Chapter 26
Chapter
Twenty-Six
The party, now over two dozen strong, broke camp early the next morning. Breaking camp in these terms meant casually distributing what was left of last night’s festivities as rations, tidying up the cottage as best as they could, then leaving it empty to return it to the size of a hairpin.
The actual camp-breaking involved Valefour, Ophidia, and Newt taking down their tents and leading the way forward and downward, on to the ruined portal.
Braiden turned over his shoulder, giving the burning meadow a last longing glance before he followed the demons deeper into the foliage far across from the obsidian forest.
Here the plants more closely resembled those that were found above ground, except for the somewhat unsettling little differences. Bare branches resembled the gnarled talons of a bird of prey a little too closely. The fruits on these trees seemed to pulsate as they passed.
This early in the morning, Braiden was used to seeing dew clinging to the leaves. For some reason, the dew down here was a bright ruby red. He lowered his head to avoid a low hanging palm tree with leaves as sharp as daggers, narrowly missing a bead of red wetness it dripped onto the ground.
“Well,” Braiden breathed, trying to keep cheerful. “This is very — different.”
Valefour slashed at the undergrowth with his midnight sword, clearing the way as if hacking through a jungle with a machete. Ophidia was his mirror, wielding a black scimitar instead.
A few of the other demons did the same, chopping away the more sinister-looking branches and brambles. The chatterboxes spread out throughout the jungle, unfortunately not much use for clearing away jungle foliage unless they meant to burn the whole thing to the ground.
“Best stay on your guard,” Valefour said. “The path down to the portal can be treacherous, and we haven’t gone this way in a while. The land may have, ah, evolved in the meanwhile.”
“Astonishing,” Augustin said. “Is this the portal’s influence?”
“Yes,” Ophidia replied simply.
Warren nodded. “I’m very interested to see more of the life that flourishes down here. Out of curiosity, would you say that we would need to be more cautious of the local flora or fauna?”
Ophidia swiped away the sweat from her forehead and again answered, “Yes.”
Elyssandra frowned at the back of Ophidia’s head. “But what does that mean?”
Newt flicked an errant branch out of the way. The swishing sound it made reminded Braiden of a knife slicing through the air.
“It means,” Newt said, “that we get a little bit of column A, a bit of column B. The land has been transformed, and often the flora itself is fauna, and the other way around.”
Braiden stared at their surroundings with freshly frightened eyes. “Great. So we’re talking about fully autonomous plant monsters?”
“Many of them carnivorous, too,” Ophidia helpfully offered with annoying nonchalance. “And since there isn’t a lot of meat in the area, I’d imagine they’re particularly hungry.”
Bones gulped. Braiden frowned. What did Bones have to worry about? He was the only member of their caravan that wasn’t carrying any meat.
Valefour stuck his sword in the ground, taking a break and resting his hands on its pommel. “Even with the portal shut, traces of chaos and corruption from the several hells still leaks through. It twists what you consider normal into something more familiar to the infernal dimension.”
Ophidia held her hand up, freezing in place. The party stopped as well, bodies still, only heads turning to search for whatever the demon had discovered.
The chatterboxes came whizzing back between the trees, repeating a drone of “Danger, danger,” loud enough for all to hear.
“Prepare to defend yourselves,” Ophidia shouted.
A rustle of leaves rushed from deep within the jungle, as if heralding the arrival of something long and deadly. Braiden watched in horror as the foliage rippled like disturbed waves, the way the surface wavers as a predator rockets through the water.
It was making a line directly for the back of the party: straight for Elder Bahul. Whatever this thing was had picked out the slowest member of their party as a target. Easy pickings, it probably thought.
Braiden shouted out in warning, but the elder only trundled on. But before the threat had even arrived, it occurred to Braiden just who it was attacking. A council member of the Lighthouse, an Elder of Weathervale, arguably the most poisonous creature for miles around.
Even as his party shouted in warning and sprinted to the elder’s defense, Braiden suddenly found himself relaxing. The chatterboxes sped forward, then stopped abruptly, as if in understanding.
Something darted out of the undergrowth, like a vine as thick as a tree trunk, its tip tapered and heart shaped. It was a great serpent with leaves instead of scales, glowing lumps of amber for eyes, and razor-sharp thorns for teeth.
It parted its jaws, ready to take a bite out of the elder. The demons screamed.
Elder Bahul twisted to his side as casually as someone on a sightseeing tour of the jungle, catching the serpent’s fangs on the treasure chest strapped to his back. Its teeth splintered on impact.
Before it could make another move, Elder Bahul slipped the chest’s straps from his shoulders, then slammed it onto the ground, crushing the great serpent’s head into the jungle floor. The creature went limp.
“Now where did I put that thing?” the elder muttered to himself, rummaging through his treasure chest as if nothing had happened.
“Valefour’s wisdom is best heeded,” a shaken Warren said. “I’ve never seen anything like this in the dungeon.”
“And we’ve never seen anything like your elder here, either,” Valefour said with obvious awe. “Several hells, but that was something to behold.”
Another creature lunged from the bushes, this time a long, thick tendril tipped with something resembling the maw of a ferocious fish. It snapped at the air with pointed teeth, hungry for flesh, limited only by the arm-thick stem that tethered it to the ground.
In a flash, Warren whirled and struck the fang-filled creature in the mouth. It whimpered and whined, taking off back into the undergrowth like a kicked dog.
“That one likes to take its time eating,” Newt said, elbowing Braiden in the thigh. “Ask me how I know.”
Braiden did not ask.
Augustin shook his head. “We can no longer attribute these environmental oddities to things of this reality. It’s no longer a simple matter of these creatures extruding from the influence of the elements. This has everything to do with the portal.”
“So he’s not all brawn, after all,” Ophidia teased. “The wizard has a lovely brain, too.”
Augustin stuck his chest out, clearly paying more attention to the compliment than the insult. “Why, thank you, friend Ophidia.”
Valefour gestured at the jungle even as he used his sword arm to hack at the brambles. “Think of all this territory as something that started as a weed. Even when inactive, the portal’s influence took root in your reality, growing and growing ever outward.”
“This is the habitat that allows us to exist here at all,” Ophidia continued. “If we stray too far, we’d be as fish leaving the water. Valefour here is built different. He can hold his breath longer, as it were. It’s his physical conditioning, how his body is trained for battle.”
Valefour’s crimson skin reddened even more. “My wife flatters me, but it is the way of things. It is why I venture to the surface in our people’s stead.”
The legends about infernal attacks in the olden days of Aidun often spoke of this, describing the terrestrial encroachment as the spread of demonic corruption.
The ground around a demon portal would slowly become fallow, unhallowed, desecrated, ever expanding until the soil itself became permanently salted and scorched.
So the stories had a ring of truth to them, just not at all in the ways that Braiden had expected. The demons needed this strange terrain to actually survive on this side of the portal.
“For some reason,” Newt said, “the chatterboxes aren’t affected by this phenomenon in any way. Still, their use up above is pretty limited, unless we’re looking to raze entire towns with hellfire, which — you know. That’s not really on the agenda.”
Spread out through the jungle, the chatterboxes muttered among themselves in annoyance, yet another dig, perhaps, about Newt’s parentage.
Braiden smirked. “Or when you need to get someone’s attention, or to bring attention to the little blueprint card stuck in someone’s storage room.”
Newt chuckled. “I get it. We owe you a window. Tell you what. We’ll send you some stained glass, special from the artisans of the several hells.”
“Stained with blood?” Bones asked.
“You know it. Provided the portal stays open, that is.”
Braiden hadn’t considered this one little detail. Would the portal slam shut behind the demons again? It felt selfish to feel sorry that he wouldn’t see these people again. It mattered much more that they successfully made it home.
The journey through the jungle took hours longer, with yet more run-ins with the local floriferous fauna, enough that Braiden regretted wishing he could see specimens on this level of the dungeon.
The ground seemed to lead downward, as if they were traveling along a barely inclined slope.
Just as well: the portal awaited deeper, and deeper they needed to go.
At about the point where the heat of the jungle penetrated Braiden’s skin the deepest, where the humidity made breathing ever harder and pulled the sweat out of his body, the trees finally, mercifully thinned. An end to their hellish trek at last.
Now the land opened into dark, blackened earth, cracked throughout as if parched for rain, glowing red veins traveling in a spiderweb pattern outward to the edge of the jungle.
It was clear where the pattern narrowed, radiating like roads from a single point: a pair of massive bronze columns, their ends curved like bending branches, meeting high up to form an archway.
Each of the columns had the dullness of old, worn bronze, like something broken and long forgotten. Braiden realized that the way they bent didn’t remind him of branches, but of candles left in the sun, drooping and discarded.
As they drew nearer, it became easier to see the runes and glyphs inscribed into the bronze in a delicate script, the demonic alphabet intricately etched into the metal.
They stopped several paces away from the portal, and that was when Braiden was forced to take in the sheer enormity of it, nearly as tall as the Lighthouse, as if built for the passage of things much bigger than the demons he’d already met.
“For the ones among us who know how to fly,” Newt explained, pointing at the top of the arch. “That’s why these were built with plenty of clearance.”
“Some of you can fly?” Braiden asked in open wonder.
“Some of us had wings, once,” Ophidia answered, smiling sadly beside him.
Lucie tugged on her trouser leg, looking up at her mother, then at the empty portal. “Do we finally get to go home this time?”
Ophidia knelt and embraced her daughter, her eyes filling with the stillness of someone who had grown too used to disappointing her own offspring.
Braiden swallowed hard. Not this time. This time, he would send these people home.