AUTHORS NOTE
Thanks for the favourite and follow Siddharth1998m!
Archer1Eye - Lol.. Spelunking! She very desperately wants to get there, but it's a long journey and part of her knows that it may all be for naught.
Oh dear me, no. Worm itself is bad and some worm fanfiction REALLY sends Taylor to hell and back! I like Tolkien; where even in the dark places there may still be a light where all other lights have gone out. I like my stories to still have that glimmer of hope, that faint reassurance that there may yet be a happy ending despite the fear that all may be lost. I think you guessed it, her connection to Tenebrae meant that the priest's Cure Light Wounds spell actually did damage to her, almost putting her to -10. Thank the darkness that the soldiers had the presence of mind to put a potion to her lips! You know what? I don't think I got a notification of your favourite/follow :/
? Day of High Summer? 768 n.c?
The man with the torch shouted out, "of course, it would be our pleasure!"
Beside me Garth sighed, I looked at him and said softly, "we probably don't need to mention our… misunderstanding, do we?"
He replied gruffy, "no, no we do not," and although his expression didn't change, he seemed to walk a bit taller.
"My name is Sharein," I introduced myself as I got closer, "I'm a journeyman wizard on my way to Allarth and I was just looking for a cave to spend the night."
"Well met Sharein!" The man boomed and the woman behind him immediately shushed him. He immediately appeared abashed but continued a bit softer, "my name is Damon and behind me are Karalin the huntress and Gorgrim Hillgrip of the Irongap Dwarves. Please, bring your horse into the cave and sit by our fire for a bit."
"Is it safe?" I asked, "Garth mentioned that the cave leads to the underworld and troglodytes?"
"It should be safe for the night at least," Damon said, "Gorgrim found the doorway entrance and wedged it closed."
He was an older man, probably about my father's age; his face very weathered and his hair peppered with grey. The woman, Karalin, appeared slightly older than me and was dressed in green dyed leather armour. She had a pretty heart shaped face that was kissed all over with freckles. It was Gorgrim the dwarf that took all of my attention however, he was my height but twice as wide as me. He didn't have quite the same proportions as a human, appearing to be somewhat squished down. Brown hair covered his head to such an extent that I could only see a small part from his forehead to the end of his bulbous nose. The dwarf's hair wasn't messy at all like a birdsnest, but braided in parts with small metal rings or beads threaded through the braids in parts. He was wearing a sort of scaled armour and carried a large double headed axe that all gleamed in the torchlight.
The cave was fairly small at its mouth but widened after a short s-bend into a large cavern. Inside the cavern were more horses, tied up, and a camp complete with fire and a large chunk of meat cooking on a green branch above it. The fire crackled and flared with drips of fat from the meat and the air in the cave carried the delicious aroma of smokey meat.
"Come," Damon gestured to the camp, "tie up your horse with ours and join us for some venison."
"Oh, thank-you," I gushed at his generosity and offered, "I have some pickled cabbage in my pack that could be warmed up?"
"Pickled cabbage?" The Dwarf declared in such a gruff tone that I feared that I may have offended him, but continued more wistfully, "why, I haven't had pickled cabbage since I left the Irongap mountains!"
I almost had to laugh when he seemed to realise that he wasn't sounding at all as gruff as he had begun and seemed to feel the need to live up to every dwarf stereotype I had ever heard in stories continued, in a much more gruff tone, "I doubt it will taste anywhere near as good as gandarschard."
Karalin snorted and the dwarf shot the woman a frown.
"I didn't say anything," she said and Garth laughed lightly beside me.
"Well," Damon declared, "I think this is ready," and he fetched some wooden plates from a pack and lifted the spit off its stand.
I pulled the final jar of pickled cabbage out of my pack and handed it to the older man, who had produced a frying pan from somewhere. The cabbage was upended onto the pan and the acrid smell of the pickling water made my nose twitch. While that heated, he pulled wooden plates from a pack and proceeded to slice up the venison. It was a very lean meat and not something I had usually eaten although people had occasionally shot a deer that came too close to their farm. It was an earthy meat and tasted absolutely delicious combined with the pickled cabbage.
I was looking towards Gorgrim when he took his first bite of the cabbage and noticed his widened eyes and an expression that seemed to hint at a recollection of happy childhood memories.
"How?" He stuttered, before he began to shovel the food into his mouth at an impressive (and slightly disgusting) speed. Once his mouth was full, he chewed, swallowed and savoured with a look of supreme contentment. Once his plate was empty of pickled cabbage (he hadn't at that point even touched his venison), he asked if anybody wanted the extra still sitting in the pan. I then realised that I wasn't the only one staring at him, as everybody else seemed to be looking at the dwarf in shock.
We all stammered variations of "no," or "help yourself," and watched as he tipped out the remaining cabbage onto his plate, almost but not quite overflowing onto the ground until he had a fair mound piled over the top of his meat. Once done, he proceeded to continue shovelling the food into his mouth.
Everybody shared a look over the top of the dwarf's head and continued to eat our own meal, in relative silence, until Damon asked, "tell me Sharein, why are you journeying this way to Allarth? Wouldn't it be safer to travel by the main roads?"
The other two (the dwarf was still preoccupied with his food) looked at me and I immediately felt a bit nervous, I'd be a fool to trust these strangers with the truth, so I answered evasively, "I have no fear of the things in the wilderness, I killed two trolls on my way here."
"Trolls?" Asked Karalin eagerly from beside me, "you fought two of them?"
"I killed two of them," I corrected her, "although it would have been a close thing had not my Acid Splash spell stopped them once and for all."
"Good," she said with a vicious nod and continued, "fire or acid are the only ways to vanquish those disgusting creatures."
"I think I tried everything else before I came across something that would work," I told her and then said to Damon, "I've also killed orcs beyond count, I'm no farm girl."
I realised, when I said it, that I really wasn't a farm girl anymore and that realisation made me smile a little.
"Well," Damon said, "I think that I can speak for everybody here, when I offer you a place in our company; at least for this one task, should your quest in Allarth not be one of dire need?"
I was a little torn, for although I did feel such a pressing need to get to Shard's altar and felt such a sense of despondency at the thought of the missing pieces her disappearance had left inside me, I could also provide some assistance to those gathered in the cave. Should I decline the offer and one of them die, would I not in some small way be responsible for that? No, I thought rationally, but it didn't change the feeling that I would be.
"For this one task," I said, "but I really must be getting to Allarth."
"Once we collect the payment for removing these troglodytes," Damon said, "we can discuss it, but we do not have any other tasks ahead of us, so perhaps we could accompany you at least some of the way? But that's a discussion for once our task is complete."
When Gorgrim finally finished his food, he set down his plate on the ground and looked up at me in some sort of awe.
"Lass," he said, "how, did you come to have gandarschard? It's almost exactly like my maman used to make!"
Although I knew that he appreciated it, that was obvious from the way he was eating, it came as a little bit of a shock that it tasted (to him) exactly like a favoured dish from home.
"I… don't know?" I answered honestly, "it's my mother's recipe that she got from my father's family I think. Everyone in Easthaven makes it pretty much the same way though. Cabbage, water, salt, beets, apple vinegar, cloves, garlic and peppercorns," I said after a moment's thought.
The dwarf sniffed and Karalin exclaimed cheekily, "Grim! Are you… are you crying?"
"No!" The dwarf declared, wiping his nose on the back of his hand and added quite unconvincingly, "jus' a peppercorn stuck in my teeth."
After we had all finished dinner, we talked around the fire for a little while before bed. I learned that Karalin had grown up in a forest village as the child of a hunter and had followed her father on hunting trips from the time she could walk. She was almost of age to marry when goblins attacked the village and killed everybody except her and her father. Together they followed the tracks of the goblins back to their den and used the same methods they both employed to learn about their animal quarry to increase their knowledge about goblins. They hid and watched. For tenday after tenday they observed the goblins, until they felt that they knew enough to act. I shuddered a little at the patience required to just watch and the amount their hatred and anger must have simmered. Together they killed the entire goblin tribe, though tragically her father was killed by the goblin chieftain moments before her own arrow ended its life. Since then she had been travelling throughout the wilderness looking for more goblins to kill until she ran across Damon and Gorgrim.
Damon used to be a soldier and then a caravan guard until he fell in with an adventuring party one day and had been adventuring ever since.
Gorgrim had grown up on tales of the Hammer of Austri, the Dwarven Sun God. When he grew old enough to join a trade, rather than take up the trade his family was pressuring him into: jewelry making, he decided to go adventuring in search of the Hammer.
Garth was very tight lipped about his past and by the looks of things he had not opened up very much to the others either.
I told them of growing up in Easthaven and getting my apprenticeship and moved on to the invasion by orcs. I glossed over any mention of Shard and merely told them that someone 'very important to me' might be in Allarth.
Whether through lack of trust in me, or prior planning the others already had their watch planned out, with one person staying awake in case of trouble and then waking another to take their turn.
Before I went to sleep I wrote out an alarm rune scheme and placed it in my pack on top of the other things… just in case.
I fell asleep mostly distracted by the novelty of meeting new people in such a different situation for me, but still had tears in my eyes as I thought of Shard.
I woke with a start in the middle of the night and at first thought that it might be my alarm going off, but was surprised that it was instead Karalin gently shaking me with a concerned look.
"I'm sorry," she whispered as soon as she saw that I was awake, "you were crying out in your sleep, I didn't want you to wake the others."
"Thank you," I whispered back, wiping some tears from my eyes that had apparently fallen during my dreams.
She started to move away back to her spot, but paused and asked, "is Shard who you are looking for in Allarth?"
I nodded as the tears increased.
"We'll help you get her back, if we can," she whispered before turning and moving back to her watch post.
The reassurance helped me fall back asleep. Eventually.
