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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lars Frehse" data-source="post: 469947" data-attributes="member: 1674">Shadows of Mithril, part 4of5 (Yes, yes, I know, I had spoken of four parts earlier)They went uptown and met their friends at Mithril Keep. They decided to have two of them watching the house at any time. Torn and Niklas were chosen to take up the first eight-hour watch, after which Trepat and Ben would take over.Yurik's house was a three story building in moon street, close to the shrine of the lost. All the houses there belonged to succesul merchants and the like, and there was hardly any traffic on the cobbled street. The only means to stay close to the house was to either hunch into one of the opposite doorways, hoping that none of the people in there would notice them or walking up and down the road. From what Nadezhda had told them, it seemed that there was only one person living in the house, but that one person looked different every time he or she left it. One time, it would be a woman leaving, and a man returning, or vice versa. But there was never more than one person inside, and so the Scaled Ones had surmised that there was really only one single individual who had the power to change his appearance in there.Around noon Niklas and Tornn  were sweating in their winterclothes. The springsun was melting away the last snow on the roofs and streets, and after a while they were both holding their wrapped up coats in their arms. Then, the door of the house opened, and a young red haired woman came out. Torn followed her, and Niklas stayed behind, keeping an eye on the house.The young woman went to a storagebuilding down by the harbor, and Torn waited outside. As the hours passed, Niklas grew more and more worried about his friend not coming back, until, in the afternoon, he was walking up in front of the merchant's house, as suddenly he stood face to face with Baron Yurik Vagas. Both stood there, puzzled, just ten yards from each other, until the Baron was the first to react.He chanted a short formula and strechtched his arms out towards the surprised monk. Immediately, Niklas felt how a dark force tried to get a hold of his body, and for a terrifying moment that seemed to last an eternity, he could see his hand getting darker and almost insubstantial. Surpressing his panic, he willed himself to stay calm, and with all the mental strength he had, he forced his body to remain solid.The shadow disappeared, and his flesh became as solid as it had been before, and now Niklas jumped into action. Running as fast as his feet could carry him, he dashed down the road and around the corner, out of the sight of the Penumbral Lord.Around the corner, he decided to get back to Mithril Keep. All this seems to be too much to handle for him and his friends, and he knew that he had to tell the Paladins all he knew, so that they could come to the house in force. Having made up his mind, he went uptown, as a call from the roof stopped him.It was Nadezhda, who came crawling headfirst like a spider down the wall of the house to his right:" I have seen the man attacking you. When you ran, he stepped into the shadow of his house, and disappeared.""Alright. I will go get the Paladins. Meanwhile, stay behind and tell Torn what has happened if he comes back". He hesitated for a moment, and then added with a reassuring tone:"When he comes back, I mean."After Niklas had reported about the events at the keep, it was a matter of minutes until a small troop of Paladins was ready. Niklas lead the way down, and together with Ben, Trepat and Jan, he showed them the way to the merchant's estate. Meanwhile, Torn was back as well. He had stayed outside of the building for hours, and in spite of many men and women coming and going, the red haired woman hadn't been among them.The Paladins knocked hard against the door:"Open up in the name of the shining council!"When nothing happened for a while, they bashed the door down and stormed into the house, their mithril swords drawn. The heroes waited outside, and for minutes, all they heard were the Paladins ravaging the house. Eventually, the Paladins came out again. Their leader reported that the house was deserted.While the Paladins returned to the keep, the heroes were on their own again. They went into the house, and looking around, they found no evidence that anyone had really lived in there. There were guestrooms and representative rooms on the ground floor, but the kitchen-stove looked like there had never been a fire in it, and the upper rooms were all empty.Most of the furniture had been turned over by the searching Paladins, and it looked as if the whole building had merely served as a front for whoever was behind all this... Maybe it had been Dar' Tang himself...They searched through the house once more, even though they thought it was unlikely that they would succeed where the Paladins of the order of Mithril had failed. They started on top, where they found a few pigeon feathers, and worked their way to the basement. There was a winecellar.- Here, too, they gained the impression that the place hadn't been used in a year. Most of the bottles were empty, and even the wine Ben tried was corked.The bottles were lined up in the wall, each one in a small seperate shaftlike compartment that was hewn into the rock of the basewall. As Ben was complaining about the bad wine he had just tried, Trepat noticed that one of the bottle looked different then the others. Unlike the other bottles down here, it seemed clean, and it was neither covered by cobwebs nor dust. The elf reached for the bottle, and when he tried to pull it out, he felt a resistance- and has he pulled on, a trapdoor opened in the middle of the room.The trapdoor opened a shaft that lead further down into the darkness.Niklas and Nadezhda stayed behind, in case anyone should come from behind, and the others climbed down. The shaft lead to a damp, rectangular room that was totally empty. The walls and the floor were moist, there were small puddles of dark water on the floor and there was a heavy closed door at the far side of the room.The friends looked carefully around, as all of a sudden three things happened:The trapdoor above them slammed shut, Trepat's and Torn's shadow fused together, keeping the two tied together as strongly as a chain around their ankles could have done, and large black leathery tentacles grew out of the floor, lashing out for anything they could grasp.</blockquote>

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