Chapter 81
Dolor lies face down on the cave floor under several hundred pounds of dead blazebear. The smell alone is enough to qualify as a combat condition.
Grindlefoot appears at the chamber entrance, takes in the situation, and moves to help Dolor. Bilwin raises his Mage Hand toward the blazebear with the optimism of someone who hasn’t done the arithmetic on the weight involved. The spectral hand strains against the carcass with all the effect of a stiff breeze on a boulder, so Grindlefoot puts his shoulder into it as well.
With everything he can muster, Dolor simply pushes upward, not lifting the blazebear so much as forcing himself to stand through it. The amalgamated creature’s bulk parts around him in ways that he won’t think about more than necessary. He emerges upright, coated in fluids and body parts he doesn’t want identified, and immediately begins casting Prestidigitation in methodical repeated passes across every surface of his clothing and skin, one patch at a time. It takes a while.
Grindlefoot high-fives the Mage Hand. “I loosened it,” Bilwin offers. “Exactly,” says Grindlefoot.
The companions take stock of themselves. Gven is the worst off, her longcoat scratched in places, dried blood at her shoulder and side, but she’s upright and moving. Grindlefoot casts a round of Mass Cure Wounds and their wounds become slightly more manageable.
Grindlefoot investigates the chamber and turns up nothing worth taking, just bear leavings, the pile of broken bones the creature had nested in, and a smell the companions will be living with for some time.
Bilwin looks around the chamber, then at the Mournland-gray tunnels beyond, then at the dead blazebear. “Does it strike anyone else as odd that since we arrived here, we’ve seen mechanical things and ghosts, but not much in the way of flora or fauna? And now both of them have tried to eat us.”
“We came out of the colossus into the cave behind it,” Dolor says. “The flora and fauna may be native to the caves.”
Nobody has a better theory, so they move on.
The chamber connects northward to a space that loops back, as expected, toward the main tunnel junction near the pool of gray liquid. From there, two additional openings present themselves. The first is small, low and narrow, the kind of passage Grindlefoot might manage on his hands and knees while the rest of the party waited. It angles back eastward, roughly the direction they came from. The second is larger, heading north before bending west, and rises at a noticeable incline.
“The small tunnel is a bad idea,” Dolor says, and no one disagrees.
Grindlefoot makes a careful survival check, reading the terrain the way he reads forest floor. The gray liquid in the smaller passage flows downward, which means it originates from above, which means the larger northern passage is the one heading up. The control center is in the head, Alamar-Vatashi said, so that settles it.
The larger tunnel winds upward steadily, the floor slick in places where gray fluid has pooled in shallow channels. The companions pick their way through with care, all too familiar now with what happens when the liquid makes contact with skin. Gven leads, her darkvision cutting the dimly lit passageways. As usual, Grindlefoot relies on his enchanted goggles to manage the terrain.
Before he realizes it, the halfling’s boot slips into a channel of the fluid. The contact is brief but sufficient — a strange vertigo, the sensation of thoughts that aren’t quite his own pressing in at the edges, gone again almost before he can register it.
A moment later, Dolor’s foot finds the same channel. What hits him is not pain exactly, or not only pain. It’s a memory, except it isn’t his. Voices reach him, clear and urgent, the kind that belong to people working under pressure toward a deadline they’re not sure they’ll make.
“Primary and secondary systems online. Still waiting on the tertiary, we need that cued up now. Are the main crystals charged? Eighty percent. They should be at ninety-five by now. We had to offload some into the auxiliary, there was a leakage, we need to get this thing moving.”
The voices overlap, technical and fast, layered until the individual words start to blur. And then the reason it hurts arrives: he knows these voices. Not from memory, not from any encounter he can place, but from something deeper, something that belongs to a different kind of knowing. They sound like his parents. The digital work in the warforged archives, the signatures he identified on the engineering schematics. His parents helped build this thing. This is their memory.
He removes his foot from the channel and keeps the uneasy memory to himself.
The tunnel clears of fluid as it rises, the channels draining into a smaller side passage and leaving their path unobstructed. The cavern opens to roughly ten feet wide and runs upward for thirty or forty feet before bending sharply right, north becoming east, then continuing another sixty or eighty feet before opening into a larger chamber.
Here, the ceiling climbs to twenty-five or thirty feet. Two tunnels curve away on opposite sides of a central space, looping north and south, and above the path the companions are walking, a natural rock formation spans the gap like a bridge, a wide, irregular overhang, five or six feet thick, crossing the full width of the passage ten to fifteen feet above the floor.
Gven enters the chamber first, followed by Dolor, Bilwin, and Grindlefoot, with Mond at the rear. From above them, two sharp cracks sound almost simultaneously, close together in time and in direction.
A crossbow bolt punches into Gven’s shoulder, and because she isn’t raging yet, she feels every bit of it. The second bolt clips the rock just above her head, spraying grit across her face. She doesn’t see where either shot came from. The overhang is too wide, the angle too steep, the light too poor.
Mond fires a Fire Bolt toward the point where he thinks the bolts originated. Something shifts up there but there’s no sound of contact, no cry. He moves for a better angle, trying to find a sightline under the overhang.
Three more bolts come in rapid succession, all from the same elevated position. One catches Gven across the shoulder again, deepening the wound, and the other two miss, striking rock with sharp cracks that echo through the chamber. Whatever is up there fires fast and then goes quiet.
Bilwin looks at where the bolts came from, looks at the overhang above it, and makes a decision.
He casts Shatter, aiming the spell squarely at the overhang, twenty feet of solid rock spanning the width of the tunnel. What follows is a sequence of four distinct sounds. The first is the spell cracking, the familiar sound of Shatter going off. The second and third are metallic, different from stone, something with a voice in it, brief and sharp. The fourth is the sound every dwarf knows and most people only hear once: the deep, structural crack of rock that has decided to go.
The overhang comes down.
The debris fills the chamber with a billowing cloud of stone dust, the kind of obscurement that treats both darkvision and regular vision equally. No one can see anything. Everyone scrambles clear of the worst of it, folding into whatever shelter the chamber offers, and when the roar of falling stone finally settles, no one has been crushed beneath it. Until the dust clears, the chamber is obscured enough to effectively blind everyone within.
Dolor moves through the cloud. He’s been navigating by means other than sight for enough years that the dust doesn’t paralyze him. He picks a direction, moves carefully, reads sound and air movement. As he comes through the worst of it, he hears something near him: grunting, stone shifting against metal, the sound of something working its way out from under rubble. Not close enough for an attack of opportunity. Just close enough to know something is there and alive. He goes still and waits.
Gven invokes her rage and walks into the cloud with Tempest Edge in her hand. She is not going to be shot at twice with crossbow bolts and wait patiently for the air to clear. She swings at the place she estimates the attackers would be, and with Bilwin’s War God’s Blessing lending its weight to the strike, the blade connects hard, though she can’t see what she’s hit. There is contact and it’s solid. Somewhere in the dust, something absorbs the blow.
The barbarian doesn’t take another swing. She’s connected with something but has no way to confirm what, and there are too many unknowns in the dark. Standing at the ready, she holds her position.
Grindlefoot casts Gust of Wind and sends it straight down the corridor, a focused sixty-foot line blowing the stone dust ahead of it. For a moment, the chamber clears.
What the companions see: two warforged, standing in the debris of the fallen overhang. Both are armed. One of them is leaner than the other, fast, arm blades already extended, unmistakable even in the half-second of clear air. The other looks like it was just pulled from the rubble, scored with fresh damage amongst scars received long ago, moving stiffly. A split second later, the rescuing construct loses footing on the loose gravel now blanketing the floor and tumbles fifteen feet down the corridor, catching itself before it falls but ending up well back from where it started. The magical wind presses behind them like a hand at their backs, adding insult to physics.
Mond sends a Lightning Bolt at the two warforged, drawing on heightened spell to strip away their resistance, the bolt crackling down the corridor in a narrow, blinding line. The scarred warforged catches the full brunt of it, arcing blue-white across broken plating. The other twists half clear, catching only a fraction of it, enough to stagger but not drop.
The wiry warforged extends arm blades from both forearms and turns toward Gven. Three strikes, fast, efficient, mechanical. Two land. The rage absorbs some of it, but the blades find gaps in her longcoat. Then it turns and runs, bolting down the corridor at a speed that makes the Gust of Wind feel like assistance rather than obstacle.
Bilwin raises a hand and calls down Guiding Bolt on the attacker, radiant light flooding through its plating and lighting it up like a lantern. Whatever hits it next is going to hit it with advantage.
From hiding, Dolor steps in, Green Flame Blade already running along Gleaming Blade’s edge, and brings the advantage to bear. The strike opens a deep gash across the warforge’s chassis, sparks and fluid spilling from the wound. The second attack misses. He disengages, walks to Gven, and says quietly, “Your turn.” He’s grinning just slightly.
The warforged, badly wounded now, looks at Gven, looks at its companion already gone down the corridor, and follows its wiry companion. Both of them, fleeing together, disappear into the tunnel ahead.
Gven is already moving.
She charges down the corridor at full rage, Tempest Edge in hand, and hits the first trap before she sees it, a small explosive charge triggered by pressure, her momentum carrying her through it without breaking stride. The second trap is less forgiving. Shrapnel catches her across the ribs and thigh before she can pull free, a burn of heat and pressure that even her rage-dulled senses register.
At the far end of the corridor, an opening back into Landro’s structure. Both warforged are there, standing together, having turned to make their stand. She’s close enough to see them, but too far to reach them.
Grindlefoot turns off the Gust of Wind, runs after Gven, and gets close enough to lend a Healing Word, the words threading warmth back into the half-orc’s shoulder even as she runs.
Mond dashes down the corridor, getting within range of both targets.
The more damaged warforged raises a crossbow, three bolts at Gven, and one catches her again, a shallow puncture along her ribs.
Bilwin dashes the length of the corridor and reaches Gven’s side, summoning his spiritual beer stein to strike one, the force blow rocking it back on its heels.
Dolor Misty Steps to Gven’s position and sends three Eldritch Blasts into the pair of enemies, the crackling bolts finding gaps in both their frames. Between the magical stein and the eldritch blasts, it’s enough, and one finally goes down, slumping against the tunnel wall and going still.
One remains.
Gven attacks the lone survivor twice. The first strike misses, the second lands clean and hard across the warforged’s midsection, the longcoat’s sleeves whipping through the follow-through. Her dagger misses on the bonus attack.
Grindlefoot sends another Healing Word to Gven as a bonus action and saunters fifteen feet closer to the action at a pace that suggests he is deeply unconcerned about the warforged’s remaining hit points.
Mond fires at the last standing warforged and misses, his bolt going wide by enough that it’s almost impressive.
The warforged extends arm blades and takes three swings at Gven. One connects, the rage reducing what gets through but not erasing it. It has been in this fight long enough to know how it ends, but it doesn’t run.
Bilwin swings with his battle axe for a modest hit, and directs his spiritual stein toward the target with his bonus action. The stein misses, swinging through empty air with what can only be described as commitment.
Dolor steps forward.
Green Flame Blade courses along Gleaming Blade’s edge, advantage from the earlier Guiding Bolt still in effect, and the tiefling finds a gap in the warforged’s plating with the kind of precision that makes the whole thing look easy. The strike opens it wide, and the follow-through finishes the job. The warforged teeters, something internal going quiet that had been running. It falls toward Gven.
She’s ready and deflects it cleanly, the body sliding off to the side. She watches it hit the floor with the flat expression of someone who has earned the right to not be surprised anymore.
Without looking at Dolor, “A worthy adversary. Still, much smaller than that blazebear.”
The corridor is quiet. The two warforged lie still, both of them dead.
Gven looks closely, “We encountered this wiry one earlier, at the foot, with Glaive.” Dolor and Mond nod in agreement.
Beyond the bodies, the opening back into Landro’s structure sits waiting, open and unguarded. The companions have been in the colossus’s leg, its foot, its waist, its chest. The head is still above them. Somewhere up there is a control center, and somewhere in this construct is another piece of the Rod of Seven Parts.
They catch their breath, and go through.