Book 3: Chapter 9: Stone Silence

  [Time Remaining: 622 Days, 9 Hours, 07 Minutes]

  The next morning arrived with the reluctant drag of gray clouds and a damp wind that carried the subtle stink of urine from the night before. Or maybe that was just the bacon-leftovers that Tom-Tom inexplicably had buried under the wagons; Alex wasn’t going to investigate to find out for certain.

  Regardless of the reason, he could tell once he had woken up in his bedroll the next morning, the forest had changed.

  Not in the dramatic, trees-on-fire, or vampire-castle-revealed-in-the-fog, sort of way. No, this was a quiet shift, like the entire woods had tensed its shoulders. Looking around, he could see that the others felt it too. Everyone moved differently, their eyes anxiously darting about every so often, even the mercenaries and merchants had a different sort of countenance about them, as if waiting for something to happen.

  Henry was the first to say something.

  He crouched by a patch of disturbed earth near the roadside, fingers brushing across deep, chaotic claw marks in the mud. Not neat trails, no slow stalker-beast pacing, these appeared as frantic, fleeing tracks, like every creature in this part of the forest had been given a very convincing reason to run away, and run fast.

  “Something’s wrong,” Henry said simply, standing and brushing his off his hands.

  Alex frowned. “Define ‘wrong.’ On a scale from ‘bad weather’ to ‘doomsday snake cult,’ where are we landing?”

  Henry just looked deeper into the woods, where even the birds seemed to have lost interest in chirping. He bobbed his head back and forth, as though chewing over the question methodically for a moment. In the end, Alex never really got an answer, as Henry eventually just shrugged and continued on after the wagons.

  It was an unsettling thing. Henry was usually a man of few words, but this felt different, as if just speaking the worries out loud would somehow make them real. He never knew Henry to be a superstitious kind of man, so it was strange to see him that way. Strange enough for Alex to take what he had said, and hadn’t, to heart.

  As the caravan creaked onward, the forest got weirder.

  First came the strange scales littered about the forest floor. It wasn’t armor, or discarded gear, but dull, dusty fragments of what looked like cracked stone serpent scales. Lizard-like in shape, serpentine. The kind of scales you would expect to find from a molted snake, but far too thick, too pristine, and apparently carved from stone. There were no accompanying bodies to signal what made the items was dead. There was also no signs of sentient races in the area recently, to say they were dropped or left behind be a different merchant caravan.

  In the end they had to just accept the strangeness and move on.

  Next came the rocks.

  Or rather, not-quite-right rocks. Just like the scales before, these seemed to be stone objects in the shape of animal body parts. One looked like it had started life as a deer head, carved from stone, antlers curled upward in spirals. But the carving was cracked down the middle, and discarded like a failed art project. Another of the rocks appeared to be the half-formed claw of something with too many knuckles. Garret poked one with a stick. It cracked apart like brittle shale when he prodded too forcefully.

  “Ten copper says this forest is haunted,” Cole said.

  Peter, walking beside him, shook his head. “Nothing haunts forests this creepy. You get haunted by forests this creepy.” Which received a curt nod of acceptance from Cole, as well as the others.

  Even Ghrukk, who usually regarded anything not on fire as a mild inconvenience, walked closer to his team, his gaze sharp and his hands secured tight around the haft of his weapon. Alex kept his [Aether Sight] active on full bore. He couldn’t deny the worry that was creeping its way into his mind from the reactions of everyone else.

  Something wicked this way comes. He couldn’t stop the phrase from entering his mind.

  By midday, the path ahead was silent enough that you could hear the caravan wheels squelch in every rut along the narrow path. Alex’s nerves were charging up with static, but had no way to release it. His hands twitched, his eyes darted to any direction he heard that contained a sound that wasn’t immediately recognized as human, or Ork, or Dwarf. It felt like he was trying to stay calm after drinking ten cups of coffee, a slight ringing buzz constant in his ear. The buzzing sound and the rhythm of his sped up breathing forming a melody of anxiety, and a hint of fear.

  By nightfall, that song had turned into something else, and Alex was barely holding it together. They made camp in a forest clearing slightly too circular to be natural. The fires were low. The laughter that normally graced the nightly gatherings, was gone.

  Then it began. From deep within the trees came the sound.

  A long, quiet hissss, like background static. It was distant at first, but rising and falling overtime in a barely perceptible way.

  Then one of the mercenaries from the other two teams—a veteran archer with more scars than clean skin—spoke up loud enough for everyone to hear, “There’re stories. Old ones. About the Serpent-Kings of the Deepwood.”

  “Here we go,” Alex whispered under his breath.

  The archer turned, showing he obviously heard him, but continued anyway. “They say long, long ago, dragons used to nest in these woods. Not the legless ones that fancy art, and have tea with their guests. I mean the feral ones. The forest holds their spirits, still filled with the memory of their species’ betrayal, and still angry. Or even… ones that never died, and just waited for their revenge instead.”

  “Just spirits now,” another chimed in. “Guarding their treasure hoards. Watching, and hungry.”

  Tom-Tom, now mostly invisible under a pot and two cloaks, whispered, “Angry dragons are not to be poked. We should camp on the wagons. Or in a tree. Or possibly underground, we can make tunnel, Tom-Tom will show you. Somewhere that isn’t… here.”

  Alex didn’t comment. He was staring into the dark, his pupils dilated slightly as he strained to peer beyond the trees.

  At first, he saw nothing. The standard aetheric hues of the mixing ambient energy. There was glowing red of the campfire which bolstered fire aether, the ground below slowly seeping earth-aether green into the silver-white of the air aether. All the standard things he was used to when looking through his extra senses. Nothing showing up as hostile, or dangerous.

  Then… there it was... something. It wasn’t a movement. Not a pulse of magic or a beast in the brush. Just a subtle shift of the ambient aether, normally gently flowing and mixing like a lazy breeze, beginning to warp. A slow, almost imperceptible spiral was forming. Like something massive was turning in its sleep.

  Obby whispered in his mind. “Something old is waking up.”

  Alex just stared deeper into the forest, heart beating a little faster. And somewhere in the shadows, the trees still hissed in the background. He didn’t know what was stirring, but for now, it was far enough away it hadn’t noticed them. At least that is what he hoped.

  They all went to bed still filled with dread.

  In the bedroll next to his, Holly shifted, rolling over on her side. Her hand found his own, their fingers interlacing easily. He squeezed her hand gently as he looked at her in the starlight. She was still asleep, but the small, almost unnoticeable smile that formed on her lips gave Alex something else for his mind to focus on. He found himself drifting into unconsciousness shortly after.

  As they continued their travels the next day, the eerie anxiety still stuck around. The static hiss of the area the only noise in the still quiet. Not a peaceful quiet, but the eerie silence of two cowboys sizing each other up on the barren street of a town not properly sized for more than a single gun-slinging man. A deficiency on the part of the city planner, rather than on the two men, really.

  The caravan creaked along, wheels bumping over ruts, the air thick with the earthy smell of moss, wet bark, and something else. Something dry, stale. Like the gasping breath of a room that had been sealed away, unopened for years.

  Tom-Tom sniffed, his pot helmet shifting on his head. “Smell that?”

  Garret glanced over. “Yeah. Smells like lizard breath.”

  Tom-Tom barred his teeth at him, tail twitching erratically. Garret grinned back, wiggling his eyebrows antagonistically. Alex ignored the two, he was already scanning the tree line instead. The feeling under his skin, the prickly, static electrical sensation that usually meant trouble, was back.

  And this time, the trouble didn’t keep them waiting.

  As they traveled down the road, the underbrush exploded in a blur of movement, claws, and scales. They poured out from between the trees, and bushes in a scramble. Each creature was a low-bodied, thick-scaled serpent with four legs that attached at thin joints, giving the impression that the limbs were an afterthought, like some cosmic taxidermist had gotten bored halfway through their creation. Their eyes were milky dead-glass in appearance, their jaws twitching in hungry spasms, saliva dripping from their glistening teeth.

  Obby’ hit Alex’s mind like a wake-up slap. “Those aren’t just snakes with legs. These are juvenile basilisks. And before you ask, yes, that’s bad. Very bad. Their venom has a petrification effect.”

  Alex’s stomach dropped. He didn’t have time to think, he shifted into a ready stance, aether already cycling through his channels in preparation of a fight. “Basilisks! Don’t let them bite you!” he shouted. “And don’t look into their eyes!”

  That stopped everyone cold. Even the mercenaries, who, up to this point, had seemed convinced they could stab their way through most problems, faltered a second. Everyone tightened their grips on their weapons. Basilisks were one of those things you didn’t joke about, no matter what culture, world or universe you hailed from.

  The resulting hush lasted exactly one heartbeat, then the first of basilisks lunged.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Its fangs snapped against Garret’s shield with a crack like a hammer on stone, spit and spittle flying in every direction. Another skittered low under a wagon, hissing, claws raking the dirt as if to prove the legs they had were not for show after all. All around them the air filled with the sound of snapping jaws, scraping scales, and shouted warnings from the mages breaking through over the constant hissing noise that came from their mouths.

  And just like that, the road became a battlefield.

  If the adolescents were supposed to be clumsy, someone had forgotten to tell them. They moved like nightmare-fueled serpentine-toys on overclocked springs; lunging, skittering, twisting midair with a speed that made any sane mind watching the say, Nope, that’s not right.

  Kate was a golden blur darting between trees and dodging strikes from snapping jaws. Her thin rapier flashed as she counterattacked the beasts, each cut neat and economical, like she was teaching a class on the proper way to dissect a murder-snake. She didn’t stop moving, not even when claws raked the fabric of her sleeve, drawing a line of whetted crimson on her clothing.

  Zach stayed close, the nearby shadows curling at his heels like loyal hounds. He’d vanish a step before a basilisk could strike, only to reappear at its side and bury the tip of his spear into the gap beneath its jaw. The moment it collapsed, he was already melting back into the gloom, preparing to pounce on his next victim. If Kate was a surgical scalpel, Zach was a guillotine in the dark.

  Garret, meanwhile, had planted himself in the center of the road like a one-man wall, shield up, braced against the impact of each charge. A handful of mercenaries closed ranks with their own shields beside him, their boots digging trenches in the dirt as they absorbed strike after strike. It was obvious within seconds that the basilisks weren’t just strong, they were relentless, frenzied almost. Garret or one of the other tanks could knock one beast back, and it would be scramble to its feet a heartbeat later, angrier than before.

  A rush of wind tore through the road, catching two of the beasts mid-lunge and hurling them into a tree hard enough to crack the bark. Holly stood just behind Garret’s line, one hand outstretched, hair whipping around her face as she kicked up her own personal, localized storm. Another blast of air from her hand scattered a cluster of beasts trying to flank the wagons.

  “Stay sharp!” Allie shouted out over the chaos, commanding. “I swear if anyone makes is bitten by one of these things, I’m not wasting my poultices on you! And don’t look them in the eyes.” She darted between the fighters, checking wounds and yanking the occasional idiot mercenary’s or merchant’s chin toward the ground.

  Somewhere behind them, a wagon’s pack-lizard screeched, the sound piercing into the din of the fight. It looked as though these juvenile basilisks were not against eating their reptile cousins. The defenders closed ranks around the wagons, defending each other’s flanks and attempting to stave off the assault. But the basilisks pressed in harder.

  The dance of battle had begun, and one misstep could cause a series of problems that could turn it into a massacre. Alex kept his eyes fixed on the dirt, the edges of his vision nothing but blurs of movement and the occasional too-close whip of a tail.

  “Two o’clock, a short one,” Obby murmured in his head, quick-paced but unhurried, like a chess player giving advice at a public park match. Alex’s vision received a hazy red arrow indicator a bit to his right.

  He pivoted without looking, catching the oncoming serpent with a heel kick that crunched through scale and bone. Another hissed somewhere to his left. “Behind you, ugly one,” and he spun low, fist driving into a scaly underside in a short, brutal arc.

  Ugly one? They’re all ugly.

  “That one was extra ugly.”

  Alex kept going, fists flying at anything moving that didn’t have a humanoid form. He wasn’t aiming for elegance, he didn't think he'd be getting all 10's for his score. This wasn’t that kind of fight. There was no time for flourishes, or pretty footwork, just pure, ugly power. Boots slammed down on snapping jaws. Elbows drove into eye sockets. He shoved one back into a tree hard enough to leave a smear of cracked scales in the bark.

  A hiss sounded in his left ear, too close for comfort. He flared his aether, channeling into a short, sharp burst of [Flare] ejecting out of his left hand like a miniature blue sun in the battle’s gloom. The beast shrieked and was tossed back, reeling in the mud with a snapped spine somewhere along its back.

  “Careful,” Obby warned. “If they can use their gaze attack, then too much light at the wrong angle and you’re the statue.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Alex muttered under his breath, already shifting to the next target. Another [Flare] burst, smaller this time, concentrated power erupting from his fist dropping two more of the basilisks. Their bodies twitched in the dirt, saliva dripping from their jaws.

  He kept moving, kept stomping, kept listening to Obby’s cold, precise directions. His eyes remained focused on the dirt, hands and feet doing the talking. The moment he slowed was the moment he’d have a set of jaws clamped into his flesh, and it would be the last moment of his none petrified life.

  Alex caught movement near one of the wagons, two mercenaries dropping to their knees, clutching at their arms. One was swearing in a fast, breathless loop, the other just stared at his own hand as if he couldn’t quite believe it belonged to him anymore.

  The reason for their reactions was obvious. Around the bite marks on their limbs, their skin was already turning the wrong shade of pale. Gray veins shot through their skin with hairline cracks, like pottery that had been left in a kiln too long.

  “Allie!” Alex barked, pointing towards the two mercenaries.

  She was already there, medical satchel slapping against her hip, a potion in hand, as she dropped beside them. Her hands moved fast, but her face gave her away, the subtle shake of her head, the narrowed eyes. “It’s spreading too fast,” she yelled out.

  From somewhere behind a wagon, Doran yelled out. “Slow progressive venom! Tis' not instant, means it can be stopped if you move quick!”

  For the team, that single line was both a blessing, and a terrible curse at once. If it wasn’t instant, then it was a race. And the one thing they never had enough of, was time.

  “How?” she yelled back.

  “Dunno’, just what we dwarves feel in our guts.” His response wasn’t helpful, and Allie was already back digging through her bag.

  Alex glanced across the fight. The serpents still weren’t slowing. For every one that fell, two more seemed to slither from the shadows of the trees to attempt some revenge for their kin. The tempo of the fight shifted in his head. They couldn’t just try to outlast the things, they’d begin losing to many people after even the smallest of mistakes.

  Every second they took to land a blow was another second the venom claimed more flesh.

  Right now the clock was ticking, and the basilisks were winning.

  Alex crushed the skull of one last basilisk under his boot, a sickening crunch followed by a limp stillness. His attention went into his bracelet, and he began pulling out items. Aether crystals quickly filled his hands as he rushed toward Devon.

  “Hey, do you have a gun?” Alex asked as he slid up next to him.

  “What, no we sold them—“

  “God dammit Devon, I know you have been working on making one, is it ready?” Alex had seen Devon tinkering in his free time. He mostly appeared to work on new glyph ideas and crafting theories. But he did make a few items, and Alex had seen a rather familiar looking weapon in his hands on a few occasions.

  “It’s not ready.”

  “I don’t care, hand it over.” Alex left no room for debate.

  With a scowl, Devon reached into a hip pouch and withdrew a long item that was far too big to fit the bag’s dimensions. If the warfront at Terraxum’s northern territory did anything for the worldstriders, the loot they had gotten with their kills was probably the top result.

  He handed Alex the item. In his hands, Alex could see that Devon was mimicking the look of old timey 1800’s rifles. But the loading chamber was much larger compared to those, at least from what Alex knew. He cycled the side latch and bolt, watching how the pieces moved and interacted. There was a piston with a glyph covered back plate, enclosed in a housing that lead towards an open barrel. Everything was covered over with wood and metal, but Alex could see it all through his [Aether Sight]

  “Damn, nice.” He could tell that Devon hadn’t really made a gun. It was actually a hand-held magic powered ballistae. It didn’t fire projectiles, but used aether powered runes and basic physics to launch them out at massive speed. It would work for Alex’s plan.

  “Don’t break it.” Devon looked at him with pleading eyes.

  “I won’t, now wait here.” Alex sprinted away, ballistae-rifle in one hand, and a large number of small aether crystals in the other.

  He jumped as he moved, landing on the top of one of the caravan’s wagons, earning himself an angry shout from a nearby merchant, which he ignored. He gave himself only a brief moment to scan the battlefield with his eyes, Obby was already highlighting all the still living basilisks and laying down projections paths in his vision.

  Then he looked down, dropped a crystal into the loading chamber, and held the weapon up, the butt of the rifle pressed to his shoulder.

  Kra-plack!

  The thing kicked harder than Alex was expecting. The piston slammed forward, mechanisms all engaging smoothly, and the aether crystal Alex had loaded in was launched outward like a crossbow bolt. He was relieved the thing didn’t just explode in the barrel, and instead was sent flying along the projection path he intended.

  A following explosion, and the scream of a basilisk, told him he had hit his mark. Or at least he was close enough for it to not matter. Horseshoes and hand grenades, and huge ass magic gun-cannons, he told himself. Then he loaded another crystal and got to work. His hands moved in a blur, dropping in charges, and readying the next as he fired.

  The battlefield was quickly lit up with explosion as if they had been hit with an airstrike, every flash of blue energy was accompanied by a localized shockwave and the screech of a beast as its scales were pierced and its innards were crushed. He didn’t slow even for a second, didn’t think about all the time and resources that were put into making the crystals he was now essentially throwing away on this battle. He just knew that the faster he killed the things, the more likely that people would be saved.

  His crystal supply went empty in less than a minute, and the weapon in his hand felt heavier than he remembered it being. The barrel smoked with a hazy aura of blue aether, the loading chamber glowed a faint orange from the heat of over-use. He felt a bit bad, as just looking at the thing was enough for him to know he had failed Devon’s request; it was most certainly broken.

  He sighed when Devon ran up to him and caught the weapon as Alex tossed it over.

  “Sorry,” he said quietly.

  “God damn man, you fried the glyphs for sure. And I’ll have to replace every internal piece of the breach chamber.” Devon complained as he began field stripping the weapon right then and there. Alex only watched for a second or two, but noticed some obviousl similarities that Devon’s creation had with their old service rifles.

  “Sorry,” he repeated once more. Then turned his eyes back to their surroundings.

  The battlefield was quiet now, quiet except for the pained groans and ragged breaths of the living. He saw mages sipping on stamina potions, the green liquids sloshing lazily in glass vials. Alex popped one of his own, finding the fatigue in his body lessening a bit within seconds, but it wouldn’t last.

  He ran toward the cluster of healers by the wagons to find Allie crouched beside a mercenary whose arm had gone gray from the fingertips to the elbow. Myrae was at another man’s side, her face pale with apparent worry as the man’s leg had cracked, rocky skin spreading visibly up his calf. Cole stood over a third, a woman, biting back curses as he held her still, her left hand hardening.

  Three mercenary guards, all thrashing, all losing the fight against the basilisk’s venom, second by second.

  “Can we do anything?” Alex asked, breathless.

  The three healers looked at him, and in their silence, he had his answer. There was no antidote. No miracle. There was just the tick-tock of time, running out.

  Fuck, is there no way to save them? Nothing at all?

  Alex’s heartbeat quickened. His gaze looked from the injured man next to Allie, then to the sword that hung loosely on a nearby guard’s hip. He didn’t hesitate, grabbing the sword from the guard, and stepped up to the man with the graying arm—

  Shlench!

  The severed limb hit the dirt with a dulled thud. The man screamed, then sobbed, curling around the stump of his arm as Allie moved in to staunch the bleeding. Alex rounded to the second mercenary. The stone had reached halfway up the man’s shin at this point, and was still visibly spreading.

  Alex met his eyes. “Leg or life?”

  The man didn’t answer, but he didn’t pull away either. That was enough for him. The sword rose and fell on the man’s leg, and his cry joined the first. By the time they reached the woman, Allie’s hands were slick and trembling, but she helped him anyway. The woman lost a hand, but kept the rest of herself.

  When it was over, Alex straightened, breathing hard, his sword arm heavy. The field stank of blood slick scales, spent aether, and the tears of the three injured.

  The fight had been long and brutal, but the last basilisks finally lay dead and there was still plenty to do. Mercenaries moved about the battlefield as they scavenged the sparing intact beast cores in the few adept beasts, cutting away patches of scales and muscles where the petrifying venom hadn’t spoiled the flesh. Every movement was slow, every voice subdued.

  They’d won the fight, sure, but the victory felt hollow. And underlining it all was the question no one wanted to voice. Alex caught the eyes of a few of his teammates as they worked, even Sarson and Rynel, but they all avoided his gaze after a few moments. He still saw it in their eyes though, the worry, the anxious unknown.

  No one would say it, but Alex still let the thought enter his mind in silence. What are so many of these fucking basilisk hatchlings doing here? And if these were the babies, the juveniles…

  Where was the mother?