WELLS OF DARKNESS
On Red Shroud’s advice, the six companions sought out a specific merchant in the market place of Broken Reach. He was a mercane, though not one of those they had encountered on the Abyssian Ocean. Without being asked, he silently produced a non-descript metallic tuning fork.
“Twenty-thousand in gold,” he said without blinking. “I assure you, that is ‘bargain basement’ for this particular item.”
Mandi eyed him for a moment and then snapped her fingers at Tower Cleaver. The big minotaur produced a large sack and dropped it on the counter with a snort. Mandi knew that planar attunements were not cheap, especially those meant for travel to more obscure, or secure destinations. The price sounded right. She picked up the fork and motioned for the others to follow, leading them to the center of the market.
“You’re going to do it right here?” Marius asked. “In front of everyone?”
“I suspect all the ‘right’ people are already well aware of what we are doing,” the sorceress answered. “The time for secrecy has passed.”
The group gathered round her as she began the spell of planar shifting. The tuning fork began to glow ominously, and the environment around them blurred into a shifting miasma of color and sound. A howling wind filled their ears as light and dark streamed by. Then, as quickly as it had begun, it was over.
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Once the motion sickness of the transition had passed, the company gazed around at their new surroundings. They stood on a white marble path, ten feet in width. Ten yards off the path, on either side, the rocky ground abruptly ended in shifting walls of mist, rising twenty feet in height. Above the fog, large, jagged tors could be glimpsed, and above all a steely blue sun shown down, making harsh shadows and throwing an unhealthy glow across the landscape.
“Now what?” Marius asked.
“Well,” Mandi replied, “the most obvious choice would be to seek out Shami-Amourae’s prison, but since we have no idea where to find it, nor any way to free her if we did so, then I suggest we seek out Overlook first. If the rumors are true then we should find the map room there, as well as a possible control chamber.”
“And if the rumors are true, we may also find the so-called Spawn of Ahazu,” Marius snapped.
“Surely you didn’t go to all the trouble of finding us again just play the part of devil’s advocate, did you?” Mandi smiled, gently stressing the word ‘devil.’
“I most assuredly did not go through all that trouble to end up dead…again,” the gnome retorted. “Still, I see no other option, so how do we go about finding the fortress?”
“Daelric knows where it is,” the sorceress said, slapping the priest on the back. “Don’t you, Daelric?”
“There is not a place in the multiverse that the Traveler cannot find,” the cleric said smugly.
He placed his hands together, pointing his index fingers at the sky, and then began to chant and turn slowly. Eventually his fingers bent to point west down the path.
“That way,” he said, and began to walk.
The scenery was unchanging, and they encountered no other travelers, nor the mysterious guardians of the plane. Twice, the path they followed opened into paved courtyards with wide, black wells in their centers. The Legionnaires gave them wide berths, unwilling to disturb whomever or whatever lay imprisoned within. After passing the second such well, Daelric came to a halt, his fingers pointing up, towards the summit of a high tor they could just see in the distance.
“There,” he said.
Mandi nodded, and waved the others into a circle around her once more. This time, the trip was much briefer, and less disorienting, but when it ended, the company found themselves atop the tor, staring at a large and ancient fortress. It was constructed of blood-red marble and dominated by a massive corner tower. The once-grand edifice was crumbling, and several holes in the walls opened into the structure’s interior, giving easy access to the once-opulent chambers within. The six adventurers made their way to the shattered front doors and entered the nave of the fortress. Within, wooden floors hung in various states of disrepair, all caked with guano. A wooden staircase appeared to have once spiraled up the interior wall, but large sections had collapsed and fallen to the stone floor. Most of the chambers were open to the sky above, but a few of the smaller rooms were more or less intact. Here and there, a few eerie paintings still adorned the walls, but rectangular discolorations suggested many others had been removed. Each of the remaining paintings was more disturbing than the last, depicting scenes of horror and chaos that could only exist amidst the Infinite Planes of the Abyss.
“Tower Cleaver hate this place,” the minotaur grumbled as he struggled to avert his eyes from the disturbing paintings.
“I think you’re about to hate it a lot more,” Octurus murmured from beneath his balaclava, gazing up into the rafters above. As the rest of the group raised their eyes to follow his gaze, several high-pitched shrieks filled their ears and the air was alive with beating wings. From out of the darkness dove almost a dozen bat-like humanoids…varrangoin. Claws extended, fangs bared with saliva flying from their mouths, they swarmed the Legionnaires. Marius was spun completely around as one struck him a glancing blow when it passed. Octurus crouched, his eyes picking one of the demons out the pack as it closed. Just as it was upon him, he pivoted, letting it pass bare inches from him, and then slashing across the back of its thigh, hamstringing it and sending it tumbling across the floor. Sepoto and Tower Cleaver were more direct, hacking and whipping at anything that moved, and sending screaming fiends scattering in all directions.
As quickly as they fell, however, the varrangoin scrambled nimbly back to their feet, darting in and slashing viciously. Marius seemed to bear the brunt of their attacks, as Daelric remained invisible throughout the melee, healing wounds where he could, while the three warriors managed to keep their assailants at bay with whirling steel, and Mandi assumed the form of a towering angelic being whose skin seemed to shed the blows of the demons like water. It was only a matter of time, however, before the deadly gnome saw his chance, hurling a fiery bead at his feet and blasting all of the varrangoin away, clearing a wide swath around him. As they struggled to recover, the warriors pounced on them, aided by Mandi’s powerful telekinetic grasp, which would hold one demon still while Tower Cleaver dispatched it before moving on to another. In this manner the Legionnaires made quick work of the varrangoin, and before long, the fortress was quiet again.
The varrangoin had been expected. Red Shroud had warned the Legionnaires about their presence, but it was the rumored Spawn of Ahazu that Mandi was concerned with. It had been her experience that deific spawn were always bad news. She recalled all too well the Age of Worms, when the spawn of Kyuss had been released once more upon the world. So it was with trepidation that she and the others approached the doors that led into the large tower on the fortress’s southeast side. Beyond them, the tower was revealed to be a single immense chamber. A collection of strange paintings hung on the walls, but it was what lay in the center of the room that drew the attention of the six companions. It was a circular mosaic, fully forty feet in diameter, made of hundreds of stone tiles. These created a scale model of the Wells of Darkness in their entirety, complete with inky pools marked with demonic seals. In the center of the diorama, where Overlook should have been, was instead another pool marked with a strange glyph that resembled a fanged maw. Immediately Sepoto felt drawn towards the mosaic. The black tooth that protruded over his lower lip began to throb, and he felt that there was something he had to do. Almost mechanically, he walked into the room and knelt down on the floor beside the display. Marius, Mandi and Daelric followed, gazing at the diorama as well as the odd artwork. As Octurus and Tower Cleaver crossed the threshold, however, they were suddenly seized by wracking pains, causing both of them to double over and fall to their knees just inside the door, where the agony passed as quickly as it had come.
“This…place…,” Octurus wheezed. “So…evil…I can…smell it…”
Marius quirked an eyebrow and shrugged. “Funny, I hadn’t noticed.”
Sepoto had ignored the entire incident, focused as he was on the mosaic. In his mind he could see a pattern beginning to form, and he reached out one finger and pressed one of the tiles. It sank in a fraction of an inch with a metallic click. Quickly, the goliath began to press more tiles in rapid succession, totally absorbed in the task.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Mandi muttered.
Meanwhile, Octurus had just pulled himself slowly to his feet when his sharp eyes spotted a faint flutter of movement in the darkness above.
“Ware!” he shouted as four immense shadows detached themselves from the gloom. They appeared as nothing so much as huge manta rays composed of utter darkness. They flapped and circled high above and their voices sounded like harsh whispers echoing across the vast, open space. Suddenly, an energy wave ripped across the chamber and the Legionnaires felt a physical pull as the magic ripped at their arcane and divine wards. The creatures were trying to weaken their defenses. As Mandi realized what the things were, her heart grew cold. She had heard tales of such beasts told in frightened whispers…nightshades, undead beings crafted from shadow stuff. Specifically, they were nightwings, and beyond their unliving nature, she knew little else. Could these be Ahazu’s spawn? There was no time for conjecture. She couldn’t allow them to further debilitate the protections of her and her companions. A blast of green fire streaked from her hand, tearing off large chunks of shadowy darkness from one of the beasts. Then, whirling she grabbed Tower Cleaver’s arm and spoke another spell, rendering the minotaur lighter than air.
“Get up there!” she snarled.
As Cleaver nodded and rose from the ground, Daelric released his own magic, lighting up the darkness like bright daylight. One of the nightwings simply disintegrated in the blast. Then another shrieked as a beam of light like concentrated sunlight shown from Marius’s outstretched palm. As it writhed and burned, Tower Cleaver swung his glowing axe, completely obliterating its corporeal form. The remaining two horrors swarmed around the barbarian, and Cleaver felt a gust of air colder than the grave. Just like that, the light from his axe was snuffed out, leaving him holding dull, gray metal in his hands.
“Noooooo!” he howled, and proceeded to flail at the nearest nightwing with all his might. Even with the magic of his blade suppressed, his sheer, raw strength was awesome to behold, and the undead creature withered under his repeated blows. An instant later its companion also ceased to exist as Marius’s disintegrated it into black powder.
“Got it!” Sepoto yelled abruptly. He pushed in the last tile, the pattern he had created an exact duplicate of the fanged sigil. As the final tile clicked into place, the entire mosaic began to rumble. Within seconds, the tiles began to fold outward in a clattering storm, overlapping impossibly back on themselves as if they had no depth at all, until they had folded neatly into the rim of the upper edge of an exposed shaft…a large well. The walls of the shaft were gouged and pitted, as if a great beast had clawed its way into the depths long ago. Several hundred feet below rippled the glint of inky, black liquid. Thousands of horrifically silent ants clung to the upper walls, their cold, blue eyes and dripping mandibles eerie in the stillness. As one, they raised their heads to stare at Sepoto, and then as one, they began swarming up the walls.
“Watch out!” Daelric cried as he began chanting, calling into existence a spinning wall of silvery blades, bisecting the top of the shaft with it and destroying hundreds of the formicates. Sepoto began backing away from the mouth of the well and heard Mandi’s voice behind him, the guttural words to a spell falling rhythmically from her lips. A dense fog began to coalesce within the well, obscuring the oncoming horde. Then, Marius snapped his finger, tossing a small flame over the rim, and laughing as it exploded, sending flames high into the air. Incredibly, the ants still came, spilling out of the top of the well like a single creature. Now Daelric and Marius began unleashing blast after blast of fire on the swarm, but still they came, closing on Sepoto. To his horror, they parted their mandibles and spat at him, the acidic fluid congealing into a large glob which hissed and sputtered as it struck his breastplate. Cursing, he continued to back away from the oncoming tide until finally, under the withering barrage from the wizard and the priest, the last of the vermin was roasted to ash.
For several long moments the group stood silently around the well, gazing down into the darkness. Everyone feared what awaited them below, yet they had no choice. Sepoto felt the pull of his tooth’s original owner, and his own trepidation was multiplied ten-fold. Finally, Mandi spoke.
“There’s no point in delaying this any further. Our goal lies below.”
Then, the angelic form she wore spread its wings and she glided down into the darkness. One by one the others followed, each using their own form of flight. Sepoto went last, and as he passed the lip of the well, the mosaic unfolded itself once more, sealing the top of the shaft shut again…
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
