Of Truth and Beasts

Only instinct kept him clutching Hannâschi’s cloak as he threw himself back and fell. Muddy orange vapors spilled out of the opening, rising over the breach’s top lip and drifting upward. Before Chuillyon could roll off his back, Shâodh knocked his grip free and pulled Hannâschi farther out on the hall’s floor. He dropped to his knees, and she collapsed in his arms, her head lolling to one side.

“No ... no!” Shâodh stammered, all composure gone from his horrified face. 

Sau’ilahk saw Wynn’s glowing light ahead and even heard her voice. From what he could tell, she stood at some dark crosscut in the tunnel.

“Keep searching,” she said, her voice barely reaching him.

Sau’ilahk’s excitement grew. He longed to drift closer, but he was too close even now. Yet he could not bring himself to withdraw. What had she found?

Wynn suddenly appeared to drop out of sight, as if she sank lower than the tunnel floor. By the glow of a crystal’s light, Chane and Ore-Locks appeared to be on the crosscut’s far side, and a fair distance away from Wynn.

“What are we looking for?” Ore-Locks called.

“Any more of the same,” she called back. “Or anything unusual.”

Sau’ilahk’s urgency heightened. What did they search for?

A rumble carried down the tunnel from behind him, and he could not help turning to look.

Light spilled into the tunnel from the breach where he had planted his servitor. The elves must have come, but his stone worm could not have made that rumbling sound. He hung there, watching, until a crack like thunder echoed through the breach and down the tunnel.

Chuillyon regained his feet, prepared to repel whatever had assaulted Hannâschi. He drew his sleeve over his nose and mouth and looked through the breach, but he saw only the rough stone of the tunnel’s inner wall through the thinning vapors.

A crack of breaking stone filled the hall.

Chuillyon whirled as the sound pierced his ears. More stones crashed down the chute inside the wide breach at the hall’s other end. A billow of dark dust bulged out of the opening, and a charred stench filled the hall’s air.

It was not dust, but smoke.

Flame bellowed out of that breach, reaching toward the hall’s midpoint. Shâodh shouted something, but the fire’s roar drowned him out.

Before the flames had begun to die, a monstrous form crawled out of the wide breach on all fours, its bulk spreading the cloud of smoke. 

As the flames erupted, Ghassan tried running for the entrance, but he stumbled as he was assailed by searing heat. Something charged right through the fire, and he ran back behind the first effigy, rushing to its far side to see what was happening. All he saw amid the flames was something huge and four-legged, with a massive head on a long neck. It charged straight toward Chuillyon and his people. 

Wynn tensed at the thunderous echo rolling down the raw tunnel. A soft, red light filled the passage’s distant end back where the narrow breach led into the Chamber of the Fallen. But she froze before calling to the others.

A dark silhouette stood in the tunnel between her and that pulse of orange-yellow light.

Shade spun and lunged two paces past Wynn. The dog’s growl began to twist into something akin to a cat’s angry mewl, and her hackles rose in the light of Wynn’s crystal.

Wynn’s mind went numb. She knew Shade’s sounds, but she couldn’t accept what it meant, and kept whispering, “It cannot be. It cannot be.”

Wynn couldn’t take her eyes off the black figure framed by the orange glow farther up the tunnel. Then a crack of stone erupted behind her, followed by the sound of falling rocks.

Wynn twisted about as billowing dust and dirt rolled toward her.

“Chane!”

Chane was farther down the tunnel with Ore-Locks when three sounds stunned him in rapid succession. Shade let out a loud mewl of warning, and Chane shoved the cold lamp crystal into his pocket, reaching for his swords. Before he could draw them, he heard rocks falling overhead, and then Wynn cried out, “Chane!”

A cloud of dust and loosened earth filled the coal pocket between him and her, nearly blocking out her crystal’s light.

Chane heard rocks crashing down within that cloud, and still he lunged forward. He felt Ore-Locks grab his cloak and jerk him to a halt.

“Let go,” he snarled.

He turned in a frenzy, but faltered at the dwarf’s gaping mouth and wide eyes staring upward.

Ore-Locks shouted, “It is coming from—”

The rest was drowned in a thunder of crashing rock. Dust filled the air around both of them. Chane grew wild to reach Wynn as he looked back for her, but that choking cloud obscured everything.

Something lashed at him out of the dust.

He caught only a glimpse of a great, snaking tail with a barbed end, and he tried to duck. Its bulk caught him across the chest like a swinging tree trunk and slammed him against the tunnel wall. As the world darkened for an instant, he heard a metallic clang, and then Ore-Locks cried out.