Depths

"What, you saying you're scared now? Ha! Always knew you were a coward!" Dragonfly taunted. The two dragonets stared down the sinkhole below them, tensions high in the air.

"No I'm not! I just... have a bad feeling about this..." Bee said, staring at the abyss below. "Do you think it even has a bottom?"

"I don't know, but I'm not going back now!" Dragonfly shouted, diving down towards the sinkhole. Bee dove down after him, not wanting to be left behind. They landed at its edge and stopped to look for a minute.

"Are we going down there? It doesn't look like a good idea..." Bee whispered to Dragonfly. "We shouldn't be here..."

"So what? We're going back and get everyone mad at us? No way!" He said angrily. "I'm going and find out what is down there. Don't you ever wondered about it? This giant hole just beside the hives and no one can tell what's inside?"

"Maybe it's for a good reason that it is this way..." She whimpered.

"You are just making excuses to get back! Well you can go if you want but I'm not going!" He shouted, but Bee could still see the fear in him, no matter how tough he acted.

"I'm not leaving you alone! They will be even angrier at me if I went back without you." As she told him, she could see his tension lift up a little, but they both still got chills from the sinkhole beside them.

"Whatever, do what you want." He said, visibly glad he isn't going alone. They both dived down the sinkhole, darkness slowly engulfing them.

After some very uncomfortable minutes, they manage to hit the bottom. The stone is harder and colder than the usual floors of the hives, giving them a slight shock on landing. They look at each other for a second, and Bee opens her bag and pulls out a flamesilk lamp, although it didn't manage to do much against the darkness around them. 

“Okay what do we do now?” Bee asked, looking all around them, trying to see anything.

“Let’s look around, maybe there’s a cave or something…” He said while pulling out his own lamp and spinning around a few times. “It has to go somewhere…”

“You really want to go even deeper? It could be dangerous you know!” She told him, a worried tone on her voice.

“Dangerous with what? Some bugs? What do you think is down here that could be that dangerous?” He said, walking around and searching for something. “Look there’s an opening there.”.

“I have a bad feeling about this…” Bee mumbled, but still followed Dragonfly deeper into the caves.

They walked down the narrow pathways of the cave, going deeper and deeper with barely no visibility despite their lamps, too weak to penetrate the thick darkness of the tunnels. After a while they sat down to rest for a bit, they had been walking for a while and still nothing but the darkness around them.

“I don’t think there’s anything here… We will just end up lost in all of these tunnels.” Bee said with a tired voice.

“No it can’t be! maybe is just a little deeper... “ He whispered to himself, the cave echoing his voice. They both sat down for a little bit and looked around a bit more. There was nothing around them but small rocks, and even more rocks. But after looking around a bit more they noticed that some of the “rocks” looked a little strange.

“Look at that...” Dragonfly said, carefully moving closer to the suspicious rock. “It is...fluffy? That's weird…”. He picked up the rock and analysed it a bit.

The “rock” was actually a small rodent, or a meerkat, but it was hard to tell since its body was all shrivelled up and dry.

“Eww what is that??” Bee cried “Is that a meerkat or something? Why does it look like that?” She flinched, looking at the dried creature that was supposedly a meerkat, but is now unrecognizable.

“I don’t know…” he said looking around a bit more. “It shouldn't be like that…” as he looked around, he noticed more of them, there were about 3 or 4 other corpses of the small creatures. They looked horrified at them.

“I-I think we should go…” Bee said, her voice now trembled with fear. “We need to g-”

“We’re going. I don’t wanna stay either…”.

As he said that, he noticed something reflecting their lights a little deeper inside the cave. He went a little bit further to see the reflective object, growing ever shinier as the light got closed.

“Is this… silk? Is there Silkwings down here?” He said “But… it’s weird and sticky…”.

“D-Dragonf-f-ly..” Bee said while trembling. He looked at her absolutely horrified expression, and then looked around in desperation.

The walls around them suddenly lit up with countless eyes, all with a blank stare towards them, with bizarre contorted shapes that somewhat resemble a dragon. Limbs where it shouldn’t have and wings membranes too thin to hold flight, all of them stared directly at them, slowly but surely, crawling, ready to strike.

Both of them screamed, and bolted as fast as they could away from them. twisting and turning with the tunnel’s walls, scraping all their scales on the pointy stones of the rugged passages, just running as fast as they could.

It only needed a single rock out of place. and then…

Thump.

Dragonfly glanced behind him. Bee had tripped on a rock and fell, hitting her head on the wall of the tunnel and was desperately trying to get back up.

They heard the creatures coming closer and closer.

Dragonfly didn’t stay. He ran as fast as he could, not looking back.

He only heard a scream.

And then silence.

He managed to reach the sinkhole again, and flew right away, only now glancing back at the tunnels, feeling horrible for leaving Bee behind. He flew away back to the hive, with overwhelming guilt and terror, and no one would believe him.

Back at the depths of the sinkhole, a creature watched him fly away.

“Stupid child…” the creature mumbled "At least he won't be coming back.” and giggled to themselves, going back to the tunnels.

“We now have to deal with the other one…” they said “That will be… interesting” going back to the darkness covered depths of the caves below.