By David C. Daoust
Page 2 of 10
Efreet could only guess what civilization had left these ruins behind. He was fairly confident it was human, though that was mostly going by the size of the place… Plus it was a human that had hired him to drag them out here, though that might be faulty logic he thought. Just because he was human, doesn’t mean he was researching humans. If it were dwarves, Efreet doubted he would have found the passage at all; a crafty lot them dwarves. Of course these ruins were above ground. Hill Dwarves were the only dwarves that lived outside of the mountains and their grand caverns. Hill Dwarves weren’t around back then, not that Efreet knew of anyhow, though a historian he was not.
His mind wandered through a thousand possibilities as it tended to do when he was excited about something. Searching through old hidden ruins was just the sort of thing to get his mind churning. He made his way down to the bottom of the stair to a musty moss covered passage. He rubbed his hands together as he found his first choice… left into the pitch darkness… or right into more pitch darkness. Delightful!
“Something about ‘right’ sounds right,” he muttered choosing to allow a half thought-out play on words to dictate his direction. “Always best to save what’s left for last.”
He had not taken a step before the slow screech could be heard in the distance. He couldn’t say what made a noise like that, if a living thing it was that emanated it. He unsheathed his curved blades. Sickles were favored amongst gnome as they afforded much more blade than a dagger, without being longer than the short race could handle. The round curved weapons were quite deadly.
Efreet’s entire stance changed, his mind stopped pondering silly questions, and he focused on not just what was ahead of him, but what was beneath him. He could be quite stealthy when need be, and as the screech returned again, he knew he need be. He moved quickly and silently, ever vigilante for traps. The shadows easy enough for him to see through with his low-light vision. He doubted, though, it was an advantage to anything that had been living here…
The screech was eerie to say the least, often times it suddenly sounded closer, and then others much farther away, Very disconcerting. Efreet had been taking note of the distance, he’d come across few turns. At first he thought he had stumbled into a labyrinth, and had even hoped it was true, but now knew he was just in some old dungeon, as the layout of the thing made some semblance of sense.
He came upon an old heavy oak door, rotted with time, with a small barred window too high for him to peer through; Looked like the entrance to the dungeon proper. Efreet fully expected to find rows of similarly barred wooden doors, leading into cells beyond this one. It only took him a moment to pick the old lock, though about five minutes to force the old crusty hinges to budge. The noise was a ruckus, though the screech did not seem to change and still remained distant. He doubted there was much in the cells… but it still warranted a look at the very least.
Efreet did not find what he expected in the least, instead of a row of old cell doors, he found a circular room, with markings on the floor and a black, very black, very expensive looking, altar at one end.
