SniptheShadow
09-11-2011, 11:13 PM
A Tale of DDO
by
SniptheShadow
Part Two: Dead in the Halls
It happened quickly.
Nalinor stooped down as the creature roared. The sound was deafening. It caused the stone floor beneath his feet to tremble, the walls all around to vibrate. Boiling up out of the black hallway, it was like the very darkness was enraged.
It blasted its way into the palatial chamber with raining mortar and stone. One second it was a shadowy bulk down the hallway, the next it crashed its massive black reptilian head into the room –- a Black Dragon. It thumped against the threshold of the arched entrance. Masonry broke free and rained down, cracking the tiled floor. It roared and pulled its bulk into the room. As it slammed through the tall arch, other things poured into the room around it: Giant Ants the size of large dogs; nightmarish Giant Centipedes twice as long as a man is tall with glowing red eyes, their dozens of legs scampering; chittinous Giant Beetles as big around as Jet’s shield, their mandibles snapping and clicking insanely. The filth poured through the arch, wave upon wave of vermin, a vibrating carpet scurrying into the room. It looked like the floor breathed.
The companions scattered around the room, some finding the best place for battle, others stumbling backwards and clear from the onslaught of giant bugs snapping and skittering toward them.
Nalinor swung his Rapiers in tandem. Two Giant Rats fell in four parts.
Elaan and Juti moved up the stairway to Nalinor’s left. Elaan cast two spells back to back at the Black Dragon. The first was a Lightning Bolt, and when it hit the scales of the dragon, the power crawled over the surface of its black scales like searching, jagged fingers made of white light. It was a beautiful sight to behold, the contrast of white and black. The beast screamed in pain and rage and spun round. As it did Elaan let loose with his second spell. Jet, down on the floor by the dragon’s feet, struck a blow to the Dragons mid section. The spell cast by Elaan was a Fireball. Flames scorch the scales of the dragon's great neck. Yellow sparks rained down around Jet like fireworks as the ‘Forged struck and struck and struck. The Black Dragon roared, turned around and batted Jet out of the way with its wing. Jet hit the far wall high up and fell to the floor. He was instantly covered in vermin, so much so he vanished from sight. Thousands of insects swarmed over him. Nalinor saw one wood and metal arm trying to reach above the chaos before it too was overcome.
A scream caused Nalinor to turn. Juti had moved up the steps to stand with the Wizard Elaan. She was bleeding from her temple and had a long gash down her arm. With bloody fingers, she flicked a wand repeatedly at the dragon. Magic Missiles shot out of the wand one after the other, each glowing ball breaking on the torso of the beast and sending searing energy into its scales. It whipped its head back at her and the Wizard and exhaled a cloud of green noxious gas into both their faces. Elaan clutched at his throat and tumbled over the rail and fell thirty feet to the moving floor below. Two Giant Ants hurried up to him. One latched onto his right arm, clamped down and tore it from his shoulder. The Wizard screamed. The mass of giant insects moved his way and, covering him, snuffed out his screams. Somewhere in the madness Nalinor could hear the Wizard’s brother Edaam cry out in horror.
Juti was still high up at the top of the stairs. She coughed and coughed, doubling over in pain. The Black Dragon studied her. It tilted its head much like a dog would do when it hears an odd sound. It burped up on her. The Dragon hiccupped up a mass of green mucus that completely enveloped the short woman. Juti was suddenly trapped in a buoyant, tenebrous emerald egg sack, and her arms and clawing fingers pushed and punched and tried in vain to break free. The Dragon’s phlegm began to retract, to tighten around the struggling Assassin. Nalinor watched in horror as the green liquid destroyed her. Skin and bloody flesh sloughed away from a yawning skull, delicate fingers broke free of the acid bubble and their skin, muscle and sinew melted away like candle wax. The bones of Juti’s fingers fell and clattered across the floor like macabre marbles. Acid filled her open mouth and Nalinor screamed for her. She toppled forward, struck the tiled floor below, and her skull broke apart. The bells in her hair tinkled and chimed and bounced away.
Her brother, Momakar, screaming in rage, tried to rush the Black Dragon. He made it ten yards. A translucent Glass Spider appeared, vanished and then reappeared behind the Half-Orc. Nalinor shouted a warning but too late. The Spider visualized, leapt on the confused Cleric’s back and bore him down to the floor. A Giant Black Beetle as large as a sea tortoise jabbed its mandible into his thigh. A Giant Centipede raked into his throat and shoulder to the bone, and his frustrated howls ceased in gurgling gags and wet, wheezing half screams as the bugs moved in.
Only Edaam and Nalinor remained. The Wizard Rogue was diagonally opposite Nalinor on the other side of the room. Edaam had the Black Dragon’s full attention as he cast spells from hand and wand.
“Let us make and end of this, city boy,” he shouted over the thunder of the Dragon’s bellow.
Nalinor was about to answer the Sand Shadow when the Black Dragon suddenly shot its long neck forward and bit Edaam one third away. The man had been smiling at his own comment and awaiting Nalinor’s reply when suddenly his right arm, shoulder and the majority of his ribcage on that side of his body were gone. Edaam’s blood cascaded out and down, his vital organs quickly following: heart, kidney, ropey intestines. The carnage hit the floor and the odor of human blood sent the vermin skittering his way. Edaam toppled face first into the sea of bugs, a smile still on his face.
Nalinor tried to step forward. Something held his left arm and bit down. He grunted in pain and saw a Giant Centipede attached to him. Its mandibles had punctured all the way through his forearm and stuck out the bottom, blood dripping. The things little legs wiggled maddeningly, all trying to grasp and grapple for purchase.
“GODS!” Nalinor shouted. He hacked the insect’s head off. Its body fell and thrashed around, spraying gouts of yellow and green innards in its death spasm. He pulled the centipedes head out of his arm. He let the head drop to the floor. Upon impact it broke apart and became one hundred normal sized Centipedes. The Centipedes darted toward him and ran up his legs beneath his leathers. One bit him on the ankle, another on the inside of his thigh. He gave a grunt and slapped at himself. A Centipede bit him below the nipple, another on the left side by his hip.
“GODS!”
It was getting difficult to move. Nalinor’s arm felt like it weighed as much as Jet, and as he tried to lift it to swat at the Centipedes slithering and skittering under his clothes, he fell to his knees. Not like this, he thought. Not like this.
A Giant Red Ant as large as a hound clamped down on his right foot. He yelled in pain and reached back to strike at it, and then a Giant Beetle three feet across flew into him. The weight of the thing combined with its hard shell felt like he’d been struck by a granite boulder. He toppled over and wailed. Nalinor felt his ribs poking out in places they should not be poking out.
And then insects were all around him.
They bit into his legs, latched onto his swatting hands, pulled at his long hair. A Giant Scorpion sunk a taloned stinger into his throat. He tried to crawl with a carpet of insects holding him down. Soon his vision grew hazy, and sound diminished more and more. It was getting harder to hear save for the maddening clicks of insect legs on stone all around him.
Through the multitude of wiggling antennae and crawling legs around his eyes he saw a woman in a rotting robe standing at the center of the arched doorway to the chamber, broken masonry and demolished stone all around her. The Black Dragon was roaring silently in the background behind her, thrashing about and destroying the chamber. The woman’s back was turned. She had limp and lifeless strawberry-blonde hair, and when she turned around he saw her face had been burned away by acid.
Sorrow.
Nalinor reached for her. Bugs dropped from his arm. “Sorrow, help me.”
“No, my love,” said the apparition. “Did you help me? Look at my beautiful face, Nalinor. Look at what you did to me.” A Centipede scurried from her eye socket, down her rotting cheek and into a torn place on her delicate throat, slithering back in among the showing vertebrae.
“No, I –”
“It was you. You left me there. Where were you, Nalinor?”
“I –”
“I was all alone in the dark.”
“No.”
“Your fault.”
“No, please.”
“How could you leave me there? I was so alone. Why didn’t you come for me?”
“I did. I looked. I looked everywhere! My love!”
"You KILLED ME!!”
The insects chewed and swarmed and burrowed into his ears and up his nostrils and beneath his skin and Nalinor screamed and screamed and…
…screamed inside a room void of chittering, biting insects or dead comrades or his Sorrow pointing accusingly at him or a Black Dragon thrashing and roaring and destroying. All gone? He looked all around him and the room…slipped left. Things blurred around him. He heard an audible popping sound, and then the floor and walls, the dank air and the flickering doom and madness of insects all shifted and vanished. He blinked rapidly, trying to understand what he now saw:
Jet had a hold of a tall, thin humanoid shape by its throat, and his massive hand squeezed. An ichor of black and pink oozed over his fingers as he killed it. He dropped the creature on the floor. The mouth of the thing was like a squid attached to the place where a mouth should be.
A Mindflayer?
Nalinor looked around the chamber. Everyone was alive! All his companions sat stupidly on the floor looking around in confusion. Nalinor surveyed the carnage. He counted six Mindflayers in dead heaps and twice as many Striders, theirs exoskeletal appendages shattered and broken, their fleshy parts torn and gross. Jet moved from corpse to corpse looking down at each. He was covered in gore.
“What happened?” asked Edaam.
“Mindflayers,” said Juti.
“All was an illusion?” muttered her half brother, blinking. He leaned over and was sick.
Jet said, “I tried to dispatch of the Illithids quickly, but they were many and their Strider servants slowed my progress. The last two Illithid were especially difficult to end.
Elaan laughed. He uttered a prayer overhead and said, “Thank the Gods for that necklace and its immunities, Jet.”
Jet touched his pendant. “My amulet enabled me to withstand their mental manipulations.”
“Indeed,” answered Elaan with a smile.
“All of you were screaming hysterically toward the end of my battle,” said Jet. He turned toward Nalinor. “Your screams took on quite a feminine tone near the end, Rogue.”
Edaam laughed.
Jet turned towards him. “And you soiled yourself, Wizard Rogue Edaam.”
Yes he did,” said Elaan, covering his nose.
“Only a bit,” Edaam said defensively. “If you saw the…” he trailed off, muttering, and got up and moved away from the group, embarrassed.
“However we reacted to our personal horrors, be glad they were merely illusion and nothing more,” said Momakar.
Nalinor agreed. To die like that…to see Sorrow so…he shuddered and got to his feet.
“Let us keep moving. We have an entire palace to conquer,” he said.
“Not wise,” said Jet. “Your fragile human minds need rest. I suggest you eat and see if Momakar has some potions for strength and vitality, something to get all of you at your maximum potential.”
“He’s right,” said Juti. “I know I could use a rest after that.”
"We're not the only ones," said Edaam moving back towards everyone. "Jet, look at yourself! What did they do to you in that battle!? Come over here and let me tend to your wounds." And the Wizard Rogue got out his mending tools.
________
The six adventurers moved through a series of connecting rooms. Their rest – too short by far for Nalinor – was three hours behind them and they all were tired, bloody and confused. They wandered a maze.
They moved through seven rooms and battled something in each before Nalinor and Juti figured out it was a maze. They would enter a room, doors would slam and others open, and then ‘things’ would come shambling out. The Onyx Pyramid seemed more aptly named the Zombie Pyramid for what the maze threw at them. Fire won out every time. By hand or wand, the Undead burned. Some went up in flames so quickly they never uttered a sound.
Once they discovered they were in a maze, then it became trying to figure out what they needed to do to escape. It took six more rooms until Nalinor’s trained eye spied a trap door in the floor. And so they escaped the maze and moved deeper into the bowels of the Onyx Pyramid.
Room after room, encounter after encounter; it felt to Nalinor that he’d fought the Undead his entire life. It was like he stepped outside himself, looked down and watched time repeat: a swing of his blades, a rotting face biting and drooling, and then fire and soon ash. So much ash! It choked him. Mummies and Ghasts and Gaunts, Wraiths and Specters and fetid, molding Zombies, they came at them and all died – a second time. The hours wore on beneath the sands.
They stepped into the throne room.
It was massive. By far much older and built in a different design than the oily walls they had moved through thus far. Bricked over alcoves one hundred feet in height lined the walls of the great oval shaped chamber. At the center of the room was placed a gigantic throne. The thing was thirty feet tall. It was elaborately carved with scroll work and runes, swords and axes, and there was an etching of a great crown at the high back of the chair where the monarch would rest his head. As the companions approached the throne, as they moved deeper into the palatial space, an alcove on their left crashed and boomed. Stones came loose in a blast, rubble rebounding everywhere. Behind the fallen wall was the skeleton of a giant. It growled at them. Its eyes glowed a menacing turquoise. The tower of bones kicked its way free from its prison and thundered its rage down at them. The Greataxe it had in its skeletal grasp was fifteen feet long.
Boom!
BOOM!
BOOOOOM!
The other alcoves – five in all – vibrated, cracked and exploded. Nalinor saw glowing turquoise eyes back in the dark recesses and billowing dust as stones as large as wagons tumbled free.
Then chaos.
Six Giant Skeletons ran at them. Elaan made short work of two in one shouted spell that caused Nalinor to clap hands to ears and try not to scream. Whatever the spell was, it turned both stomping Giants to powder. Disintegrated bones rain down in white sand that choked. Jet destroyed a third Skeleton. His Greataxe hacked away at shin and ankle. Edaam cast a spell at the Warforged, a spell that caused Jet to glow red, and then another that caused him to glow green. The Warforged Barbarian became an ebony blur of axe swings and chipped bone fragments. In seconds the Giant Skeleton fell. Jet leaped high and brought his axe down and shattered the things skull. Its glowing blue eyes winked out.
Momakar and his sister took care of skeleton four and five. With Juti whipping wands in each hand in succession: fireball from the left, Magic Missile from the right, Momakar had time to call down a holy spell and the two retreating Giants glowed bright gold and then winked out of existence without a sound.
The last Giant Skeleton barreled across the wide chamber. Nalinor noticed a lever he at first had thought was a narrow set of stairs; it looked that way from his angle. It was so tall of a thing, and stationary, like steps to nowhere. But it was a lever, a lever for a Giants hand.
“Stop him!” he yelled at the Arcanes, to anyone. Too late.
A set of double doors disguised by a fresco as tall as a tavern slid back. Growls, like a crowd rioting on a crowded street, hundreds of ravenous snarls echoed from down the pitch black hall.
“Get to the doorway,” yelled Elaan.
A lightning bolt blasted the Giant Skeleton apart, and bones as long as boats bounced away and clattered.
“Fight in the threshold! Fight in the threshold!” said Juti.
Nalinor and the others ran to the new opening. A hallway filled with Zombies faced them. Rotting heads shifted and jostled for room; they looked four hundred deep. The shambling mass let out a deafening groan and came on.
“Light them up!” shouted Momakar. He pointed. “Jet, shield-block the door. Do not let any get through. Edaam, Elaan, we need fire,” he ordered.
The brothers tossed wands to Nalinor and Juti. They turned and raised first their left hand then their right. It looked like liquid sprayed out from their outstretched arms, but it set the air on fire. Wall after wall rose up in a burning torrent. Momakar yelled spells of his own. Suddenly the black walls of the throne room shone like it was midday. Nalinor and Juti moved up front by Jet, but hung back to each side. They flicked their wands and added even more incendiary aid to the battle. The secret hallway was a path of fire, choking smoke and feral Undead. Watching Jet, it was like he played a game of ball, swatting away each blazing corpse to fly back over the crowd and burn with the rest. Ash choked Nalinor, smoke blurred his vision, and the Zombies still came on. He felt like laughing but was so frightened that he might never stop once he did.
Then there was nothing left to fight. Jet dropped his axe low. Juti moved back to check on her brother. The twins, breathing like runners, rested hands on thighs, tried to catch their breath.
“Gods! I hate this place!” said Nalinor.
Everyone gave chortles and winded snorts in reply. All of them were too tired to even laugh.
Nalinor put his wand back in a pocket and then, blinking, noticed a bald man in a red and black robe staring at him from across the wide room. Nalinor pointed and stupidly began to ask who he was when Elaan mumbled a spell. The robed figure froze in place surrounded by a latticework of spiraling blue light. Jet bounded up to the Necromancer in three big strides. He lifted the man up by the throat and held him against the stone wall.
Juti moved up and interrogated the Necromancer. “We seek the main chamber. The place all the dead are taken.” She poked a Dagger at his watery, blinking eye. “Tell us!”
The Necromancer, his eyes darting at each Sand Shadow, laughed. “Lord Rot will eat your souls and hang your carcasses to be used as steaks!”
Jet squeezed.
The Necromaner’s hands slapped uselessly at the hand.
“There, there,” said Juti, “tell us of what we seek and you may get to live longer.”
Jet lessoned his hold, let the dark Wizard rest his feet on the ash-coated floor. The man licked his lips and studied each of them in turn. “It matters not if you find him or he finds you. Soon enough we all shall be shambling sacks of clay and we’ll serve him FOREVER!” The Necromancer laughed like the truly insane. Spittle sprayed out and a line of it drooled down from his lower lip. “You are almost to the place of your doom, little Rogue,” he spoke down at Juti. “You stand at the cusp of your death. My master awaits.”
“Where, Necromancer?”
Jet raised his massive hand toward the man.
He flinched, held his arms up to ward away further pain. “Near, near,” he pleaded. “Down this hall I came from you will find stairs. Follow them but not to the end. No. There will be a door at your left. That leads to a high balcony. Take that.”
“Why?” asked Nalinor.
“Trust me,” said the Necromancer. The man paused, pondered his own words and sputtered his mad laughter. Once he settled, he looked at Juti and said, “Now release me! I’ve corpses to tend. Work never ending, for all die and join Lord Rot.” He licked his lips.
“I’m sorry,” said Juti, “you are to join him now too.” She turned and touched Jet lightly on the arm.
Jet reached forward and put his three-fingered hand over the Necromancer’s mouth and nose, blocking off his air.
“You would summon others. We must end you,” said Jet.
Jet pressed down.
The Necromancer’s eyes went wide, tears quickly spilling out. He slapped and punched futilely at Jet’s rock solid hand to no avail. Nalinor watched in silent awe tinged with disgust as another man slowly died. The Necromancer moaned and grunted. He kicked against the wall and he kicked out at Jet, trying to get free. His legs began to tremble and spasm, and then finally his chest heaved outward in one final death throe. His limbs went limp, fell lifelessly down. Jet dropped him. The body crumpled, the legs bent wrong underneath the man’s torso, akimbo and horrible looking. His eyes bugged out, frightening and fearful and accusing. He evacuated. The stench of it was sudden, shocking and awful. Nalinor swallowed and once again was in awe of the pure killing efficiency of a Warforged.
“Let’s go,” said Juti.
______
It was as the Necromancer had said – trust him they dared not, but, as it turned out before his death, he did not lie. They traced the dark Wizard’s steps (easy to do when the dust of burnt Zombie ash coated the floor) back to the stairs. As he had said, there was a side door two thirds of the way down. They carefully opened it. Juti and Nalinor scouted ahead for traps. They found three and quickly disabled them: one, a knee level blade hidden in a recessed wall, another, electric tiles on the floor. The last trap, although disabled, still had to be jumped. On the other side of it they entered a narrow hallway that led out to blackness. Nalinor was not sure what his eyes were seeing: Had they resurfaced? Did this path lead back outside? And were those stars up ahead; all those little multi-colored pinpoints in the gloom?
Yard by yard, they moved forward. They stepped out onto a high balcony, but not to a view of open sky like Nalinor had first surmised. They entered and overlooked a vaulted chamber. It had a low recessed floor that dipped down very low like an inverted bowl, like the dome below reflected the dome above. And what Nalinor spied below sent ice racing through his veins.
So many!
(to be cont…)
by
SniptheShadow
Part Two: Dead in the Halls
It happened quickly.
Nalinor stooped down as the creature roared. The sound was deafening. It caused the stone floor beneath his feet to tremble, the walls all around to vibrate. Boiling up out of the black hallway, it was like the very darkness was enraged.
It blasted its way into the palatial chamber with raining mortar and stone. One second it was a shadowy bulk down the hallway, the next it crashed its massive black reptilian head into the room –- a Black Dragon. It thumped against the threshold of the arched entrance. Masonry broke free and rained down, cracking the tiled floor. It roared and pulled its bulk into the room. As it slammed through the tall arch, other things poured into the room around it: Giant Ants the size of large dogs; nightmarish Giant Centipedes twice as long as a man is tall with glowing red eyes, their dozens of legs scampering; chittinous Giant Beetles as big around as Jet’s shield, their mandibles snapping and clicking insanely. The filth poured through the arch, wave upon wave of vermin, a vibrating carpet scurrying into the room. It looked like the floor breathed.
The companions scattered around the room, some finding the best place for battle, others stumbling backwards and clear from the onslaught of giant bugs snapping and skittering toward them.
Nalinor swung his Rapiers in tandem. Two Giant Rats fell in four parts.
Elaan and Juti moved up the stairway to Nalinor’s left. Elaan cast two spells back to back at the Black Dragon. The first was a Lightning Bolt, and when it hit the scales of the dragon, the power crawled over the surface of its black scales like searching, jagged fingers made of white light. It was a beautiful sight to behold, the contrast of white and black. The beast screamed in pain and rage and spun round. As it did Elaan let loose with his second spell. Jet, down on the floor by the dragon’s feet, struck a blow to the Dragons mid section. The spell cast by Elaan was a Fireball. Flames scorch the scales of the dragon's great neck. Yellow sparks rained down around Jet like fireworks as the ‘Forged struck and struck and struck. The Black Dragon roared, turned around and batted Jet out of the way with its wing. Jet hit the far wall high up and fell to the floor. He was instantly covered in vermin, so much so he vanished from sight. Thousands of insects swarmed over him. Nalinor saw one wood and metal arm trying to reach above the chaos before it too was overcome.
A scream caused Nalinor to turn. Juti had moved up the steps to stand with the Wizard Elaan. She was bleeding from her temple and had a long gash down her arm. With bloody fingers, she flicked a wand repeatedly at the dragon. Magic Missiles shot out of the wand one after the other, each glowing ball breaking on the torso of the beast and sending searing energy into its scales. It whipped its head back at her and the Wizard and exhaled a cloud of green noxious gas into both their faces. Elaan clutched at his throat and tumbled over the rail and fell thirty feet to the moving floor below. Two Giant Ants hurried up to him. One latched onto his right arm, clamped down and tore it from his shoulder. The Wizard screamed. The mass of giant insects moved his way and, covering him, snuffed out his screams. Somewhere in the madness Nalinor could hear the Wizard’s brother Edaam cry out in horror.
Juti was still high up at the top of the stairs. She coughed and coughed, doubling over in pain. The Black Dragon studied her. It tilted its head much like a dog would do when it hears an odd sound. It burped up on her. The Dragon hiccupped up a mass of green mucus that completely enveloped the short woman. Juti was suddenly trapped in a buoyant, tenebrous emerald egg sack, and her arms and clawing fingers pushed and punched and tried in vain to break free. The Dragon’s phlegm began to retract, to tighten around the struggling Assassin. Nalinor watched in horror as the green liquid destroyed her. Skin and bloody flesh sloughed away from a yawning skull, delicate fingers broke free of the acid bubble and their skin, muscle and sinew melted away like candle wax. The bones of Juti’s fingers fell and clattered across the floor like macabre marbles. Acid filled her open mouth and Nalinor screamed for her. She toppled forward, struck the tiled floor below, and her skull broke apart. The bells in her hair tinkled and chimed and bounced away.
Her brother, Momakar, screaming in rage, tried to rush the Black Dragon. He made it ten yards. A translucent Glass Spider appeared, vanished and then reappeared behind the Half-Orc. Nalinor shouted a warning but too late. The Spider visualized, leapt on the confused Cleric’s back and bore him down to the floor. A Giant Black Beetle as large as a sea tortoise jabbed its mandible into his thigh. A Giant Centipede raked into his throat and shoulder to the bone, and his frustrated howls ceased in gurgling gags and wet, wheezing half screams as the bugs moved in.
Only Edaam and Nalinor remained. The Wizard Rogue was diagonally opposite Nalinor on the other side of the room. Edaam had the Black Dragon’s full attention as he cast spells from hand and wand.
“Let us make and end of this, city boy,” he shouted over the thunder of the Dragon’s bellow.
Nalinor was about to answer the Sand Shadow when the Black Dragon suddenly shot its long neck forward and bit Edaam one third away. The man had been smiling at his own comment and awaiting Nalinor’s reply when suddenly his right arm, shoulder and the majority of his ribcage on that side of his body were gone. Edaam’s blood cascaded out and down, his vital organs quickly following: heart, kidney, ropey intestines. The carnage hit the floor and the odor of human blood sent the vermin skittering his way. Edaam toppled face first into the sea of bugs, a smile still on his face.
Nalinor tried to step forward. Something held his left arm and bit down. He grunted in pain and saw a Giant Centipede attached to him. Its mandibles had punctured all the way through his forearm and stuck out the bottom, blood dripping. The things little legs wiggled maddeningly, all trying to grasp and grapple for purchase.
“GODS!” Nalinor shouted. He hacked the insect’s head off. Its body fell and thrashed around, spraying gouts of yellow and green innards in its death spasm. He pulled the centipedes head out of his arm. He let the head drop to the floor. Upon impact it broke apart and became one hundred normal sized Centipedes. The Centipedes darted toward him and ran up his legs beneath his leathers. One bit him on the ankle, another on the inside of his thigh. He gave a grunt and slapped at himself. A Centipede bit him below the nipple, another on the left side by his hip.
“GODS!”
It was getting difficult to move. Nalinor’s arm felt like it weighed as much as Jet, and as he tried to lift it to swat at the Centipedes slithering and skittering under his clothes, he fell to his knees. Not like this, he thought. Not like this.
A Giant Red Ant as large as a hound clamped down on his right foot. He yelled in pain and reached back to strike at it, and then a Giant Beetle three feet across flew into him. The weight of the thing combined with its hard shell felt like he’d been struck by a granite boulder. He toppled over and wailed. Nalinor felt his ribs poking out in places they should not be poking out.
And then insects were all around him.
They bit into his legs, latched onto his swatting hands, pulled at his long hair. A Giant Scorpion sunk a taloned stinger into his throat. He tried to crawl with a carpet of insects holding him down. Soon his vision grew hazy, and sound diminished more and more. It was getting harder to hear save for the maddening clicks of insect legs on stone all around him.
Through the multitude of wiggling antennae and crawling legs around his eyes he saw a woman in a rotting robe standing at the center of the arched doorway to the chamber, broken masonry and demolished stone all around her. The Black Dragon was roaring silently in the background behind her, thrashing about and destroying the chamber. The woman’s back was turned. She had limp and lifeless strawberry-blonde hair, and when she turned around he saw her face had been burned away by acid.
Sorrow.
Nalinor reached for her. Bugs dropped from his arm. “Sorrow, help me.”
“No, my love,” said the apparition. “Did you help me? Look at my beautiful face, Nalinor. Look at what you did to me.” A Centipede scurried from her eye socket, down her rotting cheek and into a torn place on her delicate throat, slithering back in among the showing vertebrae.
“No, I –”
“It was you. You left me there. Where were you, Nalinor?”
“I –”
“I was all alone in the dark.”
“No.”
“Your fault.”
“No, please.”
“How could you leave me there? I was so alone. Why didn’t you come for me?”
“I did. I looked. I looked everywhere! My love!”
"You KILLED ME!!”
The insects chewed and swarmed and burrowed into his ears and up his nostrils and beneath his skin and Nalinor screamed and screamed and…
…screamed inside a room void of chittering, biting insects or dead comrades or his Sorrow pointing accusingly at him or a Black Dragon thrashing and roaring and destroying. All gone? He looked all around him and the room…slipped left. Things blurred around him. He heard an audible popping sound, and then the floor and walls, the dank air and the flickering doom and madness of insects all shifted and vanished. He blinked rapidly, trying to understand what he now saw:
Jet had a hold of a tall, thin humanoid shape by its throat, and his massive hand squeezed. An ichor of black and pink oozed over his fingers as he killed it. He dropped the creature on the floor. The mouth of the thing was like a squid attached to the place where a mouth should be.
A Mindflayer?
Nalinor looked around the chamber. Everyone was alive! All his companions sat stupidly on the floor looking around in confusion. Nalinor surveyed the carnage. He counted six Mindflayers in dead heaps and twice as many Striders, theirs exoskeletal appendages shattered and broken, their fleshy parts torn and gross. Jet moved from corpse to corpse looking down at each. He was covered in gore.
“What happened?” asked Edaam.
“Mindflayers,” said Juti.
“All was an illusion?” muttered her half brother, blinking. He leaned over and was sick.
Jet said, “I tried to dispatch of the Illithids quickly, but they were many and their Strider servants slowed my progress. The last two Illithid were especially difficult to end.
Elaan laughed. He uttered a prayer overhead and said, “Thank the Gods for that necklace and its immunities, Jet.”
Jet touched his pendant. “My amulet enabled me to withstand their mental manipulations.”
“Indeed,” answered Elaan with a smile.
“All of you were screaming hysterically toward the end of my battle,” said Jet. He turned toward Nalinor. “Your screams took on quite a feminine tone near the end, Rogue.”
Edaam laughed.
Jet turned towards him. “And you soiled yourself, Wizard Rogue Edaam.”
Yes he did,” said Elaan, covering his nose.
“Only a bit,” Edaam said defensively. “If you saw the…” he trailed off, muttering, and got up and moved away from the group, embarrassed.
“However we reacted to our personal horrors, be glad they were merely illusion and nothing more,” said Momakar.
Nalinor agreed. To die like that…to see Sorrow so…he shuddered and got to his feet.
“Let us keep moving. We have an entire palace to conquer,” he said.
“Not wise,” said Jet. “Your fragile human minds need rest. I suggest you eat and see if Momakar has some potions for strength and vitality, something to get all of you at your maximum potential.”
“He’s right,” said Juti. “I know I could use a rest after that.”
"We're not the only ones," said Edaam moving back towards everyone. "Jet, look at yourself! What did they do to you in that battle!? Come over here and let me tend to your wounds." And the Wizard Rogue got out his mending tools.
________
The six adventurers moved through a series of connecting rooms. Their rest – too short by far for Nalinor – was three hours behind them and they all were tired, bloody and confused. They wandered a maze.
They moved through seven rooms and battled something in each before Nalinor and Juti figured out it was a maze. They would enter a room, doors would slam and others open, and then ‘things’ would come shambling out. The Onyx Pyramid seemed more aptly named the Zombie Pyramid for what the maze threw at them. Fire won out every time. By hand or wand, the Undead burned. Some went up in flames so quickly they never uttered a sound.
Once they discovered they were in a maze, then it became trying to figure out what they needed to do to escape. It took six more rooms until Nalinor’s trained eye spied a trap door in the floor. And so they escaped the maze and moved deeper into the bowels of the Onyx Pyramid.
Room after room, encounter after encounter; it felt to Nalinor that he’d fought the Undead his entire life. It was like he stepped outside himself, looked down and watched time repeat: a swing of his blades, a rotting face biting and drooling, and then fire and soon ash. So much ash! It choked him. Mummies and Ghasts and Gaunts, Wraiths and Specters and fetid, molding Zombies, they came at them and all died – a second time. The hours wore on beneath the sands.
They stepped into the throne room.
It was massive. By far much older and built in a different design than the oily walls they had moved through thus far. Bricked over alcoves one hundred feet in height lined the walls of the great oval shaped chamber. At the center of the room was placed a gigantic throne. The thing was thirty feet tall. It was elaborately carved with scroll work and runes, swords and axes, and there was an etching of a great crown at the high back of the chair where the monarch would rest his head. As the companions approached the throne, as they moved deeper into the palatial space, an alcove on their left crashed and boomed. Stones came loose in a blast, rubble rebounding everywhere. Behind the fallen wall was the skeleton of a giant. It growled at them. Its eyes glowed a menacing turquoise. The tower of bones kicked its way free from its prison and thundered its rage down at them. The Greataxe it had in its skeletal grasp was fifteen feet long.
Boom!
BOOM!
BOOOOOM!
The other alcoves – five in all – vibrated, cracked and exploded. Nalinor saw glowing turquoise eyes back in the dark recesses and billowing dust as stones as large as wagons tumbled free.
Then chaos.
Six Giant Skeletons ran at them. Elaan made short work of two in one shouted spell that caused Nalinor to clap hands to ears and try not to scream. Whatever the spell was, it turned both stomping Giants to powder. Disintegrated bones rain down in white sand that choked. Jet destroyed a third Skeleton. His Greataxe hacked away at shin and ankle. Edaam cast a spell at the Warforged, a spell that caused Jet to glow red, and then another that caused him to glow green. The Warforged Barbarian became an ebony blur of axe swings and chipped bone fragments. In seconds the Giant Skeleton fell. Jet leaped high and brought his axe down and shattered the things skull. Its glowing blue eyes winked out.
Momakar and his sister took care of skeleton four and five. With Juti whipping wands in each hand in succession: fireball from the left, Magic Missile from the right, Momakar had time to call down a holy spell and the two retreating Giants glowed bright gold and then winked out of existence without a sound.
The last Giant Skeleton barreled across the wide chamber. Nalinor noticed a lever he at first had thought was a narrow set of stairs; it looked that way from his angle. It was so tall of a thing, and stationary, like steps to nowhere. But it was a lever, a lever for a Giants hand.
“Stop him!” he yelled at the Arcanes, to anyone. Too late.
A set of double doors disguised by a fresco as tall as a tavern slid back. Growls, like a crowd rioting on a crowded street, hundreds of ravenous snarls echoed from down the pitch black hall.
“Get to the doorway,” yelled Elaan.
A lightning bolt blasted the Giant Skeleton apart, and bones as long as boats bounced away and clattered.
“Fight in the threshold! Fight in the threshold!” said Juti.
Nalinor and the others ran to the new opening. A hallway filled with Zombies faced them. Rotting heads shifted and jostled for room; they looked four hundred deep. The shambling mass let out a deafening groan and came on.
“Light them up!” shouted Momakar. He pointed. “Jet, shield-block the door. Do not let any get through. Edaam, Elaan, we need fire,” he ordered.
The brothers tossed wands to Nalinor and Juti. They turned and raised first their left hand then their right. It looked like liquid sprayed out from their outstretched arms, but it set the air on fire. Wall after wall rose up in a burning torrent. Momakar yelled spells of his own. Suddenly the black walls of the throne room shone like it was midday. Nalinor and Juti moved up front by Jet, but hung back to each side. They flicked their wands and added even more incendiary aid to the battle. The secret hallway was a path of fire, choking smoke and feral Undead. Watching Jet, it was like he played a game of ball, swatting away each blazing corpse to fly back over the crowd and burn with the rest. Ash choked Nalinor, smoke blurred his vision, and the Zombies still came on. He felt like laughing but was so frightened that he might never stop once he did.
Then there was nothing left to fight. Jet dropped his axe low. Juti moved back to check on her brother. The twins, breathing like runners, rested hands on thighs, tried to catch their breath.
“Gods! I hate this place!” said Nalinor.
Everyone gave chortles and winded snorts in reply. All of them were too tired to even laugh.
Nalinor put his wand back in a pocket and then, blinking, noticed a bald man in a red and black robe staring at him from across the wide room. Nalinor pointed and stupidly began to ask who he was when Elaan mumbled a spell. The robed figure froze in place surrounded by a latticework of spiraling blue light. Jet bounded up to the Necromancer in three big strides. He lifted the man up by the throat and held him against the stone wall.
Juti moved up and interrogated the Necromancer. “We seek the main chamber. The place all the dead are taken.” She poked a Dagger at his watery, blinking eye. “Tell us!”
The Necromancer, his eyes darting at each Sand Shadow, laughed. “Lord Rot will eat your souls and hang your carcasses to be used as steaks!”
Jet squeezed.
The Necromaner’s hands slapped uselessly at the hand.
“There, there,” said Juti, “tell us of what we seek and you may get to live longer.”
Jet lessoned his hold, let the dark Wizard rest his feet on the ash-coated floor. The man licked his lips and studied each of them in turn. “It matters not if you find him or he finds you. Soon enough we all shall be shambling sacks of clay and we’ll serve him FOREVER!” The Necromancer laughed like the truly insane. Spittle sprayed out and a line of it drooled down from his lower lip. “You are almost to the place of your doom, little Rogue,” he spoke down at Juti. “You stand at the cusp of your death. My master awaits.”
“Where, Necromancer?”
Jet raised his massive hand toward the man.
He flinched, held his arms up to ward away further pain. “Near, near,” he pleaded. “Down this hall I came from you will find stairs. Follow them but not to the end. No. There will be a door at your left. That leads to a high balcony. Take that.”
“Why?” asked Nalinor.
“Trust me,” said the Necromancer. The man paused, pondered his own words and sputtered his mad laughter. Once he settled, he looked at Juti and said, “Now release me! I’ve corpses to tend. Work never ending, for all die and join Lord Rot.” He licked his lips.
“I’m sorry,” said Juti, “you are to join him now too.” She turned and touched Jet lightly on the arm.
Jet reached forward and put his three-fingered hand over the Necromancer’s mouth and nose, blocking off his air.
“You would summon others. We must end you,” said Jet.
Jet pressed down.
The Necromancer’s eyes went wide, tears quickly spilling out. He slapped and punched futilely at Jet’s rock solid hand to no avail. Nalinor watched in silent awe tinged with disgust as another man slowly died. The Necromancer moaned and grunted. He kicked against the wall and he kicked out at Jet, trying to get free. His legs began to tremble and spasm, and then finally his chest heaved outward in one final death throe. His limbs went limp, fell lifelessly down. Jet dropped him. The body crumpled, the legs bent wrong underneath the man’s torso, akimbo and horrible looking. His eyes bugged out, frightening and fearful and accusing. He evacuated. The stench of it was sudden, shocking and awful. Nalinor swallowed and once again was in awe of the pure killing efficiency of a Warforged.
“Let’s go,” said Juti.
______
It was as the Necromancer had said – trust him they dared not, but, as it turned out before his death, he did not lie. They traced the dark Wizard’s steps (easy to do when the dust of burnt Zombie ash coated the floor) back to the stairs. As he had said, there was a side door two thirds of the way down. They carefully opened it. Juti and Nalinor scouted ahead for traps. They found three and quickly disabled them: one, a knee level blade hidden in a recessed wall, another, electric tiles on the floor. The last trap, although disabled, still had to be jumped. On the other side of it they entered a narrow hallway that led out to blackness. Nalinor was not sure what his eyes were seeing: Had they resurfaced? Did this path lead back outside? And were those stars up ahead; all those little multi-colored pinpoints in the gloom?
Yard by yard, they moved forward. They stepped out onto a high balcony, but not to a view of open sky like Nalinor had first surmised. They entered and overlooked a vaulted chamber. It had a low recessed floor that dipped down very low like an inverted bowl, like the dome below reflected the dome above. And what Nalinor spied below sent ice racing through his veins.
So many!
(to be cont…)