“It’s good to be back in Prand,” Isu remarked.
“It doesn’t really feel like we’re back, though,” Elyse said. “I feel like we’ve entered another world, one even more alien to me than Yeng.”
“I quite like these caverns,” Layna said, looking up at the ceilings, which were riddled with stalactites of all sizes. “I could just picture cobwebs in all these corners. My war spiders would love it down here, and these stalactites would be perfect for hanging cocooned prey…”
Elyse shuddered, and a look of disgust came across her face. She had learned to accept and tolerate a great many things during her time with me. Although she had never been able to get over the fact that the Arachne ate people after they wrapped them up in spider cocoons.
“Aye, it’s quite eerie down here, isn’t it?” Rollar remarked, looking around. “If the ancient gods ever fashioned their own cathedrals, before men arrived in Prand and learned to construct buildings of stone and wood, I’d imagine they would look something like this.”
“There is some sort of ancient power humming silently in these walls.” Friya stared around her in wonder. “I do not know what it is, but I feel as if I have visited this place in my dreams, long ago.”
“And were they dreams … or were they nightmares?” Isu asked, a dark light glinting in her eyes.
“Shh!” Anna-Lucielle hissed, stopping dead in her tracks. “Everyone, quiet! I think I heard something.”
“What did you hear?” Elyse asked.
“Something moving underground, a rumble beneath my feet.”
“We’re already underground, in case you haven’t noticed,” Isu remarked drily.
Anna-Lucielle flashed her a glare with daggers in her eyes. “I’m not an idiot, Isu.”
While the women were arguing, my eyes drifted over to Drok. He had gotten down onto his hands and knees and had pressed his ear to the ground, and he was listening intently. His coarse-featured face was scrunched into an expression of intense concentration, but this gave way to a snarl of aggression after a few moments. He sprang back and whipped out his double-bladed battle ax, shifting into a combat stance.
“What’s going on, Drok?” I asked.
“Wyrm coming,” he growled.
And then the floor of the cavern exploded upward in a gigantic plume of shattered rocks and billowing dust.
Chapter Fourteen
The wyrm was spectacular, in a terrifying way. We’d all talked about how huge and powerful these creatures were, but since none of us had ever seen one in the flesh, we had all had to imagine what they looked like. I didn’t think the pictures we conjured up in our imaginations came close to reality.
I first got a good look at the wyrm a few seconds after the dust from the explosion had cleared. It was a brief look, however, since the monster moved way faster than anything that massive had a right to.
The wyrm looked, in a way, like a living stone grain silo like the peasants in the fields of Brakith used, except with a monstrous spiky head on top. It had no eyes, ears or nose—just a huge, gaping mouth riddled with multiple jagged rows of the biggest fangs I’d ever seen. I’d known that the beast’s circular mouth had to be big since it snacked on cave trolls, but I was impressed, to say the least, to see that not only could it have effortlessly swallowed a cave troll whole, it could have gulped down a wine wagon without too much trouble. Illuminated by the bright violet glow of the enchanted dagger, it looked even more freakish and otherworldly.
I guessed I’d been expecting it to look like a snake, or maybe something like a dragon, but it looked like neither. That was why the image of a grain silo popped into my head before either a snake or a dragon: the beast looked like a long stone cylinder—a flexible one, of course, since it was able to move like a snake even if it didn’t look like one. I’d pictured it as being a scaled beast, but its body was covered in what looked like armored stone.
I didn’t have much time to really analyze how the wyrm looked, of course, since it came surging toward me at a terrifying speed.
“Rollar, Drok, get the wolf’s heads ready!” I yelled. “I’ll distract it!” I jumped onto Fang’s saddle; I would need his speed and his ability to climb vertical walls to defeat the wyrm.
Rami-Xayon and Yumi-Rezu, the enjarta sisters, were already loosing rapid-fire arrows at the wyrm. As powerful as their enchanted bows and arrows were, the projectiles shattered harmlessly against the wyrm’s stone-armored hide. In fact, the massive beast didn’t seem to even notice that it was being attacked by them.
It was, instead, focused on me and Fang.
We were racing along across the open floor of the cavern in a bid to get its attention, which we definitely seemed to be succeeding in doing.
“I’m going up the walls!” I yelled. “Hit its underbelly with the wolf’s heads!”
During our time at sea, my party had practiced with the Yengish wolf’s head weapons. They had all become quite proficient in their use. After much practice, they were able to shoot them with accuracy and reload them in quick time. I was hoping that the tremendous power of these weapons, with their explosive ammunition, would be enough to take down the wyrm. We would just have to score a few critical hits in its vulnerable areas.
I urged Fang up a vertical wall, with the wyrm racing along behind me and gaining on us alarmingly quickly. When I glanced over my shoulder, I saw that taking the beast out might prove more difficult than I had anticipated. I’d imagined it as a reptilian kind of creature, guessing that
