Chapter 29 #2
The bear’s only answer was a disgruntled huff, but he padded after her, stopping only when he sniffed the air and suddenly recoiled.
“Probably means we’ve found the corpse again,” Ryn said sympathetically.
But the bear shook its massive head and charged past her, blocking the corridor as it stared into the distance, a growl rumbling from its chest.
“Something else?” She sniffed too, and instantly began to cough as an acrid stench flooded her nostrils. “Egad, what is that?”
It did not smell like something dead, but rather—if she had to describe it—something incompatible with life. Something so utterly repulsive that anything with a nose would flee.
“I still need to finish testing my theory,” she told him. “Perhaps just a little further?”
Xavi didn’t like it. Even as a bear, his reluctance was clear, but they moved on, past one more junction as the scent grew stronger and Ryn’s stomach began to turn.
They took a sharp left, back to where she’d calculated the corpse of the slain herbivore should be…
Ryn promptly gagged and would have thrown up if she’d had anything to eat. Her calculations had been correct, but there was little satisfaction to be had.
Not when there was nothing left but bones.
Bones, and whatever was giving off that utterly repulsive stench.
She only knew it was alive because it moved independently and reacted to their presence.
But it had neither eyes nor limbs, and even if pressed, she could not have named its shape.
Like a puddle of something dark and viscous, it oozed and stretched and reformed itself, shifting away from the stark white skeleton on the floor and drawing upwards in a bizarre echo of her own upright bipedal form.
The bear roared and probably would have charged, had Ryn not grabbed a double handful of his fur and yanked backward. “Xavi, no,” she warned, a grim certainty overwhelming even the wild urge to flee. “If you touch it… I don’t think you can gut or crush it. I don’t think it bleeds. We need to run.”
A mere heartbeat later, the bear was gone, and Xavi stood beside her, his eyes glowing crimson and a blade in each hand.
“Then I will cut it into so many pieces it will never be able to recover.”
And before she could stop him, he attacked.
Swift as the wind, too fast even to see, he sliced the abomination from side to side. Ryn could see only the flash of his blades as he cut… too many times to count, dancing in a deadly circle that carved strange gelatinous chunks from his enemy.
The chunks flew and splattered against the walls and the floors, and yet somehow Xavi went untouched until his final strike—when a single dark drop rebounded from the wall and landed on his left arm.
He grunted, twisting around and away from the source of the pain. Jerked his arm back and held it against his chest.
And as he turned to confront his enemy once more, they could only watch in horror as each individual piece turned to liquid and began to ooze back together into a quivering, formless clump.
Hissing unintelligible curses under his breath, Xavi began to back away until he stood in front of Ryn, still cradling his arm.
“You were correct,” he said flatly. “We run. I cannot defeat a creature that refuses to bleed.”
Refuses to bleed… because it was made of liquid. There was nothing to break, nothing to tear. But every creature had a vulnerability—of that she was certain.
“It can re-form itself because it’s a liquid,” Ryn said swiftly.
“But if we can change the liquid itself, perhaps it would be unable to heal. Xavi, what if we tried to burn it? I don’t know how we could make a fire.
I have a flint at least, so if we can only find fuel…
But if we run, we might all too easily stumble into it as the labyrinth shifts. I think we have to try.”
She could see pain in the clench of his jaw muscles, the thin line of his lips, and the sweat that beaded his forehead, but in his eyes the rage of battle still burned.
“There is no need for flint or fuel. Only…” He glanced her way momentarily. “I may be unconscious afterwards. So you must promise that you will leave me if this fails. Do not linger and be consumed. Run, and find your own way out.”
She could never promise him that.
“Xavi, I…”
But it was already too late. He’d shifted yet again. Not into any form she’d seen before, but one that filled the passageway, forcing her to shrink against the wall as it unfolded leathery wings and hissed in fury.
A wyvern. With fang-studded jaws, sharp hooks on the leading edges of its wings, and those same crimson eyes that told her whose heart beat in that reptilian chest.
The wyvern drew in a breath. Its wings flared as its chest expanded, then folded tightly again as it released that breath, expelling it in a jet of brilliant white fire.
The fire blazed up and outward—a furious explosion of heat and light that smashed their amorphous enemy backward into the wall.
Ryn heard a sound that was not really a sound, but a reverberation that knifed into her ears and dropped her to her knees.
She shut her eyes and clasped her arms over her head as the silent keening rose to a pitch so painful that she screamed.
But as the echoes of her scream died away, so too did the pain.
And when she finally dared to lift her head, it was to the sight of clean and empty stone.
No sign, no smell, nor even any remnants of the bones that had littered the floor.
So pure and hot were the wyvern’s flames, it was as if none of it had ever happened.
But even as she stared in shock, she saw the wyvern begin to stagger. Its legs folded, its wings crumpled, and it shifted.
“Xavi, no!”
She was not fast enough to catch him, and he fell—limp and boneless. She heard his head crack against the stone floor, saw his limbs fly askew, and then he lay there, unmoving.
Her face was already wet as she scrabbled across the floor, tripping over her skirts, desperate to reach him. It was like his fall from the horse, only a thousand times worse. And when she touched him, lifting his head with trembling hands, his eyes did not open.
Ryn choked back a sob of terror and pressed her fingers to his neck, searching frantically for a sign of life.
His heart…
…still beat.
There was blood in his hair, and a wound on his arm where the splash of their enemy’s noxious form had eaten away at skin and muscle, leaving a pit that brought a swell of nausea to Ryn’s stomach.
But she would not be a coward. No matter what he told her, she would not run.
He would wake up and they would go on together.
There were no other options.