TIME August 13th, afternoon (continuing) LOCATION The mountain wall, Borthanza
BACKGROUND:
A carved hole in the rock face, guarded by hostile vines and lit by a faint blue glow from somewhere deep inside – and something down there had already made its interest in the Agents very clear.
WHAT HAPPENED
Raven went in anyway.
The tunnel was strangely smooth, barely wide enough for her shoulders, and the deeper she crawled the more the bluish light ahead was interrupted by moving silhouettes.
Then came the sound – a rapid clicking, footsteps, claws on stone, closing fast.
She backed out at speed, and the vines nearly had her before she launched herself clear.
An elven head popped out of the hole moments later, followed by the rest of him – scrambling clear just ahead of a pursuing pack of grimlocks that boiled out after him.
The Agents cut them down as they emerged, one at a time through the narrow gap, while the elf held his own line against them with a drawn scimitar.
Once the last of the pursuers was dead, he gave the Agents a nod, sheathed his blade, and shifted – wings for arms, talons for feet, a hawk’s head where a man’s had been a moment before – and took to the sky heading south.
They camped in the overgrown courtyard that night, uneasy but undisturbed, aside from a distant flicker of torchlight on the ziggurat roof behind them.
Come morning, the choice was the cave over the temple, and Raven went in first, sliding down the tunnel into a cavern too large for her light to find the walls or ceiling – sheer stone rising into darkness overhead, the air thick with the reek of ammonia and the drip of water from somewhere far above.
Skittering noises carried out of the black passages bored into the rock on every side, never quite resolving into anything she could place – something cold and wet, somewhere; something dry and rough, somewhere else.
Krusha followed her down and found the floor told its own story: faint traces of a circular pattern and two rows of columns cut flush with the stone, worked rather than natural – something had built this space long before it became a cave, and been carved away since.
The cavern itself ran close to a hundred feet before the wall curved back to rough rock, lit only by patches of iridescent blue fungus glowing like the light from a television, thick with translucent insects and gnats; Raven took a sample for one of Sam’s vials in passing.
Following the smooth wall around, they found, at last, a heavy iron-and-rock meteorite fragment sitting in a scuffed and scorched depression in the cavern floor – recovered and carried toward a recessed hallway at the cavern’s edge, and whatever was waiting at the end of it.
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- A wild elf druid scout fled south by air – friendly, but with an agenda of his own.
- A recessed hallway at the cavern’s edge ends in a door unlike anything else in the temple – what it hides is still unknown.