11. Chapter 11
Chapter eleven
Erix
The tearing sensation in my chest was visceral as I turned and charged down the passage toward Aderyn’s retreating screams. Keera’s face swam in my vision, but she had urged me to go after Aderyn, dragged away at the mercy of the tricrith. I could do this for her.
As my boots pounded against the packed earth, carrying me further into the darkened tunnel, I promised myself I would circle back for Keera—dig her out with my bare hands if I needed to.
My fingers itched with the tendrils of magic still clinging to them, begging me to blast the wall of earth between us out of the way. I clenched my fist. My uncalibrated power was what had caused the cave in. I couldn’t risk bringing the tunnel down and trapping Keera even further.
I would content myself with spilling the tricrith’s blood instead.
Following the tricrith through the twisting passages in the dark might have been difficult if not for Aderyn continuing to shout and curse, letting me follow the sound of her voice.
My heart pounded and my breath rasped in my throat.
The wound in my leg throbbed with the movement, but I let the pain ground me as I gained on my quarry.
Its many legs and massive size let it scuttle impossibly fast, but the tunnels were a tight fit for the large creature, which gave me more room to maneuver.
As I chased it and we turned corner after corner, the passages grew larger, joining together as if they were creating a main thoroughfare. Like the side roads in Kelvadan that all merged to create the main street up to the palace.
Bitter dread coated my tongue. Whatever the tricrith’s version of a palace was, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go there. I needed to catch this tricrith before it brought Aderyn to whatever sort of central nest it might be running toward.
A ragged cry bubbled up in my chest, and I let it free to echo in the tunnels, hoping to cause the tricrith to turn and fight me. It did no such thing, just rounding another corner.
I needed to attack it, and with only my saber and dirk with me, magic was my only option for range.
Gritting my teeth, I reached a mental hand for the fibers of power that seemed to entangle in my mind—my very soul—these days.
Even as I did, feeling the beginnings of a storm brewing beneath my skin, I reached my free hand down to the still-bleeding wound in my leg.
I gasped as I pressed my fingers into it, but the pain was enough to keep me from getting swept away in the whirlwind that barreled down on me. Instead, I was able to pull free just a single bolt of lightning. Sparks danced between my fingers for a moment before I threw it forward.
A crack of light illuminated the dark tunnel, like a picture frozen in time. The bolt stretched between my fingers and the creature’s tail. It seized, tails and legs crunching in on themselves, and Aderyn fell from its pincer.
She hit the ground with a muffled groan, and I winced, but there was no time to check on her as the creature rounded on me.
It pinned Aderyn to the wall behind it, standing between us.
I had the wild thought it was protecting her for a moment.
Its tails curled toward me, and it clacked its pincers menacingly in warning.
I held my saber in one hand, while lightning still danced in the other.
I hesitated to use it, though, without my other hand free to inflict pain that would ground me.
I slashed out with my saber, aiming for the creature’s maw, which I knew to be vulnerable.
A clang echoed through the tunnel as my blade was batted away by an armored leg.
A venomous tail shot out, forcing me to dance backward.
I hissed. Between the claws and pincers, I couldn’t get close enough to attack its few unarmored spots… unless I took advice from Keera’s scroll.
The tricrith attacked next with a swing of its pincer. As it did, I stabbed downwards, momentarily pinning the snapping claw to the ground. Then, I used it as a step, before running up the arm that connected it to the segmented body.
The creature bucked and shook. I tried to grasp onto the threads of the desert’s magic that often let me jump higher or run faster than would have been possible otherwise, but I wasn’t fast enough to find my footing on the slippery exoskeleton.
I fell sideways, hitting my shoulder hard on one of the creatures many joints.
But I was already close enough to my goal.
I stabbed my saber out as I fell, stretching as far as I could to drive the blade into the tricrith’s eye. Hot black blood splattered up my arm. The creature convulsed, managing to bat me away with a leg. The breath flew from my lungs as I hit the ground.
I wasn’t sure if I had dealt a mortal blow, but it didn’t matter.
As the creature was distracted in its distress, Aderyn had gotten to her feet and drawn her weapon.
She drove it into the gap between the first and second body segments.
It disappeared all the way to the hilt, and she bared her teeth and twisted roughly.
The twitching creature went still, and she yanked her blade free.
The only noise in the passage was Aderyn’s heavy breathing and my own wheezes as I tried to draw air back into my lungs.
I pushed to my hands and knees, shaking my head to free my mind from the buzz of battle.
I knew more violence awaited us, but I needed to think straight, and for now the aching of my body from my violent fall helped pull me from the haze.
“Are you all right?” I asked, my voice rough from exertion.
Aderyn dug the tip of her saber into the ground and stared at the corpse before her with distaste.
“I… I think so.”
I frowned. Even when Aderyn and I trained together as youths, and she broke her arm when she took a bad fall, she had adamantly insisted she was fine. I had practically dragged her to the healers, and she protested even as they set her bone.
This hesitancy from her was unsettling, although I wasn’t sure I could blame her. Even the staunchest of warriors would be cowed by the monsters rising in the desert.
Pushing to my feet, I walked over and put a hand on her shoulder.
I still didn’t touch many people casually—except, of course, for Keera—but Aderyn seemed like a natural place to start.
We had often shared occasional touches as youths, although we mostly tackled each other to the ground in the training yards.
“I’m glad it didn’t kill you,” I said with a squeeze. Her muscles were as solid and tense as my own.
“I’m as surprised as you are by my survival,” she said.
I frowned. At my mother’s funeral, I had watched a tricrith snap a rider in half with its massive claw as easily as if he were a dried stick. None of the beasts of the desert had seemed to have a mind for capturing humans before.
“When it grabbed you, it looked like it was… smelling you,” I admitted.
Aderyn wrinkled her nose, and a similar feeling of disgust rolled through me at the thought. Still, I wondered aloud, “What might it have smelled on you that made it want to take you back to its nest?”
Indeed, the tricrith had seemed rather intent on killing me, but almost protective of Aderyn. Now, Aderyn blanched, and her free arm drifted across her abdomen defensively.
“No…”
“What is it?” The disbelief in Aderyn’s voice raised goosebumps on my skin.
“It smelled it?”
“Smelled what?” I pushed for an answer as my confusion grew.
Aderyn chewed her lips before the words tumbled out of her. “I’m pregnant.”
I blinked dumbly. The statement echoed into the silence with unexpected weight.
“Pregnant? How?”
“I don’t think I have to explain to you how it happened,” Aderyn snapped. “I know what you and Keera get up to.”
“That’s not what I…” I swallowed. I didn’t know what to say.
I supposed you were supposed to congratulate somebody, but everything about this forced admission in a darkened lair crawling with monsters from nightmares seemed wrong.
But in another life, where I hadn’t left Kelvadan, and Aderyn and I had been lifelong friends, this would have been a joyous moment.
She might have shared it over a meal with my parents, and my mother would have broken out the good laka.
This was as far from that as I could possibly imagine, but Aderyn was still my friend. I even liked Neven, who didn’t have a hostile bone in his body despite being married to the fiercest person I knew.
“You’ll be a wonderful mother,” I settled on.
A short humorless laugh burst out of Aderyn. She slumped back against the wall and slid down so she was seated with her elbows propped on her knees.
“None of this is going how it was supposed to,” she admitted.
I sat down next to her, keeping my sword drawn, although we appeared to be completely alone, and no sounds of approaching tricriths disturbed the quiet.
“How was it supposed to go?” I asked.
Aderyn sighed. “Neven and I had been talking about it for a while—a couple years really—but with everything going on, there never seemed to be a right time. Then, after Keera agreed to marry Calix, there seemed to be hope for some sense of normalcy, and we decided to start trying. Then…”
She sighed again, and the weight of the sound conveyed everything that didn’t need to be said about the fall of Kelvadan and the subsequent chaos.
“He doesn’t even know,” she murmured.
“Neven?”
Aderyn nodded. “I just began to suspect myself about a week before we left the clans. It was so soon, and I wasn’t completely sure.
If I’d told him, I knew I wouldn’t have the heart to leave him.
But I had hoped we would retake Kelvadan quickly.
I want my baby to be born there.” Her voice caught.
“But then we didn’t find the other clans and are crossing the ocean with you, and who knows how long it will be. ”
I leaned sideways to brush my shoulder against hers. “I’ll keep your secret.”