Excerpt from Alexan’s Third Journal, Tour of the Shadowed Depths

I really should have known better.

While the visit to Linumbra’s Hollow Home and the stay in the place they call the Heart has been interesting, I was still possessed with the urge to explore. From a distance, the aether tree looked every bit as large as a mountain in its own right.

Except it’s not a mountain, it’s a Hollow Home, with every root and branch potentially holding its own warren of tunnels. Fortunately the residents are used to scrying the dark tunnels of the tree, I was only lost for a couple of days. At least there was plenty to eat.

Chapter 14

Less than a minute had passed before they heard the sound of something breaking the surface of the water behind them. The sound was distant and muted, but with Tal concentrating as hard as he could, he didn’t miss it.

Tal glanced back from where they’d come. With vision still enhanced by the enchantment of darksight, he could make out the sight of two figures climbing out of the pool. Their bodies streaming water, the two of them didn’t hesitate to start looking.

Not that they’d wasted their time.

Nolsa had led Tal into one of the tangled pillars of roots that supported the ceiling of the low-hanging cavern. This had served to remind him that Nolsa was very much an adult, but even that didn’t do much to distract him from the fear gripping his heart.

This particular tangle was more than just a bundle of roots. The center of it was hollow, with a gap that led up higher into the tree. The Nolsa that Tal had known up to now had always been a well-collected teacher and dressed the part. He’d never seen her without well-groomed long hair nor outside of her long dresses.

Now she had that hair tied into a single tight braid. For clothes she wore a shirt and linen vest and some pantaloons that left her lower ankles and hooves free of encumbrance. He grunted as one of those hooves dug into his shoulder. She was currently using him as leverage to climb higher into the gap. Easil sat on his other shoulder doing what he could to maintain a shell of stillness around them.

The two Erlkin were starting to explore, their eyes scanning the darkness. Tal was afraid, but not as afraid as he could be. He was peeking through a particularly dense strand of roots, giving him at least some confidence in his cover. Their pursuers had the whole cavern to explore. The two-toed hoof on Tal’s shoulder rose up into the darkness above.

Tal gave the pair of wardens one last glance. This time as the one of them turned his way, Tal recognized Seft as one of the pair. Seft might have been on Tal’s side, but when two more wardens rose from the water, the possibility of receiving any help evaporated.

The Erlkin had been willing to give Tal an opening, but he wasn’t going to toss his lot in with the chosen here.

While he’d been peeking at the wardens and Nolsa had been working on her path up, Tal had taken his shoes off for the climb. He finished tying them together and hooked them onto his belt. A forager in the Hollow Home didn’t get by without a few climbs like this and he no longer needed to look at what he was doing for this task.

Tal glanced at Easil.

His adopted father was holding hard to the little rail. His face was a study in concentration and Tal could just see his lips moving as he chanted to himself to maintain the spell. Easil nodded as he saw Tal’s eyes, and Tal nodded back.

Nolsa continued on her way up.

Having already given a cursory visual inspection, Tal put his hand up to grab a particularly strong-looking root, put his foot into a dense knot at knee-height, and started climbing.

With such a narrow tunnel and so many well-anchored roots, the climbing went smoothly. He could hear Nolsa’s voice occasionally grunt and sigh with exertion above him, and Tal was much the same. There was little room to speak as they continued their escape.

Tal felt a tingle of mana passing through him and he saw Easil waving with one hand as if gesturing downwards.

After a moment Tal realized that Easil was moving the sound barrier. It wasn’t easy to maintain a barrier of any time, reducing the volume of the spell could only help.

The climb continued.

There was a soft cry from above. Reacting purely on reflex, Tal looked up just in time to be hoofed right in the forehead. Nolsa had slipped, and the impact caused Tal to slip as well. One of his feet let go and he had to slump against the surrounding root wall to recover.

“Oh gods! Are you okay?” Nolsa whispered fiercely with worry.

Shaking his head to clear the lights swirling about in his vision, Tal looked up at her while blinking. “I’ll be okay; I’m mostly surprised.” His head thumped after the abuse, but there was nothing for it. “Keep going, I’ll stay a bit further back.”

Nolsa nodded awkwardly as she looked down at him. Lifting her head back up, she resumed her climb.

Tal shook his head again and followed.

The climb continued mostly in silence, only the grunts and groans of effort filling the small area. Tal periodically glanced down, but the tunnel had curved slightly over time. He couldn’t see if they’d been followed or not. Not that he was going to go back and check.

Nolsa stopped again. With her unmoving, Tal caught up in a moment and looked up in concern. She had braced herself against the wall and he could hear her sucking down air, tongue hanging out. Tal was sweating with the effort of climbing as well.

“Hey, Easil,” Tal called quietly.

“Yes?”

“Are you able to give us a breeze at all? With all the roots in the way, them hearing us from this far away probably isn’t going to happen.”

Easil looked at Tal with concern. “Are you sure?”

Tal motioned upwards with his head. “Yeah.”

Looking up and seeing Nolsa overheating, Easil nodded with understanding. “Feed me some aether to get me started.”

Tal took a deep breath to help relax himself. He then reached up to put his hand on Easil’s back, scraping his elbow on a root in the process. Easil had to hold on tight as the shift in Tal’s posture put the gnome at an angle.

Regulating his breath and pushing aether, he didn’t have to wait long until Tal felt a small breeze brush past his head.

“Oh, that feels so nice,” Nolsa sighed from above. “That brings me back to life Easil.”

“If it’s just this much, I can keep it going for a bit,” Easil replied. “But we shouldn’t stop moving for too long.”

“You’re right,” Nolsa replied. “I’m out of shape.”

“You probably didn’t expect to be climbing,” Easil joked in return.

Nolsa laughed quietly. She took a deep breath and resumed her climb.

“So, Tal,” Easil spoke slowly, concentrating on the spell in the midst of the climb. “We have a general idea of the direction we are going. Nolsa was telling me about it earlier.”

Tal nodded as Easil spoke. Talking wasn’t something he wanted to do in the middle of climbing, and Nolsa was probably less inclined.

“Turns out, Nolsa grew up in Linumbra’s Heart. She’s old friends with a bunch of the residents, and knows her way around.”

“Knew Seft?” Tal grunted in surprise. The tunnel had continued to slowly curve, to the point that they were now moving at a noticeable angle. Not having to hang from a vertical shaft made the whole effort easier.

“And Meyla too. Anyways, it means that she’s a little familiar with the area.” Easil grunted and stopped speaking as Tal grabbed a loose root and wobbled around for a moment. “When we find the end of this, we’ll have arrived at a garden in the outskirts.”

“In the underglade?”

“Not the underglade, but a smaller underglade nearby. It is dedicated entirely to farming.”

“So we’re going to be spotted.”

“Maybe.”

Nolsa’s voice broke in from above. “Oh gods, it’s gone rotten.”

Tal paused and looked up to Nolsa. “Rotten? But I don’t - oh.”

Easil’s spell of wind had also pushed away the smell. He might not have been able to smell it, but Tal could see that familiar sickly, slimy look of the rot ahead of them. Without even thinking about it, Tal took a large breath and felt a lurch in his stomach as he caught the edge of it.

Disgusting and wrong, the smell stuck to his nostrils like oil.

“Uogh, that’s so bad.” Tal grunted. He looked back reflexively, wondering for a moment if they should go back.

“It is terrible indeed, but we can’t go back.”

Tal looked up to see Nolsa resting with her side against the wall and her eyes closed. Even with the enchantment of darksight, he still had a hard time seeing through the shadows exuded by her horns and hair.

Taking shallow breaths as she spoke, Nolsa continued, “Seft said he would distract them from the tunnel while he could, but there wasn’t much he would be able to do without being given away.”

“So we have to move up,” Tal looked to Easil at his side. “Can you protect us from the smell?”

Easil shook his head. “If I block the smell, you also won’t be able to breathe.”

“Nose plugs then?” Tal tried.

After a moment of hesitation, Tal’s father nodded. “That might work, maybe a strip of cloth from your sleeve?”

Tal shifted around, hooking an arm under a root, “I don’t have a knife though.”

“I’ve got one.” Careful to avoid the earlier accident, Nolsa backed up slowly, crawling back down toward Tal and Easil. Once she was within touching distance, Nolsa reached for a holster at her belt. After popping the clip holding in place, she withdrew the knife and handed it down to Tal, handle first.

Tal hooked an arm under a root and took his time to put a few slices into the end of his sleeve. That done, he handed the knife back up to Nolsa. He then ripped a few strips to also hand up to Nolsa. Tal held a strip for Easil to cut a few tiny strips for himself, then everyone stuffed the cloth up their nostrils.

Nolsa resumed her climb, but the rot slowed their pace immediately. Tal was soon into it as well.

The Rot was something to be avoided. Any area struck with the affliction was not safe to traverse. Nor was the danger easy to avoid. It attacked the hollow wood itself. So much of the tree was made with interconnected strands of wood, those strands always seeming to be of different types of trees. And each of those strands reacted differently as the rot set in.

One strand Tal grabbed seemed healthy at a glance, but as soon as he gripped the wood it gave way, squishing in his grasp. Sticky sap seeped over his hand, stretching out to long strands as he pulled back. The next root remained strong, but the one after that crumbled like parchment at the slightest touch.

Tal cringed as he felt something slimy and cold soak into the back of his shirt.

“Oh, I can taste it,” Nolsa whimpered.

Tal couldn’t blame her, the air on his tongue made him gag. And he felt like something was squirming against his leg.

The wood gave way under Nolsa’s hoof with a squelch and something wet and chunky dribbled down over Tal’s hand. Easil choked and coughed from where he was hanging on.

The climb continued just like that, the three of them doing their best to soldier through the experience.

“We’re almost, huah, almost there,” Nolsa said, careful to keep her voice soft. Warning given, she continued moving up.

Tal wasn’t enjoying himself. Knowing his companions weren’t having anymore fun than him only mitigated the experience a little bit. But soon, the taste of something else in the air caught his attention. Rather than the pollution of living things transitioning into death, it was an acrid smell that caught the back of his throat differently. It didn’t help the rank odour already saturating the air, but it didn’t make it worse either.

The feeling of it got stronger as they climbed. The air also started to move, tugged by an unseen current separate from Easil’s spell.

“Careful,” Nolsa warned as she slowed down. “The exit is in the side of the tunnel, you don’t want to fall through.”

A little bit more and Nolsa stopped. When Tal looked up she gestured for him to climb up next to her. The tunnel was still pretty narrow, but not so much that there wasn’t room. He climbed up, careful lest he grab something that wouldn’t support him.

“Oh,” Tal whispered as he realized, “That’s smoke.”

“It is,” Nolsa replied. “Look.”

The roots at the side of the tunnel wall had thinned where Nolsa had stopped. Here it formed a curtain separating the tunnel from another space beyond. Tal peeked through to see what they were looking at.

It was a long, flattened out underglade, unlike the usual round ball of a cavity. The base of it was filled with water like the other areas he’d seen, but the glow had faded. Torches kept the area lit to a bare minimum, but that wasn’t the only fire he could see. A few Erlkin figures moved about, carefully maintaining controlled fires burning gradually through the rot. Other Erlkin waved fluted wands, stirring the air in the chamber to send the smoke out and bring fresh air in. Both groups had numerous gnomes with them helping guide the mass castings.

“Been a bit since I’ve seen a rot burn,” Tal admitted.

“It’s been dragging down the casting of wind and rain,” Nolsa whispered back. “I had to stop classes to help with the last casting.”

Nolsa leaned forward, her head and eyes scanning the area.

“Is this the way we’re going?” Tal asked. “Is the tunnel no good?”

“It might be good,” Nolsa whispered back, “but it cuts through the home of the bristleback spiders.”

“Oh, okay, through here it is.”

Tal took a deep breath and pulled himself up. Carefully he put his leg through the gap to climb through, only to have the root he was holding onto give way. Somewhere above him it snapped and he found himself clutching at whatever he could grab as he dropped over the wall and down into the chamber. He found another root that gave way bit by bit, slowing his descent just enough to keep him from getting hurt.

But certainly not enough to hide the noise as he landed in a heap and a tangle of roots.

Nolsa arrived next to him, having climbed down almost as fast as Tal had fallen, after a moment she was able to pull him free of the roots. Tal had to rescue a sputtering and coughing Easil from the pile. Realizing the fall had busted the rail on Tal’s pauldron he dropped Easil into his shirt.

“Hey wai - mmph!”

“Sorry, pauldrons broken!”

Already they could hear the hue and cry of the Erlkin in the chamber.

“This way!” Nolsa shouted. Holding onto Tal’s arm, they started to run.

End Chapter