-Let’s go, girls. I have a guide.-
Purple hair meant an interest in poisoning, slow torture, and biomorphing. This asshole was a master poisoner and torturer, now shaking in the throes of utter pleasure none of his drugs would ever be able to duplicate.
My Tails deposited him on the Disk that unfolded out of my Masspack. I didn’t even glance around at the umbvar arrayed on the slopes all around me, trying to stay out of sight of my autobow and Tails, and especially not daring to get in melee range, as the best warriors and their savage pets of this group were now lying in many pieces behind me, while I didn’t look to have a wound on me. They’d watched their psychic weapons just bounce off my skin, the few that could actually hit me, and in return I had utterly and mercilessly butchered anyone and anything that attacked me.
They were insanely brave, but they weren’t stupid. The ones who didn’t attack got to live. My whole attitude of looking right through and past them as if they weren’t there was incredibly demoralizing and humiliating, and they could only grimace and glare their hate at me as I did as I wished.
Law of the jungle here. Biggest fist gets the respect and makes the rules. My fist was incredibly big... metaphysically speaking.
I could see some of them were thinking of offing the Shaman to deny me my prize as he drooled there, but my eyes drifted that way and they thought better of it.
I prompted him mentally, and he couldn’t even point. He just indicated the direction, I turned towards that section of canyons like a cannon slowly circling and stopping, and headed that way.
The smart ones got out of the way. The foolish ones shot at me. The really stupid ones jumped out to stop me. Exercises in natural selection followed, and the brave warriors of this tribe who were lacking intelligence followed their seniors.
---
I simply jumped their barricades and continued down the canyon the drooling Shaman was indicating. The girls were converging from their alternate courses onto me, and by the Shaman’s directions, we’d likely meet up right at the cave we needed to access the font this insidious poisoner knew of, and we would have to pass the guardians of the font... who were not elvar...
Jensa came swooping in from a pass that cut into our path. Celestia came in from the opposite side, jumping down a five-thousand-foot cliff and basically landing right in front of us. Keva found herself looping around and coming in from the opposite side, and was actually at the cave entrance before we were.
“Impressive,” she murmured, looking around. “They’ve got hanging gardens on the walls so subtle you can barely see them. The size of the doors indicates they are under five feet tall... definitely a race of short folk.”
The Shaman’s impression of the guardians of the Font was that they were shadowy, elusive, and masked. While the elvar were perfectly happy to intimidate and/or enslave them, the fact was that elvish presences totally disrupted the accumulation of shadowfire, and would snuff the Font out. It only seemed to grow and thrive in the presence of these small pints who were watching us very carefully from behind cover, probably deciding if they should make a move or not... and us showing up with the Shaman on a Disk probably decided the issue.
Scent was an iffy thing in the Gloom, with the crap in the air rapidly eroding any kind of scent trail. But still... I sniffed, and I wondered...
“In we go...”
------
The way was long and winding, with psychoactive crystals in the walls at irregular intervals and patterns, adding to the twisting shadows and eeriness of the place. Distant winds moaned through the caverns with distracting noises, and skitters and soft sounds of things brushing against stone tickled the edge of our hearing.
It was a pretty good atmosphere, very suitable for unnerving people. The intermittent light and dark played with the eyes, the noise made it easier to disguise movements, everything put people on their toes.
Our Trembling Domains mapped out everything around us while our eyes ignored the changes in illumination. Small tunnels that looked like flitting shadows in the changing light were all around us, carefully dug through the stone, paralleling and crossing over and under this main, mostly natural passage around us.
There were people in those passageways. Short people, between three and four feet tall, moving like ghosts, whisper-quiet, saying nothing, and peeking at us here and there through slits in the stone, lost in the shadows.
We conferred and agreed the crystals were probably psychoactive, stirring up the shadows and really messing with psychic awareness. Those coming here probably had no idea exactly how many of the natives were here, or how quickly they might have died if things came to that. Naturally we didn’t have much concern for either a fight or psychic assault, although my drooling poisoner umbvar guide wouldn’t have lasted long. Then again, I really didn’t need him at the moment, so if something happened, it would just hasten his death.
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The cave trail was actually over a mile long, twisting and turning through the mountain, and yet most of it was naturally formed. I didn’t want to know what it was a reflection of, although we did stop in a couple of the larger caverns it intersected to admire the crystals on and about the area.
Our destination was a carved-up cave where we were to meet with the guardians of the Font. The floor had been leveled off, even carved up in runeforms that weren’t quite magic, weren’t quite psionic, working off the natural organic nature of the crystal veins that had been growing denser as we came down. The whole room was a strange mélange of crisscrossing shadows flowing this way and that, making it rather difficult to actually judge the dimensions of the place if you were relying on conventional senses.
Since we weren’t, the scores of hidden figures behind the walls with poisoned darts aimed at us were pretty obvious, but we weren’t too worried.
“If the guardian of the Font might come forth?” I asked aloud... in Human.
We all watched them shift uncertainly as they heard the unfamiliar language... and understood exactly what I’d said.
-No way...- /murmured Keva, echoed by the other two.
Our eyes snapped around, Jensa’s first, as a short figure came Veilwalking out of nowhere and materialized on the platform.
Despite himself, he tensed when he saw how rapidly we focused on him, and the expression on our faces. He looked composed and confident... for a moment, and then the vibes coming from us made his expression a little peculiar.
“Veilwalking!” Jensa said aloud. “Holy shit!”
“Damn! I didn’t think there were any hyn left! His Brothers are going to be in a tizzy!” Keva agreed. Celestia just looked on coolly, calculating, while I put my hand on my chin and smiled thoughtfully.
“Greetings to Elder Brother Shadowknife!” I stated, and calmly went to one knee as the cloaked hyn blinked in astonishment. My girls promptly did the same. “I apologize for interrupting your duties, Brother Shadowknife, and for disrupting the lives of your kinfolk. My daughters and I have come to anoint our blades in the Shadowfane your people maintain, and expose them to the true Shadowfire. We will take no power nor shadows from the Fane itself. We need only expose them to the true flames.”
I reached out, and without hesitation punched my claws into the skull of the drooling umbvar, frying his brain and giving his spirit a kick towards its final fate. I hauled him off the Disk as my hair grabbed a few things in my pack, and hauled them out to clatter on the Disk. The girls added their own contributions, and I nudged the Disk towards him.
He eyed it warily as it floated up to him, but couldn’t resist a flicker of amazement as he saw the array of daggers and short swords stacked up on them.
The weapons were black, but running through them were liquid, living veins and whorls of whites and greys, the telltale signs of the shadowfire within empowering them.
They had all been taken off dead elite umbvar. Obviously, the weapons were considered powerful toys, probably exacted as tribute from these or similar hyn, who were also the only folk who could make them. Forging them probably kept the shadowfane drained of power, and left them little to use for themselves, which likely concerned the umbvar not at all.
There were no hyn known in the galaxy. Human dwarfism had been removed from the genome millennia before the Emperor came to power, and as hyn were basically the Powered version of human midgets, that basically eliminated them from existence.
With them naturally went the Shadow and the Knife, the Void Brothers who guarded against those things that crossed Time or came from outside the Veil. The Aberrants must have been quite pleased, as well as the Warp Gods themselves, who would hardly like creatures that foiled their chronal manipulations.
They were here in the Underweb. The only reasonable explanation was the drow.
The drow were very into genetic experimentation, and must have stumbled upon the buried genes of dwarfism when experimenting upon captured human slaves/lab rats. Coming up in a psi-active environment, they must have literally re-invented the hyn, probably thinking to themselves that they had made an ideal slave race of easily controlled physically unthreatening sentients without the violent tendencies of goblins or the like.
Until the first Shadowknives naturally Awakened in this magical environment, and showed them just how deadly the little folk could be.
They must have led their people out into the wilds of the Underweb to escape the drow, found a niche, and survived.
The Gloom would have adopted them as its own, given that they gave birth to Shadowknives. The drow probably owed their continued domination of the Underweb to the hyn interfering with all the powers who desired this place, messed with its Veil, and tried chronal manipulations. The truly powerful might even know they were responsible.
The Land really did love its Helix Brothers, even if it was just the Gloom...
“What is this language you speak?” he asked in a whisper. “It sings in my bones that I should know it...”
“This is the Human genetic tongue, Brother Shadowknife,” I replied warmly. “The Hynfolk are a subrace of humanity, so naturally our tongue is yours.”
“You... are humans?” He frowned at the word. “That does not seem right...”
“We are born of the human race, but we are Rantha Hags, and while our root is there, we’ve branched quite a ways off the main stem, Brother,” I admitted. “It is good to find kinfolk here, however distant. We only expected to see some in the slave pits of the drow. Are your folk faring well, here in the wilds of the Underweb?”
He was looking over us all kneeling there, his eyes flicking to literally centuries worth of fane-work in weapons floating on the Disk there, being returned to his people. As a Forsaken, he’d be free of Warp influence, but that didn’t mean paranoia wasn’t well-deserved.
“We... are surviving,” was all he said, his heavily accented elvish somber and clipped. “You came... just to anoint your weapons in the Fane? Nothing else?”
“Truly, we did not expect the presence of the Shadowknife or his people,” I admitted. “Are you in need of aid?”
He looked at us, at the Disk of weapons again, probably his whole world getting turned upside down. The mere idea that us towering all-jet women with pointed ears considered him kin was probably like a bombshell going off in his head.
“Aid?” The very idea was probably pretty novel to him in this world. “What sort of... aid?” he asked.