Kellen stared in deep confusion at his legs.
'Did I really walk over here?'
He could not remember his past actions that had led him to the edge of the glowing ravine. His head began to ache and turn foggy as he tried to recall his body's previous movements.
Tommy stopped his curious prodding of the stone armor, that was intricately carved into the soldiers' sculptures, as he finally noticed Kellen's strange expression and walked over to investigate.
"Wow... That goes down pretty far!" Tommy whistled as he peered over the edge of the ravine by Kellen's side.
He kicked a piece of small stone over the edge and watched it disappear into the abyss.
Still not hearing a response from Kellen, Tommy turned his concern to the frozen boy standing next to him.
"Hey! You alright?" He asked as he waved his hands back and forth in front of Kellen's blankly staring eyes.
"I-I'm not sure. I can't remember... Hey, do you see that thing glowing down there at the bottom of the ravine." Said Kellen, still in a dazed state, as he pointed towards the deep center of the ravine.
Tommy attempted to peer through the glowing energy and red mist like particles thickly emanating from the ravine. He squinted his eyes and strained them to make out what lied beneath but resulted with no success. The deeper he stared into the ravine; the more concentrated and sluggish the red mist became, and further obstructed his view.
"I don't know man. I can't make out a damn thing through that mist and that red glow reflecting off of it only makes it more difficult to see." Commented Tommy with disappointment.
Tommy patted Kellen's shoulder and hung his arm around him in an attempt to differ his attention from the ravine.
"I wouldn't worry about it. Hey, why don't you come over and check out these cool soldiers I found?" He suggested in an attempt to gain Kellen's attention.
However, his unheard words basically hit a wall before reaching Kellen's ears.
"It almost looks like a weapon of some kind..." Kellen interjected with a weird light in his eyes.
"What? How can you tell? That mist makes it practically impossible to distinguish anything down there." Argued Tommy.
The red hue of Kellen's eyes glinted with confirmation and startled Tommy.
"No... You gotta be kidding me." Tommy complained with disbelief as he recognized the mischievousness in Kellen's eyes and slowly backed away.
Kellen finally removed his fixed gaze from the bottom of the ravine and turned towards Tommy, who was shaking his head like he knew what was about to come next.
"I'm going in!" Stated Kellen with resolute affirmation in a bold voice.
"But we don't even know what's down there! For all I know, there might not even be a bottom!" Tommy shouted with concern in a strained voice.
"Look, I just got a feeling that I need to find whatever's down there, okay?" Kellen explained as he solidified his stance.
The odd burning sensation in his chest was now engulfing Kellen's entire being as if confirming his suspicions. Whatever was down there at the bottom was crying out to him and Kellen could no longer control the desire fiercely resonating within his being.
"You can't be serious... I know I may seem like the adventurous type but suicide isn't currently on my bucket list. How do you know we can even make it down there?" Tommy whined.
"I never said you had to follow me in. This is just something I know that I absolutely have to do!" Replied Kellen with complete confidence.
After convincing himself he had to get to the bottom of the ravine, no matter the cost, Kellen plotted out his descent. The stone sculptures protruding from the sides of the ravine had now turned into glorified footholds as Kellen carefully jumped down onto them.
"This is insane..." Breathed Tommy in amazement and fear as he watched Kellen's skillful descent.
His once grand session of show-and-tell had now turned into a dangerous expedition due to Kellen's unique and untamable curiosity. It seemed to Tommy like his new friend was actually crazier than he was.
"Ugh... He didn't even wait or listen." He irritably complained to himself as he urged up his foolish courage to chase after his current problematic partner.
The two boys were like giant frogs, as they leaped back and forth between the stone sculptures, descending deeper and deeper into the ominous fog of red mist.
"This is crazy..."
"I can barely see a few feet in front of myself anymore..."
"Of all the dumb shit I usually get into..."
"I just had to follow him down here..."
Tommy's self-burning monologue continued with every jump and fall as he comically chased after Kellen's slowly dissipating figure in the fog.
Kellen on the other hand, was too busy and focused on locating the strange weapon near the bottom, that he dismissed and completely ignored Tommy's incessant complaints.
'I've ventured down at least seventy or eighty feet but I still can't find what I saw from above.'
Kellen was beginning to get anxious, thinking that he had hallucinated seeing the odd weapon before, he nervously scanned below as he continued his leaping descent.
'Is it getting hotter down here?'
With every other few stone sculptures he landed on, Kellen could feel the blood in his body begin to heat up. Drops of sweat fell from the tips of his hair in front of his face as the constricting red mist around him begin to warm and the burning sensation in his chest increased.
Even with his demonic body, Kellen wagered he would not last much longer if he had to descend more than another few tens of feet.
'Shit it's hot!'
After twenty more feet of descent, Kellen landed on the blood red stone floor of the large ravine. He could feel his feet slowly burning through the soles of his shoes as he stepped onto the sweltering stone floor.
The landscape at the bottom of the ravine was like the steaming core of hell, if the frozen city above could be considered an underworld, and the many kneeling or frightened still sculptures only supplemented the hellish area with even more horror.
The concentrated red mist at the bottom snaked along the many sculptures like flowing magma and seemed likely to be the cause of their somewhat melted exteriors.
'This is unbelievable!' Thought Kellen while wiping the heated beads of sweat from his forehead with his arm.
He took off his black jacket and tied it around his waist to alleviate some of the heat before proceeding.
'Whew... I doubt Tommy will have been able to make it all the way down here.' He thought to himself as he, himself, was barely surviving the scorching conditions.
The glowing red light from the heated blood red floor of the ravine ominously illuminated his surroundings, as Kellen inspected a few of the kneeling sculptures.
'They're all facing that way...'
He noticed that the stone figures were all kneeling in the direction that led farther down the ravine, like they were praying for salvation. Kellen did not know what they could be so afraid of, but his intuition told him that he would discover what he was looking for if he followed in their reverently knelt direction.
The number of fearful sculptures paying their homage decreased as he ventured further down the bottom.
Suddenly, the thick and sickly sweet smell of iron began to assault his senses.
"I must be getting close." Coughed Kellen in excitement.
Strangely, the smell that he determined to most likely be blood, did not bother him, and conversely strengthened the racing of his heart as he determinedly pushed onwards.
He guessed this was one of the many results that arose from his sudden change from a human to demon. Oddly, it did not raise any concern for Kellen but still the thought annoyingly remained in the back of his mind.
'There was no other choice... I had to for survival, for power, and of course for my revenge!' Kellen thought to himself as he steeled away his human-like reservations and did not stagger or slow his pace.
As the mist became thicker, along with the smell of blood, the sculptures he passed were now dwindling to single digits beside him, and Kellen began to notice a change of feeling surging in his chest.
'What now?'
The flaming feeling in his body was now switching and lessening to that of a colder one. For a moment, he was in a state of relief. However, that moment soon passed as the dwindling temperatures in his body continued to decrease after closing in on the final and lone sculpture laid out in the center of the ravine's floor.
The burning sensation returned with a fierce and bitter vengeance. Kellen felt like the core of his body had been reduced to absolute zero and an onset of hypothermia was ravaging within his system.
"What the fuck is going on now!" Kellen roared in pain as he fell to his knees against the scorching red floor of the ravine.
Amongst the front lines of kneeling sculptures, Kellen joined them on the floor, as he tried to console the weird energy erratically raging inside his body.
He struggled to lift his exhaustedly lowered head from the floor, but what he found ahead of him made his blood run completely cold.