NOVEL FROG Cavern Exile: Stars in Spheres
The cave is tall, tall as three trolls, and bends around and inward at both left and right, hinting at the shape of a ring. The bottom of it is filled with the same kind of mucky, bluely glowing water we’ve been wading through this whole journey; from the top hang stubby stalactites. Embedded into the wall opposite us is our goal—cyan spheres looking like cleverly made glass at first glance, but who betray their magical nature by the bright glowing stars in their exact centers.
Their rays illuminate our faces. The trolls shade their eyes, while Hayhek and I are drawn subtly forward by the promise of runic power. Dwatrall is even keener than us and is first to step down from the wide stone opening. He sinks up to his ankles in the water, which ripples around his steel leg-plates. He waves his weapon, a twisted iron club like Hayhek's but three times the mass.
“Coming or not?”
The trolls lumber down after him and form a protective ring. Half of them hold lengths of iron like he does, and the other half have sacks filled with rocks slung over their shoulders. Hayhek and I proceed after them and I curse as water runs into the gap under my breastplate, trickles around my waist and runs coldly down my legs.
“No need to worry,” Dwatrall says. “No living beings in this water, at least none big enough to harm us. Pick off the hytrigite and go back.”
He unstraps a sack of his own from his back, opens it and strides toward the bright-shining spheres. A hissing screech sounds from the ceiling, then a chorus of them. The spaces between the stalactites come alive with black wings and thin-furred bodies. Red-fanged bats swarm down—the same kind as the beast I made my first weapon from.
The trolls grunt and swing wildly upward with their iron clubs. They strike out fast despite their size but the bats are faster—like flies they weave around the club-blows and sink claws and fangs into the trolls’ hides.
One comes for Hayhek. It grabs him by the shoulders with its back feet, grabs his helmeted head with its hands. He shouts a warcry, grips its neck in his armored hand and crushes its throat.
Two come for me. I laugh at them, loudly, and stab quickly with Heartseeker. It stays true to its name despite the reduced accuracy from my broken gauntlets, and the beasts splash down bleeding profusely from the left sides of their chests. The trolls drop their weapons and begin to tear the bats off of them with massive clawed hands. The bats’ fangs are sharp though, and many a troll’s hands become weak and bloody, run through with punctures. A few fingers drop into the water.
Dwatrall is having trouble too—although he’s clad well enough that their scratching and biting doesn’t get through, there’s so many on him that he’s being dragged down inch by inch into the water.
I help him out. Ten bats go down in quick succession and flop lifeless around him; their wings splay on the water. He nods in thanks, and goes for one attacking the nape of the troll in front. A single punch and the beast, which is not that much smaller than a dwarf, explodes into mulch.
As one the bats decide that these meals are too tough for them and scatter upward. I manage to nail another four on the retreat. The water is now clogged with their corpses, bright red, and stinking of blood.
“Nasty little fucking bastards,” Dwatrall spits. He’s picked up plenty of unsavory language from us these past months. “We saw them off though, did we not?”
“We did,” I say, grinning at him, though of course he can’t see it through my visor. “That’s the power of metal. The power of the forge.”
“It’s powerful indeed. Once we unlock its power in full...” I sense him grin behind his asymmetric helmet. “No troll will fear mere cavern beasts, that’s for sure. Nothing will stop us!”
I’m not quite sure how to reply to that, so I point to the cyan spheres running up and down the wall in vertical seams. “If we want power we’ll need plenty of those.”
“How many?”
“As many as we can get,” Hayhek says, dripping with blood and sounding a little short of breath. “I’ve never worked with hytrigite before and neither has Zathar. It’s going to take some trial and error. And I don’t want to waste another week going all the way back here.”
“Of course,” Dwatrall says. “No time to waste, with things as they are up there.”
He’s heard the story of the battle, of course—forging wasn’t the only thing he asked about. And he’s aware that Hayhek’s in a hurry to get to his family, although he’s not quite sure he understands the concept of a family. For trolls, everyone around is family of kinds.
He grunts at our escorts in troll-speak. They nod in acknowledgement and wade forward through the crimson water to the hytrigite spheres. The wings of the dead bats rise up and down in time with the waves they generate. They pause and look upon the cyan spheres with interest.
I’ve never worked with hytrigite, but I’ve read about it plenty. It’s the safest of the reagents to extract: while incandesite can flare into hideous fires when mined in bulk, and salterite dust burns the lungs of those who mine it, the raw magical energy of hytrigite is sealed securely in the spheroid crystals.
Incidentally, despite it being safe to extract, it is by a large degree the most dangerous of the reagents to work with, but we won’t have to worry about that until later.
The trolls pick off the hytrigite spheres one by one and dump them into Dwatrall’s leather sack. It’s easy work, almost like picking fruit. I have a go myself, and find the sound they make when I pick them intensely satisfying, something between a crunchy crack and a sucking noise. The biggest I find I hold up to my eye, and gaze upon the star within. It’s intensely bright, brighter than even white-hot metal. Bright beyond white, like looking into something beyond the physical world.
What will I accomplish with this new material, I wonder? I had plenty enough incandesite before that I never bothered trying out a different reagent. What possibilities can I unlock? Although the meanings of a rune are unalterable, their connotations can and do change depending on the reagent used to graft them. Incandesite imbues them with passion, whereas hytrigite is cool and regal, but can be awoken to awe-striking wrath if the smith knows how.
“Full up,” Dwatrall grunts. He hands the sack off to the biggest of the trolls. “Time to head back.”
He sloshes up to the exit and climbs up and out. He offers a hand to Hayhek, who takes it and is lifted up with a grunt. Dwatrall does the same for me, then the rest of the trolls follow behind, grumbling and massaging their wounded hands and torn shoulders and backs, which Dwatrall informs me hurries the regeneration process.
I sigh: another long, dull journey stretches ahead of us without even the anticipation of what we might find at the end. The deep blue water sloshes coldly into my sabatons and my feet itch. Apart from the excitement of the bats, it was rather an uneventful trip.
I nearly slap myself! I ought to be sighing in relief, shouldn’t I? What if I had run into something worse in this un-runed armor? Shouldn’t I be happy?
As I walk I angrily ponder on why I feel so irritated.
The bats were rather too weak, that’s the problem. I want to prove myself to these trolls properly, and more than that, prove myself to myself after my defeat on the bridge. Prove that I’m growing stronger, climbing the bloodstained ladder rung by rung just as my brother must be doing.
We begin to grow sleepy, legs and eyelids get heavy, and by unanimous unspoken decision we call an end to the march. I sink down onto a flat stone that keeps my armored bottom just above the water, lean Heartseeker behind me, and lean my head back against the wall. Hayhek sits opposite me with his hands clasped over his face. I wonder if he’s silently weeping again, watching the head of his son roll in his mind’s eye. I feel a twinge of guilt.
The trolls lie down too, five before and five behind us. Soon their chests and bellies are rising and falling steadily. I watch their hands as I slowly let my eyelids sink down—it’s fascinating how the wounds and cuts are slowly closing, ragged stumps of fingers becoming smooth and round and sprouting the beginnings of tiny claws.
I wake. All the others are sleeping still, but I feel hot, dry. Just beyond the five trolls behind lurks a crimson face with eyes like black coals and teeth like daggers filling a wide mouth. A forked tongue flickers out. For a horrible instant I think it’s the black dragon—but no, that monster’s eyes are green.
This creature is just an abyssal salamander.
An abyssal salamander.
Abyssal salamander.
It bites into the belly of the nearest troll and tears out its guts at the same moment I snatch up Heartseeker and scream out:
“Get up! Get up! Get up!”