NOVEL FROG Cavern Exile: Amphidon Assault
The day ends and the night begins. Hayhek, his eyes finally dry of tears and chest freed of wracking sobs, offers to take first watch. It goes by without incident. Mine is more eventful. Two of the amphidons attempt to crawl up the ramp. I stab one in the head and after it slides back into the water its friend and another half dozen beasts rip its corpse to shreds.
Thankfully, they take no further interest in us and drift back to the river bank like before. Yet somewhere in their tiny brains they’ve registered our presence. It’s only a matter of time before they come for us en masse.
“Come up with a plan yet?” Hayhek asks after our slimy breakfast. His voice is stronger and has lost some of its bitterness, but not all.
I spit out a piece of fishy gristle. “Maybe.”
He sighs. “Kill one of the beasts and while the rest are distracted, swim out?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think it’ll work.”
“Why not?”
“We can’t swim fast enough.”
“You have something better?” I ask.
“No.”
“Then we don’t have much of a choice.”
“Give me the day,” he says. “Maybe I can think of something.”
I nod. “Okay. Glad you’ve decided to help.”
“Yezakh wouldn’t have wanted me to give up.”
“No. He wouldn’t have.”
“I still don’t think we’re going to make it, though.”
“We will,” I say firmly, then make my way back up to the top of the slope and leave him to his planning.
I while away the time by looking carefully at the circular runes in the stone, and tracing them in the air with my fingertip. It’s a fascinating system of writing. At first impression the circles seem to be linked together haphazardly, but when I trace them I realize that they all flow into each other, and I can trace the design from start to finish from whatever point I choose without breaking my stroke once. If only I knew what they meant, or what dwarves created them.
Countless civilizations of dwarves have lived through the ages. There isn’t a cavern in the world that wasn’t once inhabited by us. We used to be able to create our own runes, our own magic from scratch with just clever minds and curious strokes of the chisel or pen, and through this a thousand kinds of power were created. Yet sometime during our endless wars the ability was lost and now we’re reduced to digging up scraps of our lost majesty and scribbling them down into dictionaries.
This I learned from the guild library. I thought I’d pushed out all the information that wasn’t a new rune for my arms and armor, but it seems a lot still remains. Some geography too. Fifty miles or so directly below this cavern lies the broken realm of Holohom, half sunken into the magma seas, yet inhabited still, apparently, by dwarves whose helmets allow them to breath the sulfur-laden air.
Perhaps it’s there my brother lives.
As I ponder I continue to trace the looping runes in the air. I sense a kind of pattern, and add extra twists and loops with my finger, omit others. I grow more bold, making more and more drastic changes, yet to my surprise I can always make it back to the starting circle without breaking the overall flow of the characters I create.
When the thin line of light along the river becomes bright white and even a little warm, Hayhek comes up with the second leg—the first is bones now. I slice off two small pieces and try not to breath through my nose. Its fishy stench is growing worse.
“I’ve thought of something,” he says as we eat.
“What’s the plan?”
He begins to explain. As he continues I feel my eyebrows rise high in disbelief.
“It’s drastic, I know,” he says.
“It’s insane. From you, especially.”
“I believe it’s our best chance.”
I narrow my eyes.
“I do. I’m not trying to trick you to your death, Zathar. If there’s a chance I can get back to my family, I’m going to try for it.
I examine his wrinkled face and serious eyes. He doesn’t seem to be lying.
“Okay,” I declare. “We’ll do it... Now, while there’s still light.”
He nods.
“Do you want my other gauntlet?” I ask. “Might not be a weapon, but you can punch with it all right.”
“You keep it. Won’t fit my hand. I’ll put my own armor back on—better than nothing.”
We put the plan into action immediately once he equips himself. First, we chop the remaining leg into several large chunks. Hayhek picks up one in either hand. They’re slimy but he keeps a firm grip on them as we walk down to the waterline. He tosses one high up and toward the riverbank. It splashes noisily a dozen or so feet shy of it. The amphidons raise their heads and one by one slide into the dark water, stirring it into ripples. Hayhek waits until they’re above the spot where the meat sank, and before they dive tosses the other chunk.
He doesn’t toss it into the distance. There’s no way we can get the amphidons all far away enough that we can swim to the riverbank before they notice our splashing.
No, he tosses it halfway between us and them. He takes up another, and again throws it halfway between us—it splashes a mere thirty feet or so distant.
His plan is simple: draw them to the island and kill them all. If I could kill two, why not all the rest as well?
The last piece of meat he slaps down in the shallows just twelve feet from where I stand—Heartseeker’s maximum striking distance. The biggest, greediest amphidon, twice my size, snaps it up into its jaws and I stab out.
My luck is bad. The second fattest of the monsters shoves its rival in jealousy and knocks it out the way so Heartseeker only cuts its shoulder. Undamaged, my abyssal-runed weapon might have propelled itself deep and sought the monster’s heart, but in its current state it only sinks in a few inches.
I tear it out as the beast lets out an angry grunt and lurches toward me. I back away and stab in the same motion, wound it shallowly. Blood sprays but I’ve only made it angry. It snaps viciously.
A third amphidon waddles up the ramp with a hungry gleam in its eyes. At first its gaze is directed toward its wounded fellow, but quickly it catches sight of me and Hayhek. Frills around its black head twitch. It senses our smell, the smell of dwarf, a meat it only very rarely gets to taste.
The three race each other up the slope toward us, their thin claws finding purchase in minute cracks and roughnesses so that despite the sliminess of their skin their speed is fearsome.
“Stab them!” Hayhek shouts. “Hurry up!”
I slow my breathing, remind myself of the fifth degree exam where I cut down two salamanders and a troll, steady my stance and strike out at the middle beast. Heartseeker cuts right through its soft skull and destroys its small brain. It collapses, legs splaying out then spasming rapidly.
Heartseeker comes out with a splash of white slime and within half a second I’m stabbing at the second beast. My strike is true and I slice open its throat. It falls gasping but I’m not in time to stop the leap of the third one. Its front paws shove me down by my shoulders and its middle claws dig into my sides, bringing forth sharp spikes of pain. Its jaws open and descend to my face.
Hayhek uppercuts it in the neck. Though in their battered state his gauntlets aren’t much protection, they do add enough force to his punch to stun the monster, granting me the reprieve I need to extract myself from the black paws and roll away. I draw-cut Heartseeker across the amphidon’s belly as I do so and its guts slop out in a stinking mass.
We scramble further up the slope before the other dozen beasts get to us. They’re content to stop, though, and feast on their fellows. Chunks of flesh go down their gullets and their bulbous eyes shine with ecstasy. Blood dyes the water crimson.
“Greedy bastards,” I say, and grin. “I’m going to finish this.”
A wave of spray and spume erupts from the base of the slope. The amphidons spin around hissing in shock then terror. The pack splits; half dash to the right side of the ramp and half to the left. Their claws scrabble at the low stone walls.
They are too slow. Tentacles lash out from a pillar of still-falling spray and wrench the amphidons into the air. The rain of spray ends and we watch as a gigantic conglomeration of teeth and slimy flesh throws the writhing beasts into its maw—all of them at once with room to spare.
“No!” I scream.
There is nowhere to run. The beast fixes the hundred eyes that ring its mouth onto us. We back away, my joy now terror.
Then from the deeps behind a dozen hooked ropes fly out and dig into the monster's flesh.