Blood Shaper

Chapter Seventy-six

It didn’t take long to get to the entrance trapped under the tree, just like Cindy had said. With some careful maneuvering and a little bit of time, they were able to get the tree growing halfway over the opening out of the way without dropping the large tree on top of them.

“This would have been easier with Leaf,” Claudia muttered as they finally started prying the door open.

“Yeah, but I only got that there was a tree on top,” Cindy muttered as the pair of them watched Kay and Stephen pull to the door open with a crowbar, “I didn’t know it’d be that damn big!”

Kay and Stephen finally wrenched open the dirt-encrusted door with a final yank. A piece of it actually snapped off as they flung it open.

Kay stepped back to give the other human man some room and stared down into the tunnel. Just like the other one, it was weirdly dark in front of him, even though the stairs were only a few feet in front of him; by the third step down, they disappeared into the gloom.

“I really hate this,” Stephen said.

“Suck it up, buttercup,” Claudia stepped forward and smacked him on the back. “Those weird undead aren’t the only things that like magical darkness.”

“Weird undead?” Kay asked, glancing back over his shoulder.

“No idea what they’re called, but we ran into some in a cave back during our adventuring days when it was just the two of us and Leaf. They weren’t smart enough to make their own magical darkness, but they managed to find an item that did it for them at some point, and they fought to the death to keep it.” She frowned, “Or re-death or whatever. I hate that discussion. Who cares what term you use if everyone knows what I mean?”

“They were horrible, and I hate anything that reminds me of them.” Stephen declared, “But once again, I will march on, my honor a shield before my weaknesses.” He dramatically lifted his nose up.

Everyone but Claudia stared at him blankly.

“Steve, I love you, but none of them get the joke. That’s probably the most inside joke we have out of all the inside jokes.”

“You got it. And stop calling me Steve.”

“Yeah, but I stopped thinking that one was funny like, three years ago.”

He shrugged and grinned. “Whatever.” He glanced over at Kay, “My sense of humor aside, I’ll be fine. I just hope there aren’t any of those weird undead. I was serious about that part.”

Kay looked down at the stairs, “I’m pretty sure it’ll mostly be Rittian cultists driven mad and forced into some form of servitude by some unknown terrible creature.”

Stephen nodded decisively, his short hair swaying slightly. “That I can deal with.” He marched down the steps, his shield held out in front of him.

Kay slowly turned to look at Claudia, who shrugged. “Me and Leaf like him.”

“I’m not really at the point of like or dislike yet,” Kay said slowly, “I just want to know what’s going on.”

She shrugged again, “He’s weird. Does what he wants and ignores everyone else’s opinions about him.”

“Why does he not like those specific undead so much?”

“They sprayed him with weird goop that smelled. His boyfriend at the time made him sleep outside for a couple months. Then they broke up.”

Kay stood there with his mouth open for a while, then shook his head. “I’ll save the backstory delve for later. Leya, you go next since you’re going to be doing a lot of sensing while we’re down there. Then Claudia, since she’s ranged, then me in the rear.”

Leya nodded with a serious expression and followed Stephen down, with Claudia hot on her heels.

Kay waved at Cindy, who nodded back. Flanked by her two escorts of armed dwarves, she started back to the settlement. Kay watched for a moment, then followed the rest of his group underground. A few steps in, and the light around him suddenly faded as he stepped past the threshold of magical darkness.

“What’s the plan, boss man?” Claudia asked when he’d joined them, her face faintly lit by the flames dancing around her head.

“Head that way,” He pointed down the tunnel in the direction of the cliff, “And use my distance and memory Skills combined with Leya’s Skills to sense the earth around us to find the best direction to go once we get far enough.” He scratched his head and added, “In battle, Claudia will be the shot-caller since you two have way more experience than us in this, but I’ll make the calls outside of fighting.”

Claudia nodded since they’d already discussed that, and the other two didn’t say anything.

“Let’s go.”

The tunnel they started in was really long, almost entirely straight, and went on for a really long time without branching. Even without the incredibly obvious evidence in the shape of doors being used the cover the entrances, the tunnels were noticeably created by someone. Kay started theorizing various reasons for the tunnels while they walked, but without more evidence, he couldn’t make any definitive conclusions. Whoever had made the tunnels obviously didn’t like the sun, what with the magical darkness blotting it out near every entrance, but why wasn’t being almost completely underground good enough for them? Magical darkness on Torotia wasn’t like the kind he knew from Dungeons and Dragons, where it prevented other light from passing through or being generated, but it was still a costly and time-consuming enchantment to set up for a tunnel network that was already protected from the sun by literal dons of dirt and rock.

“We just hit the edge of the settlement,” Kay murmured quietly to the group, “At least distance-wise. We should hopefully start seeing other branches soon.”

“I’m not sensing anything yet,” Leya informed them.

They kept going, and it wasn’t until they were roughly a quarter of a mile inside the space occupied by the plateau that they finally found something other than straight tunnel. It wasn’t a split or a branch, though. It was an empty room.

“Ruins can be so weird.” Claudia commented as they glanced over the small space, “Without any context, there’s no way to know what this was for. But also, why the fuck is there a random room this small in the middle of an otherwise entirely straight tunnel?”

The room was barely bigger than a porta-potty, and whatever furniture or other things that had occupied the space had rotted away long ago.

“Maybe it was some kind of rest-stop?” Leya offered.

“This tunnel is only a few miles long; why would you need a rest stop? And the rooms only big enough for two people if they crammed themselves in.”

“I was going to say toilet, but there’s no hole,” She waved he hand in the direction of the floor of the room. “Whatever it was for, I don’t think this has anything to do with what we’re looking for.”

“She’s right, lets move on.” Kay motioned for Stephen to start moving, and he did with a nod.

Eventually, they did run into another tunnel after passing another three rooms, all the same size as the first one. That tunnel led upwards and to the north a little, so they ignored it. The next tunnel was in the right direction, down and southward, so they took it. After that, the branches, splits, intersections, and rooms filled with more and more tunnel entrances became common. They wandered around for hour after hour, backtracking, turning around, double-checking their steps, and more to make sure that they stayed on track. With only vague directions to follow, they had a hard time knowing where exactly to go; coupled with the endless amount of tunnels that had suddenly appeared, they ended up late into the night, still not entirely sure where they were or where their destination was.

Even though they’d surprisingly not run into a single threat, they ended up having Leya carve them a room out of the side of a tunnel and seal them in for safety. It took her longer than it would have taken Darten, which wasn’t surprising given their difference in experience, but within an hour, they had a small room to set up their bedrolls where they weren’t stacked on top of each other.

Kay slept somewhat fitfully, strange dreams plaguing his rest. He woke up three or four times because of the dreams, each time quickly forgetting the details and left with a sense of foreboding without any concrete reason why.

When everyone was awake and getting ready to go, Kay spoke up. “Does anyone know of a creature or being or whatever that can make people have freaky dreams? Along with the whole corrupting a group of people into mad cultists thing? Because something about last night felt unnatural.

They all shared looks.

“You had fucked up dreams too?” Claudia asked.

“Yeah.”

The other two nodded as well.

She sighed, “Well damn. I know of a few things that might do something like that, whether it’s intentional or random, but nothing that’ll attract or make worshipers or followers, or need sacrifices for anything.”

“Great. I was hoping we could come up with some plans.”

“Smart, but we don’t have enough to know anything yet. Or it could be we’re running into something none of us has any experience with, which means we have to use the oldest plan known to any being.”

“What’s that?”

“Go with your instincts.” Stephen intoned seriously. “Sometimes, it’s all you can do.”

Leya slowly broke down the stone shell over the entrance to their little cave, and they cautiously moved out, looking for a path deeper into the tunnels, where something waited. Or just was, there wasn’t any reason for it to be expecting them. Or at least that was what Kay hoped.

Eventually, they ran into signs of Rittian presence.

“You’d think there’d be more of them or something,” Leya commented while they carefully inspected the remains of some kind of meal, with bits of bone chewed on by rat-like teeth. “Or at least we’d run into them when we came down here. Why did they only send one group upwards, with weak members?”

“I’ve been asking the same things,” Kay commented, “But I still don’t have any answers.”

“That’s one of the drawbacks of reacting instead of acting. We have to come down here and prevent whatever bad thing is going to happen,” Stephen told them, “We don’t have control of the timing, location, or a lot of other stuff, so we have to react to what’s happening instead of acting to be the thing happening. We lose a lot of ability to gather the information that way. It could be they pulled back after losing that scouting team. Could be there are less Rittians than we thought, and the real danger is the thing they’re awakening. Maybe there was some kind of tunnel collapse earlier, and a bunch of them died.”

“Less chatting, more moving.” Claudia poked his back, “You’re right, but we’re close enough to run into enemies, so be on guard.”

They crept forward, finding more and more signs of there being Rittians about, from food to abandoned scraps of clothing, and they eventually made their way into a large circular room with multiple tunnels leading out and away from them.

The sound of something large sniffing and snuffling made them all pause. They sneaked closer to the source of the noise and found a hole in the floor that led to another circular room of the same size just below them.

In the room under them was a small band of Rittians, all asleep on raggedy bedrolls and blankets. A few feet away from the pile of rat people was an actual rat. But it was the size of a large SUV.

It was also asleep, and they watched as it shifted around, its snore cutting off a moment before it sniffed at the air. It apparently didn’t detect them, as it went back to sleep seconds later.

“That might be a problem,” Claudia whispered.

“It’s just a giant rat.”

“Watch it breathe.”

Kay watched for a moment, waiting to see whatever Claudia was seeing that he wasn’t. A moment later, he got it. On the backs and sides of the creature, two giant teeth filled mouths opened and closed in time with the monster’s breaths. Massive tongues lolled inside the mouths, and it shifted around in its sleep.

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“What is that?”

“Some fucked up monstrosity, that’s for sure. But now we know we’re headed in the right direction.”