10.
sound of stone on stone
dripping: blood on bone
reek of graves, scent of night
dead-white, taken up in flight
Afterwards, she isn't entirely sure how it all ended. She has scattered, almost-static images in her head about that part of the mission: the way like to this day she can't tell how exactly that last confrontation with Queen Morag of the Creator Race went, or how she escaped through that exploding portal Master Drogan kept open for her and Deekin.
It all goes sideways as soon as she sees the prone form lying on that bloodstained altar, shackled with rune-studded chains, her skin almost translucent from blood loss and losing its faint golden hue way too fast. It goes sideways because the anger that possesses her at the moment she realizes that the cultists here gained power by draining the blood and life of a celestial, an astral deva of the higher planes suddenly is too great to be contained, and both Deekin and Valen have to step back as she screams in her righteous wrath and strikes at those shackles with Enserric so that sparkles fly everywhere and the air fills with acrid smoke.
The chains don't shatter, of course: the foul magic is too strong. They find the key that powers the strange mechanism locking up the entire contraption in another room, and Adele shakes in her entire body as she steps across the shattered remains of unclean monsters built on reeking bone and smeared with blood runes to cradle the golden head of the fragile angelic form to her chest and wash her face with some water from her canteen.
…It's all scattered and sideways, little images frozen it time, like a bizarre chain of timestop spells keeping a slowly unraveling mind together…
Lavoera is her name, as they learn once she's come to, and she is, probably due to the constant torture and blood loss, not quite exactly there. She regains her powers with astonishing speed and exudes a constant faint aura around her, from the tips of her golden wings to her sandaled toes. She also insists on going with them to vanquish the leaders of the cult before she joins their army in Lith My'athar: she mutters something about a quest she was on that she can't quite recall but which might have been exactly this, and surely a paladin of the divine Torm wouldn't throw away her help when there's so much at stake?
Valen is tense in the deva's presence, constant lines of irritation between his eyebrows, and his lashing tail speaks volumes about how the presence of a divine messenger affects his abyssal blood. But he doesn't object to the deva coming with them: Adele knows that he also recognized that the strength in that fragile-looking body is way beyond what either of them possesses and that in the upcoming battle with the unknown leader of the vampiric bone-cult they need every ounce of advantage they have.
And then the high priest of the cult, Sodalis, is finally nothing more but a heap of crumbling bones, and Adele is standing there with her sword at her side, still hearing the vampire's hissing chant to his supposed god awaiting them beyond the door stretching up ahead of them..
"Boss thinks we killed him this time for good?" Deekin inquires and Adele just nods wearily as she circles the remains, watching Lavoera kicking them apart with disgust bordering on glee.
"I want your kobold to scout ahead there,"Valen says tensely all of a sudden, nodding his chin sharply at the two-winged great door, and Adele notices for the first time that rims of red are slowly appearing around the deep blue of his irises. She is used to little specks of crimson peppering his gaze in the depth of battle by now, but this is new, and different, and while not exactly frightening, it's unusual enough to warrant follow-up.
"Are you all right?" she asks quickly, and she expects him to say something to the effect of 'of course', like he always does, dismissing even the notion of not being perfectly fine… and it hits her all the more, then, when he shakes his head with a small, almost violent motion.
"We need to get this over quickly." He growls the worlds over his shoulder at her as he prowls across the hall to stand by her side, tail lashing. "I am…reacting too strongly." Even his sentences become shorter, terse and clipped. "Not sure: might be your and her aura together…" he nods towards where Lavoera is examining the runes on the gate, "…or whatever this…Vix'thra is." He inhales deeply. "Or all of it together. Too much."
"Reacting?" Adele furrows her brow. "You mean…?"
"Get. Your. Kobold. In. There." Valen measures between his teeth, nostrils flaring, irises for a second flashing into almost pure red. "Now." He spins around and almost flees to the other side of the hallway, turns his back on her and stands there, leaning on Devil's Bane with hunched shoulders that scream of a desire to do horrible violence, barely restrained.
Looking back at it, Adele is almost certain if she had waited just a bit more, she would have been able to think about it logically and would have put all of it together: the constant pressure of the undead' s presence, the barrage of raw magical attacks they just suffered from Sodalis, Lavoera's heavenly luminescence and almost unbearable level of power that got stronger with every passing minute she spent recovering from her long captivity, the strange dread seeping from underneath the last gate in front of them… And yes, no doubt she would have noticed that small trickle of blood slowly seeping from under the left side of Valen's breastplate. But there was no time…and in that strange frozen almost-timestopped image Adele sees it all…
sound of stone on stone
Deekin goes in first; cloaked with the effects of one of his Invisibility potions, the little kobold slips in through the barely open side door that he opens with a tiny key found amongst the crumbled remains of the finally dead high priest… Adele bites her lip and Lavoera taps a rhythm with her mace in her palm as they wait. Valen is as far from them as possible, face almost deadly pale, cheekbones jutting out; his breathing is labored.
dripping: blood on bone
…Tiny claws scratching her feet, no sound or sight…Adele crouches down, and into her ears comes the frantic whisper from Deekin like so many pebbles thrown into a well…
"There be a bone dragon there, Boss…smells like power and old dead things. Bad, bad thing…if this be Vix'thra it be a dracolich, and we must destroy its phylactery, else we die. It's in a little room to the side but it's guarded: bone golems. Boss wants Deekin go and…?"
"No." Valen's voice, right there, almost a snarl. His grip on her shoulder is like a steel vice: Adele winces. "This is what we do; exactly like this. Adele gets invisible, goes to the side room, destroys the golems and the phylactery. Lavoera and I distract the dracolich. Deekin provides spellcover." He closes his eyes briefly, and swallows. "Need to do it soon."
Adele knows that look, recognizes it with a sickening pitch of her stomach, and the air hisses from her lungs as she turns.
"You are wounded." Her gloved hand comes away from Valen's side red and sticky and she stares at her palm in disbelief. "You didn't say anything…"
"No. Time." His lips peel off his teeth with a feral sound that makes her to take a step back and the deva to lift her mace. "Too much… at… once. My…control is fading." He grits his teeth. "I need to channel…it. I need to…kill. I need to…"
She understands it with a speed that, ironically, makes everything else way too slow. She grabs a potion from her hip-pack she already had out just in case.
"Understand." She measures the word carefully, nods to Lavoera who already looks at Valen as if he would be the enemy and not the source of the dreadful cold now seeping out from under the gates…"Mission is a go as described."
Take care of him for me, deva…or at least make sure you two don't kill each other instead of the real monster…
…the vial's content glides down her throat with strange spices, she grabs another one for strength, another for mental fortitude and yet another one, rare and treasured, to protect from deadly magics of evil, her lips press together into one single line as she spins around and fades out of view…
reek of graves, scent of night
…and it is cold, cold, cold in there, everything smells of old blood and half-rotten marrow, piles of huge white things in the corners of the—cavern?, and high up like two hell-spawned rubies, the eyes of the dracolich feasting on something that makes little crunching sounds as the huge claws tear bone like parchment.
Her heart beats so loud that she's sure the monster, the perverted god of undead cultists that feeds on the remains of vampire victims the rest of the priests and monks discarded might hear…but she slips past him, hunching over herself so no accidental clang of armor betrays her movements. It's dark, but there's a glow coming from the back of the cave that she follows carefully and slowly, and when she finally reaches a smaller, roughly hewn room that is literally crammed full of moldy bags and chests that are falling apart from age and spilling their content on the floor. Of course, it runs through Adele's mind, of course, dragons have treasures, why should a dracolich be different?… Or maybe this is un-treasure, the irrational part of her thoughts supplies, and she has to stifle a giggle. Un-dead has un-treasure, and all of this stuff will just simply go up in smoke and disappear, or suck the life out of me, or something equally bizarre, so let's just do the same thing like in Halaster's abominable dungeon and not touch anything.
I am getting tired, she thinks, finally spotting a little pedestal in the corner with a slowly revolving cocoon of sickly green light on it, cradling a slender vial. I am getting tired, and this place is horrible and vile, and I am sick from worry for Valen, and my mind is going places it normally would never go. She recognizes the symptoms of battle fatigue, and bites her lips as she quietly vows that when all of this is done and she finally manages to discharge her responsibility and help the Valsharess breathe her last, she will return to Waterdeep and rent the best suite of Master Durnan's inn, the one with the four-poster bed and separate bathing chamber with a huge circular tub, and she will stay there eating roast chicken and grapes for an entire week, before she goes back home to Tantras and helps her nieces and nephews with their homework and her sister-in-law and mother with cleaning.
Or something. Anything other than crawling in the Underdark and avoiding traps and monsters and making sure undead dragon leaders of vampire cults have no undead armies left to aid evil sorceress drow queens to eliminate an entire city. Hells, how about playing tourist and showing Valen around Waterdeep—if we are into truly bizarre fantasies brought on by mental exhaustion by constant danger, that one ought to be ranking right up there with playing cards with Elminster. They could go and gawk around the markets, visit the Castle Ward and marvel at the changing of the guards at the Open Lord's Palace, have some of those little shell-shaped pastries and drink coffee from bone-thin Shouware cups at that horribly expensive place just on the corner from The Spires of the Morning, Lathander's cathedral… Just two soldiers on leave, nothing to see here, ignore the horns of one and the holy aura of the other…
And I'll do it too, dear Lord, I'll do it, and feed him from my own hand with those grapes, just let us get out of here in one piece and unharmed, and with his soul intact…
She gropes around in her belt with her left for the prepared little bottle of Speed potion, yanks the cork out with her teeth and pours the liquid down her throat. Her time slows down into sticky molasses when the god's battle time invades her mind to get this done very, very fast.
Enserric remains blessedly silent, simply sending thoughts of grim determination into her mind as she draws him out of the scabbard. The sentient sword hates undead magic-users with a passion that borders on obsession, and given that he was in the possession of one such for quite a long time, Adele can understand; more so since she knows the soul imprisoned in the living steel used to be a powerful wizard-adventurer himself. She brings the blade around in a shining arc, aimed at the glowing vial on the pedestal, and the satisfying crunch of glass brings a short, grim smile on her lips…
…until heaps of bone suddenly animate from around corners of the room with glowing runes on skull and ulna, and she hears the enraged roar of a very, very thoroughly furious dracolich from behind her.
Not fair, she thinks, biting her lips again as she spins out of the way of the first bone golem aiming a giant fist at her, not fair, of course he had a warning system built in, it's part of the hoard, and dragons always guard their hoard…
dead-white taken up in flight
…all is disjointed, all is hanging in the air, like a tiny insect enclosed in amber from the Frozen North's shores. Of course everything went sideways…
Lavoera's battle cry is clear like the call of eagles over snow-capped mountains. The air is filled with blue-white light about her as she leaps up, beating her great wings and brings her mace down on Vix'thra's shoulder. Adele feels her head clear just a little bit from the celestial sound, enough to murmur an invocation of her own as she rolls away from the second golem and sweeps the legs from underneath the first using Enserric. She sees the force of the divine energies unleashed wreathe the other monster in a crackling web on destruction, as small fractures appear on the bones…
…another roar cleaves the air, and this one has almost no sentience in it, nothing but mindless rage and the desire to rend and hurt and tear. Adele spins and the hair on the nape of her neck stands up from that sound, so utterly alien and different and yet with a terrible familiarity that fills her with ice-cold dread…
…and she sees the great head of Vix'thra, dracolich and self-appointed god of Drearing Deep pushing into the small room. The ceiling shakes, dust clouds the air as a huge paw, each claw as long as Enserric, reaches towards her, and the dragon's maws open with a hiss that heralds something distinctly unpleasant that Adele really doesn't want to wait for…
…so she moves, fast, lightning fast in the potion's overcharged time, unleashing her own battle cry to the Lord of Duty. Enserric cleaves the air, clear amethyst light on his edge…
…and there's that roar again, that mindless, ululating sound of frenzy, and something large and fast and clad in green appears by Vix'thra's side, vaulting up on the dracolich's back in one smooth motion…
…dear Lord, he's riding the dragon, Adele thinks as her time slows down even more and her mouth is almost hanging open as she ends up rolling behind a large chest full of half-spilled gold and tiny diamonds. She watches Valen squeezing around the dracolich's neck with his thighs and planting Devil's Bane's head amongst the last vertebrae with such a force that the weapon is stuck. Valen bellows again, the sound reverberating under the cavernous room's canopied ceiling, and with eyes fully flashing red and his hair wild about his face, he drops Devil's Bane's handle and with gloved hands grabs under Vix'thra's skullplates and rips upwards…
….Adele, from the corner of her eye, sees a flash of red as Deekin sends a bolt of pure flame towards the dracolich's underbelly, feels her limbs suffuse with new strength from the little bard's powerful song, hears Lavoera's triumphant cry as she brings her mace down on their opponent's back leg… but what she really sees is Valen's face, savage and snarling, and the bulging of the sinews in his neck as by Torm's left gauntlet, he tears half of the back of Vix'thra's skull off with his bare hands, lifts the huge piece of bone and roars again, with the unadulterated, finally-unleashed ecstasy of doing what he does best. He twists with unearthly grace and jumps on his feet, standing upright as the great dragon bucks in agony, adding its own cries to the cacophony of sounds in the cavern. Valen slams the piece of bone down on Vix'thra's skull, again and again, and again, and each time that awful roar goes up Adele swears she sees a huge dark shadow coalescing around him, pulsing and growing with every roar and every strike, something oily and roiling and having many colors that hurt the eye: bile green, sticky yellow-brown and the putrid violet of rotting meat.
Chaos.
Demontaint.
Vix'thra bellows, his huge body thrashing around in the final throes of its existence, maws gaping and spewing acrid fire in uneven, random spurts. Lavoera jumps aside gracefully, grabbing Deekin's arm and hauling him away from a ray of acid, mace still lifted in one hand. As Vix'thra rears up, exposing his chest, Adele sees a darkly pulsing soft spot on the enormous breastbone, and feels, yet again like many times, her training taking over: her legs push her body into sprint, running faster and faster towards the dying dragon, Enserric extended in her hand. In the last second, she is sliding, one knee bent, and the other extended in front, leaning forward and calling up her last Smite invocation against evil, as she slams into that wall of bone and magic and undead will and buries her blade in that vulnerable spot on the dracolich's body.
She's not sure how she manages to avoid those last gushing torrents of uncontrolled acid and raw magic energy erupting from Vix'thra's body, but she does come away unscathed, except from a long, smoking scorch on her left shoulder when she did a full forward roll to escape a gigantic tail's final twitch. She comes up, Enserric still in hand, panting from the exertion and the effort to leave the god's battle-time, her heart uplifted in that strange state she always falls in when vanquishing a particularly dark foe in Torm's name…
…when she hears her name called in a slightly panicky, querulous female voice first she doesn't even recognize.
"Adele!" Lavoera sounds absolutely unlike herself: high-pitched and almost panicky. "Adele! Do something! He…"
…and the snarl of something big, furious and absolutely without reason, like an enraged lion or tiger, maddened by the scent of blood and battle, raging to continue the killing for the pure, sheer joy of it…
"Boss!" Deekin's face, peering from behind the deva's legs, as she backs to a corner, lifting her mace. "Boss, Goat-Man be mad!"
No, not mad, Adele thinks as she slowly circles around, and recalling the lecture from the old demon-hunter back in Tantras. This is something very similar, and yet very different… and may Torm give me His strength to face it.
She almost falters when she sees his face this close. What clearly was terrifying from a distance is magnified two, three, four times: the swirling red of his irises rimmed with black, the pale lips drawn up from the suddenly sharp teeth, the deep, almost coughing growl emanating from his chest, the hunched shoulders, fingers twisted into claws, tail lashing about wildly…
…And I am out of absolutely everything that could knock him out… Adele bites her lips. Suppose I can use Enserric's pommel, provided Lavoera and Deekin can distract him long enough…
She gets about that far when one of her sabatons slips on a puddle of dragon acid on the floor.
Deekin and Lavoera cries out about the same time as Valen whirls around, hearing the clang of her armor as she falls on her knee, having lost her balance…
…The last thing she sees before her head is slammed against the stone floor by two iron-clad arms and she loses consciousness, is the snarling face of Valen Shadowbreath, with that oily, roiling cloud of taint enclosing him, and the last thing she hears is his deep growl as his teeth descends on her throat.
"Mine!"