Page 45 of The Goblin and The Dancer
It was the moment’s delay that Grik needed. He moved the final boulder blocking Rosanna’s way and then grabbed her by both hands and pulled her free from the crevice. They hugged briefly and then began racing along the ledge towards Paul.
Ratiga appeared to be so obsessed with having her revenge on Grik, Paul, and Rosanna that she wasn’t paying the slightest attention to the fact that there was a man-eating kraken in the tide pool. She was standing on a boulder, shouting threats and orders in a never-ending screech. But the monster had not escaped the attention of her men.
“Run for your lives!” one of them shouted as he nearly bowled over Ratiga in a mad dash for the tunnel from which he had come.
“Get back here!” Ratiga howled as she staggered to right herself. “You there, shoot at those two—now!”
The goblin Ratiga had bellowed at spun towards Rosanna and Grik, raising his gun to fire—only to be knocked into the pool a moment later by one of the kraken’s tentacles. He hit the water with a little, high-pitched shriek, followed by a burble as he went under.
“Get out of there, you idiot!” Ratiga shouted, hopping up and down in frustration. “You’re supposed to be—gah!” The same tentacle responsible for the fall of her minion slapped her in the face and knocked her into the water, effectively cutting off her tirade. More than half of her men rushed to the side of the pool to try to fish her out, greatly reducing the gunfire aimed at Grik and his friend.
In the back of his mind, Grik noticed that Ratiga and her man were treading water easily and were not being pushed against the rock ledge.
Slack tide had begun.
Rosanna had darted past Grik towards the part of the ledge where the elf had dropped his pistol. A second before a wave washed it over the side and into the pool, Rosanna snatched it up with trembling hands and fired in the general direction of the mob.
She missed completely, but the bullet began ricocheting off the walls, and every occupant in the cavern hit the ground to escape it.
While Rosanna kept Ratiga’s men more or less occupied, Grik looked around wildly for some way to help Paul.
One of the kraken’s tentacles was braced against the side of the cavern, only a few feet away from Grik and only inches away from a thin pillar of rock.
He scurried towards it, throwing himself sideways and bringing his massive goblin feet slamming into the pillar with all the strength that he could muster.“Come on, you have to be good for something!” he yelled at his feet, giving the pillar one more giant kick.
The pillar wobbled and toppled over, trapping the tentacle beneath rock.
Grik jumped, straddling the tentacle, despite its sliminess, and began pounding at it repeatedly with a rock.
He only managed to remain sitting on it for a few minutes before the tentacle started bucking. Rosanna grabbed Grik and pulled him off before the kraken pulled its tentacle free of the pillar.
Grik convulsed, overwhelmed by the onslaught of fear as chaos reigned around them and feeling inordinately repelled by the slime that now covered the bulk of his trousers.
Rosanna grabbed Grik and shook him. “Grik, your glow stick! You said it was poisonous, right? Could we poison that thing, somehow?”
In between shakes, Grik’s mind spun as he tried to work out her suggestion. “Maybe? But we don’t have any way to get the poison inside of it unless . . .”
The answer blazed into his head, and he winced away from it as if he had been burnt. But he knew he was going to do it. It was the only way. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t hesitate.
He threw the glow stick down on the ground. The glass shattered, sending the pebbles inside scattering and the phosphorescent liquid oozing across the rocks in a luminous and bubbling puddle.
“Stand back,” he told Rosanna.
Rosanna’s voice jumped with fear. “Grik? What are you doing?”
Grik shoved his hands into the thick liquid and smeared it all over his body with a few quick motions before jumping to his feet.
He looked up into Rosanna’s face. “I love you.”
Then he turned and leaped for one of the rock spires in the pool.
“Grik!” Rosanna screamed. “No, stop!”
Grik hit the spire with a little thump and scrabbled at it desperately with his fingers, wiggling and crawling up onto its peak.He was now some ten feet above everyone else, far closer to the kraken’s tentacles than he had been before. As one of them went squirming past, he jumped again and landed on slimy flesh.
“Grik!” Rosanna yelled again. “Don’t!”
But Grik didn’t let go, even though it was the most terrifying thing he had ever done to close his eyes and wrap his arms around that hideous tentacle and let it bear him through the air.
