The Destroyer Book 2

by Michael-Scott Earle

  Luck was on my side and the creature proved predictable. As it darted forward to sink its horrible teeth into my friend, I leapt on top of its carapace-covered head and drove the point of my long sword deep in between the two opposing clusters of eyes. There was a slight resistance as the blade slid past the armored skull before I felt the tip penetrate the squishy brain. The beast flopped on the ground next to Greykin. Then it began to twist, thrash, and coil as its reptilian brain sent false signals to the rest of its putrid body.

  The big man let out a yelp as he threw himself out of the way to avoid being crushed. I flipped off of the creature's head, dashed away, and then winced in disappointment when I heard my sword snap. I hadn't been quick enough to yank it out of the wurm's skull and it had rolled on top of the blade's handle. We watched it coil around itself and thrash its many grotesque, clawed appendages for a few seconds before the Old Bear commented.

  "Fucking burning cow shit on a stick!" Greykin cursed.

  "I have never seen anything so horrible," Danor said. His face was white.

  "Can we do anything for Cedrig?" my big friend asked. I assumed he spoke about the man whose arm the monster had ripped from his body. He was still screaming but the blood poured out of his body like a river. Danor nodded and grabbed a medical pack out of my backpack. The other men seemed to still be in shock and they waited until the creature had stopped moving before they approached Danor to help with any possible first aid.

  "The creature's mouth was putrid. He will probably succumb to an infection, if he has not already lost too much blood," I said to the big man, but he stared at the corpse of the massive snake and I didn't think he heard me.

  "Greykin?" I asked as I touched his arm. He blinked several times and looked at me.

  "I never believed I would see one of these monsters. I thought they were myths to scare children. If we didn't have other pressing matters, I would want to have some of our sages study this creature." He sighed. "Of course, we need to take back our kingdom first."

  "It smells like corruption," I said as I wrinkled my nose. The big man laughed and put his hand on my shoulder.

  "You are quite the stoic my thin friend. I don't think there is anything that concerns you. Everyone else shat their pants, aye, including me, but you actually did something."

  "Not true Greykin, you were the first to attack it."

  "I happened to be the closest. Thank you for slaying the beast. I thought it was the end of the road for me." Greykin put his giant hand on my shoulder. "The more we are around each other, the more gratitude I owe you." His words filled with emotion and the big man's eyes shone brightly in the torchlight.

  "You would have done the same for me." I smiled at him and shrugged a little. I knew he would have ripped apart mountains to save his friends.

  "Too bad about your sword," he remarked as we approached the giant corpse and my broken blade.

  "I have a spare." I pointed to the short blade at my hip. It was only a foot in length, but I could kill with the weapon, as long as it wasn't another monster-sized mutated serpent. I thought about grabbing a blade from one of my dead companions, but they had all dropped into the sea of mist. It might take me hours to find one.

  "He's gone," Danor called over to us. The other men took off their skull caps and bowed their heads.

  "We should bury our comrades," the mustached man said as he handed me back the unused medical kit.

  "It will take too much time, lads. We have a mission to accomplish. I don't want to stick around here with all this blood. There might be more of these monsters, and I am sure they all have noses." The men looked shaken by his words. Danor sighed in worry and then nodded.

  "How much longer?" Greykin inquired.

  "Ten minutes at the most," he said and the group began to walk again. The mists seemed to grow thicker and the men jumped at imaginary noises. Every minute that passed could be counted by the Old Bear asking Danor about our time, and I didn't think it helped relieve the group of their fears.

  After he asked the fifth time I heard another scraping noise behind us. I was at the back of our party and didn't like the idea of being the first meal it would target. I pulled my blade out of its sheath and spun around to run backward.

  "There is one at our rear," I spoke as calmly as I could over my shoulder.

  "Are you sure?" Danor almost screamed in panic.

  "Should we run?" I said as I looked down at my short sword. I doubted it would penetrate the creature's skull. I would have to use the Elements if the creature attacked.

  "We are almost there. Hold the line," Greykin shouted in encouragement and I turned around to face the backs of my companions.

  We continued to move, so quickly now that when I felt a cold trail of sweat down my back I was not sure if it was from fear or exertion. I had experience fighting men and Elvens; I could use my weapons and magic. I could heal myself if I made mistakes. These wurms were new. They could rip me apart with little effort. I had always been skilled, disciplined and hardworking, but also lucky. For the first time I felt my life was not in my own hands.

  Perhaps this was the night my luck would run out.

  The sound of the river had grown so loud that I was sure the other warriors heard it roar. I couldn't see through the darkness and mists, but I estimated that it lay less than a hundred yards away. We all ran now and I found it difficult to listen for the sliding sounds of the monster over the cascade of the water, the slamming of boots into the stone, and our fearful breathing.

  In correlation to our running speed, the thick layer of mist that hugged the ground had grown almost two feet high, making it impossible to see anything below our knees. When one of the men tripped and fell, screaming with fear, I wasn't surprised. He collapsed in front of me and I bent over to pull him upright. As soon as my hands closed around his shoulder I smelled the putrid stench of the mutated snake descend upon me like a sticky spider web.

  I dove to my side and narrowly avoided its snapping jaws. The creature aimed for me and not my fallen comrade, but the warrior still screamed as if the monster had sunk its beak into his own torso. I continued my roll and came to my feet in a crouched position. I somehow managed to keep my torch and my sword in my hands. This snake was smaller than the first beast we encountered, but still reeked of death and poison.

  "Get up asshole!" Greykin screamed as the slime-covered creature made another darting strike. This time it went for the man who fell instead of me. The man's scream of terror turned into one of wet, bloody pain when he was yanked off the ground and crunched in the creature's powerful jaws.

  "Follow Danor! Run!" the Old Bear shouted, and the group of warriors scattered. Danor sprinted in one direction like a rabbit running for the shelter of a bush. The Old Bear followed him and most of the others did the same.

  Two of the men either didn't know which direction Danor and the rest fled, or they felt so much terror that they ran without thinking. They split off from the main party and ran to the west, in between the wurm feasting on the corpse and the group. I hoped that they would be able to realize their mistake and join us before the creature finished its meal.

  "The support structures!" I caught up to Danor and Greykin in a few seconds. Our guide pointed toward a massive colonnade a quarter of a mile in the distance. Although it was pitch black in the cavern, the towers appeared to be backlit by purple and blue light. The pillars seemed to grow out of the ground and connect to the ceiling like man-made stalagmites. Each support column was almost as thick in diameter as the towers in the castle above. Haphazard bridges and slack ropeways connected the structures like the ancient vines that grew between the trees of the Vanlourn jungle.

  "The first one is no good! Run up the stairs of the second!" Danor called out as he altered his destination to aim toward the larger pillar, which was an extra two hundred yards away.

  "Watch out!" I yelled as I saw movement to our right flank. This was a different wurm than the one that had just attacked us. It h
ad a slimmer torso and was a blood rust color instead of the brownish green. A soldier tried to move out of the way, but the serpent proved too fast. Its set of beak-like jaws closed around his shoulders and crushed his skull as easily as I would pop a grape between my thumb and pointer finger. The monster picked the corpse off of the ground and repeated the same gesture as other lizards when they latched onto meat. They shook their heads frantically side to side until their razor sharp teeth and the momentum tore the body into a piece small enough for them to guzzle.

  "There are at least two of them!" I croaked out through a stomach full of icy fear. I couldn't recall being more terrified in any of my memories.

  Finally, we reached the base of the massive support structure. We ran around it to the left until we came to a narrow set of stairs that hugged the face of the wall. Danor scurried up on all fours and we followed in the same frantic manner. After two hundred stressful steps, the stairs widened into a platform and the crumbled remains of what had once been a bridge to another column. The group collapsed on the solid part of the landing and gasped for breath. I wasn't winded from the sprint up the stairs and posted at the top in case the creatures decided to follow.

  "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!" The Old Bear pounded his fist into the stone platform over and over as he cursed. Each one of his blows seemed to shake the ancient structure like an earthquake and I wondered if the wurms would hear. "Roll call. Who is here?" The men called out their names. Six of us remained, including Greykin, Danor, and myself.

  "That's nine we have lost. They were good lads too." The big man's voice filled with remorse and pain. "I hope the prince is fucking grateful. If he makes one snide remark about how long we took to rescue him, I'll rip his fucking ears off." I would have smiled, but something on the pillar caught my eye and I got off my knees to look at the wall of the vertical beam.

  The stone was odd. Most rock is porous, but the slabs of the support column seemed to be made of smooth metal. I knocked my fist against it, but the material retorted like rock. The seams of the slabs were set amazingly tight and I ran my fingers across the surface to feel their construction. Small, almost seamless indentations by each of the cracks separated the blocks that composed the structure. Whoever built these pillars must have cut each block perfectly.

  "What is wrong Kaiyer?" Danor asked me.

  "Nothing. Just looking at this support tower. Where next? Up?" Our guide nodded and we moved off of the platform and continued up the narrow stairs that hugged the pillar.

  We ascended forty feet to another bridge that ran fifty yards before connecting to the closest pillar. The air here was clear of the mist and fog that clouded below, I could see other bridges extending toward an eerie glow that backlit a massive colonnade.

  "What is the light coming from?" I asked everyone, but I meant it for Danor.

  "What light?"

  "The shades of purple and blue." I pointed at the pillars in the distance. Now that we stood higher on the elevated steps, the origin of the glow seemed closer.

  "I don't see anything, Skinny. It's as black as my shit after I eat four pounds of plums."

  "There is light over there. None of you can see the violet color?" The other soldiers shook their heads.

  "We need to go up more and hope that there is an entrance to the dungeon sewers below the castle. Let's keep moving." Danor started the climb upward and the rest of the men followed.

  "Coming?" Greykin asked me. Something about the light was familiar. I felt myself drift toward it. A soft voice seemed to call my name.

  "Kaiyer?" Greykin's rough voice shook me from my effort to remember. I nodded at the big, bearded man and walked to the stairs.

  A recognizable scraping noise echoed behind me and Greykin's mouth opened to shout a warning. Without thinking, I harnessed the Earth and pushed myself off of the stone bridge, backward through the air, and away from jaws intending to eat me.

  The wurm screamed and hissed as I evaded the surprise attack and landed next to it. Part of its body coiled around the overpass, and I noticed that this particular creature's arms were not as misshapen as the others we had encountered. They were still small, but set in even rows of centipede-like trails down its belly. The arms ended in long, sharp claws that the creature used to climb up the pillars. My short sword lashed out and cut a wide gash into the monster's side, spraying pus-filled blood across the bridge and enticing another scream of outrage from the beast's maw.

  It was probably not one of my best decisions.

  The bridge had little room for me to maneuver, so when the wurm thrashed around, I couldn't avoid the swing of its tail. Greykin screamed my name as the slimy tail smacked into me and threw me into the air like one flicks away a small bug. My stomach lurched when my boots left the platform and I tried to spin so that I faced the direction of my plummet.

  I fell about thirty feet and slammed my body into the pillar next to the bridge. I managed to thrust my short blade into the stone plates of the tower, which helped me hold on, but the movement cost me the torch I held in my other hand. The lighted brand spun lazily down into the darkness and my vision swam from the impact to my face. I tried to hang on to the sword buried in the rock and adjust my eyes to the reduced light.

  The monster hissed from above me and slid across the bridge away from my companions toward the pillar where I clung. It would not be so easily robbed of a meal.

  My eyes finished adjusting to the lack of torchlight and I noticed that the coil of stairs was only five feet beneath me. I thanked my luck again and let go of my stuck sword, dropping the short distance to the skinny stairs. There was no safe way to retrieve my blade. I would have to pull so hard to free it from the stone wall that the effort would accidently fling me off of the column. My magic could kill the beast, but it would have made me feel better to have a weapon in my hand.

  I darted up the stairs as fast as my legs and limited vision allowed. I reasoned that if I could make it to the top before the creature I could escape, or at least not have to worry about it attacking me from above. It would be a small advantage that might give me a few more minutes of precious life.

  I did not see the serpent or my companions when I reached the far side of the bridge. The men had probably moved farther up the stairs. I did not want to run across the platform and possibly draw attention to their location.

  The sound of the wurm skittering on the other side of the column reached my ears a fraction of a second before its decaying smell punched my nose. I threw myself across the bridge and slid on my belly atop the thin layer of disgusting mucus the beast had left in its trail.

  The monster screamed in disappointment as I evaded it again. It hung inverted from the pillar, where I stood only moments ago. The tiny arms on its belly must be amazingly strong to be able to hold up the creature's massive bulk. It moved like a cross between a snake and a centipede as it slithered and climbed down the pillar toward the bridge with the efficiency of a victorious predator.

  I channeled the Earth through my body quickly, feeling the beat of my heart throb strong and pound against my skull. I closed my fist around the thin, elusive breeze from the river below. Power built in my hand and I released it at the slime-covered mutation as the monster reached the bridge and coiled itself back to strike me.

  An elliptical sphere of maroon-colored energy erupted from my palm and flew toward the serpent like a hawk diving for the kill. The wurm screamed in panic as the air in front of it burned as hot and bright as a thousand green suns and melted the putrid flesh from its maw and eyes. The creature had probably never seen light brighter than the torches we carried with us today. It reared up and twitched in death throes similar to the first beast I had killed. I backed away to prevent one of the creature's seizures from knocking me off of the pillar again.

  The stench of the roasted wurm's putrid corpse brought me to my knees and my body wrestled with my willpower in a war over the bile in my stomach. My gut was empty but I lay there thrashing around and dry heav
ing for longer than it took for the monster to finish smoking. Finally, my stomach realized I wasn't sick and it stopped the forced process of cleansing.

  I rose to my feet and looked over toward the column I suspected my companions had climbed. The bridge was still intact. I crept over the platform that joined the metal gangway.

  Then I stopped and glanced back over my shoulder.

  I stood close to the source of the strange, glowing lights. Greykin probably thought I was dead, again, and I figured he would be happy to find I was alive, even if I followed a few minutes behind the group.

  I changed direction and crossed two other bridges and went up one long row of stairs. Any noise might bring another attack from a wurm or any other creature that lived down in this dark, damp place.

  The farthest pillar from where Greykin and my friends ascended cast the purple and blue glow. As I grew closer, I heard a faint hum, almost like the sound of the river. But while the river moaned with the chaos of life, the drone from the column sounded a constant pitch. It reminded me of wheels being turned at a mill.

  The only way to reach the glowing pillar was via a thick braided metal rope suspended over a dizzying drop, the rusted remnant of a bridge that once connected the pillars. I took a deep breath and traversed it, hand-over-hand, while my legs dangled over the dark void.

  This column appeared similar in design to the others, but as I grew closer I noticed its surface was embroidered with careful, intricate etchings of trees, birds, mountains, and celestial bodies. It was smoother than the surrounding pillars, it looked less like something man-made and more like a crab or snail shell. I circled around to the opposite side and found the source of the glow.

  The column had glass windows, and the illumination came from the other side of the oval panes. From inside. The glow was too bright after hours of darkness. I had to shield my eyes for a few seconds until I could look without pain bringing forth searing tears that blurred my vision.