Sample, Out of Dark Waters: Prelude

Out of Dark Waters: Prelude

The Eye of the Maw

  “Do you see anything, Thomas?” a chipper voice wafted down the stairway toward the guardsman. In the cramped passage, Thomas had stowed his spear. From behind his raised shield, he extended a short blade toward the darkness, trying to peer farther. But daylight did not reach the bottom of the stair. Reluctantly, he put down the shield and lit a lamp.

     “Just a hallway,” the guardsman called back to his master. “It’s narrow. Wait there, Sire.” Thomas trod further in, sword and lantern raised like talismans. This was not the first ruin his lord had found in an obscure book, but already Thomas hated it like no other. Something about the floor made his pace uneven, as if an incautious step might be swallowed in vertigo. He inched farther in.

     Even with the lamp, it was difficult to see. The stonework seemed to drink away its light. But Thomas would not be cowed by mere darkness, not in front of his master, not in front of the two guards waiting behind. Forcing himself forward, he soon came to a wider chamber, hewn from the same odd stone as the stair had been, green and veined. There was some low structure in the center of the room, though in the smothered lantern light, he could not make it out. From behind him, echoing down the stairs, he heard booted footsteps. “We’re coming down, Thomas!” the same excitable voice informed him from the blackness of the passage he had left behind.

     Thomas sighed and cursed quietly. He made his way clockwise around the room’s edge. Ahead, there looked to be another passage. He turned back to the low object in the room’s center just as the other two guards came in, flanking their charge.

     “Hold there a moment...please,” Thomas told them. “I want to take...” He froze mid-sentence, fear’s cold hand gripping him from spine to throat. Something moved on the ceiling above him, not six inches from the peak of his helm. Slowly, he looked up. An eye opened in the darkness. Not an eye. He saw teeth, curved and long like wicked needles.

     His chin met the floor hard, something heavy on his back, biting. Gray flesh held fast his arms. The bite was frigid, and Thomas felt he had been pitched into the gray sea. Feverish weakness crept through him. He raised his head, and he saw a shape careen from the darkness into another guard, slamming her to the ground. Then his face planted into the stonework, and there was nothing.