10. Chapter 10
Chapter ten
Keera
Iwas alone in the blackness. Even the sound of Aderyn’s scream and Erix’s wordless shout of frustration was gone, replaced by my own ragged breathing. It grated harshly in the oppressive silence.
I squeezed my eyes shut, not that it made that much of a difference in the darkened tunnel.
There was nothing but my own hammering heartbeat.
Nobody would hear me if I screamed, and no one would find my body if I were to die right here, crushed in a mountain of earth.
My lungs tightened, and I snapped my eyes open again.
Forcing myself to take a couple of deep breaths, I reasoned with my baser instincts. I hoped Erix had gone after Aderyn. She was in immediate danger, while I was simply separated from the group.
I was good at surviving on my own.
I needed to find Dhara and Aderyn and get out of this death trap. They wouldn’t be in this labyrinthine nest if it wasn’t for me. Without my mistakes, Aderyn would still be safe in Kelvadan, leading as she was meant to.
No, it was fitting I was the one left alone.
Still, I reached for the fiber connecting me to Erix—practically a rope of tangled strings at this point—and felt him on the other end. His presence was enough to give me some semblance of hope, however small, even as I felt him moving physically even farther away.
I needed to find Dhara and figure out another way around to help him and Aderyn.
With great difficulty, I began to move from my half-kneeled, half-crouched posture. There was very little room to maneuver in the cramped quarters, but I would need to head further into the smaller tunnel.
While I could try to move the earth that had separated me from Erix, I knew neither he nor I would have the control to do so carefully.
With the way Erix’s power seemed to detonate every time he called it forth, I had no doubt he could blast the obstacle out of the way, but he would likely cave in the entire tunnel system in the process, burying all of us who were trapped down here. I shuddered at the thought.
I suspected I would have a similar problem, despite my control being tighter than his these days.
My magic jumped forward like a fresh colt every time I called on it, despite my control having improved over time.
Erix’s volatility did not leave me unaffected, just as I had dragged him into unexpected flares of magic in the days when we first started sharing dreams.
So, for now, I made do with contorting myself around and crawling further into the darkness.
Perhaps I could find another way around to the others.
Although, I would have to be quick and quiet to avoid attracting a whole brood of tricriths.
As the earthen ceiling of the tunnel scraped my back, and I took in the oddly dank smell—unlike the dry dusty scent of the surface far above me—I tried to puzzle out the purpose of such a small tunnel.
My fingers dug into the ground below me at the memory of the oddly translucent white of the tricriths we had seen earlier. They must not have been fully grown, which meant these tunnels were for young.
They were breeding.
Nausea roiled in my gut at the thought of even more armored legs, all scrabbling and crawling over one another, and I forced myself to keep moving.
The tunnel twisted, and while it was hard to tell with no point of reference, I felt as if I was crawling downhill.
The thought of descending further into the earth made my skin crawl, but I had no choice.
The path ahead was dangerous, but there was no going back.
Dirt fell into my hair and dusted my clothes as the way got narrower and narrower, hugging my ribs until I thought I would not be able to make it any further. Then, just as it was becoming difficult to breathe past my panic, the tunnel suddenly flared wide.
The walls around me disappeared, stealing my breath away with them at the sudden change. I squinted into the darkness, wishing I had one of Aderyn’s torches. Still, I managed to make out that I was in a sort of large chamber made out of a myriad of intersecting pathways.
I scanned the space, only to freeze as my eyes caught on a huge shape huddled in the corner. My breath stilled in my lungs as I pressed myself against the wall at my back, praying to the sands that the tricrith had not noticed me yet.
Perhaps I could duck back into the smaller tunnel where a beast of that size would not be able to follow me, although then I could find myself trapped with no other exits. Bile rose in my throat, and I shied away from that option.
My heart hammered as I stood paralyzed, not wanting to move and attract its attention if I had not already given myself away. Long moments stretched and my panicked adrenaline began to morph into confusion.
Was it sleeping?
I wasn’t even sure if they did sleep. I knew little of these beasts—did not know if they had the same needs as other creatures. Just as the bone spiders seemed to defy all natural laws and lava wyrms disobeyed the rules of survival by abandoning their young, tricriths seemed like anomalies.
Where people and horses were sparks of light in the magical landscape of the desert, the risen beasts of legend felt like specks of blackness, destroying the life around them.
I carefully reached out a mental hand. While my magic jerked, wanting to barrel through all obstructions toward Erix, I forced it to reach for the still tricrith.
There was nothing there.
Not the consuming darkness I had felt around the lava wyrm or the gravehawk. Just… nothing.
I creeped forward from my hiding spot, wondering if I had come upon a corpse. When I was just feet away from the mirrored black surface, I gasped.
This was an uninhabited exoskeleton. One of the tricriths had shed its armor, leaving an empty black facsimile of itself behind.
I jumped back at a faint chitter, afraid I had somehow been tricked and that the monster before me was actually about to come to life and strike me.
But it stayed still, and the sound came again.
I whirled around, but it echoed and bounced off the walls disorientingly, and I couldn’t tell which passage it came from—or which way to run to escape from it.
I cast about, looking for a place to hide when it hit me.
The molted armor.
I dived for a crack between the body segments.
The sharp edges scraped me as I squeezed between them, tearing the loose tunic I wore, and I stifled a hiss of pain.
After a moment’s struggle, I managed to duck down inside the dark, cavernous body.
The impression of being inside a monster made my skin crawl, but I managed not to think about it too hard as I focused on the approaching sound.
To my momentary confusion, dim bobbing light filled the cavern. Then, as the scraping and clattering of beastly legs crescendoed, a familiar voice cut through the din.
“Damn you to the burning sands!”
Dhara.
I sprang to my feet, nearly bumping my head on the armored surface above me. Drawing my sword, I tried to squeeze free of the segmented body and jump to her aid. I wiggled my way out just in time to see Dhara dispatch a small tricrith, about the size of a yearling horse.
Her saber pierced through its pale shell with a splintering crack—different from the impenetrable coating that had deflected my saber so easily when I had fought the full-grown tricriths.
She cupped a small ball of light in her left hand, illuminating the chamber enough for me to see more clearly than before.
“Dhara,” I exclaimed in relief, stepping up behind her.
She whirled around, saber out as if ready to attack another enemy.
She pulled up just short, blade pointed at my chest as I raised my hands.
Her eyes were wild, her smooth, dark hair pulled free of its neat braid in chunks and dust covering every inch of her.
Several knives were missing from the long row of weapons in her sash.
Her shoulders relaxed when she saw me.
“Sands, you’re alive.” She sighed, lowering her weapon. “I thought you were another wave of these awful creatures coming to attack me.”
“I feared I would never find you when we got separated in the fall,” I admitted.
“The others?” She asked, before swallowing thickly. “Elion?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think Elion fell. He and the horses got to safety. Aderyn and Erix were with me, but we were attacked, and Aderyn was dragged away.” It was my throat’s turn to stick. “I told him to go after her when we were separated from another cave in.”
Dhara swore. “What is this place, and what are these things?”
I grimaced. “Tricriths. Kin to the bone spiders and the lava wyrms. Unfortunately, this is not my first encounter with them, although I hadn’t seen their young before.”
“Their young?” Dhara asked in confusion before her eyes widened as she caught sight of the glossy black form behind me. She jerked her saber up again, but I raised my hand, palm out.
“It’s just a husk. It must have outgrown its armor.”
“Outgrown it? So, they get even bigger than that…” She sighed as her face spasmed. “Fantastic. I’ve been beset by dozens of these small ones since I fell, and they were bad enough.”
I looked down at the corpse beside us. The baby tricrith lay on its back, legs curled in with the tension of death.
Crouching down, I inspected its three tails.
They didn’t appear to be tipped with the lethal stingers yet—the ones that bore the venom potent enough to break blood glass and boil your blood in your veins.
“Be careful of the stingers on the adults. I have not seen what the poison would do to a person, but after watching it melt through steel and blood glass, I have no doubt it would be a painful death,” I warned.
Dhara stepped up next to the empty shell at my back, the fire in her hand making it gleam iridescently, as if it were coated in some strange oil. She reached out to touch it, fingers barely brushing over the glossy surface.