“One final door,” Sister Hilan reminds the others, shaking her head at Renalt’s comment and ignoring the musician carefully sliding clothes from this ancient home’s closet into Alessari’s bag.
Denlo looks over at her, still visibly nonplussed. “Likely leads down. Deeper. Might be problems.”
“Nothing we can’t handle,” Felazo absentmindedly says as he flips between the same two pages in the journal repeatedly. Then, to Sari, he adds, “I’m not positive, scion, but I do believe either this writer is experiencing the same event repeatedly, or this discusses a repeated dream. The vast majority of the fragments within the first few sentences are nearly identical.”
Alessari nods. “It was found in a poorly locked drawer within arms reach of the bed,” she admits. Then, she looks over at Denlo. “Step lightly?”
“Eyes up,” the Elfi’ika replies. Together the two of them begin to make their way down the hall to the door at the end. The musician, the sister, and the captain hang back, to give the pair a chance to see what is happening on the other side of the door. The door opens silently and, even from where they are standing, it’s clear it leads directly to a stairwell.
As the quieter pair slide through and down the stairs, the others begin to walk forwards. Sister Hilan furrows her brow and asks, “Captain, how do you intend to figure out that ancient text?”
Felazo shrugs. “Study,” he replies without actually answering.
“And what, wise wizard, would this studying entail?” Renalt asks with a smile.
“Honestly? I look for common words in the text, then of those most common words, guess which ones are the particles. From there, I can compare to the classical ancient languages to see what is the closest comparison and perhaps even a little bit of how they’re different grammatically, and then use that to look at the longer common words, which are likely dream-related words and determine phonemes therein.”
“I would love a recounting of the tales within, once thy hath determined said meaning. Would aid in the composition of an original ballad, one which I sorely need if I am to journ alone again any time soon,” Renalt says with a smile and a nod. There is a trio of knocking that echoes up the stairwell. “That be Den’s all clear,” Ren says.
Sister Hilan nods and takes point for the trio, once again reminded that Ren and Den have been traveling together for quite some time now. She carefully walks down the stairs into a dark room. “Mind lighting the room up, Sari?” she asks Alessari.
“Of course,” the huntress replies, and once more the small clouds of glowing green spores float around her. The room reminds her of Felazo’s laboratory on the ship, though not quite the same. It’s older, and broken down, and also has less of Felazo’s clearly alchemical aspects.
Felazo, upon the light illuminating the room, pushes past the sister. “Now, this is likely the place where our ancient magician type constructed that suit of armor from above,” he says as he starts to pick up and look at random objects and things on the workbench.
“First the library, now this, I’m beginning to suspect the entire building was made for you,” Sari says with a smirk.
Felazo nods along absentmindedly. “Yeah, sure, I would bet that has any finished projects that were not in use. Some of them might still be functional.” He gestures to a small cabinet by the side of the stairwell.
Hilan, standing by the cabinet already as she looks across the room, opens it. There are five metallic arrows carefully laid out on a rack, covered in dust. Nothing else. Whoever was working here must not have been stocking when whatever happened happened. “A set of arrows,” she says, “I cannot tell their nature.”
Sari steps over. “I can hold onto them for the moment,” she says to the sister, then adds in a soft whisper, “Don’t worry, I won’t fire them until we know what they do.” Sister Hilan nods as Alessari wraps a ribbon around the fletching of the arrows and slides them as a cluster into her quiver.
Felazo waves them towards the other door in the larger than strictly seems necessary laboratory. “It will be a bit, I feel like I should try my best to understand this all.” He smiles, genuine giddiness rushing across his face. “If this is at all logical, that should lead to a storage area, and maybe some kind of additional, more secret library. Could you check that, while I finish cataloging this?” he asks
Denlo nods and silently heads over checking the door. After a moment, he kneels down. Pulling out his picks, he smoothly and quickly unlocks the door. Putting his tools away, he, still without having said a word, slides open the door and slides into the next room. Alessari, leaving her lights here, follows. From the subtle light of the spores that falls into the room, it does look like Felazo’s guess was wrong. It’s almost a giant, open room. Hilan and Renalt walk in to look around. While it may be dark, their human eyes do see some of the larger details. Felazo was perhaps not entirely wrong, the walls seem lined with some kind of storage shelves. And the room is less open than it appeared from the doorway. Small, almost too small to be functional, walls rise up from the floor to just above Sister Hilan’s ankles. As they enter, Renalt lights a torch of his own to illuminate the whole of the room without any continuous effort. And as he does, they can immediately see it will pay off, as, bathed in the light of the flames, is a creature silently hovering overhead. Large wings and horns on a thin, almost emaciated body, blending in with the very shadows it casts.
Renalt, looking up at it hovering above, begins to sing a quiet song as he puts down the torch on one of those ankle-high walls and slowly backs up. Sure enough, as the lilt in his voice reaches the creature above, it begins to move with the voice, with the tune. It falls asleep at the mystical lullaby. Unfortunately for the crew of the Ekzokia, nodding off like that makes it stop silently flapping its wings and causes it to plummet to the ground, smashing into the stone floor hard and its head and neck jerk back into a more wakeful position.
Sister Hilan takes a deep breath. Up in the sky, she might have struggled against this thing. But now it’s in her territory. Bracing her shield, she rushes forth, making her way over the small walls with ease, and slams her shield into the skinny creature. It moves with the impact and hisses, though she can’t tell where the hiss is coming from as the creature lacks a mouth, or any features on its shadowy face.
It reaches out with its claws in response, digging into her flesh. As she tries to pull free, it simply grips her harder. It begins to lift her into the air, flapping its wings and taking off. As it does, its tail begins to twist, trying to lash across her. But all the tail finds is her armor’s metal. The hissing changes to some kind of call for something.
Alessari looks angrily at this creature that’s taking away her friend. She’s read about creatures like this. This is a creature of dreams, often hunting for emotions. Nobles of the Kingdom sometimes used to summon them in order to terrorize and spy on their rivals in the court. That practice has been abandoned because they always ended up finding a way to break free of the summoning and feed on their former masters. Nocking a pair of arrows, one above the other. She aims for the faceless head. Quickly she fires the first, dropping the second arrow down, drawing the bow and launching the second immediately afterwards. Whizzing past her friend’s head, they hit true, one after the other, within inches of one another. Only the fletching of each is visible. And the hissing stops.
“Oh dear,” Sister Hilan mutters as the grip on her loosens. She falls to the ground, hitting the ground hard. Then there is only silence. No movement. Felazo pokes his head in. “What on earth is going on over here?” he asks.
“Monster, it seems,” Renalt replies.
Alessari is about to add more, when out from the ground behind the huntress a strange figure, not quite human but close, begins to rise. It reaches two arms towards the woman that killed the monster, the hands seeming less like hands and more like tendrils of energy, like the vines that wrap around Alessari’s arm from time to time. One manages to touch her while she gets out of the way of the other. Just being touched seems to drain her, and the huntress begins to breathe heavily. “After this, we bring everything back to the boat and rest,” she says.
Renalt begins to play a strong, empowering ballad on his lude, inspiring his companions to fight well, and ends it with a backflip. With a smile, he looks towards the strange new attacker. “Thank you for the applause,” he says. The creature merely turns its head towards Renalt, twisting its neck beyond what a normal creature should be able to do, and looks at him curiously.
Sister Hilan stands up, still gripping her shield, and moves over to stand beside her tired friend. “Don’t touch her,” she says as she slams her shield into the body. It almost seems to pass through the form slightly, as though it isn’t entirely real.
The huntress turns around, focusing on the new threat. It’s similar to the other one, but stronger, more tied to the world somehow. She doesn’t exactly know how, however. She should stick by Hilan, for now. She slides her drawing hand down, and pulls out her short sword, slashing out towards the creature. The slashes both miss, as the body seems to bend and twist itself out of the way.
Then out of the darkness there is a shout echoing through the entire room. Even Sister Hilan seems a little shaken, until falling down into view of the torchlight from atop one of those shelves is Denlo’s masked form. With blazing speed, the massive sword slices through the air twice. The body of the creature moves out of the way of the first strike, but is surprised as the blade slashes back immediately, sliding through its semi-existent flesh. Strange ethereal fluid splashes out of the cut. “It bleeds,” Denlo adds. Sister Hilan can practically hear the smile behind his mask.
“Then we ought to kill it,” Felazo says, though his speech is more matter of fact. He reaches out and a tendril of strange energy seems to form between the creature and himself. The tether pulses as a sort of darker color flows from him to the creature, then, like a heartbeat, a slightly different lighter color flows back. The creature writhes in pain.
Afraid of the stranger with a blade, and harried by this new creature, the creature turns and charges at Felazo. Denlo takes another hungry slash, and more of the strange, ethereal blood-like substance splashes across Sister Hilan’s shield. But, rather than attack them, it breathes a quiet breath towards the three people clustered together. All three of the powerhouses of their crew fall fast asleep.
“‘Tis a mistake to forget about our humble hero,” Renalt says as he spins towards the creature. Sliding the strap of his lute over his head, he lets the lute drop down, turns it over, and with the heavily reinforced back, he smacks the spirit-like creature. It does not seem to be very effective.
In their minds, the pair of awake crewmembers here, “Really, you’re the hero?”
“He was talking about me,” Felazo says, grabbing the creature and letting that tether pulse once more. Then, pulling out a small vial from his coat, he says, “This is going to hurt, and shoves it into the center of the creature. The vial explodes, and the creature begins to lose control of its form, falling into a pile of strange shapes seemingly made of the liquid that splashed out of it. Renalt and Felazo also start coughing, being caught in the explosion.
Renalt smiles. “I believe it be time to awaken the others.”
“Perhaps we can convince them to lock the doors and let us rest down here,” Felazo muses as he walks over to the pile of his sleeping crew.
“I doubt it, but perhaps,” Renalt says absentmindedly as he begins to examine the strange puddle of creatureless shapes that the second being left upon dying. “Perhaps,” he mutters again, this time to himself.
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