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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 4669393" data-attributes="member: 143">Lazybones's Thunderspire LabyrinthPrologueTandrin was coughing again, huddled in the lee of the wall, his tiny body wracked by uncontrollable spasms.  The cloth he held against his lips was flecked with blood.  The others that formed a miserable line looked little better off; shivering in the chill of the dark tunnel, clutching the remains of their tattered garments together and pressing close to share what little warmth their bodies could muster. Yarine pressed her hands against Tandrin’s face; the halfling farmer had a fever.  Invoking the power of her patron, the goddess Avendra, she funneled a trickle of divine energy into the stricken man.  It did little to help him.  She might have invoked a ritual to purge the sickness from his body, but the magical adjuncts, the herbs and other medicines that she needed were many leagues from here, on the far side of the Vale, at her home in Fairhollow.  That might as well have been on the other side of the world.Tandrin nodded at her in thanks, and Yarine felt a stab of guilt pass through her.  She’d done little to preserve her people, the halflings that she was supposed to watch over, to protect.  Certainly she hadn’t been able to keep them from the fate that now loomed over them like an ogre.  A faint clink of metal and a faint stink of sweat different from that which pervaded the halfling prisoners warned her of a presence behind her.  She turned to see the hobgoblin warrior looking down at her, with as much emotion in his eyes as if she’d been a sheep that had escaped from its enclosure. “You come now,” he said.  There was nothing to be gained by defiance, so with a final reassuring squeeze of Tandrin’s shoulder, she rose and followed the warrior.  She tried to gather some shred of decency around her, but it was hard with her tunic torn and ragged, and streaks of dirt marring the soft skin of her face.  She had been slightly plump before her capture, but all of the prisoners were rapidly becoming trim, even gaunt, from the hard marching and short rations that their captors had provided.  The stink of blood greeted her as her escort brought her to the other side of the tunnel, where a dark opening rested in a deep niche, shrouded in darkness.  An ugly carcass lay in the gap, and other had been dragged against the wall a few paces away.  She’d overheard one of the hobgoblins call them kruthiks.  She’d never seen their like before, and would have much preferred to avoid ever seeing them altogether.  The things had emerged from the side passage without much warning, but the hobgoblins had reacted quickly, the warriors forming a line while the warcaster flung destructive magic against their reptilian attackers.  Yarine had been alert to a chance for an escape, but the battle had ended almost before the halflings knew what was going on.  She thanked Avendra that the creatures had attacked the hobgoblins at the front of their company; had they lunged into the line of prisoners…Not that the hobgoblins had escaped injury.  The warcaster, Zhadroff, was crouched beside a warrior lying against the far wall, a scant pace from the mangled form of the second kruthik.  He looked up as Yarine reached him.“You will heal him,” he said, simply.  Yarine looked at the warrior, who regarded her coldly with eyes that flashed with pain.  With him lying nearly prone against the wall, their gazes were almost level.  The kruthik’s claws had opened long gashes in his side that had torn through his armor; Yarine could see the wet pulses of blood that indicated ruptured arteries.  The wounds might not be mortal, but the hobgoblin wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. She glanced up at Zhadroff.  The warcaster noticed her hesitation.  “You are slaves now, and have value,” he conceded.  “But there are parts of your bodies that can be removed without unduly reducing your worth.  I will start with the younger ones.  You will be last.”Yarine could not suppress a shudder.  Zhadroff spoke without rancor, his voice as cold and even as the stone floor of the tunnel, but somehow that made his threat that much more menacing.  As she knelt beside the injured warrior, whose expression had not softened in the slightest, she felt a surge in the back of her mind, as the hope that she’d so desperately clung to since her capture receded just slightly more, now just a tiny distant twinge in the farthest reaches of her thoughts.</blockquote>

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