Chevias tucked away the rest of the jerky and stood from his chair, “Alright, let’s get moving. The sooner we’re out of here the better.” Ellie couldn’t have agreed with that statement more and stood up with him. They reentered the hallway and Chevias walked over to the door he had earlier identified as an office. He put his hand on the panel next to the door that was much like the one that turned on the lights.

The panel flashed red and gave five long, annoying sounding beeps, then did nothing.

Chevias growled, “Uggghhh…” Then he grumbled something in Witch-Speak that Ellie was ninety percent certain was a swear.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s only supposed to open for authorized personnel. Stand back, I’m going to bust it open.”

She jumped a few feet away, “How?”

He hesitated with his hand on the door, “…Ok, I’m gonna do something, but freak out, ok? It’s totally normal and I’m not going to hurt you.”

Ellie wasn’t sure what to say to that. She was sure that he was about to open the door the same way he killed the bear, the goblins, and skinned last night’s dinner. Last night she had been scared of him enough to not want to know, but now her curiosity far outweighed that. So she nodded, “Ok, I won’t.”

“Alright. Just stay back; I don’t want any glass hitting you.”

Ellie stared at him intently, waiting for him to do something odd. She waited a moment and nothing seemed to happen. He just stood there, his shoulders and tail stiff as he expected her to start screaming. She flicked her eyes down and up, then down again as she finally saw what had changed.

What had been Chevias’ oddly pale, but otherwise perfectly normal hands had been replaced. Now they were pitch black, and each finger had been replaced by a long, sharp looking claw. Ellie’s breath hitched and a squeak escaped her throat.

“It’s ok!” Chevias held up his new hands, “This is just something I can do! Please don’t scream, the echoes in here are bad enough at normal volume!”

Ellie let out her breath and forced herself to suck in one after another to prevent a scream, “Ok, I’m alright. W-what exactly is that?”

He waved his hand and Ellie could swear she heard the faintest sound of splitting air as the knife-like claws swept through the air. “They’re my hands.”

“I can see that, but happened to them?!”

“It’s just something I can do. It’s as normal for me as being able to walk is to you.”

“Can…can all witches do that? I’ve never heard that witches could do that.”

Chevias sighed and put his hands on his hips, rolling his eyes.

“You can’t tell me? Fine…just-just open the door already. I want to get out of here.”

“Alright,” he turned around to face the door, “you know, you took that better than a lot of people have. Once time a grown man ran away from me screaming after I saved his life and a kid your age fainted. You’re pretty level headed for your age.”

“Thank you...?”

Chevias reared his clawed hands back, “Shade your eyes, you don’t want any splinters flying in them.” Then he started to hack through the thick wooden door, his claws slicing through it like it was made of butter. Ellie had seen her dad chop fire wood before and not even the sharpest, most well made axe money could buy would cut through solid wood as cleanly and easily as those claws. In fact, chopping and cutting weren’t the right words for it; the claws were gliding right through it, so sharp that the wood wasn’t resisting them at all. Ellie could only stare wide eyed and wonder just what all those blades could cut through.

Chevias finished cutting a large hole out of the middle of the door, and stepped back to look at it, “Yup, that outta do it.”

Ellie watched as his hands shifted back to their normal, human shape. They shrunk the slightest bit, as though that form had made them swell up a bit, and the claws receded until they were the normal, blunt and human shape and length. Then the blackness that coated his skin like ink pulled back and disappeared beneath the cuff of his shirt. All this happened in just about two seconds; if Ellie had blinked, she’d have missed it. It was also, like the rest of anything Chevias does, an eerily quiet process. Perhaps you would expect such a drastic change to be accompanied by the sound of clicking or crunching bones, or a sandpapery, slithering noise as the inky blackness crawled onto his skin, but it was completely silent. It was no wonder Ellie hadn’t noticed anything at first.

Chevias went through the hole into the dark office. Ellie waited until another crimson light flickered on, bathing the room in that eerie glow before following him, being careful not to scratch herself on the wood.

The office was sparse and messy; it looked like it had been ransacked. The desk had been overturned and flung across the room, the book shelves had been cleared of anything that was once on them, and a tall cabinet with four drawers had been yanked out and emptied. Despite the mess, there wasn’t a single scrap of paper strewn about.

“There’s nothing here.”

“They must’ve cleaned it out before leaving. Come on, see if you can find a metal plate. It’ll be long and rectangular, with some Witch-Speak on it.”

It didn’t take long to find. It had been stuffed behind one of the open drawers of the cabinet, obviously hidden.

Chevias picked it up, appeared to read the Witch-Speak for a moment, before turning to the back wall of the office. It was unadorned except for a slightly indented portion of the wall. Ellie would’ve missed it entirely, but Chevias seemed to have known it would be there.

He walked over and placed the panel into the indent. The Witch-Speak flashed, this time the same light green as Chevias’ grimoire. Then the wall behind it opened up and slid to the side.

It was high up, so Ellie had to stand on her toes to properly see what was inside. She was a little disappointed. The wall had opened up to reveal what looked like a safe. Ellie had been expecting a safe to contain jewels, or valuable information. The contents of this safe were mostly…junk. There were several items in it, most of them made out of what looked like copper, steel, and another bluish metal that Ellie didn’t recognize. They looked like tinker-toys, or pieces of a clock tower…Ellie wasn’t sure how to describe them.

Chevias ignored the large pieces of metal and pushed them out of the way until he found a box. The box was somewhat small and covered in very dusty velvet. He pulled it out and opened it.

The box contained a necklace. Now, a necklace was closer to what Ellie imagined belonged in a safe, but this necklace hardly looked valuable enough to stow away. It looked like a piece of junk that was laced onto a string. It was a flat, irregularly shaped piece of metal that was silvery-blue in color (at least Ellie supposed it was, as it was currently bathed in the red light). It had a strange pattern and was otherwise un-noteworthy.

“You came all the way down here for this? Who would want this?”

Chevias shrugged, “Who knows, I’m just an errand boy. Come on, let’s go.” He turned around and started heading for the door.

Ellie glanced back at the still open vault, “Aren’t you going to close it?”

“No point. Even if someone found this place, those things aren’t valuable anymore.” Naturally he didn’t explain why these items were useless, or what their original use was. He just exited through the hole and didn’t look back. Ellie scrambled after him.

Instead of heading back the way they came, Chevias lead her further into the bunker, finding that the floor began to slope up again and that the rooms on this side were a bit different from the ones on the other.

Several appeared to be armories filled with dusty, ancient looking weapons. None of them looked fancy or particularly valuable. Another room was a sprawling one filled with empty shelves. Ellie wasn’t sure if this had been a larder or a library, but she supposed that it didn’t make much sense for an army to carry a library around with them. They passed another particularly large room that looked like an infirmary with beds surrounded by tattered curtains, trays with abandoned medicine, and shelves of old bandages. Even in the crimson light Ellie could see that most of the beds were covered in bloodstains.

They passed several rooms that were identical to the ones above and several more that Ellie couldn’t fathom the purpose of, like rooms filled with large bird cages and rooms with nothing at all.

They walked and walked and walked for what seemed to Ellie like an eternity in this dreariness until the hall finally came to an end.

Instead of a ladder and a trapdoor, like the other end of the bunker, this end was a door. A big, heavy looking metal door. Chevias opened this one just like he did the trapdoor and it swung open at his command. Ellie looked through the door to see that it was surrounded by dead leaves and debris and that there was a steep and narrow set of stairs going up for awhile. At the top of the stairs, the first natural light she’d seen in hours spilled in from a hole just big enough for an adult to squeeze through.

Chevias climbed the stairs and, with his lithe form, slipped through the hole as easily as a rabbit. He turned around, “Come on, you’re almost there!”

Ellie clambered up after him and grabbed his hand through the hole. He pulled and picked her right up out of it. Ellie gratefully breathed in the fresh air as Chevias set her down. She was so thrilled to be at ground level again that she barely noticed the way the setting sun stung her eyes.

Chevias shaded his eyes and looked around, “Alright! Tyman should be about a half hour’s walk from here. We should be able to make it by nightfall.”

Ellie squinted and looked at her surroundings. The hole that lead to the hidden bunker was nestled between the roots of a large tree, hidden well from all but bunnies and squirrels. The tree wasn’t especially odd looking, except that it was surrounded by the same kind of stone markers that had surrounded the clearing last night. She supposed that anybody who didn’t know what they were would easily overlook these signs, and that one of them must point the way to Tyman.

“Come on Ellie, we wanna get there before it gets too dark!”

“Coming!”

Ellie glanced back at the hole, so dark and innocuous you’d never guess what was down there just by looking, before following Chevias as he stepped over one of the stone markers.