I think everyone knows the feeling of being watched. That subconscious, instinctive, seemingly psychic phenomena that eyes are focused on you, even if your active mind hasn’t taken note of them. Maybe you don’t, I don’t know you. But I like to think that I’m a fairly observant person–one of the side-effects of half my brain seemingly dedicated to perpetually doing its own thing–and at the very least, I certainly knew the feeling.
I paused suddenly, turning a small circle with my glowing crystal held aloft, carefully searching for any movement around us. We had been moving for what could’ve been half an hour or two and a half days (probably the former, but I wasn’t ruling anything out) and were now in a tunnel much wider than those we had passed through so far. Here, at least, dim crystals jutted out of the wall occasionally, shedding diffuse light on our craggy surroundings while still leaving too many shadows for my liking.
“What’s wrong?” Fallon asked. The girl stayed close to my back, but she gave the surrounding darkness a distrustful look of her own.
“I don’t know,” I told her honestly. “It just… It feels like something’s watching us.”
“I was starting to feel the same way.”
I spun around suddenly, my light held out in front of me. It had been mostly concealed by Fallon’s words, but for a second there, I could’ve sworn I heard something move.
I lifted a hand for silence before Fallon could ask any of the half-dozen questions I was sure she had ready, and to my shock and surprise, she actually stayed quiet. Not that there was any point. After a long minute, there was no further noise, and I started to relax.
“Sorry,” I told her. “I thought I–”
There it was again! It was soft, easy to miss, like cloth being dragged over hard rock.
I swallowed, my throat suddenly tight. We definitely weren’t alone anymore, if we ever had been. And whatever was in the tunnel with us, it was clearly intelligent, using our occasional conversation to disguise the sound of its movements.
“Who’s out there?” I called.
There was no answer.
“We’re lost,” Fallon tried to say. “We’re just trying to find our way out of here!”
No answer.
“Well. Fu–”
Another sound. This time it was more noticeable, as if it was closer–and it came from behind us, in the direction we had recently come from.
I turned, my crystal held out, but the shadows revealed nothing.
“Dani?” Fallon asked. Her voice was edged with hysteria, the girl clearly on the edge of panic. “What is it? What do we do?”
How was I supposed to know? Like I was any better off than she was!
“We run,” I told her. “Let’s go!”
The smaller girl grabbed my hand and we were off, my light held out ahead of me in a desperate (and mostly unsuccessful) attempt to guide our way. Again and again, one or the other of us stumbled, forcing us to pause while we got our balance back, precious moments that allowed whatever unseen presence that was pursuing us to close the distance. I didn’t hear anything else, but running and panting weren’t exactly conducive to paying attention to gentle noises, and my sense of being watched had blended with my general anxiety into a blur of alarm.
Suddenly, I pulled up short, Fallon all but running into me from behind.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“That.” I pointed ahead at the worst possible thing we could’ve run into. Ahead, the sporadic crystals that had guided our steps so far seemed to simply stop, the one just behind us the last in the tunnel. That left an almost tangible wall of darkness blocking the way in front of us. If we went any further, we would have to walk rather than run, picking each of our steps carefully. Running in the pitch black, even with my little crystalline light, was a quick way to break a leg.
I felt Dani tremble through our held hands, and I tried to be strong. One of us had to be. I looked down at her and offered a smile I hoped was more encouraging than sickly. “We’ll have to keep going,” I told her. “Slow progress is better than waiting for whatever that was to catch up with us.”
“W-we can’t, though,” she said, once more on the edge of panic.
I tilted my head at the alarm in her voice, and she pointed a shaking finger back in the direction of the darkness before us. I looked back just in time to see the dim red glow she must’ve noticed resolve into a defined shape as something emerged from the stygian wall of darkness.
It was like a shadow made manifest, a flickering red outline, the color of simmering coals, the only thing that distinguished it from the darkness around it. It was low slung, like a lizard, but with six stumpy legs. Behind it, flickering red indicated the vague shape of a long tail, but my attention was much more occupied by its head, where the red edges seemed to become more detailed, outlining a flat head, three glittering eyes, and a wide maw.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
I saw the lizard-shadow tense, and I pushed Fallon away as it lunged forward at us. It hit me instead of her, its momentum bearing me to the ground. Despite being about the same size as my torso, discounting its long tail, the monster was lighter than I expected, as if it was only half real.
The thing’s stubby legs flailed and raked at me, but I had no time to think about that as its maw reared back, letting out a whispering hiss before it darted forward. I barely got one arm under its chin in time and pushed up against its neck, lifting it off me with all the strength of my new and improved body. If not for the muscles I had never actually cultivated, the shadow would have certainly been able to rip my throat out before I could do anything, and even with them, I could barely hold it off of me.
Being built more athletically didn’t actually give me any extra ability to fight off a giant lizard, much less a weird shadow monster shaped like one, and the thing’s flailing threatened to overcome my desperate efforts at any second. Out of options and not knowing what else to do, I tightened my free hand around my glowing crystal light and desperately stabbed its sharp tip into the lizard’s flank.
There was no blood or gore, but the lizard seemed to arch its entire body in a single desperate, sinuous effort to escape my makeshift weapon, finally freeing me of its weight. Don’t get me wrong–I had never tried to stab a komodo dragon or something in the side before, but it felt to me like the shadow monster’s reaction was more than my desperate, feeble little attack should’ve merited.
“Don’t like crystals, huh?” I snarled at it. Had I been thinking straight, I probably would’ve taken the opportunity to escape with Fallon into the dark tunnel ahead, but after being hit by a bus then spending hours stumbling, helpless and terrified, through an otherworldly cave complex, my brain wasn’t exactly working at one hundred percent. So, before the lizard shadow could scramble away, I grabbed at it, managing to get a grip on its long, whip-like tail. It tried to lash around, but the shadow-stuff the thing was made of proved surprisingly soft to the touch, like grabbing a piece of rope, and I hauled it backwards until I could grab the base of its tail in the other hand.
Now the lizard truly started thrashing, trying to flail its wide, flat body around to meet me, but I didn’t give it the chance. I rolled my weight, using the full strength of my improved physique and some half-remembered moves from that karate class I had taken to pivot the lizard's weight–and hurl it directly at the large, glowing crystal that emerged from the wall a few feet away.
The shadow thing tried again to twist away from the light shed by the uneven crystal, but it was unsuccessful. Sinuous shadow met jagged mineral and the light around us seemed to dim even as the lizard-thing arched its back with a whispering roar of obvious agony–and then it simply vanished, dispersing like a puff of smoke on the wind.
I rolled back onto my back, panting for breath, as the adrenaline coursed through my body. Only then did I realize what I had done, and I let out a wheezing gasp of a laugh. That had been so stupid, but it had felt so good.
“Woo!” I threw my arms up in a drunken cheer, woozy from the chemicals racing through my battered body. “Eat crystals, weird shadow freak!”
“Dani?” Fallon’s voice asked. Her head, complete with its corona of curly hair, came into view, looking down at me with a worried expression. “Are you okay?”
I dropped my arms but kept smiling up at her, exhilaration still outrunning fear after the struggle. “I’m doing great, why?”
“Uhm… you’re bleeding a bit.”
A splash of icy cold panic finally doused the adrenaline-fueled flames of my exhilaration, and I sat up in a rush to look myself over.
“Huh. It’s… not as bad as it looks,” I told Fallon, as surprised as she was that it was the truth. My arms were a bit clawed up from the creature's initial lunge, but not nearly as badly as I would’ve expected, as if whatever had passed for the shadow monster’s claws hadn’t actually been that sharp. They looked more like the sort of scrapes you’d expect from falling off a skateboard. My torso wasn’t even that bad–my weird shirt was a little scuffed up, but it wasn't even ripped or torn, and when I lifted it to inspect my belly, I didn’t even have any marks on me.
“Pretty good clothes,” I observed, to myself as much as Fallon.
The concern on the other girl’s face was obvious, but before she could say anything, there was another sound, reminding us of the presence we had noticed behind us earlier. No gentle noise, this time it was another one of the whispering hisses, rapidly approaching us.
“Time to go,” I told Fallon.
#
Our steps got increasingly desperate as we carefully worked our way through the darkness of the tunnels. We were forced to be more careful now, as my crystal light was noticeably dimmer than before, as if it had given some of its strength up when I stabbed the shadow-lizard with it. Without any time to think about the fight itself, or how I had managed to kill the monster, we kept moving, but we both knew it was a fruitless effort. Occasionally, we’d hear another one of those hisses, louder and closer each time.
We both stayed quiet, as much to listen for sounds of the approaching pursuit as to avoid voicing our mutual fears. Any second now, we feared, another lizard-thing would lunge out of the shadows, and this time we wouldn’t be as lucky.
“There!” Dani suddenly cried. “I think I see some light, up ahe–AHH!”
I wheeled on the girl, and saw that the lizard monster behind us had finally caught up, apparently drawn by the sound of Fallon’s voice. Its jaw had clenched down on her arm.
“FAL!” Without thinking, I took a sharp step forward and stabbed my light crystal straight into the thing's head. Just like the last one, the shadow monster reared back in pain, freeing Fallon’s arm but jerking the crystal out of my hand. The monster continued to thrash from side-to-side, my improvised weapon still embedded in its head–but even as I watched, the crystal began to dim further. It was impossible to guess if the crystal would outlast the struggling monster.
“C’mon,” I told Fallon, pulling her forward. She stumbled, and I helped her up, but my arm came away wet and sticky.
“I’m okay,” she gasped in obvious pain. The tunnel was dark enough still that I couldn’t tell if she was lying, but it wasn’t like we had much in the way of options.
We didn’t have the light anymore, but there was another ahead, getting brighter with every uncertain step forward. All we could do was keep struggling forward in the hope of reaching it.
