Um, no.
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Sagiro's Story Hour: The FINAL Adventures of Abernathy's Company (FINISHED 7/3/14)
- Thread starter Sagiro
- Start date
Um, no.
Nice catch.
Sagiro
Rodent of Uncertain Parentage
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 377
Scuttle
The storeroom in which the Company has arrived is uninteresting, but the same came cannot be said for their location in general. From outside the room come shouts, screams, and other familiar sounds of battle. Weapons clank, men grunt, and in the background, ceaseless, is a clicking sound as though thousands of tiny feet are scurrying along stone floors.
Parthol’s beads translate some of the shouting.
“There’s another seven of them, north hall, go!”
“Huge wave of Scuttle reported from the southeast corner breach. No Spotties!”
“Get them off of me! Get them off of me!”
There is a door leading out of this glorified closet, halfway open. Something scampers past the doorway, something like a dog-sized scorpion, but it moves too quickly for the party to get a decent look. In close pursuit are two short humanoids, stocky, with beards and hammers.
Dwarves!
“What do we do?” asks Dranko.
Kibi is affronted that he even asked the question. “We go out and help them!”
“Who? The dwarves or the scorpions?”
“The dwarves!”
Dranko holds up his hands. “Well, we don’t know that the dwarves are good and the scorpions are evil.”
Kibi glares at him, and Dranko shrinks back a bit. “Uh, let’s find out.”
They move out into the hallway, which has a low seven-foot ceiling but is very wide. It stretches off in both directions for twenty feet or more before bending out of sight. The architecture is reminiscent of dwarven buildings from the surface, which enforces the notion that it is the dwarves who are under attack. Sounds of scuttling feet and rattling chitin echo all around .
Another dwarf comes racing around the nearer corner, looking worriedly over his shoulder. He’s fully armored in a chain suit, and his beard is impressively voluminous. He practically runs into the Company before he notices them and pulls up short.
“Do you need help?” asks Ernie. “We came through a Leaping Circle.”
The dwarf blinks. “Help? Yes! Please!”
Six huge scorpions come crashing around the corner in pursuit of the dwarf. They pile up almost comically as they make the turn but immediately gain their footing and charge forward. Dranko steps in front of the dwarf and fires off a prismatic spray from his helm of brilliance, damaging five of the monsters and exploding the sixth. But the survivors swarm upon Dranko, crawling up his legs and onto his back, looking for openings and whipping their barbed tails to and fro. They’re very conventional looking scorpions, save for their size, and that they have short prehensile tentacles surrounding their mouths. Ew. Dranko flails about and manages to avoid any damage from them, but he’s still a grim sight.
Aravis’s prismatic spray is more effective, and he uses the Battlestone of St. Jenniver to avoid affecting Dranko. Three of the five scorpions die immediately, fried or baked or dissolved. One of the remaining two would normally be sent to another plane by the ray with which it’s struck, but in the Underdark the spell has a different effect; the scorpion is flung backward with great force. It crunches into the wall and is still. Only one of the half-dozen scorpions survives, and that one but briefly; Flicker runs up and stabs it to death.
Dranko turns to the slack-jawed dwarf. “You got any more of these?”
The dwarf looks pointedly over Dranko’s shoulder. “Uh… yes?”
Those six had been a small advanced party. Dranko turns in time to see a veritable flood of the creatures spill around the corner, dozens of them climbing over one another in a nightmare heap of pincer claws and stinger tails.
Ernie drops a blade barrier across the hallway, then calls down a flame strike on the far side. Grey Wolf follows up with his ironstorm and chain lightning combination. The scorpions shriek as they explode in the deadly electrical storm, and half the bits are propelled into the blade barrier to be smashed up into even finer pieces.
The dwarf’s eyes bug out of his head.
“Are there many more?” asks Dranko casually.
“Y… yes,” stammers the dwarf. “Many more on the right side where the wall was breached. At least a hundred Scuttle, plus a handful of Spotties.”
“What are Spotties?” asks Morningstar. “Something worse than these?” She gestures to the chitinous fragments now scattered along the stone floor.
“Much worse,” says the dwarf. “They’re like these ones, but there’s somethin’ wrong with ‘em.”
Ernie guesses first. “Black spots?”
“Yeah, black spots. The Spotties can kill ya from a distance, just by lookin’ atcha.”
“Damn,” says Dranko. “How did the Blood of the Adversary get down here?”
Ernie asks the dwarf, “Did three really nasty people in red armor come through here in the past few months?”
The dwarf nods. “You’re not with ‘em, are ya?”
“No!”
“Good.”
“Had you ever seen Spotties before they arrived?” asks Morningstar.
“No,” says the dwarf. “We suspected they may have had somethin’ t’ do with ‘em.”
“Great,” says Grey Wolf. “They left us another gift.”
Even worse, it means the Evil Trio was not sent off to Leaping Circle Three as the Company had hoped.
“Are the Spotties mixed in with the other ones?” asks Dranko.
“Yep. They’re out with the rest assaulting the wall, but them black-spotted buggers can tunnel like nobody’s business. They managed a breach on the south bulwark and a bunch poured in before we could seal ‘em out again.”
“You should lead us to the wall,” says Aravis.
“And who are ya, if ya don’t mind me askin’?”
“We are the ones prophesied,” says Dranko gravely.
“Abernathy’s Company,” adds Morningstar.
“Who’s that?”
“Long story,” says Ernie.
“Then you can tell me later, when we’re not in the midst of battle.”
Dranko hops through the blade barrier to peek around the corner, in case any scorpions survived their magical battering. There’s only one, and it’s nearly dead. He slays it with its whip. But from around yet another bend he can hear another wave approaching. For the moment he stays on the far side of the blade barrier, as bait. “Help!” he cries in his best imitation of the dwarf. “I’m injured! Someone help!”
The next wave of Scuttle surges around the far corner and boils toward Dranko. This group brings with it the barest whiff of Essence; two Spotties are in the with the rank-and-file scorpions. Their carapaces are a mottled bronze and black; their eyes and tentacles are entirely black.
Just as Dranko takes this in, the others hear a tearing sound from the wall not far down the hall in the other direction. A hole appears in the wall, bored through from the other side, and four more Spotties drop down to the floor. Now there are six of the Essence-tainted Scuttle, and these make the same attack that similar creatures have been making since the party first encountered them. Dranko, Ernie and Morningstar all feel the horrid burn of black pustules appearing and then bursting out of their faces. The two Spotties on the far side of the blade barrier, with Dranko, have stopped short of the area filled with Grey Wolf’s iron filings, but the rest of the Scuttle push forward, filling the hall and swarming over Dranko. Though he avoids their attacks, they are numerous enough to bear him to the ground. For every one he knocks aside, a new one climbs onto him. Soon only one hand is sticking out of a nearly solid mass of scorpions.
“Pewter, I have a job for you.”
The cat thinks back to his master, “Boss, you can’t be serious.” But Aravis is not joking. He shapechanges into a xorn to skirt the wall of blades, then releases Pewter to dart in among the scorpions to deliver a teleport to Dranko’s thrashing hand. “You owe me big time for this, Boss!” But Pewter evades the clacking claws and barbed stingers, leaps onto Dranko’s arm, and teleports the two of them back to the more populated side of the blade barrier.
Aravis isn’t finished yet. He steps up to the blade barrier and casts another prismatic spray through it. It’s mass carnage, as the amassed Scuttle are variously petrified, crisped, poisoned, or (if they’re lucky) only heavily damaged. A few are flung hard away from Aravis, again those being the ones that would ordinarily have been sent plane-hopping. Of the two Spotties caught in the cone, one resists being turned to stone, but the second goes insane.
Even as the energies of his spell still crackle, Aravis feels Crosser’s Maze lines draw themselves across his forehead. “No, not now! Not…” He vanishes. The others curse the ill-timing.
There are still four Spotties on the near side of the blades. Morningstar quickens divine power, moves to one of the black-spotted scorpions, and brings down Ell’s Will hard upon it. As she hoped, the creature is spell resistant, making it highly vulnerable to her Epic weapon. The morningstar cracks the thing’s chitin like it was eggshell, but it survives the attack.
Ernie casts destruction on the closest Spotty, crying out “Yondalla does not want you here!” His Goddess would seem to concur; the blood-touched scorpion glows brightly and puffs into dust, leaving no trace of Essence behind. Grey Wolf steps up to another one, quickens a true strike, and channels a maximized acid orb through a hard swing with Bostock. The sword cleaves it down to its center, and the acid dissolves the creature into a foul puddle of liquefied organs.
There are still two Spotties and a number of injured Scuttle on the other side of the blade barrier; Kibi, seeing that prismatic sprays are the order of the day, casts the spell upon the cluster of enemies. His magic item the Pulse of Abernia empowers the spell, and both the Spotties take tremendous damage despite evading the direct beams of light. The remaining Scuttle are killed in the typical variety of ways. He then quickens a rainbow pattern and mesmerizes the not-insane Spotty, hoping to entice it into the wall of whirling knives.
The remaining two Spotties on the near side go after Dranko and Morningstar. They are faster and stronger than their untainted brethren, and in addition to the horrible Blood attack, they tear into their targets with razor-sharp claws. Both also deliver perfectly-placed tail-snaps, sinking their poisoned barbs precisely into the necks of their victims. The pain and damage are intense, but not fatal, largely because both Morningstar and Dranko are still under the poison-nullifying effects of the morning’s regular heroes’ feast.
None of the remaining four Spotties survive to attack again. Morningstar crushes one with Ell’s Will. Flicker lops of the tail of a second. And Kibi smashes a third with an empowered, maximized earth bolt before luring the final one, still insane, into the blade barrier.
Ernie caps off the melee with a mass heal.
Dranko turns to the dwarf. “You have any tough monsters?”
The dwarf laughs. “That was amazin’! There are thousands more Scuttle, but nothin’ tougher than Spotties, thank Yavin.”
His speech is refreshingly vocal. Unlike that of the Stribe and the Mehar, the telepathic component of the dwarf’s language is almost vestigial, providing the tiniest extra nuance of meaning.
“What’s your name?” asks Dranko.
“Gehentas,” says the dwarf. “And let me welcome you to Kehentohantas, though what yer seein’ is only the border outpost nearest the region controlled by the Scuttle. Somethin’ has driven them things into a frenzy!”
“When did it start?” asks Kibi.
Gehentas looks closely at Kibi while he answers. “They’ve been assaultin’ the wall for nine days now.”
“So the scuttle don’t usually attack like this?” asks Morningstar.
“No, the cavern is typically a neutral buffer zone, which they’ve not violated in decades.”
“Are they intelligent?”
“Yes. Well, sort of. They have a kind of hive mind. They build things, you know…” He’s interrupted by a distant boom. “…and that includes siege towers, sorry to say.”
He stares at Kibi again. “You look somethin’ like a drevin, but not exactly,” he says.
Kibi returns the stare. “And you look something like a dwarf.”
Gehentas looks shocked. “A dwarb? You’re a dwarb?!”
“It’s ‘dwarf’” says Kibi.
“Are you… are you from the surface?”
He drops to one knee in front of Kibi, head bowed. But before Kibi can properly appreciate this, Aravis reappears next to him with a faint sizzling sound. As with his previous returns from the Crosser’s Maze, he appears to be just waking up from a sound sleep. This time there is a smile on his lips, and has a very satisfying vision to share.
Shreen the Fair, hunchbacked and snarling, paces back and forth in front of a line of monsters. There are a dozen of the things, sinuous and malign, acidic drool oozing from mouths full of fangs. Behind them, in the vast courtyard of the Shrine of Dralla, hundreds of other abominations of every stripe stand restlessly at attention, filling the air with soft, unnatural sounds.
“This is our moment,” cackles Shreen. “Long have we suffered, and let others dictate our fate. We have been robbed, and tricked, and stepped upon, but no longer! The time of our revenge is at hand. Even now, our new allies are mounting an assault against the worms of Charagan, laying waste to their lands and slaughtering their people. We have been invited to join in the fun.”
Shreen stops pacing for a moment, and inclines his misshapen head toward a figure standing nearby – a stocky, bearded man in blood-red plate mail. “Carren here is an emissary from Emperor Naradawk, the new ruler of Charagan. His people have prepared a teleportation circle for us, and within the hour, Strug will complete the ritual that will allow us easy passage across the sea. Do not fear that the sun is rising here in Djaw; it is the middle of the night in the land of our enemies, and we go to be their nightmares. Once there, we have but one mission: to kill. And my friends, we are so good at killing.”
Shreen raises his arms, and a cacophony of hoots and screeches fills every archway and shadow inside the Shrine. It takes a full minute for the din to subside.
“Before we leave,” shouts Shreen, “ there are some final preparations. We need to…”
He is interrupted by a sound even louder than the roars and barks of his menagerie. It is an awful sound to Shreen’s ears, like the blaring of hundreds of golden trumpets, their notes clear and piercing. But worse, the sound is followed immediately by another – the grinding crash of stone walls collapsing. The entire east wall of the shrine falls into rubble, sending up plumes of thick dust. Shreen and his monsters fall silent, confused. Then a magical wind banishes the dust, and reveals a terrible sight.
Thousands of brightly-armored soldiers stand in rows behind the ruined wall, filling the courtyard with the cracked angel statue and every street and alleyway beyond. Their polished mail glitters in the rising sun. They are Knights of Kemma, mingled with hundreds of city guard Falcons. But four figures stand at the head of the army, who are more familiar. One is the diviner Belinda. Another is the High Priest of Kemma, One Shining Mirror. The other two are the Ellish Daywalkers, Evenstar and Scola.
“Got it in one,” mutters Belinda with a smile.
Someone shouts a command in the back of the soldiers’ ranks, and a thick hail of arrows rises into the sky, gleaming in the sun. The ranks of monsters in the courtyard squint upward as death rains down upon them. A dozen clerics cast daylight as the soldiers then stream past and around Evenstar and Scola, swords shining, advancing into the Shrine of Dralla and bringing with them a cleansing light that is long overdue. With Drosh’s influence gone, the divine politics of Kivia have shifted, and some things will no longer be tolerated.
The battle lasts the morning, and hundreds of Knights fall to tooth and claw, but in the end the monsters are scoured out of every hole and crevice. Paladins root out dozens of horrid creatures from the myriad small chambers beneath the shrine. Shreen the Fair is found cringing in the bottommost pit, and dragged up and out to stand, face twisted with bitterness, before Evenstar on a field littered with hacked-apart monsters.
“Lady Evenstar,” says One Shining Mirror, “here is the one you wanted. But we cannot remove him from this place, physically or by magic. And while he’s here, he cannot be killed. Dralla still protects him.”
Evenstar looks down upon Shreen, who seems shrunken and pathetic in the light shining down over the smashed wall. “Drosh has departed the world,” she says, “and Dralla is thereby diminished. I can put an end to this one, and for Morningstar and for Ell, I will.”
“Shreen!” she barks. “For your crimes and treachery, and for all that you are an affront to Ell’s darkness, I condemn you to death.”
“You cannot,” spits Shreen. “You may have defiled this place with your sunlight, but I will endure. I will always endure. And when Naradawk has chewed you up and spit out your bones, I will be at his side, laughing at your pitiful memory.”
“I don’t think so,” says Evenstar. She sits down before Shreen, concentrates, and drops into Ava Dormo.
And she takes Shreen with her.
Shreen looks around, terrified. This place looks like his shrine, but it is empty, save for himself, Evenstar and Scola. The two Ellish sisters are fulminant with a hot, dark energy.
“We have stood with Morningstar against a greater threat than you,” Evenstar says, her voice echoing in the Dreamscape. “And for her, and her kingdom, and for Ell, we now deliver you from this world.”
Scola steps forward, and with a mace like a black star, she sends Shreen the Fair to oblivion.
...to be continued…
Scuttle
The storeroom in which the Company has arrived is uninteresting, but the same came cannot be said for their location in general. From outside the room come shouts, screams, and other familiar sounds of battle. Weapons clank, men grunt, and in the background, ceaseless, is a clicking sound as though thousands of tiny feet are scurrying along stone floors.
Parthol’s beads translate some of the shouting.
“There’s another seven of them, north hall, go!”
“Huge wave of Scuttle reported from the southeast corner breach. No Spotties!”
“Get them off of me! Get them off of me!”
There is a door leading out of this glorified closet, halfway open. Something scampers past the doorway, something like a dog-sized scorpion, but it moves too quickly for the party to get a decent look. In close pursuit are two short humanoids, stocky, with beards and hammers.
Dwarves!
“What do we do?” asks Dranko.
Kibi is affronted that he even asked the question. “We go out and help them!”
“Who? The dwarves or the scorpions?”
“The dwarves!”
Dranko holds up his hands. “Well, we don’t know that the dwarves are good and the scorpions are evil.”
Kibi glares at him, and Dranko shrinks back a bit. “Uh, let’s find out.”
They move out into the hallway, which has a low seven-foot ceiling but is very wide. It stretches off in both directions for twenty feet or more before bending out of sight. The architecture is reminiscent of dwarven buildings from the surface, which enforces the notion that it is the dwarves who are under attack. Sounds of scuttling feet and rattling chitin echo all around .
Another dwarf comes racing around the nearer corner, looking worriedly over his shoulder. He’s fully armored in a chain suit, and his beard is impressively voluminous. He practically runs into the Company before he notices them and pulls up short.
“Do you need help?” asks Ernie. “We came through a Leaping Circle.”
The dwarf blinks. “Help? Yes! Please!”
Six huge scorpions come crashing around the corner in pursuit of the dwarf. They pile up almost comically as they make the turn but immediately gain their footing and charge forward. Dranko steps in front of the dwarf and fires off a prismatic spray from his helm of brilliance, damaging five of the monsters and exploding the sixth. But the survivors swarm upon Dranko, crawling up his legs and onto his back, looking for openings and whipping their barbed tails to and fro. They’re very conventional looking scorpions, save for their size, and that they have short prehensile tentacles surrounding their mouths. Ew. Dranko flails about and manages to avoid any damage from them, but he’s still a grim sight.
Aravis’s prismatic spray is more effective, and he uses the Battlestone of St. Jenniver to avoid affecting Dranko. Three of the five scorpions die immediately, fried or baked or dissolved. One of the remaining two would normally be sent to another plane by the ray with which it’s struck, but in the Underdark the spell has a different effect; the scorpion is flung backward with great force. It crunches into the wall and is still. Only one of the half-dozen scorpions survives, and that one but briefly; Flicker runs up and stabs it to death.
Dranko turns to the slack-jawed dwarf. “You got any more of these?”
The dwarf looks pointedly over Dranko’s shoulder. “Uh… yes?”
Those six had been a small advanced party. Dranko turns in time to see a veritable flood of the creatures spill around the corner, dozens of them climbing over one another in a nightmare heap of pincer claws and stinger tails.
Ernie drops a blade barrier across the hallway, then calls down a flame strike on the far side. Grey Wolf follows up with his ironstorm and chain lightning combination. The scorpions shriek as they explode in the deadly electrical storm, and half the bits are propelled into the blade barrier to be smashed up into even finer pieces.
The dwarf’s eyes bug out of his head.
“Are there many more?” asks Dranko casually.
“Y… yes,” stammers the dwarf. “Many more on the right side where the wall was breached. At least a hundred Scuttle, plus a handful of Spotties.”
“What are Spotties?” asks Morningstar. “Something worse than these?” She gestures to the chitinous fragments now scattered along the stone floor.
“Much worse,” says the dwarf. “They’re like these ones, but there’s somethin’ wrong with ‘em.”
Ernie guesses first. “Black spots?”
“Yeah, black spots. The Spotties can kill ya from a distance, just by lookin’ atcha.”
“Damn,” says Dranko. “How did the Blood of the Adversary get down here?”
Ernie asks the dwarf, “Did three really nasty people in red armor come through here in the past few months?”
The dwarf nods. “You’re not with ‘em, are ya?”
“No!”
“Good.”
“Had you ever seen Spotties before they arrived?” asks Morningstar.
“No,” says the dwarf. “We suspected they may have had somethin’ t’ do with ‘em.”
“Great,” says Grey Wolf. “They left us another gift.”
Even worse, it means the Evil Trio was not sent off to Leaping Circle Three as the Company had hoped.
“Are the Spotties mixed in with the other ones?” asks Dranko.
“Yep. They’re out with the rest assaulting the wall, but them black-spotted buggers can tunnel like nobody’s business. They managed a breach on the south bulwark and a bunch poured in before we could seal ‘em out again.”
“You should lead us to the wall,” says Aravis.
“And who are ya, if ya don’t mind me askin’?”
“We are the ones prophesied,” says Dranko gravely.
“Abernathy’s Company,” adds Morningstar.
“Who’s that?”
“Long story,” says Ernie.
“Then you can tell me later, when we’re not in the midst of battle.”
Dranko hops through the blade barrier to peek around the corner, in case any scorpions survived their magical battering. There’s only one, and it’s nearly dead. He slays it with its whip. But from around yet another bend he can hear another wave approaching. For the moment he stays on the far side of the blade barrier, as bait. “Help!” he cries in his best imitation of the dwarf. “I’m injured! Someone help!”
The next wave of Scuttle surges around the far corner and boils toward Dranko. This group brings with it the barest whiff of Essence; two Spotties are in the with the rank-and-file scorpions. Their carapaces are a mottled bronze and black; their eyes and tentacles are entirely black.
Just as Dranko takes this in, the others hear a tearing sound from the wall not far down the hall in the other direction. A hole appears in the wall, bored through from the other side, and four more Spotties drop down to the floor. Now there are six of the Essence-tainted Scuttle, and these make the same attack that similar creatures have been making since the party first encountered them. Dranko, Ernie and Morningstar all feel the horrid burn of black pustules appearing and then bursting out of their faces. The two Spotties on the far side of the blade barrier, with Dranko, have stopped short of the area filled with Grey Wolf’s iron filings, but the rest of the Scuttle push forward, filling the hall and swarming over Dranko. Though he avoids their attacks, they are numerous enough to bear him to the ground. For every one he knocks aside, a new one climbs onto him. Soon only one hand is sticking out of a nearly solid mass of scorpions.
“Pewter, I have a job for you.”
The cat thinks back to his master, “Boss, you can’t be serious.” But Aravis is not joking. He shapechanges into a xorn to skirt the wall of blades, then releases Pewter to dart in among the scorpions to deliver a teleport to Dranko’s thrashing hand. “You owe me big time for this, Boss!” But Pewter evades the clacking claws and barbed stingers, leaps onto Dranko’s arm, and teleports the two of them back to the more populated side of the blade barrier.
Aravis isn’t finished yet. He steps up to the blade barrier and casts another prismatic spray through it. It’s mass carnage, as the amassed Scuttle are variously petrified, crisped, poisoned, or (if they’re lucky) only heavily damaged. A few are flung hard away from Aravis, again those being the ones that would ordinarily have been sent plane-hopping. Of the two Spotties caught in the cone, one resists being turned to stone, but the second goes insane.
Even as the energies of his spell still crackle, Aravis feels Crosser’s Maze lines draw themselves across his forehead. “No, not now! Not…” He vanishes. The others curse the ill-timing.
There are still four Spotties on the near side of the blades. Morningstar quickens divine power, moves to one of the black-spotted scorpions, and brings down Ell’s Will hard upon it. As she hoped, the creature is spell resistant, making it highly vulnerable to her Epic weapon. The morningstar cracks the thing’s chitin like it was eggshell, but it survives the attack.
Ernie casts destruction on the closest Spotty, crying out “Yondalla does not want you here!” His Goddess would seem to concur; the blood-touched scorpion glows brightly and puffs into dust, leaving no trace of Essence behind. Grey Wolf steps up to another one, quickens a true strike, and channels a maximized acid orb through a hard swing with Bostock. The sword cleaves it down to its center, and the acid dissolves the creature into a foul puddle of liquefied organs.
There are still two Spotties and a number of injured Scuttle on the other side of the blade barrier; Kibi, seeing that prismatic sprays are the order of the day, casts the spell upon the cluster of enemies. His magic item the Pulse of Abernia empowers the spell, and both the Spotties take tremendous damage despite evading the direct beams of light. The remaining Scuttle are killed in the typical variety of ways. He then quickens a rainbow pattern and mesmerizes the not-insane Spotty, hoping to entice it into the wall of whirling knives.
The remaining two Spotties on the near side go after Dranko and Morningstar. They are faster and stronger than their untainted brethren, and in addition to the horrible Blood attack, they tear into their targets with razor-sharp claws. Both also deliver perfectly-placed tail-snaps, sinking their poisoned barbs precisely into the necks of their victims. The pain and damage are intense, but not fatal, largely because both Morningstar and Dranko are still under the poison-nullifying effects of the morning’s regular heroes’ feast.
None of the remaining four Spotties survive to attack again. Morningstar crushes one with Ell’s Will. Flicker lops of the tail of a second. And Kibi smashes a third with an empowered, maximized earth bolt before luring the final one, still insane, into the blade barrier.
Ernie caps off the melee with a mass heal.
Dranko turns to the dwarf. “You have any tough monsters?”
The dwarf laughs. “That was amazin’! There are thousands more Scuttle, but nothin’ tougher than Spotties, thank Yavin.”
His speech is refreshingly vocal. Unlike that of the Stribe and the Mehar, the telepathic component of the dwarf’s language is almost vestigial, providing the tiniest extra nuance of meaning.
“What’s your name?” asks Dranko.
“Gehentas,” says the dwarf. “And let me welcome you to Kehentohantas, though what yer seein’ is only the border outpost nearest the region controlled by the Scuttle. Somethin’ has driven them things into a frenzy!”
“When did it start?” asks Kibi.
Gehentas looks closely at Kibi while he answers. “They’ve been assaultin’ the wall for nine days now.”
“So the scuttle don’t usually attack like this?” asks Morningstar.
“No, the cavern is typically a neutral buffer zone, which they’ve not violated in decades.”
“Are they intelligent?”
“Yes. Well, sort of. They have a kind of hive mind. They build things, you know…” He’s interrupted by a distant boom. “…and that includes siege towers, sorry to say.”
He stares at Kibi again. “You look somethin’ like a drevin, but not exactly,” he says.
Kibi returns the stare. “And you look something like a dwarf.”
Gehentas looks shocked. “A dwarb? You’re a dwarb?!”
“It’s ‘dwarf’” says Kibi.
“Are you… are you from the surface?”
He drops to one knee in front of Kibi, head bowed. But before Kibi can properly appreciate this, Aravis reappears next to him with a faint sizzling sound. As with his previous returns from the Crosser’s Maze, he appears to be just waking up from a sound sleep. This time there is a smile on his lips, and has a very satisfying vision to share.
Shreen the Fair, hunchbacked and snarling, paces back and forth in front of a line of monsters. There are a dozen of the things, sinuous and malign, acidic drool oozing from mouths full of fangs. Behind them, in the vast courtyard of the Shrine of Dralla, hundreds of other abominations of every stripe stand restlessly at attention, filling the air with soft, unnatural sounds.
“This is our moment,” cackles Shreen. “Long have we suffered, and let others dictate our fate. We have been robbed, and tricked, and stepped upon, but no longer! The time of our revenge is at hand. Even now, our new allies are mounting an assault against the worms of Charagan, laying waste to their lands and slaughtering their people. We have been invited to join in the fun.”
Shreen stops pacing for a moment, and inclines his misshapen head toward a figure standing nearby – a stocky, bearded man in blood-red plate mail. “Carren here is an emissary from Emperor Naradawk, the new ruler of Charagan. His people have prepared a teleportation circle for us, and within the hour, Strug will complete the ritual that will allow us easy passage across the sea. Do not fear that the sun is rising here in Djaw; it is the middle of the night in the land of our enemies, and we go to be their nightmares. Once there, we have but one mission: to kill. And my friends, we are so good at killing.”
Shreen raises his arms, and a cacophony of hoots and screeches fills every archway and shadow inside the Shrine. It takes a full minute for the din to subside.
“Before we leave,” shouts Shreen, “ there are some final preparations. We need to…”
He is interrupted by a sound even louder than the roars and barks of his menagerie. It is an awful sound to Shreen’s ears, like the blaring of hundreds of golden trumpets, their notes clear and piercing. But worse, the sound is followed immediately by another – the grinding crash of stone walls collapsing. The entire east wall of the shrine falls into rubble, sending up plumes of thick dust. Shreen and his monsters fall silent, confused. Then a magical wind banishes the dust, and reveals a terrible sight.
Thousands of brightly-armored soldiers stand in rows behind the ruined wall, filling the courtyard with the cracked angel statue and every street and alleyway beyond. Their polished mail glitters in the rising sun. They are Knights of Kemma, mingled with hundreds of city guard Falcons. But four figures stand at the head of the army, who are more familiar. One is the diviner Belinda. Another is the High Priest of Kemma, One Shining Mirror. The other two are the Ellish Daywalkers, Evenstar and Scola.
“Got it in one,” mutters Belinda with a smile.
Someone shouts a command in the back of the soldiers’ ranks, and a thick hail of arrows rises into the sky, gleaming in the sun. The ranks of monsters in the courtyard squint upward as death rains down upon them. A dozen clerics cast daylight as the soldiers then stream past and around Evenstar and Scola, swords shining, advancing into the Shrine of Dralla and bringing with them a cleansing light that is long overdue. With Drosh’s influence gone, the divine politics of Kivia have shifted, and some things will no longer be tolerated.
The battle lasts the morning, and hundreds of Knights fall to tooth and claw, but in the end the monsters are scoured out of every hole and crevice. Paladins root out dozens of horrid creatures from the myriad small chambers beneath the shrine. Shreen the Fair is found cringing in the bottommost pit, and dragged up and out to stand, face twisted with bitterness, before Evenstar on a field littered with hacked-apart monsters.
“Lady Evenstar,” says One Shining Mirror, “here is the one you wanted. But we cannot remove him from this place, physically or by magic. And while he’s here, he cannot be killed. Dralla still protects him.”
Evenstar looks down upon Shreen, who seems shrunken and pathetic in the light shining down over the smashed wall. “Drosh has departed the world,” she says, “and Dralla is thereby diminished. I can put an end to this one, and for Morningstar and for Ell, I will.”
“Shreen!” she barks. “For your crimes and treachery, and for all that you are an affront to Ell’s darkness, I condemn you to death.”
“You cannot,” spits Shreen. “You may have defiled this place with your sunlight, but I will endure. I will always endure. And when Naradawk has chewed you up and spit out your bones, I will be at his side, laughing at your pitiful memory.”
“I don’t think so,” says Evenstar. She sits down before Shreen, concentrates, and drops into Ava Dormo.
And she takes Shreen with her.
Shreen looks around, terrified. This place looks like his shrine, but it is empty, save for himself, Evenstar and Scola. The two Ellish sisters are fulminant with a hot, dark energy.
“We have stood with Morningstar against a greater threat than you,” Evenstar says, her voice echoing in the Dreamscape. “And for her, and her kingdom, and for Ell, we now deliver you from this world.”
Scola steps forward, and with a mace like a black star, she sends Shreen the Fair to oblivion.
...to be continued…
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carborundum
Adventurer
Fantastic! The party get to have a blast (literally) and generally be all heroic after a few rough epic encounters. Plus Shreen gets his. 
SolitonMan
Explorer
carborundum
Adventurer
Did Sagiro do the Shreen voice for this Maze vision?
(Any chance of an mp3? ;-) )
(Any chance of an mp3? ;-) )
