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: 4198788" data-attributes="member: 143">I'm traveling for business tomorrow, so consider this the weekend cliffhanger.  <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=":)" /> * * * * * Chapter 32TREADING NEW GROUNDIt was not especially cold, but Allera could not suppress a shiver. They had come by express invitation, this time, but the vault still felt like an alien and unwelcome place.  The colored striations in the walls flickered oddly in the light of their torches, and the noises they made were either muted by the pressing weight of all that strange rock, or caught by some strange acoustic quirk and echoed back at them, distorted until they sounded like the wail of some tormented soul.  As a result, there had not been much conversation, beyond the information that they needed as they pushed deeper into the complex. Thus far, they had had a relatively easy time of it.  The sudden opening of the vault hatch had nearly caught them off guard, but Dar had quickly ordered their companions to take hold of something solid.  When the hatch had opened, and the gathered water had sloughed down through the opening, Secundus had slipped and would have fallen through, but for a quick action by Kiron.  The young knight had ended up as mud-slicked and soaked through as the rest of them, by the time they all made it down to the floor of the cavern below, but he looked no less determined for it.  They all knew what was at stake. They all had an idea, but only Allera truly grasped the magnitude of what awaited them.  Only she had confronted the Ravager, and even within its prison she had gotten a glimpse of its reality.  Only a glimpse, but she still had nightmares about that which Amurru had shown her. She shivered again.  Maricela saw, and said, “Are you all right, healer?”Allera nodded.  “I’m fine.”  She turned her attention back to the chamber that Dar and the others were searching.  Behind them, the stone along the left wall was knitting slowly back together, and Allera knew that as soon as it was fully restored, the hissing barrier of brilliant energy would come back to life.  This was as far as they had gotten into the complex, last time.  During that visit, a pair of illusory demiliches had emerged from the walls and attacked them, knocking most of her companions into a catatonic state.  Amurru had appeared to her for the first time, then.  The memory of that encounter was still not a pleasant one. This time, there had been no illusions to threaten them.  Thus far they had encountered no guardians at all, although they had found some dark smears in the room of steel pillars.  The smears could have been anything, but Allera remembered their desperate battle against dread wraiths in that room on their first visit here.  Apparently the wraiths, if they had in fact been restored, had not been enough to stop the raiders that they tracked. Their had been no other traces of their quarry, but there was only one way that they could have gone.  The open vault doors indicated the way, but the trail had come to an apparent dead-end in this room.  The only distinctive feature of the room—other than the energy field—was a set of three stone biers set into deep niches in the walls ahead and to either side.  The remains of the long-dead warriors that had rested on those biers lay on the floor amidst a tumble of ancient armor and weapons, as if hastily searched and then discarded.     Zethas, the scout, spoke up from the far alcove.  “I think there’s something under this stone block,” he said to the others.  “And there’s some scrapes here that suggest it was moved recently.”  Qatarn gestured, and the three guardsmen hastened to assist the wiry Elemite.There was a flare of blue light behind them, as the walls completed their self-repair and the energy barrier erupted back into light.  “Our escape is cut off,” Selaht commented.  Allera glanced at the monk; their newest ally was still an enigmatic figure, who spoke little.  Her eyes were continually drawn to the intricate tattoos that covered his hands and wrists, the patterns vanishing up into the sleeves of his loose robe.  When he clenched his fists, the drawings moved and twisted almost like actual flames.  Maricela was staring back at the barrier.  “How long has this all been here?” she asked.  “Thousands of years?” “This whole place is one big trap,” Allera found herself saying.  “To keep the Ravager in.”Dar and Kiron had joined the guardsmen, and together they were able to move the heavy stone slab.  As the stone ground forward, it revealed a shaft that descended into another chamber below.  An odd radiance of shifting colors could be seen glinting off the walls, but they could not discern its source from their current location. Dar shone his torch on the walls of the shaft; there were no footholds or rungs to facilitate descent.  He nodded at Zethras, who was already digging out his ropes, knotted at regular intervals to allow for an easier climb.  The heavy stone slab made for a convenient anchor, and he looped the rope around it, tossing both ends down into the shaft.   Letellia rose up off the ground, and drifted through the air toward the shaft.  For a moment it looked like she intended to go on ahead of them, as she had before, but Dar stood and moved to block her.  “Scouts first,” he said. Allera came forward to join them.  She looked at Letellia, hovering beside the opening.  For a moment, she thought that the sorceress would defy her husband, and push forward despite him.  But finally, Letellia nodded incrementally, and drifted back a few paces. While Dar and the others attended to the shaft, the healer followed the sorceress.  For a moment, there was an awkward silence between them; Allera had many questions, but it was obvious that Letellia was in no mood to discuss what had happened to her.  “Once we rest, I can heal the injury done to your throat,” she finally said. “Do not bother.  It is part of what I am, now.”“Why... why didn’t you contact us earlier, Letellia?  We tried repeatedly to find you... after, but even discern location did not reveal your location.  We had feared you dead.”“I was dead.  My rebirth was... unpleasant, but it allowed me to find a new purpose.”  She hesitated, and an almost human empathy passed across her face.  “I do not blame you, Allera, none of you, for what happened to me.  I made the choice that brought me to my fate.”Allera’s response was interrupted by Dar.  “We’re going down,” he said.  Most of the soldiers had already descended on the ropes, and Aldos was helping Petronia as the knight lowered herself into the shaft.  Allera looked back up at Letellia, but the sorceress was already moving, drifting quickly over the shaft before dropping like a stone, narrowly avoiding the descending knight. “Are you all right?” Dar asked her, as she came over to him.  He glanced at the mouth of the shaft.  “Did she reveal anything more?”“She has been through a lot.  If we had more time, I would try to help her...”Dar nodded in understanding.  “After.”  He handed one of the ropes to Allera, and took the other end himself.  The two of them, the last to descend, dropped into the shaft, moving down quickly hand-over-hand to where the others waited below. The shaft deposited them into a wide hall that extended to their left and right.  The walls of the hall glimmered with reflected light in a range of colors, making them seem almost alive.  “What is that?” Allera asked, stepping away from the rope to look down the hall to the right.  There was a glow shining there , almost blinding, a mélange of colors that was too bright to look at directly.    “Trouble,” Dar said.  Gesturing to Kiron to watch their backs, he and Allera headed down the hall to the right. “Look at the walls,” Allera said.  They had been etched, faintly, with letters in a runic script, forming words no more than a few inches high.  They covered the walls in long marches, from a few feet off the floor almost to the vaulted ceiling above.  “They are names,” Letellia said.  “This place is a memorial of a civilization long dead.”  She drifted forward above them, her feet a good three feet off the ground.“How do you know that?” Dar growled.  “I can hear their silent cries,” Letellia replied, her voice distant, her eyes fixed on some place far ahead.  Several of the soldiers shared grim looks, but no one spoke. Zethas and Selaht, scouting ahead, were approaching the end of the passage ahead.  Allera could now distinguish the source of the bright lights as a pair of scintillating globes.  Before them, the scout and monk were just vague black outlines. Zethas approached one of the spheres with caution, a hand raised to shelter his eyes, the other probing ahead of him like a blind man seeking the edge of a wall. “Do not touch them, on your lives,” Letellia’s voice sounded clearly.  The Elemite drew back his hand as if he’d been scalded.  She looked down at Dar.  “They are prismatic spheres, soverign barriers against all but the most powerful of magics.  Even a casual contact with the colors is almost certain death.”“I wonder what they are hiding?” Kiron asked. “It’s not our concern,” Dar said.  “I doubt that our friends are inside them, so we keep going.”  He gestured to Zethas, who turned away from the globe and pressed on.  Allera could see that the corridor turned to the left and continued; she hadn’t noticed earlier with the light from the spheres blinding her. “Stay close, nobody touch anything,” Qatarn cautioned his men.  From the looks on the faces of the guardsmen, the warning was unnecessary.  The passage continued for another twenty paces, the scrawl of names continuing around them, until they encountered another pair of alcoves, another two spheres.  There was a narrow space between them, and they could see an archway ahead that might have been an exit, so after a brief hesitation Dar gestured them forward.  Each of them passed warily through the gap, keeping their hands and weapons pressed close against their bodies, as far from the shifting lights as possible.  But the static barriers did not stir from their places, and within a few moments they were all through safely. “A dead end,” Kiron said, looking at the arch.  Once beyond the prismatic spheres they could see that it was blocked from top to bottom by a massive slab of stone.  “Zethas, check it out,” Dar said.  The scout started forward, but before he reached the arch there was a flicker in the air, a shimmering as though a bit of dust had gotten frozen in the light.  The scout drew back suddenly, and several of the others lifted weapons, but the flicker was gone as swiftly as it had come.  But for the barest instant, the outline of something had been there. “This place is cursed,” Tertius said, holding his sword in white-fingered hands.  “When I want your opinion, soldier, I will ask for it,” Qatarn barked.  “You are a man of the Watch, not a soothsayer or priest.”  But even though the centurion’s voice was level, all of them could feel the unease that radiated from this place like heat from a fire. Zethas looked back at Dar, who nodded back toward the arch.  Swallowing, the Elemite started forward again.  But he’d barely made it three steps when a grinding noise began, a sound like the world below them coming alive. “It’s moving,” Kiron said, pointing with his sword at the stone within the arch.  They could all see it, the slab slowly moving upward.  It revealed only more stone below, but kept rising.  Maricela moved to his side, her own eyes wide with expectation. “The way is being opened for us,” Letellia said.  “Or it’s a trap,” Aldos said. “We’ll find out soon enough,” Dar said.  He faced the slab, which kept rising, slowly but continuously.  “All we can do now is wait.”And so they waited.</blockquote>

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