The depths of the world were filled with many things. Some of them not benign. Jewels, valuable ore, and magical items long lost to time. Naturally, none of those things had a place in my future. Anytime I would descend beneath the surface I was lowering myself into the dark underworld in a literal sense. Danger, depravity, and death. For a being that used to embody the night, the lightless depths were no friend of mine.

The villagers were unrelenting. Almost fevered, like they had some rabid desire to rend us limb from limb, and whatever pleasantry they had allowed us to leave unharmed had now been forever revoked. Flares of grey light illuminated our faces as the blunt objects and short blades of the mob clattered against the shield around us.

We ran to the edge of the gray dome just as Angelos dropped the spell. The [Fire Wall] burst from Florence’s hands and sprung up to our left, blocking off some villages and creating a corridor for us to move through further into the village between that and the house to our right. A small group of five people became unsettled as the protective magic they had been beating against dissipated, and they stumbled forward.

I charged into them with my sword held horizontally, knocking them to the floor with the flat of the blade. Using the gap created by the flames, we leaped over the mass of struggling limbs and ran through an alleyway between two houses ahead. Angelos pulled down two stacked crates in front of the mouth of the alley to buy us some time - with the brief hope that we weren’t going to be easily flanked. It shouldn't take us too long to get to the town hall, yet the villagers were quite insistent on stopping us and probably would catch up to us in short order given any chance.

I supposed one of the issues we would soon run into was - how to keep the momentum of the whole situation should we enter and find something untoward within? Pressed between the roving throng and untold evil, we would have to make some tough choices. The options had been to fight them in a town square or try to head off the problem at the source in the hopes that they would break out of the spell.

Just when we thought we would have an easy morning before the struggles ahead, it turned out that we had just walked into the den of yet another foul monster.

The door of the hall shook noisily as I kicked it open with my heavy boot, the light of the day pouring into the otherwise darkened room. Before my eyes had a chance to adjust to the difference in lighting, the smell of damp earth and festering flesh assaulted my nostrils.

The fact that everything evil seemed to come with some kind of malignant odor was starting to grow old, and the brief thought that perhaps I had smelled like something similarly bad at some point in my life played on my mind. No time for that.

Wooden chairs and benches had been splintered and flung to the sides by the walls, and in the middle of the stone floor, a large hole had been dug through the grey tiles and into the earth. I turned as the rest of the party entered the hall behind me, and we shut the door with the footsteps and yells of the villagers not far behind.

We were out of breath and pressed for time, but other than some bruises and light burns, we had not harmed any of the villagers.

I gestured for Jakob to pass me the longest shard of broken wood from a bench nearby, and I wedged it in the doorway. Briefly, as time allowed, we all gathered bits of broken furniture to place against the door. Seconds later, it flexed with the beating of the villagers now arrived at the door, their muffled yells demanding us to open up.

"Well, that probably won't hold them," I shrugged. "We'd best make this quick.”

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“Plus, there are windows," Florence narrowed her eyes as she looked around the hall.

Although they were high up to flood the room with sunlight unaffected by the nearby structures, it probably wouldn't take much for people to figure out a way to climb up and gain entrance through the windows seeing how desperate they were.

"Into the pit then," I smiled grimly as I withdrew my greatsword.

I stepped towards the edge to peer down into the hole that had been dug through the ground. It was around fifteen feet in diameter, roughly cut by the pickaxes and shovels which lay around the outside of the hole. A tipped-over wheelbarrow sat beside one of the walls, and tracks of dirt ran from the hole to the main doorway of the building.

"Excavating for something?" Florence asked, her eyebrows raised.

"Or found something they wanted to bury?" Angelos grunted.

The hall doorway began to crack as the ramshackle blockade we'd constructed soon relented to the constant pressure from those outside who were so eager to stop us. The hole was dimly lit with a soft amber, which suggested the presence of some kind of lantern or candlelight within. After a drop of about eight feet, the tunnel then continued in a curve as if it went far below the village.

"No time like the present," I said; as I jumped down, I landed atop rocky soil, somewhat surprising as the nearby area was mostly farmland - I didn't expect the soil to be so densely packed with what appeared to be some manner of shale or other similar stone. The gaps in my knowledge seemed to grow wider the more time-sensitive my need to grasp at them.

I helped each of the Party down into the hole in a rush and then turned to look down the passageway. A hole roughly hewn from the dirt carried on further into darkness. A lantern of low light sat on a wooden table a dozen feet from where we had dropped down, alongside a pickaxe it looked to be holding a large parchment flat across the table.

We approached, and Angelos took the lantern, adjusting the brightness to illuminate the cavern further. As I looked upon the map beneath the pickaxe, an idea struck me. "Might be an idea to take this with us," I said, picking up the tool for myself. My eyes darted across the map to make sense of the current area, and in some manner, it seemed similar to Jakob's map, though it was in higher detail and mostly focused on a couple of miles around the village.

Something has been scrawled in black ink; some crosses stood apart, question marks beside a couple. “Looks like they're trying to find something," I said. "Let's go find out what it was."

We began to move down the tunnel quickly as behind us, the creak of the door collapsing off the hinges was combined with the yells and confusion of people - probably landing on top of each other. I half expected figures to be dropping down into the hole behind us—a runaway wave of people, either mind-controlled or too deep in a panic to see sense in their actions.

“They’re not following us into the hole,” Jakob noted.

"That's probably a bad thing for us." Angelos grimaced. "They must have a reason why they're not coming down here again. No doubt that is something we should be wary of."

I nodded but said nothing.

Too many questions that we couldn't answer with the information we had on hand and too many things that could go wrong. I had already had enough of the day - enough of underground tunnels, even before we had set off to go to the Warren, where the giant rat lived. Underground was one of my least favorite places to fight, yet it was a prime location for untoward entities to hide away.

Regrets started bubbling away. Maybe we should have taken a few more days to enjoy living, even if it meant being under the judgemental noses of that adventuring party. A few days of ale and warm meals sounded divine compared to… whatever obscene show we were about to become privy to.

As we descended the tunnel, it seemed to narrow slightly, still in the range of a dozen feet in diameter. But now, the stench of whatever lay within was almost thick in the air—a tangible substance that left a foul film inside my nostrils.

“How did we end up in this position again?” Florence muttered, wiping the sweat from her forehead.

I stopped as we reached a fork where the path split into four smaller tunnels.

“One each, right?” The Guardian snorted, then regretted the action, covering his mouth as he grimaced.

“We needn’t have even seen the map.” I shook my head. “We just have to follow where the smell is strongest. Sometimes having a heightened sense of smell was a curse more than a blessing. For every delectable freshly baked cake or flowered perfume, there were a handful of less desirable smells.

With no complaints, as everyone tried to mask their disgust, we headed into the farthest right dirt corridor.