If there was one thing to be said for the place, it’s that the air was incredibly clean. Normally when you think of a city you expect at least some pollution, and ruins in general tend to be quite musty and dusty. It just comes with the territory. Here, though, there was none of that. Just the cold night(?) air and a gentle, mournful breeze. That’s about all the praise I can offer it, however. Aside from ‘fresh air’, the place was dark, spooky, and horrifyingly quiet. It’s the kind of quiet that has preceded every jump-scare in history; a silence waiting to be broken by something leaping out and trying to suck your face off (in a bad way).

  I shivered, doing my best to convince myself it was from the cold and not out of very reasonable fear. I coiled my rope back up, shoved it into my bag, and then shrugged on said bag. My staff was clutched tight in my right hand, while my left flitted uncertainly between the pouches containing the ‘spell-beads’, and my waist where the hemisphere of the folded cannon currently was. Anything to convince myself that I was ready and prepared to face whatever was out there. The other three looked somewhat self-assured, although I guess they would be. It must be nice to be prophesied; to know there’s some purpose waiting for you in the future. Gives you a sense of security, I’d imagine.

  Lacking that myself however, I looked around the gloom to the best of my abilities. The shadow-people were still standing in front of the glass eyes of the head, so we decided not to go that way. A victory for the forces of self-preservation.

  There was enough rubble piled up around the outside of the head that we could actually step down fairly easily, though balancing was a bit tricky. Even though we’d decided that our main focus for getting out of here was speed, that didn’t mean we had to attract unnecessary attention. Our movements were deliberate and cautious, taking care not to disturb random rocks for no good reason. We made it down to street level pretty much unscathed, which was a blessing. It was also scary. Even though the head was a prison of sorts, it had also felt safe. They had been ‘out there’ and we had been ‘in here’. Now we were all ‘out here’ though, and I felt vulnerable and exposed.

  As I’ve said, another problem was that we didn’t actually know which way led out of the city, and which way would just take us into the centre. Lacking anything to base the decision off, we’d just agreed to move away from the shadow-people, and sort of hope. Besides, if we kept going in a straight line, we’d have to make it out eventually.

  We set off, every heartbeat like a bass drum in my ears, and every footstep we each took going off like a gunshot in the silent city. By any reasonable standards, we were moving basically silently. The problem, though, was that Denofell was literally silent. It’s something we don’t really embrace as a society. We’re social creatures, and more to the point, there’s always something making noise somewhere. The hum of a machine somewhere, the faint whisper of wind, or a distant cricket. This city was as still and silent as the grave, and we were disturbing its rest.

  I’m not actually opposed to that on principle, it must be said. I’m an archaeologist by trade, and that was much more loosely-defined back then. The idea of cracking open a tomb and having a good look around in the name of adventure, learning, and profit, was very normal to me. Likewise, ghouls and traps were a sort of occupational hazard, and I’d become used to the idea that just because someone was dead, that didn’t mean they didn’t want to keep their stuff. I just felt like living people had more of a right to that stuff. Seriously, the least you could do is leave it to someone you liked and trusted, like your family and friends, instead of sticking a perfectly good sword and all your money underground for all time.

  There was a difference however, between my previous experiences and my current one. Before, I was part of a team of around ten, entering a small tomb that might contain one or two of those things. We’d think about what we could do, and if it all looked a bit much, we’d just… leave. Here, I was one of four, launched deep into a whole city. We didn’t know what was in here, how many of those things there were, or even the way out. There were too many unknowns, and I’d happily leave the first 2 as mysteries if it meant l could learn the third (and then make use of it).

  What this meant, though, was that everything we did felt too loud. It didn’t seem to matter how quiet we were trying to be, we were literally the only things making any noise at all. I dared to hope that maybe the shadow-people had lost their ability to hear, since they’d have no use for it somewhere silent. Like those species that live in caves with no light, and eventually lose their eyes? Fat chance, I thought. It was nice to dream, though.

  Under normal circumstances, I’d say I felt like we were doing alright. We were moving at a good pace and not making a whole lot of noise doing it. Sadly, we didn’t know where we were going, so we could be moving at a good pace in the wrong direction, and even ‘not a whole lot of noise’ was still ‘all the noise in this place’.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  All of our heads were on a swivel, looking up, down, round and round, straining into the dark. Nobody wanted to give any sort of false alarm, in case that drew the creatures. It was still difficult not to jump at shadows, and there were so many shadows. As we walked, I was also hosting an internal debate.

  The motion: “This house would not like to see any shadow-people”.

  The arguments for: The shadow-people are scary. Not seeing them meant we didn’t have to fight them. We could get out of the city more safely and easily. I was more likely to live.

  The arguments against: Not seeing them didn’t mean they couldn’t see us. You can’t fight what you can’t see. We know they’re out there and very good at hiding. If they snuck up on us we might die.

  In short it was a question of ‘if we don’t see any of them, are we avoiding them or are they sneaking up on us?’ The fact there was no good answer wasn’t very encouraging. I let the debate end in a draw, and got back to looking around.

  Our little procession went in the order of Nalfis, Tove, Me, Alf. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, it was nice to not be right at the back. It felt less exposed, as much as I felt bad for Alf. He was practically facing backwards at all times, resulting in a slightly silly crab-walk. I put a hand around his wrist, and lifted his hand to my shoulder, letting it rest there and giving him a point of connection in case we would diverge. He gave a short squeeze in what I decided was gratitude.

  Under other circumstances I would’ve just held his hand or wrist, but I selfishly wanted to keep both of my hands free. I was mentally running down the list of options I had, magic-wise, if a fight began. The list was actually quite long – it’s surprising how much magic you can learn when you only have to focus on the academics of it, since carving it into the beads largely offloaded the ‘mechanics’ of how to do magic. There were ups and downs though. I had breadth but not so much depth. My magic wasn’t quite as powerful as other people, those who did actually know how to cast magic, not just move energy around. I was sort of ‘pre-programmed’. Plus, each bead was single-use, and if I ran out of a particular type then I wouldn’t be able to do it again until I carved new ones. And carving new ones was a complete bitch. I kept a stock of blanks with me, but the very easiest would still take at least a solid 15 minutes of undisturbed carving, where a single tiny slip or nick meant I had to restart completely.

  Loredump aside, the long-ish list of ‘spells’ I had tucked into my pockets was swiftly getting whittled down (heh, wood pun) as I thought about it. Half of it was ‘utility’ – spells for climbing walls, making small lights, changing my appearance and so on – while the other half (the half that could actually come in handy in a fight) was shrinking as I crossed off choices that would make tons of noise or be useless against things that were probably incorporeal. Plus, should I pick a spell to protect myself or to attack them? Quite a few difficult decisions to be made. It’s tough being me.

  The decision was taken out of my hands when I felt Alf’s one tighten into a vice grip on my shoulder. I stopped dead as he did, while lunging my arm forward and prodding Tove in the back with my staff. She turned, seeing us stopped, and passed the tap onto Nalfis. I was the last person to turn around, but I already had a depressingly good idea of what I’d see when I did. No points for guessing what it was.

  My blood ran cold, and I licked my lips, which had suddenly gone very dry. There were half-a-dozen of them that I could see, and I made the assumption there were more that I couldn’t. Each group stared at the other. I assumed they were staring at us at least, since they didn’t have faces or eyes. Creepy barely even begins to describe it. I wouldn’t have said it was a Mexican stand-off (even if we’d had the term back then), because that would have suggested a bit of mutual fear, and it was all feeling very one-sided.

  The nearest of them began to move, approaching us with all the noise your own shadow makes. None. The starting gun had been fired, and so we did what any competitor does in that scenario: we ran. It really felt like a horror film. No music, no background noise, just our own heavy breathing and scrambling footfalls as we did our best to pick our way through streets that were covered in debris, cutting corners where walls had collapsed, and otherwise trying to keep as straight a path as possible. We were a stumbling, jangling mess, but by the Gods we were going to keep running while we could.

  It’s a terrible thing, to be chased by something silent. Our ears and brains are truly amazing pieces of range-detecting equipment, and so often when you are being chased (what, you don’t get chased often?), this is a very important bit of information to have. Turning around means you’re not looking where you’re running, and you will slow down by default. This is just a fact.

  But as terrible as slowing down is when you’re getting chased, worse still is not knowing where the chasers are. So that meant we were all shooting the briefest glances we could get away with over our shoulders, hoping not to trip over a random rock as we did. It’s damn hard to try and pick out a moving shadow when you’re running in the dark, and I wasn’t doing great. The other three all remained determined and disciplined as they ran, which helped me realise that they were in their element here. This hair-raising, death-defying, heart-in-your-mouth and balls-to-the-wall action was what they did, and here I was, doing it with them.

  Why? Search me.