Episode One: The Song of the Deep, Section III
Perhaps days passed. The path stretched on endlessly, punctuated every few hours by a small cubby cut into the wall, stocked with ages-old jars, once intended for travelers, now rotted away. The only passing of time they knew were conversation, hunger, and exhaustion. After thrice sleeping and four meals, after a hundred miles or more of featureless, cramped tunnels, of nervous conversations and desperate attempts to keep their spirits up, they found something new.
“It’s a snail,” Allar said, crouching beside the tiny creature, smaller than the tip of his finger. It was crushed, and he never would have noticed it if he hadn’t stepped on it.
David held his light close, and a thin, slowly drying trail of slime reflected the red glow. Careful to avoid ruining the trail, Allar crawled along the ground for thirty feet, looking for where the snail could have come from, until he found a small crack in the ground. The rock was slick with mold.
“There’s water nearby here, I think.” Allar stood up, about to look at the ceiling. But the rocks beneath his feet crumbled, and he jumped aside as a four-foot wide section of the floor caved in. Dust filled the air, and then came the sound of rock splashing into water. The noise of the small cave in echoed for several seconds, and when the dust cleared, they all peered into the new opening. David’s light spell flickered briefly into a full white light.
“It’s a natural cave,” David said. “None of the white stones down there.”
“At least we found a landmark,” Babb said. “No reason not to explore it.”
With the practiced caution of professional tomb robbers, Allar, Lacy, Babb, and David explored the cave. It was moist, covered in fungus that spread a fog of spore dust over the floor. Their footsteps crunched occasionally on snails, or splashed in shallow puddles. The cave sloped roughly down and away, and grew only more humid the deeper they probed. Finally, a hundred feet in, they found the river.
At first just a stream of water, it flowed uphill from a black, twenty-foot wide tunnel. Water dripped upward to the ceiling, and as they watched, a pool of water began to form in a depression on the ground just past the crest of the slope of the tunnel, spreading as water flowed upward from the depths. The air grew cold, impossibly wet, like trying to breathe underwater. A rushing sound like waves crashed through the room. Shadows darkened. David’s light faded. The room was nothing but blackness and weight, oppressive and intangible.
Suddenly, brilliant light flooded the room, flaring out from David’s talisman. Lacy shuddered and nearly slumped to the ground, but Babb caught her. David likewise staggered, and only Allar was free to see behind them. A hundred feet away, the long, endless tunnel where they had been just moments before was crackling with lurid red light, pulsing like a guttering candle. The wisps of low fog were sucked away, and around the rift in the ceiling, patches of mold and fungus dissolved to ash.
Lacy whimpered against Babb’s chest, her voice hidden by the sound of the cavern creaking around them. And then, after just a few breaths, the tunnel was silent again, David’s light again a relaxed gleam. There were no echoes, just the faint trickling as the stream that had flowed uphill seeped away, back into the depths.
Babb was comforting Lacy, who looked far more distressed than Allar would have expected. Lacy whispered something to the Geidon, and Babb asked in confusion, “‘Mother’?”
Allar knelt beside David, who was composing himself. Urgently, he asked, “What was that?”
It was Lacy who replied. “The Scourge. It felt like something was drinking from my heart.”
David stared at Lacy, nodding nervously. “Me too. What-?”
“It’s a legend,” Lacy said. “When the Ragesian Empire fell, a witch lay a curse that would drink the life from all magic-users.”
David glared at her in disbelief. “And you didn’t think of mentioning this before?”
“Most of these things don’t end up being true. I also know a legend that says there’s an invisible gnome that has an archdevil hidden in a hole in his chest. Should I have mentioned that one too?”
“Actually, I know that one.” David shrugged. “Alright, you have a point. Why aren’t we dead, though?”
“Less talk, more move,” Babb said, pointing down the tunnel. “That’s a different direction than the death thing. I say we go that way.”
Allar shook his head. “We’re not going any deeper.”
“It’s been working for us so far,” Babb said. “If we hadn’t come in here, we’d be dead.”
Allar crossed his arms. “How can you be sure?”
Lacy cleared her throat, then said, “A- . . . according to legend, they – and by they I mean I can’t remember if anyone even knows their names – managed to seal the power of the Scourge, so it couldn’t feed.”
“The stones,” David exclaimed. “All those white stones that absorb magic. They’re what’s trapping the Scourge. We were the first magic to come down here in a thousand years.”
“Twenty-eight hundred years,” Babb corrected.
“Right,” Lacy said.
Babb looked to Allar. “It sounds like that tunnel keeps in the whole ‘evil’ thing, which makes us safe here, and not safe in there.”
“Why didn’t it kill us before?” Allar asked. “We were in there for at least a few days.”
Everyone looked to Lacy. The tall woman squinted, thinking. “I have no idea. Just lucky, I guess.”
“Lacy,” Babb said, “you’re never lucky. The last two men who liked you ended up stealing our jobs. Can you think of something a little more comforting?”
Lacy shrugged again, and then everyone turned to look down the natural cave tunnel, which sloped off sharply into the depths. Lacy asked, “Um, did anyone else get the feeling that the water was alive?”
They pondered the path, and then, by silent, mutual agreement, began to climb downward, into the Great Below. When they were finally out of sight of the entrance, Babb gave Allar a friendly poke. “I’m watching you, just so you know.”
Allar saw Babb shift his great horned head toward Lacy. “Third time’s a charm.”
Sighing, Allar shook his head and moved to the front of the group, trying to look for signs of dark Elves or other dangers. But occasionally he glanced back at Lacy, smiling at the thought.
* * *
These tunnels were like nothing Allar had traveled before – great massive caverns, chambers carved by rivers, narrow corridors rent apart by the slow grinding of earth. High, jagged ceilings disappeared out of range of David’s magical light, and the ground was as uneven as any wild mountain.
There was life here, more than any of them would have imagined. Great carpets of gray and white fungus stretched across the ground and walls in some places. Creepers of tendril-like mold dangled from ceiling to floor like a dense subterranean forest in others. Small insects and snail-like creatures eked out survival around intermittent puddles and patches of moist, powdery earth. Flies buzzed through the air, some large enough to prey on others like bats. It was as if everything that had ever died and sunk into the ground had been reborn, foreign and pale, but alive, in this great, hidden darkness.
At first, every step was revulsion. Unfamiliar textures assaulted them. In many places, the floor was not rock, but a mass of flaccid fungus, thriving on ageless piles of decay and detritus. A handful of snakes they spotted slithered past, pure black against the paler mold, seemingly undisturbed by maggots that grew from sockets where land snakes would have had eyes. The ceiling of one mile-long stretch of smooth, narrow tunnels was covered in bustling, twitching spider webs. The air was always still, always just too chill to be comfortable.
By the time they finally stopped to rest, however, they were tired enough for fatigue to let them ignore the odd spore-mist that wheezed from the floor whenever they had to walk across the fungal ‘grass.’ They breathed comfortably through cloth over their mouths, and took watch as if their surroundings were no stranger than a swamp or jungle. Allar took great pleasure in the fact that the smell of their food seemed to drive away the creatures native here, while Lacy spent her free moments writing on parchment, claiming she remembered once reading a prayer that could purify food, and that she hoped she could recreate the necessary incantation. They slept in a grove of waist-high capped mushrooms, next to what appeared to be a pond of oil.
Away from the hungering tunnels of the ‘Scourge,’ as they took to calling it, conversation came more freely, and Allar was able to laugh at his own nervousness. The Great Below was unsettling, but certainly, they had seen nothing threatening. But when he slept, his dreams were heavy and vague, but filled with whispers.
* * *
“Up ahead,” Allar said. “A tunnel.”
The group was picking its way through ankle-deep sludge along the bank of the river. They had followed it for most of their second day in the wild caves, but it led downward, and they had seen no passages branching in other directions. The river, at least, provided strange fish the size of a man’s palm, which they had cooked and eaten for lunch. So far, none of them were feeling sick.
Allar moved ahead to check the new tunnel, going as far as he dared from David’s light spell. The river, really just a stream eight feet across, swept away and downhill to the right, while this new tunnel climbed away to the left, sloping uphill ever so slightly. The muddy sludge that made up the river’s banks stopped just a few feet into the tunnel, and though this new passage was smaller than most of the caves they had explored so far, it felt less foreign. No strange shelled creatures scurried across the walls or ceiling, and the ground looked like sturdy stone. More barren, perhaps, but easier to travel.
Allar was about to turn back to the others when he spotted a dark patch on the ground. Kneeling low, he pulled out a small hand lantern and lit it, feeling his throat tighten nervously. As the flame caught, and light flickered into this tunnel for the first time ever, Allar lay eyes upon a footprint, etched in dried mud. Holding his lantern higher, he could see two more footprints, bare feet, five toes each. Then, as if to hide its path, whatever had left the trail had scraped its feet against the stone, smearing the drudge of the river on a protruding rock.
The footprints were short, as graceful as might be possible with mud. But they had to be recent, within a few days, maybe even a few hours. Allar held no doubts that somewhere down in these caves, dangerously near, was a dark Elf. He could not move, and it was more than a minute later when the others finally followed and found him, leaning against the wall, drawing shuddering breaths.
“What does it mean?” Babb asked. “No more jokes from me. If you guys want to tell me about mythical demon Elves from below, I’m more than ready to listen.”
Allar tried to speak, not wanting to appear weak. David looked up at him and whispered, “You can face this. Come on, Allar.”
Lacy was kneeling next to the three brief footprints, and Babb leaned over to snort at her impatiently. She waved a hand at him dismissively, then chanted briefly. She sighed and stood up.
“It’s fairly recent, less than a day, but all I could see was legs running from the river, with dark grey skin. Actually more than I expected, since, well, there wasn’t any actual light here when that happened.”
“Running?” Allar asked. He noticed he was gripping the hilt of his scimitar, and he tried to let go as discreetly as possible. “Why would a dark Elf be running?”
“I didn’t see anything chasing it. Nothing has come by here since then.”
Allar knelt next to the muddy footprint again. “I don’t like this.”
They were quiet for a moment, and then Babb snorted in amusement. “Allar, you think about this stuff way too much. He was probably just in a rush to get that crap out there off his feet. I mean, why do you get so worried every time somebody says ‘dark Elf’?”
Allar took a slow breath, and said, “My parents were killed by dark Elves.”
Lacy and David looked away uncomfortably. Babb managed to look solemn for just a moment, however, and then he laughed.
“I’m sorry,” he said, trying to hold back his chuckles. “This wasn’t recent or something, was it? Because,” he laughed again, “no offense, but isn’t that a little . . . cliché?”
David glared angrily at Babb, but Lacy sheepishly grinned. Allar was too shocked by what Babb had said to reply.
“I mean,” Babb continued, smiling at Allar’s dismay, “haven’t most professional adventurers lost their parents? Lirensce did. Lacy and I did. Heck, Crassus didn’t even leave his home town until his father died of syphillis.”
Lacy nodded weakly, trying to look apologetic. “Babb is just being a little insensitive. He lost his parents twice, actually. His original ones, and then my mother after she adopted him. Not, well, not dark Elves, though.”
Allar scoffed, sputtered, and then looked away. For a moment he wanted to explain everything, but then he heard Babb chuckle. Allar growled quietly.
“If you don’t care, fine,” Allar snapped. “But someone else is down here, so we need to keep quiet.”
Babb asked, “Do you have a problem with Kohalesti Elves? They’re dark-skinned. It’s brown, not grey. And they make nice sculptures. Have you ever seen the bridges in Seaquen? Kohalesti made those. Do the bridges scare you?”
“I’m not frightened,” Allar sneered. “Right now, our goal is to find this dark Elf and have him tell us how to get to the surface. We’ll beat it out of him if necessary. Now, let’s go.”
Not waiting for them to reply, Allar started walking down the tunnel. A few moments later, he heard them follow, thankfully, since otherwise he would not have been able to see where he was headed. The tunnel sloped gently upward, rough but open.
At the back of the group, Allar could hear Babb grumbling. “What’s the big deal?” the Geidon asked. “At least his parents were killed by something interesting. Mine died in an avalanche. Do you know how common avalanches are in the mountains? Pretty damned common.”
“He was very young,” David said defensively. “I was with the Jispin caravan that found him. He was buried in snow under his mother’s body.”
Allar winced, more out of anger than from any clear memory. He had been too young to recall the actual attack.
There was silence for a moment, and then Lacy said, “Then we should trust him. If the Taranesti are dangerous, Allar knows more about them than any of us.”
“I’m not afraid of avalanches,” Babb said, his tone softly mocking.
“Honestly, Babb.” Lacy heaved a sigh and hurried to catch up to Allar.
When she was next to him, she said quietly, “There’s more to this than just something that happened twenty years ago, I’m guessing. Don’t tell me if you don’t feel comfortable. Just tell us if there’s anything we need to know, alright?”
Allar forced out a chuckle. “Do you know any myths about dark Elves?”
“They’re supposed to be immortal,” she said, smiling.
Allar sighed and looked away from her. “Well, that one’s not true. Come on, let’s move. If the Taranesti was running from something, it might be smart for us to run too.”
Babb tried to talk for a few more minutes, but eventually they trailed off into silence.
* * *
They traveled for a few hours, occasionally slowing when intermittent pockets of heavy, cold air wafted over them. There was no wind, but it felt as though something dead was breathing upon their necks. The feeling always faded quickly, but David was in the process of suggesting they turn back when the sounds of dripping water echoed from the tunnels ahead. Everyone grew quiet in nervousness, and Allar crept forward, scimitar in one hand, lantern in the other.
Twenty feet ahead, the tunnel opened up and sloped suddenly down five feet. Though the light from Allar’s lantern was feeble, the room beyond gleamed, stretching out a hundred feet or more before disappearing into blackness. Hundreds of stalactites and stalagmites rimmed the room, with thin clusters forming pillars that supported a ceiling forty feet high. Pools of water, unknowably deep, covered the floor so that there was more water than solid land. The stone everywhere glistened with moisture, and the flickering glow from Allar’s lantern reflected off dozens of black pools, and glinted on every dangling spire of rock.
It was only a slight drop from the top of the tunnel they had followed to the floor of the lake cavern, so Allar gestured behind him for the others to wait, and he slipped forward. He wanted to scout just a little further, to make sure there was a clear path to walk. He didn’t know how well any of them could swim, and Babb certainly would be in danger if he fell into one of the lakes wearing his heavy armor. But after a quick reconaissance, the only disturbing thing was that even just a few feet from shore, all of the lakes were deeper than the length of Allar’s sword. There was a comfortably wide stretch of dry rock that led to an opening into another chamber, so he slipped back to the others and waved them over.
“Walk carefully,” he said. “And David, dim your light a bit.”
“No dark Elves?” Babb teased.
“No nothing,” Allar replied. “Not even bugs or fish in the water. It’s practically empty.”
They moved through the lake cave carefully, Babb having to sheathe his sword and use the stalagmites as guides to keep his balance. Even with David’s light spell dimmed, the chamber seemed almost as bright as day, the flooded floor reflecting a nearly still glow across the room. At the far end of the chamber, there were two tunnels. One was half-submerged, the other dry. Allar was about to lead them into the dry path when he heard a splashing sound echo from the next room, like someone running through water.
The others grew tense, but Allar held up a hand, then gestured for David to kill his light spell. With just the faintest of lantern light to give away his location, Allar sprinted to the tunnel opening, staying as low as possible. When he reached the edge of the chamber, he pressed his back against the wall, and turned his head ever so slightly to peer around the corner.
Out of the near blackness of the room beyond, Allar saw the rocky ground slope into the water less than twenty feet away, and less than ten feet away, something man-sized moved away, across the stone toward the shore. Allar guessed more than actually saw that it was turning to look at him, so he took cover and held his breath.
The distant splashing continued, and the air began to feel heavy, wet, whispering without sound. The sensation was familiar, and eery, but it passed after a moment, and when Allar was certain he hadn’t been spotted, he waved his hand over the lamp twice quickly, then once slowly, a signal to David that there was one sentry.
It had only been a few seconds since he first heard the sounds from the cave beyond, but now suddenly there was more sound of movement, and with the strange echoes of this chamber, Allar couldn’t tell if they were approaching or not. He held his sword ready and again peeked into the next room.
The sentry was gone.
Cursing to himself, Allar began to back away, looking around in all directions as he ran back to the group. The noise from the next chamber was hectic now, and Allar was certain they had been spotted. He called out to Babb, Lacy, and David, “We’re about to get attacked! Run!”
At that instant, two things happened that incited Allar’s reflexes, and he responded so quickly to each that he did not have time to think. First, from the pool beside his friends, a creature burst forth, clawed arms reaching out to rake as the spray of water concealed it.
“Light, David, light!” Babb was shouting, and suddenly the chamber flared into blinding brilliance.
Allar had leapt at the creature, and in mid-swing, as his scimitar pressed its right arm away, he saw it in pure clearness. David’s light glowed through it, its massive body transparent like water, except at its eyes, where pools of murky black glared at them. Half-again as tall as any of them, its head was nothing but two eyes and a gaping maw of gleaming, watery teeth. Its arms, somehow ridged with a texture impossible in a liquid, slashed inch-long talons across Babb’s face and chest, and it started to embrace him, diving forward with its mouth to tear into his shoulder.
Babb was already roaring in defiance, and he fell back under the creature’s weight, but did not stop fighting. He thrashed his head sideways, goring a horn into the creature’s eye, just as Allar leapt upon its back and drew his sword across its throat. The creature spasmed, and a death wail emerged from the lakes around them. The creature itself made no noise, but the water burst upward like something had exploded beneath it, and a cry of agony shrieked and echoed. Then, in an instant, the spray fell back to the surface of the lake, and the creature, massive and imposing, disintegrated into nothing but water.
That was the first, and in the same brief instant that the creature attacked and fell, in the next room, a woman screamed. Her voice, panicked and desperate, pierced through the death cry of the monster, and had not even stopped before Allar leapt away from the dissolving body of the beast and ran to help her.
“Allar!” David shouted. “It’s too dangerous!”
In the back of his mind, he was aware that they were following him, that he was not plunging foolishly into a pitch black, flooded cavern, that they would help him fight whatever was endangering the woman whose cries for help filled the air. But even if they were not following him, he would have gone anyway.
As the others followed him, bringing light, the next chamber emerged from darkness. Lower than the last chamber, the ceiling here sometimes simply plunged below the water, and the only land was rough islets. There were more of the water creatures in the distance, a hundred feet away or more, their faint transparent bodies moving to surround a woman as she splashed through the water. He saw all this in the time it took him to leap from the shore into the water and begin to swim after her, but when he pulled up from the water to draw breath, she was out of his vision.
His splash had alerted the rest of the creatures, and from the cluster of perhaps a half-dozen that were a hundred feet away, two broke off and dove into the water toward him, vanishing without disturbing the surface. Allar followed the woman’s screams as best he could, but he had swum only twenty feet when something slashed him across his neck, dangerously close to ripping open his throat, and then he was pulled under.
He struggled wildly, unable to see what was grappling him, stabbing ineffectually through simple water as unseen arms dragged him below the surface. Then he felt a jerk at his legs, and for an instant was able to make out one of the creatures as Babb plunged into it from above, his heavy armored body pulling it away from Allar. Then Babb clove his sword across what may have been the beast’s belly, and the water pulsed around them, filling with blinding bubbles.
Babb sank away, vanishing below him, but Allar was able to get enough freedom to swing his sword into one of the arms holding him. It pulled away, ripping him with talons, but then it bit his ear, and Allar knew where to aim. Flailing with his free hand, Allar grabbed the creature’s semi-tangible head and plunged his sword into it. The tension holding onto him faded away, and another burst of sound pulsed through the water, sending him reeling.
He could not see Babb and needed air, so he pressed for the surface. Just as he cleared the water and took a desperate breath, the air at the far end of the tunnel exploded with fire, and he heard David holler in glee. Peering through drenched hair, Allar could see two of the creatures on shore collapse and burst into steam, slain by David’s fireball talisman.
“Lacy,” Allar called out, “Babb’s drowning.”
Allar finally reached shallow enough water that he could run again, and he started to sprint for the two remaining creatures. One dove into the water, heading in a direction that would reach David and Lacy, while the other, growling and gurgling, pulled the screaming woman off the ground and tossed her over its shoulder. They were just forty feet away, and in the dim glare of David’s light spell, Allar saw the woman slump, unconscious. He shouted angrily, illogically, for it to let her go, and then rushed after it.
The creature snarled and turned toward him, its black eyes glaring viciously. He was almost to it when the monster shrugged its broad, ridged shoulders and dropped the woman into the water beside it. She fell away with a splash and vanished, and the creature lunged for Allar, claws outstretched to drive him to the ground.
Allar dove to his right and rolled, and the beast fell where he had been a moment ago. He kicked up and landed on its back, swinging his scimitar and beheading it. It fell away into water beneath him, and he gasped for breath for a moment, looking around desperately to find the woman before she drowned.
In the distance, another fireball blossomed, and the air shrieked with the last monster’s death, but the flare of firelight filled the chamber, and Allar saw the woman’s body, shallow, but deep enough to drown. He dropped his sword and ran over to her, pulling her free. She wasn’t breathing, and without thinking, barely even able to see her in the darkness, he rolled her over so she’d exhale any water she’d breathed in.
The woman coughed, desperate, but Allar smiled, knowing he had saved her life. She gasped for breath, and Allar held her carefully, content for a moment. But then his eyes adjusted to the gloom, and he looked at her again, brushing aside a strand of white hair. The light of David’s spell approached, and Allar saw the woman’s emerald green eyes stare at him from a dark-skinned, Elvish face.
