by Tony Johnson
“I was sent to live with my mother’s brother, who ran an orphanage in Celestial. That’s the place you guys saw in the vision. I hated living there. I lived there after Cain had been killed. The foster parents had become even greater drunkards than what Malorek experienced. I knew it was wrong when he came in and killed my uncle, but I felt happy. I was finally free.”
“The man who killed your mother, he got away with it?” Willis asked. “He’s still out there?”
“Yes,” Grizz said, but Steve, Ty, and Willis noticed that he gulped and his eyes darted to the side when he answered. Having been trained in detecting lies from civilians in Warrior Training, they knew straight away what he said was untrue.
He’s not telling the whole story, Steve thought, but he decided not to press the issue, already feeling bad for the Dwarf and his rough past. He still blames himself for her death, he realized, and that’s a burden he’ll carry his entire life.
Hiking up the path on a steep hill, everyone stopped talking when they heard rushing water on the other side.
“The Fluorite!” Kari said out loud, realizing what it was. She ran up the path, followed closely behind by everyone else. Coming over the precipice of the hill, they saw the sparkling, clear blue water. The fast-flowing river looked powerful as it rushed along.
“We’re almost to Serendale!” Grizz said happily. “Another seven hours or so and we should be there.”
The knowledge that they were approximately less than half a day’s walk from a bustling town full of people put a quickness in each of their steps, except for Steve.
Although he had gotten medicine and was stitched and bandaged up at the Den, he was still incredibly sore and hurting badly. Ever since they left, he was consistently pushing himself as hard as he could go to keep pace with the rest of the group despite his aches, pains, and injuries.
However, Steve, like everyone else, smiled upon seeing the beautiful sight of the Fluorite, but immediately began thinking about how if they followed this river, it would take them all the way back into Celestial. He recalled how he’d last seen the capital. It was full of chaos, fire, smoke, destruction, darkness, and death. It’s a whole other world out here, he thought in the peacefulness of the Evergreen Forest with the shining sun, birds chirping, and the bright blue sky filled with puffy white clouds.
“No, no, no!” Willis cried, alarming the group.
“What? What is it?” asked Kari. She and the three other men walked over to where Willis was looking farther down the river.
“Grizz, you might have to wait a little longer to see your wife and kids again. I don’t think we’re going to be able to make it to Serendale this way. Look.”
They all followed where his finger was pointing and saw the bridge that crossed the Fluorite had been burned down.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Grizz yelled angrily.
Ty summed up the problem accurately by grimly announcing, “We’ve come all this way for nothing.”
Chapter 54
With somber faces and sinking hope, everyone unenthusiastically walked to the river, inspecting the charred remains of the destroyed bridge jutting out of the side of the bank.
“Should we try the bridges further down?” Willis asked. “There’s another about ten miles west of here.”
“If someone took the time to burn down this bridge, I’m sure they burned the others as well,” Grizz reasoned, bending down to rub the black-and-grey wooden beams that’d been eaten by fire. He used the grass to brush the messy soot off his fingers.
“Who would’ve done this?” asked Ty.
“I don’t know, but I’ve got a bad feeling,” said Willis. “First hearing about Celestial, then Almiria,” he considered, “What if part of the army was sent to Serendale, as well?”
“Ty, Kari, and I would’ve seen them. The monsters would’ve had to pass us at some point as we traveled north, but we didn’t see any.”
“We can’t swim across?” Kari asked, slapping an annoying mosquito on her forearm.
“There’s no way we’d make it,” Ty declared. “Look how fast the water’s going. We would drown.” He turned to Grizz and was half joking and half serious when he asked, “Can’t you use your earth element to build a land bridge or something?”
“I don’t think I could do that even if my powers were really strong.”
“So, what? Do we walk all the way back to the capital and turn ourselves in, hoping they don’t kill us?”
“I don’t know,” Steve said. “I’m not sure what to do.” There are no options left. We either wait around here while more cities are taken over or we go to the monster-run cities of Celestial or Almiria, where we’d be killed within minutes.
Sighing, Steve felt the same as he did when he was back in the capital, waiting to be hanged. There was no way out of that situation, just like there seems to be no hope here. I thought the only way out of that noose was death, but I didn’t die. I’m alive because I was saved by the two friends who are here with me now. There must be a purpose in the three of us making it out alive, and it can’t be a coincidence we all saw that vision. All of this has to have some meaning. We’ve come too far to give up and go back. There must be a way across.
“Get to cover!” Willis loudly whispered, interrupting Steve’s thoughts.
Everyone ducked behind some bushes, following Willis’s order even though they hadn’t seen what alarmed him. From the shrubs, he pointed out the problem.
At the top of the hill, a giant spider lurked. It dragged what looked like the dead carcass of a deer behind it in a web cocoon. Copper growled and sunk to a crouching stealth position, looking like he wanted to pounce on the prey, until Steve lightly pet him, calming him down.
“It’s a tarantula,” Willis whispered to the group even though the monster wasn’t within earshot. The red-headed Elven warrior knew a lot about spiders from studying them in Serendale’s Warrior Training. For many decades Serendale was known to be a highly spider-infested territory. The city’s warriors were required to know about the different kinds of arachnid monsters.
Giving a brief lesson to the group, he explained, “They’re three types of monster spiders: tarantulas, black widows, and wolf spiders. Each one has its own unique strengths. Tarantulas are known for their retractable claws, making them good at climbing and sticking to surfaces. They also have barbed hairs covering their bodies that can prick you if touched. Black widows are more about what’s inside their bodies. They are incredibly venomous. They have a powerful bite and strong silk. Wolf spiders are venomous too, but not to the extent of the black widow. They carry their eggs on their backs, but the extra weight doesn’t slow them down. They are the fastest of the three. They also have excellent eyesight. Their eyes are positioned wide so they have a larger field of vision.”
Kari cringed while Willis painted a mental picture in her mind as he described the three types of spiders. She stared at the one they were hiding from and tried not to breathe, scared it would hear her sharp inhales even though she was far away. They’re so repulsive. I thought the tarantulas I saw during the siege were big, but this one is huge.
“One last thing,” Willis added. “With all types of monster spiders, you can tell their element based on the color of their blood.”
After Willis finished quietly describing Zebulon’s giant arachnid monsters, but before the tarantula was out of sight from the heroes’ vantage point, it stopped by a big rock sticking out of the forest floor. It wasn’t odd for boulders to be found this far into the Evergreen. The Valpyrio Mountain Range was not much further east. The increasing size of the hills and rocks in this section of the forest was an appetizer to the mountains they soon grew into.
“What is it doing?” Grizz whispered to Willis, but the warrior, like everyone else, had no idea. They watched the spider poke with his legs around the rock. Then, it lowered into the ground and disappeared.
“That has to be it!” St
eve said aloud.
“That has to be what?” Ty, Grizz, and Kari asked together.
“Our route to Serendale,” he insisted, firmly believing seeing the spider was somewhat of a sign since he had been worrying about where they would go only a moment ago.
“How much do you want to bet there is a tunnel or cavern down there that will take us under the river and to the other side? I have a weird intuition that this is the path we should take.”
“Well, I have a weird intuition that this is not the way to go,” argued Ty. “For all we know that might be a burrow the tarantula bunkers down in to jump up and kill its prey.”
“Well, we won’t know until we go have a look.” Steve got up from the coverage the bushes provided and walked towards the rock the spider had disappeared near. He drew Brightflame from its sheath.
“Hey! Wait!” Willis yelled as quietly as he could, fearing the spider was still within earshot, but Steve didn’t turn back.
With everyone watching him, since he was the only one moving, they saw a limp had returned in his leg. Even though he was trying to hide it, it was bad enough that it was noticeable.
He’s starting to decline again, Ty could tell. All this traveling is too much for his body to take. I knew the short rest at the Den was not nearly enough time to get him back to full health. Let’s hope this spider doesn’t attack. I don’t know if he’ll survive another encounter with a monster.
Kari was the first to get up and follow Steve. She was followed by Copper, and then, reluctantly, the rest of the companions.
“Sometimes, you have to go backwards to go forward,” Steve said, once they all stood over the tunnel the spider had entered. He looked down into its dark vastness and then across the river to the higher terrain of the Evergreen Forest, beyond which lay Serendale. “And, sometimes, you have to go down to go up.”
Ty’s continued to voice his apprehensiveness, “Are you sure you want to do this? We don’t know what this expands into. This doesn’t look like a natural cave. It looks like monsters dug it. We could be entering a maze. If we could barely make it out of the sewers alive when we knew where we were, how are we going to survive this in the dark?”
“It won’t be a maze,” Steve assured. “Spiders wouldn’t dig out a maze. Their minds wouldn’t be able to comprehend that kind of complexity. Why would they create something just to get lost in it?”
“I don’t know about this,” Willis voiced his opinion as well. “It’s dark and foreboding. The entrance to this cavern has death written all over it. Dropping down into the dark and unknown is asking for trouble.”
“Light won’t be a problem,” Kari answered, and in saying so, implied she was siding with Steve that they should go down. She directed the men to the crystals on the walls of the cavern below. “See, there are Fluorite crystals down there.”
Fluorite crystals were bright, neon-colored energy crystals found underground. Each one had a faint everlasting glow. One crystal didn’t penetrate the darkness much at all, but together, a group of crystals could provide enough light to dimly illuminate a dark corridor. The crystals were commonly found when mining in rocky earth, which made sense because of their proximity to the Valpyrio Mountains.
“It’s our only choice,” Steve said again, wincing in pain as he sat down on his butt and skidded down the sharp incline that led underground before anyone could stop him.
Kari followed him, moaning when she slid off the incline and smashed her butt hard on the ground. Steve let out a little laugh as he looked down at her, which made her smile. He offered his hand and pulled her up.
“Come down! We haven’t been eaten yet!” he yelled up to the three cautious men and the direfox.
The four of them slid down one after the other, with only Ty and Copper landing on their feet. Everyone drew their weapons and started walking down the declining slope, traveling farther and farther beneath the ground level of the Evergreen Forest. The cavern wasn’t perfectly dug as the sewers had been. Instead of walking down straight paths, the walls were curvy, slowly twisting the group to the right then back to the left.
The dim lights of the colorful Fluorite crystals were enough for them to see, but looking ahead was like walking in the dense fog as they had earlier. They were only able to see what was around their general vicinity. Everything in front of them was shrouded in the mystery of darkness.
Not knowing how close they were to the spider that unknowingly showed them the entrance to the cave, Steve spoke in a whisper. “This is good. For the most part, we’ve been heading north. We should be under the river soon.”
After another two hundred feet, the heroes heard the pitter patter of drops of water splashing down from the ceiling of the limestone cavern. The leaks were falling into small pools.
Briefly stopping to listen, they could discreetly hear the furious rushing of the Fluorite River above the rock ceiling they stood under. Kari pushed past them and quickened her pace.
“What’s wrong?” Steve asked, sensing her fear.
“If there is a cave in, this entire cavern will flood,” she explained nervously.
“Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be like it was when the sewers were flushed,” Steve reassured her, knowing she was drawing comparisons of the underground cavern to their narrow escape from underneath Celestial.
“She’s claustrophobic,” Ty whispered to Willis and Grizz, who immediately understood the reason behind her anxieties.
“It’s just drops of water finding their way through the rocks,” Willis explained. There has to be hundreds of pounds of dirt and rocks between our heads and the bottom of the river. It’s not going to cave in on us.”
Kari wasn’t convinced. “Steve, you said this looked like monsters made it, and correct me if I’m wrong, but monsters are not the best builders. This place is like a boat, you get one hole in it and soon enough you’re flooded.”
Steve and Ty smiled, no matter what they said, they would not have been able to change her mind.
“I think we should be more worried about spiders than drowning,” Ty said, insinuating Kari was worrying about the wrong threat.
After saying that, Kari began itching frequently at the tiny, invisible arachnids she felt were climbing all over her body. Steve and Ty were laughing, telling her there weren’t any on her, but Kari couldn’t stop scratching every couple of seconds.
Steve smiled as he looked at the Halfling. She’s scared of spiders and was probably terrified of encountering the one down here, yet she was the only one who supported me in my decision to descend into the cave.
Even though the Fluorite River was very wide, it didn’t take the heroes long to cross under it, particularly because Kari had taken the lead and was speedily walking underneath it.
Once on the other side, the cavern tunnels began to grow wider. Spiky stalagmites rose from the floor. Some were columns, connecting all the way up to the ceiling. The ground no longer ran downhill, in fact, it seemed to level out and was even slightly going back uphill.
The group soon came across a large opening in the cavern. Rather than the corridor tunnels they were traveling through, this was a wide room.
“This must be the tarantula’s lair,” Kari guessed. She stayed behind a rock and cautiously peered around it to see what lied before them. The vastness of the jagged, oval room was too much space for the crystals on the limestone walls to fully light. There were also Fluorite crystals in the thick columns stretching from the floor to the ceiling, supporting the cavern, but these too only provided limited lighting. The entire center of the lair was unreached by light. It looked like an eerie black fog, impenetrable by the dim light of the crystals.
From what the companions could see, there were thick webs strewn around the cavern. Rabbits, squirrels, and other smaller animals were hanging dead in some of the webs.
Ty noticed motion on the left side of the lair. “The tarantula is in there!” he whispered and pointed.
Near one of the walls, they watched the giant tarantula drop the deer it had been dragging into a pile of other wrapped carcasses. The spider was feasting on a smaller monster arachnid that had gotten caught in the webs of the lair. At least monsters are smart enough to know to eat the older food first, before it starts to decompose.
“It’s captured more food than it needs for itself,” Grizz said, looking around at all the trappings. “I don’t think this is the only spider here. A cavern of this size with so many carcasses probably belongs to a small clan of these arachnids.”
“We should get out of here then,” Kari urged. “Look, there’s our exit.” She pointed to the far side of the cavern where there was a small tunnel leading up and out of the lair.
“That looks like a bait tunnel where these smaller animals would ignorantly come in and soon find themselves tangled in a web,” Willis gathered, gesturing at the pile of dead, cocooned creatures.
“It looks tight, but we might be able to fit through,” Steve surmised. He waited and watched the tarantula’s movements. After the tarantula had finished its snack and headed into another corridor on the opposite side of the cavern, he said, “We’re clear. Let’s go.”
Finally, thought Grizz. No more obstacles are in our way. We can be in Serendale before the end of the day, just like we planned.
Steve led the way and swiftly walked alongside the wall instead of cutting through the unknown darkness in front of him. He felt more comfortable moving in the light, seeing where each step would land. Still, he cringed with every footfall that thumped against the floor harder than intended or accidently crunched a pile of dried leaves.
He and his followers ducked and jumped over the scattered webs. Using Brightflame, he hacked through any large webs that couldn’t be avoided. It seemed like the strong silk webs were trying to rip the sword from his grasp. He could see how easy it would be to end up like the animals that had gotten tangled in them.