GIANTS FLYING, DRAGONS BITING, AND THE RED MENACE
“What now?” Dexter asked as he peered down at the massive army that lay between the tower and Jorgenfist. Behind him, the giant skeleton patrolled mindlessly around the perimeter of the rooftop, maintaining the illusion that all was as it should be.
“We find another way in,” Wesh replied. “It would seem the direct route is not our most viable option.”
Dexter chuckled. “That’s an understatement. Any ideas?”
Wesh shrugged. “If I had an army of that size at my command and a fortress like that, I would make sure that there were no loose ends, but then again, I’m not a megomaniacal stone giant. I imagine this Mokmurian thinks himself quite safe. Therefore, I imagine there is at least one loose end overlooked.”
He nodded towards the bluff. “The river. That’s where I think we should start looking…and I think you should be the one to go…you and Adso.”
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Less than an hour later, Adso and Dexter were flying low along the foothills, careful not to cast silhouettes against the horizon. They crested the bluff and began descending towards the river, two-hundred feet below. They had drawn almost level with the fortress above when they spied the two caves, a larger one fifty feet above the river, and a smaller one two-hundred feet above the muddy water. Dex and Adso nodded to each other and then began the long flight back to the tower.
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Later that night, the giant lookouts from the encampment would have seen a sight they would not have believed had it not been hidden under the darkness of a moonless night. A gigantic skeleton soared through the night sky carrying a very strange cargo. The Sandpoint Seven clung to the bony behemoth like lampreys to a shark as it flew above the rushing waters of the river below. As luck would have it, however, there were other eyes that did spy the aerial raiders, and they burned with hunger.
No one saw them coming, not even the sharp-eyed monk or the keen-eared rogue. In fact, no one was even aware of them until they struck, for the night wyverns were deadly nocturnal hunters, and they used their jet-black scales to excellent effect when stalking their prey. Cruemann was their first target, and the force of the blow from the talon that struck him wrenched him from his perch upon the skeleton. Before he knew what was happening, the archer was hurtling towards the river, his bow knocked from his hands as he fell. He struck the ice-cold water and immediately sank beneath the roiling surface.
Dexter watched Cruemann fall, but unlike his daring rescue of Duerten, the rogue didn’t have the option to go after the archer. The air around him was full of beating wings as the four reptiles swooped and dove around the skeletal giant and its cargo. Instead, Dex struck out, slashing at one of the wyverns as it passed while at the same time clinging desperately to the giant’s bony ribcage.
“Hang on!” Reaper shouted, and then he leaped from his minion’s back to the nearby cliff wall, clinging there like a spider after a hastily spoken spell. Then, with a mental command, he ordered the giant to halt its flight. The brute hovered in midair, the wyverns circling and screeching. At a second command from its master, it began swinging its massive club. Shouts of alarm and outrage came from Reaper’s companions as they hung on for dear life. The giant’s club whistled through the air and caught one of the wyverns that came in too close squarely on the side of its head. The dragon’s neck snapped with an audible crack and it pinwheeled towards the river below. A second wyvern pulled up sharply in front of the giant, its scorpion-like tail striking like a whip. Unfortunately, as the beast backwinged, Adso and Dex, by far the most agile of the troupe, struck out simultaneously, the rogue stabbing his blade through its eye, while the monk shattered its jaw. In a tumble of wings, it joined its companion in the muddy water. Wesh and Duerten, meanwhile, still scrabbled at their precarious perch, the mage trying to get a clear line to loose his magic, but unwilling to let go with even one hand. He tightened his grip as the giant swung its club again and the third dragon fell. Suddenly, however, Wesh found himself wrenched loose from the giant, dangling in midair. The last of the wyverns had seized him in its claws and was beating its wings to gain altitude. Wesh screamed for help, which came unceremoniously from a devastating and crushing blow of the giant’s club. The dragon released the wizard as it fell, and Wesh fell with it. Fortunately, the quick-witted mage spoke a single word and his harrowing descent turned into a gentle, floating fall, like a feather on a breeze.
When Cruemann finally managed to thrash his way to the surface, his friends were nowhere to be seen. The night was pitch-black in the river canyon, and the rushing waters were carrying him along at an alarming speed. He shouted desperately, but he was certain no one would hear him over the roar of the river. Suddenly, however, he saw a dim light coming towards him from upriver. It grew brighter quickly until he was finally able to make out that it was Dexter flying towards him, his sword held above him, glowing like a beacon. The rogue dipped towards him and seized the back of his tunic. Cruemann felt himself lifted effortlessly from the water, his feet resting upon the surface as if it were solid ground.
“Say thank you, Dexter,” Dex said, grinning broadly
“Thank you,” Cruemann said glumly.
“Ah, why so serious?” the rogue jibed. “Missing something?”
Cruemann glanced up and then his eyes suddenly widened as he saw what Dex was holding in his hand…a thoroughly soaked, but still intact greatbow…
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The seven companions spent the night in the wyverns’ lair, the lower of the two caves Adso and Dexter has spotted. The following morning, the group climbed upon the giant once more, and Reaper commanded it to carry them aloft to the higher cave. As they rose carefully to the level of the ledge, they peered cautiously inside. The interior of the cavern crawled. Countless bloated, many-legged insects trampled one another as they carpeted the floor and climbed the walls, creating a susurrus of a million clicking bug legs. The deepest part of the cave seemed to be unnaturally thick with darkness and fallen webs. As the company watched in disgust and horror, two massive shapes detached themselves from the shadows. Whatever terror of gigantic legs and venom-dripping fangs the arachnid monstrosities once were could have been no more appalling than the obviously undead remnants they had become. The house-sized creatures’ wasted exoskeletons cracked and split as they skittered forward with unnatural speed, and from the web of rotted gashes crisscrossing their bulbous bodies poured swarms of fat, poison-bloated spiders.
“What the…?” Wesh whispered.
“I’m not sure what they are exactly,” Reaper said, a sly grin spreading across his face, “but I know they are no longer among the living, and that means they are mine!”
The necromancer commanded the skeletal giant to place him on the ledge outside the cave, and then he stepped boldly inside.
“Stop!” he intoned as he raised one hand towards the nearest creature. To the amazement of his comrades, it did.
“Destroy!” he commanded, pointing towards the second monstrosity. The first spider immediately turned towards its companion and leaped upon it, tearing with its mandibles while its legs gripped and clawed. The second spider shrieked and tried to fend off the attack, inflicting massive amounts of damage in return. Then, from out of the deeper darkness two more of the creatures emerged. One of them immediately joined in the assault on Reaper’s drone.
“This is beautiful,” Reaper grinned. Then he turned to the equally grinning skeleton behind him.
“Well?” he asked. “What are you waiting for?”
His companions quickly clambered down from the skeleton as it shambled forward into the middle of the melee, swinging its club like thresher. One of the undead spiders exploded under the impact, releasing thousands of its smaller kin to scuttle for the shadows. One of the new arrivals quickly turned on the skeleton and began weaving a massive web from its spinnerets. Within seconds, the giant was completely enmeshed, rooted to the spot.
“Uh-oh,” Reaper grimaced. He turned to his companions, who were still staring open-mouthed at the titanic clash. “Isn’t there something all of you could be doing?”
The others shook themselves from their reverie, and Cruemann quickly brought his bow to bear, finding it impossible to miss such massive targets. Sinclair and Wesh brought their own barrage as well, hurling fire and arcane bolts of force into the fray. The flames quickly burned free the webs entangling the giant, and the skeleton surged forward again. Within moments, all of the spiders had been annihilated…all save Reaper’s slave.
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Several minutes later, Reaper stood with his head bowed and his hands resting upon the giant spider’s carapace in silent communion. The necromancer seemed oblivious to the hundreds of tiny arachnids that swarmed over him.
‘What are you?’ he asked through the mental link he shared with the undead creature.
‘We are Deathwebs,’ the behemoth responded in a hollow voice that sounded like the sighing of a thousand dead leaves.
‘How were you created?’ Reaper asked.
‘We were created by Mokmurian,’ the deathweb replied.
‘For what purpose?’ Reaper prodded.
‘We do not know,’ said the spider. ‘We simply are.’
Reaper pondered this for a moment. ‘Do you know how to find Mokmurian?’
‘Beyond the webs,’ the deathweb answered. ‘He came to us from beyond the webs…’
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Sometime later the deathweb lay in a crushed heap next to its kin, destroyed by the giant at a word from Reaper. Meanwhile, Dexter had slashed his way through the dense webbing at the back of the cave and discovered a well-concealed door. The spider had spoken the truth. Reaper instructed the giant to await his return, since the small, cramped tunnel beyond the door would not accommodate the skeleton. He also commanded the brute to kill anyone or anything that tried to follow. Then he entered the tunnel behind in his companions. Somewhere in the distance outside the cave, horns began to sound.
Navigating the tunnels was a claustrophobic ordeal. They varied in size between three and five feet wide, and wrapped over and under each other in a tangled three-dimensional maze riddled with dead ends. They wound steadily northward, according to Duerten, ever upwards as well. Dozens of other tunnels intersected the primary passage, sloping away in an increasingly vexing labyrinth. It was at one such intersection that the ambush occurred. There was nothing to distinguish it from any of the other countless junctions they had passed, but without warning, half-a-dozen small figures suddenly darted from the darkened passages on all sides. Snarling and spitting, the tiny creatures looked like hateful old men, their faces wrinkled like month-old fruit. The bent, three-foot tall cretins wielded rusted scythes nearly double their size in their gnarled hands, and they wore overly large spiked iron boots. Upon their grizzled heads sat bent hats, gruesomely stained bright crimson.
Initially, the redcaps’ attack caught the heroes completely off guard, and the little savages hewed at their larger opponents with their scythes, opening several vicious wounds. The advantage lasted only a moment, however. Reaper began casting, and around his companions a protective ring of swaying black tentacles emerged from the floor. The rubbery appendages seized the redcaps and swung them about like ragdolls. The diminutive demons bit and kicked at the tentacles, but to no avail. In the midst of the chaos, Sinclair introduced his own magic. The stone floor beneath the dangling redcaps cracked open and geysers of flame spewed forth, immolating the creatures in a matter of moments, leaving nothing but charred husks behind.
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It was several hours later before the seven companions emerged from the tunnels, thankfully without encountering more redcaps. They found themselves in a large cave cluttered by tiny mounds of carefully sorted junk…bones, scraps of armor, broken weapons, stones, dead rats, and chitin harvested from large vermin. A net hammock hung from a pair of stalagmites near to where the crack emerged into the cave. No sooner had the first of them stepped through, than a high-pitched shriek sounded from across the chamber. On the far side stood a small, red-scaled, reptilian creature. It was dressed in bone and chitin breastplate, and carried a gleaming spear in one hand and a leather buckler on the other. As Dexter’s eyes widened, the rabid kobold charged…
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
