The abyss took us all the way out of Orowen and the suburbs of the Burning Bend. “Inside the woods beyond this path,” Rowland Radcliff's voice spoke inside my head as I led my companions down the dirt road outside the city.

  “If his business was related to digging and excavation then what happened to the machinery?” I asked Cynthia.

  “They took those back as well,” she said. “Except for one drilldozer that hasn’t been found yet. Also a few of the men on his team have gone missing as well. The internal police said that Rowland and the men might’ve sold off the drilldozer, split the money and skipped the town.”

  “How many men?” Lily said.

  “Maybe three or four.” Cynthia shrugged.

  I came to a halt right outside the woods next to the road. Bugs were chirping in the trees and animals howled in the distance. Lily pulled out a glass bottle filled with a green liquid and shook it vigorously. The fluid gave a bright glow. She passed it to me and then she shared two more bottles with Lenora and Cynthia.

  “I don't need it, because I can see better than any of you in the dark,” Smokewell said, red eyes glinting.

  And we headed into the woods.

  Twigs snapped and leaves crunched underfoot as we made our way through the forest. Every once in a while a couple of bats would screech overhead and the chorus of bugs would keep chirping around us. After walking for about fifteen minutes, the agonized scream of a woman rang out from not too far away.

  We all came to a terrified halt. Smokewell scoffed. “That's a coyote,” she said as she kept walking. “I know it sounded like a dying woman. But trust me there are a lot of things in a forest that sound like humans in the dark.” She glanced at us over the shoulder with her red gaze and she was probably smirking as well but it was hard to tell because of the shadows surrounding us.

  We kept walking. The voice of the abyss in my head brought us to a large yawning hole in the ground. Darkness greeted us from its gaping depths. Even our glowing potions couldn't illuminate much farther into it.

  I frowned and released the abyss from its bottle. “Are you sure this is where you came last time?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Rowland’s voice answered from the black mist hovering above.

  “And what’s inside?” I asked.

  The abyss was silent for a minute before the voice said, “I am lost…I need help…”

  “W-What does he mean?” Cynthia asked anxiously.

  “I think he means he needs help,” Smokewell said with her usual eye roll.

  I sighed and tried probing the abyss for a better response. But Roland's voice kept repeating the same answer. So I liberated it in the end.

  “I think it's safe to assume that Rowland went in there,” I pointed at the dark pit. “And he couldn't find his way out.”

  “But why would he go inside a sinkhole?” Lenora asked.

  “It's not a sinkhole.” Smokewell walked into the cavernous opening and ran her paw over strange horizontal marks on the floor. “This hole was dug by something big.”

  I crouched down to examine the marking. They looked like grooves left by the caterpillar wheels of a tank. Or something that was built and moved like a tank, at least.

  “The excavator,” Lily said, shining light on the tread marks.

  “If he went down there five days ago,” Lenora said, “I hope he at least took some food with him down there.”

  “I'm sure he did,” I said. “This seems like a part of an excavating operation he was running. They probably went in searching for minerals or something. And chances are, he probably took a team of people with him.”

  “Well at least he isn't alone.” Cynthia sighed in relief.

  “So, what do we do now?” Lenora asked.

  “We go in of course,” Lily said as she pulled out her familiar cards and summoned her direwolf. Cynthia and Lenora jumped in surprise at the sight of the large white beast. Lily asked Cynthia for Rowland’s wrist watch. The woman handed it over without much questioning.

  Lily held the watch close to the wolf's nose. “Use phantom scent, Pearl,” she muttered to the wolf.

  The beast sniffed at the watch and her golden brown eyes turned silver. She let out a soft hiss and gazed into the dark cavern in the ground.

  “Good girl!” Lily patted the wolf on the head and turned to us. “She can sniff Rowland's scent inside that cave.”

  Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

  “Then there's no point in delaying,” Smokewell said and hopped onto Lily's shoulder. “Let's go and bring the man. We'll be in and out in a minute.”

  Lily nodded and mounted the large direwolf. I gave a nervous frown before getting on the wolf as well. We decided to take Lenora and Cynthia with us as well because it was more dangerous to leave them alone in the forest at night.

  Pearl took off bounding into the dark cave, following Rowland's scent. The wolf ran for almost twenty minutes straight before Lily noticed something and pulled the beast to a halt.

  “W-What happened?” Lenora asked, gripping my sleeve.

  We had deactivated the glowing potions because Lily said her glasses allowed her vision in the darkness and Pearl had supernatural senses. They would alert us if they noticed anything strange or dangerous in the way.

  It seemed like they had noticed one of the two.

  Lily mounted off the wolf and pulled out the glowing potion. She shined it on something--a large metallic structure with a massive drill head on its front and caterpillar wheels on its bottom.

  “This must be the thing that he used to dig his way in,” Smokewell said as Lily illuminated the machine from all sides.“And look closely folks,” Lily said, shining the potion light on the cabin of the excavator. “The windshield is shattered.”

  That's when the rest of us dismounted the wolf to take a closer look. Half of the vehicle's side was buried in the dirt wall. The caterpillar wheels on its left were tilted up in the air and it was difficult for any of us to reach for the cabin door.

  “This must be the missing drilldozer,” Cynthia muttered.

  I heard that and said, “Lily, climb up and see if there's blood anywhere inside.”

  The girl didn't waste any time in launching off the ground and landing gracefully on the massive drill-head, her skirt billowing as her boots thumped down on the metal surface. With the same grace, she made her way up the drill head and towards the broken windshield. She leaned forward and squinted behind her round rimmed glasses. “I don't see any blood.” She shook her head.

  Cynthia breathed a loud sigh of relief.

  “Wait, I see something else,” Smokewell said. She was still perched on Lily's shoulder. The cat hopped inside the cabin through the broken windshield. Then she returned with a piece of torn fabric in her mouth.

  She handed it to Lily. The girl looked at it for a second before hopping off the excavator and giving the fabric to Pearl to sniff. The direwolf gave a single bark.

  “It belongs to Rowland,” Lily said with a nod.

  “I found it skewered to a jagged piece of metal,” Smokewell said, licking her paw.

  “And you both are sure you didn't see any blood in there?” I asked.

  Both of them nodded.

  I gazed into the darkness ahead before taking the fabric from Lily and extracting an abyss from it as well.

  Only a tiny shred of black mist formed in the air in front of me. I got down to business with it right away.

  “What exactly happened?” I asked.

  “I was the one driving the excavator,” Rowland's abyss said. “That's when I saw a child in the way and to avoid mangling him alive I took a sharp turn. The machine swerved and crashed into the wall over there.”

  “And you kept moving? Even after that accident happened?” I said.

  “I had to. I couldn't stop after coming this far,” he said. “My team was too scared so they retreated. But I didn't stop.”

  I frowned deeply. “What were you even trying to find?” I asked.

  “The castle. I wanted to find the Butcher’s Castle.”

  I liberated the abyss after asking one last question: “What was even in that castle?”

  “Everything that mattered to Godfrey the Butcher,” Rowland’s abyss said. “All his riches, preserved along with his corpse in his crypt. It would've been more than enough to bring back the lost glory of my family.”

  ****

  What happened after I liberated the abyss was not unexpected. Lenora and Cynthia looked like they were about to shit themselves with fear. But Lily deftly subdued the oncoming tide of panic by pointing her glow potion at the way ahead. "Look, everyone, the path is paved," she said.

  Everyone paused. The road stretching into the darkness was laden with what looked like panels of stone. And we seemed to be in some kind of stone tunnel. The walls and the curved ceiling were covered with writings in a language I didn’t understand. "We've come this far," I said, "And we know Rowland is at a castle up ahead. We should just keep moving."

  "Agreed," Lily and Smokewell said in unison.

  Lenora and Cynthia still looked petrified but they nodded reluctantly. We all mounted Pearl and advanced into the darkness again.

  "I didn't know there was a kingdom buried under Ravenwind," Lily said.

  "It's not a kingdom," Smokewell said. "It's just a castle. A kingdom would've had more buried structures than a single castle–like houses, shops, maybe an arena or two."

  "But why does a castle exist underground in the first place?" Cynthia said.

  I looked at the cat who was still on Lily's shoulder. "Any fables you've read about this?"

  "I might have," Smokewell said. "If the king's tomb is in that castle along with his riches, it might be something similar to what we saw in heaven."

  "You mean the 'graveyard'?" I asked.

  "Wait, did she just say 'heaven'?" Lenora asked, flabbergasted.

  The cat ignored the question and nodded at me. "The Butcher King might've carried out some kind of ritual for his afterlife if his tomb contains his riches too."

  "None of this sounds good," Lily said, "Is my brother trapped in an underground castle with something dangerous?"

  "There is a good chance that he is," Smokewell said.

  Cynthia was about to yelp in fear when Pearl came to a halt.

  "What happened? Why did we stop?" Lenora asked.

  Lily was frowning in the darkness. Then she pointed ahead and said, "Is it just me or can you all see that child too?"