I have to admit, I almost skipped across.
The ancient double doors loomed over me, twenty feet high and fifteen wide. In the flicker of my light, I saw magnificent figures decorating the ornate steel: mighty-limbed dwarven warriors doing battle with orcs while dwarven laborers erected towering halls and keeps in vast caverns. Strange locking mechanisms stood to either side of the vault doors, and at the doors' center, a clockwork mechanism of tiny gears encased in some sort of clear crystal barred the portal from opening.
I checked the wayfinder once more. Sure enough, it pointed straight through the doors.
I looked again at the mechanism, which I now saw was covered with concentric rings of tiny runes. I sighed and prepared myself for another long translation session. Then, on a whim, I recited the poem from the drawbridge.
Nothing happened at first. Then one tiny gear spun in a tight circle inside the mechanism, faster and faster. Another followed it, and another. Hairline cracks ran across the case, and, with a crunch, the whole mechanism collapsed on itself. To either side, the massive bolts still held the portal firm.
Oops.
I admit, I probably shouldn't have been so hasty: it's only common sense that the key to one passage might bar another. But, common sense or not, it meant I was out of ideas.
Or was I? As if on cue, the whole cavern rumbled again. And suddenly, I knew who could help me.
The source of Urgir's strange tremors.
I always say, until you're hanging upside down over an infinite chasm thanks to the good graces of a savage orc lord, being stalked by monsters who want to eat your only weapon, you're not really having an adventure.
Dangling by a rope harness around my waist, I was lucky that the drawbridge chain gave a scream of tearing metal before giving way completely, allowing me time to jerk my battered metal file back from the long cut I'd made. As I kicked off and swung out of the way, the last link of the mighty chain snapped. The linked iron plunged through the dark, limp as a dead serpent, whizzing down the rope I'd already threaded through it until, with an ear-splitting clatter, it came to rest on the platform below. The second chain still fixed on the bridge groaned once like a wounded aurochs but held.
I waited just a second, then rappelled down the wall, touching down softly on the balcony-turned-bridge, and I recovered my rope. With a massive effort, I hauled at the chain until it stretched straight down the bridge's length, a trail leading from the base near where I'd entered to the doors, reflecting all the while that this—more than treasure, more even than glory—was why I'd rather be a Pathfinder than a merchant. A merchant pays his bills and stocks his shelves. A Pathfinder crosses chasms and wrangles monsters, and does it with no one but maybe Desna looking out for him. Any day you outsmart a rival, you honor yourself. Any day you outsmart nature, you honor your profession. The chain in place, I scampered back across the bridge, used rope and pitons to haul myself up to a perch above the doors, and settled in to watch.
"Suppertime!" I hollered out into the dark. "Come and get it."
I didn't wait long. It may have taken the rust monsters a century to figure out that they couldn't cross the chasm, but it took perhaps five minutes for one creature to smell metal on the balcony and creep out to see what it could find. Delicately, almost reverently, the creature brushed the farthest link with its feathered antennae, trembling with excitement. Then it pounced, and with the scuttling of tiny feet raced forward, following the ferrous buffet toward me and the doors at top speed. I worried momentarily if I were in danger.
I needn't have worried. For the creature, it was as if I had never existed. In my frail light, the vault doors with their snapped mechanism glowed, as friendly as a campfire. Gibbering, the thing sprang, tenacious claws digging into the frame, feathered antennae working in a blur as it cavorted and gobbled. Below me, the dwarven metalwork gave way as the grand graven images of warriors and monsters sighed and bubbled. The carved runes blurred into illegibility, the rust spread, and then, with a clang, the doors collapsed open, kicking up white dust and pitching the creature, in its throes of appetite, forward face-first into its meal.
As lightly as I could, I dropped down behind it, sword drawn. "Thank you very much, friend," I said politely, then chopped its head off. Call me unsentimental, but I think rust monsters have played their part in this journey.
Beyond the doors' corroded frame, the stygian mouth of the tunnel yawned open. This just keeps getting better, I thought. Waving my light a few feet ahead of me, I took my first step into the Darklands.
Darkest Before the Fall
By Amber Scott
26 Lamashan, 4707 ar
I dug the fingers of my left hand more firmly into the gritty rock and inched my right hand up over the lip of the chasm. Rocks sliced into my knees where I pressed them against the cliff face, as if by sheer force I could stick myself to the wall. Sweat ran down my back in sticky streams, cooled instantly by the chill underground air. My eyes strained to make out shapes in the blackness—I cursed the ill fortune that allowed my lantern to slip from my now-aching fingers—as I quested for a handhold in the dark. With luck, with skill, and with strength I could get enough of a grip on something to pull myself up. If the ground or my arms didn't give way first.
In the pitch blackness before me, I heard the faintest of sounds. A brief but audible shuffle, perhaps a footstep.
"Is someone there?" I called. My own voice bounced back at me, small and thin in the yawning silence of the Darklands. No other reply came. I didn't think it possible my position could grow more precarious, but the thought of an unknown predator out there added a layer of uncertainty.
"Hello!" I called, risking the appearance of an enemy for the hope of salvation. "Is anyone there?"
As I waited, agonized, for an answer, I continued to grope for a means to pull myself up. The entire time, I reflected that on the surface roads exist where you make them, and at any time you can leave the trail and blaze your own across undiscovered country.
But underground, every passage is a potential dead end.
My journey hadn't started off badly. Once past the ancient seal and into the Darklands proper, I had found myself enchanted by the place.
I admit I'd anticipated long stretches of featureless stone tunnel, the monotony broken now and then by a stalactite, or perhaps some unusual fungi. Once I descended the flight of stone steps, obviously hewn by dwarven hammers, I found myself in a spacious, well-made tunnel stretching into blackness. Pictograms covered the walls, most depicting dwarven warriors in ornate armor battling against bizarre creatures: something like a cross between an ogre and a beetle, ambulatory mushrooms, and worms that appeared roughly the size of a two-story inn. I took my time examining the pictures as I proceeded down the tunnel—while crude, they held an arresting sort of power in their simplicity and action.
The tunnel stretched on for at least three hundred feet before it ended in a simple archway. Beyond that, a much narrower, rougher tunnel sloped sharply down. I concluded I was entering Nar-Voth, the uppermost layer of the Darklands.
Calling it a natural stone tunnel doesn't give an accurate picture. Certainly the walls were rough and the floor uneven, the stone pressed close and the air stale. The stone wasn't featureless gray, but a rippled mosaic of shades from slick black to almost bone-white, encompassing every dimension of gray and brown within, marked with veins of jade-green, rosy red, even at one point a deep sky blue. These ripples of stone ran along the wall for a few feet, or a few dozen feet, or sometimes for up to a mile. The stone didn't merely crest the wall like a wave, but occasionally broke loose and stretched to the floor or ceiling, or wove across the tunnel like a lattice, so that I was constantly climbing over or ducking under fantastic stone formations.
There was mold, often growing thick as tapestries and long as a woman's hair on the wall and floor. In one place, mold
hung from ceiling to floor like a curtain, and I had to push my way though the sea-green strands, so thick it was like being underwater. Tiny leaf-green beetles, smaller than roaches, scuttled away at my passing.
The tunnel widened to cavernous proportions from time to time, and numerous smaller tunnels branched off the one I walked. I tried to choose the widest and clearest-looking turn each time I faced a choice, while still keeping with the wayfinder's heading, and did my best to record the path in my journal. I even went so far as to scratch tiny marks into the stone of the walls, though I dared not make them too obvious, lest something down here pass through and decide to investigate. Indeed, I feared something might already be doing so; whenever I paused, it seemed to me that something was watching me from just beyond my circle of lamplight, patiently waiting for me to begin moving again. I longed for dawn, then shook myself with the realization that it would never come.
The level of the tunnel rose and fell as I walked, and several times I retraced my steps to veer around an impassable gorge. I was beginning to think of campsites and how best to rest in this underground maze when the walls trembled.
I stopped dead, my hand outstretched and grazing the tunnel wall. The tremor ceased as abruptly as it had begun. Visions of cave-ins filled my head. Not the most glorious of deaths, I thought. Pinned under a thousand tons of rock miles below the surface, with no one the wiser. Still, this would make one hell of a tomb.
Regardless, I wasn't ready to lie down in my grave just yet. I inched forward cautiously, waiting to see if the tremor returned. It did, moments later, louder and even stronger. The tunnel was a wide one, almost a chamber, and the tremors seemed strongest along the wall I touched. I let go of its grimy surface and moved silently across the wide expanse to the far side.
Then the ground heaved and bucked like a living thing. I fell to one knee and my lantern skittered away in the dark. The floor opened beneath it, swallowing my little light. A keening roar echoed through the room, a screech like that of a predator but with a wet, phelgmatic quality to it. I struggled to my feet to sprint to safety, but it was too late. A chasm opened up beneath my boots and it was all I could do to catch the ledge.
The tremors faded to a low and constant tremble in the ground, and there I hung, dangling over a blackness so deep it hurt to look at, wishing for a light, a rope, a friendly face, or at the very least, that I hadn't exhausted my magical ability lighting my way.
My arms ached with the strain of bearing my weight, and it felt like red-hot pins were sliding into my shoulders. My groping right hand found a divot just deep enough to get a grip. "Cayden, or Desna," I whispered, "or anyone who might be listening, really—please let this hold my weight." I dug my fingers into the stone and heaved.
My arm held out just long enough to scrabble my boots against the stone and fling my left hand over the ledge. With both hands clutching to the rock I managed to squirm my way up onto solid ground and lie there, gasping and choking in the fine dust that now filled the cavern. In the spaces between breaths, I heard something move just beyond the reach of my vision.
"Thanks," I coughed, then lifted myself on one elbow and scanned the darkness. I could make out nothing. "Is someone there?" I tried again.
No one answered, and I heard no further footsteps. "Hmph," I muttered, wishing I had the innocence left to chalk up what I'd heard to imagination.
I fumbled in my pack for a torch and relaxed once its friendly light burst forth. I stood and made a quick circuit of this side of the chamber—now split by an eight-foot-wide gorge—but saw no trace of anyone lurking in the dark, or whatever had made that tremor and roar. I shrugged and returned to the chasm.
I could have retraced my steps and gone around, but I was convinced something lay in the darkness that way. Besides, the wayfinder still pointed in the other direction. I lit the stubbiest of my candles and placed it at the near edge of the pit, then tossed my torch to the other side. It hit the ground, rolled and sputtered terribly, but stayed lit.
Then, out of curiosity, I tore off a bit of wrapping from a second torch and lit it, edging up to the lip of the gorge. Peering over into the blackness, I dropped the flaming fabric.
It fluttered as it fell, a winking star in the black, and for a moment I feared the distance was too great and it would flicker out in the fall. But the flame held, and after twenty or thirty feet it hit ground. I strained my eyes for anything of interest, but saw only the ridged stone.
Then I realized the flame was moving. It slid slowly to the left, and my whole body went cold as I realized the "ground" was the back of a huge, wrinkled beast. Its purplish-gray skin looked to be made of chitinous armor plating in the tiny circle of light, and I hoped desperately the beast wouldn't notice the burning on its back and look for the source. The monster filled the entire chasm—a river of hardened flesh undulating away from me—but I realized that the creature was actually a massive, wriggling worm.
I held my breath, watching its tremendous bulk writhe on and on until the candle snuffed itself out where the worm slid its bulk into a tight tunnel. Now that I was listening for it, I could hear the rasping of its body forcing its way through the rocky channel. With a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, I backed up, then dashed forward and hurled myself across the chasm. I skidded a little on the far side, teetered and windmilled my arms for balance, then scooped up the torch at my feet and hurried as fast as I dared away from the chamber and its disturbing occupant.
28 Lamashan, 4707 ar
By the time I'd found a place to camp, caught some restless slumber, shaken the grit out of my cloak, and followed the winding tunnels down for another few hours, I'd grown heartily sick of traveling underground.
My fatigue did not keep me from enjoying the sights, however; the territory I passed through was awe-inspiring and beautiful, in an alien sort of way. But the endless blackness, with no shred of sunlight to lift the gloom, the stale air, the constant crunch of grit beneath my boots, the ever-present chill radiating from the stone walls—all these things wore on me. It takes a special type of person to make his home underground, and I am evidently not one of them.
The tunnels grew steeper and narrower the farther I progressed, and I seemed to be walking on a down slope more often than not. I passed through a magnificent chamber with a ceiling so high it was lost in the blackness; a stream of icy-cold water cascaded down one wall and formed a churning pool in the center of the room. I waded gingerly through the pool, staring in fascination at the oily black fish with pure white eyes that swam lazily in the water.
I also traveled through a network of tunnels that crisscrossed like a web. Phosphorescent fungus completely covered the walls; the bulbous growths lit up in unnatural shades of blue, pink, purple, and green in the light of my sunrod. (A good Pathfinder carries multiple light sources. I had three more sunrods, a couple of torches, and a handful of candles tucked into the side-pouches of my backpack, in case of emergency.) When several tunnels intersected they often formed a pocket chamber, some of which contained fungal "trees" ten or twelve feet tall. My fascination ebbed slightly when I found a malformed little skeleton half-buried in one of the trees. Its fungus-covered skull looked up at me with blank sockets, and I shivered and hurried on.
It's hard to gauge the passage of time underground, but I estimate it was around noon when I came to a side-tunnel so steeply sloped it looked more like a chimney. Sharp ridges covered the tunnel's sides, like the ripples of waves. The tunnel was narrow, but almost perfectly square, and the ridges were just the right size to form a ladder, albeit for someone slightly smaller than me. The straightness and angle of the tunnel was too perfect to be natural; someone had carved this tunnel-ladder here, which meant that something interesting probably sat at the bottom.
I leaned into the entrance and looked down as far as I could. The tunnel sloped even more sharply a few feet in, becoming a true chimney, but I s
aw the ridges offered numerous hand- and foot-holds.
As I peered into the black, an echo drifted up the shaft. A series of whispers in a language I didn't understand, and a moment later, an answering whisper from another voice.
Someone was down there.
At first the chimney's walls had seemed wide enough apart to allow some freedom of movement, but close enough together that I could brace my back against the wall while I descended. After a few dozen feet, though, they narrowed to the point where I had trouble stepping down—there wasn't enough room to properly bend my knee. The walls pressed in close around me and my breathing seemed loud in the narrow channel. The ridges offered secure hand-holds, but the rock abraded my skin and occasionally cut my fingers. The farther down I climbed, the narrower the chimney grew, and I began to wonder if I'd stick at some point or be forced to climb back up. So tight were the walls that I couldn't look down past my shoulders. I rested on my toes for a moment to give my arms a break, but the ridges weren't quite wide enough for me to stand on comfortably. That's when I heard the whispers again.
They came quickly, incomprehensible as before and echoing weirdly in the passage. It was as if a hundred strangers each tried to whisper a secret to me all at once. I looked around pointlessly and the whispers died.
"Hello?" I whispered. I felt a bit silly, but I'd heard enough stories of ghosts and phantasms not to discount the possibility of parlay. "Hello, is someone there?"
I remembered the sensation I'd had last time I was hanging from my fingertips and felt as if someone was watching me. Then I'd been certain there was a figure in the darkness, and no one had been there. But I knew I wasn't imagining this sound.
The Compass Stone: The Collected Journals of Eando Kline Page 18