BO'H - Chapter 14 - More Victims

A few dozen meters up the craggy walls of the tunnel, I discovered that my fall had managed to rupture several of the partially-healed wounds I’d sustained from my encounter with the other tentacled horror we’d stumbled across on this trip. The blood trickling down my legs and arms was distracting, but I think the feeling of it running down into the cracks of my charred arm was somehow worse, being a very alien feeling. Almost like something was oozing around just between layers of skin. I’d have shuddered, if such a motion wasn’t likely to send me dropping back into the strangling grasp of the Hyphaenid, and my almost-certain doom.

Already on this climb I’d had to expend even more precious energy in burning off encroaching vines as they ripped themselves free of the wall in an attempt to swat me down, and as that drain compounded with my reopened puncture wounds and pummeled muscles… Well, I’ll just say that I wasn’t feeling especially chipper.

Imagine my elation, then, when my reaching hand finally hit a ledge, rather than solid rock! Suddenly filled with hope, I scrambled over the edge. I hoped that I had reached the crumbled tower already, and I’d merely imagined falling for half an eternity. However, I was met with an unfamiliar, dark corridor rather than a shattered doorway.

“Well, it’s something other than climbing…” I muttered quietly to myself. “Maybe I can loop around to a point higher up on this shaft. Give my arms a rest.”

That delusion given voice, I rested for a moment against the wall, and then began walking, using my arm’s natural glow to light my way enough to prevent tripping over small rock formations or falling into another pit.

Curiously, this place seemed to be entirely free of the viney fungus that seemingly carpeted everything else in this cave system. Even normal fungal variants - mushrooms, lichen, and the like - were completely missing. I could understand them being a bit less ubiquitous in one region or another, but the more I looked, the more I realized that the walls and floors of this tunnel seemed to have been scoured clean of any and all fungal growth. I risked affording myself a bit more light and began to inspect the walls closer. There was a definite grain of some kind of scrubbing or scraping tool being used on the rough stone.

“Interesting…”

A series of clicks and hisses responded to my quiet comment. I whirled, for a moment thinking that the Hyphaenid had somehow caught up to my while I dallied, but instead I came face to face with a chitinous shape, and more important a rough, steely shape of some kind of spear being pointed my way. The shadowy face of the creature clicked and whistled again in some strange tongue.

“I’m… sorry?” I  gulped. “Can I help you?” This was almost certainly one of the other races the three Hyphaenid had alluded to in their expository gloating.

The spear jutted forward, first towards my gut, forcing me to inhale quickly to avoid adding another hole to my collection, and secondly swatting sideways to bat my flaming hand.

“Er…” I was at a loss. This creature spoke a language unlike anything I had heard before. I wracked my brain for a potential way of communicating with the thing. My hand was on fire, so suddenly flailing around in an attempt at sign language was almost certainly out… The older Hyphaenid in the old ruins had spoken a variant of the Solarren language. Maybe they had also lived down here at one point? I didn’t have many options…

“Friend?” I hissed out in the unfamiliar language. My pronunciation was off and I was only slightly sure I had even picked the right word for my intended meaning. I’d considered attempting to learn Solish once, on my first visit to Sur’Dhanza, but had quickly been put off by how complicated it was to people like myself and the humans. It was a complicated series of tongue movements and a dizzying array of different hissing noises that lent itself much more easily to the sharp, carnivore teeth of the Solarren than to us omnivorous humanoids.

The creature holding me at spear-point cocked its head and retracted its spear slightly. It let out a few slavering chitters before managing to hiss a word that I think translated roughly to ‘Not tree’. It was worried that I was a fungus?

“Not tree.” I repeated, nodding and throwing another ‘Friend’ on the end just to reiterate my point.

The spear wavered, and for a moment I thought that it was going to pull away entirely, but then it jabbed towards my hand again. “Claw... fire?” The creature spit at me.

That put me at a loss once again. Was there a Solish term for ‘Marked’? Hell, I wasn’t even sure if there was one for Magic! I wracked my brain for any word I knew in the language that might explain why my arm burned but didn’t burn up. I grimaced and managed to come up with “Strange things.”

There was an uneasy tension in the air as my new friend considered that for a bit. I’m not sure if he made the connection I’d been trying to make, or if he just figured it sounded less like a lie than if I’d tried to pass it off as a terrible injury. Whatever the case, the spear slowly returned to an upright position and the creature clicked at me a few times. Seconds later, after an odd sloshing sound, I had to shield my eyes as the tunnel was suddenly filled with a sickly green light.

When my eyes adjusted, I saw that the creature had pulled out a small vial filled with a vibrant green fluid. Some small bits of something solid floated around inside, but it seemed to be the liquid itself that was emitting a very powerful glow. Though still a bit spooked by the sudden meeting with yet another new, unexpected, sentient being, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the concoction.

“Sun water.” The creature clicked, noting my curiosity. As it spoke, it drew my attention back to what exactly I had met here. Needless to say, I was a bit more spooked now that I had a clear view.

He (at least, I assumed it was a male. Bit hard to tell, really) was an insectoid creature, as I’d surmised from his clicking language and the glimpses of shiny exoskeleton I’d gotten in the darkness. He reminded me almost of a centipede from the waist down, but his upper body was closer to that of a wasp or mantis. He positively bristled with limbs - feet down below, arms equipped with slender, needle-like fingers above - and his small, antennaed head had several more pairs of eyes than I was accustomed to. Beyond that, though, he was… well, appalling seemed a bit rude. Putting it bluntly, he was incredibly disfigured, even considering his alien appearance.

Scars and cracks covered his exoskeleton, and strange pustules could be seen in the spaces between plates in his carapace. If I’d had to guess, I might almost have thought that he had fallen victim to some sort of horrible, leprous disease, only to partially recover moments before death.

My staring was apparently a bit too obvious. The insectoid frowned at me (as well as one can without our fleshy, hairy eyebrows) and clicked angrily at me. “Tree Sickness.” It said, after searching for the right way to say the second word.

“Gods above, those fungus did that to you?” I whistled. “They’re worse than I could have imagined…”

The insectoid shrugged, obviously not understanding my words, but getting my meaning well enough based on my apparent awe. He then said something else in Solish that I didn’t quite understand, but when he turned and waved for me to follow, I gathered his meaning.

“Where?” I asked simply.

He gave me a sideways glance over his shoulders. “Friends.”

-----

When we had first begun to enter the territory of his people - after quite a significant walk, I might add. These folks were taking no chances in actually settling anywhere near that sinkhole I’d crawled out of - the guards didn’t seem to be too pleased with my presence. They lowered their weapons as they spotted me, exchanging worried chitters with my guide. It took him a while, during which I stood by and tried to look as innocent as possible, but eventually they drew back, giving me a wary eye. I waved timidly at them, causing one to snort in annoyance. Apparently he wasn’t the trusting sort.

The insectoid hive was fascinating, to say the least. Like some sort of colossal ant’s nest with a bit more open space to it, the place was a complete maze of chambers, pools, alcoves, and tunnels, all lit with various containers full of the same liquid that had provided light for my captor-turned-friend earlier. I think he attempted to give me his name at some point during our walk, but it was nothing that I would ever have been able to pronounce. I introduced myself as Flint, and he certainly did a better job with that than I could have for him.

Along the way, we ended up passing far more civilians than I would have thought to have found it what seemed to amount to a refugee camp. At least, they were civilians as far as I could guess by the way their physiology was a bit less muscular than my friend or the guards. Were I not in such dire straits of my own, with Nora being left alone in a fungus-infested cave and my crew most likely unaware of the dangers lying within the temple we had moored outside of, I would have been most interested in sticking around the place for a while, learning as much as possible about these creatures’ culture and history. As it was, I would merely have to stop by for a visit when I inevitably returned with a small army to purge this entire area of the Hyphaenid menace.

We reached an especially large chamber, eventually. With the multitude of elaborate lighting arrangements in the place, I guessed that it was likely some kind of royal meeting room.

The presence of what appeared to be the queen of this insectoid race probably helped.

My guide bowed low, his spindly limbs pressed together in reverence. I did my best to replicate the motion with my radically different body shape. He seemed to chuckle at that, as did his queen, but I think they appreciated the attempt.

I remained silent as my friend exchanged a fair amount of clicking and chirping with his monarch. She seemed particularly interested with my arm. I couldn’t blame her, really. The fact that it drew the eye was a part of its problem, back home. There seemed to be no such stigma here, though, so that was nice.

After a time, the queen nodded, finally turning to face me directly. She rattled off quite an eloquent sentence in the Solish language. I was lost almost instantly after the first word, but I managed to catch ‘want’ among the gibberish. Did she assume I had some desire for a boon from her ailing kingdom? I… supposed I did, after all. They likely knew at least some path back to the surface from here! Possibly even one that didn’t require so much climbing!

“Up.” I said, with the only relevant word I could think of. “Help friend.”

The queen visibly flinched at my horrendous butchering of the language, but I think she found me funny. “One thing.” She replied, no longer bothering with full sentences, as she realized I was incapable of understanding them.

I raised an eyebrow, wondering what she could possibly want from me in exchange for the information I sought. Or, at least, what she could want that I could actually offer…

“Return.” She stated, a bit of sadness slipping into her expression. At least, it seemed that way. Insects are hard to read like that. “Help.”

The ‘trees’, as my guide had called them… The Hyphaenid were no doubt a constant threat to this colony. Their scarred faces suggested that they were also a very real and immediate threat. Given my own desire to come down here and wipe their megalomaniacal brain-pods off of the face (or under it, really) of Teicna… I could definitely promise that much. I nodded and repeated, “Help.”

She smiled (again, I can’t be too sure of these things, but it looked that way at the time!), and turned once more to my guide, most likely requesting that he set me on my way. As he bowed his head and turned to lead me along towards my goal, she turned to me one more time, bowing her own head and waving. “Farewell.”

It occurred to me some hours later that these people had been quite quick to trust me in all of this, particularly given my rather grisly-looking limb. I imagine my lack of outright hostility had helped a lot, but even then… These were creatures that lived in constant danger. No doubt they had begun to grow desperate as the fungus encroached on their hive and they slowly lost warriors capable of holding it back. I might have very well been the first friendly being they had encountered in ages. Perhaps I was their last hope… They hadn’t picked a very good savior, if that was the case, but I would be damned if I wasn’t going to do my best to fill the slot.