> Empirical Gnollage: Installment 53 [https://squirrel.dogphilosophy.net/Installment053.png]
Al went to the cart and opened his pack to retrieve a torch, while Bote followed and donned their own pack.
"It might be dangerous further in. You don't mind if we leave you here, do you?" Al asked the donkey. If the bland look he got in response meant anything at all, it was probably You're talking to a donkey, what's wrong with you?
"Right," Al answered the imagined question, and after checking on the bundle of flowers they were meant to deliver, he decided to take his whole pack as well. After shouldering the pack, he commanded the torch to light with a bit of magic. The additional light didn't accomplish much immediately, aside from highlighting the rubble on the floor and piled against the door. As an afterthought he also fetched a bowl from the supplies on the cart and poured some of the grain they'd brought as donkey-feed into it, and left it on the floor in front of Haunch.
"Okay, do we have everything we need?" Al asked the others.
"You know, this place is damp and made of stone, I'll bet you could safely throw fire around in here," Wikwocket suggested. Al hesitated, but had to concur that it might be useful. He took the remaining crossbow bolt with the ampoule of ultraphlogisticated oil tied to it and tucked it in his belt. Wikwocket nodded approvingly and levered the spider-marked blade...BiteySue...from its resting place, and stepped cautiously ahead to the hallway.
"Everybody knows ancient tombs are filled with devious traps and vengeful dead people walking around. We should be careful," Wikwocket warned, watching the walls, floor, and ceiling as she crept cautiously ahead. She prodded each smooth stone in the floor before she stepped on them. "If we step on the wrong one, a hidden mechanism might shoot poisoned spears at us, or summon angry ghosts, or drop the ceiling on our heads! Hey, Al, come closer with that torch so I can see better!"
"Why would they have a trap that ruins their ceiling the first time someone sets it off? They'd have to rebuild it each time, right?" Al questioned, though he looked back at the rubble in the first chamber, and wondered.
The hallway they were moving slowly into also had traces of pigment here and there along the walls. As they got further, more of it seemed to be intact, and the few pieces remaining began to suggest a mural of a parade or procession, presumably of elves judging by the shape of the ears on the fragmentary pieces of heads that were still discernible in the remains of the artwork. Within a few paces, the torchlight showed a smaller pair of stone doors blocking the hallway. They, too, had fragments of a mural on them, which suggested each door had an elven figure painted on. As with the rest, much of it was missing, but the outstretched hand of the rightmost towards the middle of the doors, and the positioning of what was left of the other figure that suggested it had been painted in a similar gesture, seeming to be beckoning the viewer to open the doors and go inside.
"Ah, HA!" Wikwocket accused with a grin. "No doubt this is a clever trap! Oh, please go right in and awaken the spectral swamp-dragon inside to devour your souls and curse your shoes! they're saying. Well, we're not going to fall for it!"
She was very disappointed when several minutes of careful checking turned up no obvious danger.
"Well, whatever devious trick is involved, it's beyond the door itself, so somebody should push the doors open and see what happens," she said, then jumped aside as an impatient Gruntle pushed. They opened more easily than the larger front doors had. There was more hallway on the other side, and the remnants of the processional mural continued forward along the walls. Up ahead, there were signs of the hallway opening into another chamber, and a shaft of dim light slanted down from above to reveal more rubble on the floor there. Wikwocket moved ahead slowly past Gruntle, still suspiciously watching the floor and walls and becoming increasingly annoyed that no hidden catastrophe was to be found.
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The chamber they found themselves in was also strewn with stone rubble, and an irregular patch across the ceiling appeared to have fallen in. A crack in the stone roof over what was left of the chamber above them allowed a shaft of daylight to reach in. The center of the chamber had a round stone well with its wall rising just a few feet above the floor level. There was no mechanism to lower or raise a bucket, or any bucket at all, for that matter. Stone steps led upward along the right and left walls, rising towards openings in what was left of the ceiling and into whatever remained of the upper chamber. The stairs appeared to have once wrapped all the way around to form an archway over another door at the opposite end of the chamber, but that part had crumbled in with the ceiling. The degraded mural on the doors seemed to be the same as the ones on the doors they'd just come through, as best they could tell from the parts that were left.
The whole room had a terrible reek of musty, swampy, ammonia-tainted air. Gruntle stalked to the edge of the well and leaned over, sniffing. Curious what he could smell, Al joined him at the well's edge. He leaned over and looked down. The water was only about twenty feet or so below. The sides of the well seemed to be overgrown with something black, lumpy, and organic. He didn't get much of a look because he sniffed the air at that point. He reeled back, immediately regretting what he'd done - the stench was like nothing he'd ever encountered before, though it reminded him of stagnant sewage. Eyes watering and trying not to gag, he wondered how Gruntle could stand it, especially since Al knew by now that Gruntle's sense of smell was sharper than human.
"Smells bad," Gruntle announced, his voice resonating in the well. He kept his head bent down to look into the well despite this, and Al thought he heard something inside the well shuffle around. He carefully approached again and took a deep breath before leaning over and holding his torch downwards into the well. Countless beady eyes reflected the torchlight back from the mass of bats covering the sides of the well from about five feet below the top and nearly down to the water. A few of the small creatures flapped nervously at the activity.
"If we make too much noise, we'll probably disturb them," Al said, stepping back away from the well to take a breath. Taking this as a suggestion, Gruntle leaned further down into the well and let out a long, loud whooping call that reverberated down into the well and back out into the chamber. Then he stepped back, holding his hands over his ears and barking with laughter as a squealing cloud of agitated bats came up and out of the well in a swirling tornado of flapping wings. Al and Bote retreated back to the hallway to get away from the leathery tempest, and Wikwocket crouched laughing and covering her head. Gruntle let them swarm around him as they fled, and he lunged out to chomp down on a bat that passed too closely. The cloud of bats spread out, most of them disappearing up through the hole in the ceiling, but a few settling themselves high up on the walls near the corners of the chamber. The light dimmed as some of the creatures made their way all the way up to the crack in the roof and fled the structure entirely. Gruntle chewed and swallowed contentedly as the excitement died down. Al hesitantly stepped back into the chamber once the air was clear of bats.
Wikwocket stood back up and looked at a bat that had settled fitfully into a nearby corner near the ceiling. "They're kind of adorable, like little dragon-mice!"
"Yes, well, I was going to suggest we not disturb them," Al griped.
"You should have said so then!" Wikwocket giggled.
Al rubbed his forehead. "Yes, of course. Look, I don't want to rush recklessly through here or anything, but I don't think we should dawdle around stirring up trouble either. Shall we just push through the doors and see if the dead hero we're looking for is in there?"
Wikwocket's eyes followed the worn steps up to the broken ceiling. "What's up there?"
"Go ahead and take a look, but be careful," Al told her. She grinned and quietly stalked up the rightmost steps. Gruntle followed. As Wikwocket popped her head up past the ceiling, she froze. "Ah, HA!" she yelled triumphantly and scrambled back down past a confused Gruntle, who stuck his head up to try to see what she had noticed. Wikwocket picked up a few small pieces of stone rubble from the floor and started back up the steps.