Fear seemed to drown me, clogging my spiracles and filling my lungs. The adventurer looked at me, saying something I was too panicked to comprehend. All I could see or process was the blinding fiery-orange amulet hanging from her silver-skinned neck. I knew immediately that the amulet would kill me. It would mutilate me in the most terrible ways. My fears were optimistic dreams compared to the nightmare the fiery gem would inflict upon me.
Something within me urged me to move. I wanted to, but the fear was too strong. It was all I could muster to continue thinking. However, this thought sent shame rippling through me. To die valiantly in battle was honorable, but to die stricken with fear, to die of cowardice, was true shame. I felt I should end my own life, through self-digestion or some other painful means, than to die of cowardice. Prodded by the shame that poured over me, I realized I could not lay in fear and call myself courageous. If looking at the amulet stunned me with fear, all I had to do was not look at it, so I simply looked away from it.
After finally breaking my gaze from the object of my fears, I found myself with a new object to fear. Another adventurer, a short and pointed figure wielding a wicked dagger, advanced toward my helmet. He would kill me, for sure. This was the end. How hard would it be for the dagger to slip between my bevor and gorget? How hard would it be for that dagger to slit my throat and sever an artery? A true knight would never—
My mind seemed to go blank this time, but it was not out of fear. It was confusion. What was going through my mind? Why was I considering myself a knight? Where was this self-shaming nonsense about valiance and courage coming from?
The daggered adventurer suddenly brought his hand back, a look of surprise on his face. He slowly placed the dagger on the ground, then spread out his palm before sticking two fingers out and advancing again to my neck. What was he planning to do? Did his fingers have retractable nails? His nails were dirty and short, not wickedly sharp. Was he going to remove my armor for a clean cut? No. He did not seem the type that cared for a clean cut. If he wanted me dead, he would stick the dagger up my bevor without hesitation. Why was he using his fingers as a weapon then?
Maybe he was not. He might have brought his dagger toward me by instinct. He seemed to hold it with confidence. Perhaps he forgot to withdraw the knife. That would explain his look of sudden confusion before he withdrew. Then…
He thought I was an adventurer. That was the only explanation. He looked fearful, but not with the same look that adventurers always had when I opened up my hinge and saw the real treasure that lay inside. Instead, he had the sorrowful look that adventurers had when one of their allies bled out. He must have feared I was a wounded adventurer.
In that case, I could not let him advance. He was likely going to remove my helmet to identify me and perhaps begin to try to treat me. If he removed my helmet and saw a faceless amalgamation of flesh, he would likely scream and then actually make an effort to kill me. Expanding the blood vessels in my arm and making an effort to lift it under the weight of the armor, I managed to intercept his wrist with my cold gauntlet.
A new look of surprise showed on his face. He muttered something to his companions, but this time I made an effort to listen, to process. I had never put an effort into processing the words before, but I felt I could do it. A region of my brain lit up whenever an adventurer spoke. Perhaps, if I reached far back, I could find some vestigial design for understanding the words. Making sure to grip the adventurer’s arm, I centered my attention on my brain. I could feel pulses buzzing through it, zipping about faster than I could comprehend — or, perhaps, at the same rate as I could comprehend. Another adventurer, with a breathier, softer voice, responded to the daggered adventurer’s elated grumble. Nearly immediately, a pulse fired through my brain. It was mostly the usual pulse that I felt whenever I heard a notable sound, but I saw something else. I drew upon my reserves of energy and proteins and began building up that vestigial part of my brain. Perhaps one of my older clones could once understand their tongue, but perhaps my newer clones allocated the brain matter elsewhere. However, I felt the nearly forgotten pattern, atrophied and vestigial as it was.
As I built out that portion of my brain, certain patterns in their speech began to make some sense. The modulations and rhythms of their voices began to seem more orderly to me, and I felt if I concentrated enough I could begin to understand it, but it was frustrating. Finally, tensing my hand as if I could grab onto the sound itself, I caught a sound that felt familiar. “He”. I immediately, as if by instinct, looked to the daggered adventurer. “He”. The concept of a male adventurer surfaced in my mind, some combination of all the recent male adventurers I had seen. “He”. They were talking about the daggered adventurer? Not necessarily. I knew, somehow, that “he” could refer to any male. So then how was I to figure out who? All the adventurers now were looking at me, and that fear began to well up again. If I could grow some parts of my brain, could I kill some parts? Fear was necessary, I knew, but if it was crippling me from acting, could I deactivate it for now?
Forgetting about speech for a moment, I concentrated on my brain, memorizing the pattern. Then I looked at the silver-skinned adventurer’s amulet. Immediately, a small area buried deep within my brain rushed with activity, and fear began to overwhelm me. They were going to kill me. I could not keep up the lie for long. They would figure out what I really was.
I looked away, and the fear died down. I hated that. I would have to kill the silver-skinned one soon. I struggled to remember what I was thinking about. Killing the adventurer? Looking at the — I stopped myself before I could panic again. No, I was… The thought suddenly resurfaced. I was trying to stop fearing them! My brain! My brain!
I looked again at my brain, and I remembered the small node within my brain that rushed with activity. That was where the fear came, so I constricted the blood vessels feeding it. I closed the eyes that gazed through the gaps in my armor, and I slowed my breathing. Panic was rushing through my body, but I could control the spread of it. Soon, the panic began to wane, and I found myself able to think clearer. Now that the initial panic was gone, I felt calmer than before. Ready to shut it before I could be overwhelmed, I opened one eye and gazed at the amulet through a small chink in the armor. Fear crept into me, but, compared to what I had felt before, it was nothing. I felt liberated!
I had to remind myself that this was a temporary compromise. If I restricted the flow of blood to that part of my brain, it would soon die. I did not know how long I could keep this up, but I had restricted blood flow to useless parts before, and it always damaged them. Muscles were easy to repair, but I did not want to risk damaging the organ that allowed me to repair them.
With my mind free of worry, I refocused my attention on that part of my brain that I figured would allow me to speak. After batting away the adventurer’s prodding hand several times, once tight enough to cause the adventurer to shriek, I felt like I could grasp some words. By paying close attention to the situation, how they moved, what muscles they flexed in their faces, and even small things like the rushing of blood which I could faintly feel, I could piece together some clue of what they might be saying.
“___ you ___ us?” the daggered adventurer asked, leaning towards me. Two of his words slipped past me without recognition, but the other two felt familair. He followed by waving his hand at me and then gesturing at his ear. Helpful. What did adventurer ears do? They looked weird, stuck out of their skulls, and has a tube going in. Did they breathe through them? I thought they breathed through the other orifices on their faces. I had seen them consume things through their mouths, so they must taste and ingest things through it like I did. I had seen them wiggle their noses around when entering a room. That could either be for smelling, hearing assuming they did not have any senses I did not have and their bodies were not redundant. They had two ears on either side of their head, and the outer part perked outward, as if to catch something. Their noses perked out forward with two holes. Since their noses were close to their mouths, I had to assume it was to smell their food since they ingested it below. Their noses were to test food before ingesting it, then. So I had to infer that their ears were for hearing.
What was that thing they did to convey confirmation? There was that word, “yes” — a phantom sound traveled through my thoughts as the word occurred to me, but I was not about to try speaking it. It would probably come out as some horrific gurgling. A gesture occurred to me then. A gesture that meant the word “yes”. With great effort on my muscles but little thought, I rocked my helmet back and forward repeatedly.
The adventurers’ faces grotesquely shifted. Their bodies seemed to reflexively spring about, and a shrill wailing escaped from all of them. The tone of the wailing brought to mind the excitement and relief of food finally showing up after a long period of hunger. They were hungry? The little fear I had left surged.
After painstakingly processing their grotesque voices, catching some words and trying to piece together any details I could to understand them, I had reached a point that, I hoped, meant they believed I was a hard-of-hearing, mute adventurer who was terribly wounded and would die if they tried to remove the armor from me. I hoped they could somehow infer that I was hungry, but they never asked anything of the sort. I had tried patting my abdomen, but they seemed too distracted asking me questions I did not understand. Even better, I realized that they probably did not want to eat me! They were just excited when I rocked my head in response to them.
Now that I could reasonably believe that they thought I was to be protected, I hesitantly restored the flow of blood back to that terrible part of my brain. Soon, a jarring flow of fear came upon me, but, as I compared it to my memory of it, it was actually better now that I had internalized an excuse to not be paralyzed. They believed I was one of their own. They would protect me. All I had to do was keep playing the part of an insufficient adventurer, and they would not kill me, for some reason. Why adventurers would not just eat one of their own that was incapable of basic functions was beyond me.
The short and wide adventurer, with the crimson skin and smoky hair that rested above his head and ran far below, looked at me with an eye raised. With a notably deep voice and rolling speech, he rumbled a rapid series of words. I caught the word and concentrated on it. Soon, the meaning came to me. “Can you walk?“ There was another word at the end that I missed, but I figured I had understood the meaning. Could I walk? That was a good question. I had been able to shamble, trip, and roll about, but that act could hardly be compared to the strange gliding the adventurers were capable of. I shook my head, conveying the opposite of confirmation. I could neither walk with their grace nor with their speed.
The adventurers talked to each other at a speed I did not even try to keep up with, and their voices began to grow louder. Some of the more familiar words came to me without much thinking. There were lots of those sorts of words that mean really nothing at all: “the”, “are”, and so forth. There were more familiar ones that I clearly understood but meant nothing important without understanding the full conversation: “he”, “she”, “you”, “I”. So many words. Periodically they shot scary looks at me or gestured at me. These adventurers, more than their fast talking, loved to flail around like a hive of convulsing insects.
The short crimson-skinned one raised his voice louder than the rest, stopping the scary one and the daggered one from talking. “I will ___ him ___!” he roared and then muttered something which I could not hear. The scary one paused, laughed, and spoke, and the daggered one slammed his palm into his own face — was that even meant to convey meaning? Some of these gestures were seriously confusing.
The short one began walking to me. His crimson skin was decorated with meaningful patterns that glowed like fire. His frame was considerably short but wide and stocky, especially in the lower abdomen. A clump of hair which seemed to be made of smoke swayed as he walked, reaching from his chin down to his belt. As he reached me, he placed his hands beneath me and, visibly straining and letting out a roar, lifted me. He swung his arms over him and held me above his head. He roared something and chuckled, then began walking towards the door. The others followed him. The short one awkwardly turned to fit me laterally through the door, and he continued marching on.
I wondered when they would stop walking, but they did not. They took me farther and farther from my home as the door and the two stone statues of skeletons beside it shrunk in the distance. I wanted to stop them, to crawl back home, but it was too late, and I was exhausted. At this rate, if I did not get food soon, I would have to go dormant.
Thanks for the chapter!
Tyftc
