“Amaryssan,” said Ria. “The Eastern Desert. We will cut a line across its center, the area directly in front of us. It will not be an easy trek, but it represents the last unforgiving stretch of terrain between us and Yvvestrosai.”
“What’s so unforgiving about it?” asked Damon.
“Aside from the usual trappings posed by such harsh terrain – lack of available water, food, or shelter – there are quite a few monsters that make their home within this region.”
Damon let a smile sneak onto his face as he set a hand on his myrblade. “Sounds like fun.”
Amaryssan was beautiful in its own barren, unforgiving way. The wind was the only constant presence, gusting and making waves flow through the yellow scrub grass poking out of sections of dirt and clay intermingling the sand.
Massive dunes cast deep shadows that stretched and shifted depending on the sun’s position overhead. Desert or not, the weather was still cold. After Damon and Ria set up their campsite after the first day of slogging through the sand, the sky clouded over, and it began to snow. It was no more than a pitiful dusting that quickly melted into the sand, but it felt strange, regardless.
They were deep within the desert on the third day when everything changed. Damon was half walking, half sliding down a dune when he felt the ground underneath them begin to shake with a subtle quiver.
“Do you feel that?” he asked Ria.
She’d been using her spear as a walking stick and took a moment to stick its butt into the ground and lean against it. “Feel what?
“The ground,” he said. “For a moment, it felt as though it was…”
Another rumble came, this one powerful enough to send a few burrowed beetles skittering from their hiding spots. Damon exchanged a worried glance with Ria, and then immediately set about searching the nearby area for anything resembling cover.
He didn’t get a chance to look that hard. The rumbling grew to the strength of a full-on earthquake, one centered on a point not far from where they stood. Damon pulled Ria into a run, but it was hard to move swiftly through the desert.
A sudden burst of dust and sand came from Damon’s left, and he felt a shadow falling across him even before he’d seen what they were dealing with. He turned and felt his breath catch in his throat, fingers twitching as he fumbled to get his sword out.
A massive sand snake was midway through berthing from within the desert, creating a living arch of monsterish, scaly flesh overhead. It was as wide as Damon was tall, and at least a hundred feet long. It was, in a word, terrifying.
He’d faced off against a variety of monsters over the course of his life, from lidaragi to tau, even the moderately sizable colossus snakes of the Malagantyan. He’d never seen anything like this, never even dreamed of it in his most disturbing nightmares. It could crush them simply by falling over at the right angle, burying them in sand, even swallowing them whole. What could they possibly do against it?
“Run!” shouted Ria.
Damon was on board with that idea with every fiber of his being. They took off through the desert, their direction lost in their haste to simply get away. The speed with which they ran was one unlocked by the intensity of their desperation. Run or die. Run or be consumed. It was a simple, inescapable truth.
Time seemed to slow into fractured seconds as the sand snake came down in front of them, mouth open wide enough to expose several hideous rings of teeth. Damon seized Ria, who was a step in front of him, by the back of her tunic and yanked with all his strength as the monster dove into the sand within mere feet of swallowing her whole.
Unexpectedly, the hole the creature left in its wake began expanding. Damon felt himself suddenly scrambling uphill in his rush to put distance between himself and the monster. The sand crumbled underneath his hands and feet, slipping away, pulling him downward faster than he could pull himself up.
He shouted as the abyss opened and drew him in.
***
“Damon,” whispered Myr. “Damon! Wake up! Hey!”
Damon let out a groan and tried to pull himself up into a sitting position. He blinked, which was a mistake. His eyelids were coated with a layer of sand and dirt that threatened to force its way into sensitive places as his vision adjusted to the dark.
“What happened…” he muttered. “Am I… inside the snake?”
“Um…” Myr sounded caught between worry and amusement. “Do you want me to answer that or just give you another second to recover yourself?”
“I’m good, thanks.”
He was somewhere dark, but also somewhere spacious, judging from the way his voice echoed through the emptiness. A tiny dot of light was visible far above, too far to be a realistic means of escape. He was underground, in some kind of subterranean sand cavern.
“Rovahn’s balls,” he muttered. “This is where that monster lives, isn’t it?
“I don’t know,” said Myr.
He slowly pulled himself to his feet and began taking stock of his situation. He wasn’t injured beyond a few scratches and bruises. He still had his traveling pack, though a quick inspection of its interior revealed that he’d shattered his lantern at some point during the fall. His food and waterskin were still intact, which was a massive relief.
Ria was nowhere to be seen. Damon only barely resisted the urge to start shouting for her, aware of the likelihood of it being more than just the two of them in the sprawling cavern. His eyes were beginning to adjust, despite the fact that the hole through which he’d fallen seemed to be refilling and closing itself off with a fresh slide of sand.
There was more ambient light than he’d realized at first. Luminescent moss grew on both the cavern’s walls and the massive rock spires hanging from the ceiling and extending upward from the ground. The illumination it gave off was faint and reminiscent of the sickly green of the ghost moon, but it was enough for him to see a bare outline of the area.
“I need to find Ria,” he whispered. “If I’m down here, she must be, too.”
Myr didn’t say anything. He took her silence for affirmation and picked a direction at random in which to set off.
The simple act of walking across the cavern’s floor was made needlessly challenging by the nature of the terrain. It was filled with trenches and sloping ledges, as though centuries if not millennia of erosion had found certain types of rock easier to move than others.
The sound of dripping water in the distance was a constant distraction, and the air also surprisingly dank and humid, warmer than it had been on the surface. Damon resisted the temptation to consider how he might find a way back up when it was time, as the question threatened to feed into his ambient sense of claustrophobia.
A shout came from ahead of him and to his left, too distorted by the echo for him to make out specific words. He headed toward it, slowing as the sandy rock underneath his feet began to slope downward in a circular bowl shape.
“Daaa… mon,” called a familiar, though far distant voice.
“Ria!” he shouted. “Where are you?”
He had to wait a few seconds before the answer came.
“Down here!” she shouted.
The echo made the words lap over one another, emphasizing just how far down she was. He could see a dark pit at the center of the bowl-shaped depression in front of him, feeling his stomach twist as he considered how deep she might be.
“Are you alright?” he called. The question felt naïve and overly hopeful. He had to ask it, regardless.
“I am uninjured,” called Ria. “There was water where I landed. It is over my head. I… have not found a place with footing.”
Damon furiously considered his options. There was the rope, but it was still in Ria’s pack. If she could throw it up to him, maybe he could pull her up? He looked at the hole again, considering how horribly pitched her shouts were by the echo. Was she fifty feet down? A hundred feet? More than that?
“I’m going to drop a rock to try to get a sense of how deep down you are,” he said
. “It’s just a small one. Apologies in advance if it lands on you.”
“Damon!” called Ria.
He gave it a shot, letting a coin-sized rock fall and listening for the splash. The time that went by before he heard it plunk into the water was disconcerting, if not outright heartbreaking.
“It is too far for the rope,” said Ria. “I know it is.”
“There’s another way,” he said.
“There is no other way. Damon… Husband… you must continue on. I will not have you wasting your only chance of survival on holding out on an empty hope.”
“Move toward the wall,” called Damon. “I’m coming down.”
“What?” Ria’s voice was panicked, and he heard the sound of water splashing from below. “No! Stay where you are! Damon, hold for a moment and think about this…”
He did, long enough to decide to shrug off his traveling pack so his food wasn’t ruined by the water. He slid down to the center of the bowl-shaped depression and eyed the imposing darkness of the pit. It wasn’t a simple thing to just jump and hope for the best, not according to his tense nerves and accelerating heart.
“Are you out of the way?” he asked.
“Damon, you foolish ass! Please! Spend some time thinking of another—"
He stepped forward before she could finish, letting himself drop into the mouth of the abyss.
CHAPTER 13
Damon was silent as he plummeted into the pit, though various internal screams reverberated through the core of his marrow. It wasn’t so much that he was terrified by the fall or even the potential for the danger, more the simple, innate way that the anticipation of his landing combined with the inability to see the water below.
He had no idea how long he’d been in the air or how much farther he had to go. It was more than unsettling and shook something deep in his core, a need for certainty, even if it came as certain death.
When he finally splashed down into the water, it was mid-breath. The force of his impact stung his feet through the soles of his boots, and he was left flailing to swim, not entirely certain of which way was up.
He let out a gasp that echoed weirdly off the walls of the pit as he surfaced. Ria was shouting at him in an annoyed voice, and he reached toward her, grabbing something that felt suspiciously soft against his hand.
“Ahem,” said Ria. “That is my breast.”
“It’s a nice breast.”
“You are a child,” she said. “You are a fool! What purpose is there in you subjecting yourself to the same hopeless fate I stumbled into?”
“It’s far from hopeless, now that I’m here,” he said. “Give me some space.”
She must have heard the confidence in his voice and trusted it. She splashed backward, giving Damon room to draw his myrblade and prepare for what came next.
“Good,” he said. “Now wrap your arms around my shoulders and hang on tight.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Lift us out of here. Now grab on.”
She did. Her teeth were chattering, and he could feel how cold she was through the contact of their skin. If he’d arrived an hour later, it was anyone’s guess whether she would still have been afloat, drained of energy and body heat.
Damon let out a breath of frozen condensation that passed near enough to Ria’s neck to send a wave of shivers through her. Carefully, still treading water, he took his sword and slid it down alongside his feet, focusing on picturing what he wanted to do as he drew from the myrblade’s magic.
A pillar of ice rose underneath them, lifting them up and onto solid, albeit frozen, ground. Water dripped from their bodies and clothing, freezing to the ice on contact. Ria clung tighter to him as he continued channeling his magic, driving the pillar upward and toward the pit’s mouth.
It wasn’t a simple act of magical prowess. The pit was deep enough to require him to think about how best to utilize the water to cross the distance between them and safety. He kept the pillar as thin as possible, barely a steppingstone for them both to stand on, embracing one another.
Higher and higher they rose, until the top of the pit was in sight and Ria shivered wildly against him. Damon didn’t feel cold, but was numbly aware of the fact that he was freezing, hardly any warmer than the ice.
“There,” he gasped, jaw clenching from the exertion of will. “That’s the top. We can pull ourselves up from here.”
“Husband,” whispered Ria. “I… think I am frozen to you.”
“Ah.” Damon shifted his focus, trying to let his own body temperature stabilize. “Any better?”
Ria pulled her cheek away from his, and Damon felt a small pinch as the skin separated.
“That was not all that pleasant,” she said.
“We’re alive and out of the pit. That’s all that matters.”
He let Ria go first, watching her pull herself up to the moderate safety of the cavern. To step off the platform without letting go of his myrblade, he had to time his own departure just so. He let the pillar dissolve as he jumped, pulling his sword with him and scrambling over the rock ledge onto solid ground.
They were out of the pit, but far from out of danger, the darkness of the cavern feeling endless and all-consuming. Damon watched Ria taking stock of her traveling pack, which had fallen into the water along with her, ruining much of her food and leaving her without a change of dry clothes. She shivered and swore a few times under her breath as she wrung water out of a tunic and stuffed it away.
“We could rest here,” he suggested. “Set off once we’ve had time to dry and recover a bit.”
“I have no intention of staying in this cave a moment longer than I must,” said Ria.
Damon looked around. There wasn’t much to see, even with his eyes adjusted to the dim light.
“In that case, let’s start exploring,” he said. “There must be a place where it connects to the surface. We’ll keep an eye on the ground and watch for areas where it starts to slope upward.”
Ria nodded, and they both set off. Their progress was slow and directionless, with obstacles ranging from similar pits to the one they’d fallen into, to steep underground cliffs, and even just treacherous footing. Lichen and slime covered much of the rock, forcing them to take each step as though walking across ice.
Eventually, Damon found a tunnel which had a promising upward incline. He made sure to keep Ria close to him as he started along it but didn’t trust the darkness, even after more than an hour spent within it.
The tunnel shifted along wide, meandering turns, as though a river had carved through the stone. It narrowed in places, forcing them to commit to squeezing through tight gaps in single file. After one such chokepoint, it began to widen, opening up into a second large cavern that, by Damon’s reckoning, was at least a few dozen feet higher than where they’d started.
“Why are there so many rocks?” asked Ria, gesturing to the open chamber in front of them. “They seem oddly placed.”
Damon nodded slowly. Several dozen boulders, each smooth and oblong, sat in a messy, but not completely random pattern across the floor. A thin layer of strange fog occluded much of the chamber, lending a stale and bitter scent to the air, and in the distance, a soft rattling noise was audible.
“I don’t think those are rocks,” said Damon.
“No?” Ria strode over to the closest one. “What would you assume them to be, in that…”
She touched one with her hand and immediately drew it back in disgust. The rock, the egg, shuddered slightly, and a crack formed across where her fingers had been an instant previous.
“Jad’s blood…” she swore. “Disgusting.”
“We have to keep going,” he whispered. “This is a sure sign that we’re on the right path. The sand snakes feed in the desert. There has to be a tunnel leading out from here.”
“You would have us walk through the nest of the monster that nearly ate us before we fell down here?”
She was already stepping backward, movi
ng toward where they’d arrived from. Damon took her hand and squeezed it reassuringly, feigning confidence more than feeling it.
“Eggs are harmless,” he said. “Juvenile sand snakes are also probably harmless. If we encounter a larger one, I’ll handle it with my myrblade.”
“I’m not in love with snakes either, you know,” whispered Myr.
“We’re in more danger of starving in this cavern than we are of being overwhelmed by a bunch of eggs.” He gave the nearest one a nudge with his foot to illustrate his point.
“Fine,” said Ria. “But let us move quickly.”
“No objections to that.”
They weaved through rows upon rows of eggs, taking care not to draw too near any of them whenever possible. Damon paid attention to the slope, making sure they always continued in a direction that would take them nearer the surface. Unfortunately, it kept moving in the direction of the rustling noise he’d heard before, until the source of it drew into view against the darkness.
A ball of mating sand snakes sat near the back of the chamber, next to an opening that potentially would lead them to their escape. The snakes were entwined, almost knotted together, and the collective pile was twice Damon’s height and similarly wide.
“I feel sick,” muttered Ria.
The snakes abruptly stopped hissing. Damon gripped Ria’s shoulder, preparing to pull her into a sprint back the way they’d come, but after a moment or two of heightened interest, the creatures returned to their business.
He slowly nodded to the tunnel next to the mating pile and started walking in that direction, taking Ria’s hand again and making sure she stayed close. He never turned his back completely to the snake ball, just in case. It was a layer of caution which, as he soon realized, was justified.
The ground shook, and a shower of sand fell from the tunnel’s ceiling. Damon had just enough time to pull Ria with him as he leapt backward, narrowly avoiding the giant sand snake as it burst through the wall to their left.
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