>>5293424You wish you could say that you felt the presence draw closer—that your divination or superior draconic senses detected your stalker’s approach. But… You didn’t. Your sword-arm was twitching, ready to draw your hidden dagger and to parry a blow or plunge it into somewhere non-vital to secure a capture… And yet, had it not been for Glowie crying out “Draygunburn!” in her garbled True Speech, you would have surely been seized upon and dragged into the night.
>1Only at Glowie’s outburst, breaking her stealth, does the cloaked figure—nearly as bundled-up as Glowie herself—appear as if from nowhere before your very eyes. It is built like a hunched-over Steeltalon, bulky but compact, though you cannot say how much of that is the layered fabric and leather. Large spikes of—metal? stone? bone?—jut out of it at odd angles, and it grips a notched and battered stone blade of what you quickly appraise is dark-elf design. The long, grey nose and queer, pallid eyes of these cave-dweller prove it to be no sort of Drow with which you are familiar.
The not-Drow in its tatters-and-spikes hesitates, uncertain whether to attack you, to flee, or to wheel around to face Glowie. You begin to stand up, to take a step back for distance and to draw your own dagger, when Glowie takes your assailant, AND you, by surprise.
>17You’d thought the worm-princess’s concern for your safety had spoiled her ambush, but what you had forgotten as that Glowie was not consigned SOLELY to melee combat: she opens her mouth and, with a chittering hiss, ejects a spurt of stringy silk, faintly glowing with her iridescent, adhesive secretions. It is a bizarre thing to see an outwardly-Reptilian female do, but you are hardly wont to criticize her, for the opportune blast of glowworm-goo catches your would-be assailant’s face and chest. It drops his blade and begins pawing at its face, trying to pull the silk away. You take the opportunity to give it a heavy boot to its cushioned midsection, inflicting no moral wound but sending it toppling down a ramp of stone, nearly into a pit.
>15You bound after it, and as it starts to stand again, you are upon it, delivering a blow to its face to stun it and then bringing your blade to bear in a mortal threat. It screeches and grabs for you, to pull your body into its own—to impale you on the spikes.
“Fool,” you spit, “I am wearing armour.”
The watcher-in-darkness seems to realize this at the same time as you say it, though it surely does not understand your words. It struggles to free itself, to escape…
>10But you hold it fast, squeezing it closer and pressing your blade until its exposed cheek, just below its eye and drawing ever closer to blinding it even as you crush the life out of its surprisingly-steely body.
“W-wait! Wait! No kill me! No kill meeee!” the stalker cries out in elf-speak inferior even to your own, finally relenting and going limp as it surrenders.
