Meek

Eli's teeth grew back better than ever. That was the good news. They were strong, white, and completely unworn. Also, he must've gained ten pounds of muscle in three days.

The bad news was the stonechild rite.

"So let me get this straight," he said to Mist-Beneath. "You're going to leave us alone, one at at a time, naked and unarmed, at the ass-end of a tunnel with three chambers? And in each chamber, we need to kill a clister if we want to move on?"

"That is correct," she said.

"Obviously," Yellow rumbled.

"And a clister, just to be clear, is a lizard with a thousand teeth that weighs more than Yellow and is even less friendly?"

"They only have a few dozen teeth!" Fleck said, encouragingly. "They're easy to fight! Or, well ..."

"Well what?"

"Yellow and Lichen won't have trouble." She made a face. "When I practiced on one, it ate four of my fingers."

"So you have trouble fighting them?" Eli said.

Fleck looked embarrassed. "That was weeks ago. I've grown."

"And you stomped me without even trying?"

"I tried a little."

"So how ..." Eli looked back to Mist-Beneath. "... and this is the key question, how in all the celestial realms am I supposed to beat one of these things without a weapon? Or armor, for that matter. Your hide is a hundred times tougher than mine."

"Trolls are born first from our mothers and then born from our mountain," she told him. "We are children of stone. Your first-birth was ... not that of a normal troll. So your second-birth must follow the rite precisely."

"My second death," he said.

"If you die, you're not a troll."

"How about this?" he said. "No."

"No what?"

"No stonechild rite. No clister. No second-birth. No nothing."

Mist-Beneath smiled gently at him with her horrible mouth. "I saved your life."

"Yeah, thanks for that. Never felt better. Now how about instead of feeding me to a lizard you--"

A massive troll paw wrapped Eli chest from behind, and lifted him off his feet. The fingers were each as thick as his wrist. The troll they were attached to was ... big. After days with the juveniles, he'd forgotten how shockingly huge the fully-grown adults were.

"Put him down, Armored-in-Frost," Mist-Beneath said, with a rumble of humor.

"Yeah," Yellow muttered. "Into a midden."

"I will carry him to the rite," the massive troll said, his voice like a grindstone.

"That's sweet of you," Eli said, "but I--"

The hand squeezed slightly.

"I think that's a great idea," Eli finished.

"Most trolls emerge from the rite in six or seven hours," Mist-Beneath said. "However, some take a full day, or even two. Make sure you heal between chambers. We will see you again shortly."

"Sure, but will I see you? Or will a lizard have eaten my head?"

"You can do this, Five," she said. "I have faith."

* * *

Tunnel walls swam past Eli as Armored-in-Frost carried him deeper in the mountain. He caught brief glimpses of an underground troll village: four stories of caves dug into the wall of a towering chamber, with stone ramps and pale-petalled flowers, crystal gardens and glowing moss, and slender waterfalls and a dozen trolls chatting and grinding minerals and--

And Armored-in-Frost hefted him down a steep slope where the air grew cooler and the moss-light dimmer until the only illumination came from a glowstone in the big troll's bandolier. Until finally, the big troll set Eli down beside a darker patch on a dark floor, a roughly-circular area of pure blackness.

"What now?" he asked.

Armored-in-Frost moved his glowstone over the black patch as if to show him.

"A hole in the ground?" Eli asked.

"For most, there are songs before the rite. There are dances and wishes and tears. There is joy."

"Thanks, now I feel left out."

The big troll pointed at the hole. "Look."

Eli peered inside but there wasn't enough light to see anything. "What's in there?"

"You," Armored-in-Frost said, and pushed him in.

"Toadass!" he shouted, a moment before he hit the bottom.

He must've fallen six or seven yards before he landed on a blanket of soft moss. A blanket of soft moss over hard stone. He felt a rib crack and maybe his kneecap. Pain stole his breath but that time he knew to wait for the numbness. That came first, then the healing.

At least he hadn't lost his entire shoulder.

The darkness was complete. Fleck had told him that trolls could see--a little--in the absolute absence of light, but even they struggled. To Eli's weakly-trollish eyes, there was nothing but complete blackness.

Yet as the sweet numbness spread, he painted a picture of his surroundings with his other senses. The sound of his breath, the brush of air on his face. The ... the animal sense of space all around him.

Time passed. An hour, maybe two. No way to tell, but he thought this was a large chamber--stone, obviously. Moisture on the walls and ceiling dripped into puddles. He heard the faintest echo. And he felt that the true floor was still below him, somehow, like he'd fallen onto a ledge.

He lay still while his damaged rib knit together and his kneecap shifted back into place. Still had all his teeth, too. What a legend.

Yeah, he'd definitely fallen onto a ledge. He crawled forward in the inky blackness, patting the moss gingerly before resting his weight on his hands. The ledge extended a yard in front of him and five or ten yards to either side. Long and narrow. Puddles of clean water to drink gathered here and there, along with the fruiting bodies of the moss to eat. These didn't glow, but they were the size of his thumb, and tasted like crisp raw squash.

Not bad.

He felt around until he found a rock. When he tossed it from the ledge it clattered onto a stone floor, not far below. So that was the lower surface of the chamber. He groped warily in the dark for another hour, hoping to find stairs or a ramp. Instead, he found a jagged rocky wall where the ledge ended. The wall flared outward slightly, with plenty of hand- and foot-holds.

Utterly easy to climb ... if he could see two inches in front of his face.

He couldn't see, but he seemed to be hearing better than ever. Maybe that was another trollish ability, maybe it was an effect of his temporary blindness, or maybe it was just that the troll blood had healed a lifetime of wear to his ears, too. Whatever the case, he listened to a watery chorus of drips and splashes and trickles, an airy symphony of drafts and gusts and ... and wondered why there was any breeze at all in the middle of a mountain.

The air was exiting through the hole above him, but it was entering from somewhere. From a cave hole in front of him in the pitch darkness. The exit, far across the chamber.

What he didn't hear was the scrape of clister claws on the rocky floor. The huff of lizard breath, the flick of a rasping tongue, which Yellow had gleefully told him could tear human flesh from human bone.

He was alone in here. So maybe this was just a test of courage. A rite of passage where you had to conquer your fears. Sure, or maybe the clister was sleeping. Halo, maybe the cursed thing had fled from the strange scent of human.

So he listened for another long, dark, featureless time, then lowered himself down from the ledge.

Slowly. Silently. Finding purchase easily. A nice easy climb ... and ten feet down, he stubbed his toes on the chamber floor. He lowered himself fully then crouched in the darkness, breathing though his mouth.

Still no noise. He crept forward, groping with tentative fingers. He felt a smooth stone floor interrupted by fat spears of rock that stuck upward like reverse icicles. Damn trolls had carved traps in here. He huffed in outrage. Like this wasn't hard enough withou--

A hiss sounded in the chamber, like a thousand snakes about to strike.

Then he heard the scrape of claws against stone.

Getting faster, getting closer, and Eli still couldn't see a single blessdamned thing so he spun to retreat and immediately caught his bare foot on one of the rock-spears and sprawled onto his face. The creature--the clister--scrambled closer and Eli shoved onto his feet and fled in the inky blackness, running at the speed of panic, three paces, four, desperate to reach the ledge again and--

A mace smashed his face.

He gasped and reeled and bled, stunned motionless, as the creature raced toward him. He realized with a panicked gasp that he'd found the ledge, he'd run face-first into the ledge, so he groped for handholds and found them, pulling himself upward.

Too slow, far too slow. The clister's breath felt scalding on the back of his knee and he climbed frantically and heard a snap, the snap of jaws. He felt a hard snout punch his calf but the teeth didn't find him and he pulled himself higher and--

The clister's teeth closed around his ankle.