Amalynde--Reprise

"We be blasting a new tunnel, following a pink quartz vein. The charge ought not have been as mighty, yet I checked afore and doubly so. Half the roof must’ve come down on us. When the smoke and dust settled, I saw as we’d opened up a cavern. Poor Master Thorbaeg and young Lommet was lost ‘neath rockfall. We tried to get to them and, just as dwarf took to pick an’ shovel, something right ‘orrible came out that cavern.”

This is a revised version of Amalynde, originally drafted as a contest entry. Collaboration between @GMuxx, @bex-dk, and myself inspired a flurry of worldbuilding, and birthed characters and conflicts beyond the competition. Please read the first installment of this collaboration HERE

I have declined payment for this post, as portions of it have already appeared on Steemit.

With a sound like wood on leather, the staff in Amalynde’s hand connected with its target. The hairy tarachnomite scurried back, chittering in outrage, waving two of its eight legs in defiance. Yet retreat it did, undamaged by her blow, but cautious now, heedful of her warning.

Amalynde crept forward, staff held high and visible. Twelve times her reflection glistened back at her from six pairs of dull black eyes, stacked in vertical rows above a mouth with jaws capable of crushing bone. The tarachnomites were venomous, too. If the bite itself didn’t kill, the neurotoxin would.

She reached for the vale swallow struggling against thick strands of web. It flopped helplessly with gaping beak and rolling eyes, its own struggles binding it tighter in the silk. Amalynde ripped it free, leaving the fabric of the tarachnomite’s web dangling, sticky strings loose on the breeze. The swallow screeched in her ruddy hand, sending tiny bolts of terror slicing up her arm. Amalynde backed away, holding the swallow’s body up with her long, thin fingers, until it caught the wind and flitted off toward the upper story of the forest.

A glance over her shoulder confirmed that the tarachnomite hadn’t moved. It wouldn’t give chase. And clearly, it had communicated no alarm to the neighboring webs that stretched from tree to tree throughout the wood. Though vicious with their prey, the tarachnomites seldom chose aggression over safety. She collected that day’s harvest of tanabym root from where she’d dropped it in haste and made her way home.

At the edge of the clearing, seven furry panter pups clambered over each other and bounced on spindly legs to get her attention. She set her basket of tanabym root in the grass and accepted their offer to play, shuffle-running small circles as they nipped at her heels and growled like the fierce beasts they’d one day become.

“Sillies!” She laughed into breeze, releasing joy as tiny flashes of heat lightning. It spread from dust mote to dust mote, traveled on the updraft, and spread over her clearing like the shimmer above rocks in the midday sun. “Remember this day,” she told the pups. “When you’re big and ghastly and eyeing me for your dinner.”

Even in their prime, one look from her and they would be docile, no matter how empty their bellies. Fun to tease them, though. On some level, they understood.

Basket in hand, she headed for the door snugged tightly into the western bank of Fairie Hill. No fairies had ever lived in the glade, but the locals clung to their superstition and she wouldn’t disabuse them of it. Amalynde had been part of this landscape since the dregons flew. She’d been too young when the last one vanished to remember seeing them, but she was born under their sign. “Haart of a dregon,” the Peacemaker had spoken over her at the Endowing, when her power over the britefly became power over the brehr. Now all manner of furry, fanged creatures knew her call, not just the tiny winged ones. But the dregons had gone. She would never touch their minds, never feel their spirits. Such a loss for the world, so misunderstood a nature.

Floxy the burble stood knee-deep in summer grass, tethered with a long rope to one burled branch of the whispering oak. Pickeroons combed the yard for pests and crawling things, cackling and heckling each other over a morsel turned over by scratching claws. In the shade at the edge of the wood napped a herd of cerva, heads tucked alongside their bodies with pronged horns camouflaged against branches of tangled underbrush.

“Aye,” called a voice from inside the hillock when Amalynde opened the door. “That be you, ‘ere, Sissy?”

“It be me,” she called back, setting her basket on the low table beside the entryway. “What are you into, Bub?”

Nielynde ducked underneath the stone lintel of the deeper den, where he spent much of his time sprawled on the floor in contact with the clay, grounding his young bones with the soil of Mother and reading one tale or another from the bound books he kept there. So tall—just yesterday he’d been knee-high, or so it seemed to Amalynde. Now he neared half the height of their father, and his spun-gold hair almost reached his shoulders.

He grinned, impish. “Saw Floxy on the way in, did yeh?”

Amalynde nodded, drawing up a pail of water from the well at the center of the room. “Right where I left her, yah.” She poured the water into a basin set on a ledge beneath the room’s only window. “Why you ask?”

“To my eyes, it look like she be baggin’ up. Don’t reckon she got into it with that rutty old bastard from across the hillock, do yeh?”

She lowered the pail back into the depths of their water source and paused, one brow cocked thoughtfully at Nielynde. What did he know about “getting into it,” anyway? Something he’d read in one of those books of his?

Into the basin of water went the tanabym root to soak. Amalynde upended the basket over the cold hearth and tapped it several times to free all the dirt and pieces of bark trapped in its weave. “We’ll just go see about that Floxy, won’t we?” she said quietly. “Whether she be baggin’ up, or if you have too many thoughts flying ‘round in your head.”

Nielynde followed her across the clearing, padding silently through the grass with his long, slender bare feet. All the time he spent soaking up Mother elements through the clay floor of their deeper den had lent his skin an even darker bloom than hers. His hair made a striking contrast, bleached pale from the sun and shimmering with health. He would be of age soon. Amalynde dreaded the impatience that would come with maturity, the wanderlust that would take him away from her in search of others to satisfy urgings she would never understand. Males didn’t bond with homeground. They moved with the currents of air and sea, seeding the generations of naphti who tended the spirits of Mother and nurtured her very soul with their presence.

“See there?” He pointed to the plump udders hanging beneath Floxy’s round belly. “You can’t argue that—your own eyes tell yeh I be right.”

Amalynde placed a hand on Floxy’s broad forehead. “Tell me, missus, what mischief yeh be finding out on the hillock.”

Floxy’s spirit reached out to her, gentle and sweet, with all the innocence of a ruminant who never craved the flesh of another beast. And yes—there with it beat the heart of a second, even more innocent young creature, a male, tiny and obstinate and very much a part of the physical realm though he hadn’t yet taken a breath of its air.

“I’ll be.” Amalynde shook her head, but couldn’t deny herself the pleasure of a smile. “You little minx.”

Nielynde grinned. “Next time maybe you’ll believe—”

A blast shook the ground. Subtle at first, a thudding deep in Mother’s core, muted by leagues of soil and stone. The shockwaves after it caused Floxy to startle and shook the leaves on the trees. Amalynde grabbed the rope and reached out in spirit to steady the frightened beast, her own heartbeat skipping in her chest.

She glanced quickly at Nielynde. He’d paled, rocked back on his heels, mouth hanging agape with uncertainty. “What that be?” His voice quavered.

Amalynde shook her head. “Not sure, Bub.” She’d heard of quakes, the shifting of Mother’s core, but never had she felt one. She looked around, searching the ground for cracks or rifts that would signify trouble, but saw nothing except cerva disappearing into the wood, their white tails flagging. She tracked a flock of grakken across the sky, their dark wings beating haste from whatever perch they’d been jostled. Behind them, a gray cloud rose over the mountain, mushrooming upward in a dense pattern that didn’t look or behave like smoke.

She pointed. “Look. The mountain—”

The dwarves—what had they done? Greedy little bastards, sucking the life from Mother, stripping her of precious metals for who knew what reason, and now this? A simple explosion? A cave-in? Amalynde’s tender heart hardened at the thought. Let them all suffocate under the ground they raped. Let death rain down upon their ugly little heads and make their race extinct.

But the trolls—those innocent, animalian creatures who slaved alongside—their loss of life would be intolerable. Such simple, insentient beasts, yet they felt pain in their bodies, and wouldn’t deserve a violent end.

“They blew up the mountain.” Nielynde’s pale blue eyes had widened in shock. “Blew it to bits.”

Amalynde squinted in hopes of seeing through the distant mushroom cloud, settling downward now impervious to the wind. “I think it’s still there. Don’t let yer imaginations take yeh over.”

At the edges of thought, Amalynde registered a buzz. Below the level of her own audible range, she sensed it through Floxy’s reddened energy, heard it in her panicked bleat. Amalynde whirled, scanning the ground and then the sky for its source. What sound was this? What manner of unnatural vibration could make such a din—so loud on one level of her awareness, yet undetected by her natural ear?

Nielynde sucked in a breath and stepped back, stumbling, then righting himself. Amalynde cringed. He heard it, too? She let go of Floxy’s rope, seeking to calm her brother first, the burble second. But the sound intensified, deafening now, as it rose above the baffle of ground that kept it silent.

“What is that?” Nielynde pressed his hands over his ears. “Sissy, what is it?”

Wings. Amalynde gasped at the sudden understanding. Thousands of wings, tiny and beating against the air with fury, driven by a hatred black enough to be pure evil.

But the answer never made it past her lips. At the edge of the meadow, across the clearing beside the wood, a shadow rose on the horizon. Solid at first, bunched, it quickly spread to near transparency and floated in their direction.

Wings. Insects. Nasty ones, with murderous intentions. Instinctively, Amalynde reached out with her spirit, hoping to intercede, desperate to assuage the tempest. She made contact with nothing except malevolence, nothing receptive to her call, and nothing obedient.

Floxy’s bleats turned to wails as she struggled against the tether that bound her. With one hand Amalynde grappled to hold her, and with the other, she pointed to the hillock. “Go, Neilynde!” She fumbled in desperation with the rope. “Run! Get ye inside! Bolt the door and window—hide in the deeper den!”

“But you—” Nielynde rocked from one foot to the other, arms held out in a position of flight as he danced in place. “Sissy! You?”

“Run!” She slipped the loop over Floxy’s head and gestured wildly toward the door. “Bless it, Nielynde—just go!”

She watched long enough to ensure that he would reach the door before the swarm. Then she faced it herself. “Here!” She leapt high in the air and waved her arms. “Here, you insolent bastards. Come and get me!”

Wait...wait...let them come closer, until--

Amalynde bolted.

Stumbling, falling, clambering to her feet, long frame more suited for endurance than sprint—no matter. Sprint she would. Down the path, back the way she’d come with the tanabym root, deeper and deeper into the forest with the swarm buzzing close behind. She could almost hear their voices, smell their venom. She could certainly sense their rage.

Leap! Now! Over the fallen tree. Bend forward and scoot beneath the marisvyne draped across the path. Don’t stop running. Never stop running—into the wood, where coarse filaments of tarachnomite webbing hung between trees. Lead them this way, and they will follow. Lead them this way, and let their own fitting death take them where it would.

She heard the forerunners of the swarm hit the webbing first—pap! Pap! Pap! The angry buzzing of wings, the clacking of carapace against coarse silken fabric. Then came the clacks and the crunches, those powerful tarachnomite jaws closing on wads of entangled things, the glorious music of destruction. Impervious to the stings, the tarachnomites released their own caustic venom, digesting the hornids alive as they struggled in vain.

More hairy, eight-legged beasts descended from the trees, closing in for the feast. Within minutes the entire swarm had been consumed. No more beating wings, no more incessant buzzing.

Yet their fury remained.

Amalynde tested the air with one upturned palm. Black energy, dripping with hatred, seeped through her pores and crawled underneath her skin. She shook free of it, slinging her hand as if she’d been burned.

What? How could this be? The swarm no longer existed. The imprint of their evil should have died with them. She rose from her position of cover beneath the fronds of a giant fern. Had part of the swarm diverged? Had their energy stream bifurcated, transferred, somehow?

The rustle of webbing drew her attention. Tarachnomites—dozens of them—making their way downward, toward the ground where they never ventured, yet now seemed eager to go. Hundreds of eyes pinned a stare on her she could feel, along with the malice it conveyed.

Oh, no. Not good. Something off kilter, something terribly wrong. Something—

Amalynde took a step backward. The tarachnomite closest to her stepped forward. It raised its front legs and opened its powerful jaws. A stream of viscous, yellow fluid landed inches from Amalynde’s bare foot.

She ran. No clear direction, just away. Behind her, twigs snapped and branches cracked as her pursuers gave chase, hundreds of hairy, segmented legs tearing through the underbrush in ruthless abandon. The chittering—it rose above the noise of their movement, launching birds from the upper story and causing forest vermin to scatter. Amalynde ran all the way to the river, then parallel to the deep gorge that bisected the upper plain of the Normynde Valley. Not her ground, this part of the Mother. The soil felt foreign beneath her feet. Different minerals. Different organics. The energies resisted her, unfamiliar. No matter. Escape had become her only option. That, or—

A hundred feet below the edge of the embankment, the Normynde River tumbled and flowed over boulders and chunks of Mother’s core regurgitated while the mountain still breathed fire. Somewhere along this stretch of land the currents eddied and pooled into a deeper channel, which sank underneath the ground and poured into the sea several miles down the coast. Amalynde had never seen it, but her father regaled her and Nielynde with tales of it every time he crossed the region. If she could just make it that far—tarachnomites could not swim, and all the evil in the world would never lend them skills that nature had not seen fit to bestow.

There! Just ahead—a whirlpool of water clear as glass, with no froth and no shoals of rock. It could be her salvation, or it could be her death. She ran closer to the edge of the cliff, where the spongy ground could give way beneath her feet at any moment. A glance over her shoulder told her the tarachnomites had gained. Closer now, they skittled along the ground only seconds behind her. Their added weight could cave in the entire edge of the river, and dash them all to bits on the jagged rocks that lined its bank.

It was now or never. She leaped, flung herself over the edge, and hung in the air for several heart-stopping seconds. Arms windmilling, legs flailing, she propelled herself as far from the ledge as she could. Down, down, down—until the cold water slapped her like a slab of granite and knocked the breath from her lungs. Then came darkness, when the river softened and closed over her head, sealing her in blackness and the tomb of its powerful current.