He should have known this bounty was too good to be true. It was an absurd amount of gold to offer, especially for a "dead or alive" job. Now Ehvin is fucking dead and Darin will follow him shortly if he can't land a killing blow on this horrible she-snake.
At least he thinks Ehvin's dead, no one is quite sure what happens to humans who are transformed by the Gorgon's curse. Scholars and healers can't quite come to an agreement on whether the monster's bite hardens the skin of its victims into marble or if the flesh and bone becomes stone as well. No one has ever been lucky enough to escape a snake pit before the venom transformed them entirely. Besides which, a fully entombed specimen is almost impossible to retrieve, the entrances to these Gorgon lairs can be miles long, reaching deep into the labyrinthine guts of the undercoves beneath the mountains they call home. The secrets of the Gorgon are as well-kept as the ever-growing collection of marble warriors in these inescapable oubliettes.
Darin hasn't caught a good glimpse of Petra the Gorgon yet, but he has seen plenty of evidence of her presence here. The chamber is littered with chipped swords, exhausted torches, shards of broken armor, as well as a half a dozen petrified warriors who were foolish enough to think that they would be the one to stake their blades through Petra's wicked heart.
The bounty hunter aims his torch at the darkness around him prepared to meet any movement with the sharp tip of his gladius. His eyes meet the milky gaze of one of Petra's victims, the face frozen in a grimace halfway between agony and fear, white orbs bulging out of their sockets, and the mouth frozen in a scream, pooling over with liquid from years of water condensation. He feels a pang of sorrow for the brave fool, another one of many permanent fixtures of this cave, all of whom once dared to dream of being the fabled hero who conquered the Gorgon.
Darin was brave too, at least he thought he was until the moment he became separated from Ehvin. The success of their strategy was contingent on them having each other's backs, but they lost each other when Petra ambushed them in the innermost sanctum of the pit. When he reunited with Ehvin, his companion had already been completely marblized. The features of his face, like the rest of the statues here, smoothed out by the venom, a vague echo of the life encased within.
Until now, he hasn't taken the time to examine these statues closely, his eyes are busy struggling to find any slithering forms in the shadows. But now he sees that, oddly enough, all the statues have been stripped of their clothes and armor. Stranger still is that some of the statues had large erect penises, where others have had their manhood smashed or chipped off leaving no sign of their sex at all. Surely, Darin thinks, these must have been carved by Petra herself, how could any bounty hunter find themselves in a state of arousal as they faced off against this horrible beast?
As he turns away from the stone fighter, the flickering light from his torch catches the reflection of something shimmering in the darkness a few yards away from him. Petra barely makes a sound as she springs out of the shadows at Darin and he is barely able to dodge out of the path of her killing stroke and responding with a counterattack of his own.
But his sword is an impotent tool against those steel scales, her flexible yet impenetrable armor. Every slash seems to slide right off her sleek, sinewy body. Thousands of infinitesimally small scales gleam abrasively in the dark as the serpent slithers back into the cover of darkness before immediately doubling back and striking at Darin once more.
He brings his sword down hard with an overhead swing, but the pale blue-green skin melts away from the blow as though made of water. The blade cracks against the stone floor and snaps. He watches helplessly as the tip of his gladius skitters off into the dark, lost in a sea of stone victims.
A sharp pain tears through Darin's left leg, no doubt shrapnel from the broken and useless blade in his hand. He curses his stupidity and threatens to cast the weapon away, but a broken blade is better than none, so he holds it out in front of him pointing into the dark ocean of rocky faces weeping back at him. It is a sea of sorrow, agony, and fear. All faces of men realizing too late that they never should have come here.
He lowers his torch slightly to see the extent of the damage to his mangled leg sparing only quick glances downward as he searches for the telltale gleam of the snake's scales. A sharp cackle rebounds off the cave walls. She has drawn blood, and she is mocking him.
