ONE WEEK LATER
ORTHOS
Onward Pounding Into Glory Ride
Sign Of The Hammer, Be My Guide
Final Warning! All Stand Aside!
Sign Of The Hammer, It’s My Time
-SIGN OF THE HAMMER, Manowar
They crested a hill. Plains of grass waved all around them. The wind whipped their capes and hair around them. “Is that it?” Orthos asked.
“Yes. Verbobonc.”
Once a great and thriving independent city, Verbobonc’s ruins lay before them. For miles, the overgrown rubble of buildings, keeps and houses spawled about. Piles of brick reached up from the ground like the hands of skeletons clawing from the earth. The fields, once overflowing with grain and crops, lay brown and dead on the hills surrounding the town. Small earthen huts were erected here and there, and people tried very hard to go on living.
Most baffling among the incredible range of shattered buildings was the castle. An enormous keep stood unspoiled on one hill at the edge of the ruins, facing them. Steam plumed up around it like wisps of smoke from a doused campfire. The keep’s walls were in disrepair and the banners flapped rotten and ragged from the spires… but the keep was obviously untouched by the hellish rampage of the dragon.
Nanny had told them what he could manage on the ride here. Kizzlorn and the others had only the vaguest idea of the history of Spellforge Keep from his telling. They knew that Rafflorn and Katya had won the keep somehow and built Nanny there with the help of someone named Mormont. They knew that one night, something attacked the town and destroyed it, so the Spellforges picked up and moved West. They filled in the blank about the creature being the dragon that had followed them early on in life. Everything else was unknown. Kizzlorn only knew that she now had a birthright to reclaim. It drove her. It powered the fire in her eyes.
In the last Inn they’d stayed at, they’d asked questions about Spellforge Keep and Verbobonc. “Don’t as hear it from me,” the barman said, leaning forward. “But I’ve h’ard tell there’s a lich what taken up residence in the bowels o’ that place. Strange doings, there. Have a care and stay well away.”
Here they stood, now, on a hill overlooking the valley of the ruined city. A passing resident who looked more like a filthy serf walked by carrying a basket of moldy mushrooms. “Old woman,” Kizzlorn called. “What can you tell us about that castle?”
The woman eyed the group suspiciously. “The castle? Dreadful place of dreadful things. I’d not step inside, milady, even wearing expensive armor and swords. They’ll do you no good ‘ere.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “There’s tell of a black evil in it. Evil as can take your soul out’n your body. Evil as does not die.”
Orthos said “We have heard it is a lich that has taken control of the castle. Is this true?”
The woman’s eyes darted around nervously. “I can’t tell truthfully, my lord. I only seen bizarre red and green lights flashing through the castle’s lower windows at night, a few times. Often, some well-to-do party of adventurers and plunderers comes round to raid the castle. They don’t come out again.”
“We won’t be raiding the castle,” Kizzlorn announced. “We’ll be taking it back. Spellforge Keep is mine by right. I am Rafflorn Spellforge’s daughter.”
At that, the old woman’s eyes turned fierce, and she spat on the ground. “Then a curse on you,” she growled. “A lich’s torment is all a Spellforge has right to. I say go to it, and leave Verbobonc in the ashes your father laid it in.” She hustled away.
“She wasn’t terribly friendly,” Garren said.
“I suppose the townspeople blame my parents for what happened.” Kizz looked saddened, but only briefly. “Let’s go,” she said, kicking her horse in the ribs. “We’ve got a lich to kill.”
They tied the horses off outside the Keep. Orthos said his prayers to Moradin. As he did, Ziad spoke to Garren. “Are you certain you wish to come inside? You can’t even remember your place, much less how you did your fighting. This isn’t your fight to begin with.”
Garren looked fearful but resolute. “I’m thankful to you four for saving me from the mirror. If I can help in any way, I will. Besides… this is exciting.” He drew his sword and tested it clumsily with a grin.
Nanny unscrewed several small pieces of his arms and legs. He rescrewed them together into a long staff. He removed from his back two four-foot wide bladed sections fitted there by Kizzlorn’s father long ago. He affixed them to the staff, one at each end. Nanny’s thirteen-feet long double-bladed axe was now completed and ready to destroy.
Orthos finished his prayer and took his warhammer from his back. It was a huge and wickedly brutal piece of metal. Each head bore a flattened teardrop shape, connected in the center by an anvil. The Tear of Moradin, he called it. He swung it through the air once or twice, grinning at the way its familiar balance pleased him. “Everyone ready?”
They walked into the castle, across the already open drawbridge. It’s as through intruders weren’t minded at all… or, in fact, welcomed. No one liked it.
Kizzlorn gasped as she stepped into her father’s great hall. Dust covered everything. Long tables ran the length of the hall. On one wall was mounted a colossal sword that was wreathed in fire. Water poured onto it from an endlessly emptying pitcher mounted above. The constant hissing was maddening in the dim room. The steam flowed upwards and into tunnels. Cobwebs blanketed every surface. “Base-ment this way,” Nanny said. He still knew this castle fairly well, though he wasn’t permitted to roam much when he’d stayed here.
They walked slowly down a spiral staircase hewn from stone. At the bottom, eerie torches lit a long corridor before them. Silence. Orthos took the last step from the stairs, and his foot clicked on the cobblestone it found. At once, liquid sprayed them from maybe six different hidden nozzles in the darkness. They sputtered and held their breath until Ziad gasped. The torchlight showed him perfectly well what had sprayed them. “B… blood!”
“What kind of madness…” Orthos muttered in disgust, shaking his arms of the gore. A deep, heavy ratcheting sound echoed towards them from far down the hall. They all looked down the corridor as the echoing sounds took forever dying. They waited.
A scratchy, scrambling sound, from far down the corridor. “Running,” Kizzlorn said, readying her shortspear. “Several animals running.”
They all stood dripping with blood watching the darkness. The torchlight reflected off of a pair of eyes. Then another. Then, a horrible baying cry. From the dark ran a pack of undead wolves. The scent of the blood drove them mad with hunger.
Orthos jumped towards them, uttering a cry to Moradin. He cleaved a wolf clean in two. Ziad and Kizzlorn fell back with spells, and Garren tried his hand at fighting. Scared though he was, he rushed up. A wolf flattened him and almost ripped out his throat before the Tear of Moradin spattered its skull against the wall. “Fight, fight to the last,” Orthos was yelling. Nanny waded through the wolves, stomping them when he could. They couldn’t hurt him with claw and fang.
When the wolves were all killed, the group pulled themselves together. Garren was injured. He was given a potion, but it didn’t do all its work. The entire party now had blood on their clothes and faces and by that their spirits felt panicked.
They walked past the cage that had held the wolves and rounded a corner. Here they found a small room with a door on one end. On the door were words. The group entered the room, and a portcullis slammed shut behind them. Immediately, the ceiling above them began grinding slowly downward. From it were growing long iron spikes, each about a foot apart, and each a half a foot long and growing. Nanny reached up and managed to slow their descent with his might, but only slightly. Kizzlorn read the words on the locked door.
My first is born but once and dies nine deaths.
My middle is the Heart of Alarm.
My last arranges the Locks of Golden Thread,
And can be found on the Morning Caller’s Head.
“Hurry! What’s it mean,” Garren shouted, badly shaken.
“Uh… nine deaths… uh… cat! Middle… heart of… What’s… oh, I know! A. Cat a. Locks of- Comb! CATACOMB!”
The ceiling stopped, and redrew itself up to the ceiling. The doors behind them and before them opened. They picked themselves up and walked on.
“I wish Niffler were here,” Orthos moaned. “He was always good at this stuff.” They all missed the halfling- except for Garren, of course, who’d never known him. They rounded another corner, and looked towards a door maybe thirty feet ahead. “WAIT!” The dwarf had spotted something. “Everyone be still. See that patch of stone up ahead by that door? It’s of a different cut and color than the floor around it. Another trap.”
“I’ll set it off,” Kizz announced. “A little MAGE HAND will turn the knob and unleash the trap, I think. Everyone stand back.” From twenty feet back, she used her magic to turn the knob of the door.
And the floor beneath them opened down a seam between the rocks.
They plunged into ice-cold water. Nanny, who was made of stone and metal, sank beneath the surface immediately. Ziad and Orthos struggled to stay afloat, but their armor was pulling them quickly down. Kizzlorn and Garren alone managed to tread water. It was a good three feet to the edge of the walkway above them. SHINK!! A series of parallel steel rods, each ten inches apart, extended from the wall to the other side above them. It began to slowly move downward. It would push them beneath the surface and drown them in less than a minute.
Garren yelled “Kizzlorn, do something!”
She thought quickly, but nothing came. “I don’t know what I can do!”
“DO ANYTHING!”
What with all the yelling and splashing, it was a wonder Kizz heard the scrape of boots on the cobbles above them. She wrapped her hands around the descending bars, looked up with her terrified eyes, and saw a man’s form covered in hideous black armor. Horns sprouted from his devilish helm. Ragged gray bits of cloak hung from his shoulders. Red light gleamed where his eyes should have been.
“Little flies. I always like how you writhe, though the web will not release you.” Vek Mormont laughed down at them. "Wee Jas grants you the gift of death.”
More to come…
