by Scott Beith
“She only went up there to bring me back down,” stated Anara, shuffling past the two guards and through the study doorway in quick defence of me, less puffed than I was as she came straight inside to take her place beside me and her mother.
Surprisingly, Milena decided to disregard the guard’s remark about me being up in the Sunspire. “You got this at Midas’s old house?” she calmly tried to clarify.
“Yes, with the sword. Somewhere very close to the gnoll’s ambush sites,” I added.
“Your majesty, despite his insanity, I believe Midas still cares very deeply about his son. Enough to have planted it there for Akoni to one day find. They’re in serious danger if they enter the Caverns without this information. We need to bring them back immediately,” I said, my words playing upon my queen’s very deepest fears, enough to consider me inconsequential in her eyes – at least for the time being.
Ebony had been standing just as deathly still as the other guards, patiently waiting for a time to include herself in this discussion. “My lady, I will go,” she offered. “Please send me and Cammy. We’re the only two who can reach them before they arrive at the Caverns.”
“I CAN’T!” Milena shouted in a strange but determined frustration, throwing the map to the ground in an angry fit as she walked around the room, trying to think how she could save her son. “We just can’t!” she repeated. “Even if we catch them, we still need that crystal, and any new additions to their team would only risk exposing Arlo and Akoni to outsiders… We just can’t afford someone like Camilla to leave The Capital right now,” she added to Ebony.
“This mission is do or die for us, regardless. It’s just too important to cancel, despite who it is,” she objectively reasoned, trying to convince herself and us that letting Akoni and her son continue with their mission was the best course of action.
“Your majesty, we need to warn them,” I contested, disputing her decision not to intervene.
“WE?!” Milena shouted. “YOU’RE NOT A SOLDIER, KYA! NEITHER OF YOU ARE!” she howled towards me and her own daughter alike, stepping in front of us and grabbing our shoulders as she began pushing us out the door. “Go back to your quarters, girls, and do not leave them until I have come to speak with you!” she then barked, the anger in her words spooking me so much that my shadow manifested by the bookcase, rising up like a ghost in the corner as Milena turned to notice it and then quickly let Anara and me go. My subconscious had conjured it in response to the panic of feeling threatened, and I could only assume it was about to make the situation even worse for me, but it didn’t. “Please just go,” said the queen in a strangely polite tone, the presence of the shadow startling both Milena and Ebony enough for them to turn away from us and move back towards each other in a show of peace.
Finding quick refuge in the dining room just across the hall, I took a seat at the cleared table Arlo’s and Ebony’s family had all just eaten dinner at, sitting on a chair and popping my feet up onto another, while Anara paced back and forth around the side of the table, contemplating our current situation.
“Now what?” I muttered to Anara, near ready to return to my room and merely await a supreme punishment far greater than I had ever received in the past. “Milena’s right… Even if Ebony and Camilla go, they will never catch them in time,” I sighed in defeat.
Anara stopped pacing and dangled the treasure map over my head, a sinister smile appearing on her face as she lowered her head beside my shoulder, as if to whisper something mischievously evil into my ear.
“How much do you trust me?” she then asked in a calm, and almost scary, tone, dropping the map onto my legs as a ploy for me to hold it. Her hand reaching out for me to grab it, a symbol of her asking me to follow her lead.
Rolling my eyes, as I knew full well what I was about to get myself into. And so, inhaling one last safe breath, I attempted to refocus my mind. “Regrettably… I trust you with my life,” I responded and grabbed her hand. The world whitening around me once again as Anara dragged me blindly down the hall towards whatever creative horror she had in store for us this time around.
13
The Chase
We ran down the empty streets and into the winding tunnels, stopping only briefly to pass through a stray burial room in the vault to loot a handful of gold coins for our journey ahead. Next Anara dragged me over one of the many web bridges into what I could only assume was the very centre of the brooding chamber’s nursery pit, both of us needing to step ever so carefully as we crept silently along the crypt walls of the funnel web group stables, overhearing the patter of large roaming spider feet carelessly lurking alongside us while we blindly trotted towards the chamber walls within the nesting grounds. The two of us finally able to break free from all nearby spider trainers and guards and be assured that we were going to be alone enough in order to hitch a suitable ride and make our dramatic prison escape.
With Anara finally letting go of my hand, my sight returned as I re-emerged from her cold invisibility. To my surprise, we were back in Vallah’s side burrow, and Vallah was actually there, coiled up all cosy and warm before us, her eight feet tuckered into her body snuggly. I was more than astounded and thankful that she was able to make it home safely after all that befell us back in the meadows. As to even greater surprise, her saddle was still on, meaning all we had to do was cautiously approach her and hope she had no ill will towards me, considering what had happened.
And so, moving over to pat her head as gently as possible. She nestled her head straight into my chest upon my greeting.
“Looks like somebody missed you,” whispered Anara as she came over to pat her as well. A true godsend to see that she’d made it back safe and unharmed, despite all the beetle swarms and maggot flies that tend to prey upon animals caught outside the walls on their own.
She was thrilled to see me again, almost as if she was yearning for freedom. A giant baby playfully rising and prancing back and forth as Anara attempted to check her saddle, leaving me in the burrow to quickly glance out and check for roaming guards. Anara climbed onto Vallah’s back and stretched her hand down to me, helping pull me up behind her. We moved slowly and carefully back towards the bridge and the chasm’s overbearing edge, waiting for a moment to execute our slow but stealthy spelunk down the great cave’s gorge. The most simple but elegant of unspoken plans being to just drop down looking like any other free-roaming adult spider, and to ensure that only a short mad dash would be necessary to escape this labyrinth, without anyone being the wiser to us being here.
“Stop!” the stable master shouted, bursting that thought bubble almost immediately as it was schemed, our plan having to rapidly change as he signalled some of his preoccupied spider trainers to apprehend us. Those tending guards of his all dropping their coaching leashes unanimously as they attempted to chase us down on foot, only to lose us to the distance as we jumped off into the great spirally chasm expanse deeply below.
The two of us each gripping a side of the saddle tightly while Vallah rappelled down the murky cavern long before any riders came quick enough to make any effort to pursue. Dropping down as fast as one legitimately could fall.
And so, abseiling down our spider’s web vine, we slowed enough to strike ground with only a gentle bump, landing on the biggest stone island surrounded by a toxic yellow and green moat of bubbling spider bile. This lowest cave chamber floor completely absent of all animal and plant life alike, insidiously deceptive to new coming animals in making them think this could be a place of safety and refuge.
Vallah scuttled over the thin bark bridge overlooking the forest’s deep ocean cliff face and valley, passing us straight into the mainland shrubbery, as any possibility of pursuit would have went cold the second we dared to head off track and dive into the wild thickening shrubbery heading around the canyons, moving towards the northern hinterlands behind the other side of the high rising castle.
I looked around in a state of blissful wonder as the wetness of usual rainfor
est vegetation began to dry out and space itself to barky woodlands and then into a huge green grassy clearing. I had never been this far north before, only seen it from out in the distance when I was a kid sneaking up to the old unused lighthouse tower on the northern side of the castle.
Out beyond the hinterlands, even the air was dangerous. For it was filled with giant plant spores always falling down to the earth like slow moving granite-sized boulders. Rusted old signs were posted about on the grass stalks we passed through, warning us of the falling and crushing plant debris.
Anara scanned the environment periodically, attempting to locate something she obviously had her heart set on.
We had ridden for what seemed like hours, watching the sunrise as the baby fresh green tree stalks rose up to the sky in bloom, the sight always repeating itself as we continued to head further outwards, in the very opposite direction of where the boys would have been travelling.
I felt as though each step we took only brought us further and further away from them, but I didn’t want to speak up. I truly did trust Anara completely, and there was no better travel guide than her. So doing my best to be patient, I stayed quiet as we travelled between giant ferns and the dirt mounds they sat upon.
Sunlight had begun to strike us hard as we tried to move between the high shade of those plants, every so often coming across huge colossal fungal domes that grew out in fester of the smaller plants that couldn’t quite grow fast enough to receive the light.
It was nothing but a reprieve for me, however, as those wide and wild mushroom caps helped block out at least some of the early morning’s heavy rays. I couldn’t help but watch and ponder as those stray fungal monstrosities growing like tumours on those dying plants, fought their own harsh battle for daylight. Stalks turning from green to brown, simply because they couldn’t compete with the taller counterparts right beside them.
Eventually enough was enough. I couldn’t help but ask, “Anara what are we even looking for?” I enquired exhaustedly.
“Midday,” she then announced back to me, quite cheerily and bubbly, despite our long silent boredom.
“When the time is right, we should see a few buds on one of those treetops begin to split and flower – they’re bright yellow so you can’t miss them,” she then proceeded to state, still looking around everywhere as she took pleasure in soaking in the sunlight amidst this slow and hot trek into the epicentre of the pollen fields.
I had a sneaky feeling she was thinking of attempting to fly Vallah with a dangerous technique spiders use to migrate with called ‘ballooning’. Daredevils have often thought a means of quick transportation could be achieved through such a radical idea of getting their spider to shoot out a web into the sky and take off with the wind the second the web catches something solid, moving through the air like some spontaneous kite-flying service.
I knew she was still young and a little naive at times, but she couldn’t have been so young to think such an extreme sport was free of potential danger, especially when she hadn’t had any practice or raw utilities to help us direct where precisely we wanted to go. Among other dangers found up in the sky, there was a complete inability to predict where we would even land – should we be silly enough to attempt such a feat without the flying debris we hitched ourselves upon, simply crushing us the very second we landed.
“We’re not ballooning,” she was quick to state, somehow reading my mind.
“Well, what are we doing then?” I asked nervously.
“Something much faster,” she then said with an ominous tone, finally spotting a giant green towering tree as she said it, the giant yellow petals slowly peeling backwards as they began to gradually fall and dangle from the splitting bud at the top of the stalk.
“Don’t worry, I’ve done this before,” she assured to me, lifting the saddle’s leash to direct Vallah upwards, instructing her to begin the climb up the tree’s giant fat green stalk.
“If that were true, why weren’t you able to find this tree straight away?” I asked, feeling negative and pessimistic due to the current vertigo I was once again feeling.
“Because every tree here only lives for one day,” she wisely explained, educating me about this strange species of plant. “They sprout up randomly all across this flat region of land. Never twice in the same spot,” she added.
Having moved very quickly, Vallah had already valiantly climbed onto the long yellow petal leaves before I could think of anything more to say, and we headed diagonally inwards, towards the flat fuzzy centre top. A single sloping climb achieved with minimal delay as she threw all her front legs out and over the ledge of the plant’s thick tree-trunk stem, pulling us onto a star-shaped flat yellow plateau.
More proud of my spiderling than I had ever been, Anara and I hugged into her as she dropped down onto to her belly and slid us down the hill of the inner yellow leaf petal towards its black and yellow centre node. We had found ourselves in a natural field of those huge fuzzy yellow pollen balls that were seen sporadically floating around in the sky.
The view from this yellow tower top was insane, the scenery alive with drifting leaf particles and spores colliding against one another as they moved west with the wind, fibrous squishy-looking pollen balls expelling outwards by the dozen, each from a different towering treetop, yet all jumbling and mixing in the sky as one, with the distant coastal wind blew them inland, towards the mountains.
“Quick now, we don’t have long,” Anara said abruptly, jumping off Vallah and dismissing the cool crazy view in a sudden, almost frightful, rush. “Kya, we need to bind four of these fuzzy spheres together before the next blimp comes,” she instructed, shaking her hand to me unsteadily as she signalled me to hop off Vallah and allow her to get quickly to work.
“Blimp?” I asked timidly.
Anara raised her hand upwards in anxious concern, pointing out a giant fat-bellied beast flying down at us from the sunny sky. This flying goliath starting to vibrate the tree and earth as its hornet wings flickered, its round large tummy buzzing towards us in some kind of slow dooming attack.
There was no time to ask what it was or what to do, only time to blindly obey the last words Anara said to me, so I attempted to focus, despite the trembling of my hands and feet due to the earth quaking on approach of this monster.
I was able to utilize the very shade made from this beast’s eclipsing descent, conjuring and concentrating enough of the blanketing mist into mushroom sprouts that pushed like springs against the pollen balls at the highest rim of this rooftop field, tipping and rolling two of them downwards as they crashed and collided into a larger cluster near the corner centre Anara and I were close enough to.
But thinking of it only as a means for refuge, I ran inside the gap of those four sphere corners as quick as I could. Surprised Anara had planned one step further, as she instructed Vallah to wrap around it with countless long ropes of silk, creating a fast but innovative protective basket while Anara and I climbed up to one of the top corner pollen balls while a roof and floor was hastily netted together by our incredible ride. Hey quick effort successful at locking all those fluffy fabric boulders together with dexterous silk cables, only to seal in the roof last as Vallah crept inside like a hermit crab hiding in its strong sturdy shell.
We silently waited to find out if we’d been spotted by the creature outside. All hopes of survival being crushed the very moment our basket began to rattle and shake. The beast was ramming against our enclosure violently, trying to crack us open like an egg. The fine hairs of the pollen catching onto the beast’s skin as it rubbed itself against the cage. I looked to Anara, who had closed her eyes, consumed by terror. A lady stopped mid-prayer as soon as the shaking began to stop.
I blew out at breath of relief, only to suck it back in and lock my arms around the branchy hairs of the corner sphere I sat upon, looking downwards in dread and agony upon the realisation we were flying through the clouds, high up in the air.
The creature had attached
itself to our basket, much like the design of a blimp, and only then did I understand that all the horror we had just gone through had been Anara’s natural intention all along. And, in total honestly, I wanted to slap and shove her for not cluing me in with what she wanted us to do the entire time. But the sad truth of that was, if she actually had have been kind enough to have told me, I don’t think I would have been able to go through with it. So, despite all the grief I had been put through, I was mostly just thankful to all the angels above that this silk cage didn’t end up becoming my coffin.
And so, looking up towards the belly of the beast, noticing its black and yellow body stripes in between the patchy webbed roof that exposed us to this beast’s ludicrous hanging undercarriage, my nerves slowly did subside. Our four-cornered basket cage appearing to be glued well enough to handle the shaking of the beasts flight as the basket hung over its enormous hairy belly along with countless other pollen balls from the previous treetops it must have fed on and visited.
“Do you know where it’s taking us?” I whispered to Anara, hoping the creature wouldn’t hear me talking.
“Its hive. Have you ever heard of the Honeycomb Hideout?” she said with an amusing smirk.
“You’re not serious, are you?!” I said in quickened tremble. “Anara, that’s a pirate sanctuary – a safe haven for the criminals and traitors who flee our borders because of your father and mother.”
“Yeah, that’s the one. I’m glad you’ve heard of it.”
“Do you know what they’ll do to you if they figure out who you are?” I ranted, just as scared for her safety as I was for mine.
“Relax, they won’t recognise me. Besides, it’s much faster to the Caverns than the way my dumb brother is going. We could easily arrange transport towards the Caverns’ mountainside peak and be there hours before he and Akoni even arrive,” she argued.
“If even one of those castaways recognises you...” I trailed off, scared for my life all over again, only this time afraid of what happens when this blimp ride actually ends, truly unable to even fathom the punishment that would come, should Anara be caught.