I descended cautiously. I had my lights close and a teleportation spell at the ready. The moment my skin changed colour or my trousers began to freeze about my ankles I was out of there.
The moment never came.
I descended further. Then down the corridor and around the corner without effect. I leaned back round with one of my lights and beckoned to Gunhild.
“I think it’s safe. Follow me, keep banging that dagger.”
Together we crept down the corridor. Gunhild remained twenty or so feet behind me, ready to flee the moment I disappeared. The second turn of the hallway was also clear, as was the third. Even the entrance to the pillar room. It was only when I sent my lights to scour the interior of the room itself that I saw the gas. The same small cloud hovering around the mage’s staff.
I beckoned Gunhild to stand beside me.
“What is it?” she asked, staring blankly at my light.
Of course, the darkness. Her nightvision was far better than a normal person’s, but a candle didn’t illuminate red gas at fifty feet for anyone but me.
“The gas hasn’t moved from where we last saw it. Just a little cloud maybe a foot in diameter,” I moved my will-o’-wisp about it in demonstration, “If it weren’t for needing to record my spell I’d be feeling a little foolish.”
“How do you think I feel?” Gunhild murmured, “I fell flat on my face running from a bale of wool.”
I cracked a grin, “A bale of wool is far larger.”
Gunhild tilted her head up at me and fixed me with a playful pout, “And more dangerous, I’ve no doubt. Why don’t you go stand in yonder cloud to mock me further?”
I raised up my hands defensively, “I’d have also run. And I would again in the future. I’ve seen gasses which froze anything that touched them till they were as brittle as salt, and acid which rained from the sky. Worst of all was the gas which turned me gr-”
The cloud dissipated, right before my eyes.
“What is it?” Gunhild asked.
“The gas is gone.”
I held out an arm to block Gunhild’s path as she made to move towards the statue, “One moment, I’ll try a more direct means of moving your statue first.”
Swordferno
Shard flew, sparks rained down, and the twisted statue weathered my assault. I threw in the fireballs for the chaos of it, blackening stone and doing little else.
The housing was less adamant.
Metal twisted and screamed, softened and broke, and the walls shook from the force of it. It was not a quick assault, near ten minutes passed, but the investment was repaid the very instant the statue came crashing down to reveal a passage carved directly through solid stone.
My fireballs were the first through the breach, but they were met with no resistance. My swords went through next, fanning about the room beyond, and only then did I enter.
The room was unusually large, even for the dungeons, though not as measured by the size of its floor. It was still massive, perhaps fifty by thirty feet in all, but it was the ceiling which stood out. It rose high into the darkness, far beyond the reach of my fireballs’ light. I sent one arching upward and it was nearly fifteen seconds before it reached the top, perhaps 100 feet above the floor. Great stone pillars and latticework snaked their way up from the floor to ceiling, all clearly carved directly from the living rock. The place was old. Ancient. There was nothing to mark it but the feeling of time which weighed heavily in the room, almost oppressively. The walls had been carved like an apple might be peeled, layer after layer, forming a sort of series of rings. The hand which had hauled and chipped away the stone was masterful, but the tools had been undeniably crude. I had no doubt this chamber was one of the oldest, if not the oldest, room in the dungeon. Perhaps even the place which all else had been built about. The very reason for the founding of Bleakfort.
I arranged my fireballs somewhat about the room in time for Gunhild to gape openly at the newly illuminated sight as she entered.
“I’ve never seen it lit like this before,” she breathed.
“You’ve been here before?”
She started, as if she’d forgotten I was there, “I... perhaps. There are several chambers like this scattered throughout the dungeon. At least the areas I’ve explored. My sisters and I theorized much of the dungeon is built atop and within these hand-carved caves. But it has always been dark. We never knew they rose so high, or looked so... old. It’s primal.”
“So you don’t know who made this?”
“Long before my time, before my kind came here.”
I stared up in wonder. To think they had hidden this away behind such a hideous statue. I began to move about the room, peering around the great stone pillars to see more of what was hidden beyond. To my right, sunken into the wall nearly out of sight ‘till I was upon it was an iron portcullis. Halfway around the room as I continued to circle the walls was a hole, this one uncarved. Stone had cracked and crumbled, as though rocked by an earthquake or mighty explosion, perhaps the volcano I had unleashed, for it looked recent. A corridor waited on the other side.
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The portcullis seemed to suggest the warlocks had known of this place, and had to seal it away. Had it even made their maps? I joined Gunhild to take Conan’s second map from her.
Several moments of study revealed they had indeed marked it on their map, though as a dead end, so the ruin to the north was new. I took the first map as well and found Conan’s path. He’d been all the way to the portcullis, perhaps peered through into the room beyond without being able to learn of its true nature, but gone no further. To our purpose, Conan’s path to the lower floor was just beyond the portcullis as well. We were still on track.
“Stand back and away, and be ready to run. I’m taking down that gate,” I said to Gunhild.
I followed my own advice and ducked behind a pillar near the exit to the room we’d come from. Gunhild hung further back, waiting on the far side of the fallen Magus statue.
My swords surged forward at my command and tore into the metal barrier. I didn’t bother lifting the gate. Gunhild was with me. If I fell or we were otherwise separated she wouldn’t be able to lift it on her own to retreat back to Brace or her sisters. This way a path was always available. The destruction of warlock property was just a bonus.
The gate was resilient and my swords, were they mortal, would not have been up to the task. But metal tired where magic did not. Wedges appeared like axe-wounds in wood, metal warped under supernatural strength and fire weakened the whole structure. The gate fell, hissing and screaming. The dungeon hissed and screamed with it, though none came to brave the source of their disturbance.
I broke from cover and approached my handiwork. A twisted metal-scythe lay mixed in with the rest of gate. The blade was taller than I was. A trap. The warlocks had been serious about sealing off causal access, even if they hadn’t blocked it off completely.
Why?
I searched the room while I waited for the gate to cool, but found to sign of anything extraordinary beyond the room itself. Perhaps it was meant only as a museum; a monument to their origin.
I called Gunhild from cover then led the way over the mangled mess of metal. The portcullis led to a room of reasonable size. Ten feet give or take in each dimension. It was completely barren, clearly more of a landing area or antechamber than a true chamber suitable for the warlocks’ propensity for excess.
Directly to the right of the room was a wooden door, this one left or wedged open by previous passage. Conan’s presumably.
I sent my fireballs forward and peeked around the corner, spells ready for flight.
The room was empty.
I stepped through. Sent my fireballs high. This room was also tall, though not nearly so much as the previous room. Instead it rose to twice that of a normal room to make way for a catwalk which spanned both the left and right sides and connected in the middle via a bridge. Rising up from the middle of the room was the staircase to access the walk. To my left, leading off from the walk, was our goal; a door fifteen feet off the ground. Directly ahead (south, by my map) was another door, this one leading to the room of the voices who had wielded truth like swords.
This room too had not escaped unscathed from some sort of cataclysm though the damage was limited. great cracks spider-webbed across the ceiling, giving the whole place an unstable feeling even if nothing had yet fallen from above. Still, it was enough to want to move on quickly.
The catwalk door swung open easily under the assault of my swords, revealing neither lock nor traps. We ascended the catwalk easily and stepped through the broken doorway. A corridor followed thereafter, twisting and turning, and branching twice in short succession.
This was known.
What was not know was the enormous gap in the wall to my right between the two branching paths. Darkness beckoned beyond, which I let be. Time was fading. I’d already spent half the day casting spells. The frequency of the sun seemed to increase in Gunhild’s presence, though I could not say why.
Another hundred feet of twists and turns revealed yet another consequence of my messing with rituals beyond ken. A gigantic boulder sat in the path Conan’s map said he’d gone straight through. The boulder filled the corridor entirely, with no room to squeeze past at top or bottom, sealing it more effectively than the grandest of doors. We must have been no more than thirty feet from our goal.
Gunhild walked up to the boulder and struck it with her fist, “Unbelievable,” she shook her head, “it is as if the very walls of this place work against us.”
“May I have the maps?” Gunhild had taken to carrying and studying them while I continued with my cutlass and spellbook for defence.
She handed them over then pressed against the side of my arm to study the pair with me. The path soon became clear. If we returned back the way we came and took the fork just after the hole in the wall a circuitous route would take to the other side of the boulder. The path didn’t even appear long, passing through only three additional rooms and perhaps a hundred feet of corridors. Best of all, it was a path Brace and Conan had already walked.
I returned the maps to their bearer and took up sword and spells.
The new corridor was long, though more free from obstruction than the previous path we’d taken. It ended through an archway, leading out into another sort of bathing chamber with the tiled floors I’d seen so much of on the previous floor. Like the previous bathing chambers, this room also contained a number of alcoves cut into the walls, these ones square rather than round, their purpose still unrevealed.
More strangely, the room also contained a bookshelf against the far right wall complete with a single book. The room was otherwise empty, so I allowed my curiosity to take me over to the shelf, though I kept some swords nearby and some at each entrance, just in case.
The book was in English, The Manual of Farme Economics. I flipped it open and was greeted with page after page of dense text, leaving no room for margins or even spaces between the words. I felt a headache coming on just trying to read the first paragraph. It still might have been worth taking to scrape and turn into a spellbook, but even without the dreamseed stretching my pouch beyond its limits I’d struggle to fit an entire book in pouch or bindle.
I returned the book to its shelf. The fact it had remained free from damage had me wonder if the black-and-white tiled rooms were for bathing at all as I’d first guessed. This room didn’t even hold any visible pipes or faucets.
My path was through the door on the opposite side of the room. I sent my swords to work as I headed over. The door opened on the second strike of my swords.
Gunhild hurried from the other doorway where she’d waited and was about to make for the door when we were both assaulted by a torrent of screams and moans. Chains rattled against bars, snapped as they were pulled tight, and dragged against stone. As we were still reeling from the onslaught, a pale figure lurched through the broken door.
Here then, was one source of the dungeon’s ambience.