Gregor And The Prophecy Of Doom (Book VI)

Chapter 16 (Pt.1)

The Underlanders may be different from overlanders in many different ways, from their purple pupiled eyes to their whitish transparent skin to their manners of talking similar to those of the British High Society in the 1960s, but Gregor now found at least one thing they had in common with the principle of his Senior Highschool, and that was boring, long, despairingly hypnotic speeches before a meeting. As soon as the head of the council, Vikus, announced they had officially started, one particularly ratty looking old council member walked onto the speaking platform and started to talk. He droned on and on about how the deaths of the two Underland warriors "are not accidental, they are the product of a long-forgotten enemy's hatred" and how "the humans need to stand up against such a malicious force" and so on. Gregor hadn't had that much sleep in the night before, thinking about Luxa and Ripred and the battle and the quest made his adrenaline pump continuously through his veins. His eyelids began to droop.

He was flying along the dark interior of a giant cave, stalagmites gliding past him as his powerful black wings beat against the air, propelling himself forward. Though the space around him was obviously pitch black, he could still see as clearly as if all the jutting stones were actually lit torches. Echolocation, he thought, and a powerful mature one at that.

He finally landed, touching down lightly beside a collection of half-closed rocks. There was something behind there, a black-green stick of some sort. He moved in for a closer look, and then he realized it wasn't a stick, it was...

"Oh, can't we get a move on!" Gregor jerked up, to hear Ripred slapping his thick tale on the stone floor, "Your insightful exciting speech is putting the poor warrior to sleep!" He saw the ratty man whisper something angrily to a woman sitting to the right and behind him, but clearly, he didn't want to argue with the smart-mouthed Ripred, so he bowed slightly and sat down again.

"Good," The rat grunted, "I'm sure all this talk is very important for reasons I wouldn't dream of, but we are really short on time here. Got a world to save here people!" He flicked his tail at someone sitting in the shadows, "Eira, speak, give us a recap, and make it FAST please."

The woman sitting there rose to her feat, and when she stepped into the well lit center of the speaking platform, Gregor nearly jumped out of his chair. His mind flashed back to a cold stone dungeon, he remembered the words "you and I have to come to an understanding", and then the awful sound of the heavy stone door slamming shut behind him, blocking out light, sound, and any means of communication to the outer world. The dagger in his belt seemed to be much heavier than usual.

She was, of course, not Solovet, nor anyone closely related to her. Ripred had introduced her as "Eira", and he remembered Egan saying that his armor was bid given to him my Eira. Now on closer inspection, she didn't look that much like Solovet, her right cheek bore a scar running from the top of her forehead, through her right eye and down to her chin, and her height and facial features were slightly sharper than Solovet's. But her posture, the energy field that seemed to bloom around her, the way the others in the council shrank slightly away from her all remind him so much of Solovet. It also told Gregor that Ripred was probably the only creature in the Underland that dared point at her with the tip of his tail and say commanding things like "make it fast".

Eira began to speak. Her voice was rather low-pithed and rough, with tiny cracks when she pronounced vowels, as if it had sustained as much battle as she had. Her tone was quick and firm, she never hesitated, and her delivery was as precise as an automaton but as cold as stone.

"On the late-night regular scouting mission dated 5 days ago, scouts Lin and Cormax were attacked, dismembered and partially eaten when they discovered and investigated an unusual commotion by the southern end of the Gnawer to Uncharted regional border." Gregor noticed some of the council members mutter quietly but angrily at Eira's choice of the words "dismembered and partially eaten", but one sharp glare from Eira's eyes silenced them all. She went on. "The unbonded flyers with whom Lin and Cormax formed a mixed-scout-party, Egle and Lithclaw, flew back after surviving the attack. They reported the incident to be beyond a doubt, the work of a, or multiple, cutters. They claim that their ears picked up the slight snapping sounds of insect jaws apart from the snapping of bone, and they state that the prints left by the attacker resembled that of a large cutter." Eira looked up from the thin stack of papers she had been consulting from, and added: "New scouts have been sent to the spot of incident, and have discovered no evidence against the details Egle and Lithclaw provided. That is all we know." She sat down.