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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 1980790" data-attributes="member: 143">Chapter 312“Mole!” Zenna cried, starting toward the wall.  Dannel was faster, darting toward the illusory wall, the others only a step behind.  They passed through the illusion to see what Mole had found, an unremarkable, roughly circular room maybe fifteen feet across.  There was no obvious sign of the gnome, but her voice came up from below even as they entered the room.“Don’t come in!” she shrieked.  “The floor’s an illusion too!”Dannel instantly stopped, slashing his hands out to arrest the movement of the others.  Hodge quite nearly went over anyway, his foot vanishing through the illusory floor up to his knee before Dannel and Fario were able to grab him and drag him back into the wine cellar. Fellian was the first to spot the tiny fingers sticking out from the floor, at the edge where illusion and reality met.  He reached down and grabbed onto Mole, pulling the gnome back up to where the rest of them waited. “Well, that was almost an unpleasant journey,” the half-elven cleric commented.  “Where does it lead?” Fario asked, as Hodge shook himself free and regained his footing, muttering something unpleasant about dwarves being rescued by “damned fey elves.”“It’s dark, so I couldn’t see anything,” Mole said.  “But it sounds and feels like it goes quite a ways down.  Listen.”They quieted, and could hear the faint whisper of air moving through the shaft, the tiniest hint of a breeze that Mole had detected earlier.  There were some unpleasant smells on that current of air, as well. “Probably some sort of tunnel complex, below the city,” Beorna suggested.  “We’ve found more than a few of those,” Arun agreed. “Perfect for a beholder,” Zenna said.  At the confused looks of the others, she explained, “They have the ability to levitate their bodies, and can travel straight up, down, or horizontally about.”“So what you’re saying, is that Vhalantru could appear at any moment, while we’re climbing down there,” Fellian said. “That’s right.”“What’sa matter, elf?  Scared?” Hodge asked, but his taunt was undermined by the way his eyes kept drifting toward the shaft, and the nervous way he kept worrying the snaps on his belt pouches with the fingers of his free hand. But the half-elf refused to rise to the bait.  “No, just making sure we know what we’re getting into.” “Trouble,” Hodge muttered under his breath.  “Up to our bleedin’ necks in it, as always.”Mole had taken a lengthy coil of rope out of her bag of holding, and now affixed it to one of the sturdier units of shelving in the adjacent wine cellar.  Giving it a few trial tugs to confirm that it was secure, she looped the rest of the coil around her body.  “I’ll go first, check it out,” she offered.  “Of course, I can’t see in the dark like the dwarves can.  Lend me that flaming stick you have, eh Dannel?”The elf took the brand, enchanted with a continual flame, out from his belt pouch.  He handed it to Mole, who stuck it through one of the straps she wore over her armor to keep her pouches close at hand.  “Be careful,” Dannel said.  “If you hear or see anything, anything at all, give a holler and we’ll draw you back up.”  With a grin and a mock salute, the gnome unraveled about fifteen feet of slack from her rope, then leapt out into the room and vanished through the illusory floor. “We cannot cover her effectively, with this illusion in the way,” Fario said, an arrow nocked to his bow.  “Can we dispel it?”“Permanent illusions are no simple magic,” Fellian explained, and Zenna nodded in confirmation.  “And I think our remaining dispels might be needed,” Zenna added.  She didn’t have to elaborate. “I’ll keep an eye on her,” Dannel said.  Carefully he descended into the shaft, using his slippers of spider climbing to walk along the sheer surface of the cylindrical bore.  To the others, it looked as though the floor swallowed him up.  Mole felt a familiar thrill of excitement as she dropped lower into the shaft.  The flickering flames of Dannel’s torch showed the shaft descending in a straight line down as far as she could see, at first; but as she descended she could make out an opening below, and a floor maybe fifty feet below the chamber above. That would have been a nasty fall indeed, she thought.  She rappelled down easily, letting out slack in the rope as she kicked off and descended in bursts of ten to fifteen feet at a time.  She drew the rope taut right at the edge of the shaft’s bottom, right where it opened onto a large room, ten feet above the floor below.  She expertly slipped the remaining length of rope through one of her belt loops before wrapping it around her left leg and tucking the rest into the strap that she used to hold her crossbow close at hand.  Once secure, she inverted herself and leaned down over the rim of the shaft to dangle upside-down over the room, drawing out the torch and shining it about. The room was dank and unkempt, a bubble of stone blasted from the volcanic stone by the power of Vhalantru’s magic.  The chamber was circular and of considerable size, maybe forty feet across.  And as she scanned the place, she spotted a shadowy alcove on one side, but her eye was drawn to movement on the opposite side of the room.  A humanoid figure shifted in the shadows, lumbering slowly and awkwardly forward into the light.  As it drew close enough to clearly distinguish, Mole’s face wrinkled in disgust.  A zombie; she could smell the stench of rot rising from its body from here.  There was more movement along the wall behind it; two more of the foul creatures. She must have said something aloud, for she could hear Dannel’s voice from above, drifting down to her as he descended the shaft.  “What is it?”“Just some trash,” she called up, already digging in her magical bag.  It was a bit tougher, dangling upside down, but nothing that she couldn’t manage, with her incredible agility. She found what she’d wanted, a clay flask sealed with beeswax that would have drawn a very disapproving stare from Zenna.  Mole didn’t see the big deal; alchemist’s fire was... well, fun wasn’t really the right word, but it was certainly useful, especially in the dangerous situations that they often found themselves in. The first zombie was drawing nearer, although there was no way it would be able to reach her up in the shaft, unless it suddenly sprouted wings, or its arms grew five feet longer.  Mole took careful aim, and hurled the flask in a straight arc that connected solidly with the zombie in the center of its forehead.  The flask exploded, showering the creature in a satisfying eruption of orange flame.“What was that?” Dannel yelled down, and Mole smiled as she heard the voices of her friends from up above echo his concern. “Just a little fire,” she offered up, “Don’t worry, I got it under control.”  She waved her hand as some rancid smoke drifted up from the creature; a minor glitch in her otherwise perfect plan. A roar from above drew her attention back down to the zombie.  The undead creature staggered forward, the flames eagerly eating away at the remains of its flesh.  But even as the flames consumed it, its body shuddered and snapped, bones cracking loudly as its torso seemed to come apart from within.  As Mole watched in terrible fascination, the zombie’s body split in two, and... something came out from inside its body.  Massive claws appeared, followed by arms and a body that were clearly too big to have fit inside the frame of the man-sized undead.  But the presence of the creature offered irrefutable evidence to its apparent contradiction of the laws of nature.  It was nearly seven feet tall, lean almost to the point of being skeletal, its head an oblong orb dominated by bulbous eyes and a gaping jaw full of jagged teeth.  Its body was covered with a thick, clinging black slime, and it gave off an odor that made the zombie’s stench seem pleasant by comparison.  The creature looked up at her, and snarled something in a language that she didn’t understand, but which didn’t sound like a friendly greeting. “Uh oh...”</blockquote>

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