As Darius looked about, gazing at the world before the trio, he decided that it was a scene that most people would consider to be ‘beautiful’. The sun was dipping under the horizon, its orange rays basking the gothic architecture of the city with radiant warmth. It felt wonderful to face, even as the sky above turned indigo, slowly transitioning into the blackness of night. Fantastic creatures roamed the cobbled streets and the skies, while armored warriors patrolled the town, settling disputes between individuals and keeping the peace. It was…ultimately not THAT odd of a place.
Before the brown-haired boy could go any further with his observations, however, a man, no, an elf in red garbs appeared from nowhere, speaking of things that Darius couldn’t completely understand. Cherin, was that the boy who had let them out? Or the person who brought them to this world? He was tempted to punch the elven male in the throat when his chin was suddenly lifted up, but in that instant, a lance of pain ran into his ears, causing Darius to clutch them. He could feel something hanging there, earrings that had somehow been pierced there at the same time as that elf’s examination.
And regardless of how much Darius wanted to say something in the contrary, he accepted the elf’s dark cloaks, also materialized from the aether, before wrapping it over himself. There was a direction for him to travel in, and a goal to be attained, followed by the ‘reward’ of that seemingly magical existence’s assistance at the end. The Elf was a rude shitstain, but then again, fiction had already prepared himself for that type of bullshit.
Darius breathed, assembled thoughts, gathered resolve and then stated,
“Three people in the same type of cloak would stand out too much. Sounds like those guards may be on the lookout, judging by how this was supposed to ‘prove’ ourselves to that bastard.”
“We separate and meet up, ok?”Of course, he really just didn’t want to be bogged down by a couple of crazies, but hey, they didn’t need to know that. Without another word, he marched off into the crowd, hood over his head. Admiring the scenery was secondary. What was important was getting some answers and maybe having the elf mage remove those earrings.
The rainclouds coalesced, swirling in the sky as if two great existences were wrestling each other. The temperature was dropping rapidly, winds picking up on the rooftop, strong enough that Free could feel herself being tugged away, over the edge. As the clouds burst, sending billions of droplets down onto the flooded streets, something began to turn within the dilapidated city. No, not just ‘something’, but a multitude of gears spun by an array of waterwheels and windmills. Countless ripples bounced off each other on the ground floor, whilst everything else was utterly drenched. It was a rainstorm that assaulted the unfortunate humans, heavy droplets turned into irritating projectiles that stung when it struck exposed skin.
When Dominic tried the roof access door, it would not open, the door’s hinges having rusted over and becoming nigh unusable. Some extra physical force would prove to be all that was required though, and, with efforts redoubled, the door broke clean from the frame, leading up to shelter and a stone staircase, the steps spiralling downwards like that of a medieval tower. Whatever lights once present had been snuffed out with age, leaving the staircase appearing like a descent into abyss.
Noise could be heard at the bottom. Wind, perhaps? Or something more?
Erich’s impromptu bullets shattered the corpses around him, revealing just how brittle and dry they were. A musky scent rose up from them as the wind sighed, almost as if lamenting the actions of that gun-toting maniac, but nothing else arose from it. Kevin’s jog, too, crushed bones in his wake, creating the same strange effect with each heavy step. There was definitely something unordinary in this cave, but what it was had yet to be determined by the trio.
The bodies of the insect-winged beings, while appearing to have been littered all over the place, like trash on the sidewalk, started to show an odd pattern in their arrangement. They were deliberately arranged in curls, the most mummified of them making up a long, and elegant curve, while the ‘fresher’ corpses had their bodies positioned like rays. They connected to the main ‘stem’, before branching out sporadically. From above, perhaps it would have looking like a flower or a snowflake, but from ground level, it simply looked…eerie. The eggshells and webbing were spread around everywhere in a relatively even distribution as well, each corpse having been sprinkled with that mixture.
And even though it looked as if they stared at the newcomers in the corner of their eyes, the ones with bodies broken by Erich’s rifle or Kevin’s feet did not rise again. The smell of death simply grew stronger, as the winds were roused by the aroma of life.
