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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr Midnight" data-source="post: 3808502" data-attributes="member: 69">Session 9 - Chapter 2 KNEE-DEEP IN THE DEADOnce more they breached the clearing and Arianna patiently searched the field for traps as they made their way across it. “The cave seems uninhabited,” Gerrit said. “Again.”Toufghar muttered under his breath as he spun his axe’s haft in his palm. “This is stupid. They’re never home and we keep wasting our time.”“It’s not a waste,” Arianna said. “We have to find the Tome, and this is the only way.”“I bet we don’t even have to find the Tome,” the half-orc grumbled.“There were definitely werewolves in the area, and recently. One moved quickly – here – within the last hour or so. I’ll bet it’s the sentry. He came and warned them, and now they’re ready.”Ashlyn unsheathed her sword and cracked her neck with a swift head-jerk. “So what’s the plan?”Thendrick stroked his chin and thought for a moment. “We go down. We should leave someone up here to defend the entrance. They may be trying to close us in.”Toufghar laughed. “Split up, we’ll be safer that way, right? We should stay together. We’re being hunted.”“We’ll leave Jade to guard the entrance,” said Arianna. Gerrit looked at her. “All alone? Are you sure?”“Not a bad idea,” Toufghar said. “She all but blocks the tunnel anyway, and she’s more n’ big enough to take on a group of werewolves.”“Yeah, but… Arianna, Jade doesn’t have silver-plated tee…”“She’ll be fine,” Arianna said curtly before entering the cave. Gerrit and Thendrick exchanged another look.Jade was left filling the mouth of the cave, facing outward. What with the shape of the rock around the cave, she somewhat resembled a monstrous turtle with a small mountain for a shell. The heroes descended carefully, as before, testing the rooms to their left and right as they went, listening for noises. There were none. They reached the inner den and unlike before, not a creature was within. Ashlyn gasped and pointed. The body they’d left behind, that of the mad nymph that Toufghar had crushed with a boulder, was gone. “Do you think she’s still around? Could she possibly have survived that?”Toufghar tilted the rock up and looked beneath. “Nope.”“How do you know?”He pointed and grinned. “Most of ‘er head’s still here.” It was true- the underside of the rock was still smeared with skull fragments, brain and hair. Arianna examined the few remains. “Her body was pulled free.” She traced a line of blood on the slick stone ground. “She was torn apart and eaten, right here. Spatter on the walls, some drips on the south end of the cavern, her corpse was picked clean and tossed… here.” Her torch illuminated the pit of bones. They glistened wetly in the light. “Knee-deep in the dead,” Thendrick whispered.Arianna squinted at him. “What?”“Nothing. Look, I don’t think there’s much chance of it but I think I should search the pit. ‘Anna, you guard the cave mouth and listen for Jade.” Arianna looked at the sorcerer suspiciously as he clambered over the rim of the pit and lowered himself into the pit. He quelled the waves of rising nausea as he pushed his foot down past the first few bones. A ribcage tumbled aside as it brushed his two hundred gold piece bullywug-skin boots. As the bones neared his knee he felt for the bottom and didn’t find it. He lost his balance and pitched forward, scrabbling for a grip on the rocks behind him but finding none. Thendrick hopped off his perch and plunged into the grisly pit. The bones clattered around him as he fell in deeper than he’d guessed the bottom would be. This wasn’t knee-deep at all. With a splash, he was standing up to his neck in filthy skeletal corpses. Water had pooled in the pit at waist-level and he felt the cold, loathsome corpse-soup soak into his robes.  Thendrick was horrified beyond telling. The first time he’d seen the pit, he’d had to turn and lean on a wall to keep from throwing up. Now, very keenly aware of the slimy clicking of the bones all around him, nausea was a distance behind him. What he felt was more like the first tickle of real madness.  He shut his eyes and concentrated, employing the skills he’d learned as a spellcaster to keep his mind focused and alert.Ashlyn called to him. “By Urso, are you okay Thendrick?”“Heh… s’cold,” he muttered through clenched teeth. He got to work on casting a detect magic spell- it gave him something to think about other than the bones. When he was finished, a dim yellowish light appeared to his eyes as coming from beneath the bones, roughly seven feet to his left. Thendrick waded there, making a terrible sloshing, crumbling noise that echoed through the cavern as he did. He reached out and felt with his hands, trying to ignore the bones he recognized by feel (mandible, patella, tarsals) and concentrate on finding the magic item in the pit. His hands fell upon a floppy leather shape and he clutched at it, then moved back to the lip of the pit. With Gerrit’s help he climbed out. His robe was ruined: immersion in the brownish water had turned it into a mucous-slicked horror. Arianna approached. “What did you find? Let me see.” Her eyes seemed to bug slightly, but that might have been a trick of the torchlight.Thendrick opened the leather satchel and looked inside, hiding its contents from Arianna. “Ahh, we’ve finally made some money on this little excursion. We’ve got quite a few gold pieces here, and at least one large gem. Here’s a ring… that’s our magic item.” He held it up. It was made of clear glass, with no markings on it at all.Ashlyn, looking over Thendrick’s shoulder, said “Hey… a book! Is that it?”Arianna snatched at the satchel. “Let me see.” Thendrick quickly grabbed the book out and held it away from her. It was dry, very luckily above the water table of the charnel pit. Its cover was without a title but a metal crest on its front had a small, clear banner reading Von Zarovich.Tension mounted in the cavern. Thendrick and Arianna were staring each other in the eye, squared off. Each mouthed words- Thendrick’s arcane, Arianna’s divine. They were preparing to cast. Gerrit shifted his weight nervously from foot to foot. Toufghar and Ashlyn, having no idea that Arianna should not be trusted, watched all this in confusion. “Uh,” Ashlyn said, eyes flicking between the sorcerer and the druid, “What are you two doing?”All at once, Arianna lunged at the book and her opened palm gushed forth a volume of water. It splashed over the book just as Thendrick finished his spell, turned and ran from the cavern. He ran so fast that he appeared to be a blur, leaving drops of pit-water suspended in the air behind him. Gerrit, whose boots of striding and springing made him almost as fast as the spell of haste that Thendrick had cast upon himself, took off for the tunnel as well. Arianna screeched in alarm as the book moved away from her at a frightening speed. She had to destroy it, just had to, Uncle Strahd had told her to and that was that, she must. She would kill to do it. She ran up the tunnel after Gerrit and Thendrick, screaming for them to give her that book. Toufghar and Ashlyn, left behind, didn’t even have time to ask each other if they knew what was going on. They just ran up the tunnel as well. They didn’t want to be left behind. Not here.Coming up RUN FOR COVER.</blockquote>

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