Hide and Sneak

I crept down the passage with nothing but the bioluminescence from Viney lighting our way. The walls oozed disconcertingly, the floor was damp and sticky, and here and there my foot met the brittle crack of bones, long abandoned by their previous owners. There was a faint groaning that reminded me of a night I spent in the Land of the Dead--the sort of groaning only made by disembodied heads and people listening to bad puns. I began to feel the first pangs of fear and doubt as my foot crushed yet another skull, its decaying eyeballs peering at me through the steaming muck. 

What if the Guy was a jerk? What if he was just some dudebro pretending to be a hero? As much as I longed for company, what if he was boring and obnoxious? What if we had political disagreements? What if he didn't like plants? Worse still, what if he was a Pacific Northwesterner? All those guys know how to talk about is the weather--and we have none of that down here. 

And I stopped in my tracks, attacked by visions of dull conversations about the humidity and windchill and lack of sunshine and oh God I can't care less what type of rain you prefer. A rumbling and sloshing of footsteps awoke me from my reverie and I tucked within one of the rough crevices within the wall, pulling Viney behind me to dim his light. 

A contingent of, what are those? Bowelbears? Oh gross. They were marching straight towards me--maybe ten of them--slowly and steadily. One of them had a drum and I could hear a faint chant, almost like a song, echoing through the chamber.

This is what I heard:

"God save our hungry Wyrm,

Long live our vicious Wyrm,

God save the Wyrm:

Send her victorious,

Food that is goriest,

Long to reign around us:

God save the Wyrm.

O Lord, our Wyrm, take flight,

Rend her enemies in fight,

Make them most foul.

Confound their magic sticks,

Frustrate their conjured tricks,

For thee these wounds we inflicts, (at this point I heard a voice yell in pain and shout out, “That’s grammatically incorrect and hardly counts as good verse!”)

God save us all.

Thy choicest beasts in store,

In her be pleased to roar;

Long may she slay:

May she defend our maws,

And ever give us claws

To sing with hate and vice

God save the Wyrm"

I stayed well out of sight until they were gone, and as I hid I caught sight of the Guy's face. Battered though he was, he seemed to enjoy grammar well enough. I think I may have caught his eye, for although he was chained and bloodied, he had a little smirk on his dirty face, and my fear melted away.

As they squelched and sloshed into the distance,I began to follow. I'm sure this Guy who liked grammar and could smirk when being led down the digestive passages of a dragon by Bowelbears could talk about something more interesting than the weather. The beginnings of a plan were forming in my mind as I stole quietly through the passageway, but suddenly I was grabbed by a rough hand and pulled into the dark. 

"Avast missy you best be strugglin' no more," said the creature. Its hot breath stank of sand and rum in all the worst ways. The scent was so foul that I didn't even have time to say "Why did the pirate go to the Apple store?" before everything faded to black.

-Girl.IAD

(To buy an iPatch! Arrrrr!!!)