Meepo followed the rest of his companions through the maze of booky corridors created by the book place's seemingly endless shelves, doing his best to stick close to the others without being too out in the open. Move quickly, move together, stay out of sight. This was the way of the kobold hunting party.
The collection of four foot tall dragonlings scampered from shelf to shelf, keep their eyes and noses peeled for any sign of their quarry. Another intruder was digging in the book place. Another knife ear, like the one before. But this one was even more tricksy than the last. It liked to hide and climb.
All around the book place, kobolds were working furiously. Laying traps, running wires, setting up watches. But this would take time, time the knife ear would use to cause more trouble. So hunting parties were sent out. Some kobolds, some big folks, some dead folks. But all of them out in the stacks, searching.
There was a big reward for this knife ear. The Dead Midnight herself had promised gold. Magic. Eternal life. Well, the messenger of the Dead Midnight. But that was basically the same thing, and Meepo could do a lot with riches. And magic. And eternal life.
So caught up in thoughts of the reward, Meepo didn't notice Beema, the best archer in the brood, disappear from the group. It took someone else coming to a halt mid scurry, looking around, smelling her absence.
The party stopped in its tracks, calling out to each other. One by one, everyone in the party called out their name, signaling they were still there. Still alive. But Beema said nothing. Someone called out to her, but there was no response. Meepo couldn't smell her. She was nowhere near.
A spiderweb shot out from a bookshelf, latching on to another kobold and yanking it into the shelf hard enough to knock it unconscious. Everyone else in the party cried out. Those who had arrows or throwing spears loosed them blindly, hoping to get lucky. Nothing seemed to do the trick, but an instant later two more kobolds dropped to the floor, crossbow bolts embedded in their chests.
Finally, someone spotted the source of the danger. It was tall and thin, dressed in blue with big pointed ears sticking out of either side of its hood. The knife ear. Those kobolds who'd held out on loosing attacks before did so now, only to watch the knife ear dodge them, or see them bounce off of its armor.
In a panic, Meepo loose his own crossbow bolt, and then fled to take cover in the closest bookshelf as the others similarly turned tail and ran. Most escaped. But an unlucky few became trapped in a massive spiderweb that appeared in front of them, filling the space between two shelves. The knife ear waved its hand, and there was a loud crashing sound. In stunned silence, Meeop watched the spiderweb and every kobold trapped inside it explode into a shower of gore and gristle. A speck of it landed on Meepo's face.
For a moment, as the knife ear surveyed its handiwork, Meepo was worried he would be spotted. But then, a miracle. The sound of the struggle had attracted other hunting parties, including some tall folks.
Meanwhile, the surviving kobolds from Meepo's party were regrouping, preparing to join the others in a was the moment. Now, they had it.
Celia swore, in Infernal for the hell of it, as several cultists and kobolds began to close in around her. For what felt like the hundredth time this week, she'd gone from hunter to hunted. She was supposed to be good at this ambush thing. This was starting to be embarrassing. It was already annoying.
Kobold crossbow bolts and spears came raining toward her from the tops of bookshelves and through slits between books. It was impossible to block them all, even with her shield out. Her armor took most of the hits. At least one bolt managed to pierce through, and she felt the dull sensation of pain through her adrenaline. She had to move.
With surprising grace from someone with a crossbow bolt stick out of her, Celia backflipped away, landing on the side of a shelf and running up it with the aid of the spider bracers. There was no time to pull out her crossbow as she crested the top of shelf, and anyway, the shield was to valuable for the moment.
So instead, as she got to the top and found kobolds waiting for her, she drew her rapier, and with one swipe cut them down. Sheathing the blade, she turned to the cultists drawing a bead on her. Several of them were readying javelins.
Celia was faster, firing a series of web shots from the bracers that managed to bind the javelins into the cultists' hands before they could throw them. One cultist though, wasn't throwing a javelin.
Instead, uttering a few angry, draconic sound phrases, the cultist extended his hand, and a bright orange beam of light shot out from his hand. Celia ducked, and it passed over her head to strike a balcony railing on the second floor, where it splashed across the wood an almost instantly ate it away.
Acid lasers. Because of course. Running out of ideas, Celia traced her fingers across her flute, willing air through its passages and picking out just the right note from it. When she had it, she threw her hand out, casting another shattering spell. This time, her target was the bookshelf closest to the cultists.
The base of the shelf turned to splinters, and the tomes and scrolls contained in it were scattered. A moment later, the shelf came crashing down, crushing the cultists underneath it. It also slammed into the next closest shelf, and domino effect began to ripple outward. Celia sprinted and leaped, desperately trying to outrun it, until eventually she was out of shelves to leap to and dove straight for the closest wall, sticking to it.
Pausing to catch her breath, she looked back on the mess she'd left behind. Dozens of shelves in the stacks now lay toppled, their contents strewn about. All around the library, she could hear footsteps of other search parties closing in on the noise. Shaking her head, she climbed away from the scene, keeping to the ceiling and any dark corners she could find.
It took almost half an hour of skulking around, but eventually, the sound of footsteps and shouts seemed to be getting further away. For the moment, she was safe. Rappelling down from the ceiling on strand of webbing, Celia sat down on top of a bookshelf, and took stock of herself.
Her side hurt. Why did- oh, right.
Grabbing hold of the crossbow bolt, Celia started humming the beginning of a healing spell. Then, just before she cast it, she yanked out the bolt. Luckily for her, the spell only needed a vague vocalization to work, and the muted sputtering of pain she gave counted, even if it was slightly undignified.
"Well," she muttered. "This is going well."
Reaching into her bag, she pulled out the scrap of paper she'd been using as a map. Celia wasn't much of a cartographer, and the library seemed like it didn't give two shits about the laws of space and dimensions, so the map wasn't particularly well drawn.
In fact, of late it had descended into a series of boxes connected by lines, with most of the boxes being labeled things like "books," "more books," "even more books," "how are there this many books," "I met a ghost here once," and "not books (jk it's books)." With a heavy sigh, Celia drew an X threw another one of the boxes that she was pretty sure corresponded to the part of the library she'd just finished searching.
"Dad, where are you?" Celia whispered.
She'd been at this for two days now, skulking around in the library, searching, and coming up with nothing but cultists, kobolds, a bunch of undead and spirit things she only sort of understood, and the occasional pile of wyvern poop. One of which she'd stepped in. She needed a break.
Lacking a better idea, and genuinely curious what she'd find, she leaned down, and plucked a book from the shelf underneath her. Just her luck, it was written in a language she couldn't read, and this time, it didn't have the decency to translate itself into Elvish like the markings on some of the signage and doors tended to.
But then something happened as she thumbed through the pages. A gust of wind escaped the pages, hitting Celia in the face. It was warm, and for a second she felt like she was back on the Pale Sierra as the feeling of the sun kissed her skin and the subtle smell of clouds filled her nose.
A surge of awe and determination gripped her chest, and the bookshelf she was sitting on stopped feeling static. It felt alive, moving, twisting. And all at once, she wasn't in the library anymore. She was riding on the back of a dragon across an early morning sky. All around her, other flying creatures- wyverns, griffons, pegasi -swarmed.
Just as quickly as the scene came, it was blinked. She was back on the bookshelf, in the dim interior of the library stacks. The feelings subsided. She stared down at the book, and found she could read it.
"What the hells?" Celia wondered aloud.
Ah the battle of Varcuo. I remember it well!
"Who is that?" Celia asked.
The skies swarmed with the numbers of the Featherborne. Ballistae, proud and ready on the castle walls… The voice persisted, in her head, but not her own. Celia held her own head in her hands. She was all too familiar with the sensation of a mental passenger by this point- and she wasn't a fan of it.
"Get out," Celia ordered.
A small mote of light materialized in front Celia's chest at the same time she felt whatever presence was in her mind leave. The light zipped around, dancing freely in the air. Celia stared at it, then at the book, whose were now blank. On a hunch, she opened the book up, and the snapped it shut on the mote of light. When she opened the pages again, the text was back.
"That's weird," Celia said. "Really cool. But weird."