Breath in the Stone Part 1
An account from the beginning of the crusade and the Thundering Vale campaign.
Armageddon’s everpresent rumbling woke her, cold sweat soaked her clothes and armor while dust retained uncomfortable heat. In the glowing fungi's light in the cleft above she saw some of the contents of the fissure covering her. She ripped off her iron mask and let it rattle on the flagstones, choking a gasp through a clay-dry throat. A prayer she recited by rote, her free hand outstretched, and she began unburying herself in the flickering amber light of the magic circle's serpentine letters.
She dragged herself free of the remaining scree, dragged herself to a corner of the chamber, and quickly her pulse became all she felt and heard seeing the suet that was the flesh above her knee. In that war-drum she found her center and recited another prayer, felt an ice-cold tingle, but for nought: the new tissue advanced some, but broke like surf against the gore of her leg.
But the spell stopped her bleeding and cleansed the wound of any infection, so the priestess counted her blessings. Calling her iron mask to her hand, she examined the chamber.
Diamond-shaped, twenty-three feet to a corner, and made of a mortarless work of massive stones betraying how little history modern mortals knew. Corners to either side gave way to arches surrounding voids, the flow of air like funeral shrouds of the restless dead. Opposite where she sat, alcoves with skulls. A thought came to her--she looked over her own shoulder and over a dozen skulls looked back indifferently. The fissure that grew over quiet centuries to weaken the corridor far above her dominated the ceiling, the mycoids prospering within a testimony to its age.
Her prayer of light was cast against the fissure, part of it on the ceiling, another part on the rocks just beyond, compromising the spell's integrity and giving the light a flicker. It followed the caster as she shuffled to one of the arches, the black void like the mouth of a skull shedding cold mist, into the darkness and the skeletal breath of the telluric current. When she entered the dark passage beyond, the spell failed and the dead resumed their vigil over eternity's cosmic expanse.
A DARK VOID studded with more glowing fungi far above--the stars and constellations of the spirit realms. Arms outstretched, she could only touch one side of the hall, the masoned stone giving way to naked rock fifteen feet above, more like another infinite realm than underground. Condensation misted down, sapping all heat, and the hard exertion of moving with an injured leg merely kept her just warm enough to be uncomfortable. Here and there were opposing pairs of alcoves made from a single vertical right angle; diamond-shaped chambers where more skulls questioningly followed her where the organic green-blue light reflected from sockets worn smooth from time. The deep air whispered, a lamenting praise of the most-feared yet most-common part of life--the end, and the gulfs and nebulae awaiting on the other side.
Time seemed to stretch on--not merely its passage, but the tangible idea stretched out as might a massive black serpent from some huge fissure in the corridors or the diamond-chambers. These rooms were of different sizes and the same shape, a common element in these catacombs, and were warmer with their ceilings. She sat on a fallen segment of ceiling in one and examined her leg. Weighing her options, she prayed to her ancestor steppe-god, reciting some of the early scripture He later claimed--the oldest stuff, unchanged over time and dealing with the harsh essentials of life--and felt her body temperature fortifying against the cold.
Now and again she felt the earth tremble from the ongoing attack far above: maybe another massive, storied building sinking into the karst, or the karst giving way and consuming a building; maybe an equally-massive attacking demon struck with a chthonic beam and crashing into the city, shaking the air with its death-howl. The skulls whispered dust with every disturbance of their posts, and the air currents seemed to grind with agitation the underground domain was not being left alone in peace.
With spell and hand she discerned the injury as better than it looked. A sharp stone stabbed into her leg, easily worked out and sealed of bleeding with the last prayers she could focus on that could push matter. Some basic kit she kept on herself bound up the wound. But by Tangrit'ulkha'an, her knee and hip hurt. They felt tight and loose at the same time, an unsettling feeling that grew the more she walked, needing frequent rests when the pain overcame her wits. As the latter came back in an almost foreign way now that she treated her wounds somewhat, her focus returned and her eyes narrowed at the susurration carrying on an instant longer and a pitch lower than the air and the rumbling.
She furrowed her brow under her mask, the skulls seemed to return her gaze like guards eyeing a stranger, affronted by the use of life-oriented magic in their presence. The priestess pushed herself to her feet and onward--stopping as she reached the arch. She looked over her shoulder--nothing. But she heard the shifting air pause and give away the unmistakable rasp of air through an ancient-dry mouth--and her spine bristled.
A BLUNT RENT in the throat was how the pioneer died, trauma from an unedged, nonmetallic object so strong his flesh gave way and the grotesque mask went flying to the other side of the diamond-alcove. One of the better-trained soldiers of the attackers, called 'pioneers' because they operated far ahead of the disorganized mobs of the enemy, advancing as far as possible into the defenders' lines. The ones she had seen were clad in crudely-made but well-put together armor and wielded thin, razor-sharp longknives and short swords. This one's knife was recently chipped, edges of fresh metal glinting here and there among the tarnish.
The priestess put aside speculation what he was doing here, where his friends were, and what killed him--she turned his head to examine his physiognomy. His adult teeth grew in only on one side of his mouth--the teeth on the other side were small and spaced-out, and she could feel aborted adult teeth through soft weblike cheekbone. That side of his face was shrunken by comparison, giving his head a wan-moon shape. Other than this significant deformity, the skull was well-shaped. This individual came from whatever amounted to near-vital stock in the Rift--but those lanes of thought she chased from her mind as she rose and gasped back the pain.
A human peal gave way to a gurgled cry, and her blood chilled--it came from the same direction as she. She backed away from the distant echo of commotion, turned, and sped away as fast as her pain allowed.
THE SCREAMS GREW the further she fled, unease running sweat-like down her back as she heard them coming from multiple directions, as if the pioneers met with a party far deadlier than they, and bereft of hesitation--and it all surrounded about where she woke up from the collapse. Her imagination pendulated against the restless dead awakening as a horde and a single aeons-forgotten beast drawn from the deep tunnels by the battle on the surface.
Finally, several minutes without screams or any other disturbance. The priestess by then was of one mind with her hosts in their sconces, wanting nothing to do with any disturbances and to be left alone and unmolested. Glances stolen downwards of more pioneers dead from blunt-force trauma; like the first their lean physiques were in better condition, less dysgenic, than the stooped mobs who swarmed the city above.
Then a scream, somewhere between fright and anger, and the harmonics told her the source had unobstructed line to her. She turned around and saw a figure making a mad dash in her direction down a straight corridor crossed with side-halls. From its beastlike exertion and the sound of its armor, she knew it was another pioneer, possibly the last of the cadre exploring these depths. Out came the knife she took from his dead compatriot, reluctant for her final stand--to die here, so far from the sky, would her soul find its way to her ancestors?
When the pioneer was close enough to barely fit in her outstretched thumb, some missile struck him prone, and the event clapped her mind as a massive falling boulder in a canyon. He cried out--the sounds felt muted, drowned-out--and tried to crawl away as a shadow approached from the same direction. The seconds it took to overtake the pioneer felt like an eternity, a silent force of raw aggression that made the air vibrate with anticipation of violence and she heard distant chants, drums, and fingers running up instrument-strings--no flight of imagination, she heard it.
The sound of flesh rent by hands alone would have sickened her, but the sight of the thing picking up the pioneer by the neck captured her attention and left room for no other sensation, the spectral music quickening like a heart on the verge of exploding.
And then the horned shadow spoke. A staccato like boulders striking wet soil; an ancient, dead tongue primordial in its roots that living languages were mere echoes of, and power behind every word. A language of war and dominion, aggression in audible form. She snapped out of a vision of armies and war-engines marching against blizzards only because it stopped speaking--her eyes darted to the shadow.
It looked directly at her, two blue motes of smoking grave-light the same color as the ever-present flora, faintly illuminating two downswept horns, like it watched her the whole span of her life and she only noticed now, in its demesne where the priestess' escape would be a miracle.
She ran until the pain overtook her enthralled wits and her every sense was drowned by an all-consuming perpetual roar.
THE SECOND TIME the priestess awoke, it was between two low stone surfaces. Getting up, one of these was the edge of an unused water fountain, the other a wall overlooking a sloped vault lit with fungi. She saw the fountain stuck out midway from a causeway bridging the vault, and where she collapsed was a narrow walkway surrounding the dry decoration. The cause of the roar curtained the other half of the causeway: a waterfall, fed by a hot spring. The mist kept the vault warmer than the black catacombs down the stairs behind her, and with a little greater diversity of color than before, the flora carpeted the angled floor that led out of sight.
The water snaked like a black ribbon down the incline--she wondered an instant what ancient place it led to, if some deep civilization was looking up and musing on the source of their water right then. The many tunnels and vaults of the local karst topography created a separate ecosystem still permeable with the surface--yet alien none the less.
The cascade proved a relief, shaking loose the dust and her mind. On the other side was a curved landing built to accommodate the causeway with a wider staircase. Standing at the head of stairs that once followed the landing's curve to the fault floor, she saw the masonry in this chamber bore little in kind with the catacombs--light-colored stone aflow with curves and gentle lines; similar in size and scale, but not the heavy blocks, straight lines, and right-angles of the vaults below and their diamond-chambers.
She suspected there was more than a transition in style and depth at work--but of civilization as well. The priestess wondered how long this particular people persisted--at the top of the stairs ahead, she saw the ceiling design consummate of the current local culture.
She dared to look back the way she came, down the stairs. The grave-breath of the subterranean air was a distant moan, and between pain and hunger, she held little certainty if she remembered the sound of the pulse-like drums--or could hear them right then. She dreaded finding out.
As she climbed ahead, Arcadian stonework become more apparent--seamless low walls of layered slate, heavy stone low-angled ceiling beams rising to a peak in the middle. On one side was an unused water sluice leading back down to the vault--the Arcadians always designed for their frequent rain. The staircase was still incredibly old--who builds underground corridors the width and height of two carriages?
The stairs long enough she took a break midway, she made the landing at the top and the right-angle turn. Here three pioneers lay dead from burns of various kinds she did not bother to inspect, leading to more stairs. She appreciated the stairs demonstrating what exactly was wrong with her leg's joints--but providence's diagnostic eventually worn out its welcome, and when she crested the landing, she leaned against the wall at the corner.
The priestess used the deep pain in her leg to concentrate, and subsuming herself to the pain, she subsumed the pain to a spoken prayer. She ended the prayer seeing more tissue crawl it's way over her injury and the joints in her leg at least feel less pain.
And drew her scavenged knife, for her other hand, which was on the worn corner, had a large scaly paw on it.
The priestess did not wait--she turned the corner and threw a punch with her knife hand into a tusked face between two ram's horns. The creature yelped, reeled back and she followed it, swiping out with her knife. The creature deflected simply by turning a horn into the blade, landing a superficial cut. It grunted and threw her to the ground, and she caught it by surprise using the same grip as it to push her good foot into its ribs, tackling it to the ground as it screamed in pain.
Her vision and wits swam during the grapple from the acid-like pain in her leg. She abandoned all sense of stealth and screamed through gritted teeth while wrestling the blade to the thing's neck while it tried to get both hands around her throat. Both leaned against the wall, facing one another, when the fiend croaked "You're not one of them!"
She blinked through the pain, shaking her head. The chipped blade grazed the throat of a wide-eyed injured woman.