Chương 346: 7.2

Bruiser did not consider herself one prone to cowardice. When she was a man she'd have decked someone for suggesting it and now she'd have a long thought about precisely how much of an unmanning she could get away with given that insult. So she was being quite perfectly stalwart and brave when she vowed to all the gods that had their grubby hands in her flesh and bones that only the Shining Countess herself and in person would ever drive Bruiser to travel by cave sloop again!

She never thought that she would be happy to see a cloudy overcast night with hardly a star visible. But here she was grinning like a fool behind her veil. If she was only a year into the curse she would have denied the tears welling up in her eyes. But Waif eyes were traitorous things like the rest of her face and they bubbled up like a spring in even the hardest of her 'kin'. Bruiser would know, she was among the hardest.

Fortunately the lanky colts and fillies in Robin's crew knew better than to comment and the pale sailors were too busy being smug at all the 'sunlover cave-virgins' getting almost equally weepy alongside the waif. Which managed to finally break her gaze from the wonderfully dreary expanse of black sky and faint flickering of lightning. None of that awful accursed false sky now with its soul destroying lights. None of the dim red coal lamps as the only glow on the ship for days upon days upon uncountable days.

None of that horrific and all consuming baleful glow of the 'guide house light' searing out at them across the shining black of that endless underground sea! Like a great red eye glaring out at them. Blinking slow and ponderously at them. Cavesloop crews and their captains were insane! Utterly mad! No one could possibly willingly go through the ordeal that Bruiser had just lived through willingly. Not once. Not twice. But every season!

Going back and forth through that horrible twisting maze of rivers, braving that abyssal black expanse where any light that was not the baleful red of spilled blood and dying fires could send you into a 'light drunk madness' or apparently summon something far worse. No one in their right minds would find staring into the searing hateful lantern light of the 'guiding tower' for hours upon hours on end satisfying. No one sane would throw a party in celebration in that horrible red gloom!

It was like some bizarre accursed village of pale skinned and bald men and women. Eyes so wide and gaping in the darkness they looked like the horrific fish they fed on! Bruiser shuddered in memory of the things that came out of the water on that shore. What the cave dwellers cooked and ate! She'd never before understood quite what was meant by the vileness of lairspawn spoken of in the temple, the horrors of the caverns and deep places.

But the way that darkness below had twisted simple fish and other animals she could not even think of what they once were? The horrible wrinkly things that she might have heard one of the 'light keepers' call a pig? The wretched things looked more like maggots with cloven hooves than any pig she had seen! This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. Eyes lost or nonexistent under the rolls of translucent flesh. All heaving wrinkled skin and blue-black veins!

But it was all past them now. That eerie warren of tunneled dwellings and its wan slinking inhabitants. The endless watery tunnels. The Stars and Heaven's damned howling winds echoing twice a day! The even worse silence of the abyssal crossing?! Conflicting and contradictory horrors piled one after the other! Bruiser took a heavy breath and could not keep the laughter out of her throat as she exhaled. Not trembling, but harsh and raw with relief!

She didn't even care when the rain began to fall onto her face, nor when it drenched her hair slick to her head. Soaked through her clothes. How it bit into her skin with the cold. But even if the drops stung bitterly in the chill of the air it was so much better that for she was out and free under a proper open sky! But best of all? Even beyond the way she was soaking through nearly to shivering under a proper open storm after what felt like seasons of time underground?

It was that they were about to be free of this awful boat and the awful leering presence of the damn crew of this cave sloop! Days on days trapped on that awful boat or in the winding halls of that accursed red lighthouse! If she'd not seen the horrors that swam through the very same waters she saw flowing out from the caverns behind them she might have leaped from the boat there and tried her luck swimming to the lights of the proper yellow glow more beautiful than gold just a mile ahead of her.

But memories of the single 'light drunk' man held her back. Still the beautiful golden lit city drew her in a way that had nothing to do with being what the damned dark broken sailors called a 'sun lover'. It was just common decency for a man or woman to want to see the world lit by something other then near dead coals and whatever the fuck that fiend begotten red lighthouse was! It was unnatural, surely it laid a curse upon the things under it?!

Black roots almost squirming in the mud and shit, the awful maggoty pigs chewing with unseen teeth. Goopy fluids around their flesh hidden 'faces'. Rooting around in that filth, crunching on bones. Bruiser nearly swung when a hand landed on her shoulder, only just realizing that the figure next to her was Robin, wearing a traveler's cloak like a sensible man instead of standing in just a shirt and trousers to soak through in the freezing rain like some idiotic waif did.

He handed her the substantially shorter cloak fitted to her without a word. She grunted to him, the sound probably not even reaching his ears as the rain began to fall heavier. Crashing down into the rising swells around them. Gods and fortunes damn her was Bruiser even going to be able to stand on dry land without wobbling after this? She barely even noticed the rise and fall of the ship under her, even as the wind built up towards what sounded like a rather nasty storm.

Voices from the sailors calling out things she was still lost on. Something to do with ropes, sails, oars. All the bizarre arcana that let them turn a howling wind and raging water rapids in a tunnel into movement in the direction they willed. Never again. Bruiser was never traveling by those dark ways ever again. Not on her life! Robin finally said something loud enough to be heard over the sudden downpour and thunder." Let's get below deck and let the captain and his crew do their work.

We're almost done with them." Bruiser didn't dare answer, the trembling from the lack of heat and the deep wet was making her shake. She simply followed Radomil down into the muggy, damp, stuffy but thankfully warm depths of the sloop. She would have to be an idiot to stay out here in the storm, no matter how beautiful that overcast sky was. She'd never realized just how light a starless heaven could be. But then again anything would seem blazing after the dark beneath the earth.

Not even pitch and soot compared to the black of that abyss. Somehow made all the deeper for the terrible blue lights within it.