“You have consumed “Healing Potion” Grade: Strong. This portion is a mix of magical enchantment and special healing herbs and spices designed to both taste at least mildly edible and save your life. You have been healed 1d20 + 39 = 45 total health points.”
I pushed the hands away from me and gasped for breath. “What!” Another breath “The hell, was, that!” I shouted. But the man who had nearly broken my jaw to save me had disappeared into the fighting. I wiped my mouth off and slowly got to my feet, knees shaking from the experience.
I looked around, Tol’geth and the knights were all engaging the handful of still struggling goblins. As I watched, Tol’geth picked up one of the biting and struggling creatures off the ground and ripped it in half, his sword casually leaning against his hip. Traser ran one through on the point of his sword, and flung it back down the hall, it split in half mid-air. Holy crap I really need to start remembering to stand behind these guys. I might be a mage, but these guys are beasts!
As the last of them died to Tol’geth’s bare hands, I asked: “So, which one of you nearly broke my jaw to save my life?” Traser stepped forward.
“I administered the potion wizard. You were down, your bowls exposed to the air after I slew the creature. I will not apologize for saving your life.”
“No need to whatsoever. My jaw doesn’t appreciate it, but the rest of me does. Thank you.” I said as I leaned on my staff for support, knees still somewhat weak.
After the fight was finished, and while I finished healing myself to full health using Cure Light Wounds, Traser ordered two of the knights to investigate the tunnel where the goblins had come from. He accepted Ailsa’s warning about the Blood Kraken I had seen and avoided sending anyone down that passage.
When the two knights returned, followed by Ailsa who had gone with them, they reported that there was nothing of interest. Just a simple goblin camp, a fire pit, a pot, and some rusty dagger hilts not worth keeping. By that time, I was steady again, and feeling ready for another fight.
Before we moved out I cast new lights on the walls, and we moved forward. We came to another three-way crossing, the exact same as the last one. I did my whole rolling light ball thing, then tried the “Bring Out Your Dead” routine, but nothing showed up this time. Traser sent two knights down each side passage and we waited.
“No! Gods above why?!” We heard from the passage to the right. It echoed off the walls and reverberated through the empty stone corridors.
“I’m taking Tol’geth, we’ll investigate what happened on the right, while you all wait here for news of what happened on the left. Sound good?” I asked Traser, who only nodded staring off at the sounds of weeping now coming from the same direction.
I raced down the corridor, Tol’geth right on my heels, but we shortly came to a dead end. One of the knights was on his knees, sobbing, the same one whose lover we had found in the storage room. The other knight was kneeling down, trying to convince the taller yet skinnier man to stand, and follow him back to Commander Trasers position.
“What's going on?” I asked as Tol’geth and I came to a stop. The knight on the ground simply pointed behind him as he desperately tried to comfort his friend. My eyes shifted, and what I had thought was simply a pit of gravel or fallen stone from a cave in, was actually bones. Thousands of them, they went on for nearly a hundred feet back, and nearly touched the ceiling. They were small too, like goblin bones, but thinner, wispier, smaller. They all had gnaw marks from what I assumed where goblin teeth. Halflings? Did they slaughter a tribe of halflings? I thought quizzically.
When the realization of what I was seeing hit me, I had to lean on my staff, worried I would fall like the man in front of me as my head swam from the sheer scale of the slaughter. “Those are…There are so… there are thousands.” I stammered.
“This is a place of truest nightmare,” Tol’geth said, a slight tremble in his voice. It sounded like a mix of fear, and sadness. Fear not for himself, but for others, and sadness for the terrible things the children must have all gone through before death.
Tol’geth helped the knight lead his friend back to the main group, he was still nearly inconsolable. When we got there, the other two from the left side passage had returned, with a rather small guest in their arms. She was small, maybe six or seven years old. She wore a white wool shirt over her body. Her cheeks where gaunt, and her eyes brimmed with tears. “We can’t get her to tell us her name.” Said the knight holding her. “But we found her hiding at the end of the corridor.
“Finally, a glimmer of sunshine in all of this gloom,” Tol’geth said as he patted the finally sobering mans back. “Cheer up friend. One child still yet lives, and your sword is needed to protect her.” The man, now helmetless having discarded it along the way, found his feet and stood straight, wiping his eyes and clearing his throat.
“What did you find Sir Trestin?” Traser asked the knight before I could stop him. The man did well, though is lower lip trembled slightly as he spoke. He explained what he had seen, the mountain of bones that we all suspected where the bones of children. When Sir Trestin was finished he held out his hand, palm open, and showed a tiny blue ribbon tied in a bow. One I recognized from the docks. My heart sank at the look on the man's face, and the realization of what had been taken from him here.
“This was Isabella's. Her bones were added to the pile it seems. I can’t even tell which ones are hers.” His voice cracked, but he kept his composure, eyes now dry of tears.
Traser for his part kept a stern expression, and a tight hold on his emotions. “We will find justice for the lost ones. That is my promise. For now, we must press on.”
Casting even more lights to expel the darkness that seemed to seep into our souls, we walked down the central hallway. After only a few feet we found ourselves again at a three-way intersection.
“Let's all stay together this time. Yes? Last time turned out, acceptable, but if there had been an ambush we would have lost two good men.” I said, and Traser nodded his acceptance of my plan. We flipped a coin, and went left first, leaving the knight carrying the girl, and Sir Trestin, behind to guard our backs and the child.
We entered the stone, darkroom. I threw several large balls of light that stuck to various portions of the wall as high as I could place them. The light revealed a large room with ten, maybe fifteen different tables each with manacles for arms and legs, but no bodies. On the far portion of the room from where we entered, I could make out a boiling cauldron similar to the one we encountered in Laketown, behind that, however, right against the wall, where two massive cages, bars slightly bent outwards.
“What in the realms of the Gods and Demons are those!” Yelled one of the knights I still didn’t know. “They, they have the heads of men!” He shouted in distress.
Well, he's not wrong. I thought, withdrawing into an analytical frame of mind . Five each it looks like. Seven, no eight tentacles, and a giant writhing black mass for a body. It's like something out of Lovecraft. I analyzed the abominations.
“Name: Unknown, none given
Race: Dark Abomination
Class: N/A
Level: 1
Height: 8’3
Hair: N/A
Age: N/A
Affiliation: Self, Hunger, Darkness
Alignment: Instinctual
Disposition Towards You: Hungry, Enraged.
HP: 832/900
Physical and Immaterial Characteristics: Unknown, Skill Too Low
Defensive Characteristics: Unknown, Skill To Low
Offensive Characteristics: Unknown, Skill To Low”
“Ailsa? Do you know what these things are? They’re called Dark Abominations according to my analyze skill, know anything about them?” Ailsa hung in the air almost as if she wasn’t moving, looking at the writhing creatures. They squirmed away from the light, trying desperately to hide their human faces from it, even as the still exposed black mass sizzled slightly in even the weak light I had cast the room in
. They made no noise, but where clearly in distress.
“They’re monsters created out of the blackest of acts. They are not evil in and of themselves, just, sad. They are dark cavern dwellers, usually living out their short painful lives in the Underdark beneath mountains or in fallen ruins where little light gets in. They are not evil so much as instinctively drawn to devour sapient minds. With everyone they devour, they become more intelligent, larger, and stronger. Once they reach sentience and sapience, their instincts usually drive them mad, or evil.”
She turned around, hovered over, and let herself drop onto my shoulder, almost sadly. “They are, in a way, elementals of darkness. In a similar fashion as Ra’thin’ax, in that, they were once something different, but changed by mortal magic into something… else. The necromancer was probably feeding them, trying to turn them into far more powerful minions.”
“In short, they’re her little mad science projects. So, we should kill them?” I asked, honestly at a loss for what to do about the creatures. On the one hand, they were little more than pets, on the other they were very dangerous pets born of evil.
“Not out of malice” Her wings buzzed annoyed as she wrestled with the same question I did. “It would be a kindness to end them. These creatures while they have the potential for intelligence, are not naturally so. They are, as their names suggest, creatures of darkness, that have been turned into abominations.” I nodded sadly, casting and affixing two balls of light on the top of both cages.
After a few short seconds, the creatures burst into flames. Their giant black tentacles tried uselessly to bend and break the metal bars that made up their cages. The bars were easily as thick as one of Tol’geths arms. The creatures human faces wordlessly, soundlessly screamed as they died. Oddly, the fires did not produce much smoke, just a lot of heat and light.
“Wish we could have made that quicker.”
“Your weapons and most magic would have been ineffective against them. It is lucky we destroyed them before Mcstabby lady let them loose. She probably had them around as a last resort weapon, as they would have been just as dangerous to her as to us.” Ailsa said as she landed on my shoulder.
“Light is their only predator,” Tol’geth said as he put one massive hand on my shoulder. “Such creatures, if left to gain strength, can cause much harm to the countless innocents before they glut themselves and enter the Underdark to sleep a long slumber.”
Ailsa buzzed her wings in a way I came to associate with agreement. “All life, even in the Underdark, is twisted by their very presence. Though not evil, such creatures are seen as a type of natural, or unnatural, disaster to all of Ethria. To attempt to weaponize them is seen as a great crime among all living beings.”
“It is not the least, nor the greatest of this witch's crimes. But, it is worthy of a beheading.” Tol’geth responded as he hefted his sword almost eagerly.
As the rest of the group went back to watching the fires slowly die out, I leaned over to my barbarian friend and whispered “I’m not sure If I just broke my oath. They would have become intelligent, and had not committed any crime that I was aware of.”
“Ethria would have told you had you breached your oath. The land takes such things very seriously.” Tol’geth promised, patting my shoulder lightly. “Your oath speaks highly of you, but don’t be held hostage by it.” Tol’geth thought about it for a moment before pronouncing “You had just cause.” I nodded sadly and watched the last of the creatures death throws end in stillness.
“This does mean one good thing,” I announced as we turned to leave.
“What is that?” Traser asked.
“We must be close to her, otherwise these doomsday weapons would have been useless.”
“This also means she doesn’t know how close we are.” The Knight-Commander slapped my back, grinning at the realization.
Down the other hallway, after passing by the little girl and her two knights, we found a much smaller room, with row after row of cages. Most of them were empty, too many of them were empty. But some of them, the ones in the back, where filled with children.
“What do we do?” I asked. “There are too many to simply free them and take them with us. We’ll have to send someone back with them.”
“Let's get them out of the cage's first, count them, and then we can figure it all out,” Traser said as he sheathed his sword. And so we did, we opened every cage, checked every box. Nearly thirty in all. We found seven children alive, many had died in their cages of malnutrition, illness, or exposure. We found two actual babies in one of the boxes we smashed open, twins we thought. One had passed away, and the other was on death's door.
I cast cure light wounds on every child at least once, going up in a skill rank for my efforts, just to ensure they would survive the journey out of the caverns. One of the older children, a young boy maybe eight or nine years old, pulled on my blood-caked shirt sleeve. I looked down “Yes?”
“Um, um, the witch lady went down the hall, sir.”
“You’ve seen her?” I asked. “How recently?”
“Just um, about um, maybe a few minutes before you made all the lights?”
“Good boy, do you know how far away her, uh, table? Her magic table is?” The boy nodded.
“Just down the hall a little, she’s always taking us there, but she never brings the other kids back. She took my sister yesterday, and I haven't seen her since.”
“What's her name?” I asked curious.
“Angelia”
“Go join the others,” I said as I pushed the boy along. “I don’t know where your sister is, but I'll do my best to find her,” I promised.
When we re-joined the other two knights, with more children in tow then when we left. Sir Tristen's eyes lit up with hope and a passion I had seen in few eyes. If a man was going to see a job done, it would be this one. “Sir Tristen, perhaps you should be the one to lead the expedition back to the surface?” I said looking at the Commander, who thought about it and nodded in agreement.
“What?” Tristen asked confused. “Return to the surface? But, we have a job to complete.”
“Indeed, but we have been informed by this one.” I ruffled the young boy's hair who had spoken to me “That the witch is most likely in the next room, straight ahead. We can not contend with an evil necromancer who has powers and horrors at her command that few can understand let alone defend against, with a bunch of toddlers running around underfoot. Now can we?” I asked. Tristen thought about it for a moment.
“No, I suppose we can not. But, there are so many children…”The man looked uncertain for a moment. “Can Sir Garin assist me? I think prying that girl from his arms might just prove more difficult than winning a thousand wars.” The other knight smiled goofily as he held the now sleeping girl to his shoulder, rocking her gently.
“That settles it, Sir Teegan, Sir Garin, you are both responsible for the care and protection of these children. Return them to the surface at your best speed, and safeguard them once there. The rest of us will make our way to the altar of this, dark god Tesh, and put an end to the creature once and for all.”
We waited and watched as the two knights organized the children, and took off with the oddly quiet and subdued little ones in toe. Once they were well underway and out of earshot, I whispered to Ailsa “I have no idea how they’re going to get those kids past that meat shop horror show.” Ailsa smacked me in the nostril, hard. It's an odd place to be smacked, the nostril. It didn’t break my nose, just made it itch, really, really badly.
“They can carry them one at a time, while the kids close their eyes.” Ailsa chided.
“Or simply have them all hold hands, blindfold them, and guide them slowly through the room,” Traser said smiling next to me. “I was honestly thinking the same thing, and I mentioned that solution to Garin just before they left. It’ll be alright. Come on, let's go.”
We walked down the corridor for a lot longer then we had any of the other times before we came
to a set of double doors. We could see light, and hear voices on the other side. I put my ear to the doors and listened carefully.
“You’re kidding me right?” Said a high pitched, and angry yet gravely voice in the goblin tongue. “They’ve breached every trap you’ve laid. They now defend the upper levels and towers from even your greatest bone constructs! And you want me to open a portal, and bring all of the goblins from the siege of the Twins there?! Just to defend your little ruin? Why not run, escape and come to me in the swamp, or meet me at the twins.” The voice sounded muffled through the door, but I could make out what was being said clearly enough. I whispered the words as I understood them for the group to hear.
“No chieftain, I do not expect you to come through those portal crystals I have laid in my domain, and have given you for this exact purpose. I am ORDERING YOU! If you do not come, I will take your tribes next two spawnings as sacrifices in recompense!” The mad necromancers voice was shrill, tinged with fear.
Silence gripped the other side for a few moments before the female human voice came back, this time much calmer than before. “The ritual to free me from this place failed. I am still bound to the altar of Tesh, and can not leave it until either I grow powerful enough, which will take more time than I have, or I can complete the ritual of releasing. The ritual that failed due to the interference of that bitch goddess and her little pyromancer puppet! Her presence, so close to Lord Tesh’s realm, caused enough etheric static to disrupt even Tesh’s blessings!” The necromancer sighed and took a deep breath, calming herself. “I must wait six more days before I can attempt it again.”
“Then hide yourself. Surely your god of darkness can grant you concealment for yourself at least.” The first voice, what I thought must have been the goblin chieftain she was speaking to, nearly begged. He was obviously still frustrated, though the resolve in his words had nearly evaporated.
“If you do not heed me, and I die here, your entire clan will be decimated. I have already signed contracts with, other powers in the region and they will see you butchered to the last for your broken oath!” There was a lot of shuffling of feet, and other indistinguishable noises followed by a piteous squeal of pain. “I have your son, chieftain. Your greatest warrior. If the threat against your clan is not enough motivation, then perhaps this will be. If you do not do as I have ordered, I will sacrifice him upon my altar and send his reanimated corpse back to your village in the fetid swamp you call home!”
Ethria- the Pioneer Page 50