“You’ll thank me when we barely escape a death beast with our lives, and everyone needs a good laugh.”
“A death beast?” Meela asks.
“Yeah. Death beast. Or whatever the fuck is out there.”
Meela chuckles.
And before we know it, we’re almost at our first inn for the night, with plenty of flame left on the time orb.
“This quest is too easy,” Raef remarks as we see the inn off in the distance.
“Dammit, Raef. Saying stuff like that is when things always go bad. At least in all the adventure tales I’ve read,” I chastise him.
“It’ll be fiiine.” He waves me off. “Those are just stories.”
“Right.” I feel uneasy about it all.
But we ride into the stables, tie up our horses, and find a cozy, lively inn with plenty of rooms for us all.
We even have plenty of time to sit and eat a nice dinner.
~
Gaethri is telling us tales of his homeland, which he hasn’t returned to in many years. I sense an uneasiness about him since we’ve journeyed closer.
We sit around a large wooden table toward the back of the tavern, where the noise toward the crowded bar drowns out everything said among us. There’s no one else sitting too close.
I’m still avoiding eye contact with a certain dragon.
“There used to be a heavily populated community of us in the mountain,” he tells us, his eyes somewhere far, far away.
“What happened?
“Maliths got in one night. No one knows how.”
“Maliths?” I’ve not heard of them.
He looks at me curiously. Based on everyone’s faces, no one else seems to know either. Except for Rhydra. “You don’t know of the maliths?”
“No,” half of us say.
He shakes his head. It almost looks like he shivers. “Unnatural creatures of the darkness. They come at night, and they’ll feast on any living thing they can find.”
I want to shiver too.
“What are they, exactly?”
“It’s hard to say for sure. They don’t show themselves in the light if they can help it, and if you’ve gotten close enough to get a good look, you’re likely dead anyway. All I’ve heard is that they’re massive furry beasts with yelloweyes and haunting screeches. And sharp, long claws, based on evidence they’ve left in their devastation.”
Raef glares at Meela with an I-told-you-so look. “Death beasts.”
She doesn’t argue. Instead, she bobs her head as if to say he was right.
“So, they got in the mountain…” I circle back to the story that was being told.
“Aye.”
“They got your family…” I say softly.
