The nameless old man planted his staff. "Follow me," he said, and marched into darkness.

Felderon glanced at Cylene, who nodded, fingers gripping her staff.

The air grew cool and damp, an earthy odor lingering in the ancient corridor, leading them across the borders of daylight into the domain of devils.

Pupils dilating, Felderon became sensible to an increasingly surreal atmosphere. The passage widened into vaulted chambers, and the sounds changed, echoing strangely off of distant walls, mineralized columns, frozen waterfalls and curtains of stone--vague and vanishing into darkness.

Heavy air carried a fetid odor that hinted of life. Bats flitted through the darkness, frantic wings breaking on vapor as they wove their way through a maze of stalactite columns. Silence broke only with the scuff of footfall and the distant echo of dripping water.

Almost nothing else, and yet...softly...voices.

"Old man? Old man!" No answer followed Felderon's call.

"I said--Old Man, who else is down here?"

Nothing but illusions, emboldened and growing louder.

A boy--where had he come from? Half starved. Dressed in rags. Bruises on his arms.

Felderon lunged forward and fell to his knees. "Where did you come from? Who brought you here?"

The little waif cowered as though he were struck. Flinched a thousand times.

Tears streamed down his cheeks. "I can't. Don't make me do it!"

Crawling on hands and knees. "You don't have to--You don't have to do it!"

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Eyes wide, and unblinking, a whisper answered. "Yes I do."

"What?"

"They'll accept me if I do."

Suddenly, the figure lunged, gripped Felderon's shoulders, writhing and screaming filth in his ear, foul breath in his face and the cold blade of a knife at his throat,

"We all have to pay the piper somehow! You're a foul stench of a man, but I guess you'll do!"

The boy was a fiend!

Demon hands circled Felderon's throat, choking the life from his lungs.

"You think you can stop a war! You can't even save yourself!"

Worm!

Pox!

"STOP!"

A new voice spoke. A woman's voice. Her cool hand was on his shoulder. Now on his brow.

"He's going mad!"

"It's the cavern," the old man said. "It sorts the weak from the strong."

Felderon's eyes focused. The demon was gone, and he lie on the ground of the cavern, Cylene's hands holding his shoulders. He'd torn the sleeves from his tunic, and the cold gripped his bare flesh, but it wasn't the nakedness of his arms that haunted him.

The cavern sorts the weak from the strong.

Of course it did.

Of course.

An unbidden image of the weak, impoverished boy flashed in his mind's eye.

Felderon shivered and climbed to his feet. Stared at his hand, almost invisible in the darkness of the cavern, but he felt its involuntary trembling and he thrust it inside his tunic.

"You're cold," Cylene said.

"Scared!" the old man said.

"If I am, It amounts to nothing. I can walk." Felderon took a cautious step forward.

"Not that way!" The old man pulled his tunic. "You've lost yourself!"

Cylene's cool hand clasped his wrist, her voice a whisper, "Stay with me."

Felderon recoiled, but somehow managed to find Cylene's hand again--managed a strangled thank you, over the lump in his throat.

"You carried me for miles," came her soft reply. "You could have left me collapsed on that inn floor."

"I don't know that you wouldn't prefer to be there now--next to hell of this underground."

"Without a doubt," Cylene said. "But I would have died in the fires when they sacked the town--so much for good instincts."

Felderon couldn't manage more than a short grunt of agreement. Maybe it would be better if they both had remained and died in the blaze of the grape vineyard.

Silence fell, complete, but for the faint scuff of furtive footfall, and the drip, drip, drip of liquid condensation as they followed the strange old man deeper into the belly of the earth.

Then, from somewhere out ahead, the old man's grainy voice rose up, "Down! Down on the ground!"