>>5342481You feel a growing helplessness in you as you realize just how much earth you have moved with your <Tremor>--and how little ability you have to actually, DELIBERATELY move it away without causing further damage. You can reshape it into walls, but even with all your mana you could not use this skill to completely clear the path down to the dungeons-depths of this fort, and all your mighty muscle is nary enough to liberate your companions from this tomb of your own making.
Eventually, as the last of the dwarves are slain, your allies begin to come help you. Many can do little to speed the process—it takes three or four kobolds to equal your physical power, and the Pit-Guard’s Apprentice is still injured beyond being able to assist for long, while many of your other allies are necessarily less athletic than you. It is a long time—over an hour, you would estimate—before you truly open up the shaft into the ‘town’ below.
It is indeed a town, albeit a small one. What was above-ground was all defensive bulwark and waste-storage; below, you find storehouses of trade-goods, barrels of food and ale, treasures of the earth, sleeping quarters for the miners and guards…
And down below that, the mines—tunnels stretching down and out, into the mountain below. And in that place, where the tunnels meet the main column of the vertical column which seems to serve as community hub (or once did), you find the scene of the battle below—where dwarves, Drow, Bogbarri, and Reptilians made a final stand. Two dozen dwarves and a dozen of your own forces lay dead, hacked to pieces with one another’s weapons or crushed by falling debris form your own conquest above.
You survey the casualties.
Seven bugbears lay dead, with only two alive, greedily looting the corpses of their allies and enemies despite their own injuries. They laugh madly and grin at you with triumphant glee when you reach them, though you can see them tremble slightly with anxiety or the come-down from their intense adrenaline high.
Half the dark elves who accompanied you are dead, also… Including their Ranger-Captain, Epharidan, with whom you brokered peace. He lays atop a dead dwarf, his twin daggers still embedded in the stouter mammal’s chest, his knuckles still white with the ferocity of his death-grip… Despite the axe embedded in his skull in retaliation.
The remaining two Drow are injured, but stand dutiful vigil over their dead companion… And two others. Your heart falls a little as you see the prone, unmoving forms of two figures: the Thief, wearing the very cloak you gifted him; Paeris, the half-elven Degenerate bard.
You stride towards them, the Drow making way for you without the need for request, and you lean down to examine them. Paeris… Is dead. He is missing an arm in its entirety, and has gone pale white with loss of blood.
“When he could not string his bow, or pluck his harp, the trai—the half-elf, he yet sang.”
