A Trickle of Soulfyre

Chapter 30: Rescue

Awful didn't begin to describe this scene. There were better, stronger words Lyrani could use. Horrific. Devastating. Tragic.

Lyrani gritted her teeth against her tears, against the pain she felt like her own, like a rough, clawed hand twisting at her heart.

The dead around Lyrani were all ages, old enough to be her grandparents, her parents, her friends, her little brothers or sisters, her children. They had all been murdered and left to rot here for days if the smell of them was any indication.

Who had done this, and why?

Lyrani surveyed the cavern. There was no sign of life, no clues about the identity of the halflings' assailants that she could see at this distance.

She didn't know enough about the half-elves' numbers to decide whether all or only most of them were dead. Could it be that they somehow held Nash responsible for this mass murder, and those who had survived it were now hunting him out of vengeance? That was the only motive Lyrani could see.

She shivered. The same sense of unease she had first felt when she neared this place returned. It hovered over her like a dragon, wings leaking darkness, glistening fangs dripping blood. It turned the air heavy with its hot breath, stained the night with its malicious presence.

Lyrani looked up. Seeing nothing but the early night's shadows rising to the cavern ceiling, she lowered her eyes to the ground. She couldn't see anything, but she felt something.

It was a restlessness in the darkness, like claws running along her skin, sending goosebumps skittering over it. Like hundreds of invisible fingers tangling in her hair, each demanding her attention.

She shook her head to repel the ghostly sensation. A massacre of this magnitude would certainly create a disturbance among the spirits, but Lyrani couldn't let them interfere with her assignment.

Still tense under the gazes of the watchful, restless dead, Lyrani started as a shadow came up behind her. Her fear lessened when she realised it was just Meiyla, although the junior agent looked like a ghoul as she stood all hunched up and holding her nose to block out the smell of the decaying dead.

The baby's cry sounded again, from what sounded like the far side of the cavern. Lyrani's gaze fixed itself there, even as her stomach clenched at the idea of crossing the floor to get there, of all the spirits she'd have to shake off just to answer the infant's desperate call.

Lyrani grabbed Meiyla's arm. "Do you hear that?"

The junior agent's black eyes widened, and then she scowled. "I would have to be deaf not to," came her nasal voice from behind her hand.

"We can't do anything about these people." Lyrani gestured at the bodies surrounding them, a sea of dead to their island of life. "But we can do something for that little one." She pointed in the direction of the baby's cries.

"Assuming it isn't a trap or a trick from another clan." Meiyla's gaze followed Lyrani's finger.

Behind her bluster, her unease was obvious now that Lyrani had spent days with only her and their griffins for company.

"That's why we're going in together." Lyrani made that decision in the moment that she spoke.

She forced herself to start walking before she lost her nerve, before the empty eyes and invisible touches of the ghosts around her chased her away from Phoenix Mountain for good. She pulled her junior agent after her.

"You do know I'm useless in the dark, right?" asked Meiyla, hanging back like a child who didn't want her mother to drag her away from an enchanted bubble display at the market.