Chapter 80
Bilwin and Mond are asleep on the floor of the sleeping quarters, their breathing slow and even. Motes of dust drift through the air with a peculiar languidness, as though even the particles have been enchanted into stillness. Dolor stands at the doorway, awake and upright — the magical compulsion that dropped his companions found nothing to grip in the tiefling. Gven waits in the antechamber just outside, watching through the doorway.
Dolor drags Mond out first, then Bilwin, pulling each by the ankles into the antechamber. Gven looks down at Mond on the floor, unresponsive, and slaps him across the face. His eyes open, confused and listing. She does the same to Bilwin. The dwarf sputters, blinks, and sits up with the expression of someone trying to locate a word that’s just out of reach.
“All right, then,” Gven says to both of them.
Dolor turns back toward the sleeping quarters. The woman on the bunk hasn’t moved. He crosses the room and reaches down to lift her. The moment his hands make contact, his vision goes sideways.
He’s outside. The air is clear, without a trace of fog or ash, and the sun is out. The land around him is Cyre, transformed — nothing like the dead, gray expanse he’s been moving through, and the difference is so complete that it takes a moment to accept it as real. Below him, in the distance, sounds of battle roll across the plain. Colossi are fighting, enormous constructs pummeling each other in slow, catastrophic exchanges. Smaller warforged move between them like currents around boulders. And then Dolor sees Landro.
Even among the colossi, Landro dwarfs the others. The tallest of the battling constructs barely reach its waist. It simply stands, motionless, while gathered around its feet robed figures hold their hands raised, voices murmuring in low, overlapping streams of arcane language that Dolor can’t parse. The ground begins to quake beneath their feet and the figures struggle to stay upright, their voices rising.
Time lurches. The vision accelerates — seasons blurring past, years collapsing into seconds — and Dolor feels the disorientation of watching history move faster than he’s equipped to process. Then it stops. He’s looking at Landro half-buried in the mountainside, the gray fog threading through everything.
He blinks and he’s back in the sleeping quarters, holding the blanket that laid over the woman. She lies on the bunk, eyes half-closed, dressed in casual, travel clothes. She speaks without opening them.
“Well, that was rude.”
“I was trying to help.” He sets the blanket aside. “What’s your name?”
“Alamar-Vatashi.” She doesn’t move and it’s apparent that she doesn’t want to be disturbed.
Dolor presses carefully, “Where’s the control center for this colossus?”
A long pause. One finger rises from the bunk and points toward the ceiling. “In the head,” she murmurs, and her hand settles back.
The companions return to the shaft along the colossus’ spine and find it blocked by a cave-in somewhere above the abdomen, too dense to pass. They divert to the workshop on the right side of the antechamber. Gven leads the way in — tinkering tools and wood carving implements share space with metal pieces and wood scraps, every surface covered. Along the far wall, a section of rock has collapsed inward, leaving a rough hole that opens into the mountain beyond.
Dolor investigates the room while the others look toward the hole. Near one wall, he finds a vat of gray liquid — the same substance they’ve been navigating around since entering Landro, but thicker here, more viscous, less like runoff and more like something stored deliberately. Tucked nearby, he discovers a set of tinkering tools and pockets them.
The companions move through the hole into the mountain tunnel beyond. Gray fluid runs along the floor in thin channels without covering the ground entirely, and they pick their way through. Gven takes the lead, her darkvision scrutinizing the tunnel ahead. Grindlefoot slides his enchanted goggles over his head, allowing him to also see the path forward.
After a short while, Gven slows. A figure is running toward them from further down the tunnel. It’s humanoid, flesh and bone, not a warforged. Something about the clothing and armor is familiar in a way she can’t immediately place.
Behind her, Bilwin — still not quite himself after the sleeping quarters — spots the approaching figure and his eyes go wide. “It’s coming right at us!” He flings a Mage Hand out in front of them. The spectral hand intercepts the oncoming figure and slaps it squarely, passing right through.
The figure reaches them and stops. A human male, breathing hard, his face urgent. “Please, I’ve lost my comrades. Will you help me find them?”
Gven looks at the clothing, the armor, the weapons at his belt. They’re identical to what they found in that first chamber worn by the perfectly preserved dead. She glances at the others, they’ve noticed as well.
Grindlefoot points back in the direction they came. “I think they’re back that way.” The human male continues its run, moving past them. The companions watch him reach the cave opening that leads back into the workshop, and the moment he crosses the threshold, he’s gone.
A moment later, he appears again, running toward them from down the tunnel. He reaches them and stops. “Please, I’ve lost my comrades. Will you help me find them?”
Grindlefoot tries, “What are you running from?”
“I’m not running from anything. I’m running to find my comrades. They need me.”
“Well, they’re out that way.” Grindlefoot points. The man runs past them and vanishes the moment he enters the room.
He appears again. This goes on another three or four times before the companions, by silent consensus, simply keep walking. Eventually they’ve moved far enough down the tunnel that the ghost no longer appears ahead of them, reappearing behind them now and continuing his unending search in the opposite direction.
The tunnel opens into a chamber. At the center is a pool of gray liquid, roughly fifteen feet in diameter, its depth unknown. The surface is flat and still. Near the pool’s edge lies a scattering of equipment. Chain mail, a couple of swords, and a mace, all warped and discolored, the metal twisted into shapes it was never meant to hold.
To the north, a chamber. Further on, a passage leads southwest. The companions agree to look in the chamber first. Meanwhile, Bilwin turns back the way they came.
The dwarf finds the ghost’s starting point and plants himself in front of it. When the figure appears again, Bilwin holds up a hand. “Sorry, buddy. Your friends are dead. So are you.”
The ghost looks at him. “I don’t feel dead.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty common, from what I understand.”
“What happened to Woof Woof? I miss that puppy.”
Bilwin’s face softens, “I know. But it’s been a really long time. I’d wager Woof Woof has passed on as well.” He lets that sit for a moment. They both hear a single bark off in the distance, its origin untraceable. “But you could probably find him if you focused on enjoying the afterlife instead of running around this tunnel.” He shrugs, “I’m just saying.”
Bilwin rejoins the others in the chamber as Gven walks into the chamber to the north.
The chamber opens wider than expected, spreading roughly twenty feet across in an irregular, lopsided shape, with smaller recesses carved into its left and right sides. In the center of the floor is a pile of leather scraps and broken bones — ten feet by ten feet, easily, and piled two to three feet high. Sitting in the pile, watching them, is a large bear. Three tentacles protrude from its skull, each ending in a knobbed, glowing lump of flesh. Pustules of varying sizes cover its body from head to haunches. It rises onto its hind legs, the full height of it filling the alcove, and roars.
Without hesitating, Gven invokes her rage and draws Tempest Edge in one motion, closing the distance fast. The first swing connects solidly across the blazebear’s chest and the backswing catches its opposite leg.
The creature’s eyes glow and Gven is stunned. Every muscle locks, leaving her standing there, fully conscious, utterly unable to act. Dolor, standing beside her, feels a sensation run through him and then it’s gone, as if nothing happened.
The blazebear lunges, biting Gven twice in quick succession, each strike deep enough to draw blood and leave her longcoat torn.
Bilwin enters the alcove and stops. He takes in the creature, the size of it, the tentacles, the pustules, and tilts his head. “Huh. You’re a big fella.” He walks toward it. “I wonder if you’re maybe just misunderstood.” Standing within arm’s reach of the blazebear, the dwarf makes a concerted effort to handle the creature as one might a spooked horse or a wary dog. The blazebear stares at him for a long moment, then opens its jaws and roars directly into his face, thick spittle covering the dwarf’s beard. It clearly does not feel misunderstood. Bilwin shrugs and turns to Mond, singing out a Bardic Inspiration.
Mond receives the inspiration and channels it immediately into a Fire Bolt that hits the blazebear square in the chest, clipping Bilwin on the way through. The dwarf yelps, and the jolt of it shakes the last of the sleepy fog out of his head.
“Ouch!”
Dolor lights Green Flame Blade along Gleaming Blade’s edge and closes on the creature, slashing a burning line across its body. The rogue follows with his off-hand shortsword before he disengages and steps back. From her frozen position, Gven’s eyes track him across the room. The look on her face says everything that her locked body cannot. She mumbles incoherently through gritted teeth.
Grindlefoot sees the state Gven is in and runs to her, presses a hand to her waist and casts Cure Wounds. The blazebear immediately notices the small halfling and swipes at him with its tentacles, the glowing knobs connecting hard. Grindlefoot turns to run and the creature takes its opportunity, biting down on the halfling as he flees, leaving him badly wounded.
Gven can feel her rage slipping, the blazebear’s magical hold wearing the fire down. She also feels the grip of the stun beginning to lift. But she’s not quite free yet.
The blazebear presses the advantage, biting her twice in rapid succession, each strike worse than the last. Gven absorbs both, her jaw set, her eyes fixed on the creature with an expression that is not fear.
Bilwin grabs his battle axe and puts everything into a swing that catches the blazebear clean. His spiritual beer stein appears in the air beside him and delivers a force blow of its own.
Mond casts Dissonant Whispers, threading psychic damage into the creature’s skull. The blazebear shudders, then holds its ground, resisting the magical urge to run away. It pivots, slashing at Mond with one enormous clawed paw and raking him across the side.
Dolor closes again, Gleaming Blade finding the blazebear’s midsection with a strong hit and the off-hand sword landing right behind it. As he pulls back from the strike, his free hand goes to his belt, closes around a healing potion that he lobs it at Gven’s face. It shatters against her cheek and she catches enough in her mouth to feel warmth spreading through her. She glares at him and mumbles through her still partially stunned state, “Uummm, thhhaaankssss.”
Grindlefoot, bleeding freely from the creature’s bite, raises his hands and Mass Cure Wounds flows out to everyone in the party. Bilwin channels a War God’s Blessing into two more solid strikes against the blazebear.
Finally released and free to move, Gven realizes that she has always been the first one into the fight, even as a child, because showing fear was a faster path to trouble than anything the world outside could offer. Fear isn’t a stranger to her, she knows its weight, the cold of it in the hands before a battle. But she has never let it lead. Not when the chimera’s lion head nearly took her arm off. Not when the kraken pulled her under in the cold of the open sea. Not when the Hertilod swallowed her whole in the god’s heart and she had to cut her way back out from the inside, Tempest Edge shearing through the length of its neck while bile burned up her legs. She is tired of being the one who takes the worst of it every time they walk through a door. But her body knows this work. Her hands know it. Tempest Edge knows it. And this creature chose the wrong barbarian.
Rage floods back through her like a current finding its channel. Tempest Edge moves fast enough that the first slash opens the blazebear’s chest before it tracks the blade. Then, instead of pulling back for a second swing, Gven reverses her grip and drives Tempest Edge point-first into the creature’s midsection, just below the sternum, all the way to the hilt.
The light goes out of its eyes. It falls forward and she catches it. Barely, for a moment, the full dead weight of it falls against her and she holds it triumphantly. Then, with a slight shift of the blade, she steps aside and lets it fall.
It lands directly on Dolor.
The tiefling, who had not been watching Gven’s footwork, finds himself pinned to the floor under several hundred pounds of warm, pustule-covered, distinctly aromatic blazebear.
“Mmphrrffker.”