TIME August 14th, morning (Day 38) LOCATION Beyond the carved door, Borthanza
BACKGROUND:
A recovered meteorite fragment, a recessed hallway, and – waiting at the end of it – a door unlike anything else in the temple.
WHAT HAPPENED
The hallway ended in a stone door covered in bas-relief carving – hands reaching outward, illithids being chased by strange humanoids, a towering tentacled figure looming over chained captives, an illithid and an elf face to face, another laid on what looked like a bed or a coffin while a humanoid figure bent over it, falling stars, columns of people marching toward a mountain.
Krusha spent the better part of an hour tracing the script beneath the images with soot and salt before it resolved into readable text:
Qualith, a tactile illithid writing system. What it said didn’t improve anyone’s mood – when the tears fall from the sky, burning the ground… the sleeper will awaken… let this be a warning.
The last word had worn thin along the door’s lower edge, its final letters rubbed to nothing under what must have been generations of clawed hands tracing the same lines by touch. What Krusha could feel of the original text still said warning.
What centuries of grimlock hands had left behind said only war.
Beside the door, a stretch of wall was covered edge to edge in tiny scratched lines, thousands of them, packed too tight to have been anything but deliberate.
Krusha did the arithmetic out loud before anyone asked him to: one mark a day, for close to 500 years.
Dire bats had other ideas about visitors. One dropped without warning out of the dark and tore into Ash before anyone saw it coming; Raven and Ash cut it down between them, though not before it had fed.
Past the bats, past strands of larval silk hanging sticky but harmless from the ceiling, the corridor opened into a chapel and dining hall that had clearly served as a grimlock nesting site for a very long time – long stone tables with no benches, stone pillars, and the remains of a font and a water feature stripped of whatever furnishing had once made the room recognisably elven, murals on the walls faded almost past reading where the stone hadn’t simply chipped or grown over.
The air hung thick with the smell of loamy compost, slime and mould, curdling under a worse reek of ammonia, decay, blood and rot that caught at the back of the throat; water dripped somewhere unseen, the same drip the grimlocks used to echo-locate by sound alone.
Insects scattered from Ash’s light into tangled clumps of fungus and hanging tendril overhead.
The dead told most of the story on their own.
Villagers, an elf, baboons – impaled upside down on wooden stakes near a raised dais, stripped mostly to bone by whatever fed there regularly – lay alongside older debris: scattered waterskins and bamboo pots, scraps of hardened leather armour shredded through by claws, and older bones still, bleached and forgotten in the corners, belonging to neither villager nor elf.
Whatever this room had answered to before the grimlocks moved in, it hadn’t gone down easily either.
Not everything in the room was dead.
One shape further along the wall took a long moment to resolve into anything at all – a grimlock standing motionless, its mottled grey hide blending so completely with the stonework that it nearly went unnoticed passing within a few feet of it.
Another, further back near the inner door, pressed a scrap of torn flesh to its own mouth before running clawed fingers slowly over the carved pictographs – reading them, or doing something close enough to reading that the distinction hardly mattered.
Through a second door, marked with the same warning – this one intact, unworn – they found the source: a grimlock, heavily pregnant, giving birth attended by another of her kind, a beetle-like scarab pressed into the newborn’s flesh the moment it was born – the same kind of thing they’d find later fused into every grimlock’s chest, feeding it a black, slagma-derived essence a dose at a time in exchange for whatever else it took root of.
Ash didn’t hesitate.
A fireball ended the birth, the mother, the child, and the ritual together in one blast, the flash lighting up a huge statue at the chamber’s far end – another likeness of the same watchful, hooded figure from the hall above – before the screaming stopped for good.
The dais beneath it was carved with a whole menagerie worked into the stone: grimlocks, snakes, leopards, crocodiles, apes, elves, and things that weren’t any of those, shown sleeping, fighting, dancing, smiling, horrified – a full range of moods nobody had time to make sense of just then.
It also woke the rest of the temple.
Cylinders of a raw, potent essence – something like coraman crystal energy, but rawer and stronger – sat in racks nearby, most of them long since drained; before anyone could get a proper look, the rasping and clicking of dozens more grimlocks began pouring in from holes in the walls, the ceiling, even the ground itself.
The Agents backed into a corner and made a stand, Ash’s fire and Raven’s blades cutting down wave after wave as more poured in behind them.
The corridors themselves seeming to close in around them as they fought, walls and passages a fraction narrower than they’d been on the way in, as if the rock itself were healing shut behind whatever had leaked into it.
A larger one – a leader, judging by how the others deferred – scuttled across the ceiling directing the assault, chittering the same phrase over and over:
the sleeper will awaken… let this be a war…
With the tide showing no sign of stopping, the only way left was forward, deeper into the temple.