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Essek could not see an end to the long metal shaft ahead.
The Nein’s footsteps clanged against the flooring as they entered, and everyone flinched. As the sound echoed, Veth shushed the group frantically before pattering off down the tunnel ahead to scout.
With his arms folded beneath his coat, Essek surveyed the dark ruins behind the tunnel, watching for any signs of life or unwanted pursuers. In his grayscale vision he noticed a rat skittering up a fallen building, but otherwise no other signs of movement. Essek uncrossed his arms and rubbed his hands together to ward off the chill in the air.
To Essek’s left, Caleb whispered arcane words and released a few drifting lights into the air in his signature warm amber color. They circled once above his head before hovering off down the metal tube, their light bouncing off the walls and illuminating Veth’s silhouette far ahead.
It was too silent, which was rare for this group. Essek found himself, shockingly, the first to decide the quiet needed to be broken.
“I must assume you like the color amber a great deal, at this point,” he said, facing Caleb and inclining his head toward the little lights dancing away. “You weave it into everything.”
“It is a very nice color,” Caleb agreed, “and you, my friend, are equally guilty of maintaining a theme.”
That surprised a short laugh out of Essek, and he nearly said, you’re right, I have no ground to stand on, but caught the pun just in time to save himself from voicing it. He turned his attention back to examining the tunnel, looking pointedly away from Jester who was wiggling her eyebrows at him. She’d started making faces at him often, and he still wasn’t certain what she was insinuating so he simply shrugged in reply.
This made Jester giggle.
The metal tube ahead was about ten feet tall and equally wide, angled at a subtle decline. Essek was wary of it, of course, because the Mighty Nein were on the remaining Tomb Takers’ trail, and there was no telling what those two had left behind in their wake.
“Seems clear!” Veth’s small voice whisper-yelled from down the tunnel. “Team M-Nein, roll out, affirmative!”
The group traveled down the tube for a good half hour before Essek started to get worried. There was an ever present anxiety that hung over the entire group ever since they’d entered Aeor, but this small space seemed to magnify it. This metallic tunnel was concerning in its design—the deeper they’d gotten, small holes had started to appear along the reflective metallic walls, organic-looking as though made by a creature. The largest of them were nearly a foot wide, though on inspection Essek couldn’t see anything within them even with his remarkable darkvision—they didn’t appear to go more than a few feet before some kind of cloth-like blockage filled them.
A few more minutes passed in relative calm, except for Beau groaning about how long they’d been walking for. The holes continued to increase in regularity.
Caduceus, of course, noticed the skittering noise far before anyone else. The whole group stilled as they saw him freeze.
“Hey everyone, I don’t think we’re alone,” Caduceus said, a single ear twitching as he cocked his head and listened. “Oh boy, yeah, there’s a lot of little things coming our way.”
Now that he’d pointed it out it was audible, when Essek listened carefully. It seemed insectile, a clattering of countless tiny legs on metal that was increasing in volume. Essek tensed, his hands poised to run whatever somatic he might find necessary.
The rest of the Mighty Nein seemed unphased as they readied their weapons and pressed their backs together. Caleb sighed and muttered something under his breath, flipping his coat open to access his components, calm and composed as though a possible attack was the smallest of inconveniences.
Essek hoped that his own anxiety was not betrayed on his face—although he was learning to expect a fight at any second while adventuring, it was a different matter to feel unaffected by it.
With a final surge of skittering noises, many-legged shapes began to pour from the pipes. Spiders. Jester yelped at the sight of them and threw a wave of enchanted unicorns around the group in a circle.
Essek couldn’t quite restrain the shudder that ran through him. He didn’t like spiders. He considered it an ancestral inheritance, considering his people’s history.
Essek prepared a gravity sinkhole—overkill, maybe. Was anything overkill when it came to spiders?
There were so many of them—they just kept coming. They were of all sizes, but each had a similar grey-white coloration to their bodies alongside red eyes. These were creatures of the Underdark, out of place in Aeor. They were designed to see in blackness. Essek was unsettled by the idea that any similarity could be drawn between them and himself.
“I can’t do this forever and ever, guys!” Jester squeaked, raising her glowing hands higher. Licks of smoke twisted up where the spiders burnt away on contact with the ring of unicorns.
Caduceus lifted his staff, but waited as he looked over to the group for a cue. Fjord was much the same, a hand over his chest and magic licking at the edges of his fingertips, but he held still. All of them were hesitant to dip into their magical reserves; They all anticipated the fight that might lie ahead of them today should they catch up to the Tomb Takers.
Veth moved behind Caleb, cocking her crossbow. Fjord summoned Star Razor and lit it up, and the spiders seemed to have a small reaction to its glow, a shudder traveling through their mass as the blade’s holy light ignited.
Caleb was readying components for fireball, Essek realized as Caleb slapped his hands together. Caleb prepared his spells in the way that an experienced sailor tied a knot or a master chef cut vegetables; hardly watching his hands and with incredible confidence.
Essek threw his sinkhole at the opposite end of the hallway to where Caleb’s aimed his flames and watched in satisfaction as the spiders were crunched into dust.
A second later Caleb’s fireball collided with the growing mound of Aeorian spiders, but the many it felled were quickly replaced by a new surge. They’d reacted to the fireball’s light, though. Even those untouched by the flames skittered away from the surge of light that accompanied the fireball.
The spiders were wavering at the edge of the overhead light globules’ glow even now, Essek noted—perhaps it wasn’t entirely the unicorns holding them at bay.
Caleb, brilliant man that he was, picked up on it immediately, lifting his driftglobe from his coat. In the process of hoisting it up Caleb hesitated, and met Essek’s eyes with blatant concern—which was ridiculous. It wasn’t as if drow were vampiric. A bright light would not kill him.
The spiders pressed in further. Essek gave a flippant gesture with one arm, to the tune of ‘just do it already—I am not so fragile.’
‘Fajar’, Caleb said as he relented, hoisting the orb into the air. The driftglobe exploded like the sun itself.
A tight hiss escaped Essek’s lips, a flash of pain that he couldn’t bite down on in time. The reflective metal of the tunnel ensured that no matter where Essek tried to look away it was still overwhelmingly bright. Essek’s skin stung, and he blinked rapidly in an attempt to clear his vision before his eyes flinched shut entirely, unwillingly closed under the continued white-hot burn.
Someone said something about the spiders. The tone seemed positive. Get a grip, he thought to himself, biting the inside of his cheek hard enough that it stung. The tip of his fang might’ve drawn a dot of blood. Still blinded, he poised his hands at the ready for somatics again.
“-ssek? Essek, hey!”
He registered that there was a warm hand on his wrist, and a thumb brushed his chin. Essek was shocked at the amount of stress the small touch released from him—he was unused to blindness, maybe, and the disorientation was disturbing. A touch was grounding.
“Ah. I apologize,” Essek bit out. “I assume the danger has passed.” He lowered his arms, and the gentle hand holding his wrist released. He fought to blink his now-watering eyes open but only saw tones of bright white and grey.
“Not quite passed,” Caleb replied slowly, and there was a sound of moving fabric. “They are holding around us in a ring at the edge of the daylight. It seems to burn them.”
Caleb could not lower the driftglobe, then, until they reached the end of the tunnel, the blasted, neverending tunnel that they’d walked for nearly an hour already.
Of course, once again, Essek was out of place, the only one caught off-guard among this group of experienced, quick-witted adventurers.
He gave in to the burning beneath his eyelids, swallowing his pride and rubbing at his eyes. It did not clear the white from his vision. Fresh, hot frustration curled in his gut.
Soft material was pulled gently over Essek’s eyes, a swath of blue cutting through the white. It smelled like smoke. Essek pulled his hands away from his face as Caleb tied the scarf behind Essek’s head.
“Is this alright?” Caleb asked, a hand lingering on Essek’s shoulder.
Essek nodded stiffly and opened his eyes beneath the covering of Caleb’s scarf. They stung less, but he could tell his vision was still fuzzy from the shock of moving from near darkness to full daylight.
Caleb held his hand against Essek’s cheek quickly before releasing him.
Essek inhaled sharply. “I’m perfectly fine. I will adjust. I apologize—we should continue moving.” He drifted away from Caleb, turning towards the rest of the group. He was fairly certain he was facing the right direction.
Hovering, he felt that the groups’ eyes must be on him. Though he wasn’t able to see them through the ridiculous scarf across his face, their attention, as he pictured it, burned on the back of his neck and up his ears.
Now that he’d pulled away from Caleb’s touch he felt unmoored, drifting, and hyper-focused on his hearing in lieu of his sight. The skittering and clattering noises were ever-present. Something metallic pinged to his right. Essek set his feet on the ground, and felt slightly more stable. He listened to the little noises of the group sheathing their weapons and the continued skitter of legs.
“Oh Essek,” Jester yelped, presumably after seeing his blindfold. “I’m so sorry, do you want another umbrella?”
“No, I’m alright, Jester. Thank you.”
A light tap on his shoulder from behind was followed by Yasha’s rumbling voice. “I could carry you down the hall, if you wanted.”
“I’m quite alright,” Essek insisted, crossing his arms tightly as though he could hide himself behind them. “Please, let’s continue on.”
A faintly furred hand brushed the back of Essek’s neck, and he flinched. With a gentle pulse of energy, cool magic ghosted over his vision and his blurred, watering eyes relaxed.
Caduceus didn’t say anything. He just passed by silently as if he’d done nothing at all. Essek was surprised by how grateful he felt.
“Okay, if you want to keep going we can keep going!” Jester chirped, grabbing Essek’s hand. If it were anyone other than Jester he’d probably yank it back, but Jester was difficult to say no to. He allowed her to tug him as he drifted into his hover.
Essek reached to pull off the scarf—he didn’t like feeling vulnerable, and he could see decently after Caduceus had cleared away the sting. Any further pain beneath the light would be perfectly bearable.
Before he could remove the covering, Caleb brushed up against his shoulder and said quietly, “We all wish you well, you know.” Essek could hear Caleb’s hesitation in his breath. “Ah, I mean,” Caleb continued, “you know I would not use that device flippantly, right?”
Essek’s fingers brushed over the scarf that sat over his eyes. “I am not so fragile,” he said aloud this time, firmly. Gentler, he continued, “I do not mean to burden you all. I am only here to aid you, and if I am no longer an aid I shouldn’t remain here. I’d never want you to hold back on my account.”
“Essek, you…” Caleb muttered something under his breath in what Essek thought was Zemnian. It was quite a beautiful language when Caleb spoke it, so different than he remembered it sounding from those that Essek had dealt with in the assembly. Caleb shook his head. “You should be careful not to say these things within earshot of Caduceus, or you will quickly find yourself trapped within a lengthy plant-based metaphor. No, Essek, of course you are not only here for your usefulness.”
Jester piped up, squeezing Essek’s hand. “Yeah, you’re not here with us because you’re the most powerful option, Essek! Or— Oops, I mean, you’re very super powerful of course. But the reason you’re here and not icky-thong is because you’re our friend, and of course we want to keep you safe and keep you from being hurt, right?”
Essek found his eyes prickling again, for no reason related to the driftglobe. The Nein never ceased to shock him in the amount of ways that they made him feel things he hadn’t thought he was capable—or deserving—of.
“I suppose,” he said finally, and he mostly kept the wobble from his voice.
“Oh, look at that!” Jester said. “The tunnel’s ending up ahead!” She squeezed Essek’s hand, and after a moment’s hesitation Essek squeezed back.
“Goodbye, spiders,” Caduceus said warmly.
“And good riddance,” Fjord huffed, sounding unexpectedly shaken. “Those things almost made me miss the evil baby.”
“Do you think those burnt up ones are still sitting back down the tunnel? The crispy ones?” Yasha asked longingly.
—to which Beau replied with great pride, “Don’t worry babe, I grabbed some of ‘em before we left.”
Essek removed his blindfold to the sound of crunching spider limbs and the dimming light of the driftglobe as Caleb returned it to his cloak. The warmth in his chest when each member of the group turned to him was shocking.
These people never ceased to surprise him.