A tense silence filled the clearing as the two parties stood at an impasse. The yeti had stopped about twenty feet away, spears pointing threateningly at the cyclops, who still had Thud slung behind him. He returned the favour, eyeing down the guard. They were uglier than he remembered them. Grayish skin covered with coarse white fur, aside from their face and chests, a crooked maw of sharp teeth, and manic-looking yellow eyes with those creepy goat pupils. At least goats had the decency to be tasty to eat. More diminutive than most mountain descendants, yeti instead used their coloration and tribal living as advantages for their survival in the snowier caps of the higher peaks. Giant was a crude language to begin with, but the yeti took liberties even with that.
"I want to talk to Ruul." Grugg stated in Giant, folding his arms as if to exaggerate his position on the matter. The wizard at least managed to pick up on the name, even if he didn't understand the rest.
[That's great. Hopefully, he can ask these gentlemen to stand down. Hmm, maybe we should have brought something to trade for the artefact?]
The yeti chuckled in a low, menacing fashion. Whatever inside joke the pack shared, they decided to make more apparent as one jerked his thumb back towards the temple.
"Good luck, valley-scum. Welcome to join him."
Grugg looked back to the temple to where he was being directed. A yeti head in the early stages of decomposition hung from one of the many dilapidated, dirty wooden structures.
[What did they say? That laugh didn't - oh, is that… That's Ruul, huh?]
"Hat definitely need this trinket?" he muttered, trying to keep the conversation between the two of them.
[Yes, I'm afraid without it, I'll never- woah!]
That was all Grugg needed to hear. With his large gait a standing sprint covered the distance between him and the defenders surprisingly quickly. So much so that he caught most of the yeti off guard - too distracted between themselves cackling over their assumed intimidation tactic. Thud quickly unslung and whipped around into a sizeable overhead arc directly at the nearest flat-footed yeti. The resulting clang as the metal tip crushed the metal helmet of the target straight into the yeti's skull, spraying droplets of red and pink across the light dusting of snow.
It didn't take long for the remaining yeti to gather their composure and get ready into combat, but the second swing of Thud came sooner; a follow-up backhand to the yeti to his right, already in full motion as the first yeti was still falling to the floor. This next hapless foe tried to bring his crooked spear up to block the blow, but the sheer force of the impact not only split the wooden spear in half, but the multiple proceeding cracks indicated the arm had been shattered along with it as collateral. The yeti wailed in pain as it clutched at the now dangling appendage, dropping the splintered spear shards.
"Idiots, keep distance, go and get-" the leader of the small group began, before catching the heft of the club straight in the chest, the weight of the blow knocking him back almost a dozen feet. Despite yeti typically being a terror compared to a normal sized human, Grugg was in a league above them when it came to pure strength. Just the idle power he could put behind any swing could cause immense damage.
The two yeti guards left standing immediately turned tail and ran, dropping their spears where they had stood. Now having lost the advantage of numbers and underestimating their opponent, their only options were to save themselves or go and get reinforcements. Though, there shouldn't be many of them left - unless more things had changed than he knew. Grugg grimaced as he panted from exertion, his breath forming clouds in the cold atmosphere. He watched the cowards vanish back into the temple and then turned to stare down the crippled yeti, who had been still moaning in pain and returning pointed glares at the cyclops.
[Woah - I don't think I've been so petrified, yet exhilarated, in my life. You should, uh, extract some information out of this injured one, right?]
Grugg paused, with Thud raised above the head of the yeti. Information wasn't the first thing he had thought of. But… maybe that's what he would have to start doing if he was going to help his new friend solve that mystery. Huh, friend. That was an unexpected phrase that had sprung up in his head. It wasn't an unwelcome one, but it felt uncomfortable in his inner vocabulary. Years of solitude had left him socially dust-covered and creaky. The cyclops lowered his club and crouched down beside the squirming yeti, pointing a stubby figure towards the fallen enemy.
"Is this a crime?" The blunt seriousness of the asked question left an awkward pause hanging in the air; even the yeti seemed taken aback despite not understanding Common.
[Oh, you mean 'Is he a criminal?'. I mean, he certainly isn't pleasant, but I can't say more than that.]
"Are you a crime?" he repeated towards the yeti, this time in native Giant.
"Your mother is a crime against the Great Mountain." The yeti attempted to spit at the cyclops for punctuation at the end of his insult but was prevented as his tongue was grabbed by the massive hand of Grugg. Maintaining his grip, the cyclops pushed his fist into the mouth of the now panicked yeti, too shocked to continue complaining about the broken arm. The yeti began choking; his jaw stretched too wide to bite into his assailant as a defense. Clawing in desperation as it blocked his airway, his claws lacked the strength to pierce the skin. He didn't struggle for long.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
[Gods on high! What did he say?]
Grugg stood up from the now unmoving figure of the suffocated yeti and wiped the drool off his hand onto his leather kilt.
"No comment."
He picked up Thud and started walking towards the temple, his feet crunching on the small clusters of fresher snow on the approach. As he reached a short staircase leading up to the temple entrance, he stopped to wipe Thud clean on a snow-laden desiccated bush.
[Well, this place certainly looks… inviting.]
It had undoubtedly received some ill-conceived renovations since the structure was initially built. Not only were there tasteless corpse effigies littering the entryway and hanging from the lip of the peaked roof but even the pillars had been defaced. In addition, crude drawings of skulls, icons relating to the tribe, and even some poorly imagined erotica had been carved into the previously well-crafted white stone structure.
[It all looks to be marble, which would have taken a long time to bring up this high in the mountain.]
The entrance itself was foreboding - at the top of the small set of steps a wide doorway just led into darkness. Grugg could hear slight, muffled voices in the distance, but that didn't seem to match up with how big the temple looked from the outside. He tried squinting his eye, but it couldn't pick up any shapes past the threshold of the building.
"Hat know where shiny thing is?"
[Only that it is in the temple, or was. Probably before it became a den of yeti.]
Grugg dug around in his sack for the last pine nut and crunched it down, the aftertaste finally evoking a sickly frown from his hard features. He wondered if the yeti had any better food in there. Or anything other than filth and dead wood. Not receiving any answers, just standing out in the cold, he shrugged glumly and took the necessary steps towards entering the temple. As the cyclops entered the building the second thing that hit him after the enveloping darkness was the absolute stench of the place. He was certainly no paragon of hygiene himself, but the temple's interior reeked of desiccated feces and aged body odor.
He stood with Thud at the ready in the entranceway, whilst waiting for his eye to adjust to the darkness within and the details of the room gradually came into focus. It was a simple one-room building, rectangular, with a peaked roof and raised ceiling to match the outside. Some kind of statue lay at an irregular angle in the center of the chamber.
[About thirty feet wide, and forty feet deep. Ceiling about twenty by walls rising to thirty feet by the apex. Toppled statue in the center resembles- oh, this won't do.]
"What's up, Hat?"
[I usually have a notepad or something that records my voice when I start investigating something so that I can recall the details later… that doesn't seem possible now, unfortunately.]
"Oh, uh, Grugg will help," he stammered, over-eager to be a useful part of solving the mystery. "Hat says 'So many feet here, even up walls. Statue broke, probably by gross yeti'."
[That's… a reasonable effort. Thank you, Grugg.]
The cyclops grinned; it was clear to him that the yeti here had been committing mass amounts of crime, both in ruining the building and generally just being foul creatures. Of course, it wasn't much of a mystery given the apparent abundance of evidence present currently offending his senses. Still, he was sure to solve it really thoroughly with the assistance of Thud.
[Say, look by that statue a bit closer - you can see it right? There appears to be a hole in the floor.]
Grugg tempered his excitement before it got ahead of himself and moved closer to the center of the room. The marble tiles that weren't covered in filth or debris were chill to the touch on his bare feet. But yes, the wizard had been correct; beneath the position where the statue had once stood upright, there was now a hole that tunneled downwards. The yeti voices echoed down this passageway some distance away, but it was hard to judge how far.
"Hmph, hiding like rats."
[Probably leading us into a trap too; we would certainly be at a disadvantage.]
The cyclops observed the toppled statue. It was a figure carved from marble like the rest of the temple, and perhaps at one point had been beautifully designed, but now lay scarred and dirt ridden from the yeti neglect. It was difficult to make out at this angle, but it looked like a lithe figure with hands outstretched as if holding something.
[The temple was originally built by elves before they had long left this place. The figure represents one of their figures from folklore, Elith Moonchaser, said to have wanted to ascend to the heavens by simply walking to the highest place he could find. Simplifying that for the sake of brevity, you understand.]
"Did elf ever make it?"
[Unlikely, that would have been at least a thousand years ago, and they didn't know as much about the different planes as we do now. Another plane is not typically something you can just walk between, but that is a conversation for another day. However, there used to be what we are looking for in his hands - the artefact known as the Moonchaser Orb.]
Grugg grunted. With a name like that, it sounded like the stinky kind of magic he would usually prefer to avoid at all costs. It also sounded like something a group of yeti would steal and fight over. If Ruul had been usurped, it was likely in a power grab by someone with bigger aspirations. And a bigger weapon. He certainly didn't remember the yeti wearing armor; as amateur and ineffective as it had just been, that didn't bode too well.
The roughly hewn tunnel entrance dug into the marble flooring looked wide enough for him to fit through, maybe even swing Thud about a little. But there would be no guarantee that further in would be the same. The worst-case scenario he could imagine would be a corridor he could barely fit through that was lined with holes for the yeti to poke spears through. Assuming they were capable of planning that kind of thing - they didn't exactly have any predators or visitors that would require an elaborate trap. He tried to be more optimistic, but he was too hungry for that.
Weighing up his options, he idly drummed his fingers on the handle of Thud. Behind him, a rattling sound began to increase in pitch, drawing his attention away from the hole. He twisted his neck to look towards the doorway where the previous daylight had become an immutable gray. A chill rain had begun, dotting the icy rocks and sparse vegetation with an increasing tempo.
Grugg sighed and took the first steps into the tunnel.