Chosen One Protective Services

As Rusty pelted down the stairs, he felt waves of guilt overcome him.

Frodo would have stayed, he was certain. Frodo would have fought next to Gandalf.

But then, he'd tried that in those mines, and Gandalf had told him to run. This was like that! Obviously Terathon would have a mighty battle with the dark sorceror, and show back up later, in new robes. That was how it worked with wizards, right?

Besides, Rusty was wounded. He cradled his arm as he went, kept it still as he ran down, doing his best to keep the lit end of the torch from burning his face. Frodo had been wounded, and he'd needed his friends to save him. And Rusty only had one friend here. There was no one to carry him if he got hurt worse.

The thought made him stumble, and slow down a bit.

And for a horrible few moments, it sunk in that he was alone on this world.

There was precisely one person on this world who gave a damn about his life. Heck, he didn't even know if there were any other humans around!

It was a strange and alien world, and he had no way home, and nobody to mourn him if he died. He couldn't just give up and go back to his old farmhouse and his barn full of brothers and his mom with her lined face that would be full of worry for him, and his dad who might notice he was gone eventually, and Cyrus, who would definitely call his army friends to come find him but they didn't have wizards to go across worlds, and...

He had to sit down on the stairs then, and tears pushed on the back of his eyes, and he cried a little. Just a little, because boys didn't cry and there was a bad guy coming to kill him, and so he got up and snuffled, and headed deeper into the stairwell.

And in a few minutes, he came to the end of the stairs.

They might have gone deeper, once. It was hard to tell, through the solid layer of mud that coated the floor, and squished between his bare toes.

Rusty looked around, taking in what he could see.

It was a cut stone room, with tunnels branching off in five different directions. Four of them were close to each other, but one stood apart. It seemed almost like a hand to him, with the fingers splayed out a bit and the thumb on the side. The walls were cut stone, with slabs bulging on the ceiling, and a couple of them fallen into the mud a long time ago, making muddy, mossy lumps on the floor.

The air was wet and musty here, and he sneezed a little, sneezes that turned into a gasp as his arm twinged with pain. Darned thing, Rusty thought, and snuffled, hocking snot into the mud. For a second he worried about breathing in poison, but then a faint sound drifted down the stairs from above. Voices? Yeah, time to go.

Which way was the next question, but there was only one tunnel that didn't match the others, so that seemed like a good place to start. Rusty stepped away from the stairs, and picked his way across the chamber.

He paused before the archway. It was round, almost a half-circle. Looking down at the mud at the threshold, he could believe that it had once been a fully circular entryway. It put the age and scale of the place into perspective. How long had that mud been building up? That archway stretched high up, almost to the edge of the torchlight, and it was at least sixty feet from the left side to the right side.

Rusty shook his head. Terathon was probably in the fight of his life, right now, what was he doing standing around?

He had to honor the wizard's sacrifice.

And thinking about it, he had no idea how long this torch would last. He'd never used a torch before. So he picked up his pace as fast as he dared, tucked his wounded arm close to his size, and jogged through the mud.

It had been a poor choice.

The corridor curved slightly as he went, and he zig-zagged back and forth between each wall, trying to make sure he didn't miss anything. And there were places the mud was sunken in close to the walls, that suggested smaller archways had been there, but were covered over now. He sure didn't have time to dig them out, and one of his arms was out of order anyway. So he pressed on, and hoped.

The ceiling got lower as he went, and the mud started sloping gently downward. For a moment he hoped he'd find the end of the mud. He hoped that up until the corridor ended in a bare wall. Rusty's heart sank...

...up until he felt the draft.

Looking closer, he saw that at the center of it, there was what looked like the top of an archway. And there was a space under them, not a large space, but enough that a twelve-year old who'd never had enough to eat a day in his life could maybe wiggle through.

Could he do it with a bad arm, and without dunking the torch in the mud? Well, that was another question entirely.

And as Rusty sat there and studied it, that's when he heard the sound of smacking, and gooshing. It didn't take long to figure out it was the sound of something pretty big dragging itself through the mud.

It took a horrifyingly smaller amount of time to realize that it was coming from behind him.

Rusty got down on his knees, measured the gap, breathing hard and trying to shut down his rising panic. He tried putting weight on his bad arm, and aaaaaaah no. Nope, bad idea. He leaned straight up, switched his torch to the left hand, and tried to ease down on his good arm. That went better.

But the gap was too small to slide through. He'd have to go flat, he realized, if he was to have any chance at all. Keeping the torch lit and upright would be tough.

Scraaaaaaappppe. SLUSH.

Ohhhhh, that was way too close.

He didn't look back. He kept his focus on the hole he had to scoot through. There was no other choice now, and it had to happen.

Maybe if he rolled the torch under, it wouldn't go out immediately?

Maybe, but that was one heck of a gamble. If things didn't go his way, he'd be in the dark.

It was also his only weapon against whatever was back there.

It wasn't perfect, wasn't good, but it was the only thing he could think of, so he lay on his back, turned his head on his side, and pushed, pushing himself back through the mud.

The draft was easier to feel here, cool air pushing against his skin, strong and focused, and almost as unrelenting as the grimy stone that pushed down against him, the further he scooted inward. It was a good thing he wasn't like Trent, who howled like a coyote whenever he had to go into tight spaces. But it still wasn't fun.

SQUUUUUUELLLLCH!

Oh, that was bad! That was almost on top of him!

The torch was hot in his hand, and he tried to shift it downward as he went, tried to keep it from scraping itself out against the stone.

He almost managed.

Ironically enough, it wasn't the pain from his bad arm, or the narrowness of the crawlspace, that sunk him.

It was his underwear.

He felt it sliding down, and without thinking he reached down to grab it, keep it on...

...and the torch seared his leg.

Rusty screamed, dropped the torch and squirmed away before he could stop himself.

And the torch went out.