She Shouldn’t Have Come Here Alone
Whatever it was, it was following her.
She was absolutely sure of that now.
Serena took stock of her surroundings, as best she could in the fading glow of her flickering torch. How many torches did she have left now? She unslung her pack, rummaging quickly, sucking her breath in horror.
She was using the last one.
By Mithra, how did I go through them all so quickly?
She should never have come down here alone.
The torches had come cheaply and now she knew why. Never buy torches for a dozen a copper from a wily dwarf who refuses to look you in the eye. The traveling merchants were the worst. Of course he had conned her with a bundle of torches that burned each for less than an hour. But she had been desperate. She was always desperate.
But now, as she eyed the fading torch, watching it burn down to her trembling fingers, she knew what desperation truly was.
The catacombs below the city of Northfell were a seemingly endless maze of ancient tunnels. She’d been extra careful to mark the walls as she passed with bright red chalk but without light the marks would be useless. Even infravision would be useless. The marks were cold, the walls even colder. Everything down here was cold.
She had come to the end of a long tunnel. How long had she been moving down it? She couldn’t remember. She had no frame of reference. It was no use turning back though.
That thing was back there. Whatever it was.
She had to press forward. She squinted at the darkness ahead. Nothing. Only more endless black. She checked her weapons. Her dagger was still sheathed at her side, unused, save for butchering. She preferred the bow which had held up well. She’d had it for years now and it was her favorite, carved from yew and carried with her from her homeland, long before she had run away. She reached over her shoulder, checking the quiver and counting the arrows.
Thirteen left, an unlucky number.
She’d had fifty when she descended the stairway deep in the city’s sewers, making her way down, in slow winding circles that went on forever, until eventually she lost track of how long she’d been going.
The other thirty-seven had been used on the carrion crawlers, giant twenty legged centipedes the size of her arm that fed on the feces that came from the city’s waste waters, trickling its way into the catacombs below. They’d been waiting for her at the stairway’s base, arched back on their hind legs, antennae flailing, hissing at her in the shadows.
There’d been exactly thirty-seven of them. Serena knew that for a fact because she never missed. She’d also spent the better part of what must have been an hour butchering their heads to retrieve their bioluminescent glands which she knew for a fact she could sell back on the surface for a copper a piece.
Better than coming back with nothing at all.
Thinking back on it all she realised that she should have turned back then. Was it greed or curiosity that compelled her forward? She wasn’t sure, really. It was probably a combination of both.
She took a deep breath, getting ready.
It stunk down here. The sewage smell had long since been left behind her, but what remained now was almost worse. It was the smell of an ancient death in a space of air that never moved.
That and something else, a horrid stench for which she had no name.
She felt her lungs burning and cautioned herself about going any deeper. The air grew thinner with every turn.
But she had no choice.
The catacombs under the city had been there for centuries, longer than the city itself, dating back to the fall of the Estonian Empire. The city of Northfell, as everyone knew, had been built on its ruins.
No one went down there anymore.
Well, almost no one. There had been a few naive adventurers who made their way through its tunnels but the ones who came back either came back reporting nothing or they didn’t come back at all. The rumors of the treasures buried there persisted though and they still, from time to time, drew the courageous and the careless, just as they had drawn Serena.
Serena, the great thief. At least that was how she had imagined herself.
But not anymore.
Now she was just Serena, the frightened little elf girl who missed her brother, with something cold and unknown at her back.
She never should have taken that second stairway down, the one that took her beyond the city’s sewers. She never should have touched the stone sarcophagus, waking something that had been sleeping here for as long as anyone alive could remember. Even the ancient history texts had warned against it, had warned of the horrors that existed deep in the bowels of the earth.
She took her first tentative step into the darkness beyond. Then another. The ground here had grown wet again. Her footsteps splashed in the fading, flickering light. She looked at her feet again to see how deep the water had grown and that was when she saw it.
Another carrion crawler, raised on its back legs, hissing at her.
She quickly notched another arrow, setting the torch down carefully against the wall and drawing the string back. For a moment they stood there, staring each other down. Its heat signature was extremely faint, but in the fading torchlight she could see its eyes, all six of them, round and jet black like a spider’s, none of them the same size, set firmly in the middle of its face like black jewels.
She released the bowstring and heard a vicious snap. The arrow landed harmlessly at the carrion crawler’s feet. It hissed again. She looked at the bow, horror stricken.
The bow string was broken.
By Mithra, she was cursed this day!
The carrion crawler lunged, its horrible mandibles snapping. Serena dropped the bow, producing the dagger from its sheath. The creature’s mandibles wrapped around the blade. They struggled that way, the creature not letting go and Serena trying desperately to shake it free. Somehow in the struggle they got turned around with Serena facing back the way she came.
Abruptly the crawler let go, darting between her legs, back into the darkness it came from. She could hear it behind her, skittering away.
No, running away. Almost as if it had sensed something, something of which Serena was still unaware.
Serena looked ahead at the passageway she had come from.
And that’s when she saw it.
Looking at her with more eyes than she could count.
Serena screamed, stepping back, her foot reaching for contact with the ground and finding only air instead. The passageway had opened up onto a steep underground embankment, the beginnings, most likely, of large set of natural caves, deep below the surface of the earth. She fell backward, sliding through the rock and mud, losing track of time, until finally she hit the ground hard, hitting her head on the wall as a sharp jolt of pain shot through her leg.
Her leg was on fire, throbbing now. It would need a bandage, possibly healing too. Her hands were beginning to shake uncontrollably. She unslung her pack, feeling around in the dark for the one healing potion she’d been able to afford, hoping it would be enough. She pawed around in the dark for the slender glass vial with its green, translucent elixir, only to find broken glass instead.
*By Mithra, it had been broken in the fall!*
She reached down to feel her leg and realised then that she was going to die down here. Her leg was broken. She could feel the bone poking through the skin, jagged, wet and sharp.
Then, from the darkness above, she heard a low groaning sound, like a massive, ancient door on a low, creaky hinge, followed by a guttural growl that no living thing, human or otherwise, could possibly produce, a cacophany of madness that came from its myriad moving mouths.
It was coming for her.
The torch was gone now, left behind. She was alone down here, in the darkness, her leg broken, unable now to go anywhere at all.
She heard something working its way down the embankment, shambling, slow, like a hunter, until at last, even in the pitch black, she could still make out the beginnings of a shape. She could see its heat signature now, a crawling mass of flailing limbs.
And Serena screamed again for the last time ever.