The next morning, Lylen awakened to find no sign of Gunnolf anywhere, other adventurers and travelers were still in their bedrolls. She got to her feet, making sure her gray blue blouse was buttoned, she threw on her tan coat and exited the tent. Outside, the morning was already adding a pink hue to the sky above but the cliffside to the east kept the sun blocked and would until mid-morning or so. Three new amphobos guards were guarding the Sacred Tent while three from last night when she and Gunnolf arrived were asleep in their own version of bedrolls, they were like soaked yet leathery green leaves that spanned their whole body.
“Excuse me, did you happen to see a tall, dark, furry man come through here?” she asked one of the guards who was still awake.
A blue skinned amphobos man replied, “We saw him approach the ruins, he mentioned he was with a Lylen, I suppose that is you?”
She nodded in confirmation. “Thank you, I will catch up to him. How long ago did he come through?”
“Perhaps a quarter hour since then.”
Ensuring she had everything and carefully seeing that Gunnolf left nothing behind, she headed after him. A good ten minutes, she began wandering up the uneven stone steps leading to the great archway into the ruins. The courtyard was in the same manner she remembered it when she came through with Atzler, rubble was in the center where a great statue had been once, she still couldn’t puzzle out what the statue was supposed to be. Raised garden beds overgrown in tangleroot poked out from the blue bricks that formed them against the outer blue stone walls while the building ahead was like a miniature fortress with two spires caressed in vines and moss connected with a round structure in between them that spanned three floors high as the waterfall to her left gave it a majestic and mysterious look as if only peace and serenity could ever grace this once temple of two of the Dragon Gods. She shivered because she knew better now, Atzler was alone in there, trapped or perhaps dead. No, she purged the thought from her mind until she would have proof.
Before the entry doors of thick oak, sitting on a ledge overlooking the courtyard, Gunnolf sat there in silence. She wanted to yell at him, but he looked like he was lost in his own thoughts, tip of his tongue slightly sticking out and that left ear of his half drooped but the black fur in front of his eyes with a tuft of brown fur still gave a riddle to what he was thinking, feeling.
“Why didn’t you wake me up when you got up?!” Lylen demanded when she was about ten steps from him.
His head turned her direction and then back to overlooking the courtyard. “You needed rest,” he said after a long moment.
“Dammit, but we need to get in there and look for Atzler. So much time is gone already, and he might have died while I slept in!”
“Push too hard and both die,” he replied curtly, his eyes glaring up at her through that fur.
“And what about you, you were drunk last night and here you are all up like an early bird?” she wanted to strangle him for his hypocrisy.
Gunnolf got to his feet and faced the entrance to the building, “Drinks keeps nightmares as nightmares,” his tone as calm as ever as he strode toward the structure.
Perplexed, Lylen crossed her arms, her temper still was at a boil, but she followed after him. Square blue-green stone columns lined both the left and right and was more than double the kobold’s height and thicker than two feet on every side. The ceiling overhead had plenty of missing bricks from years of falling into further decay revealing the cracked wooden rafters inside. The doors ahead were nearly ten feet in height but sleek, no more than four feet wide each and intricate markings lined them depicting slender, serpentine creatures on them. Gunnolf touched the markings with his right index finger as he examined them.
“Go left,” Lylen instructed him. “We weren’t able to enter this place through these doors.” Left of where he stood, by ten steps he saw a hole in the structure in the wall, but it was only a little less than knee high to him. The interior was pitch dark as Lylen stepped before him. “This is how he and I were able to enter before; I’ll take the lead if you don’t mind.”
Gunnolf silently moved his hand, gesturing her to go on. The elf crawled into the hole and Gunnolf waited until she was fully inside before following after. Suddenly, he found himself on a slope sliding downward. He gave a grunt but quickly realized Lylen had to be ahead and knew of the sudden drop.
Landing at the bottom, dust kicked up and both of them were sneezing and coughing.
Getting to his feet, before Gunnolf’s eyes a flame flickered above Lylen’s hand. He almost drew his tanto but refrained when he realized it was only her with a small flame dancing above her hand.
“Magic,” he muttered with eyes fixed on the flame that gave the only light in here.
Lylen picked up a chunk of splintered wood on the floor that was scattered about and used the magical flame in her hand to light it as a torch. “It’s a little I learned when I was an apprentice mage, it hurts me to cast even this spell,” she said. “Understandably, this is about all I know of magic.”
Gunnolf tilted his head almost curiously but said nothing as he folded his arms and returned to his stoic stance.
They were in a cramped room with an open doorway to their right and open ceiling overhead that went into blackness. The walls were a cerulean green with white trim as the shadows flickered and danced from the torch. Leaving the room, it opened into a wide open space with narrow walkways with banisters preventing anyone from stepping off the ledge.
Gunnolf stared carefully as he and Lylen approached the walkway, listening and observing everything but no sounds were heard.
“We have to hurry,” Lylen encouraged as she ran through the old structure. “Be wary of spiders and oozes, they lurk through this place.”
Gunnolf silently ran behind her, following the curvature of the walkway, it had to be hundreds of years old, cracks in the cerulean colored stone floor but no signs of it giving way either.
Lylen led them to a spiral staircase that curled upward. At the top the pair crossed another walkway and then turned left. A screech was heard overhead, Lylen came to a stop to hold up her torch to reveal three one-eyed purple bats flying toward them.
“Plague bats!” she cried as two swooped toward her and the last aimed for Gunnolf but swiftly met his short tanto and was split in two. Swatting at the bats she got to her feet and flung a dagger from her coat slicing off its wing it went careening into the dark abyss below. The final bat backed off, near ten feet overhead, a dark aura surrounded it as it seemed to be gathering energy toward it. “It’s chanting!”
Giving a leap into the air toward it, Gunnolf’s tanto gave it sliced it diagonally across its eye. Its body split in two parts, as one hit the walkway and the other tumbled over into the abyss below as well as the kobold landed on his feet once more sheathing the short blade. The monster bodies faded as if they never existed, no blood either as Gunnolf peered at them in confusion.
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He gave a start to ask why that was, but Lylen quickly explained it as these particular creatures were of a type known as fey and that sort never bled nor did its remains stay in existence for long if at all after death, its entire existence was a manifestation of aether directly from the Aethersphere itself. “A good thing you were able to slay it when you did,” she said relieved. “Plague Bats only know a single spell and it’s a terrible one at that, the spell of Death. A spell that abruptly stops blood flow, organ function, in a split second but fortunately, it has a semi-low success rate even when its cast.”
The pair of them continued trekking the walkway until it led down a corridor roughly six paces wide with walls and a ceiling just over nine paces in height. The white trim halfway up the wall continued down and sconces holding old torches where just at the right height for Gunnolf to light them along the way. Lylen’s torch was still going on strong as she handed it to him to create more light. Two iron doors stood on both sides of the corridor with no obvious handle barred their path to either but straight ahead there was a wide archway large enough for two thick doors, but both were long since removed or destroyed as bits of old stone and rotted wood lay on the floor in seemingly random spots around the archway.
Entering the large room, Gunnolf noticed two levels with balconies ran above the perimeter of this round room, every twenty paces along the wall a slender steel barred door was there on both levels. Ten barred doors per level and straight ahead was a cracked marble stone tablet of some kind embedded into a part of the wall that jutted outwards nearing five paces wide and nine high if he had to put a wager on it.
Lylen headed for the small staircase to her right, “He was last this way, wait here,” she said cautiously while keeping her eyes above.
Gunnolf carefully examined the room, analyzing each detail, the shattered stone on the floor against the walls and a few seemingly randomly placed but only the shins down remained on most, that tablet especially. He strode to it; he ran his hand along its surface and the etchings upon it were quite old, he was unsure what they said. The flow of time had certainly weathered it and perhaps inscribed in a tongue long since extinct?
On the second level above, Lylen found her way above the entryway to the large room and there was a man sitting inside the narrow cell, eyes downcast as if he was dropped into a vat of depression. “Atzler!” she cried out ignoring the stench of urine and feces coming from it.
His red hair plumed by a violet bandana on top of his head shifted as his blue eyes met hers, the same scar she remembered was there across his right cheek and his pointed ears were only a little longer than hers. His voice cracked weakly due to suffering dehydration, “Lylen, I told you to simply move on.” He came to the bars, still wearing his yellow and green tunic that was filthy at this point. She handed him her small flask of water.
“No way!” she said with a stomp of her foot. “We’ve been partners for nearly four years, and you want me to just leave you to die?!”
“I got captured in here,” his voice broke after gulping down every drop he could from the flask as he returned it to her. “It was my foolish curiosity.”
“I brought help,” she told him.
On the ground, Gunnolf studied the tablet intently. The markings on it made no sense to him, he shifted his gaze upward to where Lylen went and then from the ceiling something was coming, five figures in total creeping down on thin silk that suspended them. Three feet in height and nearly five in length covered in patches of stone and rock each with eight skinny gray legs and eight gleaming yellow eyes.
“Lylen!” Gunnolf shouted up as two of the monsters dropped in behind her as she spun to see two large spiders staring at hungrily.
“Watch out!” Atzler said as the young woman flung two daggers from her belt, each sticking into the heads of the arachnids.
The other three dropped to floor around Gunnolf as he readied a stance, hand on the hilt of the blade on his hip.
Time for more deaths to add up! The voice returned. Gunnolf gritted his teeth as he mumbled, “Dammit, these are not undead.” His focus as sharp as his blade, two of the spiders lunged at him with their first two legs raised as that green-blue blade flashed like lightning, sending both of them into the wall over thirty paces away.
Lylen dodged the leg strikes from each of her foes, a sidestep and front flip. Regaining her poise, she darted toward the left one, grabbing her dagger sticking out and ripping it as hard as she could while flipping over it. A hand axe flew from between the bars as it split the other spider in its maw, cutting off half its right mandible as it fell lifelessly on the floor curling its legs under itself.
Landing against the railing, the elf woman spun and let her dagger take to the air one more time, silk webbing entranced her throwing arm as soon as she released it. The spider let out a screech as the blade was buried in its eyes and its legs went to curl under it. The silk webbing was already thick after mere seconds of landing on her but after a moment of struggling with it she was able to rip it off.
“Disgusting spiders! I hate spiders!” Lylen complained, trying to discard the sticky silk.
“If you came to free me, Lylen, could you do that now before more of those monsters show up?” Atzler asked.
“Yeah, hang on,” she said before peering over the balcony back to where Gunnolf was, “Hey, Gunnolf!” He stood over the last of the large, rocky spiders with his long blade sheathed once more and removing his tanto from the head of the final spider. His right hand though, seemed disfigured and hard. “Your hand!” she exclaimed.
Gunnolf merely looked her way waiting for what else she was going to say. He seemed to almost not notice his hand was turning to stone, his nerves were unbreakable and no sign of panic either.
You must kill with the sword. Kill, kill, kill! Gunnolf tried to drown out the noise in his head notating to himself, he managed to end each Statue Spider with his tanto while using his tachi for defense.
“Dammit,” Lylen muttered digging through her satchel until finally finding it, a semi-spherical bottle with a flat bottom and a dark gray fluid that swished inside as she lifted it and a cork to keep it sealed. “If I toss you this Basilisk Potion, are you certain you will catch it?” she called down to the wolf-man.
“Throw!” he called out in a flat tone with the stone encasing reaching to his elbow now.
Throwing the bottle over the edge, it spun, a good throw indeed as Gunnolf focused on it. The difference between catching it or failing could spell out his fate. His body turning to complete stone like the broken stone chunks down here once were or to continue his life as he was before the nasty Statue Spider landed a fang into his hand before he retaliated by slicing it open between its eyes with his tanto. The bottle spun, and Gunnolf darted to the right and his left hand met the bottle with his upper right arm now petrified in stone. Popping the cork with his teeth he poured the fluid onto the affected arm and watched as the stone dissolve and his flesh and fur returned to normal once more.
“Do you see a small lever down there?” Lylen called from above.
Beneath each holding cell was a small edifice of a feminine face carved into the wall with a lever that had a chain behind it. “Yes!” he called back.
Lylen above, saw the lever next to Atzler’s cell and placed a hand on it while shouting out, “Pull on the count of three! One, two… three!” both levers were pulled, the chains behind of them began clinking as they went by and the bars that held Atzler in rose through round holes in the doorway. The young elf man exited the confined space, having not walked in a few days and not eaten in at least as long stumbled over from weakness in his legs. Wrapping her arms around him, Lylen helped him to his feet. His stench was repulsive, but she didn’t care, he was safe now. The pair slowly walked their way to the stairs back to Gunnolf’s level. “Don’t you ever get yourself caught like this again,” she scolded him.
“Don’t trigger traps next time,” he quipped back with an arrogant grin. “I still have it,” he said revealing a large black cube from his satchel. It was too large to have fit between the bars and tiny slashes covered, whether they were intentional or not could be anyone’s guess.
“Good,” Lylen replied, “That must be what Zarmhel was after.” As the pair rejoined Gunnolf on the level below examining the large tablet once more. Lylen introduced the two of them, but Gunnolf said nothing, hardly noticing the red-haired elf man, gave a simple glance, a nod and resumed looking over the tablet.
“What’s with this guy?” Atzler asked irritably.
“Gunnolf is…a quiet individual. But an expert swordsman,” Lylen answered.
“Ronin,” Gunnolf said and the two of them looked at him quizzically. “I am a ronin. I follow the way of the blade and wherever I am paid.”
“I see,” Atzler said slowly. “Well, we have what we came for so we can abandon this ruin now.”
“Right,” added Lylen. “I can show you both how I escaped.”
Gunnolf straightened from his studying of the tablet. “Perhaps it is coincidence,” he muttered.
“What is it?” Lylen asked.
Gunnolf strode ahead of them, “Not sure,” he muttered leaving the round room behind and with the two elves following after.
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