Empirical Gnollage: Installment 67 [https://squirrel.dogphilosophy.net/Installment067.png]
Al awoke groggily to the sound of Bote muttering a repeated maledictive prayer to call down divine retribution for attempting to foil the Ineffable Plans. Al forced himself to stagger to the door and open it to check on things. Al had forgotten to extinguish the candles in the hanging candelabras, and several of the blood-hungry ferns were now dangling from the ceiling next to one of them. A column of divine light pulsed down through the ceiling at each completion of the several-second-long prayer, causing the ferns to flail slowly but desperately as they smouldered before they died off one by one and fell the the floor.
"They appear to have sensed the light and perhaps the warmth of the candles, and they each pulled themselves across the ceiling to there as I watched. I thought it best to deal with them safely before they became a problem," Bote explained, as a sleepy gnoll looked out from the room he shared with the donkey. Gruntle half-heartedly huffed in annoyance and went back inside, prompting a few sounds of hooves moving around to make way.
Al gave Bote a nod of thanks and went back to lie down and go back to sleep. As he drifted back out of consciousness, he heard the small trapdoor covering the drain hole being lifted in the next room. The room's occupants moved around, and there was a long sound of liquid pouring down into the trench below. Al was pretty sure the second stream-of-liquid sound that started back up a few moments later was just a fatigue-induced hallucination. Al's eyes closed, and he dreamed of flames trying to whisper secrets to him.
A loud SLAM! of a heavy object smashing into the floor outside startled Al awake again far too soon. Groaning with effort, Al shoved himself back up to his feet as the SLAM! repeated once more. He opened his door again to see Gruntle swinging his flail down onto a two-foot-long pink snake. Two more of them were crushed to the floor. In the flickering light of the nearly burnt out candles Al could see a few more of them fleeing back through the gap behind the propped-up front door. As Gruntle turned to look for any more that needed smashing, Al noticed one with its mouth stuck to the back of Gruntle's right thigh. The head and several inches down the body had darkened to a deeper red.
"Gruntle, you've got one more there!" Al warned. The gnoll looked down, confused that he'd not noticed being bitten. He grabbed the snake by the end of the tail and before it could try to escape, he yanked it loose and whipped its head against the floor until it stopped moving. Gruntle's own blood oozed from the rough, round, coin-sized wound where he'd pulled the snake loose.
Bote had roused themself from sleep at the noise, too, and shuffled over to tend to the wound while Al's curiosity made him take a closer look at the snakes before trying to return to sleep. They were thin and not especially large. Their scales were a soft pink, except near the head of the one that had latched onto Gruntle and fed on some of his blood. Their mouth-parts were unusual. Al had read about lampreys in a book of sea-creatures at one time, and these snakes reminded him of them. Their mouths opened all the way to be able to sink all of their teeth into a flat patch of flesh and hang on. Bote pressed a clean cloth to Gruntle's injury and tied it in place to bandage it.
"Looks like everyone's all right," Wikwocket said, leaning against the doorframe to the room she'd taken. She yawned. "Looks like dawn's almost here, guess I might as well take over." She came out and leaned against the wall while the others tried to get back to sleep some more. Al was too tired to feel bothered by Gruntle idly eating the snake that had bitten him as they all returned to their rooms. Al dropped into dreams of flying through a dark, hot void inhabited by fear, hate, and hunger.
Al wasn't sure how much time had passed before the clomping of donkey-hooves moving across the floor out to the main room of the tavern woke him again. He wanted to go back to sleep, but the irritating buzzing of a mosquito flitting around the room prevented it. He didn't know how long Gerhardt's flea-ointment would continue to repel other insects so the sooner they got moving the less likely it would wear off before they reached their destination. He rolled over onto his back and stared at the plain ceiling of the room for a moment.
"At least we were out of the weather," he admitted, "but it would have been nice to actually rest."
Then he sat up with more effort than should have been required, and slowly gathered his things together. Al worried a little that he'd find Wikwocket's bloodless corpse sitting outside since he hadn't been awakened again during her watch, but he opened the door to find her getting Gruntle to help carry the lead-lined chest back outside to put on the cart.
"Ready to leave so soon?" Al asked.
"Yes," Wikwocket replied, "this whole area is creepy and exhausting. Another night like that one and I'll be too tired to keep anything from sucking all my blood."
"Perhaps unnecessarily dramatic, but I agree with the sentiment," Bote said, shuffling out of their own room with their pack.
"Did you figure out how to shoot magical fire from your fingers yet, so we can burn down this swamp?" Wikwocket asked Al.
Al yawned.
"I think I've just about got the concepts figured out, but I'm not going to be able to try anything until I've had some real rest and a chance to make some notes. The next thing I want to figure out after that is to conjure up a demon."
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Even Wikwocket seemed to be a little scandalized by this. "That...seems like a very big leap in ambition, especially when you wouldn't even let me haggle with the last one we met," she reminded him.
"Not a free-willed one," Al tried to explain as he carried his own pack out to put on the cart. "I need one to study safely, and I think it might be able to help me with understanding some things. A lot of magic-workers end up conjuring a spirit that's bonded to the magic-worker's own. It'd be a barely-formed thing, shaped like a natural animal here in the waking world to give it a shape that it can manifest into. Like Codex, Melissa's magpie. That's not a natural bird, that's a spirit in the shape of a bird. It seems like they're safe and obedient because they're sort of too simple to have truly independent thoughts. I really need to find a copy of that book I promised Father I'd read before I tried to do anything like that though. I hope it's not too obscure to find a copy."
"Do you think it would shock the nobility to have you running around with a demon slave?" Wikwocket asked, an edge of enthusiasm creeping into her voice.
"Slave isn't exactly right, it's...well, never mind, I'm not sure I can explain it well. But, actually, probably not. Well, I take it back, they might be offended that someone like me who is clearly not noble, could have a supernatural servant."
"That's good enough for me! If I can help you get that book, I will!"
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At Wikwocket's insistence, Al and Gruntle hauled the small barrel of glowing vinegar out of the cellar and loaded it up onto the cart as well. Al wasn't sure what use it would be, but if nothing else, he supposed it might be something they could sell to an alchemist. He still wasn't sure it wasn't poisonous. It hadn't done them any harm when put into the stew, but Bote had said a prayer for the purification of the food before they ate it.
The morning air was pleasantly cool, though still humid. Once everything was loaded up, Al took some of the broken pieces of the sign and used them to wedge the loose front door into place so it at least wouldn't easily fall in again now that it was off of its hinges. He didn't expect to ever be here again, especially if he had any choice in the matter, but it seemed like the right thing to do. Then, the group continued their trudging further up the overgrown road.
Aside from the smell of it lingering on them - especially Gruntle - beneath the odor of the flea ointment, they seemed to be leaving the swamp behind them. They still caught glimpses of lingering dense fog behind them and to the east through the pine trees. As they continued, they began to occasionally see flat stones here and there, buried in the road.
"It has been some time," Bote opined after they'd passed a few of them, "but I believe at one time this would have been a stone-paved road. The stonework is not up to proper dwarven standards, of course, so I imagine this is old humanish work. Perhaps a few decades since it was last maintained in any way. Much longer than that and I think none of the stones would still be visible at the surface, due to being covered by soil and such. Or at least, this is my opinion as someone with no formal experience of stonework."
After a few hours of marching, the stones became frequent enough to be a bit of an impediment. Their long neglect and occasional plant growth at their edges resulted in many of them tilting up instead of lying flat, and this made the cart lurch and bump. Al was relieved that shortly after this they encountered the first roadsign they'd seen in a while. The wooden pole was overgrown with moss and lichen, but the deeply gouged letters in the sign's weathered wood still clearly indicated they were headed towards HELL'S BATHTUB. A smaller sign pointed to the east, where a few more stones seemed to suggest a smaller road heading off in that direction. The smaller sign was completely moss-covered. Al scraped the moss away to see if there was anything still legible there, but was only able to make out LAV. The rest was no longer discernible. Looking further east, Al thought he could see a rising plume of steam, or perhaps white smoke. A faint sulfurous scent hung in the air.
"At least we're going in the right direction," he said, and they continued on their way, having no interest in dragging their tired selves through gratuitous exploration at the time.
Gruntle was still a target for flies, attracted by his slaughterhouse mopped with swamp-water odor, but the remains of the flea-ointment seemed to be doing a fair job of keeping them from staying on him when they landed. There were far fewer mosquitoes now, and Al was pleased to hear the sound of birds for the first time since they'd begun following this road.
They soon discovered what made the bird-calls. A bright red hummingbird seemed curious about the interlopers in its territory. It flitted between them all, pausing to hover and examine them, and it chirped out a cheerful call. A few more calls answered it, and soon they had several of the brightly-colored birds entertaining them. Even Gruntle seemed amused, as he kept trying to catch them in his teeth. Wikwocket giggled as one of them landed on her shoulder.
"Hey, look! I'm like one of those magical princesses in the storybooks!" she laughed, reaching up to gently rub the bird's head as it nuzzled her neck with its beak. Al laughed, too, until he noticed something.
"Is that bird biting you?" he asked.
Wikwocket reached up to touch her neck, startling the bird into flitting away. "I don't feel anything," she said, but when she looked at her fingers, there was a smear of blood on them.
The birds looked very fragile, but they were small and quick and the whole party was still worn out from the night of poor sleep, so their attempts to do violence to the bloodthirsty birds did little more than frighten them. After chasing away the one that was lapping at the blood slowly leaking from a small bite one had made in the donkey's shoulder, the party managed drive the rest off with a minute or so of persistent but unsuccessful attempts to kill the birds.
"I am done with this place!" Wikwocket shouted, as she pressed the clean piece of cloth that Bote handed her to the side of her neck. Fortunately the injuries turned out to be superficial, and they were soon on their way once again.
The road headed up a gentle rise and the pine forest began to thin out. In the distance, Al could see plumes of steam and a few thin streamers of smoke that suggested fireplaces. Al was relieved when the elaborate iron gate in the fence across the road came into view, with numerous small buildings beyond that made clear they had arrived.