Interlude - Scouting the Near-Badlands, Part 2
[*] It's moving away from the path the Expedition will take, that makes it no longer your problem. Get back on course and head for the port.
You're curious, and there's reason enough to justify sating that curiosity, but in the end you turn away from the corpse-laden Dragon Ogre. With it returning to the mountains, the path of the Expedition is clear and your responsibility is to return to your original mission. The remainder of the trip is uneventful. Two hours of riding gets you to the point where the tributary you're looking for splits off from the river, and being unburdened by armour and in good shape means it's relatively safe to ford across atop your Shadowsteed, and you dry out quickly in the sun.
The river has, over countless centuries, carved a valley between mountains as it makes its way from higher up in the mountains, and the vegetation missing from the near-badlands behind you gradually returns until trees stretch up the slopes on either side of the river. Goats and deer watch you cautiously as you pass, and that they don't run is a good sign; perhaps the greenskins never bother to cross the river, and thus have never infested this part of the mountains.
The port, when you reach it, is unmistakable; a dozen ancient stone jetties jut out into the river, so heavily worn by flowing water that their width furthest out is twice that where they join dry land, but you see no reason they wouldn't still serve. Recesses in the stone show where small cranes were once anchored, though it seems they are long gone; either taken by the dwarves when they abandoned this section of the mountains, looted by greenskins or other, fouler things in the time since, or merely lost to the elements. Enormous square holes in the ground nearby open into massive underground warehouses, and once would have been covered in wooden or metal trapdoors, but now stand open to the elements and as such are now utterly filled with stagnant water. Crowds of mosquitoes rise to meet you as you approach, and you wrap yourself in magical armour and smile as you imagine the little pests fracturing their probosces trying to get at you. You're distracted for a moment as you contemplate whether the Rune of Spite would activate for a mosquito bite, but though the question is a fascinating one it's not the one you came here to answer.
The entrance to the Underway, from what you were told, is going to be rather more difficult to find, and you have to take a few steps back and examine the shape of the land before you see the tiny hint of what was once a trail leading up the slope. It's a struggle to follow a road that hasn't been used since before the founding of the Empire, and several times you have to make judgement calls as to what was once a carved slope and what is merely natural stone, and you end up seriously questioning your judgement as you climb higher and higher, into the clouds that obscured the uppermost part of the mountain. You can't even enjoy the view any more. You climb higher still and the trees vanish, giving way to hardy grass growing on the white stone that reminds you of the hills of your own land. The temperature has noticeably fallen from the heat of the valley below. You're ready to write it off as a fruitless endeavour, but in an instant your doubts vanish as the path stops being hints of a long-lost path, instead sprouting ancient, tarnished steel handrails and a severely battered roof piled high with brilliant-white limestone rubble, clinging to the side of an increasingly steep slope. You urge your horse to a trot along the undercover path and at last you turn a corner on the now-shaded trail and catch sight of what can only be the entrance to the Underway.
The entrance is wide enough for twenty to march abreast, and slopes sharply downwards, quickly vanishing into darkness. Part of you wonders why the dwarves didn't just put the entrance level with the dock instead of having a path climbing to the opening and then the highway sloping all the way back down, but you're starting to get a feel for how dwarves think and this is exactly the sort of grandiose feat of engineering that they delight in.
Even with clouds obscuring the valley below, the view is amazing, but you didn't come here to admire the view. The dock is present and intact enough to be used, and the entrance to the Underway is right where the records said it would be. Good news, and worth knowing, but there are still unanswered questions. Does this underground highway still reach all the way to Death Pass? And, in the thousands of years it's been since a dwarf once walked its length, has it remained uninhabited? And after making camp up here for the night (with suitable precautions, of course), will you turn back or press further?
[ ] Dock, check. Underway entrance, check. Mission accomplished, let's rejoin the Expedition.
[ ] You didn't come all this way just to scout the entrance. Push deeper into the cave.
- With thanks to the Eisriesenwelt cave in Austria.
Last edited:
