Excerpt: DARK TIDES - EURANTHYA BOOK 2

Prologue
Nightmares 2

T
he young boy walked down the dark cold tunnels, listening to the drops of water running down the clammy walls of the subterranean caves. He was alone, barely clothed and starving. He has no memories of his father or mother although he can recall the fact that he had had them at one point in his life. Lost in the darkness, he wandered aimlessly through the twisting corridors of the Lycanian Mountains. He scavenged whatever he could find for food, most times eating things that later would bring him to his knees, vomiting the day’s meal. He walked and stumbled in the darkness ever deeper and deeper underground, his eyes eventually becoming accustomed to the darkness. He heard something crawling to his left near the edge of the rock wall. He got on all fours and crawled towards his next meal. He reached out and felt the cool rock with his right hand and quickly reached out with his left to grab the unsuspecting critter. The boy missed and scraped his knuckles against the hard floor. Muttering angrily he lowered his head to the ground searching for his elusive prey. Seeing no trace of the creature, he stood up and continued on down the ever sloping tunnel when he again heard the scraping of small claws. This time he ran in the direction of the noise and caught a glimpse of a hairy lumpy shape scurry under a small opening in the cave wall. The boy leaped forward, sliding and scraping his stomach, his threadbare tunic offering little protection against cave like environments, hands coming up empty as the Cave Spider disappeared through the rock wall. Pounding his fists against the wet stone and beginning to cry as his hunger pains racked his stomach, he felt a cool breeze emanating from the space where the Cave Spider made his escape.
The boy picked up a small stone and began enlarging the space. After a half hour of scraping, his thoughts of hunger all but disappeared as his knuckles and the back of his hands bled from the effort. Blue light seeped through the hole that was now large enough for the boy to wiggle through. He looked at the blood on his hands bathed in the strange blue light, raised his right hand to his mouth and licked the blood, expecting a different taste but the blue color did not alter the salty taste he knew so well from past injuries.