“Whoops.”
Stop doing that!
The Aspect laughed as I pocketed all the keys and hurried out of the office.
"Eris, catch!" I tossed her two of the four keys, and we set about freeing the slaves. As I opened the little rabbit girls’ pen, I handed her my extra key and sent her to help with unlocking the rest of the cages.
Within five minutes, we had all twenty or so unlocked, and the group of former captives was huddled together in an awkward attempt at solidarity. They still bore looks of confusion and sadness, but there was a splattering of hopeful faces in the crowd as well.
Eris finished unlocking the final cage and rushed over to join me. Her hand around mine was a comforting warmth in this dank, decrepit place.
Though the current slaves had been freed, this place held the weight of too many lives sentenced to bondage. That kind of darkness leaves a stain that will never fade. Save for under the purifying light of fire.
Let the former slaves escape under cover of smoke. Burn the place down, and while the slavers are busy figuring out what the hell is going on, we'll be long gone. A solid plan with a decent chance of succeeding.
I had a thought and cleared my throat, speaking loudly to the crowd.
"All right, you're all free. You can walk out that door right now if you so choose. In the back room, behind the heavy iron door, is a chest filled with gold. Take what you can carry with you. I recommend traveling in groups to avoid getting recaptured. Use the gold to buy what you need any way you can.”
“You have five minutes to grab what’s here. After that, I'm taking a torch to this fucker. Okay, speech over. Good luck to all of you."
After my words, I walked over to one of the crates and splintered it with a kick, grabbing a few planks of wood and a discarded rag in one of the nearby cages. It was filthy with all manner of nastiness, but it would serve as decent kindling.
The slaves had started bustling about after I finished speaking. A few had found metal pipes and were in the process of ransacking the crates looking for anything of value. Grunting from behind me caused me to turn. A couple of the dwarves were carrying the chest of gold. They dropped in the middle of the room and went through counting it and dividing it equally among the twenty or so slaves. They counted the money like machines. A blur of hands counting and stacking coins by the thousands.
I left them to deal with the loot and set about getting ready to burn this place to cinders.
I was walking hand in hand with Eris, making my preparations, when she stopped dead. It was sudden enough that my hand was nearly yanked from hers.
"What?" I started to say when I noticed the look she had.
Her face was wide in disbelief, not in fear, just like she couldn't believe what she saw. I followed her gaze to see her staring at two children huddled together by themselves, away from the main group of freed slaves. For some reason, they seemed familiar to me.
I was trying to figure out why, when it hit me like a ton of bricks. I had seen them before. In the flashes of memories from Darren. They were the strange children with long, curved ears—the not quite demi-humans.
Eris let go of my hand and walked unblinking towards the children. I called out to her, but she paid me no mind. I called again much louder this time—still nothing. The children had heard me yell and looked up to see Eris walking towards them. They looked at her with confusion on their faces before it crumbled into dawning realization.
They know what she is.
This turn of events more than piqued my interest, and I rushed over to stand by Eris. I brushed my hand against hers, and she jumped like a bolt of lightning had struck her. She whirled around at me, before calming herself once she realized it was me.
"Eris, what the hell?"
"I'm sorry, Sam, you startled me."
"Obviously," I replied, "You mind telling me what's going through that beautiful head of yours?"
She stared at me, incredulously, motioning towards the children. "Do you not see them?"
"Yeah, the kids with the long ears. What about them has you in such a frenzy?"
Something clicked on Eris's face, and she turned away from to kneel in front of the children. They seemed a little wary of her but not nearly as much as they feared me. They shivered in fright just from looking at me.
Great. Durandahl, Hive Knight, and monster to children everywhere.
Between Eris and me, they chose Eris gratefully, rushing to her and huddling into her knees. They disregarded the dirt they accrued from the floor onto their clothes, and both of them clung onto her legs, burying their faces to hide from me.
Eris looked from them to me, and with an apologetic look, asked me to back up a tad.
"Sure…no problem."
I crept back on the floor, well out of arm’s reach, and sat down next to one of the few remaining crates that we hadn't splintered to pieces, waiting to find out what was going on with Eris and the strange children.
Eris gently cooed at the frightened kids, brushing their disheveled and dirty hair through her fingers, trying to get the kids to settle enough to stop hiding away. She started humming to them. The same
