Chapter 15: Please Don't Feed the Grummites
"Siena! Siena wake UP!" A youthful male voice called out to her, echoing as if far off. Siena frowned, aggravated at being disturbed in her sleep. "Siena, you lazy n'wah! You're going to miss the ceremony!"
Siena opened her eyes, partially at first, then fully. The world around her was blurry but she could make out Belmyne's fit young form, his handsome young face. He was leaning over her, close to her and clearer than the world behind him. He looked to be ten, maybe twelve years old. "They're swearing your papa into the position of Councilor today, remember? Don't you want to be at the ceremony?" Belmyne asked her with a jesting scowl. Siena smiled.
"Yeah, I'll be ready in a second…" Siena whispered, and raised herself onto one elbow before pausing, perplexed. It didn't feel like a bed beneath her. It felt hard and unyielding, like rock. And the light around her was soft, like firelight, the colors blurring into splotches of browns and mold greens in her fuzzed vision. This wasn't her house, and as she looked around, she could not find Belmyne either. What she did see made her tongue knot up and nearly choke her.
Through a thin wooden gate she could see the blurred form of a hulking humanoid beast roughly half her height, with spikes on its back. It reminded her of a fat goblin, and it stood between a small campfire and a pavilion of sorts fashioned from wooden poles and an animal skin roof. In the firelight Siena saw a glint of dulled metal. The surrounding area was new to her, but the form was familiar. It was that same sort of hideous monstrosity she had first met when entering this realm. Apparently, the goblin analogy wasn't too far off; it was as primitive and intelligent as a goblin, and equally getting on Siena's nerves.
The thing was holding something, inspecting it. Siena could only guess what thanks to her glasses missing. This brought the question of where they were, where she was… and how the hell she'd gotten here. She shifted her position slowly to try and find the spectacles on the ground, but a surge of stinging pain made her bite her lower lip and stop moving.
Still biting back the urge to cry out, she looked at herself, and found the cause of the pain; her right thigh was gashed, and it looked like a wolf attack. She tried to wrack her aching brain for the cause of this sudden injury.
She walked down the path cautiously, looking around the cliff that flanked her left side for an enemy in the distance. The grasses to her right shifted, and as she turned a form charged her, hitting her thigh before she could even register what it looked like. She hit the cliff wall... And that was as far as she could remember. Frowning, Siena tried to take inventory of her situation further without moving. Her chainmail cuirass and furred boots were on, along with the pants. She could still feel the lockpick in the boot, along with Belmyne's iron dagger in the other. Siena smirked wickedly; the thing was indeed as intelligent –or less so- as a goblin.
She needed to escape. Needed to heal, needed to find her glasses, needed to get out of wherever she now was. Slowly dragging herself towards the gate of her confinement, she bit back the throbbing pain and reached into her boot for the lockpick.
The lock was as primitive as the prison 'bars', and in half a minute Siena had cracked it open without issue. But she knew the gate wasn't going to be an obstacle; killing her captor in her state was the true obstacle. But unlike before, she could not see any source of water in the area; one point in her favor. The other was the element of surprise.
Siena closed her eyes, searching within herself for that large pool of magicka common to those of the Atronach. While it was still dwindled, unable to recover from the more recent uses, there was enough for her purpose, and while still lying on the ground, she delicately pushed open the gate.
The other hand was pulsing with magicka, and Siena lifted herself using the gate, weakly thrusting this hand out at the offending blur-monster. The magicka ignited and shot forth, fire rushing through the air. The impact was not largely explosive, but sent the beast stumbling.
Right into the campfire.
The resulting cries of agony made Siena shut her eyes as the thing began to flail about, only fanning the growing flames. She couldn't erase the feeling that a frog being burned alive would make a very similar noise, and those unease-inducing cries echoed in her mind long after the toad-man-thing had collapsed and died of third degree burns. Grimacing at her bittersweet victory, Siena crawled towards the campsite of the now prone form, searching the ground. Finally she felt thin, cool metal on her fingers, and scrambled to put on her lenses and see the world clearly once more.
The sudden shift from dull, dim, and blurry to dimmer, duller, and clearer induced further headache in the Dunmer. Groaning, she reached for Belmyne's dagger, crawled to the bedroll the creature had slept upon once, and began to shred it. If she was going to make it out of here, she had to properly tend to the wound. It was dried and scabbing, but if there were more of those frog-faces, it wouldn't remain that way. Siena sincerely hoped there weren't, or there could possibly be healing potions somewhere in this place.
There was only one way to go when she'd managed to get steady on her feet, and that was through the hall beyond. Grabbing the spear-point dagger of the burnt corpse for extra armament, she proceeded to stumble down the hall, her clumsy steps softened by the moss of the tunnel floor. Navigating was even more difficult because of the tint of her lenses (which, ironically, was supposed to help her see; the craftsmen had not accounted for dungeon dives) dimming the already low lighting given off by the bulbous blue flora she occasionally passed.
Thankfully, the tunnel was relatively level; unfortunately, it also led right into a four-way intersection occupied by not one, but two of the beasts. Their skin glistened like slime in the light of two torches erected at the entrance of the tunnel to her left; a tunnel going down. The tunnel opposite her went up. Siena frowned as she carefully crouched into a nook in the rock wall of her tunnel, shrouded in shadow and soft, dim blue light.
Torches mean encampments. Encampments mean more of them. Uphill slope means it is likely to lead to the surface, out of here. But it could also be a dead end. And I am in no condition to fight even two of these, let alone more… As she was musing in the darkness, the two beings had wandered towards separate halls. Snapping at the opportunity to get at least somewhere, Siena dashed for the hall to her immediate right, remaining close to the wall and barely maintaining poise. When she'd made it into the hall and around a bend without incident, she thanked Vivec for the moss beneath her feet, collapsing to rest.
After the pain in her thigh had begun to dull, and no further danger was imminent from either direction of the tunnel, Siena rose and carried on, a tight grip on both daggers making her dark blued knuckles turn white. She slowly made her approach, hiding her slim form behind a large mold-green blob with mangrove-like roots before coming out in full view to find a dead end.
She did frown, but she did not turn away. She found her attention grabbed by a certain thick root that came from the ceiling and continued into the floor. It was blotched in bright spots of hardened sap, and those strange lights she'd first seen when passing through the Gates of Madness danced now in front of the root. Only now they were orange and danced far more frantically. Slowly, she stepped up to the root and brushed her fingertips over the smooth amber, before smiling.
Hlaalu minds thought primarily of three things; survival, political strength, and wealth. Siena raised the crude spear-tip dagger she'd confiscated, and began to carve at the amber, wedging the blade between crystallized sap and hard wood. Small, light chucks came loose, and these few chunks she pocketed. The beautiful amber looked valuable, if the Shivering Isles proved to have a market; and if it had guards, Siena would not be able to pilfer for her meals. And wealth meant influence; she'd need all the leverage she could get against the Mad God, any diplomatic or aggressive might she could grasp.
Siena gasped as a strange gas spewed from a tree trunk, the thick cloud of green suffocating her with a weak stench. Pinching her nose, Siena looked at the twin stumps of hollowed wood. In the hallow shell, a mass of green gelatinous matter had taken up residence. Siena leaned close curiously. Was that-?
Her reaction was instantaneous, her arm plunging into the blob without hesitation. She ripped it back out, clutching a bottle victoriously in her hand; a hand which was now elbow-deep in aqua blue slime.
Siena ignored this fact as she looked at the bottle, staring at the contents. Seeming unconvinced of the safety of the potion, she opened it and sniffed it. Satisfied, she became a Nord with his first mead in a week, not even stopping to breathe between gulps. Finished, the bottle fell to the ground as Siena slumped against the amber root and sighed.
The potion was weak, and took a little time to take affect, but when it worked to heal her wound she felt the difference quickly; the cool, soothing touch of magic upon her intensely tingling thigh. A minor healing, but it would be enough for now; until she could find another potion. The other trunk was sadly empty.
Before she got up, though, she looked at the spear-point dagger inquisitively. Then her grip shifted to the tip of the blade, and she chucked it at the wall. It stuck. Good… a better throwing knife than the iron dagger, though somewhat off balance. If I can get one critical shot though, I can make it. She reasoned with herself, going over to the dagger and yanking it out, before turning towards the tunnel entrance soberly.
Of the two, the first one didn't even get to know what it was that buried itself at the base of his skull, but his comrade knew quite well when he slumped to the ground. The slimy humanoid hissed anger as it turned towards the killer, seeing the shimmer of steel chain links and a glint of red eyes in the torchlight. The being sloshed forward on its webbed feet, charging at Siena.
Unlike her first encounter with the thing, Siena was more accustomed to it, and better prepared for the battle as a result. This preparation was evident in the simple fact that the beast's charge was cut short by a small advance by the Dunmer, followed by a vicious stab to the face when it was open to attack. Apparently, they weren't quite intelligent enough to understand blocking with those daggers of theirs. Siena plundered the bodies, taking the daggers and spare gold. To her delight, one of them was also sporting a lockpick. That fit nicely into the boot with the other, but the four daggers wouldn't fit in a boot quite so nicely.
A little disturbed by the idea of it, she decided on taking the thick black leather belt off one of the corpses, and holding onto the daggers with it. Once armed comfortably, she looked at the last two tunnels. One went down –the one with the torches- but the other went up. Reason dictated that in a cavern up was good if one desired escape, so she took that path.
The uphill slope proved unforgiving to her thigh, which wasn't happy with her behavior of late either. But she made it, and around the bend found herself looking at another small 'camp'. The fire cast an eerie, unnerving light on the slick, fat bodies, but it also revealed another form beyond them. Taller, thinner, and three-legged. She could barely make out the silhouette, but shuddered nonetheless. That living tree…
There had to be another way. Siena had been sticking close to the wall, and now in frustration leaned against the bubbly wet-
What the-? Siena realized it too late, however, and fell through the sea green membranous screen onto hard stone. Frighteningly turning around, she watched the membrane close itself back up, removing all trace of her ever passing through the 'door'. Now the cavern was beginning to unnerve her. Slowly, she rotated and headed down the new tunnel.
This one opened up into a vast underground chamber decorated with massive roots that ran along the walls, diagonally like ramps from the upper to the lower level, and even across the gaps between plateaus above. Most of the roots sported protrusions that were sharp pointed and large; either root branches, or really large thorns. More of the fluorescent flora abounded the cavern, but Siena turned her attention instead to the poorly made stake barricade made at the tunnel entrance. And the animal skin roofs she could see on the above plateaus. The torches, and three large crimson statues, did little to dissipate the idea that she'd just stumbled upon a full scale encampment.
Inhaling through her nostrils, Siena clenched her fists, and hoped her leg would hold up to the coming battles. Getting out of here was not going to be easy.