NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 3140601" data-attributes="member: 143">Glad I was able to properly convey the intensity of that clash, jfaller. Thanks for the kudos.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> And glad to see you on board, Brogarn!  You read fast... although I checked and it's only been 37k words thus far. I have a ways to go to get to match The Shackled City, which ended up at 734 thousand... And we continue, with at least one Bastard's fortunes having taken a turn for the worse...* * * * * Chapter 27RUNNING IN CIRCLESTiros could not move.  His lungs felt like they were on fire with every breath, and he felt like he was drowning, all of his efforts barely sucking in enough air to keep him alive.  Every now and then he coughed, and those moments were the worst, ending with him gasping desperately for air.  “Is he going to live?” came a voice.  Familiar, yet not quite identifiable.  All he could think about was the pain, and everything else faded into the background.“I do not know.  He is fighting hard, but there is barely any strength left in him.”“I know.  I only caught a bare whiff of that stuff, and I feel like I’ve been on a two-day bender.  What in the hells was that crap?”“Yellow mold.  It is exceptionally... toxic.  If he succumbs, we will have to burn the body, or it will become dangerous to us as well.”Tiros felt like he was falling, the voices swirling away as he fell into a weird semi-conscious haze.  In that narrow space between life and death, images formed, as recent events replayed themselves in his mind...* * * * * After the desperate battle with the ghouls, the three survivors of the Doomed Bastards had taken their new gear and returned to the corridors of Rappan Athuk.  They made their way back into the entry room through which they had first entered the level, cautious lest they encounter either the wererats they had fought above, or the implacable dung monster.  But the room was as empty as the first time they had entered it. There were two doors that they had not explored last time.  Choosing the first, they had found a corridor that had twisted around several bends before depositing them in a small crypt.  There were several somewhat fresh bodies decomposing in the chamber; a dead human woman lying in an open stone coffin, and what looked like a goblin sprawled out on the ground next to it.But before they had a chance to investigate the bodies, a rumbling sound from an arched exit in the wall to the right had drawn their attention.  They crept to the entry to find a passage occupied by an iron ball festooned with hundreds of spikes.  The odd device was rolling up and down the corridor seemingly of its own volition.  As it had approached the companions had drawn back cautiously, but it slowed as it neared the arch, and ultimately retreated back in the opposite direction.  They had watched it complete several such circuits before they retreated back to talk. “Well, that’s the dumbest trap I’ve ever seen,” Dar commented.  “You’d have to be as stupid as Ukas to walk into that corridor.”“Perhaps there is something valuable on the far side,” Varo noted.  “We should investigate the other door first,” Tiros said.  In the weird haze of his dying dream, it was as if he hovered over himself, watching himself speak.  “If we do need to go this way, perhaps we could rig a shield using the materials in the storeroom we found earlier.”In his disembodied state, Tiros saw Dar kneel to search the body of the dead woman.  He was merely an observer, and so he could not warn the fighter, could not do anything as he watched Dar rear back, looking down at his hands in horror.  The fighter spat a curse. “What is it?” the then-Tiros said, coming over to him.  But Varo was faster, lifting his torch to shine it on the fighter’s hands.  There were... things bulging under the flesh, moving...“Rot grubs,” Varo said.  “Do not move,” he said to Dar.  “But what are you.... aah!” the fighter yelled, as Varo thrust his torch at the fighter’s hand.  Dar jerked back.  “What in the hells are you doing?”Varo did not hesitate.  “The grubs are burrowing deeper as we speak.  If they get deep enough within your flesh to avoid the flame, you are dead.  You have seconds to decide.  I will heal you afterwards, but this is the only way.”Dar looked wide-eyed at Tiros, then back at the cleric.  He nodded, and thrust out his hands.  The fighter’s screams echoed loudly in the crypt.  Afterwards, Varo was as good as his word, and he used his divine powers to heal the fighter’s blackened hands.  The grubs were all destroyed—or at least Tiros had presumed so, since he didn’t drop dead—but there had been a haunted look on Dar’s face as they left the crypt and retraced their steps.  The fighter had confronted the various horrors of Rappan Athuk with a grim stoicism, but somehow this, where a careless touch could mean a slow and certain death, had unnerved him.  The other door back in the entry room had led around in a circle that had ultimately connected with the corridor of the rolling ball.  It had also contained the black skeletons.  The dream-Tiros watched as the creatures came up behind them, disgorged from a secret room that they had missed in their exploration.  Their bodies were a flawless ebony, each carrying a pair of ancient shortswords that were surrounded with the faintest hint of a cerise glow.  A foul aura surrounded them, and their torches dimmed as the creatures drew near, as if the light itself sought to flee at their arrival.  They ignored Varo’s rebuke, laying into them with their weapons, striking with expert strokes that avoided parries and clipped through armor.  There were five of them in all, and for a moment it had looked like the three humans were doomed.  Watching the battle again, Tiros felt a tremor as he recalled feeling just that, as a pair of skeletons flanked him, cutting deep gashes in his torso with their blades.  His own strike with Valor had been almost useless, as the creatures lacked skin or organs to cut.  Then Dar had laid into them.  The fighter fought with a berserk insanity, dropping his shield and nearly useless sword, and taking up the magical club that he’d won from the mad barbarian that had murdered Navev.  The weapon proved deadly effective where Tiros’s sword had not, and the fighter had reduced the first skeleton to bone shards within moments, immediately slamming into the next. Even so, it had been close, damned close.  By the time that the last skeleton had fallen, all three of them had been covered with trails of their own blood.  Varo and Tiros had worked together to bring down one of the monsters, but Dar had destroyed the other four.  The fighter staggered, and would have fallen had not the others caught him.  A jagged shard of bone from one of the creatures stuck through Dar’s right bicep, dripping blood, and one of his ears hung from a slender dongle of flesh, nearly hacked from his head from a blow that had shorn off the cheek-guard of his helmet.  “I hate this freaking place,” Dar had said.  After Varo had restored them as much as he could—using up the last charges of his wand in the process—they had continued their search.  They briefly revisited the chamber where they had fought the barbarian, only to find that both bodies, his and Navev’s, were gone. “I’m sure the ghouls had a nice meal,” Dar had said, but now, as the dream-Tiros watched himself and the others leave, he felt a cold chill, and suddenly he wasn’t quite sure. Having circled the level, the three had elected to check one of the rooms they had passed, the packed-dirt chamber near where they’d first encountered the ogres.  Leery of the uncertain-looking ceiling, they made their way into the corridor on the far side of that room.  The place proved more sturdy that it had looked at first glance, and they soon found themselves in another large cavern. Memory began to return as the dream-Tiros watched the three men enter the place.  The scene began to blur, and he felt himself falling into a soft gray.  But he forced himself to watch what happened next. The place was full of fungi of all shapes and descriptions, clinging to the walls, forming mounds that turned the floor of the cavern into a subterranean forest.  But the three men’s attention had been focused on the more obvious feature of the place, one that had given them immediate hope. “Sunlight!” Dar exclaimed.  The shaft was narrow and diffuse, and it came from the far end of the place, from a deep cleft in the ceiling, but the source of the light was too... pure, to be anything else than that.  The screaming that had followed the fighter’s words came from the ground, the wall, everywhere; it was as if Rappan Athuk itself was shouting its defiance at this new hope that had shown itself to the three men.  In response to the piercing shriek, the three could see movement among the dense knots of tall fungi stalks.  A dozen man-sized, shuffling things, resembling nothing more than animate, purple-colored toadstools, emerged from the forest and shuffled toward them.  Long violet tendrils dangled from around the perimeter of their bloated caps, probing the air.  Varo was screaming something that the others couldn’t quite hear over the continued shrieking.  The cleric shoved past Dar, who was waving his sword in a wary defensive stance, and grabbed something off the floor.  Tiros hadn’t gotten a good look at it before, but now as he hovered above the scene he could see that it was the corpse of a giant rat.  Or at least what was left of it; half of the creature’s body had rotted away. Varo hurled the rat at the approaching mushrooms.  The dead creature hit one of the toadstools, and was immediately tangled up in one of the creature’s tendrils.  Varo’s message got across clearly this time; they could all see the thing fall to pieces, the flesh coming apart, sloughing off the rat’s bones to fall in limp heaps before the fungus-creature. Just in case they didn’t get the message, Varo grabbed Dar’s arm and pulled him back.  The creatures were moving slowly, but they were within twenty feet now, and their tendrils began to extend toward them, seeking. Tiros could only watch the dream-image of himself as he drew back in alarm.  Now he could see the dense patch of yellow growths that he stepped into, and the cloud of violent mist that exploded out from the mold, engulfing him.  That was the last that he remembered.  The scene dissolved into gray, and Tiros fell back into the cold embrace of oblivion.</blockquote>

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