RPGBloggers NaNoWriMo – Short Story (Part 3)
Last month, I posted a call for RPGBloggers to create a short story as part of NaNoWriMo. You can see the schedule below. So far it’s going really well and the story is turning out great. I can’t wait to see how it ends! 
November 9th – Part 1
November 16th – Part 2
November 23rd – Part 3 (posted below; written by Tom Martin)
November 30th – Part 4 (to be posted on Exchange of Realities)
7
Shalla stopped running. Durgin, sensing the halfling’s hesitance, slowed to a halt and leaned against a tree. His chest worked like a bellows and he grunted between breaths. “Come on,” he called, his rheumy eyes pleading. “We have to keep moving.”
“No.” Shalla crossed her arms. “You just said ‘nowhere will be safe.’ That doesn’t make sense.”
“What?? We don’t have time for this!”
“When you found me, you said ‘gotta keep moving, get to safety.’ Just now, you said ‘nowhere will be safe.’”
Durgin waved a hand. “I can explain later, after…”
”Also? If you were being chased by something, you’d likely have an idea of what it was. You may have blacked out, but you didn’t just wake up running.”
“Fine! Accursed halflings and all their curious ways. I’ll tell you, but we have to get moving.”
Shalla shook her head.
“WHAT? What is it NOW?”
“You’re a stranger,” the child said flatly.
“Oh for the LOVE of the HAMMER,” Durgin yelled. He turned and continued running.
Shalla smiled to herself. Mother would be proud. So many halfling children go missing, mother always said, because they trust strangers. Some are sold to Winebottom shops as slaves, some are sold back to their parents at a price, and some meet fates too grisly to name. Shalla would have to brag later that she’d outwitted some fat dwarf in the forest. She would have the rapt attention of all the other-
The halfling turned around. What was that? She’d heard something in the direction the dwarf had come from. Kinda like a distant crashing noise, Shalla thought. As she listened, a kind of horror dawned on her as she realized that the sounds were growing less and less distant. She took several careful steps back, eyes scanning the trees for movement.
Movement came, but from above the trees. An opening in the canopy was blotted out as an enormous shape filled it. It was a head, and it was looking at her. It had ten eyes, arrayed much as a spider’s might be, and they glowed down at her from above a wide maw rimmed with crocodile teeth.
Shalla screamed and bolted. The beast mewled out a tremendous bellow and began to lumber after her. It ran through trees, knocking them aside like stalks of wheat. The crashing sound was thunderous. The thing’s tread shook the earth so badly that the halfling had to time her own frenzied gait just right to avoid losing her footing.
Durgin had heard the trumpeting cry of the monster behind him and winced inwardly for the halfling child. I did try to warn her, he told himself. I did. Fool child wouldn’t listen… wouldn’t run.
“RUN!” Shalla shrieked, coming up fast behind him. Her little halfling legs were a blur and she outpaced the dwarf by almost twice his speed.
Durgin cast a glance behind and gasped. The thing from the portal was charging them at a dead run, its thick legs crashing into the earth and sending up clouds of dirt. It was moving far too quickly. It would catch them both in a matter of-
The dwarf burst through a brush into a clearing before a cliff, and Morgril was standing there. He was grinding his teeth and had set his staff against the ground, aimed against the treeline. The sight of him was so shocking that the halfling child had stopped and was staring up at the wizard in terror.
Durgin huffed past them. Beyond was the cliff. A river met the ledge some fifty feet to his left, and the dwarf could hear the rushing of the waterfall some several hundred feet straight down into a shallow lagoon. Durgin skidded to a stop and looked down the cliff.
The creature burst from the clearing, roaring. Morgril tamped his staff twice against the ground and fired a whickering blaze of white light at its eyes. The thing tossed its head, clawing at the air around it, never ceasing to run. An enormous foot crushed the earth beside Shalla. Shocked out of her daze, she ran again.
The rift-monster began to grind on the lip of the cliff. Its arms turned for balance, but it was too late. It lurched forward. Its foot brushed Shalla as she ran and in her panic, she rolled off the edge along with the monster. Time slowed to a dead crawl as the halfling child, the immense beast, and a ton or so of earth and shattered trees hung over the drop to the lagoon.
An arm shot out from beneath the cliff’s edge. “GOT YOU, LASS!” Durgin’s strong hand clasped around Shalla’s forearm. The dwarf had found a ledge just beneath the cliff, a small catwalk that didn’t even give five feet of area to stand in.
Shalla swung down in an arc as the keening beast fell. Her eyes met Durgin’s. “Don’t let go don’t let go!” The monster landed in the lagoon beneath them, and the resulting sound was like the colliding of worlds.
Durgin pulled the shaking girl up to the cliff. “It’s all right, there, you’re okay.”
A shadow fell over them. “Durgin Falbarrow, don’t lie to her.” Morgril stood there, blocking the sun with his hands on his hips.
8
“The problem, mind you, isn’t so much that Collin betrayed us. It’s that you broke the boundary.”
Durgin rolled his eyes angrily. “How was I supposed to know not to step inside your sissy-circle?”
Morgril went on. “Breaking the boundary is exactly what Collin wanted, of course. When a clumsy, foolish dwarf scuttles into a hallowed circle, the spell is broken. If the spell happens to be the Portent of Doors, a tear in the fabric between realities can be rent. This is what Collin wanted when he unleashed the ogre on the village. It was all toward this end.”
The wizard, the dwarf, and the halfling girl were walking toward Shalla’s village. It seemed the only sensible thing to do while Morgril muttered to himself, trying to piece together what had happened. “So. Collin turned on us. Why? Why would he want to open a door to a beast-plane? The answer, of course, is to unleash immense hellish creatures here… or to slip through the portal.”
Durgin said “He didn’t go through the portal, he…”
“He died, yes, I know. Don’t interrupt again. The thing crushed him and he seemed to be as surprised about the black hole in space opening before us as you were… BUT he led us to this, which makes me think he was acting at someone’s behest.”
“Who was Collin?” Shalla asked.
Morgril ignored her and went on. “Only a few catalogued foes of the realm are interested in opening portals YET unable to do it on their own YET capable of ensnaring someone’s will. It could be anything from a succubus to a death courser or maybe a…”
Shalla spoke up again. “Was Collin an elf?”
This time Durgin and Morgril stopped and looked at her. The wizard asked “How could you know that?”
The halfling kicked feebly at some acorns and shrugged. “Sometimes I dream things. I was sleeping in a tree and I was dreaming that an elf was talking in a clearing with a scary looking lady who seemed to blink from place to place. She was almost… foggy. With gray skin.”
“And jagged teeth,” Morgril finished.
“Yes, that’s right!” Shalla nodded.
“Jelmaira. Third of the Punished Sisters,” the wizard mumbled to himself. He smiled warmly at the halfling and knelt before her. “Shalla, is it? When you dream like this, is everything coated in a glaze of shadow?”
“Um… yes.”
“Is everything silent, though a storm might be waging?”
“Yes! How did you guess?”
“I didn’t guess. You’re a vision-kin.” Morgril began to root through his bag. “It sometimes happens among children born after a long winter. One last question for you, love.” He pulled out a short, dark dagger with a red handle and offered it to her.
“Do you think you can do it again?”
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Tom Martin November 24th, 2008 at 10:04 AM
Aww shucks, thanks