Several Days, 623 HK: Wherein Brother Abràkus and young Dīad keep low to avoid the attentions of Torgor Gonth guards and decide to explore the extent of the underground passage that delivered them from the walls of Dirynayna Dyada.

Continued from The Chapel of Abràkus.

Day 1, 623

Ōded and Gaston lay on the vine-tangled ground weak from their wounds and delirious with fever. Abràkus and Dīad took turns looking over the crumbled stone walls; through the leaves a simian patrol marched across the wind-shorn fields interrogating farmers and slaves. The staff-wielder growled as he talked, and both apes and Uren cowered before him. Soon, the guards moved to further fields to continue their search for the fugitives.

During the day Dīad fetched water from the river and managed to forage a good haul of fruits from the surrounding forest. After eating, they determined that they would not be able move their feverish comrades, and so fashioned a spider-thread sling and lowered each into the shaft. Following down the peg ladder, they built a small fire in the escape corridor and rested the evening, night, and well into morning.

The next day showed no improvement in the condition of Ōded and Gaston and so the two decided to explore their surroundings. Creating some torches they explored backward along the passage they had traveled to escape the walled city. Well into the darkness they found a series four rotted doors. Behind the first door a corridor teeming with rats led back to a subterranean culvert and a dark pool of water. Searching the root-curtained edges of the chamber, Abràkus spotted some crates floating in the pool. Further investigation discovered that the pool was filled with wax-sealed dark glass bottles. Opening the bottles, they found a dark syrupy substance that smelled and tasted loamy. They poured some on the ground to no effect, and offered some to the rats who did not seem interested. In all, Dīad was able to pull thirty of the bottles from the dark pool using his strange powers.

The next two chambers contained old beds and numerous roots cascading down the stone walls. In the second of these rooms, the bed was overturned against the door as a barricade. In the barricaded room they found an iron dagger and some bronze trinkets among Yrūn remains. The fourth rotted door revealed a twisting staircase to a lower level, so the two returned to check on their sick companions.

Finding their sick fellows unchanged, the two decided to climb the shaft to the old mill and experiment with the dark bottled liquid in the sunlight. Climbing the peg ladder they poured some on the ground, on a leaf, and over some seeds pulled from foraged fruit. The leaf began to grow root-hairs and soon the ground was erupting in leaf sprouts and small mushrooms. The bottles, they determined, contained a magical fertilizer. Descending back to the corridor, Dīad tried some of the liquid in the dark and found that plants would grow there also, but they would be colorless and limp.

The final door opened onto a turning staircase which soon ended in a jam of old furniture and thick woody roots. Hacking with his sword, Abràkus chopped through the old furniture and squeezed his way onto the remainder of the stairs. The stairs ended in a flooded room with thick roots descending from the ceiling like columns. Abràkus reached into the water and withdrew a skull which he tossed back with a small prayer. The two waded through the submerged remains to a door on the far side. Chopping through the door they found a submerged figure beneath the water’s surface. Unlike the skeletons they’d found to this point, this one was a cadaver with a hint of life, similar to the one in the mountain crypt. Abràkus examined the corpse for a time before returning the dead woman to her watery grave. An exhaustive search of the larger room found many rusted weapons, some silver trinkets, a bronze ring with an opaque blue stone, and an odd bronze blade with the heft of an axe.

Returning to the upper corridor, the two spied a creature at the passage’s end picking around the bodies of their companions. The two charged forward, with Dīad stopping to envelope the baboon which his strange powers. The baboon shrieked and wrestled with the invisible force around him as Abràkus rushed forward with his drawn sword. Abràkus hacked at the creature, which snarled and howled as the sword bit into its flesh. The baboon reaches clawed at Abràkus, knocking him unconscious in two blows. Diad, alone versus the wounded ape moved closer and using his strange powers hacked at the monster with the bronze blade. After much fighting and at least one claw finding Diad, the baboon collapsed to the ground. The young Dīad used the blade to finish the baboon, noticing then in the failing light from the shaft above that the blade seemed to be etched with the baboon’s blood.

Continued in Worms in the Earth.

Characters

• Abràkus = 2 CPs
• Dīad = 2 CPs

Played 20 Jan 2006