by Alexis Davie
Ellie heard the words that he was saying, but they didn’t make any sense.
“Of course it’s a skeleton!” She got off him, pretending that she hadn’t been as scared as she had been. “What the fuck else would it be, birthday balloons?” She blew her hair out of her face, grimacing and looking at the shinbone, the only part left of the skeleton that had once been leaning up against the wall. “What is that doing here?”
She willed more power into her magic, casting a brighter light to her arm and subsequently illuminating more of the room. She released a soft exhale of horror and brought her hand to her mouth as she stared at the sort of scene that she hoped she would never see.
Death. A whole lot of it.
Apparently, not all the villagers had left.
Bones everywhere. Human bones, all old and brittle and untouched for a great many years, all piled up like they’d died fighting one thing. The hallway opened up into a large, man-made room forty feet across and stretching to the left and right into the darkness. Scattered swords, shields, and spears intermingled with the remains, along with a considerable amount of armor.
Even Sebastian seemed taken aback by the sight. He looked mildly horrified as he walked past her, grimacing and studying the scene. “Soldiers.”
“What… what happened to them?”
He picked his way around a pile of bones. He crouched, studying something.
“Huh. Whatever killed them, I hope it’s long dead.” He prodded a shield and flipped it over to reveal long, jagged claw marks stretching for a couple feet through the metal.
“Is…” Ellie couldn’t make herself say it. She couldn’t even process what she was looking at, much less talk about it.
“It’s not a dragon,” Sebastian assured her, looking around the room for clues. “Something bigger was in here.” He stood out and walked over to the stone wall away from them, where a tattered, ancient purple tapestry hung. “Look at this.”
Ellie picked her way over to him, wanting to look at literally anything other than what was all over the floor. She tried to distract herself from what she’d just seen by transcribing the markings that covered the old fabric.
“It-it’s a coat of arms. And this is a…” She trailed off, putting her hand over her mouth again. They were still there. Even if she was no longer looking at them, those skeletons were still there, and that many people had died where she was standing. Sebastian picked up on what she was thinking almost instantly.
“Ellie, come on. We don’t need to stay here any longer.” He put his hand on the middle of her back and guided her protectively away from the scene. “I know,” he assured her as they moved back the way they’d come. “It can be very difficult to see stuff like that.”
Ellie eagerly accepted his protection and hurried away from the mass gravesite, not wanting to know what else might be in there with them.
That was when she heard the yelling.
8
Ellie practically jumped out of her skin. The screaming came from somewhere within the caves, deeper to the left of the hallway that she and Sebastian had just found.
His hand clenched on her back. “What the hell was that?”
Ellie saw visions of her fast-approaching death. They were alone in that tunnel. Anyone or anything that made that noise wasn’t supposed to be alive, and she didn’t want to meet whatever was living in those cavernous halls.
“Let’s get out of here!” She hurried back towards the stairs, but Sebastian stayed there, listening as another scream echoed from somewhere out in the darkness.
“That sounds like Teneha!” Without saying another word, without even thinking about what might be making the hardened soldier scream and debating if he wanted to find out what it was, he sprinted back into the hall of death. “Get to safety!” he ordered Ellie before taking a left in the hallway and vanishing from her sight.
Ellie froze, wanting to get to safety but having no idea where the safety was to be found. Option one: go back to the outside world. Hustle her witch backside up and out of the wyvern cage into freedom and daylight and whatever else was out there. Pros: not in the creepy-ass, death-filled caves. Cons: completely alone, with no idea of where the dragons were or any idea of where to go. Option two: go after Sebastian. Pros: she’d be with Sebastian. Cons: she’d be with whatever Sebastian was after. Both of the options decidedly fell under the “shit plans” category, but stuck between a rock and a hard place, she hurried after Sebastian with a steady stream of expletives.
“Sebastian, wait up!” He was evidently quite an excellent sprinter, because by the time Ellie made her way back to the death room, she caught only a glimpse of his back as he ran deeper into the gloomy hall. “Fuck!” She picked her way around a variety of skulls and bones, trying to avoid puking, before dashing after him. The deeper she went into the underground room, the more obvious it became that she was in a manmade structure. This had been carved out of the mountain in what she could only imagine was a ridiculous amount of time and effort, though it soon became apparent why: just after leaving the mass grave, spiraling, orangish-red cracks snaked all over the walls like a spiderweb. Thick veins of the glowing rock created a beautiful pattern in the stone, something that the artistic part of her noticed and appreciated even as she sprinted towards likely death.
Her heart pounded as she stumbled through the darkness in the general direction of the shouting and what sounded more and more like fighting. She wasn’t built for this. Sebastian, Teneha, even Ajax—they were better prepared to deal with this than her. They were immortal. She, being basically human, could die if she ate the wrong kind of food. Those men back there had died fighting something, and even they had been better prepared to battle it. At least they’d had training. At least they’d had a warrior drive, unlike Ellie, who felt too guilty throwing away her pumpkin after Halloween because it looked so sad that she kept it on her porch for days. She was designed to watch romantic comedies, to create cool, vintage, funky environments, and to complain about the DMV taking too damn long whenever she needed to change the address on her driver’s license. Even trying to walk through the hall was a challenge, since the faster she went, the less she could see, as the lantern-like effect of her hand only cast a glow a few feet ahead. She nearly wiped out by sprinting into some column half a dozen times before she finally got to the source of the yelling, and just like that, she couldn’t care less about a few measly columns.
The first thing she saw in the nightmare-like scene was the spiders the size of a smart car. They looked like normal spiders in every way except for their enormous size, pouring out of the walls and jumping down from the ceiling in a frothing, horrible mass of legs and bodies that encompassed every square inch of the hall. On a small level, spiders could be mildly cute, especially harmless ones like jumping spiders, but these caused Ellie to come to a skidding halt and regret every choice she’d ever made. In the midst of them were Ajax and Teneha, standing back to back and firing off rounds into the advancing massive spiders, breathing fire at the ones that got too close. The spiders made horrible, screeching sounds every time they were injured, usually struggling for a few feet closer before collapsing with only a couple of the thick limbs twitching in the throes of death.
Sebastian had already transformed into his dragon form, but the relatively narrow passageway blocked him from being able to fly. He stood at the approximate size of an 18-wheeler, covered in shimmering golden and black scales with long, jagged spikes protecting his spine and shoulders. Huge, leathery wings stuck out of his back, but he kept them close to his chest thanks to the fact that he couldn’t fully extend them in the room. A long tail, covered in lethal spikes several inches thick, swung wildly as he breathed fire into the oncoming swarms of spiders, torching dozens of them around his soldiers in a second.
Ellie stared in sheer horror and amazement at the scene in front of her, sheer horror and amazement that were cut abruptly short when one of the spiders dropped in front of her with an audi
ble thud. She shrieked and jumped back, but her spider adversary spared no time to talk things out. Instead, each of its eight legs kicked into full gear and skittered towards her like a bat out of hell, mandibles the size of her forearm snapping in preparation for the meal. Ellie, without thinking, spit the first thing that came to her mind. "Yekos mil!"
As one of the very few “damage” spells that she knew, it did its job perfectly. A razor-sharp spike formed of energy and magic materialized from nowhere and shot into the spider’s general direction. It sank deep into the juicy body of the creature, which let out a tortured squeal but kept scrambling towards her. If it died, it was taking her with it.
"Y-yekos mil!" she ordered again, sending another one of the magical stakes into it. This time, it plunged into the spider’s head, rupturing one of the eyes and spraying Ellie with some sort of hot, thick fluid as it thrashed around for a second or two before collapsing, legs twitching and clawing at the stone ground in a last attempt to attack her.
“Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh my—” She jumped in place, frantically wiping the goo off herself and trying not to puke, faint, or both.
Things weren’t faring so well for the dragons. Though undeniably better at killing things than herself, hundreds of spiders were after them, while only one had come after Ellie. A nightmarish swarm of spiders crawled over the corpses of their fallen brethren, each generation getting a little closer to the dragons themselves. They kept jumping onto Sebastian, who swatted off the first ones with ease, but as more and more came, the more of them were able to hold on. Trying to avoid getting swatted by his tail, knowing that a single swipe would be like getting a fly with a fly swatter, Ellie scrambled towards them. She shouted spell after spell, trying to clear Sebastian of all the creepy crawlies, but for every spider she knocked off, two more took its place. Finally, his body vanished and shrunk down to human size, sending all the spiders to crash to the ground. A wall of fire exploded from his location, doing something to keep them away, but not much. In the mostly dark room, the only sources of light were from her hand and the occasional burst of fire, illuminating more and more spiders by the moment.
They locked eyes in the fray, and for a moment, she saw true horror in his eyes. “I told you to get to safety!”
“I’m a bad listener!” was her terrible reply, born of fear, a habit of badly timed jokes, and having no idea what else to say.
The spiders got closer and closer and closer until the four of them were stuck together, fending off more and more every second. The safe spot fell from a thirty-foot-wide span to a twenty to a ten, to them basically having no room around them whatsoever—just a wild fray of fangs and legs and guns.
Ellie was not a genius. She had never claimed to be one, but she knew one thing, and she knew it damn well: she was not going to die to a bunch of fucking spiders in the basement of some haunted funeral site. A sudden, unexpected burst of power surged through her body like electricity through a power line, and she screamed the only spell she could think of: a dangerous, taxing spell that required a massive amount of energy, maybe more energy than she had, but if she was going to die, it was going to be by overloading her own abilities instead of becoming spider food.
"Rall pali!" The second the spell came out of her lips, she knew it was a bad idea. A semi-transparent, crimson barrier enveloped the four of them in a clean bubble, slicing off anything that was in the way, including severing straight through spider limbs and one of the guns. The spiders’ screams were instantly overcome by the crackling sound of electrical energy as the shield around them grew dangerously unstable from the spiders pounding on it, trying to get in.
Ellie’s world started to spin wildly. Shapes became distant and mysterious, and even the sound of the yelling and the shooting faded away. She felt light, too light. Something was wrong. She’d overpowered herself, and now her body was shutting down. The runes of her arms burned, but she barely noticed them as she slumped to the ground and felt the barrier’s integrity give out.
She weakly slumped to the ground in a strange, half-conscious state. She was only partially aware of watching a spider’s fangs make it through the bubble, only partially aware of what that meant, and only partially aware of the explosion that followed.
9
“I say we leave her.”
Ellie’s world remained fuzzy and blurry, with only a few distant voices coming through as she slowly slugged her way back from the realm of unconsciousness. The first thing she heard while still mostly out of it was Ajax’s loving voice, suggesting that they leave her behind, followed by what sounded like Sebastian.
“We aren’t doing that.”
“Give me one good reason why not!”
Ellie could think of a good reason, namely that she didn’t want to get left behind, but her semi-conscious brain struggled to make sense of things. She opened her eyes to find herself moving across the ground several feet in the air with something beneath her. It took her a second to realize that she was tossed over, hopefully, Sebastian’s shoulder like a bag of feed, her legs dangling over his back and her face draped against his midsection. She felt what she theorized was his arm over her lower back, keeping her from tipping over and falling off his shoulder. She was being transported, evidently, but her attempts to move or let them know that she was awake were instantly met with failure, leaving her helpless and silent as her senses slowly returned to her.
Sebastian carried them both down a series of steps and replied to Ajax with a sharp growl. “Because she’s the only way out of here. If she dies and that portal fails, we’re stuck here. Even you should appreciate her value in that, and besides, I told her that I’d try to keep her safe, and I fully intend on making sure that she survives.”
“White knight,” came Ajax’s sullen response, not with a lack of disgust in his voice.
Ellie finally found herself to be able to speak, muttering a quick, “I’m with Sebastian,” before her tongue failed her.
Through drifting in and out of consciousness, she was fairly sure that she heard a few other things and might have even said more while he carried her. She’d overpowered herself, big time. She was lucky to be alive, and although she wasn’t at her full functioning brain potential yet, they must have gotten out of the spiders somehow. How? She couldn’t even begin to guess, but Sebastian had to be okay if he was carrying her along, and Ajax, unfortunately, seemed to have survived. She hadn’t heard Teneha speak, though that didn’t necessarily mean she was dead.
Ellie’s arms felt like she’d just worked her forearms and chest for seventeen hours straight at the gym: sore beyond reason thanks to all the magic that had been drawn out in one big swoop. As her magic reserves recharged, her brain slowly came around, growing less foggy by the minute, even though having her head below her waist wasn’t doing much to help clear her mind. Finally, though, after some amount of time that she couldn’t even begin to guess, she awoke to find herself still over his shoulder, walking through a narrow corridor illuminated by veins of the glowing rock all around.
“Ugh,” she said majestically, registering the headache and wishing she was still unconscious. “Fuck me…”
That was evidently enough of a reason for Sebastian to bring them to a stop, gently removing her from his shoulder and softly putting her down on the ground. He crouched beside her in the narrow hallway, studying her and checking her arms and face for injury. “Ellie, you’re awake.”
“Unfortunately,” she whimpered, bringing her hand up to her skull. “What… what happened?”
“What happened—” Ajax decided it was his time to shine and stepped forward. “—is that your candy ass brought the whole ceiling down on us and trapped us down here!”
Ellie was too out of it to fully appreciate that this man was blaming her for his dumb ass getting in trouble with the spiders, but her eyes drifted past him to see Teneha behind him, face set into a scowl like she was starting to realize this mission was nowhere near worth it, jaw clamped shut. Elli
e blinked hard once, twice. “What?”
“We’re beneath the hallway we found,” Sebastian explained. “It caused a cave in, and we’re looking for a way out.”
“Are the spiders…” She groaned halfway through her sentence, clutching her head and wishing there was a spell for removing the sort of headache that was going on inside her skull right then, which was like someone was throwing around lightning bolt with thunderous, clapping booms echoing through her mind.
“Flattened. Or at least barricaded off from us.”
She winced, meeting the king’s eyes.
“I would cut off my right arm for three aspirins right now,” she declared, hoping he was realizing that she was just joking but also hoping that they had some aspirins somewhere in their pack of military shit. Teneha scowled and entered the conversation.
“We lost everything. All trapped.” She glared at Ajax. “We should have left the cave alone. We were supposed to meet at the top, not—”
“Don’t you dare try and blame this on me!” Ajax snarled at her.
Sebastian slammed his fist into the rock, cracking it.
“Enough!” he snapped at the two other dragons. “It’s in the past. It doesn’t matter! Get over it! Kiss and make up. I don’t give a shit what you do, but quit arguing!”
Ajax looked like he wanted to say something, but he thought better of it. “And what should we do instead, fearless leader? Eh? We’re fuckin’ trapped down here in this stone tomb!”
Sebastian, as cool and hard as ice, replied stiffly. “This is a tunnel. It goes somewhere. We find a way out, we get to the boat, and get the fuck off this island.”
“And what if we don’t?” Ajax retorted.
Sebastian glared at the bigger dragon, not backing down or even flinching. “You have a better plan, or are you just whining?”
