Chapter 17 - Part 6

Orphan crept through the tunnels, keeping his footfalls as silent as possible. The sharpest sentries in the armies of Khorvaire wouldn’t have heard him, but that was the real world. Today’s world. Now he was in the world of demons, and one of their sentries had nearly killed him just a half-hour ago.

The worming holes under the Waste through which Orphan traveled were roughly circular tubes, about nine feet across. Here and there they had been worked to lessen some of the steeper grades, or to widen a turning point, but overall they seemed the result of some natural process rather than an artificial one. The tunnels often doubled back on themselves, and sometimes they tapered to a dead end, but Orphan had not even explored a tenth of them yet.

He adjusted the sunrod in his belt sash so that he could see better as he came to an intersection. Someone had hacked away at the joining of the two tubes long ago, and made a squarish room.

Orphan turned, sensing that he was not alone. A shimmering figure came flying directly out of the rock. The monk had a sense of a ghostly figure with a translucent face, a vaguely luminescent thing that slipped right through him. A chill accompanied its passage, a feeling of wrongness that twisted him on the inside.

Orphan whipped out his kama and set his mind on defending himself. The creature, puzzled by something, flew at the monk again, but the magic in the kama made it bank to the side.

“You can’t drain life-force from me,” Orphan said. The thing hesitated, floating in the air as it looked at him with hatred. He could tell that it used to be an elf when it was alive. “You can hurt me, but you can’t feed off of me.” A part of Orphan regretted that, and was ashamed to say it aloud, but Oalian had told him that he was alive, so the monk resolved not to be taken aback by the immunities that his construct nature afforded him. He flicked the magical edge of the kama at the ghostly thing a few times, and at one point he nicked it. “Do you still want to fight or do you want to talk?” he asked it.

The thing hesitated, then flew into the floor and disappeared.

“Or you could do that,” Orphan muttered. He waited a moment and then ventured on.