by TurtleMe
This was another strategic advantage we held. The ascending elevation gave our archers and conjurers a clear advantage, as they would have superior visibility and range. Defensive walls had been crafted by earth mages to provide the troops at this level cover should the Alacryans try to attack the back line from a distance. The truth was, we really didn’t know that much about the kinds of spells their Casters could specialize in, so we had tried to prepare for anything and everything.
We reached the top of the hill just in time for me to feel the first raindrop on my cheek. It only took a few seconds for the single drop to become a heavy downpour. Sylvie was about to lift up a wing to shield us from the rain, but I stopped her.
We’re all soldiers here. We’ll all be fighting in the rain together anyway, I said, my eyes focusing on the field of ice. Rain and fog impeded our vision, and the sound of our soldiers still marching towards the shore could be heard under the heavy thrumming of rain.
“We will stay behind for the first wave. Scryers will have eyes on the field and General Bairon will relay information on the enemy forces for us soon after,” General Varay said beside me. “Many of our forces are still mobilizing, so we’re expecting continuous reinforcement, including more silver core mages.”
And so, we waited. I could feel the tension building and more than once I heard a captain delivering a pep talk to their troops.
‘The wait is more agonizing than I imagined,’ my bond thought, her bright hazel eyes trying to catch a glimpse of anything within the fog above the ice-field. I nodded, wishing I could simply fly to the enemy flotilla and unleash hell, but we already knew that their Shields were more than capable of defending the ships, even from a Lance.
More and more troops arrived. Some were sent to either side of the bay, while others remained back as reserve forces.
It felt like hours had passed, all of us standing in the rain with white knuckles gripping our weapons.
Were those shapes, moving in the distance? Was that the low rumble of steam engines, barely audible beneath the hammering rain?
A crack like ice breaking resounded through the bay.
Then the horn rang.
I could see our men stiffen as the deep, brassy note announced that the enemies had landed on the outer edge of the ice fields, and their soldiers were disembarking.
A minute passed, then two, and finally the second horn rang, followed by General Varay’s mana-enforced roar.
“Charge!”
233
Dim Tunnels III
MICA EARTHBORN
“Through there?” Skarn echoed, his voice rising nervously.
“Aye,” answered Oberle, who had just directed us into an uncomfortably tall and narrow crevasse.
It had been three days since we’d left the Earthborn Institute. Oberle had led us down and through the deep tunnels until we’d left Vildorial behind entirely. We’d seen no sign of the Alacryans, though our guide assured us we were going the right way.
“Mica will go first. Keep your eyes up. This would be a fine place for a trap.”
I slipped into the gap. On either side of me, towering walls of volcanic glass rose up into the darkness above. Behind me, Oberle carried an illuminating artifact, which cast a silver light across the rippling obsidian.
Hornfels and Skarn came next, their axes out. Elder Buhnd’s soldiers trailed behind them.
All three of them, I grumbled to myself.
When Alanis had returned, tired and frustrated, she had brought three mages and the news that most of the dwarves under Buhnd’s command were already pursuing a lead that had taken them away from Vildorial. These three were all the assistance the taskforce could afford us.
They weren’t useless though: two dark yellow core augmenters and a solid yellow core conjurer. The augmenters, Kobel and Jasper—both rugged veterans—followed behind my cousins. Tetra Satinspar, the conjurer, brought up the rear. She held a second illuminating artifact, which caused her chalky-white skin and pure-white hair to glow.
Though we moved slowly, the narrow space amplified our noise, and it sounded as though a hundred dwarves marched with us. Great. With every step, we’re basically ringing the dinner bell for any mana beasts that lair in this crevasse.
Within minutes, Skarn began interrogating our guide in a hoarse, urgent whisper.
“How far does this go?”
“Not far,” Oberle answered.
“And you’re sure this is the way?”
“Aye.”
“Did you see any creatures last time you were through?”
“No.”
“Hush,” I hissed. “Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut, Cousin.”
Despite Oberle’s assurances, the fissure seemed to lead on for a very long time, and it began to play tricks on my senses. The walls appeared to move, rippling like the surface of a pond, and a silky scraping sound echoed down from above, barely audible over our own scuffling feet.
Then the clicking started. It was subtle and consistent, like someone had a rock stuck in their boot. I was entirely focused on the noise, trying to determine where it was coming from, when Oberle caught a toe on the uneven floor and spilled forward with a grunt.
The luminous globe he carried tumbled out of his hands, bounced off the hard ground with a sharp crack that echoed through the ravine, and rolled between my feet, causing the walls to dance madly around us.
“I thought you were a miner, boy?” Skarn hissed. “Some tunnel legs you’ve got—” Skarn’s voice choked off suddenly. I shot him a concerned look, but he was silhouetted against Tetra’s light. As I opened my mouth to speak, his dark form was lifted into the air.
Hornfels hollered and leapt upward, grabbing his brother by the ankles. For a single breath they appeared to float in midair, then Skarn’s boots slipped free of his feet and Hornfels crashed back to the ground. Skarn’s axe bounced off the stone floor a moment later.
“Skarn!” I yelled as he was dragged out of sight high above us.
Supporting myself with ambient mana, I lifted off the ground and flew up into the dark after Skarn. Even for a dwarf, it was difficult to see in the utter blackness within this crack, but once I was in the air I could hear the shapes moving in the dark clearly: Click. Click click click. Click click.
Something like a thick, wet, sticky rope sudden wrapped around my neck, jerking me off course so that I crashed into the wall. Reaching up, I grabbed the rope, wrapped it around my wrist, and pulled. At the same time, I increased the force of gravity on my body by several times.
From above, a hairy creature slightly larger than a dwarf plummeted past me, its eight legs scrabbling at the glassy walls. There was a wet crunch when it reached the bottom.
“Gallows spiders!” I yelled to my companions below. “Light!”
A moment later, a blob of bright orange light arced into the air; Tetra had thrown a ball of pure magma high up into darkness, revealing a shifting, twitching river of huge spiders scuttling upside down along the roof of the crevasse. Long strands of webs hung down all around me, their knotted, noose-like ends set like snares to catch unwary prey.
“Skarn!” I shouted again, searching for my cousin among the mass of spiders, which had begun hissing and clicking loudly in the presence of the light.
Something heavy hit me from behind and several hard, hairy legs wrapped around me. I turned to see the spider’s eyeless face only inches from mine, its four fangs, each as long and sharp as a filleting knife, ready to carve me open and pump me full of venom.
Twisting away to avoid the fangs, I conjured a short blade of granite in my left hand and flicked up and outward, sheering through two of the spider’s legs. With another flick, the spider’s abdomen fell away, followed quickly by the rest of it.
The lava dripping down the ravine wall was already fading, taking the orange glow with it. I turned back to the task of finding Skarn when a grinding roar like an avalanche filled the air. Twenty feet away, four stone spike
s burst out of the walls, skewering a crowd of spiders and revealing Skarn, clinging for his life to a strand of web.
Taking a cue from my clever cousin, I molded a boulder—three feet across—from the obsidian walls, then reversed gravity’s pull on it, causing it to fly up into the air and smash into the roof. The black boulder began to roll across the ceiling, crushing the spiders and destroying their webs.
I focused on the boulder until I saw it pass above Skarn, breaking the tether to which he clung. With a curse, he began to topple downward, but I was next to him before he’d fallen ten feet, grabbing him around the chest and easing his decent.
On the floor, our companions had been forced to shield themselves from a shower of spider parts.
“By rock and root, this is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen,” Hornfels grumbled, wiping a glob of green slime out of his beard.
“It smells!” Oberle moaned, sheltering under a stone slab that Jasper had created.
For good measure, I rolled the stone back across the ceiling, making sure the gallows spiders were good and dead, then let it meld back into the walls.
“Well, that was certainly exciting,” I said happily, pulling a bit of spider-silk from Skarn’s hair. “Mica is glad you’re not spider-food, Cousin.”
“Likewise,” Skarn growled, rubbing at the red burn on his neck where the Gallows Spider’s snare had caught him. “Now, where the hell are my boots?”
The evening found us all sitting around a mound of glowing fire salt amid our makeshift camp, which we had set up in the middle of a long, straight section of the tunnel, allowing us decent visibility in both directions. I dipped a chunk of hardtack in my ale to soften as I listened to Oberle discuss the enemy hideout.
“The grotto is at the bottom of a natural fissure. Water runs down it into a pool within a cave maybe a hundred yards wide. All their tents and things must have been hauled in, because I didn’t see any structures that looked grown or conjured.”
“Seems likely they don’t have the means,” added Tetra, who had been listening carefully and nodding along. “We haven’t found any Alacryans trained in that sort of magic. Their use of mana seems very specific.”
“It is,” I added. “Mica doesn’t think they brought their bakers and carpenters to Dicathen for war. Their soldiers focus on just one thing: killing our soldiers.”
“And how far away did you say this fissure is, again?” Kobel asked. He was a grizzled old dwarf; his left ear had been chewed off by something and his beard was patchy on that side due to a network of scars that ran across his face.
“Round about four hours, maybe five,” Oberle said with a noncommittal shrug. “Only been here the once and didn’t think I’d be back. The tunnels are all pretty easy going for the rest of the way, though.”
Tetra leaned forward and gazed at Oberle. The weak red light of the fire salt reflected in her pink eyes, making them glow like burning coals. “Were there any scouts, any guard posts outside of the grotto?”
“I never saw any, ma’am, and I was looking,” Oberle assured us. “Truth is, I was petrified after near-to-four days of crawling through the tunnels, just me and Torple. I had stared into every nook and cranny to make sure some critter wasn’t waiting to grab me from the shadows.”
“Awful lucky those gallows spiders weren’t there when you crossed the crevasse,” grumbled Skarn, eyeing the boy suspiciously.
“Maybe they were,” Oberle said, shrugging again. “We went the whole way in the dark, though. Torple insisted.”
“Ah, well, that wouldn’t have helped us any,” Hornfels said seriously. “The way Skarn huffs and puffs when he walks, they’d have found him regardless.” The group burst into laughter, all except Skarn, who eyed his twin dangerously and brandished his axe.
“Hey! You’re no better than—”
“Quiet!” I hissed, turning my ear toward the dark tunnel behind me. Tetra held aloft her lighting artifact and focused down the tunnel. The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up despite the fact that the tunnel appeared empty.
“What is it—” Skarn started to ask, but I motioned for silence.
Focusing mana into my eyes, I searched the tunnel for any sign of movement. There! The beam of light revealed the individual particles of dust floating in the air, and, at a point thirty feet down the tunnel, something was pushing them aside.
“They’re shielded!” I screamed, throwing up a wall of stone across the tunnel. An instant later, something hammered into it with the force of a battering ram. Behind me, a chorus of curses issued from my companions as they each jumped up and prepared to defend themselves.
A second blast caused a spider web of cracks to form in the wall. It wouldn’t survive a third, but that was fine with me.
Between my hands, I condensed earth mana into a rough stone a foot and a half wide. I kept pressing into it, forcing more mana into the stone but not allowing it to grow, until it weighed as much as a bull aurochs.
When the stone wall crumbled under the force of a third blast, I released the Meteor Strike, targeting the ground forty feet ahead. The dense stone began to glow as it streaked toward where I thought the enemy was hiding. When the meteor met the invisible barrier there was a sound like shattering glass and the shield fell away, briefly revealing three very surprised men.
One of the Alacryans was standing in the meteor’s path. He was nearly vaporized on contact. The speeding stone struck the ground behind the remaining two, exploding with enough force to fling them the thirty feet into our camp, where they landed in crumpled heaps, both entirely still.
Behind me, Hornfels lowered his axe. “Why are we here again?”
I was bent over the closest Alacryan, my hand pressed against his chest. “Entertainment,” I told him. I then checked the second man. “Dead, both of them. Mica hit them too hard.”
I straightened and gazed at my companions, mulling the situation over. “If Mica were in their boots, Mica would have sent the fastest runner back to warn of enemy soldiers nearby. The element of surprise is likely lost.”
“You could fly after them, see if you can catch up before they reach the grotto,” Hornfels suggested.
“Mica would have to leave you to do so, and we don’t know how long these three waited before they attacked. No. High risk, perhaps no reward. But we won’t give the Alacryans any more time to prepare than we have to. Break time is over. Grab your gear.”
We ran all the way to the fissure that led down into the hidden grotto where our enemy was camped, which took a little less than two hours. There had been no sign of the scout I assumed had gone to warn the Alacryans of our presence.
A series of cracks in the walls and ceiling dripped constantly, feeding a stream that meandered down the fissure. All around the stream grew glowing mushrooms, which filled the fissure with a dim green-blue light.
“How pretty,” I whispered, bending down to look more closely at the fungi. “Also deadly, Mica thinks.”
“We were warned not to touch them,” Oberle said quietly from behind me. “When I was here with Torple. The grotto’s just at the bottom, maybe three hundred yards.”
I took several careful steps into the fissure, trying to see what lay ahead, but the natural path was too jagged to see far. A flutter of something akin to fear passed through me, raising gooseflesh along my arms and neck. Don’t be a coward, I thought to myself.
Turning, I gazed at the rest of my party: pale, terrified Oberle; grim-faced Skarn; Hornfels, one eyebrow cocked slightly as he waited for my word; scarred Kobel and silent Jasper; and Tetra, glowing like fire bug with her light artifact held aloft.
“Perhaps Mica should go in alone,” I suggested, my voice barely audible. If there is a Scythe down there…
Skarn spit into the stream and Hornfels snorted. “Not bloody likely.”
“We’ve been tasked by Councilor Buhndemog himself with tracking down every last Alacryan in Darv, General Mica,” Tetra added. “It would be tantamoun
t to desertion if we turned away now.”
“Oberle,” I said, making a decision. He looked at me nervously. “You, at least, will return to Vildorial. Go to the Earthborn Institute and inform Mica’s attendant, Alanis, that you delivered us to the Alacryan hideout as promised. If Mica does not return within two days of your arrival in Vildorial, assume the worst. Alanis should beg assistance from the Council. If Mica dies, it will mean that a Scythe is still in Darv.”
Oberle’s resolve seemed to crack and his shoulders began to shake. “Thank you. They… they said if Torple or I came back to their camp we’d drop dead and I—I was so afraid, I thought for sure…” He trailed off as tears began to leak down into his beard.
“Hush now, you’ve done beautifully as Mica’s guide.” I smiled in what I hoped was a comforting way.
Oberle stepped into the fissure, carefully moving over the mushrooms, and wrapped me in a tight embrace. Unsure how to respond, I froze, staring helplessly over his shoulder at the others. Hornfels grinned and winked at me. Then the green-blue light around us shifted subtly, taking on an amethyst hue.
“What is—” Skarn started, but he was cut off by a pained grunt from Oberle.
The fire salt miner took a step back from me, staring down at his chest. A dull, purplish glow was radiating through his heavy tunic.
Stepping forward, I ripped open the thick cloth, revealing his barrel chest. Something within his sternum was glowing through his skin and getting brighter by the second.
Oberle opened his mouth to scream, but dark purple light came out instead.
He’s a bomb!
With no time to even shout a warning, I used Black Diamond Vault. A glimmering crystal structure appeared around me, then grew rapidly outward until it had encapsulated both me and Oberle within an impenetrable layer of black diamond.
Once Oberle was contained, I pushed out in all directions with a nova of anti-gravity, hopefully causing the others to slide away from the mineral prison containing the bomb. I couldn’t see or hear anything outside of the spell’s effects, though. With no way of knowing how strong the explosion would be, I waited, encased within the black crystals.