Descending Shadows: Shelter

We turned around to find the monsters coming at us. The more of them we slew, the more they poured into the room. We were outnumbered, and running out of space. I knew that if we didn’t act quickly, we’d be dead; so I released Arabella and asked her to teleport everyone in the cellar away from there. Reluctantly, she agreed. I could hear Jason call out to me as they disappeared, but there was no time for us to say our goodbyes. Some of us got injured as the battle waged on, and we were all losing energy. All hope seemed to slowly abandon us when Arabella reappeared.

We counted our blessings and teleported out of there with her right away and, as we arrived at where the others were, Jason ran up to me yelling “Moon, I thought I’d never see you again!”

I smiled and hugged him tightly. “Oh, no, you’re not getting rid of me that easily. Didn’t I promise never to leave you?”

We were close to the twins’ home, so we went back there to prepare for the hordes that pursued us. A few hours passed, and we were ready for them with more Canamazdh. One of the others ran up to Leslie and me as we filled our last canister and placed it in a rack with more of them. “They’re here!” he yelled. Arabella and the other civilians got out of the house through the back entrance while Leslie, Nolan, and I stayed inside.

“Nolan, set the timer for a minute!” I yelled.

“Got it!” he replied from the other room before returning to the living room, where Leslie and I were.

Moments later, the monsters stormed inside. We kept backing off from the front as they came in, hewing the ones that leapt at us; and once they were all inside, we got out of the back, locking them all inside. We rushed away from the house as it exploded with a thunderous roar; the monsters’ screams echoing in the air.

We were ready to leave, but the twins looked at me with sad eyes and I couldn’t leave them behind. They were no different than Jason and I. However, we couldn’t teleport at the time; Arabella had used up too much magic with the previous teleportations. But we had to find cover, and fast, so we scoped out our surroundings. We couldn’t tell what time it was because all our watches were broken, but judging by the skies, sundown was a couple hours away. It felt strange, how our watches had stopped working when we got here, but there was no explanation for it at the time.

Not long after, we came across an underground shelter. We didn’t want to endanger everyone, so Leslie, Nolan, and I went into it. The shelter was deep; there was barely any light piercing into it. We climbed down slowly along a ladder that seemed around twelve foot tall. The air was still and cold, barren of sound or life. We were safe. Once everyone was inside, we locked the hatch and laid the ladder on the floor. Everyone was exhausted from all the running. I found myself dozing off perhaps half an hour later, but was woken up by a tap on my hand after hours had passed. I slowly opened my eyes to find a silhouette before me.