Logrus turned a grim stare to him, his eyes black in the near-darkness. “Has not a god sent us here?”
Aiul’s reply died in his throat at the sound of hatches opening and closing in the distance, the echoes reverberating throughout the subterranean structure. For long moments, they listened for more, the dripping of water and the hiss of the torch loud in their ears, and then came another sound, a shuffling, something large approaching.
A figure out of a nightmare loomed from the darkness. It was fully ten feet tall, and shaped like a man, but there the resemblance ended. Its overlong arms, proportioned more like those of an ape than a human, ended in razor sharp talons. It had no neck to speak of, merely a misshapen mound atop impossibly broad shoulders. Two beady, reptilian eyes stared from the gnarled head. Others, arranged seemingly at random about its body, rolled in their sockets or cut back and forth in paranoia. A snakelike tongue slipped in and out of a jagged-fanged maw, testing the air. More mouths, smaller, but no less vicious, dotted its body at irregular intervals, their tiny teeth chattering and gnashing at the air. Small tentacles erupted from unlikely areas and whipped about the creature, as if it were flagellating itself. Muscle rippled beneath black, putrescent skin as the thing approached them.
“Playthings,” it spoke, its words a sickening, burbling rumble. “You are fortunate. My master wishes you to live.” It beckoned to them with a filthy claw. “For now.” Its laughter was the hacking of a man dying from tuberculosis.
Logrus’s face twisted into a mask of hatred and fury as he charged the creature, a cry of abandon on his lips.
Aiul hesitated only a moment before hefting the hideous black mace and joining him, shouting Elgar’s name as a battle cry. This is pure madness.
And yet it was the right sort of madness.
In its sanctum, the Master watched the scene in the pool, frustrated but amused. What could these playthings be thinking? It was interrupted from its musings by a thunderous rumbling as a shockwave tore through the foundations of Torium, sending ripples over the image and turning it to blackness once more.
Annoyed, the thing poked a claw at the surface, and screamed. It drew back quickly, but the black liquid crept upward, dissolving talon and flesh, leaving only exposed bone in its wake. It took half of the finger before it lost its potency.
The surface of the pool was smooth as glass, now. The thing stared at it in a mad fury, and roared, “I have your book! A thousand years I have kept it! I will have my due!”
The surface of the pool shifted and bubbled, rising to form a contemptuous, hate filled face. The lips parted to speak a single word: “Fool.” The room resonated with the sound of Elgar’s voice.
“I will rend you!” the Master shrieked. “I have the book! I wrote it!”
“You no longer understand it,” the face in the pool rumbled. Dust fell from the ceiling as the words battered the stonework.
The Master tore at its own flesh in a frenzy of rage and growing terror, its claws leaving deep trenches in its mottled, scabrous hide.
“I am the Master of Torium!” it keened. “I will rend your playthings! And I will rend you, too! You will see!”
The face spoke once more, again a single word, but one full of power: “Fear.” More dust rained down as the sound burned along the thing’s nerves like fire.
The Master screamed in impotent rage as the face sunk back into the pool, leaving the surface once again calm.
The servant was fleeing. It could not really say why. Logically, it should turn upon its pursuers and rend them, but logic was a very small voice in its mind. Fear roared in its ears, drowning out the tiny whisper of reason.
There were other sounds, too. A thousand wails of terror and misery pierced the thing’s mind in an unrelenting assault. They were familiar shrieks of agony; pleas for mercy; wretched, plaintive, damned cries wrenched from the broken and dying bodies of those who became art. Torium had, at times, resounded with such echoes, and the thing had been pleased. Now, they battered the inside of the thing’s skull, and he cried out himself to please another. It was not fair. It was not the proper order of things.
“Mercy!” the thing wailed, over and over, as it fled in blind panic from its relentless pursuers. They did not answer, but the thing heard their reply, still, in a horrific, multi-sensory assault: “Never!”
It fled onward, dogged at every step. It had to reach the others. They would protect it. Full of desperate hope, it headed for friends. They were many. When it was with them once again, the fear would pass, and they would rend these fiends, these monsters the Dead God had set loose upon them.
It came, after much running, upon its brethren, a group forty strong. They roared questions at it, and the thing tried to explain, to tell them of the Dead God’s harriers, but no words would come. Panic clenched the thing’s throat like a vise. Only one word was possible.
“Mercy!” it cried, trembling in abject terror.
One of the others moved toward it, tried to restrain it. Fear exploded within the servant’s chest like lighting striking a tree. It could not be restrained! It must not be restrained! It had to flee!
The servant struck out, frenzied, desperate to escape. Twisted flesh and blood splattered over the stones. The other, too, began to scream. The other, too, felt the fear now. In the servant’s mind, the other sounded just like the works of art.
The rest gathered around the two screaming things, confused, trying to calm them, to understand the alarm, but the fearful ones could not express it, save to scream and lash out. With each blow landed, another thing took up the cry, the terror. Pleas for mercy pierced the fetid air of Torium, echoing down the corridors and passageways, but it would not raise an alarm. Such cries were common, a kind of music. How could any of them know the truth?
The servant felt claws rending its flesh. It responded in kind, desperate to survive.
“Mercy!” it begged again, joining the chorus of similar cries from its fellows as they slashed and battered at one another. It fought on through blinding agony and crippling terror. Mercy, at last, came in the form of eternal darkness.
Aiul and Logrus chased the thing for some time, through countless interconnected rooms, all with the same curious hatches, all with the same hideous décor. They would have chased it to the end of the world, so strong was their impulse, but their bodies were simply incapable of keeping pace with the creature’s huge strides. By the time they admitted this unpleasant truth to themselves, they were hopelessly lost within the depths of Torium, and completely spent.
Aiul slowed to a stop and paused with his hands on his knees, panting, as Logrus struggled against pain and exhaustion to catch up.
“He’s gone,” Aiul gasped. Logrus nodded, for once having reason to spare words, and lowered himself to the cold, damp stone of the floor with a grimace. For long moments, they said nothing, as they caught their breath.
Then came the screams, guttural, rumbling, more than a little like roaring, but definitely screams for all that. At first, they assumed it was the thing, doubling back, but it became more and more clear that there were multiple sources of the cries.
Aiul looked about, considering their situation, and realizing it was, indeed, grim. He had no idea how to retrace his path, and no way to determine what constituted forward. “Which way?”
Logrus pointed in the direction of the screaming. “Can you feel it?”
Aiul tried to open himself to whatever Logrus was tapped into, but to no effect. “I’m too tired to feel anything.”
Logrus clapped a hand against Aiul’s back, his eyes wide with newfound energy. “Elgar!” he said, his voice reverent. “I feel his presence!”
Aiul felt a surge of hope. “The blood? Is it near?”
A grin spread across Logrus’s face. “It must be.”
Invigorated, they set off, following the screams, trusting to Logrus’s sense to guide them. It was yet another trek through the horrific chambers of Torium, but the sense of hate and horror t
he place inspired ebbed as they progressed. Aiul could feel it now, too, a low throb of menace and comfort. Elgar was here, or at least a part of him.
The screams stopped after a while. Soon after, the two found both the source and the reason for the silence.
Dozens of twisted corpses littered the room, all variations on the theme of the one Torian they had seen, but each unique. The floor was slick with black, putrescent ichor, and the reek of rot and death made Aiul gag.
A few of the mutilated creatures still lived, twitching and wheezing as life seeped from them. One cut its eyes toward them and rasped, “Mercy.”
Logrus spat on the dying thing. “I have none for you.”
As pleasant as the scene was, Aiul knew there was no time to rejoice. Already, he could hear roars echoing about them from all directions, cries of fury, not fear. “Reinforcements,” he said. “I don’t think these will run.”
“No,” Logrus agreed. “We are near now. Elgar has cleared the way for us. That is all we can hope for.”
Aiul licked his lips, doing his best to crush down his rapidly mounting terror, to control it enough to allow him to act rationally. “Let’s go, then!”
They set out at a dead run, the roars of the approaching creatures growing louder, as despair began gnawing at Aiul’s mind. By his reckoning, they were headed directly for their enemies. His fears were confirmed as they ducked through another hatch, and burst into a chamber of unprecedented size.
The place was large enough to hold a small village, an enormous cavern that rose at least fifty feet above their heads. The rough-hewn ceiling was buttressed to support its own massive weight. A titanic spiral stair rose from the floor, ending in massive, iron doors set into the stone ceiling. Beams of sunlight poured from windows near the top of the chamber, filling the room with twilight.
Aiul felt his stomach churn when he saw what the cave contained. A legion of tortured, damned souls, frozen in their final moments of agony and horror, dotted the vast plain before them, thousands of victims on display like exhibits in a colossal, ghastly museum. And in the shadows, all around them, the hulking shapes of more things, hundreds of them, advanced in a slow shuffle, teeth gnashing and tentacles whipping, a low, hideous chant of hate and hunger rumbling from their many lips.
Aiul’s muscles wavered like jelly. This is the end.
“There!” Logrus cried, and gave him a shove forward.
Aiul stared ahead, numb, eyes slowly focusing on a deeper darkness within the gloom. The structure was squat and rough-hewn, as if the rest of the cavern had been carved out around it. A faint, liquid glimmer shone from what appeared to be an opening in the near side.
Aiul had no reason to believe it offered safety, but he ran for it anyway, hoping Logrus was right. The Torians continued shuffling toward them, slowly but inexorably tightening their circle, in no hurry at all. Were they still afraid, Aiul wondered? Or, perhaps, they simply know it is a dead end, and are savoring the hunt.
The entrance to the central chamber was yet another set of the huge, rune-graven doors they had encountered. These, too, stood wide, as had the entrance to the city above. Aiul and Logrus charged headlong past them, and into the room beyond, the hundreds of hideous things still shambling after them in slow, relentless pursuit.
The chamber in which they found themselves was an enormous room rather than a small town, a meeting area for the inhabitants, perhaps. No seats or other furniture broke the monotony of the carved stone interior, but in the center stood a large stone basin filled with dark liquid, and piles of stone debris lay in random places about the black granite floor. The pool, black as crude oil, glowed with a cold, dim light that filled the room. It was large enough for a dozen or so men to bathe in, at least ten feet across, and surrounded by a ledge of inlaid, rune-graven stone. Four long, sloped trenches, carved into the lip, ran from the cardinal points like tributaries.
Aiul turned back to the doors, desperate to find a way to close and bar them. A brief, panicked search of the wall yielded a hopeful sign, a huge, steel lever, blackened with eons of accumulated filth. He hauled on it with his full weight. Gears ground, and the doors began to close, finally coming together with a resounding clang.
Aiul heaved a sigh of relief just as Logrus began to scream.
Aiul spun on his heel, and froze, slack jawed at the horror before him.
How it had hidden itself, Aiul could not guess. The creature was half again as large as the others they had encountered. There were clear similarities, but there was more of everything: more teeth, more arms, more tentacles. Its head nearly scraped the darkened ceiling twenty feet above, and its mouths chattered and dripped saliva as it regarded Aiul with yellow, hate-filled eyes.
In one taloned hand, it gripped a huge, leather bound tome. The book seared the beast’s flesh where it touched, filling the room with the scent of burning meat. In another claw, it held Logrus aloft in a vise-like grip, squeezing the life from him.
The thing made a rumbling noise akin to a chuckle, and lashed out at Aiul with a thick, ropy tentacle. The force of the blow knocked the breath from Aiul and sent him to the floor, stunned.
“You will suffer for this!” Logrus howled, drawing more laughter from his captor.
“No,” it hissed. “You will suffer.” It raised a single talon and slashed at Logrus’s leg. Blood fountained from the wound, and the thing crooned in pleasure.
“The book rends me,” it complained, glancing at its blistering hand. “But I will use it still!” It held Logrus at eye level and leered at him. “The blood of Elgar’s faithful is his weakness! I will steal the Dead God’s power for myself, and you will be the key!”
“Fool!” Logrus cried. “You dare challenge a god?”
“I am the Master of Torium!” it roared. Logrus wailed in agony as the creature tightened its grip. “I dare anything!”
Aiul struggled to raise his head, his vision darkening from lack of air. At last, he regained control of his lungs. He sucked in a great, gasping breath, and called out, “Elgar! We are outmatched!”
He did not expect a response. He had not a shred of faith. But he had to try.
The surface of the pool boiled and shaped itself into a wrathful visage that spoke: “You have all that you need. Save yourself and punish the guilty.”
Aiul ground his teeth in fury, hating Elgar for his refusal to help almost as much as he hated himself for daring to believe. “Bastard!”
The Master cackled in glee and crushed Logrus against the lip of the pool with a tentacle, positioning him in one of the troughs on the ledge. It extended a claw and pointed it at his throat, toying with him.
Logrus glared up at the behemoth with undisguised loathing and declared, “You cannot kill me, fool.”
“Scream and deny,” the creature taunted. “Call out to Elgar. Your faith powers the ritual!” It slashed its talon across Logrus’s chest, cutting him to the bone.
As Logrus cried out in new misery, Aiul struggled to his feet, still having difficulty breathing. His head was a ball of mud. All he knew for certain was that it was over, and they had failed. The Master was an impossible opponent. Part of him wondered idly if this had been Elgar’s plan all along, to send them to their deaths here, against hopeless odds. But why? What point could it serve? Aiul shrugged. It was too difficult to think, and he had no weapon that could challenge the monstrous creature that stood before him. Even if he did, there were hundreds more waiting outside. We are doomed.
As despair filled him, weighing him down like a suit of lead, and his life passed before his eyes, he once again saw the strange symbol in his mind, an almost understood concept, and one memory loomed large over the rest. In his memory, he heard Logrus gasping, ‘Great Elgar! Never before have I seen this!’
Logrus screamed as the Master slashed him again, laying open his forearm and exposing the bone beneath.
“My gift,” Aiul muttered to himself, as he sucked in a great gasp of air. Clarity rushed in with it. He s
taggered toward the pool, a mad plan burning in his mind
“Where do you wander, plaything?” the monster chuckled, and lashed out with its tentacle again. It hammered against Aiul’s back and sent him crashing to the ground. His forehead bounced against the rim of the pool, sending blinding white bolts of lightning across his vision. He struggled to hold on to consciousness, knowing if he lost it, it would never be regained.
“You have no faith,” the thing hissed at Aiul. “You are useless to me.” It raised a sword-like talon and prepared to impale Aiul. Ah, well. At least I died trying.
Logrus, covered in his own blood, somehow found the strength to suddenly twist in the thing’s grasp and kick out at its seared, ruined claw. The Master screamed in agony as the skin of its hand split and a huge chunk of its flesh slid off like beef falling from a long-cooked bone. The repulsive meat hit the floor with a sickening, liquid sound as the Master’s cries continued.
Logrus shouted, his voice hoarse with effort, “Now, Aiul!”
Aiul struggled over the rim, every muscle screaming, barely able to move. The Master dropped Logrus to the floor and rushed Aiul, suddenly understanding his intent. Aiul tried to dodge the fiend’s thrusting arm, but its deadly talons ripped through his shoulder, pinning him to the pool’s ledge like a bug in a collection.
Aiul’s heart sank as he struggled not to black out from the excruciating pain. The Master cackled in unhinged, malevolent glee as Aiul’s arm fell nervelessly, flopping like a doll’s, right into the Black Pool.
As his fingers made contact with the surface, Aiul felt his despair burn away like ash, forced up and out as rage and energy boiled into him like a volcanic eruption. Elgar spoke in his mind: “I will clear the way, my servant. Avenge them.”
Time seemed to stagger momentarily, everything frozen but the oily, black liquid and the faces of Aiul and the Master. Aiul flashed his enemy a hateful grin as the blood crept up his arm, gathering speed, and made contact with the talons in his shoulder. Fuck you. You lose!
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