Chapter 79
The tunnel is quiet in the aftermath of Filch’s revival, the only sound is the faint drip of gray liquid somewhere deeper in the rock. Mercy helps Filch to their feet. The two warforged stand together for a moment, close enough that the companions feel they’re witnessing something not meant for them.
Grindlefoot casts Healing over Filch and the light behind their eyes brightens slightly. Bilwin follows with Cure Wounds and Filch’s frame settles into itself, less taut than before. They look, if not restored, at least functional.
Mercy turns to the companions. The decision is already made — it shows in their bearing. “It is time for us to return to Ialos. Filch needs rest and the others will want to know they are found.” A pause. “I hope you find what you are looking for inside Landro.”
Dolor nods, “As do we. Safe travels, Mercy.”
Bilwin raises a hand and casts Invisibility over both of them. Mercy and Filch disappear from view, the only evidence of their departure a faint sound of careful footsteps fading westward into the darkness of the tunnel.
The companions continue down the tunnel heading westward. The walls are close and the ceiling low enough that Gven has to stoop at points, her shoulders occasionally brush the stone on both sides. The corridor eventually turns south and then opens into a split. Two paths continue from here — south or southwest.
Grindlefoot closes his eyes for a moment, his druidic senses reading the land below the rock. “South,” he says, pointing. “That goes back toward Landro.”
Bilwin and Gven take the lead heading south. The tunnel weaves for a while before curving west, and then opens into a twenty-foot wide cavern. There, pressed into the far wall of the chamber, is the unmistakable shape of a colossal metal foot. One of Landro’s, embedded in the mountain. The toes have collapsed inward over time, folding into a pile of rubble at the base and leaving an opening where the heel would be — a gap large enough to walk through. A cylinder of green light drops from somewhere above, too high to see the source, and within it small motes of light drift upward and downward in lazy spirals.
The floor of the cavern is covered in mushrooms. They grow from cracks in the stone and cluster along the base of the walls, ranging from a few inches to nearly a foot and a half tall, in every imaginable shape and color — rust orange, deep violet, pale yellow, cloudy white.
Bilwin walks straight into Landro’s foot without hesitation. Gven, reading the dwarf’s expression as the same one he has right before something goes wrong, follows close behind just in case.
Of course, the dwarf’s boot catches a mushroom.
It snaps in half and a shriek erupts from it immediately, building in pitch and volume until the metal walls of the chamber begin to vibrate. The other mushrooms join in, one by one, then all at once, until the sound is a wall of noise pressing in from every direction.
Gven’s jaw tightens. Grindlefoot presses his hands over his ears. Both are overwhelmed by the racket.
Mond raises a hand and sends a Fire Bolt across one side of the chamber, obliterating a row of mushrooms in a flash of flame. The shrieking drops by half immediately. He turns and sends another bolt across the other side. Silence envelopes the room so completely that the absence of sound is its own kind of weight.
In the tunnels behind them, that silence takes on a different quality. Dolor turns his head. A sound reaches him from back the way they came — metal on stone, faint but rhythmic. Clanking. Something moving in the dark.
“We should keep moving,” Bilwin says helpfully, already peering up into the green cylinder of light.
A shape floats down from higher in the colossal leg, descending slowly within the column of green. It lands and straightens. A warforged. Leaner than the pilgrims, leaner even than the blade scouts that ambushed them outside Landro. Its body is charcoal gray and scored with marks from fire or blasts, the evidence distributed evenly across every surface. The joints have been filed down, smooth and silent. One eye lens is cracked. Its body is angled slightly forward, weight forward, the posture of something that doesn’t wait for trouble to arrive.
Dolor raises both hands and three crackling beams of energy streak toward the warforged. The first goes wide. The second and third connect, staggering it backward a step.
Gven invokes her rage and steps forward into the cylinder of green light, drawing Tempest Edge in one motion. Her feet leave the ground immediately — the levitation seizes her like a current. The half-orc spent enough time weightless in the Astral Plane to know better than to fight it. She adjusts her center of gravity, gets her feet under her, and swings from the elevated position, the greatsword’s glowing blade cutting along the warforged’s shoulder.
From the cavern entrance, Mond directs a Fire Bolt at the warforged, threading it carefully around Gven. The warforged moves faster than the eye can follow and the bolt sears nothing but air.
Grindlefoot shifts into a giant wolf spider and from his position at the tunnel entrance fires a web into the chamber. It catches the warforged squarely and the construct goes rigid, restrained in the tangle of silk. The spider body now fills the tunnel behind the rest of the group, conveniently or otherwise.
The warforged wrenches itself free from the webbing with a sharp mechanical effort and fixes its gaze on Gven. Something behind the one unbroken lens could almost be called deliberate. It attacks with its hand-sword, quick and precise, leaving only a minor scratch before she pulls back.
From deeper in the tunnel behind Grindlefoot, the clanking grows faster. More repetitive. Speeding up.
Something slices through the giant spider’s body — a blade moving too fast to see clearly. A blur passes through Grindlefoot and past Dolor, rushing forward into the chamber. It misses Gven, barely, the displaced air enough to feel.
Then it stops.
Standing next to the first warforged is a second. This one is built differently — heavier plating across the torso, mismatched pieces bolted and welded together from multiple sources, and where the others have hand-swords that emerge from their forearms, this one’s entire left arm is a blade. Etched into the metal between its shoulders in neat, deliberate lettering: G-L-A-I-V-E.
The look on their face — if the rigid architecture of a warforged face can be called that — is not tactical assessment or battle focus. It is malice. The kind that has been sitting for a long time, gathering weight.
Glaive reaches out and takes hold of the first warforged, turning them aside as though removing them from consideration. Looking up at Gven, still levitating in the green light, and at the companions ranged behind her in the chamber, they say:
“This place is not for you, fleshlings.”
Then Glaive shoots upward into the green light, pulling the other warforged with them and disappearing into Landro’s leg above.
Bilwin watches them go for a brief second, then runs at the cylinder of green light and launches himself into it, clambering over Gven’s levitating form with an odd grace. He casts Invisibility on himself and begins climbing the rungs bolted to the inside of the leg. The levitation helps and doesn’t help — he drifts upward, but the actual velocity is his own, which turns out to be not especially impressive. Above him, the two warforged are already gone from sight or sound.
Gven descends back to the chamber floor and pushes upward as hard as she can, trying to launch herself the way the warforged did. She rises a few feet, settles into the green field alongside Bilwin, and accepts that she is also climbing rungs.
Dolor follows immediately after, finding himself in the same predicament. Then Mond. Grindlefoot, still a wolf spider, finds the cylinder wide enough and skitters upward with eight-legged efficiency, his tiny halfling-sized bowler hat tilted at a determined angle.
About fifteen minutes into the climb, a rung gives way under Bilwin’s weight with a sharp metallic crack. The green field keeps him from falling, but the sudden jolt blows him backward and he has to grab the wall to stop himself from drifting sideways out of the column. He collects himself, finds the next rung, and keeps moving. No one mentions it.
Dolor reaches the end of his patience with the rungs and attempts flying, pushing upward with more authority than the ladder allows. Looking back down at the others still climbing, he lowers a rope.
Gven grabs it.
Dolor strains. Gven does not move appreciably faster.
After thirty seconds of this, they share a look and she lets go of the rope. They resume climbing.\
Eventually, the leg opens into a larger space, the air pressure shifting as gravity reasserts itself. The hip socket. Across the gap is the other hip socket, and between them a rectangular area — roughly twenty feet by ten — that must correspond to Landro’s waist. A shaft opens upward from the center of the floor where a spine would be. A small armory is built into the wall: two halberds and a crossbow with twenty bolts, all of it collecting dust, none of it worth taking.
Grindlefoot, still a wolf spider, discovers the hard way that the hip socket is not built to accommodate a fifteen-foot arachnid. He contents himself with hanging in the joint, drifting lazily in the residual levitation, doing slow barrel rolls and catching his bowler hat before it tumbles away each time.
Bilwin turns slowly in the waist chamber, feeling the familiar pull of the rod tugging at his attention. It divides itself, pointing two directions at once — down toward the other leg and upward along the spine. He looks at the shaft above them.
“Up first.”
The companions float upward through the shaft, Grindlefoot having shifted back into his halfling form. Rubble blocks them somewhere around the chest — too much to pass through — and they divert sideways. The space that opens is the same footprint as the waist chamber: a workshop to the right, two doorways to the left. Through one of the doorways, Bilwin can see what looks like sleeping quarters, and inside them, a humanoid shape lying on one of the bunks.
Bilwin enters first, Mond close behind. Four bunk beds made of wood, their frames wrapped in something green — moss or fabric, hard to tell in the dim light. The humanoid figure lies still on one of the lower bunks, a woman, by appearance, deeply asleep.
She doesn’t stir as they enter.
Bilwin takes one more step toward her and his eyes go glassy. He slumps sideways, asleep before he reaches the floor. A heartbeat later, Mond folds into himself and sits down heavily, out before he finds a position.
The woman on the bunk doesn’t move.