Sonara’s magic hissed, coming awake again. From within its cage, she could just barely sense the reek of death, an aura she felt quite often in her travels. “So what are we to do?” she asked, ignoring the painful pulse in her temples. “How are we to strike against them?”
“We’ll watch them around the clock, in shifts,” Markam said. “We’ll learn their patterns, try to decipher their plans. Then we’ll come up with a way to attack.”
Sonara stepped over an unfinished track, the wooden cart abandoned,the side railing of it splintered and broken through, as if a massive beast had taken a bite out of it.
Release me,Sonara’s curse whispered.Let me dance in the dark.
She hated the feeling of it.
The pressure it put on her skull, the fire it brought to her senses.
But she refused to open that cage again, to let it take control over her the way it had so many times lately.
The torchlight flickered as Thali took a left at a fork in the tunnel, heading back towards their cave. Here, the rounded walls pressed in tighter, the ground unstable. Sonara ducked her head, avoiding a jagged bit of rock protruding from the wall.
Sonara’s boot crunched on something hard.
A human skull, eye sockets dark as pits, stared up at her. Hollow and void of life. She hadn’t seen that before, on the way out of the tunnels.
“Thali,” she said. “I think you took a wrong turn.”
“There are no wrong turns,” the cleric responded, “only detours, and I believe this one is a shortcut.”
Sonara stepped past a ribcage that was now a jungle for glow worms to inch their bodies through. They carried on, as more bones grew in piles. Evidence that perhaps soon, they would face a beast lurking in the darkness.
“Thali.”
Sonara’s curse hissed and gripped the bars of its cage. She found herself stopping, tilting her chin to sniff the air as if she could sense what was wrong on her own.
The smell had shifted. The air hadchanged,warmer somehow, as if there were a daytime breeze blowing at the back of her neck.
“The smell,” Azariah said from the back of the group. “It’sawful.”
That warm breeze tickled Sonara’s skin like a sigh.
Release me, release me,her curse hissed.
It pounded against the cage, setting Sonara’s teeth to clenching as her temples pulsed and she tried to keep it in.
“Oh, for the love of…” Sonara turned to see Markam’s shadowy outline as he lifted a foot, a thick substance clinging to the bottom of his boot. “Damn the goddesses for all time. These are real leather.”
Sonara glanced to the right as something in the darkness shifted.
“Thali, we need to turn around.”
The cleric continued to murmur about something as she lifted her torch and held it to the rounded wall, where it looked like something dark had been smeared across it, staining the rock.
“Blood,” Sonara whispered.
Her curse hissed again in its cage, and suddenly the pressure of holding it back was too much to bear. The cageclangedinside as her curse shook the bars with its shadow claws, trying to tell her something. But goddesses, she wasso tired,and…
The cage door blasted open.
Her curse soared out like a fowl taking flight, sensing the ripe earth, the natural scents that she knew the rest of the group could smell, but beneath it all…
Hunger.
A sharp aura that had Sonara spinning around, searching for the source of it. Again, she felt that warm, sighing wind, a pattern that felt like a breath being released, after having been held for too long…
