13-4. Natives
“This is humiliating,” said Benedict.
Elijah ignored the man’s oft-repeated complaint, mostly because there was no other choice in the matter. But also, because he was too focused on everything else.
“Did you hear me?”
“I heard you,” Elijah sighed, continuing to put one foot in front of the other. The terrain was steep, and he’d been at it long enough that his attributes had begun to fail him. Not to the point where he would collapse, but enough that he felt the strain of climbing a mountain that should have been an easy obstacle to overcome.
That was one of the hidden dangers inherent in his situation. With as much power being channeled into his Mantle of Authority, there wasn’t a lot left to motivate his body. As a result, he felt weaker than he had in years. With focus, he could overcome his exhaustion, but he couldn’t maintain it for longer than a few hours. In the interim, he simply made his fatigued body do what he wanted it to do.
In this case, that meant climbing a mountain with a surly Warlock strapped to his back.
“No response?”
“You can’t walk on your own,” Elijah grunted as he leaped thirty feet to latch onto the edge of a cliff. He hauled himself up and continued, “This is the only way.”
“And where are we going?”
“I don’t know.”
“Shouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Elijah repeated.
It was the same conversation they’d had multiple times over the past few weeks, and every instance went the same. Without any real information, Elijah had simply chosen a direction at random and started walking. After all, staying where they’d arrived just wasn’t an option.
No one was going to save them. They had no choice but to forge their own path home.
At first, Benedict had trudged along by his side, but the man’s recovery was still incomplete. As a result, he’d quickly exhausted himself. That necessitated a change in their arrangement and the birth of the Benedict-backpack strategy, which saw the Warlock harnessed to Elijah’s back.
And Elijah didn’t disagree that it was a humiliating way to travel. It was necessary, though. Otherwise, they’d have been forced to stop every few hours just so the man could regain his energy.
They’d first caught sight of the mountain range only a day after setting out, but the sheer size of the landmark made the distance deceptive. Each peak stood miles above the ground, and climbing them had proven to be both treacherous and exhausting.
Still, even a weakened Elijah was far from powerless. His body remained well into superhuman territory, and he’d climbed the mountains with the stoicism of a man who simply had no other options before him.
On and on they went, and Elijah estimated that the range was more than a thousand miles wide and too long to judge. However, along the way, he did find some evidence of past civilization.
The first instance was no more than a cave whose sides were a little too straight to be natural. When they entered, they found weathered statues that might have once represented a race of humanoids. From Elijah’s experience as an amateur explorer, he concluded that the statues were thousands of years old.
At least.
Whatever details the statues had once possessed had long since ceded to erosion. Aside from a basic humanoid shape – two arms, two legs, and a head – their nature remained a mystery.
The same could be said for the cavern itself. The walls were still unnaturally straight, but any decorations had been worn smooth by the constant wind howling through the cave. It carried with it a scent that reminded Elijah of rotting fish, though far more subtle.
His instincts told him to investigate, mostly because that kind of smell usually came from rot. And rot only came on the heels of life.
He followed those instincts deeper into the man-made cave, only to find that it originated in a narrow crack a few hundred yards into the space.
“What do you want to do?” asked Benedict, having unlatched himself from Elijah’s back. His legs still wobbled as he squatted next to the crack. “Can you fit in one of your other forms?”
Elijah shook his head, though his negative answer wasn’t the entire truth. The crack was about eight inches wide and ran from the floor all the way to the ceiling. He suspected that, if he shifted into the Shape of Embers, he could have squeezed through. However, that came with a host of problems – not least that he would be forced to leave Benedict behind.
On top of that, he had no idea what he’d find once he squeezed through. The crack might keep going for hundreds of yards. But it could also narrow to the point where he could no longer pass. And if something attacked him? Elijah would have no way to defend himself in such a narrow space.
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“We could widen the crack,” Elijah suggested. “But that might result in unwanted attention.”
“From what?” asked Benedict. “This entire planet is devoid of life.”
“That’s not true,” Elijah disagreed. “I’ve felt it.”
“I thought you said –”
“I said there’s no vitality,” he pointed out. “Not as we think of it, at least. But there is life here. It’s different. Wrong. Like a tumor. I’m not really sure how it all works, and I think my senses are incapable of telling me more. The way life works in the abyss is so different from what we associate with that term that…I don’t know. But it is life. And it’s almost always aggressive.”
Elijah had more experience than most with abyssal abominations. The Broken Crown had been lousy with the creatures. And yet, he still wasn’t sure exactly how it all worked. It was life, but twisted into something entirely unfamiliar and completely terrifying.
Especially to a Druid.
Eventually, they decided to move on from the cavern. As interesting as it was, it offered nothing to help them survive. So, it wasn’t long before they were once again trekking across the mountains.
That was when Elijah realized that something was following them.
Throughout the past couple of weeks, he’d sensed more than a few hints that the planet wasn’t as deserted as he’d first believed. But so far, they were just flashes in the periphery. Like shadows at the edge of his vision that disappeared the second he turned his head.
This was different, though.
Steadier. More persistent. And far more solid.
“We’re about to be attacked,” Elijah predicted, his bestial instincts screaming at him that he was being hunted. “When it happens, I’m going to drop you. Do what you can to help, but try to stick close.”
He could feel Benedict’s frown when the man acknowledged the order. It wasn’t unsurprising. Benedict was a proud and powerful man, and he certainly wouldn’t look forward to being an afterthought. Or being sidelined entirely. However, the reality of the situation was that he’d yet to fully recover. His entire soul was in shambles, and though it improved a little each day, it would be a long time before he could fully express his power.
Elijah kept going until he reached a wide valley between two towering mountains. The relatively flat surface gave him clear sightlines so that he could see his stalker coming.
There, he dropped Benedict and waited. His Mantle of Authority remained at a low burn. Just wide enough to encompass his companion’s position. Anything else would sap his strength even more quickly.
And after nearly three weeks of keeping it constantly going, his soul had begun to burn. His channels were raw and ragged from the constant flow of ethera, and it felt like someone had injected him with potent acid.
But so long as he kept the mantle close, he could ignore the subtle pain.
Finally, he saw his stalkers.
Plural.
They came from all sides, skittering forward on ten spindly legs. Their low-slung bodies reminded Elijah of cockroaches – an impression supported by the thick, brown carapaces covering their broad bodies. Each one was at least seven feet long and approximately half as wide.
But that was where the resemblance to Earth-born insects ended. In addition to having ten legs instead of six, their mouth parts writhed with a multitude of hungry tentacles.
When one came close enough for Elijah to sense it with Soul of the Wild, he couldn’t help but flinch at what he felt. The carapaces weren’t really exoskeletons – not as they existed for creatures on Earth. Instead, they were more like what he’d expect from a hermit crab. Inorganic shells meant to contain the creatures’ bodies.
And those bodies were truly horrifying.
They were best described as a knot of writhing tentacles. It reminded Elijah of the California blackworm, which tended to congregate into balls of tangled worms, mostly for protection. However, as unappealing as those creatures were, they were at least natural. These new tangles of tentacles encased in a protective shell were anything but that.
They also fed off one another in an oddly balanced adversarial relationship among individual tentacles. How they managed to move in conjunction was a mystery to Elijah.
What was not a mystery was that they were very, very fast and incredibly numerous.
Knowing he couldn’t afford to tax himself, Elijah shifted into the Shape of Spores. The transformation completed just in time for him to meet the first wave of tentacled cockroach monsters. When they attacked, they did so by throwing themselves at him. Their tentacled mouth-parts shot out, wrapping around his hastily raised arm.
And then, they began to feed.
Each bite was tiny, inflicted by thousands of small mouths covering the tentacles. The physical damage wasn’t terribly taxing, but the tangled colony also drained vitality and ethera with every bite.
Fortunately, Elijah’s form was well chosen. Even as the cockroach-like creatures piled on top of him, he knew he couldn’t fight them off. Nor could he dodge their attacks. Instead, he relied on simple endurance.
And the growing cloud of yellow spores that came with every attack leveled against him.
Soon enough, the entire area was covered in an ochre cloud. The cockroach creatures weren’t weak, but they weren’t individually powerful, either. Their true might came from sheer numbers, which they probably used to overwhelm their prey.
But Elijah could not be overwhelmed. His regeneration was too high, especially when he used Wild Resurgence to augment his natural recovery. And with the spores taking root within the things’ bodies, the battle’s eventual end was all but inevitable.
Thankfully, they mostly ignored Benedict, and it wasn’t difficult to see why. Elijah blazed with powerful vitality, while the Warlock’s life remained comparatively dim. The carapaced tentacle colonies were obviously attracted to life – not unlike moths to light. And Elijah was the sun compared to Benedict’s simple candle.
It wasn’t a mystery why they ignored the other man.
Unfortunately for them, that instinct was their undoing. It was also incredibly painful for Elijah. He did manage to rip one of the carapaces off, but that just freed the tentacle worms to envelop him even more thoroughly. They ate at his fungal flesh, practically ignoring his Shell ability and burrowing into him. Most died before they managed to get more than a few inches beneath the surface, but there was something undeniably horrific about a parasitic creature tearing into his flesh.
The battle went on for almost half an hour until, at last, Elijah ripped the last of the tentacles out of his body. He was well aware that things would have been much worse had he been without his Mantle of Authority, which served to both depower and damage the horrible creatures.
But in the end, he emerged victorious.
Even as his wounds healed, he turned to Benedict. The man had killed a few of the creatures himself, though doing so had clearly drained him. He could barely sit up, much less walk. So, without further ado, Elijah strapped his companion to his back, gathered a few of the discarded shells, thinking they might be useful, then continued on his journey. But as he did so, he could scarcely convince himself that he would survive for much longer.