Backwoods Dungeon

Chapter Twenty-Two

Cursed

Unknown

He was cold.

He hated it.

There was a warmth to be had here though. Cimigda found solace in his success. He’d slipped through the wall. Finally.

“Wh-where am I? Who are you?” the fodder stuttered.

The Greaters were all cowards. None of them had dared even attempt to breach the wall. Still quivering from stories of the last Valam and the fall of Bequistha. Now, he wondered what they’d been so terrified of. There were no Valam here. Humans were all that was left.

Just fodder.

“I can’t see? Can… someone turn on a light?”

Cimigda didn’t deign to respond. The fodder got to its feet and walked blindly in the dark a few steps before it tripped over the chain around its ankle.

“Wh-what the hell?”

Cimigda still chuckled at that. Hell. How quaint. This wasn’t the first bit of fuel to swear by “Hell,” and he doubted it would be the last. The humans still had some memory of the last ascent. It must have trickled down through generations of their short, pinprick lives.

He poked it with a claw, and it howled as blood poured from the wound in its arm. The blood flowed, filling the basin and seeping down to join the rest. The amount of blood in a single human body was just a drop when he needed an ocean. When the curse broke though… there would be nothing left to stop him.

Humans could only face his kind with the power of Valam’s curse. Without it, they were helpless. Hell would cover the world as it had in ancient days, and he would be undisputed as ruler.

“F-ffuck. Fuck that hurt! I’ll kill you, motherfucker!”

All bluster. The creature couldn’t even break its chain, let alone attack him.

Cimigda had expected to find giants. When the word human was uttered in the depths below, it was with fear and hatred. No small sense of awe. He’d almost built them up to be as terrifying as the Valam themselves, and so he’d prepared accordingly.

He’d been almost disappointed to find them so… small. Pitiful. Up in their homes, on the surface, they could be surprisingly dangerous to his mindless spawn, but thus far, he had encountered none noteworthy, let alone worthy of fear.

The fodder was crying now, blood flowing freely from its arm as it tried to squeeze its wound closed. It would die soon enough, its blood fueling one more attack on the seal and the curse.

His spawn were becoming adept at filling the larder with more and more of the wretched creatures. It wasn’t even proving difficult. There were millions of them up there, which clashed with the stories he’d heard. They’d spawned like rabbits since the last ascent, but that didn’t bother him. Better a billion humans than a single Valam.

Still, Cimigda resolved to remain cautious. More of his spawn had died than he had anticipated, up on the surface. He also had yet to meet any of the human warriors. According to the Greaters, the difference between one human and the next could be as vast as the difference between himself and one of his mindless spawn.

But not this human.

A sharp scream of terror accompanied another poke. Another opening for the blood to flow. A small red glow began to fill the basin. The fodder froze when it laid its eyes upon him in the dim red light. Then it began to howl.

Cimigda smiled before poking a third hole in the fodder’s stomach, sealing its fate. It would die eventually, but not before giving all the precious fuel its little heart could pump.

Its wails filled the demon with warmth.