I chose to go up. I tucked the three arrows into my belt and moved to the wall. Once there my fingers sought hand holds in the smooth rock. There weren’t many, but my hand strength was enough to make do with very little. Once I reached the top tunnel I looked back over my shoulder and listened. I didn’t see any light behind me or any echoes of movement, but that meant nothing.
The tunnel was steeper than I thought, I was not yet forced onto my hands and knees, but the angle was so sharp, if the floor had been even the slightest bit wet, I would have slid down the entire length like an oiled seal across ice. It wound like a corkscrew upward in a wide circle. After twenty minutes of hiking, the angle increased and I was finally forced to extinguish the light in my palm so I could use my hand to crawl.
Now I was in absolute darkness, so thick and complete it felt like I was under water.
The tunnel continued upward and I began to lose track of how long I ascended in blackness. I wasn’t used to being without my sight. It felt as if hours passed, and then days. I started to believe I had dreamed my life and in actuality my entire existence was crawling forever in darkness. There was nothing but the sound of my heart beating in panic and the stench of my fear.
A noise sounded against the walls. A slow, soft scrape. It echoed around me, making it impossible to tell if it came from in front of me or behind me. I could not tell what it was, but the sound sent sharp chills of terror through my body.
“Fuck this,” I whispered under my breath. My muscles trembled and I fought against panic. I wanted to turn around, but the Elvens were waiting in that direction. Or was I heading right toward them? The noise sounded again, a few quick scrapes and a metallic tap. It echoed clear and close, but whatever created the noise was moving away.
I took another deep breath and exhaled slowly. I was Kaiyer. I led hundreds of thousands of humans to freedom against the Elven race. I had ripped the life from dragons and lived through thousands of years and returned from death. I was without equal in combat and would dispatch any foe: human, Elven, or monster that tried to prevent me from helping my friends.
I would destroy anything that kept me from finding out about my daughter.
I crawled forward and strained my ears to hear and my nose to smell. I just needed to get out of this hole and back to Nia. Telaxthe mentioned that she studied the Destroyer. She knew of Iolarathe. There must have been some writings left that indicated how a half-breed child could be created. After all, Nadea was one.
Iolarathe visited her sister in Deadflats with my daughter. I was sure of it. Perhaps Nyarathe wrote of the encounter. I still needed to figure out how to get the information from Telaxthe and how to handle the surrender of Nia. But I would figure that out in the process of researching my daughter. If I could not negotiate with the empress, I would rip the knowledge from her dying body.
I heard the noise again, ahead of me. I saw a bit of light sliding down the smooth walls. The glow was tinged with blue, as if I had been fleeing the Elvens for the entire night and into the next day. The light grew brighter as I continued and I heard the distant sound of flowing water.
I heard more scrapes and clicks. They were closer now; I was only a few hundred yards from the exit of the corkscrew tunnel. I pulled an arrow out of my belt and carried it in my mouth while I crawled quietly around the last curve of the tunnel and into the light.
Something burned ahead, the smoky char mixed with the scent of rotting meat. What waited for me was not a group of Elvens, but the den of some creature. A shadow flicked across the dim light source.
I jumped out of the tunnel, dropped five feet, and rolled across a bed of smooth river pebbles sideways to prevent the arrows in my belt from snapping. Once I sprang to my feet I inhaled and was assaulted by the stench of rotting meat, shit, and sulfur.
I stood in a large cavern, laced with jagged toothy stalactites and stalagmites that made me feel like I was inside a giant predatory fish's maw. A tiny creek wound its way through the pebbles and rock columns in the dim blue light.
I listened for the click and scrape, but the creatures must have fled with my arrival. I heard no movement save the sound of the trickling water at my feet and the torrent of a nearby waterfall. But the stench was all around me. One side of the cavern was bathed in a blue glow, the other shadowed in darkness. I moved toward the light.
The light grew only slightly brighter as I approached its source. The tiny stream widened, but I found stepping stones and remained dry. The water smelled fresh and clean, but the putrid stench of rot grew stronger as I moved toward the light.
Finally, I saw the source of the blue glow.
“Fuck me.” The words escaped my mouth before I could even think them. They were made of fear, wonder, and awe.
It was a dragon.
A giant, still statue, roughly the same size as the beasts I recalled from our final battle with the Elvens. A hundred feet at the shoulder, stone wings spread across its back, merging with the rock of the cavern. The effigy’s massive claws clenched ferociously at the floor of the cave, churning up the stone as if it was made of soft clay.
The neck bent down from massive shoulders in an aggressive and coiled twist. The giant, tooth-encrusted maw opened in a silent scream, and the waterfall emerged from its mouth, cascading down thirty feet, forming a pool of water in which the creature stood. I glanced under the legs and saw that the tail merged into the cavern wall behind the creation.
Each scale was etched in stone and polished to the same mirror-like shine I remembered from the dragons I had slain. The statue’s eyes were nests of thousands of sapphires, each easily the size of my chest. Their sickly blue radiance illuminated the cavern like the Wisps of the ruined city I visited with Iolarathe.
At the foot of the statue, raised on a circular platform above the pond of water were a pair of bronze braziers, burning the same blue light. I could smell their flames and their smoke, but I could not see what fueled the fires.
An altar squatted between the braziers. Upon the dais sat a mass of rotting flesh, bones, and bloody organs. The stench radiated from the carcass, the blue glow furthered the sensation of fear that the scent and sight of the corpse and dragon evoked. I felt the same fear now as I had when I first saw the trio of dragons descend from the sky and incinerate thousands of my warriors in a flash of Fire and magic.
Despite my fear, a dark curiosity drew me to the altar. There were no bugs or maggots on the rotting flesh, and the body did not appear human or Elven, the rib bones were too thick and long.
I sensed movement from my side and turned my head, my body instinctively twisting away from the danger. Something wet flew by my face, and forty years of combat training took a hold of my body. I threw the arrow in my hand back at the source of the noise while I pushed myself backward off of the dais.
A high-pitched scream reverberated off of the walls of the cavern. I sprung to my feet as other screams echoed through the chamber. The creature my arrow had found moved from around the stalagmite and I got a good look at it.
It was the size of a small pony, maybe four feet at the shoulder, and resembled some unnatural amalgam of a lizard and a spider. The scales on its dark green body were dry, and the creature’s powerful-looking mouth was wider than its shoulders but shorter than made sense. That was where the resemblance to a lizard ended.
The monster had three sets of sinewy legs. The limbs were scaled like a reptile, but grew from its torso at awkward, arachnoid angles. Each of the legs ended in a cluster of grasping claws. Where a long lizard tail should have been, a bloated abdomen arched above the animal’s back like a scorpion.
My arrow had taken the creature in the side of its face, but it must have missed the brain, as the lizard-spider did not flee or falter, but glared at me with malevolence. A sick-looking liquid oozed from its abdomen, and the creature flexed the bloated sac, shooting a stream of the slime across the cavern toward me.
It smelled toxic, a noxious mix of acid and decay. I ducked behind one of the limestone columns and then ran. I heard clicking, scraping sounds closing in on me from all sides. They moved rapidly, and I dodged back behind more rock, the splatter of liquid narrowly missing me as I ducked for cover.
With the second of my three arrows in hand, I attacked the monster I had already injured with my first arrow, slamming the arrow into the creature’s head closer to its mouth. It jerked back with a scream and a frantic spasm. The shaft snapped and I dodged the animal’s arms as it tried to slash at me. I quickly surveyed the rest of the cavern. Five more lizard-spiders approached on the ground, three more clung to the limestone spikes.
Fuck.
I found a break in the monster ranks and sprinted toward it. If I had a weapon, preferably a spear, I might have stood a chance fighting the creatures. The single arrow wouldn’t do much against their numbers, and the thought of battling the toxic beasts with my bare hands was less appealing than running.
Splats of liquid dashed against the rocky columns and stone pebbles scattered behind me as I ran and twisted through stalactites. There was more movement on the ceiling, to my sides, and I heard thrashing and running behind me. I skidded to a stop around the side of the dragon and changed course to run away from a thick clump of thirty of the creatures. They were everywhere now, a swarm of bees that occupied every space of their hive.
I switched direction again and circled back in front of the statue and attempted to make for the hole where I had entered this cavern. I predicted that I could slide down the tunnel faster than the monsters and escape them. I might encounter the group of Elvens who were pursuing me, but perhaps the creatures would attack them instead of me.
The beasts seemed to anticipate my plan, and when I got close to the tunnel, dozens of the monsters emerged from the opening like angry wasps. I skidded to a halt again, jumped away from three that tried to bite me, and then ran atop two to escape into the only open spot I could find in the blue glow.
There were hundreds of the creatures now, swarming me in a tidal wave of green anger and ferocity. They chased me through the twisted teeth of the cavern. The ground was thick with them, I had to wade my way through their gnashing teeth toward the dragon statue. One of them jumped at my face and I managed to duck and roll away before he ripped into me. Another lunged for my legs and I kicked it away before its teeth connected with my shin.
I made it to the foot of the dais beneath the statue and turned my back to the pool of water and slab of stinking meat. There were too many of the beasts to count. They clung to every surface of the cavern and their hungry screams echoed through the cave.
I was going to die here, torn into pieces by thousands of teeth. I would be ripped into scraps of meat by their many claws. They would fight amongst themselves just to get a lick of my blood or a tiny scrap of my carcass. The feeling should have terrified me or driven me to despair.
Instead I was just angry.
For a second the creatures held off at the bottom of the small flight of steps leading to the altar. Maybe they were afraid of the statue, or perhaps they sensed my anger. The break in their chase gave me a chance to pull more Earth and release it.
“Die you ugly fuckers!” I screamed with the blast of Fire I unleashed. It was the same purple and green color of the magic that had burned Shlara, and this giant sphere of hate acted in much the same way. It slammed into the front rank of lizard creatures in a ball of sticky flame. Ten of them transitioned from living beings to charred skeletons in an instant. Then the sticky fire splashed and spread through the ranks of the lizards. Even small drops of the watery flame quickly ignited the monsters as if they were made of paper. Some of the creatures had time to scream; others turned and ran from the fire. This only spread the fire as contact with another one of the beasts consumed the new body in flames.
I pulled the Earth again and released a second ball of death. Then another. The creatures seemed to possess intelligence that was beyond that of a mere lizard or arachnid. At first they tried to flee from the flame, but then a small group formed to my left and attempted to charge up the stairs. I annihilated this group, but in concentrating my Fire on the attacking horde, other clusters of the creatures were left alive to take up the charge. They acted as an army and seemed to have an almost human ability to launch a coordinated attack. Smaller groups of three or four lizards charged the dais. My vision was clouding and I felt the faint sensation that came from releasing too much magic.
I had thrown maybe a dozen fireballs into the ocean of beasts. It was already much more power than any of my kin could normally harness, but there were still thousands more of the monsters and my attacks still hadn’t broken their desire to kill me. They surged toward me again in a tidal wave of scales, teeth, arms, and claws. Some were burnt by the writhing corpses of their brethren, but one of every three passed through the flames. They would bring me down with their endless numbers.
A single creature emerged from the fire and jumped up the stairs toward me. I caught the large creature’s maw and punched its skull into liquid. My hand broke against the bones there, but I hit it again with my broken fist and its head caved in like a rotten pumpkin. Another monster made a lunge, but I managed to use the corpse of the lizard in my grasp to fill the new attacker’s jaws.