It had come upon him too fast, a blip across the visual feed from the drone. He’d had less than one second of warning, and it hadn’t been enough.
He stopped struggling and focused on the drone input. It had a clear view now: an awakened beast, some kind of chimerical nightmare, had chosen him as prey. It had the wings of a crow and the head of a snake, and it was rising up to the canopy.
Maybe he could distract it, buy a moment to squirm out of its grasp. Luckily, he hadn’t dropped the glove to control the drone’s flight. He concentrated on his hand gestures, knowing that he only had one chance. The drone dove, and Thorn lined up the angle perfectly.
The visual feed from the drone cut out as it smashed into the snake’s head. He’d been aiming for an eye but hit its forehead instead. The beast hissed in anger and dropped in the air, Thorn’s stomach lurching into his throat.
But it wasn’t enough. The beast didn’t drop its prey.
Thorn didn’t give up. He squirmed and pushed and tried to think of some way, any way out of this mess, but he was out of time.
The snake-crow abomination hovered over its nest, nestled high in the canopy of a conifer. Thorn looked down at a writhing mass of hungry snakes, black feathers sprouting on their backs, as they all turned their heads up as one and unhinged their jaws.
The System notification woke Thorn. He jerked up, his back stiff from sleeping on the ground.
He’d had a nightmare.
Shaking the vivid images out of his head, he quickly broke camp, only pausing to clean the sappy gunk out of his water bottle’s filter as best he could, before pushing on. Today he would find Lief, or barring that, what was left of him.
He moved quicker than the day before, driven by the receding terror of his nightmare. Thorn wasn’t the suspicious sort, but he couldn’t help but think the vivid dream was an ill omen. Just in case, he spent extra time keeping an eye on the canopy above him, and found himself compulsively thinking of contingency plans in case he was attacked from above.
It had taken Thorn six hours, twice as long as expected, to reach the last recorded location for Lief’s drone. The problem was the ravines; they had increased in both size and frequency. One had been so large that it had created a break in the canopy, and Thorn had needed to backtrack significantly to the east in order to cross it.
But that detour had also brought with it a positive development: he had found a sign of humans passing through. Probably not Lief, since he typically didn’t leave boot prints in mud (even partial ones), but Thorn hadn’t memorized the pattern on the bottom of Lief’s boots so he couldn’t be sure. It was still a sign that someone else had been out here in the wilds, recently enough that the print was relatively fresh.
He’d slowed his pace and grown more cautious after discovering that boot print. He stopped being so concerned about beast threats and more concerned with the kind that walked on two legs. Despite the increased danger, it was possible verification he was on the right track.
As Thorn gazed around him, though, he wondered if that boot print was simply a coincidence. He was at the target location, and Lief was nowhere to be found.
There was nothing around him except the unending forest. The same towering canopy, birds flitting about in the tree tops. The same dense loam and spotty underbrush, broken by clumps of mossy rocks. The same deep, seemingly bottomless ravines.
He set the drone up in the canopy and began walking in concentric circles, or as close to circles as he could get when the ground was constantly broken by ancient cuts through the earth. He looked carefully for further signs of passage, but found nothing. Even less than nothing: there was hardly any natural sign to be had either.
Thorn thought hard. He was almost certain that Lief had come back out here looking for more awakened beasts, doing his Warden thing of maintaining the forest and local ecosystem. But what if he hadn’t?
What if he was (stupidly) out here looking for the source of the glitter? He tried to recall what Lief had told him about glitter farms, and what he knew about them from his past. They planted a type of plant called the imperial plum. Despite the name, it wasn’t a true plum or even type of tree; it was more like a shrub. But the fruit that it grew looked like a regular plum, at least at first glance. The sheer amount of quintessence in each plum, however, was almost on the level of a mini beast core.
The imperial plums couldn’t be grown underground, could they? Most plants needed sunlight to grow, and he didn’t expect imperial plums to be any different. Thorn walked back to the first location recorded in the drone’s memory and looked down at the gorge in front of him. It was fairly narrow, maybe only twenty feet across, but he couldn’t see the bottom. He picked up a rock and threw it in. There was no sound of the rock hitting the bottom.
Could Lief have accidentally fallen into the gorge? Thorn sat down in an out-of-the-way spot, hidden in a pile of brush a short distance from the ravine in question, and just in case, deployed his personal shield, placing each of the stakes for his pumpkin in a triangle around him. Covering himself with his camouflaged poncho, he closed his eyes and concentrated on the visual feed from the drone as he flew it down into the ravine.
The crumbling stone walls of the ravine slanted away from the opening, growing wider the further down the drone drifted. As the light from the opening above began to dim, Thorn flipped the visual feed to night vision.
He estimated he was a hundred meters below the ground now, and the bottom was still not visible. The opening of the ravine was a tiny, thin crack, far above, and the side walls had disappeared into darkness.
At two hundred meters, there was only darkness. There wasn’t enough light for the night vision mode to work. He began cycling through the infrared mode as well, looking for heat signatures.
At three hundred meters, a faint glow had appeared. Thorn wasn’t sure if it was an artifact of the camera, but he carefully maneuvered the drone towards the glow. The light grew in intensity, and he was eventually rewarded with the sight of softly luminescent lichen growing on the side of the wet cavernwall.
Another fifty meters down and the sandy bottom of the ravine came into focus. Glowing lichen grew in splotches on the walls and on rocks strewn through the sand, generating enough light to see on night vision. A wide, shallow stream meandered across the bottom, cutting back and forth in lazy curves. The cavern at the bottom of the ravine was several hundred meters wide.
No heat signatures on infrared. No bodies lying in the sand, either.
The ravine stretched roughly east to west, with a slight tilt to south-southwest. Thorn decided to explore west, flying the drone low and slow over the floor of the ravine. His head was starting to ache, but he pushed through the pain.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
He was getting close to the limit of his range on the drone (only a single kilometer in a straight line) and had decided to turn the drone around when something glimmered on the edge of the visual feed, on the wall of the ravine.
It looked metallic and was definitely man-made. Thorn flew the drone closer. It was a large eye hook, drilled into the stone, approximately twenty meters above the ground. The sand on the ground under the eye hook could have been disturbed, but it was difficult to tell with only the dim light of the lichen to see by.
Thorn flew the drone up the wall. As he had suspected, there was another eye hook about twenty meters above the first one. If he tied a rope (or better yet, rappelling gear), he could easily descend from the top down into the bottom of the ravine.
Thorn flew the drone back up to the top of the ravine, noting the placement of the top-most eye hook, hidden underneath a pile of leaves and brush. From this point forward, the ravine dove underground, forming a cavern and no longer open to the sky. When the drone returned to him, he set it down and turned off the visual feed. He desperately needed a break; his head was pounding and nausea was building in his gut, but more importantly, he needed to make a decision.
The eye hooks were clear evidence that there was something going on at the bottom of that ravine. Context seemed to say glitter farm, but from what he knew of farming… that didn’t seem possible, or at least economical.
The whole situation felt a lot more real to Thorn now. More dangerous. But as he considered the facts, he realized that things hadn’t really changed. He could pack up and head back to Aba… and do what? Sit and wait for Lief to show up? For Gammon to track down the “Amaranth” clue? For Grif to find him and administer another professional reminder to pay up?
No, the only path was forward and through. He wasn’t going to sit around feeling useless. He needed more actionable intelligence than some eye hooks set into a random ravine in the wilds. If he had visual images of an actual glitter farm, he (or more likely, Gammon) might be able to stir up something.
Forward and through… Slowly and cautiously.
Thorn tied a rope around his waist and legs, then using the hook as an anchor, slowly lowered himself over the edge. He didn’t have enough rope to go all the way to the bottom, so he would have to tie and retie his rope as he went down. He had trouble reaching the second and third hooks, since the walls sloped away sharply, but he was able to loop a second rope through the hooks using the drone and pull himself over.
He was sweaty and his arms were numb and shaking by the time he reached the bottom of the ravine. Going back up would be even more of a chore, and Thorn grimly considered if he had bitten off more than he could chew. He decided to leave two of his ropes hanging from the eye hooks, in order to speed up his retreat, but take his last rope in case he needed it for something else.
The bottom of the ravine was dark but not quite pitch black. Thorn tried to position the drone on his head or shoulder and use the drone’s night vision to see, but soon gave up. It was nauseating and incredibly awkward attempting to walk that way, and he kept tripping over the small stones and rocks on the sandy floor of the ravine.
He decided to risk a small, dim light.
The floor of the ravine sloped downwards, heading deeper underground. The air was cool and moist, far more humid than the forest above them. Thorn walked slowly along one wall, listening intently. The only sounds were the soft gurgle of water from the stream in the center of the ravine and the rustle of Thorn’s boots on the sand. There were long, smooth tracks in the sand, but no other footprints that Thorn could see.
After walking a short distance, only a few hundred meters, he noticed another eye hook drilled into the wall above him. The top of the ravine was closed up at this point, with the cavernous opening continuing below ground, so he wasn’t sure what the hooks were supposed to do. Perhaps they were not intended to be used to rappel down from the top of the ravine but had some other use.
Thorn was annoyed by the sudden intrusion of his System on his thoughts.
Nope.
Thorn found a comfortable rock to sit on and turned his light off. He flew the drone further down the ravine, now noticing quite a few more metallic hooks drilled into the walls on both sides of the cavern. The sides of the cavern were also gradually closing in, forming a tunnel. The ground was no longer sandy, but strewn with cobble and larger rocks. The slope of the floor began to rise, and the stream in the center of the ravine grew deeper and narrower, the water flowing much more quickly.
A sharp pain hit the back of his calf. Thorn gasped. A second piercing pain struck directly below the first one, near his ankle. It felt like being stabbed with a series of needles.
He jerked his leg up, but something was attached to it, and he couldn’t lift his foot off the ground. He closed the visual feed from the drone that was impeding his vision and turned on his flashlight.
Worms. Dozens of worms were crawling out of the sand all around the rock he was sitting on. Each was about the thickness of his thumb, and two of them, to his horror, had bitten into his leg. He yanked harder, stomping his leg up and down, and the worms’ sucking mouths released his calf and ankle.
Blood spurted from the wounds and hit the ground. The worms went into a frenzy, digging into the bloody sand. Thorn hopped on top of the rock he had been sitting on. The stretch of sand behind him, in the direction he had come from, was full of worms poking their heads out. He jumped and ran further down into the ravine, pausing after fifty feet to take a look backwards.
More worms were crawling out of the sand behind him. The vibrations from his footsteps must have brought them to the surface.
Further down the ravine, the ground changed from sand to rock. He hurried, following the stream in the middle and closely watching his steps. He didn’t stop until he was clambering over rough wet stones and the stream had turned into a swift current. The wounds on his leg throbbed.
If Lief had indeed fallen into the ravine or had had an accident while descending to the floor, then those worms might have cleaned him up. If that had happened, Thorn hoped Lief had been dead or at least unconscious first. That would not have been a pleasant way to go.
Thorn could barely see his drone ahead of him, hovering over the stream and further down the narrowing tunnel. He was looking for a place to sit down and rest when he noticed movement out of the corner of his eye. It was his drone. It fell out of the air, as though it had lost all power.
Strange. It hadn’t run out of power. Thorn didn’t see or feel anything different. He fired off a quick comm to Gammon.
The message showed as delivered, so there was that. As Thorn waited for a reply, he squinted at where the drone had dropped out of the air, but he couldn’t see it among the rocks. It must have fallen into the water. He decided that enough was enough, and between the unknown danger in front of him and the known danger of the worms, he’d rather run and dodge worms.
Unfortunately for Thorn, it was already too late.
He felt it wash over him, like a wave of freezing air.
Thorn barely had time to register the message before another flashed in his vision.
Thorn ran. He stumbled and tripped, falling over the loose scree of rocks, slamming his nose into the ground. He ignored the pain and blood and scrambled forward on hands and knees.
Thorn ignored the message as he got his feet under him. He sprinted back the way he came, legs burning. He felt strange, like he was running through water. His muscles felt slow, his mind sluggish.
He’d screwed up and bitten off more than he could chew. He was useless, and he was about to die. He stumbled again and fell face first into the running stream.
Thorn felt a deep flash of pain, as if his entire body were on fire, and then everything went dark as he sank beneath the surface of the water.