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[5E] The Age of Worms - Solid Snake's Campaign
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<blockquote data-quote="Alexander Bryant1" data-source="post: 7820193" data-attributes="member: 6916184"><p>We attack.</p><p></p><p>No, that’s not right. Treig attacks. Just Treig. It is a profoundly Jodan thing to do – I don’t know what he was thinking. I was told later that he dashed into the middle of the entire group, throwing cigars and firing his efficient little repeating crossbow, until everyone was dead.</p><p></p><p>Well, not everyone. Just one, really: a kenku on a ledge was also firing his crossbow but missed where Treig did not.</p><p></p><p>Let me back up a bit.</p><p></p><p>Rey and Verdre had scouted ahead and came upon the scene of a whirling, dark cloud moving towards the group in front of us who, with magic, managed to blow the cloud away and reveal a flying bird-horse-rhy’nos’ferous (?) underneath which Rey immediately took a liking to. There was a djinn flying something on fire, a shield put up by the mage, two underling tieflings positioning a sort of trap underneath it which began pulling the bird-horse-rhy’nos’ferous in. Rey, seeing the lone creature beset and not winning, jumped onto its back to help it. Of course. I wonder if perhaps she feels a sort of kinship with hybrid monsters because … but she is no monster, save to those who oppose her. Verdre also leaped, but onto the flying beast of the djinn, and sought to squeeze some sense into him in the form of a boa constrictor. He and she both tumbled off as Rey and her new best beast friend performed an aerial charge that dissipated his steed. And Treig was being turned to stone.</p><p></p><p>All of the above is what I pieced together through talking to Rey and Verdre later. I first saw Verdre in connection to the fight gliding back to earth as a flying squirrel.</p><p></p><p>You see, I had not been paying attention to any of this. I was, the entire time, some distance away down the burned passage through the thorns trying to see if I could pick my way through the living mass to follow a sprite who had appeared and darted away. I could not, and anyway Verdre landed and let me know there was a battle, something Jodan had already picked up on and had trotted in to lash our opponents.</p><p></p><p>I sized up the situation, fired some rounds into the fray from a good vantage point, and decided we had had enough. We could probably down the mage’s followers but not the silver-masked one himself who could not seem to be hurt permanently: even the gaping wounds caused by Angivre’s fury were almost instantly healed. More of us were going to be transmuted into stone like Treig (a striking figure in granite but like all statues, not useful) or captured or killed. Though, not killed, not here. More accurately: before our material forms ended to become other, fae forms, a fate that had happened to one of their party, the unhappy, darting sprite who was then slain again by a restored Treig as he observed it listening in on us while we were talking about the non-aggression pact. Its body was absorbed by the plants and then a raccoon-man stepped out of a huge, swelling bulb a moment later.</p><p></p><p style="text-align: center">***</p><p></p><p>“Why are we fighting one another?” I call out. “If you are here to seek the library, then our goals might not be in conflict. We will step back if you will.”</p><p></p><p>The silver-masked one offered one of the roc king’s feathers. We accepted. We had an accord.</p><p></p><p>Their mouth was the fire djinn, a surprisingly cheerful being named Malhazar the Exiled Flame, who knew many details about each one of us.</p><p></p><p>“You have a reputation,” he exclaims. “And it tells us that you are far more suited to facing what is here than we. In fact, if you handle the, ah, <em>situation</em> correctly, I don’t doubt you will complete two of the quests at the same time! Ha ha!”</p><p></p><p>“With the feather,” I venture, “that you took through unnecessary violence, that leaves only the belt. There is also no need to attack him: we have a pact with him already.”</p><p></p><p>“Ah, the stone giant. Yes,” he says, laughing. “It is how we found out about the dying here. Kufastios was a mighty minotaur, but that stone giant was too much for him even as we backed his, ah, bull-rush attack. Very impressive, but so was the strength of our opponent! And now our dauntless armored warrior is but a tiny, toothless sprite. This change has not been good for him, I will tell you. No, no. But if you have a pact with the giant already, yes, then you should be the ones to claim his belt. Yes, we work together!”</p><p></p><p>“No, we work and you try not to gratuitously set upon anything. Honestly, is killing all you know? And if so,” I remember a phrase Treig likes to use, “how is that working out for you?” The tieflings and silver-masked Vecna mage were probably lost causes, but the djinn I felt could be reasoned with, a task for later.</p><p></p><p>I leave them and our party huddles in a circle some ways away. No one is happy with the direction I am leading us.</p><p></p><p>“They killed the roc lord,” says Rey, “and using necrotic energy.”</p><p></p><p>“What of it?” says Verdre.</p><p></p><p>“What she means, I think, is that rocs are not good creatures, Rey. They aren’t gentle beings of light. And yes, I understand those people are not our friends, but we weren’t getting anywhere battling them.”</p><p></p><p>“I am not happy, Etona.”</p><p></p><p>Maybe she sees herself in the great birds, or perhaps she developed a bond with them in communicating with them. I don’t understand, and neither does Verdre: they are carnivorous foes only allied with us because there is mutual advantage.</p><p></p><p>“I thought these agents of Vecna were –,” adds Treig. He also wants to continue the fight, I sense, because he fires off his crossbow mid-sentence and plants a bolt through the minotaur-turned-sprite’s head. “…long-time foes of yours?”</p><p></p><p>We watch as the dead sprite is pulled into the thorns and spat out again from an enormous bulb as the raccoon man. He scurries away with a glare at Treig.</p><p></p><p>“Yes, they are. But … all right. We should remember what we are here for. If we are all turned into cute Fey creatures or stone, how will that further our own goals? They seem content to let us both use the library, and I doubt their purpose is more nefarious than the drowning of all the world’s life in undead worms which is what we came here to solve.”</p><p></p><p>This earns grudging acceptance.</p><p></p><p>“I will still kill them,” says Rey with an approving nod from Treig.</p><p></p><p>“Fine,” I say.</p><p></p><p>We return to the group.</p><p></p><p>“We know your name, Malhazar, and the name of this being here. Who is your master?” I nod, indicating the silver masked-mage.</p><p></p><p>“Ah,” says the djinn. “He is The Faceless One. Yes, that name again. As his has been surrounding your travels, so yours have been orbiting ours.”</p><p></p><p>“He was in the mines in Diamond Lake?”</p><p></p><p>“I believe his name was.”</p><p></p><p>What an odd answer. “Where is the next part of this task?” I ask.</p><p></p><p>“There is a cave not far from here through these odious plants.” He points to the green-grey wall in front of us, the direction they would have kept going had we not intervened.</p><p></p><p>“What is there?”</p><p></p><p>“Madness. But it is a madness you will probably handle,” he says and laughs. “Better than we, at any rate. So we are allies now?”</p><p></p><p>I take him aside and lower my voice.</p><p></p><p>“We are in cease fire. When this is all done, I must meditate on the crimes wrought here in your needlessly destructive path, and I must know what your Faceless One master means to My Mistress. But you, fire djinn, I should like to talk to again, if you are amenable, one day. Away from these others, I sense you are not entirely without light.”</p><p></p><p>He grins and bows, and their group gathers up their dead, their equipment and their capture-box, and forms their own circle some distance away.</p><p></p><p>Verdre, from her perch above, calls down to us. “I believe I can pick out a trail through this, but only Rey is likely to be able to follow. No, Etona: your chain mail will get hopelessly caught on thorns, and even if you strip and follow, Treig will not manage it, nor will Jodan.”</p><p></p><p>“I will call one of my friends,” says Rey, emphasizing the last word for my benefit.</p><p></p><p>We exchange looks. “Very well. Let me heighten your voice so that it carries.”</p><p></p><p>We move to the entrance of the Thorn Vale. I place my palm against her throat. She shrieks a terrible cry that causes me to step back. “Goodness! Er, sorry, Rey. I was unprepared.” I once more place my hand to her and she repeats the roc’s call again and again. Eventually, one flutters down to us and we clamber onto its back, Jodan submitting again to being carried in the great beast’s claws.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>It drops us not far from where we fought, a limestone entrance steaming like a fumarole, a word Rey taught me when we visited her own mistress, Seraph.</p><p></p><p>Verde sniffs and recoils, then moves closer and peers inside.</p><p></p><p>“Two gasses make the poison,” says Rey from behind her.</p><p></p><p>"One from each vent,” Verdre says to Rey’s nod. “A wind tunnel then. Easily arranged,” says Verdre.</p><p></p><p>"Yes. But may I do it?” Rey replies.</p><p></p><p>Verdre crooks a faint smile and takes a step back, teacher studying her pupil. Rey’s long, strong arms sweep; her eyes are slits in a face contorted with concentration. She forms a corridor of wind, neatly outlined by the white malefic vapors, across both crevasses. We may now pass.</p><p></p><p>Jumping across them through Rey’s breezeway – Jodan moving past on his Hell-steel tentacles – leads us to a cavern.</p><p></p><p>And what a cavern! Its every surface is overgrown with beautiful, iridescent plants.</p><p></p><p>But my eyes are riveted down at the bottom of barely-visible steps to an altar. Behind it is a life-sized carving – black stone that does not match the rest of the rock here – of a Nightmare, an actual Hell-steed. I saw my first one almost a season ago in the arena: it carried off the death-knight form of the arena’s master of ceremonies.</p><p></p><p>On the altar lies a sleeping or dead Drow woman.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>A Drow. My cruel but misunderstood cousins. The lost ones. Elves forced to live under the earth will go mad, and collectively they have, following their queen, Llolth – once-beautiful, once mischievous Llolth, cousin to Sehanine – also insane with the grief of separation and being buried alive. I never thought them irredeemable – as most of my kin do – but this notion was cemented when I met Lilliam.</p><p></p><p>She was a terribly shy, easily-frightened, young, lonely castaway from her own people: a Drow forced to live on the surface. She was adept at being invisible and a master of disguise besides: I had thought her a small, gray-skinned elf, the like of which I had never seen before until I realized, through patience and all-but-forcing my friendship on her, that she was Drow.</p><p></p><p>Verdre traveled with her for a time when they each separately accompanied a group of adventurers to an old, haunted, human-built keep some five days’ swift travel south of The Mirror. It had turned out that it was somehow built on an opening to the Shadowlands, and the men who had manned it had gone insane. The creatures from there moved in to join the ghosts.</p><p></p><p>Once Verdre’s group understood the nature of the problem, and allied themselves with the powerful spectre of the former paladin who roamed there, they were able to bring in a trio of cleansers: myself, a Dwarven priest of Pelor and a being from the Bright summoned by my tribe’s leader, Tamyl, a creature simply called “Te”. We permanently sealed the opening. This, however, destroyed the keep and nearly killed all of us.</p><p></p><p>I digress. My point is that my aunt and I do not share most people’s hatred of Drow. I suspect Treig doesn’t either: he is too pragmatic. Jodan? I don’t know. And Rey probably has no opinion, isolated as she has been all her life from cultural prejudice.</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>“I must go down there,” I say and turn to Rey and Verdre. “Please sweep the area for traps for me: I don’t want to get my hair mussed by something launching my head from my body.”</p><p></p><p>Rey has worn an air of conspicuous distraction since we entered. She keeps sniffing the air. After a moment she begins to examine the floor. Very carefully.</p><p></p><p>Verdre has, meanwhile, transformed into a small snake and is slowly slithering across the path I must take, back and forth, back and forth. Treig, too, is examining the walls and the floor, rapping things with a carved stick. He notices my look.</p><p></p><p>“It’s technical,” he says.</p><p></p><p>“Poison!” exclaims Rey from her hands and knees a third of the way down the stairs. “A hallucinaremic. No, a halluci– … we will start seeing things and dream awake, if I’m right about the plants here and their oils dripping into these cracks.”</p><p></p><p>All eyes goes to Verdre whose naked serpent skin is caressing those same cracks. She shimmers back to elf form and runs back to us.</p><p></p><p>“What will happen?” she asks Rey.</p><p></p><p>“Colors will grow, become like the Bright? And you might see movement where there isn’t any. And wrong shapes.” Verdre nods, unsettled. “You might not recognize anyone,” Rey goes on. “Your vision might narrow like a,” she seemed to remember something, “as like looking through a glass fish-eye lens. It’s in the ground but in the air, too. It’s only a matter of breaths.”</p><p></p><p>“This I will not permit,” says Verdre. One arm begins the waving that Rey’s had though more confidently and with smaller, easier motions. She calls a wind tunnel and extends it to the end of the cave where the air was fresh. Her other arm sets to summoning another, down the ramp to the Drow.</p><p></p><p>“Do you see? Smaller motions,” she murmurs to Rey who is watching carefully.</p><p></p><p>I smile. “Thank you, Verdre.” To the rest: “I will approach her, alone.”</p><p></p><p>“Of course,” replies Rey. “Except that I will be with you.”</p><p></p><p>Since grimacing and eye-rolling are not sufficient to dissuade her – they never are – I agree. “All right, but stay a few steps back.”</p><p></p><p>“Why would you go alone, anyway?” says Trieg. “What can you do that no one else can?”</p><p></p><p>“Apologize.”</p><p></p><p>***</p><p></p><p>“Verdre? What do these runes say?” I call up to her.</p><p></p><p>Maintaining her concentration, she comes down and looks at them. “Here lies the livery of She Who Crossed the Moon.” Her eyes widen at mine which must be moon-pies.</p><p></p><p>“Citania,” we exclaim together.</p><p></p><p>“This cannot be her,” Rey says, frowning. “She was not Drow.”</p><p></p><p>“Not originally,” says Verdre.</p><p></p><p>“Cross our Mistress of Imaginative Revenge and you may end up as anything,” I add.</p><p></p><p>Jodan had trailed after Verdre, come to stare at the Nightmare on the wall. “Who is Citania?” he asks.</p><p></p><p>I am just staring at the woman, so Verdre tells the tale.</p><p></p><p>“A fair elf, once, and priestess of Sehanine. A leader of her tribe. She carried two thousand from the failed lands to the West after the fall of the human empire of Suul. She was selected by the Goddess to bear a priestess – unusual back then, unheard of now – but so strong her feelings for life and position and her dryad lover, Meleeta, that she refused to die, somehow, when her daughter came.</p><p></p><p>“Sehanine allowed the daughter a full and normal life. But for the mother, who chose life over the Goddess’s will, she was banished from the Bright and from the surface world of the Fade. She became Drow.</p><p></p><p>“These were the days when all the gods were more wild, and My Mistress more a harsh winter than brisk autumn. For it did not end there. When the child grew older and came into her powers, she sought out her mother, very dogged according to the stories. But she could never find her. It was because her daughter was invisible to her whenever the sun or moon were out. There was only one time they could meet one another: <em>dobrun</em>, new moon. Even then, when Citania was near her child, she was reduced to the shape – and mind, say some of the tellings – of a small animal. Nether could ever recognize the other.</p><p></p><p>I heard the last part only distantly. My eyes closed, my hands on Citania’s, I sought My Merciful Goddess.</p><p></p><p>“I must go back up to the top to keep this tunnel open,” Verdre says to Rey somewhere. “Watch her.”</p><p></p><p>It is dark. Black. But there is a pinprick of white light from Her face beaming down to me. She will be with me, my Goddess of the Hunt who willed this centuries-long curse into existence.</p><p></p><p>Shadows now.</p><p></p><p> A girl’s face, a woman’s face but not elf</p><p></p><p><em>Sehanine! I am here.</em></p><p><em>Use me.</em></p><p><em>Let me right this wrong!</em></p><p></p><p>Crying, sadness</p><p></p><p> sounds, screams in the dark</p><p></p><p> cruel laughter</p><p></p><p><em> </em>cries that are </p><p></p><p> yips</p><p> small</p><p></p><p> fur</p><p></p><p></p><p> fox</p><p></p><p></p><p>TRAPPED.</p><p></p><p>RUN.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>RUN!!!</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Alexander Bryant1, post: 7820193, member: 6916184"] We attack. No, that’s not right. Treig attacks. Just Treig. It is a profoundly Jodan thing to do – I don’t know what he was thinking. I was told later that he dashed into the middle of the entire group, throwing cigars and firing his efficient little repeating crossbow, until everyone was dead. Well, not everyone. Just one, really: a kenku on a ledge was also firing his crossbow but missed where Treig did not. Let me back up a bit. Rey and Verdre had scouted ahead and came upon the scene of a whirling, dark cloud moving towards the group in front of us who, with magic, managed to blow the cloud away and reveal a flying bird-horse-rhy’nos’ferous (?) underneath which Rey immediately took a liking to. There was a djinn flying something on fire, a shield put up by the mage, two underling tieflings positioning a sort of trap underneath it which began pulling the bird-horse-rhy’nos’ferous in. Rey, seeing the lone creature beset and not winning, jumped onto its back to help it. Of course. I wonder if perhaps she feels a sort of kinship with hybrid monsters because … but she is no monster, save to those who oppose her. Verdre also leaped, but onto the flying beast of the djinn, and sought to squeeze some sense into him in the form of a boa constrictor. He and she both tumbled off as Rey and her new best beast friend performed an aerial charge that dissipated his steed. And Treig was being turned to stone. All of the above is what I pieced together through talking to Rey and Verdre later. I first saw Verdre in connection to the fight gliding back to earth as a flying squirrel. You see, I had not been paying attention to any of this. I was, the entire time, some distance away down the burned passage through the thorns trying to see if I could pick my way through the living mass to follow a sprite who had appeared and darted away. I could not, and anyway Verdre landed and let me know there was a battle, something Jodan had already picked up on and had trotted in to lash our opponents. I sized up the situation, fired some rounds into the fray from a good vantage point, and decided we had had enough. We could probably down the mage’s followers but not the silver-masked one himself who could not seem to be hurt permanently: even the gaping wounds caused by Angivre’s fury were almost instantly healed. More of us were going to be transmuted into stone like Treig (a striking figure in granite but like all statues, not useful) or captured or killed. Though, not killed, not here. More accurately: before our material forms ended to become other, fae forms, a fate that had happened to one of their party, the unhappy, darting sprite who was then slain again by a restored Treig as he observed it listening in on us while we were talking about the non-aggression pact. Its body was absorbed by the plants and then a raccoon-man stepped out of a huge, swelling bulb a moment later. [CENTER]***[/CENTER] “Why are we fighting one another?” I call out. “If you are here to seek the library, then our goals might not be in conflict. We will step back if you will.” The silver-masked one offered one of the roc king’s feathers. We accepted. We had an accord. Their mouth was the fire djinn, a surprisingly cheerful being named Malhazar the Exiled Flame, who knew many details about each one of us. “You have a reputation,” he exclaims. “And it tells us that you are far more suited to facing what is here than we. In fact, if you handle the, ah, [I]situation[/I] correctly, I don’t doubt you will complete two of the quests at the same time! Ha ha!” “With the feather,” I venture, “that you took through unnecessary violence, that leaves only the belt. There is also no need to attack him: we have a pact with him already.” “Ah, the stone giant. Yes,” he says, laughing. “It is how we found out about the dying here. Kufastios was a mighty minotaur, but that stone giant was too much for him even as we backed his, ah, bull-rush attack. Very impressive, but so was the strength of our opponent! And now our dauntless armored warrior is but a tiny, toothless sprite. This change has not been good for him, I will tell you. No, no. But if you have a pact with the giant already, yes, then you should be the ones to claim his belt. Yes, we work together!” “No, we work and you try not to gratuitously set upon anything. Honestly, is killing all you know? And if so,” I remember a phrase Treig likes to use, “how is that working out for you?” The tieflings and silver-masked Vecna mage were probably lost causes, but the djinn I felt could be reasoned with, a task for later. I leave them and our party huddles in a circle some ways away. No one is happy with the direction I am leading us. “They killed the roc lord,” says Rey, “and using necrotic energy.” “What of it?” says Verdre. “What she means, I think, is that rocs are not good creatures, Rey. They aren’t gentle beings of light. And yes, I understand those people are not our friends, but we weren’t getting anywhere battling them.” “I am not happy, Etona.” Maybe she sees herself in the great birds, or perhaps she developed a bond with them in communicating with them. I don’t understand, and neither does Verdre: they are carnivorous foes only allied with us because there is mutual advantage. “I thought these agents of Vecna were –,” adds Treig. He also wants to continue the fight, I sense, because he fires off his crossbow mid-sentence and plants a bolt through the minotaur-turned-sprite’s head. “…long-time foes of yours?” We watch as the dead sprite is pulled into the thorns and spat out again from an enormous bulb as the raccoon man. He scurries away with a glare at Treig. “Yes, they are. But … all right. We should remember what we are here for. If we are all turned into cute Fey creatures or stone, how will that further our own goals? They seem content to let us both use the library, and I doubt their purpose is more nefarious than the drowning of all the world’s life in undead worms which is what we came here to solve.” This earns grudging acceptance. “I will still kill them,” says Rey with an approving nod from Treig. “Fine,” I say. We return to the group. “We know your name, Malhazar, and the name of this being here. Who is your master?” I nod, indicating the silver masked-mage. “Ah,” says the djinn. “He is The Faceless One. Yes, that name again. As his has been surrounding your travels, so yours have been orbiting ours.” “He was in the mines in Diamond Lake?” “I believe his name was.” What an odd answer. “Where is the next part of this task?” I ask. “There is a cave not far from here through these odious plants.” He points to the green-grey wall in front of us, the direction they would have kept going had we not intervened. “What is there?” “Madness. But it is a madness you will probably handle,” he says and laughs. “Better than we, at any rate. So we are allies now?” I take him aside and lower my voice. “We are in cease fire. When this is all done, I must meditate on the crimes wrought here in your needlessly destructive path, and I must know what your Faceless One master means to My Mistress. But you, fire djinn, I should like to talk to again, if you are amenable, one day. Away from these others, I sense you are not entirely without light.” He grins and bows, and their group gathers up their dead, their equipment and their capture-box, and forms their own circle some distance away. Verdre, from her perch above, calls down to us. “I believe I can pick out a trail through this, but only Rey is likely to be able to follow. No, Etona: your chain mail will get hopelessly caught on thorns, and even if you strip and follow, Treig will not manage it, nor will Jodan.” “I will call one of my friends,” says Rey, emphasizing the last word for my benefit. We exchange looks. “Very well. Let me heighten your voice so that it carries.” We move to the entrance of the Thorn Vale. I place my palm against her throat. She shrieks a terrible cry that causes me to step back. “Goodness! Er, sorry, Rey. I was unprepared.” I once more place my hand to her and she repeats the roc’s call again and again. Eventually, one flutters down to us and we clamber onto its back, Jodan submitting again to being carried in the great beast’s claws. *** It drops us not far from where we fought, a limestone entrance steaming like a fumarole, a word Rey taught me when we visited her own mistress, Seraph. Verde sniffs and recoils, then moves closer and peers inside. “Two gasses make the poison,” says Rey from behind her. "One from each vent,” Verdre says to Rey’s nod. “A wind tunnel then. Easily arranged,” says Verdre. "Yes. But may I do it?” Rey replies. Verdre crooks a faint smile and takes a step back, teacher studying her pupil. Rey’s long, strong arms sweep; her eyes are slits in a face contorted with concentration. She forms a corridor of wind, neatly outlined by the white malefic vapors, across both crevasses. We may now pass. Jumping across them through Rey’s breezeway – Jodan moving past on his Hell-steel tentacles – leads us to a cavern. And what a cavern! Its every surface is overgrown with beautiful, iridescent plants. But my eyes are riveted down at the bottom of barely-visible steps to an altar. Behind it is a life-sized carving – black stone that does not match the rest of the rock here – of a Nightmare, an actual Hell-steed. I saw my first one almost a season ago in the arena: it carried off the death-knight form of the arena’s master of ceremonies. On the altar lies a sleeping or dead Drow woman. *** A Drow. My cruel but misunderstood cousins. The lost ones. Elves forced to live under the earth will go mad, and collectively they have, following their queen, Llolth – once-beautiful, once mischievous Llolth, cousin to Sehanine – also insane with the grief of separation and being buried alive. I never thought them irredeemable – as most of my kin do – but this notion was cemented when I met Lilliam. She was a terribly shy, easily-frightened, young, lonely castaway from her own people: a Drow forced to live on the surface. She was adept at being invisible and a master of disguise besides: I had thought her a small, gray-skinned elf, the like of which I had never seen before until I realized, through patience and all-but-forcing my friendship on her, that she was Drow. Verdre traveled with her for a time when they each separately accompanied a group of adventurers to an old, haunted, human-built keep some five days’ swift travel south of The Mirror. It had turned out that it was somehow built on an opening to the Shadowlands, and the men who had manned it had gone insane. The creatures from there moved in to join the ghosts. Once Verdre’s group understood the nature of the problem, and allied themselves with the powerful spectre of the former paladin who roamed there, they were able to bring in a trio of cleansers: myself, a Dwarven priest of Pelor and a being from the Bright summoned by my tribe’s leader, Tamyl, a creature simply called “Te”. We permanently sealed the opening. This, however, destroyed the keep and nearly killed all of us. I digress. My point is that my aunt and I do not share most people’s hatred of Drow. I suspect Treig doesn’t either: he is too pragmatic. Jodan? I don’t know. And Rey probably has no opinion, isolated as she has been all her life from cultural prejudice. *** “I must go down there,” I say and turn to Rey and Verdre. “Please sweep the area for traps for me: I don’t want to get my hair mussed by something launching my head from my body.” Rey has worn an air of conspicuous distraction since we entered. She keeps sniffing the air. After a moment she begins to examine the floor. Very carefully. Verdre has, meanwhile, transformed into a small snake and is slowly slithering across the path I must take, back and forth, back and forth. Treig, too, is examining the walls and the floor, rapping things with a carved stick. He notices my look. “It’s technical,” he says. “Poison!” exclaims Rey from her hands and knees a third of the way down the stairs. “A hallucinaremic. No, a halluci– … we will start seeing things and dream awake, if I’m right about the plants here and their oils dripping into these cracks.” All eyes goes to Verdre whose naked serpent skin is caressing those same cracks. She shimmers back to elf form and runs back to us. “What will happen?” she asks Rey. “Colors will grow, become like the Bright? And you might see movement where there isn’t any. And wrong shapes.” Verdre nods, unsettled. “You might not recognize anyone,” Rey goes on. “Your vision might narrow like a,” she seemed to remember something, “as like looking through a glass fish-eye lens. It’s in the ground but in the air, too. It’s only a matter of breaths.” “This I will not permit,” says Verdre. One arm begins the waving that Rey’s had though more confidently and with smaller, easier motions. She calls a wind tunnel and extends it to the end of the cave where the air was fresh. Her other arm sets to summoning another, down the ramp to the Drow. “Do you see? Smaller motions,” she murmurs to Rey who is watching carefully. I smile. “Thank you, Verdre.” To the rest: “I will approach her, alone.” “Of course,” replies Rey. “Except that I will be with you.” Since grimacing and eye-rolling are not sufficient to dissuade her – they never are – I agree. “All right, but stay a few steps back.” “Why would you go alone, anyway?” says Trieg. “What can you do that no one else can?” “Apologize.” *** “Verdre? What do these runes say?” I call up to her. Maintaining her concentration, she comes down and looks at them. “Here lies the livery of She Who Crossed the Moon.” Her eyes widen at mine which must be moon-pies. “Citania,” we exclaim together. “This cannot be her,” Rey says, frowning. “She was not Drow.” “Not originally,” says Verdre. “Cross our Mistress of Imaginative Revenge and you may end up as anything,” I add. Jodan had trailed after Verdre, come to stare at the Nightmare on the wall. “Who is Citania?” he asks. I am just staring at the woman, so Verdre tells the tale. “A fair elf, once, and priestess of Sehanine. A leader of her tribe. She carried two thousand from the failed lands to the West after the fall of the human empire of Suul. She was selected by the Goddess to bear a priestess – unusual back then, unheard of now – but so strong her feelings for life and position and her dryad lover, Meleeta, that she refused to die, somehow, when her daughter came. “Sehanine allowed the daughter a full and normal life. But for the mother, who chose life over the Goddess’s will, she was banished from the Bright and from the surface world of the Fade. She became Drow. “These were the days when all the gods were more wild, and My Mistress more a harsh winter than brisk autumn. For it did not end there. When the child grew older and came into her powers, she sought out her mother, very dogged according to the stories. But she could never find her. It was because her daughter was invisible to her whenever the sun or moon were out. There was only one time they could meet one another: [I]dobrun[/I], new moon. Even then, when Citania was near her child, she was reduced to the shape – and mind, say some of the tellings – of a small animal. Nether could ever recognize the other. I heard the last part only distantly. My eyes closed, my hands on Citania’s, I sought My Merciful Goddess. “I must go back up to the top to keep this tunnel open,” Verdre says to Rey somewhere. “Watch her.” It is dark. Black. But there is a pinprick of white light from Her face beaming down to me. She will be with me, my Goddess of the Hunt who willed this centuries-long curse into existence. Shadows now. A girl’s face, a woman’s face but not elf [I]Sehanine! I am here. Use me. Let me right this wrong![/I] Crying, sadness sounds, screams in the dark cruel laughter [I] [/I]cries that are yips small fur fox TRAPPED. RUN. RUN!!! [/QUOTE]
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