"Hm. I've found his scent," Ehren announces after a few seconds, wrinkling his pig-like nose. "At least I think I have. It is rather... foul."
"Alright, I think I'll be rearguard again. We've got quite a lot of time on Fen'wen's spell, I think, so you guys can stay up front and investigate, and we can give you a bit more room than normal, if you like. That'll help to keep us out of trouble back here. Hrut should probably stay back here with us as well until he can get his helmet back on straight."
"Also... Avi... I have no idea how you're getting along as well as you are." Ary explained. "I was blind for like... six seconds and I was terrified. You're pretty amazing in my book." she shakes her head, slowly.
Valaria nods. "I'll stay up front then. Li'an, if you want to scout with us, I certainly won't say no to an extra sword arm up front. I'm not going to be in shape to put up a good fight until I work that shock out of my system."
Li'an shook her head, wondering why he was so bothered by the appearances. "I'm sorry Horgus, but magic does operate according to certain principles. If we were up at the surface I'd be more cautious about using polymorph, but down here I'm not sure we can afford to hold back."
"Of course, lets get moving. We should go without light as it'll make it less likely he'll know we're coming."
"Yup. That was the plan. You guys outside of the light's range... and me providing light for everyone back here, following up a bit behind."
Ary moves to collect Aravashnial. "I'm ready when you are, Avi." she says as she gets close and leads him back to the group, if he'll follow.
Ehren leads with Valaria and Li'an into the next cavern. A small, extinguished campfire and a well-used bedroll, along with a few utensils and tools, sits near another cave opening in the far wall of the cavern. There are animal bones scattered throughout the campsite, as well as a large of pile of dung. The air is musty, and stale.
"He's not here. Not anymore," Ehren says, managing to refrain from gagging. "Farther ahead, down the other tunnel."
Meanwhile, back with the rear...
Aravashnial nods in acknowledgement of Ary's remark. "Indeed. But I suppose I trudge along," he says, dryly. His moment of cheerfulness has passed, it seems.
Anevia paces back and forth, surprisingly agile with her crutch - though being in the back of the group did not suit her. "Ugh! Freaking Millorn, that jerk."
Valaria nods. "Right." She calls back down the tunnel. "Alright. The next cavern is clear. It reeks, but it's clear."
Ary frowns as she apparently rains on Aravashnial's parade, apparently more at ease with showing her negative emotions when focusing on the blind man. She turned her attention back to the front, looking amongst the others for a moment.
After a pensive moment, she sighs. "I'm gonna keep my word. We'll get you back down here."
Anevia limps around the cavern, managing to find one intact arrow. "Down to nine already," she sighs. She turns towards the tunnel when Valaria calls out for them.
"Great!" she cheers, looking at Ary, Markus, and Hrut. "You heard the lady. Let's go to the reeking cavern!"
Ary moves to the edge of the room at Anevia's insistence, and then waits for the others to press onwards, eyes still moving from statue to statue in the dark.
"Maybe you wanna stay at the front of our group, Hawk?" she suggested to Anevia. "We need the best pair of eyes in the middle of us, so you can see what we've all managed to miss."
Li'an prods the group onward after the crazy dwarf.
"We can double back to here once we've caught Millorn," she says quietly. "Or if we give up tracking him," she thought to herself, "If he gets too much distance on us we might not be able to catch up to him,"
Anevia pushes her way to closer towards the front, nudging the now much taller bugbear-Ehren. "Well, you're the new frontman! Lead the way!" she whispers. The trio lead the way to investigate the farther tunnel.
"So... Avi. What's changed with the Crusader's way of doing things that makes it so that we can enter and exit the Worldwound safely without becoming... well... deformed?"
Valaria looks around, but can't find any trace of the mad dwarf. "Huh, there's some kind of ladder thing over here. It might lead somewhere if we take a look. Don't know if Millorn came through here or not."
Ehren nods at Anevia before proceeding. He was not really used to leading people, but at the moment it was more out of necessity than anything. Unfortunately, despite his newly acquired large, floppy ears, he gets too caught up in using his scent to track. And for good reason.
"He's close," Ehren mutters, looking up the ladder, "And the blood trail ends here - he must be on his way up... or in here with us."
"Shh...," Li'an says, putting her finger up near her mount. She cocks her head and listens intently for a moment. "I can hear him, and there's an empty vial here," she says, pointing at the discarded vial in along the wall's edge. "Another invisibility potion? He's definitely in this passage up somewhere." she says as quietly as possible to the others.
Aravashnial allows Ary to guide him as they go.
"Preparedness. You can avoid corruption with divine magic, but you need to be quick about it, before the corruption takes hold. You never send a group into the Worldwound without a divine caster, or at least a skilled alchemist," he answers her, matter-of-factly. "That wasn't common knowledge, back then."
Ary moves forward into the room as the others move into the next tunnel, bringing Hrut, Aravashnial, and Horgus along with her, while allowing Anevia to lead the way with her sharp eyes.
"Are there any specific tools we can use to keep ourselves safe if we wind up crossing into the Worldwound side of things? If you're right, we're probably still under the city... which... as much as we've been moving is kind of terrifying. Maybe we won't need the crazy dwarf to get aboveground after all.." she sighs.
"I don't suppose any of you three know how true the charges leveraged against him were?" Ary asked. "There's been an awful lot of witch hunting in the last few decades." she frowned.
Ehren was surprised by how easily he could recognize the familiar spell, even by smell. Perhaps the scent triggered some latent instinct? He shakes his head at Li'an.
"It was a healing potion. We have to hurry," he says, looking back up the vertical passage. He then frowns as a certain realization hits him. "It should be easy for everyone to climb... except for Anevia and Aravashnial."
Valaria groans. "Of course, he's trying to patch himself up after getting injured. Hopefully, he's not too healed. He was enough of a pain the first time. Though maybe we'll be lucky and he's out of spells by now."
She looks back at Ary. "He was charged with use of Abyssal magic last year. It seemed like he was guilty, but he vanished before he could be taken by the crusaders. Most people thought he fled Mendev, but apparently he found his way down here and has been hiding out. He'd powerful, but if he was guilty, the Abyssal magic might be why he's lost it."
Anevia glances around, kicking chunks of garbage away from her as she goes. "Yuck. It'd take at least a few minutes to rummage through this junk. Is it even worth it?"
She thinks for a moment, at Ary's question about Millorn.
"I have no idea if he's guilty or not. I know there's been a bounty on his head for several months, though! But really, 'ol Prelate Hulrun hasn't instigated any witch hunts since...well... before my time! Irabeth said that she thinks the higher up Sword Knights must have cracked down on him or something. At least the Eagle Knights always carry out extensive investigations before bringing anyone in."
....
"I can't smell him anymore - he's getting away," Ehren says with some degree of urgency.
"If we're going to go after him, we can climb... or someone could go straight up," he adds vaguely, palming the silver scale he received. "That is the power Terendelev bestowed on my scale."
Ary looks around at the question, and then frowns. "Yeah. It'd be worth it. Don't worry, I'll take care of it. Just chalk it up to being on rear-guard duty." she gives Anevia a small smirk. "I'm glad they look into things. It's a shame you weren't involved in that. It'd be good to know, you know? I do wish he'd tried to kill the Darkmantle over the Drow though..." she sighs as she begins to dig in to the various things, never knowing what she's going to find... and being particularly wary of digging in too deep in the first 'go'. "Thank Iomedae for ending the Witch Hunts..." she said, understanding that it must have been a necessity if Iomedae let it continue in her name. That didn't mean she particularly liked Hulrun. But she also wouldn't exactly bring up her particular feelings about her commander, either... unless it became important.
Rearguard:
"Working the rearguard is extra s#%$ty," Anevia half-jokes. She helps them rummage around Millorn's stuff for the next few minutes and find the following not-disgusting things:
- Dirty, smelly bedroll (5 lbs)
- Small pack filled with 6 lbs of dried meat of questionable origin. (could last a single person 6 days)
- A chipped 6-inch-tall marble statuette of a humanoid throwing a spear.
-----
Ehren/Li'an/Valaria:
A roiling wave of clouds appears below Ehren's feet, giving him the ability to propel himself upwards while leaving a thick mist in his wake. He levitates upwards for 20 feet, and sees that above him the tunnel he is in abruptly levels out once more at 60 ft. He comes close enough to Millorn to smell him. Following, he floats slowly upwards to see down the tunnel, and is able to simply step off of the wave of clouds onto the ground. Twenty feet away, he can see a swinging bladed pendulum trap, humming as it swipes back and forth on accord of its own momentum.
Before Ehren's eyes, he sees Millorn dash into the pendulum trap and become cleaved in two, the invisibility spell wearing off as he dies. It catches the acid-blinded dwarf unawares and so he does not even scream. His two bleeding halves are on either side of the pendulum.
Ary will snatch up anything that she happens to personally find to show the others. She isn't going to take the bedroll, but the dried meat is food (albeit food that is likely best given to someone else). If she's the one who finds the statue, she'll grab it as well, looking it over with curiosity.
Valaria follows Ehren up, climbing the rough trail of pitons driven into the wall. As she reaches the top, her eyes go wide at the sight of the crippled dwarf dying to the trap. "Oh dear." She hauls herself up. "That... that looked unpleasant." Seeing him cut down so easily by the trap makes her shiver.
Ehren's eyes widen when he sees the deadly trap, and hearing the patter of the dwarf's feet, he sees what comes next a mile away.
"Millorn, no!" he calls out to the invisible dwarf, far too late to do any good. He cringes as the pendulum cleaves him in two, killing him in an instant. That his death was probably painless seemed to be the only consolation.
"I... killed him," Ehren murmurs as Valaria reaches his side. If he had been able to see... He promptly shakes his head, quickly bringing an end to that train of thought. "No, he... he brought it on himself. He would have tried to attack us again. I... want to believe that."
Li'an follows Valaria up the wall cautiously, not having the benefit of the magic that Ehren had. She gets a hint something is wrong as Val pauses momentarily when reaching the top. "What happened?" she calls out, continuing climbing when Valaria makes it to the top.
It takes her a few moments once she reaches the top for her to realize exactly what she's seeing. "Oh Lleuad... what a horrible fate," she said seeing the dwarf's body bisected. As she moves up she puts a hand on Ehren's shoulder and shakes her head. "I don't think any of us wanted him dead like this," Li'an says, trying her best to help Ehren feel better about the situation. "Trying to assign blame in this situation won't help anyone, after all, it was my magic that caused him to attack us in the first place. But he might just as easily have attacked us even without us having been polymorphed, and he may very well have tripped and died to the trap even if he'd been fleeing from us without having been injured by your spell."
Li'an stepped past Ehren cautiously, looking at the ground for the trigger that had set off the pendulums in the first place. She avoided looking at the dwarf's body and instead focused her mind on the workings of the fiendish trap before them.
She knelt down carefully, freeing the small burlap bundle lashed tightly to the bottom of her pack. As the bundle unrolls a fine set of lockpicks and other assorted tools is revealed.
"We'll have to be extra cautious from here on, this is a rather intricate trap. It's unlikely this is the only one."
"We should cover him up... and figure out if we can bury him somewhere. We can't just leave him here in the hall like this." she adds, speaking up after a few minutes of focusing on the mechanisms of the trap.
"He died in a trap. You couldn't have predicted that. It wasn't your fault. It was just an accident." She nods. "Yeah. He was clearly completely mad. Even if we could have calmed him, there's nothing much we could have done about it. It might be better than he went quickly rather than continuing to live down here like that." She gestures back to the filthy chamber that appeared to be Millorn's home. She glances around, looking for more traps and wondering what's ahead.
"Right, even if he attacked us, we can't just leave him here." She walks up to the dwarf's body and after a moment's hesitation, pats him down. It feels a bit like desecrating his body, but lacking most of her supplies and injured, she feels a bit desperate. Once she gives him a once over, she pulls his two halves back a bit, giving Li'an room to work. "I think I'm going to need help moving him if we're going to take the body elsewhere. I'm not terribly strong."
Markus follows along silently for the next couple of minutes, having done what he can to help out the group and staying with the rearguard. When they reach the ladder-thingy, and Ehren uses his scale to propel himself up, he turns to Anevia and Aravashnial. "We've reached a place that requires climbing - I have one of the same scales that Ehren does, and if we decide to go up, I'm going to have to use it on you so that you can get up."
"I have to say..." Ary says humorlessly, "This is not the palace I was looking for. Poor guy was beyond crazy." she says with a sigh, as she looks through the various belongings in the area.
Then as Ehren calls out about Millorn, Ary is dragging Aravashnial that way, hurrying to ensure that her allies are okay... for all she knows they're about to fall on her in a heap.
Seeing nothing bad happening, Ary seems to be better-settled. "So yours lets you do floaty things?" she asks Markus.
Ehren/Li'an/Valaria
Valaria takes the time to search Millorn's lower half. She finds:
- 2 scrolls in a scrollcase on his waist.
- His spellbook, written in Dwarven.
- His moneypurse which contains 8 platinum pieces, 7 gold pieces, minted in Nerosyan.
------
Rearguard
Horgus is repulsed beyond comprehension. Really, it was not possible to do much of anything in this cavern without touching something soiled. He quickly moves to the other side of the cavern as Markus goes, eager to be away from the place.
Aravashnial and Anevia follow Ary into the tunnel. Anevia peers up and into the darkness.
"This would be an easy climb," she sighs.
Given that they don't come back down, Ary takes the time to cleanse the statue using her extra waterskin. "We keep finding stuff that's mostly useless. I'd kill to find a cold iron dagger, or... well... anything. I've found a statue you might be interested in, Avi... but we'll need to get it cleaned up first." she explains.
"And yeah... I agree, Horgus. But on the bright side... if we are trapped down here, I can eat this, and you'll have my trail rations." she sighs softly. Horgus wasn't really meant to be here, in this sort of stuff; same probably went for a lot of the others, but they were all taking it so well. Ary had actively signed on for this sort of thing. Horgus was in Kenabres as a merchant, not as a soldier... so she was likely latching on to the fact that he really was a civilian.
Valaria examines the scroll case, but can't read the scrolls inside. She looks over at Ehren and offers him both the case and the book. "I think he's got some scrolls on him, and a spell book of course. Why don't you hang on to them, or pass them off to Markus or Aravashnial if they're not of any uses to you."
She weighs the purse in one hand, impressed by how much the mad dwarf had collected, then attaches it to her belt, separate from her personal purse. She figures they can find a good use for the money later, or simply divide it among themselves.
Horgus sniffs. "I'd expect no less, naturally," he says to Ary.
Markus takes a cursory look over both of the scrolls, but he finds that he can't decipher what either of them do. When he sees Ehren take the spellbook, though, he stops. "Hey, hand that to me, will you?" Assuming he complies, he approaches Li'an. "You're a burgeoning arcanist, aren't you? You won't find a better object of study than this." he says, handing her the spellbook.
Anevia grins as Markus channels Terendelev's power, granting her the ability to float upwards. But when he turns to Aravashnial, the elf shakes his head, already twirling a small leather loop around his fingers to help him cast the spell himself, though his spell does not manifest as wispy clouds like Terendelev's does. Aravashnial allows Anevia to help guide him up the shaft and safely into the next tunnel.
Horgus, still on the bottom, experimentally hoists himself up onto the lowest pitons before stopping to complain, "That's...a really long way up." He looks afraid, staring up into the darkness.
"I can help you up, if you like, and don't mind riding on insubstantial clouds." offers Markus, offering up the scale for Horgus to see. "It'll be safer but it'll feel just as weird."
Ehren nods at the others appreciatively, feeling a little foolish for blaming himself for even a second. Still, he thinks, glancing again at the halves of Millorn's body, it was not a good way to go. Using his magical senses, he attempts to identify the scrolls the dwarf was carrying.
Unfortunately, both of them manage to elude him as well. When Markus asks for the spellbook, Ehren offers it up without resistance. It was not of any use to him, after all.
Faced with the prospect of losing his grip and falling from a very long way up and magical protection, Horgus chooses the latter. He wobbles clumsily back and forth as he floats up to the top of the shaft.
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Li'an pulls the lever to disable the device, and notices a tripwire up ahead as she does. "Careful, there's a tripwire up here that will reactivate the trap." she says to the others. Moving up to the tripwire, she cautiously disconnects it so they'll be able to avoid setting it off.
After she finishes up with the trap, she joins Markus and Ehren to look at the scrolls and spellbook. "Thank you Markus, I'm rather interested to have a look at these," she says as she takes the spellbook and scrolls. Calling forth her innate magic, she grants herself the ability to read the scrolls.
"Hmm, this appears to be a scroll of shocking grasp, and this second one is resist energy." After determining the contents of the scrolls, she cracks open the spellbook to take a look through it quickly. Noting that it appears to be written in dwarven, she stops again to call upon her innate magics. When she finishes casting, she begins flipping through the book attempting to determine the contents of the spellbook, interested in what the dwarf had access to.
When she finishes, she offers to help Valaria with disposing of the poor dwarf's corpse.
Earlier:
Hrut startles on the ground, thrashing and gasping for air.
"I cant breathe!" He gasps as he realizes he is now awake and no longer in the darkness.
"Thank you Markus for mending my wounds, those dark mantles are terrible creatures, I know now I need a way to see in the dark..."
Perhaps later I can check with the wizards to see what my options would be to see in the dark...
----------
Now:
"Good riddance to that vile dwarf, he was a disgrace to his race at the very least. With those pitons and the rope I should be able to climb up this rock face to save you some of your scale magic."
I am more of a dwarf then that stinky evil troll!
Hrut begins getting out his own rope, hammer and pitons.
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Ary would hold up the rear, waiting for everyone else to go up, then goes up, personally. She'd only given Horgus a small smile when he said that it was the natural thing to do. As she watched everyone else go up, she had a chance to frown, rolling her shoulders and slumping slightly.
Being a hero was hard... she was sure she was going to die when Markus saved her. What if Terendelev had made a mistake. Ary had failed at every real undertaking of importance and chance to shine that had appeared before her. So, why, of all people, did Terendelev choose her..? She could have saved Anevia from being a cripple, or the High Priest from death, or Aravashnial from being blinded. A boy who could talk to the wards, a man whose very future thrummed with power and untapped energy, a man who was able to cleave demons in two without cold iron, and a pair of women who'd been adventuring since before she was born.
Her eyes fell on her shield, and she sighed softly; maybe Terendelev had been saving her bloodline, not her. And so she climbed, behind Hrut; the most trudge-like climb she'd ever managed.
Hrut begins climbing the ladder after noticing it is not as difficult as he first thought.
Beyond the trap the narrow, ten-foot wide tunnel continues ever onward into the darkness, at a slight upwards incline.