I suppose the next few moments should have come as no surprise to me – but still, I found myself in an unwelcome situation once again. It would be positively fantastic if at some point I was able to wash myself before climbing into these boiling kettles we find ourselves in. But, I suppose, this is the life I chose. I’d have no better fare in the Turathian army.
At least I’m not in Arkhosia.
We saw the outpost stretched out around us, glowing gently purple in a sickly fashion, the faded darklights still showing up after apparently months of disrepair. Above it in the giant cavern, some great winged thing slowly arced over. I didn’t speculate at what it was. It was hard enough convincing myself to stay here, and not simply turn around and leave.
The temple, where we wanted to go, crouched on a great plateau, about twenty feet or so high, in the center of the enormous cavern. I assume the entrance around the other side had a simpler way in, but this is what we had to deal with. The plateau started some sixty or eighty feet from the tunnel we were emerging from, and although the ground between it and our position was fairly smooth, hardly any of us could see at all in the faded purple.
Trying to see in all this was quite frustrating – you’d catch a view of something, and your eyes would tell you it was this, but it was that. It was almost more useful to simply close my eyes and walk that way, with our lights out my eyes were almost more a hindrance than a help.
Dex volunteered to lead the way across, trailing a rope which I would anchor. Only he had the ability to see clearly in the almost perfect darkness, and we didn’t want to advertise our presence with exposed torches or other significant lighting. Once he was across, we’d each individually follow the rope to the wall as quick as we could, and then up the wall we’d go.
Dex led the way out, rapidly vanishing from sight, only the slowly trailing rope pulling its way out from me gave me any indication he was still attached.
Of course, that should have been my first clue of the impending disaster.
The rope stopped. Then went tight, and almost jerked me off my feet. The others were around me, and heard me grunting with the effort of keeping hold of it.
“Something’s on him.” The rope was jerking around, and the rest of the team was huddling around me, occasional chuffs and sighs giving away the exasperation we all were feeling.
Out ahead of us, about fifty feet, a figure lit up in dim purple. The glow of it flickered and washed, and I could see there were others there. The dunkel (we call them that, the Shadrim do, that is – it’s the same word we use for a night without stars, and for a deep-black beer that has a very thick white foamy head) must have lit up one of his assailants.
Without even a moment, J’Tiel grunted “Mine!” and charged out at the small knot of creatures. As he went he plucked away the hood from his everburning torch, and its glow lit up the scene – a small pack of ghouls had stumbled onto Dex, or he’d stumbled onto them. Whatever the case, they were leaping all over him, and he was obviously confused at what to do with all the attention.
The ghouls saw J’Tiel inbound and set up a wailing…an answering keeing call from off to the right told me we weren’t going to be alone for long.
With a mix of bows and charges we dealt with the small party of ghouls – there were four – just in time for a second set of them to arrive. In the dim torchlight we could just make out the top of the ridge ahead of us, where the temple rear rose up out of the stone. Atop it I caught a glimpse of three figures standing there – one ran off towards the front of the temple, while another leaped down cleanly and out of my view. The third lofted something towards our ranks with an underhanded toss, it could have been a ball or a stone.
Of course, it was neither.
The thing cracked open when it hit the floor, and a whirlwind of mist and silvered lines erupted out of it – they formed up to a visage of horrific rot and a swirling maelstrom of chilling vapor. All around us, smaller echoes of the thing’s nature billowed out of the dark, their shrieks only faint imitations of their ‘parent’.
The fight was notable for its speed, its stench, and its lethality.
Bingo was mowing down ghouls left and right with bow shots, while I wrestled with the whispy forms of two of the smaller spectral creatures that had focused on me. I caught glimpses of Dex at one point surrounded by four of them, with the towering cloud next to him, J’Tiel trying to skewer a larger ghoul – the one that I’d seen jump down, as it turns out – and the roiling mist of the clouded wraith sucking the life out of the both of them.
I tagged the two that were on me as I skittered sideways away from the side of the ridge and towards Dex and J’Tiel, and pulled Sybarron to invoke a halo of winter light around me. I sent a searing bolt into the large ghoul that J’Tiel was desperately fighting, hoping to draw a little attention, but to no avail. As I watched, it knocked his spear aside and sank its teeth deeply into his left shoulder. Blood fountained out of the wound, which told me immediately that the bite had severed an artery – he’d be dead in minutes without help.
Dex was fighting off her own ghouls, and the rest had issues. I was the only one who had a hope of getting a bit of arcane healing in, so I rushed forward, hoping to draw him into range just long enough to get a crack at him.
Not quickly enough.
J’Tiel ripped the ghoul from him and threw it down on the ground, and pulled back to skewer it with his spear.
Which gave the enormous wraith its chance. It whipped threads of darkness across his back, scouring away the armor there and scarring the flesh beneath. It threw off J’Tiel’s aim for just a second, and he glanced over to get a view of his assailant.
The ghoul he’d thrown down leaped back from the floor as if it were the bounce of a child’s ball, and bit cleanly through his neck.
J’Tiel’s head lolled back, and for a second I thought it would simply roll off, but I could see that his spine was still intact. The connecting tissue of his neck was ruined, and with a spurting of black blood, he collapsed in a heap with the ghoul riding him all the way down.
Bingo fired a dual arrow shot into the ghoul, which caused it to turn and scream at him, gobbets of things I didn’t want to think about falling from its lips. I ratcheted off another bolt of searing light into the wraith, which seemed to blow off a large portion of its swirling mists.
The ghoul grabbed J’Tiel’s body and began to drag it away, just out of my sight. Dex began dicing into the wraith between her and our fallen comrade, and I fired yet another bolt into it – which exploded it completely. The other echoes of it faded almost immediately, their little screams echoing far into the darkness around us. The others rushed in the general direction of where J’Tiel had been dragged away, and in the dim light of the torch we made out a gang of ghouls fighting over him.
He must have truly died while we were watching. He was wearing one of the bone rings given to us from the Adepthus Thoad. As we charged the ghouls, his body erupted into a mass of spray and chunks, quickly evaporating into cinders and falling to the ground in rapidly-disintegrating ashes. The ghouls let up a cry of frustration that quickly turned to pain as Bingo’s arrows and my invokations began to pepper them down.
That’s when things got truly insane. Behind the ghouls, J’Tiel rose again. We could tell it was him, it had his shape and form, even his face in the light was the same.
But he was covered with incisions and blood. We’d seen his body disintegrate. This was something else. A while back this place had been described to me as being a focus of undeath, an unclean boil on the world. I could only assume this was an echo of J’Tiel, a phantom formed in the sudden echoing absence of him. Whether he’d fight against us or with us, I could not tell.
It was decided in short order, though, as he picked up his spear and severed the leg of the ghoul that had killed him.
The thing squealed with agony, and began to gallop away like a three-legged dog, its stump oozing a thick dark ichor of some kind.
Bingo finished it before it could get far.
“We have to move fast here. Be ready to kill it if it…well, if it doesn’t behave like him.” I gathered my things quickly and shuffled over to the place we’d been intending to scale.
J’Tiel…well, the thing that looked like him, it joined us. “What do you remember? Who are you?” I asked, hand on Sybarron and ready to strike it if I needed to act quickly.
“Very little, and I am J’Tiel.” It spoke without a single speck of emotion. That struck me as odd, given my knowledge of the undead. Generally the ones that formed as echoes had an overarching purpose, and at least experienced hate and loathing pretty well.
“Do you remember why we’re here?”
At this, its eyes lit up a little, a faint red glow that died down quickly. “Kill Casava.”
“Yes. Are you ready to do that?”
It thought a moment. As it did, a drop of blood issued from a cut on his right cheek.
It fell upward.
“Oh, yes. I am very ready to do that.”
I looked over at the others. Arn just shrugged at me, and Bingo just didn’t say anything at all.
“Okay. Hmm. Come along, then, but I suspect we’re going to have issues if you come back to Al’Veydra and meet the real J’Tiel.”
We scaled the wall in record time, and made our way around to the front of the temple – mist billowed out of the entrance, and lying in it, curled up in fetal positions all around, were dozens of ghouls. Strangely, they were all laid in the mist, as if they wanted to be in it. They were so tightly packed that I knew there was no way to walk through. The piles of them stretched all the way up the stairs and straight into the temple arch, through its doors.
We couldn’t spare time – the alarm would be raised shortly, the one I saw run would surely be letting the entire settlement know we’d arrived. An idea sparked up, and I passed two of my fire-enchanted arrows to Bingo. I mumbled a few words to the bloody J’Tiel. Bingo and I exchanged a few hand signals, and I nodded to the newly-minted goliath. In one deft move he stripped the cover from his torch and flung it into the midst of the ghouls.
As they struggled to wake from their torpor, Bingo and I opened fire. Incendiary arrows flashed into the crowds, setting a great many of them ablaze to thrash and flail before falling to the ground in greasy smears. The rest charged forward, dealing with the odd ghoul that escaped our conflagration, and we worked our way inside the doors. As we burned our way inside, two rather tougher human-looking ghouls came dashing forward, only to retreat quickly as they saw the quick work we were making of their packs of undead.
Arn cast a glance back behind us as we all entered, and immediately screamed “DOORS GET THE DOORS!!”
I cast a glance back and saw what induced his panic – an enormous dragon-like skeleton with a patchwork of skin and sinew had risen from the outpost behind us and was lumbering in the direction of the temple. It almost looked as though it was created, rather than animated. Regardless, I had no intention of letting us get trapped between Casava and this thing. Arn and I leaned into the doors, slamming them as the thing arrived in the courtyard. The breeze of its arrival pushed the scent of charred and bloody flesh, and something drier, fouler.
We slammed the doors shut and lost sight of the beast. Leaning back against it, the two ghouls ahead of us moved back up the corridor. The smoking and steaming bodies of fried ghouls littered the floor around us like the remnants of a forest fire.
As we muscled up our courage, I again had that feeling – how in all the hells do I end up doing this?
