The Tale of Xenosa

New Buddy

Cheska’s POV

More or less I’ve spent the last 6 hours trying to navigate the tunnels. As much as I don’t want to admit it having Lacresia around is quite comforting. I’d still have to worry about the tens and thousands of mindless creatures here but having a friend around just lessens the burden a bit. Well anyway a quick recap, we’ve already located our pets, turns out we both use our pets as guides, and they’re both the reasons why we ended up in this tunnel. After a while of walking, we decided to take a break. Lacresia has been complaining nonstop about her legs being tired. We were seated across each other. I decided to share the map I discovered from the lairs of the aswangs with her. I didn’t have any other choice I lost my flashlight and she had hers. Plus, I find her to be quite trustworthy. I reached for my bag opened the scroll. “Hey Cres, I’d like to show you something. Here” She bobbed her head up and down, she finally stopped whining about her legs. She’s been at it for the last 30 mins now, bugging me to take a break somewhere. The place we were at was the least dangerous of the places we’ve attempted to stop. At our first attempt, we stopped at some kind of cave, but after a while of looking around, we weren’t exactly comfortable. Well, who’d be comfortable with red eyes glaring at us, every time we looked at the walls. The second attempt wasn’t that good either, it had a stinky smell of garbage and sewer areas. Judging on our past experiences, we didn’t like it there. Here on our third and hopefully the last attempt to find a place to camp, we are at some kind of meadow. So you’d think a meadow at a tunnel hundreds of feet below ground, this girl must be hallucinating. To tell you the truth I’m weirded out by it as well. Lacresia cleared her throat causing me to snap back to reality, “Ches do you really think this map could help us? I mean if this place keeps on changing its pathways, like what you said wouldn’t this map be useless?” She asked. “I’ve thought about that but it actually helps us in identifying the places we had already been in.” I cleared my throat and explained more “I mean if you look here, this is the place I fought the bungisngis, and on this side here was the lair of the manananggals. And if you follow that path downwards we can find the cliff where we fought the aswangs. Look at the markings”. Cheska nodded her head and said “well I guess that’s quite helpful. Judging from the marks it could be that these are the lairs. And this kind of red string is the path you’ve taken while the blue string is mine”. After saying that Cresia then closed the scroll and handed it back to me, “ I think we should stop here for the night, I’ll take first shift and guard” she added. We spent a few minutes setting up camp and just talking with each other. We even made jokes and laughed together lightening the atmosphere. I crawled into my sleeping bag and was just about to close my eyes for sleep when Cres suddenly said “Ches I want you to be honest with me.” She said while seriously looking into my eyes. I’ve never noticed it before but she actually had nice straight dark brown hair and hazel eyes. A few freckles showed up on her face as well. She was pretty honest. “Why are you here Ches? Why take this risk?” I then looked at her and said “My grandmother, Nana, disappeared a few days ago. She was out on her weekly rituals in the forest but she just didn’t come back. Like poof!” She nodded and said, “If my Nana disappeared that suddenly I would do the same thing”. “What about you Lacresia? Why are you here?” I inquired. She sighed and laid down on her sleeping bag “Well it’s a long story but to make it short, my grandmother and grandfather ordered me to find this place. They said I was supposed to be this powerful combination of god and human, they told me I was a-“ I cut her off and said “a demigod, same here”. She nodded and continued “jokes on them though, because I have no clue what a demigod is and I just followed Louis, my pet bird, here.” I laid back down on my sleeping bag and cozied myself to sleep, “I guess that makes the both of us Cres.” and finally closed my eyes. When I woke up a few hours later, I realized that I had no clue what day it already was. I had to find a way to at least see some sunlight. Not a while longer Lacresia started to wake up. “Hey, Mornin,” I said, though I didn’t have a clue if what time of day it was. I checked all of my stuff and packed up my sleeping bag again. This time none of our stuff or pets went missing, which is a relief. Cresia started another fire and cooked us some soup, which I’m super thankful for since I was super hungry. We ate and chatted for a while, after a few minutes we both decided to go and continue exploring the tunnels. We’ve already been walking for at least an hour now, the place we were at was now super dry, sandy, and hot. We were sweating bullets. I was carrying Luci on my back while Cresia had Louis on her shoulders. We were using the map I found, good news is we have another dead end coming up the bad news was that we’re not sure how to get out of the said dead end. The paths kept on shifting rapidly, it’s up to the point that we couldn’t go back and retrace our steps if we wanted to. After a few more minutes of walking, we finally reached the dead end on the map. We were both exhausted so we both decided to take a break and just sit for a few minutes. But just like many of the things in this tunnel, things will never go like the way you expect them to be. “Hey Cres, here is some water” I called out to her. “Ah, th-aaaaaah” she suddenly fell. I immediately went to her spot and peaked at the hole she fell at “What just happened? Are you okay?” I asked. “Yep, All good down here. Come!” So I jumped after her. I landed on my feet, thank goodness. “Hey Cres what just happened back there?” I questioned. Which she answered with “ I don’t know. I was about to lean on the wall while drinking the bottle you gave me when I suddenly fell here. Hey look more pathways!” “That’s weird the map didn’t show any more pathways the last time we checked in.” We were now in a room, it looked like a temple, you know like the old temples they found in Egypt it looked exactly like that! Only this one was golden and had a lot of statues of people, there were no mummies or caskets though. I decided to open the map again, on jeez “why didn’t I notice that before?” “Notice what?” Cresia said. “This isn’t a tunnel Cres we’re in a maze and labyrinth. And it’s alive!” “Huh what do you mean it’s alive? Don’t over exaggerate Ches,” she said. “Look I’m not over exaggerating, look that’s why the tunnels keep on shifting. That’s why we’re able to meet down here considering that Samar and Palawan are from each other. At first, I thought that the tunnels must have been stretched to lots of different places but I was wrong, the tunnel itself is moving or it’s traveling. This whole place is an entire creature” I explained. Needless to say Cresia’s mouth gaped open at what I just said, “So uhm you mean to say, we’re inside a traveling creature?” she asked “Yep, that would be right. But I don’t think we got eaten or something, I just think we’re in something that’s moving and has a life of its own but we’re not getting eaten because if that were the case then there would be no other creatures living here”. Cresia just nodded to what I said, though fear was evident in her eyes I knew she was hiding it. Just when we thought things couldn’t get any worse, the walls inside the room started to get smaller, “Cres we need to get out of here or we’ll get squished”. “C’mon Ches we’ll try to climb,” Lacresia said, and so we started to climb the walls as fast as we could. She ordered Louis to fly ahead and get some help. The plan was to climb to where we first fell at but it looked like even that hole was now gone! Geez could things couldn’t get any worse than this. Though we didn’t know where we were going we just kept on climbing, the golden room below us was no longer evident. “Cres I think we need to find a hallow wall to break into, we can’t keep on climbing” “I think so too, let’s break the wall on your upper left I think that part is hallow enough” she said. Just as we were about to break the wall someone broke it first, Louis peeked first to which we both exclaimed at the same time “Louis you’re back!” a hand also appeared from the wall, Cres and I looked at each other and said “and with help!”