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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 3198281" data-attributes="member: 143">Heh, that was one of those scenes where I felt physically tired after writing it. * * * * * Chapter 49TO THE VICTOR...Dar wasn’t out for long, and his transition back to awareness was anything but pleasant. “Damn it... ow!  Gods, that hurts!”“Keep yourself still.  You have been grievously injured, and I must make adjustments to your body to maximize the effectiveness of my art.  If you will wait for just a few moments, the healing will take its course, and the pain will ease.” Blinking, Dar looked up at Varo, who was kneeling beside him.  The dead bodies of ogres were sprawled all around, forming a low rampart around them.   “Not who you hoped to see, perhaps?” Varo asked quietly.  “She is helping Talen; the captain was in little better shape than you.  But it looks like all of us will survive yet another of Rappan Athuk’s little trials—this time.”“Aelos?” Dar said, trying to pull himself up into a sitting position, and regretting it almost at once.  Varo’s healing magic worked, but it lacked the sheer... impact of Allera’s touch.  “Drink this,” Varo said, offering him a potion—one of the ones they’d found in the ghoul cache on the level above.  Dar drained the liquid in a single gulp; it tasted terrible, but the familiar effects of magical healing followed almost at once.  “The priest of the Father suffered a severely broken hand, but it was nothing that couldn’t be fixed.  The Most Exalted Lord has already attended to his servant’s injuries, I believe.  Aelos is currently keeping an eye out for any other attackers that might have been drawn to the nosie of the fight.”“How many, altogether?” Dar said, letting the cleric help him up.  He could see Talen and Allera about ten feet away, the healer offering similar assistance to the injured captain.  As if feeling the weight of his stare, she glanced up at him briefly, then turned to continue helping the battered soldier.  “Eight.  The dungeon is replete with the creatures, it would seem.”“What did you do to them?”“The spell is called confusion,” Varo said.  “Why didn’t you use it on the first batch of ogres we fought?  Might have come in handy.”“I lacked the ability to channel that much of Dagos’s power, when we entered Rappan Athuk,” the cleric explained.  “Like you, my skills and abilities have grown since we have been in this place.”“A proving ground, I think you called it,” Dar said, his tone suddenly wary.  But he was distracted by the sound of someone approaching. “Are you all right?” Allera said, coming over to them.  She had healed her own injuries, but traces of hastily-wiped blood were still visible on her cheek and and neck.  “A little the worse for wear, but I’ll live.”“If you’ll execuse me, I wish to attend to something before we depart,” Varo said, turning and walking away from them. “There is something disquieting about that man,” Allera said, watching him leave. “He’s an odd one, no doubt, but he’s good in a fight,” Dar said.  He slid off his pack, grimacing as the movement awakened new pains in his body.  She started toward him as soon as he betrayed feeling pain, but he waved her off with a hand.  “I’m fine,” he insisted.  “Varo may not be as gentle as you are, but he gets the job done.”She looked at him critically.  “By the gods, you do seem to be able to take a beating.”“I get plenty of practice,” Dar said, cracking his back.  “How’s the captain?”They looked over at where Talen was recovering his sword from where one of the ogres had dropped it.  Allera had healed him, but he still looked like a mess, with his clothes torn and soiled, his shifting black armor dull with accumulated blood and dirt.  He looked like a man who’d been crawling around through tunnels, battled giant spiders, and then been pounded several times to within an inch of his life by a mob of bloodthirsty giants. “He will be fine... physically, at least,” Allera said, softly.  “What you did... it was crazy,” Dar said.  “Walking into the melee like that.”She turned back to him.  “Talen was down.  I did what I had to do,” she said.  “I don’t suppose you would understand that.”They shared a look that lasted for several seconds, then Dar bent down and recovered his pack.  “No, I suppose not,” he finally said.  He walked over to where Varo had been checking the bodies of the ogres.  Each of them had carried a bulging sack which he was in the process of searching as the fighter walked up.  “Anything good?” Dar asked. The cleric held up a wheel of cheese that the fighter could clearly smell from five feet away, even over the stench of dead ogres.  “Depends on how you define ‘good’, for the most part,” the cleric said.  “But I have detected several magical auras, and considerable mundane treasures that might interest you, assuming that you can find additional space to carry them.”  He looked meaningfully at the fighter’s bulging pack, already laden with extra weapons and a considerable weight of gold ore. “You let me worry about that, my friend,” the fighter said, grabbing the nearest sack. “We should get moving,” Talen said, coming over to them.  “Those spiders, or the wererats, may follow us up here at any moment.”“There are several passages that look like they might lead elsewhere,” Aelos said, joining them from where he’d been investigating the far side of the cavern.  “They are tight, but at least it looks like more crawling isn’t necessary for once.”  The cleric looked pale, but his right hand seemed to be more or less intact. “This won’t take long,” Dar said, admiring a small-sized silver helmet with a garnet set upon the brow.  That ended up in his pack, which was already bulging with more material than it had been intended to carry. “It is not a trivial exercise, captain,” Varo added.  “We have already found numerous magical items in the dungeon that have greatly added to our capabilities.  If these ogres had any items that may enhance our chances for survival, it would be foolish to leave them.” “All right then, but quickly,” Talen said, recognizing the logic of the cleric’s statement. In and among some disgusting miscellany—including the corpses of at least two adventurers—they found an assortment of valuable items.  Varo’s detect magic allowed them to sort out the items that possessed magical auras.  Those included a longsword, half a dozen arrows in a leather quiver, three potions in crystal vials, a short, battered crowbar of lusterless gray metal, an arcane scroll in an ivory case, a spellbook that was almost entirely ruined by fire, a set of boots with a bright green trim, and a clerical mantle that bore the sigil of Orcus. “Wow, there’s a lot of stuff here,” Dar said, once it had all been gathered together.  The fighter had helped himself to several other jeweled items and some gold pieces, but there was still a fairly large heap of less valuable items, including some masterwork weapons and armor, that they could not carry with them.“Ill-gotten wealth,” Aelos said.  But he accepted three small metal flasks from Varo.“I believe that these contain blessed water,” Varo said.  “It would seem to be most appropriate that you carry them.”Aelos nodded and put the flasks in his pouch.  Dar drew the longsword and admired its flawless blade.  “Elven make, if I don’t miss my guess,” he said.  He tested the blade with a bit of leather throng, and found it to be razor-sharp.  He started to fit the scabbard to his swordbelt, but hesitated.  For a moment, he looked down at the sword already there, part of its blade visible through the battered and ancient scabbard.  He’d lost the sword that had originally come with that scabbard, absorbed by the dung monster.  The marshal’s sword, Valor, was ill-suited to him; Varo had told him that the weapon was aligned to Law, and each time he had used it, it had taken something from him, drawing a piece of his own essence into it.  Dar shook his head as if to clear it.  It was just a sword.  And in any case, he was finding that he preferred the big club he’d been using, and he had a few other weapons still in reserve.  Before he had to use Valor again.     “You need a secondary weapon, captain,” he said, coming over to Talen.  “That dagger won’t do you well enough, if you lose your blade again.  And there might be situations where you don’t need that beacon of a blade alerting every foe within a league that we’re coming.”The captain’s expression betrayed suspicion for a moment, but then he nodded.  “Thanks,” he said, taking the elven blade.  The group was rapidly preparing to depart.  None of them could use the arcane items, so Varo took them for safekeeping.  The cleric also took the other assorted items that radiated magic, at least until they had more time to probe their function later.  Allera had found a ceramic pot containing antitoxin, which she’d added to her own healing kit.  Also notable were some flasks that sloshed with lamp oil. “Those will be useful if we encounter those trolls again,” Talen said, dividing the flasks out between them.  Dar took the quiver with the magical arrows, and found that the space inside the leather case was far roomier than what it looked able to hold from the outside, with slots that could hold hundreds of arrows. “Magic,” he said, slinging the case over his shoulder without further reflection.  His gaze lingered on the heap of discarded treasure, which contained armor and weapons that would have been worth a month’s pay, if not more.  The others had already gathered by the mouth of one of the narrow passages on the far side of the room. “You’re already carrying a small fortune, mercenary,” Talen said.  “Let’s get going.”They chose the larger of the two crevices, which split into two passages at its end.  Talen led them into the left fork, which appeared to be slightly wider, but as they pressed onward it rapidly narrowed into a tight squeeze that forced them to move ahead in single file, their bodies turned sideways.  Dar, bringing up the rear, had to take off his pack and drag it after him.  The uneven ceiling was a good eight feet above them, so Aelos was able to hold his staff aloft, clearly illuminating the way ahead.  Not that they could see that far; the rough passage twisted and turned, limiting how far ahead they could see.  As they pressed onward, they could smell an ugly odor on the air that grew stronger as they continued, until it overpowered even the stench of death and blood that clung to each of them.  It was the heady smell of rot and decay, a smell that Varo and Dar were familiar with from the ghoul chamber in the complex above.  Talen looked back at Aelos, who was just behind him.  The cleric nodded and lifted his staff high, grasping his holy symbol with his other hand.  The captain, holding his new elvish sword, turned and continued to probe forward. “This is getting tight,” Dar huffed, as his armored torso snagged where the gap between the irregular stone walls of the passage narrowed to barely two feet.  “If something jumps us in here, we’re screwed.”Allera, just ahead, looked back at him, and lifted her finger to her lips. “Talen says there’s another larger cavern up ahead,” Varo’s voice came back to them.  “Be ready...”As Talen entered the chamber, Aelos’s light revealed it to be another irregular cavern.  The place was shaped like a giant “X”, with narrowing arms that included numerous tight crevices like the one they had just traveled.  The cavern was more spacious at the center of the “X”, although the contents of the room made it seem smaller than it was. The place was crowded with heaps of refuse.  The identity of the contents of the noisome heaps were evident from the foul odors that dominated this place.  Scattered among the heaps of rotting organic material, the light glinted off of half-buried metal, or the dirty white of old bones.  Small insects were everywhere, and Talen’s boots crackled on the carapaces of tiny beetles as he left the passage. “This place smells similar to a chamber we encountered above,” Varo said, as he followed Aelos warily out of the passage.  “The denizen of that place was an indestructible creature that we called the ‘dung monster’.   I would recommend that we...”But before he could offer his suggestion, the nearest rubbish heap stirred.  A long tendril emerged from the mass, twisting around Talen and lifting him off his feet before he or his companions could react.</blockquote>

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