Legacy of the Fallen
Page 42
“That’s interesting,” Halcyon commented before I could say anything. “You guys see the six sources ahead of us?”
“I do,” I answered, hearing similar words of affirmation from the other spellcasters. “They’re both in line to each hallway, just deeper underground.”
“But no moving sources of energy anymore,” Caius pointed out. “Maybe those were the two Specters we killed?”
“Could have been,” Zethus spoke up in an unsure voice. “But…how many were there when we last looked? Was there just two, or more?”
“There were several if I remember right,” I said, recalling the first time that I had scanned the area and realizing that I couldn’t see any sources of magic moving anywhere I looked.
Which for obvious reasons, didn’t make me feel any better.
“They’re missing,” I told everyone, dismissing the enhanced vision that the Ætherscope gave me and putting the device back into my inventory. “I have no idea what they were, but something’s changed now.”
“We’ll have to be ready for them then,” Halcyon replied with a shrug. “Nothing we can do about it but move forward.”
“I guess,” I stated, before looking towards the non-magical members of the group and seeing the blank looks on all their faces.
“So,” Drace was the first to speak. “You guys see anything interesting?”
“Or…didn’t see something interesting?” Sawyer asked, his tone sounding unsure.
“The moving sources of magic we saw earlier are gone,” I told the group, then went on to describe what I had seen while scanning the area.
“So, there could be other Specters or other magical…things waiting for us going forward,” Freya said after I had finished my explanation.
“Probably safe to assume that there are,” Halcyon replied. “And I think we were right in thinking that this is a split dungeon, with the three different magic sources down below on each side…this might only be the first checkpoint that we have to be working together.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem for us,” Thorne chimed in. “We’re more than used to that already!”
“That we are,” I agreed, then cast one final look around the circle. “If no one else has any objections or ideas then, shall we get moving?”
“Just point me to where you need me,” Lazarus grunted with a shake of his head as he moved to stand beside me.
“I think we’re good to go,” Freya said, meeting my eyes as everyone began to form up into their two respective groups. “We’ll give our first plan a shot and see what happens.”
“Sounds good to me,” I replied, our two groups giving one another a brief wave before moving into our assigned hallways.
The relatively small passage made for a rather tight fit once we had all piled into it, Lazarus, Drace and Amaranth visibly appearing cramped as they squeezed in close to one another in an attempt to give the others space.
“Is everyone ready?” I asked, holding my hand just above the crystal that would send the stone door closing and hopefully activating the panel near the other group.
“Hurry it up,” Drace grunted. “Something’s jabbing me in the back and think I’m standing on someone’s foot.”
“Right!” I said, wincing at the volume of my familiar’s distress and placed my hand on the crystal.
Once again, there were a few seconds of delay before the door began to move, the stone slab noisily grinding along the floor as it closed. Then with a loud boom, it finally closed, cutting us off from the main chamber.
Taking my hand off the crystal, I looked back towards the group and offered them a thin smile.
“Well, there’s no going back now.”
Chapter 33
“Finally!” Drace’s voice boomed through the cramped hallway as the door beside me began to grind to one side, our hunch having clearly paid off.
It had been less than a minute since the door had closed behind me and closed the nine of us in the hallway, but the duration had been more than long enough for us to begin to worry and for claustrophobia to set in. Shoving his way forward, Drace didn’t wait for the door to finish opening before shoving his bulk through it, bumping me hard in the process and eliciting yet another angry yowl from Amaranth as the half-giant stepped free of his tail. Following close on his heels, everyone in the group moved to follow the man, the gasps of relief and rushed footsteps echoing loud enough to drown out the sound of the grinding door.
“Phew!” Constantine exclaimed as he moved by, the last to push past me as I maintained my position in front of the panel. “I was starting to think that we were going to be stuck in here!”
“You and me both,” Sierra muttered. “I like you guys, but I like my personal space a bit more. If you know what I mean.”
“Keep on your toes, everyone!” I heard Lazarus call out from somewhere at the front of the group. “We don’t know what’s ahead of us, and that door opening wasn’t exactly quiet.”
Everyone’s voice immediately died out at the half-giant’s warning, and a quiet stillness filled the air as everyone turned their attention forward, listening to see if there was anything ahead of us. Caught at the back of the party, I couldn’t make out where the passage ahead of us led, both because of everyone blocking my way and because my attention was still focused on the panel.
Is this other crystal going to light up? I thought while watching it carefully, waiting for any sign of magic in the crystal to appear.
With our earlier theory having been proven true, I could only assume that one of the crystals on Freya’s side had activated itself once we had sealed ourselves into our hallway, and that one of our crystals would become active soon after the second door had opened. Which would then, in turn, allow me to return the favor and unlock the second door for the other group.
Was this intended as some sort of a security feature to keep people from getting deeper into the ruin? Or did something break when this place collapsed? The thought filtered through my mind as a spark of magic finally bloomed in the second crystal set into the panel. Without any hesitation, I reached out to touch it, feeling a similar sensation of warmth shoot up my hand as the crystal activated itself and a faint rumbling echoed through the wall behind me, coming directly from where I knew the other hallway to be.
“It worked,” I whispered, looking back towards the rest of the party as the rumbling noise came to a stop, followed by a loud clicking sound, which then began to repeat itself, each interval between clicks gradually getting shorter and shorter.
“Lyr!” Sierra exclaimed, beckoning me forward as everyone’s eyes widened at the audible timer that was echoing through the air. Years of gaming having taught us all too well what a sound like that meant.
“Coming!” I replied, letting go of the crystal and rushing the short distance past the doorway, easily passing through it as the party backed down the hall to give me space.
We had enough time to put several feet between us and the doorway as the noise continued to speed up, before it suddenly cut out at the exact second the heavy stone door slammed shut, moving faster than the eye could follow.
Trapping us inside the ruin.
“Well, I guess we’re doubly committed,” Constantine said in a low voice as I turned around to look at the party. “And so much for keeping things quiet, if they didn’t hear the door opening, they sure heard it close.”
“Probably,” Halcyon agreed with resignation. “But given that the Specters likely set off some sort of alarm, it’s safe to assume that anyway.”
“True,” I stated, motioning towards the wall. “It sounded like Freya, and the others managed to get past their door at least.”
“Hopefully,” Sierra said. “Nothing we can do about it now.”
“Only to move forward,” I acknowledged with a nod, before turning my attention towards the pa
ssage ahead of us. “Speaking of which, what do we have ahead of us?”
“Stairs going down from the looks of it,” Lazarus answered from the front of the group. “My guess is another set of switchbacks.”
“Man,” Constantine grunted. “The Nafarr had all this technology on their hands, and they couldn’t have figured out an elevator?”
“Would you trust an elevator that hadn’t had any maintenance done to it in who knows how many centuries?” Drace asked pointedly before sharply motioning us to follow him down the stairs.
“Probably not,” Constantine replied with a sigh, conceding the point. “But still…”
With nothing left to say, we all fell into a wary silence as we began to move down the stairs ahead of us, Lazarus’s guess that the stairs ahead of us led to another set of switchbacks proving to be correct. Moving forward carefully with several orbs of magical light guiding our path, we descended down several flights of stairs, the walls all around us covered in more of the same battle damage we’d seen earlier.
Looks like the Nafarr made the Irovians pay for every inch they took, I considered, carefully scanning everything around me as we continued downward, our footsteps and shuffling armor the only sound reaching my ears. But in the end, it doesn’t look like it made much of a difference.
After descending what I could only guess had been about eighty feet, we rounded the final switchback and found ourselves basked in a familiar azure light, which emanated from a hall at the bottom of the stairs.
“Guess we’re about to find out whatever that source of magic was,” Halcyon whispered practically in my ear as we all stopped for a moment before continuing forward.
“Looks like it,” I agreed in hushed tones, before gently pushing myself through the group and making my way to the front, seeing that Lazarus had already partially descended down the stairway in an attempt to get a better view of what was ahead.
Creeping silently, I saw the lithe half-giant slowly step down the stairs in a half crouch, pausing once he had traveled far enough to see where the azure light ahead of us was coming from. He stayed still for a moment, before slowly turning his head back towards us, his eyes landing directly on mine. I saw something in them that I couldn’t quite identify, meeting his gaze for several seconds before he motioned for me to join him.
Following his lead, I slowly moved forward and climbed down the stairs until I was directly by his side and pressed against the opposite wall, entering the azure light emanating from the hallway ahead of us. Squinting from the brightness, I was forced to wait a moment until my eyes adjusted, temporarily stricken blind by an intense source of magic ahead of me as it overwhelmed my magically enhanced sight. When my vision finally cleared, however, it was all I could do not to gasp in surprise.
The short hallway rapidly opened up into a larger chamber, stretching further than I could see from my limited angle, but not far enough that I was unable to miss the large glowing crystal that was suspended high in the air over a circular dais. Encircling the floating crystal were two gleaming metal disks, each of them rotating sedately as they gradually traveled from the crystal’s base then back up to its tip, pausing for a second at each end before reversing its direction and repeating the motion. Thanks to my True Sight ability, I could see the waves of magic emanating from the crystal, filling the air around it in a thick azure haze of power.
Wow! I thought, completely speechless at the magic before me. I had accepted the possibility of us discovering still functioning Nafarrian technology in the ruin, but even in my wildest dreams, I hadn’t expected anything like this. This must be the source of magic that we saw through the Ætherscopes! I wonder—
“I think there’s at least nine of them.” Lazarus’s barely audible words were enough to bring me crashing back to the present as he whispered almost directly in my ear. “Some are on the other side of the crystal.”
Flinching slightly from the unexpected sound, I glanced over towards Lazarus in surprise, caught completely off guard by whatever he was talking about. Watching an eyebrow rise in question as he waited for me to reply, I shook my head and temporarily deactivated True Sight.
“Hold on,” I whispered back as my enhanced vision faded and the near blinding magical aura that was the crystal faded.
Don’t get distracted, I admonished myself as I narrowed my eyes and looked back into the chamber, searching for whatever Lazarus had seen. To my dismay, it only took me a second to spot what he had been talking about, which prompted me to mentally kick myself. Damn it, Marc! How the hell did you miss that?!
Standing arrayed in a circle around the azure crystal, were the charred armored figures of several people, or what I assumed had once been people, before magic had twisted them into whatever they now were. Each of them was visibly burning with deep emerald flames from within their armor as if all of their flesh had become living fire. I saw the vague shadow of a skull visible from under the dancing flames, hovering just above each of their shoulders. A set of tags appeared in my vision, pointing to all the figures that I could see before me.
[Ætherbound Soldier] – Level 15
I missed them because they’re made of magic! I realized, remembering the haze of magic that I had seen clustered around the crystal. I couldn’t begin to guess what had happened to the soldiers before me, but at first glance, it seemed like they had been transformed to something akin to what the Slave King was when his spirit had interacted with the Ley Line, giving him a physical body to inhabit that was made completely out of Æther. The only difference that I could see in this situation was that each of the soldiers ahead of me had managed to retain their armor, which despite its blackened and almost charred looking appearance, I recognized as being of Irovian make, similar to armor that we all were wearing.
“So, the Irovians did at least make it this far,” I whispered back to Lazarus, silently wondering what had happened to them to transform them so completely. It didn’t appear as if they had been Ætherwarped, yet every single one of them appeared to be completely fixated on the large crystal in the center of the room, their bodies frozen in place as if drawn to the magic. What else happened in here when this place was destroyed? This looks like something completely beyond Ætherwarping, but as if the Æther itself is animating it.
“Looks like it,” the half-giant replied softly, before motioning for us to ascend back up the stairs and return to the rest of the party. Allowing the man to go first, I took one last look towards the chamber then turned around to follow.
“What did you see?” Drace asked from the head of the party, having been in perfect position to see our reactions.
“There is a giant crystal in the room,” I said, before going on to describe the undead-like creatures in the chamber ahead of us and how they had been warped by magic. “The Ætherbound Soldiers all look like Irovians based on their armor and, from what we could see, are all level fifteen.”
“Hrm,” Drace grunted, his face scowling slightly at the mention of the level, knowing that the majority of us were still level fourteen. A few levels weren’t an insurmountable difference when it came to fighting as a group, but it was a clear indication that we would have to take the fight seriously. “Do we know how many for sure?
“I counted at least nine,” Lazarus added, glancing over at me as he finished his sentence. “But that’s just a guess based on their spacing around the crystal; there could be more in the room we couldn’t see.”
“We can’t rule out the possibility of a boss ranked creature somewhere in there too,” I pointed out, seeing both Drace and Lazarus nod at me in agreement. “This is a dungeon after all. It’s not going to make it easy for us.”
“That’s probably a safe assumption,” Drace said before motioning down the stairs with his chin. “What’s our plan?”
“Keep moving forward,” I replied without hesitation. “I’ll scout just a bit further down the hall to make sure that there isn’t anything else waiting for us in the room out of sight, but
if there isn’t, I think that if we rush the soldiers around the crystal, we can probably take a handful of them right off the bat if we focus our attacks. Plus, once we’re out in the open, we can use our numbers to our advantage. This passageway would suck to fight in.”
“Yeah, I definitely don’t want to do that,” Drace said, glancing upward at the ceiling which was barely three inches above his head.
“I’ll second that,” Lazarus added sympathetically, only being a few inches shorter than Drace.
“Alright,” I said, shifting sideways on the stairs so I could see the rest of the party and pitching my voice so everyone could hear. “I’m going ahead to make sure there’s nothing waiting to ambush us. If it’s clear, I’ll signal you all forward, and we’ll charge the crystal together. If not, I’ll figure something else out.”
Pausing for a moment for my words to sink in, I waited to see if anyone had anything to add, but after seeing several nods from the group members, I figured that everyone was happy with my plan. Motioning for everyone to follow me to the bottom of the stairs, I slowly turned around from my position at the head of the group and led the way back down a second time, silently drawing Splinter from its sheath as I moved.
Taking the approach slowly, I stalked into the short hallway at the base of the stairs and approached the room beyond, the faint steps of our less stealthy party members causing me to wince as they moved behind me. Pausing at the entranceway into the chamber, I pressed myself into the leftmost wall and listened, hoping that my ears would be able to catch any noise coming from ahead of me.
After several seconds of silence, I decided it was safe enough for me to poke my head gingerly around the corner of the doorway, silently hoping that the movement wouldn’t attract anyone’s, or perhaps more appropriately, anything’s, attention.
Moving with infinite care, I scanned the interior of the chamber, starting on the side closest to me, and immediately felt my heart leap in my chest once more. Lined in a row on the far-left side of the chamber were three small daises, similar to the one that was in the center of the room save for the fact that none of them bore any crystals upon them. Instead, there was a large collection of crystalline shards and fragments of metal littering the area, causing the smaller circular daises to glitter with countless azure reflections.