[game-notes version here]

XXIV.

Duskmarch 25, Hearthday, Year 731, the day of Sweet Requital in Oakton.

Vessa groaned and rolled to her back. Something wet and sticky had sealed one side of her face to the floor and the motion tugged at her skin painfully. For several heartbeats she lay there, breathing through cracked lips and trying weakly to gain her bearings. Her entire body hurt, sharp stabs of pain everywhere alongside a deep ache.

Where was she? The floor felt hard, but soft, liquid forms touched her skin, sliding around as she touched them like lifeless slugs. The smell of rotten meat and the heavy, sharp scent of blood filled her nose.

She coughed and remembered in a start: The tomb! In Starless Rift!

Something crusted over her eyes, so she scrubbed at them with one hand and opened them wide, struggling to sit up. Even with her eyes open, there was only blackness. Panic seized her chest and she began panting, remembering the hordes of skinless terrors piling atop her companions… Maelen dropping from exhaustion and pain, ready to die… Vessa’s own desperate intervention, and—oh! Wings! She patted her shoulders awkwardly, trying to reach her back. The raven’s wings were gone as if they’d never existed.

She needed light.

For a long, terrified stretch of time, Vessa explored the space around her on hands and knees. The horrifying creatures’ organs and ropy muscles lay everywhere, sloughed bonelessly to the ground as they died. She tried to calm her own frantic breathing and the pounding of her heartbeat in her ears, to sense if any of the things’ telltale snuffling or clacking of teeth were nearby.

She heard nothing. The tomb was as silent as it was dark. Lifeless.

Sobbing, she found a single arrow, but not her bow, or the dagger she’d unsheathed from her boot to tackle the creature looming over Maelen. How far had she and the creature tumbled and fought before everything went dark? She remembered it abruptly ceasing its movements and beginning to disassemble. Then all light had gone out and…

She couldn’t remember anything after that. Her muscles felt stiff and half-numb, blood drying tight against her skin. How long had she been unconscious? Were her companions still here or had they left her? Were they dead? Visions of Maelen dropping her black mace to the stone floor, defeated… of Alric being buried under a pile of skinless bodies clawing at him.

“Maelen?” she croaked, her throat dry and voice rough. “Alric?”

No answer.

Truly panting now, her search became desperate. Her hands slid through wet, cold offal. She sobbed, pushing forward and patting in front of her. Vessa called out again, her voice high and frantic. Still no one answered.

She was alone. Trapped in darkness, with nothing to fight and no one to save.

It was the Larkhands, all over again.

With a sudden gasp of triumph, her hand touched a leather strap. Either her travel pack or the pack of a companion. She pulled it to her knees, slick fingers shaking and fumbling with the clasp. Snot ran over her upper lip as she cried loudly, pushing through the materials in the pack until she found the long, solid form of a torch. More searching produced a tinderbox. Shaking her head, shuddering with sobs, she clumsily struck flint and steel to no effect. Vessa growled and redoubled her efforts. There was a brief flicker of light as she produced a spark. Then another. Another. A fourth time was enough to catch the resin-soaked cloth. For a moment, nothing… and then fire bloomed at the tip of the torch, shedding a dancing, orange light around her.

Vessa wiped a forearm across her running nose and tear-blurred eyes to look around, shoulders shuddering.

She was still in the tomb, its polished black walls making a perfect square topped by a low dome. Gore from the skinless terrors lay everywhere, only vaguely human-shaped and strewn seemingly haphazardly. Any etched runes along the walls or floors had been scratched out or split by spiderweb cracks. Her head scanned back and forth, eyes wild and wide, looking for her friends. Vessa pulled herself to her feet, body protesting with pain and stiffness, and swept her torch around in a wide arc.

There! She stumbled, tripped, and stumbled again to where she saw Maelen’s legs, splayed beneath a mound of red tissue and stinking organs. Vessa dropped to her knees and pushed the offal away. Thankfully, the remnants of the abominations had only covered her torso, not smothered her face. Was she breathing? Maelen’s chest rose and fell slowly, steadily. The thief sobbed again, then wiped her eyes and searched for injuries.

Miraculously—and somehow wrongly, a tiny voice in her mind whispered—the most grievous wounds she’d seen as Maelen faced death in the battle had healed. How? Was Alric able to use his magic after she’d tackled away the creature looming over her? Still, the warrior’s flesh was riddled with bites, bruises, and angry scratches. Nothing fatal that she could see, but none of it would feel good, and Vessa didn’t think she had enough bandages to wrap everything. Maelen would be in very real danger of infection if they couldn’t treat those wounds.

Something in the shadows behind her groaned, and Vessa’s heart skipped a beat, a scream catching in her throat and threatening to escape. She whirled, holding her torch out defensively.

Alric, coated head to toe in crusted blood and scraps of gore, stirred weakly. She moved to him as quickly as her battered body could manage. He was alive!

Eventually, they all limped to the edge of the black, still pool to take stock of and address their injuries as best as they could manage around the column of warm air. Alric was the worst of them, both in terms of how many bite wounds he’d suffered as well as overall spirits. He looked ten years older than when they’d entered the Starless Rift, haggard and stooped, every movement eliciting a wince of pain. None of his wounds bled significantly, and once they’d cleaned him of the gore, they didn’t bleed at all. Vessa thought that odd but he rebuffed any attempts to discuss it. His new cloak, however, was as shredded as his robes had been, and utterly ruined. She gave him hers… she liked her older cloak’s fit better, anyway.

Maelen couldn’t keep the concern from her eyes or voice when she regarded Alric. “Lad…” she said, licking her lips. “Can you… heal yourself?”

The look he gave her was haunted and filled with shame. He shook his head grimly, then turned away.

Vessa moved to speak to him, but Maelen grabbed her bicep. “Leave it,” she murmured.

So, with a weary sigh, Vessa worked to address her and Maelen’s wounds as best she could, cleaning them both of as much from the horrible nightmare they’d experienced as possible. When that was done, they were still filthy and stunk worse than a tannery, but it still felt considerably better than being caked in gore.

For the rest of her torch’s life, she navigated carefully and filled with disgust through the places in the tomb where they’d fought the skinless terrors. Vessa found her bow, dagger, and enough arrows to half-fill her quiver. When she returned to the warmth of the poolside hole, she handed Maelen back her heavy mace. The warrior took it and stared down at its black, spiked head for a long while, jaw clenched, longer than Vessa lingered. Both of her companions, it seemed, had winding paths in their own thoughts to explore.

She only had two torches left in her travel pack, same as the others now. With a weary sigh, she lit one of them and wandered back to the tomb. Ignoring the viscera strewn everywhere, she picked her way towards the central area, where Saelith the Vanished had been entombed. The concentric circles of runes all around the indentation in the stone were littered with cracks, shards of basalt crunching under her boots as she approached.

The circular tomb was empty. Vessa wished she was surprised, but it’s what she expected. Those horrific creatures had been working like bees in a hive to weaken the magic here and, apparently, they succeeded. Was Saelith alive again, walking the caverns somewhere nearby? Or was his liberation simply part of a larger ritual, the body now gone to serve some grander purpose for the demon-lord Orthuun? Surely Alric would have an opinion, some theory he would want to research back at the Inkbinders Lodge.

The thought of Oakton made her chest seize in longing, and for a moment Vessa couldn’t breathe. Whatever was happening in the Redwood Marches—the corrupting influence of a dark god and its army’s generals—it no longer had anything to do with Vessa Velthorn. Maelen had promised her that once they’d left this place, they would return to the city and stay there for a long while. She would take whatever coin they’d recovered from this place and make a life beneath the stretching branches of the Argenoak. She would rebuild the reputation she’d enjoyed with the Larkhands as a thief-for-hire, breaking into merchants’ vaults and guild houses once more. She looked down at the lark tattoo on her hand and smiled grimly. Nightwights and corrupted skratt hordes and certainly skinless monstrosities would be reserved for her nightmares from now on, and nothing more.

Envisioning home provided her with a spark of energy, and Vessa left the vacant circle in the room’s center to explore the far sides of the vast room, away from where they’d entered and fought the terrors. Discarded piles of organs still lay strewn here, but few enough that she could avoid them easily. Vessa held her torch out front, the orange light dancing over the black stone and its scratched, defaced symbols.

She stopped, blinking. Ahead, a section of the wall was open, pushed inwards like a door though it had no handle or visible hinge, twice as tall as Vessa and three times as wide. When they’d first entered, had this door been open? The thought unsettled her. She didn’t think so, though it was possible their collective torchlight didn’t reach to the far side of the room. Still, as she soared over the battle—she had flown!—Vessa was sure she would have seen such a large opening. She glanced over her shoulder to check if one of her companions was there with a torch but no. She was alone. Hm.

Carefully and quietly, she stalked towards the opening. As she approached the wall, her eyes roamed over the surface and her ears searched for any noise beyond her flickering torch. Sensing nothing, she stepped into the opening.

On some level, she knew that she was taking unnecessary risks. Perhaps the day’s constant peril had numbed her to danger, or perhaps she knew in her bones that Saelith the Vanished had already left his prison. Whatever the case, Vessa found a tall rectangular room of the same smooth, basalt walls, much like the vault they’d discovered in Thornmere Hold.

It was just as sparsely filled, too. A few squat wooden chests sat neatly organized upon the floor, alongside a small scroll rack. The gold-gilded lantern with a stag seal that hung from a hook near the doorway was the twin of the one she’d sold three months ago and was the strongest evidence that this place was indeed created by the same ancient order that had buried the artifacts within Thornmere Hold. Alric would be pleased, with plenty of new theories to occupy his time. Vessa hoped those chests held coin, or at least valuable items they could sell. Grinning, she turned to go fetch her companions.

As she exited, her eyes caught something in the firelight. A small dark blemish on the otherwise smooth stone of the door. She bent down, bringing her torch to see. It was… a keyhole? She fished the golden key she’d retrieved from the corpse. The key slid perfectly into the lock. So. A locked vault, after all, with a barely perceptible keyhole along the blank surface of wall one would have to know existed. But how had it opened, especially after the battle? And why were the contents still here? Unless there had once been more housed in the vault? She shook her head, padding away. More mysteries of the Starless Tomb.

She found Maelen and Alric in the same place she’d left them, on opposite sides of the column of warm air. Maelen still stared absently at her weapon, while Alric’s back was to her across the hole in the floor, eyes unfocused and head bent. Vessa doubted they even noticed she’d departed, much less returned.

“Hey,” she said. Maelen’s head snapped up, her face a thundercloud of anger. Alric blinked slowly and, painfully, turned his body back to face them both. Vessa waited until she had both of their attention and ignored her friend’s glare. “I found something. Come on.”

They gathered their packs and she led them through the rocky corridor and back to the tomb, then around its perimeter towards the back wall. Neither of her companions spoke while they moved, each still lost in thought. When Vessa glanced back to check they followed, she couldn’t decide which expression concerned her more: Maelen’s scowl at everything and anything, or Alric’s abject despair. She wondered briefly how she must appear. Could it be that she was the least haunted by this awful place? Whatever the case, they all needed to be free of it, and soon.

When they returned, the vault door still lay pushed open. Vessa stepped into the middle of the room and turned in a slow circle, holding her torch before her, to show the chests and scroll rack. The air in it felt stale, oddly still.

“Treasure, Mae,” she said. “And perhaps answers, Alric.”

Maelen grunted and pushed into the room, immediately dropping to her knees in front of a chest and examining the lock. Alric limped to the scroll rack and settled himself painfully in front of it. Vessa grinned. Good.

For another full torch’s light, they worked. And with each passing discovery, both of her companions returned to some semblance of their former selves. In the end, they’d profited an entire chest each of old copper oaks and another of silver thorns. Not any golden crowns here, but still enough money to—almost—be worth the misery they’d endured.

In addition to the coins and the golden lantern, one chest included two items: First, a carefully packed silver chalice that Alric immediately declared magical, though he said he would need to study it in more detail to understand its properties. Second, a long wooden case that revealed a needle, like an oversized sewing needle, as ebon black as Maelen’s mace and seemingly made of the same alien metal. Alric declared it magical as well, and when he laid the needle upon the floor it slowly turned on its own volition, then stopped. Alric tapped his lip with a finger, puzzling at its intent, before returning it to the case.

The mage also took four scrolls. One, he said, was a written log on the construction of Saelith’s prison, while another seemed to be a journal from early years here by one of its occupants. Alric said both documents would be invaluable to uncovering the history and intent of the order who’d fought Orthuun long ago. The final two scrolls were magical spells, though again he said he’d need to study them to understand their intent. His mention of spell-scrolls sent a thrill through Vessa, and she again remembered flying over the tomb on her giant raven’s wings. Perhaps, she thought, there would be one positive memory of the Starless Rift, at least as its other horrific visions faded. She’d flown.

By the time they’d filled their travel packs and pockets, Maelen was again ordering them around with grim efficiency, and Alric was positing ideas about the greater meaning of ancient orders. Vessa hoped their lifted spirits would endure through the return to the surface and desperately, desperately wished that return would be terror-free.

Maelen was the last to leave the vault. She lingered there, squinting.

“What is it?” Vessa asked.

“It’s… emptier than Thornmere Hold,” she said slowly. “I’m not complaining about the coin, mind you, but…”

“You think Saelith took something before he left?” Alric said thoughtfully. “Yes, that makes sense. He undoubtedly was the one to open the vault in the first place. He was looking for something, and now has it.”

The doom of that sentence hung in the air. Vessa cleared her throat. “It doesn’t concern us. He’s gone, and someone will fight him, but not us. We need to get out of here and back to home.”

Maelen blinked and nodded once. “Right enough. Let’s go.”

With so many coins weighing down their bags, Maelen didn’t think they could return the way they’d arrived, across the still pool of water. That decision suited Vessa just fine. Not only did she worry about both companions’ injuries, but she didn’t relish the idea of freezing to death, wet, without the warm column of air on the opposite side.

Yet by the time they’d left the vault behind, each of them was left with only a single unburnt torch each. They would need to navigate through unexplored caverns with the very real danger of getting lost and running out of light. As a result, they decided to have Maelen carry a single torch, keeping the other two as replacements. The warrior walked as briskly as she thought Alric could follow given his poor health and lack of walking staff, with Vessa close behind.

Thankfully, the cavern complex of the Starless Rift was not vast. Maelen located a hidden exit from the tomb that avoided the flooded chamber and led them around, through rocky corridors and, occasionally, open caverns, though none as large as the one that had housed the most gruesome of the otherworldly monsters. Indeed, they discovered no less than four additional piles of viscera, where more of the abominations must have been prowling when Saelith escaped. Alric guessed that somehow the ritual that had opened the Starless Rift had also spawned the awful minions throughout the cave complex.

“It all makes sense,” he said in his deep baritone, as they stooped at the pool’s opposite edge. They’d found their way back around to their previous route, and now the mage had his staff and Vessa her shortsword. “The members of the order that created this place hadn’t been corrupted like those the ageless figures from Thornmere Hold. Somehow the tomb seems to have held Orthuun’s corruption at bay. At least until Hadren cracked open the rift. Then, well…” He shrugged one shoulder and winced at the pain it caused. “We know what happened next.”

Those three members of the order had been slaughtered, and horribly. While other skinless creatures prowled the darkness hunting, the mass of them had gathered at the tomb to free the Blind Sovereign’s general. Once freed, the power of the ritual had been severed, which is why the abominations had all, as one, dropped lifeless to the stony floor. Vessa shuddered as she remembered it all.

Then a thought struck her, which she said aloud. “But if the ritual only lasted long enough to free Saelith… Why is the Rift still open?”

Alric paused, considering it.

And, as if the idea had triggered it, the entire cave complex shuddered once. A deep rumble echoed all around them, then settled into silence.

“What was–” Vessa began to ask.

“We go. Now,” Maelen cut her off.

They exited back towards the large chamber, filled with natural stone columns, where they’d fought the most terrifying of the skinless creatures and where the ancient orders’ members lay eviscerated. They hustled, all injured, without comment or question.

As they passed closer to the exit, the rumble began again, this time building and shaking the floor beneath them. A stray rock tumbled nearby.

“GO!” Maelen yelled, and they began a last, desperate flight through the darkness.

Next: To The Light [with game notes]