TIME August 14th (continuing) LOCATION The lift chamber, Borthanza
BACKGROUND:
A hidden door had finally opened onto some kind of lift mechanism, with a flood of grimlocks bearing down on the only way through it.
WHAT HAPPENED
Ash made it through the doorway first with two grimlocks right on her heels – her last blast of flame crisped both before they got further than the threshold.
Raven and Krusha held the line behind her, but the borrowed strength from the construct fight ran out on Krusha at the worst possible moment.
Holding the doorway a moment too long, he was struck down mid-retreat – Raven hauled him bodily through as the surge hit, standing over him to fend off the first wave alone.
One grimlock barrelled straight into her and went down under a well-placed grab.
She flung it bodily at Ash’s feet rather than waste a blade finishing it.
A second slipped past to snarl over Krusha, still barely conscious on the floor – Ash cut it down where it crouched while Krusha, gambling everything on one last desperate invocation, called on KemerLexi’s aid and came back from the brink himself.
Between the three of them, they cut down whatever else made it through before the door finally ground shut for good, sealing the last of the grimlocks outside.
The chamber they’d fought their way into was circular, no obvious exit and no ceiling their light could find.
They searched for a way out while Krusha worked what healing he could, and it was Ash who found it: a hairline groove running the full circumference of the floor, and beneath it, the faintest vibration in the stone.
The rumbling grew as they investigated. Moving to one side of the room to get a better look, the floor shifted under them – only a fraction, but enough to prove it wasn’t imagination – and their ears began to throb uncomfortably, the specific, unpleasant pressure of a dive rather than anything solid underfoot.
Then it properly began to move. The floor wobbled, then rose in earnest – the particular, stomach-dropping sensation of the upturn of a swing, ears popping a second time, differently, as it climbed.
Krusha hoisted Ash onto his shoulders so she could watch for the ceiling or any other way out, marks on the surrounding rock wall sliding steadily downward as proof they were climbing rather than imagining it – twenty-five feet of clearance, then twenty, then fifteen, everyone ducking on reflex at ten before the platform finally shuddered to a halt.
It was, very clearly, a lift, hauling them up through solid rock toward a destination none of them had chosen – and it wasn’t finished with them yet.
Three separate tests lit up on the wall, guarding whatever came next, an alarm somewhere close behind them climbing steadily in pitch as if counting down to something.
The first was etched right there on the wall:
5 + 5 + 5 = 550, plainly wrong, solvable only by redrawing a single line so the second plus became a four: 545 + 5 = 550.
The second wanted the same trick played straight, an equation built from one number used three times over until it balanced to 60: 55 + 5 = 60
The third was the cleanest of all – arrange the digits 2, 3, 4 and 5 with nothing but a plus and an equals sign into something that actually held true: 4 + 5 = 3 squared.
Raven solved them, working through the possibilities by scratching the figures out rather than staring at them, the last conundrum falling just as the alarm behind them resolved into words Krusha could pick out:
Reverse stasis initiated. Resuscitation stage five complete.
The passage beyond ended at a wall unlike anything else in the temple – a rippling, slime-slick membrane grown directly over what had clearly once been a doorway, cool air and a strobing light flickering from whatever lay past it.
Krusha and Raven hacked a way through by hand, and climbed into a corridor that no longer resembled a temple at all.
Something was waiting for them on the other side – 8′ of matted fur, canine snout, and gnarled claws, cloaked in the same eye-marked fabric the huecuva had worn, close enough in shape to the creature that had killed Crowe back on Pine Street that Raven froze for half a second before her instincts caught up with her.
This one was bigger, straighter, more symmetrical.
And it opened Raven up badly before Ash and Krusha’s combined assault dropped it, Krusha finishing it with a hand plunged straight into its chest.
Raven went down in the fight and came back up gasping under Krusha’s healing – a close one, closer than anyone wanted to admit out loud.
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- A second cloaked, eye-marked beast – bigger and more ‘finished’ than the one that killed Crowe – guarded the threshold into whatever this place actually is.
- ‘Resuscitation stage five complete’ – something, or someone, was just revived nearby.