Adventure Dance Bucket

Today’s writing prompt and my response.

Day four of this week’s challenge.

Adventure Dance Bucket: use these three words

‘Hello, hello?’ Colin shouted into his phone, shook it, held it high. Useless. It wasn’t his phone which had lost the signal.

He had no clue where Eve lived, and would it help anyway? The wind battered his window, setting the frames shuddering. The storm appeared to have intensified, leading all those not tucked at home a not-so-merry dance in the flooded streets. And if Colin didn’t get to Eve, that wouldn’t be the only adventure happening. Bugger his dead laptop. He might have been able to get in that way, through the old, deeply buried code. Now he had to venture out there, go back to the office and hope the electricity was on.

*

‘I mustn’t what the knights?’ Eve muttered, staring at her signal-free phone.

The hoary old head at the end of the tunnel growled again. Eve stayed well back to address the king.

‘Your majesty, oh, dwarven king,’ she cried, ‘why do you grumble against the knights?’

Eve had no idea what this character could do. When she found the basic code for him, she had set him aside to explore later. She waited, and was rewarded.

‘Free them.’

‘Free them? Aren’t they free now?’ Eve’s coding brain kicked in as she asked the question. Yes! That was it. It was like the knights were caught somehow, captured. Which is why she hadn’t been able to get them to fight. She took another step forward.

‘They are here, girl, bound at my feet, in the depths of my halls.’ The king’s huge head tilted to the side, his gaze sliding to whatever lay below him.

‘Why?’ Eve moved closer and now she was within a few feet of the king.

‘Shadow and light. Summer and winter.’ He growled. ‘Life and death.’

Well, yes. That was what the game was about, as were most games.

‘This is no game.’ The dwarven king read her thoughts. ‘They must not be freed.’

‘Oh, come on.’ Eve threw out her hands. ‘If I can get back to work now, I can fix this, and tomorrow you’ll be a star in a game bound to be an international success.’ She smiled, coaxing. ‘You’d like that.’

The king raised a bushy eyebrow. ‘It’s your world, girl.’

Eve blinked. Was he giving in? The king’s mouth opened, its own dark cavern. A rush of warm, foul-smelling breath engulfed Eve. A dizziness came over her. She stumbled, lurched towards the wall, pressing her palm to its solid surface. A moment of blackness, and she slid, fainting, to the floor.

*

The rain had stopped, leaving torrents of water flowing down gutters, flooding the streets.  The wind, wearied by its boisterous efforts, had quietened to occasional half-hearted gusts. Colin reached the office, glad to see lights on in most windows. He let himself into the building with his pass and ran up the stairs, not wanting to be caught in a broken lift. Panting after six floors, he waved his pass at the door to the office and pushed through.

Eve was there, crouched over her keyboard, tapping away as if the salvation of the world depended on it.

Colin’s gut lurched. He went cold, as if a bucket of ice water had been thrown over him. He was too late.

Find Day Five here.
 

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