Chapter 137

  We tried to keep warm by lighting a fire in the fireplace, but the wind had picked up as twilight gave way to total darkness, and the flimsy walls of the house had too many holes to protect us. Liff was a bundle of old bedsheets beside me, huddled close to my hulking figure.

  I was deep in thought, Liff’s soft snores allowing my mind to relax a little bit while the howl of wind tried to do the opposite. It was a bad, sad and dark place in here, like a reflection of what my mind had become in the last years of my life, as if the dungeon was trying to tell me something, to use a metaphor to teach me an important lesson.

  Liff had a nightmare later that night. She was shaking as she held me in her sleep, whimpering and crying while tossing and turning. I stayed with her, awake, until she calmed down. Only then did I leave in search for more wood before the fire died. That’s when I heard it.

  The echoing toll of a bell. Old, rusted metal moved not by wind, but by something else. I dropped the large stack of wood I was carrying and looked around, crouching down like a coiled spring, ready to jump into action. My eyes zeroed in on Liff’s house, scanning for threats, but the darkness was absolute and I couldn’t see.

  The wind had not lessened, its howls covering all other sounds save for the incessant toll of the bell at the center of the village. Its sound was like a beating drum drilling into my mind, punctuating each of my steps until I was back at the threshold of Liff’s house. I peered inside, but I couldn’t see her. The fire had died, turning to soft embers that cast the room in orange and then red, casting long shadows. The bundle of covers was there, but I could not see Liff’s face from where I was.

  I pushed on the door, but before I could even hear the groan of old hinges I heard something else. Something that chilled my very blood. Stone flowed on my skin, my protecting skill snapping into existence while my body twisted to face the well at the center of the plaza. The bell wasn’t tolling anymore. In its stead, I could hear scratching and snarling.

  A shadow passed, and I thought it was Liff so I broke into a run, passing by the well where a quick revealed what looked like hundreds of pairs of evil red eyes glinting in the reflected light of the storm above. The snarling and the scratching became louder the closer I got to the well, but I didn’t care and ran past it. My legs kept pumping until I found myself at the broken down tractor, staring through its thick glass.

  There I saw Liff, the diminutive girl still covered in some of her blankets. She had carried what she could with her, but they had gotten dirty as they trailed behind her. Her unkempt locks were spilling out of the bundle of sheets and blankets, and she was shaking.

  She peeked for a moment, saw me, panicked and fell backwards in the old, worn seat of the tractor. I made what I thought was a reassuring motion and walked backwards, towards the well, towards the monsters. There was nothing there anymore, the bell was immobile and the black fathoms of the well were, well… black. I couldn’t see anything there now, no eyes, no monsters and no sound of scratching.

  I still summoned my power of Stone and sealed it shut, erasing any trace that the well had ever been there, sealing it with as much magically reinforced stone as I could make. Liff saw me do it, and when I returned her eyes were wide and her mouth open, like she was trying to find words to say and failing. I waited until she opened the tractor’s door and sat with her, and we spent the rest of the night.

  In the morning, when the twilight was slightly less harsh than the dark of a full night, we left the tractor to do a full sweep of the village. Liff had been clingy before the incident, but now she refused to let me out of her sight for even a moment.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  The light of the morning storm allowed me to see that she was shivering. I thought it was the cold at first, and indeed her skin was pale and cold like ice, but when she stumbled and fell I cursed myself for not realizing that it was the hunger. My powerful body could go for days without food if I don’t exert myself, even at my age, but hers? She had nothing left to burn. She was skin and bones.

  All the houses had been looted clean long ago. There was nothing inside anymore, save for broken furniture that couldn’t even be burned. I went through the whole village twice, each empty house leaving me feeling more and more angry at the dungeon for conjuring up such an evil challenge. I couldn’t stand the sight of the weak girl. Liff had woken up, but she was groggy and incoherent.

  Then, almost as if the situation couldn’t get any worse, the bell began to toll yet again. I ran back to the plaza, securing the little girl in the tractor cockpit and telling her to lock herself in, but the well was still sealed. The bell was tolling on its own now, no longer moved by the metal grate but by its own forces, animated perhaps by magic or perhaps by the will of this wretched place.

  I heard snarls again. This time, they came from all around, and as night fell I began to see the twin orbs of many monsters pouring out of the surrounding hills, laying siege to the abandoned village. I fought the first of them, kicks and punches and stone magic and skills defeating the first few waves of creatures. They were misshapen, furry things with long teeth and dripping saliva, deep red eyes that felt malicious and corrupt, but they were weak.

  What they lacked in strength they made up in numbers. Many times I found myself overwhelmed and had to change location, the stone skin protecting me beginning to weaken under the onslaught of limbs while mountains of carcasses piled up left and right. Other times I had to run back to Liff, finding the girl cowering in her tractor, halfway between awake and a nightmare, while the monsters clawed at the windows and tried to get in.

  I dropped a mountain of stone around us, but the monsters could climb. I entombed us alive, but the monsters could dig. In the end, during a brief lull in the attacks, I saw Liff begin to give in to despair, all the hope that I had rekindled in her gone now that she saw that not even I could protect her.

  I was furious, overcome by rage. There was nothing I saw that I could do. I went back to punching, then waited for another wave, then back to punching, and each time I saw Liff growing weaker, the light in her eyes fading.

  Then I recalled her words when I met her. About her uncle Roger and even her grandpa Heorest before him. They both had left the village in search of something, a dangerous journey that had required them to abandon the girl perhaps in spite, perhaps for protection, perhaps both. It was the only way.

  I turned the tractor’s key and heard the sputtering of its engine. Then a vibration shook the space I was in, waking Liff up, and a cough of black smoke rose from the exhaust tube as the engine roared to life, old and beaten but not defeated.

  It reminded me of myself.

  “Where are we going?” asked the little girl after a while. She had got her bearing, slowly, and was watching the dark landscape pass us by.

  “We are going where the others went,” I said, pointing at a map I had strewn across the seat. She was small enough that even with the map, there was still empty space on it. “Can you help me navigate? I can’t drive and look at the map, you know? I need your help.”

  I smiled at her, and as she fumbled with the map, she too gave me a weak smile. “Are we going to find grandpa Heorest?” she asked.

  “Perhaps,” I said. “Do you think he’s still there?”

  I pointed at a place marked on the map. I had found the map in the tractor, the dungeon’s hint.

  “He talked about the cave in the mountains a lot,” she said, “do you really think he’s still alive?”

  “I don’t know, kiddo.”

  She held back tears, but then seemed to steel herself. At least until a shiver made her lose hold of the map, and she had to bend to retrieve it. Her eyes drooped, and she yawned. “I’m hungry…” she moaned.

  “I know, kiddo. There’s food where we are going—just… just hang on tight, alright?”

  “Alright…” she slurred, “can I sleep? I’m so sleepy.”

  “Yes of course,” I said, “I’ll wake you up when we arrive.”

  “If grandpa is still alive, then Roger might be too…” she said, and those were the last words she said before she started snoring quietly.

  “I don’t think either of them will be, kiddo." I muttered, shaking my head.