Marbles: The Hawk Who Refused to Die a Virgin

Chapter 30. Dire Bear

Languin, whose elven eyes had given him a few precious seconds to adjust to the sudden dim light, held out his arms to keep Lucy and Opal from running headlong over the ledge.

Jezebel and Marbles were long gone. Entranced by the prospect of sunlight, they had flown right through the cave and outside, finally free, finally able to fly more than fifty meager feet in the air. They had assumed that their friends were close behind. Or maybe they hadn't. Maybe they just couldn't wait. Being trapped in a cave for months had been especially hard on the birds.

"Shhh!" cautioned Languin, who held his finger to his lips. He motioned for Lucy and Opal to lay down beside him, and peek out over the ledge, to see for themselves what he had smelled.

The ledge swept down to their right, making a natural ramp that curled around the rim of the cave. It was going to be a cakewalk out of the final stretch of this godforsaken cave, save for the fact that nestled together beneath the ledge were two of the biggest goddamn grizzly bears Languin had ever seen.

"Good god those are some bigass bears," whispered Opal. They were nine feet long if they were a foot, sleeping deep, perfect, Propofol-prescribed sleep, blissfully unaware of the mountain falling down behind them. The white, footlong claws on their feet scratched adorably on the floor as they climbed up towards beehives in their dreams.

"Something is not right about them," said Languin. "No two fully grown bears cuddle together like that. And though they are huge, look at their ears. The ears are too big for their heads, as if they have yet to grow into them."

"Their claws are white," said Lucy.

"Yeah," said Opal. "Aren't grizzly bear claws kind of brown and gnarly?"

"Not when they're cubs!" shouted the questing cat, who reared up behind Opal and used its two front paws to push the gnome over the edge of the ledge.

The cat had been laying in wait for days. It had snuck down in the cave at the dawn of every day to roll around in bear piss, so that the elf wouldn't notice his separate smell. He had lain on the hard stone ground stock still, with his eyes screwed tightly shut, though he never slept, lest his open eyes betray his presence with reflected light. He was not doing well, mentally.

Opal shouted in surprise as he fell, landing face first on the cave floor in front of the still sleeping bears, rebreaking his nose and knocking himself out.

"Whoops!" screamed the cat, who leapt down after Opal and landed on the back of a bear, claws out. It leapt from bear to bear, raking out long bloody furrows from each bear's back before running out of the cave, its sickening cat laughter echoing back throughout the cavern.

The bears woke up mewling in surprise and pain. Their mews were very intimidating considering they were pouring in twin baritones from the throats of two--and I don't feel that I'm overstating this--very big goddamn bear cubs. These mews blew flat the hair of the knocked out gnome, whose hat lay beside the him in a cold pile of bear shit.

The bears looked down at what they could only logically deduce was their aggressor. They sniffed at Opal in surprise. One of the bears tentatively reached out, effortlessly poked claws through Opal's tunic, and raked strips of skin from the gnome's back, both out of natural inquisitiveness and as an instinctually fitting recompense for the questing cat's attack.

Languin unsheathed the scimitar from his back scabbard and leapt down from the ledge, landing soundlessly between Opal and the bears. He turned around and slashed down once, from right to left, diagonally across one cub's muzzle, then again, from left to right, diagonally across the muzzle of another, leaving long scars between each cub's eyes.

This was too much for the cubs, who had only been alive on earth for a couple weeks and frankly were not prepared for overweight gnome meteorites and fat slasher elves sneaking up behind them and wrecking their shit. They roared and took off howling out of the cave.

At that point the cubs' mother, who had until then been masquerading as a rock wall on the right side of the cave, woke up. Now, admittedly, we have been talking a lot about really big bears. But this thing. Holy smokes. The difference between a bear and a dire bear is the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony. You could jam a volleyball into each of this thing's nostrils. It breathed louder than your mustachioed dad at church. Its meter long claws drooped like black, lacquered stalactites from the paws it held against its chest. It was a hoary, stinking, two story tall mass of frothing mad bear flesh.

The dire bear rose on her hind legs to look around for her missing cubs, then squinted down at the elf, who stood there with her beloved children's blood still dripping from his scimitar.

The dire bear avalanched to all fours in front of Languin, opened its jaws, and let out a deafening roar that blew Languin's braids straight back behind him. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say the roar was deafening. Languin would never hear anything else again.

In mid roar Lucy, who couldn't leap twelve meters straight down like an elf, had run down the ledge and was booking it towards the disoriented Languin. She ran up beside the roaring bear and wedged her quarterstaff in its open jaws, jamming the ferrules behind the top and bottom rows of the bear's teeth. The bear's tiny (basketball sized) eyes blinked in surprise and it tried to swipe the staff from its mouth, but by then Lucy had already picked up a big rock from the cave floor, hefted it to her right shoulder, and shotputted it straight past her quarterstaff and down the dire bear's throat.

The bear, bewildered, began to choke, too startled now to even claw at the quarterstaff. Lucy, who was at the tail end of an adrenaline rush that was allowing her to ignore a newborn hernia, reached down and heaved an unconscious Opal over her left shoulder and grabbed Languin's hand with her right hand. She began to run to the cave's exit, towards a sun she hadn't felt on her face in months.

She ran hard at that light, and never looked back at the bear. Not when the two snapped halves of the quarterstaff skittered past her and over the stone and out of the cave, not when the coughed rock shattered against the side of the cave entrance, and not when Languin's hand shot back out of hers as the bear snapped him up in her jaws.

She heard Languin's bones crunching as she ran crying out of the cave, through a bright spring morning, towards the enormous upturned roots of just one of the huge trees that had been felled during the storm giant's withdrawal tantrums. She set Opal face down against the soft soil still clinging to the bottom of the tree's roots. The root system was the closest thing to shelter she could find. Maybe here she could hide Opal there, in the upturned earth, away from that rampaging bear.

Lucy turned around to finally look back at the cave entrance, but it was gone. What she thought had been the sound of blood roaring in her ears had in fact been this pile of rock's last gasp

as Hawk Mountain. It had finally collapsed, utterly, a blunt stony heap where once a proud mountain stood. It sagged like the face of a stroke victim, the dust from the bear cave pouring forth in a thick white cloud.

Lucy lay on top of a still unconscious Opal to protect his claw wounds from the dust cloud. Once the dust had settled, she wiped her eyes and looked back at the mountain, just as the dire bear's head burst forth from the debris and roared.