energy_One
First Post
Ciaran said:
That just reminds me how confusing and difficult things have just become.
Whoops! Abernathy's Company is in trouble.
- energy_One
-
NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.
Sagiro's Story Hour Returns (new thread started on 5/18/08)
- Thread starter Sagiro
- Start date
That just reminds me how confusing and difficult things have just become.
Whoops! Abernathy's Company is in trouble.
- energy_One
KidCthulhu
First Post
Ciaran said:
Unfortunately, ever since the battle at Verdshane, Aravis has been unable to access the Maze. I don't think it's permanently off-line, he's just sprained his brain rather badly, and needs to rest a while.
energy_One
First Post
KidCthulhu said:
What sort of difference is there now as opposed to before he "sprained le brain"? Is it simply a matter of him not feeling it, or can he not get together enough brain power and concentration to use it?
Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 178
* *
He was free, and now he will be killed. Was it worth it? Maybe. Dying will be, must be, better than living.
He doesn’t struggle. Two armed guards hold him in a vice-like grip. Two more walk ahead and two behind, as they force him down the dark streets of Pyke Vale. Ahead in the light of torches one of the monstrous furnaces comes into view. His heart sinks.
Although he has never seen it, he has heard from some others that if a slave escapes and is caught, he is thrown into one of the furnaces to be burned alive. Now he is learning those stories are true. The guards march him right up to the door of the massive furnace, a hulking box of steel and heat. The two guards in front lift a metal bar from the door and swing it open. Heat pours out; the guards instinctively turn their faces.
Then the escaped slave is flung inside. He hears the door clang shut behind him and the bar thrown down.
In his mind, in the seconds leading up to this, the slave envisioned that he’d simply erupt into flames, instantly burned to death by intense fires. Although his death is still not in doubt, his confounding survival for the first five seconds causes his instincts to take over, looking for a way to stay alive.
The furnace is huge – almost twenty feet on a side – and has not recently been stoked. Oh, it is hot – brutally hot – and here and there the coals are still red and pulsing. Small fires burn all around him, and the air immediately provokes a drenching sweat. His pant cuff catches fire and he swats it out, even as his head jerks this way and that, looking for a way to survive. Miraculously, he finds one.
In the far back corner of the furnace it is slightly less hot, though in scrambling there he badly burns his foot, and once slips and lands his forearm on a hot coal. But in the corner he finds that by burying himself in old warm ashes he achieves some insulation from the heat. Part of his mind urges him to give up. What is the point? He is trapped. Tomorrow the furnace will be ten times hotter. He cannot flee while the door is open; guards and workers will be swarming outside. In the best possible scenario he can imagine, he will die of thirst in days. Better to burn quickly now than die of slow roasting.
But in man there is nothing to rival the basic instinct to survive. So he stays in his corner.
The next day is a nightmare that Morningstar can hardly bear. In the early morning the furnace is open; logs, kindling and torches are thrown inside. By late morning it burns with the fires of hell. Burrowing as far as he can beneath his pile of ash, the slave still feels as though the skin is melting off his bones. The air in his lungs is mixed with ash and burns with every breath. Hot embers find their way to bits of exposed skin. One time a wet log explodes nearby and showers him with fiery fragments; his ashen blanket gives him some protection from the scalding air, but when burning wood touches down, it makes holes in his body. He knows he will die. He wishes he would die. Morningstar’s reliving of his memories swims in and out along with the slave’s consciousness.
In the evening they stop throwing logs in. The door is shut for the final time, clanging in its frame. Minutes pass.
In the back of Morningstar’s mind, the slave comes to a foggy-headed realization. There had been no sound of the bar being lowered. Slowly he turns his head on his ashen pillow. The door was not securely closed! He nearly jumps up to make a run for it. Yes, there will probably still be guards outside, and they will catch him, but maybe they will simply cut off his head and make an end, instead of throwing him back inside…
No. Survive.
He is terrified that someone outside will notice the open door. But his best chance is to wait until the wee hours of the morning, when the furnace will be abandoned. The hours creep by, the air in the furnace slowly cooling. When he can bear it no longer the slave hops to the doorway, trying hard not to look at his own burned and blistered body. He peeks through the half-inch gap between door and frame. He sees no one, hears no one.
The exhilaration of freedom is just enough to mask the pain as he flees into the night.
Morningstar lifts her trembling hand from the slave’s arm.
“We should get him back the Greenhouse,” she whispers. “He needs… help. Food. We can’t just leave him here.”
They wind walk back to the Greenhouse to pick up some soft bread and cheese, then fly back with Aravis to the slave’s hovel. They set the food down next to the sleeping man and withdraw to the other side of the room.
“Wake up,” says Ernie, in a normal tone of voice. “We have food for you.”
Ernie has to repeat himself a few times, but eventually the man stirs, blinks, sits up slowly. He sees Ernie, Dranko, Aravis and Morningstar, standing nearby and smiling. They expect that he might startle or even attack, but he does neither. Instead he slumps down, back still against the wall. They can read his emotions easily enough; he knows he’s finally been caught, and now they’ll throw him back in the furnace.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” says Ernie. “And we won’t tell anyone you’re here. We brought you some food.”
He points at the bread and cheese. “Eat. That’s for you.”
The slave looks down at the food, puzzled. Poison? A trick? Maybe he’s hallucinating. Dranko senses what the man is thinking. He walks forward slowly and the man shrinks back. Dranko picks up the bread, tears off a small piece, and deliberately puts it in his mouth.
“See?” he says. “It’s good.”
They’re pretty sure the slave understands them; people in Pyke Vale speak a thickly accented common tongue. But he doesn’t touch the food. His eyes are full of fear and doubt.
“What should we do now?” asks Aravis, speaking low. “We can’t make him eat. And now that he’s seen us, we can’t afford to let him go.”
“We’ll take him back to the Greenhouse,” says Ernie. “We can heal him, give him a comfortable bed…”
“…and have to keep him there for the entire duration of our stay in this reality,” says Aravis. “If he ever leaves, he could be caught, and made to tell the Emperor about the Greenhouse.”
“That’s better than him staying here,” says Dranko. “Look at him. Look at this place. This isn’t life.”
“It’s better than what he had before,” Morningstar whispers.
“I’m going to cast sleep on him," says Aravis. "Then we can get him back to the Greenhouse without him knowing how far it is. We don’t have a choice at this point.”
Aravis casts his spell. The slave’s eyes go wide as Aravis chants and waves his arms, and then he drops into a peaceful slumber. Gently they carry him back to the Greenhouse and set him on the couch in the living room. Before too long he wakes again, sitting up on the sofa and looking around in wonder. Ernie has set some oatmeal and water in front of him, which he eyes suspiciously for only a second before greedily consuming.
“What is your name?” asks Ernie gently.
The slave opens his mouth but no words come out. For a minute the Company thinks he might be dumb, or have had his tongue cut out. But it’s simply the vocal rust borne of a long solitude. After a moment of working his jaws, he whispers: “Carp.”
* *
The education of Carp is slow and delicate. He vacillates wildly between mistrust, confusion and gratitude. The Company explains that they have come from a far-off land, that they are enemies of the Emperor, that they are safe in this strange house. It is tricky convincing Carp that he may not leave the Greenhouse, but they manage it. The promise of unlimited food and drink, combined with protection from the Warlord Pinfaro (who is the ruler of Pyke Vale) is enough to satisfy him.
“And I’m stuck here as well,” says Eddings, handing Carp another slice of buttered bread. “But here we have books, and food, and cats to keep us company.”
In the days that follow, Carp provides some more information about his escape.
Free from the furnace he fled through the streets of Pyke Vale, dodging guards and hiding in the shadows. He made his way to this abandoned ghetto of boarded-up homes, eventually finding an unsealed window. For two days he had gone into and out of delirium. Had it not rained the first night, he would have died from thirst. He was able to leave his shirt out in the downpour and wring filthy drops into his mouth. Since then he has lived on stolen scraps; he knows of a guards' eating-house where leavings are tossed in a back alley. Each night he scavenged for food. Each day he hid, terrified. It has been months.
When he is more at ease, Carp answers some of their questions about Pyke Vale. There are no children on the streets because they are kept underground – fed and exercised, but not educated. He guesses the children of important people are raised inside the palace grounds. Warlord Pinfaro keeps such a large army because he fears another Warlord, somewhere to the north he thinks. The Company finds this fascinating.
“I bet the Emperor keeps his generals at each others’ throats,” says Ernie, “so they don’t come after him.”
Over breakfast one morning Aravis reiterates his impatience.
“It’s time to go,” he says. “We’ve learned everything we can about what Charagan has become. We’ve helped the only person we could find to help. Now it’s time to go set things to rights.”
“One more thing before we go,” says Morningstar. “I have a few questions I’d like to ask of Ell.”
Offering up a bit of her life energy, Morningstar casts commune, seeking answers from her Goddess. The connection that she typically feels is slow in coming after the spell is cast, but she asks her first question undaunted:
Are we likely to succeed if we try to travel to Kivia via the Delfirian Arch?
The answer does not come immediately. Just enough time passes to make Morningstar start to doubt, when a divine voice sounds in her soul. It is faint.
NO.
“My connection with the Goddess is weak,” she tells the others. “I don’t know why.”
She asks a second question.
Is the Gate at the Delfirian Peninsula in active use?
Again a delay, before:
YES
Will we still end up in a jungle clearing if we use the Rope to return to Kivia?
YES
Does the rope have enough power to work a third time?
PROBABLY
Is an Eye of Moirel at Het Branoi?
This time the delay is especially long. Several minutes pass. Then:
I BELIEVE SO
Is Seven Dark Words a person?
HE WAS
“I knew it!” says Ernie.
Is the house of Seven Dark Words in Djaw?
ONE OF THEM WAS
Are there Sisters of Ell in Kivia?
YES
Are there Sisters of Ell other than Morningstar in the place we know as Charagan?
NO
Are any of the people we know as the Archmagi alive?
NO
Is Het Branoi abandoned?
Again there is a long delay.
I DON’T BELIEVE SO
With one question left, Morningstar asks a question on Ernie’s behalf.
Are there any halflings in Kivia?
YES
Morningstar’s connection with the divine drops immediately. She finds herself winded.
“Looks like we use the rope then,” says Grey Wolf, reaching for his sword. “I say there’s no time like right now.”
Not knowing if the Greenhouse would muddle the use of their magical Rope, the Company assembles on the roof. Eddings is left behind with Carp.
“We know we’ll show up in that jungle clearing,” says Morningstar, as Ernie lays out the long rope in a circle. “But we should still be ready for trouble.”
It takes fifteen minutes for the magic of the Rope to take effect. The Company stands within its circumference, fidgeting, eager to get on to the next part of their adventure, to start the process of setting the universe back on its proper course. All at once the world around them changes, as they are teleported en masse, thousands of miles to the east, to Kivia and the Jungle of Lost Dreams.
* *
It is night, and around them is a jungle clearing. That much is expected. Everything else is an unpleasant surprise.
They are not standing on grass. Beneath their feet is a wide circular floor, 15 feet in diameter, made of gray stone slabs.. That circle is edged by a circumference of black obsidian bricks. A nine-pointed star made of similar bricks circumscribes their circle, and at each point of the star is a squat, unsettling statue. The air around them glows with a wan reddish light.
Outside the circle many torches on tall stands illuminate the night, and what they show the Company is a vast array of people surrounding them. Sixteen of these have crossbows aimed at them. Another eight have drawn scimitars. Two wield rapiers in each hand. In the back, outside of any direct torchlight, two immense bulky figures shift and grunt. And none of these are what immediately grab the Company’s attention.
Only fifteen feet from their circle stands a tall, imperious man. He wears a black robe with a red fringe, and a pendant with a black circle hangs around his neck. Next to him is a short armored woman in similar robes.
Aravis wastes no time; he has recently added the spell mass haste to his books, and starts to cast. But as his arms move in the patterns of spellcasting, the air in their enclosed cylinder begins to glow bright red and heat up rapdily. Some unseen force makes Aravis' hands shake, and in less than three seconds the spell is disrupted. Morningstar tries casting prayer with the same results. Seeing that spells are failing, Dranko adopts a wait-and-see attitude, keeping an eye on the foe outside the circle. Kay draws her bow and fires an arrow straight at the tall man's chest; it flies eight feet before splintering against a force barrier at the edge of the obsidian circle.
The tall man chuckles.
Grey Wolf also tries casting, but his effort is similarly thwarted. Step, furious, charges forward, crashes into the force barrier, and falls back. Kibi drinks a potion, and even that fails to have any effect. Magic seems to be completely nullified inside the trap.
In the torchlight the Black Circle leader holds up his hands. The Company watches and listens, a captive audience.
“The Prophets of the Circle spoke,” the man's voice booms in heavily accented Kivian common, “and we listened. The Prophets did not lead us astray.”
He turns to the smaller woman standing beside him.
“You see, my Lady? It is all as I expected. There was no need for this…” he gestures to the armed soldiers around him “…unseemly show of force.”
“I read things differently than you," grumbles the woman. "I’ll relax when they’re dead. Get on with it.”
The man clears his throat.
“Here, at the exact time and place foretold, are the mortal enemies of our Lord. They come from a world much like this one, but one in which the Black Circle suffered bitter defeat. They have traveled across time and space in an attempt to change our world into one like their own. As you can see, they have failed, because I read the Dark Books and was prepared. You will all be witness to their destruction, that I have engineered.”
He strides forward toward them, stopping just short of the nine-pointed star. He speaks in a low voice meant only for them.
“But tell me one thing,” he murmurs. “How did you do it? If you share with me the secret of crossing the infinite boundaries of worlds, I will find a way to spare your lives."
No one responds.
"And if you don't tell me," the man whipsers, "the remainder of your short lives will be extremely uncomfortable."
No one responds.
The woman behind him hisses. “Stop playing with them. Get this done with. I’m sick of this accursed jungle.”
The tall man steps back with a sigh.
“I suggest you make peace with your Gods.”
He turns and walks back to where he was originally standing, at the woman's side. As he walks, Dranko takes out a spike from his pack, places it against the flagstones (glowing a slight red) at the very edge of the obsidian circle, and smashes down on it with his mace.
The spike entirely fails to penetrate the force effect that coats the stones like an impervious skin. Dranko seethes with frustration. The tall man turns to face the circle and begins to chant in an evil tongue. Inside the circle the air suddenly gets very, very warm.
Out of options, Dranko resorts to one of his oldest means of showing displeasure. He unbuttons his trousers and pees toward the man. The stream of urine strikes an invisible barrier at the circle’s edge and splatters to the stones. The woman standing by the chanting man wrinkles her face in disgust.
The temperature in the circle continues to rise. It seems that the Black Circle has finally caught them in a trap with no escape...
From somewhere in the jungle behind the Black Circle practitioners, there is a tremendously loud roar.
...to be continued...
* *
He was free, and now he will be killed. Was it worth it? Maybe. Dying will be, must be, better than living.
He doesn’t struggle. Two armed guards hold him in a vice-like grip. Two more walk ahead and two behind, as they force him down the dark streets of Pyke Vale. Ahead in the light of torches one of the monstrous furnaces comes into view. His heart sinks.
Although he has never seen it, he has heard from some others that if a slave escapes and is caught, he is thrown into one of the furnaces to be burned alive. Now he is learning those stories are true. The guards march him right up to the door of the massive furnace, a hulking box of steel and heat. The two guards in front lift a metal bar from the door and swing it open. Heat pours out; the guards instinctively turn their faces.
Then the escaped slave is flung inside. He hears the door clang shut behind him and the bar thrown down.
In his mind, in the seconds leading up to this, the slave envisioned that he’d simply erupt into flames, instantly burned to death by intense fires. Although his death is still not in doubt, his confounding survival for the first five seconds causes his instincts to take over, looking for a way to stay alive.
The furnace is huge – almost twenty feet on a side – and has not recently been stoked. Oh, it is hot – brutally hot – and here and there the coals are still red and pulsing. Small fires burn all around him, and the air immediately provokes a drenching sweat. His pant cuff catches fire and he swats it out, even as his head jerks this way and that, looking for a way to survive. Miraculously, he finds one.
In the far back corner of the furnace it is slightly less hot, though in scrambling there he badly burns his foot, and once slips and lands his forearm on a hot coal. But in the corner he finds that by burying himself in old warm ashes he achieves some insulation from the heat. Part of his mind urges him to give up. What is the point? He is trapped. Tomorrow the furnace will be ten times hotter. He cannot flee while the door is open; guards and workers will be swarming outside. In the best possible scenario he can imagine, he will die of thirst in days. Better to burn quickly now than die of slow roasting.
But in man there is nothing to rival the basic instinct to survive. So he stays in his corner.
The next day is a nightmare that Morningstar can hardly bear. In the early morning the furnace is open; logs, kindling and torches are thrown inside. By late morning it burns with the fires of hell. Burrowing as far as he can beneath his pile of ash, the slave still feels as though the skin is melting off his bones. The air in his lungs is mixed with ash and burns with every breath. Hot embers find their way to bits of exposed skin. One time a wet log explodes nearby and showers him with fiery fragments; his ashen blanket gives him some protection from the scalding air, but when burning wood touches down, it makes holes in his body. He knows he will die. He wishes he would die. Morningstar’s reliving of his memories swims in and out along with the slave’s consciousness.
In the evening they stop throwing logs in. The door is shut for the final time, clanging in its frame. Minutes pass.
In the back of Morningstar’s mind, the slave comes to a foggy-headed realization. There had been no sound of the bar being lowered. Slowly he turns his head on his ashen pillow. The door was not securely closed! He nearly jumps up to make a run for it. Yes, there will probably still be guards outside, and they will catch him, but maybe they will simply cut off his head and make an end, instead of throwing him back inside…
No. Survive.
He is terrified that someone outside will notice the open door. But his best chance is to wait until the wee hours of the morning, when the furnace will be abandoned. The hours creep by, the air in the furnace slowly cooling. When he can bear it no longer the slave hops to the doorway, trying hard not to look at his own burned and blistered body. He peeks through the half-inch gap between door and frame. He sees no one, hears no one.
The exhilaration of freedom is just enough to mask the pain as he flees into the night.
Morningstar lifts her trembling hand from the slave’s arm.
“We should get him back the Greenhouse,” she whispers. “He needs… help. Food. We can’t just leave him here.”
They wind walk back to the Greenhouse to pick up some soft bread and cheese, then fly back with Aravis to the slave’s hovel. They set the food down next to the sleeping man and withdraw to the other side of the room.
“Wake up,” says Ernie, in a normal tone of voice. “We have food for you.”
Ernie has to repeat himself a few times, but eventually the man stirs, blinks, sits up slowly. He sees Ernie, Dranko, Aravis and Morningstar, standing nearby and smiling. They expect that he might startle or even attack, but he does neither. Instead he slumps down, back still against the wall. They can read his emotions easily enough; he knows he’s finally been caught, and now they’ll throw him back in the furnace.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” says Ernie. “And we won’t tell anyone you’re here. We brought you some food.”
He points at the bread and cheese. “Eat. That’s for you.”
The slave looks down at the food, puzzled. Poison? A trick? Maybe he’s hallucinating. Dranko senses what the man is thinking. He walks forward slowly and the man shrinks back. Dranko picks up the bread, tears off a small piece, and deliberately puts it in his mouth.
“See?” he says. “It’s good.”
They’re pretty sure the slave understands them; people in Pyke Vale speak a thickly accented common tongue. But he doesn’t touch the food. His eyes are full of fear and doubt.
“What should we do now?” asks Aravis, speaking low. “We can’t make him eat. And now that he’s seen us, we can’t afford to let him go.”
“We’ll take him back to the Greenhouse,” says Ernie. “We can heal him, give him a comfortable bed…”
“…and have to keep him there for the entire duration of our stay in this reality,” says Aravis. “If he ever leaves, he could be caught, and made to tell the Emperor about the Greenhouse.”
“That’s better than him staying here,” says Dranko. “Look at him. Look at this place. This isn’t life.”
“It’s better than what he had before,” Morningstar whispers.
“I’m going to cast sleep on him," says Aravis. "Then we can get him back to the Greenhouse without him knowing how far it is. We don’t have a choice at this point.”
Aravis casts his spell. The slave’s eyes go wide as Aravis chants and waves his arms, and then he drops into a peaceful slumber. Gently they carry him back to the Greenhouse and set him on the couch in the living room. Before too long he wakes again, sitting up on the sofa and looking around in wonder. Ernie has set some oatmeal and water in front of him, which he eyes suspiciously for only a second before greedily consuming.
“What is your name?” asks Ernie gently.
The slave opens his mouth but no words come out. For a minute the Company thinks he might be dumb, or have had his tongue cut out. But it’s simply the vocal rust borne of a long solitude. After a moment of working his jaws, he whispers: “Carp.”
* *
The education of Carp is slow and delicate. He vacillates wildly between mistrust, confusion and gratitude. The Company explains that they have come from a far-off land, that they are enemies of the Emperor, that they are safe in this strange house. It is tricky convincing Carp that he may not leave the Greenhouse, but they manage it. The promise of unlimited food and drink, combined with protection from the Warlord Pinfaro (who is the ruler of Pyke Vale) is enough to satisfy him.
“And I’m stuck here as well,” says Eddings, handing Carp another slice of buttered bread. “But here we have books, and food, and cats to keep us company.”
In the days that follow, Carp provides some more information about his escape.
Free from the furnace he fled through the streets of Pyke Vale, dodging guards and hiding in the shadows. He made his way to this abandoned ghetto of boarded-up homes, eventually finding an unsealed window. For two days he had gone into and out of delirium. Had it not rained the first night, he would have died from thirst. He was able to leave his shirt out in the downpour and wring filthy drops into his mouth. Since then he has lived on stolen scraps; he knows of a guards' eating-house where leavings are tossed in a back alley. Each night he scavenged for food. Each day he hid, terrified. It has been months.
When he is more at ease, Carp answers some of their questions about Pyke Vale. There are no children on the streets because they are kept underground – fed and exercised, but not educated. He guesses the children of important people are raised inside the palace grounds. Warlord Pinfaro keeps such a large army because he fears another Warlord, somewhere to the north he thinks. The Company finds this fascinating.
“I bet the Emperor keeps his generals at each others’ throats,” says Ernie, “so they don’t come after him.”
Over breakfast one morning Aravis reiterates his impatience.
“It’s time to go,” he says. “We’ve learned everything we can about what Charagan has become. We’ve helped the only person we could find to help. Now it’s time to go set things to rights.”
“One more thing before we go,” says Morningstar. “I have a few questions I’d like to ask of Ell.”
Offering up a bit of her life energy, Morningstar casts commune, seeking answers from her Goddess. The connection that she typically feels is slow in coming after the spell is cast, but she asks her first question undaunted:
Are we likely to succeed if we try to travel to Kivia via the Delfirian Arch?
The answer does not come immediately. Just enough time passes to make Morningstar start to doubt, when a divine voice sounds in her soul. It is faint.
NO.
“My connection with the Goddess is weak,” she tells the others. “I don’t know why.”
She asks a second question.
Is the Gate at the Delfirian Peninsula in active use?
Again a delay, before:
YES
Will we still end up in a jungle clearing if we use the Rope to return to Kivia?
YES
Does the rope have enough power to work a third time?
PROBABLY
Is an Eye of Moirel at Het Branoi?
This time the delay is especially long. Several minutes pass. Then:
I BELIEVE SO
Is Seven Dark Words a person?
HE WAS
“I knew it!” says Ernie.
Is the house of Seven Dark Words in Djaw?
ONE OF THEM WAS
Are there Sisters of Ell in Kivia?
YES
Are there Sisters of Ell other than Morningstar in the place we know as Charagan?
NO
Are any of the people we know as the Archmagi alive?
NO
Is Het Branoi abandoned?
Again there is a long delay.
I DON’T BELIEVE SO
With one question left, Morningstar asks a question on Ernie’s behalf.
Are there any halflings in Kivia?
YES
Morningstar’s connection with the divine drops immediately. She finds herself winded.
“Looks like we use the rope then,” says Grey Wolf, reaching for his sword. “I say there’s no time like right now.”
Not knowing if the Greenhouse would muddle the use of their magical Rope, the Company assembles on the roof. Eddings is left behind with Carp.
“We know we’ll show up in that jungle clearing,” says Morningstar, as Ernie lays out the long rope in a circle. “But we should still be ready for trouble.”
It takes fifteen minutes for the magic of the Rope to take effect. The Company stands within its circumference, fidgeting, eager to get on to the next part of their adventure, to start the process of setting the universe back on its proper course. All at once the world around them changes, as they are teleported en masse, thousands of miles to the east, to Kivia and the Jungle of Lost Dreams.
* *
It is night, and around them is a jungle clearing. That much is expected. Everything else is an unpleasant surprise.
They are not standing on grass. Beneath their feet is a wide circular floor, 15 feet in diameter, made of gray stone slabs.. That circle is edged by a circumference of black obsidian bricks. A nine-pointed star made of similar bricks circumscribes their circle, and at each point of the star is a squat, unsettling statue. The air around them glows with a wan reddish light.
Outside the circle many torches on tall stands illuminate the night, and what they show the Company is a vast array of people surrounding them. Sixteen of these have crossbows aimed at them. Another eight have drawn scimitars. Two wield rapiers in each hand. In the back, outside of any direct torchlight, two immense bulky figures shift and grunt. And none of these are what immediately grab the Company’s attention.
Only fifteen feet from their circle stands a tall, imperious man. He wears a black robe with a red fringe, and a pendant with a black circle hangs around his neck. Next to him is a short armored woman in similar robes.
Aravis wastes no time; he has recently added the spell mass haste to his books, and starts to cast. But as his arms move in the patterns of spellcasting, the air in their enclosed cylinder begins to glow bright red and heat up rapdily. Some unseen force makes Aravis' hands shake, and in less than three seconds the spell is disrupted. Morningstar tries casting prayer with the same results. Seeing that spells are failing, Dranko adopts a wait-and-see attitude, keeping an eye on the foe outside the circle. Kay draws her bow and fires an arrow straight at the tall man's chest; it flies eight feet before splintering against a force barrier at the edge of the obsidian circle.
The tall man chuckles.
Grey Wolf also tries casting, but his effort is similarly thwarted. Step, furious, charges forward, crashes into the force barrier, and falls back. Kibi drinks a potion, and even that fails to have any effect. Magic seems to be completely nullified inside the trap.
In the torchlight the Black Circle leader holds up his hands. The Company watches and listens, a captive audience.
“The Prophets of the Circle spoke,” the man's voice booms in heavily accented Kivian common, “and we listened. The Prophets did not lead us astray.”
He turns to the smaller woman standing beside him.
“You see, my Lady? It is all as I expected. There was no need for this…” he gestures to the armed soldiers around him “…unseemly show of force.”
“I read things differently than you," grumbles the woman. "I’ll relax when they’re dead. Get on with it.”
The man clears his throat.
“Here, at the exact time and place foretold, are the mortal enemies of our Lord. They come from a world much like this one, but one in which the Black Circle suffered bitter defeat. They have traveled across time and space in an attempt to change our world into one like their own. As you can see, they have failed, because I read the Dark Books and was prepared. You will all be witness to their destruction, that I have engineered.”
He strides forward toward them, stopping just short of the nine-pointed star. He speaks in a low voice meant only for them.
“But tell me one thing,” he murmurs. “How did you do it? If you share with me the secret of crossing the infinite boundaries of worlds, I will find a way to spare your lives."
No one responds.
"And if you don't tell me," the man whipsers, "the remainder of your short lives will be extremely uncomfortable."
No one responds.
The woman behind him hisses. “Stop playing with them. Get this done with. I’m sick of this accursed jungle.”
The tall man steps back with a sigh.
“I suggest you make peace with your Gods.”
He turns and walks back to where he was originally standing, at the woman's side. As he walks, Dranko takes out a spike from his pack, places it against the flagstones (glowing a slight red) at the very edge of the obsidian circle, and smashes down on it with his mace.
The spike entirely fails to penetrate the force effect that coats the stones like an impervious skin. Dranko seethes with frustration. The tall man turns to face the circle and begins to chant in an evil tongue. Inside the circle the air suddenly gets very, very warm.
Out of options, Dranko resorts to one of his oldest means of showing displeasure. He unbuttons his trousers and pees toward the man. The stream of urine strikes an invisible barrier at the circle’s edge and splatters to the stones. The woman standing by the chanting man wrinkles her face in disgust.
The temperature in the circle continues to rise. It seems that the Black Circle has finally caught them in a trap with no escape...
From somewhere in the jungle behind the Black Circle practitioners, there is a tremendously loud roar.
...to be continued...
Last edited:
RangerWickett
Legend
lol
lol
lol
lol
lol
Plane Sailing
Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!
Carp. Now that guy is *really* heroic.
And Ell... doncha just wish that the gods would be a bit more forthcoming with their answers sometimes?
They seem exactly like DOS-level computing! If you ask exactly the right question, you get brilliant answers. If...
And Ell... doncha just wish that the gods would be a bit more forthcoming with their answers sometimes?
They seem exactly like DOS-level computing! If you ask exactly the right question, you get brilliant answers. If...
Mathew_Freeman
Adventurer
Nothing to see here, no double posts, oh no, of course not, as if I would do such a thing...
Last edited:
Similar Threads
