N19, Torn Roots

It had been a few since Number Three’s incident. After one day of nervous waiting my hurt follower had woken up and, although he could barely move, he seemed to be slightly better. Since then I had taken turns alongside Number One and Number Two to watch over him and make sure the veteran tamer wouldn’t try anything. Of course, I didn’t forget to spare him some of the salted meat morsels I had promised.

‘It’s good that he has survived, but…’

His accident had delayed my plans to find the rest of the gang once again.

‘And now I’m stuck in a hunting expedition… sigh…’

Tone and me hadn’t been called to participate in hunts for a while, but today we suddenly had to join one.

‘At this point it almost feels like I’m just making excuses not to look for them.’

I couldn’t deny the unknown state of my minions made me quite anxious.

‘Anyway, I better focus.’

We were moving through a long and spacious cave. The path zigzagged quite a bit and the number of lateral passages was diminishing the further we traveled, the few we had passed by lately were all full of rubble. I didn’t think we would catch anything here.

None of my subordinates was in the hunting party this time, they should be taking care of Number Three who wasn’t fully recovered yet.

‘And that asshole isn’t here either.’

The veteran tamer hadn’t come with us. That bothered and relieved me at the same time. On one side I didn’t have to see his damn mug, on the other I was concerned he might try to do something while Tone and I weren’t around.

At least we were about to end the hunt. Only three tamers and a few laborers remained in the party, everyone else had gone back to the village carrying preys. Yet, for some reason we kept walking down this long cave.

After a while, some black roots came into sight, running horizontally along the wall. They looked like the ones I had seen before, but a big section in the middle was missing. They had been torn out along with the surrounding white rock, that showed cracks in the spots were the roots had sprouted from the wall.

‘Hmm, judging by the appearance of the rock this was done recently. Did the ratmen take the roots to make that black powder?’

There was a sweet scent coming from the torn roots. For some reason it felt like a familiar smell to me, but it was mixed with the faint stench of the black powder.

‘Did I ever find something like that down here?’

While I was struggling to recall the memories of the familiar smell the tamers in the group had started talking among themselves. They were discussing if we should go back and it sounded like all of them had strong opinions on the matter.

I didn’t pay much attention to their bickering and instead approached the black roots. There was a few reddish crystals clinging to their torn parts. Small like grains of sand and with a very sweet scent, they were very tempting to lick.

‘Ugh, no. I mustn’t… This stuff may be poisonous.’

There was no way this root was edible, but such contradicting smells…

‘Does this plant want to be eaten or not?’

Looking down I saw tiny crabs eagerly eating the red crystals that had fallen on the ground. They were wagering a brutal miniature battle over them, as if the reddish grains were the spoils of war fallen from some celestial palace.

‘Maybe one lick won’t hurt me…’

“Bigd fagh!” Shouted one of the tamers while doing a gesture with both arms, indicating said ‘fagh’ was more than a foot long.

I hadn’t been paying attention and didn’t know what a ‘fagh’ had to do with going back, but the other tamers agreed to keep walking down the cave.

The group kept advancing. Other than the twists and turns of the cave our path was free of obstacles that could impede our vision. I doubted we could find any prey in this place, but maybe there was a wider cavern ahead.

“Cghome,” Tone suddenly ordered me to stay near him. All the ratmen were looking at the ground as they walked, probably searching for that mysterious item, or animal. Looking at them I noticed that some of them kept casting nervous glances towards the front.

It was natural for the members of the hunting party to stay alert and scout the surroundings for dangers and preys, but I could tell everyone in the group was unusually tense.

“‘ere!” One of the tamers exclaimed while running to the side of the cave. Once there he picked up something from the ground before coming back.

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“Fghoun’…”

“Shh!” Tone and he other tall ratman rushed to put their hands on their companion’s snout. The tamer shut up, but he started jumping up and down visibly excited, doing little hops while holding something that looked like a large fang. The thing was almost straight, about four fingers wide and easily a foot long, and that was not even counting its root. I also noticed its edges looked quite sharp for a piece that had been lying on the floor of a cave.

‘What kind of beast…’

I was trying to calculate the size of the fang’s owner, even if it was from a species whose tusks stuck out from their mouth the creature couldn’t be small.

‘Whatever it is, I definitely don’t want to meet it... Specially with only three tamers and three dogs remaining in our party.’

The big lizards were the biggest creatures I had seen in this underground, but a beast with such fangs would probably dwarf them.

‘Let’s get away from here at once!’

I was about to grab Tone’s leather armor when the cave started trembling. In an instant all the feather like creatures on the walls hurriedly hid in their holes while the crabs in the ground squeezed their legs under them and stood motionless like pebbles.

“Ghready!”

“Cghome!”

The ratmen were panicking and the tamers started giving orders to their dogs.

“Ghready!”

I ignored Tone’s order. I could clearly feel something approaching from the cave ahead as the rhythmical temblors increased their intensity and pace. Whatever it was, it had to be enormous, and was rushing towards us. For a moment I stood still in the middle of the group that had broken down into chaos. Most of the ratmen laborers started running away, one tamer managed to get his dog into an attack position while the other was struggling with his beast.

Then, a short distance from us and close to the cave’s ceiling, an enormous reptilian head poked out. A glimpse of its black and dark brown scales was enough to make me react.

‘I have to run!’

I took a glance at Tone and he looked back at me. There was pure terror on his face. Like most of the group he had already turned around and was starting to flee. Only a couple ratmen laborers had stayed in place, paralyzed with sheer fear.

I ran with all my might and quickly overtook the ratmen that had been faster to take the decision to escape. Behind me, I could hear their scared yells mixed with the thunderous footsteps of the beast. Then, the first sound of a crushed body reached me.

I felt the urge to look back. I wanted to know who had been squashed, but the loud footsteps hadn’t stopped. I gritted my teeth and kept running as the sound of crushed meat kept repeating again and again.

‘Fuck!’

Every time one of the yells died off my blood seemed to run colder. I didn’t want to think about what was happening behind me anymore. I could feel the beast was catching up to me and I desperately searched for a way out of the cave. Only one of the tamed dogs was running ahead of me now, but the animal was too frightened to do anything else than fleeing blindly.

I could swear I was already feeling the beast’s breath on my back when finally I found a lateral passage and rushed inside. For an instant, the footsteps hesitated before recovering their rhythm.

A dozen foot in, the passage narrowed into a tiny aperture, but I kept advancing without hesitation. The slow progress was only making me more frantic.

From somewhere in the cave the howl of a dog reached me as the stomping quietened. Now the loudest sound was my heart thumping in my chest.

‘I need to calm down.’

I stopped. I was bleeding from several cuts made when my body brushed against the rocky walls. After all my efforts I had reached a more spacious area, the rest of the passage seemed wide enough to walk through without any problems.

But the moment I took a step forward I heard a crunching sound coming from the cave outside, followed by the footsteps of the approaching beast. Despite my instincts shouting me to flee I decided to turn around. At the entrance of the passage an enormous reptilian head came into view once again and I saw dozens of small teeth chewing the crippled remains of a dog. The frightened animal had kept running instead of finding a safe place to hide.

‘No. Those aren’t small at all.’

The head of the beast was almost too big to fit inside the passage. Its mouth was lined with sharp teeth like the one the ratmen had found, and further inside a second row of wide molars were crushing the dog’s corpse.

“This isn’t a beast… It’s a monster!” I shivered at the thought.

After it finished eating, the monster poked its head further into the passage and used a long purple tongue to lick the narrow pathway. I knew it couldn’t reach me but the scene made take several steps back in fear.

Unable to find anything, the monster turned its head. An orange eye searched the passage. It’s vertical pupil narrowing slightly as it focused on me. I shivered again and took another step back under the quiet scrutiny of the monster. Thinking back, other than its stomping, the creature had barely made a sound since it appeared.

Having judged that it couldn’t reach me, the monster calmly took its head out of the passage. Unlike the savage instincts of a wild beast, its calm demeanor struck me as the calculative actions of an intelligent creature. This monster had set out an ambush and methodically killed as many preys as it could catch.

As the creature walked away I could get a glimpse at its general features. It was a four legged reptilian beast a few dozen feet long. Its bulky body was covered by big rough scales of black and dark brown colors. And behind it, a long tail with blunt spikes on its tip slowly swayed. Each swing of it raised clouds of dust and made the small pebbles on the ground go flying.

‘A dragon? But it doesn’t have wings… And it didn’t use any kind of breath.’

From the broken remains of my fragmented knowledge I summoned everything related to dragons I could recall, but no answer came to me.

‘It may be some creature related to dragons, or just some huge lizard…’

I honestly had repairs classifying it as a mere lizard, although I didn’t discard the possibility that it could be an extremely evolved form of them. It certainly had some small resemblance to the big lizards I had seen in the caves.

By the time I decided to stop thinking about it, the monster was already far away. I did my best to ignore the gruesome sounds reaching my ears and briefly pondered if I should look for survivors.

‘There is no need,’ I somberly decided. If someone had miraculously survived they would either be eaten alive or had already found shelter somewhere. It was pointless to look for them here.

‘…’ I should start moving. There was no way I would step out into the main cave with that monster lurking around. And it was going to take me a while to find a path back using the small tunnels. Yet, I found myself hesitating.

‘Is he really dead?’ I hadn’t known Tone for long, but I might have developed a bit of sympathy for the tall ratman. He had never treated me poorly and I was under the impression that during our short time together the tamer had seen me more like a companion than a tamed animal.

‘This feeling… Is it sorrow?’ I had previously felt sad when using other creatures as pawns for my plans or when I lost one my underlings during a hunt. But those were mere tinges of guilt I had experienced after seeing the consequences of my own actions.

‘Is it because I gave him a name?’ This was confusing. I tried to recall other instances of losing a fellow one, but I couldn’t find anything. There was no one in my memories.

‘Perhaps I’m just frustrated because I had deemed him useful.’ I thought, trying to find a rational cause for my current emotions. I also might be scared because I didn’t know what was going to happen once I was back alone in the village.

‘Anyway, what’s a fucking monster like that doing down here?’ Yes, that was it. I was definitely frustrated. That wasn’t a thing I could hope to win against, even with the help of all the ratmen in the village it would be impossible to take revenge.

In the end I decided to head back to the ratmen settlement alone. If someone had survived they would also go there. I didn’t know how the tamers would react when they saw me coming back alone, but whatever happened I couldn’t leave my subordinates alone.