142 - Old and Forgotten
“Light.”
“Just give me a moment, Speck,” Alexandra said, flipping through her journal. “I can’t read in the dark.”
The senses of a darkness elemental simply weren’t designed to see ink on paper. She kept her light at a minimum and moved fast to avoid hurting her familiar.
Still, the fight with Speck had netted her a few levels that she wanted to register before continuing her exploration of the cave system.
Familiar Contract 1 -> 2
Her senses of darkness had improved a little in the few minutes since she first linked with the elemental. It wasn’t quite like seeing, but the alien nature of her new sense offered her a different perspective on her surroundings that her eyes just couldn’t match.
Darkness was pervasive, slipping into the tiniest crack, and she could feel it all.
Light 8 -> 9
Drain Life 6 -> 7
Aggressive Assimilation 5 -> 6
Reminded that she'd stolen lifeforce from her new companion, Alexandra felt a little guilty. They had been fighting for their lives, but it still wasn’t ideal. “Do you have a way to recover?”
“No.” Speck’s source rested on her shoulder.
“We’ll find a way.”
She turned off her light and dispelled her journal. Maybe Kam could help in the future. But realistically, Alexandra hadn’t managed to heal her own lifeforce despite having access to Drain Life, so it wasn’t looking good.
“Why?” the darkness elemental asked once she shared that with it.
“Ugh, I’d have to take lifeforce from a Bronze-rank human. Aside from me, they’re all children. I’d rather wait until I get to Silver. I’m sure I’ll have enough enemies by then not to feel guilty about it.”
“Children?”
“Are you asking what a child is?” she asked. “It’s like a new elemental.”
“Why. Not. Take?” Speck breathed in her ear.
“You would? Even those of your species?”
“Consume. Eat. Grow.”
Alexandra raised an eyebrow. So elementals grew by consuming other elementals. It felt wrong, but she understood that they were not humans, nor even creatures of flesh and blood. Judging them by her own standards of morality was pointless. Besides, she did just say she would use her enemies’ lifeforce to replenish her own.
Feeling the sea of darkness around her, Alexandra caught the edge of the walls and drew a mental map of her surroundings. Behind her was the large cavern she had landed on after her river adventure. In front of her was a small tunnel.
“Any idea where we should go?”
“Water.”
She winced. “I can’t swim up the river.”
“Fly?” Speck asked.
“I can’t fly either,” Alexandra answered. “Wait.” She quickly checked if she could buy a flying skill. As expected, if such a thing existed, it wasn’t in the common shop.
“Tunnel it is.” Alexandra dispelled the search window and stepped toward the gap in the rock.
Speck's weight shifted on her shoulder. “Water. Better.”
“We already went over that.” She ducked under the low lip of stone, finally slipping out of the cavern’s heat.
The passage narrowed enough that she had to turn sideways. Speck stayed silent, seemingly content to stay on her shoulder. The ceiling dropped low enough to graze her scalp. She ducked lower. The rock scraped her shoulder through her shirt.
Then the air opened up, sound stretching into a bigger room, her own footsteps losing their echo.
The cavern was even larger than the last one, its ceiling lost somewhere above the reach of her senses. Water pooled black and still along one wall, fed by a thin trickle she couldn't trace to a source. And near the center, coiled around a boulder the size of a wagon, something lifted its head.
The senses she was borrowing from Speck were still muddled, but she could feel the edge of scales. The head alone was as long as her arm, jaw hinged wide enough to take her shoulders in one bite, tongue flicking out to taste the air she'd just disturbed. Its body kept unspooling from behind the boulder.
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“Speck.”
“Big,” Speck said.
“Yes. Thank you.” She backed a step toward the tunnel mouth, journal already half-summoned in her mind. “Any idea what it is?”
“Lizard.”
The lizard's head swung toward her voice.
Shit.
She felt the pressure. It was a Gold-rank.
Alexandra slowly stepped back into the tunnel, knowing that the beast wouldn’t be able to follow her inside.
“I guess go back to the river and see if there’s another path,” she said. “Are there many Golds down there?”
“Many,” Speck whispered. “Golds. No. Silvers. Yes.”
“So we’re just unlucky.” Alexandra grimaced. “Got it.”
“Fight.”
“You can fight Gold ranks?” she asked.
“Can’t. Kill. Can. Fight.”
Right, as long as Speck could protect its source, it shouldn’t be in danger. Had it been another day, Alexandra might have tried to fight the lizard. But her inability to defeat Speck had destroyed her confidence. It seemed unlikely that she could win without paying a high cost. Even then, she’d still be lost in the caves.
It was better to look for another path.
They found their way back to the previous cavern, then to the river, which they followed downstream. The river narrowed as they walked, the current picking up speed where the passage pinched tight. Alexandra kept a hand on the walls, letting Speck's borrowed senses fill in what her eyes couldn't.
She stopped when she heard a scrambling sound. Claws on rock coming from a side passage she hadn't noticed.
“Speck?”
She felt the thing behind the bend, body as long as her leg, fur sticky with cave damp. It was the size of a dog, and when it reared to look at her, its front teeth showed yellow and longer than her fingers.
“Rat.”
She nodded. Silver-rank.
“We can take this one,” she said.
“Yes.”
The rat didn't wait for her to finish deciding. It came at her, aiming for her legs. Alexandra threw herself sideways, and Speck's darkness surged forward to meet the thing head-on.
The rat shrieked when the darkness closed over its snout. It thrashed, claws raking sparks off rock, and Alexandra scrambled to unsheathe her sword and join the fight.
Her blade caught the rat in the stomach before it could twist free of Speck's hold. The thing screamed, a sound too high for its size, and thrashed hard enough to wrench itself loose. Alexandra didn't wait. She drove the sword in again, and felt the point catch between ribs. It stopped moving.
She yanked her sword free and stepped back, breathing hard.
“Dead,” Speck said.
“Yeah.” She rolled her shoulders. With Speck helping, the fight had been easy.
The side passage the rat had come from sloped downward, narrower than the last tunnel. Alexandra wiped her blade on a spare piece of cloth and sheathed it.
“It’s going down,” she said.
This wasn’t what she was looking for, but it was worth a look. Maybe it would go back up very soon.
She ducked and went into the tunnel. The walls were rough stone, slightly wet.
They kept moving until the wall under her palm changed. Smoother rock, cut in flat panels, seams too straight to be natural.
She stopped. “Speck, I’m going to need light for a second. Can you hide?”
“Quick.”
She cast her skill, illuminating the tunnel. Carved lines ran along the panel, ornate with symbols she didn’t recognize. She raised an eyebrow, not having expected to find signs of civilization here.
“Can you follow me, Speck?”
“Yes.”
Alexandra kept going.
The tunnel opened into a chamber. Pillars carved directly into the stone lined a walkway that led to a flight of stairs that went deeper underground.
“I don’t like that,” Alexandra said.
“Why?”
She took a few steps inside the room, turning off her light so Speck could come closer.
“What’s a place like that doing here?” she asked. “This can’t be a good sign. Can you sense something down there?”
“Elementals,” Speck said. “Multiple.”
“Their type?”
“Bone.”
Alexandra exhaled. “That’s a tomb.”
Should she go in? That was a risk, but it would make sense for a manmade construction to be linked to the surface in some capacity.
“How many elementals?”
“More. Than. One.”
“Okay…” She paused and reached for her satchel. “Only bone types?”
“Close. Yes.”
Meaning that there could be something else further inside the tomb. “Alright. Sorry, Speck, I’m gonna need light again.”
Speck floated away to a crack in the wall to wait her out.
“Is light that harmful to you?”
“Uncomfortable. Feel. Weak.”
So not deadly. It was something she had expected from the moment she had opted to hunt darkness elementals, so she wasn’t surprised to hear it.
Alexandra turned on her light and checked out the entry on bone elementals on the list Medh had provided.
“Fantastic.” She smiled. At least she might come out of it with a nice lump of change. Bone elemental sources were rather expensive. It wasn’t easy for them to form. There were not many places with a large enough concentration of bones for them.
“Several, you said?” she asked, turning off the light.
Speck came back to her. “Yes.”
Alexandra frowned. “How many people have been buried here?”
The presence of multiple bone elementals meant that there had to be a lot. Especially now that she knew they consumed each other to grow, so this place had to birth a lot more. As to how many she would have to fight, she would find out soon.