The next few days of travel go fairly smoothly. There is some cautious scouting to avoid the invisible black mist known as Imbindarla’s Breath, a few simple victories against giant beetles and rat-like underdark pests, and some difficult climbing through narrow crevices and across delicate rock bridges. Despite temptation, no one tosses a rock into any of these “bottomless” holes to see how far down it goes, and so the crossings go smoothly.
During this time, Agar manages to master a spell in Nulloc Toadbringer’s former book Acimer’s Divinatory. “Got it!” he smiles triumphantly during a rest break. “I’ve been wrestling with some of the spell formulae in the spell vision cascade, but I think I’ve got it now. Let’s find out.”
“What’s it do?” asks Tao.
“It disassembles my mind to find out what I’m interested in, then it goes out and sweeps the world,” says Agar without even the faintest trace of concern. “When it finds something that I’d probably be interested in, I’ll generally have a vision. It also helps me see the immediate future in combat, but it’s a lot less powerful in that sense. The spell lasts for a full day, so with any luck it’ll give us glimpses of people and places I know!”
“Cool,” says Nolin, raising his eyebrows. “Most other divinations are being stifled by Imbindarla’s death. You think this one will be any different?”
“I can only hope so,” says Agar as he casts the spell. “Ooh, it tingles.”
Everyone stares at the halfling, but he doesn’t immediately begin to prophesize or speak in tongues. After a minute, Priggle lets loose a disappointed sigh. “That’s it, is it?”
Agar looks a bit cross, and on his shoulder Proty chitters in annoyance. “Look, it isn’t as if…” In the middle of the sentence, the halfling alienist keels over backwards, his eyes rolling up in his head. The group rushes towards him, but he’s already sitting up.
“Whooo,” Agar says.
“What’d you see?”
“A couple of different things. There were a few young adventurers, looking like they’d gotten the you-know-what kicked out of them, sitting outside of a cave entrance and staring at the setting sun. Then there was a baby crying – I think it was sick. And a huge battlefield, strewn with thousands of skeletal bones and human corpses.” He turns to Mara and Malachite. “They were wearing the uniforms of your church’s army.”
Mara exhales an anxious breath of air out of her nose; from where he’s sitting up, Agar can scent its freshness, like flowers in the sun. “Who won?”
Agar shakes his head. I couldn’t tell. I didn’t see anything moving at all.”
Malachite clenches his fists, knuckles cracking. “Then perhaps it wasn’t the undead who were victorious.”
* * *
Galthia scouts far in front of the group, easing from shadow to shadow like the faintest whisper. He pauses next to a tall stalagmite and sniffs, his flattened nose twitching in the darkness. His eyebrows narrow, and he turns to silently slip back to the rest of the group.
“Trouble,” he says brusquely as he slips out of the shadows. “I can smell ghouls.” Everyone exchanges a worried look, and weapons are loosened in their sheaths.
“Did you actually see anything?” asks Malachite, frowning.
“No. Didn’t need to.” He gestures for the others to follow, and turns to retrace his steps. Moments later, all of the Defenders are outside the same stalagmite, and they too smell the sickly sweet stench of decaying flesh. Priggle and Velendo examine the walls with a careful eye, and they eventually note a spot where the stone grain is slightly different: an expertly constructed secret door, set high on the wall and designed to pivot out into the corridor. With caution, Galthia eases it open, and the hideous scent of rotting meat floods the narrow tunnel. Even with the everpresent wind whisking it away, the odor is enough to sicken most of the adventurers present.
Tao boosts herself up to look in, gags, and chokes down her bile as she slides back down. “Not much living in here,” she says thickly. “I’ll see if I can figure out what happened.” She grimaces, and then vaults into the opening with one smooth and graceful movement. Galthia and a few other Defenders follow, themselves clambering into the hidden fortress.
And a fortress it is; it’s quickly apparent that this is a ghoulish staging area, designed to hold several hundred troops in a spot that would give them quick access to Akin’s Throat and its network of convenient passages. Not so much any more, though; now it’s an abbatoir, a graveyard filled with the sprawled and scattered bodies of dozens of undead. Tao’s experienced eye slowly picks patterns out of the seemingly random chaos.
“See over there?” She gestures to Galthia. “These ghouls seem to have spontaneously dropped in their tracks. That must have happened when Imbindarla died. Now, these ghouls probably went insane…”
“Or suddenly, coldly sane,” says Galthia quietly. “Briefly.”
Tao swallows. “They’ve rended their own flesh, their faces, their eyes. They mostly killed themselves, one way or another.” They move deeper into the reeking, fly-filled excavation. “Now these ghouls over here look like they fought one another. This was an intelligent battle. This ghoul here,” she indicates a sludgy track in the rancid mud, “won. He killed these creatures, then went around putting other ghouls out of their misery. It looks like he was attacked by a wizard as well.” She lifts her head and looks around, finally noting a ghoul impaled on a stalagmite. “That one there.”
“Shhh!” says Galthia. They freeze, and then Tao hears it also. Creeaaak… creeaaak….
They round a pillar, and the source of the noise dangles before them. An elven ghoul hangs by a noose of braided hair, swaying slowly back and forth. Flies buzz about it, rising and falling as it moves. Creeaaak…
“By the prophets,” murmurs Galthia. Then the corpse opens its eyes.
“Kill me!” Its voice is clotted and hard to understand, choked off by the noose. It twitches spasmodically. “I can not do it myself. Kill me!”
Tao’s eyes narrow. “You did.. this?” She waves a hand.
The ghoul shrugs or nods, setting his whole body to swinging. “Some fell,” he gurgles. “Some went insane when they learned what they had become. I had to kill the ones that remained. Some still loved…” it chokes off. “Still loved what we were. What we are. They had to die.” His teeth part in a feral, deadly grin. “Painfully. But I can’t seem to kill myself. Please, end this. Please.”
Tao and Galthia exchange a look, and Tao nods. “Then be at peace.” She swings her sword.
* * *
It’s two days later when the abyssal caverns begin to show signs of life. The group has passed a completely abandoned troglodyte cavern, and they’ve heard quite a bit of scuttling and odd noises off in the darkness, but nothing has molested them. Now the passage that they follow widens dramatically. Galthia is once again scouting ahead, and he descends a steep slope towards what he first thinks is a dead end.
Not quite.
Crouched in the shadows, his sight first falls on a relatively new gong, a huge piece of copper the size of a full grown man. Behind it the floor slopes steeply upwards into a near-vertical wall, even as the ceiling rises at an equal rate. It is as if some god idly grasped the straight corridor and bent it almost straight upwards. There are marks of some sort of cable or creature on the mossy stone slope before him, and an occasional cracked and chewed bone that must have been tossed down from above.
As the rest of the group arrives, they discuss the best path for proceeding. Fly up to the top? Climb the extremely steep slope on their own? Ring the gong? They remain locked in mental conversation for some time, long enough for the dwarves to call for an official rest break and sit down to rest. Mara finally loses patience and does the honorable thing. “No need to trespass,” she reasons, and hammers the gong as hard as she can. It booms out into the darkness.
“Wha..?” Velendo’s head snaps up from where he had been debating strategy with Malachite and Nolin.
“Look sharp, folks,” says Mara. “Whoever is up there, I think I just got their attention.”
The sound of heavy wings slaps at the darkness as the gong’s ringing fades. With palpable thuds, several creatures land on the cavern floor to both the right and left of Mara. A grinding moan reaches her ears, but with just her darkvision Mara can’t see what they are; they’ve landed outside of the spell’s 60’ range. The paladin utters a short prayer and golden light rises from her holy shield. The creatures she sees in the rising light are roughly the size of horses, apparently stone with hawk wings and a hawk’s head. They look a bit like overgrown gargoyles, if gargoyles had eyes that glowed with orange fire. They stare at her.
From above, a deep voice echoes down. “Thuglid! Grbak hoksuk ner telblin!”
“Damn it!” swears Nolin. “Too far away for my cloakpin to translate. Anyone understand them?” Agar casts tongues, even as Tao’s face grows red.
“Oh, I understand him,” she growls. “It’s a giant.”
Velendo rolls his eyes. “Well, don’t kill it. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here.” Tao begins to smile, and Velendo adds, “OR offend it so that we have to kill it.” Her smile promptly vanishes, to be replaced with a disappointed frown.
“Party pooper.”
Except for Nolin and Mara, the Defenders draw back into the deep shadows. Standing by the gong, Mara calls up in undercommon. “Can you understand me?”
The voice calls back down, reverberating from the stone. “Yah. No you move! I me down to gather toll.” There is a faint grunt, and a minute later a thick rope hawser skitters down the near-vertical slope. The rope is quickly followed by a hideously misshapen parody of life. At first, the form looks human. . . but it’s soon apparent how wrong that impression really is. The fishbelly-white giant descending hand-over-hand is horribly malformed; half of its face droops down towards its neck, it only has one ear, and the frail beginnings of a third arm juts from its right shoulder. The creature has muscles and scar tissue to spare, and its sharpened teeth indicate that it is far from docile, but it doesn’t immediately attack after dropping the last fifteen feet. Instead it grunts, crouches, and studies the group with its largest, bulging eye.
“Oh great,” says Tao sotto voce. “A giant AND an abomination. May I kill it now? Please?”
“Hello,” begins Mara cautiously, drowning out Tao. “Who are you?”
The formorian giant’s throat vibrates in a low rumble as it makes a complicated gesture with its hands. “Grgl.”
There’s a pause as the Defenders look at one another. “I don’t know if that’s a name,” whispers Nolin. “I think it is. But maybe he just has gas.”
“I see, Grgl,” continues Mara politely. “We’d like to pass.”
It snorts. “Course you want. We warned. You go, you pay toll.”
“What kind of toll?”
Nolin breaks in, stepping forward next to Mara. Standing next to one another, the two look radiant in the flickers of fire coming off of the bard; their teeth and eyes gleam as over 44 points of focused charisma begins to work their magic on the dull giant. Nolin smiles politely. “And who warned you, if I may ask?” The giant looks back and forth from one to another, somewhat confused. “You may answer her first,” allows Nolin considerately, and the giant nods heavily.
“Magic items,” it says as it looks at Mara. “Things of magic.” It nods again, its misshapen head bobbling on the end of its thick neck. “Powerful and expensive.” Then its head swivels towards Nolin. “Rotting things warned us.”
Nolin blinks. “What?”
“Rotting things. Ghouls. They said you bad, and gave much tribute so that we kill you.” At this a mental rumble arises from all the mindlinked heroes.
“Are you still going to kill us?”
The giant stares at him with a beetled brow. “Not my decision.” It shrugs, setting its growths to wobbling. “You pay, we let you pass.” It glances over to the winged gargoyle-things, which are still prowling around the edges of the group’s darkvision, and smiles slightly.
“And whose decision is it?”
“Thulk’s. This is Thulk’s Wall.” The giant looks proud, and perhaps a little scared.
Mara grasps her rod of leadership, a magic item gained back in Eversink that makes her even more commanding than she already is. She takes a few steps forward, looking up from the giant’s backwards-bending knees up towards its hideous face. “Now, we’re going to go destroy those ghouls, and they’re never going to bother you again,” she croons. “Why don’t you just let us pass without payment?”
The giant looks worried. “Ghouls not bother. Give mighty tribute for passage back and forth. Make us rich.” Back in the shadows, Stone Bear’s eye twitches slightly; he isn’t especially materialistic, but the thought of huge amounts of mgic and loot excites a quiet little part of his soul.
“Well, once we’ve killed them, anything they have could be yours, if you wanted to go get it,” reasons Mara. She catches and holds the giant’s eyes in an unbreakable gaze. “You wouldn’t be sorry. And what we’re doing is really important.”
“It is,” agrees Nolin in seething envy, gazing out of the corner of his eye at Mara’s +6 cloak of charisma. “Say, do you know the old giantish song about the rock throwing contest?” He then breaks into a percussion-heavy version of a giantish folk song that emphasizes the message of bargaining with strangers instead of killing them outright. The music sounds amazing in the echoing chamber, and Grgl is clearly entranced. In fact, he’s so entranced that Nolin’s suggestive message of cooperation penetrates his craggy skull. When the song finishes minutes later, he looks down at the bard.
“You right!” exclaims the giant. “We no need kill you. You stay here,” he says to Mara, patting the ground with a thump, “and you! Come talk to Chieftan Thulk!” And before Nolin can say a thing, the formorian snaps a talon-like hand around Nolin’s midriff and hoists him into the air.
“Ummm… Nolin?” asks Tao as the giant begins clambering back up the near-vertical wall with Nolin slung over his shoulder. “Do you want us to help?”
“Nah,” thinks the bard. “This’ll get me in to see the Chieftan. A few fast words, and we’ll be up and over this thing for free.” He watches as the two of them clamber up the stone barrier. Near him, large openings in the stone appear and disappear.
“I’ve found where those gargoyle things live. It looks like there’s a lot of them. I see nests all over this place.”
“Oh, great,” grumbles Velendo. “I’m liking this less and less.”
Next to him, Tao agrees. “We ought to just kill them all.”
Malachite shakes his head. “They may be evil, but they’re not our goal. We can’t afford to waste resources on these creatures instead of on the undead, unless we have no other choice.” He raises his head to try and glimpse Nolin, but the bard is only visible as a flicker of flame hundreds of feet up the wall. “We’ll see what Nolin can do.”
Tao looks at him. “What sort of paladin can pick and choose their evil?”
Malachite shoots her a cold look. “I am a Knight of the Emerald Chapel, and my loyalty to my God is not in question. I have a duty, and we have a more important enemies than these things.” Tao glowers back.
Finally reaching the top, Nolin is unloaded and placed on his feet next to the giant Grgl. He looks up to see that he is surrounded by four other repulsive formorian giants, and the sheer cliff face is at his back. In front of him, behind the ring of guards, are another two dozen giants standing before tall several stone buildings.
One of the foul-looking giants facing Nolin squints, then swears descriptively in giantish. “You idiot, Grgl!” it trumpets. “You know what you were told. None ascend! As the rotting ones said they would, these things have bewitched you!” The giant wiggles a swollen four-knuckled finger as it stumps closer on its wide and bulging legs.
“No!” says Grgl, confused, looking back and forth between his fellow giants and his new friend. “Me fine.”
“Yes,” says the other giant coldly. “I’m sure.”
“Well, actually, I…” Nolin begins, but cuts off his sentence as he desperately tries to duck three incoming great hammers. Two of the formorian guards manage to connect with crushing blows, drawing blood and breaking bones as they slam into Nolin’s shoulder and leg. With a snarl of triumph on his face, the hunchbacked guard captain lets loose a wide and powerful kick which catches Nolin across the belly. The bard is knocked more than ten feet backwards from the blow, and with a thrill of horror he realizes that there’s no ground beneath his feet. His spattering blood tumbles into the darkness beneath him.
Over the mindlink, Nolin thinks, “Oh, shi…”
Like a comet, Nolin falls.
To be continued…
