quote:

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Arancaytar:

What is the matter?

...

What are the runes?

...

The mental questions were becoming more frantic and urgent. Where had it gone? From one moment to the next, the alien presence had evaporated from her mind like so much water on the brain.

"Come back!" she finally exclaimed out loud, not caring who else heard, but it was senseless. Gnosis had left, and something told her he... it wouldn't make contact through the book now, either. She was on her own again.

The yawning tunnel faced her like a gaping maw. The darkness was impenetrable even to her dark elven, heat seeking eyes, but she did not need to guess where Orloki was leading her. Nothing pleasant, in any case.

To battle it is. Or certain death. What was the difference?

She mentally went over her arsenal.

A lot of the daggers were wasted in the previous battles, but half a dozen remained. She had been careful to retrieve the single mithril dagger. It gave off a mild shine in the darkness, and she suspected it was somehow blessed - how else could it slay a demon? But against Orloki, it would be a blessed toothpick. The bow was also still there. It was her only remaining weapon of elven manufacture, and although she had spared her few arrows so far, it was easily her best. But they were for physical enemies, not foes that could move mountains and raise storms.

Magic would be her only chance. But her skill was mediocre at best: She was neither a necromancer nor a demonologist; her only specialty lay in stealth and disguise.

"I'm not made for this," she suddenly surprised herself by speaking out loud again. Was she not? And the wraiths of Shanaar? The guardians that stalk the Golden Temple? The cries of shantak among the Iron Pillars? Compared to the nightmare realms she had explored, this should have been a pleasant walk. Instead she was here, waiting to be killed.

The shantak never came close. The guardians fled before me. I bid the wraiths move aside and they obeyed, she remembered. With fear in their pale eyes...

---

The realization came with a pang. Of course it was not she that commanded such power. It was the... thing... she had brought with her. In those years, it had been with her always. It was not silent then, nor controlled. Without finding rest, she wandered the world, from the bottomless roots to the highest peaks, and those she came upon knew her as their own.

"Are we made to be vessels?" Her voice was low, but echoed in the enclosed darkness. "Filled with the power of the gods, but none of our own?"

The face of the druid swam into memory. Several faces - the serene wisdom in the forest, the fear in the caverns, the injuries and the exhaustion, and the anger as he became a living outlet for nature's wrath. Was he content? He was, she answered herself immediately.

Lisha wasn't, Melora reflected. An agent of the Grand Lord she might be, her whole life devoted to serving, but she was not a vessel. She had merely suppressed her independence, and now, far from the Grand Lord and close to her own demise, it boiled forward. She had seen it, briefly - flickering as Melora spoke of her quest, dancing in her eyes when she had aided Sequoia. If she survived, she would return to Tass-Shanti a loyal servant, but a changed one.

And Melora?

She tried to remember what it was like to be touched by shadow - harf'er'melóra. To move as a vessel to the elder ones, to know fear only in the eyes of others.

Like a dream, but much more clear. More clear than waking. The doubts fall away. My will is not my own, but that of the universe. The hesitation ceases.

---

Not a pleasant feeling, but that was irrelevant. Anything to get her out of this mess.

If only she knew how to wake it...

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Ephesos:

OoC: For the record, let's try to get everyone headed in the same direction again... I've got an intro post for the fight with Orloki that I'm itching to use. But until then, I've got a short IC.

IC:

Clearing the top of the staircase, Sequoia found himself facing another torch-lit tunnel. It looked just like every other tunnel they'd walked through so far... but he could feel Orloki's presence strengthening. The taint that Sequoia had absorbed when tapping the mountain's power was clamoring to be heard, and Sequoia was having a bit of difficulty holding it back. He kept walking anyway.

He could feel his thoughts shifting under the pressure of the taint. But there was something else there... the mountain's energy was clearly affecting the druid's mind, but he couldn't tell how. There was a faint light growing at the edge of his vision, and it wasn't the torches. It was a bright white light, and Sequoia fervently hoped that he wasn't about to black out.

Something in the back of his mind began to bend. The tunnel grew lighter, and it had nothing to do with the torches. The druid looked around him, and saw that more pure ice was forming behind him, in unbroken strands that marked his path.

The air here felt cleaner, less oppressive. Sequoia wondered how much he had to do with this.

Sequoia was beginning to wonder why he'd come. A vague sense of unease was all that had kept him on this path, a sense that something needed to be done. Once he'd been attacked, there was that nagging need for revenge, or to at least find out who or what was after him and try to engage it in some sort of reasonable discussion. But there had to be some reason why he'd gone along with this from the start...

He felt something in the rock of the mountain. It was moving again, and he didn't care. He could feel the passage close behind him, and he could hear the rest of the mountain shifting around again. But what the druid was focused on was the low, deep rumble that echoed up from the base of the mountain. And it sounded like a voice.

The druid listened, and then he knew.

I am here to free the mountain...

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Sherlock Holmes:

OOC: By the way, Tuulentekija does NOT have his mask. It was left behind pages ago when he lost it after the Giant Cavern collapsed.

The first part of my post is going to be a reflection of the past several posts as seen by Edith. The rest will be in the present tense to reflect current happenings. Pardon the length, I have a lot of catching up to do. I lost almost two pages in my absence.

IC: Edith was finally proven right to her utter horror. They HAD been rats in his twisted maze of death all along, being led to the spider in the center of its web. What’s more, now he had the audacity to send an underling to escort them to him like pigs being led to the slaughter. Had he tried to do the same thing to her father as well? It all made her furious when she thought about it and it must have been clearly displayed on her face for everyone to see. But before she could react to what was happening, the memories from Tuulentekija's past became too great to him to handle any longer and he accosted the Curator with them. The Curator in retaliation put a massive curse on him and fled back up the steps. The ultimate plan from then on had become to find Orloki and destroy him before Cain was killed in the shrinking gallery, but it wasn't as simple as that to Edith.

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After all the others leave the gallery using the stairs, Edith looks down at the runes on the floor, and contemplates following them. Out of curiosity, she walks up to them and as she approaches them, they pulse a steady, blood red. That's odd. They didn't do that when the others approached. Reaching out her hand, she extends it over the runes. In an instant, a strong burst of electricity shocks her and forces her to recoil several paces. Turning to Cain, she looks at him questioningly.

"Cain, what's going on? Nothing happened when the others went near the runes or crossed them. Yet, they tried to electrocute me when I probed my hand over them. I don't understand."

Cain thinks for several moments about it and then seems to come to a possible explanation. "Are you by any chance carrying anything with you that might have come from this mountain originally? I'm carrying a part of Orloki in me, so I dare not cross them.” Edith thinks about it for a second and then replies. "Why, yes. I am. An acid dagger and a piece of linen that might have come from some sort of tapestry. My father recovered them both from the mountain before his death. Do you think..."

Cain's eyes widen at the revelation. "Let me see them... quickly!" Edith complies, and removing the piece of linen from her knapsack and unsheathing her dagger, she hands them to Cain. He in return snatches them up and examines them intently. He hands her back her dagger after a few moments, but examines the piece of linen with extreme interest. In a sudden impulse of experimentation, he approaches the runes, linen clutched in his hand. As he expects, the runes immediately start to pulse a blood red and the piece of parchment glows with an aurora of white light. Returning to Edith, he hands it back to her and she promptly puts it back in her knapsack.

"I believe THAT is why you cannot pass. This piece of linen seems to be something special that is not permitted to pass those runes for a particular reason. Perhaps it holds the key to something that we have not yet encountered. Or perhaps it is some sort of magical artifact that just reacts badly with the runes. In whatever case, if you plan to follow them, my dear Miss Edith, then you cannot take this with you. Those runes will reduce you to ashes if you try."

Edith turns to look at the runes again, sheathing her dagger in the process. Then she looks up the stairs. "Well, as much as I would like to chase after them, I feel I should not. There is you to consider and then there is something else. (Turning to face the tunnel that the Curator had seemingly opened up) Why would the Curator have purposely redirected our attentions to the stairs when the side tunnel opened up? It's certainly not an illusion." Edith walks over to it and disappears briefly into the darkness within. A moment later, she reappears and walks over to where the original entrance had been from which they had all entered the gallery.

"The entrance is still here, despite the fact that the Curator tried to convince us that the room had moved. See?" Edith puts her hand on the patch of still slowly expanding bluish-white ice that Sequoia left in his wake. Cain walks over to examine it and notices the darkness behind it. "You're right Miss Edith. The entrance to the gallery is still here. It was just frozen over by that black material. But where does that leave us?"

Edith walks back over to the side tunnel and stares into the darkness. "It leaves us with the possibility that you are not trapped after all, Cain. As you can clearly see, this tunnel's entrance is already starting to be consumed by the black tainted mass that Sequoia was trying to hold back. In a few minutes, this tunnel’s entrance will cease to exist. I think it would be in both our interests to see where it leads and learn why the Curator was so apt to draw our attention away from it after it opened. If my suppositions are correct, a pattern is emerging in this mountain."

Cain walks over beside her and examines the ever-shrinking tunnel. "What pattern is that? To me, everything about this mountain seems to be in random control of Orloki." Edith turns to him and points to the floor. "Well, to tell you the truth, I didn't see the pattern either until just a few moments ago. See here on the floor? There are NO runes here. And I don't know if you examined it at the time, but when the room had supposedly shifted and this tunnel suddenly opened up, I could have sworn that I saw a twinge of surprise and fear surface in the Curator's lifeless eyes for a moment."

Cain gets wide-eyed again. "I think I am beginning to see a glimmer of what you are referring to. It has to do with the shifting of the tunnels and the controlling of the black material in this mountain." Edith nods in agreement. "There appears to be a connection between them. If I'm correct, every time a passage is shifted or closed with the black material, another tunnel must be adjusted somewhere else in the mountain to compensate for the moving of material."

Cain gets a look of hope on his face. "I understand now! You think that when the entrance to the gallery was sealed up by the black material, then this side tunnel's entrance was opened to compensate automatically. That would make sense then. The Curator knew it would happen, but he hadn't counted on this particular tunnel being revealed. But that would mean..."

Edith approaches the edge of the tunnel entrance. "Yes. Orloki doesn't have full control over the mountain and I don't think he opened this tunnel. Someone or something else in this mountain took advantage of the mountain's basic nature to try to show you a different way of getting to Orloki without having to cross the runes. This means that you no longer have to remain here in the gallery awaiting certain death. The Curator would have realized that the moment he saw this tunnel open. That's why he tried so desperately to get us to follow him across the runes and up the stairs. Orloki knew that as long as you believed you were trapped, you wouldn't even consider the side passage. In the end, you would be forced to cross the runes to save your own life. But if you realized the significance of the side tunnel before Orloki could seal it up again..."

Cain gives a malicious grin. "Then I could escape through a loophole that he had not foreseen." Edith gives a triumphant start. "YES!! But enough chatter. It's time for us to make our move, Cain, before it's too late." With that, she casts the light spell on her ring, and taking hold of Cain's hand, leads him into the dwindling passage.

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