Agar speaks unpronounciable syllables; rock that was briefly mud before becoming rock again is once more transformed into sticky mud, freeing the toads and people who had been unable to escape in time. The archangel called into being by Tao turns toads back into people, and the astral deva summoned by Velendo easily destroys the polymorphed, terrified goblin-trolls. As the Defenders of Daybreak count heads and heal the injured, the two angels briefly speak to one another in the language of the Gods. Their tone is somber.
Velendo’s angel turns to him before he departs. “I may not tarry. I am needed elsewhere, but your call was too important to rebuff.” He raises a perfect eyebrow. “Velendo of Hunnerstide, you are far from home.”
Velendo clears his throat in embarrassment and awe. “I certainly am, Holy One. I’m sorry if I bothered you.”
The deva smiles. “Far from it. In fact, it is good that you called now. We are worried for you, Child, because Our Lord has trusted you with a task that few others are qualified to accomplish.” The angel looks approvingly across the Defenders clustered nearby. “I come bearing a gift for you, to aid when Our eyes can not be upon you.”
Velendo swallows with a dry mouth. “A gift, Holy One?”
“A gift, and a punishment, and a lesson in humility.” The angel smiles beatifically, there is a blinding flash and a cascade of celestial trumpets, and it is gone. Velendo glances about, but doesn’t see anything resembling a gift. He shrugs his narrow, bony shoulders and basks in the warmth of his certain faith, then looks confused.
“Wait. A punishment?”
Twenty feet away, Stone Bear frowns and stares at the old cleric, his eye sockets lost in empty shadow.
Nearby, the solar Evergreen bends down on one knee to look Tao in the eye. “I must hurry back before I am missed.”
“Of course. You were kind to come.” She bows her head in reverent thanks. “I hope I did not draw you away from something more important.”
The solar smiles, and light spreads through the cave; everywhere it touches, plants begin to sprout and grow. “There is more under the vault of the heavens than your repugnant enemies, gloried one. I am an angel of growth; without my office, crops would not sprout and trees would not bud. There are dark days ahead. Now more than ever, I am needed.” He kisses Tao on the forehead, and pulls his angelic face back so that she can see the serious expression on his face. “You do not shoulder this burden alone, you know. There are others who strive as you do, and still more who address issues you have not even considered. Remember this in the days ahead. I am sorry for what is to come.” He sighs, and on his fragrant breath is the scent of an autumn wind. “Tao Camber, you are blessed. Go with grace.”
The radiance fades.
Tao twists her head and looks about, looking miserable. “What did that mean?”
In Stone Bear’s ear, the shadowy spirit of Elder whispers jubilantly. It means that anyone can die. Anyone. It stems from life, and this is something she would be good to remember. The dour spirit sounds almost cheery.
Stone Bear turns to Velendo. “Did you know your shadow is glowing?”
Velendo squints at him. “What? No it isn’t.”
“Indeed it is. You've been transformed, old man.”
Velendo looks aggrieved. "AGAIN?" Then he catches himself, has the good grace to look embarrassed, and turns his face to the invisible heavens above. "I mean," he says hesitantly as he tries to put something resembling sincerity into his voice, "thank you!" He rubs his eyes tiredly, and shakes his head.
Agar hurriedly casts a spell, nervously crunches an errant beetle crawling by, and nods his head. “It’s true. I can’t tell why, though. It looks normal to regular sight, but it’s certainly glowing when viewed magically.”
“Huh. Maybe that’s the gift He was talking about.” Velendo lifts his head. “Is it? Huh? And what’s with the punishment?” He lowers his head to look at his own shadow, and shrugs. “Come on, everyone. Let’s go question that corpse.”
* * *
Nolin brushes some more hardened mud out of his clothing, and leans back against the comfortable boulder. “I’m still annoyed that eyebite won’t work if you cast mislead. Yeah, I know, gaze attacks aren’t terribly effective while you’re invisible – but still. It should have worked. Hummph. Who knew?”
“Actually, I…”
“Shut up, Agar.”
“Right.”
“But at least this guy is dead now. What a loon; have you seen his love letter? It seems his paramour is actually a ghoul. Revolting. Now, vampires I could understand – they’ve got that sexy non-rotty thing going for them – but a ghoul? Yuck. Even when I was a teenager and hard up, I was never that hard up.”
Tao glances at him, thinking of the teenaged girl Nolin got pregnant before fleeing into a life of dangerous adventuring. She raises her voice slightly to carry over the croaking of toads. “I remember Cynda. You were never hard up.” Nolin smiles in guilty remembrance of past sins and leans back with a nostalgic expression on his face. Tao continues, “Speaking of ghouls, I wonder how Telay is doing?” Nolin’s feet hit the floor hard as he sits up and glares at the Divine Agent.
"She's not a ghoul."
"I hope not."
Stone Bear sits in meditation, recovering his equilibrium after a painful bout of vertigo. Around him, he can sense the life force and movement of every person, every beetle, every toad. He lifts his head with a thought. “What are we going to do with all these toads?” They aren’t really toads, though, his spirit guide Bear growls into his ear. Not natural. They are other things, transformed. “I am told that they are not natural.”
“Told? By who?”
Stone bear smiles slightly. “Nature.”
Tao comes over and crouches down, studying them. She blinks, casts true seeing, and rears back. “You’re right. Would you look at that!”
“What do you see?”
“All sorts of things. Goblins, beetles, flumph, worms, some odd goats, even a few umber hulks! None of these are actual toads. I suppose we’ll just kill them.” As she says this, one of the toads begins hopping around in agitation.
“What’s that?” asks Nolin. Tao studies it.
“A goblin.”
“What’s it saying?”
Tao translates. “It’s saying, ‘No! I don’t wanna die! Pick me, pick me! I’ll shine your armor, I’ll carry baggage for you, I’ll be loyal – but I don’t wanna get killed!’” She rolls her eyes. “It’s fairly upset.”
“Well, it’s got a good head on its shoulders. I kind of like the little bugger.” Nolin reaches in to pluck the goblin-toad out of the wire toad corral. “Come on, little fella. You, I think we’ll keep.”
“Croak?”
“You betcha.”
“Nolin, are you going to turn him back into a goblin?”
Nolin chews on his lip. “I’ll think about it.”
From the side room, Velendo enters, along with Mara and Malachite. “Well, we questioned the corpse and thoroughly searched his sleeping area. We found a secret door, but didn’t go through it. The spell worked quite well; he knew quite a bit, that’s for sure.”
“What’d you find out?”
“He’s a drow outcast and a mercenary, hired by the ghouls to stop anyone from coming in to the Deeping Rift. Someone else was supposed to be here with him, but isn’t around; we’ve found signs that this ‘Quelm Tonguethreader’ is small and carnivorous. Maybe cannibalistic, or a ghoul.” Velendo shudders slightly. “Nulloc was a vegetarian, but had a good sized alchemy and research lab in there. He seems to enjoy dissections.
"It gets better. Remember that woman in Akin's Throat who was selling the ability to be cloned?"
Mara's face takes on a sour expression. "She was intensely evil."
"That's because she wasn't a woman. We're in hell; it should be no surprise that she was a demon," Stone Bear says.
"Really?"
"Yes." He sounds certain.
"In any case," continues Velendo, "we found a receipt. Nulloc Toadbringer used her services. That might mean that we have to deal with a clone of him at some point."
"If she was a fiend," says Nolin, thinking out loud, "then there's a good chance that he's been fooled. His living clone is probably trapped in the Abyss even as we speak, screaming in pain as he's tortured by demons."
"Serves him right," decides Mara.
“Fair enough," agrees Velendo. "Nothing we can do about it in any event. Let's discuss the Rift. They’ve used heavy boulders to block off the tunnel between the cavern we fought in and the Rift, but there’s a secret way through if you follow that concealed door. There are three of those flying eyes in there; he actually mapped their locations for us in a letter he was writing. We’ll have to destroy them so that they don’t warn anyone we’re coming.”
“How much time do we have?”
“Well, he reports in every day by communication spell. We know of a partial chain of command involving Commander Murliss and this Advisor Soder.”
“Think Soder is the Puppeteer?”
“We don’t know for sure. I hope so, because it will mean that we have a name. Anyways, Toadbringer said that they had already started the ritual, and that they’d be finishing soon. But that’s not the bad part.”
“Joy. What is?”
Mara speaks up. “The ritual is creating some sort of a giant juggernaut, a construct designed to travel through solid earth and deliver thousands of ghouls at a time to surface cities. Like the necropede, but much worse.”
Splinder frowns. “Where?”
Malachite frowns back as he cracks his knuckles unconsciously. “At the bottom of the Deeping Rift, and it’s perhaps a half mile straight down.”
Splinder whistles through his teeth. “That’s some rift.”
“And there are hundreds or thousands of ghouls down there, mostly aggressive slave stock called gibberlings. Between us and them, there is a guardian. Something called a ‘thurn.’”
Nolin glance up. “A thurn? Couldn’t be. They’re mythical creatures from thousands of years ago. Giant, and dark, and evil incarnate. As far as I know, they were supposedly brought into being, but were too foul to actually survive.”
“Oh, goody.” Agar looks worried. “Well, we better hurry. The signs and portents are all getting much worse. Whatever is happening, it’s going to happen soon.”
“Shall I scout ethereally?” asks Mara.
“No,” reminds Malachite. “Toadbringer made these eye-things see into other planes. We’ll probably have to use stealth.”
Quickly making a plan, Galthia borrows one of Tao’s psionic gauntlets and sneaks forward through the secret door. In the darkness of the tunnel, he sees a fiery green eyeball circling a chamber. Moving so stealthily that the ghoulish eyeball never sees him, Galthia activates the githyanki-made gauntlet with a small shudder of distaste.
He concentrates, and the fiery green eye is instantly and unerringly teleported into his hand. He slaps his other hand down, but it nimbly squirts through his fingers and starts to shoot away. Before it can get very far, Galthia lunges forward. As he does so, he focuses his ki and slaps his hands together once again. This time he catches the magical spying device squarely between his two palms. The construct bursts with a spurt of wet slime.
“One down,” reports the monk over the mindlink. “Two more to go.” The next one is easier. Finally, the group gathers at the end of a narrow tunnel, separated from the Rift by only a few stacked boulders. “the last one should be out there somewhere.”
“I’ll clairvoy,” offers Tao, and concentrates. “Good God. It’s huge.”
“The eyeball?”
“No. the rift. It’s a big canyon; I can’t see the other side. And the walls are moving.” She pauses in confusion, and then the worry lines on her face smooth. “No they aren’t. They’re just covered with a solid layer of beetles, all scuttling downwards. Millions of them. They look like they’re headed somewhere. Some of them are huge, bigger than I am, but most of them are fairly small.” Agar makes an anguished moaning sound and starts to twitch, his eyes wide with fear.
“Any sign of the eye?” asks Galthia.
“No.. yes! There it is. It’s circling in the darkness, patrolling the Rift.”
“All right.” With Priggle’s help and Velendo’s guidance, Galthia silently shifts back one of the boulders blocking off the exit of the tunnel. Peering through the gap into the open darkness, Galthia waits until he can see the cold green luminescence of the ghoulish spying device. As soon as he does, he twitches his fingers, and the eye instantly appears in his enchanted gauntlet. Within a second, it’s no more than a slimy paste.
“Done. Here’s your gauntlet back, Tao. Now let’s open this up.” Galthia wrenches back a boulder, and the skittering sound from millions of tiny legs hangs in the air of the narrow tunnel, along with a hideous distant shrieking. “Phew. Look at that.” Beetles crawling downwards from above fall over the tunnel entrance like drops of scuttling black rain.
Agar finally breaks. He crawls backwards away from the entrance, trying not to whimper, and his friends all comfort him.
“Is that the ghouls shrieking like that?”
Nolin concentrates. “No. I think those are shrieker mushrooms. They respond to nearby movement. They might have been planted as an alarm, but all these beetles must be setting them off.”
Tao tries to use clairvoyance to see down into the Rift, but fails. Stone Bear crouches and comes forward. “Let me,” he offers, and picks up a beetle to whisper to it in a language it can not ignore. Inside of Stone Bear’s head, his vision becomes that of the beetle. It scuttles off, and as soon as it bumps against another beetle Stone Bear changes the focus of his chain of eyes. His vision flashes forward down the wall of the Rift, marching from beetle to beetle, down into the unknowable depths. A few minutes later, helifts his head. “I think I can see the guardian beast.”
“What is it?”
“Not sure, exactly. The beetles are avoiding it. But it’s huge, and I can see the glint of metal. Maybe a sword. It’s crouched on an alcove’s ledge, waiting. It looks horrible.”
“Could we hit it if we dropped something on it?”
“No. But we’d probably get its attention.”
“Huh.” Galthia looks down into impenetrable darkness, and then pulls his head in and brushes a few insects off of his hair. “It’s a long way down. ”
“And they’re down there,” growls Malachite. “Doing their rituals. Eating their flesh.” His voice is rough with hatred. “Guardian beast or not, we need to go. Now.”
“I wish that we had something that we could drop…” Nolin ponders. Then his eyes light up and he starts to laugh.
“What? What?”
“The toads!”
“Huh?”
“It’s more than a half mile down, right? And polymorphed creatures turn back into their own form when they’re killed, right? So we grab those umber hulk toads and smack them against the wall as we toss them into the rift. The bouncing kills them, and they turn back into their normal great big form. And even if it misses the thurn those ghouls are down there, doing their ritual,” Nolin mimes a ghoul, “and suddenly SMACK! Incoming umber hulks!” Tao starts to giggle, Malachite chuckles, and even Priggle begins to smile at the mental picture.
“We have a scroll with a chained polymorph on it, right?” Mara’s face is lit up with a huge grin. “So we change fifteen-odd large beetles into elephants, and wheeeeeeeee! Elephant rain!” The laughing redoubles, and soon the entire group of thirty adventurers are all wheezing with built-up nervous laughter. “Whooooosh… SPLAT!” Gradually the laughter fades, but morale is much higher than it had been minutes ago. The air itself seems to be charged with some kind of static, as if in anticipation, and the group quickly focuses.
“I’ll make a Calphas’ Comfortable Castle right here in the entranceway,” says Velendo. “Agar, you use limited wish to spoof a mass fly spell. That’ll get all of us and half the dwarves into the air. The rest of the dwarves will hold the fort here.” Splinder nods. “Everyone, cast your prep spells. Nolin, go get an umber hulk toad!” He smiles. “Let’s get that thurn’s attention.”
Croaking madly, the toad spirals down into the darkness.
Elder is back again, whispering into Stone Bear’s ear. It’s coming, the spirit says hungrily. I’ve been waiting for this.
“It’s coming, everyone!” snaps Stone Bear. Half of the Defenders fly out into the huge open air of the giant underground canyon, while the other half cling to the stone wall and try to ignore the ubiquitous beetles. In Stone Bear’s ear, Elder chuckles mysteriously to itself.
Buoyed by magic and hanging in midair above an unknowable height, the Defenders strain to see down into the darkness below them. The the darkness bulges. With clapping wingbeats that sound like ancient thunder, the thurn rises from the depths.
It is larger than demons, larger than giants, larger than some hills. It is old and vile, covered with warts and pus. Its presence poisons the very air that its bat wings beat. Around its wrist is manacled an immense iron sword, as long as two men put together.
Stone Bear smiles in anticipation. “Let’s take it.”
To be continued…
