I never realized how oppressive darkness can be.
I don’t know if I will ever get all the mud out of my clothes. I feel as though I have somehow become part mud, it is so ever-present here. Between that and the ****ing spider webs I’m about ready to split Casava open myself. I think Rhogar and I have finally found something we natively agree on – this “Underdark” is for the weasels. I mean really, it’s that horrid. I have so much mess caked into me that it grates my nerves just to look down at myself.
If it weren’t bad enough with all the filth, it seems as though everything that walks or crawls down here either wants to eat you, or bite or sting you with some venom so horrid that you wished it HAD eaten you.
I thought I’d seen the Underdark when I went to Ihnbharan. Ohhhh, no. That was the tourist’s tunnels, I think, the ones they save for visiting dignitaries. This, what we’ve seen in the past couple of days, this is the real underdark.
Let me back up a bit. When I was last writing, the skeletons were just drawing down on us – well, more appropriately, drawing down on me. The arrows started flying, all right – they flew right into me. I blacked out with the image of two or three – three, I think – arrows sticking out of my chest and gut. Figured I was finished, really. I guess at least it saved some of the other team, since they had time to act there.
As it turned out, Arn ran over to me from wherever he was and un-stuck me, because I came to a few moments later. I felt like someone had splashed a bucket of cold water over my face, and it took every effort to lay still and play dead. Some glowing blue runes, effervescent in my lidded vision, danced around before me…it must have been J’Tiel who’d healed me. I’d have to thank him later, if we made it. I figured the action was still on, since I could hear clashing and shouting, and whatever it was that had drawn the skeleton’s attention to me, I didn’t want it back – so best bet would be to play dead and take quick stock of where I was. Through my slitted right eye I saw some kind of strange moss poultice applied to my chest and gut – Arn, definitely – and Arn laying on the ground next to me, with the head of an arrow protruding from his shoulder. He’d apparently been pierced from behind while tending to me.
Not one to fail to repay a debt, I summoned up a bit of arcane mending – this time, I used the trick Mahar had shown me, the same that let me tap into the strength and vim of my grandcestors. Touching the healing with a bit of that fire, I felt the wisp of power stretch from my fingers to his wound. Gratifyingly, the shaft of the arrow that had punctured Arn turned to ash instantly, the head falling away with a glowing stump of fungal wood still protruding from it. I heard the feathered end (what the hell do they use for feathers down here, anyway?) rattle to the stone behind him.
The wound glowed with a deep red ember color, and quickly ejected the last smouldering splinters and ashes. I saw Arn’s eyes flicker open, then squint at the pain. I nodded to him, risking my bluff of death, and mumbled at him “Sorry for the extra pain, man, it’ll pass.”
I had seen there were still several skeletons firing at us, and I really – really – did not want to get shot again, so I stayed on my back and timed my scuttling for the times when the eyes of the skeletons (yeah, that sounds weird…really it’s their sockets, but you can kinda tell it’s their eyes and when they’re “looking” at you) were averted. I must have made a good impression, because I didn’t attract any more unwanted attention. I saw Bingo was tied up with one of the skeletons and some sort of strange shade…it looked like a drow warrior, but it’s lower half dissolved into mist, so I couldn’t really tell what it was. The mist made it hard to see Bingo in there, but I could tell he was hurting. The Halfwise race can take a lot of punishment before they expire, but they do usually pass out pretty quickly from the pain. He was close.
And as I watched, that warrior opened him up from his left hip to his ribs with an uppercut stroke, and down Bingo went, his bow clattering to the rock beneath him.
You know that feeling, when someone kicks your dog, or you see a little child being beaten just for standing there looking at a loaf of bread? I got a bit of that there. Might be I got hit up with a dose of the fire again, but I felt a fury that I haven’t had in a few months get wrapped up in my mind, and I went a little nuts. I piled every curse and foul word I’d ever learned (and when your former commanding officers are from Hell, you learn some pretty creative doozies) into a stream of invective laced with every ounce of crystalline frost I had access to, and I unloaded it all on that shade.
I charged forward, screaming (I’ve noticed now, when I’m transformed, my voice seems to acquire an echo – I’m going to work on that, might actually be able to harmonize with myself if I practice right) at the top of my lungs. The words and magic shot from me like a bolt of lightning, straight, true, and violent. The shade saw me, and froze (no pun intended), transfixed by my pinning force of will. Frost flaked up off his misty half, and I could see him shedding little crystals of it as he stared at me, transfixed.
A moment later, something flashed out of the dark and hit him a little below the jaw. Without a sound, he just shattered. The pieces fell all around like an icicle made of black water fallen from a sill. The pieces began to evaporate into mist before they even stopped moving, and I flicked a glance over to the right – where Zenith gave me a little salute.
I noticed then that there was a great bit of shouting going on further ahead at the train. That dunkel elf, Dex, had unlocked one of the cars and the prisoners within were charging out and attacking the skeletons.
Bare-handed.
I’d like to say that went well, and in some ways it did, but a couple of the elves went over the side as they pushed the skeletons over. Dex freed the second car’s contents, and they all went after the skeletal archers as well, and before we knew it the last of them had been pitched to break into fragments in the dark below.
I dashed up to bingo and pressed shut the wound in his side, digging bandages out of my side-kit while J’Tiel jogged up to assist. Once we made sure no one was going to die, we took a quick look over to the train. The huge beetle drawing it was still lumbering on slowly, and the train was eventually going to cross the bridge into Cozule.
“Well, if we’re going to get in that way, now’s the time,” I said.
“Can’t.” J’Tiel responded. “Jhaelent already went in. Nice shot, by the way, his whole side was still frozen solid.”
“Thanks. Hope he dies. So pretending to be captured isn’t going to work, huh?”
Zenith looked over at the train. “No, and I don’t want to be in that train when it gets there with all its guards gone and it’s caravan master half-dead.”
“Okay, scratch that.” I thought a second. “With luck, the ghouls will be so pissed off at an empty meal-bucket that they’ll just eat that guy.”
Arn snorted a short laugh. “That’d sure be nice, yeah. But let’s assume he gets his story out first.”
Dex sort of…well, materialized out of the shadows. Creepy ****ing elves. “We have to get my people home.”
“What’s this ‘we’ you talk about, Dunkel?” I said.
“You attacked that train to save them, you cannot let them die now.”
“Last I checked, your kind didn’t put a whole lot of value in charity. If these relatives of yours are fit to survive, they will make it home. If you want our help, what’s in it for us?”
“Calm down there, Az,” Arn could see I was a little…hmm…overheated. I shut up and backed off.
Bingo looked to Dex and held his bow across the drow’s arm, which still had a weapon drawn. He wasn’t looking very kindly at me. “What our friend means, is gifts given are never appreciated. We fought your battle for you because we have common cause against the one who leads Cozule now. If you want our help getting them safely home, we need guarantees of safety from your people, and we need payment to help us understand that you are appreciative of our assistance.”
One of the prisoners, a male, came forward. “We saw you fight for us. Will you at least see us as far as Eirarchae? It is perhaps six hours distance from here. We can then secure escort away and carry warning about Cozule.” Dex nodded at this.
I looked over at the prisoner. “Do you know who we are?”
“No, I have no knowledge of you.” He shrugged, but I could see my appearance had some affect on him. “Should I?”
I drew Sybarron and stormed up to him, ignoring Dex’s reflexive windup with some kind of knife. “We are Fellbane – and you should be glad that we are aiming to pay a visit to Cozule and not your home city. We make for a terrible enemy.”
He backed away a bit shaken, and retreated to the group of prisoners, who had huddled together a few yards off.
Arn got my point. “We require your service, elf, in our mission to put an end to Cozule, as repayment for assistance in safegaurding these people to the place you’re talking about.”
“Eirarchae.” Dex said. He contemplated a moment, then nodded. “We share a common enemy, it makes sense to fight it together.”
Whether that was a good thing or not, I have yet to see. I have never trusted the dark elves, and for good reason.
We set out for Eirarchae.
As we walked, we discussed our options – only two finally made the cut. Dex indicated that he knew a possible back way into the outpost, assuming Casava hadn’t sealed it. The other option was to scale under the bridge over the chasm, and sneak in that way. No one wanted to have that go awry, and be set upon by hungry ghouls while clinging over a seemingly bottomless chasm.
That would…well, it would suck.
So, back door it was.
Which leads me to my bitch about caves. I’d have loved to say that it was all nice, smooth, dry walls and a simple back-around switch.
Nope. No such luck. There were tight holes through which J’Tiel could barely fit his head (much less the rest of him wearing a backpack), vertical drops that almost claimed Zenith’s life (I grabbed his harness just in time to keep him from stepping off – you’re welcome, Z), waist-deep (neck for Bingo) muddy rivers to wade through, gummy snot-ites hanging from the ceiling that hit you before you knew you were in them.
Oh, and spider webs. And did I mention mud?
There was one interesting point, where the tunnel we were in finally widened out, but it got cold pretty quickly. The natural rock of the walls turned into more of a worked stone, and eventually became obviously carved. As we were heading in along our path, this section almost felt like we’d been back in the Feydark, it was that different. We could see it continued over off to our right, and the tunnel that forked off of ours had an inscription over it, which read “The Thief of Life”. Sybarron explained to me there was a legend about this – a lover named Esereve who lost the favor of his goddess, and was punished with the destruction of his personal beauty and the denial of his desire.
The only time we ever saw anything remotely resembling life was some kind of colorless leech that had sunk its maw in Dex’s ass (Bingo removed it with an arrowhead), and something moving down a side tunnel. Arn heard it before the rest of us, and froze us all with a hand motion. I heard the thing slithering down that passage with a grinding like a mill-stone…whatever it was, it was big, and I’m glad we had no part of it.
So here we are. Overlooking Cozule from a hole in the wall behind it, the town spread out in the darkness before us, faint purple glimmers ahead. The former temple of Lolth squats in the center, carved to resemble the spiders she fancies herself to be among. Seems like that would be the most likely place for a usurper to set up shop, so that’s where we’re going to aim at sneaking in first.
Again, I find myself wondering how the hell I got mixed up with all this. What in the name of the Black Queen did I do to end up in this spot? Arn says it’s been two days since the fight near the bridge. I can’t tell. In the dark, it could have been hours or weeks, I’d never know. I just know I want to get out of here and see the sun, and I don’t want to have to use one of these bone rings that the Thoad Adepthis.
All this because this Casava fellow can’t contain his appetite. Time to put a little end to that.
