Chapter 149: 8.12 – Descent into Tarin-Tiran

The secret door gave a click and swung open as Jhess pumped her fist in jubilation.

‘Further in?’ the rogue asked, a hopeful look on her face.

‘Great fortune and great danger await,’ Savra said, eyeing the coin in her palm.

‘Further in,’ Vance opined, with Drev agreeing a moment later.

‘Might as well,’ Robin said, following the will of the party. ‘But slowly. We’ve had a warning and it would be foolish to completely ignore it, even if it might be a trick.’

‘We’ll be fine,’ Jhess waved away the concern. ‘Between you and Savra we’ve got it covered.’

The seeress and the bard exchanged a skeptical glance, but follow close behind as the rogue began scouting ahead. Robin sent his familiar a mental directive to back Jhess up.

Robin glanced behind him and saw that Vance was wedging the secret door open. Good thought. Getting trapped in the dungeon was not the way any of them wanted this little expedition to go.

The corridor behind the secret door was much the same as the one that had led to the temple space. Or it was at first. Robin noticed several small veins of iridescent crystal beginning to grow in the walls around them. At first it was simply as if they had been growing in the cracks between blocks of stone, but soon small outcroppings of the stuff appeared, almost willy-nilly.

Jhess carefully chipped a bit free with one of her daggers after Drev cautiously scanned it with his senses and proclaimed it unlikely to explode.

‘It looks like the stuff growing out of those rats’ eyes,’ Robin said. ‘Maybe try not to cut yourself on it. It might take root.’

Rerebos stopped scratching at the exposed shiny immediately upon hearing that.. Robin bit his cheek to keep from laughing. Laughing at a dragon was not something one did, ever, and expect to escape unscathed.

The tunnel system still mirrored the layout of the city outside. It wasn’t a grid proper, but there was some suggestion of hallways and corridors, of streets and alleyways. They couldn’t see any of the city proper, as Robin might expect, which made him all the more certain that the shenanigans the dungeon was pulling were both extreme and dangerous.

He double-checked the markers they were leaving. Everything still seemed in place, both chalk marks and small scratches in the surrounding stone. And magic, when they could manage it.

‘I think we should have another [Mystic Mark] here, Drev,’ Robin called. ‘I can just barely make out the last one from here.’

Drev chanted a quick incantation and pointed his finger at the wall next to Robin. His magic glowed its usual purple-white, but this time the colour was echoed by a small outcropping of crystal near to Drev’s hand.

The mark appeared, but Robin was busy staring at the crystal. Had he imagined that? The thing had gone back to its regular glimmering self as soon as Drev finished the incantation and the mark appeared.

‘Did you see that?’

‘See what?’ Jhess asked. ‘Anything good?’

‘The crystal glowed the same colour as Drev’s magic,’ Robin explained, resisting the urge to reach out and prod it with a finger.

‘It doesn’t look any different than any of the others,’ Jhess complained after look at it for a minute. ‘Are you sure?’

‘No, I’m not. That’s why I asked if you’d seen it!’ Robin snapped.

‘Cast an illusion at it,’ the rogue suggested. ‘See if that does anything.’

It wasn’t a bad suggestion. Robin thought for a moment then conjured a small stature of a dancing mouse to hover in front of the small outcrop of crystal. Rerebos made an acquisitive cry and launched his cat-form at it, only to swoop through it as if it were not there. Because it wasn’t.

There was no reaction from the bit of crystal, however.

‘Must have been a trick of the light,’ Robin said, unconvinced.

‘Come on,’ Vance called. ‘The next location on the map just ahead! It should be just around that bend in the hall.’

The party moved ahead, eager to finally have something to do aside from track their progress and be paranoid about losing their way. They moved perhaps a bit faster than they should have, and it was only a warning from Rerebos echoing alarmingly in Robin’s head.

‘Wait!’ the bard called.

His outburst saved Jhess from falling through an illusion and into an open pit. Rerebos had spotted it by flying through the thing, but for land-bound sentients it would have been a far more effective trap.

Jhess pulled out a ten-foot pole and began running it through the floor until she found the boundaries of the pit. Then she cross checked the walls in a similar fashion, throughly testing them all to ensure there weren’t more hidden traps or hidden passages. When she found none, she banished the pole back to her storage and pulled out a ladder which, with a little direction from Rerebos via Robin, she managed to lay across the pit so the party could bypass the trap easily enough.

‘Thanks,’ Robin said, as Jhess stowed the ladder back in her personal storage space once everyone was across.

‘Standard equipment, standard solution,’ the rogue said. ‘All part of the service.’ She flashed an irrepressible smile. ‘And thank you for spotting it.’ Jhess reached out to skritch Rerebos behind his ears as he sat on Robin’s shoulder.

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‘Uhhh, I think you should come see this,’ Vance’s voice drifted back to them. ‘We’re definitely in the dungeon proper now.’

Robin and Jhess turned to follow the sound of their teammate’s voice.

Vance, Drev, and Savra were in the next room, staring around themselves warily.

Stepping inside, Robin could see why. Gone was the pretence of artifice and city ruin. This chamber looked like it was a part of a naturally grown cavern, though they would have had to have been translocated who knows what distance in order for that to be accurate. No, the dungeon clearly created this, modelling it on natural caverns, perhaps ones it had subsumed long ago and far below where they actually stood.

The rock walls were rippled, as if from the passage of water over aeons, and the whole place was lit with a pale glow from several large crystal veins in the walls.

It wasn’t a small space, either. It was a vast cavern, easily large enough to fit a small ocean liner or a large village within it. Pillars of stone like trees held up the ceiling and there were vast areas shrouded in shadow, the perfect place for ambush predators of all sorts.

‘Does this still match the map?’ Drev called, doubt creeping into his voice.

Robin conjured a replica of the map from the altar.

‘Seems to be,’ he said, squinting at it. ‘It was hard to see what it might be from the map, but the distances and turnings seems to track. Not sure if this was supposed to be a coliseum or some kind of stadium, before? But the map definitely pointed to this as some kind of large structure. And there should be some kind of nexus of runes beneath it or near the centre, I think.’

He could really use some help from the quest notification box right about now, but the thing was stubbornly silent. Robin opened his interface anyway, just to be sure. He even flipped to his character sheet, in case there was something hidden there, some new Perk or Peculiarity that might point the way.

Nothing.

‘It’s too dark in here,’ Jhess said quietly. ‘Anything could be up there lurking. Do we try and flush things out with a quick flash? Or lure them into trying to attack an illusion?’

‘What are the odds there’s something up there?’ Drev asked.

‘What are the odds there isn’t?’ Vance asked gaily. ‘This is a dungeon! We had to solve a puzzle, find a secret door, and follow a map to get here. Do you honestly think this place is empty?’

‘No,’ Drev said reluctantly, punctuating his admission with a sigh, ‘but I was hoping.’

‘Best options for defensible positions?’ Robin asked. ‘I don’t trust something not to change if we do rustle up some trouble. I want some fallback options in case we end up trapped in here.’

Jhess made a sign for warding off evil.

‘There and there,’ Savra said, pointing. ‘That one had cover from whatever may be lurking above as well as plenty of room to move and keep those three pillars between us and whatever might spring out from teh sides, and that little hollow near the wall would be good if we need something at our backs while we fight. We could break either direction from there and retreat if need be.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ Jhess said, daggers appearing in her hands. ‘Twitch those fingers, boys, rustles us up some trouble.’

‘Hopefully not too much,’ Drev said drily.

‘Let me see if I can tempt anything out with an illusion, first.’ Robin called up [Visual Phantasm] and added some sound with [Lesser Phantasm] in case there was an echolocation element in play. It wouldn’t be the first time.

A copy of Rerebos’s winged cat form flitted up and began darting amongst the stalactites, yowling in distress. A susurration of chittering answered, and flickers of movement began to shift in the shadows, but whatever it was was too fast or too shy to expose itself easily.   

Then the illusion vanished.

‘What the fuck?’ Robin stared at his hand. The feeling of magic in his fingertips had cut off abruptly and his extremities began to tingle.

The quality of the light around them shifted slightly.

‘What happened?’ Vance glanced from wehre the illusion had vanished and back to Robin.

‘My magic jsut…stopped? I’m not sure.’ Robin flexed his fingers. ‘At least we know there’s definitely something up there?’

‘There’s definitely something going on down here, too,’ Jhess’s eyes narrowed. ‘Drev! I think we’re going to need some light. I can hear something moving above us!’

Drev’s fingers flexed and several spheres of purpleish-white light began to spiral up from his outstretched hand, driving back the shadows.

Or they started to. As the magic rose, crystals embedded in the floor and nearby stalagmites flared the same colour as Drev’s magic and the sphere first began to wobble and then to spin, before they began exploding, one into a shower of pink daffodils, another into a small puddle of acid, and a third into cerulean bubbles that giggled as they floated away before popping with a wail of disappointment.

‘Fuck me,’ Robin swore. ‘Wild magic!’

And that’s when the monsters above chose to reveal themselves.

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