Blood in the Green Depths

This story is set on the world of Kemetrias, ten years before Mage Errant Book 6. This one's a little more violent than usual, fair warning.

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Apchek’s teachers had warned him, a thousand times, never to get complacent while sailing the Grass Sea, never to assume he was safe.

Apchek meant to follow their advice, knew consciously they were correct, but the Sky Lords hadn’t created humanity for constant vigilance, had seen fit to bequeath them with boredom, for whatever reason.

So when the patrol ship came to an abrupt halt, Apchek’s arm was out of his armor, and he was picking his nose and staring off into space.

The impact rammed Apchek off his feet, and into the patrol ship’s railing. It splintered under the weight of his paper battle armor, but just barely held.

He wiped his face as he clambered to his feet, coming away with blood from his nose. Apchek scowled, then pulled his arm back into his armor, the rune-ribbons weaving around him as he did so. He was lucky he hadn’t broken his arm under the weight of his armor when he fell— it was dangerous to be only partially armored, and his teachers had warned him repeatedly against it, but it got exhausting and itchy to stay fully armored for long.

He shook his head, checked to make sure his rune-sword remained sheathed, then sprinted over to his commanding officer, who was leaning on her rune-halberd.

“You’re bleeding,” Sir Nankhare said, sparing him a brief glance as she scanned the horizon for threats.

“Hit my nose on the railing,” Apchek lied.

“Is your head still clear?” Nankhare asked.

“It is,” Apchek said.

Nankhare nodded, as she turned to go speak to the captain of their patrol ship. “Armor up. That was a shipbreaker caltrop we just struck, and there are a half-dozen sails on the north and west horizons. All red.”

“Bezans,” Apchek cursed, and sent the signal through his tattoos to seal his helmet.

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Paper rune ribbons folded rapidly across Apcheck’s view, sealing him away from the world in heartbeats, save for a few rune valves pumping air into his armor.

For a single heartbeat, Apchek’s view was completely cut off. He wasn’t in darkness, thanks to the thousands of runes glowing inside his helmet, but not a hint of the outside world could be seen.

Then a new layer of ribbons unfurled across the inside of his helmet, filled with countless thousands of runes, each smaller than the head of a pin.

Waves of color flashed across his view in sequence, then within three heartbeats, the tiny, pin-size runes resolved their colors, and Apchek was viewing the world around him once more. Many of the colors were a bit off, and the view around him flickered every now and then, but he could see nearly as well as he could without a helmet. 

It was a vast improvement from the eyeholes of yesteryear. Before King Anekhten’s reforms, magic mirrors like this had been impossible, but once he had ordered runes and runecrafting techniques shared freely among the population, innovation had soared. The inside of Apchek’s helm was one of the most spectacular examples.

There were, unfortunately, quite a few limitations on magic mirrors— they couldn’t transmit a view very far, couldn’t record views, struggled with complex environments like the seabed of the Grass Sea, and were absurdly expensive. The ribbons that made up the magic mirror were a significant percent of the entire cost of a suit of armor. Each mirror rune ribbon took dozens of hours to produce, with each tiny rune having to be written by a runecrafter with the precise color needed. Lower-quality magic mirrors had as few as three shades of rune, but high end ones could have as many as a dozen. Apchek’s had five, which was more than enough for him.

The washed-out, pale colors of the magic mirror made the scarlet sails of the Bezan ships stand out sharply, and Apchek cursed. In just the few heartbeats since he’d closed his helmet, yet more Bezan ships had appeared. Not all of them showed on the horizon, a few had risen up from the depths of the sea itself. Anchoring on the seabed was extremely dangerous, but sometimes it paid off.

Like now.

“We don’t stand a chance,” Sir Wadek groused.

Apchek ignored him— Wadek was a never-ending font of pessimism and misery.

“We’re completely screwed,” Sir Vaat agreed.

Apchek paid considerably more attention to her— Vaat of the Eleventh Eclipse was one of the most confident knights he’d ever served with so far in his admittedly short career. It was well-earned confidence, too.

Sir Nankhare strode back over, a thunderous look on her face. “The shipbreaker caltrop broke the keel,” she snarled. “We’re going to have to abandon ship.”

“Here?” Wadek demanded. “That’s mad, we’re only a few hour’s walk from the Green Abyss! It’s next to suicide!”

“Well, staying to fight is actual suicide, so we don’t have much choice,” their commander said.

While Apchek and the other two knights started cursing again, Sir Nankhare turned and started yelling at the crew. “Soldiers, get ready to disembark, we’re going to flee on foot! Sailors, decide now whether you want to join us or surrender!”

Normally, fear of Bezan labor camps would drive most of the sailors off-ship with them in the event of a ship abandonment, but this time, they were even more alarmed by their proximity to the Green Abyss. Less than a quarter chose to join them in their descent.

Part of Apchek thought the majority that remained were the smart ones.

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The soldiers and sailors descended by rope and ladder, frantically lowering supplies for their march as quickly as they could, even resorting to hurling them overboard.

Apchek and the other knights simply dropped off the side of the patrol ship, their armor easily absorbing the shock of the thirty-foot drop.

Apchek’s magic mirror immediately began failing, as its runes failed to handle the complex landscape of towering grass, filling his vision with flickering bars of color. Something about being below the sea made the runescripts go mad. It wasn’t simply the pattern of the blades— seabed paintings didn’t trigger the effect. When Apchek had asked runecrafters about it, they’d just given him incomprehensible excuses filled with discussions of parallax and depth perception. 

Rumor was that the next generation of magic mirror rune ribbons would be able to handle the seabed, but that didn’t do him any good now. Apchek cursed, then sent another signal to his tattoos to deactivate his magic mirror and open his helmet into its visor form.

The magic mirror rolled back behind his neck, and the rune ribbons forming the front of Apchek’s visor followed them, stopping just behind his forehead. In the resulting open space, the rune ribbons formed an interlocking triangular mesh guarding Apchek’s face.

He hated having to peer through the mesh, but he’d hate getting his skull crushed or face stabbed more.

Or, given that they were walking the seabed now, he supposed having his face bit off was a stronger contender for his biggest worry.

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Sir Nankhare chose to go south.

The soldiers and what few sailors had joined them protested at that— there was nothing to the south, nothing save for endless grasslands and nearly endless Karai herdsman. The soldiers who had fought against the Karai protested loudest— the Karai were a nightmare to fight. Their rune-armored behemoths, each carrying a mobile fortress on their back, were absolutely brutal to crack, even with a full contingent of knights and multiple warships. Half the crew of a patrol ship and four knights? Wouldn’t stand a chance.

Sir Nankhare stared them all down. “The herdsmen are a lot more likely to notice Bezan warships than a few soldiers on the ground. And what other option do we have? Try to sneak under their ships? Go east into the Green Abyss? No, this is our only reasonable choice.”

That settled the argument, but not their hearts.

Apchek tried to hide his own unease, but he’d never fought the Karai, and had been raised on stories of their vast hordes. 

No one called him out on his fear, though, and the group started their march south.

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The next few hours were an even mix of terror, anxiety, and boredom. Every so often, they’d spot a sea monster, resting on the seabed, but none attacked, not hungry enough to risk approaching such a large group. They passed several more shipbreaker caltrops, the immense wooden spikes reinforced with countless runes, then wrapped in rags to hide the rune-glow. 

Again and again, as they silently trudged across the seabed, Bezan ships floated overhead, parting the flexible tops of the great grass stems around them. 

Somehow, they always managed to stay hidden under stem clusters and dangling leaves every time a Bezan ship passed.

It had been an hour since they’d seen a Bezan ship when they came across an immense, sheer-sided boulder jutting up from the seabed, its top extending well up out of sight, past the gently waving tops of the grass.

Sir Nankhare gazed up at it, then turned to Apchek.

“Your armor is the lightest-weight and least colorful,” Nankhare said. “Climb to the top, give us a report.”

“Shouldn’t we send a sailor, aren’t they used to climbing?” Wadek demanded. 

“A sailor won’t know what to look for, and even they’re going to struggle with the sides of that boulder,” Nankhare said. “No one without armor is making that ascent. Apchek, climb.”

Apchek nodded, then advanced towards the boulder.

The paper fingers of his armor latched onto a convenient outcrop, and Apchek pulled. With just the motion of a single arm, he hurled his whole frame up into the air, ten feet straight off the ground, then latched onto the side of the boulder.

He climbed swiftly, launching himself from one hand-hold to the next, and it was no time at all before he reached the top of the grasses.

He didn’t breach the top right away. Instead, he hung just below the curving grass-blades and lowered his helmet.

Then, he ever-so-slowly raised his head up above the grass, and, clinging to the boulder with just one hand and foot, swiveled around to peer back the way they’d come.

There, in a staggered line, slowly sweeping back and forth in a search pattern, were a half-dozen Bezan ships. Even from this distance, he could see the many ropes hanging down from the ships’ railings, and he knew they stretched down to knights and soldiers doing a careful sweep of the ground.

Apchek cursed quietly, then lowered himself back down below the grass-tops.

He didn’t return to the others just yet, though. Instead, he began circling the sides of the towering boulder below the grass line, climbing back up above it at frequent intervals.

When he was once more on the side facing his patrol, Apchek raised his helmet with the mesh front once more, then launched himself off the side of the boulder.

Apchek latched onto a different grass-stem with each arm, and they both bowed under his weight, and slowly lowered him down. He only descended so far before the stems’ own woody bases and the grasses around him stopped his descent, but he was only fifteen feet off the ground and easily dropped the rest of the way.

He said nothing until he reached Sir Nankhare, whispering in her ear quietly enough that even Wadek and Vaat couldn’t overhear.

Nankhare whispered a quiet prayer for the birds to carry to the Sky Lords atop the ring, then spoke to the group. “Sir Apchek, would you repeat your report for the group?”

Apchek hesitated, looking at the exhausted, dirty, dispirited crew. Then he forced himself to speak. “We have cordons of Bezan ships approaching on three fronts, each with scouts dangling on ropes below them. I didn’t see any gaps large enough to break through them. We have maybe half an hour until the closest side reaches us.”

“You said three directions,” a soldier called. “Which way are they leaving open?”

The soldier didn’t look like he really wanted an answer, as though he already knew what response Apchek would give.

“East,” Apchek said with a heavy heart. “East, into the Green Abyss.”

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There was plenty of cursing and despair at that news, but there was little doubt what Sir Nankhare would order.

They were descending into the Green Abyss.

For all their horror, no one seriously tried to argue or stay behind— they’d already had their chance to surrender, and the Bezans didn’t give second opportunities. Their choice was between certain death at the hands of the rebels and an uncertain fate in the deepest part of the Grass Sea.

It helped that Sir Nankhare wasn’t proposing they descend into the true deeps— instead, she planned to sneak a short distance into the Green Abyss, then trek northward until they were well past the Bezan lines.

No one was happy about the plan, but they didn’t have time to argue about alternatives.

So they turned east and marched.

Like everything else about the Green Abyss, its border with the rest of the sea was deeply unnatural. Not the structure of the land itself— the Abyss was simply an old river that had carved itself a channel deep into the plains and the rock below them, eons ago.

Why it hadn’t filled up with sediment in the eons since was one of countless mysteries about the Abyss, but that wasn’t why the border was unnatural.

No, the border was unnatural because the Grass Sea switched from a dozen different species of grass to just one— abyssal grass.

The abyssal grass was a dark green, giving the abyss a murkier look than the rest of the sea even up this high. What truly set it apart from the other grasses in the sea was its height, however— abyssal grass always, always leveled out at an identical height to the rest of the sea around its borders. The grasses in its deepest depths reached hundreds of feet into the air in a bizarre act of defiance against gravity.

The disquieting abyssal grass wasn’t the only sign they’d entered the Green Abyss, either— the instant they crossed the border, all the runes on their armor, equipment, and tattoos glowed more brightly. Apchek felt the ink in his skin tingle strangely as more magic than usual tried to rush through it. Their runes could all handle it, but it was uncomfortable and unnerving.

There were a hundred other strange things about the Green Abyss. Stories of sunken treasure, of ghost ships still cruising the depths of the abyss with slaughtered crews, of mysterious fogs that crept through the grass stalks, and of numerous undefended underworld gates in the deeps.

Apchek could ignore all of that unease and unnaturalness for one simple reason, though— he had something else to worry about.

Namely, the greatest reason people feared the Abyss— its monsters.

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They barely made it down past the lip of the Abyss in time— as the last sailor stepped into the abyssal grass, the noise and voices of a Bezan search party reached them.

Sir Nankhare gestured them all down, and the soldiers, sailors, and knights all threw themselves down to the seabed and waited in silence. 

It was shocking that the Bezans would approach the Green Abyss this close, and he desperately prayed that they wouldn’t come any closer.

Their voices grew closer, and Apchek fingered the hilt of his rune-sword, ready to fight before he’d submit.

And then, to his great relief, the Bezan chatter began to recede.

When all was silent again— and it was unnaturally silent, there on the edge of the Abyss— Nankhare climbed to her feet, and gestured for everyone to follow her, and started her descent.

Apchek sighed and looked up towards the sky. He took one last, lingering look at the ring above, the home of the Sky Lords.

Then he followed his commander down.

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Apchek was walking alongside Vaat of the Eleventh Eclipse, an hour after they’d entered the Abyss and around forty minutes after they began moving north, when the first death happened. They had to be at least a hundred and fifty feet deep, if not two hundred. The sky was invisible at this depth. A bit of sun filtered down, but the bulk of their light came from the runes on their armor and equipment. The knights were like lighthouses, figures contoured in the glow from their endless runes.

Vaat was tracing her armored fingers in the sacred patterns of the astrotheists, almost leaving shining trails in the air, when there was a strange crunching noise, then a sudden, brief rain.

It took Apchek a moment to realize that the raindrops were bright red as they ran down the rune-ribbons of his armor, and that the object that fell to the seabed near him was part of an arm. Another moment to smell the coppery scent of the droplets that had splattered through the mesh of his mask.

Then the soldiers and sailors began screaming.

By the time Sir Nankhare’s yells got everyone gathered together, the four knights around the outside of the group, three crewmembers had already bolted.

The rest of them clustered together there in the depths, in a pool of rainbow light from their runes. They all aimed their weapons outward, few of them even bothering to hide their fear.

Nankhare somehow worked up the courage to call out to the three missing soldiers, and keep calling.

Eventually, one found her way back. Wadek almost crushed her with his over-size rune mace before stopping himself, then dragged the soldier into the middle of the cluster.

The second soldier arrived not even a minute later, and he was ushered into their center as well.

Nankhare kept calling, but the third missing soldier didn’t show.

Long after Apchek had given up hope, long after he would have preferred them to move on, his commander kept trying. And then, miraculously, the final soldier stepped hesitantly out of the surrounding abyssal grass right in front of him.

The man burst into tears, and staggered toward them. Apchek wondered whether he’d been hiding, or had gotten lost. He never got an answer, though.

As he took another step, a strange look crossed his face.

Then he just vanished, yanked back into the Green Abyss in the blink of an eye.

Now there was screaming, and it kept up for some time as the soldier was carried off into the depths.

The screams only receded so far.

Then they cut off in an instant.

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Many of the soldiers, as well as Wadek, started arguing they should ascend out of the Abyss, flee back into the rest of the sea. The regular seabed had plenty of monsters of its own, of course, but nothing like this. No unseen, devouring beasts in the dark.

Sir Nankhare would have none of it. They weren’t far enough north to be sure they’d evaded the Bezans, and for all their fear, everyone knew she was right. 

Sir Wadek kept protesting, though. “Maybe they’ve given up?”

At that, Sir Vaat whirled on him. “You know they haven’t, Wadek,” she growled. “They wouldn’t be out here in such numbers, and wouldn’t have set up shipbreaker caltrops, unless they were trying to protect something. The Bezans have clearly set up a base somewhere near here, or are engaging in smuggling, or the like. We’re too far out from their territory for them to be here for no reason, and they can’t afford for us to report back. If we ascend now, we will be found.”

Wadek opened his mouth to argue again, but trailed off as Vaat glared at him. He turned to Apchek, as if to appeal to him, but he kept his face studiously blank.

Finally, Wadek just nodded.

Sir Nankhare turned and set off northward, as though the argument had never happened. The only sign that she was anything but her usual calm self was the fact that she was using her halberd as a walking stick, instead of holding it ready for battle.

The rest of the party followed her, clustered so closely together that they threatened to trip one another.

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The next deaths happened an hour later. This time, Apchek saw it happen. Watched two soldiers yanked upwards, right from the center of the group. Saw the first ripped in half, the second broken and crushed.

What he didn’t see was the monster. Didn’t see the limbs that picked up the two women, didn’t see the mouth that devoured one of the torn halves. Didn’t see the creature as it carried the corpses away dangling in the air, save perhaps for a few shifting blades of grass.

Unfortunately for the group, quite a few others witnessed the deaths, and the absence where the monster should be.

And each and every one of them knew the truth— they were being hunted by something huge, something hungry.

Something invisible.

When half a dozen soldiers and sailors broke ranks and began sprinting uphill, Sir Nankhare didn’t bother to call them back or wait for them. 

She just ordered the march to resume, and didn’t stop.

Not even when they heard screaming from the direction of the six who’d fled.

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The next hours were an endless nightmare for them all. The sun dipped down, and what little light had filtered down before vanished almost entirely, leaving only wavering runelight. 

Their invisible stalker struck seemingly at random. Sometimes it would seize three in as many minutes, other times most of an hour would go by with no sign of the creature.

As if the gory dismemberments weren’t enough, as if the Green Abyss had some special hatred for them, it was far from the only threat they faced.

A ten-foot centipede savaged the wrist of a sailor before Vaat sliced off its head with her fiery axe, and even then Apchek had to pry the centipede’s jaws out out of the sailor’s flesh. Before long, they were forced to amputate and cauterize the man’s arm using the same burning axe that killed the centipede, to stop the poison from spreading farther.

Bioluminescent grasshoppers the size of children assaulted the party. No-one died before the creatures were driven off, but more than a few suffered bites and kicks from the creature. One even latched onto Apchek’s helmet, its horrible chitinous mandibles trying to chew through his mesh and get to his face, at least until he ripped it off and battered it against the ground until it was just a glowing smear on the dirt and his gauntlet.

An albino behemoth crossed their path in the dark, eyeless, with patchy fur. It opened its maw as it sniffed them, and instead of the grinding teeth other behemoths used to eat grass stalks, its mouth was full of meat-tearing fangs.

The great furred lizard stood over them for a time, then snorted and lumbered away into the darkness below.

They passed a sunken ship, broken against the seabed so long ago that abyssal grass grew up through its hull. Its few remaining runes flickered strange colors with no discernible pattern. The vessel lay tucked at the base of a jutting cliff in the slope, forcing the party to descend even deeper into the Abyss to get around. Deeper than any of them would have liked, because sometimes, in the flickering and failing rune-light of the ship, they could see something moving below its decks.

They climbed back up again as soon as they could, to escape the chattering noise coming from just below them. Their tension only grew as the chatterers followed them uphill as they rounded the cliff, and Apchek and the others prepared for battle.

That battle never came, because the chatterers vanished when their invisible stalker struck again.

The stalker was slow killing this victim. Once the screaming stopped, it took its time throwing back the sailor’s bones, one by one, cleaned of all meat, drained of all marrow.

That was when they knew they weren’t just being hunted.

They were being toyed with.

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“We can’t keep doing this,” Wadek growled. “This thing won’t stop until we’re all dead.”

“Better some of us to that thing than all of us to the Bezans,” Vaat said, whirling back towards Wadek.

“Easy for you to say! You’re fully armored, it will just avoid you for easier prey!” a soldier yelled.

“Meaning us!” another followed, as if the first hadn’t been clear.

Vaat seemed shocked that common soldiers were yelling at her, but her glare firmed up a moment later. She started to speak, then cut herself off and turned to Sir Nankhare, who was staring deeper into the Abyss.

“Orders, sir?”

Nankhare didn’t respond, just stood there, gazing out over the darkness below them.

“Sir?” Wadek asked, after a long silence from their commander.

“Can anyone else hear the whistles?” Sir Nankhare asked.

Everyone shifted uncomfortably.

“I… don’t hear any whistling, sir,” Vaat finally replied. “What are your orders?”

Nankhare slowly shook her head, but didn’t turn to face them. “We haven’t heard from you, yet, Sir Apchek. What’s your opinion?”

“You’re really asking the rookie?” Wadek demanded. “He’s just going to say whatever he thinks will impress you. Apchek’s got no spine of his own, no experience.”

“He’s held up better down here than you have,” Vaat snapped.

“Enough,” Nankhare said calmly. “I want to hear from Apchek.”

Apchek frowned. “We might have gone far enough. Maybe. The problem is that it’s probably going to be night, and our rune-light is going to be much more visible than it would be during the day if we leave the Green Abyss. That said… we can’t take much more of this. We’re not runescripts, won’t keep going forever if we’re fed enough magic. We’re all of us close to breaking. I think the known risk above is going to be easier to handle than… this.”

Sir Nankhare was silent for a time, then sighed heavily and turned to them. To Apchek’s shock, her visor mesh had rolled back, leaving her face completely exposed— and that face was torn with fear and exhaustion.

“So be it. We ascend.”

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The ascent was easier said than done. The Green Abyss seemed to sense they were trying to escape, and had no intention of letting it.

They hit loose patches of soil they struggled to climb, of a sort that hadn’t been present during their descent or long trek. Logically, they’d just moved into new terrain, but Apchek couldn’t help think the Abyss was doing it.

Another swarm of luminescent grasshoppers hit them, and this time they took down a soldier, dragged his corpse off into the night. Their light faded rapidly, cut off by the dense abyssal grass.

They made it halfway up when the eyes appeared. Just a few, at first— featureless, actinic blue orbs glowing down at them from above. Then those few became dozens, and those dozens became hundreds, all lined up in two immense curving parallel arcs stretching a hundred feet in either direction, one arc hanging above the other.

Apchek understood instinctively that each and every one of the eyes belonged to the same creature, but he didn’t try to figure out what it was, only ran with everyone else.

When they came to a stop, they were two fewer. 

They didn’t wait to look for them, just set off northward again, until they were far enough away from the eyes that they could ascend.

There were no horrible blue eyes this time, no marauding insects or albino behemoths.

The first trickles of ring-light were becoming visible above them, if not filtering down to them, when the invisible hunter decided it was done playing.

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Half a dozen soldiers lifted into the air all at once, screaming and dying.

Then chaos erupted.

Sailors and soldiers bolted in every direction, but most of them were thrown right back into the cluster by the invisible creature. Broken bodies were hurled down at them like missiles, sweeping more off their feet.

They tried to fight, tried to defend themselves. Apchek swung his sword wildly in the air over his head, desperately slashing at the invisible creature, but not one blow made contact. He was seized with the sudden conviction that he faced not a living thing, but some malevolent underworld force, some incorporeal power that would tear them all to shreds.

And then Sir Nankhere struck it. Just a glancing strike with her halberd, but blue ichor sprayed across her armor.

And the beast went mad.

Apchek was thrown from his feet by a great blow, and he could feel, through his tattoos, at least a dozen ribbons dissolve as they absorbed the damage.

By the time he struggled back upright, the circle of light was splattered with blood and corpses. Apchek could feel a sharp, jagged pain from his temple, and blood poured down the side of his face from the wound. Wadek had been jammed deep into the soil by the creature, and was struggling to free himself, while Vaat was rolling into the darkness below, thrown by some devastating blow. Ribbons drifted and dissolved after her tumbling form.

And Sir Nankhere, their commander, one of the most dedicated knights in Hebrast, was rising into the air, her arms spread, her halberd laying on the ground below her. 

Her silhouette shifted oddly, and for a moment, Apchek was convinced that he’d taken a bad knock on the head, until he realized he was seeing Nankhere’s armor projected onto the skin of the invisible creature as it lifted her.

Apchek was already charging, his sword raised, and, in a great surge of power, leapt through the air towards his commander, leapt farther and harder than he ever had before, powered by the strangely thick magic of the Green Abyss.

The creature still swatted him down against the ground like a child’s toy, and he bounced like one.

When he staggered, dazed, to his feet, his sword was gone, and his visor mesh was half-filled with dirt.

He brushed it clean just in time to witness Sir Nankhare being torn out of her armor through her open visor.

Apchek screamed and ran to the spot his commander had died, ran towards the empty armor, snatched up Nankhare’s fallen halberd.

And then he too found himself carried into the air, flailing wildly.

For a heartbeat, as he stared into the empty space that was about to rend him apart, Apchek accepted death.

But that heartbeat passed, and the next heartbeat brought inspiration.

Then heartbeat after that brought blindness as the magic mirror rolled across the inside of his helmet.

Another heartbeat brought flickers of color.

The following heartbeat, waves of color, rolling across the magic mirror.

The next heartbeat brought utter, incomprehensible chaos as the magic mirror tried and failed to make sense of the gently waving abyssal grasses surrounding them. Chaos that ruled his entire field of view.

Or, rather, ruled almost his entire field of view.

His magic mirror might not be able to make out the grasses, but it could make out the image of the grasses projected onto the smooth skin of the monster just fine.

There, in the middle of his magic mirror, was the horrible, twisting, tentacled form of their stalker, dangling from the grass-stalks above him.

Apchek bellowed and thrust Sir Nankhare’s halberd forward.

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Only eight of them made it to the surface. Four soldiers, a sailor, and the three surviving knights, bearing the empty armor of their commander.

Later, when stories were told of their escape, their escape through the grasslands earned as many words in those tales as their time in the Green Abyss. Bards celebrated their week-long flight, as they concealed themselves below cunningly-woven grass mats whenever Bezans sailed overhead. Hebrastan citizens and bureaucrats alike cheered when the storytellers got to their desperate assault on a Bezan cutter, where three exhausted knights somehow defeated five Bezan knights and a dozen soldiers. Of the surviving soldiers and sailor bringing the cutter back to Hebrast, bringing back their commander’s armor and news of the hidden Bezan base between the Green Abyss and the Karoi pastures.

All of that, however, would forever be mere epilogue for Apchek.

For him, the story always ended as he gazed back down into the Green Abyss from its edge, and whispered a prayer for birds to take the souls of the dead up to the Sky Lords.

He didn’t believe it would come true, though, didn’t believe the souls of Sir Nankhare and the crew would ever ascend to the ring. Couldn’t persuade himself that the Sky Lords held any power in the Green Abyss, no matter what the priests said.

For not once had Apchek seen or heard any sign of birds in the depths.

Not even a single bird call. Not even a feather.