Round 1: Jonah T. Barnham Vs Forbidden [Archive]

Jonah T. Barnham

08-27-11, 10:19 PM

The night was dark, damp and chill. The moon was beginning to rise above the horizon, a bronze medallion against the sparkle of stars in the early fall sky, the light from it bathing the fields and roads in a cold, heartless silver.

The shadows always seemed longer on a night like this.

The camp lay in the center of a clearing, a handful of ramshackle tents pitched around the slowly dimming embers of a fire. Candles flickered on a stump long hewed, but even their clean light couldn't shorten the shadows; couldn't steal the intimidating blackness from the yawing, toothless mouth of the pit dug roughly in the center of the tents.

Fortunately, underground, it didn’t make much of a difference.

The golden flicker of a lantern lit the tunnel, surrounded the young man crouched at the end in a warmth that didn’t exist in the tents and the trees; cast the illusion of someplace small, nurturing and welcoming. The lantern had been carefully disconnected from the helmet discarded at the foot of the ladder. It balanced on the edge of a small stone outcropping, its flame catching in the young man’s dusty spectacles, turning his messy shock of dark hair into a mass of red and gold and black.

The dry, rich smell of old earth assailed Jonah Barnham’s nostrils as he carefully brushed dirt off the bulge in the wall. His calloused fingertips hit the rough edge of whatever object lay embedded there - and the resulting flash behind his eyes let him know his questing touches had found something other than stone.

The sky was red-tinged, tainted with something he couldn't put it words, though he'd seen it before. The twin moons hung high in the sky, the sun - smaller and brighter - set over the horizon, the west, the general direction of Radasanth. He blinked his eyes and looked around, careful not to make any other motion.

He was afloat in a river that didn't exist in the Corone of today; wide and shallow, if the patterns the currents made on its surface were to be believed. His own, green-eyed gaze looked back at him before he glanced away. He wasn't here to look at his own reflection, he was hear for -

The splash of violently displaced water hit his ears. He caught a glimpse of something large, moving faster than an arrows flight, cutting the water before a massive dorsal fin. It broke from the river, teeth flashed in the sunlight, and he couldn't stop himself from jumping back as the jaws snapped shut-

The movement was enough to pull him from the psychometric vision. He pushed his hair back from his eyes with one hand so he could see more clearly in the guttering light, leaving a smear of dirt behind in the sweat. His other thumb stroked the bone, brushing more soil off in a cascade that half-buried his boots. "Don't know what you were," he whispered to the creature embedded in the wall, "but you looked interesting enough to want to find out. You looked like some sort of shark..."

All teeth and hunger and instinct.

The thought made him shiver, slightly, too close to age-old fears to be realized. Thighbiter, for one. He could still feel the young Dynonychus in the back of his mind, her hunger adding to the one constantly burning in his own belly. The vicious creature didn’t like ladders, hated the dark, and so he’d left her guarding the mouth of the hole. Guarding against what, however, he couldn’t quite say.

He shook off the hunted-fear and the hunter-hunger with some difficulty, focusing instead on the simple glimmer of success.

Whatever the creature turned out to be, it had made staying down here long after sundown worth the hassle. If the whole body was there, fossilized in the wall, he would have a third complete skeleton to add to his collection, while most of the formally trained archaeologists he'd had to deal with this time had disconnected bones and fragments of an idea of what they should look like. It would almost make up for the savant comments, the whispered rumors about his intelligence, his mental facilities...

Almost.

Jonah reached out to pick up the tiny brush from his pack, but his fingers closed on empty air. Nothing lay at his feet but a pile of displaced dirt and tiny chips of stone. That's...odd, didn't I leave it right there? Apparently not... Unconcerned, he shuffled a foot further down the hall and made another grab.

Nothing. Not even his pick-axe. He caught his lip between his teeth, resolutely not looking further down the tunnel, deeper into the darkness. The catacombs had been there when they'd begun to dig, after all; they'd found them looking for something else. A happy mistake, and a fortuitous one. Time saved, lamp oil saved, blood and sweat and manpower...

But, Jonah thought, does that take into account whatever might have made the tunnels in the first place? His knives hung, as always, off his belt. He took one hand from the wall to pull Hook from its sheath, sliding it back in so it would hang ready before he repeated the motion with Talon.

Just, he told himself, warily making his way back in the general direction of the ladder, in case.

Just in case.