Act I


As a whole, the group didn't exactly go clickity-click and start working together. A few barbs were shot back and forth and side-to-side, and everyone took part in it whether they were giving or receiving. After a few rounds, the barbs sank deep enough and started to contract, and where the Raiders did not click, they simply congealed together. After a while, a Watchman's stares and incessant throat clearing drove them down.

Two-by-two they went, two to each ladder. Even at what seemed like a quick pace, it took them almost fifteen minutes to get down to the bottom of the well, and by then the only light from above were a handful of distant, pitifully inadequate stars. What greeted them was an eight-walled chamber centered around an ancient, and very recently lit and stoked torch. Its four sides were each shaped like a stack of skull faces.

Across seven of the walls, ancient words were etched in; some crude, others so elegantly that it looked as if they'd been traced with a pen. Everything was written in the archaic tongue of Old Diamonic, but all the letters and glyphs were off somehow; as if literally turned sideways so that you could only recognize the language in the same way most people know that a gigantic wood-based plant is, probably, a tree. If you stared too long, the letters looked as if they might move. The only wall without these runes was instead dominated by a druidic seeming archway; three huge rectangular blocks shaped in the likeness of a doorway.

"Well," someone said; it didn't really even matter who, "Whoever put this together knew how to make it look cozy."

And on they went, into a darkness that literally felt old. It was a chilled, eldritch kind of darkness that looked like it'd host all sorts of horrible things with glowing, slit-shaped eyes -- something that probably caused a few skipped heartbeats the first time any of them exchanged looks with the phospher-eyed Half-Orc who, by hook, crook, or stupid luck, had snagged the map. Halfway down the hall, and the group stopped.

The light from the torch behind them literally stopped with them, in a perfectly set line. Undeterred, hand-carried torches and lanterns were lit in its place, but even their light seemed almost feeble and strangely detailed down here. As if the darkness wasn't bad enough, it was also becoming more and more humid and cold, and it didn't take long before each of them noticed an unpleasant smell that, at this point, was simply too complex to pin a single metaphor to.

They arrived at last to the end of the first corridor, and there they stopped. It forked, and with a little squinting, Aeraul was able to confirm that both of the new hallways forked as well. The original expedition had gone to the left, then the right. It fell to someone, anyone, to ask the obvious question.

"Which way now?"

...and it fell to everyone to decide.