Dullahan 'Choose Your Own Adventure' Story - Part Ten (sfw) (Patreon)

We're back! Got some fighting in this chapter, and a serious injury, but other than that, I don't think I have any warnings for you. 

It'll be up on Tumblr later today, but as ever, you get a sneak peek first. 

Reacting on instinct as the footsteps approached, you scooped Kravik up in your arms and hauled him upright. The only place you could see to hide him was in the lea of the low cabinet to the left of the entrance to the cavern. It was a poor hiding place, and it might only just cover him, but you had few options in that split second. 

Kravik might have been only three feet or so tall, but he was muscular and compact, and you staggered as you half-dragged and half-carried him over to the wall. He was still winded and dazed from the tunnel collapse, and the searing flash of the wards on the mayor’s laboratory door had done nothing to help his recovery. 

You knew you wouldn’t be able to hide there beside him as well, and that his only chance of staying hidden was if you moved somewhere else. But where? 

You stood warily, back hunched defensively as you searched frantically for somewhere else that might just hide you, but no sooner had you begun to sprint for the wardrobe when you heard the mayor’s cry of fear and surprise from the entrance. The game was up. You’d been spotted like a hare in an open field. 

Before you could react, however, she had summoned some kind of ball of energy to her hands, and was clearly readying it to launch straight at you, a fierce look blazing in her eyes. 

A scream tore itself from your throat and instead of darting for safety, you simply froze on the spot. With your feet rooted in place, you could only stare in wide-eyed horror as Will shouted something from the cage on your right. The sequence of events that unfolded next all seemed to happen very slowly, and yet they were still over in no time at all. 

Will sprang from the open cage, the key flying from the lock and skittering across the floor, and as the mage hurled her spell at you, he leapt between it and you. Blinking in shock, you watched his knees go out from under him as he caught the full force of it in his small chest, and he fell sideways to the rough floor of the cavern. 

The mayor let out a wordless cry of horror and dived down to kneel at his side, heedless of her smart robes or the ragged, dusty cavern floor. “William!” she hissed, shaking him, then fluttering her hands uselessly at his temples. “How did you get out? Are you hurt? William?”

Relief flooded through you when he croaked and sat up, wheezing and short of breath, but otherwise unharmed. His stone-bound blood must have absorbed the force of her spell, you realised, and then cold horror dropped through you as the mayor got carefully to her feet. Her jaw ground and her eyes flashed as she met your gaze. 

“You!” she snarled, extending her finger to you. “You did this? You let him out? You blew up the tunnels?” 

“This has to stop,” you croaked helplessly. “It’s wrong. Can’t you see that? You’re poisoning people and…” your eyes darted to Will’s shaking form on the floor. His tattoos had flared a bright blue at the impact of the magic. “And you’re torturing your own son!”

She advanced on you then, stepping around Will as though he were little more than a piece of furniture. Her face was terrible in her rage. “You dare involve yourself in my affairs?” she hissed. “You have no idea what’s going on here!”

“I have a pretty good idea,” you said, aiming for defiant and missing as your voice gave a little wobble. 

It was as Will staggered to his feet behind her that you saw Kravik beginning to creep out from behind the cabinet against the wall, quiet and careful as the shadow of a cat. He was making for the exit, and as you looked at him, he brought his bony finger to his lips, smiled, and then mimed ‘boom’, his hands splaying apart silently. He intended to go and blow up the one remaining store of phoros in the mine. You looked away from him just as the mage took her last few steps towards you, close enough that you could smell her perfume and see the stippled sweat at her temples. 

“Mother, no,” Will said, lurching towards her and grabbing the back of her robe. “She’s right. This has to stop. You’re killing my own people just so I can have access to your magic? So you can have a son who’s a mage? It’s wrong! Can’t you see that?”

“I will break through that cursed stone-bound blood of yours,” she offered over her shoulder. “I will not have the shame of my family heaped upon me twice over.”

“What sort of approval is worth all this?” you asked defiantly, disgust thick and evident in your tone. “Do you really want the approval of people who can’t accept that you loved someone, regardless whether he was a goblin, and that you have a son who isn’t able to use magic?” you snarled. “Is it worth all this to you? Is his ability to use magic Will’s only worth to you?”

“Don’t you dare! You have no idea what it was like for me!” she snapped, tears sparkling in her eyes. “To have all the weight of expectation on my shoulders growing up, and then to be expected to marry some mage from another kingdom, just to try and distill a little more magic into our family line? I loved his father,” she said, jabbing a finger behind her at Will. “I loved him, and they ridiculed me for it. I brought shame on them. They can’t show their faces in the senate because I bore a non-magical son with a dirty goblin.”

Will’s sharply-handsome face cracked. “Why can’t you just love your son, mother?” he choked. “Why do I have to be more than what I am to earn your approval? Why can’t I be enough for you?”

The heartbreak in his voice sent a tear rolling down your own cheek. “She doesn’t deserve you, Will,” you hissed. 

The mayor ignored you both, her face settling into a grim expression, and she grabbed you by the arm. Her grip was astonishingly strong, and she began to steer you helplessly towards the cage despite your frantic protests. Will launched himself at her, wrapping his skinny, lithe arms around her waist and knocking her to the ground with the force of his attack, and you twisted free. 

“Go!” he shouted. “Run!”

Kravik’s feet vanished around the tunnel ahead of you, and your own legs faltered. You found yourself looking back over your shoulder, terrified for the half-goblin who had saved you. 

“Go!” Will yelled again. 

You didn’t wait around any longer this time, and bolted, but you soon heard footsteps chasing after you. Your heart was in your mouth, pounding desperately against your throat as you ran blindly up the dim corridor, back towards the collapsed tunnel. 

A flash of light whistled past you, your lungs burned, and you fought off a fit of spluttering coughs as the air got thicker around you, the dust from the earlier cave-in still heavy in the air. 

Voices. Up ahead. And a dim glow of light.

Kravik’s harsh, frantic, scraping tenor, followed by something richer and darker, and finally a female voice, scratchy and curt. It couldn’t be!

“D! Ten!” you screamed as another ball of energy hissed and crackled past your shoulder. 

The voices stopped and then you heard the sound of Justice bellowing your name. It resounded off the tunnel walls, and was immediately followed by the ringing of boots on hard rock and the sharp rebuke of Tenacity, which apparently went ignored. 

D rounded the corner in a blaze of greenish-white light. He was not wearing his head, but instead his ghostly body glowed in the darkness, and you flung yourself at him. 

He caught you easily and wrapped his arms around you, the solid weight of his chest buttressing you up as your knees went weak with fear, adrenaline, and exhaustion. “I found you, I’ve got you,” he crooned, as much to himself as to you. “I was so afraid for you. I felt the earth shaking… I thought -” he cut himself off and took a deep breath. “What happened?”

“Oh D!” you whimpered. “Run! We have to get out of here! She’s coming!”

“Who is?” he asked, stroking your hair back from your face and pulling back a little to get a better look around the tunnel. 

“The mayor! She’s injecting her son with phoros to make him open up to magic. Krav and I found him, but then she came in, and she attacked, and then Kravik went to try and destroy the rest of the supplies, and then she turned on me and she’s coming after me!” you said in a huge, garbled rush. 

D instantly put himself between you and the tunnel behind you, and no sooner had he done so than the mayor herself appeared. 

She had a staff in her hand now too, and she stopped abruptly at the sight of the dullahan standing squarely in the corridor. Clearly, a spirit of justice had been the last thing she’d expected to see.

D began to growl then, a vicious, feral sound that resonated in your chest and against your eardrums, and you glanced up to see that his lips had peeled back into a snarl, revealing his ghostly canines. They matched the elongated fangs he had in his physical head, but somehow they looked more dangerous in this eerie green light. He truly was inhuman and monstrous as he seemed to grow and fill the space with his menacing presence. The darkness seemed to grow deeper against the burning light of his phosphorescent glow. He pulled his shoulders square and moved his taloned hand to his side where the gruesome whip made of human vertebrae hung at his hip. He unhooked it with practised ease, and as he took up a fighting stance, footsteps sounded behind him. 

A red light preceded Tenacity’s appearance, and your breath caught in your lungs as you saw her for the first time without her head. She looked like death itself. True red flames flickered up from her empty collar; her long hair was the white hot of iron ready for forge-welding, and it flowed freely behind her as if caught in a current of slow-moving water. Her hands were bare, and the snaking lines which had once been black were now blood red and glowing. But it was her eyes that truly terrified you. Blazing scarlet with righteous anger, she came round the corner with death in her gaze, and even the mayor balked visibly at the hellish apparition. 

“No,” she whimpered, but then she seemed to rally. “No!” she repeated, more fiercely. “I will not let you take my research from me. Not when I’m this close! I will not be cut off by my family for loving a goblin, and I will not be beaten! I will have a mage child if it kills me!” she shouted. 

“And what if it kills him!” you yelled back at her. 

D put his hand out to keep you behind him, but even his black-clawed talons could not keep you silent. 

“What if you’d killed those other goblins instead of just nearly poisoning them to death?” 

Your words enraged her and she hurled a fork of lighting through the tunnel that left a blazing white afterimage in your vision. A sudden crack and flash of white light stopped it in its tracks, and you realised that D had used his whip to create some kind of barrier, perhaps to counter the incoming bolt. He was breathing hard. “Get back further behind me,” he growled at you. “Ten, go with Kravik and blow up the rest of those crystals. I’ll deal with her.”

Tenacity approached him and laid her hand on his shoulder, and her other on yours. “Light be with you,” she said. “And for the love of all that is good and right, Justice, do not get yourself killed.”

He nodded, never taking his terrible gaze off the mage, who still seemed to be struggling to recover her reserves of magic after her last failed attack. 

Ten turned, and as her red light disappeared around the corner of the tunnel, a sudden, icy fear dropped through you. This was the first time you’d seen what D could really do, and you were terrified for him. “D,” you breathed, but he shook his head. 

“Stand back. Go and find somewhere safe,” he said, taking a step forwards and readying the whip at his side for another attack. He knew as well as you did that he had to hold her off long enough for Ten and Kravik to blow up the stores. He was the last defence, and he had to hold. 

The mayor brought her staff in front of her, holding it like a quarterstaff, and you saw it had a wicked blade attached to the butt of the shaft. It glinted and seemed to ripple and flicker in the light emanating from D’s ghostly head. He made no move to attack her, simply standing there, watching, keeping himself between her and you. But when you saw what was inlaid into the steel blade at the end of her staff, your blood ran cold. 

“D,” you hissed, “D, that blade has got gold on it!”

“I know,” he said calmly, still facing the advancing mayor. “I can feel it from here. I’ll be careful.”

And then the fight began.

The mayor stepped forwards, launching a flash of magic at him with one hand while spinning the staff up with her other, attempting to slash him across the chest with the blade. 

D danced gracefully backwards out of range of the weapon, but caught the spell directly in the shoulder. He let out a grunt, but sent his bone whip flailing out at her. She dodged it, keeping the staff safe from the whip’s grasp, but she caught the tip of it in the face. It lashed across her cheek and left a gash that began to bleed instantly. 

She turned on him in a fury of attacks, forcing him further back up the tunnel towards you. 

“Get out of here!” he yelled hoarsely, sidestepping and using his whip to try and grab her ankle with it to pull her off her feet. She shifted positions and this time sent a fireball hurtling up the tunnel. It missed you by a fraction of an inch, and the heat of it seared your skin as it flared past. “I can’t protect you and fight her!” he gasped. He had only his whip and his body to fight her, and while he had her dancing side to side in the confines of the tunnel, he was clearly concerned. 

He moved with the fluid grace of a hunting cat, spinning and arcing, his foxfire trailing behind him as he forgot to maintain the effort it required to keep his ghostly head there. He battered her back down the corridor again, but just when you’d though the might have gained the upper hand, he bellowed a roar as another blast of magic took him in the gut and he staggered backwards, winded. 

“D!”

Taking advantage of his weakness, the mayor pressed forwards, swinging the staff blade up. It connected with his arm as he shielded himself instinctively, and he let out a yell of pain as it sliced through the thick material of his jacket and connected with his dark grey skin. A liquid the colour of his green mist spurted out, oozing down the blade and dripping to the cave floor, and the mayor laughed. 

“You do bleed,” she snickered. “I can finish you.”

“No!” you screamed, and at the sound of your voice, D pushed himself up off the wall with a shout like a wounded bull. He lashed out at the mage with the whip, wrapping the tail of it round her neck. In panic, the mayor brought the staff up and tried to cut through the bones in the long whip, but to no effect. 

Then you saw, in the bright glow of the now-blazing light at his collar, that a new idea formed in her mind. Her eyes locked onto a spot on his chest, and she smiled horribly, despite the colour rising in her face as the whip cut off her air. She held the staff like a javelin, and hurled it straight at D. 

“No!” 

The shout was not your own. It came from behind the mayor. It was Will. He swung something through the air and it caught his mother on the back of the head. She fell, limp and unconscious to the cave floor, but it was too late. The damage was already done. 

D let go of the handle of his whip, his fingers going slack, the staff embedded in his chest. As he staggered and slipped sideways, the heavy staff fell to the rock with a clatter, and his bright, unusual blood began to soak outwards with horrifying speed into his jacket. He gasped and gulped, the light of his ghostly head flickering, and his knees gave way. He toppled backwards onto the tunnel, even as you darted forwards to try and catch him. 

A crash like thunder rippled through the mines, followed by a series of deep rumbles. 

“The storage room,” Will said, staring wide eyed from his mother to the fallen dullahan. “They did it.”

You barely heard his words as you crashed to your knees beside D, hands pressing down hard on his torso. “D?” you sobbed, your vision fogging with tears. “D? Oh gods, D? Can you hear me?”

Horrifyingly, the ghostly apparition of his head simply disappeared, flickering out like a guttering candle, and you saw the raw, scarred stump of his neck in the open collar for the first time. The tissue was hard and puckered with old scarring, a shade darker than the slate grey skin of the rest of him. 

“D!” you shrieked, your voice breaking with terror as it ricocheted off the walls of the tunnel. “No! Please!” 

You pumped at his chest, trying to get his heart going again - not knowing if dullahans even had working hearts or not - and as you did, you heard shouting and running footsteps. D’s green veins began to glow again, giving you the tiniest of faint hopes, and a green mist furled lazily, teasingly, out from the collar of his jacket like a single breath fogging the air on a cold day. 

A warmth began to creep into your leg and you looked down to see his hand on your thigh. 

“D?”

He twitched his thumb and index finger just once. 

Tears flooded your face and you blinked as a red light bounced and bobbed down the tunnel towards you. 

Tenacity, and she was sprinting. “Justice!” she whispered, her pounding feet skidding to a halt when she saw him on the ground. She hissed like a cat when she saw the gold-tipped staff beside him. “Get that out of here,” she snarled, and to your surprise, it was Will who stepped forwards, his tattoos glowing a soft blue in the darkness, and picked it up. He walked past you, heading back down the tunnel towards the laboratory. 

As he walked by you, he paused and laid his gnarled, goblin-like hand on your shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “This is all my fault.”

Blinking the tears from your eyes, you shook your head, but had no words for him. D was lying there, unmoving, and Tenacity had sunk to her knees. Red light spiralled down from her palms as she held them over the wound. 

“Come on, you stubborn fae,” she snarled at him. “Accept my magic, you little bastard. I’ve saved you before, and I’ll save you again, if only to thrust that blade right through your stupid heart and kill you all over again myself for being so fucking stupid!” 

“Ten…” you gasped, shocked by her words. 

Her head snapped up to stare at you, and you lurched away in horror and surprise. Tears flowed down her ghostly cheeks like blood from a wound, and you saw then the desperate fear of a mother about to lose her son. You’d known the two of them were close, but the more you thought about it, the more you realised how much she must have taught him, how much she must have tutored and encouraged him. She had guided him through whatever ordeal a dullahan endured to become what they were, had been at his side for a century, and now she faced losing him. And part of that was because of you. 

Tenacity scooped D’s limp body up in her arms and staggered upright. She might have been tall and muscular, but D wasn’t exactly willowy and light himself. 

“Take him to my house,” you croaked, getting shakily to your feet after her. “We can heal him there, can’t we?” you asked with the innocent hope of a child holding out a broken doll to their mother. 

She stared at you. 

“Ten?” You swallowed thickly. “Ten, he’s going to be alright, isn’t he?”

“I don’t know,” she said at last. “That gilded blade went deep. If it reached his heart, he will die. It will poison his blood and he will die.”

Your knees wobbled and the world tilted. “Please, Ten. Don’t take him away. Let him come and rest with me.”

“I could heal him here,” she said slowly, her voice harsh as a handful of river grit. “But I will need to go to the fae realm to fetch supplies. He might die while I am gone. On the other hand, he might not survive the journey to the fae realm. If he does survive, he’ll heal faster there, for sure.”

“Please,” you whimpered, reaching out and grabbing his limp, dangling hand. It was so cold. “I can’t bear the thought of letting him go and never seeing him again.”

You knew she was leaving the choice to you. Let her take him away, which might kill him anyway, or allow him to be cared for in your hut, where he might still die anyway. 

You took a deep breath and told her. 

Choose now! Click here to tell Tenacity what the heck you want to do with our favourite injured hero, and I'll make sure it happens :)