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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 4852134" data-attributes="member: 143">Chapter 56Carzen hated the Well of Demons. He’d hated it since their first arrival in the entry chamber, even before the ambush by the tentacle thing and the choker-monsters, but since then his hatred had taken on a fierce passion, nuanced with gradations of disgust and terror that together formed a ugly pit that lodged in his gut.  He felt like he would never lose the stench of blood that seemed etched into his nostrils, and he knew that he would never forget the blood-filled room they’d just left.  There were not enough years in a life to allow such a memory to fade. They were resting in one of the smaller anterooms off the main hall, the looping complex that circled around the black pit in the center that had sent a deeper chill through Carzen when they had looked upon it.  The young fighter felt as though every muscle in his body had been pulled and twisted until he felt every single one as a little sliver of pain that merged into a seamless whole.  He had an itch on the back of his neck, but the simple action of moving to address it seemed utterly beyond him.  He knew that Vhael would order them back into action in a few minutes, and also knew that somehow, his battered body would obey. He glanced over at the dragonborn, and realized that while he was tired and worn, the general had to be… Carzen shook his head.  There were no words to describe the warlord.  He was still crazy, as far as Carzen was concerned—more so, after what he’d just witnessed—but he was starting to understand why men of all races had followed him.  Still followed him, he mused, thinking of Gral, and Surina, and Gez. And Carzen Zelos. He couldn’t fault the dragonborn’s leadership against the first few few tests.  Getting the book had been trivially easy; it had been lying out in the open, as the spirits had said, in a small anteroom off the corridor of blood.  The blood trail had started there, in front of the altar, a grim pool too big to have come from one, or two, or even a dozen men.  It had given Carzen the shudders, but that hadn’t stopped them from seizing the book and going on their way. The first real test had started off easily enough.  They had opened the doors to the chamber to see a vast hall, bending to their left, supported by tall pillars that were decorated by floor-to-ceiling mirrors bounded in brass.  Carzen remembered the sensation that he’d felt when he’d looked at that first mirror.  It had felt as though his soul was being torn from his body.  He couldn’t look away, couldn’t scream, although he had felt like it, felt as though the mirror was trying to swallow him whole.He still couldn’t quite remember just what he’d seen in that mirror.  Gral had grabbed him, roughly, turning him so that the mirror fell out of his vision.  “Don’t look at the mirrors, any of you,” the dwarf had commanded.  “There’s fell magic here.”Carzen could have told him that, but he obeyed, all of them did.  Vhael had led them around the perimeter of the room, close to the wall, their eyes fixed upon the stone so intently that they could see the grain in the rock.  Carzen had felt the skin between his shoulder blades crawling, but the mirrors apparently lacked the power to harm them if they did not look at them.  That hadn’t fully erased his uneasiness, though. They followed the wall around the bend in the room to the left, all the way to a black curtain that blocked part of the chamber off from the rest.  But it hung free, unanchored on the sides, so they had pushed through.  With their eyes averted as they had been, the skeletons had caught them by surprise.  Carzen remembered a flashing pain in his side as something jabbed through his armor.  He had looked up—thankfully, there had been no more mirrors beyond the curtain—to find himself facing a monstrous skeleton, its bones covered in nasty-looking spurs and edges.  He’d gotten his shield up in time to deflect a spray of those shards; apparently the gods-forsaken thing had possessed the power to shoot out bits of itself at intruders.  The things—Gral had called them boneshard skeletons—had been fearsome and tough, but they had been two to the party’s five, and they’d defeated them at the cost of some painful but ultimately minor wounds.  They’d claimed the artifact that the things had been guarding, a minotaur mask carved out of black wood, and retraced their steps. After that trial, Carzen hadn’t known what to expect next.  But the blood room had been worse, that much was certain. The second challenge had been in a chamber still larger than the first.  The double doors had opened onto a stone platform, but most of the rest of the room’s floor had been covered in a sea of what had looked and smelled like fresh blood.  Carzen had almost gotten sick at the sheer stink of it, and only the iron control of the dragonborn had given him the example needed to overcome the wave of nausea.  Gez hadn’t been quite so durable, but none of them had chastened him when he staggered back over to the group, pale. Rising up out of the blood pool had been a pair of massive stone statues, depicting minotaurs armed with long spiked chains.  The room had been divided down its center by a stone platform maybe fifteen feet across, rising maybe four feet above the level of the blood.  They could just make out two more small platforms on the far side of the room, upon which small objects that Carzen hadn’t been able to quite make out had rested.  No doubt they were what they had come here to claim. All in all, Carzen had been ready to leave at once, ghosts and trials and captive prisoners be damned.  But Vhael had only hesitated briefly, taking in the whole environment before issuing orders.  “Destroy those statues,” he had said first. Carzen hadn’t understood the logic of that at first, but they’d complied, blasting the nearer statue first with magic and arrows.  Carzen and Vhael had armed themselves with gnoll longbows, and the steel-tipped arrows had dislodged big hunks of stone with each solid impact.  But it had been Gral and Surina who had done most of the damage, the dwarf’s icy blasts and the warlock’s fire combining to weaken the stone, creating a tracery of fine cracks that slowly spread across the statue’s body.  The arm holding the chain fell free, splashing noisily before vanishing into the pool of blood. Carzen had been about to ask what they were trying to accomplish, when the statue suddenly came alive, issuing a terrible roar before crumbling into fragments.  “Oh,” he had said.  The second statue lasted longer, the distance putting it out of the range of the casters’ magic, but the gnolls had left them plenty of arrows, and they had done the job.  That had left the pool of blood, an obstacle that Carzen was not eager to test.  Probing indicated that the blood was nearly six feet deep.  Vhael had consulted briefly with Gral, and together they came up with an answer.  It took some time to shuffle back to the gnoll chambers, and longer to bring up the two tables in the barracks there, but they formed an effective bridge first to the base of the ruined statue, then from there to the platform in the middle of the room.  The tables were relatively flimsy and unstable as bridges, but they held up, at least long enough for them all to make it over to the statue platform, crossing one at a time.  Vhael had just stepped out onto the second table, the wood creaking alarmingly under his weight, when the demons attacked.  The thing sprang up out of the blood, a fearsome red thing that was all muscles and claws.  Without warning it seized the edge of the table, tipping it.  Vhael shifted his balance quickly and for a moment Carzen had thought that he would keep his perch, but then the table had broken down the middle, dropping the dragonborn into the blood.  The demon surged forward, and was on him almost before Vhael could do anything more than lift his head above the roiling surface of the pool.  Arrows and spells had blasted the fiend, but with the blood protecting most of its body, the attacks had had little effect upon it.  Carzen had thought that Vhael was a goner, especially when the demon had started tearing at his face with its claws, but then the dragonborn had seized his tormenter, lifting it up out of the blood.  Carzen had quickly realized what he was doing; even as the demon continued to ravage him the companions now had a clear shot at the thing, and they made their attacks count.  Within ten seconds the demon had been reduced to a wreckage, and Vhael had tossed it aside, to vanish in a flash under the blood. But that hadn’t been the end of it.  Even as they slew the demon, two more of them had risen out of the blood on the far side of the room, leaving dripping trails behind them as they pulled themselves up onto the platform in the center.  The smart thing to do, as far as Carzen was concerned, would have been for Vhael to fall back under the cover of their fire to the platform, where Surina was waiting to pull him up.  With them under the blood, the demons were invincible, but better that than to confront them in their element, he had thought.  He hadn’t been quite fully surprised when Vhael had attacked.  The demons had leapt forward into the blood, shrugging off the companions’ fire, even the arrow that Carzen had sank deep into the shoulder of one of them.  It was clear that Vhael wouldn’t escape the blood before they reached him, but even as they tore into him, coming at him from both sides, he kept pushing forward, his bloody body slowly emerging from the blood as he reached the steps leading up to the platform.  The demons followed, tearing at him, trying to drag him back, but even as they had gashed his clothes, scored his armor, and sliced his flesh, he hadn’t given so much as an inch of ground.  He didn’t draw his sword until he was fully clear of the blood, and by then, the demons, for all their fury, were showing the effects of the constant fire from the dragonborn’s companions.  Vhael’s sword had decapitated one, even as Gez sank an arrow into the throat of the second, sending it into a wild spasm of flailing limbs.  Those struggles had ended quickly, with another quick thrust of the dragonborn’s great blade. With the statues gone and the guardians defeated, it had become just a matter of time and effort to recover the prize.  The first table had been shifted to replace the broken second, and all of them reached the central platform safely.  Vhael had looked almost like a demon himself, covered in blood.  The far platforms were too far distant for them to use the table as a bridge, but Surina’s magic overcame this final obstacle.  She possessed the ability to teleport herself short distances, a power she used to reach the platforms, after leaping to close the distance.  It took some time, as she had to refocus her will after each jump, but no more demons had emerged from the blood, and in less than an hour they were back where they had started, carrying two pieces of a large dagger, the third of the four items they needed to reach their goal.  “Come on, soldier,” a voice said.  Carzen started—his mind had started to drift off in the midst of his reminiscing—and he looked up to see Vhael standing over him.  The others were already up and ready.  The dragonborn had cleaned himself as best he could, but streaks of red were still visible in the cracks and crevices of his armor.  Crude bandages from Gral’s seemingly never-ending kit covered the new gouges on his face and neck, but otherwise he looked as determined as ever.  Vhael extended a hand, and after a moment Carzen took it.  His legs still felt a bit unsteady, but he wasn’t going to let the dragonborn, who’d suffered far worse, get the better of him.  “One left,” he said, leading them once more through the complex to the doors.  Their route took them again through the hall that formed a long rectangle around the central chamber where the black pit with its Guardian waited for them.  The floor and walls of the hall were marked with black streaks and deep gouges in the stone.  Carzen had remarked on these before, but none of them had any idea of what might have caused the damage.  One thing that Carzen was sure of, it wouldn’t be a good thing. But they made their way through the scarred hall without incident, and down the long passage that led to the doors that warded the final trial.  Like the others, these doors were unmarked slabs of stone so dark that they were almost black.  The doors were balanced on recessed hinges, but it still took Carzen and Vhael working together to force them open enough for the others to squeeze through.  Carzen had been expecting another grand hall, so the chamber beyond the door caught him by surprise, even though it had to be almost thirty feet across.  The room was dominated by two tall pillars, the nearer barely ten feet beyond the threshold of the entrance.  Carzen stared at the pillar in horror; it was carved to depict a mass of writhing, tormented forms, hairless humanoids twisting in a chaotic disorder of torsos and limbs.  “That is… foul,” Carzen muttered under his breath, releasing the door and stepping forward to give the others space to follow. Despite all that he had seen in this cursed place, he almost jumped out of his skin when the pillar came alive.  The graven figures started moving, the arms twisting and reaching, the faces contorting in expressions of agony.  “Back!  Back!” Carzen shouted, all but falling over his own legs as he retreated.  The others moved back from the doorway, but not quickly enough, as several of the animated mouths upon the pillar opened wide, and unleashed a gout of hissing, stinging green droplets upon Carzen and Vhael.</blockquote>

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