Stone's Embrace
Eleventh Day of the Ninth Month 294 AC
"Fuck! It's locked!" Garin called as he tested the heavy lead lined door at the end of the hall through which you had come and yet which would lead you onwards. His gaze flickers to the headless corpse of the suspicious guard, thoughts likely in step with your own. He must have locked it with some unheard command, likely enough to have earned him a reprimand had his suspicions proved unfounded, but now the first obstacle in your path.
"Can you open that?" you prompt.
"No, not in anything like good time." Seeing Ser Richard step forward, your friend wards him off with an upraised hand. "There are likely traps, I'm not sure what they would do but they would not set them if they did not think they could take out a decent strike force."
"Right," you nod and with a flourish of your cloak and the flicker of a simple
cantrip, you set an explosive pack on the door while staying well clear. Then you consider the weight of it and and another and another, before stepping well back and casting a dart of fire to set it all alight.
The two sides of the door fly off their hinges with a blast of hot air and aborted magic even your eyes cannot catch the shape of, save that it is stronger by far than any spell you have dared cast so far, then they fall to the ground with an almighty clang. Before the dust had even settled you are off, racing through the corridor and up a flight of polished black steps that should lead to-
Click
The sound sends your mind scrambling, you just barely manage to follow it to the step under Ser Richard's feet before the whole chamber descends into chaos. Even as your leal knight takes to the air upon the wings of his enchanted cloak the stairway shapes itself into a sort of ramp, though rather than being smooth it is covered in a mad array of spikes and thorns of stone.
Garin flickers away in instinct but it is only by the grace of one of your many wards that you are a lucky. The distinct scent of rot and withered things, of old blood long shed assails your nostrils. Magebane poison as Aberi had used against you years ago.
Not so bloody secret, is it? You think with perhaps an irrational amount of spite directed at a man you had not seen for almost as long.
"Stay off the floor," you call, taking on your own wings to fly over the broken steps.
"They will be expecting tha..." Garin never does get to finish his full sentence as entire spiral chamber squeezes in a sound of stone grinding on stone like some colossal serpent.
This time it is Ser Richard who is fastest to react, snapping a wall of arcane force in front of you from a token, such as to keep the jaws of the trap closed without utterly barring your way. Alas, you do not have long to celebrate as no sooner had the three of you made it to the top that a torrent of alchemical bile spews forth from spigots in the shape of snarling chimera. There is nowhere to jump aside in the narrow confines of the corridor and even a second barrier does nothing but slow the flood for a moment.
What do you do?
[] The stone walls of the chamber seem to be containing whatever the hells this is, risk a spell of the fifth circle to stop it
[] Brace for the impact, you can heal through this
[] Write in
OOC: Really short, but that is the nature of adventuring. I cannot just roll through all the traps either because these things are dangerous, they were meant to stand up to serious infiltration and that means traps with Reflex Save: NO among other things. Not yet edited.
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