Ren of Atikala

by David Adams

  KHAVI AND I WANDERED AIMLESSLY through the winding tunnels that twisted and turned around the outskirts of Atikala. Miles and miles of empty passages, climbing and descending, looping back on themselves, forking and joining, impossible to navigate without years of experience.

  The two of us had walked this path many times but not like this. Never with the aim of leaving. Always it had been on patrol, a path that took us from place to place and then home again.

  Perhaps out of instinct or habit we followed that set path. We walked the route we would have taken had our patrol been with us. We didn’t know any other way. They didn’t teach us that. The further we got away from the city, the fewer cave-ins we found and the less debris we encountered, heightening the illusion of an ordinary day.

  Our last walk through these tunnels as guardians of the community, soldiers in an army of soldiers. Except there were only two of us.

  Two kobolds had never accomplished anything. Patrols were fifty strong and could deal with a handful of humans or a dozen gnomes. We won wars through attrition. By sheer mass of numbers. Two kobolds was a rounding error.

  We were pretending to be a patrol, but we both knew it was a lie. We were warriors who had failed in our duty. Atikala was a tomb.

  I wanted to crawl into a dark corner, curl up into a ball, close my eyes, and wait until the bad dream ended and I woke up safe in my quarters surrounded by my patrolmates.

  But I had experienced enough dreams to know the difference between figments and reality. The weight of this knowledge burdened me more than my pack or my armour, heavier than the stones that had crushed Atikala.

  The only thing heavier than that was my guilt.

  “Maybe the patrols missed them,” I said for the tenth time. “Maybe the gnomes slipped through the mists between them.”

  “The previous patrol would have checked the mists,” replied Khavi, “and they would have raised the alarm. If any gnomes had come through, the heat of the mists would have betrayed them.”

  I shook my head. Not to disagree, but to quiet the guilt bubbling in my conscience. “Perhaps they tunnelled around them or devised some way to fool the mists. Perhaps the fey ones have found a way to defeat the power of the barrier.”

  Khavi rolled his shoulders, adjusting the blade on his back. “You were not on patrol. You are blameless. It doesn’t matter how the gnomes did what they did, only that they did. It’s nobody’s fault.”

  The tunnel began to slope and loop back around to the east, and my senses told me that we were now well above the cavern that led to Atikala. “Small comfort to Tzala and Yeznen and all the others.”

  “Perhaps some escaped from the city,” said Khavi, “as we did. Tzala is a powerful sorceress. She could have gotten away.”

  There was little hope of that. Kobolds either expanded or defended, either grew or consolidated. Atikala was in a consolidation phase despite the cramped conditions. There would have been few of our kind outside the city’s iron gates. “Maybe we should try to track down other survivors? There might have been a patrol out, or—”

  We froze, a faint rumble and cave-in training took over. The ground trembled, and handfuls of rock and dirt dislodged from the ceiling. I cast my eyes to the roof.

  The rumbling subsided though, and the world’s body stilled itself once more.

  “An aftershock?” I managed to ask when my nerves came back.

  Khavi looked at me, the skin around his eyes and nostrils pale. “This far underground?”

  “The first tremorquake was enough to bring down the ceiling of Atikala,” I said, although I didn’t feel convinced. “I wouldn’t doubt anything at this stage.”

  “Perhaps the gnomes are continuing their dark work,” said Khavi, giving voice to my suspicions. “They live just above, after all, and the collapse was mainly focused around the city. These tunnels are unaffected. Who else but their druids would have the inclination and power to do this?”

  Druids were powerful, but there were other magics that could destroy a city. Something nagged at me. The pieces didn’t fit. “I doubt it,” I said. “If they had the power to destroy us before, they would have. Gnomes are relentless and wicked, but also impatient.”

  Khavi nodded. “Agreed, of course, but we cannot discount the possibility. Atikala has—” Khavi’s tone turned bitter, “had few enemies. None other but the gnomes could be responsible.”

  I thought of the pink-skinned arm I'd found outside Atikala's broken gate. “Then it must have been their druids, I suppose.”

  We marched on and set a frenzied pace, our legs trying to outrun the guilt. The passage continued to ascend until we came to a white curtain of fog that stretched the length of the tunnel. The Veil of Atikala marked the divide between the kobold and gnome territories. It was as smooth and still as a pond of water, the shell keeping the kobold city safe.

  Out of sheer habit, I extended a finger upwards and touched the mist. Cold as ice. If any non-kobold had been through in a day, the calm sheet of vapour would have been roiling and warm.

  Neither of us had been through the mist before. “Do we just walk through?” asked Khavi, examining the damp barrier with an upturned head.

  “I suppose so,” I said. I went to step through but hesitated. A ripple wound its way through my belly, a parasite tightening my muscles and working against me, imploring me not to enter. My mind argued against itself. Only the Darkguard were permitted past the mists. Khavi and I didn’t have the training. The supplies. The numbers. It was hopeless.

  We stood there for some time unable to move beyond the confines of the city we had spent our entire lives within. Eventually Khavi broke the silence.

  “If we are to walk all the way to Ssarsdale, we will need courage beyond that required to slip past our front door.”

  The sense of finality was crushing, but caught between the anvil of the mist and the hammer of the guilt, the guilt won out. Without a word, I put one foot before the other and strode into the smooth wall of mist. The frigid white embrace surrounded my head, then crept down my body as I climbed upward.

  The cold sliced right through the thick padding of my armour, through scales and flesh, and straight to my bones. I had never felt anything quite like it before—a magical supernatural cold that stung my nostrils and seemed thicker than any fog. It was like walking through a bowl of glowbug soup.

  “Khavi?” I called, but there was no answer. The mist sank between my scales, numbing the skin beneath and creating a thin mesh of pain around my body. Stumbling, blind and frozen, I pressed on with one hand on the wall to guide me.

  I crossed a threshold, some dividing line I did not quite understand. The temperature began to climb. Warm at first, enough to soothe the chills on my exposed flesh, but it soon became uncomfortable. Within seconds, I was walking through a wall of steam, a blanket of heat that forced me to close my eyes and clap my free hand over my muzzle.

  It seemed the mist that divided our peoples worked both ways.

  Just as abruptly as it began, the sensation left my upper body, the hot steam now only billowing around my waist. I opened my eyes and squinted into the sudden luminescence, struggling to see.

  The other side of the veil was completely different from the one I had left. Large crystals, twice as tall as a kobold or more, grew out of the walls at odd and random angles, glowing with some inner light and casting the entire area in a strange blue hue. Blue was an unusual colour; the glowbugs that illuminated Atikala emitted a yellow light, and aside from the occasional spell or glowing magical potion, I had never seen the world cast in such a hue before. The wonder and beauty of it stole my breath for a moment, but a furious shriek behind me brought me back to reality. I twisted my head in time to see the point of a wickedly sharp pickaxe descending straight towards my face.

  I raised my buckler in time to catch the swing underneath the weapon’s head, the edge of the pick stopping an inch away from my eye. I ducked back down below the mists, feeling the burn of the vap
our once again. I crawled away on my hands and knees, getting as far forward as I could.

  Overhead, the blade of the pickaxe swished through the mists as the weapon tried to find me, but there was no other sound. No war cries, no yelling, not even the laboured breathing of one exercising their arm so.

  I soon felt the surface of the vapour just above my head and sprung up to my feet, bringing my whole body out of the mist save my ankle. The sound of the world returned. I was face to face with a pinkish smooth-skinned creature as tall as I was, its curved and pudgy body a gross mirror of my own; round and blunt teeth; no claws, only stubby protrusions for fingers; and its eyes an unnatural brown colour. The creature’s muzzle was short, not protruding at all, and it had a bulbous growth in the middle of its face dotted with two nostrils.

  And its arms. Just like the one I had found.

  It had a strange moss growing all over the top of its head, a series of messy brown ropes that bloomed out from underneath a blue cap, and the moss had spread all over its face and chin. A horrid fuzzy growth that seemed monstrous and unnatural. I had heard tales of such a thing in my classes. My combat instructor Yeznen had called the fuzz hair. Many creatures had it, humans, orcs…

  And gnomes.

  We stood face to face, shocked and motionless, studying each other. The gnome seemed just as curious about me as I was it, but then something changed. Some subtle shift of the dynamic. It remembered we were enemies. Its right foot came forward, and I knew it was going to strike. It raised its pickaxe up above its head, shrieking something in its foul language.

  I slid my shortsword from its scabbard, stepping back into a combat stance, buckler tucked in. The two weapons met with a clang, my blade digging into the wooden handle of the pickaxe. I swung my shield out wide, cracking it on the creature’s side.

  Its eyes had a fire in them. A wild burning that told me, on no uncertain terms, that it recognised me and knew what I was. It was seeing something grotesque, a hideous and warped beast, a monster fit only for extermination.

  I knew because that was what I felt.

  Both of us took another step back. I stared at it, trying to find a weakness in its defences. We had trained to fight gnomes and their various allies, but this was the first time I’d ever seen a real monster before.

  “Yerp narl grennim-vross, khorvhal mik ni’ vren,” it cursed in some rolling, sing-songy tongue that made my scales crawl.

  “May the shit of the dead Gods fall on you, murderer,” I spat back. I brought my shield hand out, pressed my thumbs together and spoke arcane words of power.

  Dragonflame!

  An arc of searing yellow flame leapt from my claws, the wide cone of roaring fire flying out towards the monster, filling the corridor above the roiling mists.

  But the gnome was quicker, falling flat on its face and disappearing into the billowing hot mists just as I had. I stabbed down with my blade, striking all around where it vanished, each blow meeting the hard stone floor.

  “Come out, you coward!”

  Several more stabs later, I backed out of the mists onto solid ground, glad to be free of the heat. I dared not take my eyes from the pool of mist, nostrils flaring as I took in breath and blood pumping through my veins. My heart was a pounding drum threatening to leap out.

  The gnome’s hat appeared at the surface of the mists. I readied my weapon and braced myself behind my shield as it burst out and charged, its limbs flailing wildly, unarmed and running straight at me, its feet clear off the ground.

  For a terrified moment I thought the monster had used some foul power of flight and was rushing at me on the air, but then the tip of a familiar blade exploded from its chest. Khavi emerged, his roaring battlecry heard as his head broke the surface of the mist. I dove out of the way just in time as my enraged friend slammed the gnome into the wall. The monster, still impaled upon the sword, twitched and went limp, bright red blood spraying out in all directions.

  Khavi tore his sword free, and the monster slumped to the ground.

  “What took you so long?” I asked, climbing up to my feet, staring at the body as crimson poured out onto the ground in a puddle, its strange scaleless flesh turning a pale shade of white. Red was such an odd colour for blood.

  “My nerves are not as strong as yours,” Khavi admitted, his eyes locked on the dead gnome. “What is it?”

  I couldn't stop looking at its arms. I extended my sword, giving the dead creature an experimental poke in the side, digging into flesh. The monster didn’t move. “I…I think it’s a gnome.”

  Khavi’s lips peeled back in a snarl. “Shit of a glowbug! A gnome!” He kicked the monster with his foot. The gnome slumped over onto its back.

  The gnome’s blue jerkin had been split by Khavi’s blade, but something was poking out of the gap between its vest and undergarments. A strip of something our sorcerers and leaders used—paper. An exotic and rare material that was almost impossible to come by in the deep of the underworld. A scroll of this size would even be grounds for a dangerous raid to the surface.

  I snatched it up, cradling the curled strip of paper reverently. It was lined with gold and held closed with a wax seal. I held it up to show Khavi, but his confused stare reminded me that it was pointless. Only sorcerers and leaders were permitted to read.

  I broke the seal and uncurled the cream rune-covered strip.

  “What is it?” asked Khavi.

  “Shh,” I hissed, glaring at him. “I’m trying to find out.”

  I scanned the arcane runes, the symbols leaping back to me from my training. It was a call to the stones and elemental powers, written in the hand of the dwarves and their kin. It was a language the gnomes, inbred cousins of the dwarves, often spoke and used for writing.

  “It’s a magical scroll,” I said, reading further. I didn’t speak dwarven, but the power in any magical scroll depended upon certain foundations that were universal. The runes would tell me the incantation and gestures to activate it. I could see the rune for shifting, the rune for shaping, and the rune for rock.

  “This is a spell of stonework with the power to shape the stones of Drathari itself.”

  Khavi hissed, clicking his jaw. “This is the proof!” he snarled, “The gnomes caved in the stones and destroyed Atikala!”

  They had killed us all. Tens of thousands of kobolds. Caretakers and warriors alike. Hatchlings. Eggs.

  Murderers.

  I threw the scroll to the side and leapt upon the monster with my claws, screaming as I stabbed their broken ends through the cloth of its jerkin and into flesh, slashing and tearing, rending its body to bloody hunks of meat. I kept going until my arms were exhausted, the gnome’s skin hanging from its body in bloody scraps, my entire body splattered in red blood.

  My injured arm stopped, and then my other one did too. I slumped to my knees, gasping and labouring for breath, tears pouring down my face. I wanted to do so much more to it, but I couldn’t.

  Khavi waited until I was clear, then with a single slice of his blade, took its head.

  “Let us hang the body here,” he snarled, “hoisted on one of these crystals as a warning to the others.”

  “Do it.”

  My arms were too far spent to help. The seething rage bubbled and frothed like a cooking pot about to boil as Khavi hoisted the decapitated corpse, roaring in triumph as he rammed the body onto the top of the crystal, impaling it through the creature’s arse-pit. The gnome’s shredded arms hung limply by its sides as it slouched over, a grotesque bleeding flesh-statue.

  “Better than the beast deserved,” I said, wiping splattered blood from my body. “But over far too quickly.”

  Khavi’s eyes were dim red lights in the pale blue as he stared at me, offering me his hand to stand.

  “The next one,” he said, dark and truthful, “we will capture alive.”