Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

Darkness has always been an enemy of humanity. Every day when the sun goes down, the world becomes a more hostile place. Fire can push back the darkness a little, but at night the world belongs to creatures more adapted to the dark.

From a certain point of view, you are one of those creatures.

For the majority of your life, you have been shaping Ulgu, and in return Ulgu has shaped you. The most obvious manifestation of this - your 'arcane mark' - is the uneasiness of fire in your presence. But just as fundamental, if less visible, a change is that in places where there's no light to be found, the ebb and flow of Ulgu around you reveals the area around you as clearly as if the noon sun illuminated it. The ignorant call it Witchsight, but to the Colleges of Magic, it is Magesight - the ability to see the movements of the Winds of Magic. And when one is attuned the the Wind of Shadow, darkness can be as revealing as the light.

You stride with confidence through the near-total darkness of the Underway, stepping around the occasional pile of rubble. If the sheltered pathway leading up to it was not proof enough that this cave system was artificial, then the way it remained a constant width and height as it spiralled downwards through the mountain would clinch it. There were no offshoots or caverns or fissures, just a single gentle slope, with only the occasional bit of rubble to mark some three thousand years without maintenance.

At some invisible point, after an amount of time you have no way of measuring has passed, the spiral reaches subterranean levels, and points what you can only assume is south in a straight line. The tunnel here is worse for wear than it was in the mountain - the smell of damp hangs in the air, and the silence is punctuated by dripping in the distance. The darkness becomes slightly less than total as phosphorescent fungi illuminate small patches here and there, and rubble becomes more common, and you have to watch your step with more care, as the noise of a stumble would carry quite far in the silence of the deeps. The road becomes treacherous, as generations of fungus have leached trace nutrients from the stone.

As you advance, step by careful step, the distant squeals and squabbling of the Underway's current inhabitants reach you long before the tiny sparks of their minuscule and eternally-confused brains shows up to your Magesight. Greenskins, but not the terrible orcs, not even the treacherous goblins: the smallest, stupidest, and most pointless of the greenskins have called this stretch of the Underway home. Snotlings.

You approach a massive pit in the highway, where someone or something tunnelled deep and wide into the highway's surface, and are greeted with the sight of a massive, haphazard metropolis in miniature, far below you. The mining pit plunges hundreds of yards down and in the sides of the pit thousands of small radiating tunnels have been bored, and into and out of these branches snotlings swarm, each occupied with their own task and busily getting in each other's way. Far below, the phosphorescent mushrooms are gathered in massive piles to illuminate the bottom of the pit, where a dozen varieties of fungi are farmed in seemingly random arrays, criss-crossing each other as the tiny farmers work at cross purposes. As you watch, brawls erupt, grow to encompass every snotling in the vicinity, and then die down, only for another to break out nearby. The creatures seem to be trying to build a city, but their essential nature betrays them at every turn.

Level with you, a hundred yards away on the opposite side of the pit, a team of Snotlings cry in triumph as they reenter the dim illumination from far below, and you watch as dozens of them tug at threadbare ropes until a creature many times their size is dragged into the light. Spheroid and mostly mouth, there's no mistaking the sight of a squig: the partially-fungoid creatures that play many roles in the greenskin ecosystem - predator and prey, pet and steed, beast of burden and living weapon. The creature is dragged down the side of the pit as the procession is flanked by cheering snotlings, until it is pulled into one of the side-tunnels and out of sight.

Shrouded by darkness, you watch the snotling hive swarm below you and consider their presence. There doesn't seem to be any larger greenskins amongst them - would orcs or goblins allow an independent hive of snotlings on their periphery, or could this only form in their absence? Is this the center of a tiny snotling commune, or the outskirts of a larger greenskin empire? And can you assume the absence of skaven from this city - would skaven have rounded them up to use as slaves or food, or would they not bother with the tiny pests when there are, presumably, entire dwarfholds of greenskins in Black Crag and Karak Eight Peaks for them to prey upon?

Perhaps the dwarves, more versed on greenskins and their habits, will derive enough information from this snippet of information that it is worth taking back on its own. Or perhaps you should take this as indicative that there's nothing in the Underway that could be a threat to you if these knee-high creatures are able to thrive, and push deeper in confidence - after all, four fifths of the length of the Underway to Death Pass is still unknown to you. You stare down into anarchy in miniature and weigh your options.

[ ] Return to the Expedition.
[ ] Detour to scout Thunder Mountain on the way back to the Expedition.
[ ] Push further into the Underway.