In Baleful Light Unveiled
Seventeenth Day of the Eleventh Month 293 AC
The Coils, Beneath City of Brass
Too many spices for just one pot, the saying he first heard in Lys two years ago went through Maelor's head. It was one thing to have your master captured and needing to race for help, common enough other than the loyal slave. Running to a shop your master had gone into once in all his days made a stranger tale, but maybe he'd guessed just what sort of power lurked in the middling shop that sold cheap magic and took all you could sell. The shapeshifting spiders, the maybe dead sister, these didn't fit, but not in a way that spelled trap, it mostly spelled gibberish.
At least we won't have to wait long for more answers, the young sorcerer thought. The echoes were getting closer, and with them the all too familiar reek of charred flesh. He briefly considered if he should just ask the others to let whatever was coming jaw and jabber at them. Viserys had gotten a lot of answers that way. Then again, Viserys was a bloody dragon and he usually had four or five companions around him when he made those sorts of decisions. You could trust a fury to fight for her oaths and a sellsword for his coin, but he was far less sure on the girl.
Light flashed again, this time in front of them not above, blazing gold and other colors somehow harder and sharper, painful for the eye to behold and the mind to contemplate, and in that light floated something that may have once been human but somehow gnawed around the edges of its being into new shapes. Skin ashen grey, oily and lustrous hair golden-white that almost seemed a part of the light, eyes open and staring into some even brighter radiance, mouth opened into a silent scream as a four fingered claw pointed at Ashia in condemnation: "You made me this, you ran from the Calling and so it took and took from me! Look At me! Look at what I had become!"
At the back of Maelor's head a small and not very helpful voice noted that the thing was not speaking any of the languages he knew, but something else entirely yet the impossible light made them understandable, for under its gaze nothing could be hidden, no secrets could dwell.
As the dreadful light
spilled out towards them like water from a broken dam Maelor pulled at the whispering darkness of his soul to smother it. It was not enough.
Bronn ducked out of the way, his sword seeming to reflect some of the hateful light as he lunged at the thing, dealing it three great cuts, one under the arm, the second to the ribs and the third to the neck, each of which should have split the withered thing in twine, but the radiance around it seemed to catch and slow the blows until only shallow cuts showed upon its grey skin. Yet Sarel was not deterred, black feathered arrows sang through the air, each seeking to strike one of the wounds.
Though only two of three found their mark the thing clearly felt them.
A little more fire and...
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to," Ashia was repeating under her breath in place of spells.
Maelor's fist clenched around the ornate scepter in anger.
Be sorry when it isn't trying to kill us. Rage mingled well with the power of the Pit and from their joining a lash of shadow was born, tearing at the curtain of light.
The light seemed to boil out from its wounds this time, seeking not just to blind but scorch. Sarell escapes the first but not the second, a third of her wing is burned to the bone though she could endure the very flames of hell. "Begone ye spirit of an unclean House!" the light-begotten screamed as it tried to dart away further down the tunnel.
Alas for it that Bronn was waiting, once, twice his sword connected, then Sarell's blade of adamantine flashed into her hand, bow clattering to the floor. Neck hanging by a shred the light began to boil over again. Shadows rolled over it and at last it was broken to the ground.
Ashia was crying, still speaking that strange tongue, though with the poisoned light extinguished Maelor could no longer understand it.
"When you said your master was trading with 'those under the sky', you did not mean the skies of flame, did you?" Maelor asked softly, remembering the talisman Silas had sold him. "You meant skies of blue."
The girl nodded. "Kazahn'zi. Icshe'k... er Mossovy." A moment later she added. "There's a passage, a gate near where master and I were ambushed."
"There's an open gate to the world under the sun, here?" Maelor asked slowly, his stomach seeming to fall clear through the soles of his feet at the thought of efreeti spilling into the world.
"No, only opens twice a year for three days, only for someone like me... like my sister was," she replied.
"And we are in the middle of those three days," Sarell's words were not a question, but the girl nodded anyway.
OOC: Bronn's luck re-rolls continue to be their own sort of magic in combat and things clear up a little as to why everyone was down here.
