Finding the Spark (Pathfinder 1E Quest)

The Season of Still Stone

There is no shortage of ways opening off the Long Road. To the north, rust red signs dripping in abstract tendrils frame narrow clefts wafting with the scent of brackish water and rotten eggs. Not even Cob seriously considers a trip down there, even when he is sure that he can hear the sound of other goblins. But to the south the passages angle up like the main gallery of the Long Road and the stone remains mostly dry, marked by the crude but welcoming markings of the mongrel tribes: a flame in a circle, two snakes with their tails entwined with their heads touching, even the crossed dagger hilts of the People's mark for peace.

"Traders welcome it looks like..." you say, as much to hearten yourself as Mina. You had never been off the road this far and the legends of cave spiders, scorpions and worse things abound. The bare stone gives way to a carpet of wild lichen and, a few hundred feet in, to the first glimmers of blue-grey light filtering from somewhere far below, maybe even as far down as the drow-lands, though it seems unlikely than anyone would have failed to plug up those kinds of gaps this close to the Long Road.

As the light grows so too do the sighs of life. Vines as thick as your wrist rapping round and round the tunnel almost like they are holding the tunnel in place and to each of them anchored curtains of delicate spider webs filled with all manner of tinny crawling things; flies and beetles, bats and bugs, some look dry and withered as the stone while others...

"Don't put that in your mouth, Cob," you snap at the goblin. At the wounded look he gives you the best you can do is sigh. "It might be poison." Or it might be a lure for whatever had woven those webs, you do not add aloud.

It's clear from the way that she is very carefully not looking at the walls that your other companion is a lot less cavalier about spiders and other crawling things. So you start talking, asking questions almost at random to keep her mind off shadows in the fickle light; her favorite food, her favorite color, what clothes and customs are like in the Burnlands, how the tribes of Ustilav are ordered and how they honor their ancestors. A great deal of what she answers makes little sense to you. Why would vast crowds beyond counting worship the natural passage of life and death? Life and death happen on their own! But other glimpses of life in the monastery are fascinating; the ritual of morning prayer, the adjudication that even the mighty and the old should show humility, the teaching of writing and drawing alongside practical skills like farming and weaving.

The idea of having practically unlimited space to graze the 'sheep' that make their thread is still hard to wrap your mind around, though at least Mina seems to be thoroughly distracted when you ask if the beasts extrude the thread from the front side or the back.

"Sheep don't..." the giggling gets so bad she is practically struggling for air. "They grow hair on their bodies, the same way we grow hair on our heads."

"Oh..." you shake your head, feeling an awkward smile forming on your face, though more at the word 'we' than 'sheep'. The sounds of laughter and talking bounce across the limestone walls farther and farther, until it falls to silence, at first companionable, then again uneasy. Thin trickles of water, bitter and dark, start streaking from above like the sighs of unseen spirits, then slowly, just on the edge of hearing...

Tap, Tap, Tap

Tinny black and withered things fall from the webs. "Maybe we should..." The words 'turn back' never make it past your lips as Cob suddenly shouts:

"Up! Up Spider!"

There you see them, a split second before they can pounce; splayed out shadows, eight-limbed and deadly racing down the curtains of web without a sound, their many eyes glistening with the boundless hunger. A mated pair and new to the area you would guess from the bright red coloring on the back of the beasts.

What do you do?

[] Fight
-[] Write in how

[] Flee

OOC: Random encounter ahoy, though hardly the worst one you could get.