This blog entry may contain spoilers for the "Gand Brynd" quest series.
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| High above the moonlit southern Middenland their dangerous escape leads the motley crewof dwarves, ponies, men, halfling and elf close by a hilltop tavern... |
Accompanied by a young Ogre named Khevin and a monk of Morr by the name of Vergil they were headed to Bad Hohne a small town, which was well known for its hot springs. Suddenly a cracking sound broke the monotonous creaking and thumping of the cart that they were sitting on, and Elvino awoke from his light sleep.
Were they being shot at? Was that a weapon that was fired? Surely it must have been bandits of some sort, and he was about to draw his weapon, when the cart came to a halt because there were some lunatics on the road who were apparently chastising themselves with all sorts of makeshift whips and apparently praising Sigmar while doing it.
“Oh Myrmidia”, he mumbled as he saw a very badly injured young boy on some sort of pedestal that they carried around. It didn’t take very long for the so called flagellants to try and convince Elvinos party to join in their obviously very painful activities, and they also refused any tending to their apparent wounds. Even the youngling who seemed to be unconscious wasn’t allowed to treated by Oberon the elf, who had a talent for healing and such. Apparently they thought that he was holy or some reincarnate of Sigmar, but to Elvino that all seemed very very weird.
But it couldn’t be helped and to avoid a fight they hesitatingly started whipping themselves with a branch just to shorten the duration of this encounter. After some very well pretended self harming, the Sigmarites agreed to let Oberon have a look at the young boy, while Elvino wandered off the road to take a leak when suddenly he spotted some sort of entrance.
When he came back fortunately the crowd had scattered, and he informed Oberon and the others about the entrance he found, and so they decided to try and inspect it more closely. Unfortunately the Ogre Khevin was pretty afraid of the darkness and also his height seemed like a disadvantage so he and Vergil guarded the entrance, while both of the, respectively for their race, young men went deeper into that cave to find out more about what was hidden. Pretty soon all daylight was gone, and they had to rely on the little light that their torches were providing, and Oberon's great eyesight.
They found some bigger and smaller rooms, and hallways, when they came across something that kind of looked like a toll station hidden deep below the surface. Also they entered a crypt of some sorts, but Elvino didn’t know very much about those surely impressive underground structures. Their torches were burning down quickly, and it was a long way back, so Oberon suggested going back before the both of them would get lost in that all consuming pitch black darkness. Their goal was to reach Bad Hohne after all, and maybe they could come back later, better equipped and try to reveal the secrets of this place.
The bright sunlight hurt Vino’s eyes when he stepped back out into the daylight, and they resumed their journey since nightfall wasn’t far away. Oberon noted down the position of the entrance and they made way for the town, which they reached not long after. The smell of steaming and apparently not always fresh water lingered in the streets, generated by lots of barrels some filled with people sitting in them so only their heads would poke out.
“That surely seems relaxing, if the water isn’t three days old”, Elvino remarked to Oberon, when they were on the lookout for a barber-surgeon where the elf wanted to hone his own healing arts and learn a thing or two. The young mercenary was more interested in getting his still strained body treated and while they were here some new and warmer clothes couldn’t hurt. It was getting colder day by day after all. Newly dressed in some fine wool, they parted ways and Elvino made his way to the local Shallya temple, where a priest tended to Elvinos wounds in exchange for a generous donation to aforementioned temple.
He was strolling back to meet the Elf again, when suddenly a halfling on a pony was shouting about some sort of incident that had occured outside of the palisades. “Surely those lunatics from before”, Elvino thought to himself, when he saw Oberon closely observing another barber surgeon who was currently treating a patient.
Hobsn Knopf, that was the halfings name, was very persistent and apparently someone needed medical attention, and maybe a fighting arm or two couldn’t hurt, so they decided to follow him outside the town, back towards where they originally came from.
Not far from the entrance to that underground structure, they found some weird looking and talking dwarves accompanied by some humans. One or two of them seemed injured, and Oberon tried to help them to the best of his abilities, and it was apparent that a fight had been going on there shortly before. Elvinos Reiksspiel wasn’t the best, but compared to the dwarves he was a cunning linguist, because he could barely understand them, and more than once needed translation from one of the humans, who apparently spoke Khazalid. They called themselves Dawikoni, which seemed like a weird name, but with their dialect it was very obvious that they weren’t locals.
After some very difficult explaining it dawned on Oberon and Elvino, they had fought down in that dwarvish vault, that was apparently called Zharr Ungor, with some ungodly chaos creatures. Unfortunately one member of their exploring party had also been slain during those skirmishes and the young Tilean though that turning around wasn’t the worst idea in hindsight.
With his pretty abysmal counting skills, the mercenary agreed on a 0.1 % payment of all those unknown riches that obviously lurked in that cavern. And that for Hobsn Knopf, Oberon and Elvino each. That seemed like a great deal, and so after some preparing the ventured back into the deeps. A party of three dwarves, their leader went by the proud name of Harad, and they were closely eyeing the elf Oberon, the halfing, two of those Dawikoni guys, and the young Tilean himself. Hobsn Knopf was in charge of guiding the two ponies, his own and some sort of dwarvish horse that they would surely later use to haul out treasures of some sort.
So they advanced into this abyss that once might have been a dwarven settlement of some sort, or so they told him. Soon they passed all passages they had, unknowingly to the others, scouted before and came to a long hallway with stone tiles on the ground. One of the dwarves signaled them to stop, and the party came to a halt. The ponies with Hobsn Knopf at the very back, and the ones deemed to be able to fight up front. Apparently some of those tiles were connected to a mechanism that brought upon them all kinds of bad things. Unfortunately they would find out the hard way, that the old dwarfs were very ingenious in their trap building. Spikes out of the walls, or from below, a hole that gaped in the floor suddenly, or simply a stream of blazing hot fire. Just narrowly, and some of them wounded that made it through that passage. They used some planks and elvinos snow shoes, to spread their weight around, as to not trigger the weight sensitive plates.
The uneven party ventured further and it didn’t take them long to come to another halt. Their dwarven leader found another puzzle of some sort, and apparently, that was as far as he himself has ever gotten before. While the halfling Hobsn Knopf tried to help solve the puzzle, which involved collecting pairs stones to fit into certain, the rest of them were suddenly reminded that something else was down there, and whatever made those queaking and gnawing noises came closer and closer.
Elvino drew his long knife, and his wooden shield, that had seen a skirmish or two, and in an instant all hell broke loose while they weren’t even beginning to comprehend that weird dwarven puzzle. They were trapped in, and their only way forward was through that not yet unlocked passageway or to fight back against those gnarly huge rats, that suddenly erupted out of some sort of hole in the wall. The surroundings were definitely more suited to those halfling sized rats and their claws and teeth, this was no longer a dwarven stronghold, they had occupied it, and were, accompanied by squeaking and squealing sounds, mounting a formidable attack against the intruders. There had been stories back in Tilea, of such creatures, but here in the empire no one ever mentioned anything about abominations like this.
Just as Elvino landed a fatal blow on one of those oversized critters things got from bad to worse. Suddenly a second wave of attackers poured onto them, from a different hidden opening in the wall, now they were completely surrounded. The ponies in the back got bitten and scratched and started trampling through friend and foe alike, and you could hear bones breaking as they mowed down one of the dawikoni. During a battle like this everything seems to happen in a blur, but if their dwarvish leader and the halfling couldn’t open the passageway soon, then they wouldn’t just have shivers down their spines, but those disgusting rat like creatures gnawing on said bones.
Finally and just before even more opponents could emerge from the deeps, they opened the stone doors and got to a different hallway, fortunately they could close it from the other side. Yet they had to leave the two ponies behind, pretty much all of them were wounded in some way and one of the dawikoni fell prey to the relentless assault, and they had to leave him behind.
But there was not a lot of time left for mourning, they were trapped in this room, in the middle an hourglass with sand in it, and a dwarven statue. To top it all of there was an inscription of some sort, in Khazalid, not that Elvino could have read it in any language, so Harad read it out aloud for everyone.
“Two bodies with a single turn,
United in a circle,
The longer I am unturned,
The quicker for time you’ll yearn”
It took them a while to figure the riddle out, that they had to use a mechanism that was hidden in the dwarven statue, and it didn’t help that someone from Tilea turned the hourglass around beforehand and unknowingly started some sort of trap that would burn them all alive, with no way to flee, if they didn’t make it in time.
Soon they uncovered a second hint:
“No bone, nor nail, nor muscle there,
Unmoved when empty,
loose fingers without a hand”
They quickly figured out that this probably meant a pair of gloves of some sort, and while smoke started filling the room they found one next to the dwarven statue. But what to do with it? Their dwarvish leader kept reading:
"Two brothers - they bear the biggest burden,
Bitterly below them retained to a plane
In daylight they’d call us filled,
But void we were laid to rest.
Silently they climb the searing metal sheets,
So as to the right lever they’ll heed."
So they had to put on the glove onto something, that much even Elvino figured out. But where did they have to put the glove? The young beardling Okri, a proud dwarf, put on the gloves and climbed the already searing hot metal table that was in between the hourglass and the statue. Apparently he had figured out the way to activate a hidden lever, they had tried to move it before, but apparently it was only movable when it was red hot.
Perplexed they watched him as only a slight grumble and hissing from the burning flesh could be heard, while flames began to engulf the room, and you could still hear scratching and squeaking from the opposite side where their demise waited if they didn’t burn to death before.
Fortunately the lever opened a hidden door out of that room, and all of them made it out, except the poor beardling Okri, who was overwhelmed by the heat and the suffocating smoke that took one’s breath away, but what a valiant sacrifice he made, saving all the others from certain immolation.
Not a lot of time was left, because you could still hear the gnarly squeaking and yet another piece of khazalid mystery carved into stone.
“As strong as ten old grumps,
And long as their beards,
unbent , unbroken,
Even a beardling has it at hand”
The next room seemed like some sort of round table, with columns so high one couldn’t even see the ceiling, imagine that someone plucked all the stars and the moons from the heavens and left you with nothing but darkness.
Around the table, there were levers on every second column, and fixed to each of them a rope. Those ropes held some sort of very old curtain, that further enhanced the shadows in which they found themselves. At first the high up levers seemed stuck, but when they managed to pull them all at once after climbing up to them, the fabric that was tied to them lifted up even higher.
That revealed a basket of some sort, in the middle of the room, and suddenly they could, again, hear the sound of flames bursting upwards and that was only accompanied by the turmoil that was caused when the huge rats somehow managed to break through the door where they had previously shaken them off.
Elvino thought he would meet his maker, either burn to a crisp or be slaughtered in this eternal darkness. But suddenly, there was a glare of light, not from the fire but from up above, very faint at first, but something had opened, but so high up nobody could climb up there quickly enough.
In that bright little twilight, someone screamed, that the basket, in the middle of the room was lifting upwards. Maybe the had activated some ancient dwarven pulley, that was still functional. Anyways they’d rather take their chance with some historic technology, than burn down or get overrun by the creatures that dwelled deep below the earth's surface. They took a leap of faith, and jumped into the basket, dust everywhere and suddenly, flames directly above them. But weirdly enough, they didn’t set anything on fire, you could only feel the lift getting stronger. Below them the hordes of evil creatures saw them climb up towards some faint sunlight, and apparently only their dwarven leader Harad, knew what this was. He called it a weird word, that Elvino had never heard before in his life: “a hot air balloon”.
They emerged from the depths, and bright sunlight burned their eyes that had gotten accustomed to the darkness, and they were lucky to be alive. But only Myrmidia knows where the winds would carry them, or if they would ever get back down....
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