Silent Desperation, An Unbroken Story - Part 2: The Fearful Encounter

Read part one here.

Before long Maxyn comes to a small storehouse. Or at least it was, it has since been emptied of its stocks. Now it only houses cobwebs and rodent droppings amongst its aging timbre shelves. Closing his eyes Maxyn takes a moment to calm his nerves, the small alcove of the storehouse providing him refuge. He opens his eyes again to find another pair of eyes staring back at him. A dormouse watches him from a barren shelf. No doubt a resident from when the storehouse was laden with grain sacks. Years ago, Maxyn had eaten a dormouse roasted and dipped in honey. His mouth watered at the memory, despite it feeling like a lifetime ago. He had no roasting pit and certainly no honey, but Maxyn wasn’t about to let this grain-fed treat scamper away.

Moving slowly, he carefully slipped a hand into his pocket feeling the cold iron spike he had liberated from a trap not so long ago. Maxyn’s fingers curled around the impromptu weapon and withdrew his hand. Part of him was disgusted at what he was about to do. But hunger hammered on the inside of his gut like a forgemaster at their anvil. The spike was a poor imitation of the throwing knives that Maxyn would ordinarily use to ply his trade, but it would do. With barely a flick of the wrist, so as not to spook his prey, the spike flies from Maxyn’s hand and strikes the dormouse. Maxyn scampers to his stunned meal, retrieving the spike and snapping the neck of the rodent he begins his grisly work, extracting as much of the stringy meat as he can. The morsels he wolfs down are warm and slick with blood but they’re sweeter than any roasted and honey dipped dormouse he has had before.

Temporarily fortified, Maxyn continues on. The winding passage eventually opens out into a small cavern, the rough-hued floor giving way to earth and gravel underfoot. Above his head, stalactites stab down at him from out of the darkness. Maxyn wasn’t looking at the ceiling; however, there were tracks on the floor. The gravel and general detritus of the cavern made identification difficult, and it took Maxyn long moments to arrive at the conclusion that he was following a goblin. Or perhaps a gnoll. The memory is murky, but Maxyn thinks he remembers the higher pitched shouts and screams of a goblin when he and his party were attacked. He puts a hand on his side, the wound is still here, a dull throb against his exhaustion.

Maxyn squeezes his eyes shut and forces the painful memories back down as deep as he can. He takes long calming breaths as he focuses inwards, trying to turn his rising panic back into grim determination. Maxyn’s stomach growls again, he sighs. Opening his eyes and casting about the cavern, it is clear the place is predictably devoid of any foodstuffs. Maxyn feels some of that determination slip away. He sighs again and stands, his foot slipping momentarily to noisily disturb some of the loose gravel making up the cavern floor. The noise agitates the cavern’s other residents, the bats loitering in the gloom of the high ceiling. A few take flight, fluttering about in the half-light of the cavern. Maxyn eyes them carefully, if a mere dormouse might sate his hunger for a time, then why shouldn't a brace of juicy flying rodents do also? Once more an iron spike flies out and strikes its unwary prey. Maxyn scrabbles across the gravel collecting both the spike and his latest meal. Buoyed by his recent successes he takes aim at another, but this time the shot goes wide, the spike ricocheting off a rocky column. Maxyn watches with despair as it sails away into the darkness. He turns the remaining two spikes over in his pocket weighing his options. Maxyn decides to risk one more, weapons are of no use if you haven’t the energy to wield them. Clutching a spike on one hand and his first kill in the other, Maxyn peers into the darkness of the cavern’s roof, watching carefully for any movement. Long moments pass as Maxyn waits for a bat to leave the safety of the ceiling’s shadows. As soon as one is brave, or stupid, enough to do so the spike lashes out and strikes the poor creature, killing it instantly. He’s on the corpse in a flash, ripping and tearing to get at the still warm flesh. Blood coats his jowls as he slurps down what little scraps the kills have to offer. Finishing his sticky meal, Maxyn settles on his haunches and takes a moment to catch his breath. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and then his hands on his dirt ridden trousers.

The brief respite gives Maxyn a moment to assess his situation. Specifically, his lack of a reliable weapon. The iron spikes are useful in a pinch but would struggle against anything larger than the rodents he’s just eaten. Fishing in his pockets he takes out the length of hardwood and the old cartographer’s map he found earlier. The latter isn’t much use to him anymore, but it is rolled tight with a length of twine, which he can use. Placing the iron spikes on the wood perpendicular to its length, Maxyn uses the twine to tightly bind them in place. The resulting weapon, whilst lacking in thrusting potentially, would more than ruin someone’s day if it caught them across the stomach or face.

Maxyn stands shakily to his feet, tying the spikes in place took more effort than he had anticipated. With a weapon in his hand, he feels his resolve growing as he slowly makes his way towards the cavern’s exit. Rounding a rocky outcrop Maxyn catches the glint of metal out of the corner of his eye. He brings the makeshift weapon up in a defensive stance, but no attack comes. Looking down the glint is simply another accursed trap. Like the last one, this one is also not functional, having clearly been dumped out of the way behind the outcrop. He kneels down, seeing if there is anything worth salvaging. One of the jaws has partially broken, and with a little bit of force Maxyn is able to pry it off completely. With the back of his knee and some considerable effort he’s about to straighten it out from the jaw’s usual bowed shape. It’s by no means a weapon yet but it has promise.

Maxyn is about to stand when a sound from the other side of the rocky outcrop makes him freeze. The sound of gravel crunching underfoot. Maxyn carefully lowers the length of metal and readies his makeshift knife. He crouches in the darkness as the goblin, no doubt the one he has been tracking, rounds on the outcropping. The goblin is a head shorter than Maxyn with ill-fitting chainmail, a battered shield and an ugly wooden club. The goblin also hasn’t seen Maxyn yet, the result of a lifetime of training on the streets evading the tax men and their helmet-head enforcers. Maxyn doesn’t wait to be found and springs out of the shadows, jumping in close to his adversary. The goblin shrieks in surprise and tries to bring their shield up and the club down on Maxyn’s skull. But Maxyn is already inside the goblin’s guard, he slashes down at the shield arm with the ragged knife the iron spikes biting into flesh at the elbow and tearing through ligaments and tendons rendering the arm useless. The goblin screams again, beginning to panic and swinging wildly with the mace. But Maxyn is too close, the goblin can’t get the leverage on the taller human. Maxyn’s improvised knife is far more suited to extreme proximity of the combatants and with one quick motion the knife flashes across the goblin’s throat. The poor creature drops its club and stumbles backwards; it’s one good arm on the ragged wound in a futile attempt to stop the bleeding. It does no good as the cut, whilst brutal and messy, has bitten deep enough to catch the goblin’s jugular. Arterial blood pours from the goblin’s neck, drenching their filthy armour and cavern floor in bright red. Maxyn watches with indifference as realisation dawns on the goblin: they are going to die, and nothing is going to stop it. The realisation has only moments to sink in before the goblins’ eyes roll back and they lose consciousness, collapsing to the gravel floor.

Maxyn waits a few more moments, both to make sure the goblin is actually dead and to make sure that nothing else comes into the cavern to investigate the noises. He then approaches the corpse and begins searching for anything of use. Goblins are notorious scavengers after all. He finds some scraps of metal; he puts them in his own pack along with the metal arm of the trap he found earlier. No food though, much to Maxyn’s annoyance. With a weary sigh he gets back to his feet and makes his way out the cavern.