Path of Dragons

The water was warm.

And not the sort of warm one usually experienced in a bath, but rather, the kind that usually came when someone urinated in a pool. That was to say that it was absolutely disgusting, and it was made even more so by the stench invading Elijah’s nostrils. It was so horrid that, for a brief moment, he considered going back. However, it only took the memory of those monstrous ogres – or more importantly, the enormous weapons they wielded – to keep Elijah paddling forward.

Then, only twenty feet from shore, something brushed against his leg. It was only a tentative touch, but it was more than enough to hasten Elijah’s stroke. Even as he put his immense strength to work, the water bubbled all around him. Suddenly, a hundred tentacles, each tipped with a hand of tinier and even more horrifying tendrils, burst from the water.

Elijah lashed out, slashing the closest with his foreclaws. They fell like wheat before a scythe, though with far more white, puss-like gore than would come from any harvested plant, clearing his way. He didn’t squander that brief opening, and with a mighty heave of his long arms, he cut through the water. Behind him, something roiled and splashed, but Elijah knew better than to look back. He had no interest in identifying whatever monster he’d disturbed.

One with Nature had already given him more information about the nigh-unidentifiable monstrosity than he ever wanted. He couldn’t get a good picture, but he could sense a tangle of slimy tentacles and way too many eyes, which was more than enough to speed him along.

The sound of splashing chased him through the water, but Elijah barely stayed ahead as he clambered toward the grate. His heart beat out of his chest as the tentacled creature tickled his heels, but he narrowly managed to reach the grate before it closed in on him. After grabbing hold of one of the bars, he levered himself out of the water and onto the thin ledge of the grate. Without hesitation, he yanked against the bar.

And yet, it didn’t move.

With the tentacle monster bearing down on him, Elijah gripped the bar with both hands, then pulled with every point of his inflated Strength attribute. It creaked under the stress, but still, it held fast. A tentacle whipped out of the water and lashed his leg, then wrapped around his foot.

It yanked.

Elijah held onto the bar, and before the tentacle monster could pull him back into the water, he let out a grunt and summoned a level of power he didn’t know he possessed. The bar screamed in protest, but Elijah kept pulling until, an moment later, it budged. It only moved half an inch, but it was like the breaking of a dam. With its integrity having been sundered, the bar quickly surrendered to his massive strength.

However, it didn’t break free.

Instead, for all his efforts, it only bent just enough to widen the gap by a few extra inches. Elijah hoped it would be enough. So, he ripped his leg free of the tentacle – which dislodged quite a few of his scales – and before more could descended upon him, shifted back into his human form and narrowly squeezed between the bars.

He barely made it before a dozen slimy tentacles fell upon the spot he’d just vacated.

Elijah rolled, then scrambled backwards as he beheld the monster he’d only just escaped. And it was a true horror, with hundreds of bulbous eyes, a body that looked like a cross between a bullfrog and an octopus, and dozens of slimy, grasping tentacles.

Suddenly, his decision to cross the moat seemed ill-advised. But in his defense, he’d had no idea what horrors the water held, and he’d been riding high on the seeming invincibility of his guardian form. But looking at that thing, Elijah knew that if he hadn’t escaped its grasp, it was more than capable of killing him.

That, more than anything else he’d seen so far, hammered home just how much he had underestimated the tower. Certainly, he had every reason to think he could defeat it. However, he wouldn’t do so easily, and if he didn’t take just as much care as he had back in the Keledge Tower, he would end up just like the teams Captain Essex had sent into the Reaver Citadel.

Elijah continued to back away, though the tentacle monster seemed incapable – or at least unwilling – to send its tendrils through the grate. For that, Elijah was grateful, but he wasn’t going to trust it too far. So, he made certain to keep an eye on the creature until it retreated into the water. He still didn’t relax, though. Instead, after seeing the shallow wound on his leg, Elijah cast Healing Rain and settled in to regenerate his Ethera.

He wasn’t missing much, but he didn’t want to progress until he was at his best.

A few minutes later, the wound had healed, and he was in as good a condition as he could be. So, pushing himself to his feet, he took stock of his surroundings. The tunnel was made of well-worn stone, and it was absolutely covered in thick, green algae. Otherwise, it looked unremarkable, save for the stream of sludge flowing down its center.

Elijah could see bits and pieces of bone in the bubbling goo, but otherwise, it was mostly unidentifiable. Or rather, he didn’t want to think about what it probably was. Instead, he positioned himself on the edge of the tunnel where he could at least avoid stepping in it, then embraced Shape of the Predator.

He shifted into a scaled panther, which, due to its horizontal posture, made the pipe seem far less confining. After he’d assumed the proper form, he used Guise of the Unseen before setting off down the tunnel.

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For the first hundred feet, it was unremarkable and flat, but soon enough, the passage took on a sharp incline. That was within Elijah’s expectations, but what he hadn’t counted on was the slick algae that made climbing that slope a pain. In the end, he had to deploy his claws and treat it like he was climbing a tree. Fortunately, his talons were sharp enough that they could gouge their way through stone, but that method meant his pace was much slower than it otherwise would’ve been.

In any case, Elijah chalked it up to the price he had to pay and continued on. For a while, nothing changed, and his path was entirely unobstructed, but then he reached a large, circular chamber positioned at the intersection of tunnels. Inside, the ground leveled off, but the interior of the circle was a wide cesspool.

More importantly, there was a collection of gelatinous creatures half submerged in that slurry of waste and water. Elijah hesitated at the tunnel’s exit, remaining mostly hidden by the declining slope. He peeked over the lip and observed the amorphous blobs.

The largest was the size of a beachball, but the smallest Elijah could see was only about a foot across. The rest – he counted ten of them, but he suspected there were many more beneath the surface of the cesspool – were somewhere in between, with the majority skewing closer to the largest than the smallest. On the surface, they looked mostly harmless, but Elijah knew better than to trust that notion. Nothing in the tower was harmless. Even the mostly benign ulthrak on the first level of the Keledge Tower had been capable of killing him, and none of his experiences in either the Sea of Sorrows or the Primordial Jungle had suggested anything but more of the same.

No - those harmless-looking balls of sludge were dangerous, even if Elijah had no idea how that danger might be presented. Still, he had no intention of finding out, so he continued to observe their behavior until he’d established that the things didn’t really do anything. Perhaps they fed on the miasma of water and waste. Or maybe they didn’t eat at all.

After all, there was nothing to suggest that the environments within towers had to be working ecosystems. For all Elijah knew, they were just there to hinder anyone who tried to enter the citadel by sewer. Fortunately, Guise of the Unseen seemed capable of hiding him from their senses, so he hoped that he would be able to bypass them altogether.

With that in mind, he gradually padded forward until he’d crested the lip dividing the chamber from the descending tunnel. There, he paused, ready to flee at a moment’s notice. But the oozes didn’t react to his presence at all. The closest was twenty feet away, so perhaps he was outside their sensory range.

Once he’d fully progressed into the chamber, he looked around, and it only took a few moments for him to work out how everything fit together. If he thought of the circular chamber as a clock, then at the twelve, three, six, and nine o’clock positions, there were tunnels leading down, presumably to empty into the moat. Between each pair was another tunnel that sloped upward. Elijah felt certain that those would lead him into the citadel.

That seemed to establish the route he needed to take, so, while keeping a close eye on the oozes, he carefully crept toward the closest tunnel that led upward. Thankfully, the room wasn’t that large, and with the way everything was positioned, he didn’t have far to go. Still, he had no interest in drawing the attention of the oozes, so he took his time as he covered that short distance.

He was well-used to moving stealthily, but the relatively close proximity of the oozes – as well as their indeterminate nature – certainly ratcheted up the anxiety. So, Elijah was more than a little relieved when he finally reached his destination. Still, he didn’t relax. Instead, he stopped at the mouth of the tunnel and settled in to observe.

It was a good thing, too, because only a few moments later, a bulbous ooze came trundling down the tunnel, leaving a disgusting trail of slimy sludge in its wake. It moved deceptively fast, and its arrival was so surprising that Elijah almost found himself in a head-on collision. However, he sinuously dipped out of the way just in time for the thing to pass.

Still, the thing splattered a bit of sludge on him with its passage, and Elijah had to suppress a pained yelp when it started eating through his scales. He suppressed it, then quickly scurried up the tunnel until he was out of range. Once he’d reached the relative safety, he shifted out of his predator form.

Unsurprisingly, that only made things worse, largely because he was no longer protected by his durable scales. Still, he pushed the pain aside just long enough to unsling his pack and retrieve one of his jugs of water. Then, biting his lip, he washed the ooze away before, at last, using Touch of Nature.

Distressingly, it took three casts of the healing spell before the pain faded, and another couple before the damage was reversed. That, as much as anything, told Elijah that his choice to avoid those oozes was the correct one.

But he knew he wasn’t out of the woods yet. That last ooze had come from somewhere, and he had a feeling that it wasn’t a one-time thing. So, as soon as he’d healed, he only paused long enough to allow himself to regenerate enough Ethera to fuel Shape of the Predator. Once he had enough in his core, he cast the spell, resumed his scaled panther form, then embraced Guise of the Unseen.

Thus hidden, he mounted the upward slope and continued on his way.

It only took a couple of minutes of gradual progress before he saw another ooze sliding toward him. With no other way to avoid it, Elijah leaped, then used the side of the tunnel to vault over the thing. Still, he came close enough that he was sprayed by a few more drops of that caustic ooze.

But this time, Elijah didn’t intend to take the time to heal. Instead, as soon as his feet hit the ground, he raced up the incline. Moving as quickly as he could without discarding his stealth altogether, he quickly reached a switchback. There, he saw a couple more oozes, though these two were moving back and forth in the tiny, square space.

Elijah paused only long enough to discern the pattern, then put that knowledge to good use as he timed his passage to narrowly miss them both. He did pick up a few more drops of caustic mucus, though; that just added to his mounting pain as he continued on his way.

Over and over, he repeated the same steps until, at last, he passed beneath another iron grate. Looking up, it took him a few moments to discern that it was a drain that ran the length of the floor above. He followed it for a few seconds until he finally found the source of all those oozes.

Just above was a huge, humanoid creature with toxic green skin and bulbous features. More distressingly, it was absolutely covered in what looked like pus-filled boils. Elijah watched as one burst, but instead of spewing liquid, it erupted with one of the familiar oozes. The thing quickly slipped through the grate and began its long trek toward the cesspool far below.

For his part, Elijah easily avoided it as it went on its way, but his mind churned with questions. The most prevalent one, though, had to do with the fact that the huge monster – which he’d decided to think of as a troll – was bound by thick, iron chains.

Was this the prisoner he was meant to free?

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