Everything was wet. The crumbling stairway, the spongy walls, the very dingy air itself. The dampness was inescapable. It saturated Rasp’s clothes until his swampy garments clung to him like a second, irritating skin. Alas, there wasn’t time to stop and peel the fabric from his body. The group was still moving steadily downwards, following the ancient stairway into the underground city below, and nobody wanted to stop and watch him strip.

At least that’s what Faris said, who complained each time Rasp held up the procession to unstick his shirt from his gaunt stomach. Stupid Faris. It wasn’t like the faun would see anything. It was pitch black all around. The rest of the group was suddenly just as blind as Rasp was, except for June, of course. But she wouldn’t have cared much about the nudity. She was probably thinking the same thing as Rasp. Only she had it worse. Instead of damp, itchy clothes, she had an entire shaggy hide of dense bear fur to contend with. She couldn’t exactly peel it off in a moment of frustration, either.

The only one equipped with night vision, June led the procession in her bear form with Rasp at her side, clinging to the scruff of her neck for all he was worth. Father took up his customary perch on Rasp’s shoulder and had the audacity to doze off. The raven would awaken each time Rasp slipped, scold him for doing so, and then drift back to sleep as they weren’t stumbling headfirst into an underground grave. Rasp was envious. What he would give to ride piggyback on someone else right now.

He would have asked June to carry him, but she was a bit preoccupied with keeping them alive at the moment. Rasp figured of the two, that might have been the more important task. June took her sweet time testing the integrity of each step before committing her full weight to it. And then she would do the same with the next, and the next, and the next, until Rasp had lost track altogether. He didn’t mind the slow pace. Of all the many things to bellyache over, making sure they didn’t fall to their deaths certainly wasn’t one of them.

They were a half an hour into the descent when their circumstances took a drastic turn for the better. The impenetrable darkness receded and a ghoulish blue glow gradually filled Rasp’s poor vision.

Huh, he thought, craning his head from side to side as he took in the full scope of the strange glow. The hallucinations set in faster than expected.

“Anyone else tripping right now?” he asked, just to be sure.

“I see it too.” Faris sounded equally as confused. “It’s breathtaking. Like blue and green stars caught in the ceiling.”

“I think the word you’re looking for is creepy, Dingle.”

“It’s bioluminescent algae,” Hop explained. Due to the moist environment, the algae thrived. It was sprawled across the domed ceiling and walls, illuminating the stairwell below in an eerie glow. Creepiness aside, the algae did eliminate the need for torches — which was just as well because, according to their know-it-all artificer, the algae also emitted highly flammable gas. A single flame would be enough to set off a fire ball of epic, albeit lethal, proportions.

No fire was reiterated to Rasp several times.

“Yes, I get it,” Rasp groaned after the fourth such reiteration. It was starting to feel personal now. Of course he wouldn’t set them on fire. He had nothing to set them on fire with. There was not a single ounce of magic left in his weary body. He was little more than a sentient bag of flesh and bone, wrapped in skin to keep his gooey bits from oozing out all over the place.

The bioluminescent glow rendered the dark stairway significantly less dark. With their path now visible, the order of the party changed. Faris assumed the lead, with June behind him and Rasp and Hop situated at the end.

“Shouldn’t be much further now,” Hop said, giving Rasp’s elbow a reassuring squeeze.

“How do you know?” Rasp tugged the bandana firmly back over his nose. All the talk about algae and gas made him glad he’d thought to cover his mouth. He didn’t appreciate how the sheen of sweat running down his face kept causing the bandana to slip, but constantly readjusting it was a price he was willing to pay when the alternative involved inhaling toxic algae excretion.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“Know what?”

Oh dear. Hop was already losing himself to delirium. Rasp couldn’t have that. If anyone was going to go mad, it was him. He’s earned it, after all. “That it won’t be much further. Can you see the city below?”

“Oh, I meant my legs. They’re not making it much further.”

Somehow that was worse. “It’s alright. If it comes to that I’ll just ride you down the steps like a toboggan.”

“That sounds painful.”

“It certainly will be. For you, anyway. I’m looking forward to it, personally.” Hop was fortunate to have a friend like Rasp. Despite the faun’s wearisome protests, Rasp’s cheery conversation kept Hop’s spirits high enough to keep going. And yet, each word came at a steep cost to Rasp. Sleep pulled at him, weighing heavy in the back of his skull like a low hanging cloud. Every step felt like it would be his last. He persisted, however, knowing if he gave in, it would be he who went down the slippery steps as a toboggan.

What remained of his pride refused to let that happen.

“Be careful on these last few steps,” Faris’s hushed voice warned from somewhere below. “They’re caked in mud and are as slippery as muck.”

The aftermath of years of flooding, Rasp’s brain volunteered. He didn’t pay much attention to it. The part he chose to fixate on was Faris’s use of ‘last few’, which indicated that, at long last, they’d reached the bottom.

Hop navigated the slippery steps alongside him, their arms locked together in a manner that assured Rasp that if he were to fall, Hop would most certainly be dragged down with him. The faun took a deep, shaky breath the moment they reached the final step and moved out across flatter ground. The wet floor squished and squelched underfoot with a texture a little too spongy to be mud.

The smell was equally as revolting, like the lovechild of putrid flesh and sulfur. The stench infiltrated Rasp’s protective bandana, coating the inside of his mouth with the sour sting of stomach acid. It was a taste Rasp was familiar with, thanks to the years he’d spent drunk off his ass. The acidity pooling under his tongue usually meant he was in for a night of projectile vomiting. He swallowed the bile back down, knowing it would be a waste of effort. There wasn’t anything left in his empty gut to spew.

Hop led him through the last bit of cramped stairwell and into whatever space existed beyond the exit. Rasp felt a shift in the air as the chamber opened up around them. It was still oppressively damp, but the suffocating sense of confinement disappeared. Rasp craned his head upwards and squinted, realizing the soft eerie glow of the algae was significantly higher than it had been in the stairwell. The bioluminescence wasn’t restricted to the ceiling, either. Rasp could see a whole cluster of blurry, illuminated shapes as the party delved deeper into what remained of the underground city.

“Are these homes?” Rasp asked, gesturing to the nearest glowing structure.

“Former businesses, probably,” Hop replied. “The streets are too wide for residences. Hard to know for sure, though. Everything but the stone has rotted away.”

“Maybe we’ll find an inn.” Rasp meant it as a joke. Still, like most jokes, it held a small granule of truth. While he didn’t expect to find a fully furnished inn amongst the ruins, he wouldn’t turn down a nice dry spot to curl up in while his body recovered from three days on the run with no sleep.

“It’s absolutely fascinating, really,” Hop carried on, fueled by the passion of discovery. “By destroying one habitat, the flooding inadvertently created a whole new eco–”

“Hop, I love it when you get this excited, really. But help me find somewhere to collapse first,” Rasp pleaded. “You can tell me all about the glow in the dark bugs while I’m drifting off to sleep.”

“No sense of wonder,” Hop muttered under his breath, adding, “Also, for the record, they’re not bugs.”

Rasp patted his arm lovingly. “Yes, yes, save it for bedtime.”

Rasp and Hop moved slowly through the waterlogged streets. They would stop along any promising prospects, allowing for June and Faris to scout the inside in search of somewhere suitable to bunker down for the night, or day, or whatever fucking time it was. They traveled along the outskirts of the glowing city, scouring a multitude of dilapidated buildings as they went, until Faris finally settled on something passable.

Rasp questioned nothing. In fact, he didn’t even possess the willpower to complain when Hop tugged him up one final flight of stone steps. The room could’ve been a torture chamber for all he cared. What mattered was that the floor was reasonably dry and the room had the benefit of having four stable walls still standing. A miracle, really.

Rasp let the others decide who would take first watch as he unraveled his bedroll and collapsed onto it. He fell asleep the moment his head touched the blankets. And then, for hours, he laid motionless, all but dead to the world. Like the others around him, Rasp slept deep, pleasantly unaware of the soft scuttling sounds coming from the main floor below.