The room after that had black, long-legged things, like deer on stilts with horrible grimaces on their faces, and Isra let loose, taking more care to aim than to be quick about it. She got one of the five and injured two more, then barely got her hands up in time when Mizuki announced a fireburst to kill two of them outright. Alfric moved in quickly, sword flashing, and Isra aimed at the melee, trying to get a shot. Her efforts proved unnecessary as Alfric dispatched one then the other with only minor wounds. The whole thing was over in a blur, an encounter that almost immediately jumbled itself up, the details becoming indistinct under the relentless pace of their dungeon crawling.
They worked their way back, past the dead giant and into the room where a mussel-covered corpse was still sitting beside a pool of water. The mussels had fallen off, leaving pocked white skin below.
The next room was different from what came before, open at the top to let in moonlight that didn’t match the daylight of the other room and trees that seemed to grow straight up from the shiny black stone, their roots weaving in and out of it as though it were dirt. Isra could feel the trees, thick pines that shared something in common with those on the outside, but with a warp to them, an internal wobbling rather than a solid cylinder of the trunk.
In the center of the clearing was a bear, and Alfric stayed well back from it because it was as big as a house. It was resting but not quite sleeping, its back turned toward them. From time to time, it would huff and sigh.
said Alfric.
said
Alfric, his voice firm.
Isra looked at Verity, who was still playing, and saw the bard give a slow, circumspect nod of her head.
Mizuki came to the front, at the mouth of the cave. She breathed a shaky breath.
“Aaaah!” Alfric screamed at the bear. “Aaahah!”
The house-size bear rose, slowly, and turned to face them. ‘Face’ was
likely the wrong word, because it was simply a collection of eyes that
seemed to have been placed on the head at random, along with black
things like leeches that hung from where its mouth should have been,
each of them as large as a human arm. It warbled at them, and as it
began to move, Mizuki struck. For a moment, it was like the air had been
sucked out of the room, but it wasn’t
The spell had been directed, focused, and still the blowback from it hit them all hard enough that they staggered. Mizuki hadn’t used a fireball, or a fireburst, or the one with lightning; it had been different, almost a beam, energy in a more pure form, cleanly directed.
Half of the bear’s face was missing, and there was a hole of charred flesh in it so large that Isra thought she probably could have crawled inside.
Still, it lumbered forward, as though not aware that it should be dead.
Isra fired her bow, aiming for the eyes, hoping to blind, and stepped
after her arrow, firing more. She was feeling it in her arm, too many
firings too close together, but she pressed on. Looking at the ruins of
its face, trying to remain calm, she aimed arrows not just at the
remaining eight eyes, but at the side of its head as well. There was a
spot where its head had been which was now charred meat, and on the
other side of that was
When the first arrow she’d shot hit home, Isra backed up. A glance behind her showed something unsettling though: Verity and Mizuki were both on the ground, with Mizuki trying to rouse Verity. The song had ended.
