They were already hundreds of yards from the entrance when it started to close, as Jordan knew it would. It had to. A narrow set of stairs down into the darkness to defeat the thing that had done all this without a single guard in sight was obviously a trap.
Still, that certainty hadn’t been enough to stop him from obediently following the Crusade’s Paragon. His only act of defiance had been to count his steps as they went because Jordan’s backup plan was never far from his mind. He’d sworn to himself that he would fight alongside these brave men until the end, but at the same time, he had no wish to become the very thing that they were fighting once he died.
He hadn’t really wanted to stay behind in the Temple of the Dawn either, though. He’d never personally been to a place that reeked of evil and death as much as that place. Well, at least not until he descended the stairs and made his way to the temple beneath it. There, amidst the miasma of evil that was so strong it was almost palpable, he made sure to stay close to the Paragon’s light even as the darkness crowded around them.
“Fear not, my brothers,” Brother Faerbar said as the stone door they’d entered slowly rumbled shut somewhere behind them. “We are not trapped down here. It is the monsters of the pit that are now trapped in here with us!”
There was a rallying cry from the other men to accompany that, which was frighteningly loud as it echoed into the dark. After that, Jordan could hear the other men talking about how the Paragon had done exactly this sort of thing before when he purged Fallravea of the degenerate Oroza worshipers.
He found it hard to concentrate on that, though, with the dull echo of their earlier cheers. In fact, as he listened, he realized that the echo was getting louder again, like it was coming back to them.
“Sir… ummmm, your Paragon-ness, I think that—” Jordan started to say, but the gruff older man interrupted him.
“They’re coming,” he said quietly.
Jordan could hear it now. Even as everyone around him drew their swords, he could hear the distant rumble getting louder and louder until it was nothing but a keening horde that was so loud he couldn’t think straight.
They’d passed into the under temple, through the main exit, and had been following an elaborately tiled corridor with irregularly spaced exits on either side. Up ahead, the mage could see that the corridor expanded out into a large room, but even with the volume of the sound, or perhaps because of it, he couldn’t quite figure out which direction the sounds were coming from.
The answer turned out to be all of them. Even as the Paragon forced his way forward into the larger hall where bodies had been stacked like cordwood along the far wall, the tide of evil was coming for them all. To the Templars’ credit, nobody turned and ran, though Jordan would have if there had been a direction that was free. There wasn’t, though. He had walked into hell itself, and the gates had been slammed shut behind him.
Jordan feared that at any moment, he would see more zombies, ready to fight him in wave after relentless wave. That wasn’t what happened, though. Instead, they were assaulted by dozens of oddities that looked utterly inhuman. The first came a wave of screaming skulls that were on them before he could even decide what spell to cast against them. They were covered in blue-white fire and blew up on impact with the first line of warriors.
After that came an assortment of anatomical oddities. There was a giant snake made from the limbless torsos of a dozen people with a mouth full of rusted swords for fangs, a jellyfish made of a disembodied brain dragging a small thicket of semi-translucent tendrils behind it, and a ball of arms that was so large that it moved by pushing off the ceiling and floor simultaneously.
Each of those seemed almost comical on the face of it, and Jordan almost started to laugh hysterically as a strange sort of coping mechanism. It wasn’t so funny when they got close, though. The serpent seemed to have no issue ripping people in half with its powerful jaws. The weird ball of hands lost a few as it approached the men with swords, though it quickly started to strangle everyone around it like a particularly aggressive octopus, and the brain, well, it didn’t seem to do anything. It just sort of floated there halfway across the room, and then people started killing each other.
For the moment, Jordan found himself immune to whatever magics the hideous thing was using to make Templar turn against Templar, but as soon as Brother Faerbar surged forward to deal with the twisted serpent creature, Jordan immediately found himself filled with paranoid delusions. He could feel the hate that the religious men had for him. He knew exactly what they would do to a mage like him. Any moment, they would stab him to death. He could practically feel the blades piercing his organs, and the urge to set all of them alight before they could deliver such a gruesome end became almost too much to bear.
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He did, though. Instead of spraying fire at the knights in all directions, he called upon the thunder and struck the brain entity instead, noting how jellyfish-like it looked as the energy arced back and forth between its gently waving fronds until it burned itself to a crisp and fell slowly to the stone floor as a collection of cinders.
Those weren’t the only monstrosities to appear, though. They were just the first wave. “To me!” the Paragon yelled as soon as his serpentine opponent finally lay still, but very few men answered his call.
Most of the worst monsters that seemed to be made out of shadows more than flesh gave Brother Faerbar and his aura a wide berth, but they quickly cut swathes through the brave, holy warriors. The Templars slew their wraithlike enemies by the score, but when you are outnumbered by a perpetual tide of damnation, what did it matter if you killed a dozen or a hundred before they finally ripped your still-screaming soul from your body?
The room behind them had been reduced from one giant battlefield with two sides to a hundred smaller battles that ranged in size from skirmishes to duels. Jordan doubted that the other men in the hallway leading to this point were doing much better based on the echoing screams that made it this far. A minute or two ago, they’d been a single unified line against the darkness, but it was impossible to fight these things with any martial discipline when each of them was a unique monstrosity that had been created by a clearly deranged mind, and Jordan was quite sure that if they managed to fight their way free of this horror show, he would never have a good night’s sleep again.
Brother Faerbar continued to slice a bloodless path through his enemies, slaying as many as any other ten men in the room put together as he pressed toward the nearest doorway where they might be able to establish some kind of coordinated defense. That seemed like a pipedream at this point. No matter how many times he wove the threads to summon a wall of fire to ward off his enemies, he could feel them getting closer with every beat of his heart.
Part of him wished he’d just stayed at Abenend and died with his friends. He would have still died and been raised as a soulless servant of some dark god, but at least he would never have had to endure the sights he’d seen tonight.
Then suddenly, without warning, he was grabbed by the collar of his robes. He thought for sure that was the end, and rather than fight it, Jordan went limp and accepted his fate. No teeth knawed at his throat, though, and no sword was jammed through his heart. Instead, he realized too late that it was Brother Faerbar. He’d grabbed him, yanking the mage off his feet and pulling him behind him.
Jordan landed in a mound of the actually dead. At least, he hoped they were, as he pulled himself to his feet. They were in a small alcove that had been reduced to the storage of moldering dead. For a moment, he almost broke down in tears. He was never meant to be in such a place. He didn’t give in, though. Being trapped like this made it easier. Now, Jordan knew he had only one choice. He started to chant.
Up until now, he’d only channeled fire and lighting. They were easy enough spells that did great work against the shadows, but he would run out of mana long before this pit ran out of shadows, so he focused on the number of steps they’d take since they left the army behind. It was only 48 steps down and 200 steps eastish to get back to the temple entrance. That was doable, even with other people.
It was the solid stone between here and there that made that an iffy prospect. Well, that and the fact that there were certain to be more monstrosities waiting for him there.
The mage tried to ignore the Paragon’s desperate hymn as he fought back against some deathless monster in the doorway. He tried not to think about the fact that the fanatic was all that stood between him and a death too gruesome to mention as he focused on the facts.
It wasn’t like he could just teleport the two of them free and clear anyway. The edge of the wall of shadows was just over five thousand steps away. That was too far for anyone but an archmage.
It felt like an impossibility, but he didn’t let that stop him. The inescapable fact was that the last time he’d cast this spell, he’d ended up miles from anywhere he’d meant to be and had been lucky to be alive. Every fiber of his being was telling him not to do it again, and yet he was certain that even a messy death where he ended up fusing with a tree or a wall and dying in agony was immensely preferable to whatever would happen to him after he died down here.
So, with that thought in mind, he aimed for almost a mile away, toward what he recalled as empty fields, while he focused on the words and the gestures necessary to bend the world to his will in such a complex way. His odds were certainly less than one in a hundred with all the complicating factors involved, but Jordan ignored them. Brother Faerbar’s light was flagging, and his strength was failing. It was time to roll the dice, so with his last syllable, he reached out and grabbed the shoulder of the Paragon and took him along for the ride.
Jordan was sure that the man would have vehemently refused such an act and that he might well kill him when they reached the other side, but it wasn’t like they were leaving any of the living behind. They’d been separated from the larger group and forced to face an endless series of monstrosities alone for a while now, and everyone who had stood by Brother Faerbar’s side was already dead.
As the world disappeared and vanished into a flash of light, he left with a clean consciousness. Jordan’s heart might have been pounding out of his chest, but this time he felt sure that he hadn’t screwed up the spell.