Passengers in the Dark

Myfanwy’s eyes shot open.

Or at least, he thought they did. He could feel his eyelashes flutter against his cheek, but it made no difference. He saw only pitch-black nothingness. A chill ran up his spine. At first he thought it was panic at his blindness. It took another moment in the dark to distinguish that the real chill came from the puddle of clammy liquid he was laying in. He thought he must be in sewage, for he smelled something like rotten ale brewed in a decade-old chamber pot.

He winced as he rolled over and got up on his knees. Every muscle and bone cried out in protest. He tried to stand but could not. The pain that spiked up his leg when he pressed on his right foot told him his ankle was surely broken.

He was struck by the realization his pack was missing. He groped blindly in the filthy water around him, looking for it, until; there! His fingers grasped leather cords and he was able to pull it through the sludge towards him. Myfanway hugged it tight to his chest, like a child reunited with a lost stuffed animal. The pack had absorbed the wretched stench into its fibers, but he didn’t care.

The halfling in the dark reached inside the sack and pulled out a wooden staff. His staff. It wasn’t broken. He tossed the bag aside and held it aloft. He could not make out its details in the darkness, but he felt its welcoming magic course through his fingertips and up his arms into his body. It was glad to be back with him. Myfanwy felt for the first time like he might make it out of here alright.

A splash of water broke the quiet.

“T-t-Tullius?” his whisper was significantly louder in the shadowed silence. No reply came.

“C-c-come on now,” his stutter had returned in the face of fear, his single moment of hope snatched from him with a single sound, “M-Marrnox? A-Amra?”

Still there was only silence. He refused to move, only staring into the black, praying his heart would stop beating so loud, in case it brought whatever was there straight to him. He gripped the staff tight to stop his hands from shaking. A trickle of cool sweat slipped down his brow. He was paralyzed, caught between whether to blink away the falling droplet or remain still, and so the perspiration slipped off his face and plummeted towards the water. It hit the surface of the water with the sound of an echoing ring like the toll of a bell.

Cold lips brushed against his ear and exhaled a fetid breath in a single word, “Myfanwy.”

Myfanwy dove forward, scrambling in the ankle-high water, propelled by fear and pure adrenaline. He crawled through the dark until his wrist twisted against the stone floor and he plummeted face-first into a wall. His nose made a sickening crack as it split on the stone and he could feel warm blood roll down over his mouth and chin.

He lay against the cold wall for what felt like an age, crying silent tears in the darkness.

“T…t…Tullius…” he dared to whimper,“P-p-please help me.”

The same stench filled his nose as a clammy hand wrapped around his wrist and cold lips found his ear once more.

“I will help you, Myfanwy.”

The halfling cried out and ripped his arm free from the grasping hand in the dark. He fell to one side, pulling himself across the cold stone with his good hand, anything to get away from that thing. He pushed off the wall into the empty void, darkness and the sloshing sound of sewage enveloping him once more. He tried to drag his broken ankle and cradle his sprained wrist through the frigid liquid at the same time, stumbling on until he no longer had the strength to move. The silence was gone, scattered by his gasping breaths and stuttering whimpers. He cried and cried and thought of home.

He thought of his friends.

He hoped that when he finally opened his eyes he would see Tullius, his fiery red scales gleaming brightly as he cut a path through the shadows with his flaming greatsword. He would be followed by Marrnox, her hardy, scarred features which spoke of a dwarf familiar with battle cracking that familiar, wicked grin. She’d twirl her knives and lecture Myfanwy.

“Silly Myfanwy,” she would say, “you should have waited for me, you knew there would be a trap on a treasure like that,” Amra would make a tsking sound and shush Marrnox. Myfanwy gripped the staff harder as his mind’s eye saw the elf bending down to heal his wounds and inspect the staff.

“Let her see it,” Tullius would growl, but Myfanwy shook his head in the darkness. He couldn’t tell them.

“It’s just a staff,” Marrnox moaned in annoyance. Myfanwy curled into a ball, drawing the staff closer as if protecting a youngling.

“Now Myfanwy,” Amra said, “just let me-”

“NO!” Myfanwy screamed into the empty darkness. His friends were not there. Only the void. Only Myfanwy.

“Only me,” the cold lips lapped against his ear once more, but this time Myfanwy did not flee. He could not flee. He was broken, cold, and lonely. He no longer had the heart.

“Wh-who are you?” he whispered. Or perhaps he only thought he whispered it. The silence was deafening. The voice answered, regardless.

“I am your friend, Myfanwy,” the voice was as cold and foul as the filth he sat in. He could feel clammy hands wrapping around his forearm. He tried to pull away but they held firm.

“H-help me,” Myfanwy whimpered.

The voice did not reply this time. Instead, the damp hands gently lifted him to his feet. He cried out in pain as his weight settled on the broken ankle, but the hands held him upright. The hand which held the staff suddenly began to rise, guided by another clammy hand, when the lips pressed to his ear and spoke once more,

“Speak the word.”

“....meloesthque,” Myfanwy did not know how he knew the word. He spoke it with the command and vigor of a person with twice the courage and half the fear.

The gem atop the staff flared to life and filled the area with a thick, sickly green light. Myfanwy stood alone in a long, cylindrical stone tunnel that stretched without turning for as long as he could see. It continued for what seemed like eternity. There was no body to claim ownership of the cold, dry lips and clammy hands.

Myfanwy should have been emboldened by the revelation he had not gone blind, but he only shivered in the frigid, foul air of the expansive tunnel. He made to bury his nose in the crook of his elbow to avoid the stench, but the sleeves of his tunic were drenched in the smell. In the green light, he saw his hands and arms were covered in what looked like dried blood. Streaks of repulsive, brown grime dripped into the water at his feet. In the emerald glare from above, though, the shivering halfing could tell that whatever he stood in, it was not water. It was the same thick, roiling grime that drenched his arms, stained his clothes, and filled his nose with the rancid odor.

He fell against the curved stone wall and tried to wipe himself clean. Each time he swept away the grime, it leaked from his pores again and again, like a weeping sponge. It was within him. He wiped and wiped until his clothes hung thick with ichor and tears pricked his eyes once again.

“P-p-please,” he whimpered, “help me. I’ll d-do anything.”

“Anything?” For the first time, Myfanwy felt hope, at the sound of Tullius’s voice behind him. He turned to see his friend. The dragonborn’s ruby red head poked out of the pool at Myfanwy’s feet. His once luminous skin was drawn tight against his skull. The same ichor which covered Myfanwy dripped from the empty eye sockets of his friend’s desiccated face. A burst of arrows jutted from the back of his skull. Tullius’s sharpened teeth gleamed in a gruesome, gumless smile.

Myfanwy screamed. He turned to run but his broken ankle gave way beneath him with a nauseating crack. He spun around in a sloppy pirouette. He braced for the impact against the floor, but was caught by a set of willowy hands. A sigh of relief died on his lips as he looked up at Arma, her pale skin charred black and cracked from burns. Her mouth was agape, as if her screams had permanently wrenched her face into a gruesome death mask. He kicked with his good leg, desperate to escape her grasp. He jerked his body sharply, refusing to risk swinging his staff, but scaled hands–Tullius’s hands–shot up from the water and wrapped around him.

“P-p-please,” Myfanwy croaked. Arma’s cracked, peeling hands closed around his throat.

“P-p-please,” his friends mocked in unison, their stuttering plosives echoing down the stone tunnel.

“You should have left it alone,” a voice from the edge of the staff’s eerie green glow. Marrnox, alive and unharmed, stepped into the light. She brandished her two favorite daggers, Reaper and Reaver.

“I’m s-s-s-” Myfanwy’s words were choked off as Arma’s hands, wet with ichor and sloughing skin, pressed hard against his throat.

“Myfanwy,” his friends said in unison. Marrnox drew forward, her movement in death a macabre recreation of her gait in life. With every step her skin melted away in patches. Where it peeled off, Myfanwy could see a coiling mass of glowing violet tendrils that curled like worms. The tendrils poked out through the skin across her face; new tongues probing the air in front of her. Her daggers, once gleaming silver in the green light of Myfanwy’s staff, instead looked to be made of the thick ichor in which they stood, now jagged with serrated edges.

“Myfanwy,” they said again, their voices blurring into one. Myfanwy’s vision began to flicker and fade. Marrnox stood over him, the mask of slippery, violet tendrils twisting into a horrific grin as she lifted her rot-covered daggers.

“Myfanwy,” The blades sunk into his chest like stones into water. He opened his mouth in a silent scream.

“Myfanwy,” His dead friend's arms dragged him down further into the frigid, brown pool. He could no longer struggle. The last strength of his life held onto the staff. His mouth filled with the fetid water. His lungs burned.

“Myfanwy.” All went black.

“Myfanwy!”

Myfanwy’s eyes snapped open. He could feel the hardwood counter pressed against his face, smell the sticky yeast dried along its surface.

He wiped his blurry eyes as the assault on his senses expanded. The din of clinking glasses and murmuring voices flooded his ears with waves of indiscernible noise. Spots of candlelight bloomed in orange clouds all around him until he cleared the sleep from his eyes.

He wasn’t in the dungeon any more.

Myfanwy’s dead friends were nowhere to be seen, but the dread of his recurrent nightmare remained. Fear tarried at his back like a starving dog. It would need feeding soon.

The uneasiness was joined by discomfort as Morlan, one eye glaring at him in the way only tavern keepers can, resolved into definition before him. Myfanwy had failed to notice the owner glaring at him until his eyes finished waking up, but he looked like he’d been waiting there for a good while.

“Drink as much as ya want, I said, but no falling asleep on my bar,” the dragonborn warned. His silver scales glinted in the tavern’s dull light.

Myfanwy wiped dried saliva from the corner of his mouth and ran a hand through his head of curly, ash-brown hair. The tug against his scalp made him wince, the pounding in his head threatening to shake him loose of his meager hold on mortality.

“Sorry, Morlan,” Myfanwy muttered, though his thick tongue and garbled words made the already weak apology entirely ineffectual.

Morlan sighed and collected the dirty glass mug from where it lay, knocked over on the counter in front of Myfanwy.

“You’re a good customer,” Morlan growled, “you always pay. And normally I don’t mind a passed-out patron. By the scales of Terragoth, you’re hardly the first. You are the only one who kicks and screams, though, so I’ve got to draw the line.”

There was nothing Myfanwy could say. He’d been coming to this tavern every night for the last month. He had tried other bars, but they were not as forgiving as the Shadowed Serpent. Tavern keepers never seemed keen on having him around for long. His copious drinking was expected at such an establishment, but that sort of indulgence always came with sleep. And with sleep came the nightmares. There had also been other…incidents. But none of this shook Morlan.

Morlan had once been an adventurer himself. A successful one, if rumors were to be believed, which they weren’t. Yet Myfanwy recognized scars when he saw them - even when they weren’t readily apparent. Though Morlan’s silver scales were polished to a high shine, the dragonborn carried the weight of his own demons.

Myfanwy made as if to stand, but the floor pitched underneath him and the stool toppled over. Morlan appeared in a silver blur, his hand gripped tight around Myfanwy’s upper arm, righting him with a speed born out of disgust rather than reassurance.

The tavern keeper helped him back onto his feet and righted the stool. As quick as he had appeared, the silver dragonborn returned to the other side of the bar and placed another glass of ale in front of him. For as much as he disliked Myfanwy sleeping at the bar, the owner seemed happy to keep him there rather than wandering away to frighten the other patrons.

The liquid looked metallic through the dirty glass, like old coins. He drank the stained tankard of depressing gold in one long, practiced swig.

“You can’t do this forever, son,” Morlan cautioned, but he had the glass filled before Myfanwy had taken his hand off of it.

“Drink?” Myfanwy swirled the stagnant amber ale before setting to work on it once more.

“Hide.”

He snorted at the tavern keeper's unsolicited advice. Seasoned or not, Morlan had no inkling of the darkness Myanwy carried. He drew a clinking bag from the pack at his side. He stopped for only a moment, briefly frozen as his eyes fell on the wooden staff tied to the pack. A milky emerald sat perched at the top, glowing faintly against the bar where it lay, one strap twisted tightly around Myfanwy’s ankle.

“Myfanwy,” a faint voice whispered into his mind. He roughly shook his head and turned away, dropping the jangling purse onto the countertop.

His recent trials were only matched by his newly-acquired wealth, a bitter reward from the same dungeon which had killed his friends and saddled him with the staff and all of its…baggage. Even when not holding the damned thing, he could feel its presence.

The drink helped to dull, sometimes even silence, the whispers. So, he drowned himself in tarnished copper liquid every night, waiting for the day when he reached into his bottomless bag to find nothing but lint and regret. Myfanwy had promised himself that when the day finally came–and it would, for even the ocean of wealth in his bag could not be infinite–he would sail to the farthest ends of the Stormborn Sea and drown himself for the final time. The staff would die with him at the bottom of the endless trenches, never to be found again, and he would find silence in the depths.

Morlan returned to his duties, allowing Myfanwy to look out across the tavern. The Shadowed Serpent had always been a place of ill-repute for those banned from other places of ill-repute, and this night proved to be no different. A bard was readying the night’s performance on a suggestion of a stage while pirates, cutthroats, and bandits danced, drank, hollered, and fought the night away. At least once a night, Morlan had to lift his greatsword down off the wall, the wisps of red mist wafting out of the blade and the dragonborn’s willingness to use it serving to dissuade even the rowdiest of patrons.

The bard now sat cross-legged around a leather drum on the far end of the bar that served as the tavern’s stage, framed by moth-eaten violet curtains. Long chains of gold and silver dangled from the gnome’s arms and neck. Every beat of the drum was accompanied by a line in a tale of lost lovers or battles of might and magic. Though quiet, her words carried effortlessly throughout the audience. The percussive performance, accompanied by jangling chains, pounded a rhythm in Myfanwy’s head, as he fought to maintain his familiar haze and ignore the tormenting whispers in his mind.

“Release me, Myfanwy.”

He closed his eyes and shook his head until he felt his brain would smash against his skull like a dropped egg. He crammed his eyelids together until they ached from the effort. There was no reprieve in the shadows of his mind. He knew what lurked in the darkness. If it wasn’t the blasted staff, it would be the ghosts of his friends. Always watching. Always waiting.

Drip…drip…drip…

He smelled the dank, wet air of the sewers. Cold air chilled him to his bones as ichor swelled up from his pores and into a pool around his feet. He heard the sound of something moving through the water towards him as shadows resolved out of darkness, darker than the black of his eyelids. A pair of glowing violet eyes opened, piercing the darkness and boring into Myfanwy’s skull.

“Join us, Myfanwy,” the voice implored from the gloom.

“N-n-n-no,” he begged, “l-l-let me have one n-n-night please. Please.” The shadow fell over him.

He opened his eyes to find the tavern in full swing. It hadn’t gone anywhere. He was the one who had left. Though shadows did fall across his face and jump up the walls, they belonged to the patrons who skulked through the low-lit room. A scruffy group of dwarves and humans along the bar eyed him with a mixture of curiosity and wariness. He ignored them, instead gulping down his newly-refilled drink. Morlan had withdrawn several coins from his pouch and left an unstoppered bottle of the copper liquid in exchange. Myfanwy poured himself another drink and downed the contents as he fought to ignore the staff’s creeping influence.

Patrons moved across the tavern like wraiths, slipping from shadow to shadow to avoid the sparse lantern light. Though his mind had slipped into a drunken haze, Myfanwy’s eyes remained aware. He watched them in their dirty dealings, saw the disgust with which they looked away when their eyes fell on him in this pitiable state.

The bard, hands tapping away at the leather surface of the worn drum, had begun a new song.

“Listen ye to a tale of valor and might, of a journey through lands both dark and bright…”

Myfanway had always loved stories and music, but had found it difficult to enjoy performances since he acquired the staff. When he was not too drunk to appreciate the craft, his passenger’s whispers drowned out any sound, perverting one of his few joys in life. Now his only joy was in silence.

He fought to focus on the bard’s words, but faltered after the first few lines. His mind, though in desperate need of a distraction, had little interest in hearing of more adventure. Myfanwy and his companions had thought to join the legends of powerful adventurers who battled dragons, defended the innocent, and most importantly, earned untold riches. He absent-mindedly spun a gold coin between the tip of his finger and the bar counter. His riches. What a joke.

He shook his head, quaffed another glass of ale, and turned all of his drunken focus back to the bard’s performance.

“The brave adventurers traveled far and wide, to reach a distant land where mysteries hide…”

Myfanwy and his friends had never needed to trek to distant places. Their exploits had taken them no further than the Ashwinder Plains. They had dreamt of crossing the Stormborn Sea, but never made it that far. Tullius and Marrnox had torn through legions of kobolds, gnolls, and one particularly pissed off hill giant, all of whom had stood in the way of their destination: the Gargax Pits. A place legend said was “sacred” had turned out to be a warren of fear, death, and shit.

“In the dungeons' depths, battles were fought, where the price of victory was dearly bought…” The bard’s continued, staccato taps against her drum lulled Myfanway into a sullen trance.

The bottle on the counter stood half empty. He didn’t care anymore. He had drunk himself into such a state he could barely lift his arms to reach the counter. The coin he had spun earlier lay still, free for any who dared approach the muttering drunk. But the tavern’s patrons had fallen quiet, their minds lost to thoughts Myfanwy couldn’t hear. He hoped they too walked the lonesome halls of their own shame.

Memories returned, surrounding him like old friends drawing up seats at his side. He thought of his brother, who had drowned when they were children in a lake mere miles from the bar he now drank in. Years later, he had failed to become a mage , never able to cast even the most basic of cantrips. Though he eventually found work as a thief, his skills had always been lackluster in comparison to his peers. He could never rid himself of the notion he had been a burden to them. Each beat of the drum punctuated the onslaught of each recollected failure, like knives plunged into his chest.

“We mourn the loss of comrades dear, and hopeless now, our doom is near…”

Myfanwy knew a thing or two about hopelessness. He tried to run from it his whole life, but it always caught up to him in the dark of the night, a sneaking shadow, forever tethered to its owner. A never ending cycle of fear and dread.

“There is little to see and less to know, of the fate that lies at the end of the road…” He knew what lay in wait for him. Whether at the bottom of a bottle or the depths of the sea, Myfanwy would suffer this torment only a little while longer.

“Yet for all your cries and all your pain, suffer alone for all your days…” Tears began to trickle down his face and splattered on the countertop, matching each rhythmic drumbeat.

“Though your tears may fall like rain, the suffering remains an eternal stain.”

He tried to wipe some of the tears from his eyes. He’d lost track of the song, but he thought the bard had said something about crying. Was he so pathetic as to earn even their ire?

“Join us Myfanwy, before it’s too late....”

Myfanwy looked up with a jolt. The tavern was empty. Morlan and the wraith-like patrons had vanished. The shadows that had crept along the walls the last time he had looked up now blanketed the entire room, focusing on the stage, wrapping the bard in a cocoon of gloom. A single pair of violet eyes appeared from within the mass of writhing darkness.

“N-n-no,” he whimpered. His hands slapped up to his face, sliding on the tears as he tried to block out the nightmare around him.

Clammy hands wrapped around his wrists as he attempted to stand, prying them away from his face. His eyes were peeled open by scaled fingers before he could close them.

“Yuh yuh yessss,” the voices of his fallen friends mocked in his ear.

“Join us, Myfanwy,” the passenger whispered from the shadows onstage. A hand of violet, writhing worms split the darkness and beckoned him forward. Myfanwy weakly struggled against the iron grip of his captors.

“P-p-please, I can’t take it anymore…” His vision became blurry from the tears streaming down his face. As they hit the wooden counter and floor beneath him, the drops of water split open in starbursts of the same, squirming violet worms. In the clutches of his teammates, Myfanwy could only writhe as the growing mass of purple flesh slithered onto the floor. They nosed their way under his pant legs and crawled up his legs. Their touch was like fire, as if they were scraping away at his skin as they climbed.

“Your suffering is a stain, Myfanwy,” the passenger purred from the shadows onstage, “join us before it is too late.”

“Join us…join usss…” the hoarse whispers from his friends’ dead throats surrounded him in a susurrus cacophony as the worms emerged from under the collar of his shirt. The writhing wave crawled up his chest and neck, wracking his body with pain. They inched rapidly towards his closed mouth. Clammy fingers pried it open with ease. The wet, scraping pain inched its way to the edge of his lips.

“I won’t join you!” Myfanwy closed his eyes and screamed. He steeled himself for the first worm to slither into his mouth.

“The fuck are you on about?”

This voice was gruff, unbefitting any of his ghosts. Myfanwy didn’t feel anything wiggling its way down his throat or up his skin. He slowly opened his eyes to find the tavern in full swing. Though it maintained its usual gloomy interior, there was no sign of the passenger or his dead friends. Instead, dozens of eyes stared at him in a mixture of confusion, horror, and disdain.

The gruff voice belonged to a black-hairred dwarf in dark leathers standing between Myfanwy and the stage. The muscular man, a member of the group who had eyed him across the bar earlier, carried himself with an air of violence.

“Where do ya get off yellin’ at ‘er?” the dwarf pointed to the bard, who had stopped her song and was looking wide-eyed at Myfanwy. She was no longer wreathed in shadows, and none of the patrons seemed entranced by her music.

Myfanwy felt his cheeks flush as his eyes fell to the sticky countertop. He could only bring himself to weakly shrug in response to the dwarf’s question. Enraged further, the dwarf shifted out of the crowd and advanced on him. Morlan was between Myfanwy and his would-be assailant in a flash of silver. A low growl was enough to keep the dwarf at bay.

“Time to go,” Morlan said.

Myfanwy was already gathering his belongings off of the bar. The bartender wrapped a strong arm around him and escorted him towards the door. Confused murmurs trailed their every step, but Morlan did not seem to care and Myfanwy was in a state of shock that was new even for him.

Waves of rain drenched the two men as their feet hit the cobblestones outside. Travelers in the night appeared as distant specters against the city’s shadowy backdrop. Morlan ushered Myfanwy into the alley across the lane from the tavern. A mischief of rats fled from the newcomers, disappearing into a sewer grate. The dragonborn’s bright, silver eyes peered down at Myfanwy, piercing through the rain that fell between them. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but instead shook his head and returned to the tavern.

Myfanwy used his arm as a shelter against the torrential downpour as he took inventory of his pack. He could not help but breathe a sigh of relief when he saw the staff still tied to the pack. Thankfully the whispers had gone quiet.

“You think we could pry that gem off the top o’ that?”

Myfanwy let out a low groan at the familiar voice behind him. He turned to find the angry dwarf, with a dagger drawn and flanked by the group of humans and dwarves who had been eyeing him earlier in the night.

“Who cares about the gem?” one of the men said. “He’s got that bag of endless coins he likes to flash around. I saw him use it all week!”

“You don’t want to do this,” Myfanwy’s plea was weak, but he did not stutter. This was not the first time thugs had attempted to take advantage of him for the treasures he carried.

The men only laughed and drew their weapons, a collection of well-used cudgels and knives. Myfanwy attempted to take a step backward, but got caught on the strap of his satchel and tumbled to the ground. The men were on him in an instant.

Myfanwy cried out in desperation as blows rained down on him. The men could not have known, but he did not cry out in pain, though the beating hurt a great deal. His anguished howls were a plea for the men to flee. To run from what came next.

The violet worms appeared as if on cue, emerging from his pores in a single undulating mass. They congealed into an inhuman, writhing claw over his arm. The men looked on in horror, frozen by fear. One of them managed to turn, attempting to flee. But the passenger was already awake, and Myfanwy’s shadow would feed.

Myfanwy didn’t want to look. When his heart slowed down and his calmed breath brought him back to reality, he realized he still stood in the alley. The rain continued to fall from above. His eyes peeked open to take in the scene at his feet.

Shredded bodies lay scattered across the alley. Blood mixed with the rushing rain water and traced paths and tributaries between the cobblestones. His hand had returned to normal. His pack, including the staff and coin pouch, lay unmolested amongst the slaughter.

Myfanwy scooped up his belongings and fled into the night. It was time to find a new tavern.