Persepera

The 25th of Elaphebolion

The Year 4631 in the Era of Mortals

Running was one of the few things Lyssa had always been good at. It didn’t matter if it was into danger or out of it, she could run with the best of them. In Dawnwood, her speed was unmatched. On open ground, she was uncatchable. In the Sylv, she ran down her prey with all the wild power of a Huntress. Now, in the Vivitorium of Hekáte, Lyssa ran to survive.

She tore through the passages at top speed. Stagnant, underground air whipped past her head like wind as she lengthened her stride, practically leaping from one step into the next. No matter how fast she ran, though, the beastmar pursued. This was their territory and they knew it well.

When Arche had been tackled into a side-passage by the beastmar, she had been too slow to stop it. She saw them fall but could do nothing. He was gone, swept away into darkness. She waited for the notification to come, the realization to hit. She waited to be told that another person in her protection, who had trusted her, had died. That she had failed, again. That it was her fault, again.

The message never came.

Arche survived the fall. Somehow, some way, Arche was alive. She didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. As it turned out, she had time for neither. Two beastmar turned out of a side passage ahead of her. She ducked away as one swung at her with a greatsword wielded by arms that were too large for its body. The rest were behind her, their howls for blood and meat were deafening. Too many to fight. She could do nothing but run, away from the beastmar and away from Arche.

So she ran.

The twisted underground was unnaturally oppressive, with its dark passages and dead air. It was nothing like the gentle light of a woodland glade or the softness of grass in the bloom of spring. There was nothing of life in this place. Just endless death and things that should be dead. The beastmar were even more hateful than the undead she had fought at the Necropolis of Pygmaia. Something innate to their nature screamed of wrongness in words Lyssa could not vocalize. She could only seek to rectify the mistake by returning them to death, entomb them in this hypogean nightmare.

Lyssa had drilled the route through the passages into her mind, well past the point she felt comfortable navigating back, but being chased through it as she was, it was difficult not to feel lost. She had to hope she was on the right path, that Tess was waiting for her around some bend, but she didn’t recognize the passages around her or remember these twists and bends. After an hour of running, with the sound of the beastmar forever echoing after her, she was forced to admit she was lost.

Her fingers twitched for her bow and swords. She could make a stand here and take down as many as she could. She could hunt these creatures and take their glory. Nearly two centuries of hunting had hardened her instincts and running away from prey was not an easy thing for her pride to allow – but she had learned the price of heedless pride. She saw the consequences of failure every time she closed her eyes.

It smiled at her from her brother’s face.

Dozens of beastmar chased her. Skilled as she was, Lyssa couldn’t defeat so many on her own, not in these narrow confines. She had to find Tess and save Arche. Together, the three of them could think of some way out of this mess. They’d had a plan, after all, and it had been only half mad, but it had barely started before it’d gone completely sideways.

Lyssa slowed to catch her breath.

Running so quickly had burned through quite a bit of her Stamina but there was little she could do about it. The sounds of pursuit echoed louder. Lyssa scowled down the passage. She’d taken several turns while out of sight of the beastmar; they should have been as lost as she was but it didn’t sound like there were any less of them now than there had been before. They had some way of tracking her through the underground and that meant none of them were safe.

“Thrice-cursed, goat-smelling plains-walkers.”

There was no recourse but to push on. She looked for any sign of familiarity, anything by which she could get some idea of her surroundings, but one stone passage was indistinguishable from another.

On and on she ran until a glimmer of light brought her sliding to a halt. Unlike the bioluminescent moss that occasionally wrapped the walls or ceiling, this glow indicated something else entirely.

Several small scratches in the stone, nearly parallel to one another, glowed with a soft, gentle light. Lyssa brushed a finger over them, feeling their coarseness and depth. She knew, without need of a notification, that it had been made by a beastmar and that it was relatively new, likely in the last day or two. The notification that did appear was much simpler.

Follow the Trail?

Yes

No

The prompt appeared and disappeared nearly instantaneously. More scratches began to glow gold, leading the way in front of her. It was probably a bad idea. If she actually caught up to whatever had made the scratches, it would be an enemy to fight, but even stumbling upon an eventual enemy was better than being hunted like prey.

Time to run again.

The trail wound its way through intersections and across inclines. At one point, the trail even crept up onto the wall before turning sharply down a side passage. It was running, but whether it was running toward something or away was still a mystery. Lyssa chased the tracks until her Stamina flashed, the ten percent warning, then slowed her pace to a jog.

Going that low on Stamina was intense. Sweat trickled from every pore and her legs shook from the effort but she refused to walk. While it would take longer to regenerate her Stamina, the jog at least helped soothe some of her fears. She had no idea if Arche was in danger or if any beastmar had broken away from their pursuit of her and gone on to chase Tess. Their knowledge of the dungeon was better than hers and she wouldn’t put it past them sweep all of the passages until she and the others were found.

Lyssa cursed Arche and his plans but there was no bite to it. He was a human and exceedingly ignorant but he was also earnest. Eager to learn and always ready to help, even against her own counseling. He was clever, and much better at interacting with the villagers than she was, but he was also annoyingly impulsive and too quick to throw himself into danger. Were he anyone else, she would have assumed he’d died. As it was, it was only because they were Companions that she knew he still lived.

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Companions with a human. What a laughable thought.

It had scandalized her at first. Such bindings were rare among her people, who lived such long lives. She thought it was a punishment, some cosmic consequence for killing her brother, now she was bonded to a mortal who would eventually grow old and die.

It was the curse of the elves to know that they would outlast all others.

Arche was different, though. She was willing to admit she didn’t have a lot of experience with the mortal races, having been born just before Dawnwood’s isolation, but even from what she saw of Arche’s interactions with them, he was an anomaly. Whether it was by virtue of his lost memories or simply the nature of who he was, he made an impact on everyone he met.

Thus, despite her best efforts, he had won her over. He was a stumbling child, too full of the youthful belief of self-invulnerability to recognize that he might be killed. It was the same attitude she had held before Gregori had died. It was that same sibling fear that gripped her now. She would find him. Find him and protect him before he got himself killed. Barring that, she would die alongside him before she buried another brother.

Wrapped up in her own thoughts, Lyssa didn’t see the silhouette come tumbling out of a side passage until it collided with her. They hit the ground and Lyssa rolled away, rising into a crouch with a kopis in one hand, lips curled back in a feral snarl. The other figure groaned and sat up, rubbing the dirt out of straw-colored hair. Lyssa lowered the kopis fractionally.

“Tess?” the word was an incredulous whisper.

The figure paused.

“Lyssa? Is that you?”

Lyssa sheathed the kopis and stood, grasping Tess’s arm and helping the human to her feet.

“It’s me. What are you doing here?”

“What am I doing here?” Tess snorted. “I should be asking you that question. You two didn’t come back and then there were beastmar everywhere. I was lucky to get out while I did. Where’s Arche? I want to give him a piece of my mind.”

Lyssa glanced away.

“He…fell. I couldn’t help him. I don’t know where he is, I only know he’s alive.” The words were more difficult than Lyssa expected them to be. They’d had to move past a rapidly rising lump in her throat.

Tess’s face shifted. Emotions flitted across her face, far too quick and strange for Lyssa to understand them, but what settled seemed to be whatever passed in humans for resolve.

“If he’s lost, we’ll just have to go find him.”

“I don’t know where to start. Some distance behind me more beastmar are pursuing. This place is a maze. I cannot gather my surroundings.”

“That’s where you got lucky, Liz.” Tess flashed a smile. “You’ve got me, now. Come on, I’ll show you what your traps did to the first group of beastmar that ran by and we can retrace our steps.”

The two set off running down the hallway. Tess led them through several turns until Lyssa was quite sure she would never have been able to find her way on her own, then before she knew it, they had emerged into the same corridor they had trapped.

What lay in front of them was nothing short of brutal.

Spikes, falling stones, pitfalls, caltrops, and much, much more had turned the passage into a bloody mess, like the shattered throat of a creature forced to swallow its own teeth. The beastmar scouting party had been annihilated.

Lyssa gazed over Odelia’s work with a grim sense of satisfaction. These creatures were anathema to nature. She had hunted all manner of beast and bird, but beastmar were something else entirely. They tainted the grass that bent beneath their feet, their very existence leeching poison into the natural world. She would see them crushed before they could bring ruin to more.

“We don’t have time to waste.”

They stepped carefully through the remains of the trapped hallway, then on toward the cavern. Several minutes later, they found the intersection where she and Arche had been separated. Lyssa peered down into the dark, but the monochrome color and odd shapes made it impossible to judge distance. Tess also peered down, though she couldn’t see nearly as far in the poor light.

“How far does it go?”

“I’m not sure.”

Tess produced a torch and had it lit in seconds. She dropped it down into the darkness, watching as it shone a ring of light on the stone walls as it fell. After two and a half seconds, the torch clattered against the ground, showing a mess of pit spikes and the dark stain of a splattered beastmar.

Lyssa and Tess both caught their breath at the sight.

“That’s got to be thirty meters, at least,” the Rogue said.

Lyssa nodded, peering into the darkness for any sign of Arche.

“The corpse has been burned and there’s a small blood trail leading away from the beastmar. It looks like he had a soft landing.”

“Arche!” Tess hissed down into the hole, simultaneously trying to be loud and quiet.

There was no response from the pit.

“We should find a way to get down there,” Lyssa said, already combing her inventory for rope.

Tess hesitated.

“I’m not sure that’s the best plan.”

“What are you talking about? He’s down there and needs our help.”

“He was down there, yeah, hours ago. But what happens if we go down there and then we get stuck? Don’t forget the beastmar are still after us.”

“And what if he’s too injured to move or speak and, by not going down there, we leave him to die.”

Tess winced.

“I hear you, I do, but what would you do if you were down there?”

Lyssa paused, considering.

“I would try to find my way out. Get back to the group as quickly as possible.”

“Right. Staying still for too long in this place means the beastmar will catch up. I want to find him too, but right now we have other problems. Do you know how many beastmar fled the chamber to chase after you?”

Lyssa shook her head.

“A few dozen, perhaps. Most of the cave, but probably not all.”

“Then we should circle back and hit them while they’re not expecting it. We might be able to clean up the end, then find Arche once the threat is gone.”

“I don’t like the idea of leaving him to fend for himself,” Lyssa said, frowning.

“Me neither, but you have to admit he’s pretty hard to kill.”

“Not for lack of trying.”

Tess’s cheeks reddened but Lyssa ignored it. They had more pressing matters.

“He’s still alive, isn’t he?” Tess asked, the question sounding more genuine than rhetorical.

“For now, at least.”

“Then there’s still hope. We should do what we can, not chase shadows. I have a feeling he’s going to find us before we find him, anyway.”

Lyssa let out a long, heavy breath, then nodded.

“Very well. Let’s go hunting.”

The two turned and raced down the passage, toward where the whole mess had started.