it and the void sphere faded, we all might die.