>>5438637You travel through this place, dark in a way beyond mere absence-of-light. There is glory here—fallen glory, like that of your race. The murals are fresher, relief less worn by time and nature. Still, it echoes your early experiences of what it means to be a race in decline—driven down, ostracized and isolated, surrounded by the ruins of better times. This is what the surface elves took from them!
But… No. The artsyle is angular, brutalist, and crude—carved with softer materials than steel, by minds (and with hands) which knew no formal training. The proportions are fluid, experimental or amateur. The features stretch and warp, conveying vivid emotion but no sense of refined, naturalistic realism, such as surface-elves might employ. These visages—depictions of elves in states of battle-rapture, righteous rage, ecstasy and agony… They are DROW leaders. Not their ancestors—them. These were created by the outcast elves long AFTER they were cast out.
Surface-scum didn’t steal this place from your allies. GHOULS did.
The elves walk these halls with reverence. They stop to whisper words of thanks or appeasement to several worthy royals—figures of respect or terror, you gather. You, however, move ever onward. Eventually, you come to the centre of the place.
You behold a great chamber, with galleries of stone seats set with dried, half-decay mushroom-cap cushions. They overlook something like a gladiatorial chamber, or an operating table... Or maybe an altar. You realize, after a moment, that it is all three, after a fashion.
“This is where your dead are prepared,” you say. “Their souls released.”
“Yes,” Hamaraska agrees.
The unease—the darkness and silence which confound even adapted or augmented sight and hearing—it all makes sense. What you feel on your shoulders, a weight like water-pressure in this musty air… It is the weight of death, or undeath. Of lingering souls, deprived to the Emperor of Entropy. Lives without end, in defiance of the Lord of Endings. It is the weight of ages, of lifetimes that measure in the centuries, all pressing down in a chamber that—though cavernous—is too small for the abandoned and forgotten souls of kings and warriors who fill it like so much stagnant waster.
You force yourself to draw breath, realizing you have forgotten, and slap the Junior Novice on the back so that he does the same. Though none of your elven companions are mages, exactly, all elves are magical enough to sense the wrongness here, in a way a human or dwarf might not. So, too, Junior—a creature of biological alchemy most potent, infused with an ancient and powerful bloodline.
“Why have you brought us here?” Azonia asks—nearly whimpers, despite her usuals elf-assured and abrasive attitude.
“To fix it,” you announce.
