Of Foul Airs and Strange Chasms
Eleventh Day of the Tenth Month 293 AC
Looking upon the carpet of squirming green you instinctively raise a hand in an gesture to burn them all... then lower it. They are probably bound up in whatever blight infects these halls, but unlike the swarms outside they are not aggressive. There is more you could learn from the creatures alive than dead, assuming it's even possible to tame one. The trouble with an arcane slime is that there is nothing to control, no muscles to contract and expand, no bones to move, and no mind to deceive. A wish goes a long way...
"Obey," you command, the
spell-form designed as much to imprint a mind upon the blind hunger of the creature as it is to control it.
Gears turn and lights flicker, steam hisses, the stars grow ever more distant in their dance...
"What happened?" Vee asks worriedly, even as the harvest of the false snakes begins to slither to your will while pushing aside its brethren.
"I felt something," you reply, finding yourself uncharacteristically struggling for words. You have touched the minds of men and monsters, angels, fiends, and far stranger beings, you have fended off the blows of those akin to gods in darkness, but the fleeting alien concepts still slide from your mind faster than you can make sense of them. "There is definitely an intelligence behind this, or at least a watcher..."
The words become rather superfluous as the remaining false serpents slither aside, leaving a five foot gap in the center of the room.
"Can you understand us?" Dany asks worriedly, leaning down dangerously close, something Ser Richard is all too aware of to judge from his glare, just as he is of the fact that it would accomplish nothing to say so.
The odd slimes give no indication that they do one way or another, acting perfectly naturally, even occasionally hissing and spitting in your direction, besides the fact that none of them intrude onto the five foot wide path.
For the better part of an hour you try to communicate through everything from spells of tongues to mind-speech to the code of knocks Vrath's kin occasionally use to stay in contact through the tunnels. Nothing elicits another unnatural reaction, and though Dany does suggest dreaming, you all decide against it in the end. The chamber simply is not safe enough to sleep in with all the slime snakes, particularly once Vee confirms that 'Ozemond,' as you had decided to name him in a play on an old Valyrian name that seems to have caught Malarys between amusement and disapproval, is virulently poisonous to the point where the venom will burn through wood and stone.
***
Pressing on, you soon find yourselves before the great stone doors that had stymied even Argo's great strength, but you find them open, faint bands of green light flickering at your approach along their surface in what you suspect would have been a more complex illusion before time had taken its toll upon it.
"Maybe we should study it," Lya offers, running her fingers wistfully along the stone. "So much has been lost, so much forgotten," she sighs.
"It's just a door," you shake your head. "It is unlikely to recall much of it's history."
The stairs spiral down like the coils of some ancient serpent, the highs and angle just a little too steep for human feet, though Vrath's more flexible limbs seem to have been made for this, or rather the reverse, just as his eyes need no light to navigate the sharp and sudden twists through the dark. Idly you take the least of your draconic forms between one step and the next for comfort's sake.
When you are about halfway down the steps, at least by the rough estimate you had been able to make based on the location of the council chamber, Dany's voice calls out a touch uncertainly: "Does anyone else feel lightheaded?"
"Little bit, maybe," Vee admits as all of you freeze abruptly in place and look around for enemies, though finding none with all the senses you possess.
Fire tickles the back of your throat, sparking and sputtering... brighter than it should. "Fuck!" you curse. It's the air. "There's marsh gas down here!"
"We can just use magic to push through," Dany urges, but Malarys speaks against it with surprising vehemence.
"I am less concerned about being poisoned than I am about an explosion of Slave's Bane," he says, using the Valyrian name for the substance that had been the end of so many miners delving beneath the Fourteen Fires. "Several thousand tons of rock would make for an ignoble tomb."
No one argues further as you link hands and translocate to the head of the stairs again.
"Look!" Lya points at the door. "More of it has activated..." She squints at the faint and incomplete glyphs. "I think it's a warning sign about the bad air. This is not some kind of trap but more like an accident."
"Would have killed us just as dead," Ser Richard grunts.
After a further three hours of backtracking and even more uncomfortable exploration of cramped passages by Varys you manage to find another way down, one oft used by a colony of bats to judge from the layers of dirty white excrement that coat the stone.
"It opens up further down..." your familiar assures you, an odd note of grudging admiration in her voice.
'Opens up' is somewhat like saying that the Narrow Sea is wet or the Dornish desert hot, you soon discover. The six of you stand at the edge of a great hexagonal chamber eight-hundred feet across and almost two-hundred feet high to judge from the echoes, and it is only the edge that has anything to stand on. Beyond a band of stone about ten feet wide with no rail or barrier the floor falls away into darkness. In the center stands a single island of stone again six-sided about fifteen feet across.
"Do we fly towards the middle or down first?" Dany asks, already taking a few experimental beats of bright silver wings.
"Er... you might want to see this," Vee cuts her off. As she had been walking around the perimeter of the pit her aura of
unveiling had revealed a bridge, or at least the first five feet of one glistening into existence, but this bridge is no thing of common stone, but rather a single enormous
slime molded in shape to fit the task somehow.
What do you do?
[] Walk on the slime bridge
[] Fly to the island of stone
[] Fly to the bottom of the pit
OOC: The gas was pure methane BTW, which is odorless and colorless so it was a pretty hard wisdom check for Viserys to detect it.
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