AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He could feel her.
But something wasn’t right…something was wrong. He felt that too.
There wasn’t time to contemplate that now. He barreled around yet another bend, this one angling down as it neared the great cavern. Something loomed into his path, but he didn’t have time to skid to a halt. Instead, he plowed into the shadowed figure and sent them both skidding across the cavern floor. He rolled and got his feet under him again, head whirling.
A muttered curse greeted his ears as he held his runestone aloft to light the tunnel.
Kora gaped back, one hand pressed against the side of his head. Blood coated his arms and splattered the tunic pulled taut over his shoulders. “What’d you go and do that for?”
Jael didn’t think. He lunged and caught a fistful of that bloody tunic and shook his brother hard enough to dislodge every last one of his lying, scheming teeth.
“You imbecile!” He shook Kora again, disappointed when none of his teeth popped out of his mouth. “What have you done?”
Kora grabbed his clenched fists and tried to shove him off. Guilt and anger battled for possession of his expression as he struggled to free himself. “You can thrash me later. There isn’t time—”
“I’ll thrash you now, you lying piece of rot.”
“There isn’t—” Whatever Kora intended to say broke off as the earth bucked beneath them, so violently it flung them both into the side of the tunnel wall. They slumped to the ground, but the shaking of the ground only escalated. A low, horrible laugh rolled over his awareness. But when Kora spun to look behind him, yelling, “What was that?” Jael realized the horrible truth.
Kora could hear the laughter too.
It continued to roll over them, in sickening peels of fiendish pleasure. Taunting them. Goading them. Daring them.
Jael released his hold on his brother and took a single step toward the darkness, toward the creature that beckoned him with horrible laughs. But Kora caught his forearm and held him fast. “What have you done?” Jael rasped.
Kora had no answer. He stood frozen, his skin a ghastly pallor beneath the dried blood, expression frozen in confused horror.
Jael heard a scream as familiar to him as the pulse that thundered in his own ears. With that, he needed no further encouragement, but shook off Kora’s restraining hand and forced his legs into a run. His sore feet skidded around the last bend and down the incline into the cavern. Blue flames flickered against the darkness that felt much too deep, much too intense, much too dark. It only took Jael a moment to understand why.
Shadows raced around the cavern, incorporeal beings caught somewhere between life and death. He could almost make out the shape of a body here, a face there, a hand stretching out as if to grasp...
His chest constricted when he saw Anrid bound on the floor. She had been forced to her knees, her arms stretched out in both directions. The two elves holding her in place ducked and gaped at the shadowy forms swirling around them. Beyond them, facing Jael, Talos held a book—the book—but his focus too had been captured by the beings circling the cavern.
He took a step forward but hot, white light drove him backward as a crevasse tore open the floor between him and the others. Jagged cracks splintered away from this large wound in the floor, racing across the cavern and splitting open rock and stone and crawling up the walls with a cracking hiss. Jael ground his teeth together, backed up two paces, and then took a running leap over the crack in the Bifrost. The light caught and lifted him higher, helping him clear the wide gash in the floor. He hit hard and rolled to his feet just before a dark elf dashed toward him. Jael threw up an arm to block the dagger flashing toward him, glinting in blue Gelarian flame and white Bifrost light. But at the last moment, one of the shadows dove toward them. The dark elf inadvertently threw himself into the creature’s path.
His scream echoed as the creature tore him from the ground, but his shout was cut short as the shadow consumed him. There was no other word for it. One minute the elf hung suspended in the air, the next he vanished beneath the weight of the shadow holding him aloft. Then he was gone.
Jael snatched at his pockets, searching for a spare runestone. When he couldn’t find one, he used the light stone he held. His fingers shook as he wiped the light rune from the stone with his sleeve and then traced a warding rune: a single line with a second arcing line above it. Purple light exploded from his clenched fist as he held the runestone high. Two more shadows recoiled from it, screaming.
Another dark elf had been sprinting toward Jael, but he’d skidded to a halt when his companion was torn away and devoured. Jael recognized the older elf’s face as he turned round, haunted eyes toward Jael. Teague took a step backward as another shadow dove toward them. Jael stumbled forward to cast the lavender glow of the runestone over Teague’s body. The shadow bounced off the rune-summoned barrier. Teague met and held his gaze in an unspoken expression of gratitude. Then he drew his knife and pointed back the way he’d come.
“He’s using the book!” Teague shouted.
Jael needed no encouragement. He pounded after the dark elf, toward the campsite at the center of the cavern, toward Anrid. Blood ran down her arm and dripped to the ground.
She still kneeled, held fast by one dark elf—the other degenerate had released her to fight off the shadows by hurling blue fireballs into the air around them. The fire slowed the shadows down, but it hadn’t driven them off. Screaming obscenities in a dark language Jael didn’t understand, they coalesced to form a cloud above the campsite.
Jael and Teague broke into the circle of light cast by the blue fire smoldering in the stone fire ring. Lavender light clashed with blue and with the jagged arcs of white light from the cracks in the Bifrost. Jael braced himself as a shadow dove toward him. He felt the runestone recoil from the impact as it drew power from him in order to sustain itself. He gave willingly. He felt bits of himself being pulled in all directions as the Bifrost took everything he had to offer, and then some.
He was only feet away from Anrid. She looked up as he approached, her face deathly pale and streaked with tears. When she saw him coming, she curled her free hand into a fist and swung it toward her captor, beating at his thigh until he shoved her away from him. The moment of distraction served its purpose. Anrid’s scream reverberated through the room as a shadow caught hold of the dark elf by his shoulders and dragged him, kicking and shouting, into the writhing mass of shadows above.
Anrid managed to get to her feet as Jael skidded to a halt beside her. He didn’t ask how she was, didn’t ask if she needed help. He caught her around the waist and crushed her against him, inhaling the garden-fresh scent of her red curls. She said nothing but buried her face against his chest, fingers weakly clinging to the lapels of his robe as if they didn’t have the energy to do even that.
“Medda.” She gasped the word into his robes. He ignored her, instead grabbing for her arm to investigate her injury. The cut on her wrist wasn’t deep enough to cause any permanent damage, he hoped, but it bled too freely. He ripped his cloth belt from around his robes and used it to tightly bind her wound. She hissed and rocked with pain when he knotted the belt tightly.
Only then did he search the cavern for sign of the goblin child. Had the shadows gotten to her? Why had he not thought to look for her sooner? He hadn’t realized how much the tiny goblin child meant to him, how much her toothy grin had wormed its way into his heart...
He bellowed the child’s name.
