Dungannon said:
Wow, now you're throwing random teleportation at them? At least you reunited them, so they can all die together.
Well, it's in the module, along with almost any dungeon trope that's ever been invented.
Have a great Christmas, everyone, and I'll be back on Wednesday.
* * * * *
Chapter 321
HIDING
Unable to escape, and wary of another confrontation with the warlock and his mind flayer allies, the three surviving companions from Camar went to ground.
They quickly searched out their immediate area, looking for a place that looked relatively untraveled. Dar wiped off the blood from his boots and leggings, and they were careful to leave no obvious marks of their passage. Beyond the small room where Dar had battled the giant rats the passage continued, and after a time the corridor widened to a small room, an annex shaped like a triangle that extended out to the left for a good thirty feet. The place was empty save for some debris where one of the walls had begun to crumble, but they found black markings upon the floor and walls, signs that the abyssal hounds had spent time here. The foul scent of the creatures was stale, though, so they elected to hold here.
Letellia drew out a scroll and a length of rope from her
pouch of holding. She also took out a few other items, a small pack of supplies and a pair of extra waterskins. She handed those items to Dar and Allera, and then removed a few smaller bags that she tucked into the pockets of her robe. Once that was done, she tucked the pouch under a small pile of debris in one corner of the room.
“What are you doing?” Dar asked.
“I am going to cast a spell that will create a place where we can hide,” the sorceress explained. “But I cannot bring the pouch into it without hazard. You should hide your quiver as well.”
Dar’s eyes narrowed, but he did as the sorceress said, withdrawing a quantity of arrows from the quiver and tucking them into his pack.
The sorceress unrolled her scroll and read the words upon it. The rope suddenly came alive in her hand, and rose into the air until it dangled from a point just shy of the ceiling, fifteen feet above their heads.
“Ascend,” she told them. Dar went up first, followed by Allera, each of them vanishing as they reached the top of the rope. Letellia came up last, grunting slightly with the effort. She joined the others in an empty, dark space, a featureless circle with utterly smooth gray walls. It was spacious enough for all of them, although Dar could not stand without bending his head a bit. Letellia drew up the rope, and laid it beside the opening, through which they could see the room below.
“What if someone looks up?” Dar asked.
“The transition cannot be detected from the far side,” Letellia explained. “We should be safe in here.”
“How long will it last?” Allera asked.
“My uncle scribed the scroll almost thirty years ago, when he was not quite as powerful as he is now. But it will last long enough for us to rest, and recover our spells.”
“Rest then,” Dar said, seating himself on the edge of the opening.
“What are we going to do?” Allera asked.
“Right now, you’re going to rest,” Dar said. “I will keep watch.”
“You won’t be able to see anything,” Letellia said. “Light cannot pass through the transition.”
But Dar remained at the edge of the opening, and as the two women rolled up their cloaks and laid their heads upon them, he remained there, silent, a dark look on his face.
He was still sitting there when Allera woke, the light of her
everburning torch casting deep shadows into the crannies of his face. She rose, and crept over to him, careful not to disturb Letellia.
“You should try to get some sleep,” she told him.
“I am fine,” he said. She looked down through the transition of the extraplanar space, but saw only darkness. “I thought I saw something, earlier... I can’t be sure,” he said.
“They are probably looking for us.”
“I am sure they are.”
“Corath... what are we going to do?”
“I don’t know. The smart thing would be to get out of here as quickly as we can. This room has the black marks; could be that the hallway ahead connects back to where we fought the hounds. From there we could retrace our steps back up to the surface.”
“Without Nelan’s magic, how will we get up the river?”
“Maybe the archmage can figure something out, if he returns. Or maybe Letellia can use her teleportation magic; it seems to work on shorter distances.”
“I don’t think Orcus is going to let us escape,” Allera said, softly.
“We’re not beaten yet, angel.”
“Our enemies knew that we were coming,” Letellia said. The others turned; they hadn’t realized that she was awake. “The ambush was perfect; they struck at our weak points, and took full advantage of our vulnerabilities. If Allera hadn’t been able to hold them off, even for a few moments, we would have joined our companions in their fate.”
“What would you suggest then, lady?” Dar asked, his voice taut. “Do you have any spells that can get us out of here?”
“Perhaps. A series of
dimension doors, over relatively short distances, might enable us to bypass the river. I was able to use the spell to move across the room during the battle; I don’t know how far the interference that disrupted by earlier attempt extends, but I can test it.”
“What about your uncle?”
“He will not be able to join us while we are in here. Perhaps, once we leave the refuge...” She turned her head abruptly. “The spell’s power is waning; we must have slept longer than I thought. Gather your things, we need to get down the rope before it ends.”
“What happens if we’re still inside when the spell ends?”
“Then you will get to enjoy a brief bout of flying,” the sorceress replied. But they had little in the way of possessions, and within a minute they had dropped the rope and descended back into the small chamber.
“Damn,” Dar said, checking the pile of debris against the wall. “My quiver’s gone.”
“And my
pouch of holding,” Letellia confirmed.
“You were right, they were looking for us,” Allera said.
“We had best not linger here,” Letellia said. “The grimlocks are stupid, but the flayers may have be able to discern the significance of our leaving those two items here. There could be another ambush waiting for us.”
Dar drew
Valor. “If they come, they will not find us easy prey.” But the fighter frowned; he remembered all too well the power of the illithids clouding his mind. He reached into the pouch at his belt, and drew out a small object, a ceramic disk about four inches across, covered in small, almost indistinguishable runes. He looked down at it in his hand, and his expression darkened further, warring with an expression that Allera had not often seen in his face: doubt.
“What is it?” she asked him.
“Varo gave this to me. In the antechamber, in the palace. Right after Talen had told him to go screw himself.”
“Varo?” Letellia asked. “The priest of Dagos?”
Dar nodded. “He told me that I should speak a word and break it if Nelan were to fall. The way he said it, it seemed like he expected it to happen. On our last trip, I’d almost forgotten it.” The cleric had given him something else, but he’d already delivered that item to its intended recipient. The significance of that object, as well as the disk he held, had kept him from sleep during that long vigil inside the shelter of Letellia’s
rope trick spell.
“What does it do?” Allera asked.
“I do not know.”
Letellia spoke words of magic, and waved her hand over the disk. “Conjuration magic,” she said. “I think perhaps that...”
But Dar didn’t wait for her statement; he took the disk in both hands and broke it. The word he spoke was, “Thanera.”
There was a dull noise that enveloped them, like a powerful gust of wind, but the air around them did not move. A black rent appeared in the air, a tear in the very nature of reality that broadened like a dagger’s cut. A dark figure appeared in that opening, and stepped forward.
The newcomer was armored, and clad all in black steel that shone with a dull metallic sheen in the magical light of Allera’s torch. He bore a shield, another wedge of black metal that shrouded his left side, but it was impossible to discern more, for as the portal closed behind him, something
else appeared around him, a cloying, terrible black aura that pulsed with evil, enveloping the man in a shroud of living darkness.
Within a heartbeat Dar whipped
Valor out of its scabbard, ready to face assault.
But the newcomer did not attack, and after only a few more heartbeats it became clear that the black fog was not protecting him; rather, it was destroying him. The armored man lifted a hand and violet flashes tore through the darkness. Terrible sounds like distant animal screams hissed from the cloud, but it tightened its enfolding grasp, until they could see nothing but the vague outline of the man’s shape within.
Allera rushed forward, blue fire flaring from her hands. Dar tried to grasp her, to draw her back, but she ignored him, thrusting her hands into the black cloud. She screamed as her pale flesh entered the darkness, but then power erupted from her, a blazing scourge of light that blasted away the shadow, dissolving the cloud in a white flare. The clash of white and black lasted only a few seconds, and then it was done, and the room was quiet once more.
“I thank you, healer,” the armored man said. He lifted the visor of his helm, revealing the gaunt but familiar features of Licinius Varo.
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
