Coldest Trail, Part 4
EPISODE 2, Part 4
ART: GERMINUS, THOMAS; Source: New York Public Library
The stain of Ambition
The halls keep narrowing. Things growing more and more dilapidated.
Fewer remains, fewer signs of battle, but still marks of passage. The leyline is familiar; i feel the pulsation of magic in the light and it glints off glass. It rises above the fire in these halls. I feel it like a familiar headache. It feels welcoming, but i don’t know why it would. Beyond it is blackness. An abyssal whisper that i cannot touch and cannot escape.
There is still power here, being summoned at the hand of something. Not that alpha beast in the woods, no. This is a different sentience.
**
The halls opened up!
I have found it, i am certain.
Water dabbles somewhere in a large grotto, marked and clearly used for rest and work by past travelers who came to this awful place. Several corridors connect here; all seem to lead to darkness. Some are entirely closed off by rubble. Stones have been placed, a bit chaotically, in concentric forms to block passage of others. But at the center is the real wonder.
Down here, under who knows how many feet of frozen slag and desolation, is a pristine statue of a woman. THE woman. The one in the legend that sparked my mission. The one who drove that priest to embrace darkest evil.
Not a mud sculpture; not stone. She is carved of crystal
Flowers. Polished stones. Bones. Fabrics. Even some small gems, though i imagine these are hard to keep in place. Gifts. tribute laid out beneath her. In her hands is a small tuning rod. Its protocol to narrate this stuff, because i am about to jostle that rod and if it leaves me a charred streak on the cave walls, this transmission will at least have a chance to save the next one hired to risk their life
[shuffle sound, slight struggle, then a tuning fork pitch note that reverberates]
Someone is whispering.
The tone. It is the divining rod. I strike it
[strikes another tuning tone.]
[there is a reverse-tracked whisper underneath it]
This must be it. This must be the final section. Time to start exploring each corridor, one by one.
[steps echo down a corridor]
[distant frenetic clattering]
This hallway has more markings depicting what must be Farrel. But also this strange long monster. Something. Tentacles? I don’t know where this is coming from. It’s totally alien to me. But if that depiction means there is another ..**
[roar]
**
**
[heavy breathing]
**
Don’t know what else i could have done. The tuning rod woke something up. It came through from one of the closed corridors, would have surprised me if not fo the movement of debris and the noise
It’s eyes were empty. Just voids
It gripped my arm. Even as I had it weakened and warded, it bit through. A bite that screams at you. A bite that erodes skin from teeth at the touch
Strange? I might not be making sense. I lost a lot of blood.
In the twilight of this cave, lit only by my sputtering discarded torch, the death beast started to devour me. Reveling in its final incantation of necropotence it neglected to stop me.
Reflection spells to be immensely valuable with two groups: egotists, and the subterranean eaters of the dead.
Time to bandage up. Not home yet.
TO BE CONTINUED …