Age of Worms - the slow way

[Luke]

Jay grew up on the streets of Diamond Lake. She learned the hard way which purses to cut, and which of the town’s characters to avoid. The street urchins of the town constitute an almost invisible class, so Jay benefits from having a lot of local knowledge without having any local notoriety. Currently Jay is ‘in money’, having recently lifted a drunk merchant’s purse to the tune of several silver pieces. She is boarding at the Flophouse, at least until the money runs out. She owns a long knife (short sword), a beat-up crossbow she swiped off a corpse in the street, and the equivalent of dilapidated leather armor. She also has a set of home-made thieves’ tools and a couple of bolts.
As a local, Jay has a couple of useful friends in town. The most important (and perhaps strangest given her klepto nature) is a young adept of the deity Heironeous named Will. She and Will have been friends for years. She’s tried to dissuade him from following the self-righteous path of Heironeous, but has ultimately failed. She sees her friend either embracing the attitudes of the church, potentially souring their friendship, or digging himself further into a pit of eschatological confusion as he’s forced to reconcile the high-minded beliefs of Heironean justice with the realities of life in Diamond Lake’s squalid streets.
She’s also on familiar terms with several of the town’s performers and ‘professional’ women. She’s occasionally earned money as one of several girls who dance in elevated cages in the Emporium’s upstairs ‘Chamber of Oerthly Wonders’, but each time she’s done this she’s regretted it; both for the unwanted advances of the onlookers and for the limited notoriety she’s gained. In general, she’s a shy girl who prefers to work from the shadows while others attract attention.
As the opening scene begins, she’s in search of a purse to cut or some expensive article to lift and has marked a stranger in the street. The stranger is a solid looking young woman dressed in dusty country clothes and carrying on her hip an obviously expensive long sword.

Ashley, or ‘Ash’ as her friends call her, grew up on a remote homestead some miles south of Diamond Lake. Like her mother and her mother’s mother, she spent her childhood learning all the skills necessary to keep up a woman’s end of the work on a family farm. Unlike them, she learned early how to fight for herself among a pack of wild siblings. She has a reputation for losing her temper in a bad way, and flying into a fury that she has to struggle to suppress. And then there are the days she really loses it…
Like one day last week when a local lord hunting the woods surrounding the family farm found this out the hard way. He made a pass at Ash that turned insistent, then naturally turned to her thumping his skull with the pommel of his own sword. Fearing what the noble might do to her family, she packed up a hurried bunch of supplies and bid her family goodbye. She also took the noble’s sword with the intention of selling it when she ran out of supplies.
Her road has led her to Diamond Lake, to a bar called the Feral Dog, and inadvertently into a pit fight between two snarling dogs with men calling out wagers from every corner - and a local thief in tow. She pressed her way up to the rail to see what was in the pit and got felt up for her trouble. After what she’d been through in the last week, the results were perhaps predictable. She turned around and prepared to whale upon the offender, only to find herself chest-high to a behemoth of a half-Orc with a scar across his face. That was another time she lost it.

Jay couldn’t say that she ‘saw’ what happened next, but the crowd’s volume certainly rose an octave as her mark lost her balance and fell into the dog pit along with another unlucky spectator. ‘Unbelievable’, she thought, ‘how am I going to get her purse now?’
She dodged through the first exchanges of a general melee that was breaking out across the bar and looked down into the pit. The bumpkin had drawn the pretty sword and was putting one dog out of its misery with it. The other spectator was mauled and dying, the other dog was dead, and the angry girl waving the sword was calling out to her for a hand. She couldn’t get out, of course! Jay felt a sudden pang of sympathy for the girl and ran out to offer a hand. The fight in the common room was starting to get on now, with the wagers from the pit-fight leaking from balled fists and dropping among the sawdust and potsherds on the floor. A neat silver stack of winnings at the game-maker’s table was swept into the crowd in the melee.
Up came the fighter out of the pit and the two made for the rear door of the bar, Jay pocketing stray coins on her way out.
‘Come on,’ Jay said, ‘before Kullen sees you again.’ Then with a giggle, ‘You’re nuts!’

She led Ash through alleys down to Jalek’s on the lake front. She paid her daily at the door box and Ashley’s as well and found her friend Will waiting for her at the foot of the steps.

Like Jay, Will also grew up in Diamond Lake. Will’s father was a member of the garrison for over a decade, and Will grew-up in and around the fortress that stands on the town’s eastern eaves. As a boy, Will showed an obvious inclination to follow in his father’s footsteps. No one was more surprised than Will’s father when he began to show some natural affinity for divine magic. The boy entered the service of the clerics of Heironeous, and was schooled in the rules of chivalrous and honorable conduct and combat.
Things changed for Will with the violent passing of his father. He boarded at the chapel of Heironeous as an orphan for the last years of his childhood when it became obvious that no one knew any other living members of his father’s or mother’s family to take him. He proved a competent swordsman, but a somewhat headstrong and independent-minded student.
He also spent a lot of time in Diamond Lake proper, which brought its own set of lessons. Survival in a miner’s town is a matter of picking your fights and learning to avoid desperate people. Still, he did make friends with other town youths, and the best of these was Jay. Jay was enterprising – he really had to wonder, for he couldn’t ask how she’d managed to stay off the streets in Diamond Lake. They had an unspoken agreement not to discuss what laws may have been broken in conducting the business of the day.
His present focus on a cleansing prayer was broken when Jay walked into the flophouse with a tall stranger wearing a sword. They obviously had a story to tell, so they found their way upstairs to a small room that their paid fees entitled them to take. There the three of them talked away much of the night huddled around a beat-up old lamp clutching pints of cheap beer. Will mentioned that he’d seen a band of adventurers in town – had talked to one of them, and they made no secret of the fact that they were going to explore the Stirgenest Cairn. He and Jay had a good laugh over that. They explained to Ash that Stirgenest was a frequent rendezvous for local youths, and that there was certainly little mystery left in the place but there might be an eyeful of something else.
Jay then started talking about another place; one that did still hold for her and most of the other youths of the town a bit of mystery. This was the dark hillside arch they called the Whispering Cairn. Only a few of the kids in town ever dared to go very far into that well-hidden tomb, and those few had returned shaken, with stories of ghosts moving about and murmuring inside. Jay knew a girl who’d spent a night in the cairn on a dare, and truly never came back out.
At the end of the lamp’s oil, the three of them were tucked into bedrolls in the corners of the room, talking themselves through the late buzz of the beer and into slumber.
‘Maybe we should go check out this place – the Whispering Cairn,’ Ash said tiredly. ‘If there’s something of value in there, my bet’s we could find a use for it.’

‘Yeah,’ Will muttered. ‘Tomorrow. I’m sure I could face the place in the light of day.’
Jay snored softly.

[Luke]

Will woke to the sound of Ash running her long blade over a whetstone. Jay was huddled in the corner beside her, talking quietly about the likelihood of anything good coming from a trip into the Whispering Cairn.
‘Let’s just go look at the place,’ Ash suggested. ‘We can decide when we get there. Look, you don’t have anything better to do…right? So let’s go take a peek.’
Will caught the thread of the conversation. It was time to pray for strength for the coming day. ‘Combat it is,’ he thought.

The dark arch in question lay in a moist and deeply shaded glen of hardwoods tucked into the shoulder of one of the region’s hills. The dome of the mound was probably once barren, but tall trees had long since ascended the hill, concealing the cairn from the hillside track that ran through this pass. Jay led the party as quietly as possible through the tangled undergrowth of the forest, and to the entrance itself.
A wet wind picked up, filling the air with the sound of the trees rustling. Then lower, a barely perceptible moan that seemed to escape the cavern mouth, rising in time with the wind into the hint of whispered speech.
‘Are we really doing this?’ Jay asked.
‘Let’s see what’s in there,’ Will replied. ‘I’m tired of being poor. How can I ever get anywhere in the church with absolutely no money to my name?’
‘Right,’ Jay said with a sigh.
Ash nodded curtly and began padding toward the door. Jay lit a torch they’d brought along, handed it to Will, and silently eased by Ash and over the threshold. If anything, the moaning breeze seemed a bit louder within the passage, the whispering closer to perceptible words, though not in any language Jay recognized. She tightened her grip on the pommel of her drawn short sword and stalked further down the passage.
Around a corner to the left a wide and shallow alcove opened containing an old rag that might have once been a blanket and a family of roaches who scattered as she nudged the debris. Will moved up with the torch, lighting up the central passage that stabbed further into the hillside.
Jay crept further into the gloomy passage, uncovering another set of alcoves, these slightly deeper than the last. Jay motioned for Will and Ash to explore the alcove to the left while she found a dark shadow to crouch in at the edge of the torch light.
At the end of the alcove, Will and Ash discovered part of a standing oval frame and some shattered pieces of a black glassy substance. They were just able to exchange a couple of whispers when they heard a cry of warning from Jay in the hall. A pair of snarling wolves had crept up to her position from further into the tomb, and were crouched in front of her, hackles raised and obviously working themselves up to attack. Suddenly, a much larger wolf bounded past the two and over the dodging rogue.
Ash hoisted the wooden shield she’d purchased on her way out of town and charged to her friend’s aid. Will brandished the torch like a weapon. The passage was filled with the stench of burnt fur and the animal shrieks of the wolves as they fell, one by one, to blade and flame.
The three of them stood hunched to catch their breaths and examined their scrapes and bruises.
‘Okay. I think that made enough noise to awaken anything that might be wake-able in here. Let’s dispense with the sneaking thing and do this right.’ Ash’s voice was calculated to echo down the dark hall.
Jay took the torch and led the way, searching for signs of traps or ambushes. The other two followed close behind her, weapons ready.
The opposite alcove was completely collapsed. Ash tried to shift a couple of blocks, but only made more fall from the ceiling. They retreated back to the central hall and turned further into the tomb. Soon they came to a wide diamond-shaped gallery with halls running from its four corners. Straight ahead, the passage went down a short flight of steps that was completely choked with cobwebs. Beyond the webbing, an eerie green light flickered.
‘That can’t be good,’ Jay whispered.
To the right, the passage was again collapsed, but this time there was a gap under a slab that seemed to lead beyond the constriction.
Jay wiggled into the musty crawlspace and emerged into a small chamber filled with rubble and bones. She rummaged around and found a metal armband that looked like gold and a decrepit backpack containing a large hanging lamp with panes of deep blue glass. Inside the lamp was a sconce to hold a torch.
Down the passage to the left, they came to a raised dais. Standing on the dais, it was possible to make out just enough of a peeled mural that wrapped around the walls and seemed to portray another chamber. The painting showed seven alcoves, each with a different colored light at its end. The group stared at this for a few moments before turning their attention back to the cobwebs and the green light.
‘If we run into something in here that doesn’t know it’s dead, you get to deal with it.’ Jay said to Will. ‘You’re the one who’s tired of being poor.’
With that, she thrust the torch into the webs and began burning her way down the steps. The light seemed to remain stationary in the room beyond, which helped stiffen Jay’s resolve to continue into the dark tomb. Soon it was apparent that the light was coming from a green flame, flickering weakly on the other side of a huge diamond-shaped chamber with a high domed ceiling. Spaced evenly around the room were seven dark arches, one in each of the other three corners of the room, and four more, one bisecting each of the four sides of the diamond. The green flame flickered beyond the arch opposite the party as they filtered into the chamber. In the center of the room was a raised platform, upon which sat a long stone sarcophagus.
Will whistled quietly. ‘It’s just like the mural we saw back there. Except without the colored lights. Well I suppose there is green.’
‘I gotta know what that is,’ Jay whispered, indicating the green light. She lit another torch that Will pulled out of his back and stalked around the platform. Ash circled the platform with Will, looking for traps or hidden enemies.

‘You guys!’ Jay’s whispered call came echoing, amplified, from beyond the green arch. ‘It’s another one of those lamps. And it’s got a long chain.’
Past the arch, the ceiling of the tunnel was maybe fifteen feet off the ground. But at the end of the tunnel, the lamp’s chain stretched up into the darkness to a barely perceptible ceiling, some forty feet above. The chain returned from the heights at an angle and was anchored chest-high on the wall. Ash came over and freed the chain to lower the eerie lantern down to Jay.
The lamp door opened to reveal a torch within. ‘What kind of torch keeps burning in an old tomb?’ Jay asked, as she waived the torch about. ‘It’s not hot. Some kind of illusion, I guess.’
Each of the other arches contained a chain, and four of the remaining six contained a different colored lamp. There was already a lighter shade of blue with the lamp intact. Beneath the blue lamp was a long-desiccated corpse. The blue lamp they’d found must be a darker shade, they figured, and hung the lamp on the chain of the second-to-last arch, which was indeed missing its lamp.
‘All we’re missing is the one that probably should be red,’ Will said. ‘Maybe it’s in the sarcophagus?’
‘Could be,’ said Jay, now finally turning her attention to the platform and the coffin. She lightly sprang up onto the stone table and began going over the thing, looking for a crevice and scanning for signs of danger. ‘Ash, come give me a hand with this thing. The lid’s too heavy. Will, back up. You never know what could happen…’

A bright burst of magical fire, this time the burning kind, flashed out in a wide arc, catching Ash in the midsection with its blast. Jay sprang on top of the sarcophagus lid and avoided the flames, but also caused the lid to slide off the sarcophagus and crash to the floor where it broke.
Jay peaked over the smoldering side and into the coffin as Will healed Ash’s burns.
‘Nothing.’ Jay sighed. ‘There’s nothing in here. You’re still poor, Will.’ Jay sat down heavily beside Ash. ‘You okay? Sorry about that. I guess we should have seen that coming.’
‘Don’t worry about it. Maybe something happens when you light the lamps?’
‘Here’s something curious,’ called Will, standing over the sarcophagus lid. ‘The carvings on this lid look like an arrow. It would have pointed at the orange arch.’
‘Then let’s light that lamp,’ Ash suggested.
Jay placed the illusion torch in the orange lamp and the room was filled with flickering orange light rather than green.
‘Well that was disappointing. I’m checking out the lamps again,’ said Jay. Ash and Will tried to make out what the symbol on the coffin façade’s neck could mean while Jay started snooping around the lamps again.
‘Guys, I think we missed something here,’ Jay called from the blue arch. ‘The ceiling’s higher. I bet dead Fred here fell to his death trying to find out how high the ceiling is.’

‘That doesn’t sound like such a bad idea,’ said Ash, giving Jay a significant look. ‘The climbing part, not the falling to his death part,’ she added.
‘Let’s see if this helps,’ Will said as he picked up a small rock and cast a light spell on it. He began throwing the stone into the air and catching it, higher and higher. ‘It looks like there’s a passage way up there.’
Moments later, the blue lamp was removed and Jay was using the chain to help her climb up the narrow passage, lit stone clenched in her teeth.
‘Okay, I’m up,’ Jay called down. ‘It’s a narrow little tunnel that seems to go a ways. Give me a minute to look around.’
The light from the stone faded at the top and Jay’s voice became a confusion of echoes as she receded down the high passage.
‘There’s marks all over the floor, like something scratched it. Maybe something pushed that guy off the ledge. There must be a trap here somewhere.’ Then a few moments later. ‘Aha! Here we go. It’s a pressure plate, and there’s some kind of screaming face carved into the end of the tunnel.’ She went very quiet then for another few moments, then called down to them again, this time in more of a loud whisper. ‘It has some seams in it. I think it’s a door.’
She appeared at the top of the passage again, glowing stone in hand. ‘You guys grab a bunch of rocks from the rubble up the hall and stick them in a sack. Then tie the sack to this chain and send them up to me. I have an idea to outwit this trap.’

Soon the sack of stones was hoisted up the chute. Jay placed the sack on the far side of the pressure plate, then backed up to the mouth of the passage. ‘Get ready, guys. I may need to come down this chain pretty quick.’
She pulled the rope, and the sack slid onto the pressure plate. Several things happened in quick succession. There was a soft click, as some unseen stone trigger slid into place. The mouth at the end of the tunnel opened, and the eyes sprang to life, alternating a rapid series of colors.
‘Red, yellow, green, blue, purple, violet’ Jay called down repeatedly in a dreamy voice. Ash looked up questioningly at the mouth of the passage above, seeing the weird lights reflect off the opposite wall. Suddenly there was a violent puff of wind that spat out of the mouth, blowing Jay’s hair off her shoulders and startling her from a near trance. A low and building sound of wind racing through passages in the walls suddenly filled Jay’s ears. She began backing towards the long drop behind her.
Then, all at once, a screaming tempest of wind came blowing out of the stone mouth, filling the small passage. Jay slid back over the precipice and was falling. In sheer desperation, she threw out her arms and caught the lamp’s thick chain. For a moment, she hung there trying desperately to resist the terrible strength of the wind blowing down at her. Then something whipped up and stung her on the cheek. It was her rope. The rope she tied to a bag of heavy rocks!
She looked up and in the crazy repeated light pattern, she caught a glimpse of something lumpy and grey coming over the edge. She let go and dropped the rest of the way to the floor, rolling in a tumble at the end to pad the fall. The pain of her landing barely registered, through the insistent need to get away from the passage before the rocks came hurtling down. She dove out of the passage, hit the floor hard, and was blown by the wind across the floor of the chamber and up against the sarcophagus platform.
She huddled there at the base of the sarcophagus until the howling wind finally subsided.
‘Well, did you outwit the trap?’ Ash asked shakily, dusting herself off as she regained her feet.
‘Next time, I’m leaving you in the pit with the dogs,’ Jay answered, rubbing her bruised backside.
‘I can heal that,’ Will said, coming up out of the open sarcophagus and covered in a thick coat of ancient dust.

[Luke]

They gathered again at the foot of the platform in the center of the room, Ash retrieving the magically glowing stone lost in the tempest wind. Jay paced in front of them.
‘When you were calling out colors from up above, you didn’t list orange,’ Will said. ‘Did you see orange in the light pattern?’
‘I’m not sure. Was I calling out colors? They kind of dazed me for a second there.’
‘I don’t think you called out orange.’ Then, after another moment and in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘We need to light all the other lamps. That will disarm the trap.’
‘Well, the red lamp isn’t there, so that’s task number one,’ said Jay.
They sat there awhile, pondering the puzzle.
‘There’s nowhere left to go,’ Will said. ‘Aren’t we out of passages?’
‘Maybe the red lamp is not even here,’ Jay continued. ‘We might have to defeat the trapped door another way.’
Jay and Ash sat there in frustrated silence, pondering through the things they’d tried. Will stood staring at the broken sarcophagus lid, scratching three days of chin growth.
‘The lid!’ Will said suddenly. ‘The arrow was pointed at the orange tunnel. Maybe the sarcophagus turns.’
Jay and Ash got up, and the three of them tried to move the ancient stone container. They struggled for awhile, trying different holds, spitting on their hands and rubbing them together, and any other trick they could think of to get the thing to move; yet all they accomplished was the vague sense that it started to move, but bent back to place when they stopped pushing.
In the end, it took Ash losing her temper to get the box to finally rotate. Both Will and Jay backed away, worried about getting between her and the object of her fury. She punched it, kicked it, hurled country insults learned from her coarse brothers, and finally bent to the task with all her might. With a loud crack, the head of the container rotated around a hidden axis under its center. When it was pointed at the next arch, the yellow arch, it seemed to settle into an unseen groove.
There was a barely perceptible rumbling from somewhere far beneath them.
‘Something’s coming out of the ground,’ Jay said.
A plate that none of them had seen, a round block in the stone floor, lifted out and a cylindrical chamber rose up out of the hole that was uncovered. The chamber came to a stop under the lamp. It was about seven feet tall and was covered in runes and strange patterned carvings. A door in the face of the contraption slid open with a grating noise that echoed in the domed chamber. The three of them stood there for a moment in silence, waiting for something else to happen. The chamber shifted slightly in place as if it was being buffeted by air from beneath.
‘I bet you’re expecting me to check that out, huh?’ Jay asked.
She slinked over to the arch and approached the curious device.
‘It’s only big enough for one of us. Light a torch and throw me the rock and I’ll check out the inside.’
Will re-lit the torch and came over to stand beside Jay. Jay took the lit stone and stepped gingerly into the small chamber. As soon as she was completely within, the stone door snapped shut, and the rumbling began again. This time the floor under Jay’s feet was shaking slightly, and she had the vague sense that the chamber was moving, her stomach told her down. After a moment, the shaking stopped and the door slid open again, revealing inky, stale blackness beyond.
Jay drew her blade and carefully stepped out of the cylinder and into the musty chamber beyond. The limited light revealed intricate bas-relief statues in the walls covered in the dust of the ages, all facing the center of the square chamber and extending their arms as if in supplication to that spot. Their faces were slightly upturned towards her, their mouths open as if singing. It looked like there was a passage leading from the hall opposite where she’d entered, but a large block of stone, apparently dropped from the ceiling, was all but blocking the doorway. A small sliver of darkness between the top of the block and the door frame hinted at a deep chamber of sorts beyond.
Jay turned back to the device. Could she go back up the way she came? She didn’t want to continue without her friends. She stepped back into the small chamber, the door hissed closed behind her, and the device began to rumble and rise back up into the hall of lamps.
Ash and Will were relieved to see the chamber return and for their friend to step out of it intact and unharmed. They talked for a moment and resolved to go down one at a time. Jay went back down with the stone, then sent the car back up by using a magical sigil she found on the wall. Soon Will and Ash were helping her examine the wall carvings.
‘They’re so life-like,’ Ash wondered.
‘They’re creepy. It’s like they were frozen in stone.’ Jay ran her hands over a child in the frieze, his head upturned and mouth open in apparent song. ‘How could they have carved the mouths this deep? I can reach my entire hand…wait.’ Jay called to them suddenly. ‘You guys stop touching the statues and back up. There’s some kind of nozzle in here, like something’s supposed to spray out of the sculpture’s mouth. This has to be some kind of trap.’
She too backed into the center of the room and started looking at it with different eyes.
‘The block falls, maybe crushing you… maybe trapping you in the room…maybe both if there’s more than one of you.’ She paused for another moment.
‘Then the gas turns on and kills you when you can’t get out. And I don’t see any bodies, so whoever tripped it must have gotten away. I wonder how much of this tomb has already been plundered?’
‘There’s really only one way to find out,’ Ash replied. ‘Let’s get that block moved and find out where the passage leads.’
‘Hang on a minute. That block might have triggered the gas, which means that the trigger for the block and the gas is probably underneath. There’s a chance that if we get the block to move, it will trigger the trap again. Start cutting strips of our sack and I’ll try to find all the nozzles. We can stuff them up. Maybe they’ll hold the gas out of the room if the trap does go off.’
The task accomplished, the three once again put down what gear they possessed and began to struggle with the block.
‘I think,’ said Ash, pausing between exertions, ‘that if I was to push as hard as I could and you ran up and gave the block a big shove, we might get the thing to topple out of the way.’
They did this, and the block did go over with a deafening crash that shook the floor and filled the room with a cloud of fine dust. The sound echoed down the long, dark hallway they’d uncovered by moving the block. Behind them, there was an almost imperceptible hissing.
‘Ash, I think you’re stepping on the trap’s trigger.’
Ashley looked down, then sheepishly moved her foot, allowing the flagstone beneath to rise up out of the ground a bit.
‘Good thing you outwitted this one,’ Ash said with a wink. ‘Your rags seem to be holding.’
‘I’m not sure for how much longer,’ Jay answered, attempting to peer at one of the gagged statues from a distance. Tiny wisps of a green gas leaked around the rag and drifted into the room. ‘We need to make tracks. No telling what that stuff is.’
Jay once again took the lead, with Will carrying a torch behind her and Ash bringing up the rear. The walls bore swirling carved patterns that reminded her of smoke. Ahead, pairs of tall statues flanked the passage, their hands held aloft and cupped as if holding something. Jay cautiously moved up to the first statue, examining the stonework and trying to see up into its outstretched hands.
Out of the corner of her eye, Jay saw something move behind the statue’s shoulder. A strange chill sensation welled up inside her, but she suppressed the surprising emotion and drew her blade. ‘I bet its some kind of big spider,’ she thought. She hated spiders passionately, and she was anxious to kill the thing if it was a spider. She moved around to the left of the statue to get a better look at what might be hiding behind the statue, when Ash suddenly shrieked.
Jay spun around to see Will collapse to the ground unconscious. Hovering in front of them was an eyeball. Two of them, in fact, connected by a stringy piece of gristle. Jay sliced at the thing with her blade, but one of the eyeballs dipped with surprising speed and her blade cut only the dusty air. The nimble eyeball spun around and focused its bloodshot orb on her. The alien pupil flared, and she again felt a panicky fear wash over her body like ice water.
Jay stepped back away from the nasty thing just in time, for a great overhead chop from Ashley’s sword caught the monstrosity it in its connecting muscle body, severing it clean. The oversized eyeballs fell to the ground with a squish.

Ash dropped down to the ground next to Will, taking his head onto her lap and lifting his eyelid to peer into his eye.
‘I think he’s asleep,’ she said. ‘Alright now honey,’ she said in a fake mothering tone as she slapped Will’s cheeks. ‘The bad thing’s not gonna get you… and you really need to wake up.’
Jay turned back to the unexplored hallway once both her friends were awake and armed. Together, they continued down the hall towards a wide room that opened into murky darkness ahead, pausing to examine each of the five remaining statues. As she edged farther down the passage, she could make out a soft glow of dim light.
‘Is it getting colder?’ Jay asked, as they reached the hallway’s end and emerged into a large, dimly lit room. ‘I have gooseflesh.’
Before them, a great column of stone dominated the wide room. To the right they could make out a dark arch with a soft glowing light beyond. To the left was darkness.
They edged around the left side of the column, letting the light from their torch shine to the back wall of the room. The left side of the pillar appeared to be obscured by yet another great block that had apparently fallen from the ceiling and smashed into the ground, shattering the stone under their feet. Something was crushed under the block, preventing it from settling evenly on the floor of the chamber. A wide arch in the left wall of the room led to another room.
Working together, the three of them managed to upset the block, sending it crashing to the floor and raising another tremendous cloud of dust. On the floor amid an ugly stain were the remains of some unfortunate tomb robber who’d been crushed to death, along with all manner of debris.
Will poked through the remains with his sword while Jay focused on the few pegs not ruined by the falling block. There was a tray with two wands in it, as well as a pair of crystalline goggles hanging from an intact peg.
‘This guy’s armor survived that crushing?’ Will asked in a wondering voice. The corpse’s chain armor was in remarkable shape. ‘Reconditioned, this could certainly serve me better than it serves him,’ he said, as he began to gingerly strip the link shirt from the shattered husk of a body.
Jay looked over the wands but couldn’t really make anything of them. They packed all the items into Ashley’s empty pack and moved over to the open arch along the chamber wall.
The room beyond the arch was almost bare, though there was a carving of another hairless being wearing a symbol that Will copied down. There was a curious bed-shaped stone platform that seemed to have a perpetual turbulence of air just above its surface. They left the odd device alone and returned to the wider gallery with the column.
The backside of the column seemed to have some kind of stone fountain carved into it, but no water flowed.
‘It’s definitely colder in …’ Jay started to say as she moved to explore the side of the room where the soft light filtered into the chamber from beyond the arch. Suddenly she seemed to slip in front of Ashley and went down in a heap.

The temperature of the air around Ashley dropped precipitously. ‘What the …’ she spit out with a puff of condensation. The rest of her words were literally frozen in her lungs. Her fingers were going numb, the leather of her gloves was turning stiff and brittle. Despite the pain she leaned down and grabbed Jay by one hand, heaving her out of a patch of moldy growth that covered the floor.
They retreated to the far side of the room, where the temperature was not deadly cold, and bent over Jay. She was frigid. Her skin and lips were a bluish hue, her breathing slow and perilously weak. Will began praying for healing as Ash dug through their possessions to find a bedroll in the bottom of her pack. She wrapped it around Jay’s shoulders.
Will looked up from his channeling. Her breathing was now stronger and color seemed to be returning to her face. Jay started to wake up, her bottom lip quivering with a violent chill.
‘I might know a blessing that could protect you if you wanted to go through that arch,’ Will said to Ash. ‘But I can only shield one of us.’
Ash felt a wash of warm comfortable energy flow over her as the prayer was finished. She discarded her shield, drew her sword and took the torch in her off hand. She was now very accustomed to the weight of the blade, barely noticed it all really. She also knew enough to tell that the blade was probably not well-balanced. The pompous ass she’d taken it from had probably never drawn it but to wave it around at peasants when he felt like being tyrannical.
She cautiously approached the mold. She could still feel the cold, mostly down by her feet, but there was no pain. She dashed on tip-toe across the moldy patch and through the arch. The light ahead seemed to be coming from the ceiling and as she approached it, the light flared to life, illuminating the room as if it was open to the daylight above.
The room she’d plunged into appeared to be some kind of sculpting workshop. Chisels, hammers, blocks of stone and a large, unfinished statue identified it as such. There was also a strange metal pedestal with an egg shaped black stone resting atop it. Upon the face of the stone was a golden sigil in a shape that meant nothing to Ash. She approached the stone warily, as she’d seen Jay do numerous times now. She reached out with a tentative hand and felt the black stone, but pulled back as if stung.
The black ‘egg’ moved. Its form shifted as it appeared to slide around itself to take the vague shape of a Halfling sized humanoid. It stood on the pedestal before Ashley and started producing a sound like scree shifting down a mountain slope. Were there words? The thing stood there rattling at her for a moment, then without warning it grew a spike in its arm and tried to punch her.
Ashley’s sword came down repeatedly on her little stone adversary, prising chunks of its body off and sending them flying to the corners of the room. With a great final hack, the noble’s sword cleaved into a fissure in the thing’s shoulder and split it down to its abdomen. The living stone jerked about, wedged on the end of her sword for a moment, then went still.
‘Are you okay? What is that thing?’ Will was calling from beyond the mold.

‘Some damned thing that’s wedged onto my sword,’ came Ashley’s reply with a grunt. She took the sword with two hands and smashed the stony body into the wall, shattering it and freeing her blade. ‘Ugh. Look at the notches in my blade!’ she called.
In a moment, she came running back to Will and Jay across the moldy patch. This time the cold hurt, and she had to stamp her feet repeatedly on the floor to get the feeling to return. Jay gave over the bedroll, now mostly recovered from her chills. They moved their things over to the corner of the room furthest from the mold and took out some rations as they talked things through.
‘There’s nothing left but to go back up,’ Will concluded. ‘Maybe the other arches have their own contraptions for taking us to other levels.’

[Luke]

‘Ok. Let’s turn it again,’ Will said of the sarcophagus.
The three of them again bent to the task of pushing the container. This time it moved much easier, popping out of the groove it had settled in and swinging around towards the green arch.
At first, nothing happened. Then, slowly building, there was a rumble similar to before, but this time growing steadily louder. Each of them took a couple of unconscious steps backwards and their hands strayed to their weapons. The rumbling continued to grow stronger, Jay would have sworn closer, and the floor began to shake. Small lines of loose dust and stones poured down from hidden cracks in the ceiling above.
Jay crouched behind the sarcophagus. Will and Ash raised their shields and joined her. The sound of a great whirling wind, of an approaching tempest below the floor built up until it erupted with a shriek as the expected stone plate shot suddenly into the air along with most of the stonework around the hole. Debris and dust flew violently around the room, stinging their eyes and battering them. Then it suddenly seemed that there was a form in the cloud, a churning anthropomorphic knot of wind that sprang up out of the hole and shot across the room towards the far hall and the tomb’s entrance. They heard the receding sound of laughter in the wind as the tempest raced down the hall to its freedom.
They turned back to the gaping hole in the floor beyond the green arch. The chain swung back and forth, its lamp gone. Jay took two cautious steps towards the opening, then froze in her tracks.
‘Listen. Do you guys hear that?’
‘Some kind of whirring?’ Ash asked.
‘Ow!’ Will slapped something that lighted on his cheek, it was a large insect, its wings were fouled by the slap, and it fell to the ground where he killed it with a satisfying crunch under his boot. There was an angry red weal where the bug had landed on his face.
They looked around. There was still a lot of ‘debris’ flying around the room, but the tempest was gone. A silvery blue beetle landed on Ash’s shield with a flutter.
The sound of chittering and the soft drone of thousands of thin beetle wings filled the room in a building crescendo.
Jay and Ash looked at one another, the color draining from their faces. ‘Run!’ they both needlessly screamed at the other, and as one they took off in the wake of the tempest.
Will raised his shield and took a couple halting steps back toward the entrance. ‘What?’ he asked his companions, now too far up the passage to hear him. ‘We’re running from bugs?’
‘The sound is impressive,’ he thought to himself, a split second before a gout of swarming insects erupted from the hole in the floor.
With a swear that might have made his deity scowl, Will turned to flee before the onslaught of hungry bugs. Beetles flew around him, past him, and landed on him as he ran, but the leather armor he wore seemed to protect him from the worst. He felt a small, clawing specimen fall down the back of the tunic he wore under his leather breastplate. Where it scratched him he felt an intense burning as if someone was pressing a flame to his flesh. They landed on his face and arms, leaving red, irritated hives on his skin. He swatted at one that crawled across his cheek, smearing caustic yellow ichor, mixed with his own blood across his face. They were biting the exposed skin of his neck, his hands, anywhere they could find a purchase. The smell of his own flesh, scorched by their acidic bites made him retch, and he stumbled over the corpses of the wolves they’d killed, careening into the base of the wall just inside the entrance to the cairn.
Suddenly Jay was standing over him, waving a torch in her hand in wide arcs to catch as many of the bugs as possible. Ash’s hand was under his arm, lifting him back to his feet. They were both covered in the swarming insects too, though now that they were out of the cairn the cloud seemed to be more dispersed. The beetles swarmed over the wolf carcasses in a writhing coat of shiny black. The three stumbled away from the entrance, regaining the forest. Ash looked back toward the cairn and screamed.
Turning to look back, Jay and Will saw what had unsettled her. A thing resembling a giant spider came skittering out of the dark arch, its single revolting eye focused on the band. The creature’s skin looked like leather, and each of its legs ended in a wicked hooked claw.
Ash drew her sword and stepped in front of her companions. The creature rushed headlong at her, leaping high into the air in the last few feet and spinning madly. The dangerous looking hooks at the ends of its legs drummed on her raised shield sending splinters of wood flying. One hook strayed under the shield and traced a fine line of welling blood across her thigh. She took repeated swipes at the abomination with her blade, but the thing was deceptively quick and each time it managed to elude her attack.
Jay maneuvered around the opposite side of the creature from Ash and tried to land hits of her own, but the spinning claws kept her off-balance, and she spent more time dodging and parrying blows then she did attacking. Still, she distracted the creature enough, with its one gaping eye, that Ash was finally able to find an opening and drive her blade home.
The thing skittered to one side leaving a trail of black-green blood on the leafy carpet, but could not escape Ash’s mounting fury. She mercilessly hacked the monstrosity to pieces, coating herself and her friends with its filth in the process.
The three of them backed away from the scene of the battle. From just inside the cairn came the ominous sounds of the beetle swarm devouring the dead wolves.
‘Those things are definitely going to be a problem if we want to continue exploring the tomb.’ Will said. He was a mess. Where he was not covered with dust, dirt, or leaves, he was swollen, burnt, and stained by the blood of friend and foe.
‘Come on,’ Ash said, taking measure of Will and his injuries. ‘I camped not far from here two nights ago. There’s a stream where we can wash some of this off and I found a couple of good places to set coney traps. We can camp there tonight.’

[Luke]

First light the next day saw them alone on the meager road that led back to town. The forested hills to either side of the road slumbered quietly in the wet morning mist. The low grey sky threatened rain.
In spite of the weather and the itching of partially healed cuts, burns and bites, the three were in high spirits. The cause of their joy was their collective, new found wealth. The armband was certainly gold, and the scrollwork was high quality craftsmanship. There were several other articles that bore closer examination, and Will had an idea of someone in town who might help them figure out what they were and even what they might be worth. This was a retired scholar from the Freecity who lived in a house on the edge of town. The old man’s name was Allustan Neff, the elder brother of Lord Neff, Governor of Diamond Lake. Will had seen him before at the keep, and knew his reputation as a remote codger taken up mostly by his gardening and his collecting of curios for his library.
‘If the old man has a taste for odd treasures, maybe he’ll want these little statues we found,’ Ash said, lifting one of the interesting little structures out of their loot bag for exhibit to her friends. She admired the tiny arena sculpture for a moment then continued, ‘Maybe he’ll know what the wands are.’
‘Everyone’s heard the rumor he’s was a wizard,’ Jay said for the benefit of her friend Ash, who had not heard this rumor.
She took one of the wands out and started examining it again as they talked.
‘I’ve seen the markings on this one before. On a tailor’s placard a long time ago. Maybe it means something like “fix”, or “sew”,’ she said, gesturing randomly and sometimes quite convincingly. ‘Or “mend”…’
Suddenly there was a tingling in her hand and a sharp blue flash from the end of the wand, and an ugly tear where one of the wolves had bitten on the front of her leather vest mended itself.
‘Ooh, let’s stop wasting the magic in that,’ said Ash.
Jay slid the wand into her pack with a satisfied grin and started looking at the other wand.
‘What we need, is a trick for getting rid of nasty bugs.’ Said Will. ‘There’s obviously another level down there, probably never explored and bound to be filled with more stuff like this.’
‘If you guys trust the old man, let’s give him first shot at looking through this stuff. If he seems honest, we can invite him along to take a look at the glyphs inside.’
The group followed the road out of the woods. Further on, it cut into the shoulder of a hill on top of which sat the Governor’s manor. This confused and polyglot structure looked out on the opposite side of the hill over the roofs of the sleepy town, to the lake and beyond to the hills in the south. Mines in the slopes to either side were active, with gangs of workers and guards. Ash asked about them.
‘It’s to protect from other mining outfits. The mine managers are a greedy and corrupted class of characters. Father Kieran says their suspicious nature indicts them all as criminals.’
Jay looked over her shoulder at Will and stuck out her tongue.
The road meandered around the shoulder of the hill and Allustan’s eccentric manse loomed up out of the mist at the edge of town, its fine stone tower conspicuous. Around much of the building, a tall wooden fence partially concealed a great overgrown garden. Someone within was humming and there was the sound of water dripping. A path of stepping stones ran to a gate in the fence which opened with a squeal.
The front door was answered by a graying butler who left them in a dim foyer of dark wood paneling with an elegant mirror. They waited a few uncomfortable minutes before an older spectacled man came in. He was removing black work-gloves and the handles of small shears were visible in the pocket of his cloak.
‘Visitors, is it?’ he asked, peering into their faces. ‘Your name is Will, right? The boy from the chapel of the chivalrous?’ Something like a smirk crossed the old man’s face.
‘That’s right sir,’ Will replied anxiously. ‘My friends and I… we were wondering if you might have a look at some of the things we picked up… sort of, exploring off in the hills. The High Priest told me once that you were a learned man from the city, something of an historian, even.’
‘Well, that was good-natured of him to be sure. Come in… please do come in and sit with me on the veranda. I’d be delighted to look upon your unearthed wonders,’ he said, waving them into the house and to the left, out onto a porch overlooking the substantial garden. They took seats around a graceful stone table and introduced themselves over tea brought by the manservant.
‘A local site, you say,’ Allustan muttered as he peered through a monocle at one of the statues, this one a graceful, airy palace with elegant buttresses. ‘Remarkable handicraft, this. These glyphs you’ve drawn are certainly elemental title or name glyphs. I remember seeing their like somewhere before. I may have a means of looking into these given time.
‘As to these bugs you’ve run into, you’re going to need to use fire to burn them out. Again, in time I could scribe a scroll with fire magic, assuming you could use it to complete the spell.’ He looked over at Jay and met the doubtful look. ‘Or, you could see what the town may have to offer. There were some magical curiosities at The Captain’s Blade to be had for those with coin. If you will take my coin in exchange for these statues, I believe I can set you up with enough to outfit yourselves.’ This with a sidelong look at their dilapidated equipment. ‘I could write you a draft on Tidwoad’s. Anyone in town will honor that.’
They left Allustan’s with their draft and followed the lane and the distant sound of an armorer or weapon-smith, along the edge of town toward The Captain’s Blade. The owner was hard at work on a short glowing blade-to-be.
Some time later they walked out of the shop with the remainder of the draft in coin, along with new metal armor for Ash and a new wand, this one identified by the proprietor as a weapon that flashed a fan of magical flames from its end. Jay had some reservations about the team relying on her ability to use the wand. This talent was new to her, and she worried it might desert her in time of need.
They left town and headed back to their campsite out of town.

[Luke]

‘I don’t see any sign of them,’ Jay whispered to her friends, peering over a rotting log that offered a view of the entrance to the Whispering Cairn. It was another damp morning with a thick lair of cold dew on the forest, dripping from branches and adding a soft pattering sound to the low moaning of wind. She raised up silently and stalked towards the entrance of the tomb. In one hand she carried the wand of flame she’d purchased, in the other a glass flask of oil purchased from the general store in town. Several more of the bottles clinked happily in a sack of shared treasure that Will carried.
Will and Ash each lit a torch and moved up behind her. The desiccated and blackened remains of the spider creature they’d killed stank and they quickly moved past it, past the threshold of the tomb and down to the intersection where the wolf carcasses had lain. The bones were picked clean and gnawed to pieces by the swarming insects. A large fluttering streak of blue came out of the darkness of one of the side passages with a whirring sound and Ash swatted the beetle to the ground and stepped on it with a wet crunch. The three of them edged closer together and Jay extended the wand as they skulked hesitantly into the cairn.
Several lone beetles made chirring rushes at the torches as they advanced down the passage and Will worked hard to suppress the urge to itch at recently healed bites. The lantern room was littered with rubble left by their last experience. In their screaming rush to leave it, they’d not really had a chance to take stock of the damage that had been inflicted by the raging air demon on the once impressive chamber. Huge blocks that had once made up the floor of the alcove under the green lamp had fallen away leaving a great yawning hole under the arch. The lamp chain dangled forlornly.
Jay leaned cautiously out over the precipice, waving the torch to cast beams down the shaft. The soft and continual skittering of a multitude of chitinous legs called softly to her from below. She withdrew the flame and backed away, carefully pouring the flasks out over the floor. When the second flask was empty, she backed up to the stone platform.
Will muttered, ‘Here goes…,’ and he tossed his torch over the field of oil and into the hole.
They waited there in silence, Ash and Will hunching behind upraised shields, torches brandished like weapons. Jay crouched behind the sarcophagus with the wand and torch held at the ready.
Again the frightening sound built up in the chamber, a cacophony of whispering, whirring wings. Again the cloud of fat, flashy beetles swarmed up out of the gaping hole. Some of the biggest bugs looked larger than Jay’s hand. Ash let out a frenzied, half panicked war scream and swatted the torch madly in front of her.
Jay tossed her torch onto the pool of oil and a wall of flame lept up across the floor, spreading almost to Will’s feet. She then turned away from her friends and waved the wand through the air in an arc through the enveloping cloud of bugs. Her screamed command word rang off the walls of the tomb and a blinding flash of flame cut out into the swarm.
The room was filled with sputtering, popping, screaming beetles. Will was covered in their caustic, burning juices as they burst into flames on their way to him. He attacked frantically with his torch, nearly putting it out in the process.
Again the command word rang out, and again the wide fan of flame scythed through the air. Everyone was getting bit. Will fell to a knee swatting at the beetles that covered him and swinging wildly with the torch in his other hand. Ash stomped the creatures as they skittered on the floor and swatted them out of the air.
It seemed to them that as quickly as the storm had descended on them, it was gone. Some stragglers wandered about the chamber stupidly, searching for easier prey. Ash raged all over the room, insulting the bugs, burning the bugs, and systematically eradicating the bugs. In a few minutes, the room was once again insect-free and the last of the oil had burnt off, leaving the room filled with a thin smoke.
Ash tried to waft the smoke away from her face as she peered out over the precipice and down the shaft. She looked back over at Jay.
‘So, who’s going down first?’
‘If you guys promise to pull me up before running from the next swarm, I suppose I should be the one to go,’ Jay answered. ‘I’m the lightest, I guess,’ she added with a smirk.
Ash gave her a look that might have curdled milk.
Torch held carefully at arm’s length, foot in a loop at the end of the rope, Jay descended into the darkness. Twice a straggling beetle landed on her and her friends had to hold desperately to the rope while she thrashed at the creature. Finally, the ruined stone blocks of the floor above came into view heaped in a great pile at the base of a chamber wall. She touched down lightly waving the torch before her to reveal a small room almost filled with rubble. Across the chamber, a wide arch opened into a hallway that stretched out darkly. Her ears strained for the sound of bugs, and she did hear them, but in nothing like the volume before.
She slipped her foot from the loop, vaulted silently to the floor of the chamber and stalked over to the hall. Just within sight, the passage came to an intersection of halls. None of the terrible creatures she imagined to be here jumped out of the shadows, so she called back up to her friends softly.
‘There’s a passage down here,’ she projected up the shaft. ‘Come down.’
Ash pulled the rope back up and they tied Will’s armor, secured in a sack to the end of the rope and lowered it down to Jay. Next came Will himself, and Ash’s grunts of exertion from above told the strain on her back. Finally, Ash tied off the rope to the end of the lamp chain, swung out over the void, and neatly descended the rope hand over hand.
While she was doing this, Jay picked through the rubble to find the damaged iron frame and a broken panel of thick green glass that used to be the lamp. She stowed the pieces in her pack as Ash finished her climb.
Will donned his armor again while Jay and Ash scouted up to the intersection.
‘That would be the source of our bugs,’ Ash whispered with a nod down the right hand passage. Their soft din could be heard from the intersection. Will came up behind, the links of his mail rattling as he adjusted them on his shoulders.
‘Let’s get this over with,’ he said. ‘Let’s find where these things are coming from and smoke them out of here or something. We’ll never be able to explore this place thoroughly if we’re always thinking about these damned bugs.’
A stray beetle skittered into the torchlight and he crushed it with his boot. They backed up into the rubble and began lighting new torches. Ash took the bag with the few remaining flasks of oil in it and Jay produced the wand of flame.
Perhaps it was just the marked increase in light, but when they advanced again to the intersection they found many more of the beetles.
Will chanted a prayer of protection as Ash readied herself to charge down the passage.
‘Go!’ he said, finishing the chant, and Ash vaulted forward into the darkness, torch held high. From their vantage in the intersection, they could see her come to a stop in a farther chamber surrounded by the stirring insects. There was the sound of shattering glass as she threw the flasks against the walls in a corner of the room. The growing swarm of bugs covered her. With a last screaming gesture, she tossed her torch into the corner and a fire blazed up, obscured by her form as she came swatting and stomping back to them.
‘It’s a nest!’ she gasped as she reached them. ‘There’s a huge beetle in there too!’
This last was unnecessary, for as she was handed through by Will, the largest insect any of them had ever seen came rushing down the hall at them. It launched itself into the air with a sound like a flock of birds. Silhouetted against the light from Ash’s fire, it seemed the size of a shield. There was a hissing sound and a shower of acidic spray came flying at them from the creature. Will raised his shield in time to partially protect him from a bath of the vile stuff. Jay ducked around the corner in a flash, avoiding the spray. Behind them, Ash beat and stomped the beetles clinging to her.
After waiting a heartbeat, Jay whipped back around the corner to face the huge beetle, wand outstretched. She said the command word with a look of calm, focused anger and the fire flashed out bright and hot. In the following second, as the bug stood smoldering and dazed, Will dropped his torch to the ground behind him, nearly at Ash’s feet and in a smooth motion, drew his father’s sword and drove it through the beetle’s thorax. The screeching monster was transfixed on his sword. Despite its size, it was not a terribly heavy beast, and he used his advantage to repeatedly bash it against the hallway wall. Now they were surrounded yet again by a confusing swirl of angry beetles.
‘We’re not running from bugs!’ Will managed through gritted teeth. He slid the hissing, dieing beetle off his sword with his booted foot breaking through its chitinous shelled back. Everywhere skin was exposed, the smaller offspring left angry welting bites. The fire of the wand erupted again, the intense heat of his armored side telling how close the flames had come to engulfing him as well. Many of the beetles swarming around them were now alight.
‘Keep it up with that wand!’ Ash shouted over the din. Her torch swept in arcs to protect her and Will as he smashed at the beetles covering him.
Two more blasts of magical flames dispersed the swarm, but not before all of them received nasty stinging bites and acid burns. When it was over, they cautiously moved down the hall to the now only softly glowing beetle nest fire. The nest had fallen to the floor and burned mostly away. The far wall had a basin that was covered over in most places with a hardened crusty substance. In places, the crust was broken, and stray beetles crawled under the crust and down into the interior of the basin. The stuff spilled out over the basins bin and formed a petrified flow of brown that covered the moldering bones of three corpses along the wall.
‘They’re eating this stuff,’ said Will.
He scattered the remains of the nest in the corner, crushing beetles and their larvae as he did. In the middle of the nest were the withered and charred but unmistakable remains of a hand. Unbelievably, there was a ring on the hand that appeared unscathed by the fire. He separated the ring from the rest of the debris and picked it up. Its perimeter was carved in a handsome feather motif.
‘These guys all wear the same armor, with some kind of symbol on the breast. It looks like a silver star of some kind,’ Jay said, gingerly wiping some of the grime from the dilapidated leather to uncover more of the symbol. The second desiccated, half-skeletal body she turned over had some kind of satchel around its waist that had all but rotted away, and its contents lay on the floor below the corpse. Three small brown vials of some dark liquid, undoubtedly magical mixtures of a kind, together with a thumping white pearl.
Ash uncorked one of the potions and wafted the fumes toward her nose. It was a familiar smell, something in the healing line she was certain. It was at least scented with some herb she associated with her mother’s home treatments. Each of them stowed one in their pack carefully. Will took the heavy pearl in his hand and stood there scowling at it, scratching the stubble on his chin absently.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘It’s in a book at the chapel, that’s for sure, but I can’t recall what it is. I think it has to do with magical energy.’
They finished poking around in the room and turned back toward the intersection. They took the next passage on the right, the one opposite where they’d come in. This way led further before coming to a surprising scene.
Steps descended into a pool of murky black water that harshly reflected the orange torchlight back at them. At the foot of the steps, the water stretched further into a chamber with the level very near the ceiling. Four large square columns could be made out in the murky darkness. Somewhere in the darkness a drop of water hit the surface of the pool and the sound echoed through the chamber. Will stared grimly at the water shaking his head.
‘I can’t swim,’ he said.
Ash and Jay looked at each other.
‘If you’ll hold a rope tied to my waist and yank me back if I pull twice quickly I’ll go in and see if I can find a way to drain the water,’ Jay offered.
A few moments later the plan was being put to action. Both Ash and Jay were stripped to tunics. Ash would go in after Jay if necessary. Will stood behind them fully armed. He was to step in front of the ladies if anything came out of the water after them. This, however, was the first time he’d seen so much of his athletic companions’ bare skin, and he was so distracted that he nearly fumbled the one light spell he’d prepared for the day. Or perhaps his deity was reminding him that glances taken at an advantage were not chivalrous. In any event, he did manage to bring the enchantment off, and Jay now held a small, glowing flake of masonry in her hand.
She stood on the second step with the level of the frigid water frozen at mid-calf.
‘Uh-uh,’ she said, shaking her head emphatically in the negative. ‘No way. I’m not going to do it.’
‘Hang on,’ said Will. He ran his hands in front of her absently and closed his eyes to concentrate on a spell of protection. A ward against cold settled over her bare shoulders, taking most of the sting from the terribly cold water.
She turned back to the murky room just as a vortex of water sprang up in front of her, pummeling her with debris that had been floating in the room. Ash ridiculously pulled the rope in panic, as if to rescue her friend from drowning in barely a foot of water, but Will was faster. Protecting damsels certainly was chivalrous, and that’s what his compatriots had become in his mind when they’d cast aside armor and shield. Will rushed between them and stabbed at the column of water with his blade. In return he got the broad side of a rotted board rapped on the side of his head, just below the hairline.
The ‘damsel’ with the temper problem, now recovered from her shock, stepped over him and came roaring into the combat with an overhand chop that split a large portion of the animated water away. A fist of compact water shot out of the front of the vortex and bludgeoned her nose, drawing blood. Jay darted in from the side, short sword in hand and sliced at the flank of the creature, shearing away another appendage. A face momentarily formed in the tempest and the mouth in the face opened to emit a scream like the sound of a waterfall. The elemental rounded on Jay. The next savage swing of Ash’s sword came in at a slightly upward angle, midway up the column, and sliced through cleanly.
The two halves of the column sheared away from one another, hitting the steps with a splash and running down to rejoin the pool.

The three of them stood there in silence, waiting for something else to happen. Jay and Ash were now standing in wet tunics, and Will lowered his eyes lest Heironious strike all the power of his daily prayers from his mind. He flexed his considerable powers of concentration and successfully healed Ash’s nose before the bleeding stained her tunic.
‘Okay, let’s try this again,’ said Jay, advancing a couple of steps deeper into the water. Protected by Heironious’s blessing and carrying the glowing stone, she ducked her head under the surface and began exploring the room. The room once again grew dark as the glowing stone was submerged under the water. Ash could see a bright underwater glow that told of Jay’s progress across the room, but cast no appreciable amount of light into the space above the water.
Jay found that the center of the room was dominated by a great block of stone that had some kind of metal projections sticking out of it on all sides. The block was not quite high enough to break the surface of the water. Jay scrambled on top of it to find that there was just over a foot of water across the top of the block. She waved casually to her companions across the room.
‘It looks like there are grates in the floor, but the water’s not flowing out. They must be plugged up somewhere I can’t see.
‘There’s also a passage in either direction,’ she said, pointing left and right. She chose the left side and lowered herself back in the water. She drew a deep breath and plunged under the surface again. The glowing light disappeared around a corner to Ash and Will’s left.
Jay moved through the water in short powerful strokes. There was another plugged gutter at the back of the room, and the narrow passage back into underwater darkness. She kicked her way down the passage and saw the vague outline of some kind of debris on the floor of the submerged chamber. She returned to the surface and treaded there for a moment to regain her breath, then plunged straight down towards the chamber’s bottom to get a better look.
Scattered across the floor of the chamber was a skeleton’s worth of moldy, cracked bones. There was a mostly intact torso wearing leathers that were completely grown over with dark brown algae and was slick to the touch. The rotted belt around its waist bore a scabbard with a short blade. She laid her hand on the pommel and the wrappings came off in her hand. Just as she drew the sword, there was a violent tugging at her waist. Ash was heaving strongly on the rope and she was pulled away from the remains and back toward the entrance to the small chamber.
Jay turned back toward the passage in time to see a dark shadow swimming sinuously through the water towards her. She swung the new sword around and it bit into the thing just as it reached her, raking sharp claws down her other arm. The arm went painfully cold and dead. A terribly clear and frightening thought went through her head. If she was paralyzed in the water, how would she get back to the surface?
She launched herself off the bottom, hit the surface with a gasp, and started swimming as fast as she could toward the block in the other room and her friends. With a scream just audible from underwater, the creature pursued her, but she raced unnaturally fast through the water with Ash’s help. Ash didn’t stop pulling when she reached the block, however, and she lost her balance as she tried to clamber back on top of it.
Just then the creature sprang up onto the block and raked her lower legs, charging them with a cold, stunning pain. She couldn’t move them, but at the rate Ash was pulling her towards them, she would only have to hold her breath for a second or two before Ash and Will had her. Strong hands grabbed her tunic and heaved her up out of the water, past Will who crowded the waterline, and down the passage to safety.
Despite the spell Will had cast, Jay was trembling with chills. The wounds on her arm and legs were not bad, but the creature’s touch had drained any energy from her limbs, leaving her unable to stand. Ash left her there in the safety of the passage, drew her sword and rushed to help Will.
Will stepped past the women, shield raised in a challenge to the creature that pursued Jay. It burst from the water with a screech, clawed hands extended. Its form and size was that of a wiry, desiccated human, but its face proclaimed its undead nature. The eyes were long rotted away and replaced by a malevolent red glow. Its mouth, now snapping at him as he swung his shield around and tried to pin it to the wall, bore rotted and jagged teeth. Will crushed pressed the creature down, yanked hard to free his shield and brought his sword to bear against it.
The thing was fast! His sword jarred against the stone wall and floor and it raked its claws at him again. Suddenly Ash was there beside him, thrusting at the creature from an unexpected direction and stabbing deep into it’s rotted chest cavity. Will took a step back, shifted his sword, blade down, to his shield hand and reached for the chain around his neck. He pulled out the iron symbol of Heironeous that he wore around his neck and thrust it into the creature’s face.
The abomination reacted as if it had been burnt. It threw its twisted hands up over its face and began to back away. Ash’s next crazed swing severed one arm midway between elbow and wrist, and carried on to shear away the top half of its skull. It collapsed in a pile at her feet.
After a few minutes, Jay was able to move her toes again.
‘There was something else in the room you pulled me out of. I think it might have been the red lantern. Someone has to go back.’
That someone was Ashley. Will had no more magical protections against the frigid water, and Ash was more than a little revolted at the thought of bathing in the water that the stinking ghoul had lived in. Nevertheless, she waded down the steps with determination and was soon swimming to the back of the room and down the tight passage in long, powerful strokes. She waved the stone around near the bottom of the chamber and located the debris Jay had described. It was indeed a lantern with crimson panes of glass, an exact duplicate of the blue one they’d found.
Ash delivered the lamp to the stairway where her friends waited, then resolutely returned to the freezing water and swam out to the tunnel across the room. There, among the rotted debris of shelves she found a sack which apparently contained the ghoul’s treasure, a collection of coins and a silver ring. She returned to her companions, glad to be done with the dark, polluted water.

[Luke]

The party sat around a small fire in the wooded vale before the entrance to the cairn. Their clothing was mostly dried and they’d eaten their fill of the stores they’d brought along from the town that morning. Some of what they’d purchased with their new found wealth had been stashed in a sack and hidden under a log. Now that sack lay before them and Ash was making good use of a couple of items. They’d cooked a pot of thin soup over the fire to thoroughly warm their insides. That trick worked, and their spirits were much improved.
Jay arranged all the shards of broken green glass, along with the frame on the ground before her and produced the wand of mending. She waved the wand about confidently and spoke the command word, and the pieces flew back together to form the original yellow lamp. The pieces of the puzzle had come together, and each of them felt like they were on the verge of a large discovery.
It was obvious that another group, one that was well-funded and answered to some organization had attempted the tomb before. The corpses they’d found all wore the same red leathers with the star motif on their breast. The ring they’d recovered from the ghoul’s possessions bore an identical mark. The question was how far did the other group get in plundering the tomb? Did the state of the lantern room when they’d first seen it indicate that the face door had been breached?
‘We need to make sure there aren’t anymore passages to explore under the other lamps. Before we light all them all,’ Will said. ‘These other guys that explored the Cairn obviously did so a long time ago. They ran into major problems in the complex we just explored. If they were the last ones to see the tomb, maybe they all died and their mission with them? One of them was carrying the red lamp for some reason. And the blue lamp we found wasn’t on anyone. Whoever was carrying that must have been killed by wolves?’
‘Or maybe he was killed in the lantern room and the wolves pulled a bag off a corpse,’ Jay replied. ‘Too many things could have happened. We still have no idea if there’s another burial chamber, or if it’s been plundered. The only thing to do is go forward, and I say we finish what we’ve started. Let’s try the other positions of the sarcophagus and see if there are any other tunnels. Then we can light the lamps.
They smothered their flame and returned their loot to the sack. His armor settled back on his shoulders, Will suddenly snapped his fingers. ‘That’s why they’d be carrying lamps around in bags with them as they explored. Another group wouldn’t be able to light all the lamps if they carried one with them.’
‘And we’ll do the same,’ Jay said as she lit a torch and started back toward the dark arch.
Ash and Will fell in beside her and they walked together back into the tomb and down to the lantern room. Will gathered the other lanterns to keep them from getting lost or smashed like the green one had. The repaired green lamp stayed in their pack.
Ash leaned against the sarcophagus. It rotated smoothly to point to the next arch, the one where the blue lamp should have hung. Nothing happened. No rumbling, no explosion of masonry and wind, no caustic beetle swarm.
Ash moved the sarcophagus again, to point at the next-to-last arch where the indigo lamp no longer hung. This time there was a smooth rumbling and the expected chamber did rise out of the ground. Jay cautiously approached the door. She waved a torch inside and noticed debris scattered around the floor. There were streaks of long-dried dark substance on the interior walls of the chamber. She drew her short sword and poked the debris on the floor. There was a lot of splintered bone among rags and some coins.
‘Someone was crushed to death in here,’ she said. She looked up at the ceiling of the small chamber and noted a nasty stain there as well. ‘This is a trap,’ she stated matter-of-factly. ‘This chamber will take you to the netherworld … well, maybe not you Will.’
‘So turn it to the last arch,’ Will said, ignoring the jab.
Ash pivoted the sarcophagus to the last arch and the trapped chamber closed once more. Like before, nothing happened in the arch the sarcophagus pointed to.
‘That cuts it, we light the lanterns,’ Ash declared.
They watched worriedly as Jay scrambled up the chain to the passage above the blue lamp. Once she was safe, she cast the rope end back down to them.
Ash and Will went around the chamber, placing new torches they’d purchased in town into the sconces of the other lamps. The green lamp was tricky, requiring Ash to balance on partial flagstones on the precipice of the jagged hole to get to the chain anchor and lower the lamp.
Once all the lanterns were lit, they returned to the sarcophagus. The light of the lanterns mixed in the center chamber to create a slightly dizzying effect. Previously unnoticed bits of metal or mirror reflected twinkling lights back down on them, a beautiful replica of the living night sky on a cloudless evening. The whispering of the air passages in the tomb seemed to rise, but not to the shrieking levels they’d attained the first time they’d approached the face trap above.
‘Okay, get up here!’ Jay called down excitedly in a projected whisper. ‘The mouth of the face opened up and there’s a passage of some kind beyond.’
The climb was managed with a mere barked shin, and the three of them moved slowly and as a group down the long hall to stand before the face with its gaping mouth. Beyond the visage lay complete darkness. Jay peeked in and lowered a torch to throw some light into a wide chamber. Past the threshold, the floor at her feet was replaced by a long smooth plank two hands wide and covered with a fine layer of dust, stretching as far as the light would show. The floor dropped into the darkness, and she risked some more light to see that it ended in a vague, uneven floor some way down. A nasty fall to be certain.
She helped Will light another torch, shed her pack and crept out onto the span. She advanced, step by wary step, her torch revealing more and more of the room to her fellows.
‘The wall up by the ceiling has holes in it,’ he managed to point out in a whisper, when an ominous metal clink echoed across the room.
Jay froze in mid step and as she did the beam seemed to settle tiny bit beneath her feet. There was a whooshing sound from both in front and in back and two separately fired balls of solid metal leapt at her from the gloom shrouded ceiling. The rear ball passed within a hand of her head to the right, whipping her hair into her face and startling her. She twisted away from the ball speeding at her from the front, a move that prevented a rib from being stove by the impact of the projectile, but also one that caused her to miss her balance and slip off the beam to the left. As she passed she made a desperate grab for the beam, but missed and landed with a shout of angry pain on the floor of the chamber. The floor was covered to an unknown depth in the same projectiles she’d just narrowly avoided. The room rang from the sound of the metal balls ricocheting off the chamber wall and falling down to join its many twins. One of the balls came to rest against her twisted ankle.
She heard a whispering voice, seemingly nearby say ‘That was sooo close! I thought you were done for.’
She rose awkwardly and looked around for the speaker. Her own torch was lost in the fall and now burned against the opposite wall, its fading light shrouded by an undulation in the floor. In the corner of the room, the spheres seemed to shift of their own accord, as if something moved below them. She drew her short sword and backed painfully towards the wall behind her.
‘What in the Hells is that?’ Will asked from above, pointing with his sword to the corner.
‘Let me by,’ Ash said.
Will fell back against the wall and as Ash passed him, she could here his mumbling of a blessing upon himself and his comrades. Her sword was drawn and the shield left behind as she stepped out onto the beam and gazed down into the shadows where Jay stared. The sound of the spheres grinding together as they shifted filled the chamber, echoing and amplifying. With a shriek, a mass of tentacles burst through the surface, twisting and probing the air in Jay’s direction. The tentacles bloomed from the face of a great obscene serpent with a wicked hooked beak in the center of the tentacles.
Jay called out, pointing with a wand at the monstrosity before her. Again the magical fire answered her, erupting with a blinding flash and the monster was left momentarily smoldering. A tentacle lashed out at her blindly. Suddenly there was a war cry from above as Ash dropped to the floor and rolled gracefully to her feet.
The thing answered Ashley’s challenge and lunged forward, attacking aggressively. She spun her blade in front of her and cleanly severed one of the thick pink tentacles. Jay lunged in from the side, but her blade turned on the coarse green scales of the serpent’s hide. The grick whipped back to face Jay, lashing her with its hooked tentacles, and Ash made the creature regret not focusing on the larger woman. The tip of her blade found a seam in the scales and she drove the sword home to its hilts, pinning it by its head to the wall. The tail and the wicked tentacles flailed and the monster let out a piercing shriek that echoed painfully in the chamber. Ash withdrew her sword with a twisting motion and chopped down repeatedly on the serpent as it writhed in its death throes.
‘I guess its dead then?’ Will asked from above. Jay and Ash looked up to see him crouched in the doorway, rarely used crossbow in one hand, loaded and pointed vaguely in their direction. The other held the torch that provided all the light in the room.
‘She killed it!’ whispered a voice right in front of Will’s face. He caught the briefest of glimpses of some indistinct blue haze surrounding him, then suddenly there was a jolting cold sensation. The voice now filled his head at a tremendous volume.
‘You were luckier than me,’ the voice insisted and Will had to concentrate to prevent saying the words himself. Will recognized a compulsion for what it was, and his right hand reached up and clutched the holy symbol of Heironeous in lead around his neck. The crossbow fell with a clatter at his feet and the bolt sprang loose, darting across the room to shatter against the far wall of the chamber. The voice was thunder in his ears, painful and overwhelming. He fought hard to remember himself, to cling to himself in the face of the unseen attack.
‘Bah, you’re not worth commanding anyway,’ a petulant voice rang out, this time for all to hear. The mist began coalescing again, as if from nowhere, and the form of a young man began to take shape balanced on the beam before Will. “How the trap didn’t finish off the likes of you, I’ll never know.’
The boy, evidently an unquiet spirit, took on a more definite shape, and it quickly became evident how he’d died. The neck of the boy’s ghost self was broken, and the head sat awkward and disconnected from the rest of the form. Each of the nails on his hands extended into a sharp black claw, though the lot was incorporeal.
Will took two involuntary steps backwards. ‘Stay back spirit,’ he warned. ‘The power of the Valorous One will banish you to your rightful place of rest.’
‘Can you truly do that?’ the spirit intoned. The face leaned forward into Will’s, leering. ‘I have searched for that place, but always return here, to the place where I died.’ The spirit’s eyes took on a frightened look, and Will followed its gaze down to the floor of the chamber.
‘Is this place where you died?’ Will asked. ‘How? You look like a boy. You cannot have been fifteen years old. What could have led you to this room?’
‘There are things I cannot remember…’ the spirit moaned. ‘I left my ma, and my pa. They were sick. They sent me to town to get help. I didn’t want to go back! I was scared. I ran…and ended here. I fell.’ The face twisted in remembered pain, and a clawed hand strayed to the back of his broken neck, touching gingerly.
The eyes snapped back to Will’s face, and grew more focused, somehow harder. ‘You can help me…and I you.’
Ash and Jay peered up to Will and the ghost, straining to listen to the spirit’s whispered voice. Will’s deeper voice came down to them louder.
‘How can you help us spirit. Explain your words.’
‘The door beyond cannot be opened from this side. There is a chamber on the other side. It is vast and incredible. There is a latch to open the door from the other side. I can do this for you, show you the sights that only I have seen, and that in death. But you may walk there, if you will do this one small thing for me.’
‘I am listening spirit.’
‘My body is broken, and my bones scattered.’ The boy again looked mournfully to the floor of the chamber, where Jay and Ash stood listening. ‘They rest below the feet of your friends. You could retrieve them, take them back to my ma and pa, bury them with my family’s bones on our farm. It is not far.’
‘Spirit, we can do this thing for you, but how can we know that you will not rush off to your resting place, forgetting your promise to us.’
‘I would not…I will let you in…’ the ghost fell silent. It looked distressed for a moment, but then suddenly brightened with a new idea. ‘A gift…I can offer you a gift, a sign of my goodwill. I will tell you a secret. Something you could never know otherwise. It will be good for you…to hear my secret. You will find my bones, and I will tell you the secret. You will bury my bones at the Land family farm, next to the remains of the rest of my family, and I will open the far door.’
‘Accepted,’ came Ashley’s voice from below. ‘Tell us where to dig spirit, and we will recover your bones.’
The boy whisked from his perch up on the span down to the floor of the chamber. He hovered over a spot in the corner and said with barely contained excitement, ‘Here! Right below here, not many feet down.’
Ashley and Jay began moving the spheres, Ash tossing them to Jay who stacked them against the far wall. Soon, Jay began tossing the balls up to Will, who rolled them down the hall. Within a few minutes of digging, Ash came to a cache of rags and bones.
‘That’s it!’ the boy howled. ‘Take them to my parents’ farm, put me in the ground beside my ma. Let me find the long sleep.’
‘What of the promised secret?’ Ash asked.
‘Yes…the secret. It is a great secret. You will love my secret. That creature,’ here he gestured to the slain grick at their feet, ‘it burrowed into this room many years ago through a tunnel far below, at the true floor of this chamber. It came through a natural cave. There’s another corpse down there…a victim of the trap, just like us.’ Here he addressed Jay. ‘She fell to her death so long ago, her bones were old and rotted when I found them. Her spirit is silenced, not gone, but also not here. Her ancient blade lies there as well, unbroken, forgotten. It is…magnificent.’
Ashley’s heart stirred at the mention of the blade. She longed to be done with her current sword. It was poorly balanced and lost its edge easily. It was also a reminder of her parting from her family, and of the fop who’d assaulted her. She collected what was left of the ghost’s shattered skeleton, carefully wrapping the meager collection of fragments in a cloth and stowing them in her pack. Then she started digging in earnest.
The rusting balls flowed in a steady succession, tossed to Jay, then lofted to Will and so rolled down the hall. The ghost had dissipated in the shadows of the room. The effort took hours, and by the end their lower backs ached from the strain of their labors. Finally, a dark crevice was discovered in the wall. Ash followed this crevice with her digging as it slowly widened. The remaining mound around her feet suddenly shifted and a large number of the spheres rolled down the unseen shaft, clanking dully through the stone wall. Ash ducked her head when possible under the low ceiling of the crevice and waved a torch about.
The pile of spheres sloped steeply into the fissure, and the slightest movement dislodged more spheres that went rolling down the slope to settle among others in the lower corners of a chamber below. Ash descended into the chamber, cautious to not lose her footing, but unable to contain the noise that was made each time one of the balls rolled to the broken stone floor. Once she was on the cavern floor, she began searching the room for the remains described by the spirit. She found nothing, and began working her way through the slope she’d descended, causing spheres to flow past her and roll across the floor. The sphere’s started flowing to her and she simply stood her ground and forced them to roll to either side. The room above was emptying, and Jay had an equally difficult task keeping her footing. Finally, the flow of spheres stopped, and Ash resumed digging into the slope, pushing spheres past her and into the cavern.
Her hand struck something long and cold among the spheres. She dug to the side, in the direction of the object she’d brushed and was rewarded by uncovering a long naked blade. She brushed the spheres away and freed the sword.
It was long, broad, and heavy. It was the first hand-and-a-half sword she’d ever seen, though this particular blade would have brought joy to any professional mercenary’s heart. It was indeed a magnificent length of metal. The hilt wrappings were destroyed, but no notch or smear marred its shining silver length. There were runes engraved down the blade, flowing symbols that meant nothing to her.
She handed the blade up to Jay and scrambled back into the room with the beam. Will lowered a rope, and they all retreated back up the hall toward the precipice that overlooked the blue lamp. Jay removed the blue lamp from its chain once they were all safely back on the floor of the lantern room. They headed back up the main shaft and emerged into the clear, dark blue evening air, filled with the creaking of insects.
An hour later, the three sat together, examining the newly acquired blade.
‘These runes spell out two words,’ Will explained. ‘On this side is a word I do not know, possibly a name. It says…Carcarus. On the second side is a word I recognize in the celestial tongue. The word means “soul”. ‘
‘Sure it’s a beautiful blade,’ Jay whispered. ‘Could either of you wield something that large?’
Ask took the unwrapped hilt in her hand and stood. She reached down and took up the shield she’d left leaning against a tree. The sword was heavy. Too heavy to wield effectively in the one hand. She took a couple of swings, but the momentum of the weapon was too much for her.
‘I’ll have to work on this,’ she said, excitement in her voice. ‘Its size makes it awkward, but I’ll bet I could get used to it with practice.’
‘In the meantime,’ she said with a grin, ‘I’ll just have to do it this way.’
She lowered her shield to the ground, took the bare metal hilt in both hands and cut a graceful curve through the air over her head.
‘Carcarus,’ she said, a feral gleam in her eye. ‘Welcome home.’