Alright, play it cool. You have them right where you want them. Rasp took a breath to settle his galloping heartbeat, mindful to keep the excitement welling within his chest from bleeding over into his expression. He reached over and gave Father’s feathery head a few loving pats to steady his nerves. Disgusted by the open show of affection, Father suddenly decided he didn’t care whether or not his son lived and flew off elsewhere.
“Love you too, Dad!”
Fortunately, the dwarf translator, Bromm, was still too upset from having his priestess’s magical competence called into question to ask whose father Rasp was professing his love for. He considered his approach a few painful seconds more before asking, “You want Priestess Oreword to prove herself, is that what this is?”
As far as fiddles went, Bromm was proving quite easy to play. The translator’s unwavering devotion to his priestess was also his greatest weakness. Rasp took secret delight in pushing that particular sore spot over, and over, and over again until he got what wanted. “Look, no offense, but blind faith just doesn’t come natural to me, alright? Saying she can heal and doing it are two very different things. I’ve learned to be skeptical of everyone until they prove otherwise.”
“You may as well spit in her face!” Bromm was getting worked up into a tizzy. Still positioned near the center of the room, the angry dwarf slowly edged a step closer with each word out of Rasp’s insolent mouth. “Who are you to make demands of us?”
Rasp merely shrugged. “I said ‘no offense’.”
Priestess Oreword took offense anyway. Rasp could tell from the way her hand locked onto his swollen ankle the moment Bromm finished his angry translation. Rasp yelped as he fell from his inclined position and struck the straw mattress with a padded slam. His leg seized up. Every muscle locked into place, stretched taut. The cramping moved higher until his lower half was completely engulfed in phantom fire.
He wanted to thrash. Every survival instinct in his body commanded him to fight the agony coursing through his battered limbs, but he couldn’t. Rasp stared up at the gloomy ceiling as helpless as the day he was born. His mouth opened and closed uselessly, unable to pull air into his shriveled lungs. Through the haze of debilitating pain, he caught the sound of rhythmic chanting. It sounded further away than it should have.
Rasp lost his grip on reality as the room started to spin. The salty fumes of the tallow candle intermixed with the smoke and crushed flowers from the priestess’s musty clothes. His body suddenly felt light. Panicked, he gripped the straw mattress with all the strength in his trembling hands, certain he was about to lift clear into the air. The dark, muddled corners of his vision knitted together as the only source of light faded. Just as he was about to lose consciousness altogether, the whirling stopped.
Weight returned to his body and Rasp slammed back down onto the mattress. His eyes were still open, he realized, as the dim light of the tallow candle banished the darkness back to its shadowy corners. For what felt like the first time in minutes, his lungs inflated, allowing him to draw breath. A bead of sweat dripped down his brow. Rasp moved to wipe it away only to discover the skin on his forehead was blazingly hot.
Priestess Oreword produced a barking laugh as she patted his injured ankle. She was talking again, too, but Rasp was too distracted by the absence of pain to pay any attention. Gathering his courage, he wiggled his toes and braced himself, expecting to feel the agonized sting of a thousand fire ants biting him all at once. To his surprise, he felt nothing at all.
“Are you convinced?” Bromm asked smugly.
“I think so,” Rasp croaked.
Rasp eased into a sitting position and drew his leg closer. A quick examination confirmed that the swelling was gone. The cuts inflicted by the carnivorous vines had vanished, leaving his skin whole and unblemished. Seven realms, he wasn’t even sore any more! This was good. He could work with this. Once the rest of the group was healed, they could pretend to go looking for the beasty and then cut and run the moment the opportunity presented itself.
The other end of the straw mattress lifted as Priestess Oreword stood and moved for the door.
“Come with us,” Bromm said to Rasp.
Rasp swung his legs over the side of the bed hesitantly. Not because he was afraid the pain might return the moment he stood, but because he had a general dislike of being told what to do. “You’re not taking me to go kill the nameless one right now are you?”
Of course not,” Bromm scoffed. “You are not the Kriegaar. You could not possibly kill the monster on your own.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence. I appreciate that, truly.” Rasp remained seated just in case. “Mind telling me where we’re going then?”
“The Priestess requires your assistance with the Kriegaar.” The dwarf translator paused, either unsure how to phrase the sentence or simply out of reluctance to utter it aloud. “They have…disappeared.”
Rasp shot to his feet. “What?”
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“We need your help locating them.”
“Alright, you heard the man, Dad. Let’s go.” Rasp stormed his way across the room, bumping into several pieces of solid furniture in the process, and locked arms with Bromm. The dwarf was fast, Rasp had to give him that. Bromm slipped his grip and stepped out of reach with the speed and reflexes of someone not shaped like boulder.
Bromm’s voice dripped with both suspicion and disgust. “What are you doing?”
Rasp extended his hand in what he hoped passed for a less hostile approach. “I can’t see. If you expect me to go with you, then someone’s going to have to lead me.”
“You’re blind.” Bromm said this as a statement, not a question, in the sort of tone that implied several unspoken questions had suddenly been answered. All save for one, that was. “Is that why you leapt off a three story balcony?”
“Uh, yeah. That’s why I did that.”
Rasp flinched when an arm strung through his from the other side and pulled him close. The cloud of fetid tobacco smoke wafting from the clothes told him it was the priestess. While her bent, blurry form implied that she was old, possibly frail, the strength in which she was holding him to her side seemed to indicate the exact opposite.
With a single command, she started back towards the doorway, pulling Rasp with her. Father took up his customary perch on Rasp’s shoulder and muttered nervously under his breath as the priestess opened the door. The adjoining hallway was unlike any Rasp had ever encountered before. Being that he was in the company of dwarfs and miles underground, he’d expected to traverse along a dark, gloomy tunnel system.
Whatever the space was around him, it wasn’t that. While the smells were what Rasp expected — wet, musty, and stale — the hallway was obnoxiously bright. The surrounding walls shimmered in a sea of twinkling blues and greens. He didn’t dare touch it to confirm his suspicions, but he felt confident to assume that the surrounding light source was another trick of bioluminescent algae. It was ten times brighter than the stuff he’d encountered within the ruined city.
He shielded his eyes as he clung helplessly to the priestess, vaguely aware that they had turned a corner. “Gods, it’s bright!”
“I thought you were blind,” Bromm said from where he walked behind them.
“It doesn’t work that way,” Rasp huffed, slightly peeved that he was still having to explain this to people. It wasn’t that hard of a concept to grasp! “Blindness isn’t always an all or nothing. I can differentiate light from dark. Shapes too, if they’re close enough.”
“But not balconies.”
Father cackled, prompting the heat already burning its way across Rasp’s face to sting just a tad hotter. Before Rasp could snap back with something he’d regret, Bromm went ahead and explained the purpose of the shimmering walls. “The light helps deter the monster.”
It wasn’t the only thing the light was deterring. Rasp could already feel the telltale throb of a migraine start to pulse behind his eyes. Hopefully their little detour through the bright-as-fuck passageways would be over soon. In the meantime, he’d have to find a way to distract himself. Maybe even learn a thing or two.
“So,” he said, twisting his head this way and that in order to listen to the echo of his voice. The sound didn’t travel far, suggesting the walls were narrower than the surrounding light made them seem. He raised his hand over his head and brushed the ceiling. It was like touching fish eggs covered in thick mucus. Stifling a gag, Rasp withdrew his hand from the ceiling and wiped his fingers clean against the priestess’s robe — silently delighted to discover the area he touched glowed with the same light as the walls. “You mind explaining how you lost the Kriegaar?”
Apparently it was a bit of a sore subject given the translator’s reluctant huff. “The vessel in which you were transporting the Kriegaar—”
“Fancy way of saying pack, but sure.”
“The guards did not want to disturb the mighty one, so they placed the Kriegaar’s pack in a sealed room and left them be. Priestess Oreword arrived to discover that the Kriegaar was no longer within the pack at all.”
Rasp’s voice had a bit of a screech to it. “You lost Whisper? Like lost-lost?”
The priestess muttered something, giving Rasp’s arm an extra ungentle tug as she continued leading him on through the damp, green and blue hallway.
“We believe the Kriegaar is still in the room,” Bromm said. “Just not in the same state as they were before.”
“Okay, now you’ve lost me.”
Bromm heaved a heavy sigh before admitting everything he had hoped to leave unsaid. “Priestess Oreword believes your companion is a shapeshifter. They were in a living form when we first encountered them, and now they are not.”
Rasp didn’t think he was following along in the way he was meant to. “Please don’t tell me they’re in a dead form.”
Bromm’s gravely voice had quite the edge to it. “Do you know anything about fae?”
“I can’t speak for the species as a whole, but I do know this one in particular is a conniving little shit who doesn’t delve too deep into the personal stuff. So yes, and no, at the same time.”
“Traveling with one of the mightiest beings in existence and he doesn’t even know it,” Bromm muttered under his breath with what might have been a disgusted shake of his head. Fortunately, the dwarf took it upon himself to educate the ignorant. “Fae are capable of adopting inanimate forms, usually only as a last resort. Without senses, they are blind to their surroundings. They fall into a state of stasis and can remain dormant for eons.”
Whisper, you clever bastard.
It took all of Rasp’s willpower not to laugh out loud. Even weak and dying, Whisper still found a way to disrupt the plans others made on their behalf. “So one of the objects in my pack isn’t an object at all. Which means Whisper’s not actually missing, you just don’t know what form they’ve taken.”
“Yes. We believe the Kriegaar is using their glamour as a cloaking mechanism. The priestess is unable to distinguish them from the other items housed within the pack.”
The corners of Rasp’s mouth curled into a smile. “How unfortunate for you.”
“It will be your misfortune as well if the Kriegaar is not recovered soon. Your friend is too weak to awaken without the priestess’s intervention.” Bromm let that revelation sink in for a moment before neatly steering the conversation back in the direction he wished it to go. “Priestess Oreword senses a bond between the two of you. Locating the Kriegaar is something you should be able to do, yes?”
Maybe? Only one way to find out, Rasp supposed. “Oh, sure. Absolutely. Should be easy-peasy.”