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>3 SUCCESS: Hidden Passage. In addition to no tracking roll being required, you come across a piece of ancient lore from the City’s first founding.
>SELECTED: This corridor is old, the weight of a millenia on its shoulders. From a time when the City was perhaps first founded, when the Dragon first came to Cathagi. [Dragon Lore]
Shying away from the most obvious route where any would-be ambusher would enjoy every advantage, you lead your party of three through to the lesser known recesses of this sunken city. You had feared encountering giant scorpions or some other terrible desert beasts lurking in this forgotten undercity but, aside from evidence of some truly desperate wretches using these tunnels as temporary hideouts, you run into nothing of the sort. The collapsed walls, half-buried streets and winding alleyways are still based on a man-made design in the end and it proves a damned sight easier to navigate than the wild forests or treacherous mountain crags of the untamed reaches of your homeland.
At one point your sortie comes across a giant chasm, split right between two buried buildings like the boundary of a forgotten god, a rock that Mikail tentatively palms off into the depths clatters until the faint echoes are lost in the dark. For a moment it seems you may have to swing across, Brother Rousseau even begins to unspool a length of rope, but fortunately your keen sense of direction leads you to a section where the gap is thin enough to step across.
You travel deep into the earlier generations of the City. As deep as the Salve Reginae Sanctum upon which the Church of the Holy Juvenescence was built upon, if not deeper. About halfway through a truly ancient and widening hallway you pause, brushing your hand against an asymmetrical shadow splayed across the wall. What you first mistook for a fissure in the stone work is a thin layer of moss, its roots stretching greedily and down and into the stone floor to some unseen water source beneath your feet.
<span class="mu-i">“This way.”</span> Your companions glance down the wide corridor and back to the opening of the side passage illuminated by your torch, little more than a crack in the wall. You find it hard to fault their scepticism, but you know your Fae archer better than most. <span class="mu-i">“Trust me.”</span>
And they do, without further hesitation Mikail and Brother Rousseau follow you down the hidden passage and on to an even lesser beaten path. You travel along there for some time, with only the occasional patch of moss or wayward root creeping in from the stone above to reinforce your decision to travel this way. The passage opens up slightly into a small room, the thinnest ray of natural light shining far from the surface onto a patch of some desert cousin of liverwort is cause for celebration and a break for water. The streaks of an underground river flow through here, casting one side of the wall in a fine sheen of wet rock as it trickles down.
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