FWFW 3 - 73

Bronwyn crouched low, keeping to the shadows of the big, twisting tunnel, stalking behind the lumbering swamp troll, easily masking the sound of her passage with its shambling gait. The troll was probably eight feet tall and covered with shaggy moss-like growths that seemed to weigh it down in such a way that it stooped, shuffled, and frequently stopped to groan and breathe heavily.

She’d come to realize that the older these trolls got, the more overburdened with those growths they became, and so, ones like this weren’t very common. Bronwyn figured the harsh environment and the trolls’ natural enemies made it hard for them to survive as they grew large and slow.

She’d spent the last few hours working her way into the depths of the Hollows. She’d had to kill a few trolls, but they weren’t challenging, especially when she took them one by one. They were much weaker than the Rehavash that she, Olivia, and Morgan had fought in the dungeon on Unu. Though her memory might be skewed, they seemed easier to kill than the forest troll she’d fought when she’d been on Thun’s trail, too. Of course, she hadn’t had her hatchets back then. Bronwyn grinned as she brandished the two crescent-bladed weapons—when she charged them with solar Energy, they made short work of the trolls’ mossy armor and hide.

Her idea was to work her way as deep as possible, hoping to find the troll “matriarch” and put an end to this problem as soon as possible. She knew she had a day but didn’t know when the timer started. Had it been as soon as she’d gotten out of the Umbrilak tunnel? Did it begin when she killed her first troll? She feared it was the former, which meant she was already six hours into her free day. If she didn’t finish this troll problem in the next eighteen hours, then the Winter Court would move against Olivia. “That’s how I understood things, anyway,” she said under her breath.

Bronwyn was about to follow the old troll around another corner when she noticed a darker spot in the wide tunnel floor, just behind a pile of jumbled stones. She glided over to investigate and saw that a steep mossy tunnel led down at a perilous angle. “Well, I wanted to get deeper, faster, didn’t I?” Bronwyn stepped into the narrow passage, and, leaning back to keep from toppling down the incline, she started inching her way down into the depths of the Hollows.

As she descended, Bronwyn recalled her conversation with Whitestar. She’d run back to the Urghat encampment as soon as she’d gotten clear of the Umbrilak, and nearly tripping over her words in her haste, she’d told Whitestar that she needed to get the Urghat ready for an assault. She’d told Whitestar to move as close as possible without getting surrounded by trolls and to watch them. “Hope I was right,” Bronwyn hissed as she recalled how she’d told Whitestar that they’d know when she’d succeeded. The trolls would react when the matriarch was slain. “I really fucking hope I was right,” she repeated.

The tunnel grew even steeper, and Bronwyn was forced to sit and slide down it, using her axes to break her speed every time it started to get out of hand. She began to worry that she was descending so far that she’d be out of the Hollows by the time it ended and that she’d have to find another way back toward the trolls, wasting more of her precious hours. When she fell clear of the passage, though, soaring from a high hole in a cavern wall to squelch into a bed of slimy fungi, she knew she was on the right track—outside the fungi pit, two enormous, moss-covered trolls sat, chewing on the carcass of an Urghat.

Bronwyn saw bones, fur, and other remnants that helped her conclude that she’d descended through a feeding chute of sorts. These trolls were too slow and covered with moss to move much at all—the others were feeding them in a twisted show of respect to their elders, she supposed. Not wanting to raise a cacophony by fighting these two old, hillock-sized trolls, Bronwyn edged her way through the slippery, smelly offal pit filled with fungus and the remnants of animals and people and, holding her breath, slipped onto the solid ground far to the side of the ancient feeding monsters.

The cavern was enormous, and she didn’t have a hard time finding shadows to lurk in, as the only light came from ancient, orange Energy crystals that hung in rusted brackets—remnants from a time when the Urghat lived in these depths. Bronwyn had seen these crystals in every part of the warrens she’d been through, and she silently thanked them for not forcing her to carry a light, which allowed her to avoid many, many battles.

As she slithered through the long shadows cast by boulders and stalagmites, one of the enormous old trolls started to sniff the air, turning great, white, rheumy orbs in her direction and then back at the pit. It snorted something in a guttural tongue to its companion, and they both returned to their munching, crunching down on the bones of the dead Urghat. Bronwyn figured the creatures must be used to dead or incapacitated meals coming down the chute—they didn’t seem up for a chase. Bronwyn hurried from the cavern, turning down the first tunnel she came to.

The tunnels were wide down here, and the stone was very clean—no rubble littered the ground, and no moss clung to the walls. A warm, dry breeze seemed to be coming from deeper still, and Bronwyn found herself following it around corners and past dark chambers where she heard the sounds of grunting and dragging flesh and claws. She knew an army of enemies was at her back, and if she was wrong about killing the Matriarch, she might end up dead down there. Her pulse was quick with adrenaline as she slipped by yet another enormous cavern that echoed with the grunts of trolls, and she wondered if they were fighting, eating, or fucking.

“Gross,” she hissed at herself. The tunnel sloped down, and then she saw what she’d been hoping for—an ancient metal door signaled something important, but more than that, the two young trolls standing outside it, brandishing sharpened sticks like spears, told her that she’d reached some sort of inner sanctum, perhaps the lair of the Matriarch.

Bronwyn contemplated her options, considered the urgency in her heart, and decided to go with her gut and act with haste and decisiveness. She cast Mirage Double, and when her twin materialized next to her, she grinned and nodded to it and was a little weirded out when it did the same thing. Bronwyn cast Solar Arms and Solar Shell, and then she charged down the tunnel. Blazing like a torch made of sunlight, she fell upon the troll on the left, and her double, following her silent commands, charged the troll on the right.

Bronwyn’s blazing hatchets carved burning hunks off the troll, taking off limbs and opening its torso in a series of sizzling chops. The creature was dead before it could really react, and then Bronwyn launched herself at the flank of the screaming troll that was distracted by her double. In two hacks, she’d severed its spine and then split its skull. Suddenly silence resounded around her, but a distant racket told her that her murders hadn’t gone unnoticed. She’d have company soon. Bronwyn turned to the doors, held her hatchets in one hand, and then yanked on the right-side door. It protested with a squeal of rust, but it moved.

She pulled until it was just wide enough to slip through, and then she did so, gliding between the doors with her hatchets still ablaze. As she stepped through, pain erupted in her head as massive jaws bit down, scraping along her scalp and up along her neck. Rows of jagged, dirty teeth ripped away part of her scalp and her right ear, and Bronwyn screamed, pulling away, leaving her flesh flapping in the tall, lanky Matriarch’s mouth.

In a red haze of pain, Bronwyn reactivated Solar Shell, adrenaline helping her to sprint away from the monster while she dug around in her storage necklace for one of Thun’s potions. She wrapped her hand around one just as the troll smashed a long, razor-clawed arm into her shoulders, sending her sprawling and singing its own flesh. As she slid over the stone ground, Bronwyn tipped the potion to her lips, and then she understood how Morgan had felt when she’d poured one in his mouth.

The blood stopped sheeting out of her torn scalp, and she felt scabs form and the pain subside. More than that, though, her heart started to thunder and race, and she felt like she had to move or her vessels would burst. She launched herself into a roll and turned to face her attacker, pacing sideways with her hatchets blazing and ready.

The troll Matriarch was not as massive as the older, shambling trolls, but she was taller, with long, grasping arms, and a lean, naked torso, sporting six thick, greenish gray breasts. Overall, she looked more green than the other trolls, and her skin was smoother, absent the moss and fungus that seemed to sprout over her kinfolk’s hides. She had a narrow face more than half occupied by her wide, tooth-filled jaws, and, perhaps the most troubling, she had long black hair hanging from her head and between her legs.

One of the Matriarch’s hands was smoking, and she turned her bulging yellow eyes on Bronwyn and screamed. Bronwyn didn’t react to her right away. Instead, she turned to the door and saw that it still stood slightly open and that a heavy bolt could be thrown to lock it if she closed it. She raced that way, ignoring the Matriarch’s long-limbed charge, and slammed her shoulder into the door, closing it. Just as the Matriarch was about to slash her again, Bronwyn ducked to her left and drove the bolt home. Then, she turned to face the creature that had bitten her ear off. “All right, bitch. Let’s dance!”

The troll was fast and vicious, and Bronwyn knew that if she hadn’t had solar Energy blazing from her hatchets, the creature would have healed from her cuts before she could pile up enough damage to hamper her. As it was, though, Bronwyn ducked under her long-clawed slashes and slowly hacked the giant troll apart. The creature screamed in rage and agony as Bronwyn’s solar Energy burned through her flesh, and though she managed to claw Bronwyn a few times, the cuts weren’t terribly deep, thanks to her quick reflexes, and her Solar Shell caused as much, or more damage to the furious troll’s claws.

As the potion began to wear off and Bronwyn felt fatigue start to set in, she backed away from the hobbled Matriarch and cast Wrath of Summer, not wanting to risk failure by stubbornly trying to win with just her hatchets. A blinding light erupted from the ceiling of the enormous cavern, Illuminating the entire space for the first time. Bronwyn gasped when she saw what lurked in the shadows outside the light of her blazing hatchets—hundreds of piled, glistening eggs, like mounds of giant caviar. She was so taken by the sight that she missed her spell’s destruction of the Matriarch, and when the bright light faded and she looked back, the troll was nothing more than a pile of ash.

Bronwyn stood there, chest heaving, scalp stinging, and ears ringing, and watched as a hundred large, purple-gold Energy orbs coalesced over the ashes and streamed into her.

***Congratulations! You have achieved level 26 Summer Banneret and have 28 attribute points to distribute.***

The pain in her scalp faded entirely with the euphoria of the Energy infusion, but when she reached up a hand to feel at her ear and the spot where her flesh and hair had been ripped away, she found only smooth skin. Realizing her ear was gone, she hissed in anger and frustration and flipped her hair over that side of her head. “That sucks,” she groused, walking deeper into the cavern and recasting Solar Arms so her hatchets would light up the space again. “Time to crack some eggs!”