While Aleyda and Bowen skinned the wyvern, I sat down and started fueling my body with food for the healing that I hoped was on the way. The two of them were very cautious not to get any of the thing’s saliva on them on the off chance they could be poisoned. It took them a good amount of time to skin the thing and parts of the skin came off in strips. It would still be worth something I was sure but not nearly as much as an intact hide. Since we weren’t in its stomach being digested, I thought it was a fair trade.
After a while I glanced down at my hand. Internally, I breathed a little sigh of relief as I noticed my stumps had turned into nubs. Each of my fingers were slightly longer and covered with new flesh. There were no fingernails yet. I wondered whether they would grow back or if they were considered nonfunctional surplus by my body. Thankfully, I wore my ring of disguise on my left hand and not the right or else I would need to go rooting in the thing’s stomach to retrieve it. That was not something to look forward to. Who knows what else we would find in there?
After the skin was retrieved, Bowen and Aleyda stood and stared at each other as if they were daring the other to start pulling teeth. I could understand their trepidation. With as much time as Aleyda had spent emphasizing that the thing could be venomous, neither of them seemed to be itching to find out. Finally, with a sigh I stood up and walked over to them.
“Well, let’s get this testing over with,” I said. Then I plunged my hand into its mouth and moved it back and forth like I was administering a buccal swab. Pulling it out, I moved slightly away and sat down, waiting for the wracking pain of poisoning.
“Why did you do that?” Bowen asked.
“Neither of you looked inclined to find out,” I said. “And I can likely heal from it. The two of you, not so much.”
I say there for awhile. Then, I sat there some more. Sometimes, the anticipation of pain is worse than the pain itself. But there was no pain. Instead, all that happened was me sitting around with a hand slimed up from wyvern spit. After ten minutes or so had passed and nothing bad had occurred, I finally spoke.
“Nope, it is plenty disgusting but I don’t think there is any venom.”
“Are you sure,” Aleyda asked.
“I am pretty certain,” I replied. “I don’t feel any pain from the exposure and I can breathe alright. I am not having muscle twitches and seem to have full control of my body. I guess its possible that I have some sort of natural immunity but I doubt it. Why don’t you two get something to eat and after you are done maybe I will be recovered enough to harvest the teeth.”
“Let me see your hand,” Bowen demanded.
I showed it to him. The thumb had grown all the way back and the fingers had continued to lengthen. The early hints of a thumbnail were evident on the thumb. It seems I wouldn’t be permanently disfigured after all.
“That’s creepy,” he said.
“It beats the hell out of the alternative,” I replied.
Both of the others got a little chuckle out of that.
While they ate, I watched my fingers grow back. Bowen was right, it was kind of creepy. My entire proximal phlanges had regrown and the medial ones were lengthening as I watched. Soon, those were complete as well and the regeneration moved on to the distal parts of my fingers. I wiggled them to see if I would suffer from any loss of motion but they felt just fine. I decided then and there that out of all my essence crystal fueled abilities, Juma’s was the one that I valued the most. I couldn’t rightly recall the number of times it had saved my life, but it was many. I hoped that we wouldn’t have to fight any trolls. They would be a bitch to kill.
I stood up and walked back over to the wyvern’s corpse and started trying to harvest its teeth. They were firmly attached and I resorted to using one of the pickaxes as a lever to pop some of them out. Unfortunately, a couple of them broke during the extraction process but I still managed to harvest a good crop. By the time I was done, I had full use of my left hand although the pale, newly grown skin contrasted sharply with the rest of my weather beaten hand. When we headed back to the company again, I could see a lot of gloves in my future.
Finally, we had retrieved what we could from the corpse and it was time to set out again. The encounter had delayed us significantly and I wasn’t certain whether we would be able to make it back to the cave before dark. We were going to make a good effort at it, however.
We headed back up the mountain, moving quickly to try to make good time. I really didn’t have a firm estimate about how far away from the cave we were. I thought we were getting fairly close but there was still a lot of mountain above us.
We hiked upwards as day turned into night. Nothing looked very familiar to me but Aleyda assured us we were making our way through terrain that she recognized. Just as it was nearly too dark to see, Aleyda spoke.
“I think this is where we met Segerick and his people initially, but I am not absolutely certain.”
That would only put us a few minutes away from the cave. “Do we keep going?” I asked.
“Just a little bit more,” Aleyda said. “If I am wrong, it will become evident soon enough.”
We stumbled up the mountain in the dark. Thankfully, she was not wrong and we soon reached the rock shelf that we had camped on before. Thoroughly exhausted, we decided to call it a night and pitched camp there.
Of course, none of us would be getting too much sleep because we had to keep watch. I volunteered to take the middle shift. The night passed without incident and as the sun was rising the next day we packed up and headed into the cave.
Traversing it without a group of senior citizens didn’t take a whole lot of time. Within a couple of hours, we were at the beginning of the entrance hallway. Carrying wyvern skin was hard work. There was a lot of it, and because of the scales it was not very light. From time to time, I regretted bringing it along even though I knew that it would likely be the most valuable thing that we had looted so far. When we ran into Segerick, I needed to find out where he had found the gold. In order to make our story plausible, we at least needed to make a token effort at prospecting.
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After lighting a lantern, we made our way through the kill zone. I could tell that someone was keeping watch because I heard the faint sounds of movement overhead trickling down through the murder holes. You couldn’t have paid me enough to wander around up there. Although not typically prone to claustrophobia, that place freaked me out a little. Not to mention that, if we were correct, it had been hundreds of years since the place was constructed. Mountains may not be alive, but ground does move over time, and I really didn’t want to be buried in a pile of rubble when the floor collapsed beneath me. I was not at all certain I would survive asphyxiation.
Within a few minutes, we had made it to the real entrance to the complex. As we approached, a voice rang out.
“Halt! State your business.”
“Who in the hell do you think it is?” I called back. “Couldn’t whoever you have keeping watch overhead recognize us, at least by the sound of our voices?” I swear, sometimes these people acted like they were minor characters in a period drama. I cringed at the next words out of the guard’s mouth.
“Advance and be recognized.”
So we advanced and were recognized. Once we were, everyone relaxed a little.
“So, how have things been while we were away?” I inquired.
The guard, who I vaguely recognized as the man that had been missing and presumed dead or captured when we first arrived, replied.
“Alright, I guess. Things are really dark down here and we haven’t gotten our food supply all sorted out yet, but its nice to have some room to spread out”
“Well, we come bearing gifts,” I said. “One of those gifts is some oil so at least you can keep a lantern lit, or fashion some torches or something.”
“That’s a relief,” the man replied. “Some of the people get a little weirded out down here after dark.”
What was his name again? Alfred? Aloysius? Alphons? Something like that. I knew it started with an A.
“Well, Alf, take us to your leader.”
“He spends most of the day up in the scouting tower. Actually, a lot of people do since there is good light up there.”
There was no way I was going to climb all those stairs again just to say hello. We had just walked up a mountain and fought a wyvern after all.
“We’re pretty tired after our journey,” I said. “Yesterday, we had to fight a wyvern and we carried its skin all the way up here. And it is pretty damn heavy. Maybe someone can run up and fetch Segerick.”
About that time, another person bounded into the room. It was Sawwar.
“Hey, Sawwar,” I said. “How are you doing?”
“I thought it was you but I couldn’t be sure,” he replied. I guess putting the slight young man on the floor above us had made some sense. His weight mitigated the risk of passage collapse.
“I am doing alright,” he continued. “It is harder to find food here that it was at our original camp, though.”
“As I was explaining to Alf here,” I said. “We brought some things to make that easier. I hope you like fish, though. I see a lot of fish in your diets in the immediate future.”
“I love fish,” he responded. Well, that was one of us. I had never really developed a love of them myself.
“It was a long walk up here and we got into a pretty nasty fight yesterday,” I told him. “Could you go fetch Segerick for us so we can recover?”
“Sure!” he replied. Then he went bounding off. I briefly wished that at his age I had half his energy but then I realized that I probably had twice is much. Meth is good for that if nothing else.
Following Alf, whose name I hope I had not completely butchered, we made our way to the main part of the complex. There weren’t very many people hanging around there during the day. Mostly, it was just the old folks. Seeing us, they gave us a warm welcome. I wasn’t sure whether it was because of our winning personalities or the promise of supplies that spurred them on.
We washed up at the underground stream and then plopped down to rest. From time to time, I had to fend off attempts at conversation but I explained that we were fatigued and needed rest and most people seemed to respect that. Most was not all, however, as one older man wouldn’t stop peppering me with questions. I tried to answer him patiently for a short while, but eventually gave up and just sprawled out on the ground feigning sleep. Seeing that I was no longer in the mood for conversation, he eventually wandered off.
We probably sat there for half an hour before Segerick and some of his more trusted people arrived.
“Hello,” he said. “So you made it back.”
If nothing else, that man had a firm grasp of the obvious. “Yeah, we made it but not without a little trouble,” I said, gesturing at the wyvern skin. “We were able to bring you some supplies and a few tools but not many as I hoped because our company’s quartermaster was in town with us and we couldn’t go wild with out purchases. We did bring a few tools, quite a lot of lamp oil, some basic foodstuffs, and some of the gear you will need for fishing. If I were you, I’d harvest the underground pool with those eyeless fish before I turned my attention to the ocean.”
“Thanks,” he said. “The oil is the most important. With that, we can traverse the underground passages and maybe do some hunting on the other side of the island.”
“Just don’t let anyone get captured,” I said.
“Yeah, that would kind of defeat the purpose,” he admitted. “But still, if we are on that side of the island maybe we can find more of our kind and build up our numbers.”
“I know this is a hard ask,” I said. “You need to keep your numbers reasonable. We are only going to be able to bring one ship and if it is the ship I am thinking of, it won’t be very large. Thirty or forty we can probably handle. Any more than that and things are going to get extremely cramped and unpleasant.”
“Maybe we can leave some people here and make multiple trips?” he asked.
“Funded by what?” I replied. “Even scraping together enough funds to finance one trip is going to be pretty difficult. But if you have some people who just want to live here on the island and build this place back up a little, I guess that could work.”
“You are probably right,” he said with a sigh. “Keeping our numbers manageable is probably for the best.”
I handed over our excess food, the oil, the fishing gear, and all the tools except for one pickaxe.
“You will get this other pickaxe as well eventually. I had to come up with a goofy story about prospecting for gold to keep my company leadership from getting too suspicious. I need to know where you found the gold that we took down off the mountain to finance this purchase. Where there is a little, there might be more. If we find it, maybe we can pay for multiple trips that way.”
“That’s a great idea,” he replied. “I think Tayyar was the one who found it. Unfortunately, he is no longer with us, but I am certain if I ask around he told someone where it turned up.”
We no longer had access to the primary source for our information. That was just fucking wonderful, but not truly unexpected given the level of attrition that Segerick had mentioned earlier.
I told Segerick to ask as many people as he could. Maybe we could still salvage enough information if Tawwar had been a talker. I knew one thing, though. One way or another, with or without the information, tomorrow we were going prospecting.