>>5438642Around you lurk chittering, chattering ghouls—the smaller sort. Some hold stones or blades, some scratch madly at the floor and shriek. They are all agitated, unhappy. In one or two corners you see their taskmasters and masterminds—the dog-heads, taller and more muscular, but still no match for you.
But then, outnumbering you with their sycophantic monkey-minions a dozen-to-one, why should they NEED to match you individually?
“Get ready!” Azonia shouts. “They’ll come all at once!”
“No,” Jhamrius groans unhappily. “Look.”
You all see it at the same time: skeletons and corpses, some longer-dead than others. Skeletons lumber and rattle towards you—spooky, scary even. It especially unsettles you because, well… You FELT the unclean and unhappy spirits leave this place! All necromancy relies upon Undeath—the slaving soul-force of a lingering half-dead thing, animating the remains of itself or another with negative energy, or ‘antilife’. What, then, animates these? You sense no demons either… Well, aside from the demon yet trapped in a ring within a box in your pack, won as a prize in your war on the kobolds’ false prophet almost a year ago.
>20You sense it before you see it—a knot in the thread of your fate, hurtling towards you along dimensions temporal and spatial. You dodge it—a massive stone, almost half the size of your body and MUCH heavier! You cast your gaze about for the source of it, but see no ghoul, nor skeleton, mighty enough to heft such a thing! What, then?!
“Are you alright?” Sengar asks.
“It came from nowhere,” Jhamrius mutters, eyes flitting constantly in search of the source, bow ready.
“No,” Azonia announce,s pointing with a blade.
“From the dark,” Hamarask concurs. “But not from nowhere. It was thrown from out thgere, past where Darkvision ends.”
“No,” Azonia insist. “It came in a straight line, and if you squint, you can see that it MUST have come around the corner of that tunnel”
“Impossible,” Sengar scoffs.
The ghouls shriek, a hundred tiny wails of displeasure at your cleansing of their happy home giving way to one wail—one will. The dog-heads direct their forces with sweeping gestures, and the horde surges forth in great arcs, like a spreading cloak before their masters.
You wonder if the ones you ‘befriended’ are in this horde… And where their so-called ‘Supreme’ is, in all this? Down the tunnel, around the corner, behind this mystery-boulder?
