Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 385
Psychoanalysis
Dranko spends a few minutes babbling to Morningstar about his dream. “I think I failed. I haven’t done anything to Become, but I haven’t done anything not to Become, either. I don’t know what to do. All I know is that right when I woke up, I was about to kill you.”
“Do you think it was an attack?” Morningstar asks. “Do you think someone forced you to have that dream?”
Dranko shrugs helplessly. Almost in a panic he lights a cigar, hoping for guidance, answers. The smoke forms the words “two parents.”
What?
Morningstar caresses Dranko’s brow, murmuring reassurances until he drops back into sleep. She then goes into a trance and examines her husband’s sleeping mind, to see if he’s been meddled with. After a few minutes she is satisfied that there has been no immediate attack, but obviously the thing has been affecting Dranko since the day it was placed there.
She cannot look at it too closely; it will drive her insane if she looks too carefully at it, just as it would do to Dranko. Whatever it is, it’s not taking Dranko over, or altering his conscious mind.
“It’s not time yet,” she tells it. “Be still.”
It seethes, quietly.
Three hours later everyone has woken up. They meet in the common area of the mansion for breakfast. Dranko walks to Grey Wolf and pats his chest. “No sucking hole filled with Adversary blood. Good!”
“Uh… no,” says Grey Wolf. “Why would there be?”
He explains his dream to the others. “These voices kept saying “you are failing, you are failing,” and I didn’t think I was, and blah, blah, blah, and then it happened…” He becomes more and more upset as he describes the gleeful violence of his attacks, and the awesome power he possessed.
“There’s a good chance I’m going to fail, or maybe have already failed,” he tells them miserably. “I couldn’t talk my way out of it, and I Became, and did my level best to kill everyone. And I was well on my way to doing it.”
Ernie doesn’t show much pity for him. “Did you ever to stop to think, that maybe the answer to how not to Become is “try harder” and not “blah blah blah?”
“Um… no.”
“Then think about it!”
Dranko slumps in his chair. “I tried my hardest to kill you, and I didn’t even do a very good job.”
“That’s comforting,” says Kibi. “Maybe it was just an ordinary bad dream?”
“We’re hard to kill,” says Aravis.
“I suppose I should look at the bright side,” says Dranko. “I got a demon lord to apologize to me. That’s gotta count for something!”
This comment only makes Ernie more furious.
“Dranko, how can you…”
“No, you’re right, Ernie,” says Dranko. “I have to do some thinking about this. About how not to Become, whatever that turns out to mean.”
“I think to Become is to become like the Adversary in some way,” says Grey Wolf. “And that would be bad.”
Dranko looks at Ernie. “Do you have any ideas? About how not to Become?”
“No. I don’t know. I don’t have a horrible thing in my head as the result of the foolishness of my own actions.
Dranko grins as he sticks his finger in Ernie’s ear, but his friend is in no mood for silliness. Ernie swats the finger away. “No, that’s just you being annoying… though still as a result of your own foolish actions. I’d like you to think before you act foolish, at least.”
“I’m not foolish,” Dranko protests. “I’m adventurous. Foolish is totally different.”
“You need to concentrate!” says Ernie. “You need self-discipline. You want to not Become? Then don’t do idiotic things like pissing off a demon lord.” A bit more quietly, he adds, “I think part of you still feels unloved. You take stupid, reckless risks because somewhere deep down you feel unworthy.”
“Nah,” says Dranko. “I do crazy things because it’s fun. You may have been right once, but thanks to you, I’m a lot better adjusted. Those old wounds have healed.”
“Then think about that,” says Ernie. “Think about the scar tissue. Think about what we did to heal you, when you think about Becoming, when you think about doing something foolish. Think about the scar tissue. It doesn’t stretch the way healthy tissue does. It’s not as strong. You need to focus on what healed you, and not on keeping on doing stupid things.”
That gives Dranko pause. “Huh. I think I’ll go meditate on that for a little while.” He winks at Morningstar. “It’ll be four minutes before I fall asleep.”
“Someone should smack you if you start to fall asleep!” says Ernie, angered all over again by Dranko’s flippant attitude. “The pain will remind you of what’s important. That’s what going to teach you self-control.”
“Ernie,” says Morningstar. “Dranko spent his childhood in the hands of the Scarbearers.”
“And you know what I learned from them?” says Dranko. “I learned that hurting other people is a poor way to bring someone closer to God. That bullheadedness and stubbornness in the face of righteous piety is a great way to piss people off.”
“And yet you still did that exact thing to Tapheon!” says Ernie.
“Well, yeah. And it worked. It pissed him off. Really well. I mean, I didn’t try to piss Tapheon off. But I thought, here’s a Demon Lord, and it would be nice to give him the opportunity to repent… uh… okay, maybe you’re right. I was trying to get under his skin a little. But think about the cleric I’d have become, if I had been the one to make him see the error of his ways.”
Ernie is not mollified. “So it was all about you becoming famous?”
“Part of it, yeah. Maybe.”
“And he turned you into an inside-out fish,” Grey Wolf observes.
“I was totally getting away with it, being righteous to his face, in the name of my religion!” says Dranko. “Look, he’s evil, he’s really evil. You don’t tolerate evil, you don’t pretend he’s too evil, he’s too powerful, you shouldn’t bother. You have to stop it. And if you can’t stop it, you annoy it.”
Morningstar shakes her head. “You lost me at the end there.”
Aravis also fails to see the logic. “So if something is so hideously powerful that you can’t defeat it, you annoy it instead?”
“Look at it this way,” says Dranko. “Consider Ernie here. Ernie is happiest when his soul is at peace, and he is serene. When something annoys Ernie, and he’s upset, he is not at his best. He’s pissed and he’s distracted. Not on his “A” game. If I can’t defeat evil, I want to make it unhappy. I’d like to think Taphon was so focused on me, he wasn’t on his “A” game either. He wasn’t doing horrible things to other people.”
“It led him to send an assassin who summoned horrible things to kill you,” Aravis points out.
Ernie is still not convinced. “But he wasn’t focused on killing anyone outside the Abyss, except maybe the Lord of the Roses, until you made him angry.”
“You can’t know that,” says Dranko. “He doesn’t just sit there in his evil castle thinking evil thoughts when we’re not around. He does evil stuff. It makes me happy to think that every time he thinks of me, it angers him.”
“And when he can’t take it out on you, you don’t think he tortures things even more?” asks Aravis.
“Dranko,” says Morningstar. “I hear what you’re saying, and there’s some… bravery to it. But we’re already trying pretty darn hard to get rid of the Adversary. You caused a pretty unnecessary distraction. We had to save you from three pretty horrible monsters. We’d be a day or two closer to Seven Dark Words and Meledien, if we hadn’t needed to keep recovering.”
Dranko throws up his hands. “I can’t predict the future. I can’t not act, because it might cause us some problems down the line.”
“No one’s suggesting you not act,” says Aravis. “Just that you act in a way that’s more productive.”
Morningstar agrees. “Tapheon was a situation you had very little chance to affect.”
“You taunted him in his house,” says Grey Wolf.
“That was the action of a little half-orc boy who had no power in the world,” says Morningstar. “If you thought Tapheon was a force to be dealt with, you shouldn’t have taunted him for no good purpose in his home. We could have put him our list of enemies and dealt with him in our own time, instead of you doing the first thing that popped into your head.”
“Sometimes you’re a little boy throwing rocks at a bad man’s house,” says Ernie. “A boy throwing rocks at the windows of a man he hates.”
“I think you’re jealous,” says Dranko. “Not necessarily wrong, but jealous. Look at how things have worked out with Tapheon!”
“Of course I’m jealous, Dranko!” Ernie’s anger and frustration boil over. “Do you ever stop to think about the fact that everything you do that’s selfish, stupid, foolish, thoughtless and petty, works out for you? I’ve spent my entire life being a good halfling, and making sacrifices, and dying twice over, and yet I can’t kill my foes as well as you, or absorb injuries as well as you. You threw a stupid bottle into the Far Realms and it gave you magical powers and some kind of super-weapon. I’m good all the time and it never works for me, and you’re bad all the time and things always work for you. So yes, I am jealous. And it makes me angry that you don’t think about how it makes the rest of us feel.
Ernie stalks away, leaving Dranko with his mouth hanging open. Then Dranko too leaves the banquet room, in a different direction.
“Someday,” says Grey Wolf, “it’s going to stop working out for him. That’s going to be a sad day. Based on his dream, I think that time is coming real soon…”
/*/
After breakfast they pack up for another day’s travel. Chatter is minimal.
“I had another vision from the Maze last night,” says Aravis. “There wasn’t a good time to mention it before now.”
He shares it with the others.
Morningstar’s parents, Domira and Rodvin, stand on the deck of a ship, while huge plumes of smoke rise behind them. The ship -- a small passenger schooner called the Bay Breeze – is crowded, passengers crammed into every spare space. Each face is heavy with grief. Children cry and tug their mothers’ skirts.
Around the Bay Breeze are dozens of other ships – small craft, large shipping barges, light warships – all packed with refugees. They are leaving the harbor in a chaotic procession. Closest to the shore, several ships have been torched and sunk. Dozens of figures are in the water, swimming desperately, and those on the last ships are throwing tow-ropes.
The city of Kynder Hold behind them is in flames, and orcs run rampant through the streets. The air is filled with their triumphant shouts.
Tears spring to Morningstar’s eyes; tears of grief at the destruction of her childhood home, mixed with tears of relief that her parents made it out alive.
“This has been a delightful morning,” says Grey Wolf.
/*/
Ernie casts a new find the path once they have exited the mansion. The tunnels and connected caves beyond this point are too uneven for foot travel, and too serpentine for fast wind walking. They opt for phantom steeds, which offer the best combination of maneuverability and speed.
Halfway through the day, hours after the find the path has run out, Ernie is obliged to cast it a second time when they reach a new cavern with seven different ways out. (Morningstar first tries concentrating on Laramon’s Jade Clover, the little luck item that seemed to have played a part in their successful leap away from Leaping Circle One. She is momentarily encouraged when it grows warm as she focuses on one of the exit tunnels, but then she realizes it’s reacting the same way for all of them. Kibi also tries stone tell, but none of the stone has memory of humans passing this way in the past ten years.)
So Ernie casts his spell, forcing a divination from beyond the Iron Barrier and costing him more life force. Knowledge of the correct tunnel springs to his mind, and off again they all go. The day passes without incident, as does the following evening in Aravis’s mansion. No one’s dreams are haunted, and Morningstar checks Dranko’s mind overnight. All is well.
The next day proceeds much as the previous, though sometime around midafternoon they are forced to abandon their phantom steeds. For almost half a mile they crawl on hands and knees, as the ceiling drops to height of just over three feet. A few short stretches require them to slide on their bellies, packs scraping the rock above them.
Once they are able to stand again, the way is altogether easier, with the ground, while not exactly flat, at least offering a walkable footing. Then, slowly, the wide tunnel slopes downward for another mile, before pitching steeply and emptying into a vertical shaft over a hundred feet across. The Company can see that other tunnels also end at this shaft at other heights and compass points, like pipes terminating at an enormous drain.
The shaft is not empty. It is clogged with enormous crystals, criss-crossing the space like a giant’s pick-up-sticks. If one of the Company were to jump, they would not fall thousands of feet unimpeded, but would rather bounce painfully from crystal to crystal like a child falling from the highest branches of a dense climbing tree.
Find the Path indicates downward. Wind walk is the travel method of choice, though Kibi allows Scree to gleefully leap and tumble from crystal to crystal. The little earth elemental thinks this is the most fantastic place he’s ever seen. Long ago this formation was dubbed the Crystal Plunge by Underdark explorers, though there are few living who have seen it.
The Company wends its way down, through a latticework of crystal girders glittering in the light motes. At first they are dirty white, but over time they transition to a deep violet and then to a black-flecked orange. Two miles down, the light motes start to fade. Aravis sets up the mansion as usual, but Kibi wants to sleep outside, nestled in a formation of crystal. Dranko and Flicker offer to join him, so that no one is left to sleep unguarded. Dranko teaches Scree to play chess, thinking that after losing so often to Pewter, perhaps he can best a pile of rocks. But Scree win his inaugural game in a close-fought contest, then wins the second game on a four-move fool’s mate. Dranko grumbles and goes to sleep.
Another night passes peacefully, though Aravis has had another vision from the Maze, and it’s as troubling as any they’ve had so far.
“It’s a shame I can only do this once.”
Emperor Naradawk turns something over in his hand, feeling its weight. It is a broken-off piece of a large fang.
“I think you will be pleased,” says the man standing behind the Emperor. He is thin, and shifts awkwardly from foot to foot in his ill-fitting red plate. “There is nothing else here to rival it.”
Naradawk smiles – a horrible sight. “Yasper, you know I have complete faith in your abilities. Now, whom have you chosen to be the sacrifice?”
The man Yasper shakes his head. “It was a difficult thing, my Lord. Many of your men and women volunteered, but we are so few, I was unwilling to give up our best. Eldegin was one of the first, but I told him his worth was too great. I decided that Asbaq would be the one. He was the last one chosen before we left Chinniphath, and though he is brave and enthusiastic, we will not miss his sword as much. And he wishes to die for you as much as any of them.”
Naradawk smiles. “Good,” he says. “Then let’s waste no more time. Bring Asbaq forward.”
A young fresh-faced man, barely in his twenties, strides forward, the sun glinting off his crimson armor. He stops before the towering figure of the Emperor.
“My Lord!” he says, almost shouting. “I am here to offer myself, to die in your service, if you will afford me that honor!”
“I will,” says Naradawk, with a slight bow of his head. “Stand in the center of the circle, and do not close your eyes.”
“My Lord!”
Asbaq walks briskly to the center of the large ring of obsidian bricks sunk into the earth. Naradawk closes his own eyes before speaking.
“Blood calls to blood, and it sings within me. Blood restores blood, spilled and reformed. The sleeping will wake, and the waking will sleep forever in the cold beyond. I call upon he that was, and will be again, to arise and serve me. From the remains, a whole. From the ashes, fire. From the memory of bitter defeat, to the promise of gleaming vengeance. Blood calls to blood.”
The last thing Asbaq sees is Naradawk tossing the broken fang into the circle, almost to his feet. Then the circle fills with white flames, and Asbaq is consumed, quickly, in the unholy inferno. For several minutes the flames grow brighter, until the entire circle is filled with a roaring pillar of pale fire.
Abruptly it ceases. Nothing is left of Asbaq; even his red armor has been incinerated to a fine ash. But the circle is not empty. When Naradawk opens his eyes, he is looking up at the serpentine neck and smoldering eyes of Azhant the Ancient.
“I want my vengeance,” snarls the dragon. “Where are they?”
“Beyond your reach,” says Naradawk. “They have abandoned this world.”
“Then what would you have me do?”
“I would have you destroy everything they held so dear. Serve me until my war is over, and you will choose your own domain.”
Azhant the Ancient shows his fangs. Only one is missing.
“I will. Let me begin.”
…to be continued…
>> Here’s a page with some images that should give you an idea of the nature and scale of the Crystal Plunge:
http://thesavoia.com/2011/11/22/crystal-cave-of-giants/
Psychoanalysis
Dranko spends a few minutes babbling to Morningstar about his dream. “I think I failed. I haven’t done anything to Become, but I haven’t done anything not to Become, either. I don’t know what to do. All I know is that right when I woke up, I was about to kill you.”
“Do you think it was an attack?” Morningstar asks. “Do you think someone forced you to have that dream?”
Dranko shrugs helplessly. Almost in a panic he lights a cigar, hoping for guidance, answers. The smoke forms the words “two parents.”
What?
Morningstar caresses Dranko’s brow, murmuring reassurances until he drops back into sleep. She then goes into a trance and examines her husband’s sleeping mind, to see if he’s been meddled with. After a few minutes she is satisfied that there has been no immediate attack, but obviously the thing has been affecting Dranko since the day it was placed there.
She cannot look at it too closely; it will drive her insane if she looks too carefully at it, just as it would do to Dranko. Whatever it is, it’s not taking Dranko over, or altering his conscious mind.
“It’s not time yet,” she tells it. “Be still.”
It seethes, quietly.
Three hours later everyone has woken up. They meet in the common area of the mansion for breakfast. Dranko walks to Grey Wolf and pats his chest. “No sucking hole filled with Adversary blood. Good!”
“Uh… no,” says Grey Wolf. “Why would there be?”
He explains his dream to the others. “These voices kept saying “you are failing, you are failing,” and I didn’t think I was, and blah, blah, blah, and then it happened…” He becomes more and more upset as he describes the gleeful violence of his attacks, and the awesome power he possessed.
“There’s a good chance I’m going to fail, or maybe have already failed,” he tells them miserably. “I couldn’t talk my way out of it, and I Became, and did my level best to kill everyone. And I was well on my way to doing it.”
Ernie doesn’t show much pity for him. “Did you ever to stop to think, that maybe the answer to how not to Become is “try harder” and not “blah blah blah?”
“Um… no.”
“Then think about it!”
Dranko slumps in his chair. “I tried my hardest to kill you, and I didn’t even do a very good job.”
“That’s comforting,” says Kibi. “Maybe it was just an ordinary bad dream?”
“We’re hard to kill,” says Aravis.
“I suppose I should look at the bright side,” says Dranko. “I got a demon lord to apologize to me. That’s gotta count for something!”
This comment only makes Ernie more furious.
“Dranko, how can you…”
“No, you’re right, Ernie,” says Dranko. “I have to do some thinking about this. About how not to Become, whatever that turns out to mean.”
“I think to Become is to become like the Adversary in some way,” says Grey Wolf. “And that would be bad.”
Dranko looks at Ernie. “Do you have any ideas? About how not to Become?”
“No. I don’t know. I don’t have a horrible thing in my head as the result of the foolishness of my own actions.
Dranko grins as he sticks his finger in Ernie’s ear, but his friend is in no mood for silliness. Ernie swats the finger away. “No, that’s just you being annoying… though still as a result of your own foolish actions. I’d like you to think before you act foolish, at least.”
“I’m not foolish,” Dranko protests. “I’m adventurous. Foolish is totally different.”
“You need to concentrate!” says Ernie. “You need self-discipline. You want to not Become? Then don’t do idiotic things like pissing off a demon lord.” A bit more quietly, he adds, “I think part of you still feels unloved. You take stupid, reckless risks because somewhere deep down you feel unworthy.”
“Nah,” says Dranko. “I do crazy things because it’s fun. You may have been right once, but thanks to you, I’m a lot better adjusted. Those old wounds have healed.”
“Then think about that,” says Ernie. “Think about the scar tissue. Think about what we did to heal you, when you think about Becoming, when you think about doing something foolish. Think about the scar tissue. It doesn’t stretch the way healthy tissue does. It’s not as strong. You need to focus on what healed you, and not on keeping on doing stupid things.”
That gives Dranko pause. “Huh. I think I’ll go meditate on that for a little while.” He winks at Morningstar. “It’ll be four minutes before I fall asleep.”
“Someone should smack you if you start to fall asleep!” says Ernie, angered all over again by Dranko’s flippant attitude. “The pain will remind you of what’s important. That’s what going to teach you self-control.”
“Ernie,” says Morningstar. “Dranko spent his childhood in the hands of the Scarbearers.”
“And you know what I learned from them?” says Dranko. “I learned that hurting other people is a poor way to bring someone closer to God. That bullheadedness and stubbornness in the face of righteous piety is a great way to piss people off.”
“And yet you still did that exact thing to Tapheon!” says Ernie.
“Well, yeah. And it worked. It pissed him off. Really well. I mean, I didn’t try to piss Tapheon off. But I thought, here’s a Demon Lord, and it would be nice to give him the opportunity to repent… uh… okay, maybe you’re right. I was trying to get under his skin a little. But think about the cleric I’d have become, if I had been the one to make him see the error of his ways.”
Ernie is not mollified. “So it was all about you becoming famous?”
“Part of it, yeah. Maybe.”
“And he turned you into an inside-out fish,” Grey Wolf observes.
“I was totally getting away with it, being righteous to his face, in the name of my religion!” says Dranko. “Look, he’s evil, he’s really evil. You don’t tolerate evil, you don’t pretend he’s too evil, he’s too powerful, you shouldn’t bother. You have to stop it. And if you can’t stop it, you annoy it.”
Morningstar shakes her head. “You lost me at the end there.”
Aravis also fails to see the logic. “So if something is so hideously powerful that you can’t defeat it, you annoy it instead?”
“Look at it this way,” says Dranko. “Consider Ernie here. Ernie is happiest when his soul is at peace, and he is serene. When something annoys Ernie, and he’s upset, he is not at his best. He’s pissed and he’s distracted. Not on his “A” game. If I can’t defeat evil, I want to make it unhappy. I’d like to think Taphon was so focused on me, he wasn’t on his “A” game either. He wasn’t doing horrible things to other people.”
“It led him to send an assassin who summoned horrible things to kill you,” Aravis points out.
Ernie is still not convinced. “But he wasn’t focused on killing anyone outside the Abyss, except maybe the Lord of the Roses, until you made him angry.”
“You can’t know that,” says Dranko. “He doesn’t just sit there in his evil castle thinking evil thoughts when we’re not around. He does evil stuff. It makes me happy to think that every time he thinks of me, it angers him.”
“And when he can’t take it out on you, you don’t think he tortures things even more?” asks Aravis.
“Dranko,” says Morningstar. “I hear what you’re saying, and there’s some… bravery to it. But we’re already trying pretty darn hard to get rid of the Adversary. You caused a pretty unnecessary distraction. We had to save you from three pretty horrible monsters. We’d be a day or two closer to Seven Dark Words and Meledien, if we hadn’t needed to keep recovering.”
Dranko throws up his hands. “I can’t predict the future. I can’t not act, because it might cause us some problems down the line.”
“No one’s suggesting you not act,” says Aravis. “Just that you act in a way that’s more productive.”
Morningstar agrees. “Tapheon was a situation you had very little chance to affect.”
“You taunted him in his house,” says Grey Wolf.
“That was the action of a little half-orc boy who had no power in the world,” says Morningstar. “If you thought Tapheon was a force to be dealt with, you shouldn’t have taunted him for no good purpose in his home. We could have put him our list of enemies and dealt with him in our own time, instead of you doing the first thing that popped into your head.”
“Sometimes you’re a little boy throwing rocks at a bad man’s house,” says Ernie. “A boy throwing rocks at the windows of a man he hates.”
“I think you’re jealous,” says Dranko. “Not necessarily wrong, but jealous. Look at how things have worked out with Tapheon!”
“Of course I’m jealous, Dranko!” Ernie’s anger and frustration boil over. “Do you ever stop to think about the fact that everything you do that’s selfish, stupid, foolish, thoughtless and petty, works out for you? I’ve spent my entire life being a good halfling, and making sacrifices, and dying twice over, and yet I can’t kill my foes as well as you, or absorb injuries as well as you. You threw a stupid bottle into the Far Realms and it gave you magical powers and some kind of super-weapon. I’m good all the time and it never works for me, and you’re bad all the time and things always work for you. So yes, I am jealous. And it makes me angry that you don’t think about how it makes the rest of us feel.
Ernie stalks away, leaving Dranko with his mouth hanging open. Then Dranko too leaves the banquet room, in a different direction.
“Someday,” says Grey Wolf, “it’s going to stop working out for him. That’s going to be a sad day. Based on his dream, I think that time is coming real soon…”
/*/
After breakfast they pack up for another day’s travel. Chatter is minimal.
“I had another vision from the Maze last night,” says Aravis. “There wasn’t a good time to mention it before now.”
He shares it with the others.
Morningstar’s parents, Domira and Rodvin, stand on the deck of a ship, while huge plumes of smoke rise behind them. The ship -- a small passenger schooner called the Bay Breeze – is crowded, passengers crammed into every spare space. Each face is heavy with grief. Children cry and tug their mothers’ skirts.
Around the Bay Breeze are dozens of other ships – small craft, large shipping barges, light warships – all packed with refugees. They are leaving the harbor in a chaotic procession. Closest to the shore, several ships have been torched and sunk. Dozens of figures are in the water, swimming desperately, and those on the last ships are throwing tow-ropes.
The city of Kynder Hold behind them is in flames, and orcs run rampant through the streets. The air is filled with their triumphant shouts.
Tears spring to Morningstar’s eyes; tears of grief at the destruction of her childhood home, mixed with tears of relief that her parents made it out alive.
“This has been a delightful morning,” says Grey Wolf.
/*/
Ernie casts a new find the path once they have exited the mansion. The tunnels and connected caves beyond this point are too uneven for foot travel, and too serpentine for fast wind walking. They opt for phantom steeds, which offer the best combination of maneuverability and speed.
Halfway through the day, hours after the find the path has run out, Ernie is obliged to cast it a second time when they reach a new cavern with seven different ways out. (Morningstar first tries concentrating on Laramon’s Jade Clover, the little luck item that seemed to have played a part in their successful leap away from Leaping Circle One. She is momentarily encouraged when it grows warm as she focuses on one of the exit tunnels, but then she realizes it’s reacting the same way for all of them. Kibi also tries stone tell, but none of the stone has memory of humans passing this way in the past ten years.)
So Ernie casts his spell, forcing a divination from beyond the Iron Barrier and costing him more life force. Knowledge of the correct tunnel springs to his mind, and off again they all go. The day passes without incident, as does the following evening in Aravis’s mansion. No one’s dreams are haunted, and Morningstar checks Dranko’s mind overnight. All is well.
The next day proceeds much as the previous, though sometime around midafternoon they are forced to abandon their phantom steeds. For almost half a mile they crawl on hands and knees, as the ceiling drops to height of just over three feet. A few short stretches require them to slide on their bellies, packs scraping the rock above them.
Once they are able to stand again, the way is altogether easier, with the ground, while not exactly flat, at least offering a walkable footing. Then, slowly, the wide tunnel slopes downward for another mile, before pitching steeply and emptying into a vertical shaft over a hundred feet across. The Company can see that other tunnels also end at this shaft at other heights and compass points, like pipes terminating at an enormous drain.
The shaft is not empty. It is clogged with enormous crystals, criss-crossing the space like a giant’s pick-up-sticks. If one of the Company were to jump, they would not fall thousands of feet unimpeded, but would rather bounce painfully from crystal to crystal like a child falling from the highest branches of a dense climbing tree.
Find the Path indicates downward. Wind walk is the travel method of choice, though Kibi allows Scree to gleefully leap and tumble from crystal to crystal. The little earth elemental thinks this is the most fantastic place he’s ever seen. Long ago this formation was dubbed the Crystal Plunge by Underdark explorers, though there are few living who have seen it.
The Company wends its way down, through a latticework of crystal girders glittering in the light motes. At first they are dirty white, but over time they transition to a deep violet and then to a black-flecked orange. Two miles down, the light motes start to fade. Aravis sets up the mansion as usual, but Kibi wants to sleep outside, nestled in a formation of crystal. Dranko and Flicker offer to join him, so that no one is left to sleep unguarded. Dranko teaches Scree to play chess, thinking that after losing so often to Pewter, perhaps he can best a pile of rocks. But Scree win his inaugural game in a close-fought contest, then wins the second game on a four-move fool’s mate. Dranko grumbles and goes to sleep.
Another night passes peacefully, though Aravis has had another vision from the Maze, and it’s as troubling as any they’ve had so far.
“It’s a shame I can only do this once.”
Emperor Naradawk turns something over in his hand, feeling its weight. It is a broken-off piece of a large fang.
“I think you will be pleased,” says the man standing behind the Emperor. He is thin, and shifts awkwardly from foot to foot in his ill-fitting red plate. “There is nothing else here to rival it.”
Naradawk smiles – a horrible sight. “Yasper, you know I have complete faith in your abilities. Now, whom have you chosen to be the sacrifice?”
The man Yasper shakes his head. “It was a difficult thing, my Lord. Many of your men and women volunteered, but we are so few, I was unwilling to give up our best. Eldegin was one of the first, but I told him his worth was too great. I decided that Asbaq would be the one. He was the last one chosen before we left Chinniphath, and though he is brave and enthusiastic, we will not miss his sword as much. And he wishes to die for you as much as any of them.”
Naradawk smiles. “Good,” he says. “Then let’s waste no more time. Bring Asbaq forward.”
A young fresh-faced man, barely in his twenties, strides forward, the sun glinting off his crimson armor. He stops before the towering figure of the Emperor.
“My Lord!” he says, almost shouting. “I am here to offer myself, to die in your service, if you will afford me that honor!”
“I will,” says Naradawk, with a slight bow of his head. “Stand in the center of the circle, and do not close your eyes.”
“My Lord!”
Asbaq walks briskly to the center of the large ring of obsidian bricks sunk into the earth. Naradawk closes his own eyes before speaking.
“Blood calls to blood, and it sings within me. Blood restores blood, spilled and reformed. The sleeping will wake, and the waking will sleep forever in the cold beyond. I call upon he that was, and will be again, to arise and serve me. From the remains, a whole. From the ashes, fire. From the memory of bitter defeat, to the promise of gleaming vengeance. Blood calls to blood.”
The last thing Asbaq sees is Naradawk tossing the broken fang into the circle, almost to his feet. Then the circle fills with white flames, and Asbaq is consumed, quickly, in the unholy inferno. For several minutes the flames grow brighter, until the entire circle is filled with a roaring pillar of pale fire.
Abruptly it ceases. Nothing is left of Asbaq; even his red armor has been incinerated to a fine ash. But the circle is not empty. When Naradawk opens his eyes, he is looking up at the serpentine neck and smoldering eyes of Azhant the Ancient.
“I want my vengeance,” snarls the dragon. “Where are they?”
“Beyond your reach,” says Naradawk. “They have abandoned this world.”
“Then what would you have me do?”
“I would have you destroy everything they held so dear. Serve me until my war is over, and you will choose your own domain.”
Azhant the Ancient shows his fangs. Only one is missing.
“I will. Let me begin.”
…to be continued…
>> Here’s a page with some images that should give you an idea of the nature and scale of the Crystal Plunge:
http://thesavoia.com/2011/11/22/crystal-cave-of-giants/
