Shemeska
Adventurer
***
Roughly a half mile from their camp, Florian walked away from a group of the expedition’s scholars, trying hard to not roll her eyes. She’d spent the better part of the past hour trying to keep them calm when they were convinced that the area was crawling with hungry monsters.
What had spooked them so thoroughly? A few old footprints in the dirt at the edge of a cave mouth, and a few desiccated, gnawed bones that she’d found maybe ten feet further back where the cave abruptly ended. The footprints were old, and the bones even older, but the sages were loathe to accept her judgment on the matter and they insisted that she spend the time to search for anything that might be stalking in the shadows.
“If you don’t want to do your job and scout the area, then just perform a divination.” One of the men had demanded.
“Of course wise sir.” Florian had told him, and he hadn’t noticed the sarcasm. “I’m certain that I have a detect howler prayer to whisper to Tempus. Or perhaps a detect lurking unknown monster that drools in the night.”
The scholar had frowned and muttered under his breath, then finally replied, “Just perform a divination to detect evil in the area. You’ll screen out all of us, and only notice anything that might be a threat. Honestly, you should have thought of that before.”
“You are so naïve that it hurts my brain to think about it.” Florian had said to him.
“Excuse me?” He’d asked, growing annoyed.
“What plane are we on?” She prompted him.
“Pandemonium,” He’d replied. “The layer of Cocytus to be exact. Why?”
“What is the alignment that Pandemonium represents?”
“A metaphysical mixture of Chaos and Evil, biased towards the chaotic end of the spectrum. Again, why does that matter?”
“So as the metaphysical personification of malign chaos, with the very rocks around us being a manifestation of evil and chaos, a divination to detect evil will…”
“Oh…”
“Yeah,” Florian said as the man’s expression and ego deflated like a stabbed beholder.
“So,” Another sage then asked. “Does that mean you’ll scout the area since you can’t cast a divination?”
An hour later, she had them finally calmed down, and she’d found nothing of note except for a few more scattered bones and an old bent piece of gold lost by some nameless traveler who might have also been the source of that howler’s last meal. She’d reported back to the scholars, and then taken her leave of them, walking away to ostensibly continue her search of the area just to keep their nerves alleviated, but in reality she just wanted to time away from them to grumble.
“You seem like you need a drink.”
Florian paused and looked over to see Settys the cleric and paladin of Thoth approach.
Florian shook her head with a look of overwhelmed resignation. “Tell me about it.”
“Would you care for one?” Settys asked, uncorking a clay bottle and offering it.
“What is it?” She asked, sniffing at it hesitantly.
“I doubt you’re familiar with it, but it’s similar enough to ale.” He replied. “It’s based on honey and wheat.”
Florian paused a moment to consider, but eventually the other cleric’s smile and the smell of the mild, sweet alcohol won her over and she took a swig.
“This is pretty good.” She said. “Thank you.”
“You’re most welcome.” He replied, accepting back the flask and taking a swig of his own.
Settys had been fairly quiet for most of their time in Pandemonium thus far, and outside of his devotionals and morning prayers led for some of their wards, he’d kept to himself. He was a good public speaker, and his entreaties to Thoth had helped the workers’ spirits, but he’d otherwise been fairly insular. Perhaps now was a chance to get a better feeling for the man, and besides, even for a servant of a radically different deity from her own, he was good looking.
“I saw you leading a devotional this morning for some of the scholars.” Florian said, making eye contact and hoping to coax him out of his shell. “Now admittedly, I’m not very familiar with your faith and its trappings, but were they fellow followers of Thoth, and was there particular significance for the ritual?”
“None of them were followers of Thoth.” Settys smiled and gave a half chuckle of uncertain significance. “But to feel that they had a similarly focused power smiling down upon their work, it improved their mood and pushed them towards success. Even if they did not worship the scribe of the gods, it was worth the effort to perform the ritual.”
Florian nodded. It made sense certainly, and Settys seemed to have his heart in the right place.
“But if you were curious, the ritual was called Finding the Whispers of the Ibis’s Wisdom in the Rustle of the Thousand Reeds at the River’s Edge. The name is much shorter in my native tongue of course, but that’s a decent translation.”
“Thank you.” Florian said. “I’m glad you could help them. My own faith doesn’t exactly mesh well with their professions or their interests in life. They honestly seem to view me as a fighter more than a priest.”
“I suspect that it’s the armor more than anything else.” Settys replied, motioning to the fact that her armor was more elaborate and more obvious than his.
“Perhaps,” She admitted. “But I still think they’d ignore my preaching if I was only wearing a robe and carrying a walking stick.”
Settys chuckled. “Though admittedly, you haven’t had to be much of a fighter so far.”
“True, it’s been fairly slow here so far.” Florian said with a shrug.
Settys nodded. “I suspect that has to run counter to what you expected, especially as a cleric of a god of war.”
“Certainly,” Florian replied. “I expected packs of howlers, some tanar’ri, maybe some other things lurking in the dark that I’d never even heard of.”
They’d only just begun what was looking to be a long and fruitful conversation and exchange of ideas, but perhaps being Pandemonium, nothing normal could happen according to plans before chaos grinned and threw metaphorical stones.
“Hello lovebirds.”
Settys looked up startled, and Florian rolled her eyes as Frollis slipped out from the first cleric’s shadow.
“You have the worst timing in the world.” Florian said as the rogue extracted himself from the in-between shadow realm he used to jump from place to place.
“Bad timing?” Frollis asked, feigned innocence. “Was I correct then in my greeting? Need some more alone time?”
Settys stared daggers into the shadowdancer.
“Was there a point to you dropping in on us?” Florian asked.
Frollis hesitated in his reply, dragging the moment out, apparently to just irritate the Egyptian priest, but Settys didn’t bite, and eventually the rogue gave an honest reply.
“We found another cave.” He said. “Five of them in fact.”
Not unexpected, but to find five of them within a relatively short time was mildly disquieting, since it suggested that their stay in Pandemonium might be much longer than expected if the list of potential locations that might hold a sample text in gautish were multiplied many times over.
“Did something inside clue you off to them, or did you happen across them while searching around the area?” Florian asked.
“Very much the latter.” Frollis said. “There’s nothing around here except us.”
Florian grew curious. “So what’s inside? Did you notice anything of interest?”
“Well, there’s no way to tell for certain unless we actually explore them.” Frollis grinned. “Anyone up for it?”
“It wouldn’t be wise.” Settys replied, throwing cold water on the shadowdancer’s hopes.
Frollis sat down on a rock and frowned. “Listen, if you’re unhappy with my joking earlier, just say so and don’t be an *ss about it.”
Florian sighed. Hopefully she could ask Leobtav or Highsilver to move Frollis to another group the next day. Settys and he simply weren’t capable of getting along, and the rogue didn’t seem the kind of person to just agree to disagree. Frankly he was the type of person that caused friction and eventually fratricide among mercenary groups, and from his record he’d seemingly always worked along, but Florian wasn’t certain if that might have been a symptom or a cause.
Not biting at a verbal barb for a second time, Settys took a deep breath, looked away for a moment, and then replied. “Our wards are already on edge, and probably more so if they rightly suspect that the ground is riddled with a larger cave system than they expected for this area. None of them would be properly capable of defending themselves from attack, and if the three of us -or even one of us for that matter- broke away to explore the caves, we’d leave them in considerable danger.”
Frollis frowned, but the cleric had a point. “You have absolutely no sense of fun.”
It remained tense over the next ten minutes, but Frollis knew that he’d been taken down a peg, and so he remained quiet rather than return to the same arguments.
Still, despite not exploring the caves fully, they did take notes and give them a cursory glance to determine their contents or just their size and extent. Par for the day, they didn’t find anything lurking within, but all of them descended into the rock beyond the range of their lights. What they did pin down however, was that all five cave entrances were likely connected as part of a single system. Whatever they contained, they were probably vast enough that exploring them would likely become the task for a day or more down the line.
Eventually, growing tired and hungry, when they finally pacified their curiosity for the day and left the cave system behind, they did so without having noticed the tangle of gossamer thin, translucent material clinging to a rock outside the largest of the cave mouths. Had they discovered it, they would have immediately recognized it as webbing, and distinctly webbing composed of freshly extruded bebelith silk.
***
Meanwhile, a quarter mile away, the second group was exploring an altogether different location.
The area that Tristol, Clueless, and Nisha found themselves in, watching over two dozen scholars, was nestled against the flank of the Crag itself, just far enough from the camp to be obscured from a direct line of sight. It wasn’t exceptionally far away, but the ragged side of the Crag, and dozens of larger pieces of stone did their collective part to keep them relatively isolated. It was a worry, but as far as they could tell, the area was largely unoccupied by anything that might pose a danger.
The sages had found a few impromptu graves of indeterminate age, quite a few random bones and the remains of a dead howler, but nothing of particular importance, nor anything to positively attach the area to any of the specific regions of the Crag as mapped by its original chroniclers in the Fraternity of Order.
Of course, they had yet to actually explore the Crag proper, just the debris field extending away from it.
Tristol’s ears twitched in irritation.
“What’s up with him?” Clueless asked.
Nisha shrugged. “I dunno. But it’s kinda cute though.”
The tiefling opened her mouth as if to say something more, but a split second later she abandoned the idea in favor of squinting and wriggling her face, trying to make her own ears twitch. While amusing, it wasn’t quite the same, and it was clear that she was just as clueless as Clueless regarding Tristol’s perceived problem.
The aasimar didn’t seem too troubled, but his ears were flat against his head, laid back as if to muffle his hearing. The wind wasn’t particularly loud though, and none of the others seemed bothered by whatever it was that was setting his ears to their sporadic little dance.
“You don’t hear that?” Tristol asked.
“Hear what?” Clueless asked. The bladesinger heard the omnipresent howl of the wind all around them, but nothing in particular to differentiate it from any other time over the past forty right hours.
“There’s a whine.” Tristol said. “And it’s really high pitched.”
Nisha and Clueless strained to listen, hoping to catch what it was that Tristol clearly heard and was even more clearly unhappy with.
“Well there’s what’s irritating you.” Clueless said, pointing towards two massive pillars of stone in the distance, just at the edge of their light’s radius.
Tristol’s tail drooped as he saw just what Clueless was looking at.
“We find the source and there’s absolutely nothing that I can do about it.” Tristol sighed. “Well, short of a week’s worth of disintegrate spells that is.”
Easily twenty or thirty feet across, the gigantic stone pillars had fallen from the main bulk of the Crag millennia earlier in whatever cataclysm had ruined the original structure. Heavily eroded by windblown grit and water, the pillars nonetheless still stood solidly braced against one another, forming a crude triangular archway, and much to Tristol’s lament a perfect aperture for the winds to whistle through like the reed of a titan’s lost flute.
“That’s going to be annoying me the entire time that we’re here isn’t it?” Tristol complained.
“You and Fyrehowl both I think.” Clueless said.
“Earmuffs,” Nisha pointed out. “I brought them for you, you know. They’re back in your tent.”
That made the aasimar smile.
“We can always switch you out for somewhere on the other side of the Crag.” Clueless said.
Tristol shrugged. “I can put up with it. Besides, we’ll only be here at this spot today and tomorrow.”
Each periodic burst of wind caused a low base vibration and then moments later a full whistle as the harmonics aligned and produced a high, steady note. It was loud and grating up close, even for those without overly large ears. The sound however wasn’t the pillars’ most intriguing feature.
“Huh.” Tristol said as he approached the base of the archway. “That’s strange.”
Nisha tilted her head and trotted up behind him, following with her eyes as he looked at something that wound its way across their surface. Something was carved into the rock.
“That’s really strange.” Tristol continued, whispering a minor divination before tracing his finger across the stone.
Someone or something had carved runes in the draconic alphabet deep into the pillars. Easily two or three feet across, the letters curled around the pillars in a single, repetitive phrase, repeated over and over again from the base of one pillar up and over to the base of its neighbor on the opposite side of the archway.
“That’s pretty damn deep.” Clueless said as he peered into one of the letters. “Wow.”
Either they’d been carved by a stupendous use of magic, a team of stonecarvers working for unknown reasons for weeks or months in the depths of Pandemonium, or they had been carved by something exceedingly –large-. Neither of those prospects was very comforting.
“So what does it say?” Nisha asked. “I know draconic, kinda sorta, but it’s not making a gigantic amount of sense to me.”
“Well it’s not normal draconic.” Tristol explained as he looked over the letters. “It’s actually a dialect of Old High Wyrm, but…”
Tristol’s expression grew puzzled and he stepped back and crossed his arms.
“But what?” Clueless asked. “Is it warded?”
“No.” Tristol said, still looking perplexed. “Not as far as I can tell. It’s just that whoever carved it changed the order of the words in a few places, or wrote some of it backwards, or swapped some of the words for anagrams. Whoever wrote it either had an amazing sense of artistic whimsy or they didn’t have their head screwed on tight.”
“Hey, there’s no reason those two have to be mutually exclusive.” Nisha protested.
Tristol gave her a kiss on the cheek.
“…not that I was referring to myself…” Nisha added with a sidelong glance at Tristol. “People that I know… that you’ve never met… yeah…”
Clueless shook his head. “So what does it say?”
Tristol smiled and proceeded to translate:
“Howl into the winds of lament, scream in the face of the storm and be not surprised to find the Howling answer back in turn.”
“Well that doesn’t exactly seem pleasant.” Clueless said, crossing his arms like Tristol.
“What’s it mean?” Nisha asked.
Tristol shrugged. “That reads like a summoning if you ask me.”
Clueless took a step back from the archway. “Let’s not accidentally summon something then.”
“Intentionally then?” Nisha asked. “Perhaps maybe yes please?”
Tristol shook his head. “I don’t know enough about the history of this place to risk it. Besides, if it’s related to whatever carved the text in the first place, I’m not sure I want to meet them.”
Nisha stuck out her tongue. “Awww…”
“Still, it’s the most interesting thing that we’ve seen so far around here today.” Clueless said. “At the very least we can let Highsilver and Leobtav know about it. They might know something more, or if Nisha’s lucky they might send us back tomorrow to intentionally check it out.”
The tiefling beamed a grin.
Tristol glanced back over his shoulder to the diffuse collection of bobbing, individual lights back in the direction that they’d originally come from. Though they were virtually certain that the local area was devoid of anything larger than a blind cave cricket -or maybe a fiendish rat or two- it wasn’t wise to leave their group largely unattended, even if they’d managed to find something of far more interest than the group of sages had.
“I think we should be heading back now.” Tristol said. “They might start running from their own shadows or something.”
Nisha made an impromptu shadow puppet of a howler and giggled.
Clueless nodded back towards the pillars. “I’ll handle the paperwork on writing this up tonight if you want.”
“Sure thing.” Tristol said.
Finally, moving back towards the group of sages they’d been tasked to watch, the three of them left the archway and its enigmatic inscription behind, leaving only footprints in the dirt, with the whistling wind through the pillars chasing their shadows as they departed.
***
Relatively close to the campsite, the third of the day’s designated areas for examination
Toras glanced over at the lupinal, “Weren’t you supposed to be working with Tristol and Clueless today?”
Fyrehowl nodded. “I was, but I swapped out with Nisha this morning. She didn’t mind at all, nor did Tristol.”
Toras chuckled. “That’s adorable.”
“Oh, it’s worse than that.” Fyrehowl said. “It’s a level of cute that could burn a ‘loth by simple proximity.”
“Dare I ask?”
Fyrehowl shook her head and laughed. “Nisha woke him up this morning by growling and batting at his tent.”
“She’s lucky he didn’t throw a fireball by accident.”
“Oh, the shadow puppet made it obvious.”
“Shadow puppet?”
“Yeah.” Fyrehowl explained. “She was making a shadow puppet like a dog with spiky hair. And the growling was punctuated by, “Grrr. I’m a howler. I’m crazy for you.””
“Burning a ‘loth nothing.” Toras said with a grin. “I think that’ll burn me by proximity.”
“Well you’re safe here.” Fyrehowl said. “Safe from ‘loths, sugary sweet cuteness, and well, frankly, anything that might be even vaguely malign.”
“Tell me about it.” Toras lamented, seeming honestly let down over a lack of danger that would have let him play hero for the day.
“Bored?”
“A little.” Toras said. “But I suspect that things will pick up once we leave the area around the Crag and actually start climbing the Crag itself. There’s no way in Andros’s name that all the caves that riddle its interior are going to be empty.”
“Probably not.” Fyrehowl said. “Still, just call it a feeling…”
Toras glanced around warily. “And we know about your feelings.”
The cipher nodded. “Just call it a feeling, but even with it being grossly boring at the moment, I don’t think that we’ll be waiting till we get into those caves to have something more happen.”
True to the lupinal’s perceptions, they wouldn’t be waiting long at all.
***
6 hours later, back at the camp:
Leobtav shuffled through several pages of his notes from the day and accepted a thick stack of reports from several of his more senior subordinate scholars, nodding and murmuring as he glanced over them in turn.
“Rocks, rocks, wind, dusty rocks, howler poo, more rocks.” Ficklebarb said from his perch on the professor’s shoulder. “Not a very successful day.”
“Quite the contrary.” Leobtav said, looking rather cheerful. “We found quite a few caves on the edges of the Crag today. That was a bit of a surprise, since originally we’d only thought the caves to be inside the rubble that makes up the crag itself -hollows within the fallen, piled up rocks- but some of these new ones look to have been bored out of the underlying rock as well.”
“Creepy.” Ficklebarb said. “Dragons? Big worms? Acid breathing fiends? Angry fiendish woodchucks that like stone inside of trees?”
Leobtav rolled his eyes. “What’s more, they seem to line up with the location of some of the caves on Ulricon’s old maps.”
“Seem to line up?” The pseudo-dragon looked skeptical.
“Well two of them –really- line up with the old map, but three of them weren’t there in the old notes. Either they weren’t noticed, or were on the parts of the notes that were missing, or they’re new.”
“New?” Ficklebarb asked warily. “Like “Nom nom nom I like rock” sort of new?”
“Well, yes.” Leobtav said, not seeming troubled in the least. “That’s possible as well I suppose. But those two tunnels on the map might very well have what we’re looking for, and I’m hoping to send out people there tomorrow if at all possible.”
The professor had the gleam of impending discovery in his eyes, but his familiar seemed more worried than anything else as Doran Highsilver stepped into the tent.
“Is everyone back yet?” Doran asked as he dropped a few bits of birdseed into his magical familiar pocket.
“I believe so.” Leobtav said, fishing out the master list of their expedition members. “Clueless’s group just got back, and they were the furthest from camp, so we should be good for the evening, such as it is.”
A happy chirp echoed up from Doran’s familiar and he sprinkled a few more seeds into the extradimensional hollow.
“Well if you’ve got the list and want to make the counts, I can get started on the maps for tomorrow.”
“When I’m done I’ll meet you back at the tent.” Leobtav nodded and handed the elf the day’s notes.
Doran grinned. “Those caves look extremely promising! And Tristol found something that I’m keen to take a look at as well.”
“Oh?” Leobtav asked. “I haven’t spoken to him yet today. What did he find?”
“Tell you when you get back.” The elf promised. “Make sure we’re all accounted for and I’ll give you a formal write-up when you’re done.”
Leobtav nodded and quickly left the tent. The sooner he was done with making the inventories, the sooner he could find out just what it was that Doran was talking about. As oppressive as the darkness and wind might have seemed, he could all but taste how closely he was to finding that sample of gautish, and the looming discovery gave him jitters as he walked from tent to tent, peering in and getting signatures next to each name on his list.
Knowledge beckoned somewhere beneath the weight of years and tens of tons of fallen rock.
“Wait a minute.” Leobtav said fifteen minutes later. He paused and looked up to glance over the crowd assembled around the camp’s cook-fire, looking for a pair of faces that should have been there to match the names on the list his index finger was perched upon.
“Has anyone seen Corwin or Logan?” He asked.
“I haven’t seen them all day.” A tiefling linguist by the name of Jander Breckinridge said as he stepped out of his tent. “Why?”
“Weren’t they supposed to be part of your group?” Leobtav asked.
The tiefling shook his head. “Not as far as I knew. I haven’t seen them since yesterday, so I assumed that they’d been moved over to another group at the last minute.”
“Hmm.” Leobtav mused. “That’s disturbing. Hopefully they’re in one of the groups that just got back.”
The next group came and went, but the two blanks on the list remained as empty as before. Ficklebarb’s tail drooped like an ill-omen even before he and his master got to the cluster of tents that held the last group on the list.
Nothing; the men simply weren’t in the camp.
“Is there a problem?” Tristol asked, looking up at the sullen-looking pseudodragon first, and then to the professor.
Leobtav frowned. “We’re missing two people.”
Up on his shoulder, Ficklebarb looked worried and curled his wings around his body, suddenly even more self-conscious of the darkness. “Werp.”
***
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