FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

CHAPTER 5

"Down to my bones."

Cecil knows it is not a good idea to let Fauna stay, but he cannot very well kick her out. The last time she visited ended with them arguing over the hate his sisters have for her and Cecil's inability to commit.

When the tunnel splits, he turns right, away from the direction where her pleasant scent lingers.

Cecil reaches the foundry to find Vick had already gathered his things and left. His wall of tools has a half-dozen missing. Vick's utility belt is also gone.

Sena is hunched over her table, working on a figurine despite the orders from Dad. The set of convex lenses attached in front of her goggles make her eyes appear huge, resembling an insect when she glances up to find Cecil. The straps squeeze her beautiful scene hair. She lowers her chin to peer over the lens at her brother before quickly returning focus to her waxwork. "Vick's already there. He's got your mattock. Your girlfriend is in your room."

"She's not my girlfriend."

Sena adds detail on the intricate feathered wings to a wax Pegasus sculpture. Every single feather is detailed to a figurine that stands two inches tall. Sena has a dense candle burning to keep her sculpting tools hot.

Cecil continues down the bricked tunnel. He and his brothers had dug this newer tunnel years ago, utilizing what they had learned from the city masons. This tunnel leads around in a big circle to pass through the third living room on the way to Cecil's chamber. He turns the bend to slide by Keel, who is already heading back for a second rope. "Vick is almost done setting up the crane."

"Wow, Keel." Cecil stammers. "That was fast."

Keel laughs, his happy expression wrinkles the scar on his right cheek. "Yeah, Cecil. We cheated. We had a head start on it before dinner. Vick made it a lesson for class, you know, how often do we bother using a crane when we have these?" Keel says, patting his big lapin feet into the bricks he made for the tunnel. Keel turns to walk away from Cecil on the strong legs he revels in owning.

This much is very accurate.

Lapin-kin does not need a rope to get up or down a hole, especially not a Thumper. Cecil can effortlessly jump a thirty-foot distance with little effort. However -- in the case of this hole -- Cecil would rather not risk his brothers jumping too hard and being off with their aim, slamming a shoulder or head against a stone ceiling, for example.

Cecil heads down the newest tunnel with his eyes chasing away the dark. He enters the expansion with the familiar scent of freshly uncovered dirt filling his nose.

Vick stands beside the chasm and crane. He wears a studded dark leather vest, one he bought in The Coffin a year ago. His breeches are tweed material. He has equipped his newer smithy gloves and sleeves, and of course, his crafted alley dagger rests on his hip.

By Vick's side are Jessin, Essa, and Ike.

Of course, Ike is here and was already in trouble long before Cecil walked in.

Cecil understands why Ike is here. His eyes have stars in them. The kit would not miss the dive for the world. He sits patiently by the entrance to the chamber and keeps his eyes locked on the chasm, expecting a monster to crawl free. Ike pulls his sights away when the natural light in Cecil's eyes illuminate the entrance. He smiles at Cecil. His chubby chin appears to strangle him from the angle of his recline. Ike still wears the same dirty clothes from when he was digging for the expansion. If he is not speaking, it means someone zipped his lips.

Jessin sits beside Ike to ensure the rabbit boy behaves. She is the same size as her half-aged brother, though slender. She glares at Cecil, wishing she be relieved from watching the salivating brother. She is far too cute to be so mad. She must have followed Essa here and found Ike hassling Vick.

Essa sits between the two kits and Vick. Her blue irises glow like Cecil's. Eyes that exist slightly further apart from her siblings. She keeps those eyes on her sketch pad, sitting with her back against the wall with her knees elevated to hold her sketch pad close. A helpful sort of sketch pad with a spiral binding, one that goes for a hefty price in The Coffin and is not something sold in the Twenty-Third District, no, such books are only found miles deeper into the cave metropolis nearer to the Eleventh District. At the age of sixteen, she is the historian and archivist of the den. She wears a long blue dress that holds tight to her waist but loose down to her ankles.

Cecil approaches Vick. The pulley-crane remains braced and bolted into the stone floor.

Vick waves his drill around to invite Cecil to examine his work. He put two self-tappers in each of the three legs, locking the crane to the limestone floor. The three legs are additionally locked in place on a circular frame for increased stability. There is a parabolic lamp facing the far wall of the chamber.

The light is pure white, turning the wall of stone to a portal of blinding daylight that hurts Cecil's eyes. The second lamp hangs on the frame attached to one of the three crane legs, pouring its hot white light into the chamber below.

"The light burned off the black fungus," Vick states. He keeps his dubious eyes aimed at the chasm. He never willingly takes his attention off of the abyss as if ready for some monster.

Ike must have gotten Vick's imagination wandering.

"Vick. You're sure?" Cecil asks, peering down the hole. Sure enough, the black mass that once sprouted from the bones of the Serepentian is visibly gone. The Serepentian's bones are bright white, nearly polished clean.

Ike climbs to one knee, begging, "I want to see it! Jessin, Let me see it! Cecil!"

"No, Ike! Keep that butt sat!" Jessin says. She grabs Ike's shoulder and holds him down, pointing at the ground with her other hand. "Where's the key? Did you take the key?!"

Ike frowns. He pulls the invisible key from his pocket and gives it to Jessin.

Jessin once again zips Ike's mouth shut with her fingers sliding across his lips, she locks his mouth with the invisible key and puts the key into her blouse pocket. "I'll give you the key when we leave," she says, knowing that Ike will make up for the time he is silent.

"I'm back," Keel announces, another rope slung over his shoulder. He drops it beside Ike, who begins to play with the end it. "Leave it, Ike," Keel says, tapping Ike on the bridge of his nose.

Ike wrinkles his nose and shuts his eyes to sneeze. He shakes his head and frowns at Keel, pouting and crossing his arms after that. He does not speak, but he bobs his head around as if he were.

Jessin smiles. "That's fine, Ike." She assumes to know what Ike silently says.

"Ah, Jessin has the key to your mouth, huh?" Keel says with a smirk.

Ike averts his eyes.

"I'm all set up; we only need a stress test," Vick says.

"I'm on it." Cecil volunteers. He steps forward, ready to throw himself onto the rope.

Vick holds his hand up and says, "Jeez, hold on. Let me see if the lock is tight." He pulls on the rope beneath the winding gear to find the lock is firm. Vick waves Keel over. "Keel, help me hold this, just in case," he orders, taking up the rope and stepping outside of the second chamber, where Keel is standing by Jessin and Essa. Between Vick and Keel, they wind the line around their arms and bodies, then they nod to Cecil to get on the step at the end of the rope. "Careful. Don't just _jump_on it, that's a thirty-foot drop."

Cecil grips the sturdy metal frame of the pulley-crane and tugs the rope closer. He peers into the chasm without fear. After setting foot on the fixed-step and applies a bit of weight, he finds it supports him. He leans forward, but the locking mechanism is not secure, sending Cecil into the hole. He throws his arms out to grip the rim of the crane's base with his other leg still on the leveled floor of the second chamber. The leg he put on the rope step dangles inside the hole. "You're trying to kill me, aren't you?"

Keel and Vick rush to help Cecil out of the gap.

Vick moves to the emergency breaker after helping his brother out. "No! Let me check the pins." He looks over the gear that the rope circles through on one of the legs. He finds the brake latch not flipped downward to lock it. It was a blatant mistake on his part, and he should have known better. "Wow, Cecil, I'm so sorry!" he says with dreadful regret.

"You almost had me, Vick. You almost succeeded." Cecil says, semi-jokingly accusing his brother of trying to kill him.

Vick looks down, trying not to smile. "Sorry. I'll try harder next time."

"Good thing we check this shit before Dad comes," Cecil says, looking over a scrape on his palm.

Vick tugs on the rope to test it, then he runs to the rope feed to wind it around himself.

Keel gulps and grips the rope, ready to rescue his eldest sibling. The scar on Keel's face does nothing to make him look more robust. It is a thin scar that travels from his right eye to his jawbone as if he cried so much his fur made a path. Just like Vick, Keel's eyes do not glow. His coat is a solid midnight.

Cecil once more extends his foot out and stands above the hole and gently releases his grip on the metal frame above his head. Only the ironwood step is between him and the drop, which remains sturdy, so he nods to his brothers. "You guys don't have to hold it so tight. The lock is holding," he says with hope, before reaching his foot back out for the ledge. He climbs off of the pulley-crane and gives his brothers a confident smile. "This thing was a good investment."

"A cheap investment," Vick states. "Which is why I don't trust it. We've only used it_once_."

Cecil lets out an uncertain chuckle. "Now, we wait for Dad and Carr."

Near an hour passes, and the time had not been kind on Ike's patience.

"It's good we let our food go down, but you shouldn't have kept drinking."

Ike sighs once he hears his father coming up the tunnel. He turns to find Father's glowing blue eyes lighting the way, behind Grean is Carr's green eyes changing the color of the tunnel.

Grean marches in with his ears flat against his nape and appears quite ready with that rock hard face of his. His leather vest covers a long-sleeve, black tunic. He traded velvet breeches for black dungaree shorts. Holstered against his right hip is a prized heirloom dagger.

Ike follows the dagger as his father passes. He gazes almost lustfully at how cool the colorful woven silk wraps neatly around the handle. The glinting gem on the pommel remains framed in gold. The blade remains concealed within an ebony sheath.

Grean carries his prized leather sling bag. An old, worn bag that stinks of tobacco ash. His feet thunk the ground from the iron soles of his hock-guards.

Carr is less prepared in appearance, being in his fire retardant apron. He wears casual tweed tunic and pants. His dark blue flat cap is precisely where it always is. He looks uncertain about being a part of this project. Carr also carries Cecil's hock-guards, and passes them to Cecil the moment he walks by his brother. He leans in close to Cecil to whisper, "You have a guest. Your girlfriend is in."

Cecil stares intently at Carr, not bothering to correct him. Silent apologies cover his face as he takes the guards. He avoided going to his room for that very reason and can smell Fauna's scent on Carr, then Carr leans in and before he speaks, he looks at the rest of the family. There is no subtlety to Carr, except that at least he tries to whisper.

"Don't worry; she had her clothing on. She didn't pounce me like that last time, and I only had to give a quick hug." Carr adds before he walks up to Vick to stand ready by the crane.

Cecil grumbles quiet-like to hold back his fury as he sits on the floor and puts the guards on. He pulls the leather straps tight.

Grean makes a simple gesture to tell Ike and Jessin to vacate the room. Jessin is more than comfortable with leaving. She takes Ike by the ear to get him up faster.

"OW OW OW OW!!!!" Ike shouts.

"Oh come on, I'm not even pulling on your ear," Jessin says.

"Jessin, let go of Ike's ear," Grean says.

Jessin obeys.

Ike proceeds to retaliate. He reaches up to grab Jessin's ear.

"IKE!" Grean roars.

Ike moves his hands to his sides and freezes in place. Tears pour down his face in an instant. "I--I wasn't gonna do nothing!" he squeaks absolutely scared to death of his father.

Grean stares down his overgrown son until Ike drops his eyes and sobs.

Brilando enters the chamber with Desmond and Yaril in tow. Desmond carries two pairs of leather gloves from the textiles chamber.

"Good. Yaril, take Ike and Jessin out of here." Grean says.

Yaril throws his hands out and puts on a repugnant face. "I just got here, why?!"

"Take them." Grean orders with a snap of his fingers, pointing to the tunnel. "Stop making me repeat myself, Yaril."

Yaril slumps his shoulders. Everyone looks at him as if he had done something wrong. He stands aside to make room for Jessin and Ike. "Come on, hurry up." He incorrectly snaps his fingers and points to the tunnel.

Grean looks around the chamber. He stops his eyes on Desmond and points his hand to direct him. "Desmond, over here by the rope. Brilando, you're the main grip. Don't pull the crane off the ground, okay? Just keep a firm hold and pretend you're a rock,"

Brilando puts leather gloves on. "You got it, Pops!" he says as he looks at his hands, surprised the gloves fit his big hands.

"Pops? I have begged you time after time to please stop calling me that?"

Brilando chuckles. "Oh-Kay, Father-Figure."

Grean leans toward Cecil and rhetorically whispers, "When did he become a smart-ass?"

"He must've learned it from Mikna. I'll take smartassery over Mikna's bad mouth."

"Ah, makes sense, right, Carr?" Grean says, glaring at Carr.

Carr holds his hands up. "What?" he asks obliviously.

Grean quickly examines the pulley-crane and looks toward Vick. "Did you test it yet?" Grean looks to Essa as she furiously scratches her charcoal across a larger area of her drawing.

Cecil says nothing, and Vick knows better than to say anything.

"Yeah, we tested it before you, OW!" Keel was about to finish his sentence before Vick pinches Keel's side with claws. "I mean, you know. Of course."

Grean looks at the guilt on Vick's face. His eyes move to Cecil, who smiles with a bit too much confidence.

"Where do you want me?" Carr asks. His eyes strain to focus, and his balance is off.

Grean points to the locking mechanism. "Right here. You'll control our descent." Like his father would do unto him, Grean imagines he should be scolding his son, but he is as drunk as Carr is. He had four shots of raccoon bourbon after changing his attire.

Carr moves around the circular frame, steering clear of the ring that locks the three crane legs. He kneels beside the lever and stares at it as if he has never seen it before. "How's it work again?"

"You operated it last, didn't you?" Grean asks.

"Yeah, I was just messing with you."

Grean growls at Carr. "I'll head down first. Vick, did you bring that helmet?"

Vick nods. "I did." He points a thumb to his bag.

"Good, you wear that. I'll take that extra lantern behind you,"

To not blind anyone, Vick flips the lid to block the light when he passes it. The expansion becomes a colder, darker place.

Grean takes the lantern and starts tinkering with it to make sure he knows how to adjust the reflector and light shield.

Vick rummages through his pack to pull out the iron helmet with the wind-up light. He winds it, bringing life to the bulb in the brass frame. The brightness is trivial compared to the lanterns.

Grean reaches for the rope. "Cecil, you're behind me," He turns to Carr and then Brilando and Desmond. "Lower me down too fast, and I'll throw all three of you in, to live with the ghosts."

"Dad! That's _not_funny!" Brilando squeaks. The giant grips the rope; his life depends on it.

"Not one bit!" Desmond says. He brushes his long white hair out of his face before he grips the rope tight. "Carr, don't pull that break mechanism too hard, or I'll grab you first when I fall."

"This rope won't budge if Brilando holds it tight around his ass," Carr says with a confident expression. "He weighs twice as much as dad does."

"I do not!" Brilando whines, though he quickly gives up and lowers his head in defeat when he sees how everyone's eyes are upon him. Lowering his head this way lumps his extra chins together, inflating his cheeks as he pouts. "Yeah, I do," he admits. "Barely twice as much."

Grean has been standing with one foot on the lift for some time, waiting to be let down. He stares expectantly at Carr.

"Oh! Sorry!" Carr says. He gently lifts the lever, letting the break go.

The gears loosen, and their father descends, minding the parabolic lantern hanging from the crane's leg frame.

Desmond and Brilando feed the rope.

Grean gives his sons a walled stare. "You better be able to pull me back up." he threateningly says as he disappears.

Cecil, Keel, Carr, and Vick lean over the precipice to watch.

Grean's initial view is of large angled slabs of limestone and dry clay. The chamber opens wide after a few feet of descent, being far more extensive than initially predicted. More than twice the size of the bedroom above, except for the far side, where an oddly shaped, smoothly swirled tunnel resides there, that appears to be made of -- ice?

He keeps one arm around the rope so he can pull the lid off of the lantern's eye. "Carr, hold up. Lock it."

Carr locks the lever, relieving Brilando and Desmond. Carr, Keel, Vick, and Cecil continue gazing into the hole. They watch their father ever slowly spin as he looks around.

Grean dangles five feet above the floor, safely scanning the walls with the lamp. Markings from tools remain on one end of the circular chamber and a peculiar glass tunnel on the other end. This cave may have been someone's den expansion a century or two ago. A pile of sediments were left behind from a clumsy miner as well as their tracks from their wheelbarrow. The digger was not the reptile who died here because of the apparent marks left by a mattock or pickaxe.

He then examines the wall behind the skeleton.

"No, shit," Grean says. He aims the light above the Serepentian's body. Runes were scratched into the wall, or rather,melted into the limestone. Grean wonders what kind of welding torch and at what temperature scorched the rock so. The words are shining like glass.

"What is it?" Vick asks.

"Words. A message left by our skeletal friend." Grean says. He is not naive, and he knows the Serepentian used his finger to melt the simple phrase into the wall.Fucking Trickster, he thinks.

"Serepentian words?" Vick asks.

"Old-Miestan." Grean corrects. There is Old-Miestan that begins thirty millennium ago, and then there is Old-Miestan. The reptile was either a part of some ancient royal occult -- which he was -- or he was over thirty thousand years old -- which he was.

"What's it say?" Cecil asks.

"It says, 'Fuck with me and die.'" Grean reads aloud the literal translation.

The brothers all share a look at one another.

"Did he make that up?" Carr asks Cecil.

Cecil frowns. "I don't think he made that up."

"Desmond, I have a bad feeling about this." Brilando grimly whispers. His fur has been standing on edge. Something cold lingers around his shoulders and along his nape. He knows this cannot be right because he never feels cold.

No Thumper ever feels cold.

"Not helping, Bry." Desmond scolds. His long white hair has fallen over half his face. He grits his teeth. "Is this what _cold_actually feels like? Anyone else feeling that chill or that wet drip down your spine?"

"Chill?" Cecil asks. He had not realized. He does feel cold, yet he usually _never_feels cold. All of his brothers look to one another. Even Essa stops drawing to look wearily at the hole.

"Essa, you feel that too?" Vick asks.

Essa stares at the gap in the floor. "I'm actually cold," She looks at her hands and says. "Down to my bones, just like how the king's moon does it to me."

"We never--we never feel cold," Desmond says. "Not like this. Only the King's moon does this like Essa says, but that cold feeling is way different than this cold feeling."

Grean rereads the words to make sure he understands them correctly, and the profanity is unmistakable. He shines the light across the bones of the Serepentian. "As you wish, your royal Tricksterly." Grean curiously observes the tunnel that appears formed from ice or quartz. "Lower me down, boys, the ground looks safe," he orders, hoping to whatever Celestial Gods that are watching will warn him if there is a trap. The air is stale and scented of metal and an unfamiliar compound. Grean's light devours what remains of the shadow beneath the reptile's bones. The black fungus is all but gone, cooked away by the hot bulb.

"He's off, lift the rope," Cecil says and walks to where Essa sits to grab his pick. She gives him a wary look as he returns to the pulley-crane and takes the rope. "Lower me slow, just like you did for Dad."

Carr locks the lever so Cecil can get on, and then gently lifts the arm. Desmond and Brilando slowly feed the rope. His mattock scrapes the rock as he minds the hanging lantern before he passes through the narrow gap.

Grean puts the lantern down and aims the light at the skeleton. He points to the bones and says, "Cecil, don't go near that. The snake cursed his grave. We're_all_ dead if we disturb the body."

Cecil stares wildly at the massive, pristine remains of the Serepentian. The skeleton appears so much more the closer Cecil gets to the floor. The snake's resting skull is almost larger than Cecil's body. He notices the leather bag with a strap still looped around the snake's arm. A book and ashes remain jutting out of that satchel. "He has a book."

"That book is a bomb waiting to go off," Grean warns. "so the secrets in that book are lost forever, as the snake wishes. Give the creature his privacy. Spiritually speaking, he's not dead." He wanders his eyes around the upper corners of the chamber. "He's more than likely watching us, studying us, even."

Cecil feels a coiling chill once his feet touch the floor. "It's cold. Way colder than up there,"

"Ghosts do that," Grean says as he tightens his leather vest. He creeps ever cautiously toward the icy tunnel. The tunnel resembles a funnel of dark water frozen in time. Glints of indirect light from the lantern penetrate a few inches deep. Orange, yellow, blue, and black spiral and interchange within the formation, darkening and concealing the depth of the ice between layers of minerals.

Cecil pulls his foot off of the step to let the rope retreat. He grips his mattock by his side, ready to use it on any specters that rise.

Grean investigates the icy tunnel by reaching his hand out to brush his soft, furry fingers across the surface. There is no chill, nor heat. It is not ice, nor is it molten. It is glass, or more specifically, quartz of a sort. "Now,this is impressive," he whispers. "Cecil, come look."

Cecil cautiously approaches his father. He keeps the front of his body and mattock facing the skeletal remains before he reaches the tunnel. "Is that ice?"

"Touch it." Grean orders.

Cecil does and looks to his father with the utmost confusion.

"I thought it was ice, then quartz the moment I touched it, but," Grean trails off. He gives his son some room to come and take a gander at the swirling mineral formation.

Vick lowers down. He wears an empty pack on his shoulders, ready to be filled with any riches they find. His intense eyes glare at the illuminated bones prepared to defend himself. "Holy fucks that thing is huge." The pounding fear in his chest becomes audible because it stinks like a freshly used forge.

"Vick, I know you heard me say this, don't go near that skeleton. Come around over here when you reach the ground." Grean says.

"Yeah," Vick whispers during his descent, as though to not wake the dead. "I ain't going near that dead thing." He examines the words melted to the wall. Three nonsensical letters greet him. The letters resemble geometry on a level far beyond anything Cecil has yet to teach him. Spheres and squiggles and squares and strikes and dots. He looks at the back of his father's head, wondering if Dad can genuinely read it.

Cecil is still caressing his furry fingers across the smooth glass-like material. "Dad. There are swirls of rock in this. This glass is full of stone that was melted. Granite, coal, limestone. Is that iron? No, it's clay. How did it all turn to glass like this, and how is the glass mostly transparent?"

Grean looks to his son and then to the rock. "You see it then? Granite and feldspar and limestone?" He glides his hand over the glass. "Bands of soil and minerals. All melted together in an instant."

Cecil's eyes are wide. He struggles to comprehend how this glass-like formation can be possible. He steps back and rubs his left hand on top of his head, unable to figure this one out. He looks to his father. "The heat someone would need to make all of this melt together this way and then swirl it into a tunnel of this diameter and depth, Dad, this is not possible," he says with frightened, uncertain eyes. He studies the walls at the edge of the melted tunnel. The layers of stone from different eras smear together into the vortex of the tunnel.

Grean glances at the skeleton.

"Does he have a welding torch on him?" Cecil asks. His eyes move back and forth between the whirled tunnel and the skeleton.

As soon as Vick's feet meet the floor, he takes a step away from the skeleton. He holds his helmet from the top to not lose it when he studies the ceiling. He regrets looking up because the parabolic lantern on the edge of the pulley-crane burned a spot into his retinas. He blinks several times to get rid of the corneal burn, but it does no good. He glances around the walls to find evidence of someone digging here. Vick turns to see where his father and brother are and discovers them pouring over what looks to be a smooth, rippling tunnel of vitreous stone. "That looks like ice, but we don't feel cold from ice." He rubs his arms. "Why do I feel cold?"

"What made this? What--_What_made this?" Cecil repeatedly asks. His soft hand slides across the surface.

Grean shakes his head. "Son. This tunnel was made from that creature's ability. Heat. An unrealistic amount of concentrated heat. Perverted World-Slayer's magic. He conjured the surface of the sun and condensed it into the shape of this tunnel. He burned out all of the air in this chamber and had seconds to live with the toxic fumes." he says, smelling the air. "That smell. You smell it, right?"

Cecil turns to glance once more at the bones. "How can a creature do that? He has no tools." He turns to his father. "This is--this is not possible without--"

Grean looks proudly to his son, knowing he was about to say Magic. He peers back down the whirling tunnel. The tunnel shifts to the right, abruptly turning. It gets smaller, the deeper it goes. His lack of an answer was more than enough of a yes for Cecil. Vick finally meets his hand to the glass. Cecil should not have to question it when his father infers_magic_.

"I thought it would've been cold, but it's neutral. No chill or warmth. It's smooth rock." Vick says, just as baffled as his brother.

Cecil nods to Vick. "The snake made this."

Vick looks at the snake. "Bullshit," he whispers. "With what tool? Nothing exists that can melt sand like this."

"It's not sand, it's rock. It's metal, stone, clay, all of that."

Vick waves his finger around at the tunnel and speaks with heated sarcasm, "How'd the dead fuck make this big whirling tunnel, huh? Oh, it must have been that gigantic zeppelin's jousting engine I walked by."

"Magic?" Cecil whispers.

"Just because you can't explain it, CECIL, don't mean it's fucking magic. Dad, come on. This place has the same stink as my slag forge. We shouldn't breathe this air."

Grean climbs into the tunnel.

"Dad, you sure you should be doing that? There's nothing here, let's bury the place." Cecil says.

Vick quickly nods in agreement.

Grean pauses, then kneels into the tunnel entrance. Grean's glowing eyes examine the skeletal remains of the Serepentian, "I pray it's not in his bag."

"It?" Cecil asks.

Vick and Cecil look at each other.

Cecil looks back at the Serepentian. "Dad, what are you looking for?"

"Answers," Grean says. He turns and crawls his way into the smooth, rippling tunnel. "Vick, I need your light."

Vick shakes his head. "No way." he barks, ready to piss himself.

Cecil holds out his hand. "Give me your helmet."

Vick gives Cecil an apologetic expression as he hands it over. Cecil cranks up the battery to bring renewed life to the bulb before equipping the helmet. He lays his mattock down in the tunnel entry and crawls in after his father. He catches up in time for Grean to give new orders.

"Here," Grean says with a guiding finger, waving his hand over the floor. "Shine the light around here. Tell me if you see anything black within the glass."

Cecil is beyond confused, but he obeys. He pans his head to the left and right. "Only streaks of dark and peach," Cecil says. His dim light is exposing two or three feet deep -- streaks of metal and rock shine back. The glass goes deeper than this, but his headlamp cannot reach that far. Cecil and Grean take a turn in the tunnel, leaving Vick's sight. Grean is two feet ahead of Cecil and using his glowing eyes to scan the glass.

Their warped, stretched reflections stare back.

"Dad, what are we looking for?" Cecil asks again. He watches his father peering deep into the smooth stone.

"Here." Grean quivers. Inside the glass is an air bubble an inch or two beneath the surface. The bubble is about as big as Grean's head and contains a black rock.

"It's a rock in an air pocket," Cecil states.

Grean grips his son's shoulder and stares into his eyes with wild ferocity. "And it didn't melt to glass-like everything else." He calls to Vick, "Vick, get that lantern and aim it down the tunnel!"

Vick creeps through the quiet chamber. He dares not look up at the lantern above his head.

The silhouettes of his brothers peer down.

"What did you find?" Brilando asks.

Vick does not answer. He grabs the lantern and shines it into the tunnel.

"Closer, Vick." Grean requests.

"Vick!" Brilando calls.

Vick walks up to the mouth of the tunnel. The light fills the tunnel, reflecting the curving sheen of the rippling glass and swirling metals.

The glass absorbs the light, giving a glow beneath the surface.

"What is that?" Cecil asks.

"Something we need to get out. Cecil, use your mattock." Grean orders.

Cecil gives his father a strange look over how his father has this all so well planned out. He doubles back, turns the corner, and shields his eyes from the parabolic lantern. "Damn, that's bright." He does not notice the apparition hovering behind Vick -- Safely between the two sources of light.

"What's that?" Carr asks.

"What's what?" Desmond replies.

Carr adjusts the parabolic lantern on the crane. "Thought I saw something purple and green on Vick's heel."

Vick welcomes the heat on his back.

Cecil places the iron helmet back on Vick's head and returns to the tunnel after grabbing his pick. He turns the corner and screams in terror when his eyes meet a lone silver eye, putrid and melted within a smear along bone and flesh.

"WHAT?" Grean shouts.

"What is it?!" Vick asks.

"What's going on?" Carr shouts down the hole. Everyone but Essa clambers to the lip of the hole to peer down.

Cecil had his heart about jump from his chest. The light from the lantern reveals a terrifying and toothy nightmare three feet deep within the wall. They, too, are melted and smeared along with the rock and metal.

Grean follows his son's bulging sapphires to the wall behind him, and he too jumps out of his hide. "DEAR DRAGONS!" Grean roars.

Massive.

Monstrous.

Three of them.

Black wolf royals entombed within their moment of death, perfectly preserved in their melted state. Their woeful face and teeth had fused into the swirling tunnel, locked in a twisted expression of immeasurable agony, their skin had been blasted clean off of their boiled muscle. The darkness of their fur is a deep black that absorbs the light from the lantern. Only the pink and white of their peeled and charred flesh and bones reveal their full size. Constellations of bubbles had formed from broken blood vessels and severed tendons. The glass shines as it spirals down each wolf's stretched gullet. Molten glass had poured into each esophagus in the wolves' final seconds of life.

"Now we know why the snake melted the hallway," Grean says as he fights his own heart to calm down. "What a fucking way to die."

Cecil's heart feels ready to tear apart from the startle.

Vick and his other siblings are still calling down.

"We're fine!" Grean responds in kind. "Just a bit of a scare."

"What's down there?" Vick asks with rigid uncertainty. He wants to traverse the smooth tunnel rather than accompany the skeleton.

"Nothing you want to see. Stay where you are." Grean orders in that stone voice. He looks at Cecil, who still wallows in a pit of fear. His son's bright eyes remain locked onto the shapes of the wolves. "Son. You still with me?"

Cecil cannot take his eyes off of the dead wolves.

"Cecil!" Grean shouts.

"Huh!?" Cecil brings his dreadful eyes to Grean. "Dad! How did they--"

Grean looks over the wolves with not an ounce of concern. Indeed, he was startled to see wolves because Ottentrotter never mentioned there would be three spawn of Aluvious Shadoath. "These creatures have been trapped for as long as our reptilian guest," he says, peering deep into the glass. Formations of more transparent glass weaves between the wolves and the darker slivers of stone.

Cecil stares at his father, then dares to look back at wolves.

"These wolves were chasing the snake," Grean presumes. "because the snake had something_they wanted. _Something they needed." Grean lifts his hand and curls his finger. "Come, I need you to dig it out for me."

Cecil takes a moment to remember how to control his legs and arms again. He stumbles, but he remembers how to crawl.

Grean reaches into his sling bag to pull out goggles. He hands them to his son. "You forgot yours, so put this on."

Cecil takes the goggles and slides them over his face.

"And--" Grean pulls out a cloth mask. "this too."

Cecil shakes his head and chuckles. "Prepared, are we?" It feels as if his father has been here before to do this very thing again.

Grean frowns. "These were in case we had to dig into stone. You know what the rules are about protecting your face and eyes when we prospect."

Cecil nods with detested confusion. He knows his father is overprotective, but this is just worrisome. "Yeah." He puts on the mask and waits for his father to crawl back around the corner.

"Vick, turn your eyes away. We might have some ricocheting glass." Grean says.

"Yessir," Vick says.

Cecil finds it testing to take a good swing in the confined tunnel. He does his best with the limited range. The glass resists completely, and that resistance sends a shiver down Cecil's spine each time. Five hits of steel screaming against glass, and not a scratch to be seen. The shriek sends another shiver down his spine, again and again, until his teeth and ears ache.

A piece chips off and clatters down the tunnel.

Cecil keeps at it and starts to nick away around that spot. Tiny chip after tiny chip, he hits the glass and breaks off pieces of the next layer. Fractures thinner than hair runs up the wall and across the floor of the tunnel.

"I hear it. You're breaking through?" Grean asks.

"Yeah," Cecil says. His pick starts punching through a more brittle layer of glass. The surface was far harder than the jagged pieces that make up the bubble beneath. Light catches in the separating layers of glass as cracks run deep over his head and under his feet. The cracks reach the opposite wall, where the wolves remain entombed. The hole becomes more prominent and square-like as he breaks through. He keeps nicking away at the corners until his mattock scrapes the object in the hole. The object emits a spine-shivering metallic shriek from the impact: the nightmarish sound of iron grinding The End.

An ominous chill rushes through Cecil, then Grean, then Vick.

For an instant, Cecil thought fondly of the sharp end of his pick going through his neck.

Vick's fingers tantalize over the hilt of his dagger, thinking of how good it would feel spreading his flesh apart.

The rabbits at the crane fall back once the draft of malcontent passes through them. Some malign influence escaped. Its endless body floods the entire den before it takes a sizable breath of its surroundings.

Unable to truly focus on the dark presence, every rabbit instead falters. Each lapin from eldest to youngest scrambles along the floor or wall, gazing wildly as if blind to the world.

"What is this?!" Essa begs. She drops her sketchpad and jumps to her feet. Staring wildly at her hand, Essa finds herself having a vice-like grip on her pencil, aiming the sharpened tip towards her neck until the shaft breaks in her palm. She drops it the moment she realizes she was thinking wondrously of tugging her arteries out with the tip. Her ears fall back while her wet eyes dart around. "What?!" She notices each of her siblings having suicidal thoughts.

Brilando and Desmond each gaze lustfully at the rope in their hands. They both are curious in the same way as to how much tension the neck can handle before it gives. Brilando slowly unravels it from his throat, and then he helps Desmond unwind the line around his as well.

Carr stares into the chasm. Leaning forward is all it would take. A head-first dive would sort him out for the things he has done. His strong hands squeeze the legs of the crane hard enough to ache his knuckles. He almost did it, and not until he threw a hand out to catch his flat cap did he come to his senses and pull himself out.

There is a tingle of some abominable creature breathing down the nape of every animalian. A chill caresses every inch of sanity, sizing each Animalia up as the dark aura searches for the one entity that can supply an appropriate response. It reaches its incorporeal claws out and beyond the den expansion. Further and further into the cold abandonment of the valley.

Tendrils of a dark influence slither across every living thing in Nesterly. Hundreds of species of Animalia drop to the dark. The often quiet of Darklight Forest becomes filled with a wretched cacophony of shrieks and howls. Mile after mile of subterranean dens become infected with a lick and a whisper of Her Sweet Sanitarium, asking each creature if it knows of The End.

* * *

Huroke leaps from his seat and falls onto all fours like a feral beast. The opiates in his system means nothing as he defends himself from the most wicked set of teeth he has ever imagined. He bares his fangs at the door of his watchtower. He never reaches for his two swords even as years of training would tell him to. Every muscle on the large canine's body grows tense. His claws and teeth are ready. Something evil lingers its rotten curiosity across every follicle of his coat. A golden light spills from his fur and his eyes ignite with the same. Until he smells the wood kindling beneath his hands and knees, does he cower the emission of his innation.

He looks at his opiates, wondering if the bastards at Paxile's Fort laced his stash again with something from the Gloams again.

No, this is something more than a hallucinogenic lace. Nothing has ever given this lone soldier such a chill.

This fear remains tiers above primal. It sticks to Huroke's every heartbeat like salted molasses, prodding with a rusted needle for the slightest weakness in any corner of the canine's body.

Huroke winces and grabs his chest. "Let go of me!" he begs, retreating to his chair. Every terror of his life and every joy he has ever experienced is parading through his mind -- every emotion batters against him as he lifts his legs into the chair. His arms envelop his head, and he cries like the abandoned pup he was when he came into this world.

* * *

A verdant flame ignites within his irises. The whisper of shadows stretches far and wide until it finds a single loyal servant. The evil tug of fate coaxes Turin to change course toward his left.

Southward.

Turin obeys this savage instinct. His snout and body lock on to the den-city of Nesterly, a place he has not traveled to in decades. His verdant eyes fixate on the familiar presence that calls. Growling with tenacious hunger, he bolts toward it.

It will take him a day to run there, and Turin hopes that none of his kin sense this pandemonium, wanting the glory for himself. For his sake. For his reprieve.

Ever since he heard The Beast's awakening howl echoing from within the underground city in recent days past, Turin has had a new inspiration. A hunger. A voracious appetite for something indescribable. The muscles across his perfect lupine form bolster his advance. He will not call a single one of his kin. The voice calls only to him, and he will keep it so, for he feels chosen.

The slithering core of darkness coils and congeals within as it scrapes against the surface of its prison.

The Creature -- an extracted essence of her beautiful Chaos -- writhes within the host beast's heart cluster. It shrieks for freedom, that blessed request from The End calls to it. It takes little effort from Turin to keep the raging monster shackled within the core of his blackened hearts. Saliva drips from his peeled lips and browning canines while he races to reclaim the bounty owed to the continued immortality of his kin.

May mercy find the meal that uncovered the Shadowsteel.

* * *

Over a thousand miles away from the valley and deep beneath the southeast ocean, a megalithic entity stirs. Within the deep dark sea, freshly filtered plasma pumps through his circulatory system, boiling the ocean water beyond his chassis.

The chains that keep him towed behind his prized whale jostle free by his signal. The whale and the glowing metropolis she carries continue without him.

He sinks over a mile into the deeps until he impacts the seabed. The dark whispers tug and pull at him long after the source hushed, his sensors are far too delicate to have not detected this worldly threat. He has not smelled this sort of evil in a very long time. He had not cared for the screech from days past that coaxed his razor-toothed entourage to investigate. That Shadowy monster had gone silent and concealed, perhaps. Dealt with, he presumed. He was not to stir from a mere horror, but this, this wild reading on all of his instruments, he cannot let this go ignored.

The joints of a two-hundred-foot long finger shriek when machinery and flesh loosen. Barnacles and caught debris burst free from the gaps in encrusted fur and iron. Another two-hundred-foot finger, on the third arm, loosens all the same. Then one more.

A four-fingered claw-adorned hand limbers free, then three more such hands begin to move. Fingers open and close, gripping at the dark ocean. Four arms unfurl from the segmented fuselage of his body. Arms that reach far into the dark abyss to grab anything substantial to lift his armored belly from the sand. Water sucks through his ventilation systems, desperately failing to cool the swiftly heating reactors.

This warmth is exceptional, and emissions remain nominal. This heat incinerates the grime caught within his reactor's gravitational pull, which begins the reanimation process of his dormant flock.

First, he must feed them.

The innocent creatures that have found his compact body to be a viable home at the depths he is usually towed at -- if not utterly crushed from the sudden increase in pressure -- are boiled to sludge. Heat melts all of the sea things that have claimed his metallic carapace, fur, scales, feathers, and flesh as a home for the past eight centuries -- billions of lifeforms, incinerated in this instance of ignition. Whole lumps of coral turn to molten goo, spewing free from his perfection to expose the brilliant white light embracing his machinery. Piece by piece, he illuminates the now boiling abyss of the seabed, cracking deep into the foundation of the world's crust to stir forth a volcanic response. The first pulse of his dysolian heart-core shatters the foundation of the seafloor, bringing forth geothermal energies and gases to feed his immune system, now whirling hungrily through the dark blue.

His creations flood the ocean up to another mile around him, infecting the microorganisms and molten coral to multiply adequately. A veiling darkness envelops his colossal size as he turns the very oceanic water into a living extension of his body. The infected ocean flickers as electricity surges through the ever-intensifying fluid blanket.

Pistons punch loose the melted crustacean mass caught between joints. Feathers and fur shudder the dead dust from his limbs. The metal encompassing his flesh shifts and reshapes as his jowl gapes open. His swarm of microscopic creations, empowered by the overflowing energy that boils the ocean around him, chew and tear through anything still clinging to his form. His teeth get cleaned down to the fleshy and metal gums. A meaty tongue is freed of algae until the silvery sphere at the tip regains its perfect reflection. The dark blue whirls faster around his body, taking form where he lacks wings and fins, then anchoring to his source of gravity. White light leaks from every freshly exposed divide in the armored carapace that envelops his flesh and machinery. Lightning dances along his completeness as his microbial drone swarm lifts him from the sea bed.

Twenty-two crystalline photoreceptors -- eleven per side of his mighty head -- ignite with blinding white radiance, adjusting and focusing as every additional sensory system across his being jolts to life. Telemetry feeds through his wetware processor cores, updating his systems of any changes dealt with Vaelia.

In the distance, The End whispers sweet promises of doom.

He transmits a single burst of compressed data more substantial than all of the knowledge in the combined libraries of civilization to the One King.

The message transmits to one of the many relay spears protruding from the ocean floor. This signal fires through the artificial core of the world and to the other side of the planet. It travels up the roots of Transcendia Viae Cailo'stos, up the mighty trunk of gnarled organic machinery and intricately assembled foliage, through the miles and miles of the metal trunk, up and up and up into the canopy beyond the atmosphere of the Vaelia.

A crystalline lens of the purest blue adjusts upon receiving the message, and all within an instant. Kaeliathra replies without a microsecond of hesitation right back through the planet.

Dark Star receives his thorough orders in a burst of bulk data many times what he initialized. His mighty head -- shaped like two halves of a horned ax -- cuts through the ocean as he finds the shark's transceiver.

He sends an order to the surfacing city. To the metropolis, both on the whale's back and hanging from a thousand chains off Eeipa's imprisoned body. A simplistic signal with a more simplistic order to the millions of razor-toothed shark pirates and their fin-scaled allies.

Purge.

* * *

The feeling Cecil has in his dreams finally makes sense, but he cannot place a word on it just yet. He grips the mattock and continues picking at the glass to make the hole wide enough. He knows what this darkness is, having experience with facing it. His dreams have taken him to meet the very essence that creates this darkness.

An irresistible otherworldly virility of corrosively abysmal lunacy. These precise words infect Cecil's mind as though someone had put them there. Shale carved them into his mind. His father's gloved hands carefully scuff through the glass to make a path as he crawls back into the tunnel.

"Mind the glass," Grean says.

Cecil's feet remain protected within rubber-treaded hock-guards. He made the hole big enough to obtain whatever is in the pocket. His father's eyes find him and pause before the two swap spots.

Grean was not expecting his son to possess such an exhausted, repulsive appearance. Cecil appears to have aged ten or twenty years, merely from liberating the accursed object. A dark haze mists off of his son's fur, just as it was foretold in Ottentrotter's book.

Cecil watches his father reveal a pair of gold-plated leather gloves with gold caps on each fingertip. Grean retrieved the gloves from his sling bag and pulls them tight onto his hands. The gloves have symbols stitched into the leather and carved into the gold. Grean has a dirty silk cloth resting on his wrist, one that remains stained black from coal. Those stains meander and spill across the fabric. "Time to pick it up."

Cecil looks curiously across his father's gear. "What is it? Why--why did I get that feeling? Dad, what is this thing? It was so--it was so,"

"Evil?" Grean asks, near calm about it.

Cecil nods. "Yeah. It was begging me to hurt myself." Cecil hears his own words and thinks them silly. He looks at his father and then his father's gentle hands. Dad, how are you unaffected by this? You know what it is, don't you? I should murder you where you stand! Cecil shakes that strangest of thoughts from his head.

Grean gazes into the hole with regret. "Something like that happens when you're around its presence," he says in a dark tone. "Shut the voices out. It can't kill you unless you listen. Quicker, to death, if you touch it. Hold on long enough to this material or listen to the voices, and you'll murder everyone dearest."

Bullshit. Let go. It speaks with Cecil's voice. Don't listen to,

Cecil fears for the safety of his long term health. The voices still linger in his mind. He gulps, wondering how long he will be able to tell the difference.

"You'll be fine as long as you don't touch it with your bare hands," Grean repeats. He reaches into the broken hole with the dirty rag in hand. He wraps the dark object within the cloth as tight as he can and_gently_retrieves it, holding his breath while doing so. It feels light as if hollow yet brittle and rough like tungsten. He places the dark material into his sling bag and says, "Let's get out of here."

"Uh--Okay, yeah. Please." Cecil says. He does not have more than a second to see the object, being a pure dark ingot or brick. It was blacker than coal, and the surface begged him to touch it. The light from the parabolic lantern had sent particles of black dust hazing from the surface of the ingot. The tunnel is full of that same haze. When Cecil turns the corner to leave, he is greeted by Vick, who is crawling in to feed his curiosity.

"What are you guys," Vick was saying, but then he screams. His eyes bulge, and he yanks free his dagger. "Wol--Wo--Wol,"

Cecil nearly leaps out of his skin_again_. My heart can't take this shit! He drops his pick with a deafening clatter and lunges for Vick to hug him tight. "It's okay! It's okay! They're entombed in glass! It's okay!" he repeats. "They're dead. They can't get us."

"NO!!" Vick screams. He aims his pointy piece of metal at a curving wall of terror. The blade shakes about as though Vick battles a quake.

"Vick! Relax! They're dead!" Cecil says.

"THEY'RE NOT DEAD!"

Grean notices a reflection in Vick's dark green eyes. He spots himself and Cecil within that reflection, of their two sets of blue eyes glowing back. There is a faintly distant star of green light within Vick's eyes, between where Grean and Cecil's eyes reflect. But Vick's green eyes are dull and dark. There is no illumination in Vick's eyes. The glow never took.

It is a reflection of another -- the green glow of their kind.

Grean slowly turns his head to the imprisoned corpses of the wolves and finds the burning fire of hatred and murder, staring back from a half-melted eyeball. An eyeball loosely held within a smeared twist of white bone in mid-boiled blood and pus. A partly disconnected eye, glaring with bestial fury as it demands freedom.

Cecil turns to follow that same reflection to the wolves, to prove to himself that they are dead. He, too, screams, "DAD! THEY'RE ALIVE!" He grabs Vick and hugs his brother as the two wail in terror and hide behind Vick's puny knife.

This moment is when Cecil and Vick spot a dark haze misting off of their midnight fur under the lantern's light.

"Impossible! How are you still alive?!" Grean shouts in his best attempt at anger. He yanked his old dagger out and crawled sideways like a lobster, getting between his sons and the hateful gaze. Entombed for two centuries and still burning with hatred over their fate. "How?!" A part of him is not at all surprised.

"Dad!" Cecil cries while struggling to hold his brother up.

Vick starts fainting, but comes back a moment later.

Cecil takes Vick's dagger to sheath it on his brother's hip. If not for Eth'Dolamere and Shale's dreams, he presumes he would be in the same helpless state. Never has the rabbit heard of the Grip of Death having this kind of effect. "What's this dark stuff on us?" he desperately asks. He studies his hand. His midnight fur is hissing as though his very shadow is on fire.

"Get him to the rope. Tie it around him. Get him out of here." Grean commands while grabbing his son's mattock. He guards the tunnel to let his sons escape and to study the monsters in the wall.

The three wolves tug and fight in what tiny space they fill. Slime and streaks of their flesh and guts squish around. Their oxygen would have run out the moment each became sealed within the cocoon of glass -- two hundred years ago. Their fat has since merged into the tunnel's whirling formation. Their entire bodies and organs cauterized mid-smear the second this tunnel took shape. The wolves would have had nothing to eat or drink for two centuries, yet, they move.

Grean waits for Cecil to get Vick to the rope before he shares a word. He moves right up to the glass.

The wolf's partly boiled tendons squish against the glass and tug the bone it reattaches to, ripping open its eye so it can stare Grean down as it heals what wounds it can.

Grean pats the sling bag on his chest. "You wanted this Shadowsteel that badly?" A grin spreads across Grean's lips. "You chased the worst kind of creature into this tunnel. What did you expect was going to happen?" he taunts the wolf with his big, delightful grin, and chuckles. "_Everyone_knows to run for dear life from their kind. Even _you_idiots should know better." Grean says while shaking his head. He stares at the beast's straining eye with amusement, watching the sclera repeatedly tear and then merging those rips back together. If the royal wolf only had enough room, the lapin knows it would become whole again.

Grean does not know if the wolf can hear his words, but the wolf does relax some. It recognizes that Grean is smirking fearlessly at it. Burning hateful eyes shift into desperate, silent begging. The wolves are afraid. They have no idea how much time has passed. Centuries may have felt like millennium -- complete isolation, entombed in this dark place. No food. No water. No sound. No way to move. Every inch of their bodies a boiled smear. Glassy rock fused to their bones. The state of agony. The inability to heal. Whatever miraculous powers the wolves had acquired to live for thousands of years have become a livid nightmare.

All three wolves stare at Grean the same. He stares at the one closest to the tunnel. "Shake your eyeball if you can hear me."

The wolf does.

Grean gives a broad smile. "You all fucked up, didn't you? Wiggle your nasty eye if you fucked up."

The wolf vibrates.

Grean shakes his head. "Thanks to you, your masters won't be destroying the world as soon as they want. It took me twenty-two years to dig down and find this," Grean says while gripping the sling bag against his chest. "I can_finally_ move on with my life." He elegantly sits on his knees before letting a celeste fire burn within his eyes. "Allow me to let you see the starlight of your creators one last time."

The verdant fire in the eyes of each wolf ignites to brilliance on par with the light-blue starlight of Grean's. The royals each know what Grean's eyes mean, and he gives them a suitable moment to process the identity before he eases his power back. His typical sapphire glow returns, which is the last thing these wolves will see.

Grean admires how the tunnel had poured down their throat when it was a liquid. The glass had locked their mouth open, unhinging their jowl, keeping their burned gums and teeth exposed, and their gullet stretched open. Crystallized formations flooded into their lungs and digestive tract. Their bellies are each bloated until having burst open with cauterized boils. It is detestable to look at the disturbing state in which the wolves remain, with how the molten whirl had sear-yanked their guts and flesh across several feet. He crawls his way out of the tunnel to find Cecil standing by as the rope lowers.

Cecil speaks the second he spots his father's sharp eyes, "Vick is up top."

"Good, head on up," Grean says.

Cecil grips the rope and puts his foot on the step. He stares at his father with more questions brewing on his face.

Carr waits until Cecil is secure on the rope. "Pull!"

Brilando, Desmond, and Essa pull.

Yaril kneels between Vick and Carr, having raced back after the chill filled the den. "What was that? Why can't I stop shaking?" Yaril cries to Essa. "Everyone is freaking out! What did you guys do?! Why is Vick all messed up?"

"Yaril, shut up," Essa says.

Yaril frowns at her. His cheeks became matted from crying.

"Cecil! What was still alive down there?" Carr asks when he takes Cecil's hand.

"Nothing! It's okay! We were scared. Thought we saw ghosts or something." Cecil says. As soon as his eyes crest the floor of the chamber, he looks for Vick.

Vick remains conscious but pale through his midnight fur.

"Quick, lower the rope back down," Cecil says before he leaps off of it.

"You don't have to tell me twice," Carr says. Once Cecil is back in the second chamber, he unlocks the break and pulls on the rope to send it back.

Grean picks up his son's discarded mattock and inserts the handle of it into the leather strap of his sling bag to hold it to his back. He picks up the parabolic lantern. The light does nothing to stem the chill of whatever haunts the chasm.

This feeling is not emanating from the Shadowsteel.

Something else lingers here.

Grean closes the mouth on the lantern to darken the chamber. "Son, turn off that lantern."

"Are you crazy? The fungus will bloom if we do." Carr says.

Grean stares at the skeletal remains of the Serepentian, wondering if it panicked in its final seconds. "Do as I say!" he roars.

"Shit," Carr says. Dad never yells at him with this kind of voice. He looks at Yaril, then Keel. Keel is closer. "Keel."

Keel pushes the light shield over the lens.

Grean's eyes bring forth the only light. "Come on out."

An invisible presence creeps around Grean, and the pressure drops until his ears pop. A faintly glowing mist flows around his feet, growing both thicker and brighter with blue as it accumulates from out of nowhere. The slow whirl picks up speed as it expands across the entire chamber. The light divides into various colors of blue, purple, green, and yellow as the smoke intensifies and takes on shapes. Writhing tubes of glowing gases encircle around the expanding limits of the mist, coiling its long body over itself.

The room gets filled to the walls with the transparent outline of a snake made of glowing mist. The yellow parts of the mist solidify into an endless spinal column, each gaining its rib. Within the confinements of this ghostly skeletal structure, barely-visible organs pulse as if alive. Many portions of bone and organs remain a misty trail that struggles to keep up with the coiling body.

The rabbit finds himself completely surrounded.

Grean stumbles back from the epicenter of the haunting wind, captivated as the apparition blooms to visual brilliance in a slow-coiling vortex immediately in front of Grean's face. His feet shuffle through the apparition's bones as he backs away, bursting the solidity of the ghost-bones back into mist until it passes him. It's torso grows into being between the old rabbit and the smooth tunnel. The shape of the scaled form it had in life expands with blue and purple light as each individual scale shines into reality. The ethereal outline of a furious Serepentian finishes developing.

Brains, bones, lungs, stomach, intestines, all of these organs and more can be seen beneath a transparent skin of purple, blue, and green scales. Parts of its body appear aflame with green, blue, and red smoke. Fragments of flesh, scales, and bone hover near where the pieces belong, keeping the ghost's form barely incomplete along the edges. The Serepentian's eyes are a brilliant, but devilish blue. Purple smoke burns from the lidless irises and scalp.

"I take it, you've been bored." Grean calmly and carefully says to the ghostly thing.

The snake's lower body remains vaporous, resting in a haze across the floor and walls while the newly rigid structure solidifies.

The snake's eyes become fixed on Grean's. Predatory reptilian eyes full of knowledge and death, which towers confidently at twice Grean's height.

"Who is he talking with? I can't see it. Where is that light coming from?" Yaril asks.

Carr and Cecil are shoulder-to-shoulder, staring down at the top of their father's head, unable to see further than the coiling mist.

Ghostly lungs inhale as the mist captures air. "You," the serpent wheezes, having not spoken for such a very long time. It fights with its incorporeal form to finish creating lungs, vocal cords, and a mouth to shape the words. "Gave me--a laugh. I needed--a laugh."

"Say again?" Grean softly requests. Without a physical body, the ghost still forces air to bend and squeeze around organs that do not exist.

"Your boys--funny. Their scream--was," The snake's slender arms flicker into existence as it points to its lips. "Put many smiles on face." the Serepentian says. It's elbows never fully form, remaining a hovering of bone fragments and purple smoke. Details of its scales reach across the illuminated outline as more and more of it takes form all the way to the end of its tail. When it lowers its arm, it rests its palm on a hunk of its half-formed body residing along the floor between it and the rabbit. Its other arm bends back as it rests the hind of its wrist on what would be an animalian waist, if this massive snake were Animalia. Despite its furious glare, its body language tells Grean it is quite content to finally have someone with which to speak.

"Technically," Grean starts. "You're still alive."

The Serepentian stares at the rabbit with quiet reverence for a brief moment. "Grant me--time to--escape," It softly requests. Its voice echoes, as though it were speaking through a long tunnel. "Leave rope--soak in blood--promise to leave." The way the apparition's mouth moves is accurate to how a snake would speak. Pulling and bending on its mouth and gums to help form words. It has trouble using Grean's language. Any Oh-sounds are closer to an Ah, and that is the least of his issues. Grean watches the flesh of its mouth function around its clearly visible set of teeth. He cannot tell which part of its skull are fangs, but this Serepentian's mouth is loaded with ghostly teeth of considerable sharpness and size.

Grean thinks for a moment. "Your like-minded kin are out there, right? Can you sense them?" It was a stupid question the second he hears the words leave his mouth. Of course, the snake is unable to sense them. If he could have, then they would have detected him centuries back. He would not have been left buried for this long.

The Serepentian continues to stare, not certain himself. "I cannot sense beyond. I hope they are. The fight for Vaelia--has begun. A star must not go dark!"

Grean sighs. "I was hoping you weren't a believer." Grean looks down at the sling bag on his chest. "This dark thing is going to help me cure my home, but then here you are. They didn't _tell_me you'd be here. Not Matan, not Ottentrotter's book, not the raven,"

"The SnowLance, greedy, can be played," the serpent says. It scans over its pristine bones, regretful to have lost everything. "I know not, this Trout-Otter. Artemis knows of me. Do not trust--Book-Feather."

"I _already_don't trust that raven. That's the cunt that got me into this mess." Grean says. The raven never told him there was a Serepentian buried with the damn Shadowsteel. Artemis said the ingot would be the evil that keeps Exiles away. This whole time, Grean thought the night terrors were from the shit stone of darkness. The terrifying aura was the foreboding ward set up by this dead manipulator of reality, this ancient Serepentian. Grean clarifies, "I know Matan SnowLance is an asshole, but I distrust him less because he's not a servant of Dragons or Miestans."

The snake regretfully eyes his book, unable to interact with it because of his explosive curse.

"I know someone who can help you," Grean says.

The snake moves its eyes back to the oddly shaped rabbit. It coils its body on the ground for support even though it is a glowing mist of carved, wispy detail. The apparition elevates its head to just over eleven feet high, reminding Grean that Serepentians are enormous creatures. Even though it has no physical form or weight, the apparition makes an effort to balance its tall torso on a circular coil of its meaty, ghostly body.

Grean scratches his chin and continues his ordinary conversation with a deadly terror. "She's eh, pretty good at making new bodies. Her methods are against my religion if I had a religion, but she might be right along the alignment you left behind when you betrayed Ouron."

The reptile appears confused. The only way it shows this is with a curious tilt of its head.

"Find your way across the Causeway and leave The Burning Continent following the north coast until you reach the tall, and dense green forests," Grean begins. "and follow that northern coast for a year or so. Don't let yourself get distracted by the cities there. Find the tundra north of the Royal Boar's feeding ground and avoid the Shiyamani. Follow the first line of white mountains inland, to the east, until you find these endless open fields where tens of millions of soldiers rest. Avoid the big black scarred land; it'll suck you in if you wander near it. The war field I mentioned, you'll find more spirits like yourself, but you would be a King among them. You'll find her there, picking at fresh corpses of that perpetual war. Follow the patchwork squirrels. You'll be reborn female, and I doubt you'll have your memories for a time. Don't forget to mention my name and appearance. Grean Kestia. Make sure she knows that I was _not_the one that killed you."

"Thank you." The snake says. Its ghostly form vanishes to the dark as candlelight would when a glass encloses over it.

"You have a few hours before I seal the hole with rebar and concrete," Grean says. He steps on the platform, and his sons pull him up.

"Dad. Who were you talking with? What's a Kestia?" Carr asks. His glowing eyes are full of bewilderment.

Cecil checks on Vick. "I'm okay," Vick replies.

"You sure?"

"Yeah,"

Carr pulls the rope to the side. "Just what in the fucking kingdoms happened down there?"

Vick clears his throat and starts to say, "Wol--"

"The damn place is_HAUNTED_!" Grean states. "I want everyone out of this chamber. No working in here. All of you gather your things and get out."

"What, and leave you here?" Vick asks with concern.

"Yes." Grean flatly says. He gives Vick a look that tells the boy to obey his father.

Vick knows not to argue. Especially with his chest feeling on fire from his tumultuous stomach and irregular heartbeat. He grips his chest and clenches his teeth as if he can will himself to calm down. The cornea burn in his eye aches with every pulse of his heart. No matter how many times Vick blinks or tries to shut his eyes, he cannot remedy himself of the corneal flash burn. Keeping his eyes open makes the image fade the best. He looks at Cecil to find he blinks the same way, struggling to remove the circle of that wolf's eye.

"Dad! We heard Vick and Cees screaming!" Brilando says. He scratches his arms, unsure of how to handle the confusing thoughts he was having.

"Because they're scared of the reflections we saw in glass. Damn things looked like monsters, but they were reflections of ourselves, weren't they, Cecil, Vick?"

"Nothing! It's okay! We were scared. Thought we saw a ghost or something." Cecil says. He looks at Vick in the corner of his eye.

Vick looks away, anger filling his eyes before he looks back. They should not want to alert the family with more fear. "How were they still alive?" Vick whispers into Cecil's ear.

Cecil looks at his brother and shakes his head. "We'll ask dad after. I think we have the Grip of Death, or something similar to it. We have to sleep it off, or we'll be in serious trouble."

"Come, out with you lot, out out!" Grean says.

Cecil can see what his father is doing. He tries his best to make light of the situation. Which monster is more frightening; the royal __wolves, the snake_ that committed suicide , or my father_ _who knew about this?_Cecil wonders.

Essa gathers her things. She is beyond confused and shaking with fear. Her pencil scratched across her artwork, ruining hours of hard work.

Desmond pushes Brilando. "Come on, ogren! Grab some stuff. Dad says we have to vacate. Let's vacate!"

"Desmond. Leave that rope." Grean orders. He pulls the mattock from behind him and studies the tip of it. No residue from The End remains on the iron, so he returns it to Cecil, who still kneels beside Vick.

Cecil slips the ironwood stock down his back and into his tight sash.

Desmond looks at his father with a troubled frown, but he drops the rope as ordered.

"Good. Come, Vick. Get up." Grean says, helping Cecil get Vick up. "Go sleep, and you'll be fine." Grean steps aside when Carr takes Vick's arm from him. "Carr."

"Yes?" Carr asks, he and Cecil stop.

"Send for Maela. Vick will need a drop of Poppy-Nectar." Grean says.

Carr studies Vick to find him failing to keep his eyes open. He turns to his father to ask, "And Cecil, too?"

"Just Vick."

Desmond volunteers as he looks over his shoulder, "I'll send for her," then following Brilando and Essa out. He grabs Yaril by the collar. "Come along."

"Let the fuck go of me!" Yaril barks.

Vick emits exasperated words. "Let's go. I'm tired."

Keel holds his hand out for his brothers to offer himself. "Do you need help?"

"We got him," Carr says. "Go to the kitchen, tell Mikna, 'I'll be late.'"

"Sure," Keel says. He runs off after Yaril and Desmond.

Cecil pulls, guiding his brothers to the tunnel. A lizard's hand caresses through his scalp. He shudders from the tingle, then temporarily loses sight in his left eye. Shale's fingers sink into his scalp.

Carr stumbles along, wondering why Vick needs opiates and not Cecil.

Vick dry-heaves, but he keeps his dinner down.

"Whoa! Not here!" Carr begs.

Vick burps and holds it down. He focuses on keeping his unnaturally calm heart beating without arrhythmia. His chest aches as if a sibling thumped it. His lungs burn, as though he ran a marathon across the continent. His mind lingers into dreams. "The fuck--is wrong with me?" he asks between hiccups.

"I don't know. Cecil, what happened?" Carr asks.

Cecil says nothing.

"Cecil!" Carr repeats.

"Vick and I, we've got something similar to the Grip of Death," Cecil says.

"From a wolf? That's not--that is NOT possible!" Carr proclaims. "Cecil, What was Dad doing?"

Cecil waits until they are further away from their father. He nearly drops to the floor before planting his hand to the dirt wall, attempting to hide his exhaustion by pretending that the tunnel is not wide enough for three, which is true. Cecil's vision blurs for a moment. Strange. Beyond strange. His body feels to be fighting against some stress or fever that is not there. The cornea burn has faded to a haunting memory. There is the slightest circle in his eyes when he blinks. Shale's dream taunts him. Let go. He can feel the anole's dainty claws slipping through his flesh and skull to take control of his cerebrum. For the first time, he feels quite resistant to the dream.

Is this really because of the wolf? From looking into its eyes? I feel like throwing up. Is it always this stuffy in the den? Cecil thinks. He feels he has spent enough time being vigorously bred by his hung lover. Where am I again? The dead monster struggles to remember where he was walking a second ago. It is time to escape the cabin for some fresh air and to let his crew know he is still somewhat alive after screaming as passionately as he had been these past hours.

"I don't know what Dad was doing except; he had this whole thing planned," Vick growls out.

"Of course he had it planned out. This is Dad we're talking about." Carr says.

Cecil shakes his head as he walks awkwardly, minding his raging boner. Leave me the fuck alone, Shale! "No, not like that, Carr. He means to say; Dad knew_what he was going to find down there. He knew _exactly where it would be. He told me to mine something out of this glass wall. He was prepared with his sling bag, and he had these weird gloves on and this cloth. I've never seen that cloth or those gloves before. He specifically knew what he was going to find in there and how dangerous it was to touch it."

"It--did seem that way," Vick says through a harsh tone while struggling to keep his dinner down. He grips Carr's shoulder real tight to make him stop so he can fight back a heave.

Carr hums to himself as he thinks about it. "Maybe he went down there earlier. You know, when we weren't looking."

Cecil does not believe that.

Neither does Vick. "No way. That was his first time down, but he," Vick has to stop walking. He grips Carr's shoulder and the dirt wall to stop and catch his breath. He feels to be floating through a humid, airless cave, and he cannot seem to stop grinning like a maniac. He whimpers. "The fuck is wrong with me?"

Carr helps Vick lean against the wall. "What was down there?" Carr asks.

"Wolves." Cecil flatly says. It is easy for him to say it with none of the other siblings around.

Vick stares forward when Carr locks his sights onto Cecil. "Seriously?" Carr slowly asks. "Shouldn't we like, go get somebody? The Guard from Paxile's Fort or a fucking Priest-Knight?"

"Be quiet." Cecil frowns from despair. "We can't get help. We can't tell anyone. The wolves were trapped in a wall for a reason."

"Trapped? In a wall?" Carr asks. "I'm royally confused."

"Glass," Vick says. He is closing and opening his eyes as if enduring the heat of his forge. Something deep in his thoughts is begging him to let go.

"Glass? Then how do you have the Grip of Death?" Carr asks.

"The walls of this _tunnel_were somehow melted. It melted right through the wolves, and yet, the wolves are still alive. Carr, they've been down there for more than a hundred years," he says as he stacks the evidence of how clean the skeleton was. "That melted tunnel is impossible to imagine. Maybe a chemical device, or--" he trails off as his mind considers the impossible.

"Or?" Carr asks.

Cecil frowns as he tastes the word in his mouth. He says it anyway, knowing Vick will snap at him, "Magic."

Vick shakes his head. "No. There's no such thing as magic," he says with coarse distress.

Cecil knows Vick is wrong. "There's no device. There's no residue of any chemical burn. Only the odor of metal gas," he says to Vick. "Nothing could've been used like that. Not on that scale. Not even with the best tech in the Fifteenth District. There wasn't even a blackened coat of ash on the rock around the glass. The stone had to have been heated to a molten liquid in an instant. The amount of energy or chemicals it would take to melt that size of a tunnel with that limited amount of air, and then to trap wolves of that size in a whirling flow. Damn it, Carr, those wolves were massive, and they were smeared right into the glass wall like something shoved them into a funnel."

Carr looks as bewildered as he should be. "Why did Dad want the light off?"

Vick and Cecil stare into the distance as they ponder that very question. They both look up, and Cecil says it for the exasperated Vick, "I don't know, Carr. Can we please get Vick to his room?"

"It sounded like he was speaking to someone," Carr says, helping Vick to his feet.

Cecil shrugs. "The wolves maybe. Or the ghost," he says, finding Vick's left arm. The cabin door suddenly pulls away from him. Soft hands firmly grasp around his bare waist to plant him back onto his lover's lap. With incredible accuracy, his partner's legendary cock eases right back inside and at this perfect angle, bulging the rabbit's abdomen. He gasps as his partner's endless libido continues to pound his numb, seed-flooded anus. Resting a hand on his stomach, it feels like a firm mushroom repeatedly shoving against the underside of his belly fur. When he moans beside his brothers, he turns it into a growl, then a desperate whimper. Shale, what the fuck are you doing to me?

"Ghost?!" Carr asks.

There is a clattering behind them. Far down the tunnel. Back in the expansion. It sounds like Grean is pedaling Cecil's rock disposal machine.

"What's he doing now?" Carr asks.

"He told us to go. Let's go." Vick says, grateful for the order from his father. As much as he does not want to leave, he knows the wolves had no ill effect on his father. The look he and Cecil share tell Vick that his oldest brother is thinking the same thing: Who is my father?

Cecil speaks with an uncomfortable smile as he ejaculates into his pants and down his inner thigh. "Let's go. I have someone waiting for me." Fuck you, Shale. Fuck you, Eth'Dolamere.