The rustling of the journal brought an amused huff to William’s lips, though the ghoul mercenary humorlessly shoved it back down before it could escape. The situation that he and Rayse were in wasn’t exactly the type that brooked much in the way of humor. Besides, while the plane's inherent magic allowed all intelligent creatures within it to communicate verbally, an effect that some higher-up wittily named the All-Tongue, such understanding did not translate to written form. He'd come across hundreds of languages during his time in the Nameless City, all equally as meaningless to him as Althanas' common scrawl was to those language's writers. William had no doubt that his fresh follower was currently baffled by his meaningless script, and he felt no remorse over the fact. After all, it did keep him quiet, which was something that William found to be priceless in this situation.
Strangely though, William thought as he scanned the depressed grey rubble outside his hiding spot, Rayse wasn’t the only one keeping quiet in the Warrens. On any given day there were a dozen factions warring for control of territory within the broken avenues and twisted passages that made up the Warrens. The various packs or tribes or whatever they called themselves could be found everywhere in the Warrens, whooping war cries and clashing crudely hammered blades with one another in an orgy of violence and territorial chest beating. Add on to that the fact that the Warrens itself was a chaotic mess countless stones grinding themselves to oblivion as the mass constantly compacted and shifted and silence was almost an unknown in the echoing venues.
Since the word had been passed that he’d been hunting their leader, William hadn’t thought anything strange about how the members of the Broken Thorn Paws had all pulled back into a defensive position within their lair. It was the only sensible thing for Vreela to have commanded from his minions, though it hadn’t done him any good in the end, but it was one of the few times that William remembered seeing a claimed area of the Warrens entirely abandoned. But now that he stopped to think about it, aside from the fresh meat who had no real sense of what was going on in the place, William couldn’t remember seeing anyone other than himself and his new companion prowling the Warrens’ passages.
A faint stirring at the edges of his vision told him that his assumption wasn’t quite correct. Something was amiss in the Warrens, that much William knew from the general atmosphere that was slowly trickling into the ghoul’s brain, but after what he’d done to Deckard the liches themselves couldn’t keep the zombie boss’s men from locking onto William’s scent and hunting him down. In fact, William noted as he bent and sifted the chalky dust beneath him through his fingers, someone had already passed by their hiding spot at least three times in the short duration while he was retrieving the key from Rayse. Trackers had a tendency to disappear or go mad while pursuing prey through the Warrens, so if Deckard was going to give any one of his minions the task of tracking William down, he wouldn’t settle for anything less than the best.
“Brellneriliscint,” William hissed, the name sliding from his withered lips like a curse.
“Eh?” Rayse asked, raising his head from the spidery scrawled pages.
“Brellnerilliscint is Deckard’s best tracker and he’s been by here recently,” William stood and wiped the dust from his hands. “More than once from the looks of it.”
“So we should probably be making tracks towards your real hideout then?” Rayse grumbled, snapping the journal shut and tucking it safely away in the lip of his ratty trousers. “Well?”
William shot him an annoyed look but nodded nonetheless for Rayse to follow him only to put a hand up as he cocked his head to the side, straining to pick up the sounds playing at the edges of his senses. “Damn all the hells,” he cursed, realizing that there was something just around the bend that had picked up on his and Rayse’s exit from the hideaway and was now on the move towards them. Wasting no more time, William turned and bolted further into the thick mist filling the Warrens, pausing only long enough to give his companion the signal to follow.
The two ghouls flight through the Warren’s mazelike passages frustrated William to no end. He knew that, alone, he could have easily evaded Brellnerilliscint and made it quickly back to his shelter. But the mists rolled thickly through the Warrens today and he knew that Rayse wouldn’t have adapted to them yet, fresh as he was. Unwilling to just bolt into the mist and leave Rayse stranded, William was forced to slow down, a constraint Brillnerilliscint wasn’t burdened by.
By the time the two of them had passed through the Streets of Cracked Angels, named for the tattered menagerie of stone celestials lining the hundred yards or so of this particular piece of the Warrens, William knew that they wouldn’t make it back to his haven before Deckard’s men caught up to them. The realization wasn’t pleasant, but there was little that William could do about it, burdened as he was with Rayse's presence. And so, instead of continuing on the path towards his haven, William ducked into one of the Warren’s innumerable side passages in the hopes that he could potentially lose Brellnerilliscint in the chaos lying just outside the Warrens’ more stable pathways. Unfortunately, luck didn’t cast its fickle eye upon William that day, and the particular passage that he chose petered out after only a few winding turns, further movement being the victim of the recent arrival of a fresh pile of shattered brick and crumbling mortar.
As if on cue, a rough voice hit the two ghouls, sounding like nothing more than thick charcoal rubbing against rough stone. “Nowhere left to run Gor’Havah?” the voice rasped. Rayse spun to face the voice’s massive owner, but William was less eager to do so, knowing exacty what he would find. Brellnerilliscint’s thick boar-like visage stared blankly at the two of them, an thick-tusked emotionless slate over which the ghouls’ eyes slid like oil. Maintaining a solid focus on the tracker’s bristly four-armed form was an effort, as if the mind didn’t want to register the creature’s existence. Apparently, if Brellnerilliscint was to be believed, it was a trait that all of his species possessed, a trait which had allowed them to become the dominant species on his originating plane of existence.
William gritted his teeth with a hiss and tightened his grip on the haft of his warscythe. This wasn’t going to be pleasant.
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