Hearth Fire

"How close?" Stronric asked.

"Close enough. The Canary doesnae like the air." Bauru said. The raptor's gold eyes had gone wide and flat. She held her head low and forward following the red glowing crystal vein they followed like a needle set to a line.

They had been passing through a narrow tunnel that was now bending into a shallow S. It widened around the turns then narrowed again to a throat choked by an old cave in. It was recently cleared by hands that did not care how much stone complained and made sloppy work of it. Barua darted forward silently as a whisper, checking each turn before the party approached. A sour bite rode the cool flowing air, the rank fur of gnoll hide, and the iron of tools. Bauru appeared around the last turn and signaled. Bauru lifted three fingers, dropped one, and spread the other two: scouts and sappers.

Armand's grip tightened on his hilt. Stronric glanced at him and gave a small nod. Armand let his breath out through his nose.

"Plan," Rugiel whispered just loud enough to be heard by the two males next to her.

"Bauru marks first kills," Stronric replied quietly. "When Predator bites, we move." Stornic signaled back to Bauru, imparting this command. Barua nodded, then lifted his crossbow and turned back to the opening. "Rugiel, ye break their center if they make one. Armand, keep wi' me until I set ye. If the rage rises, tell me before it owns yer hand."

They flowed forward to the choke and Stronric tapped Bauru's shoulder, signalling they were ready on his shot. The Mountain Canary peered into the opening and opened her beak without sound, a hiss only the rock could hear.

Bauru slid low and ghosted forward. The tunnel opened into another smaller cavern with the passage continuing on the far side. The chamber was small, a worker's antechamber. Rocks and boulders filled the floor space creating narrow pathways one would need to walk if trying to pass through the center, only a single clear path flowed along the wedge. Six gnolls were speaking in their high pitched erratic tongue, seemingly obvious to the dangers spreading out around them. The room was lit by small fires about the room, some warmed pots of bubbling tar, some simply burned for light and one was a large cooking fire. Nets waited like cobwebs over stones and smaller openings between them.

The glowing crystal vein ran along one edge before passing into the further passage. Along its edge human bodies were slumped against the wall in various stages of decomposition. There were two crystal shardlings moving over them like spiders on a web. They seemed to be weaving the sinew and guts into fibrous cords that sunk back into the crystal veins. The red glow brightest where the bodies lay. The worst of the bodies was almost completely taken by the block rot and the sunken sockets where its eyes should be glowed the faint red glimmer as the husks in the last anchor room. This room was a feeder, a place to prepare those stolen by the gnolls to act as the husks and feeders for the coming Anchor room.

Predator hummed, breaking the silence. A scout sagged with a bolt through his throat. The gnoll tried to call out but only the wet sound of blood choking a thought came out. The gnoll fell as Bauru's second shot nailed a shardling to the wall, where the sound of metal on glass echoed through the space before the creature shattered. The remaining gnolls popped to attention drawing their weapons and the sappers lifted their nets.

"Go," Stronric rumbled.

They went.

Rugiel struck like a smith at a bar. Her hammer chose a path where three nets braided together above the center. She hit the anchor point once, not to break it but to twist it, and the braid slipped instead of falling. Three gnolls yanked trying to free the nets and they came up a step short and stumbled into one another.

Armand and Stronric went shoulder to shoulder for three strides, then split like water finding stone. Stronric took the thick-aproned sappers, the ones who made their living in forcing those netted to their will. Armand took the quick scouts whose jobs were speed and endurance.

A sapper flung a weight at Stronric, but Stronric did not cut the cord. He had seen the trick in his past when he engaged with the dock workers and in the galleries. He lifted the axe and let the weight wrap the haft once, then stepped forward and used its momentum to feed it back into the gnoll's shins. The sapper went down swearing. The second came in with a pick aimed at Stonric's hip. Stronric took the blow on the axe's cheek before answering with his haft across the gnoll's snout.

Armand was clean where Stronric was ugly. The greatsword moved fast without hurry and despite its weight the human wielded it without drag. A scout raised a bone-bell. Armand slashed the cord, tucked the flat into the gnoll's ribs, and spun him into his friend. Armand did not chase the fumbling gnolls instead he reset. His rage from the room before lived on inside him, but he held the boiling feelings and need to kill back with a leash in his own hands.

A shardling dropped, its crystal spider-like appendages tingling as it scurried towards Rugiel. The female warrior met it with her hammerface. She swung low, lifting the shardling and driving it sideways into the tar pot. The tar burped thick and ugly but the pot held. Rugiel kept the hammerhead cold not wanting to light the room ablaze and used the horn of her hammer to pin and shear. The crystal creaked and collapsed inward as she crashed the crystal creature without shattering it and risking the razor sharp crystal that would fly otherwise.

Bauru moved like the echo of his own steps. His first dagger found the wrist of a gnoll trying to sneak attack his sister. Bauru's second attack cut the cord of the sappers' throwing net. His third, because life rarely respects neat counts, ended the gnoll's life with a dagger to the eye. The Mountain Canary kept the roof honest, as another shardling came from the thrumming crystal vein. She drove her beak into the shardling, before it could wind into the rocks. When she lifted her head again she came away with glass in her beak and disgust in her feathers.

A sapper's toe flicked a release peg, to one side of the tunnel and a scored flagstone tipped and the top layer skated like loose bark. It slid across the ground falling right into Stronric's charge. Stronric's lead boot slid an inch across the loose stone. He sank his weight, hinged at the knee, let the ankle roll, then took a half step back and settled. The inch became a choice.

"On your left," Armand said, and cut a scout out of the air.

"Ye're holdin'," Stronric said.

"For now," Armand said. "Do not let me look at the walls." The husk's eyes had begun to brighten and the flickers of glowing light started to spread across the room.

"Then we keep yer eyes busy." Stonric replied forcing another gnoll to flee into the humans kill lane. Armand let out a short laugh taking the gift and fighting forward.

The sappers broke first. They were trained to break first. The best fall back and live to lay another trap, but these two had run out of room. They stepped in side by side behind their aprons and tried to force a lane that did not exist. Stronric filled it. There was no room left and they were quickly brought down.

The party spread about the room ensuring all were dead. Rugiel set to cutting the husks from the vein and starving the next anchor of more life force.

"These are men and women from Milstone." I've seen at least this one before." She said, the disgust rang clear in her voice as she pointed to the most recently added human. "This must be why they were capturing them and not just killing. They needed them for more than just labor and sacrifices."

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Bauru crouched by a pile of cord and dark apron. "Sapper sign," he said. He held up a twist of reed with tails cut square, three notches under it: high, middle, low. "Ground trap to the right, safe line along the back ridge to the left. Gnoll sappers use the same marks wherever they work. They likely left the traps in case any had enough life to free themselves."

"Which way did they favor?" Stronric asked.

"Left," Bauru said. "Toward the pulse."

Stronric set two fingers where the axe head met the haft and felt a thin, off-key vibration. Not danger, a flaw asking to be addressed. He marked it in his mind and moved on.

"Gather what we can use," he said.

They took cord, a net to cut into strips, a coil of wire that had not yet learned to kink, two hooks, and a small pot of tar. Bauru wrapped a dead shard under a cracked corner of stone and kept it off skin. The Mountain Canary scraped her beak and shook out glassy bits like a creature that preferred meat to error.

Armand wiped his blade on a sapper's apron, then turned his back to the stains and looked at Stronric instead. "You were right," he said.

Stronric lifted a brow. "My mother will be delighted."

"I can hold it," Armand said. "If I can keep my mind busy."

"Luck's on yer side," Stronric said. "Plenty to keep ye busy."

They moved on. The pulse came more often. The air felt warmer though nothing burned. Bauru laid his hand to the wall, frowned, and nodded without joy. "Gettin' close," he said. "Anchor's breathin' shallow."

The corridor doglegged left, then right. The polish on the rock took a faint wrong sheen, like oil on water. The grooves stopped being marks and started being intentional. More reed twists appeared in mineral ghosts of trees. The same three notches repeated: high, middle, low.

The sickly stink of rot and new growth of the demonic foliage of this dungeon hung heavy in the air and they turned the last bend. The ceiling dropped until even Stronric felt it test his hair, then vaulted into a dome that opened into a large chamber. The floors were smooth and rose gently into a spiral like that of a shell to the left of the space, stopping about head high for the dwarves. Before them a large open area ran connecting to another tunnel to their right.

There were no gnolls, shardlings of writhing tendrils. The crystal vein ran red flowing up and around the sloped path before disappearing under a large grotesque form.

A large cluster of half formed bodies and thick chords of the black roots writhed with the thrum of the glowing crystals. The Anchor Stone sat in the middle held up by a twisted hand, once humanoid but now bisected with rot roots making nine fingers where there should only be five. From the twisted form four large cords fed around the room implanting the not completed formed husks. The husks were all too fresh to be strong projectors, the bodies both human and gnoll were wrought tight with chords of their own intestines mixed with their hair and the new growth of root rot. Their glowing eyes flickered sending out strobes of lights and no clear pictures.

Something lay half swallowed in the cluster holding the Anchor Stone. Not a gnoll but also not a man. It was a mask of bone with teeth longer than they had reasons to be, maybe a creature once of this dungeon but long since corrupted. The mask moved when the pulse did. The air near the mass jittered in a way that made eyes ache if you stared.

The Mountain Canary made a sound like a cork drawn slowly from a bottle. Bauru's mouth thinned. Rugiel's hand went to the hammer and stayed. Armand's grip on his greatsword found its easy place. Stronric felt the thin wrong note in his axe wake and whisper, not fear, only honesty: we will be asked for more.

"Anchor," Bauru said, not loud.

"Aye," Stronric answered. He let one breath go and took another. "We found it."

He did not step forward. "Same rule," Stornic said. "Feeders first. Leave the throat. We starve it and hold it until our beats marry with the others."

The small party quickly split around the room. Bauru, Stonric and Rugiel each went to a husk. Armand, not wanting to risk the thrall of the husks, was sent up the spiral to block the return flows. Armand inspected the mass before him, "Four feeders for certain. There is another cord thick in the braid, flowing down into the vein. A connection to the other anchor, no doubt." The human circled the cluster. As if sensing the danger before it the thrum began to quicken and with each beat the form before him twisted and churred, the mass of death, rot and decay forming and unforming. A small bubble formed then twisted into a cord, reaching ever higher and lengthening.

"I suggest we do the killing now, this thing is changing, preparing a fight." The old knight said. As the rot spread out the knight cut it away quickly. The new appendage fell back into the mass and was swallowed back up.

Stronric stood over his knee braid. It was rope turned patient—pitch, hair, and thin veins of crystal fused by years of wrong breath. It pulsed under wood and iron, and mirrored the flickering lights of the husk before him. The beat was increasingly becoming too regular for a body and too hungry for a machine.

"Wedge and feed back," Stronric said.

"Aye." Bauru slid a flat hook under the braid, eased strain into it, and nodded. "On yer count."

They worked with no flourish. Bauru fed the hook's bite until the tension admitted excess. "Cut" He called, sending the signal to Armand. The knight blocked the return of the glow to the anchor before him and went back to cutting the whips off as they tried to form.

Stronric slid his axe under his cord then rolled the braid across the edge like a slow mill, turning strain back into the anchor's mass. The pulse in the cord stuttered, then smoothed, then lost half a beat.

"Cut," Stronric called out. The old knight acknowledged his words with action and again blocked the path. The room gave a quiet groan. The red dulled by a shade, enough to be a fact.

"Now," Rugiel said. She set the hammer on the first high feeder. A form was pinned to the wall with old iron wedges. She used her hammer to twist with short, patient turns. The brittle flesh flaked from the living vein and came free of the iron. She worked the second with the horn and a wedge, freeing the iron pin slowly. As the pin slid out a sliver of roof glass crept along the seams and cracks where it was impaled. The pin broke free sending the husk sliding down the wall and Bauru's knife kissed its root. It broke with a brittle sigh. "Cut" He called out to Armand. Rugiel fanned her flames to life, searing and cauterizing the whole left behind preventing the rot to spread out.

The room's throb stumbled once, a drummer's foot missing the head. Stronric felt it in his wrist. He did not name it. Lirian had named it in the crawl: when one anchor starves, the other stumbles. Serene's four were buying them seconds in a place that hated seconds.

Stronric's axe was heated over the last of the cords and he met eyes with Armand before bringing the blade down, severing the last of the husks and feeders. Again Armand stopped the return flow and the thing before him screamed.

The sound of multiple voices, female, male, human and animal tore from the writhing form. The pulsing glow of the anchor stumbled. A beat then a breath later a second. Their party had starved theirs but the others still lived.

They set to work preparing to cut the connection cord and destroy the mass of corrupted flushed holding the anchor stone aloft. Bauru went to one knee at their exit and marked the doorway with a crumb of coal, three short, one long, and a cross tick at the safe ridge. Setting a signal if the others were forced back this way. Rugiel set the tar pot in the lee of a fallen tooth where it could not tip. She slung a belly-high cord across the entry to trip a man too quick. Stonric stacked two bodies near the door as walls with opinions about lanes, in case the gnolls came to fight for their anchor stones.

Armand stood watch over the anchor stone marking the beat of the crystal. They waited. Waiting is work, patience grinding at their minds.

The anchor pulsed twice in fast anger, then steadied. The mask's teeth showed more of themselves. A pressure moved through the dome like a word that did not quite form. The heartbeat faltered a third time, a clean hiccup that carried a small shiver through the cords. The beats matched.

"On her word," Stronric answered. The room tried to make him hurry. He did not. "We will give her the minutes she bought. Try to send a signal through the vein Bauru, to mark we see the match."

Bauru went to the largest crack and sent out three crisp sharp whistles, like those used to bring home playing children to supper, or from the mouth of a foreman marking the end of day. The sound echoed out and down reverberating back through their own cavern and down the tunnels. The party stayed frozen for a moment all straining the listen for the friend's reply or that of the foe's feet.

Nothing came as they stayed in their positions marking the passing time with steady breathing. Armand's focus was for the mass before him. The bone mask turned a fraction, its empty sockets flaring with a steady uring beat. A wind that was not breath rolled at them, tasting of copper and old forge scale.

Armand's jaw tightened. He looked at Rugiel's hand on the hammer. "Tell me a thing that is true," he said softly.

"You stepped between a friend and a foe and chose to protect." she said. "I saw it."

His shoulders eased a shade. "Merci."

From the far vein came the soft ripple of sound, not high like Bauru's whistle but that of water made to behave by a staff. The dome listened. So did they. Bauru's head tilted. "Serene's return," he softly then yelled, "Now!"

Stronric swung the might of his skill perched on his shoulder and the strength of his people behind his axe as he severed the braided chord diving into the crystal vein. Rugiel's flaming hammer crashed down into the corrupted cluster of bodies just as Armand's sword passed a breath later severing the hand holding the stone. Bauru waited to catch the stone in a bundle of cloth before it could call into the mass.

In seconds it was over. Stronric looked to Rugiel, she stood ready as the mass was already involuting into ash, her harmer ready for more if needed. He looked to Bauru who tied the crystal off and slid it into his pocket bringing Predator up and aimed at the door, nodding to his kin. Armand's eyes blazed clean, free from corrupted thoughts, sword ready and he walked down the twisting path back to the doorway. The Mountain Canary's crest lay flat. The stone fell quiet and they stood together like family again.

"Right," Stronric said, quiet as a shop before first light. "On her word."