With everything going on, it took me a moment to realize that Lilian and Belkross weren’t with us. Nakoda had gotten off of me and joined Salim and Alton in digging through the rubble. The former was deadest on retrieving the crown from the king’s corpse. “I’ll be back,” I told Turtle. He told me to be safe and went back to breaking apart big rocks with his tail. I ventured a bit from the group, repeatedly glancing back and forth in case of stray cannibals, before catching sight of one of Lilian’s evil dogs. Apprehensively, I followed after it, careful to keep a healthy bit of distance between us. Eventually, I turned a corner and stopped dead in my tracks.
Cannibals, both men and women, were digging through the wreck that was now the mess hall. Deformed children ran about, screaming and pointing at the destruction. And the monster killing their parents.
Belkross was that monster. He killed the men.
And Lilian was using her bow to shoot down any of the females carrying any weapons.
The two of them worked in murderous tandem. And they weren’t alone. Any children who tried to run were shepherded back into a group by Lilian’s dogs. Eventually, once every man was killed, and the women were reduced to a mere dozen, along with little over twice that many children, the three dogs paced around the survivors.
One of the women stepped in front of the sobbing kids and howled at Lilian, “What do you want-Ack!”
She was cut off by an arrow to the throat.
Once the body dropped, Lilian spoke to the remaining women, “I want to make a deal.” She tilted her head. “Belkross?”
The mercenary moved forward. He sheathed his blade and produced a roll of parchment from inside his coat. The Flying Shadow’s head was a miserable, unreadable mess, but the children still treated him like a monster. They flinched and cried harder as he approached. He allowed the parchment to roll open and held it out towards the women.
“You’re all already bleeding, making it easy for you to sign your souls away. Sign and I will spare your children,” Lilian declared. “Or else I will feed them to my dogs. They die. You die. Or you sign the contract, they live, and its years before you face damnation.” Her face broke up into a wide, toothy smile. “So, ladies, what is it going to be?”
One by one, images of despair, every woman signed the contract with their blood.
Belkross rolled the contract up and, without a word to Lilian, ran away into the jungle. Lilian watched him go before turning away from the survivors and walking away from the mess hall.
“Wait!” one of the women called after her. “The children!”
Lillian glanced over her shoulder. “Yes? What about them?”
“You promised to spare them!” The same women pointed to the wreckage. “Please!”
“I did spare them.” Lilian pointed to the children in the group. “Them.”
“But…but the rest are trapped!”
Lilian shrugged a shoulder. “Then you better get back to digging.”
The dogs snarled at the survivors one last time before following after their master. Seeing them heading my way, I doubled back and then pretended to just be coming up the road. I didn’t want her suspecting that I’d seen her…That I’d seen her being…a…a…
A monster, I finally admitted to myself. The signs were there. They’d always been there. I’d just been too blinded by our friendship to truly acknowledge it.
Lilian spotted me. She waved a hand, dismissing the dogs. Despite the pouring rain and her bloodstained clothes, she actually smiled. Reaching me, she reached a hand to stroke my face. I barely managed to keep myself from flinching away.
“We definitely overestimated them, Don,” she giggled girlishly. “There’s nothing I love more than a good day’s work.”
#
Despite the newfound fear and disgust I now felt towards Lilian, I allowed her to ride on my back to save time. We came upon the boys in the process of tying a rope around a random piece of debris and throwing it over into the hole. Nakoda, who was holding to the other end, waited a moment before telling everyone, “It hit the side of the hole once, but not the bottom. How long’s the rope?”
“Fifty feet,” Paco answered, spitting rainwater out of his mouth. It was still pouring all around us. “So what’s the call? We going down?”
Lilian hopped off of me and hurried. I did the same. Together we took a closer look down into the hole. It was so dark that I couldn’t even see the tethered rock. Lilian touched her chin and then told Nakoda, “Bring the rock up again. Let’s try something before we decide on anything.”
The halfling did as he was told and held the rock out towards Lilian, waiting. She turned to me. “You’ve been practicing, right, Don? Think you can light it up?”
Oh! That’s what she had in mind. The fight had left me quite magically drained, but I still closed my eyes, concentrated, and then tapped my horn against the rock. Tiny pride filled me when I next opened my eyes and saw that the rock was now glowing. A look or realization appeared across Nakoda’s face. Without needing to be told, he tossed the rock back into the hole. Together the group watched it fall, lighting the interior of the cavern as it did so. Finally, it reached the end of its descent and…
I squinted. It was still extremely dark, but I would have sworn I saw the rock’s light shining across the surface or rippling water. Rippling water far, far, far down.
“Before we decide on anything,” Lilian said carefully. “you should send that shade of yours down to get a look around.” She turned and arched a brow at Salim. “You listening to me?”
“Just a moment,” he grunted as both he and Alton yanked. It was only once they unearthed their treasure that I realized they were both grabbing a leg. It was a male corpse. He was large, heavily muscled, and very badly burnt. Grinning, Salim dropped the leg and ripped something off of the corpse’s head. A crown. He dusted off a layer of debris, revealing one of his much sought after gems.
Lilian pointedly cleared her throat.
“Oh?” Salim said. “Oh, yes.” Almost irritably, he flicked a hand towards the hole. The shade flew down into the dark. Salim’s eyes turned black, reflecting back the green and red light softly emanating from the gem.
“What do you see?” Nakoda asked, holding his lance over his head to block some of the pouring rain.
When Salim ignored him, Alton elbowed the strange man in the side. “Time to focus on the here and now.”
Salim glowered at him before closing his eyes and focusing. “This well runs very, very deep. Someone smashed these giant gems into the walls. They run all the way down. And then…” His frown turned thoughtful. “Water. Maybe two feet deep. But there’s more of the same kind of white stone down here…But not stones? More like…organic coffins? Pods? Someone-or something-broke out of several of these. Those still intact are filled with some kind of jelly. Likely alchemical in nature…Well, well, well, it appears that the witch and the king here didn’t consider themselves monster enough.”
Alton frowned at him. “You saying that those two were experimenting on themselves, and their own people?”
“Unless they themselves were also just experiments. Just another generation of experiments.” Salim shrugged. “Does it really matter now?”
“It helps to know what we’re up against.”
“It could be assumed that all of these tribesmen we see on the surface are little more than test subjects, with that crispy witch over there being little more than a middleman.” He pointed into the hole. “The real mastermind is somewhere down there.”
“Fun,” Alton grunted. He then turned to Nakoda and Paco while gesturing to me and Turtle. “Judging by the size of those crystals, we can all use them to get down if we’re careful enough. But what about the animals?”
Nakoda scrunched his face. “Uh…”
“Wait a second,” Paco said to him. “Did I hear right that donkey-corn there teleported once?”
“Yes,” Lilian interjected before the little Rider could answer. “He can!”
Oh no, I thought. I still hadn’t managed to teleport since that first time.
“So how about we tie a rope to Donkiote, all of us hold onto it, and he pops us down there,” Alton said. “Sooner rather than later. I’d rather not get hit by lightning today.” He turned to me. “Think you can do it?”
Salim scoffed. “You’re suggesting we trust this to teleport everyone down? The nimbler people can just use the steps while others-”
“It’s either we go down now or we wait out the storm,” Alton snapped. He took a step forward and stared down into the well. “But there’s definitely something down there, man. Something big. I can smell it.”
He then said in a softer, hungrier voice. “Smells like home…”
That changed Salim’s tune really quick. “Right now our main priority is getting the animals down safely. We tether the donkey-unicorn and the lizard together, relying on the former’s magic to teleport them to the bottom. The rest of us use these makeshift steps. It’s slower but I’d rather not risk the chance of the entire group being shunted into a wall.”
“You’re worrying for nothing,” Nakoda said, patting my flank. “Don’s got this. I’ll go down with him and Turtle in case there’s anything super spooky that needs Rider-ing.”
“Your funeral,” Salim chuckled. Returning his attention to the crown, he ripped the stone out of the metal frame. He then stopped, frowning at it. Instead of a circular shape, this stone was more triangular. “A fragment…And I bet your bigger sister is somewhere in this island’s heart.” He dropped the fragment into his pouch.
“Told ya,” Alton said with a shrug. He inhaled deeply. “Can’t be a pirate story without some buried treasure to find.”
He and Paco tied Turtle and I together with rope. The sleepy lizard glanced up at me. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
I swallowed hard. “Do…do you trust me, Turtle?”
“I mean, we’re friends. So sure, yeah.”
If I had arms, I would have hugged him then. Together, with Nakoda riding me, we stepped to the hole’s edge again. So high up! So dark, so scary!
I wanted to close my eyes against it, I somehow knew that that was the wrong move. I needed line of sight. I focused in on the pinprick of ripples at the very bottom. The water at the end of this very, very long tunnel. Thankfully, none of the others spoke, not even Nakoda. I didn’t need words of encouragement from him right now. Not from him or anyone. I needed quiet trust. Trust from them.
And I needed to trust myself…
Ignoring the raging storm around me, I inhaled-
Pop!
-and exhaled down at the bottom of a black pit.
I immediately glanced up and felt relief when I finally spotted the tiny opening leading out of this cavern. “Yeah!” Nakoda cheered, his voice echoing tenfold. “You did it! Yeah! Whoo! Go, Don! Yeah!…Yeah…Um…cool! Cool, cool, cool…Now what?”
“Now what” turned out to be a whole lot of waiting. Between the combined light of Nakoda’s activated lance and my horn, we were able to see roughly a hundred feet in all directions. Even so, our light barely touched the walls, though it did illuminate a few of the pods that Salim had described. Turtle kept his tail at the ready, prepared to smash in the head of the first spooky thing that appeared. Said spooky thing turned out to be Salim’s stupid shade. It led us over to the nearest broken pod. Nakoda poked at it with his lance. The remnants of the liquid inside sizzled like acid on contact with the magic surrounding his weapon.
Beyond that, Nakoda stayed put, leaning forward and resting his chin against my saddle’s horn. All of the built-up fatigue from fighting the cannibals had caught up to him. With both Turtle and the shade on guard, he closed his eyes for a quick nap. Despite the foreboding dark, I even allowed myself to relax and focus on my breathing.
Gradually the echoing voices of our companions grew clearer, stirring Nakoda awake and making me glance upwards just in time to watch Salim nearly slip and fall to his death. Too bad that Alton felt compelled to grab him by the bicep at the last possible moment, saving his life. Unfazed by the near-death experience, Salim exclaimed giddily, “So much power! Almost like I’m drowning in it-”
“Breathe!” Alton chided him fiercely. “Focus-”
He was drowned out by a thunderclap from above. Thankfully, down here we were now protected from the worst of the storm. I doubted that the surviving Thrunefang members were fairing as well as us. Once everyone was on solid-if water-drenched-ground, Salim blessed his own sword, Lilian’s bow, and Paco’s rifle, making them glow. Alton activated his rapier all on his own. Their light combined with my horn’s and that from Nakoda’s lance. Darkness pushed back by intermingling silver-blue, sea green, and blood red pulses.
Salim called his shade back to his side as ventured over to us to inspect the same pod. He touched its fractured edges with his finger. He rubbed the jelly between his thumb and forefinger. “This magic is different than Master’s…”
“Any idea which school?” Lilian asked him.
“School?” Nakoda asked.
“Magic is divided into schools. Types, basically.”
“Transmutation,” Salim answered. “The school of change.”
“Yeah, yeah, so you were right. Congratulations,” Paco grunted, glancing around. “Now we got two questions: what were these people turned into, and how many bullets does it take to put ‘em down?”
While he spoke, Lilian walked over to the nearest, undamaged pod. “Let’s do an experiment of our own,” she said thoughtfully.
She placed her hand out, though careful not to make physical contact with the pod itself. There was a flash of red light, inside the pod. It faded, revealing a humanoid fish now trapped inside. She had the upper half of a blue-skinned woman with wide black eyes, and the lower half of a gold and green scaled fish. She opened her mouth as if to speak, only to near instantly fall asleep, held in place by the jelly inside the pod. We waited, watching to see if the jelly caused any immediate side effects or physical alterations to her person. When none became apparent, Lilian made her disappear.
“So whatever’s in there,” Alton mused, “puts you to sleep. Makes it impossible to fight back while it gets the time to do…whatever it’s supposed to do…”
He trailed off. It was his turn to walk away, this time to another, damaged pod farther into the cavern. He hunkered down and picked something up.
A mangled captain’s jacket.
“He was here,” Alton snarled. “You’re here…Kovack.”
“Alton?” Nakoda called over, worried.
Alton shot to his feet and turned. His face contorted into a horrible smile that put any of Salim’s to shame. “I was right! Here there be treasure.”