Sitting in the blackness, bleeding from his wound the pale knight groped blindly for something in his pack before producing a torch which he lit giving some illumination to the place in which he found himself. The oil caught with a slight acrid smell and showed the long winding set of brown stone steps that led only further into the unknown depths below. The girl who was even now latching an immense rusted bar-lock turned as she finished with a click letting both know it was closed completely although the sounds of pounding came outside the thick stone door. She was more of a young woman than a girl but many still called her so as she had one of those faces that made her look younger than she was. Now however no one could think of her as a girl as her the tattered dirty garb she wore hardly covered lithe form and she was very pretty despite the small cuts, scratches and bruises which could be seen on nearly every bit of exposed flesh. Her bright blue eyes seemed lined with stress like that of an aged person despite her young age and her dirty blonde hair was now knotted and torn in spots and the whole of the girl gave one the impression that she had been through a great deal of hardship. As she spoke there was a notable quiver in her voice which made her voice modulate in pitch greatly as she spoke and her mannerisms seemed erratic in the extreme.
“Who’re you. You’re not with them so who are you and why have you come here. You shouldn’t have come here. This place is wrong, evil. Now you’re gonna die too.” At this she lapsed into mumbling incoherently to herself but then came back more forcefully. “We have to get out. Not that way. They’ll catch us and put us back down in here.” She ran her hands through her hair. “There’s gotta be another way out. These stairs are part of some underground dungeon. It’s all dark, all dangerous. But you’re a warrior maybe you can get us out. Beware.” She said as she pointed a long thin finger at the knight. “There is something down here. It was a baby when I came but it’s grown. It feeds on us and those folks keep putting more of us down here. One of the men told me that the things parent was here thousands of years ago and left it to grow. The dread worm he called it. That was before… before…” At this she dropped off again this time without any sign of returning.
The pale knight leaned forward pulling the dagger from his back and began wrapping the area that looked worse than it was. The chainmail blunted most of the impact but it was the same chains that hooked onto the blade and held it in place this whole time. Rotating his arm the knight stood holding his torch overhead and without any signal began walking down the carved stone steps. After a short time the light disappeared around the turning corner, leaving the girl once again in the pitch black, and all that was left was the faint sound of the knights clinking sabatons on the stone.
With a shriek and the sound of naked feet slapping the stone the girl rushed down the stairs searching frantically for the knight who she had thought was still there. She found her goal walking slowly down a long smooth hall where the stairs leveled out and turned into a maze of square stone.
“Hey why’d you leave me?” She said smacking the knights’ armored arm. The knight simply turned to look at the girl before turning back towards the hall and continued to walk on. “Can’t you talk? Why don’t ya say something you big lug.” The knights’ silence was clearly beginning to frustrate the manic young woman. “Fine I won’t tell ya where you need to go and I’ll just let you get slurped up by whatever’s down here.” After another short period of silence the girl began speaking almost in a whisper like a parent telling their child a scary story. “There’s other things down here too. Some of them freaks above have come down here. They drink from that creatures juices while it’s eating others and it’s changed them. It changed them in ways making them look more like that thing. First their eyes fall out. They don’t need them no more to see cuz they don’t move by sight. Then their arms sluff off but they are swapped out with other, more horrible parts. Finally their legs grow together into a long slippery tail. It takes months to change fully so there’s a lot of half changed slidin’ and slipperin’ down around here. You can hear em coming from the slurping sound their skin makes on the stone and you can see where they been from the slime they leave.”
Around this time the duo turned a corner and as if conjured by her words a trail of a viscous whitish slime nearly the width of a mans’ shoulders coated the floor and parts of the walls and it was clear that there were overlapping paths in the slime. From somewhere in the blackness, not illuminated by their torchlight, a greasy slopping noise like that of a flopping scale less fish or lizard echoed off the stone corridors. As the two listened other sounds equally terrible came bubbling up creating a cacophony of wet sounds which made the girl shiver and cover her face all the while mumbling and babbling incoherently. Sluggishly, forms began to slide into view. The girls’ definition of the monstrosities did little to describe the unearthly horridness that shambled into sight. The things, as no name could fully capture truly capture their hideousness in a single word, slithered and flopped into view showing their hairless lumpy flesh and their modes of locomotion varied greatly as some had appendages like that of men while others had had hanging slabs of toothy meat which were in place of those that humans have. Thick tails, flabby arms, sagging legs and gurgling bald heads groped forth blindly in the dark corridor all converging on the place where the two stood still as the stones themselves. Although the girl babbled she couldn’t help but note the additional light which sparked and as she peered up from her tear slick hands she saw that the pale knights’ sword was vividly ablaze with a bright orange flame. She also noted as he put away a dented metal vial into one of his pouches and grasped again his torch in his left hand.
The knight flew into a veritable whirlwind of flame slashing and burning the flabby fungal atrocities all the while the things gnashed their teeth and flung their girth seeking the knights’ flesh. The pungent smell of sizzling flesh and a mix of detestable boiling liquids filled the air and as the pale knight cleaved his way through the demoniac cavalcade of insanity an acrid smoke wafted up slowly billowing across the ceiling as if in search of escape. The gibbering fleshy masses however, were not without defenses and regardless of the might of the knights’ swings and whether or not the things caught fire they simply squealed and whatever was left behind slithered, crawled or hopped towards their assailant gnashing and thrashing as they came. The knights’ armor saved him from many of the blows but one of the flopping things caught the warriors arm in its toothy maw sucking in the torch and his hand nearly up to the elbow. The knight could feel the thick gelatinous liquids seeping into his armor onto his flesh while an innumerable amount of sharp and blunt fangs down the slippery gullet pounded at his thick gauntlets slowly compressing the metal onto his hand. The knight chopped continually at things globular head like a butcher hacking at a side of beef and eventually his hand came loose with bits of the pallid soggy meat still clinging to his arm. The warriors’ torch had disappeared into the wet belly of the thing and the light from his sword was the only illumination either he or the now shrieking girl could see by. It was then the knight realized that he had cleaved through so far that the things had split them apart and some of the shivering atrocities were making their way towards her. The girl stood frozen in terror only able to scream shrilly. For the first time in an age the pale knight felt the heat of anger. It was dulled but the emotions were than the knight had felt in years. Like a blazing meteorite his sword fell again and again with a might which made the dying masses of flesh quiver unwholesomely as it struck. Foot by foot he carved through the walls of jelly like monstrosities until finally he reached the girl who was still weeping insanely into her damp dirty palms. With the still living or at least still pursuing abhorrent swarm on their heels the knight gripped the sobbing girls arm with his gauntleted left hand and forced her forward along the hallway as quickly as their feet could carry them. In the flickering light of the flaming sword they ran turning down hall after hall until only the faint slippery sound of their pursuers could be heard. Their location looked as unmarked and similar as any other hall they had been in. The faint flame on the blackened sword was slowly dying as the knight rooted through his pack searching for another torch but before he could complete his task the light was laid to rest leaving the two in a thick almost tangible blackness with only a faint slopping sound somewhere in the dark to let them know that they had not slipped into some abysmal oblivion.
It seemed like an age had passed in the dark and the girl fidgeted and her tears streamed from her eyes although no one could see and she no longer made any sound to accompany her crying. The continued reverberations of striking metal on stone complemented by slight sparks created flashes which illuminated the overwrought face of the girl and the battered helmet of the pale knight and there were times that the young woman could swear she saw hideous shadowy forms that swirled in those instants. Finally the knight lit the torch and these strange thoughts were dispelled as she saw nothing save herself, the knight and the long square stone hall. As if in answer to the new light somewhere at the end of the hall opposite from where they had come from. The light itself was faint yet did not hold the yellowish orange that the firelight gave. In fact the color of the illumination seemed hard to place in the chromatic spectrum as it seemed to have a color but held in it shades which almost melded all colors at once yet held none of the hard particulars.
The girl looked up at this and began to chuckle all the while still crying making her tears squirm on her face and her shoulders quiver in an unsettling manner.
“We’re gonna die down here. I thought we were gonna make it but we ain’t. That light… that color. It means we’re close and now it knows we’re here.” The sounds of something wet and sliding emanated from the halls they had left. “We might as well go. Those things are coming and there’s nowhere left to run. I thought we could make it. I thought…” The girl trailed off again staring down the hall towards the light with bulging, strained eyes.
The knight once again coated his blade with oil however this time did not light it and simply let the liquid drip from its still razor sharp edge. With sword and torch in hand as silently as he had done everything else the girl had seen he began walking slowly towards the light at the end of the tunnel like one who was given over to his imminent fate. This time the girl followed before getting lost and the two walked in pace with one another towards the ever brightening light.
The cosmic grandeur of that brilliance acted as a peak for the girls’ senses before it plummeted into the lowest reaches of utter horror. The scene that came into view once the blinding light was dispelled was centered in a massive roughly circular room carven from the mountain rock but it has not been smoothed like the rest of the halls. The ceiling was an almost egg shaped dome of the same coarse stone and both the girl and the knight were standing on a single ledge carved in a fashion more akin to the square halls they had come from. From their vantage point they could see that there was an immense set of stone stairs which led down to an irregular floor which sloped down to its lowest point at the center. The floor itself was layered with a half crusted cream colored slime or ichor which pooled deeper toward that center. Cropping up from out of this ooze were a vast number of the shuddering blasphemies similar to the ones they had recently escaped and, even more of the horrors slowly slid from several sloped tunnels which slanted off into slime coated blackness. The mounds of sentient flesh seemed to be drinking up this hideous concoction all the while mumbling obeisance to the thing which took up the whole of their attention once it was glimpsed. At first the two saw the lumpish wet thing which the girl thought was a hillock or imperfection of the stone carving. The unfortunate truth was far and away more hideous. As they stood frozen in fright or awe or some other strange sensation that could not wholly be described, the thing slithered and with a clear exertion of much effort rose its immense ridgey body into the air hanging like a great snake ready to strike. Its toothy maw of a head, complete with a ring of dull black eyes, swayed slowly while a slow continuous drip of the filthy whitish slime slid from its fangs falling to the floor. It splashed sloppily in the pool below where the disgusting worshippers lapped it up. The thing in its total circumference must have been wider than an elephant and its fanged cavity extended wider than the rest of the body. It was impossible to tell where the beginning of the thing was as its ridgey body sloshed the mucus about. It was then that the girl screamed but the sound was drowned out by a demoniac sludgy roar which emanated from the worm-like things esophagus.
Chaos ensued as the knight touched the torch to his sword lighting it on fire and the creatures rushed forth in a shambling horde. The knight threw the torch at one of oncoming things burning its pulpy face and he grabbed the stumbling filth covered girl dragging her along the narrow walkway to one of the exiting tunnels. He shoved her in but she struggled screaming almost indecipherably. “I WON’T LEAVE YOU!!!” At this point the knight and the girl had to fall back away from where they were as the massive toothy maw of the worm thing slammed into the stone wall seeking with slavering hunger to rend the flesh from their bones. With a start the girl slunk back into the tunnel watching as the pale knight leapt from his position on the ledge driving his flaming sword into the squishy flesh of the slithering horribleness. The knight then slid down tearing a searing line down the worms’ body at a length to the floor spraying a thick noisome liquid upon the ground. Squeals of an unearthly source echoed throughout the chamber as the thing thrashed sloshing the pool of the cream white liquid below. Somewhat caught in the morass of the pond of unnatural slime the knight slashed and hacked away at the oncoming horde of smaller more humanoid atrocities. He fell back as much as he could but his strength and speed wreaked havoc upon the once human creatures. Hunks of flesh and liquids flew all about in a maelstrom of sickening portions. Unfortunately for the pale knight the worm had recovered and it slammed its jellious bulk into the knight crashing him against the slick stone wall. The girl sobbed and stared through her dirty fingers as her tears streamed down her hands. She could not help but watch and scream incoherently. Pinned against the wall the knight flailed slamming his one free arm against the worms’ side but it gave no sign of pain. His sword arm, which was now within the beast tried to slash wildly but to little effect. With a singular slurp aided by the gripping inner fangs of the worms’ maw the pale knight disappeared into the quivering gullet of the immense monstrosity.
At this the girl screamed once again but turned in fear and began crawling through the tunnel the knight had pushed her. She cried and mumbled along the black corridor in a blind state, feeling the drip of her tears upon her arms as she dragged herself along. From a point unknown and behind her she could hear the sloshing gurgling sounds of those things which drove her frantically on. Her arms, feet and legs were rubbed raw and bleeding upon the rough stone but something had broken deep within the girl and she gave no heed to her pains. After a time the tunnel began sloping upwards and eventually grew to a completely vertical portion at which the girl had to cram up her legs and wriggle using the leverage of her arms and legs shifting inch by inch upward. A faint trickle of light broke the darkness somewhere far above. Hope grew within her at the prospect of survival and escape which drove the girl on. Up and up she crawled as the light grew more and more until it finally showed the girl in her dingy entirety. Bleeding from raw wounds and covered in a sticky dirty mess she finally squirmed up far enough for her fingers to grasp the lip of the tunnel where she felt a warmth that radiated into her torn fingers. With a grunt she pulled herself up out of the tunnel and rolled gasping with exertion onto the dirt covered hillside. She rose slowly to a sitting position and looked around at the barren rocky landscape around her. For miles in every direction there was nothing save rocks, shrubs, dirt and broken eroded structures. No people, no towns and no one to know of her fate. She then looked up at the sun leaning her head upon her arms. She began sobbing and as she did the tears on her face eroded little grooves in the mud on her face. The sun slowly sank darkening the hillside where the girl eventually slept with her head and arms on her curled up knees. With a start the girl awoke looking around at the darkening hillside. The sound was coming from around the bend of the hill and the girl scrambled to see what the source was. With a quiver she peered above a brown strained rock and the girl gave a yelp of excitement at what she saw. Clambering up out of a similarly shaped tunnel to the one she had climbed from was the form of the pale knight. Pieces of his armor were missing showing the now torn wrappings underneath and he was bleeding from a number of puncture wounds. What armor that was left, including his helmet was dented and somewhat melted and his whole body was coated with a thick sticky layer of the whitish liquid they had seen in that realm of horror below. He stared up towards the girl who sat upon the rock and the knight began scrambling up the hillside to meet her. The knight sat down on the ground near her and they both stared out at the setting sun. With a croak of her thrashed throat, due to all of her screaming, the girl asked one simple question to the knight. “Who are you?” without a word the knight reached his bloody hand into his half caved in breastplate pulling forth a piece of parchment with words scrawled in the common tongue. He handed it to the girl just as silently and she began to read mumbling the words as she read. After a short time she looked up at the knight and cocked her head slightly to one side.
“A curse?” The knight nodded. “Why would the old witch do that? You loved the woman didn’t you? And you tried to save her right?” The knight nodded again. “Is that why you can’t speak?” again he bobbed his head. The girl looked down at the paper once again and mumbled to herself the line that had grabbed her attention. “All the days of your life you shall wander until you find your death in battle while striving to save those the likes of which you failed.” The girl rolled up the paper again and handed it to the knight. He crumpled the paper into a small ball and threw it down the hill as both of them watched it bounce until finally resting upon an outstretched rock. The pale knight slumped back and both simply sat unmoving as statues as the night fell on those desolate and sun scorched hills.
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from Short Stories https://ift.tt/2NI5iCa
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