Confidence burned within her and somehow she knew that she should feel sorry for any denizens of the underground that crossed her and Taunauk. The two of them could not have been more different, yet they were forced by circumstance to work together. Helesys wondered if they had known each other before they dropped into this place.
But it was an impossible question—one quickly replaced with the silence of the hallway.
~
Cold stone surrounded them as Taunauk led the way down the hall. The hallway was robust, nearly ten paces wide and just as tall, but with the barbarian for reference it felt cramped. Helesys only understood its size when she reached out with both hands and could not touch either wall.
The hallway stretched on straight with no deviation or change for half a mile, until they came to an opening. At first it looked as if the entire hallway disappeared into a black void, but as they approached they could see that the hallway merely stopped for a while and started again some twenty feet away.
Taunauk crouched lower as he approached, impossibly silent, like a giant cat stalking prey. Helesys followed, matching his cadence. Slowly he peered around the corner, looking both ways, and waved for her to approach.
Helesys stepped beside him and peered out across the chasm. The space between had been hollowed out into a gigantic cylinder that cut perpendicular to the hallway like an underground river had once cut across it. A hundred yards away in either direction the hollow of the river had collapsed, such that the only choice forward was down into the dry riverbed and directly across it to the counterpart hallway.
Taunauk grasped the torch with two spare fingers of his axehand, somehow holding the massive weapon and the torch in the same hand. Then reached around the edge of the stone and brought back a clump of surrounding dirt. He rubbed it together and it fell away in dry powder.
“Dry soil. Old passage,” he whispered. He slid down from the hallway to the dirt floor of the cylinder in swift silence. “Safe.”
Helesys followed. It was an easy enough drop but she could not quite match the barbarian’s cat-like grace. She knew from that point on it would be a personal challenge for herself.
“Someone with your frame should not be so silent,” she whispered.
“I am a hunter,” he replied, as if that was enough.
Helesys frowned and stooped to the dirt. The cylinder was filled with concentric rings spaced two fingers apart and each wrapped all the way around the space. The spacing was nearly perfect.
“What do you make of this?” she asked.
“Wormsign. Borehole.” Taunauk emphasized the direction with his free hand. “Old passage,” he repeated. He started across the borehole toward the other stone hallway.
Helesys shuddered. It wasn’t that the borehole was from a worm or any such factor, it was merely from the size. They were amnesiacs in a strange place and the first sign of other life was a giant beast. It did not bode well.
She flexed the mechanical fingers of her wand-arm, feeling the power course within her and most of the foreboding feeling left her.
But not all.
~
They went across and climbed up to the next stone hallway. Taunauk led and Helesys followed. The eerie silence stretched on just as the hallway did and Helesys’s mind insisted on filling it…
Again, thoughts drifted to her wand-arm and the kindled power that lay within, comforting like a campfire. Helesys knew of magic—knew that weavers twisted the latent energies of the world, harnessed them, channeled them—and that she was one of those wielders of magic. ...But so much was lost. She could think of no spells that she knew—no spells at all. Her memory loss had taken not just memories of home, but memories of how to create and destroy.
She could only hope that bits would come back to her or that she would remember them innately. So as she walked behind the barbarian down into depths unknown, she flexed the mechanics of her arm trying to will some bits of knowledge from them. But none came from such gentle teasings.
Water sloshed beneath Taunauk’s feet. It was the first sound she’d heard from the man—she’d nearly forgotten he was there.
Puddles littered the hallway. Eventually the hallway was completely flooded and water sloshed with each and every step.
Taunauk grunted in disapproval.
“What’s the matter?” Helesys whispered. She pictured him as a big cat who didn’t want to get wet.
“Hard to be quiet. Going to get deeper.”
Helesys was about to ask what the barbarian meant when she realized that the hallway was on a slight decline. They were walking deeper underground, which gave the illusion that the water level was rising.
An hour later and the water was shin-deep and sinking into Helesys’s boots—frigid—and the elf gasped quietly as it filled her shoes.
Taunauk must have heard because he said, “I will not carry you.”
“You will never need to,” she replied through gritted teeth.
Soon the water was up to her knees, but mercifully leveled off.
In the distance there were pinpricks of light. Taunauk quenched his torch in the water and set it against the wall. Again the barbarian moved in a crouch. This time even slower than before so as not to slosh water and give away their approach.
“Do you think it wise to sneak up on our first contact?” Helesys whispered.
Taunauk stalked forward without replying.
The minutes drew tense as they approached and then the stone hallway opened up again. The pair stopped at the threshold. A sprawling, flooded room lay before them.
The flooded room extended back at least one hundred paces. At first, it wasn’t readily apparent if the water deepened or not, but Helesys focused on the torches and the figures in the center. Four vaguely-Terran shapes huddled beneath the torches. The crouching posture gave
