Millicent
DODGING SOME FALLEN LOGS AND twisted roots, I push forward until, eventually, the forest thins to a clearing. Ollie perches on a stump, his dark eyes darting toward the ivy-cloaked cave nestled on the hillside. It’s nearly invisible against the moss-covered stone.
“There are two men in the fields. Go get them,” I order, waving him off before turning to the cave.
As I push aside the emerald ivy, a wave of something dark and decrepit slams into me.There you are.My fingers tighten around the steel hilts of my blades as I unsheathe them from my back, my muscles tense in preparation. Within, the darkness is absolute. No light filters through the dense earth, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t need it.
As I descend on my mission to find the beast responsible for the massacre, the temperature plummets unnaturally quickly. Frost creeps along my boots like the thin tendrils of ice spiderwebbing across the stone walls. The soil beneath my feet is firm, solid enough that each step echoes faintly.
Then comes the smell: thick, rancid, and clinging to the air like grease. The scent of death. I bring a hand to my nose, but it does little to block the stench.
Something crunches on my next step.
I glance down. Bones—some still clothed in rotting flesh, others stripped bare—litter the floor. With every step, more splinter and snap under my weight.
Still, I press on.
Then, I hear it, a faint broken sob.
A child? No. That’s impossible. There’s no way a girl wandered down here.
Which means this is either a trap, or this is something that likes to keep its victims alive. A slow-feeding creature, perhaps, but that doesn’t fit. Not with the carnage left behind in the fields.
Is this the same beast?
Or am I missing something here?
The passage begins to narrow, the walls tightening around my shoulders. The space shrinks further as I push forward, forcing me to turn sideways to slide between the stones. Dirt breaks loose in dry clumps, flaking into my hair and coating my arms. I take smaller breaths, trying not to inhale the dust.
The sobs grow louder.
The sorrow in them is visceral, each cry drawn out with an aching loneliness.
My arm slides through an opening in the rock, and I pull myself forward, and I find myself in a massive cavern yawning before me.
Immense and sprawling, it dwarfs the passage I just escaped. Five tunnels gape like mouths, stretching into the darkness. The crying spills from the center tunnel. I mark the one to my left mentally as the first tunnel and note the center one as three to help direct myself.
I step forward, quickening my pace, ignoring the brittle crunch of bones. I follow the sobs down the third tunnel, navigating another narrowing passage. Suddenly, I squeeze through a tight gap only to end up in another open chamber.
It’s the same one.
The tunnels still gape ahead. The sobs still come from the third.
My grip tightens on my blades. There was no shift—no flicker of runes, no distortion of magic—that I could sense. And yet I looped.
I try the fourth and fifth halls. Same result.
I retrace my steps along the cavern walls, sheathing my blades to run my hands over the stone, searching for hidden runes or markings. I already know this is not practical. The chamber is circular, endless, stretching so high that even my sight cannot pierce the darkness above.
Stalactites hang like jagged fangs, dripping slow streams of cool water from their tips. Below, stalagmites rise in sharp, uneven clusters of miniature mountains, carving out obstacles across the cavern floor. If there are runes, they could be anywhere.
My frustration mounts. I leave the wall, kneeling beside one of the larger stalagmites and running my fingers along its rough surface. Nothing.
Taking a slow breath, I try the first and second tunnels again.
The loop repeats.
How long have I been in here? Something is fraying at the edges of my awareness.
