Ian stumbled and fell as the tree holding their house shook violently and a rain of debris pelted the wooden shack. When he looked up again, he had a clear view through the door. The crone stood on the edge of the platform, her arms raised and a strange tumble of words coming out of her mouth. Ian strained to hear what she was saying, but his ears were still ringing from the most recent explosion. With determination, he scrambled to his feet and hurried to the door.
He caught himself in the doorway as yet a fourth stone was blown to pieces. Forced to shield his head from raining debris, he attempted to call out to the crone, but the breath caught in his throat when he realized that below, the earth was no longer simply churning; it was bubbling and roiling as if it were a cauldron of boiling liquid.
Above the ringing in his ears, he heard the sound of a thousand roots being ripped from the ground, and a great gap opened wide to reveal a monstrosity like none he could possibly have imagined.
A giant form lifted itself out of the ground, its skin pinkish gray and wrinkled, with dozens and dozens of roots shooting straight out at odd angles all along its arms, neck, and head. The creature’s hair was made of long shanks of gnarled leafless branches, and its face was sharp and pointed, and it reminded Ian of a turnip.
Its black eyes were beady and cruel, and as it rose triumphantly from the ground, Ian realized with a sudden heart-pounding terror that he was looking directly into the eyes of Lachestia the Wicked!
Nearby, the crone stopped her chanting and looked back at him over her shoulder one last time. “I shall leave you one final gift, lad. May it be enough to see Theo to safety.” And then the old woman fell forward in a graceful swan dive straight off the platform.
Ian gasped in horror as he attempted to reach out to stop the crone, but he was too late. He watched as she fell in perfect time to the rising of the evil sorceress. The pair met in midair, and Lachestia, wrapping her long spiny arms around the old woman, shouted in triumph when she clutched the crone, and snarled, “Hello, Mummy!”
The sorceress squeezed the crone like a python, crushing the very life right out of her. The old woman struggled in her daughter’s arms, and Ian leaned over the lip of the bridge as he cried, “No!” but nothing could help the crone now.
The ancient one’s head fell back limply, her mouth hanging open while she gasped for air. And all the while, Lachestia laughed and laughed and sank slowly back toward the earth.
Ian thought for certain that the old woman had already died when, suddenly, the crone raised both her fists high overhead. Something she held in each hand glinted in the morning light. Lachestia stopped laughing abruptly just as the crone brought her fists down sharply, using the last of her strength to plunge two small daggers into her daughter’s eyes.
There was a scream so terrible that Ian fell to his knees and covered his ears, barely managing to crawl quickly back into the house. When the noise had mercifully faded away, he looked up into the stunned faces of Theo, Eva, and a very well-looking Carl and announced, “The crone is dead and Lachestia has risen. We must leave at once!”
CHECKMATE
Magus the Black stood still as a statue, lost in thought at the edge of Deadman’s Forest. His eyes were closed while he focused on what was happening deep within the trees. There was one individual he was most concerned with, and as he stood there, he could sense her life force flutter out like the flame of a candle against a strong current of air.
Magus smiled evilly. His aunt the crone was dead. And as Lachestia was the only thing capable of killing the crone, that could only mean that the tanks he’d so ingeniously arranged to destroy his sister’s prison had accomplished their task. The curse binding his sister had been lifted.
The sorcerer’s smile spread even wider. He’d done it. He’d freed the sorceress of earth. And because it was prophesized that Lachestia would kill the Guardian and bring about the fall of the One, Magus’s plans were all but complete.
So it was with great confidence that he stepped into the very woods he would not have set foot in even an hour before. The threat to him no longer existed. He had only to meet up with his wicked sister and convince her to find and destroy the Guardian and all would fall into place.
The sorcerer could hardly wait to tell his sire of his great success. And the only thing he looked forward to more was the look on Caphiera’s face when she learned of her clever brother’s deed. Surely Demogorgon would soon favor Magus above all his siblings.
Screams echoed out of the dark woods and gunfire erupted half a kilometer ahead. Magus’s mood improved a fraction more. “Ah,” he sighed contentedly as he made his way forward. “The perfect start to a perfect morning. Death, pain, and perhaps later, a bit of torture.” And it was with these thoughts that he quickened his pace—not wanting to miss a moment of fun.
LOAM OF GROUND NO LONGER TAMED
I an launched himself across the room and lifted Theo off her knees. “We must leave here at once!” he repeated.
“What’s happening?” Carl asked, his brow still wet but his eyes clear.
“No time to explain,” Ian said, holding tightly to Theo’s hand while he dashed back to the door. Looking over his shoulder at Carl and Eva, he asked, “Can you both run?”
Eva stood and nodded firmly. Carl wobbled as he got to his feet and nearly fell down again. Eva moved quickly to his side and pulled his arm around her neck. “I’ll help him,” she promised.
By Ian’s side, Theo screamed. Ian whipped his head around to stare down at the ground, which was a churning mass of earth. Small clods of dirt shot into the air and pelted the tank attempting to back up out of the slippery mess. The roiling ground underneath prevented it from making any headway.
A German soldier opened the lid of the tank and they could all see his wide, frightened eyes while he stared at the ground churning about his panzer. Suddenly, a gap directly underneath the tank opened and began to spread wider and wider, until the armored vehicle tipped onto its side and fell into the chasm with the soldier clinging desperately to it. In the next instant the ground closed up, and with a tremendous crunch, both the tank and its driver were no more.
Other soldiers on the ground dashed forward out of the woods to investigate, and as they drew close to the point where the tank had just been, small gaps in the earth opened underneath their very feet, and one by one, they began to disappear into their own early graves.
Ian and the others were too stunned by the scene below to move for several moments, especially when one soldier darted away from a hole only to be caught by a large spiny hand that erupted out of the earth and pulled him kicking and screaming underground.
“Gaw!” he heard Carl gasp. “That’s frightful!”
It was all Ian needed to hear to pull him out of his own horrified stupor. “Come on!” he called, and moved out onto the platform, searching for the tree that held the ladder. But as they approached it, the earth beneath the trees that suspended the wooden bridge began to churn, causing the trees to pitch, as if the trees were being torn out by their very roots. And then the branches began to sag and dip inward, and the bridge that Ian and the others were on buckled and started to crumble.
“We can’t go that way!” Theo shouted as the tree with the ladder pitched forward and creaked in a slow fall down. “Run the other way!”
They turned as one and bolted for the opposite end. Behind them Ian heard a crash as branches snapped and limbs broke away from their trunks. The platform they were on started to break apart right underneath them, and Ian felt like he was running uphill. “Get to that tree!” he cried, pointing to one that supported a rope ladder.
He pulled Theo roughly along, willing himself to make it in time. They had mere meters to go when more crashing sounded and their platform pitched sideways, nearly dislodging all four of them.
Ian flattened himself against the wood and gripped the top edge tightly with one hand while holding on to Theo with the other. She screamed in terror and he prayed that he
could hold on to her long enough to swing her back toward the platform. He saw Eva and Carl pitch forward and he cried out as they both swung over the top of the planks and disappeared from view.
“Carl!” he shouted. “Carl!”
“We’re here!” he heard his friend call back from just below him.
Ian let out an anxious breath and concentrated on pulling Theo to safety. He swung her into his torso and said, “Use me to climb up!”
Theo clung to his shoulder and slowly worked her way to the top of the planks. Ian then pulled himself up and looked over the edge. Eva and Carl were dangling precariously on a nearby branch. “Can you make it to the ladder?” he asked them, pointing to the rope and wooden rungs, which were nearly within their reach.
Carl turned his head awkwardly, sweat glistening on his forehead as he swung himself up to straddle the branch before helping Eva up too. “I believe so,” he said, motioning for Eva, who was in front of him, to go first. Ian saw that she was terrified, but she managed to move down the branch toward the rope. He hoped anxiously that she would get there before the tree they were in tumbled to the ground.
Below them, more and more soldiers were shouting in terror as they attempted to run away from the whirlpool of swirling earth. It seemed that every few seconds another of them was sucked down into the dirty depths.
Ian urged Eva to hurry. He knew they were running out of time. The brave girl scooted her way closer and closer, then stopped just feet away from the ladder, which was hanging at an odd angle away from the branch. “I can’t!” she said, her voice hoarse. “I can’t reach it!”
“Try!” Ian commanded. “Eva! You’ve got to try!”
The poor girl began to sob and she shook her head vigorously. “I’ll miss it!”
Carl had moved right up behind her and he was doing his best to coax her along. “Just reach one arm out, Eva,” he said calmly. “One hand to stretch to the ladder is all it will take. You won’t fall. I’ll hold on to you. I promise.”
But Eva’s panic was rising and she continued to cry and shake her head. “Carl!” Ian yelled, his heart racing as he felt their time running out. “Make her grab the rope!”
Carl ignored him and continued to speak softly to her. To Ian’s immense relief, the method worked. Eva finally reached a tentative hand out, stretching for the rope, but just as her fingers were within reach of it, the platform gave another tremendous jolt and he and Theo were sent over the top again.
Theo lost her grip and fell. Ian reached frantically for her and just managed to catch her by the arm. She screamed and begged for him not to let go as she dangled twenty feet above the swirling ground.
But Ian’s own grip on the platform was slipping, and he knew he could no longer hold both their weight. He looked about frantically for something nearby and saw that Carl had got Eva safely onto the rope ladder and was inching his way back down the branch toward him and Theo. “Hold on, mate!” Carl called. “I’m coming!”
But Ian didn’t know if he could hold on. He closed his eyes and focused all his effort on gripping the platform. His fingers were numb and his arm throbbed with the strain. And then, by some miracle, Theo’s weight was lifted from his grasp. He opened his eyes and saw Carl balancing atop the branch right under them as he brought her down to the safety of the branch.
Ian immediately reached up and grabbed the platform with his other hand, panting with the effort. “Ian!” Carl called, using his arms to balance on the branch. “I believe I can help you down as well! Just let go and I’ll try and catch you, mate!”
Ian assessed the branch Carl was teetering on. Theo was safely moving her way along the branch, but he worried that his weight would be too much for Carl to hold while keeping his balance on the branch, and they’d likely both fall off as a result. “No,” he told him, straining to hold on to the platform. “Get Theo down, Carl! I’ll find my own way!”
Carl gave him a worried frown, but he sat down to straddle the branch again and inch his way along to help Theo to the rope ladder.
Ian looked back up and tried to get his leg over the top of the platform, but it was too high and he was too tired. He hung there for a moment and tried to think about what to do, when to his immense relief, the platform began slowly to pitch sideways. Ian hauled himself onto the plank and waited for the movement to stop.
The bridge sank lower and lower, and he heard the supports snap one by one away from the trees that held it. His relief was short lived, because as the section he was perched atop sank several meters slowly at first, it quickly picked up momentum until it crashed to the ground.
Ian fell on top of the planks with a teeth-rattling thud, and the tree to his right tumbled to the earth beside him—a large branch nearly taking his head off. When the dust settled, he peeked warily about at his surroundings and froze.
Looming menacingly in front of him was the giant form of Lachestia, fully free from her earthen cradle, looking positively terrifying. The sorceress was even taller than she’d appeared to him earlier, at least eight feet tall, with elongated bony arms that stuck out from her wormy-looking torso as her grotesque head swiveled back and forth, as if searching for more victims.
Ian caught and held his breath as she hovered over him. He noted brown ooze dribbling down her cheeks, leaking out of her eye sockets. The sorceress’s lips were pulled back in a tight grimace, exposing her sharp pointed teeth, and she was making loud heaving sounds as if in great pain.
Her mother had obviously blinded her—but Ian wondered if, in doing so, the crone had enraged the sorceress beyond all reason. He thought that in her current furious state, she was likely far more dangerous than she had been when she could see.
Ian held very, very still as he watched her, terrified that she would sense where he was standing and drag him under the earth like she had the soldiers. The sorceress appeared to be listening carefully for any sound that might indicate another victim was nearby.
Lachestia resorted next to sniffing the air, and with great dread, he realized she had likely picked up his scent. He made an attempt to crouch low, hoping the branches of the fallen tree would hide him if she decided to reach out with her hands and feel about.
The sorceress made a grumbling sound and then she did stretch out her hands. She sniffed again and patted the ground a meter to Ian’s right. He considered running for it, but he knew she would hear his footfalls and swallow him up faster than he could get away.
He watched, wide-eyed and terrified, as she felt the leaves of the tree, then the branches, then the planks of the wood nearby. Ian braced himself. She would find him at any moment, and his mind raced to come up with some way to distract her. Then, right in front of him, he spied a loose chunk of rock from one of the megaliths and carefully picked it up. The sorceress’s hand made a clapping sound as it connected with the edge of his section of platform, and Ian took the opportunity to whip the rock over the sorceress’s shoulder. It landed with a whump just behind her.
Faster than Ian would have thought possible, Lachestia whirled around and pounced on the rock. A hail of earth and debris exploded into the air as she disappeared with it underground. Ian wasted no more time watching her; he broke away from the platform and ran for all his life.
“Ian!” he heard voices calling. “Over here!”
Ian looked to his right and saw Theo, Carl, and Eva safe on the ground some twenty meters away, but before he could even react, there was a terrible rumbling behind him and the ground under his feet began to vibrate. It felt as if a train were approaching. Ian tried to lean into his stride to gain momentum, but the vibrations underfoot only intensified and his feet began to slip, slide, and sink.
He knew he was unlikely to make it to his friends, and even if he did, Lachestia would surely gobble all of them up. He had the macabre thought that this must be what Laodamia had been talking about in her last prophecy: how his end would come at Lachestia’s hand. He also remembered that the Oracle had prophesized that if he was k
illed, then Theo would surely die, and Ian wasn’t about to let that happen.
So he changed course and began running away from the three terrified faces watching him in horror. “Get Theo to the portal!” he yelled at Carl, and didn’t wait for his friend’s response. Instead, he dashed back to the ravine they’d been kicked into earlier, willing himself not to slip and fall before he got there.
Racing straight toward the drop-off point, he increased his speed in the last few strides and launched himself high into the air, landing on the far rocky side without room to spare. He hit the ground hard and rolled, tumbling over onto his side only to see the mighty sorceress burst straight out of the earth behind him and slam headfirst into a rock on his side of the ravine. The impact was so hard that it rattled and shook the earth where Ian was lying. The sorceress shrieked in pain and her nails clawed their way down the side of the ravine while she cursed and growled and snarled in anger. Finally, she landed at the bottom, sending a flurry of sticks and leaves and dirt high up into the air.
Ian watched her for a moment before he decided to waste no more time. Scrambling to his feet, he began moving again, searching for a place to hide. Ahead he saw a large boulder and clambered up on top of it; then he held perfectly still, trying to keep from breathing too loudly. He could hear the sorceress thrashing about in the ravine, her growls and snarls like a crazed wild animal’s.
Then there were more digging sounds and Ian held his breath. From the top of his boulder, he could see the earth all around swirl and ripple like water. He crouched down and waited with his heart thundering.
He knew that the evil sorceress was about to erupt out of the ground again; he just didn’t know when or where. And then, to make a desperate situation even worse, a gunshot echoed from nearby at almost the exact moment something hot buzzed right past his neck. At first he was too stunned to move, but another pop and a chunk of rock from the boulder kicked up into his face made the situation crystal clear—someone was shooting at him!