Flotsam and Jetsam
The Season of Still Stone
You would like to say you do it boldly, without a hint of hesitation, just as you'd planned to leave, just as you had plotted the carnage all around you, even as your own hands are not dipped in blood. It truth you do it from lack of anything else to put the spell towards. What, after all, would be the purpose of keeping the spell back in a long dark tunnel? So do you watch as flesh knits and skin heals until the terrible blow to the little creature's body is nothing worse than a vast purple bruise.
The vice-like mouth full of teeth snap closed, the lips pull taunt... into a smile you realize with something like wonder.
When was the last time I saw that directed at me, without scorn or carefully hidden motives?
"Cob better, Cob no hurt," he gets out, the trade tongue coming out oddly sharp and singsong in his mouth, as though he were about to whistle it. "You no eat Cob, no chain Cob?"
You nod, then realizing he might not be able to see you properly, which would make the previous charge all the more mad in retrospect, vow aloud that you will not do either.
"Spit on it?" the question comes with a gob of grey-green phlegm in the goblin's right hand which he then extends. To the general laughter of the wounded among Vex's lot, you do. There is something reassuringly solid about the gesture, something new.
The sounds of pursuit come from down the tunnel where Vex is trying to deal with the fleeing trio of duergar guards, only to find them standing back to back with now hammers at the ready and striking more with the rhythmic thumping of the forge than with the wild flailing they had showed before.
The cornered rat is twice as deadly, you are reminded, but rather than pay attention to the fight whose conclusion matters little to you, you turn your eyes instead to the other prisoners. Perhaps unsurprisingly the sounds of bloodshed had awoken something in the orc and he is testing the chain with frightful strength, though the ragged one beside him looks like he is not quite sure he would prefer to be free if he must share that freedom with one of the Children of Gorum.
Or perhaps he is simply terrified of not being able to see his hand before his face, that is a possibility as well, Akorian, you note, humor bubbling up in your blood with the relief of a battle won.
You snatch up the nearest dark-stone and pocket it, then another and another until the shadows are merely shadows and not the embrace of the Gift.
The fellow in the ragged garb looks at you and for a moment he seems vastly relieved. Then he deflates, shoulders hunched inwards as though expecting a blow, and speaks in a manner stranger than any man you had yet known: "Messus.... I born am high pledged Messus Syla of the
something-hold of the Western Crown. My clan will pay much ransom for me fresh."
"Ooh... can I eat little bit then, cut off toe?" Cob giggles, thankfully speaking too fast for the pale-skinned fellow to notice.
This Messus certainly sounds like he could be worth something to someone. It would take years of practice looking down one's nose to be able to do it while manacled and chained to two others... or as the case might be,
one other. The gagged slave had not been under the legs of the great beetle because of some folly or mischance, but because she had been seeking and somehow managed to find the jagged key to her bindings on the cave floor.
They fall with a click and a moment later the slave parts her hood using the sharp edge of the key to reveal a woman whose face seems to have been carved from oiled stone. Her black hair seeming to fade into whips of grey smoke about her face and grey are her eyes as granite pebbles lit from within, set in orbits that seems to have been stitched open. Beneath her left eye and writ of fire is a line spelled, though what it says you could not begin to contemplate.
"The path is still, the way is broken, are we lost or are we found?" She asks... in the tongue of the people which no outsiders are taught.
Witchcraft, the accusation springs to mind like the first flames in new kindling. But even as you cross your fingers you are shamed, for how is this any stranger than your own sorcery which has seen you outcast?
Looking around a moment longer you realize that the other two goblins have already made their escape east down the tunnel, perhaps to ambush the lone dwarf who had gone that way.
What do you do next?
[] Promise you will help Messus, you like the thought of that reward
[] Shush the grey eyes woman before the others notice, they are unlikely to be as philosophical as you on the matter
[] Try to distract the other dark folk while Cob 'scavenges around'
[] Free the orc, everyone deserves that much.
[] Write in
OOC: And so I finally get to introduce these people. Well, kind of in the case of the nice lady who speaks in both tongues and riddles, but you get the idea. 
