14 - Down Low

 

“Well, that could have gone better.”

Eris taps on the flashlight clipped to her new body armor a couple of times before it finally flickers to life, illuminating the pile of rubble she just crawled out of.  The realization that the lens is cracked serves as a reminder to check herself for injuries.  That was a long fall just now, even for someone as durable as her.

She runs through her body, a joint at a time.  Everything moving where it should without pain, and nothing moving where it shouldn’t.  A couple tender spots under the armor that are probably going to be bruised later, but otherwise no pain.  Ribs are intact.  Spine’s still straight.  Neck has full range of motion.  No nausea or dizziness when she tries to walk.  No fractures, blood, or soft spots on her scalp.

She coughs into her hand and wipes under her nose.  Checks her hand in the light.  No blood there.

She pulls out her phone and takes a picture of her face.  Blinks at the flash and tries again.  Pupils are dilated evenly.

Memory check.

Who is she?  Eris.

When is it?  Saturday.  No weekends off with this job, but there’s shaping up to be enough downtime between missions to make up for it.

What just happened?  She fell through the collapsing floor of a cave.  Fell a long distance, colliding and sliding down several different ledges and tunnels along the way.  Hard to estimate how deep she is now.

How did that happen?  Fighting a bone-armored monster the size of a horse alongside Road and Ashan.  A second one showed up unexpectedly and when she slammed it into the floor, the floor broke.  Come to think of it, that’s pretty weird for the local geology.

Why is she in a cave?  See previous answer.  Lacuna found a story about bodies being stolen from a cemetery and Road confirmed the photos of weird graffiti in the area were for summoning.  A few hops across pocket dimension bridges, a ride in the back of a pickup from a farmer Road had once fixed a crop circle problem for, and a hike through the woods later and the three of them had tracked the culprit to an unmapped cave near the Tennessee-Georgia border whose entrance had recently been expanded.

Memory seems clear.

Nothing obviously broken, not spitting up blood, and no signs of head trauma.  All told, far from the worst landing she’s had.  She’ll need to thank Lacuna when she gets back for the half-dozen charms she’d spent the past several days enchanting for her.  And, she notes more begrudgingly, probably Sullivan too for the body armor.  It may not be as fancy as what Road has going on, but it’s still an offworld import decades ahead from what any local police or military are using in terms of protection, and sleek enough she can fit it under her usual tracksuits, albeit with a few odd bulges here and there that anyone paying close enough attention might notice.  In retrospect, she probably should have brought the helmet.  Maybe once she gets around to painting the whole thing red.

She runs her hands back through her hair again to clear out the remaining dust and pebbles, brushing against her ear in the process.

“Shit.”

She lost her earpiece in the fall.  She checks her phone.  No signal, so she’s too far away from wherever it fell to be using it as a hotspot.  Too far or too much rock in the way.  Same difference.

“Yo, Road!  Ashan!  I’m still alive down here!”

No answer but echoes.

So, separated from the group with no means of communication and lost in a cave of unknown depth with at least two bloodthirsty monsters stalking the tunnels.  Not great, but she tells herself it’s not the worst predicament she’s found herself in.  Sure, most of those worse ones involved being underwater, but that’s not the point right now.  Right now, she needs a plan.

Try climbing back up?  Normally that’d be her go-to answer, but scanning her light around it looks like the shaft she fell down from is in the middle of the ceiling of a cavern more than double her height and twice again as wide.  No good way to reach that, even with climbing on top of the broken rocks that came down with her.  Maybe she could start breaking off and piling some of the larger stalagmites, but the idea of destroying natural formations that took hundreds, if not thousands of years to coalesce rubs her the wrong way.  Bad enough that she’s caused as much collateral damage as she has.

Wander the connecting tunnels and look for a path up that way?  That’s just asking to get lost.  Only as a last resort.

Sit tight and wait for rescue?  As much as it absolutely galls her to need rescuing yet again, logically it’s the best idea, particularly with Ashan around to do some sort of tracking spell.  He mentioned being able to do something along those lines on their way in, both to find one another if separated, and to lead them back to the surface.  Hell, even Lacuna could probably put together a divination ritual to find everyone now that she’s got her lab set up.

Eris sighs.  Waiting it is then.  She briefly considers pulling out a knife and spreading some of her own blood around as bait for her quarry.  It wouldn’t be the first time that trick’s worked on a hunt.  She heals quickly enough that she can usually get away with it if she’s fresh, but then again, she doesn’t even know if these monsters hunt by scent.  Better to just periodically make noise then.  Second-best case scenario, Road and Ashan hear her, and best case she makes herself sound like an easy meal and brings her quarry to her.  It’d be nice to have already done the job herself by the time the others find her.

She gives one more shout for good measure, finds a wall to lean on, turns off her light to conserve battery life, and waits.

And listens.

And waits.

And listens.

And waits.

And hears.

It’s faint, and not the sound she was hoping for, but interesting nonetheless.  Barely perceptible is the soft drip drop drip of water echoing down one of the branching tunnels.  Considering the possibility that she’s hallucinating in the silent utter darkness, she turns her light back on and raps on the cave wall loud enough to be audible a few times.  When she goes quiet again she can still hear it.

After a brief moment’s consideration she makes her way down the tunnel to investigate, marking her way with a stick of chalk drawn from a tactical utility pouch on the armor.  She figures that in the off chance she’s down here longer than expected a source of freshwater will be good to have on hand.  And if there is anything living down here, it’s likely to be drawn to hydrate itself as well, making it an even better ambush spot.

It’s slow going however, between repeatedly stopping to listen to make sure she’s still going the right way and being forced by the narrowing tunnel to stoop, then crouch, then crawl.  As many perks as there are to being just over six feet tall, easy spelunking in tight spaces isn’t one of them.  

Fifteen minutes that feel like an hour later the tunnel opens back up into another cavern, this one just tall enough for her to mostly be able to stretch her arms above her head and run her hands along the stalactites.  Not that she does.  Again, preservation of natural cave formations and etcetera.  Besides, there are more immediately arresting sights in this cavern.  Like the lake.  

She could feel the trapped humidity before she even left the tunnel and now stepping into the cavern is like walking face first into a damp blanket.  The lake itself is crystal clear, shallow, and long enough that her flashlight beam doesn’t reach the far side.  Sightless white fish and crawdads keep swimming without reaction to her introduced light.  Back on relatively dry land, every now and then she catches a glimpse of a tailless pseudo-scorpion or millipede skittering by, occasionally stopping to nibble on the thin carpet of beige fungal slime.

Every few seconds the drip drop drip of a water droplet making the final leap from stalactite to lake echoes through the empty space.  

The thudding echoes of Eris’s own booted footfalls feel almost disrespectfully loud by comparison as she walks around the edge of the lake.  She stops here and there to take pictures to show Lacuna later.  Her friend will certainly get a thrill out of seeing what might technically be uncatalogued species.  

Eventually, Eris gives into the temptation and starts letting her hand trail over the tips of stalactites while she walks.  She tells herself that one person touching them once won’t hurt anything.   It’s not like she’s in a tourist area where thousands of people all coming through with that same mindset will wear things down over time.  The thought occurs to her that she may well be the first human ever to see this place.

That thought is abruptly banished by the sight of the shrine on the far end of the lake.

She has no idea who or what it’s a shrine to but there’s no mistaking it for anything else.  A freestanding structure of clearly worked and carved stone some ten feet back from the edge of the lake that it faces with the bottom of its slanted roof roughly level with Eris’s eyes.  There are no carvings, inscriptions, or holy symbols that Eris can discern, only a shallow copper dish and a white candle in a copper stand, both curiously free of the fungal growth that covers the rest of the shrine.  Lingering magic, a sign that someone else is down here and using it, or just copper being an antifungal agent?

Stepping up to the shrine, Eris pulls out a lighter and a ration bar.

“You may not be my God,” Eris says, kneeling down, “but please accept this offering all the same and pray excuse my trespass.”

With that, she lights the candle, unwraps the ration bar, and places the hardened tofu-like rectangle in the dish.  Old Vic, one of her monster hunting acquaintances from off world, always had a thing or three to say about the importance of respecting local deities once he had a few drinks in him.  Especially small and forgotten gods.  She’s less surprised than she maybe ought to be when the slime surges over the dish and begins slowly absorbing the enveloped offering.  A squelching sound at her feet signals the pulling away of the fungal carpet from the floor around her.

Offering accepted it would seem.

With aught better to do, Eris takes a seat and turns her light off once more.  A part of her half expected the ensuing darkness to fill up with bioluminescence or veins of glowing magic crystals or something; some sort of chthonic beauty previously hidden by her intruding light.  But no, there’s simply the dim, flickering orange glow of the shrine’s candle.

It’s a surprisingly tranquil setting, especially given her circumstances.  Then again, she supposes that there are few older human comforts than firelight in a cave.  Watching the shadows dance over the splotchy patterns of mold on the walls, it’s not hard to imagine them as being cave paintings, set into motion to tell a story older than writing.

Eris snorts a laugh and shakes her head.  What would her parents think if they could see her now, making offerings to some strange god in a cave.  Actually, a bit of blasphemy and idolatry is probably better than whatever violent criminality they assume she gets up to these days.  Maybe they’d write back the next time they got one of her annual letters letting them know she’s still alive.

God, when was the last time she’d even been to a proper service?  Not since shortly after finding Crossherd, she thinks, and to call that congregation unorthodox wouldn’t begin to cover it.  She never could figure out if her parents actually believed or if they were just trying to fit into a community that didn’t seem to want them otherwise.  It’s been over a third of her life since she last worried about the latter, but as for the former… well, the idea of a singular, originating, basically benevolent God always just felt right to her, even if she didn’t agree with the details of certain creeds or the things people so often use their creator’s name as a justification for.

It gets hard too at times, trying to square the faith she grew up with with a world full of magic and monsters that doesn’t seem to pay much heed to any major religion’s cosmology.  With reality supposedly being shaped by collective belief and perception, you’d think there’d be more of that.  It always made Eris suspect that there was a flaw in that accepted theory.

And true, there are heavens and hells, but those are really just classifications for worlds with archetypical sets of traits rather than true afterlives.  People have contacted, and even visited, heavens and hells, but not Heaven or Hell.  And she’s read of worlds managed by single, seemingly omnipotent deities, but even those beings have no power beyond their one world.  Even pantheonic worlds like the one Ashan mentioned he was from over dinner the other night, with gods capable of anthropic manifestations and granting supernatural powers to their followers as they take an active, undeniable role in world events are just another categorizable phenomenon.  From such powerful deities as those, down to the forgotten little fungal god she now finds herself sharing a cave with, it’s all just “deiform entities” as the modern parascience literature calls them; fundamentally no different from any other spirit, sprite, or ghost save for scale and the ability to grow in strength from active worship.  She’d even read an article last year about a research group working out of Crossherd’s western European equivalent trying to manifest a tailor-made god from scratch in a lab.  All a far cry from the ultimate sourceless source she’d grown up with and somehow seen no concrete sign of after coming Backstage.

And yet, when she made that offering and implied that there was a God who was hers, she wasn’t lying, even if she’s not sure what that God’s name or creed is these days.  That’s enough for her for now, she thinks.

A wry smile plays across Eris’s face.  Look at her, meditating about God in a cave by candlelight.  There’s probably an archetype she’s filling there.  If Lacuna were here the two of them would probably have a laugh about it together.  But it’s nice to take a belief down off its shelf and examine it every now and then.  Shake the dust off and remember why you picked it up and kept it to begin with, even if you don’t change it before putting it back in its place.  The last time she really even thought about her faith for more than a passing moment, much less talked to someone about it, was a few years back during Lacuna’s short-lived attempt to become a witch.

Lacuna’d been venting to Eris about her frustration with trying to even comprehend what it was like to have faith or belief in anything spiritual, and lamenting that she just didn’t seem capable of feeling anything like that.  It simply hadn’t been part of her life one way or the other growing up and while she knew intellectually that religion was important to most people, she just couldn’t seem to wrap her head around some fundamental aspect of it.  Even the swearing by some nonspecific goddess that Eris still caught her friend doing on occasion was more of a phrase-substitution speech pattern she’d trained herself into than a genuine expression of belief.  Eris had tried to find the words to explain her own experience, but she never was sure how clearly it came across.  Lacuna had dropped any attempts at witchcraft not long after and never really brought it up again.

Sounds of clacking and scraping cause Eris's eyes to snap open from her musings.  She tenses but makes no movement.  Best not to make her own noise yet.  It occurs to her that with where she’s sitting in relation to the shrine’s candle any significant movement, no matter how silent, is going to give her away with the shadows on the wall if her silhouette hasn’t already.  She curses her past self’s oversight.  That leaves the risky but effective strategy of pretending to be oblivious until her target is within striking distance.  At least it makes for a fun test of her reflexes. 

The clack-clack-scrape-clacking draws nearer.  Pauses.  Resumes again more slowly.  Enters the lake cavern behind Eris and to her left with the shrine between them. 

Eris’s eyes strain to catch a glimpse of the approaching creature in the reflection on the lake.  It’s large, but smaller than the monsters she fought earlier.  Paler too, and with a completely different gait.  Something else living down here then.

The newcomer rounds the shrine and stops.  Eris keeps her face forward and still, even though it’s obviously seen her now.  In her peripheral vision she can just make out the sheen of a carapace and a segmented leg.  Insectile, maybe arachnid.  Too many hairs to be crustacean.

The pale arthropod creeps forward, nearly within arm’s reach before skittering backwards and moving side to side.  Among the reactions Eris was expecting from whatever this new monster is, caution wasn’t one of them.  It’s a concentrated effort to keep the corners of her mouth from twitching up into a grin.  Cautious means clever, and clever means an interesting challenge.

The creature moves back around the shrine and approaches Eris from the other side, slowly enough this time that she almost can’t hear it.  Soon enough though, she sees the shadow of a long pointed foreleg edging closer and closer to her own shadow on the wall.

The leg - the spider’s leg, she can now tell from the silhouette - uncurls.

Almost there.

Just…

A little…

Closer…

And…

Eris snaps her hand up, catching the tip of the leg just above her shoulder.  She feels the thing tense and go stiff beneath her grip as she uses the motion of standing up to pull, preparing to yank limb from socket.  But then, looking straight at the creature for the first time, she freezes too in a half-crouch.

This squat, pale spider, large enough to come up to her waist has a blanket or shawl draped across its abdomen, providing padding between its carapace and the harness to which multiple woven baskets are attached.  In one of those baskets are candlesticks matching the one in the shrine.  Its cephalothorax bears patterns of pigments that were clearly painted on rather than naturally produced, and one of its hind legs is injured; carapace cracked and limp as the rest of the spider’s legs begin struggling to pull away from Eris’s grip.

Some beast of burden that’s gotten separated from its master perhaps?  But no, there’s no sign of saddle or reins.  And the way it keeps gesturing its other foreleg toward the shrine…

Eris lets go of the spider’s leg and takes several long steps back, leaving the front of the shrine unobstructed.

“Sorry ‘bout that,” she says and gestures to the shrine, palms open in an after you gesture.  She has no idea if the being before her can understand her.  Probably not.  Minor gods receiving offerings are one thing, but flesh and blood people?  Unfortunately all the charms Lacuna made for her were protective in nature.  Mobile wards against falling, flames, and projectiles, but no translators.  And what need would someone living isolated underground have for a translation charm of their own?

The spider gives her an eightfold eyeing up and down, takes a tentative step forward, and then begins tapping out a pattern on the ground.

“I don’t know what that means, but…” Eris crouches down and raps on the cavern floor with a curled fist, imitating the pattern as best she can. 

The spider stops abruptly in what Eris can only assume is surprise, and then taps out another pattern that she once again copies.

“I probably sound like a real idiot to you right now, just repeating back whatever you say, huh?”  Can they even hear her, Eris wonders?  Spiders don’t have ears after all.  She makes a mental note to look that up later.  For now though, she sits back down in what she hopes will come across as a sign of nonaggression and watches the spider retrieve a small cocooned offering from one of their baskets and place it on the shrine’s altar dish.  This offering too is devoured by the fungus.  Perhaps it was not so forgotten a god as she thought.

Local deity appeased, the spider begins extruding thread from their spinnerets and curling up on themself in a complicated motion that spills one of the candles from its basket.  

Eris lunges forward and catches the errant candle before it can roll into the lake.  Walking over to the suddenly-still spider, Eris offers the candle back.

After a moment’s hesitation, the spider uncurls, rights themself, and leans to one side to tilt the candle basket toward Eris.  Taking the final step closer, Eris returns the candle and sees that the spider’s been attempting unsuccessfully and messily to bandage their own leg.

Slowly, and keeping her hands in view the whole time, Eris unzips another pouch and retrieves a compressed roll of elastic bandage.  She points once at the spider’s wound leg and then at her own arm before wrapping herself up by way of demonstration.  After a moment of holding the pose, she unwraps the bandage and stretches it out, proffering it toward the spider.  When the spider turns themself to expose the injured leg, Eris takes that as permission and begins wrapping.  Once that’s secure she scoops a palmful of cold, clear water from the lake and sprinkles it over the bandage to activate the infused alchemical agents, stiffening it enough to alleviate the need for a splint and accelerating the healing process.  If it works anywhere near as well on giant spiders as it does humans, they should be better in several hours.

“There you go, all better” Eris says, flicking the last bits of water and misapplied webbing from her hands.  “Now, on the off chance that you’re psychic or something and can understand what I’m saying, I’m gonna put it out there that the thing I’m hunting is probably the same thing that did that to you.  Don’t suppose you can lead me back to it?”

The spider taps out another pattern in response.

“Still can’t understand you,” Eris replies with a shrug, but copies the pattern of taps once more anyway.

The spider begins bouncing one leg up and down in what Eris reads as frustration, gestures for her to sit back down where they found her, and begins pulling small thread-wrapped rods from another one of the baskets on their back.  One by one, they spin their own strand of thread to attach to the rods before casting them into the lake, secured by the sticky line to the shore.  While the spider busies themself with fishing Eris notices that they keep turning themself to keep the tunnel they came in from in view of at least one of their eyes.  

Still wary of pursuit then.  Good, that means there’s that much more of a chance of Eris’s quarry coming to her.  She feels only a small twinge of guilt for using her new arachnid acquaintance as bait while taking a better ambush position near the mouth of the tunnel.  She’d feel worse if she wasn’t confident she could keep them safe.

Minutes pass.  The spider returns to the shrine, keeping seven eyes on the lake and one on the tunnel.  Eris shifts her stance to keep muscles from growing stiff.

The spider senses it coming and begins skittering back along the lakeshore before Eris hears anything.  She pats a hand toward the floor in a calm down gesture and points back to the shrine.  She’s in the middle of attempting to pantomime jumping out at whatever’s about to come around the corner when she hears the echoes of heavy footfalls on hard stone and skeletal fragments clinking against stalactites and stalagmites.  

Eris grins, all teeth.  It’s the third time today she’s heard that sound approaching.  Time for payback for her fall.

It doesn’t take much longer for the monster to emerge, yellow eyes locked on the spider huddling in the candlelight while Eris goes unnoticed mere feet away.  She’d call the thing a lizard if its scaleless, bruise-purple flesh wasn’t earthworm-smooth and its refrigerator-sized bulk with a tail half-again as long wasn’t propelled forward by six limbs.  Also, most lizards don’t glue bones all over their backs and sides with fast-hardening spittle that she’d seen glue Ashan to a wall earlier before the wizard magicked himself out of it.

As soon as the monster is fully within the cavern, Eris leaps from her hiding spot and grabs it by its tail.  She’s pulled for a short distance, sliding across the slickness of the fungal carpet until she suddenly feels the friction of naked rock beneath her boots.  She says a silent thank you to the cavern’s small god and heaves the monster to a stop just short of the shrine where the spider’s reared up on their back four legs.

Eris yanks once more, thinking to swing her quarry back around to slam into the cavern wall, but only succeeds in prying loose a segment of ribcage that looks as if it might have come from a horse as the tail it had been protecting swings around out of her grip.  Turning back around to face its attacker, the monster growls, low and loud and wet, before charging Eris with a crown of splintered femurs and bear teeth.

Eris growls back and holds her ground, baring her own teeth.  This is hardly the first charging beast she’s grabbed by horns.  Holding its snarling face in front of hers, she sees that the facial armor of hand bones and jaws has been broken away on one side already.  It is the same one that got her into this mess earlier.

Good.

Eris twists her grip with the intent of repeating the maneuver that had been oh-so-rudely interrupted earlier by the floor giving way upon contact with the monster’s face but once again the bones snap free beneath her grip.  Had its armor been loosened by the creature’s own fall earlier?  No time to question it before jaws slam shut on her forearm and six legs push forward to knock her to the ground.

The new armor’s durability is put to the test and passes with flying colors.  Eris feels a tight, painful pressure, but both the armor and the skin beneath remain unbroken.  Her grin grows wild even as she fends off the claws scrambling for her face with her other arm.  She allows herself to take a bleeding scratch on the forehead in order to punch her prey in the unprotected eye.  It rears back off of her in pain just enough for her to be able to bring up a plated knee guard into its soft underbelly, causing it to let loose of her arm and retreat.

Eris wipes the blood from her eyes with one hand and uses her newly-freed one to push herself up as she rolls to her feet.  Half a second too late she realizes her mistake, for that arm, drenched in the monster’s already-drying saliva, has just cemented itself to the cave floor on one side and her torso on the other.  She’s still in the process of breaking herself free when the glob of spit collides with her other hand and binds it to the floor as well.

Her legs are next.  The creature takes its time approaching her after that.  The seconds stretch to feel like minutes for its slow plod back over to her.  Its jaws open wide in front of her face.

And then it lets out a reverberating hiss of pain in response to the spiderbite on its exposed tail.  It whips around, buffeting Eris with that bitten tail, ready to devour the arachnid that escaped it once before.

It’s all the opening Eris needs.

In one motion she shatters her restraints, grips the thrashing tail right on top of its twin venom-bloated blisters, and uses the momentum of rising to her feet to yank as hard as she can.  No limbs get ripped from sockets, and the cavern ceiling isn’t high enough to swing her prey over her head, but the wall is conveniently right in front of her for the creature to slam into, back first, with a satisfying chorus of crunching bone.

The not-lizard has just enough time to shake itself off and send loose bones and chunks of hardened glue into the lake before Eris pounces on top of its back and begins repeatedly hammering one fist down onto its now-unprotected spine.

 

*******

 

When Ashan finds her some ten minutes later with a satiated smile on her face and watching the spider pull in their stygian catch from the lake, the cut on Eris’s forehead has already healed.  None of the blood painting her new armor red is hers.

“Yo,” she says at the soft sound of his footsteps, “I was starting to wonder when you’d show up.  I’m guessing our target’s taken care of then?”

“Road is currently seeing to that.  Lacuna was quite insistent that I come find you once you lost contact.  Given your current state, I am concerned her fears were warranted.”

“Oh, this?” Eris asks, looking down at herself.  “This is all the other guy’s.” She jerks a thumb toward the large, fungus covered mound in front of the shrine.  There’s already a few mushrooms sprouting.  “Lacuna’s seen me looking way worse after a hunt; isn’t that right sis?”

“She cannot hear us at the moment,” Ashan clarifies.  “There is an unusual amount of arcane interference down here that only gets stronger as one descends, as if this cave system is being actively concealed from divination attempts.  That, combined with initial disorientation following the upper cavern’s collapse and further pursuit of our target is why it took so long to locate you.  All the same, congratulations on remaining unharmed and defeating what I assume was one of our foes.”  Ashan purses his lips for a moment before adding, “Even if it was necessary to slay the creature.”

Eris hides her discomfort beneath a shrug.  “That’s how the hunt goes sometimes.  At least I was able to put the whole animal to good use in this case.”

Ashan casts an appraising eye over the ancient shrine and the largest offering its tiny god has had in an age.  “Yes, regarding that.  I see you have stumbled into another mystery altogether from our investigation.”

“Not that much of a mystery.  We’ve got a shrine, we’ve got this little guy,” Eris waves a hand toward the approaching giant spider, “and we’ve got tunnels drenched in cloaking magic.  Classic hidden civilization stuff.”

“That is not the sort of revelation one normally takes in stride.”

“Oh don’t get me wrong, normally I’d be stoked by the idea but we’ve still got a job to be doing and I don’t…”  Eris trails off at the sound of the spider’s excited tapping next to Ashan.  “I think they’re trying to get your attention, buddy.”

“My apologies,” Ashan says to the spider, “but my translation charm only processes verbal and written communication.  If you can understand me however, might you please confirm by raising your right forelimb?”

The spider raises their right forelimb.  Ashan nods, satisfied by the confirmation.

“Thank you for keeping my companion company until I found her.  We shall be departing anon.  While we intend to keep your presence here a secret to the upper world at large, would you be opposed to our visiting once more at some point in the future?”

The spider raises their left foreleg.

  “No, you do not object to our return?”

Right leg up for confirmation.

“Thank you.  We would be honored to be your guests.  May your gods watch over you.”  Ashan turns back to Eris.  “Shall we be off?  I suspect we have kept the others waiting far past long enough.”

But what if I let something happen to you?!

The memory of Lacuna cringing in a diner booth at the volume of her own concerned outburst washes over Eris like a glass of ice water thrown in her face.  The imagined scene of her curled up on top of a chair in her new lab drumming her fingers on her arms follows soon after.

“You’re right, let's mosey,” she says, but spares one last backwards glance at the spider as they leave.  “Actually Ashan, do you mind if I borrow your translation charm for a sec?  This little guy really helped me earlier and I wanted to thank him properly myself.”

Of all the surprises sprung on Eris today, the look of sheer horror passing over Ashan’s face at the request is by far the most shocking.  She checks to make sure there’s not something creeping up behind her, but no, it’s what she said.

“Hey, are you okay?”  Eris asks.  “Sorry if I crossed some sort of line there.”

A mask of equanimity slides back over Ashan’s expression but fails to completely hide the strain in his voice.  “I am… fine,” he bites out.  “You did not offend, merely catch off guard.  A brief, temporary loan would be…” the mask grows taut with the hesitation, “acceptable.”  With that, he pulls aside the high collar of his robes to reveal a silver choker inset with a blue stone.

“I don’t know what’s going on but your obviously uncomf-”

“Just take it,” Ashan interrupts.  “It will resize to fit you.”

“I’m sorry.  You don’t ha-”

The charmed choker comes off with a click and Ashan thrusts it toward Eris without another word.

Eris takes it gingerly.  Whatever’s going on she’s already screwed it up.  Best to get it over with as fast as possible.

“Thanks, I won’t be long.”

For some reason Ashan shudders at the utterance.

The interior of the choker’s metal band is covered with hair-fine engravings of intertwining glyph circles that merge into a gestalt of larger symbols when viewed from certain angles.  Enchanting isn’t something that Eris is an expert on by any stretch of the definition, but she’s seen enough other monster hunters with enchanted gear and trinkets for sale in Crossherd to realize that she’s holding a work of art an order of magnitude more complex than anything she’s been in the same room with before.  The only thing she’s seen that’s come come close are the chaotic, near-fractal tangles covering the pendants from Lacuna currently tucked under her clothes, and according to both her and Ashan anyone who actually knew what they were doing instead of relying on an AI could produce similar effects with far simpler patterns.

Now if only it didn’t feel so much like a damn collar to slide around her neck.  

The metal stretches with surprising ease in response to her pulling the ends together until they meet with a click above her spine.  It is Eris’s first time using a translation charm herself and while she had expected to feel something - a foreign presence slipping into her mind, a sudden awareness of expanded vocabulary, at least a tingly sensation - she does not notice anything different.  Perhaps it is something that would become apparent over time, but she does not plan on keeping this thing on long enough to find out.

Eris returns to the spider who had been watching them leave from the shrine and kneels down to get on eye level.

“I wanted to thank you properly and say goodbye before we leave.  It is always good to make a new friend and you helped me out of a tight spot back there.”  She slips off the less gore-spattered of her gloves and offers it to the spider.  “Here.  A little souvenir to remember me by.  And proof that we met if no one believes you.  Sorry about the blood though.  Feel free to clean that off.”

The spider takes the glove and places it in a basket.

“Well, then I will see you later,” she says as she extends her bare hand one last time.  “It is a gesture of friendship for my people.”

The spider places the tip of a foreleg on Eris’s palm and she shakes it gently.  After she lets go they tap out another pattern on the floor.  Eris laughs as she copies it again.  Standing up, she whispers one last “Thank you,” to the cavern’s small god, and turns back to Ashan.

The translation charm is back off Eris’s neck by the time she’s caught up with the wizard.  To her surprise he’d gone a ways further down the tunnel and now he’s leaning against the wall with his hands over his ears and a conjured mote of light floating above his head.  Getting closer, she sees that he’s taking deep, measured breaths while focusing on some undefined spot on the opposite wall.  

Save for the hands over his ears, it’s something she’s seen more than a few times on Lacuna’s bad days.  She hands the translation charm back to him without saying anything and he hurriedly takes it, turns his back to her and snaps it back on, giving Eris a glimpse of a round tattoo on the back of his neck when he pulls his hair out of the way.  The moment Eris hears the faint click of the choker settling back into place the tension melts out of Ashan’s posture, leaving him momentarily deflated and slumping against the wall.

Eris is still figuring out if she should say something when Ashan shudders once more, wipes an arm across his face, stands up straight and turns back to face her again.  His expression is as tranquil as ever.  The combined light of his conjuration and her flashlight is more than enough for the wet patch on his sleeve to be visible.

“My apologies for the momentary lapse.  I take it you were able to resolve things satisfactorily with your new acquaintance?”

“Yeah, thanks for that, and I mean it, but are you okay?  Because that didn’t look okay and if that’s my fault I wanna know.”

“You are welcome, and there is no fault of yours at play, I can assure you.  I am your friend, am I not?  I do not mind a temporary discomfort to help a friend in need.  Speaking of discomfort, would you like me to remove those bloodstains for you?”  The words spill out unusually fast for Ashan.

“Yeah sure, that’d be great,” Eris replies automatically.  She’s still stuck on him calling whatever she just saw ‘a temporary discomfort for a friend.’  God dammit, just how socially starved is this poor kid?

A flick of Ashan’s wrist and his wand slides out of his sleeve and into his hand.  A horizontal stirring motion and all the blood, mud, dirt, dust, and slime that’s accumulated on Eris today sloughs off of her and floats through the air in a spiral in front of the wand.  A final flourish and the spiral condenses into a small sphere of detritus and drops to the floor.

Eris picks up the smooth marble of red, gray, and beige and examines it in the light for a moment before pocketing it.  It’s unexpectedly cold.

Ashan nods in approval.  “Never wise to leave one’s blood lying about.”

“Oh, that ship’s long since sailed for me.  I was thinking more about cave ecosystems being fragile.  It’s why I didn’t wash off in the lake back there.  Didn’t want to screw up the pH balance on the water or introduce contaminants more than I had to in the process of fishing out a couple of monster chunks that went flying during the hunt.”  Eris knows an avoidant topic change when she hears one.  How to handle this one’s still an open question at the moment.

She’s still pondering what, if anything, to say about it when Ashan conjures a barely-visible floating thread snaking off into the darkness of the tunnel.

“I laid a series of markers detectable through the interference on my way down, so our way up should be faster,” he says while following the thread, words punctuated by puffs of condensation.  

“So we just follow this thread from marker to marker and then to Road?” Eris asks, following behind.  If he doesn’t want to talk about it, she shouldn’t push, right?  Just because Lacuna sometimes needs a nudge, that doesn’t mean that Ashan does now.

“Essentially,” Ashan answers.  “Road warned me before we split up that they can be unusually difficult to trace directly, so I will be tracking their communication device.  Being part of a matched set, that should work easily enough if I use my own earpiece as a medium.”  He goes silent for a minute before glancing back at Eris.  “You say you can see the string?  Are you sure you are not a mage?”

Eris gives a dismissive pfft.  “Dead sure.  I’ve been in enough high-stakes Backstage situations over the past ten years that I’m pretty sure I would have noticed if I could do magic.  Besides, I've been able to see all of your other conjurations just fine.”

“Those have all had a physical component to them, unlike this one.”

Eris shrugs. “Who knows?  Could just be that interference down here you mentioned making the spell act weird.”

“Perhaps.  Still, you are full of surprises.”

“Not the first time I’ve heard that, but go on.”

“Cave ecosystems, pH values, botany, architectural commentary, polyglotism.  You are more learned than I have come to expect from a warrior.”

“You mean you didn’t expect the musclehead to have a brain,” Eris scoffs.  “No, don’t apologize.  Like I said, not the first time I’ve heard that.”

“It is an eclectic spread of knowledge for anyone.”

“What can I say?  I had a lot of different things I wanted to be as a kid.  Even if none of them worked out, I still have my hobbies.  What about you?”

“What about me?”

“What’d you want to grow up to be as a kid?  I’m guessing ‘wizard’ wasn’t high on the list.”

“I cannot say I ever gave much thought to the matter.  I was only nine when I left home.  If I remember correctly, my parents would occasionally talk about their hopes that I would be a doctor or lawyer one day, but that was always their dream, not mine.  But now?  I struggle to imagine being happy as anything other than what I have become.”

“Magical otherworld wizard adventure treated you well, huh?”

“Yes,” Ashan says softly.  “Yes, I suppose it mostly did.”

“You know,” Eris says, hoping to lighten the mood, “if I had a nickel for every time I went out hunting a giant hexapodal lizard, I’d have three nickels.  Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened thrice.”

“Yes.  That does sound improbable.”

Eris sighs.  “When we get back, ask Lacuna to explain memes to you.”  That should be a fun conversation to watch. 

 

*******

 

Twenty silent minutes, two tight squeezes, and three scalings of ledges with conjured platforms later Ashan speaks up again.

“Eris, we are friends, are we not?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Is it expected for friends to confess their personal struggles to one another?”

Loaded question, but okay.

“Don’t think of it as a requirement,” Eris answers, “but if you’ve got a problem a good friend would want to know so they help you handle it.”  As she’s had to remind Lacuna at least a dozen times.

“Even if there is nothing they can do to help?”

“I like to think simply being by someone’s side so that they’re less alone can be a form of help.  It’s not much, but it’s a Hell of a lot better than nothing.”  

“I see.  So much like a relationship with a family member or guardian but without the implicit power imbalance.”

“Weird way to put it, but if…  You know what?  Scratch that.  Ashan, have you ever actually had friends before?”

“I have had a number of people with whom I interacted with in a friendly manner on a regular basis, but none with more than a surface-level emotional connection.  Save for my mentor that is.  You would be the first to explicitly name me as such.”

God dammit.  Eris takes a deep breath, followed by a long sigh.  How has this happened to her twice now?  At least Lacuna had actually had friends before but had just fallen out with or drifted away from all of them.

“In light of the fact that we are still in a cave and on the job with a bloodthirsty, corpse-stealing monster potentially still lurking about,” Eris begins, “I’m gonna skip beating around the bush and spell it out for you.  Yes, we are friends in addition to being teammates.  Yes, you can talk to me about anything on your mind, even if there doesn’t seem to be anything practical I can do to help.  No, you don’t have to do that if you’re not comfortable with it.  No, I won’t judge either way.  So, whatever point it is you’re circling around, either give me the short version now or wait until we’re out of here and give me the long version later.  I’ll make a wild guess and say it’s probably about the translation charm.”

“That would be an accurate assumption,” Ashan says hesitantly.  For a moment the serene mask starts to slip but he pulls his expression back into place and stills the tremor in his voice.  “The long version later then.  For now, I recognize this stretch of tunnel and we should soon be free of the interference and back in contact with Road and Lacuna.”

 

*******

 

“Coffee or tea?”  Eris asks.

“Tea, please,” Ashan answers.  “Whatever sort of herbal blend you can find in there.”

“You got it,” Eris says as she rummages around in the pantry of the bed and breakfast some nine hours after Ashan found her in the depths of the cave system.

Mission done with, Lacuna’s sequestered herself down in the lab again and Road's gone off to wherever it is that Road goes at night.  Probably following up a lead for whatever their next mission is.  Or just handling it solo and being back by morning.  Eris is still wrapping her head around the scene she and Ashan had walked in on upon catching up with Road.

Once she and Ashan got back in comms range Ashan had passed her his earpiece to reassure Lacuna that she was alright.  Once Lacuna had calmed down from that she spent the rest of the walk back to Road going back and forth between gushing over how amazing it had been to see Road in action against the monsters and their summoner and complaining about how they’d accidentally turned off their entire earpiece again after the fight instead of muting it.  Sure enough, Ashan’s thread led them to a cavern where they found Road sitting in the middle of not one, not two, but three unconscious bone lizards lecturing a bound, gagged, and surly teenager in a discount Halloween witch costume on why it’s wrong to desecrate graves for ritual components for building an army of summoned minions with which to wage unprovoked war on unsuspecting populations.  Even if it’s a war against subterranean giant spiders.  

Fortunately they’d caught the summoner before she’d done any real damage and the one spider Eris had run into was the only injury on that side of things so there were unlikely to be any reprisals from what Road called “the Children of Ftagxurshagaalga’k.” That Road had previously met other related colonies of giant sapient spiders surprised Eris less than their ability to pronounce that name.  

The rest of the day had been spent on cleanup.  Eris called up some of her monster hunter contacts to help move the sedated bone lizards out alive while Road and Ashan dealt with the teenage summoner.  After what she’d seen on the back of Ashan’s neck earlier, Eris couldn’t help but wonder at the sight of him drawing a temporary ward on the summoner’s neck to restrict her magic while he and Road took her first back to her parents and then to a rehab center in Crossherd for young and dangerously reckless mages.

And now it was late at night and Eris and Ashan finally had another private moment to talk.

“So,” Eris says as she sits down at the kitchen table and slides Ashan a microwaved mug of tea, “that translation charm.”

“Still no beating around the bush, I see.  Very well then.  To put it plainly, I am dependent on this trinket for linguistic communication of any kind.  Without it, even the two languages of my childhood sound like gibberish to me and my own thoughts become tangled and difficult to parse.  It is a disquieting experience to say the least.”

Eris swallows her decaf and lets out a low whistle.  “Not gonna lie, that sounds terrifying.  If I’d realized I wouldn’t have asked you to loan it to me.”

“It is fine.  Better that I occasionally try to get used to the sensation in a controlled circumstance of my own volition than to be thrust into it unprepared.  Knowing that I was doing it to help a friend eased the feelings as well.”

“So, how’d it happen?  Adventuring accident?  Pitched wizard duel?”  Eris asks before remembering to hastily add an “If you’re okay with talking about if of course.”

Ashan gently shakes his head.  “Nothing as exciting as that.  I spent seven years, from the age of nine to sixteen, in a foreign world relying entirely on a flawed translation charm for communication instead of truly learning anything of the local languages.  To my mentor’s credit she did make some attempts to teach me early on, but since she had no grasp of English or Spanish we both soon agreed to abandon that in favor of the easy route.

“Long term reliance on translation magic without any breaks to speak one’s own language naturally can have detrimental effects even on adults, much less children whose brains are still going through important developmental stages.  Combine that with the defect in the charm I was using at the time and, well, I think you can see where this is going.  We were not entirely unaware of the problem; even early on there were occasional minor glitches, but they were mild enough and far enough between that we underestimated their seriousness and every time we were about to look into finding me a new charm something would come up.”  Ashan laughs bitterly.  “One time I actually had a new charm in my hands and was about to try it on when an irate dragon landed in the middle of the bazaar.  The merchant we were trying to buy from fled, my mentor ran off to go deal with the dragon, and I left the new charm back in the merchant’s stall because I did not want to steal and my mentor had our money.  One thing led to another and we forgot about replacing the charm again until the glitches got bad enough and frequent enough that we could not ignore them anymore.”

“And that’s when you got this new one.”

“Eventually.  There are seven main different methods of translation magic common in this cluster of worlds and it took some time to find the one that would work best to mitigate my condition and longer still to commission a custom charm that would do more than simply mitigate.  All that time I was barely able to comprehend what was happening to me, only that my mentor was increasingly worried about me and tearing herself apart over it when she thought I was not watching.  Those were a bad few weeks.”

“I can only imagine.  I’m impressed you can talk about it so calmly.  Normally with Lacuna…  Well, that’s her privacy that I shouldn’t be spilling.”

“I can imagine.  She does seem to be a nervous individual.  As for me, this was all long enough ago that the sting is gone and I have made my peace with it.  If anything, I would say this conversation has been something of a relief.  You are the first person I have spoken to about this besides my mentor and my relationship with her is complicated these days.”

“I can imagine.”

Silence stretches.  Drinks cool, one of them still untouched.

“You mind if I share something?” Eris asks.  “An untold anxiety for an untold anxiety.  More of a confession, really.”

“Of course you may.  You are my friend.”

“Thanks.  Truth is, part of me was glad when I realized I lost my comms down there.  It meant that if I ran into anything Lacuna wouldn’t have to watch me go to work on it.”

“I am not sure I follow.  She seemed enthusiastic enough in her recounting of Road’s exploits and you said yourself that she has seen you in worse states after a hunt.”

“That’s the point, she’s seen me after, never during.  And Road doesn’t rip beasts limb from limb and cave in skulls with their bare hands.  Road doesn’t get covered in gore during fights.  Road doesn’t enjoy the smell and feel and taste of fresh blood or the sound of cracking bones and ripping flesh.  Road’s not a monster.”

“Is that how you think of yourself?”

“No, not quite, but I know I would be if I didn’t have a constructive outlet for managing it.  Autogenesis being what it is, I’m not being entirely figurative about that either.  I know it’s not normal or healthy to find what I do and how I do it fun or to go barehanded instead of bringing a weapon because I like feeling it all up close and viscerally personal.  But the point is I do manage it.  I just also know it doesn’t look that way from the outside.”

“I think I understand somewhat.”

“Oh really now?  Got some hidden dark depths under that shiny white robe of yours?”

“No, but my mentor does.  I eventually came to learn that she had something of a reputation for employing a considerably more brutal style of battle magic than she ever taught me, one that she still occasionally employed when I was not around.  It was her way of protecting me from herself I think, but knowing what I do now I suspect my younger self would not have loved her any less for it.  As it was, the realization when it came felt like one more lie on a pile.  So, no, I do not think Lacuna would ever see you as a monster.  Nor a liar.”

“Heh, thanks for that.  Let’s see if you still think that way a few missions from now.”