Halfway down the slope of a hill, the cold around him changed.
The forest had one kind of cold—plain, honest—and then there was this: a hush. A silence that felt like breaths were being held. He immediately skidded to a halt, one foot planted on a root, and listened.
No wind. No night-birds. His own heartbeat sounded too loud, like he’d stolen someone else’s drum.
Something was off.
He lifted his chin and tried to see like Hugo said: ‘don’t look for things, and look for not-things’. Without a lantern, he could only rely on thin moonlight for visibility, so he squinted until his eyes watered.
Nothing. No glint of an eye. No shifting shadow. Still, his skin prickled as if the trees were alive and watching him.
He swallowed, mouth dry, and turned back toward Corvalenne. He’d just walk extra fast. He wouldn’t run. Running would make his skin salty with sweat, and magic beasts liked salt.
Five steps. Ten. A root snagged on his feet. He caught himself on a trunk and then—
He ran into a slick, scaly wall that wasn’t there a blink ago.
The giant blackstriped serpent’s head uncoiled from the shadows in front of him. Its jaw opened on creaky hinges, and there were rows of teeth like wet nails, and then there was only the inside of it: heat and meat and a fleshy tunnel that pulsed with the stench of rot and decay.
He didn’t even manage to shout. The serpent swallowed him in one neat motion, boots and all.
He tried to kick, but his legs didn’t belong to him. His arms were pinned tight to his ribs by muscle that clutched and slid. The serpent’s spit was everywhere, crawling under his fingernails and into the fine hairs on his neck and making his thoughts swirl like his brain was getting digested already.
‘Move,’ he told his body. ‘Do something. Bite. Scratch. Scream.’
But he couldn’t. The paralyzing saliva made him soft all at once, and the serpent worked him deeper into its body.
He thought of the lightning rod. His left hand twitched, seeking a thing he didn’t have.
‘... This isn’t the worst way to die, I guess.’
At least it was warm in here. Hugo would scold him for giving up, but Hugo wasn’t here and he had no wood to lift. He let his eyes fall shut and tried to make his muscles the same agreement as his mind. He tried to be the kind of still that didn’t hurt.
Then something hit the serpent from outside.
The serpent thrashed violently, rolling and seizing as if the forest itself had struck it. A hiss ripped through its throat, loud enough to rattle his bones, and as it jerked him side to side while trying to slither away—
A sharp, brutal crack shattered its skull, and it shuddered only once before going limp.
Moments later, a blade split the belly open. Moonlight knifed through the opening, making him wince against the sudden sting of cold and light.
Two pale hands seized him, dragging him through a curtain of blood until the night air finally hit his face.
He coughed, spat, and blinked hard against the brightness of the moon. The Witch stood over him, blood painting her boots and cheek as her knife still steamed from the cut. She hauled him the rest of the way out—then dumped him onto the frozen ground, crouching beside him with her brows casually furrowed like she hadn’t just torn apart something ten times her size.
“... Why didn’t you fight back?” she asked flatly. “You had teeth. Nails. Even a scratch would’ve been something.”
He stayed on his back, chest heaving, fingers twitching uselessly in the frost. “Couldn’t,” he muttered. “It was… bigger. Stronger. What’s someone like me supposed to do against that?”
His eyes burned, tears slipping before he could stop them. He finally began to shake as the truth pressed in: he’d been one breath away from dying, and it would’ve been his carelessness and his lack of willpower that caused it.
Hugo and the rest of the children in Sorowyn Carpentry would kill him if they knew he’d been this close to giving up without putting up a fight.
The Witch’s mouth twisted, more scoff than smile, and she stood up while wiping her knife clean on the serpent’s hide. “If you carried relics, you wouldn’t have struggled at all. Relics are the great equalizer of the world.”
“I don’t want relics!” His voice cracked, anger and terror tangling in his throat. “I hate them! I hate all of them! I wish—”
“Point to me a child who says they hate relics, and I will cut out your tongue for lying to me,” she said. “No child hates relics. Not even you.”
He bit down on his next breath, throat aching, but the tears kept coming anyway.
Without waiting for his answer, she bent and hooked his wrists, pulling him over her back as if he weighed nothing. He squirmed weakly, muttering half-broken calls for mom and dad, but the serpent’s saliva still had most of his body paralyzed. His limbs wouldn’t obey him.
All he could do was bury his face in her fur cloak, trying not to cry.
“... I found an interesting spot a few days ago while I was trying to gather mudballs myself,” she said cheerily. “Let’s go and have a look.”
Dain and Yasmin tumbled for a while, if’ ‘tumbled’ meant being rolled head over heels in complete darkness while rocks and cartilage tried to stab them to pieces.
Yasmin’s staffblade banged his hip. Something with too many edges thudded off his shoulder and slid away. Then their movements slowed, ground down into a long, nauseous sway… and finally stilled.
The giant beast that’d swallowed them whole finally settled.
He lay flat on his stomach, cheek pressed to a puddle of something wet, and tried to breathe without thinking about what he was breathing.
… It reeks.
Somewhere to his side, Yasmin hissed through her teeth. “Sorowyn.”
“I hear you,” he muttered. “You in one piece?”
“What an idiotic trap to fall for,” she grumbled.
“Not disagreeing,” he grumbled back. His own voice sounded small in the dark. “I’m gonna turn on a light. Don’t look directly at me unless you enjoy being terrified.”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“What does that—”
As he crawled to his feet, he flexed his right hand and opened his Bloodlight Eye.
The reddish-purple light immediately spilled across the dark like a poured wine, and the stomach they were in bloomed into sight in cruel detail: walls and ceiling studded with glittering iron spikes, all pointing inward like stalactites from a blacksmith’s nightmare. The ground was a slick basin of viscous fluid that wobbled in slow tremors with the beast’s breathing, and half-digested things lay embedded in the muck.
A haunch of something hoofed, a snapped wagon axle, the crushed hull of a lantern, a bundle of tin-twined roots, a heap of coin-bright beetle shells…
I know what beast this is.
Yasmin, grimacing, lifted her Manalight Lantern and willed it to burn brighter as she stood up as well. The blue light layered over his red, and the viscous puddle around their boots hissed with tiny bubbles. Dain could feel the slight acidic sting through his soles already.
“... Wonderful,” he muttered. “We’re inside an ironmaw toad.”
“A what?” Yasmin’s nose wrinkled, and she lifted her boot to watch a string of fluid snap from it.
“Ironmaw toad,” he repeated, trying not to smile despite the situation. Gods help him, at least this was interesting. “It’s a giant omnivorous toad. It eats anything it can fit inside its mouth, and its stomach is lined with metal spikes that crush anything it swallows. Fun fact: they’re known to have symbiotic relationships with lumenglobe fireflies. The fireflies lure prey close to the toad at night, and in return, the toad protects the firefly nests.”
She stared at him. “You couldn’t have realized that before getting lured into a trap?”
“Hey, ironmaw toads never show up in The Tales of Seeker Orland. I’m not that good at recognizing traps.”
“Whatever.” She planted the butt of her swordstaff in the muck and started towards the nearest wall. “We’re cutting our way out. The toad should’ve chewed us up instead of swallowing us whole—”
“Don’t even try that unless you want to die.”
She was about to rear her swordstaff blade to strike the stomach wall when she glanced back, eyes narrowing.
“If you’re strong enough to cut through its stomach and kill it in one slash, then by all means, do that,” he explained. “But if you can’t cut it open in one slash, all that slash will do is agitate it and make it contract its stomach. Guess what’ll happen if it does that?”
She went very still, gaze flittering about the iron spikes on the walls and roof.
“... We’d be impaled,” she muttered.
“Yep.”
Grudgingly, she took a step back from the wall. “How do we get out, then?”
Dain tapped his chin, eyes flicking from spike to spike, then down to the bubbling fluid at their boots.
“Well, Orland never got swallowed by one of these things, so he’s of no help. But…” He gave Yasmin a small grin. “In the Journals of the Tombjackala, Marosa did get eaten by one, and she lived to write about it. She didn’t cut her way free. She made it throw her up.”
Yasmin’s brows tightened. “Throw… us up.”
“Mhm.” He twirled his cane around, unfurled it into its oreblade form, and ignited the reddish-purple firelight. “So we’ll just do the same.”
Yasmin flinched back a step. “What in the gods’ names is—”
“My newest relic.” His grin widened. “Now watch.”
He crouched and eased the oreblade into the digestive pool. Instantly, the fluid sizzled and bubbled as though it resented the intrusion, and the stink sharpened, rising hot and sour. Next, he lifted his prosthetic, gathering a windsphere between his fingers before letting it stir into wilder swirls.
The bubbling spread, the surface breaking into whorls and foam.
Finally, he threw his wings wide. The silverplume feathers whipped gusts around the stomach, splashing the boiling liquid against the spiked walls. Droplets hissed where they struck iron, but more importantly, they struck flesh—and the toad started to groan.
The heat stung his boots. His skin winced beneath the rising scald. Yasmin swore under her breath and jerked back as a splash singed her shin, but as the toad rumbled and the walls rippled, a tremor shuddered through the entire stomach.
Like a drunk retching on bad wine, the ironmaw toad convulsed.
He glanced over his shoulder. “Hold on—”
The stomach lurched, and the two of them were swept upward in a flood of half-digested sludge. The world turned end over end, lightless and roaring, until—
They exploded out of the toad’s gullet in a rain of filth.
Dain slammed into a tree trunk, gasped, then crashed into a pile of leaves. Yasmin hit the same tree, rolled, but came up on her knees gracefully unlike him.
Deep and full breaths, Dain Sorowyn. Deep and full breaths.
They scrambled to their feet and looked up at the same time.
To call the ironmaw toad ‘giant’ would be an understatement. It rivaled the gargoyle golem in size, a squat mountain of baked mud scales slick with wet sheen. Long cat-like whiskers quivered from its jaw, while its eyes—massive, pale green, and eerily human—stared unblinking at the two small things it’d failed to keep down in its stomach.
***
Name: Ironmaw Toad
Grade: Uncommon-6
Might: 126
Swiftness: 34
Resilience: 82
Clarity: 34
Mana: 207/207 (+3/hr)
General Description: A giant tin-hide toad that habitually lies in waiting in high metal-content forests, capable of forming symbiotic relationships with bugs to lure prey closer before lunging up. Its main abilities are as follows:
- Ironmaw Bite: Its jaw muscles can contract with crushing pressure, allowing them to pulverize even extremely tough ore-bearing stones. Furthermore, when its mouth clamps shut, the metal plates within its skull lock, making forced escape nearly impossible
- Ore Absorption Feeding: It metabolizes trace metals from ingested stone, reinforcing and regenerating its tin-hide. The more metal-rich its habitat, the thicker and harder its armor becomes
***
… Gods above.
Uncommon-6?
Yasmin gulped, knuckles whitening on her staffblade, but Dain threw a hand out and stopped her from moving.
“Don’t blink,” he whispered. “Keep eye contact and move your head like this.” He tilted his chin, rolling it slowly in a looping pattern. “Tinback heron’s threat-dance. Herons are ironmaw toads’ natural predators. Copy me.”
Thankfully, she obeyed without question. It was a strange sight to behold for sure: two humans drenched in sludge, bobbing and lolling their heads in unison under the unblinking gaze of a giant toad.
But it worked.
With an almost sulky patience, the ironmaw toad turned. Its dud-thick legs heaved as it lumbered off into the forest, a constellation of lumenglobe fireflies swarming after it like loyal servants.
Only when it was gone did Dain’s lungs unlock.
He collapsed back into the tree, mud squelching beneath him. Yasmin dropped down beside him half a second later, her breaths deafeningly loud in the silence.
“... Thank the gods,” she muttered.
“Thank the tinback herons,” he said. “And thank me, too, if you like.”
She glared at him. “I should curse you. We nearly died.”
“True. But look.”
He gestured wide. All around them lay the toad’s regurgitated spoils: cracked armor plates, twisted blades, bundles of roots, and even an intact glass jar of seeds. All half-digested, yes, but still valuable… maybe.
“Plenty of materials here. Might even trade into an Manabrew Potion, if fortune’s with me,” he said. “Getting swallowed wasn’t a complete loss after all.”
As the toad lumbered off deeper into the trees, its massive bulk fading into shadow with the hum of fireflies trailing it, the two of them simply… stopped moving. Their clothes were completely clung with slime, their boots sucked at the mud, and every twitch of muscle made something squelch under Dain.
Moving felt pointless. So, without a word, they both sagged where they were and decided to just sit there side by side for a moment. They’d dry off eventually.
And while the sounds of the forest wrapped around them—the chorus of night insects leaving their burrows to feed, the rustle of bronze leaves above, and the drip of muck still sliding from their shoulders—neither of them spoke for a while.
So it came to him as a surprise when Yasmin was the one to break the silence.
“... Where did you learn it all?” she asked.
“Learn what?”
Her hands tightened on her swordstaff, but her eyes stayed on him. “Everything. The magic beasts. The relics. The fighting. I thought merchants only bartered goods and danced attendant for wealthy men, but you…” She trailed off for a moment, struggling to find the right word. “If mere books are enough to make powerful men, there would be a lot more powerful men in the world. Someone must have been your mentor. Who was it?”
He blinked.
Then he leaned back on his palms and let the question hang between them for a moment, wondering how best to start.
“... Have you ever heard of Orland the Everbright?” he asked.