Once Talia was sure that nothing alive—in the strictest sense—lay in wait behind the blockage of brownshoots, Torval had given the order to clear it.
Slowly, with swords.
The look he’d given her when she’d suggested using the ash lance to burn a path through the overgrowth… Talia cringed at the memory. Even if you liked the smell of cooked mushrooms, the smoke and ash would’ve been…problematic.
It’d taken a few hours of work—during which Talia remained vigilant—but the crew managed to cut their way through the supersized fungi. From her post behind the ash lance, the arcanist spotted Hanmul directing a few of the cooks to grab and store as much of the edible mushroom as they could.
Guess there’s a silver lining to everything.
When the fungal blockage had been cleared, there were choked gasps and startled jerks as warm orange light streamed into the dark around them, along with a blast of humid heat. Talia frowned, glancing down to where Torval and the battlemaster stood, giving orders. Neither appeared unduly surprised, though it was hard to tell through their cloak hoods.
The caravan waited with bated breath for orders, uncertain as to their course. A few clicks rematerialized the defensive line, swiftly followed by the order to move forward. Talia wasn’t sure if the choice was born out of confidence or necessity; the tight confines of the tunnel meant that there would be no turning back, either way.
Maybe if the gallery widens? Given how huge the mushrooms were, even if there is room to turn back, it’s bound to be a task and a half.
Talia shook her head.
You’re just rattled by…whatever happened earlier. There is no turning back, remember? Now focus, Tals.
The wagon train advanced slowly, matching the pace of the defenders in front, their shields held at the ready. Ranged fighters clustered on the roofs of the wagons, wands and bows clenched tight in gloved hands.
Crossing the threshold into the gallery was like walking into another world. Delvers blinked furiously at the light, their night-eye-augmented vision a poor fit for sudden changes in luminosity. The source of the orange glow, as well as the stifling heat, was a crack that ran the far-left side of the cave, where a thick magma flow hissed and popped, splattering gobbets against the sloped ceiling.
The far-right edge was overrun by huge brownshoot mushrooms curling and twinning awkwardly between long, clear, human-sized crystals that jutted at seemingly random angles from the ceiling.
Light bounced back and forth through the quartz formations, refracting to and fro, casting shadows through the subterranean glen. It was a haven of life and warmth in the middle of the usually cold and deadly under. A natural sanctuary of peace and calm.
Or it would have been.
What in all the gods…?
The whole cavern was covered in…bleeding holes. Whatever had vandalized the cave had been indiscriminate, sparing no surface. The hexagonal pillars of crystal were riddled with cracks and holes. Caps of entire mushrooms had been ripped and torn, leaving them with eerie, gaping wounds.
Something heavy dripped onto Talia’s cowl and sluiced onto her forehead. She jolted and held in a shriek. It ran viscously down the bridge of her nose, collecting in the gash of scar tissue on her cheek before she instinctively caught it with her hand.
The…fluid… congealed oddly on her palm, an oily black with a silver sheen.
Crackling wounds.
Talia blasted her mindsense to its longest range, certain that they’d made a mistake. That she’d made a mistake.
And yet…
Nothing.
But now that she was looking, she had a sick feeling she knew what had happened to the buzzing mass of minds she’d sensed. All around the caravan, splotches of otherness lay in broken heaps, as if they’d fallen from the air simultaneously, shattering every limb in their insectile bodies.
Before she could ponder the issue, the tinny voice returned, blaring a warning in her thoughts with words she couldn’t decipher.
She immediately lost her hold on her mindsense, letting it collapse back to its normal range and clutching her head. She tore an oily rag from her belt, wiping away frantically at the sludge on her face, and the voice faded to a quiet insistent throb. Orange and red runes fluttered in her vision.
Just like in the liminal. Just like in my dreams.
A bolt of warmth shot through her chest as she drew the link. Her body broke out in cold sweat. She pushed the insidious thought of mage-madness from her mind.
I have time now. The Matriarch said so. No, this is something else. Has to be.
Talia took a breath, rubbed away the last of the oil and looked up, spotting a series of hand-sized holes haphazardly carved into the ceiling, dripping with the substance. Casting a glance at the wand-toting delvers with her on the roof told her that she hadn’t been the only one to be greeted by an involuntary shower.
In fact, out of all of them, she’d likely come out of it the cleanest.
The crew had all but stopped in their tracks. Some gaped at the grotto, while others furiously wiped at the oily substance with whatever they had on hand. All cast their heads about uncertainly, unnerved by the bizarre circumstances.
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Talia spotted Zaric on the wagon behind her, his thoughts hidden by the obscuring enchantment. Even without seeing his face, he seemed, shaken. Something about the tension in his shoulders and the way his head twitched left to right warily.
Did he hear it too?
She stared at him, willing him to meet her gaze, but either he didn’t notice, or he was deliberately ignoring her.
Seeing as there was nothing hostile in the immediate vicinity, Torval put out the call to move forward. A series of follow up clicks from Darkclaw saw a stream of defenders move back along the column to guard the train’s rear. It stretched their defences thin, but apparently, the battlemaster was taking no chances now that they were out of the tight tunnels.
Glad I’m not the only one that thinks something’s not right.
The path through the gallery was clear, though it’d take a few days of travel before they made it to the final straight that would lead them to Karzurkul. In some ways, whatever those insects had been, they had done them a favour. The way forward was littered with the liquified remains of brownshoots and the crumbled remnants of crystal coated with oily black residue.
If it weren’t for that, the expedition would’ve had to carve their way through, potentially exhausting either Zaric and Osra, or putting the defensive complement in an awkward position. Which…
If they cut a path through to the way we came in…aren’t we going toward them?
The thought was a concerning one, but in the end, it was moot—as many of their choices seemed to be lately. Whether or not the source of the insects waited for them down the road, it didn’t matter. The expedition had nowhere else to go.
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Talia sat behind the chassis of the ash lance for the rest of the day, until she found her mind drifting and her focus waning, and one of the delvers on the roof with her had to shake her awake. The other defenders had long since returned to shifts, allowing a well-rested crew to keep watch at the cost of raw manpower. The psion had stayed on watch anyway, not wanting to miss something that she might have caught with her mindsense.
The tinny voice had faded away completely once Talia had rinsed her face with some water, allowing her to use the ability to its fullest once more. She still didn’t understand why exactly the fluid had interfered with her ability, but put it out of her mind when she realized that she once again had full control over the sense. She had enough on her mind as it was.
Besides, that train of thought was…dangerous. It led to places with too little information and too much uncertainty.
When she fell asleep the second time, and there was still no sign of any living beings apart from her and the crew, Talia was forced to admit that it was time for sleep.
No use to anyone if I’m exhausted.
Torval had called for an officer’s meeting in a few hours, probably to discuss the oddity, and it wouldn’t do for her to be dead on her feet. Talia waved at the other delvers, deactivated the ash lance and climbed down the ladder, and made her way to her bunk.
She didn’t even take off any of her gear before passing out, patting a distressed and squirming Menace until the darkness took her.
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Talia woke to a shaking wagon. A loud thump against the wall of her bunk made her go from groggy confusion to alert wakefulness in the span of a few seconds. She jolted out of bed, shoved her clicker in her mouth and pulled the curtain back. A few more seconds was all it took to buckle her sword on and activate her shield bracer.
She spread out her mindsense, detecting a dozen or so minds at the front of the wagon train, all with that same flickering quality she’d noticed before, but larger, more…steady somehow. Facing them were the cluster of familiar thoughts she recognized as crew. With how her sense had reacted before, Talia was wary of attempting to go anywhere near the enemy, psionically speaking. For now, it was enough that she knew where the enemy was.
Suppressing panic, she almost ran head-first into Calisto as the older woman slid down the ladder from her bunk, seeming just as alarmed. The expedition’s second in command was buckling up her leather armour, a deadly-looking spiked mace strapped to her side and one of Talia’s wands between her teeth.
The two women shared a worried glance before Talia pulled up her cowl and put her circlet on, brushed through the double curtains of the entrance and threw open the door.
A scene of chaos greeted her.
The battle had seemingly just begun; delvers clambered out of their wagons with weapons bared, doing up their armour as they went. Darkclaw stood in the middle of it all, directing the defence with a combination of clicker calls and handsign.
Light and heat flared around them as a volley of fireballs whipped through the air toward wagon one.
Reeeeettarchttch
The sound was ungodly, caught somewhere between scrape of metal against stone and the sound of a rat being torn to shreds.
‘Arcanist; the lance’ Darkclaw clicked, barely sparing her a glance.
‘Acknowledged.’
Talia broke into a sprint toward wagon one, leaving Calisto behind to do whatever it was she did during fights.
The delvers she’d left behind had been replaced by a new cohort, none of whom reacted when she took the ladder rungs two at a time and threw herself at the ash lance. She covered her eyes as they unleashed a volley of flames, the heat licking her face as it whished by.
REEAATCHHKKK
The sound tore at Talia’s ears, but she focused on her task, flicking through the activation sequence of the ash lance and checking that the stores of stone dust were full. When it hummed to life in her hands, she had to stop herself from firing right away, waiting for the wash of flames from the fireballs to fade so she could catch a glimpse of the enemy.
Already, she was running through a list of the deep dwellers she remembered from her bestiary, cataloguing which it was likely to be. The screech was pretty distinctive, so if the beast had been recorded, it should be…
The curtain of fire faded, and the close combat defenders rushed back in to fight.
What. The. Fuck.
The enemy was like nothing she’d seen before, or even heard of. They weren’t beasts; they were aberrations. Abominations.
No two were the same. Some had long spindly limbs attached to a bulbous torso with a vertical maw filled with metal teeth, others still were squat and muscular and bipedal, their short frames rippling with bulging, fleshy fibers and sporting menacing claws.
Each and every one dripped a viscous black substance that defied the law of gravity, sluicing down from their grotesque bodies slower than it should, shimmering silver, almost as if they were bleeding tar.
They moved like newborns, stumbling this way and that clumsily, swinging spiked arms in exaggerated gestures and screeching angrily whenever the delvers fought back. And yet…
Talia watched as a large quadruped with a swarm of flailing limbs lashed into a heavily armoured dwarf, sending him flying. The line closed around the gap, and the dwarf’s companions retaliated, but all the abomination did was screech. It didn’t even flinch.
They don’t feel fear.
The realization was probably the most frightening part, and as she watched, a pair of beastkin broke from the lines to put down an oily worm with a maw full of glistening silver teeth. It wriggled until the end—screeching even past the point where it should have been able to emit sound—but it never stopped trying to get at them. No hint of self-preservation.
Talia activated the first trigger on the ash lance, clicked out a call for the defenders to disengage, and sighted down the barrel.
Once they were clear, she fired, dragging a line of incandescent death across the clustered aberrations. They died so quickly she never even heard the sound.
Eat that, you fucking freaks.
The moment of silence as the shrivelled, charred corpses fell lifeless was akin to a cheer of triumph.
And then the clicker calls flickered through.
‘Enemy behind; ahead full’
‘Disengage; skirmish maneuvers’
Talia frowned, the thrill of victory fading. She threaded her psionic net behind them and flinched.
The two dozen corpses in front of her were nothing.
From the tunnels behind them, a swarm was coming.