The noise that the lizard let out was enough to perforate eardrums, I quickly jammed the toadstool that was stuck on the end of the rapier down its throat, and the sound was instantly muffled. Tom had suggested lighting a fire underneath it and cooking it alive, I had objected; it seemed unnecessarily cruel, and on a more practical note, we didn’t have the fuel to keep a fire going for that long. This had led to my idea of feeding it toadstools in the hope that we could poison it! The lizard hadn’t taken this idea very well at all, and in the end, Tom had had to resort to burning it with our make shift rope candles (which we were going through all too fast) just to get it to open its mouth, while I shoved fungi down its throat with my oversized skewer! And it worked! Or at least it worked, sort of; after the fifth skewer full the creature passed out. As I have said, time was very hard to calculate down there. I do not know how long we waited for the lizard to die. Tom fell asleep almost immediately. We had put the ‘torches’ out to save them, so I sat alone in the darkness with the lizards shallow breathing, and my thoughts drifted; I thought about last year, and then farther back; about my siblings and my mother, running round the village, and somewhere around this point I must have dozed, wondering into that place between sleeping and waking, because my father broke in on my peaceful memory; frowning in that slightly disapproving, slightly disappointed way he so often did wherever I was concerned. I tried to shove him to the side of my mind, so I could return to my pleasant memory, but I had strayed to near dreaming and had lost control of the phantom. He looked at me and the world seemed to fade around him “I always said you should give up this silly idea of adventuring, that it would lead you to a bad end. Why couldn’t you have given this up when your class came through?” I felt the anger coming back then, the anger that had stopped me from ‘giving it up’ it pulled me from the dream, and I was back; sitting in the darkness who knew how far from the surface, with the sounds of a dying lizard coming ever more softly. I woke Tom and we started a fire with the remaining fungi, the smell didn’t seem as bad, or maybe I was just getting used to it. We had just gotten the fire going when the notifications came in; ‘you have reached level 6, you have reached level 7, you have 4 remaining skill points.’ I jumped to my feet; the feeling of success flooding through me. It is unfortunate that in my excitement I put out the fire, plunging us back into darkness. Tom tried to get the fire going again, but couldn’t. He had levelled up too, but only one level, so it seemed that I had gotten the lion’s share of experience from the kill. We were just settling down again to try and allocate our skill points when I thought I saw something in the darkness. Like those mirages of water in the desert, I thought I saw light! “Do you see that?” I asked Tom, “What? Where?” “That down there” “I don’t know where you are looking.” “I am going to go and see. I’ll be back in a moment.” Stumbling and fumbling in the darkness I set off, fearing all the time that it was just my imagination playing tricks on me. It was not my imagination! The tunnel turned curved round and then began to opened onto something huge; a great cavern, you it might even called it a subterranean world; there were the vague outlines of hills and land scape stretching out in front of me, but more important; there was light! It was only slightly better than a moonless night, but to me it was brighter than a blazing summer day. Far off to my left, in the distant wall, a manna vein ran through the rock. It filled me with a strange mix of jubilation, terror, excitement, and fear. There was light out there, glorious light, but it come from a manna thread and that meant a dungeon, a dungeon with who knew what in it. But it would be impossible to walk away, drawn to it by that light, drawn with such terrible- “Hey! Have you seen this?” I turned back to find that Tom had followed me; couldn’t he see I was having a dramatic moment here?! Apparently not! He was holding a smooth white rock, a little smaller than a chicken, and strangely uniform in shape, “what is it?” I asked; “Don’t know. But there are a lot more of them over there!” I looked where he pointed; there where indeed a lot more of them. I looked back at the one in his hand, I was missing something, the cave went completely still, as if everything was holding its’ breath, an uneasy feeling formed in the pit of my stomach. In the silence there was a scraping sound, and then a crack! It may not have been loud, but in the cave, it felt louder than thunder. And then it came to me, “it’s an egg!” I said, I looked back the way we had come; and the more I looked the more eggs I saw. What was worse they were starting to hatch! The first monster to escape its egg was a lizard, it looked around at its’ newly discovered world with large liquid eyes. Those eyes settled on Tom and I and instantly seemed to fill with killing intent. On its own it wouldn’t have been a problem, but here, with a cave full of hatching eggs, it was a problem! We turned and ran. Unfortunately, we didn’t get far; the ground dropped gently away right where our passage joined the cavern, running into the cavern I had the unnerving feeling that the ground had disappeared and I face planted. I could hear the lizards swarming over the stone floor towards me, I rolled over, Tom was rushing back towards me, reaching down to help me, a lizard jumped out of the darkness and landed on his arm; he tried to shake it off and got a tail blow to the chin. He went down went down like a rag doll. There were more coming! I knew that, feeling panic rising I did the only thing I could think of; I cast fear. Under other circumstances the results would have been comical; the first lizard froze up in mid charge, so that the next lizard ran right into his tail, and like dominos a chain reaction occurred; lizards crashing into lizards, a pile up, and utter confusion. I struggled to my feet, and grabbed Tom, who was still out cold, I threw his lizard into the general confusion behind us, and started dragging him with me. It was hopeless, I realised that before I had stumbled three steps; with Toms’ unconscious body there was no way we could out run our cold-blooded pursuers, even without him it was doubtful. I would keep casting my fear spell until I ran out of manna and then we would be killed, overran by the lizards, and for an absurd moment I found myself jealous of Toms unconscious state; at least he couldn’t see what was coming! And then, a small, lean, humanoid shape threw itself into the lizards.

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