Earth Elemental

Previously on Saga of the Jewels…

The life of seventeen-year-old RYN, bookish son of a wealthy landowner, changes forever when his hometown is destroyed by the EMPIRE and everyone he has ever known is killed. Ryn discovers that the Empire are seeking TWELVE PRIMEVAL JEWELS which grant the power to manipulate different elements, and that his father had been hiding the FIRE RUBY. Ryn sets out to take revenge on the Imperial General who killed his family and retrieve the Fire Ruby, and along the way meets NUTHEA the lightning-slinging princess, SAGAR the swaggering skypirate, ELRANN the tomboy engineer, CID the wizened old healer, and VISH the poppy-seed-addicted assassin. Together the companions decide to find all of the Jewels in order to stop the evil EMPEROR from finding them first and taking over the world. They have thus far succeeded in retrieving the Fire Ruby, borne by Ryn, and the Lightning Crystal, borne by Nuthea. They have now come to the land of FARR where, guided by the Farrian monk HULD, they have entered the ancient abandoned Earth Temple in order to attempt to retrieve the EARTH EMERALD…

EPISODE TWENTY-EIGHT: EARTH ELEMENTAL

“I guess we needed that boulder after all,” the purple-haired engineer-girl was saying. “It pressed down the switch at the bottom of the pit, which opened those doors.”

“Hmph,” spoke the ponytailed skypirate. “I could have done that. I would have found it eventually.”

The engineer girl rolled her eyes at him.

Huld was just grateful that they seemed to have made it through the trap-gauntlet, for now at least. He was astonished at the variety and ingenuity of the traps and designs that had been built into this shrine to Eto. Had they been part of the original architect’s intention, he wondered, or had the ‘Earth Emerald’ formed those, too, around itself, as the old man had talked about?

“Come on everyone,” said the fireboy, who seemed to be the leader of the group when it wasn’t goldengirl or ponytail. “Let’s see what’s through these doors.”

Huld walked forwards with the others through the steel doors.

Now the pool of moving light from the collection of glow-worms in the floor, which they had been chasing for so long, moved with them, staying under their feet and following them through the doors.

Beyond the doors it lit up another large, high-ceilinged chamber much like the one they had been in two floors ago.

Only this chamber was somewhat smaller, in terms of its length and width, if not its height.

And while it had the same brown-coloured earthen floor as the rest of the Shrine, this chamber’s walls and ceiling were made of stone, grey in the light from the worm-pool. There was no exit off of it that Huld could see.

“I think we’ve reached the top level of the Temple that we saw outside!” said goldengirl.

“About time, too,” said ponytail.

“But what do we do now we’re here?” said fireboy. “Shouldn’t the Emerald be in this room somewhere?”

“Hopefully…” said the old man. “But there might be one final puzzle, one last challenge…”

“Well that’s just great…” grumbled ponytail.

“Hey, what’s that over there?” said goldengirl.

She was pointing at a small object on the floor in the centre of the room.

Huld walked over to it with the others in the light from the glow-worms and inspected it.

Growing right in the centre of the chamber was what to all appearances seemed to be a tiny plant.

The plant jutted a few inches out of the earthen floor, its stalk and presumably roots extending down into it, green in the glow-worm light. It had a few little leaves which grew off the main stalk. It was more of a shoot than a plant, really. The whole thing did not look bigger than Huld’s hand.

As they got closer to it, the edge of the light-pool touched the plant, and its leaves twitched.

“Did you see that?!” said engineer-girl.

All of a sudden the pool of light dissolved as the glow-worms all shot apart in different directions, trailing streaks of brightness across the floor as they moved away from the central point where they had been gathered. They moved faster than the party had yet seen, and made straight for the stone walls of the chamber.

Which they began to eat through.

The worms moved up through the walls, creating vertical lines of light in them, flaring white in the process just as they had done when they had eaten through the stone doors that had given them access to the previous chamber.

None of the foreigners said anything, apparently too surprised and awestruck to do so, as Huld was. Instead they held up their hands to shield their eyes against the incredibly bright light.

From behind Huld’s own upraised hand, the light moved up higher, till it was coming from above. Huld had to lift his hand higher above his head to block it out and stop it from blinding him. The worms must have eaten a path up to and through the ceiling of the chamber.

Then the light started to move downwards again. The worms were methodically eating through the walls of the chamber from the top, down.

A deep rumble sounded, punctuated by the occasional louder rise in pitch and volume, and the floor started to vibrate. It sounded like the walls were starting to crumble and fall away as the worms ate through them.

And a new light had joined the glow-worm-light now, a warmer, yellower light, all-encompassing, impossible to block out with his hand.

The sun.

Warm air enveloped Huld’s face.

He dropped his hand.

As the last of the stone walls crumbled away, Huld looked round at the blue Farrian sky, the white clouds drifting aimlessly through it, the canopy-sea of green treetops that they were raised a little higher than on this earthen platform, the pinnacle of Eto’s magnificent ziggurat, which had now been entirely stripped of its top floor’s stone walls.

The foreigners had dropped their hands too, and were looking round and staring open-mouthed at the scene like idiots.

“Well, that was pretty cool,” said engineer-girl.

“Indeed,” said the old man.

“We’re definitely at the top of the Shrine then…” said fireboy pointlessly.

“Yeah, but where’s the Jewel?” said ponytail.

“Stay patient, Captain Sagar,” said goldengirl. “I’m sure it’s around here somewhere.”

The Shadowfinger, Vish, stayed silent, and barely ever said anything, Huld noted again. His one redeeming trait.

“Er, guys…” said engineer-girl. “You’d better take a look at this…”

Huld turned to see what she was talking about.

Behind them, the plant in the floor, which they had been distracted from while the walls had been being eaten away, was growing.

It had grown so fast that it was already as tall as engineer-girl, a much larger stalk slithering upwards into the air, more shoots and leaves sprouting off it and unfurling before their eyes, its base widening, thickening, pushing at the earth in which it was encased, roots starting to pop out of it like clenched fingers.

“What in the hells?” said ponytail.

The ground began to rumble again, then it split and cracked under their feet, a hundred jagged cracks zigzagging out from the plant’s base.

They stumbled backwards to where the ground remained firm, gazes still locked on the rapidly growing plant.

Now it was twice Huld’s height, and still growing, climbing, widening, not showing any signs of slowing.

Then it roared.

Can plants roar? Huld thought.

They fell onto their backsides as in front of them even more of the floor split and crumbled away, and up out of it rose an enormous green plant monster.

That was the only word Huld had for it. A tangled mass of knotted green and brown shoots and vines covered all over in leaves, even with bits of wood and branches discernible in the huge, seething mass of it, the plant monster was humanoid in shape, and at the top of its torso the shoots and vines were twisted into something that resembled a head, with an open space for a mouth which emitted an unnatural roar somewhere between that of a lion and a dragon.

The little shoot sticking up from the floor, it turned out, had only been the tip of one of its fingers, which were each now a shoot of their own, at the ends of long arms of twisted vines. The plant monster had come up onto the platform hand-first, and used its arm to pull the rest of itself out of the ground.

It stood before them now in the sunlight and open air atop the earthen platform at the summit of the earth shine, terrifying in its inhumanity, and roared at them again. The earth floor had re-formed itself underneath the monster to make the platform flat and complete once more.

“What do we do?!” fireboy was yelling desperately. “What do we do?!

“We fight it, you stupid pup!” ponytail shouted back. “Use your damn fire, quick!”

“It’s an Earth Elemental!” called the old man. “It must be the guardian of the Emerald!”

“Watch out!” cried goldengirl.

The plant monster slammed a huge leafy hand down at the fireboy, but he managed to leap out of the way of it in time and it only smacked against empty floor.

“Fire!” shouted fireboy, appropriately enough, and thrust out his hands in a gesture not entirely dissimilar from the Strike That Moves Mountains. Maybe he was copying it. Huld wouldn’t put it past a filthy foreigner to do something like that.

Flames leapt from fireboy’s hands and engulfed the monster’s torso, setting it alight. It stepped back from fireboy and roared again, and Huld wondered if he didn’t detect pain in the roar this time.

“It works!” yelled goldengirl. “More of that, Ryn! Can you help us out?”

“Help you out with what?”

“By setting our weapons on fire again!”

“Why don’t I just attack it myself?!”

“Don’t be greedy, pup!” yelled ponytail. “Don’t hog all the glory! There’s enough to go around!”

“Alright...come here, everyone!”

The other foreigners all rushed over to the boy while the plant monster roared and staggered around on fire at the other end of the platform. They drew their weapons, made mainly of steel.

“Put them all together!” commanded fireboy.

The foreigners all held their blades to each other so they touched, except in engineer-girl’s case, who instead contributed a metal whip. The goldengirl and the old man carried simple, straight swords. Ponytail put in two curved foreign blades. Vish had a black Imperial weapon.

“Fir-AHHH!” the fireboy yelled, his magic-word cracking and turning into a shout of exertion. Again fire leapt from his outstretched hands, this time engulfing the upheld weapons in a localised inferno. Then the fire ceased streaming from his hands, but it remained burning on the blades, the whip.

The monster roared again, more loudly, and this time the roar was full of fury.

They all turned to look at it again, then watched in horror as with one leafy hand it tore a flaming chunk of vegetative mass out of its own torso and flung it, still burning, in their direction.

The party scattered, except for fireboy, whom the chunk of flaming plant-mass hit head-on. But instead of hurting him, it broke apart on him, falling apart to either side, burning up even more quickly and smoking away into charred ashes, leaving him there, holding out his hands in the same pose he had used to set his friends’ weapons alight.

The plant monster roared yet again. There were still a few flames burning on its body here and there, including on the hand with which it had ripped a section out of its own chest, but it had largely succeeded in removing the part of it that had been on fire from itself. In the cavity that had been left in its chest, new shoots and vines now grew quickly to fill the gap, regenerating its body.

“Poodoo!” ponytail yelled vulgarly. “It can heal itself!”

“Yes, but the fire still hurts it!” the old man yelled back. “We might be able to burn it up faster than it can heal! Attack! Attack! Use your flame-assisted weapons!”

“Death and glory!” ponytail shouted, and ran at the monster with his twin flaming blades held out.

“For Imfis!” shouted engineer-girl as she followed him with her fiery whip.

“Manolia!” cried goldengirl.

The old man and the Shadowfinger ran with them too, though without feeling the need to shout battlecries, leaving only fireboy remaining standing where he was, holding his hands out.

Huld watched all of this happening like a curious observer. He was a good distance from the plant in this corner of the platform he had ended up in, and he was strangely fascinated by the foreigners and their unorthodox improvised fighting techniques. He saw no reason to join in yet, if at all. This monster, fearsome as it was, was apparently a guardian of the Primeval Jewel that belonged to his people. Nothing that had happened on their journey through the Shrine had convinced him that it was a good idea to be taking the Emerald from its safe hiding place here, wherever it was. He hadn’t even located it yet. It may have been his orders to help with this mission, which he was bound to obey, but he didn’t have to rush to obey them, did he?

What was more, he didn’t have a weapon that could hold fire like the others’ could. So he had no weapon that would be effective against the earth elemental.

Or do I?

“Huld!” fireboy called out to him, “Do...do you want some fire too?” His eyes were creased up with strain and his arms trembled where he held up his hands palm-out in a gesture which seemed to allow him to be able to keep the fire burning on his friends’ weapons.

“No thank you,” Huld said to him politely. “I am not quite so...keen on fire as you are.”

“But don’t you...don’t you need a way to fight it too?” the boy gasped. It seemed to be a great effort for him to speak while he was sustaining so much fire at once.

“Your friends seem to be dealing with it well enough on their own.”

“Aaaarrrggghhhh!”

Ponytail suddenly landed on the floor between them having been knocked backwards through the air by one of the plant monster’s hands. He picked himself up and brushed himself down, wiping a bloody cut to his cheek with the back of his hand. He had lost one of his swords, but the one that he still held continued to burn with magical fire.

“Why did it have to be earth first?” he grumbled. “I hate earth…”

He ran back into the fray.

The fireboy’s friends were all slashing wildly at the plant monster, leaving trails of orange in the air where they drew their weapons across it. They were managing to hack off sections of the creature’s body, big green collections of vines and leaves falling to the floor together, and set it on fire again in different places. But the vines and leaves seemed still to be growing back, in spite of the flames, and in between swiping at them with its gigantic leafy fists and roaring, the monster continued in its strategy of tearing off the flaming parts of itself and chucking them at the foreigners, or off the top of the shrine entirely, only for them to regrow.

Huld sighed.

“I suppose that you could try to lend me some of your fire,” he said to fireboy, “if you really want to.”

He held out his wooden staff and tilted the tip of it down to the boy.

“Fire,” spoke the boy, more weakly than before, and some more fire appeared and jumped from one of his hands to Huld’s staff, setting the top of it alight. It burned orange and hot.

Huld recoiled from it immediately, but managed to keep hold of it at arm’s length. I hate fire, he thought.

“Thank you,” he said, remembering his etiquette, and dipped his head slightly to fireboy.

“No...no problem…” breathed fireboy, evidently struggling. “You better get in there…”

Huld nodded, and ran towards the battle, holding the staff a good distance away from his body.

When he ran past ponytail, the skypirate said “Baldy! So good of you to join us!”

Filthy foreigner.

Huld thought he should imitate the others, and he wanted to reassert where his allegiance lay and remind himself of his motivation for doing all this, so as he bent his knees and jumped high through the air, he shouted “For Farr!”

It came off the tongue a bit awkwardly, but it made for a good enough battlecry, he supposed.

He flew through the air and aimed an almighty thwack of his staff right at the creature’s ‘head’. The staff connected pleasingly, and Huld held it in place a little longer, using its momentum and the creature’s own body to keep it in contact for a moment after the initial impact.

The monster’s head caught fire.

Huld kicked off the creature with both his feet and backflipped, landing on the ground and twirling his staff around himself in an orange-trailed flourish before letting it come to rest at his side again.

“Nice-one, monk-man!” the engineer-girl called out to him. “That was fabulous!”

Huld allowed himself a smile and a nod to her. He supposed that he was partial to praise, even from foreigners... Even from foreigner engineer-girls who looked and dressed a bit like boys…

The plant monster roared. It was on fire again, but it tore at its own head and ripped it off, then threw it at Huld, who leapt again, over the top of it, somersaulted in the air, and came down upright.

The head regrew quickly, reforming out of the plant mass of the creature’s body, and the monster roared again with renewed vigour.

That was unfortunate.

But the foreigners seemed to have the advantage now. Whether because they were inspired by Huld’s daring attack, or because they didn’t want him to get all the ‘glory’ as ponytail called it, they charged in again, hacking, slashing, swiping, whipping at the plant, chopping more of it off and setting more parts of it alight.

Huld joined them, rushing in and swiping rapidly at its hands with his staff, deflecting them from bashing into him or the foreigners, trying to hold the monster up long enough to stop it from tearing off the flaming parts of itself before the fire could consume it completely and burn it up.

If they could all attack quickly enough together, and coordinate their attacks, then maybe they could cut enough of it off and set enough of it on fire to prevent it from regrowing and destroy it completely.

“It’s working!” yelled ponytail. “Keep going! Keep fighting!”

Almost all of the plant was on fire now and it didn’t seem to be able to regenerate itself fast enough anymore. It appeared to be shrinking, even as it roared a noise of frustration and tore more flaming parts off itself to chuck at the foreigners, who scrambled to get out of the way and came back in to attack.

They were doing it. They were subduing the Earth Elemental, the guardian of the Shrine to Eto and the Earth Emerald. Huld wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about that, but at least they were winning.

And then the fire on their weapons ran out.

The flames leaping from the foreigner’s swords and whip just fizzled out, leaving cold metal once again. Only Huld’s staff continued to burn with fire, presumably because it was made of wood and the boy had set it on fire in the more traditional fashion.

The monster reached down and grabbed his staff. Huld was too stunned with surprise to react in time. The monster snatched the staff away from him with a twitch of its arm, then snapped it in two, throwing the discarded halves of it over its shoulder, off the top of the Shrine.

“Oh dear,” Huld said.

“I’m...I’m sorry!” fireboy called back weakly from somewhere behind them. “I don’t think I have any mana left! I used it all up! I’m exhausted!”

“Well, poodoo,” said ponytail. “And just when we were starting to win as well…”

The monster roared at them, having torn another massive chunk of flaming plant-mass off of itself and thrown it away, then regrown it. There were far less flames burning on it already. And it had begun to increase in size again.

Its leafy fist flew through the air, aimed at Huld.

He raised a defence to block.

But this time, instead of punching him, the monster opened its green hand before it made impact with the monk, and instead reached out to grab him in a band of vines, which constricted around him immediately.

Huld cried out in alarm and pushed against the vines, but with no fire to blight them they held fast, and constricted all the more tightly.

He called out with pain as the tendrils forced themselves tighter around his chest. All of a sudden there was a rush of air as the monster swung him somewhere with its hand, and then he was completely surrounded by green and brown vines and shoots.

Huld wriggled and writhed, tried to kick, punch, amidst the seething mass of plant. His vision was entirely obscured by leaves and vines and branches. Every which way he turned were only more leaves and vines and branches.

What had happened? Had the plant monster taken him into itself? Into its own body?

He tried to call out again but found he had no breath. Vines still encircled him, still clamped down on his chest, and they were beginning to squeeeeeze the air out of him, squeeze the very life out of him.

He wriggled and writhed all the more frantically, all the more desperately, but to no avail. The effort only made the vines tighten around him even more. He was trapped.

His energy began to wane. The corners of his vision started to blur. And then he lost the ability to move entirely, his vision staring to turn black and fade away.

He was passing out, he realised. He was suffocating. He was going to die.

Well, I wouldn’t mind winning this battle if it meant staying alive, he thought dimly.

The world went dark.

Just before the darkness overtook the entirety of his vision, something green and bright flared in it.

Huld opened his eyes again, which had been drooping shut, looking out with one last surge of desperate hope.

A little way in front of him, also embedded in the mess of leaves and vines, was a green jewel, shining blighty with an ethereal glow.

The emerald wants to be found, the old man’s words echoed in Huld’s mind. This is all a test, he realised.

Could he get to it?

With the last of his strength, Huld stretched his neck out amidst the tangle of vines and touched his mouth to the green-glowing emerald, giving everything he had, and kissed it.

Fertile power surged through Huld, beginning in his lips and spreading to every part of him. At the same time became aware of the plant monster in a new way. All at once he could somehow feel all of its different vines and branches and leaves and tendrils. And not only that, but now he could feel the presence of the earth from which the Shrine was composed below him, underneath the plant’s ‘feet’. He could feel the whole construct of the Shrine, all its different earthen floors and walls and corridors, its stone doors, and even, below all that, the soil of the earth of Farr itself. He did not know how to put it into words even in his own thoughts—but all of a sudden he could just feel them in the same way that he could feel his own body.

And if he could feel them like his own body, he could move them like his own body, too.

He concentrated, and willed for the plant to release him.

Somewhere above him the plant monster roared again, a strained, peculiar noise. Huld hadn’t known before how a plant could roar, but now with his new earth-sense he perceived that one of the many different kinds of plants of which the tangled elemental was composed was able to trap and release air, and that a group of them were releasing a rush of pressurised air in coordination from a collection of vines in its ‘throat’ in order to make the roaring noise.

The plant was resisting him, but Huld was exerting some effect on it.

The monk shut his eyes, drawing on a lifetime of meditation and attention-training, and used his new earth-sense to ‘feel’ for the vines and shoots that composed the monster’s arms. He felt their presence ineffably, but he also saw the two arms in his mind’s eye.

He concentrated, and, as if it was his own, made one of the monster’s arms rise to reach inside its own torso.

Huld felt familiar tendrils encircling himself, but this time they constricted around him only to pluck him out of the seething mass in which he had become embedded. Air rushed over him again briefly as he willed the monster to pull him out of its body, and then opened his eyes with a jolt as he willed it to let him go and landed on his back on the ground with a smack.

Stars burst behind his eyes and the Farrian sunshine blinded him for a moment, breaking his concentration, but then he was springing onto his feet again, reaching out with his earth-sense towards the plant, willing it to submit to him.

Around him, some of the foreigners were still pestering it like irritating mosquitoes, and now Huld realised that it had taken others of them into itself.

“Son of a submariner!” came a muffled cry from within the body of the plant, from a body concealed by foliage. “Heeeeeelp!” Engineer-girl.

“Get us out of here!” came another. Fireboy.

This was why the other foreigners weren’t attacking it all-out anymore, but merely defending themselves from it and taking cheap shots—they didn’t want to hurt their companions.

“Master Huld,” goldengirl called to him from nearby. “You made it release you, somehow!” She saw much. Huld did not like that. “Can you make it release Ryn and lady Elrann, too?”

Huld set his jaw. “I will try,” he said in earnest.

Intuitively, he reached out his hands, much as he had seen fireboy and ponytail do to call their fire and wind, and felt with his new earth-sense to take control of the plant’s arms again.

He got them, but the plant resisted him, pushing back against his control. It was like the monster had a consciousness, a will of its own. Or maybe it was the will of the Jewel itself? Was that possible?

Huld grunted. Exhaustion sapped his limbs already—he was new to this power, and after the first initial flush of awakening to it, it was hard work to use it.

He gritted his teeth, a long hiss of effort issuing from between them, and forced the monster’s two arms up and into itself, searching for the engineer-girl and fireboy, found them, and pulled them from within it. They came out with gasps of relief as Huld made the monster plonk them down on the floor. It must have been strangling them to death too.

Huld dropped his arms after the two foreigners landed, releasing his mental hold on the monster. His triceps and forearms had filled with bright, flaring pain from the effort he had just expended.

“How did you do that, baldy?” ponytail said next to him, his forehead scrunched up with incredulity.

“Inside the creature…” Huld conceded, panting. “I touched… the Emerald…”

The plant monster took a step towards them.

“Well do you think you could use your new abilities to take that thing out?!” ponytail shouted.

A plant-fist flew through the air towards Huld.

He put his hands up again and willed for it to stop…

...only to be smacked in the chest and sent tumbling back heels-over-head along the floor.

He almost went over the edge of the platform, but put his hand out and grabbed the lip of it just in time, thudding into the earth wall below with the side of his body as he dangled.

“Ouch,” said Huld. His arm strained almost beyond belief.

He took a deep breath, got his other hand up onto the platform too, then grimaced as he wrenched himself back up onto it, in spite of himself a gasp of pain spilling from his lips.

The battle had resumed. The foreigners danced forwards and backwards, throwing hopeless strikes and avoiding the plant monster’s hands like their lives depended on it. Which, in fact, they did.

Ponytail turned and saw Huld standing at the edge of the platform.

“Baldy!” he called. “Look, if you’ve got earth-powers now, can you sort this thing out for us or not?!”

“I am sorry,” Huld called back. He was apologising more than he would like to today, and to filthy foreigners of all people. “I am not strong enough. I think I may have ‘run out of mana’, as the boy put it?”

“That’s right,” called goldengirl, jumping out of the way to avoid a grab from the monster, then running back to join him at the edge of the platform. “You only just got your powers,” she said when she reached him, her face flushed. “You would have had the surge when you first touched the jewel, but they are new to you, so your mana reserves won’t be very large yet. You can only increase them through training and practice. Have you got anything left?”

“No,” Huld said, keenly aware of the pain in his arms. Though maybe there was a small something left in there. “Or at least, not much,” he added.

“Grandfather,” goldengirl said to the old man, “can you give him some of your mana?”

“An excellent idea!” said the old man, his face lighting up. “I almost forgot! Though I must be careful not to entirely deplete my own reserves.”

While the others kept the plant monster busy, the old man ran over to Huld and laid a hand on his shoulder. Normally Huld would have protested at this gross invasion of his personal space and breaking of etiquette, especially by a foreigner, but he was growing to accept some of their stranger ways.

“Syphon,” said the old man, then “Cure.” Huld felt a lightness spread from his shoulder through the rest of his body, and the pain in his arms subsided.

“Thank you,” he said to the old man, bowing.

“Don’t mention it.” The old man grinned through his white beard. “Though I’m out of mana myself now.”

Huld wasted no time. He put his two hands forward, making gripping shapes with each, and concentrated on the plant monster.

In the middle of pulling back for a strike at engineer-girl, the plant monster stopped in place, trembling against the force of Huld’s earth-manipulation. He felt it resisting him, like a magnetic force physically pushing against his outstretched hands, but he held it in place. For now.

“Now!” Huld yelled desperately. “Attack it now while I am still able to hold it!”

“Come on, everyone!” the Manolian cried. “Now’s our chance!”

The foreigners rushed the monster again, though this time without any flame projection from fireboy. Being the nearest, engineer-girl got to it first, lashing at it with her whip, which shot out like a silver snake lunging towards its pray and lashed through some leaves. Then ponytail, Vish, fireboy, the Manolian, the old man, all arrived with their swords, jumping and cutting wildly at it, tearing sections of growth from it as Huld held it in place.

The pain returned to Huld’s arms, sharp as needles. He could feel the plant monster resisting his grip, pushing against him, intensifying the pain. He clamped his jaw tight.

“We’re doing it!” ponytail yelled as he slashed off another chunk of vegetation. “Just a bit longer! We’ve got it this time!”

And then Huld lost control of the monster again.

The pain in his arms had reached its highest pitch, and even though he still had his hands out and was concentrating hard on holding the monster still, it broke his grip all of a sudden and immediately flung out a massive arm, sending the surprised foreigners flying in all directions like it was swatting away a collection of irritating flies.

As it stepped towards Huld, he found he didn’t have the strength or quickness to move out of the way.

Bright pain shone on his face as he spun through the air from the monster’s blow.

Huld found himself on his back on the platform again, blinking from the sting of the pain, looking up above him at the bright, hot, Farrian sun.

The bright, hot Farrian sun, brilliant in the clear blue sky, visible because the glow-worms had eaten away the stone walls at the top of this Shrine.

The bright, hot Farrian sun, brilliant in the clear blue sky, visible because the glow-worms had eaten away the stone walls at the top of this Shrine, which had fed the plant monster with light so that it grew from a tiny shoot in the ground to this roaring, tangled mass of regenerative vines and leaves that they were now struggling to defeat.

Huld had an idea.

He reached out with his earth-sense, feeling the soil and clay of which the shrine was made below him, under his back, on all sides of him, in the floor of this platform, right at its edges where the stone walls had been…

“Earth! I summon you!” he found himself yelling, forcing his mind to focus on the material of the platform and intensifying his concentration on the words he spoke.

At the same time he thrust both his hands upwards towards the sky, then rolled over onto his side, arms still outstretched, pushing himself up with his legs onto his knees, then, with a great force of his will, straining, standing, lifted his hands high above his head as they trembled and shook.

As he did so, the earth around the perimeter of the platform rose up into the air, pushing up from lower down in the Shrine, becoming a wall around the top of it which rose as high as Huld, then higher than him, replacing the original stone walls of the chamber.

Acting on instinct, with what felt like the very last of his earth-projection energy, or ‘mana’, or whatever stupid term the foreigners used for it, Huld brought his two hands above his head slowly together.

The earth he had called up to form walls around them bent inwards towards the middle of the platform, then continued extending to form a dome, making a large, shrinking hole in the air above them.

As the hole closed up, the light coming from the sky diminished, progressively blocked out by the newly risen walls, eventually to form only a small circle through which a single beam of sunlight fell, spotlighted on the plant monster, until with the last clap of Huld’s hands as he clasped them fully together the hole closed up completely and the light disappeared.

Darkness had returned.

In the dark, the plant monster roared, and now Huld heard fear in the roar.

“Again!” Huld shouted as he sank to his knees from exhaustion. “It gets its energy from the sun! Attack again!”

In the darkness, he only heard the frenzied footsteps of the others charging forward to attack, and their battlecries.

“Death and glory!”

“Manolia!”

“For Cleasor!”

“For the One!”

“For Imfis!”

The dull thwacking sound of blades hacking at vines and foliage.

The sound of a plant monster roaring even more loudly again in...pain?

Grunts of exertion, a shout of shock, a rush of air, the thump of a body and metal on earth as someone fell to the ground with their weapon.

A hand pressed on his shoulder again. “Here you go, Huld,” said the old man. “This strategy had better work, as this is the very last of my mana.”

Lightness filled Huld once more.

“I thought that you said that you were out of ‘mana’?” Huld challenged the old man

“A version of the truth,” said the old man. “I kept just the littlest bit in reserve for any emergency healing, or to use at the right moment. Such as now. Half the trick of fighting is knowing when to strike. I’ve just given a very little to Ryn too, now that that monster can’t seem to regrow itself anymore.”

A flare of light from fireboy’s upheld hand confirmed his words, and lit a vision of the six foreigners crowded around the monster, hacking and whipping at it as it writhed and lashed out at them, apparently stripped of its regeneration power now the sun had been blocked out.

Huld almost felt sorry for it.

But not really. It had tried to eat him after all. And his orders were to destroy it and to take the Jewel.

“Hold it, Huld, hold it!” fireboy shouted, no doubt having seen that the old man had replenished the monk’s energy reserves and he was back on his feet.

The plant monster was on fire again, the crackling light from its burning body now illuminating the re-walled chamber. Stripped of its regeneration ability, it could do nothing about this but flail around madly at the foreigners, who merely ducked and dived out of the way of its limbs, then jumped in again when it turned away from them to hack at it some more.

Huld stretched out a hand, and for the third time that day held the monster in place.

“For Farr!” he yelled.

Weakened, the monster held fast, stuck in a pose with an arm pulled back to strike at fireboy.

They had it.

Safe from the strike, fireboy unleashed a final elemental attack at the monster, orange flaming from his hand and setting anything that wasn’t already on fire alight. The rest of them pressed in, hacking whole chunks of flaming vine and shoot from it, some of them getting so near to the flames they were almost burned.

Fixed in place, falling apart under the spell and swords of the foreigners, the monster let out one final, deafening roar that went deep and long, then began to peter out, growing quieter and quieter until it ended in a failing hiss, then ceased altogether.

They had defeated the plant monster. 

All that was left of it now was a formless pile of burning mulch into which its body had disintegrated.

Something shone bright and leaf-green at the centre of the mulch. Something small and oval, so bright that it gave the walls and the foreigners a green glow.

The Earth Emerald.

Without another thought, and before any of the foreigners could do so, Huld ran forward and reached into the mulch, not caring that some of it was still on fire, to grab the Jewel and pull it out.

As soon as his hand wrapped around it, he felt power surge through him again, just as it had done when he had touched it with his lips inside the plant monster, only more so. Energy throbbed along his arms and legs, reinvigorating him. He felt solid, stable, secure. And all the more disliking of fire than ever.

He hopped back a safe distance from the burning remnants of the plant monster.

The Jewel was cool to the touch, despite the fact that it had recently been embedded in a pile of flaming plant mass, and shone bright green.

He looked around at the foreigners, who stood panting, staring at him with wide eyes and faces lathered in sweat, and breathed a long sigh of relief.

He had completed his mission.

Now to return the Jewel to the Governor, who would keep it safe from these filthy prying foreigners.