Darkness and Hellfire

Chapter 17 Mine

Lenna awoke to the sound of tearing flesh. Her body ached. Her neck was definitely injured, whiplash from the feel of it, and she was covered in bruises from her armor being violently shunted into her due to excessive explosive force. Her mana reserve was only about halfway full.

She healed herself while standing up. She opened her eyes as her mana fell dangerously low again. What she saw was carnage. Scorch marks across the ground. A few bodies tossed about. A basilisk in a heap next to the water. Her backpack by the entrance was knocked over but nothing seemed to have spilled out thankfully. Her scabbard was laying against a wall about fifty feet from where she had last seen it.

Three shadow-wolves were picking at an assassin’s corpse. The corpse with her sword still stuck in its arm. A fourth wolf was sniffing at the basilisk’s corpse. They all turned to look at her as she stood. Their hackles raised and they started growling, especially the ones that had been eating. They all looked starved.

Lenna, now feeling quite a bit better, walked at a casual, even, pace towards her sword. The wolves refused to back off but she paid them no mind. Once she got within ten feet or so they lowered their body’s preparing to lunge at her. She pressed out her aura and focused it down on them.

The three that were close enough started to whimper and back away with their tails between their legs. They never stopped staring at her despite their terror. The magically induced fear from her aura was powerful but, as she found out with the basilisk, not a guarantee to take hold in the first place. The three wolves in front of her however were already afraid of her and her aura just made that fear permanent.

The fourth wolf looked a bit bigger than the others and it moved to meet her. It entered her aura and flinched but didn’t yield like the other three. It lunged at her. She brought her fist down on its nose with as much force as she could muster. Her fist coated in flames just before impact.

The hit slammed the beast’s mouth shut with a crack and then she heard a crunch as her armored fist broke bone. It slammed into the ground already unconscious from either the impact or the pain. She reached down and grabbed her sword. She had to put her foot on the corpse’s arm in order to pull her blade out.

Lenna thrust her blade into the wolf’s neck to put it out of its misery and then looked around to find the other three. They were running down one of the tunnels. She tore a piece of fabric off of the assassin’s cloak and used it to clean her blade. She tossed the dirty cloth at the corpse but then something caught her eye.

A small leather bag was tied to his waist and it looked to be full of coins. That was when she realized that she herself had not a copper piece to her name at the moment. She was so used to having bills sent to her family’s estate that she never even thought about bringing money along.

She shrugged and looted his coin purse. She then went looking for the other’s. She found two more but some of the coins were bent in one. She didn’t bother to count the coins but simply tossed them all in one of her backpack pockets. She decided that wolf meat was probably better than nothing but rations and jerky but quickly realized that she didn’t have any way to make a fire that would last long enough to cook it.

Lenna gave the cavern one last look after filling her water reserves and retrieving her scabbard. She had no idea how long she was there but it couldn’t have been more than a few hours. It was time to get moving again. No matter what she needed to get to where Lua had told her to be as quickly as possible.

Lua may have said that she only needed to be there in ten days and the journey should take a normal person ten days to do it but Lenna wanted to get there early. She would be there in no more than nine.

The Oathbreaker ran into a few more minor nuisances such as spiders the size of her torso and a few starved shadow-wolves but luckily she didn't need to spend any more mana for the rest of the day. She sat down to rest for a little while and closed her eyes. As an elf she didn’t necessarily need to sleep but there had been plenty of times where her body hadn’t given her a choice.

As she sat there meditating the rest of the world fell away. For a time there was only her and her mana. She thought back on her life and realized something that she probably should have realized earlier. She hadn’t even felt warmth from anyone except the slave woman who was her nursemaid when she was little.

The woman had been killed at the age of sixty three by Lenna’s uncle. She could no longer perform her duties so he relieved her of them. It was only logical for them to lessen the resource burden by removing those who could no longer carry their own weight. If only that woman, Ama, could have been born an elf then she could have lived longer.

Lenna was thirty seven then. Two hundred and ninety years had passed and she was still angry at her uncle. She knew that keeping her alive would have been a waste of resources but she couldn’t help but resent his actions. At that moment Lenna briefly considered swearing an oath of vengeance against her uncle. An oath that she would not rest until she both became stronger than him and killed him with her own hands.

She shook her head to clear it. Swearing an oath like that while on her way to find a better life would just lead to her breaking it and she didn’t want to know what kind of damage that would do. Already her broken oath had limited the spells she could use to only those that were primarily fire based. She could still pull on some of the incarnate magics that came with a holy oath such as healing and having an aura but even those had changed.

Her healing now left her hot and seemed to make her more tired after she used it. It felt like it was less efficient healing than before and it took more of a toll on the body. Her aura used to be defensive and actively worked to interfere with spell casting of non drow within its radius. Now it was nothing but pure wrath and hate. It assaulted her foes with the hatred of an apex predator. Like what one would expect from intruding into a dragon’s lair. It was essentially the same effect that dragons used to scare their prey into submission.

Lenna’s power that used to be so focused on protecting her and her brethren was now nothing but fire and hate. She didn’t like it but she couldn’t argue with the results. Her fire magic was much stronger and easier to use now. Her aura made a fight with most things easier due to their state of utter terror. Even though it worked that didn’t mean she had to like it.

She was jolted out of her meditative contemplation by a sudden weight on her arms and tension around her body. Her eyes flew open to see a giant snake, a foot thick and at least fifteen feet long, wrapping around her. She tried to pull her sword but the snake’s body was in the way.

She turned her hand and grabbed onto the snake. “Let my flames consume all before me.” She ordered her mana. Flames blasted out of her palm and singed both her glove and the snake’s hide. It loosened for a quick moment and then bit down.

The snake was non venomous and its teeth were u-shaped so they could grab onto prey easier. It’s mouth had clamped down on the front of her helmet and her shoulder yanking her head to the side. It started getting tighter, trying to squeeze the life out of her. She felt some of her armor’s leather straps stretch against the pressure.

She clamped her hand down on the burned part of the snake. Her hand hurt and was probably minorly burned already but she cast her spell again. This time the snake loosened enough for her to move her arms for a brief moment. She reached up with one hand and grabbed the snake’s jaw. She pulled it open slightly but she could tell there was no way she was going to be able to completely remove its grasp.

She stuffed her other hand into the snake’s mouth and the snake tightened like a vice. “Let, my flames, consume all, before me.” She got out with shallow breaths. It was getting harder and harder to breathe. Her flames poured down the snake’s throat and boiled its insides. It loosened slightly for a moment before going completely limp.

All Lenna could smell was cooked snake and whatever bacteria were making a colony in its mouth. She pried herself out of its corpse and laid on the ground for a moment taking deep breaths. She needed to be more careful. One lone giant snake shouldn’t have given her that much trouble.

She had been careless and almost paid for it with her life. If one of her armor’s straps had failed in the wrong place her ribs could be in a few dozen pieces right now. She healed herself, mostly her hand, and sat up. She decided that snake, even though she didn’t particularly care for it, was at the very least not her bland military rations that she had packed.

She took the time to gut the snake and carve out the meat that had been flash cooked well enough to eat and after the third bite decided that maybe her rations weren’t so bad after all.