The Chosen - Rise of Cithria Part 1

by Kris Kramer

  Chapter 35

  The weary Anduains rested in the shadow of the narrow slice in the thick wall. Inexorable sounds of ceaselessly dripping water grated on nerves as they sat in silence. Eilidh wanted nothing more than to find sleep behind her tired eyelids, but closing her eyes caused the awful thoughts of Ruaidhri’s fate to intensify. They’d had no real direction to begin with, but now thanks to Bob, they’d traveled far too deep into Teekwood Caverns.

  Ruaidhri, why did we listen to him? Will I ever escape this place?

  A frail sense of peace settled over Eilidh. The feeling proved short-lived as sudden nightmares jolted her awake.

  “I see that Eilidh has decided to join the rest of us in the land of the conscious,” Shela quipped irritably.

  Eilidh frowned. “What? I just closed my eyes for a moment.”

  Most of the members of the group stifled a chuckle at this. Eilidh stood up frantically.

  “What’s so funny?” she demanded, her face reddening.

  Liam placed a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged his gesture away. He shrugged in return and backed off. Bob’s voice echoed quietly in the dark space that the group occupied.

  “Your snores could wake the dead, my dear child.”

  Now her face turned the color of beetroot as the group laughed quietly. Why hadn’t they woken her up?

  With a smile, Fionn reassured the poor girl and passed her a piece of dried meat. “Don’t worry, Eilidh. We didn’t want to wake you since you’ve been down here longer than any of us. You needed the rest.”

  Eilidh didn’t even sniff the mystery meat. She’d been famished for hours, so she ripped it apart in seconds.

  “How long did I sleep?” she asked through a mouthful of food.

  The druid looked around dramatically at their surroundings with a smile. “Well, I can’t see the sun from here, but I would guess that you slept about an hour.”

  Eilidh nodded and sat down once more. A quick glance at the group revealed a missing person. “Where’s Aelfraed?” she asked.

  After a moment of silence, Bob spoke up. “That is a very good question, young one.”

  He wandered to the edge of Eilidh’s vision and peered farther down the small passage. Despite his apparent dislike for the pompous elf, Bob’s face showed concern at her unexplained absence. For all of his flowery and borderline condescending speech, the powerful nuathreen spell-caster did seem genuinely worried about the wellbeing of his companions.

  Shela plonked her athletic frame down nearby and Eilidh could have sworn she heard the druid mutter, “Just who does he think he is? Not helping us.”

  The quiet rant continued, but Eilidh could only hear muted and garbled sounds. Bob on the other hand seemed to have no problem hearing the diatribe. He spoke without turning away from his vigil at the mouth of the small space formed by the crack in the wall. “His name is Cadman, Shela. And he is possibly the greatest soldier to ever fight against Caldera and Bergmark. King Darren doesn’t promote just anyone to captain.”

  Shela merely grunted in response.

  “I’ve never seen a shade so well tethered,” Fionn said. Bob nodded his assent knowingly.

  “Is that the shadow standing next to him?” Eilidh asked tentatively.

  All eyes turned to her, and she really wished she’d kept her mouth shut.

  “Even you can see it?” Shela demanded in tones of disbelief. When Eilidh nodded, Shela huffed and turned away from her.

  “You have a strong bond with the Tree if you can see a firbolg’s shade, my dear,” Bob said approvingly. He looked to Shela. “Some druids can’t even see the curse.” Shela ignored him.

  “The curse?” Eilidh asked.

  “Ancient lore states the firbolgs were brought into this world before your kind, Eilidh, but they lost the favor of their creator, who we now call Ghrian,” Bob explained. “So now after they’re brought back from the dead just once, their dark spirit follows them back into this world, seeking to overcome them in an emotionally weak state, in order to drag them back to the afterlife. Most call this their shade, but an ancient firbolg saying calls it their darkness.”

  Now that he had everyone’s attention, he faced the group before continuing. “Cadman is a great soldier, or at least he was,” Bob said cautiously.

  “And what does that mean?” Shela asked.

  “I’ve heard rumors, but that’s mere hearsay,” Bob answered. “But no matter what, he should have come to our aid. Letting us delve so far into the depths of the caverns is downright irresponsible on his part.”

  Confused faces showed a failure to grasp his meaning.

  “Friends, he is a captain of the king’s army! His every instinct should be to drop whatever task he is currently engaged in and help those in need. Something is amiss here.”

  Fionn spoke up. “Why is he here in the first place? This place is a very remote area for a lone soldier to hunt in. And what did he say he was hunting? The guardians of the dracolich? I don’t even know what those are.”

  “All good questions, dear druid,” Bob replied. “I suspect that the captain has an ulterior motive for his presence here. It would appear that someone like Cadman would have no use for hunting such monsters as the dracolich’s minions. I have fought with them on occasion. They are strong and exceedingly vicious—”

  “And they closely resemble the brood that you people seem so intent on alerting to our untenable position,” announced Aelfraed quietly, stepping silently from behind Bob.

  The group jumped in fright and Kearney barked in surprise and agitation. Bob grasped his chest and faced the elf.

  “Thank you for trying to stop my heart with fright, elf, but your plan has failed. I still live!”

  Liam laughed, but the rest of the group sat on pins and needles, waiting for the elegant Aelfraed to explain herself. She glared dismissively at the nuathreen, who added, “And you know you’re not supposed to stray that far from my side, Aelfraed.”

  The elf’s glare intensified for a moment. After a painfully long and deliberate delay, she proceeded in the calm, unhurried manner of the elves, for whom time never seemed a pertinent issue. “This passage opens into a vast cavern not far from here. The mouth of the tunnel is about forty feet above the cavern floor, so in order to cross the cavern, we will need to traverse a series of natural bridges formed by some interesting rock formations.”

  Liam piped up, “That doesn’t sound too difficult.”

  “What’s the problem here, Aelfraed?” Shela asked with her usual brusqueness.

  “The problem, young druid, is the garrison of the dracolich’s guards marching on the cavern floor,” the elf explained sharply.

  Eilidh could see Shela’s mouth twitch in frustration, probably with the condescension lacing the word young. To the woman’s credit, she didn’t rise to the elf’s abrasive tone. To the elf’s credit, despite not looking a day over twenty in the years of a human, she could very well have been double or triple Shela’s age.

  “I’m surprised that none of them heard the racket that you people produced,” Aelfraed added, veritably spitting out the end of the statement.

  An uncomfortable silence befell the group, but Aelfraed simply stood there, tall and elegant, exuding the perfect confidence of her ancient people. She wore the robes of a mage, but if the design or pattern revealed a specific attunement, Eilidh didn’t recognize it. The group had yet to actually witness her perform any kind of magic. Was the elf in fact as powerful as she led them to believe?

  All at once, Eilidh’s vision filled with a fiery image of Aelfraed’s furious face. Eilidh’s head shot back in recoil, smacking her helmet against the tunnel wall.

  And then the moment passed. The hellish face had disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. Aelfraed stood still as a statue, looking off away from Eilidh. Bewildered, Eilidh looked around at the rest of her companions, all of whom, except the elf, now regarded her with slight c
oncern.

  “Nodding off again?” Shela asked with an unkind smirk.

  A stern warning voiced itself inside her head. “Tell them nothing.”

  Definitely Aelfraed’s voice, but the elf had yet to even physically look at Eilidh. The rumors in Andua told of domination magic attacking the mind of the enemy, either causing them to fight amongst themselves or withering their conscious self to the point of complete uselessness. A nightmarish death awaited those who suffered at the hands of such a spell-caster.

  Was the elf’s display some cheap parlor trick or was Aelfraed really a powerful dominator? Eilidh didn’t care to find out and simply shrugged at the group, not needing to feign the embarrassment glowing on her cheeks.

  Liam stood up.

  “Right. Well, I like the sound of these dracolich guardians, so let’s go find some, shall we?”

  Now Aelfraed turned to face him. “I would urge you to keep quiet in the cavern and just cross the bridges with as little chance of confrontation as possible,” she said. Liam raised an eyebrow and gave a dashing smile, but Aelfraed cut him off. “I am serious, Thorn. Do not get us all killed in there.”

  Liam’s face scrunched up at the implication. Upon realizing that Eilidh was watching him, the man’s ever-present ego recovered quickly enough to flash a dastardly grin. She just rolled her eyes in response. This Thorn was unbelievable!

  The group shuffled quietly through the remainder of the narrow tunnel and quickly found themselves in the great space described very accurately by the elf. An enormous cavern opened before them, with great twisting bridges of rock spanning a deep trench. Giant glowing rocks, the likes of which Eilidh had never seen before, provided illumination for the large space. The light revealed a few strange creatures milling around in the trench floor.

  Their height was indeterminable from her vantage point, but their appearance scared her half to death. They were mostly grey all over, mostly humanoid in shape, and mostly terrifying in nature. A pair of tattered wings stood out from their backs, and the light glinted off of jagged talons and claws. A large head with a long beak-like mouth snapped constantly as the guardians traversed the trench aimlessly.

  “There were far more only moments ago,” Aelfraed insisted quietly.

  “We should still be quiet in crossing the bridges to that plateau on the other side,” added Bob. “These creatures may not look like much, but those mouths contain rows of razor-sharp teeth, and they never surrender once provoked.”

  The small nuathreen eyed Liam in particular as he warned the group. The Thorn grinned in return. Eilidh could tell the young man was itching for a more direct solution to their problem.

  Aelfraed stepped out onto the ledge and cautiously approached the first bridge. The elf paused and slowly turned to the group, a finger to her mouth, reminding them yet again of the danger. A few of the evil-looking guards roamed in the space below, also reminding the group to watch their step.

  Eilidh followed closely behind Liam, feeling no comfort from the Thorn’s overconfident attitude. What was a dracolich anyway? And so what if they could cross the chasm? They wouldn’t be any closer to recovering Ruaidhri. The sadness weighed down on her as she turned to find Fionn and Shela physically urging Bob towards the bridge. Eilidh saw the small nuathreen at first resist their persistence, looking around the great space frantically.

  All at once, the mage gathered himself and strode quietly past Eilidh and inserted himself between her and Liam. As he passed, Eilidh could see rivulets of sweat on the nuathreen’s face and neck. The temperature this deep underground lacked the soothing effects of nature’s breeze, yet Eilidh wouldn’t have called it stiflingly hot. Bob walked on in front of her, very close behind Liam, staring straight into the man’s lower back.

  Odd.

  The troop continued in single file, only stopping when Aelfraed paused and ducked, intensely examining the lie of the land before her. Before long, the group crested the first part of the stone bridge and encountered an unforeseen junction.

  The bridge didn’t travel straight over to the other side of the cavern.

  The left fork of the split seemed to curve away from their destination, terminating in the ground below. The right path led straight to what Eilidh now recognized as an ancient marker, like the one Fionn had told her about earlier.

  Following their new leader, the Anduains slowly edged their way down the narrowing path, careful not to disturb loose rocks in the process. In plain view below them, a handful of the vicious creatures still milled around, oblivious to the potential meal sneaking above them.

  Before reaching the stone marker, which stood near the side wall of the cavern, Aelfraed halted once more and peered over the edge of the rock bridge. After a moment of contemplation, she motioned for the group to follow as she deftly threw her legs over the side of their walkway, her robes flaring gracefully, and then disappeared from view. Eilidh had worn a dress on a few occasions and had absolutely no idea how the elf managed the feat so elegantly in her long robes. Eilidh had shown less gentile agility when clambering into the back of a horse-drawn carriage in a dress.

  One by one, the group crept over the edge and discovered the sloping column of rock heading to the cavern floor. Eilidh carefully placed each hand and foot, desperately not wanting to be the novice who slipped and crashed into her friends below. She paused for a moment when she noticed that she was essentially dangling out in open air, twenty-five feet from the floor below. A look down revealed a very pale nuathreen gripping the natural pillar with white knuckles.

  Liam apparently had picked up on Bob’s hesitation and climbed back up to the poor mage. After some increasingly severe prodding, the nuathreen slid cautiously onto the man’s back and wrapped his small arms around Liam’s throat in an unintentional death grip. Eilidh stifled a smile as Liam’s eyes bulged in surprise. After a few moments of reassurance, Bob loosened his grip enough that his rescuer could breathe again.

  The rock column twisted out as the decline became less severe, making traversing the pillar much easier. At the bottom, Eilidh stepped onto the cavern floor and froze. A snarling chattering of teeth reverberated from every direction. Despite her earlier feelings on the temperature, sweat streaked down the back of her neck. She dared not move, yet she knew that she was standing out in the open.

  She closed her eyes, not knowing what else to do. Those vicious creatures were swarming and would tear her apart at any moment. A strong grip latched onto the shoulder of her cloak and almost lifted her off her feet. She stumbled in that direction and opened her eyes to find Liam forging ahead with her in tow, half-stumbling along behind him. She slapped his hand away and they both moved forward to a series of switchbacks etched into the rock of the far wall.

  Only in the relative safety of her group did she turn and look back for the hordes of guards pursuing them, their snarls still filling her ears.

  But she saw nothing.

  Aelfraed saw the look of confusion on the young woman’s face and the elf’s voice rang clear as a bell inside Eilidh’s head. “Their foul noises echo off of the cavern floor and walls, creating a sensation of the animals being all around you. Do not fear this.”

  With a nod, Eilidh turned back to the open space, reassuring herself that none of the beasts had followed them. In fact, only a handful of the dracolich’s guards roamed the area, and they’d all congregated at the opposite end of the great hall. Aelfraed signaled for the group to march quietly once more and followed the winding switchbacks up the wall.

  At the top, Aelfraed put up a hand and lay down flat on the dusty floor. Eilidh initially appreciated the elf’s disregard for her own appearance, but then recanted this thought when the elf stood once more without a speck of dust sticking to her fantastically adorned outer robe. The mage gestured for none to follow and disappeared over the lip of the path.

  Time passed painfully. The tension built in Eilidh’s aching muscles, the pause al
lowing her body to emphasize its displeasure at her most recent exploits. She would have time to rest fully when they all died to whatever calamity awaited them next. The dire thoughts of Ruaidhri now played constantly through her mind. Even gazing upon Bob’s terrified face brought no distraction to the dismayed woman. In fact, his fear didn’t concern her at all, one way or the other.

  Aelfraed reappeared and gathered the group together.

  She whispered, “It seems that we have made a slight miscalculation.”

  “We have made a miscalculation? You—” interrupted Shela.

  “This is no time for semantics, human,” snapped the elf. “The ruler of these abominations is resting about fifty yards from our position.”

  Liam grinned.

  “So what’s the problem? Let’s start at the top of the food chain,” he declared, already rising and unsheathing his red blades.

  Aelfraed grabbed him, and with surprising strength thrust him back down.

  “You do not comprehend my words, naïve Thorn. We alone cannot win that fight. The dracolich is one of the ancient dragons and is a ferocious beast unlike any you have ever encountered. Attacking with anything less than twenty-five or thirty would be nothing short of suicide.”

  Something tapped gently on Eilidh’s foot. She turned away from the elf and found a grim-faced Bob looking at her, his eyes pleading for help. Unfortunately for him, she had no reassurance to give. Eilidh turned back to the conversation at hand.

  “Can we sneak past the dragon?” asked Fionn, her voice not nearly as steady as usual.

  “No, I do not believe so. There are minions nearby watching the path approaching the dragon’s lair,” explained Aelfraed.

  Once again the tapping started on Eilidh’s boot. She turned and saw Bob’s pathetic face once more, but this time his arm was outstretched away, pointing over the edge of the switchback. The fear on his face didn’t match her expectations of a mighty spell-caster.

  She once more turned away from him, but almost immediately he shifted up behind her. His small hands gripped her head suddenly, and she could feel his anxiety through his clammy palms. Eilidh struggled at first, but he gently moved her head to the edge of the cliff, giving her a view of the cavern floor and the bridges above.

  A scream broached her lips before Bob stifled her with his slender hands. The group immediately joined her at the edge of the cliff. Fionn gasped and Shela groaned.

  The dracolich’s forces had quietly formed ranks on the cavern floor. The silent monsters observed the stranded Anduains with an eerie calm that Eilidh judged unnatural for their kind. She didn’t know much about these vicious creatures, but their poise seemed all wrong.

  Bob finally spoke.

  “Look! The marker!”

  Their heads followed his outstretched arm in unison, to the stone marker they’d passed on the bridge. Apparently the small pillars weren’t as benign as Fionn had claimed. A constant stream of Anduains, Calderans, and Bergsbor materialized and flowed out of the marker, filling the bridge with a screaming horde of violence.

  The dracolich’s army below loosed a terrifying battle cry before charging the bottom of the switchbacks.

  Instinctively, the Anduain group took a collective step back, but then remembered that the mighty dracolich and his guardians lurked in the shadows behind them. To Eilidh’s increasing dismay, these guards now poured out of small caves along the cliff wall, screaming and loping towards them, their ratty wings unable to carry them more than a couple of strides at a time. She sank to her knees and bowed her head.

  Finally the time has arrived, Ruaidhri. I will soon meet you in the afterlife.