Artyom Dereschuk - Hate the Sin

The soldiers started to worry, and the old man’s voice echoed through the chambers: “Don’t look up, either! They see the glints of life in your eyes. Don’t let them take that!”

Homewrecker doubted that the creatures above could spot anything valuable in the eyes of the men around him, but he was sure his own had something of value for the creature above, so he quickly turned his gaze toward his feet.

“You know,” Corpse Eater said next to him, looking around. “When the General said that we were going to the Underworld, I imagined it a bit… differently.”

Homewrecker understood what his friend meant. He had expected spirits to swirl around in the air above, and demons with faces like those on the effigies and totems at the entrance to the cave system. When he had heard the word “Underworld,” what had come to his mind was not a literal underground world.

Wherever their lights shone, he could see trees, bushes, and even some colorless grass springing from the ground. He had never seen any plant like those before him but, then again, the plants that he knew about relied on sunlight to give them strength, not whatever this local flora was feeding upon.

Beyond the plants spanned a seemingly boundless void. The boy had no way of knowing how far it went; it could go on for a few hundred meters or for thousands of kilometers, spanning under the entire continent and beyond—under the salty oceans. The darkness was making distance an obsolete concept. The sounds they were making were leaving no echo, and thus the boy concluded that the sound had nothing to deflect from. His ears were picking up only a faint buzzing of something that could be an unearthly bug, and, to the boy’s bewilderment, something that sounded like clapping hands and flutes. The devilish music that was playing here was without any rhythm or consistency.

His eyes, starving for light, picked up another curious detail; the shadows in the underworld were much softer, surrounded by the glow of a strange yellow hue. It wasn’t enough to make him confident where he was going if he was walking without any lights, but he would compare that faint light to being in a room at night with a new moon in the sky—not enough to see everything, but just enough to not walk into a table.

Homewrecker soon realized what the source of that strange glow was: the bizarre underground trees—no more than three or four meters at most—with spiral trunks and numerous thin branches that formed an umbrella shape over them, bore long, glowing fruits. On their own, each individual fruit produced little to no light, but together, in the hazy atmosphere of their world, they produced the glow that made the air shimmer with a barely noticeable yellow glow. Perhaps if they were to turn off their lights the glow would become clearer, but the boy doubted anyone would agree to test that hypothesis.

But while he was marveling at that otherworldly glow other soldiers, up ahead, were not as excited. Their eyes were not dreamy when they looked around, and they saw the underworld for what it was—an unknown, and thus hostile territory, where nothing was what it seemed. The memories of dreadful creatures which the underworld had made out of a handful of villagers were still fresh, and the soldiers weren’t burning with desire to see the prototypes of those monstrosities.

Tsetse stepped out of the crowd, his expression once again unreadable. He headed toward Homewrecker and the boy sighed in disappointment; he already knew that the captain was going to scold him for his little light show, and he wasn’t in the mood for it.

“Don’t do that again, okay?” Tsetse got straight to the point, his eyebrows furrowed. Homewrecker just shook his shoulders: “I was just curious. What’s so bad about that? I have to expect the attack from all sides, right?”

“Don’t be coy with me,” Tsetse warned him, raising his finger. “And take this seriously. In the two minutes that we’ve spent here, one soldier had already gone missing.”

Homewrecker felt his guts sink: “Missing? Already? How?”

“When we find his body you may ask him,” Tsetse abruptly said, and threw him and Corpse Eater a concerned glance: “Keep your eyes peeled, okay?”

Homewrecker didn’t want to submit, but he nevertheless nodded in agreement. He suspected that the captain wouldn’t get physical with him if he disobeyed him this time, but he didn’t want to test him. The older boy seemed very tense, and he had plenty of reasons to be so.

“Seems like something out of Jules Verne, right?” he heard Tsetse dreamily wonder. “This Underground world.”

Homewrecker didn’t understand what the captain was talking about. “Who’s Jul’Ver?” he wondered. The captain shook his head and walked off into the crowd.

“All right, people, this is it!” the General informally informed the crowd. “We’re finally inside the Keep! Stay alert and follow me, we’ll find the Blood of the Giants soon enough and then we can get out of here!”

“Follow me,” Homewrecker quietly mocked the man. “As if you’re going to be the one in front.”

The boy wondered who was unlucky enough to be the eyes of the brigade, tasked with carrying the light in front of the crowd. Was it Puppy Slayer? No, there was no way he was the one. The boy was too scared of everything. He simply wouldn’t walk first, and although the adults liked to make fun of him, the stakes were too high to give him such an important mission.

Death Herald? Maybe. The boy was the literal opposite of Puppy Slayer, so he wouldn’t have any problem with blindly marching straight into the jaws of death. But that came with its own problems; the kid in front had to be careful, and that boy was anything but. Putting him at the head of their group could end up attracting only more trouble.

Desecrator? Homewrecker felt some eerie satisfaction spreading through his body at the thought of Desecrator being the one at the head of the line. Ever since they’d found him under that stairwell, trembling in fear, the boy had been especially unbearable, trying to put on a show at every opportunity. Having him actually put his actions where his words were, when Homewrecker knew that he was still the same coward, was a satisfying thought.

Homewrecker stopped that train of thought when he remembered that he was in a similar position. Tsetse had already warned him that there had been casualties, and he did it for a good reason: so that the boy would know that they weren’t in some magical land and that the threat was real. So that he had a solid grasp on the fact that even though they brought a piece of their world with them, lighting the way, there nevertheless were things in the shadows just beyond that light that could snatch you away right in front of fifty pair of eyes and nobody would even notice that—and it would happen so quietly that not a single ear, strained for any unusual noises, would hear your muffled scream, if any sound would even manage to escape your lungs before you were dragged away.

He was one of the twelve eyes of their brigade’s main body. Even though every cell in his own body wanted to scream and rebel against that, it was an inevitable fact that he needed the brigade just as much as they needed him. They were the claws that he would guide toward the enemy. He just had to stay alert.

Making up his mind, the boy continued his march, letting the cable and peripheral vision guide him in the correct direction—the same direction the generators with the General and the old man at the helm were being dragged in.

The scenery around them was slowly changing; they exited the Glowing Tree Grove and were now traversing the sunless fields of transparent grass. It reached up to the boy’s belt and sometimes he saw a lone purple fruit sticking out of the grass. He heard creatures crawling above them through the Upside-Down Forests, and prayed that they didn’t have wings. A couple of times he heard something cricketing right above him but, bearing in mind the old man’s warning, he did not look up.