Chapter 83
Mond hangs from a rung of the ladder, one arm looped through it, staring down some thirty or forty feet at the pile of rubble where his companions are slowly picking themselves up. The ringing in everyone’s ears is the particular kind that comes from falling a long way and landing hard.
They gather their wits and begin, as adventurers do, to have a conversation about what just happened.
Bilwin, still on the lower floor, turns his attention back up toward the level where the stone table lives. He wants to understand the thing that flattened them, and more to the point, how to kill it if it comes to that. He turns the problem over, drawing on the knowledge his years as a cleric have given him, the lore of made things and animating magics, and after a while it settles into place. It isn’t merely an animated table. It’s a golem. A golem’s power is bound up in its very existence rather than laid over it like a spell, which means half the tricks they might reach for would slide right off it.
Mond and Grindlefoot, having had quite enough excitement for one climb, decide it’s time to rest. Mond in particular is done. He finds a reasonably flat patch of rubble, announces to no one in particular that he’s taking a nap, and tucks in. Gven takes the first watch, or means to, though she spends half of it with Bilwin and Dolor, puzzling over the golem one level up.
Bilwin leads the way back up toward the table, Gven climbing the ladder behind him, Dolor flying alongside rather than bothering with the rungs. The dwarf pulls himself up to the level of the golem and finds it, but not in table form.
It’s down on its hands and knees, crawling across the floor in a hunched, four-limbed shape, patting the stone in slow sweeps. It has no eyes that any of them can find. It’s feeling its way through the dark, and what it’s feeling for, they realize, are the maps. Its hands move over the floor where the maps used to be, searching, and every so often it goes still, as if listening, before resuming.
Something about it strikes Bilwin as deeply sad. Dolor watches the blind thing grope across the floor and suggests, quietly, that perhaps they should give the maps back.
Bilwin, Dolor, and Gven climb back down to the lower level, where Bilwin produces a handful of the maps and Dolor, who can read any language ever written, goes through them. He can’t make sense of the geography, the land they depict predates the catastrophe and bears no resemblance to the mist-drowned Mournland he knows. But he can tell the maps are old, and that they’d fetch a fair price from a collector, the warforged pilgrims among them. Valuable, then. Just not useful, unless someone happens to come across a way to travel backward through time.
So Bilwin decides to give them back.
He climbs up to the golem’s level once more, the maps in hand, and tosses several of them onto the floor beneath the creature’s searching hands, Gven and Dolor pitching in with the rest. The golem’s fingers find the first of them, and it draws the maps up against the place on its body where a chest might be, cradling them. Bilwin feels something settle in the creature, a small measure of peace coming to it. It grows still. And then, slowly, it reforms itself into a table in the center of the room, the maps resting on its surface.
Bilwin turns to Gven and Dolor, gives the tabletop a friendly pat, and announces, “We’re all good here!”
One level down, Mond sleeps through the entire negotiation.
The three companions climb back down to rejoin Mond and Grindlefoot, who have been resting all this while, tucked into the spinal column near the pilot’s chair and the rubble-choked passage they’d first climbed through. The whole party settles onto the debris that blocks the shaft from below, and begins their long rest.
Gven finishes her watch. All clear. The half-orc wakes Mond for the second watch and it passes without incident as well.
Then, during the next watch, Dolor hears it: something pushing through the debris back where they’d first entered, in the direction of the caves. The echoes in a hollow metal colossus make distance hard to judge, but it sounds close, and it’s getting closer. Concerned, he wakes Bilwin, then decides the situation warrants waking everyone. The dwarf comes up slow and bleary, barely conscious, deeply unwilling to be awake.
Into the base of the chamber, where the ladder meets the floor, push two warforged, arm blades already extended, ready for a fight.
Mond casts Blade Ward on himself, bracing for what’s coming.
Gven, with no time to work herself into a proper rage, draws Tempest Edge and swings at the nearest warforged. The first strike lands, biting into its plating; the second whistles wide.
Dolor runs Green Flame Blade along Gleaming Blade’s edge and swings. The first attack misses entirely. The second connects, but the blade skips off the warforged’s metal armor without finding purchase.
Grindlefoot Wild Shapes into a velociraptor and closes the distance, though he can’t quite reach the warforged to attack.
The first warforged turns its arm blades on Gven, catching her once for a shallow wound and missing with the follow-up.
The second warforged goes after Grindlefoot in his raptor form, its first blade opening a gash across his flank, the second cutting deeper still.
Two more warforged push into the chamber behind the first pair, but Grindlefoot’s bulk and Gven’s position bottleneck the space, and they can’t get past to reach the others.
The third warforged swings at Gven twice and misses both times.
The fourth turns on the velociraptor. The first slash goes wide; the second lands square, and it’s enough. The raptor form collapses, and Grindlefoot is standing where it fell, back in his own small halfling body.
Bilwin, still half-asleep, has been dreaming about his old friends, and when he reaches for magic they arrive as Spirit Guardians, spectral shapes wheeling in the air around him, unable to strike yet. In his groggy frustration, the dwarf just reaches out and smacks one of the warforged with an open palm. It accomplishes nothing.
A fifth warforged comes racing into the room, and the guardians descend on it as it enters, tearing into it and cutting its speed to a crawl. This one they recognize. This is Glaive, and where the others sprout blades from their forearms, Glaive carries a long polearm capped with a single curved blade, its namesake.
Glaive rounds on Bilwin. The first sweep of the polearm misses. The second finds him, the curved blade opening a long slash, and as it lands a surge of energy pulses through it and into the dwarf. They speak, low and cold: “You defile this place with your flesh.”
Bilwin wakes up the rest of the way, very suddenly. “Ow!”
Mond casts Slow across all five warforged. Glaive and the first shrug it off, but the other three are caught, their movements dragging to half speed.
Gven finally invokes her rage and turns Tempest Edge on Glaive, both strikes landing clean and hard. “Finally,” a smile of satisfaction appears across her face. “A worthy opponent.”
Dolor casts Thunderwave. Glaive and the fourth warforged brace against it and take the lesser share of the blast. The other three, the first, second, and third, catch the full force and are hurled back against the interior walls of the colossus, crushed on impact. All three drop dead, out of the fight.
Grindlefoot disengages and casts Moonbeam on Glaive, the pillar of cold light settling over them, preparing its moonlit energy.
The fourth warforged attacks Bilwin, missing with the first blade and clipping him with the second. It stays close to Glaive, holding its ground rather than pressing forward.
Bilwin, wide awake now and thoroughly irritated about it, calls down a Guiding Bolt on the warforged that just cut him. The radiant light simply incinerates it, and it drops. He glares at the smoking heap of scorched metal. “Stand up so I can kill you again!” He stamps on it.
Glaive turns inside the Moonbeam and the light sears them before they step clear of it. They round on Dolor, the first arc of the glaive whiffing past, the second landing a heavy blow, though Dolor twists with it and Uncanny Dodges to halve the wound.
Mond hurls a Fire Bolt at Glaive, the cantrip searing across their scorched frame.
Gven attacks twice with Tempest Edge, both blows connecting, the greatsword ringing off Glaive’s plating and biting through it.
Dolor runs Green Flame Blade along Gleaming Blade once more and strikes Glaive twice, the green fire leaping across them. The blade may have caught them across the eyes, it’s supposed to blind, though against a warforged’s featureless face he can’t tell whether it took.
Grindlefoot sees that Dolor is hurt and sends healing magic his way, closing the worst of the wounds.
Bilwin, who wants nothing in this world so much as to go back to sleep, calls down one final Guiding Bolt on Glaive. “I just want to get back to sleep. Are we done?”
Glaive’s joints begin to spark and smoke. There is no expression on a warforged’s face to read, but there is a presence to them, the bearing of a warrior, and it’s the bearing of one who knew they were defeated the moment they entered the room. Slowly, in their last movements, they lift the glaive and point it at each of the companions in turn, the motion dragging slower and slower. They look at all of them, and say:
“You caused this. None of you are worth—”
And the words stop, unfinished, in silence.
With the respect owed a worthy adversary, Gven crouches to examine Glaive, not to loot or to gloat, but out of a warrior’s curiosity. There’s little to take; the polearm is a fine weapon but plainly the only thing this warforged ever carried or wanted to. But one detail stops her. Across the warforged’s chest is the word G-L-A-I-V-E, and as she traces a finger across the letters she sees that it wasn’t stamped or branded there by a maker. It was carved. By the warforged itself. It had written its own name into its own body.
Gven thinks of the journal Dolor found back in Sigil, and what he’d told them of it afterward, the account of what the warforged went through when the war ended and freedom of thought came to them all at once, sudden and unasked for. For many of them, their service had been the only identity they’d ever known, and when it was stripped away there was nothing underneath. This one, she understands, had no one to give it a name, so it took the only name it could reach: the name of the weapon it carried. And its whole self grew from there.
The barbarian sits with that for a moment. If all she had ever been called was the name of the blade at her waist, if she had been handed her freedom with no idea what to do with it, she isn’t certain she’d have come out the other side any differently. The thing that came here to kill them, driven by forces it likely never controlled, had been fighting the same fight she’d been fighting her whole life. Just with far less to hold onto.
The companions settle back down onto the rubble. This time, at last, the whole party settles in.
Long rest….