In Places Dark & Terrible

Written November 26th, 2015

It had taken four days and nights of constant fighting to reach this point. Three of the five members of the expedition party had succumb to the cold and merciful embrace of Olthenna, the goddess of death. The last two, although alive, were exhausted, covered in dried blood and strings of gore, stinking of constant struggle beneath their fur and leather clothing.

The first of the survivors was an adult woman, her vibrant blue eyes darting around wildly, filled with strained energy. Her long, frazzled hair, a mixture of rich browns, with highlights of ruddy copper. Her features angular, her fair skin marred by long-dried, thick splashes of rich crimson and black. Beneath the fur-covered shoulders of her garb were lean, muscular and refined arms that tensed as she leaned forward. Both of her hands pushed down upon the hilt of her bloodied, heavily notched, and downward-pointing sword that she used as a crutch to gather her breath.

Beside her -- to her right -- in a clean area of the room where dead bodies and gore were yet to be -- upon the cold stone floor -- sat the other survivor of this journey. A wiry and small young man, slight of frame beneath the fur and leather that seemed to dwarf him. His dark brown hair was fine, his tanned complexion far darker than the woman, his eyes were wide and black like a perpetually startled cat.

"Istobin..." The woman gasped for air, pressing hard on the hilt of her blade and stretching out her back. "I swear by all the gods, ancient and new..." She craned her head to the side, cracking her neck as she closed her eyes for a moment. "You are absolutely useless." The woman opened her eyes and directed a sharp stare at the young man near her. She stood up, breathing heavily for a few short seconds, then quickly picked up her sword in her left hand, swinging it back and forth idly in front of her in the air.

The young man stared back at her, his expression still perpetually bewildered. His fingers preoccupied with a length of fraying rope that held the lower half of his clothing in check around his waist. He blinked hard twice and lowered his gaze to the relatively clean shortsword left abandoned on the floor by his feet. "My apologies cousin, Ghelta, I didn't think there were any more of them this far down into the ruins."

"Useless and dim-witted." Ghelta took two steps forward, her breath caught once again and her vigor freshly renewed. Her body moving gracefully as she paced back and forth moving her sword around herself in wide swings. She stopped, looked again to the young man whose gaze was still upon his sword. She leaned forward in front of him, bending to his eye level. "Of course the grimlocks will be down here in the furthest levels of the ruins, they love the dark. How many times have I had to tell you on this journey to never let your guard down. Ylethus told you eleven times in the last day, and now Ylethus is dead. Your incompetence led him right into the arms of Olthenna."

The man looked up, his mouth now agape. His eyes seemed to widen even further, large black holes surrounded by white. "I..." Istobin began to stammer, and then gave a long, snotty inhalation. "I was not responsible for Ylethus' death."

Ghelta backed away, straightening up. Her face dropping into a frown for a slight moment, and then a sadistic grin slowly spreading across her face. "Yes. You are." She puffed out her chest, grabbing her sword tightly with both hands. "If we didn't have a mewling coward who can barely handle a child's sword with us, I'm quite sure both Ylethus and Phrim would still be alive at this moment. That other one, your brother that came with us. No, he'd still be dead, the fool." Ghelta pursed her lips, causing the dried blood around the lower half of her face to crack and drab. "I would gladly trade your corpse for the lives of those we lost." She took two steps back and spun slowly in a full turn on her heels. "But... What is done is done. Pick up your damn sword boy, we aren't finished yet!" Ghelta took a step forward, the toes of her leather-strap sandals resting on Istobin's sword blade. She gave a hard kick to push the blade back toward the young man.

Istobin caught the blade with both hands. He gave a long look upwards to the woman with him. His expression remained as bewildered and forlorn as before, not changing. He grabbed his sword and slowly, with great strain, arose to his feet.

"Good." Ghelta blurted out curtly. She turned away, took several steps, bent down to pick up the guttering torch on the ground she had abandoned during the previous fight, then began walking away without consideration as to the young man catching up with her. "That demented, old sage our tribe took as a slave a few weeks ago... Well, the rumors he gave to us, said that there is a great treasure down here. And if he is to be believed, we should almost be there by now."

* * *

The eyeless, fang-filled face of the grimlock slavered and chattered away mere inches from Ghelta's face. The hideous thing was a mockery of the human form. Mottled, fleshy bulbs had covered over where the eyes should be. The nose was nothing more than slits of ragged flesh stretched taut over exposed, jagged bone. The hair-less head, coated in glistening mucus. Bony ridges sticking out from its jutting, over-sized jaw. Its mouth was a chittering cacophony assortment of rotted, razor-sharp teeth, leaking thick, clear saliva and sulfurous fumes. One day, ages ago, these creatures may once have been human, but now in the depths of the Below-world, tainted as they were by dark magics and their own depraved appetites, they had become something wholly other.

Ghelta had her sword pinned against her chest, in-between the naked body of the grimlock and her own bloodstained furs. She struggled to pull the blade free with her left hand. Her right hand fought valiantly by grasping the grimlock's thin, sinewy and slick neck. She put her weight and all the strength of her right arm into keeping the tainted beast from getting close enough to seize her with its infectious bite. One of the creature's claws was clasped around her right forearm, its long and dirty claws raking through her flesh, causing blood to well up in rivulets from her wounds. The creature's other claw seized the blade of her sword and kept the weapon pinned between them.

Ghelta could hear several more of the blind creatures clamoring along the stones of darkened areas nearby. Some of them chattering away as if communicating with one another, and others raking their claws against the pitted and ancient stone of the walls, using what was left of their hearing and tactile senses to localize the commotion she was causing within their unhallowed home.

"You damned fool! You walked us right into another den of them! Where are you?" Ghelta continued to fight against the creature on top of her. Slowly but suredly she was beginning to win the battle of strength against the beast. She could feel the sword coming free, notch by notch of her worn blade cutting through the sickly skin of the grimlock's seizing hand.

"Here, cousin." Ghelta could hear a strained, raspy and squeaking voice from behind her and over her right shoulder, somewhere off in the dark past the light of her, again abandoned, torch. She could hear a groan, and then a sickly wet sound like an over-ripened melon being caved in with a blacksmith's hammer. Ghelta hoped for a moment, her tolerance wearing thin this entire expedition, that the wet sound she heard was the skull of Istobin finally giving way beneath the crushing hands of some grimlock off in the darkness.

Ghelta's morbid hopes were soon dashed, when she saw the blood-drenched, wild-eyed face of Istobin emerge from the shadows beside her and quickly dash behind the grimlock seizing her. A glint erupted in his eyes, and they narrowed for a brief moment, his mouth opening up to allow a limp scream of anger. His arm raising his now bloodied shortsword in the air as he brought it down at a sharp angle, into the back of the grimlock's skull. The blade-point poked through the front of the grimlock's neck, and with a few seizuring gasps from the monster, thick, blackened, ichorous blood soon poured forth into Ghelta's face.

It was simply a matter of moments before the creature's grasp lightened and set Ghelta free. She pulled her sword away, backed up a few paces and brought the sword down hard on the head of the grimlock as it slowly spasmed its way to the floor, being propped up by Istobin's blade still stuck into its neck. After the impact, the feeling of bone grinding on metal filled Ghelta with relief and sadistic mirth. A few moments further still, the creature was finally dead, and the job of Ghelta and Istobin to wrench free their blades began.

"I see you finally proved your use." Ghelta looked up from beneath her furrowed brow towards Istobin as she pulled her sword free. "I don't know what stroke of luck you pulled in not becoming food to those things off in the dark, but I am glad you could share some of your fool's fortune with me." Istobin finally pulled his blade free with great deal of strain and heavy breathing. "Let's not keep depending on luck. I am tired of being ambushed by these abominations. I can hear more of them scurrying their blind way towards us. We go right." Ghelta pointed with a finger towards a space of darkness nearby. "Past that outcropping, and we keep running. Do you understand?"

Istobin looked down to where Ghelta had pointed. He stared off into the darkness, oblivious to what Ghelta was referring to. He nodded and returned his gaze back to his cousin. That wide-eyed, startled cat look that could not seem to ever be removed from his face for a single moment's reprieve. The look that made Ghelta want to rip his eyes from his sockets, simply so that it would cease.

Ghelta quickly ran and gathered her torch once again. She blurted out "We go now!" She pressed forward and soon began sprinting off and piercing into the dark with her torchlight. Istobin gulped hard, took three deep breaths and soon followed.

* * *

It had felt like an hour of hard running, numerous zig-zags, cross-backs, desperate sprints, and near ambushes, but finally Ghelta had reached where she wanted to be. The description she had heard from Ylethus of what the mad, old sorcerer had told him seemed to finally ring true.

Ghelta and Istobin had emerged from a roughly hewn and incredibly narrow, descending spiral staircase and into a small out-cropping room. Behind them was the small opening to the stairs, and before them seemed to be a vast and empty space, filled with nothing but darkness. The stone floor ahead of them was pockmarked, gouged, cracked and seemed to gather moisture from somewhere else in very shallow pools worn into the stone over vast amounts of time. The flickering and smoky light of the torch bounced over the similarly stoned walls and roof above them, but a scant few paces before them it seemed as if light itself could not penetrate the darkness at all. As if the terrestrial world of stone, dirt and water-filled pools gave way abruptly to a grand, abyssal realm of pure shadow.

"Do you hear that?" Istobin muttered, absentmindedly and as if to himself.

"Yes, I hear an echo of falling droplets, and I feel wind." Ghelta continued to hold her torch above her with her right hand, staring off into the blackness before her. "I think we are inside of some out-cropping room, and before us is some sort of chasm or fissure. This rings true to the words of that cowardly hedge-wizard slave." Ghelta took two cautious steps forward, remaining on the periphery of the almost solid darkness. "If what that coward said is true, we must press forward through this shadow. There is a bridge ahead, across a vast gap, and on the other side is the treasure we have lost much to attain."

Before Ghelta could even finish her exhalation of words, Istobin pushed by her and began pressing forwards into the darkness. Ghelta was startled at either the suddenly uncharacteristic courage of her cousin, or another bout of his idiocy at running ahead without caution. She shook her head hard and began a hard pace after him, speeding up as he continued to run faster and farther, heedlessly, ahead of her in the darkness.

The wind began to whip up around Ghelta, her frizzled and gore-clumped hair began to lift and chaotically flip about her head, carried by wind jets that changed, mixed and whipped around without reason. Before her the ancient stone gave way to a strangely textured obsidian bridge, arching up and down and wavering left and right in winding angles. Whatever the bridge was made of was solid as stone, but the direction and curves to it were dizzying and felt like moving forward into a spiral created by a madman. The footpath on the bridge was narrow, but Ghelta traversed it gracefully. There were no supports on either side, just shadow, and a feeling of an immense fall into nothingness.

After a few more moments of running, and once the last sense of direction and coordination had been driven from Ghelta's mind, she saw the flickering form of her cousin, Istobin, stopped and standing before her. His gaze, again startled and bewildered, was focused upwards. Her gaze joined his soon after.

Before them both was an immense monolith of jagged crystal. Although a sense of distance seemed meaningless in this shadowed chasm, the monolith itself seemed to be as large as a mountain, carrying onward, upward and outward away from the obsidian platform that Ghelta and Istobin stood upon. The crystalline monolith reflected and refracted the light of the torch in a dazzling array of blues, purples, silver and indigo hues. The crystal itself looked like a glassy form of ice, with a semi-opaque, bluish-white color to it. There was depth within the crystal, beneath shattered and jagged cracks. Within that depth there was something dark, moving slowly and rhythmically. Whatever it was, it was alive.

"This is the treasure we came here for?" Istobin's voice cracked, and his gaze never left the monolith hanging before him in the darkness. He turned his head slowly to meet Ghelta's gaze. His damned eyes widening even further, startled and afraid. "I don't think this is a treasure, cousin."

Ghelta snorted hard at Istobin's comment. She broke his gaze and leaned forward towards a stretch of crystal slightly above her height. "That book-gazing charlatan was adamant about the information Ylethus extracted from him. He wanted whatever this is to himself and no other. Not all treasures in this world are gold coins, gems and fine furs, Istobin." Ghelta leaned even closer, shoving the torch over towards Istobin so that he would take it as she examined the crystal before her. "Perhaps this thing itself is some kind of gem. Or whatever stirs beneath is some forgotten god that will grant us our every dream..." Her voice trailed off. She was transfixed by this thing.

"Cousin, Ghelta." Istobin stammered, holding the torch now between himself and the monolith before him. "Please don't touch this thing. I have a bad feeling..."

Ghelta cocked her head and turned back to him, her eyes growing more vibrant and crazed the closer she got to the crystal. "Shut up, you coward. Shut your damned mouth! You have no concept of what this is. I am sick of your feelings! Sick of your whimpering!! Sick of your uselessness..." Ghelta's face returned to the crystal. She stood on the tips of her toes, her face a few finger's width away from the thing. She reached out her left hand, upwards, slowly, until the palm of her hand rested upon the shining and dazzling wall of crystalline smoothness.

The pain shot through her hand and up through her arm like cold flames, piercing its way through every vein, every artery and every layer of flesh. At first the pain was unbearable, hard, jagged, cold and burning all at once. Ghelta winced and almost cried out. After a few short moments, the pain changed it's tone and cadence to that of a piercing kind of pleasure. The coldness felt like a presence, a presence forcing its way through the crystal, through her arm, and upwards through her body, to her heart and to her mind.

"G-Ghu-Ghelta!" Istobin tripped over his own voice, his mind whirling ahead of his body before he finally caught up to himself and reached forward to try and pry his cousin from the crystal.

Ghelta's right arm jerked up with an inhuman grace and seized Istobin's neck. Her hand felt like ice, the flesh of her fingers felt like stone, and the strength of her grasp was not human at all. She pulled her left hand, slowly from the crystal before her. Her face moving, jerking, spasmodically, as her head twisted to look Istobin in the eyes. "A coward. A fool. A disappointment to our tribe..." Ghelta's voice was harsh, broken and raspy. Each word flowed out of her mouth like a jet of cold air.

Istobin grasped her arm tightly, straining to get his neck free from her hand. He could feel her grip tightening and lifting him upwards. His breathing becoming strained beneath the pressure on his throat. He stammered out a few vowels, but nothing coherent.

Ghelta held Istobin off of his feet now with a single arm. Her left hand slowly reaching towards the scabbard of her sword strapped to her back. With a single clasp and pivot, she had her blade free, and in a lightning bolt's flash, she embedded her blade, hilt-deep, into Istobin's chest.

Istobin's eyes erupted, wider than ever before, in pain and fear. What few breaths he could seize upon under his cousin's inhuman grip, soon welled up with gurgles of blood and froth. His body twitched hard a dozen times, and quickly went limp. His startled and black eyes dropping, lifelessly, back towards Ghelta's gaze.

"A coward's sacrifice is still a sacrifice." Ghelta dropped her cousin's corpse to the ground with an echoing thud. "And with this, after these many millennia of imprisonment, we are free." Ghelta looked up, her eyes changing color from her once vibrant green, to that of a shining, glowing yellow. The whites of her eyes becoming red with blood tears that soon filled over and dripped down her face.

Within the crystal, a darkness stirred to wakefulness. Pushing through the opaque whitish-blue was a face, the size of which could capture and entire warhorse within it's severe and fang-filled maw. A booming thunder ripped through the darkness of the chasm as the crystal began to crack, more and more. Each crack echoing and more deafening than the last. The wind whipping up into a maelstrom that seemed to lift Ghelta from the very platform she still stood upon.

"Yes... We are free!"