Warning: There's a few graphic descriptions of gore/violence. If this something that can be a trigger for you, please read with caution.
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The rain assaulted their faces with vicious and wild abandon from above as if it were possible that their presence here was entirely personal and fueled by burning ice. The weather about them was getting so extreme and persistent that the smallest of them, Avaleina, had begun to obviously resist the urge to shiver.
Usually, Legolas would be able to lie and claim that he knew they would find a cave nearby. Or that soon the trail of the rocky outcropping they were scrambling across would eventually turn them so that the wind was at their backs. Maybe that soon the rain would let up. But he could feel in his bones that none of those things were true, and if he spoke now all they would hear is his own apprehensions.
As they slipped and stumbled hastily across the smiley rocks Legolas laughed inwardly at the fact humans were convinced Elves could not feel any sense of cold. How Legoas wished that were true. Eliciting a cold response was a much more complicated affair for elves certainly. An act that hinged on several requirements to render the body weak enough for it to even be susceptible to such a ghastly thing, but it was certainly possible.
And it was extremely unpleasant, every single time.
"I hate this," Farlen muttered so quietly Legoas wondered if anybody other than him had heard the words. Legolas pretended he hadn't heard, feeling his own trepidation echoing hollowly through every inch of his extremely alert body. If only it was easier to pretend he hadn't heard his stomach chanting that they were in store for an unavoidable horror.
At first Legolas' mind had wandered and attempted to hazard a guess to the source of his unease, but it was not long before he quickly had to turn his mind's eye elsewhere. Legolas knew that his thoughts and creations within his mind would always be ten times worse than whatever actually ended up occuring to them.
That's what he told himself, at least.
His mind was convinced he was to be expecting some sort of ambush attack, or an alarmingly elaborate scheme to fall upon their heads at literally any moment. It was not until the water began to flow under their feet in steady ceaseless streams that the thought occurred to him the threat could be much bigger than any trap or attack.
And so, so much worse because there was no possible way to to defend or protect yourself. You were at the mercy of the world and its whims, which had never much proven to land in favor of anything but itself and extreme disfavor for anything that was not itself.
Their footing grew increasingly hard to maintain and it was not long before it seemed the force of the water was pulling their feet along the rocks to move them forward regardless if the elves wanted to move forward or not.
Not a word was said among them, but the tension was suffecniet enough that Legolas knew they were all thinking and expecting the same thing.
A forced fist fight with mother earth.
"Somebody grab Ava!" Legolas shouted from somewhere ahead of him. Confused at the reasoning but trusting his judgment Farlen turned around to try and pull Avaleina to him. But she wasn't there.
Farlen didn't have a chance to acknowledge what was happening or prepare before without ceremony, or even half a second of warning the entire world began to crumble from beneath Farlens feet. Water enough to fill three rivers slammed into him. Layers and miles of sturdy rock vanishing effortlessly as if it had never actually existed in the first place.
Even over the catastrophic noise of what he could only imagine was the sudden departure of half the mountainside he could still hear the screams of fear personified. As he looked around with terror he was forced to observe as face after face and life after life vanished underneath the massive moving curtain of huge rocks and overwhelming water.
He tried to catch a glimpse of Legolas, hoping that he would be able to throw himself down the mountain after his Prince with the hopes of doing anything and everything within his power to keep him alive. But already, there was not even a whisper of blond hair.
Which was somehow more unsettling than the actual events unfolding around him, because nothing ever got the best of their prince like that. Not even mother nature. And especially not when he felt responsible for everybody around him.
How had all traces of him already been swept away? It didn't seem possible.
As even more water and rocks began to sweep past them, he was further distraught to witness several more friends get struck by massive boulders that cast them beneath the water near instantly. He did not need the gift of foresight to know they would never rise from those hateful murky depths.
A raw scream born of pure instinct rattled him out of his near strancelike shock and back into the horrid reality unfolding in front of him. He caught an extremely fast glance of Avaleina being drug down the mountain by the force of the water with a large rock slab laying over her body.
Farlen knew that he needed to get to her, Ava was the weakest swimmer out of all of them. In currents like this, she would not stand a shadow of a chance.
As fast as he saw her, she vanished.
A rock struck his head, and everything went dark and silent.
She had no idea how long she had been thrown and tossed around among the rocks and the endless water, but at some point she dropped into a dark nothing. She fell for several seconds before she slammed into a rock hard wall of near frozen temperatures. Total darkness encased her completely, and with the currents continued pounding from above as hard as they were it was nearly impossible to find the surface of the water.
Over and over again she struggled to the top and was forced back under again.
Once Avalena's head broke the water's surface longer than a few seconds, she thought she had gone blind for such an allencompasing darkness had swallowed her to its depths. So complete that she could not even see where a wall or any end to this pool of ice water.
With every move of her arms to keep herself afloat was extremely painful, a dim memory made its way to the surface of a large slab of rock crushing her right arm against her stomach, and her left against her back.
Her chin bobbed under the water's surface as she struggled to stay above it, struggling to find any place in the deep pool that did not seem determined to drown her.
An echoing scream shattered the darkness, and she heard the sound of another body splashing under the surface. Whoever it was seemed to struggle significantly less than she had to get situated at the surface of the water.
But unlike Avaleina, whoever was down with her did not remain silent once they bobbed to the surface. As soon as their lungs had air, they continued to scream. She wanted to yell for them to stop making so much noise, but knew that he would not hear her over the sound of the water continuing to pour into the underground pool.
Desperately, she began to swim towards the sound of his distress.
As she desperately swam towards him, Avaleina felt the unmistakable feeling of something incredibly sinister darting swiftly underneath her. Moving so quickly that the currents pushed up against her stomach. Heading in the exact same direction she was heading much, much faster.
Throwing caution to the wind and knowing that she would not be able to reach and warn him in time, Avaleina yelled for him to be silent. To stop making noise.
Stop splashing around.
He didn't hear her over the sounds of his own hysterical fear.
His screams of confused distress turned into pained terror and a metallic smell exploded into the air, and Avaleina fell silent. After several horrible splashing noises absolute silence descended upon her, thicker than the darkness could ever hope to be.
Ava didn't even know who it had been, other than that it was one of the younger warriors who had come with them.
Again she felt the horrifying and unmistakable sign of sinister things swirling in the water. This time towards her.
Assuming and hoping that whatever creature could possibly live in this darkness relied on hearing rather than sight, she covered her mouth with a hand to stifle her ragged breaths. Trusting the rushing waters still rushing in to mask the movements of her legs as they kept moving.
With the use of one arm occupied with keeping her quiet, the struggle to keep her nose above water increased with alarming speed. But she didn't dare remove the hand as the creatures continued to swirl underneath.
Legolas woke up on his back in the dark, cold water nearly came up to his shoulders but at least didn't restrict his breath. He sat up, stifling a groan as his body protested loudly to the action.
Dripping water echoed all around him.
The darkness pressed against him even more forcefully.
He stood up carefully, hating the way the water dripped and sloshed off his clothes.
He hated it even more when something else in the darkness sloshed right back, and continued to slosh its way closer to him.
Panicking, Legolas felt for a wall, stumbling several steps to the left before he found one. The sloshing getting even closer from his right.
Desperately his hands patted and searched the wall, looking for any sort of hand hold he could possibly get. Feeling beyond blessed when he finally found one. He grabbed ahold of it securely and lifted himself up off the ground, his right hand searching higher up for another handhold.
Eventually finding one, he hauled himself upwards once more until both hands were at the highest point and his feet were on the lower.
The sloshing that had been coming towards him stopped suddenly and he sank, feeling that whatever was waiting right underneath him.
A horrible snarling, sniffing sound proved his assumption correct. A different dripping noise added itself to the others, and judging by the stringiness of it, there was a good chance it was saliva.
The deep, sniffing inhales continued beneath him and Legolas raised his feet higher on the wall, seconds before a slapping sound rippled up from near where they had been. The creature, whatever it was, seemed to be searching for where he went.
He heard a few more slothing noises, as it paced up and down the wall before falling silent again.
Legolas could hear it breathing. Every breath sounded like raspy gasps and famished growls. "Come here. Come here. Come here." A horrible voice crooned to him in the darkness, its mouth obviously not made to pronounce those words. Or any words at all. Every word came out jagged and broken, twisted almost too far from what it should have been to be understandable.
Every syllable made his skin crawl, "Come here. Come here. Come here."
As silently as he possibly could, Legolas began searching for another handhold and a way to climb higher away from this creature.
Its ragged breathing never slowed, neither did its calls for Legolas to join it on the ground.
Farlen woke to the sounds of pained screaming, desperate begging, and the sicking sound of raw flesh being torn off of bones. He went to move, to react, do something. But he nearly fell off of an extremely precarious ledge.
It was a wonder that he had even managed to stop on it in the first place.
As carefully as he could possibly manage, Farlen looked over the ledge to the echoing darkness below him. Just barely making out the outlines of several monsters he had not seen or heard described before.
Long necks were attached to a sleek black body with four flippers that ended tipped with ferocious looking claws. Their long teeth glinted in the spots of light that filtered from somewhere above them, bits of flesh getting stuck on their razor sharp edges.
As another neck declined, the screaming stopped.
A chorus of wheezing sounds that were far too close to laughter for his comfort filled the chamber, followed by their resumption of dinner.
Farlen took a deep and calming breath, forcing himself to take a count of how many bodies laid on the circular floor beneath him: Seven.
Seven friends lost, devoured. Consumed by this darkness and the creatures that lurked inside of it.
The disgusting sound of ripping continued, as Farlen began to feel forwards along the ledge. Testing how sturdy the rock was before he inched himself alone on his stomach, unwilling to draw too much attention to himself just yet. For all he knew, these creatures could fly, and up here on the ledge that was the last problem that he needed. The very, very last.
Tern stared at the carvings in the wall trying to make sense of all the squares and lines etched into it. If he didn't know any better, he would have said that it was some sort of crude map of some kind. But none of the languages looked familiar to him,so he couldn't be sure.
He used his fingers to trace the lines over and over again until his mind had them completely memorized nonetheless.
After hours of wandering alone in the dark for what felt like hours, this was the only sign of life or civilization he'd been able to find.
He'd wanted to call out for the others on his team, to see if he was the only one that had ended up in this dark pit. But a voice in his mind that sounded suspiciously like Ferdan warned him against it.
Thus far he had been given no proof to say there were other living things in here with him, but he didn't want to find out that assumption was incorrect by running directly into something.
Something that knew its way around this pitch-black maze.
Satisfied that he lines had been etched clearly into his mind, Tern finally turned away from it and continued winding down the hallway. His feet making subtle splashing noises as he went.
The creepiness will continue in the next chapter.