Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 268
Earth Magic
“We’re sinking!”
There’s panic in Flicker’s voice. They’re not sinking fast, and that’s something, but the wind walk no longer seems strong enough to keep them aloft. In only a few seconds they are below the edges of the chasm and wafting downward toward the lava.
They’re still closer to where they started than they are to the far side, so the Company does an about face and flies back, but it’s no good – for every foot they travel laterally they sink a foot vertically. Desperately they scan the ravine wall for ledges, and Ernie spots one about forty feet below the cliff edge. It’s not clear that they’ll make it, but there’s no better alternative.
They barely reach the shelf. It’s a ledge long enough for all of them to stand on, but extremely narrow – not more than two feet wide. Soon they are all standing on the ledge, backs to the wall. Staying in wind-form makes it easier to stay balanced, and that’s a good thing, what with the river of lava flowing below. The heat is intense.
As dire straights go, though, this one isn’t so bad. Dranko and Flicker come out of wind form and proceed to scale the cliff face until they’re safely up at the top. Dranko activates the immovable rod given him by One Certain Step, and Flicker deftly ties a rope around it, sending the loose end over the edge to those waiting below.
Ernie goes first, turning solid and keeping his balance while tying the rope around his waist. (Every member of the Company is an expert at typing ropes around their waists, since that was Standard Operating Procedure when going through the Ways of Het Branoi.) Dranko and Flicker heave and pull Ernie up to safety. He’s a surprisingly heavy load – it must be all the plate mail.
“Why didn’t I make you float-y armor?” grumbles Dranko.
“Because you were too busy making fart-y armor,” says Ernie with a smile. (Which is true. Ernie’s armor, you may recall, makes a flatulent sound when the pinky of the left gauntlet is pulled.)
Everyone is soon safely back at “ground level,” looking down at the lava and breathing sighs of relief. Dranko reverts to wind form, but while he can assume the misty aspect, he can’t gain any elevation. Something has severely degraded the magic of the wind walk. Aravis casts greater arcane sight and notes right away that Earth Magic is all around them, emanating from the surrounding stone. He also sees that the wind walk effect on folks is weakened almost to the point of being dispelled.
“I suspect this Earth Magic saturation will prevent us from doing any kind of flying,” he says.
Squinting across the chasm, Morningstar thinks she can just make out a tunnel mouth on the far side, but she’s not sure. The wizards could dimension door or teleport across, but it’s so dim on the other side they’re reluctant to take the risk. Flicker is able to solve that problem; with his amazing climbing skills he scales one of the cavern walls and then picks his way across the ceiling. The rough, natural stone provides him all the hand- and foot-holds he needs, and though it takes him almost an hour he crosses the chasm and climbs down on the other side. Once there he lights a torch, and when he reports over the mind-link that the ground around him is relatively flat, the wizards are able to dim door the Company across. There they find that Morningstar was correct: there’s a narrow tunnel here bored into the rock wall.
“Let me just remind everyone,” says Dranko, peering down into the tunnel, “that the giants smashed that bridge because they were afraid of the monsters that live over here on this side.”
They’re out of find the paths but since there’s only one tunnel out, they figure it won’t lead them astray. It’s low and narrow, squeezing the Company into a single-file line in the darkness. Dranko is still on point, warning the others over the mind-link where he encounters treacherous footing. After half an hour he thinks he sees the tunnel terminate at a pit, but when he gets closer he discovers that the tunnel dips sharply down and becomes almost vertical for ten feet before leveling out again. Carefully they navigate the bend, and while there are no traps or monsters to be seen, Kibi does clearly feel the Earth Magic in his bones that Scree described earlier, in almost Het Branoi-ish quantities. So it is that when the Company reaches a T-junction with no signs to suggest one way or the other, Kibi is able to concentrate on the Earth Magic around him and determine the way from which it generally emanates.
“The right fork,” he says after a time.
“Why?” asks Flicker.
“The Earth Magic is stronger that way. More thrummy. Can’t you feel it?”
Well, no, of course Flicker can’t. Neither can anyone save Kibi and Scree, but the group trusts the dwarf’s judgment, and on they go.
Not long after that the tunnel opens into a large-ish cavern with three possible ways out. Two of these are at ground level, while the third is high up on the cavern wall, reachable by a narrow sloping ramp of stone.
“Time to use the dwarven dowsing rod,” says Aravis.
While Kibi concentrates, Dranko hears an odd sound emanating from one of the ground-level tunnels. It sounds like a tiny rockslide, and before there can be much discussion about what it might be, a strange rat comes scurrying out of the tunnel. Everyone can see at once that it’s not normal: its skin is rough, gray, almost stony, and it has no fur. On closer examination they see its rat-shape is only approximate, more like a rat-shaped collection of rocks with a tail. In fact, it resembles nothing so much as a cross between Scree and a cave rat.
“That’s pretty cool!” exclaims Kibi.
“No,” corrects Grey Wolf. “That’s just wrong..”
“Should I check out the tunnel?” asks Dranko.
“Nah,” says Aravis. “Let’s wait for Kibi, and stay on target.”
A few more earth-rats follow the first, and they swarm over a piece of food that Dranko tosses to them. Kibi finally decides that the Earth Magic is strongest in the other ground-level tunnel, so Flicker and Dranko go on ahead to scout and check for traps.
It’s about equal parts tunnels and caverns, all highly reminiscent of the caves they traversed while searching for Carbuncle. Every time there’s a question of which way to go, Kibi provides an answer with a minute or two of effort. They joke as they travel that, while they’re here so far in the past, they should just write the Prophecies of the Orcish Crusades themselves, and leave copies strewn around the place.
“Dear Okhot One-Eye,” says Aravis, imagining how he’d start it off. “The Bloodseer is a traitor...”
Flicker interrupts the frivolous mind-link banter “Dranko, look out! Back back back!”
The tunnel they’re in is narrow – maybe six feet wide and seven feet high. Dranko instinctively leaps back and catches a glimpse of movement as he does so. A few feet ahead of him something is dripping down from the ceiling through wide cracks.
No, he corrects himself quickly. Not dripping, so much as pouring.
Black goo is spilling down from above and pooling on the floor of the tunnel. The rate at which it collects is astonishing, and as Flicker and Dranko hop further back it begins to fill up the tunnel ahead of them. It’s like thick black tar mixed with gravel. It smells like acid.
“Fall back!” Dranko thinks urgently to the others, who have just stepped into the tunnel from a cavern a hundred feet back. The rest of the Company takes his advice, retreating back to the cavern while Flicker and Dranko start to run.
“Back to the cavern, and hammer it with spells!” thinks Dranko.
Flicker and Dranko are going as fast as they can now, chased by a grinding, sloshing sound and an acidic tang. Dranko looks back over his shoulder and sees that the black goo is filling the entire tunnel and spilling toward them like an acidic wave. As soon as he and Flicker escape the tunnel, Dranko buys them some time with a wall of ice cast a few feet in. Everyone backs up, spells ready for when the monstrous ooze emerges. They hear the hissing of the wall of ice dissolving under the onslaught...
With a tremendous sploosh the black blob comes gushing out of the tunnel mouth, expanding as it enters the larger cavern. All told it’s almost twenty feet around and piled up taller than a halfling, a seething mass of acidic goo mixed with stones. Aravis greets the Earth Ooze with a disintegrate but only a tiny section of it bubbles away. Morningstar follows with a searing darkness, and Grey Wolf with a lightning bolt. To his dismay the bolt becomes diminished as soon as it leaves his fingertips; the Earth Magic around them has a suppressing effect on it.
Dranko strikes it with his whip, while Kibi cast earthbolt and Ernie uses a wand of searing darkness. On the one hand the Earth Ooze isn’t hard to hit, but on the other hand, the sum of all these attacks doesn’t seem to have made much of dent in the huge thing.
The Earth Ooze extends a pseudopodia and lashes out at Ernie. It strikes the halfling and sets his armor smoking, but with his belt of equality (which grants him the same size bonus as his opponent for all opposed grapple checks) Ernie manages to break free of its oozing grasp.
Aravis smiles and casts maze. The Ooze vanishes, leaving only a lingering acrid smell behind. It’s a good bet that the Ooze, lacking a notable intelligence, will be in there for the full duration of the spell. Dranko wastes no time in producing his decanter of endless water and spraying down Ernie’s dissolving armor. He’s in time to save it from total destruction but while it retains its magical properties, it’s still full of holes.
“We want to be very far away from here ten minutes from now,” says Grey Wolf, gesturing back into the tunnel.
Kibi casts an enclosing wall of stone where the Ooze will be when it emerges from the maze, and the Company beats a hasty exit from the cavern. On and on they go into the darkness, and downward, always downward. The heat continues to grow steadily, becoming uncomfortable to those without endure elements in place. Then Dranko reports that for a second time the tunnel is sloping downward, but this time curves down to become a vertical shaft whose bottom is beyond his darkvision.
They jam the immovable rod into a rocky corner, activate it, and Flicker ties one end from the bag of endless rope around it. Dranko then rappels down, reporting mentally as he goes. It's fortunate that the bag has much rope as it does – it’s over 200 feet down before Dranko’s feet touch the ground! The shaft is irregular in width and not exactly straight, but is consistently narrow -- narrow enough, in fact, that at the bottom Dranko is obliged to stand sideways. He informs the others that he’s in a cramped crevasse that stretches away in both directions, with a ceiling of about eight feet once beyond the shaft itself.
Down they go. It’s not as perilous at it seems at first, since the chimney is so narrow that if one were to slip from the rope, one could simply extend one’s legs and become wedged in. But it takes a long time to descend (with Flicker coming last, having retrieved the immovable rod), and the bottom is a claustrophobe’s nightmare. They are obliged to line up in single file, and when Kibi indicates which way they should go (the Earth Magic has reached new heights of intensity down here) the non-halflings have to walk sideways in order to fit. Kibi thinks that lava has passed through this subterranean crack, though not recently.
The gap slowly becomes narrower, until Snokas has to back everyone up a few feet and shimmy out of his armor. He drags it behind him as they continue on – it’s the only way both he and the armor will fit. But just when it seems the fissure will become untenably narrow, it empties the Company into the largest single cavern they’ve ever seen.
How, you might ask, can they tell the size of the cavern, given that their darkvision only extends 60’?
It’s because the whole of the cavern, eighty feet high and well over a hundred feet across, is illuminated by the green glow of an enormous emerald embedded in the center of the ceiling. It’s a bit tricky to gauge accurately, given the perspective, but Flicker estimates that the visible face of the emerald is over eight feet in diameter.
Dranko drops to his knees. “Oh, Delioch. I know I haven’t been the best cleric, but I thank you for answering all my prayers. I’ll be a good half-orc from now on.”
Flicker just stands there, his mouth hanging open, his eyes wide.
Kibi, while acknowledging the emerald is impressive, also notes that the far wall of the cavern is unusually flat – neither exactly natural nor wholly man-made. Perhaps it’s natural stone that’s been magically reinforced? He’s not sure.
Grey Wolf taps Flicker on the shoulder. “How do you expect to carry that?”
Flicker shakes his head. “I can just climb up there and start chipping bits away. They fall, we collect them, and...
“Flicker,” interrupts Aravis. “Have you noticed that the emerald is glowing? Perhaps chipping bits out of it would be a bad idea.”
“Delioch is making it glow so that I can see it, and take it home...” says Dranko reverently.
“Don’t lick it!” says Ernie, suddenly alarmed.
Dranko turns and grins at him. “Licking it is first on the agenda.”
“How much do you think it’s worth?” asks Snokas, putting his armor back on.
Flicker gazes upward. He doesn’t have a good frame of reference for something like this, but he does some quick math in his head.
“I’d say it’s worth about four or five Charagans,” he declares.
“How much is that in gold pieces?” asks Aravis.
“I don’t know,” answers Flicker. “I can’t count that high.”
Dranko just giggles like a little kid. “This is the best day of my life,” he says. He hasn’t taken his eyes off the emerald for one second since emerging into this cavern.
Ernie nudges him. “Expect for the day you married Morningstar,” he prompts.
“Right, right,” says Dranko. “Except for that.”
“I don’t think I believe you,” says Morningstar, grinning at her husband.
Dranko tears his eyes off the green gem and looks at his wife. “Morningstar, I would not throw you over for that emerald. I’d cry, sure, but I’d pick you every time.”
Having said that, he turns to Flicker. “Here’s what we need to do. We rig up a harness with the immovable rod and some rope up there on the ceiling. I’ve got a pick and some chisels.”
“Yup,” agrees Flicker. “First order of business is getting it out of the roof.”
While Flicker and Dranko scheme, the others start to cast around glances, looking for exits but seeing none. Morningstar casts true seeing and sees nothing hidden or illusionary. The emerald is really an emerald, albeit magical. Eventually they decide to send a group, led by Kibi and Flicker, out to investigate the flattish wall on the far side of the cavern. Dranko, Morningstar and Snokas hang back in case of emergency.
Slowly the group walks into the expansive emptiness, their faces and armor green from the light of the gem above. Flicker, who’s supposed to be checking for traps, keeps looking up longingly. And right about when he’s underneath it, the emerald moves.
With a grinding sound of rock-on-rock the emerald slides slowly out of the ceiling, but this is no falling-rock trap. No, what comes out of the ceiling of this cavern is an earth elemental, a creature so large that the enormous emerald turns out to be one of its eyes. Another emerald comes into view as the head emerges, and the enormous body follows. The mountainous form flips around, and a sixty-foot-tall earth elemental crashes to the ground feet first, its green eyes blazing. The impact of its landing sends most of the Company sprawling onto the ground.
Kibi finds himself looking up at Scree writ large, a veritable tower of rock and magic, whose idling stance fills the air with a cacophony of grinding stone. It’s the second largest creature they’ve ever seen – if the Ventifact Colossus had a rider suited for its length, this might be it.
Kibi gulps. “Hello!” he shouts up, speaking in Terran. “How do you do? We mean you no harm!”
Over his empathic link with Scree, he thinks: smile!
In a voice like an earthquake the Elemental intones: “EARTH MAGE.”
“Yes,” agrees Kibi. “Is that okay?”
“Kibi!” whispers Ernie. “Is it angry?”
“I don’t know!”
Aravis waves at the Elemental in what he hopes is a friendly manner. Dranko hurriedly stows his pick.
Then, speaking again to the Elemental, Kibi continues.
“I am an earth mage, and I love the earth. It feels so wonderful in here, all full of Earth Magic...”
The Elemental rumbles again, its voice rising like an approaching avalanche.
“EARTH MAGE... DIE!”
...to be continued...
Earth Magic
“We’re sinking!”
There’s panic in Flicker’s voice. They’re not sinking fast, and that’s something, but the wind walk no longer seems strong enough to keep them aloft. In only a few seconds they are below the edges of the chasm and wafting downward toward the lava.
They’re still closer to where they started than they are to the far side, so the Company does an about face and flies back, but it’s no good – for every foot they travel laterally they sink a foot vertically. Desperately they scan the ravine wall for ledges, and Ernie spots one about forty feet below the cliff edge. It’s not clear that they’ll make it, but there’s no better alternative.
They barely reach the shelf. It’s a ledge long enough for all of them to stand on, but extremely narrow – not more than two feet wide. Soon they are all standing on the ledge, backs to the wall. Staying in wind-form makes it easier to stay balanced, and that’s a good thing, what with the river of lava flowing below. The heat is intense.
As dire straights go, though, this one isn’t so bad. Dranko and Flicker come out of wind form and proceed to scale the cliff face until they’re safely up at the top. Dranko activates the immovable rod given him by One Certain Step, and Flicker deftly ties a rope around it, sending the loose end over the edge to those waiting below.
Ernie goes first, turning solid and keeping his balance while tying the rope around his waist. (Every member of the Company is an expert at typing ropes around their waists, since that was Standard Operating Procedure when going through the Ways of Het Branoi.) Dranko and Flicker heave and pull Ernie up to safety. He’s a surprisingly heavy load – it must be all the plate mail.
“Why didn’t I make you float-y armor?” grumbles Dranko.
“Because you were too busy making fart-y armor,” says Ernie with a smile. (Which is true. Ernie’s armor, you may recall, makes a flatulent sound when the pinky of the left gauntlet is pulled.)
Everyone is soon safely back at “ground level,” looking down at the lava and breathing sighs of relief. Dranko reverts to wind form, but while he can assume the misty aspect, he can’t gain any elevation. Something has severely degraded the magic of the wind walk. Aravis casts greater arcane sight and notes right away that Earth Magic is all around them, emanating from the surrounding stone. He also sees that the wind walk effect on folks is weakened almost to the point of being dispelled.
“I suspect this Earth Magic saturation will prevent us from doing any kind of flying,” he says.
Squinting across the chasm, Morningstar thinks she can just make out a tunnel mouth on the far side, but she’s not sure. The wizards could dimension door or teleport across, but it’s so dim on the other side they’re reluctant to take the risk. Flicker is able to solve that problem; with his amazing climbing skills he scales one of the cavern walls and then picks his way across the ceiling. The rough, natural stone provides him all the hand- and foot-holds he needs, and though it takes him almost an hour he crosses the chasm and climbs down on the other side. Once there he lights a torch, and when he reports over the mind-link that the ground around him is relatively flat, the wizards are able to dim door the Company across. There they find that Morningstar was correct: there’s a narrow tunnel here bored into the rock wall.
“Let me just remind everyone,” says Dranko, peering down into the tunnel, “that the giants smashed that bridge because they were afraid of the monsters that live over here on this side.”
They’re out of find the paths but since there’s only one tunnel out, they figure it won’t lead them astray. It’s low and narrow, squeezing the Company into a single-file line in the darkness. Dranko is still on point, warning the others over the mind-link where he encounters treacherous footing. After half an hour he thinks he sees the tunnel terminate at a pit, but when he gets closer he discovers that the tunnel dips sharply down and becomes almost vertical for ten feet before leveling out again. Carefully they navigate the bend, and while there are no traps or monsters to be seen, Kibi does clearly feel the Earth Magic in his bones that Scree described earlier, in almost Het Branoi-ish quantities. So it is that when the Company reaches a T-junction with no signs to suggest one way or the other, Kibi is able to concentrate on the Earth Magic around him and determine the way from which it generally emanates.
“The right fork,” he says after a time.
“Why?” asks Flicker.
“The Earth Magic is stronger that way. More thrummy. Can’t you feel it?”
Well, no, of course Flicker can’t. Neither can anyone save Kibi and Scree, but the group trusts the dwarf’s judgment, and on they go.
Not long after that the tunnel opens into a large-ish cavern with three possible ways out. Two of these are at ground level, while the third is high up on the cavern wall, reachable by a narrow sloping ramp of stone.
“Time to use the dwarven dowsing rod,” says Aravis.
While Kibi concentrates, Dranko hears an odd sound emanating from one of the ground-level tunnels. It sounds like a tiny rockslide, and before there can be much discussion about what it might be, a strange rat comes scurrying out of the tunnel. Everyone can see at once that it’s not normal: its skin is rough, gray, almost stony, and it has no fur. On closer examination they see its rat-shape is only approximate, more like a rat-shaped collection of rocks with a tail. In fact, it resembles nothing so much as a cross between Scree and a cave rat.
“That’s pretty cool!” exclaims Kibi.
“No,” corrects Grey Wolf. “That’s just wrong..”
“Should I check out the tunnel?” asks Dranko.
“Nah,” says Aravis. “Let’s wait for Kibi, and stay on target.”
A few more earth-rats follow the first, and they swarm over a piece of food that Dranko tosses to them. Kibi finally decides that the Earth Magic is strongest in the other ground-level tunnel, so Flicker and Dranko go on ahead to scout and check for traps.
It’s about equal parts tunnels and caverns, all highly reminiscent of the caves they traversed while searching for Carbuncle. Every time there’s a question of which way to go, Kibi provides an answer with a minute or two of effort. They joke as they travel that, while they’re here so far in the past, they should just write the Prophecies of the Orcish Crusades themselves, and leave copies strewn around the place.
“Dear Okhot One-Eye,” says Aravis, imagining how he’d start it off. “The Bloodseer is a traitor...”
Flicker interrupts the frivolous mind-link banter “Dranko, look out! Back back back!”
The tunnel they’re in is narrow – maybe six feet wide and seven feet high. Dranko instinctively leaps back and catches a glimpse of movement as he does so. A few feet ahead of him something is dripping down from the ceiling through wide cracks.
No, he corrects himself quickly. Not dripping, so much as pouring.
Black goo is spilling down from above and pooling on the floor of the tunnel. The rate at which it collects is astonishing, and as Flicker and Dranko hop further back it begins to fill up the tunnel ahead of them. It’s like thick black tar mixed with gravel. It smells like acid.
“Fall back!” Dranko thinks urgently to the others, who have just stepped into the tunnel from a cavern a hundred feet back. The rest of the Company takes his advice, retreating back to the cavern while Flicker and Dranko start to run.
“Back to the cavern, and hammer it with spells!” thinks Dranko.
Flicker and Dranko are going as fast as they can now, chased by a grinding, sloshing sound and an acidic tang. Dranko looks back over his shoulder and sees that the black goo is filling the entire tunnel and spilling toward them like an acidic wave. As soon as he and Flicker escape the tunnel, Dranko buys them some time with a wall of ice cast a few feet in. Everyone backs up, spells ready for when the monstrous ooze emerges. They hear the hissing of the wall of ice dissolving under the onslaught...
With a tremendous sploosh the black blob comes gushing out of the tunnel mouth, expanding as it enters the larger cavern. All told it’s almost twenty feet around and piled up taller than a halfling, a seething mass of acidic goo mixed with stones. Aravis greets the Earth Ooze with a disintegrate but only a tiny section of it bubbles away. Morningstar follows with a searing darkness, and Grey Wolf with a lightning bolt. To his dismay the bolt becomes diminished as soon as it leaves his fingertips; the Earth Magic around them has a suppressing effect on it.
Dranko strikes it with his whip, while Kibi cast earthbolt and Ernie uses a wand of searing darkness. On the one hand the Earth Ooze isn’t hard to hit, but on the other hand, the sum of all these attacks doesn’t seem to have made much of dent in the huge thing.
The Earth Ooze extends a pseudopodia and lashes out at Ernie. It strikes the halfling and sets his armor smoking, but with his belt of equality (which grants him the same size bonus as his opponent for all opposed grapple checks) Ernie manages to break free of its oozing grasp.
Aravis smiles and casts maze. The Ooze vanishes, leaving only a lingering acrid smell behind. It’s a good bet that the Ooze, lacking a notable intelligence, will be in there for the full duration of the spell. Dranko wastes no time in producing his decanter of endless water and spraying down Ernie’s dissolving armor. He’s in time to save it from total destruction but while it retains its magical properties, it’s still full of holes.
“We want to be very far away from here ten minutes from now,” says Grey Wolf, gesturing back into the tunnel.
Kibi casts an enclosing wall of stone where the Ooze will be when it emerges from the maze, and the Company beats a hasty exit from the cavern. On and on they go into the darkness, and downward, always downward. The heat continues to grow steadily, becoming uncomfortable to those without endure elements in place. Then Dranko reports that for a second time the tunnel is sloping downward, but this time curves down to become a vertical shaft whose bottom is beyond his darkvision.
They jam the immovable rod into a rocky corner, activate it, and Flicker ties one end from the bag of endless rope around it. Dranko then rappels down, reporting mentally as he goes. It's fortunate that the bag has much rope as it does – it’s over 200 feet down before Dranko’s feet touch the ground! The shaft is irregular in width and not exactly straight, but is consistently narrow -- narrow enough, in fact, that at the bottom Dranko is obliged to stand sideways. He informs the others that he’s in a cramped crevasse that stretches away in both directions, with a ceiling of about eight feet once beyond the shaft itself.
Down they go. It’s not as perilous at it seems at first, since the chimney is so narrow that if one were to slip from the rope, one could simply extend one’s legs and become wedged in. But it takes a long time to descend (with Flicker coming last, having retrieved the immovable rod), and the bottom is a claustrophobe’s nightmare. They are obliged to line up in single file, and when Kibi indicates which way they should go (the Earth Magic has reached new heights of intensity down here) the non-halflings have to walk sideways in order to fit. Kibi thinks that lava has passed through this subterranean crack, though not recently.
The gap slowly becomes narrower, until Snokas has to back everyone up a few feet and shimmy out of his armor. He drags it behind him as they continue on – it’s the only way both he and the armor will fit. But just when it seems the fissure will become untenably narrow, it empties the Company into the largest single cavern they’ve ever seen.
How, you might ask, can they tell the size of the cavern, given that their darkvision only extends 60’?
It’s because the whole of the cavern, eighty feet high and well over a hundred feet across, is illuminated by the green glow of an enormous emerald embedded in the center of the ceiling. It’s a bit tricky to gauge accurately, given the perspective, but Flicker estimates that the visible face of the emerald is over eight feet in diameter.
Dranko drops to his knees. “Oh, Delioch. I know I haven’t been the best cleric, but I thank you for answering all my prayers. I’ll be a good half-orc from now on.”
Flicker just stands there, his mouth hanging open, his eyes wide.
Kibi, while acknowledging the emerald is impressive, also notes that the far wall of the cavern is unusually flat – neither exactly natural nor wholly man-made. Perhaps it’s natural stone that’s been magically reinforced? He’s not sure.
Grey Wolf taps Flicker on the shoulder. “How do you expect to carry that?”
Flicker shakes his head. “I can just climb up there and start chipping bits away. They fall, we collect them, and...
“Flicker,” interrupts Aravis. “Have you noticed that the emerald is glowing? Perhaps chipping bits out of it would be a bad idea.”
“Delioch is making it glow so that I can see it, and take it home...” says Dranko reverently.
“Don’t lick it!” says Ernie, suddenly alarmed.
Dranko turns and grins at him. “Licking it is first on the agenda.”
“How much do you think it’s worth?” asks Snokas, putting his armor back on.
Flicker gazes upward. He doesn’t have a good frame of reference for something like this, but he does some quick math in his head.
“I’d say it’s worth about four or five Charagans,” he declares.
“How much is that in gold pieces?” asks Aravis.
“I don’t know,” answers Flicker. “I can’t count that high.”
Dranko just giggles like a little kid. “This is the best day of my life,” he says. He hasn’t taken his eyes off the emerald for one second since emerging into this cavern.
Ernie nudges him. “Expect for the day you married Morningstar,” he prompts.
“Right, right,” says Dranko. “Except for that.”
“I don’t think I believe you,” says Morningstar, grinning at her husband.
Dranko tears his eyes off the green gem and looks at his wife. “Morningstar, I would not throw you over for that emerald. I’d cry, sure, but I’d pick you every time.”
Having said that, he turns to Flicker. “Here’s what we need to do. We rig up a harness with the immovable rod and some rope up there on the ceiling. I’ve got a pick and some chisels.”
“Yup,” agrees Flicker. “First order of business is getting it out of the roof.”
While Flicker and Dranko scheme, the others start to cast around glances, looking for exits but seeing none. Morningstar casts true seeing and sees nothing hidden or illusionary. The emerald is really an emerald, albeit magical. Eventually they decide to send a group, led by Kibi and Flicker, out to investigate the flattish wall on the far side of the cavern. Dranko, Morningstar and Snokas hang back in case of emergency.
Slowly the group walks into the expansive emptiness, their faces and armor green from the light of the gem above. Flicker, who’s supposed to be checking for traps, keeps looking up longingly. And right about when he’s underneath it, the emerald moves.
With a grinding sound of rock-on-rock the emerald slides slowly out of the ceiling, but this is no falling-rock trap. No, what comes out of the ceiling of this cavern is an earth elemental, a creature so large that the enormous emerald turns out to be one of its eyes. Another emerald comes into view as the head emerges, and the enormous body follows. The mountainous form flips around, and a sixty-foot-tall earth elemental crashes to the ground feet first, its green eyes blazing. The impact of its landing sends most of the Company sprawling onto the ground.
Kibi finds himself looking up at Scree writ large, a veritable tower of rock and magic, whose idling stance fills the air with a cacophony of grinding stone. It’s the second largest creature they’ve ever seen – if the Ventifact Colossus had a rider suited for its length, this might be it.
Kibi gulps. “Hello!” he shouts up, speaking in Terran. “How do you do? We mean you no harm!”
Over his empathic link with Scree, he thinks: smile!
In a voice like an earthquake the Elemental intones: “EARTH MAGE.”
“Yes,” agrees Kibi. “Is that okay?”
“Kibi!” whispers Ernie. “Is it angry?”
“I don’t know!”
Aravis waves at the Elemental in what he hopes is a friendly manner. Dranko hurriedly stows his pick.
Then, speaking again to the Elemental, Kibi continues.
“I am an earth mage, and I love the earth. It feels so wonderful in here, all full of Earth Magic...”
The Elemental rumbles again, its voice rising like an approaching avalanche.
“EARTH MAGE... DIE!”
...to be continued...
