The Last Satyr: The Two Paths Part 2

Amien kicked the dire bat in the head with his boot.

“It’s all right,” he called to the boy. “It’s dead. Come over and see this. I have found your other spear.”

Up ahead, Ronthiel rode Leradien quite a way up the road to safety and where they sat and waited for the others to catch up. Here, they passed the time by having an exhausting good time playing elf games like “hi-spy” and “gully-keeper”. They completed their day in fun which crowned it in a most satisfactory way. They realized they were the closest of all to The Three Candles and would be amongst the first to see it and leave this awful place of lifeless air. The dwarf women and children with them in the rear knew it too, and all were in a state of pleasurable anticipation. Ronthiel waited for the boy to come and join them, but became disappointed when the satyr did not show.

Morning came and, eventually, they could see the sunlight shining through The Three Candles.

The Three Candles were three separate caves that split off from the main one to the surface. Standing below them, one could see daylight peering down from all three at once. Their long days of being underground were nearly at an end. There were blue skies above. They could go up right now.

Only Leradien tarried, who did not like the daylight as it hurt her eyes.

“Say,” she thought to ask. “Ought we not to go back to check up on the boy? He still hasn’t shown up yet.”

“You just want to wait till it’s dark before going above ground,” Ronthiel correctly guessed. “But you’re right. Where is the boy? It’s not like him not to lead a retreat. He’s usually first in line! And I can’t imagine he’s been fighting with the rear guard for this long.”

“It would be easy enough to go back and find him,” Leradien offered.

“And I am fully recovered from that drow poison,” agreed Ronthiel, “Although you still haven’t told me exactly how that’s possible yet.”

“When we find the boy, he can tell you if he wants. It won’t come from me.”

Marching up next from behind them to The Three Candles was a troop of satyrs carrying a dozen wounded who met the two. But, when asked, they had not seen the boy either.

Ronthiel was undecided whether to join them going up to The Three Candles or not. Elves naturally dislike caves, so his spirit was for heading up with the satyrs. No one had seen the boy anyway.

Leradien’s desire, however, was just the opposite. She argued they ought to go find the missing boy. Ronthiel wondered why she was wanted to do so because she didn't seem very worried. Still, being sworn to the boy, Ronthiel had to agree and reluctantly headed away from the light of The Three Candles he so longed for and back into that utter black pit below.

Three leagues below The Three Candles, they met the rest of the satyrs and Black Dragons coming up, led by the two keepers; Graybeard and Sar. When the two confronted Graybeard about the boy, the keeper shook his head.

“We lost them—Amien, the boy and young Joe—defending our rear.”

Ronthiel was both stunned and crushed at the same time. They were this close to the surface only to have lost these three now?

“They’re dead?” he asked.

“I can still feel the boy,” said Sar. “That’s all I can tell you.”

Leradien hesitated, as if still torn to look for the boy, but then decided. “I know the boy's important to you, but I can't protect you if they're captured by man-orcs,” she told Ronthiel. “They're too many. You go back up. I'll look for him.”

But two things were wrong with that suggestion to Ronthiel. First, a girl, let alone a drider, had just told him what to do. Second, he had sworn his life to the boy and Sar had just said he was still alive back there. Much as he hated caves, he was obligated to go look for the boy.

“Are you not listening to me?” said Leradien with a frown on her cross features. “There's too many! You know, you better learn to obey and trust my judgment as well as my orders!”

But Ronthiel didn’t obey. He plunged back into the darkness. For Ronthiel, his dislike of going back deeper underground returned with a rush. It felt as if they were descending into an endless abyss, the walls of the cavern closing in around him like the suffocating embrace of despair and he was leaving the light of joy behind him.

Yet onward he went to find the boy.

“Why does no one ever listen to me?” Leradien demanded, chasing after him to catch up. “I’m the only one who understands drow and yet I’m never listened to! That’s not right!”

“I have to go back!” said Ronthiel.

“Not that way you won’t,” Leradien said, snatching him up and putting him on her back. “There’s nothing but man-orcs on the road ahead! I can carry you over the walls and ceilings. That way, we’ll at least avoid them. We’ll still have to deal with riding lizards but, if you can kill their riders, I can kill their lizards.”

“Can you light them up so I can see what I’m aiming for, like you did last night?”

“Yes,” she reminded him. “Enough time has passed that I can cast fairy fire and dancing lights three more times. But that is not enough! You must hand me your elf lantern. I can light it for you to aim by so you don’t have to hold it. And if they see me, they cannot hurt me like they can you.”

“I’m just glad you’re on my side,” said Ronthiel, handing her his elf light.

“Keep telling yourself that,” she replied, moving ahead into the empty blackness.

For both of them, this was an unfamiliar experience. The domed ceiling and sides of the cavern were difficult to navigate without the road to steer by—and they dared go nowhere near that with an entire army of man-orcs marching up it. For Ronthiel, his fear of going back underground grew and returned with a rush once the light of The Three Candles began to fade and then disappeared behind them. For Leradien, though, it heightened her hunting instincts. It was why she first wanted to turn back from The Three Candles. It wasn't the boy she wanted, it was Lolth. She was now heading towards Lolth and she had a natural, strong desire to hunt her blood. Yet she didn't want Ronthiel with her when she did. That's why she tried to talk him into not coming. It was too dangerous for him.

And maybe for her too.

Thus, they traveled over the rocks, the one intent upon the hunt and the other fearing the growing darkness.

“The rider was wounded,” Amien noted to the boy, examining the saddle of the dead dire bat under his lantern light. “My dagger must have hit. If so, he—or she—may not last long. Drow do not have strong constitutions. Our search will be over soon.”

“It's probably a she," said the satyr. “So what of young Joe?”

“He’s obviously not here. Either the bat dropped him or the drow still has him as a prisoner.”

“Should we not look for him first in case it dropped him?”

“If he was dropped and still alive," Amien said, "he should have seen our lanterns and called out to us.”

“If he can call out to us,” the boy reminded him.

The fall could have severely injured young Joe.

“You’re right,” Amien agreed. “We shall look for him first. If we don’t find him, we come back here and track this rider whose blood should still be easy enough to follow. She won’t get far.”

“Slow down,” warned Ronthiel to Leradien. “At your speed, we’ll run into a trap for sure! Remember! They can see twice as far as you.”

Leradien reluctantly agreed and reduced her speed. The elf boy was right, of course. But what he didn’t know was that she was becoming more and more consumed with the desire to hunt Lolth. She knew exactly where to go to find her.

Unfortunately, that probably wasn’t where the boy was and which left her torn in indecision. Ronthiel didn’t know it, but she was becoming more and more consumed with the desire to hunt Lolth. It was like a fierce hunger gnawing at her, a ravenous beast hungry for its prey that kept pulling her in a different direction.

Which way to take the elf—where he wanted to go or where she wanted to go?

And where was the satyr, anyway? She did not know and so began following Lolth.

Their search for young Joe’s body went unrewarded. Amien and the boy ended up back at the dead dire bat.

“The blood path should still be easy to follow,” said the human. “The rider should make for Mill’s Breath and, with my dagger wound and with having to keeping young Joe prisoner, both should slow it down.”

They began their tracking. By their lantern’s light, they filed through the cave’s bottom, their elf lights revealing stalagmites and stalactites up to six hundred feet tall. Their main path was seldom over eight or ten feet wide. Yet past every stone column, other paths branched off to the side, and each branch had to be checked and studied for drow blood. The floor of the cavern proved to be nothing but a vast labyrinth of crooked aisles that ran into each other and out again and led nowhere. One might wander for days and nights together through its intricate tangle of rifts and chasms, and never find the end of them; but, when in doubt, Amien held the truest course for Mill’s Breath and—sure enough—the drow’s blood was always to be found on the rocks that way.

“The drow does not bleed as much as I would like. I missed the torso. My blade struck it elsewhere, probably in the leg,” noted Amien. “The rider may yet still be alive. Yet she stops more often now to rest. See how the blood pools bigger where our opponent rests? Our quarry grows weaker and rests longer.”

“If it is a woman,” the boy warned him. “They are as big and strong as elf men.”

“That doesn’t scare me. Does it scare you?”

Of course, everything scared the boy but he pretended indifference in front of his hero.

Often, Amien and the boy split up, each to follow a separate way, only to have both ways join up again and for them to meet. Yet other times the paths separated and became “unknown” ground, going opposite ways. The boy’s heart always beat harder when this happened, for if he should meet that fighting drow now, the fight between them would be over long before Amien arrived in rescue.

Gradually, Ronthiel became aware that Leradien was moving with such intensity and purpose that it was evident she knew exactly where she was going.

“How do you know the way?” he asked her.

“I just do.”

He thought he detected a note of irritation in her voice. Further, it didn’t seem to him she was following something as much as being drawn to something.