David Wells - Linkershim

“The ancient history in this room alone could inspire a hundred songs,” Jack said.

“I know what you mean,” Alexander said. “I wish we had more time.”

The only door out of the room led into a tiled room filled with several benches situated between floor-to-ceiling armoires. Through that room and into the next hall, they found a straight corridor with stone doors every fifty feet or so on either side. Alexander ignored them, stretching out with his all around sight, looking for any hint of a threat in the distance, but finding only cold, empty passages and long-abandoned rooms.

Around a corner, they found a mound of dirt and stones with a crystal shard about a foot long poking out of the top.

“Hey, look at this,” Anja said, picking up the shard and holding it close to Alexander’s light.

“Be very careful with that,” Alexander said. “It’s alive.”

Jack inhaled sharply, his eyes going wide as he angled for a closer look. “This crystal is a sentient being?”

“Yes.”

“And these built all this,” Jack said.

“Yes.”

Anja gently set it down atop its pile of dirt and rocks.

“How interesting,” Lita whispered.

Alexander waited for the question he knew Jack wanted to ask next, but Jack just winked at him with a smile. They continued into the underdark, winding through what looked like a residential community. Alexander found it hard to understand why anyone would choose to live underground. It was dark and the air was stale. He already missed the sun.

Before long, he found the staircase leading up to the long hall. The hallway was twenty feet wide and just as high, running straight in both directions. Alexander suspected it had once been an underground thoroughfare for this side of the underdark. Now, he just hoped it was unused.

It certainly sounded that way, as quiet as a tomb with air just as still. Every noise felt like a trespass. He brought up the light and waited for a moment, listening for a response from some denizen of the underdark, but heard nothing.

With a shrug, he set out, his friends trailing behind him. Not five minutes later, they came to an intersection with another passage half the size of the one they were traveling. Left led toward the chasm, right went deeper into the underdark. Alexander continued going straight.

At regular intervals, they encountered similar intersections with smaller passages, occasional staircases appearing more sporadically. Alexander found himself relying on his hearing as much as his vision, stopping at each intersection to listen for any hint of a threat, but it was dead quiet for several hours.

“This place is huge,” Jack whispered.

“As big as a city,” Alexander said.

“Must’ve been a sight to behold at its height,” Lita said.

“Indeed,” Jataan whispered.

A few minutes later, Alexander thought he heard something so he doused his light, plunging the passage into total blackness. Everyone froze, stopping in their tracks and holding their breath. Faint sounds of people talking filtered through the underdark.

Alexander sent his all around sight down the corridor, but he reached the limit of his range before he found the source of the voices. He opened the door to his Wizard’s Den, lowering the light to almost total dark at the same time. Once inside the protection of his magic circle, he slipped into the firmament and sent his awareness down the hallway. Almost a league of corridor brought him to a large room that served as the intersection of two large corridors along with several sets of stairs going both up and down.

A dozen overseers stood in a circle around the Acuna wizard who’d tried earlier to stop Alexander from entering the underdark. Several of the overseers were shouting at the wizard all at the same time.

“You got us into this … how’re you going to get us out?”

“He’s lost.”

“That wouldn’t be so bad if he hadn’t collapsed the tunnel we came in through.”

“He’s been nothing but trouble; we should leave him.”

“His magic might be useful.”

“You mean like when he collapsed the tunnel?”

“Had I not collapsed the tunnel,” the wizard said, “you would all be dead. Now, I suggest you lower your voices. She may know of another way into this chamber.” He gestured toward the multiple staircases and passages.

“Do you really think that thing might come back?” an overseer whispered.

“Perhaps,” the wizard said quietly.

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

“I agree. We should go that way,” the wizard said, pointing toward the passage that Alexander and his friends were traveling.

“No!” several said hotly.

“That’s deeper in.”

“Are you sure?”

“You want to go the wrong way.”

“The exit’s that way,” another said, pointing in the opposite direction.

“I assure you, that is the passage we want to take,” the wizard said.

“You said those exact same words earlier today.”

“Yeah.”

“Look where that got us.”

“Earlier today, we were running for our lives,” the wizard said. “The path I chose was necessary at the time. This path is necessary now.”

“You know full well the only reason we got away was because the bugs stopped to eat our fallen.”

“And because we entered the underdark through a door that I was able to secure behind us,” the wizard said. “Had we stayed in the open-sided corridor, we would have been overtaken. You would all be dead.”

“You think you would have survived?”

“Most assuredly,” he said, his shield flaring just enough to make it briefly visible.

“Why do you need to be using your magic right now?”

“Yeah, don’t you trust us?”

“Not especially,” the wizard said, “but I do have an obligation to apprehend the fugitive and your help would be invaluable.”

“You want us to do our jobs? Down here? This place is trying to kill us. We need to get out of here.”

“He’s right.”

“I told you, we should leave him.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“What was that?”

“What was what?”

“I thought I heard something.”

“You’re imagining things.”

“No, he’s right.”

Everyone fell silent.

Click … click … click. Chitin on stone.

“Quickly, follow me,” the wizard said, racing through the cordon of overseers surrounding him and heading toward the underground road. Several overseers followed him without hesitation, while a group of five stayed where they were, listening to the darkness.

Click … click … click.

Alexander saw it emerge from a stairwell, crawling up onto the wall and then to the ceiling where it coiled around a pillar, eyeing the five remaining men.

A centipede. Twenty-five feet long and two feet wide, with barbed black chitin covering the entire length of its segmented body, two-foot serrated mandibles surrounding its mouth, two multi-jointed legs ending with oversized pincers jutting from its body a few feet behind its head, a foot-long stinger on its tail.

“The wizard can make light,” one of the overseers said, holding up his lamp so he could see how much oil he had left.

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Maybe we should stick together.”

They all nodded to each other before starting toward the passage.

centipede launched from the top of the pillar, uncoiling quickly yet silently. It hit one of the men in the middle of the back, slicing him clean in half with its mandibles, crashing into the ground with a clatter and using the momentum to carry it into the remaining four men, taking two men’s heads with a pincer each in lightning-quick strikes. The last two men got the worst of it. The centipede coiled around them both, raking them with its razor-sharp barbs, stripping flesh away in chunks and filling the underdark with screams that died out in gurgling gasps.