Dullahan 'Choose Your Own Adventure' Story - Part Eight! (Patreon)

Whoop! I'm not tooooo late with this one this time. I arrived yesterday at the place where I'm staying for the intensive metalwork course, and we sorted food and stuff for this week this morning, and then went to the studio for a casual meet up. I came back and edited this week's chapter, and here it is! 

Not so much of D this time, but he'll be back next week. This time, Kravik and the reader head into the mines to get to the heart of the problem, and things develop very quickly, with a rather dramatic ending... I hope you like it! It'll be up on Tumblr later this evening. 

Despite being merely three and a half feet tall, Kravik stared you down with his hard black eyes, and the fierce toughness that you had long associated with goblins began to pull every line and muscle of his bony body hard and taut. He balled his fists and ground his teeth, making his already gaunt face look harsh and almost frightening. “Let me come with you,” he growled, determination filling his brittle voice. “I can help, and I want to stop this.”

“Krav…”

“These are my people!” he snarled, taking a step towards you. “I need to stop this.”

Holding up a hand, you tried to hush him as his scraping voice echoed off the rough-hewn walls of the tunnel. “Alright,” you murmured. “We’ll need to clear the mines then if we’re going ahead with this explosives plan. I’ve got a signed writ from Vhorn to fumigate for cave beetles. That should do it, right?” You hoped it would be enough. 

Half of you wondered what Ten and D would have to say about you forging recklessly ahead with this when you were only supposed to be going on a reconnaissance excursion this time. They were soldiers of sorts though, and they’d have to appreciate that situations like this changed as often as a naga changed skins. Quelling the rising tide of dread and unease that was creeping up your body, you shuddered and looked down at Kravik again.

“Come with me, and stick close,” he said, eyeing the crystal around your neck. “I feel more clear-headed than I have in weeks with that thing around your neck. It might be useful…”

As you walked by his side, he slid his hand into your palm, being careful to avoid the raw blisters on his palm from his relentless, crystal-driven mining, and squeezed gently. “Thank you,” he whispered, his voice little more than a dry croak. 

“I’d do anything for you, Kravik,” you replied, voice cracking as your heart swelled painfully at the thought of anything bad happening to the little goblin who had been at your side all throughout your life. 

Kravik asked you quietly about the amulet as you walked, and you found yourself telling him all about D and Ten as the two of you wound your way deeper into the mine in search of the storage cave. 

“So, let me get this straight,” he laughed incredulously as you finished your unlikely tale. “You went mushroom hunting and dug up some old fae’s head, and now you’re working with two dullahans - creatures of death and justice who pretty much seem to hate humans on the whole - to fix this? And they brought you the amulet, and it cancels out the effects of the phoros. That’s why I can think straight for the first time in weeks…?”

“Yeah, I think that about sums it all up…” you grinned. 

“Well, fuck me,” he chuckled. “If this isn’t the strangest story I’ve ever heard…”

“I still don’t understand why the mayor is hoarding all this phorosnykum though,” you mused aloud a moment or two later. 

“You say the mayor’s a mage?” he asked, and when you nodded, he made a little thoughtful noise and scratched his sharp chin. “As you said before, it seems too petty for her to want it just for more power. This crystal does something that she desperately needs. I hope we’re not doing the wrong thing by destroying the tunnels though…”

You shrugged. “What else can we do? It’s making people sick, Kravik. She’s hurting people. Whatever reason she has for doing it cannot outweigh the pain she’s causing the people she’s supposed to be protecting.”

“You’re right,” he sighed dejectedly. “I just… I’m uneasy not knowing everything first.”

“I agree, but what choice do we have?”

Kravik only nodded grimly, and pointed up the tunnel ahead of you at the cavern entrance, closed off by a thick wooden door. “That’s where it’s all stored,” he said. 

Shoving the door open with a grunt, your eyes went wide at the sight of the crates of raw blue crystal encased in rock which had been left there. They ranged from the size of a peach pit right up to perhaps as large as an ox’s skull. 

“By the gods,” you swore, goggling at them. “This is a lot of phoros, Krav. What the hell is the mayor planning?”

He shook his head and shivered, his eyes reflecting the dull gleam of the crystals. You felt a sudden spark of fear that so much of the phorosnykum would overwhelm the power of the amulet to protect you and him, and you laid a hand on his knobbly shoulder. 

“Come on,” you murmured. “We shouldn’t linger here too long. Not when we have no way of destroying it or bringing the mine down yet.” You needed to get to the explosives storage first.

He nodded, a slight hazy vagueness to his features, and you steered him out of the chamber and asked him to take you to the places where the other miners were working. Luckily the tunnel system was neither complex nor particularly large. A single main shaft ran ever-downwards from the entrance for about half a mile and then forked into two slightly smaller tunnels. Kravik led you down the left hand one first, and in no time the repetitive clink of metal on stone rose through the darkness. 

Your lantern revealed very little of the tunnel beyond what lay almost immediately in front of your feet, and the darkness pressed in on you from all sides with its own peculiar weight. Your breath began to rasp in your throat, your chest tightening as you fought off waves of panic. It wasn’t even the close spaces: it was the unknown that lay in the crowding darkness beyond the feeble glow of the enchanted lantern. 

Kravik’s chilly fingers slipped back into your hand and he squeezed you reassuringly. “I’m here,” he said. “I won’t let you get lost.”

It was small comfort, knowing he could be so easily lose himself in the power of the crystals, but there was still something nice about knowing he could see in the dark, and that he knew these tunnels as well as you knew your own home. 

Eventually the figures of three goblins loomed from the shadows up ahead, and the light of your lantern glinted off the veins of phoros still embedded in the walls of the mine. They didn’t look up from their work as the lantern light bathed them in its glow, but you noticed a slight shiver run through them, presumably as the amulet’s circle of influence washed over their minds. One female, large for a goblin, looked around and blinked owlishly in the phosphorescent light of the lantern. 

Kravik addressed them in their own tongue, speaking the harsh, guttural language of the goblins, and they all turned slowly at the sound of his voice, blinking. Blue dust covered their hands and arms up to their elbows, and frosted their grey-skinned faces with a thick coating of it too. Kravik looked briefly over at you, and you caught your name amid the foreign syllables of his speech. Their gaze shifted slowly, almost drunkenly, to the basket of fumigation supplies on your arm, and then they simply set down their pickaxes and left. They filed out past you without so much as a nod of greeting, and Kravik sighed. 

“They’ve been down here for longer than me,” he said, heart obviously heavy with worry. “I don’t know how much phoros they’ve got in their system, but I got through to them, I think.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That the mines needed to be fumigated,” he shrugged. “And that you were here to do it, and had a signed writ from the overseer.”

“You think they’ll stay away?”

He looked uneasy. “I hope so. It’s hard to tell how confused they are.”

You nodded. “Well, this branch is clear now,” you said. “Let’s keep going.”

You and Kravik repeated the process three more times in little offshoots, passages, and tunnels along the main left fork of the mine, and when you were certain there was no one left working down there, you dragged a large crate across the entrance and scrawled on the side of it that it was closed for fumigation. Krav scratched his own people’s symbols on it, and the two of you exchanged dubious looks in the lamplight. 

As you wavered once more on the verge of frightened tears, Kravik hardened his features. “Come on, no time for that,” he snapped. 

Taking strength from him, you swallowed, blinked back your tears, and tried not to wish too hard that D’s steady presence were by your side instead of the gaping darkness of the right hand passage of the mine. His glowing head would be a comforting light, his body a steady rock to which you could anchor yourself, and his cool skin a balm to your racing heartbeat and feverish skin. 

It didn’t take you long to clear the rest of the small mine, and as you progressed, you knew time would be ticking faster and faster. With the mines empty, you and Kravik would not have long to break into the explosives storage and set the charges before someone came investigating the unorthodox closure. You would only have to destroy the three areas where there was phoros: the vein at the end of the left hand tunnel, one at the end of the right, and the storage chamber itself. 

Terror pumped deafeningly in your ears as you carried the single barrel of powerful, dwarven-made black powder towards the left one. Kravik had picked the lock on the explosives chamber with astonishing ease, and now carried the lantern ahead of you while you bore the sizable barrel of extremely explosive black powder in shaking limbs. It was a long walk, and sweat rolled painfully into your eyes, but you didn’t dare shuffle or set down the barrel, and eventually it was done. 

The destruction of the first tunnel holding a vein went absolutely as you’d hoped, and as the dull rumble rang through the mine, you shared a quick glance of triumph with Kravik. But you knew you had no time to celebrate. Kravik was dragging you back to the right hand fork to set the charges there before someone came to investigate. The explosion would have been felt on the surface, he was certain, if only by stone-born creatures like the goblins. 

The tunnel with the phoros vein was larger on the right hand fork, and required two agonisingly slow and careful trips to gather enough black powder in one place. Again, you found yourself wishing for D’s presence, and, you had to admit, his strong arms. 

When Kravik was satisfied that there was enough explosive power there to bring down the tunnel, he set the charge and the two of you ran back towards the storage chamber. 

The rumbling was much louder this time, and a shower of fragments rained down from the ceiling as the floor beneath your fleeing feet reared and buckled. A scream of terror ripped from your lungs, but as you choked in a fresh breath, clouds of rock dust billowed out and filled the narrow tunnel, and you broke off, coughing and spluttering. 

The roaring of the tunnel collapse was much closer than it should have been, and in the blink of an eye you found yourself face down as tons of rock slammed down into the tunnel immediately behind you. Kravik yelled something indistinctly and dived to one side as a huge boulder thudded into the very spot where he’d been just a moment before. 

There was no trace of him as you picked yourself upright and scrambled a little further down the dark tunnel. The last tremors rang down the mine and through the mountain, and everything fell ominously still. The occasional trickle of falling debris was the only sound aside from your furiously thundering heart. 

Of Kravik, there was no sign.

Miraculously, your enchanted light was still glowing, if more faintly in the thick, cloying dust that filled the passageway, and as the last few chunks of rock clattered to the ground in the wake of the explosion, you blinked, coughing, holding your sleeve across your mouth. 

With a jolt of pure, primal panic, you realised that you were completely alone. 

“Kravik!” you yelled, your voice raw and throat thick with dust. “Krav! Kravik!” 

Nothing.

“Shit… Oh shit… Kravik!” you sobbed, terror bubbling in your lungs, as acrid and smothering as the rock debris clinging to everything around you. Tears tracked down the dust on your cheeks as you pressed your hands to the wall of solid rock that now blocked off the tunnel behind you. “Kravik!”

How long you stayed there, pounding in futile horror at the wall of immovable rock in front of you, you could not have said. Eventually, with bruised knuckles and scraped palms, you slumped to the bottom of the pile and sobbed in wild panic into your hands. 

Time passed slowly, but you eventually realised that you had to get yourself out. Taking a breath for courage, you stood and swayed slightly, ears ringing with the shock of what had happened. 

But when you had picked up the lantern and held it out in front of you, illuminating the tunnel in front foe you, perhaps to find a pickaxe or someone who could help dig Kravik out, you realised that you didn’t recognise the tunnel. Instead of just one path, there were two. 

Approaching the entrance to the one on the left, you frowned as you noticed symbols carved in the rock around it. They hummed slightly with an energy when you approached, and you realised that the amulet was interacting with them in some way that you couldn’t quite discern. You were certain that that tunnel had not been there when you’d first come with Kravik down this path, and the longer you looked at it, the more your curiosity grew. 

Praying that Kravik was alright, that he would find his way out and that he wasn’t lying crushed under tons of rubble, you looked from one path to the other. 

“Left or right?” you murmured to yourself. “Left or right?”

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