Page 33 of Caveman Alien's Terror

“We’ll need torches. Wait. I mean,pleasewait,” she catches herself before I’d have to correct her insolence.

She walks fast away towards the camp.

And I follow, because this place is dangerous for her at all times and I don’t like it when she’s out of my sight.

“Oh,” she says when she spots me behind her. “You didn’t have to come.”

“I don’t actuallyhaveto do anything,” I inform her. “But I sometimes choose to do things. Do you see the difference?”

She picks up the old torches from last night. “It must be wonderful to neverhaveto do anything.”

I lean against a tree. “It’s the privilege of the superior being. To me, it’s the way things always are. To you, it appears wonderful.”

She looks at the cold torches in her hand. “Do you have an easy way to light these?”

“In my real form, I could burn them all to dust in a single breath,” I tell her truthfully. “As it is, no, I can’t. How cananyonelive like this?”

“We just do our best,” she says as she kneels by the old campfire and digs into its cold ashes. “What is your real form like?”

I get an unfinished piece of stone out of my hoard pouch and continue carving it. It’s a crude imitation of the Thimble of Derey, a famous artifact that I personally looted from the treasury of King Batt. “Surely you have heard of dragons? We’re very ancient, and we’re known to every species.”

“We do have legends and myths about dragons on my planet,” Astrid says as she locates a small piece of glowing ember and puts it inside a ball of dry grass, blowing on it. “But I didn’t think they were real.”

I flex my arm. The strenuous work with the shovel made it sore, and that's somewhat alarming. The weakness is spreading through me. “Lucky planet. Dragons must have been there before, but so long ago that we’re almost forgotten. It won’t last.”

Having built a small fire, she adds straw and wood to it. “The dragons in our legends have scales and long, flowing tails and wings. They have hoards of gold, and they breathe fire. Is that what you will be like when you Change?”

“How poor and barren those words are to describe me in my real form!” I groan. “You may just have to wait and see. I promise you will be impressed. And scared out of your mind.”

She lights two torches in the fire and gets to her feet. “I don’t know how long these will burn. Do you see well in the dark?”

“I see well enough to spot intruders in my lair in pitch blackness. Do your legends not say anything about that?”

“They’re old legends. They may not catch everything. Shall we go?”

Back at the dome, Astrid extinguishes one torch. “I will light it with the other one when it’s about to go out.”

I go inside the dome and stand by the wall. There’s a big hole where the stone I pushed hit the floor and crashed through it. “It’s very deep. And the air from below smells… different.”

“There are stairs!” Astrid says and points.

Sauntering over to them, I look down. “No gold visible.”

If there were a large amount of gold here, I would know it by now. It would brighten my mind with its presence. But there could still be smaller pieces. Or lesser items not of gold, but made with great care over a long time.

“Oh, look!” Astrid exclaims behind me. “It's painted!”

Indeed the inside of the dome has been painted in many colors. There are symbols and lines and figures that I’m not inclined to understand or care about. “Yes, very nice. Come on now.”

“Those don’t look like caveman paintings,” she says as she tiptoes around the broken hole in the floor. “Whoever built this place thought it was important. Where did they get those colors, anyway? There’s bright red and blue, too. Those are hard paints to make!”

“No gold, then,” I comment as I saunter down the stairs. The steps are shallow and short, so half my foot sticks out even when I place my heel at the very backs of them. “That’s not promising.”

“But there’s yellow,” Astrid says as she follows me down. “That might symbolize gold. But probably not.”

I step onto the floor of the next level down. The ceiling is low, and I have to bend my neck in an undignified way.

“Dwarfs built this,” I growl. “The smallest beings in the world.”

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