After a little bit of time to get the message sent and Lia settled in at the fort to await a reply, the rest of them were once again on their way out, this time to the drained lakebed that contained Old Crestwood. Even from this far out, Cyrus could feel the restlessness in the place, a disturbance that had little to do with the brand new rift and more, he suspected, to do with old ghosts. It was a subtle chill that sat beneath his skin, almost next to his bones, in the same place that lightning crackled and his natural connection to the fade flowed in time with his heartbeat. The ground was quite damp underfoot, almost slick in places, but his balance tended to correct itself on instinct more than by conscious thought on his part.
It was odd, the things he could notice when he devoted more of his attention to passively observing.
Vesryn, too, he suspected was ill-at-ease, but not likely for the same reason. While Stellulam and Lady Marceline led the way, their resident champion, usually inclined to do much the same, kept himself at the rear of the party, which was rather peculiar. With as much subtlety as he possessed, Cyrus let himself gradually drop back so that he was walking just about evenly, glancing aside at Vesryn.
“Not the most comfortable of reunions, I noticed." He spoke quietly, and left out the word games. He might not take things too seriously as a rule, but he was learning that this wasn't always the best approach with others, and it seemed inappropriate here, somehow. “Is there something lurking here I should be concerned about?" Personal awkwardness was one thing—unfortunate, perhaps, but tolerable. Wariness of a more general kind, however, was something to pay attention to. He should probably know which he was dealing with.
Vesryn observed their murky surroundings with a sort of grim neutrality, though his eyes often went back down to the party in front of them, and the elves they had welcomed as temporary companions. "All three of them know," he admitted, just as quietly. He didn't have to clarify what exactly they knew, as there was really only one secret Vesryn had in his repertoire, and it was a rather big one. "Their clan was the first, and only, group that I revealed myself to. Before encountering the Inquisition." If Astraia had spoken truly, that had been almost seven years ago, and he hadn't seen them since then.
"I'm actually quite proud of Astraia for not letting it slip yet." Vesryn smiled a bit at that, watching the young elf walking with the others, gravitating towards the Lady Inquisitor as she seemed tempted to do. She'd taken a liking to Stellulam, that much was clear. "And I suspect Zeth would have asked me about it, had you not been the one to fall back just now. None of them know that you all know."
Cyrus considered that for a moment, letting his eyes drift over the approaching landscape. Already, he could see the skeletal outlines of rotted buildings, the wood long eaten away by water and the tiny forms of life that grew within it. “I see." He wasn't sure why that alone would be any cause for discomfort, unless they hadn't taken it well—which didn't seem to be the issue here—or perhaps... “Do you think they would disapprove, knowing you had told us also?" It didn't really seem like anyone else's business to be disapproving or not, but then that rarely ever stopped such things.
That put a bit of a strain on Vesryn's expression. "We had differences in opinion, on what Saraya's existence meant for the People, and what, if anything, I was compelled to do about it. It was mostly between Zeth and I. I felt I had no choice but to leave, for their own good as well as mine." There was undoubtedly more to that story, but Vesryn did not seem inclined to share it, especially in the rather strained social situation they found themselves in, trailing just out of earshot of the people they were speaking of.
"Astraia has a gentle heart, and she's reasonable. She would understand. Shae would disapprove, but Shae disapproves of almost everything as far as I can tell. As for Zeth..." He scowled, then glanced at Cyrus. "If you aren't already, keep a close eye on him. He's not to be trusted."
“As you say, then." Cyrus saw no reason to pry further than that. While he might have preferred to understand more of the reasoning behind something that might well have an impact on the group's safety, he knew enough.
He hissed softly under his breath when they passed into the lakebed proper. Everything present was still waterlogged, of course; most of the weaker structural elements like doors and roofs were entirely absent from the house-frames, allowing the travelers a barely-obstructed view of the bog bodies strewn within. He almost wished he weren't paying much attention to his surroundings when he passed close enough to one to notice that the fingernails were gone. Trapped inside a building, perhaps, and unable to free herself and rise to the surface.
He didn't need to imagine what their suffering had been like. The proximity of the spirits here filled in the details every time he closed his eyes, whispering to him of their fates, letting images of rushing water and the feeling of sick, weakened bodies unable to keep their heads above it sink deep into his mind, like memories. One of his hands clenched as he felt the tiny fingers of someone he loved slip from it, lost to the water. His breath stuttered when his lungs filled with water, the world slowly darkening around him until the inevitability of his own death settled in. By then he was hardly conscious anyway, and it was almost... peaceful.
With a hard wrench, Cyrus snapped himself out of it, his body jerking involuntarily when he forced his eyes open. Gritting his teeth, he shook his head, trying to clear out the cobwebs and the recollections that were not his own. It was the rift in addition to the spirits, surely—the Fade was so close here he was practically halfway there even awake. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground after that, letting the rest of them lead him through the village.
"Hold a moment," Marceline called from the head of the group. She had paused and looked toward one of the dilapidated houses, though this one stood at the top of a set of carved stone stairs. Despite the wear and rot it had experienced beneath the water, Cyrus could still make out a plaque that read Mayor Dedrick. She then turned back toward the party, at least for a moment. "Shall we investigate then?" she asked, though apparently it was more of a indication of her intentions than a suggestion, as the woman was already climbing the stairs toward the house.
Cyrus, glad of a distraction, followed her up with the rest. “Interesting that all of the furniture somehow made it out alive." His comment was dry, but there were few other plausible explanations for why the home was so empty. It wasn't like it was any less impressive than the mayor's current residence otherwise, damp notwithstanding.
Stellulam was on the other side of the room, close to the back, looking dubiously at what seemed to be a chest or strongbox of some kind. “It was left here anyway, right?" she murmured to herself, apparently debating the ethics of opening it. “Might be something important about what happened here..."
With a sigh, she crouched in front of the object, reaching up to her hair and extracting what looked to actually be a specialized lockpick of some kind. Its companion emerged from her sleeve, and with a few moments' work, a muted click issued into the room, and she opened it carefully, sorting through a few miscellaneous and irrelevant items inside before she found something. A parchment envelope, damp but mostly intact, it seemed. Carefully, she opened it, extracting the paper inside and unfolding it delicately.
“Oh dear," she murmured softly, then read aloud. “The work you ordered is done. Do what you want. I'll be in the hills trying to forget it. Robert." She grimaced, rising back into a stand and carefully replacing the letter in the envelope.
"Shocking indeed," Zethlasan said, the words laced with sarcasm. "The shem mayor offing his own people once they prove inconvenient. Seth'lin, cowardice." He shook his head. Shae just scowled from the doorway. She looked eager to be done with this place.
"He... he had this town flooded?" Astraia asked, looking quite horrified. "That man we just spoke with in the village? How could he do that?"
"Fear makes all of us weaker, Skygirl," Vesryn said gently. "If we allow it to take hold. The Blight creates fear like nothing else." He put his hand on her shoulder, though she still left her mouth ajar, trying to comprehend.
Zeth slapped an open palm lightly into the sturdy wood of his staff. "Ves has the right of that, no doubt. We should get moving. I saw the door into the caves, it's not far."
"Agreed, although I do intend to have a word with the mayor when we return," Marceline stated, her lips turned downward into a deep frown.
Cyrus nodded slightly, assuming the lead this time. There weren't many places they hadn't already passed, and so he took the group up and over the steep incline behind the mayor's old house. The cave entrance was closed over by wooden planks with a door in them, sturdy enough to have survived even this long. The lock still seemed to be operational, but a concentrated fire spell fixed that easily enough, slicing right through the rusty iron. He shouldered it open and entered the cave system.
The need for light was immediately obvious, so he provided it, several small motes of magic rising from his fingertips to float above their heads. He changed the color so that the illumination was a soft blue-white, enough to see by nut not so much that it would blind them to anything incoming. “I can feel it. Below us." What he did not tell them was that there were even more death-memories here, more powerful the closer they got to the rift. He elected to drop back near the middle of the group. There was a chance he might not catch something headed towards them, half-distracted as he was, so he let someone else take point for now.
A soft touch at his arm alerted him to the fact that Stellulam was beside him. “Are you all right?" she asked, moving her hand up to his shoulder and squeezing softly. “Is it the spirits?" She knew considerably more about his peculiarities than most did, so it probably wasn't a terribly-difficult guess.
He nodded, pulling in a deep breath more to remind himself that he indeed could than anything. “I'll be better when the rift is closed." He offered her half a smile, then turned his eyes forward.
The cave system proved to be more expansive than he'd initially suspected, punctuated everywhere with stalactites and stalagmites, from ones as thin as his little finger to ones thicker around than he was. The stone, as far as he could tell under the magelight, was striated in varying shades of beige and grey. Old torch-frames lined the walls, too old and wet to be worth using when magic would serve just as well. The cave itself was dark as a tomb—fitting, since it had become one with the flood. Their narrow pathway opened up into a much larger chamber, where a wooden walkway seemed to be the only path further down.
“Mind that; I'm not sure how sound it'll be after about a decade underwater." The drop did not look like a survivable one, either.
"Well, if it can hold me I suspect it can hold the rest of us." Vesryn tested the wood under his boot, and it held. "Might want to keep our spacing, all the same."
Down they went, in a quiet song of breaths, creaking wood, and shifting armor and leathers. The air had a chill down here, this place that had not seen any light for so long. As they went further down, the only light that reached them was a pale green one, an unnatural but familiar hue. Once they were back on solid ground of cave rock they drew their weapons, readying themselves for a fight against the demons that would undoubtedly be lingering near the rift.
By the looks of it, they were encroaching on some old dwarven ruins. Bits of their signature underground architecture began to poke through the rock. It had a very geometric, squared style to it, carved from the stone that they paid so much respect to. No doubt these ruins, and perhaps some mines they may have led to, were a subject of great interest to the villagers of Crestwood, before the Blight removed all thought of anything but survival from their minds.
The rift was just inside the dwarven ruins, in a large and open chamber that appeared to be some kind of courtyard leading into the larger town or whatever it was the dwarves had built here. It sat in a shallow pool of about a foot of water in the center of the space, reaching from the floor to the ceiling. One of the larger rifts they'd faced. Worse, a heavy thumping sound reached their ears from the back of the chamber, just as a pride demon emerged from the shadows. Whips of magical electricity uncoiled and brightened from either hand, and it gurgled a low laugh upon seeing them. Wraiths surrounded it, and an array of other demons set their gazes upon those that sought to close the Veil's tear.
"Use the space as best you can," Vesryn advised. "Take the weaker ones first, then we'll deal with the pride demon."
In the interest of being able to do that before the Pride demon started taking free hits at them, Cyrus cloaked himself in the fade and set his end point, launching himself over the intervening space with the ease of long practice. The blade formed in his hand as he went, and his momentum let him cleave cleanly through the molten rage demon he hit first. No need to worry about warping the metal of a sword when it wasn't made of metal at all. Bringing it around, he thrust, pushing it through a wraith and dispersing the creature.
The second sword was always harder to form—holding two at once was not something he'd mastered yet. But he summoned it anyway, fending off an icy projectile hurled from another part of the room by a floating, shrieking demon of despair.
Vesryn moved quickly to shore up Cyrus's right flank, engaging a pair of shades that glided across the wet surface of the dwarven carved stone. He made broad strokes of his axe, first just to get them back and respecting him, and then to cut them down. He cleaved through a wraith in one swing as well, but the rift spewed out more in its place, not easily being beaten back.
Zethlasan cast a strong spell of winter's grasp on the pride demon, though he couldn't quite encase the entire creature in ice. It did cover it from head to toe in a sheen of white, almost like a layering of frost, and the demon growled its disapproval. The damage was uncertain, but it had at least been slowed somewhat in its movements and attacks. Shae loosed arrow after arrow to the right of the group, hitting any target that Vesryn was not currently engaging, with steady accuracy, always striking near the center mass of the demons. Her shots were not intended to achieve the most possible damage, but to hit with perfect regularity. No arrow went to waste.
Astraia meanwhile seemed more determined to assist against the demons than she had with the bandits, and stepped forward beside her brother. She launched orb after orb of electrical energy from her staff, directing them to the left side of the courtyard, where she was able to keep several wraiths mostly pinned down, picking off one or two.
Estella and Lady Marceline took the opposite side, working their way towards the cluster of demons on the left. They'd reached the first wave of them when the drifting despair demon moved closer, intent on finding an easier target than Cyrus had proved to be. Gathering a large sphere of magic in front of itself, billowing with rapidly-sinking cold fog, it shot a beam of the stuff straight for Stellulam's blind side.
To her credit, she must have felt it coming to some extent, and managed to get mostly out of the way. But the beam struck her foot, quickly fusing it to the stone beneath her with a thick layer of ice, and the spell was continuous. She fought to free herself, fire sparking to life in one hand, but it only disrupted the beam with a hissing pop for a moment when she released it. Not nearly long enough to break out of the coating of ice slowly making its way up her leg.
Marceline halted her progress and stepped back to stay with Estella. A wraith was floating toward them, apparently trying to capitalize on her sudden lack of movement. However, the sharp end of a rapier stopped in midair, Marceline having dipped beside and around her to pierce it. She let the blade sink all the way to the hilt before she struck with her offhand, driving the shorter main-gauche into the approximation of its head. With the immediate threat dealt with, Marceline turned toward Estella and began to carefully chip at the ice quickly encasing her leg with her rapier.
Astraia was the first to notice their predicament, and apparently decided that she needed to do something about it. Especially once several more wraiths clustered around the despair demon, and a terror demon lurked in the distance behind them. Gritting her teeth, she wreathed her staff in arcs of electricity, the magic crackling loudly even before she set it off. She lifted her staff up and slammed the end of it down in front of her, and a blast of lightning erupted from underneath the despair demon. The spell was powerful enough to completely interrupt the despair demon, even going so far as to send it back down to the ground on its backside.
The lightning then bounced around between a few of the wraiths, inflicting significant damage on those it touched, before linked closer to the rest of the fight, shocking off a shade heading for Cyrus. Astraia's eyes went wide, and she seemed to be able to predict what her spell would do next. It jumped straight onto Estella first, shocking her before it jumped to Lady Marceline. It fizzled out after that.
A moment later, the terror demon screamed from the back of the room, disappearing into a portal it created. A light then appeared underneath Estella and Marceline, and the demon leaped up out of it, throwing both of them onto their backs, Stellulam in the midst of the shards of ice from her leg that had shattered under the force. "No!" Astraia despaired, horrified. She took several steps forward, right into the range of the demon, and launched a powerful spirit bolt from her staff into its chest, at a range where she couldn't miss. It interrupted any of the terror's screaming magic it might've intended to follow with, but the demon slashed down at the little elven mage instead.
She got her staff in the way, but the force of the swing knocked her back with a quiet ungh, throwing her to the ground. Almost immediately after she'd fallen Shaethra was sprinting past her at the demon. A heavy blow to the terror's leg took it down in height, and the Dalish elf began swinging smack after smack with her mace to the demon's head, until there was little head left to speak of. Rather than check on either of the Inquisition personnel, she returned straight to Astraia once she was done.
“Stellulam." He couldn't see through all the chaos exactly what had happened after she fell, which made it all the more necessary to get over there himself. He also felt a flare of concern for Marceline, but she'd taken the weaker hit, considering that the bolt that hit her had already bounced off his sister.
He was nearly committed to his fade-step when one of the pride demon's lightning whips got in the way, hitting the stone right under his feet. Cyrus was forced to pull up hard on the spell, canceling it before it could complete. It sent shockwaves up his legs, but he ignored them in favor of focusing on the demon. It chuckled, low and gravelly, when Cyrus circled it, turning to match him. Completely unable to conceptualize its own defeat. To believe that there was anything here that could lay it low. Perhaps he could have sympathized. Once.
Right now all he cared about was getting through it, and keeping a worried eye on the aftermath of Astraia's little mishap.
The hiss that came from Marceline sounded rather annoyed, as if anyone would be thrilled with the series of events that befell both Estella and her. She did not linger on the ground for a moment, swinging her body around to stand upright on her feet. She had dropped her weapons either when the lightning chained into Estella and her, or when the terror demon knocked them off their feet, it was unclear which. As she went to retrieve them however, she was cut off by a shade that had managed to avoid the brunt of the lightning. It caused Marceline to retreat backward and away from her weapons. Still, she proved to be a resourceful woman, as her hand went to the thick black cloak that hugged her shoulders, ripping it away from the tearaway clasp at her neck. She rolled it a few times in her offhand and waited for the shade to attack.
She needn't wait long, as the shade lunged at her with its claws. She sidestepped it, using the cloak to catch one of its claws. She then pulled, dragging the shade behind her and propelling her forward toward her weapons. She ran over to her rapier and spun, impaling the shade that had been chasing close behind. She impaled it through the body and threw up her cloaked hand to fend off its teeth. She pulled the blade free and thrust twice more before the thing disappeared into a gray cloud.
With that, Marceline looked toward Estella, and pointed her rapier at the despair demon. "Let's go," she stated plainly.
Stellulam looked a bit worse for the wear, but she'd at least stopped shaking as the aftershocks worked their way through her body. She'd kept her saber in the fall, and tightened her grip on it, nodding at Marceline. “I'm going to set your weapon on fire," she warned. A moment later, both the abassador's rapier and her own blade were alight, the yellow and orange flames bright in the dark.
The despair demon, stunned by Astraia's initial lightning strike, was only just beginning to recover when they reached it. Estella, there slightly ahead of Marceline, slashed across its chest area, the fire clearly hurting it a great deal. But it also may well have been enough to snap it out of its stupor, because it immediately tried to leap away.
Marceline had the fortune to have had positioned herself so that the demon instead leapt toward her. She flung her cloak forward, the cloth wrapping around the things face before she stepped in behind it. Its defenses completely gone, she drove her rapier into its chest as well, the flame hissing as it met flesh, before she withdrew and struck twice more. When it did finally manage to pull free of her cloak, it was greeted with the sight of Marceline's rapier lancing toward its face.
As the despair demon fell, the larger pride demon swung forward with one of its whips. When Cyrus raised his sword to block, it wrapped around the fade blade, popping loudly in his ears at such close proximity. Lifting his eyes to the demon, he let himself smirk, seeking to agitate it. “Well?"
Predictably enough, it went for the overwhelming show of strength, hauling backwards with all its might in an attempt to yank him off his feet and towards it. An attempt that surely would have succeeded, if Cyrus were interested in a mere contest of physical prowess. Instead, he simply let the sword in his hand disappear, leaving the demon to stagger heavily backward in compensation for the unnecessary force. A tiny orb of light appeared at his index finger, shooting towards the off-balance demon in an unerring line. The moment the two came in contact, it exploded with a heavy boom, cloaking the demon in flames and toppling it the rest of the way over. It hit the water with a loud sizzle, throwing up steam all around itself and thrashing to regain its feet.
He was in no mood for gloating; a quick step put him close enough to reach its throat, and he did, shaping the fade into a spear this time, stabbing downwards and punching the blade end through the demon's neck. It stilled.
Releasing a heavy breath, Cyrus left the spear where it was and stepped away. “Is everyone all right?" There was still the matter of the rift to deal with, but it appeared that all of the other demons were down. Vesryn was just removing his bardiche from the last, it seemed.
"Yes, although the same cannot be said for my cloak," Lady Marceline answered, holding it up to show that it had been singed and torn into ribbons. She seemed rather annoyed by this.
“I think so," Stellulam replied, glancing around to make sure that everyone was, indeed, still more or less on their feet. Her leathers sported a rather large scorch mark where the lightning had struck her, but if the effects lingered, she did not show as much. Sheathing her sword, she stepped forward a few paces so she was nearly directly under the rift, raising her right arm towards the greenish tear in space.
The beam of light from the mark looked more solid than they had in the past, and it seemed to cause her no pain to close it, not even when the dull bang signaled the collapse and sealing of the rift.
Astraia was on her feet again, by way of the older elven woman, who was busily checking her and ignoring the others. "I'm fine, Shae." She seemed to ignore Astraia as well. "Shae. I'm fine." Astraia looked to be incredibly embarrassed, her eyes locked on the ground and her hands clenched into balls. Finally Shae relented, returning her mace to her belt.
Zeth surveyed their handiwork. "That was all very impressive. Though I think I've had about enough of this particular cave."
“I suspect that makes all of us."
It was odd, the things he could notice when he devoted more of his attention to passively observing.
Vesryn, too, he suspected was ill-at-ease, but not likely for the same reason. While Stellulam and Lady Marceline led the way, their resident champion, usually inclined to do much the same, kept himself at the rear of the party, which was rather peculiar. With as much subtlety as he possessed, Cyrus let himself gradually drop back so that he was walking just about evenly, glancing aside at Vesryn.
“Not the most comfortable of reunions, I noticed." He spoke quietly, and left out the word games. He might not take things too seriously as a rule, but he was learning that this wasn't always the best approach with others, and it seemed inappropriate here, somehow. “Is there something lurking here I should be concerned about?" Personal awkwardness was one thing—unfortunate, perhaps, but tolerable. Wariness of a more general kind, however, was something to pay attention to. He should probably know which he was dealing with.
Vesryn observed their murky surroundings with a sort of grim neutrality, though his eyes often went back down to the party in front of them, and the elves they had welcomed as temporary companions. "All three of them know," he admitted, just as quietly. He didn't have to clarify what exactly they knew, as there was really only one secret Vesryn had in his repertoire, and it was a rather big one. "Their clan was the first, and only, group that I revealed myself to. Before encountering the Inquisition." If Astraia had spoken truly, that had been almost seven years ago, and he hadn't seen them since then.
"I'm actually quite proud of Astraia for not letting it slip yet." Vesryn smiled a bit at that, watching the young elf walking with the others, gravitating towards the Lady Inquisitor as she seemed tempted to do. She'd taken a liking to Stellulam, that much was clear. "And I suspect Zeth would have asked me about it, had you not been the one to fall back just now. None of them know that you all know."
Cyrus considered that for a moment, letting his eyes drift over the approaching landscape. Already, he could see the skeletal outlines of rotted buildings, the wood long eaten away by water and the tiny forms of life that grew within it. “I see." He wasn't sure why that alone would be any cause for discomfort, unless they hadn't taken it well—which didn't seem to be the issue here—or perhaps... “Do you think they would disapprove, knowing you had told us also?" It didn't really seem like anyone else's business to be disapproving or not, but then that rarely ever stopped such things.
That put a bit of a strain on Vesryn's expression. "We had differences in opinion, on what Saraya's existence meant for the People, and what, if anything, I was compelled to do about it. It was mostly between Zeth and I. I felt I had no choice but to leave, for their own good as well as mine." There was undoubtedly more to that story, but Vesryn did not seem inclined to share it, especially in the rather strained social situation they found themselves in, trailing just out of earshot of the people they were speaking of.
"Astraia has a gentle heart, and she's reasonable. She would understand. Shae would disapprove, but Shae disapproves of almost everything as far as I can tell. As for Zeth..." He scowled, then glanced at Cyrus. "If you aren't already, keep a close eye on him. He's not to be trusted."
“As you say, then." Cyrus saw no reason to pry further than that. While he might have preferred to understand more of the reasoning behind something that might well have an impact on the group's safety, he knew enough.
He hissed softly under his breath when they passed into the lakebed proper. Everything present was still waterlogged, of course; most of the weaker structural elements like doors and roofs were entirely absent from the house-frames, allowing the travelers a barely-obstructed view of the bog bodies strewn within. He almost wished he weren't paying much attention to his surroundings when he passed close enough to one to notice that the fingernails were gone. Trapped inside a building, perhaps, and unable to free herself and rise to the surface.
He didn't need to imagine what their suffering had been like. The proximity of the spirits here filled in the details every time he closed his eyes, whispering to him of their fates, letting images of rushing water and the feeling of sick, weakened bodies unable to keep their heads above it sink deep into his mind, like memories. One of his hands clenched as he felt the tiny fingers of someone he loved slip from it, lost to the water. His breath stuttered when his lungs filled with water, the world slowly darkening around him until the inevitability of his own death settled in. By then he was hardly conscious anyway, and it was almost... peaceful.
With a hard wrench, Cyrus snapped himself out of it, his body jerking involuntarily when he forced his eyes open. Gritting his teeth, he shook his head, trying to clear out the cobwebs and the recollections that were not his own. It was the rift in addition to the spirits, surely—the Fade was so close here he was practically halfway there even awake. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground after that, letting the rest of them lead him through the village.
"Hold a moment," Marceline called from the head of the group. She had paused and looked toward one of the dilapidated houses, though this one stood at the top of a set of carved stone stairs. Despite the wear and rot it had experienced beneath the water, Cyrus could still make out a plaque that read Mayor Dedrick. She then turned back toward the party, at least for a moment. "Shall we investigate then?" she asked, though apparently it was more of a indication of her intentions than a suggestion, as the woman was already climbing the stairs toward the house.
Cyrus, glad of a distraction, followed her up with the rest. “Interesting that all of the furniture somehow made it out alive." His comment was dry, but there were few other plausible explanations for why the home was so empty. It wasn't like it was any less impressive than the mayor's current residence otherwise, damp notwithstanding.
Stellulam was on the other side of the room, close to the back, looking dubiously at what seemed to be a chest or strongbox of some kind. “It was left here anyway, right?" she murmured to herself, apparently debating the ethics of opening it. “Might be something important about what happened here..."
With a sigh, she crouched in front of the object, reaching up to her hair and extracting what looked to actually be a specialized lockpick of some kind. Its companion emerged from her sleeve, and with a few moments' work, a muted click issued into the room, and she opened it carefully, sorting through a few miscellaneous and irrelevant items inside before she found something. A parchment envelope, damp but mostly intact, it seemed. Carefully, she opened it, extracting the paper inside and unfolding it delicately.
“Oh dear," she murmured softly, then read aloud. “The work you ordered is done. Do what you want. I'll be in the hills trying to forget it. Robert." She grimaced, rising back into a stand and carefully replacing the letter in the envelope.
"Shocking indeed," Zethlasan said, the words laced with sarcasm. "The shem mayor offing his own people once they prove inconvenient. Seth'lin, cowardice." He shook his head. Shae just scowled from the doorway. She looked eager to be done with this place.
"He... he had this town flooded?" Astraia asked, looking quite horrified. "That man we just spoke with in the village? How could he do that?"
"Fear makes all of us weaker, Skygirl," Vesryn said gently. "If we allow it to take hold. The Blight creates fear like nothing else." He put his hand on her shoulder, though she still left her mouth ajar, trying to comprehend.
Zeth slapped an open palm lightly into the sturdy wood of his staff. "Ves has the right of that, no doubt. We should get moving. I saw the door into the caves, it's not far."
"Agreed, although I do intend to have a word with the mayor when we return," Marceline stated, her lips turned downward into a deep frown.
Cyrus nodded slightly, assuming the lead this time. There weren't many places they hadn't already passed, and so he took the group up and over the steep incline behind the mayor's old house. The cave entrance was closed over by wooden planks with a door in them, sturdy enough to have survived even this long. The lock still seemed to be operational, but a concentrated fire spell fixed that easily enough, slicing right through the rusty iron. He shouldered it open and entered the cave system.
The need for light was immediately obvious, so he provided it, several small motes of magic rising from his fingertips to float above their heads. He changed the color so that the illumination was a soft blue-white, enough to see by nut not so much that it would blind them to anything incoming. “I can feel it. Below us." What he did not tell them was that there were even more death-memories here, more powerful the closer they got to the rift. He elected to drop back near the middle of the group. There was a chance he might not catch something headed towards them, half-distracted as he was, so he let someone else take point for now.
A soft touch at his arm alerted him to the fact that Stellulam was beside him. “Are you all right?" she asked, moving her hand up to his shoulder and squeezing softly. “Is it the spirits?" She knew considerably more about his peculiarities than most did, so it probably wasn't a terribly-difficult guess.
He nodded, pulling in a deep breath more to remind himself that he indeed could than anything. “I'll be better when the rift is closed." He offered her half a smile, then turned his eyes forward.
The cave system proved to be more expansive than he'd initially suspected, punctuated everywhere with stalactites and stalagmites, from ones as thin as his little finger to ones thicker around than he was. The stone, as far as he could tell under the magelight, was striated in varying shades of beige and grey. Old torch-frames lined the walls, too old and wet to be worth using when magic would serve just as well. The cave itself was dark as a tomb—fitting, since it had become one with the flood. Their narrow pathway opened up into a much larger chamber, where a wooden walkway seemed to be the only path further down.
“Mind that; I'm not sure how sound it'll be after about a decade underwater." The drop did not look like a survivable one, either.
"Well, if it can hold me I suspect it can hold the rest of us." Vesryn tested the wood under his boot, and it held. "Might want to keep our spacing, all the same."
Down they went, in a quiet song of breaths, creaking wood, and shifting armor and leathers. The air had a chill down here, this place that had not seen any light for so long. As they went further down, the only light that reached them was a pale green one, an unnatural but familiar hue. Once they were back on solid ground of cave rock they drew their weapons, readying themselves for a fight against the demons that would undoubtedly be lingering near the rift.
By the looks of it, they were encroaching on some old dwarven ruins. Bits of their signature underground architecture began to poke through the rock. It had a very geometric, squared style to it, carved from the stone that they paid so much respect to. No doubt these ruins, and perhaps some mines they may have led to, were a subject of great interest to the villagers of Crestwood, before the Blight removed all thought of anything but survival from their minds.
The rift was just inside the dwarven ruins, in a large and open chamber that appeared to be some kind of courtyard leading into the larger town or whatever it was the dwarves had built here. It sat in a shallow pool of about a foot of water in the center of the space, reaching from the floor to the ceiling. One of the larger rifts they'd faced. Worse, a heavy thumping sound reached their ears from the back of the chamber, just as a pride demon emerged from the shadows. Whips of magical electricity uncoiled and brightened from either hand, and it gurgled a low laugh upon seeing them. Wraiths surrounded it, and an array of other demons set their gazes upon those that sought to close the Veil's tear.
"Use the space as best you can," Vesryn advised. "Take the weaker ones first, then we'll deal with the pride demon."
In the interest of being able to do that before the Pride demon started taking free hits at them, Cyrus cloaked himself in the fade and set his end point, launching himself over the intervening space with the ease of long practice. The blade formed in his hand as he went, and his momentum let him cleave cleanly through the molten rage demon he hit first. No need to worry about warping the metal of a sword when it wasn't made of metal at all. Bringing it around, he thrust, pushing it through a wraith and dispersing the creature.
The second sword was always harder to form—holding two at once was not something he'd mastered yet. But he summoned it anyway, fending off an icy projectile hurled from another part of the room by a floating, shrieking demon of despair.
Vesryn moved quickly to shore up Cyrus's right flank, engaging a pair of shades that glided across the wet surface of the dwarven carved stone. He made broad strokes of his axe, first just to get them back and respecting him, and then to cut them down. He cleaved through a wraith in one swing as well, but the rift spewed out more in its place, not easily being beaten back.
Zethlasan cast a strong spell of winter's grasp on the pride demon, though he couldn't quite encase the entire creature in ice. It did cover it from head to toe in a sheen of white, almost like a layering of frost, and the demon growled its disapproval. The damage was uncertain, but it had at least been slowed somewhat in its movements and attacks. Shae loosed arrow after arrow to the right of the group, hitting any target that Vesryn was not currently engaging, with steady accuracy, always striking near the center mass of the demons. Her shots were not intended to achieve the most possible damage, but to hit with perfect regularity. No arrow went to waste.
Astraia meanwhile seemed more determined to assist against the demons than she had with the bandits, and stepped forward beside her brother. She launched orb after orb of electrical energy from her staff, directing them to the left side of the courtyard, where she was able to keep several wraiths mostly pinned down, picking off one or two.
Estella and Lady Marceline took the opposite side, working their way towards the cluster of demons on the left. They'd reached the first wave of them when the drifting despair demon moved closer, intent on finding an easier target than Cyrus had proved to be. Gathering a large sphere of magic in front of itself, billowing with rapidly-sinking cold fog, it shot a beam of the stuff straight for Stellulam's blind side.
To her credit, she must have felt it coming to some extent, and managed to get mostly out of the way. But the beam struck her foot, quickly fusing it to the stone beneath her with a thick layer of ice, and the spell was continuous. She fought to free herself, fire sparking to life in one hand, but it only disrupted the beam with a hissing pop for a moment when she released it. Not nearly long enough to break out of the coating of ice slowly making its way up her leg.
Marceline halted her progress and stepped back to stay with Estella. A wraith was floating toward them, apparently trying to capitalize on her sudden lack of movement. However, the sharp end of a rapier stopped in midair, Marceline having dipped beside and around her to pierce it. She let the blade sink all the way to the hilt before she struck with her offhand, driving the shorter main-gauche into the approximation of its head. With the immediate threat dealt with, Marceline turned toward Estella and began to carefully chip at the ice quickly encasing her leg with her rapier.
Astraia was the first to notice their predicament, and apparently decided that she needed to do something about it. Especially once several more wraiths clustered around the despair demon, and a terror demon lurked in the distance behind them. Gritting her teeth, she wreathed her staff in arcs of electricity, the magic crackling loudly even before she set it off. She lifted her staff up and slammed the end of it down in front of her, and a blast of lightning erupted from underneath the despair demon. The spell was powerful enough to completely interrupt the despair demon, even going so far as to send it back down to the ground on its backside.
The lightning then bounced around between a few of the wraiths, inflicting significant damage on those it touched, before linked closer to the rest of the fight, shocking off a shade heading for Cyrus. Astraia's eyes went wide, and she seemed to be able to predict what her spell would do next. It jumped straight onto Estella first, shocking her before it jumped to Lady Marceline. It fizzled out after that.
A moment later, the terror demon screamed from the back of the room, disappearing into a portal it created. A light then appeared underneath Estella and Marceline, and the demon leaped up out of it, throwing both of them onto their backs, Stellulam in the midst of the shards of ice from her leg that had shattered under the force. "No!" Astraia despaired, horrified. She took several steps forward, right into the range of the demon, and launched a powerful spirit bolt from her staff into its chest, at a range where she couldn't miss. It interrupted any of the terror's screaming magic it might've intended to follow with, but the demon slashed down at the little elven mage instead.
She got her staff in the way, but the force of the swing knocked her back with a quiet ungh, throwing her to the ground. Almost immediately after she'd fallen Shaethra was sprinting past her at the demon. A heavy blow to the terror's leg took it down in height, and the Dalish elf began swinging smack after smack with her mace to the demon's head, until there was little head left to speak of. Rather than check on either of the Inquisition personnel, she returned straight to Astraia once she was done.
“Stellulam." He couldn't see through all the chaos exactly what had happened after she fell, which made it all the more necessary to get over there himself. He also felt a flare of concern for Marceline, but she'd taken the weaker hit, considering that the bolt that hit her had already bounced off his sister.
He was nearly committed to his fade-step when one of the pride demon's lightning whips got in the way, hitting the stone right under his feet. Cyrus was forced to pull up hard on the spell, canceling it before it could complete. It sent shockwaves up his legs, but he ignored them in favor of focusing on the demon. It chuckled, low and gravelly, when Cyrus circled it, turning to match him. Completely unable to conceptualize its own defeat. To believe that there was anything here that could lay it low. Perhaps he could have sympathized. Once.
Right now all he cared about was getting through it, and keeping a worried eye on the aftermath of Astraia's little mishap.
The hiss that came from Marceline sounded rather annoyed, as if anyone would be thrilled with the series of events that befell both Estella and her. She did not linger on the ground for a moment, swinging her body around to stand upright on her feet. She had dropped her weapons either when the lightning chained into Estella and her, or when the terror demon knocked them off their feet, it was unclear which. As she went to retrieve them however, she was cut off by a shade that had managed to avoid the brunt of the lightning. It caused Marceline to retreat backward and away from her weapons. Still, she proved to be a resourceful woman, as her hand went to the thick black cloak that hugged her shoulders, ripping it away from the tearaway clasp at her neck. She rolled it a few times in her offhand and waited for the shade to attack.
She needn't wait long, as the shade lunged at her with its claws. She sidestepped it, using the cloak to catch one of its claws. She then pulled, dragging the shade behind her and propelling her forward toward her weapons. She ran over to her rapier and spun, impaling the shade that had been chasing close behind. She impaled it through the body and threw up her cloaked hand to fend off its teeth. She pulled the blade free and thrust twice more before the thing disappeared into a gray cloud.
With that, Marceline looked toward Estella, and pointed her rapier at the despair demon. "Let's go," she stated plainly.
Stellulam looked a bit worse for the wear, but she'd at least stopped shaking as the aftershocks worked their way through her body. She'd kept her saber in the fall, and tightened her grip on it, nodding at Marceline. “I'm going to set your weapon on fire," she warned. A moment later, both the abassador's rapier and her own blade were alight, the yellow and orange flames bright in the dark.
The despair demon, stunned by Astraia's initial lightning strike, was only just beginning to recover when they reached it. Estella, there slightly ahead of Marceline, slashed across its chest area, the fire clearly hurting it a great deal. But it also may well have been enough to snap it out of its stupor, because it immediately tried to leap away.
Marceline had the fortune to have had positioned herself so that the demon instead leapt toward her. She flung her cloak forward, the cloth wrapping around the things face before she stepped in behind it. Its defenses completely gone, she drove her rapier into its chest as well, the flame hissing as it met flesh, before she withdrew and struck twice more. When it did finally manage to pull free of her cloak, it was greeted with the sight of Marceline's rapier lancing toward its face.
As the despair demon fell, the larger pride demon swung forward with one of its whips. When Cyrus raised his sword to block, it wrapped around the fade blade, popping loudly in his ears at such close proximity. Lifting his eyes to the demon, he let himself smirk, seeking to agitate it. “Well?"
Predictably enough, it went for the overwhelming show of strength, hauling backwards with all its might in an attempt to yank him off his feet and towards it. An attempt that surely would have succeeded, if Cyrus were interested in a mere contest of physical prowess. Instead, he simply let the sword in his hand disappear, leaving the demon to stagger heavily backward in compensation for the unnecessary force. A tiny orb of light appeared at his index finger, shooting towards the off-balance demon in an unerring line. The moment the two came in contact, it exploded with a heavy boom, cloaking the demon in flames and toppling it the rest of the way over. It hit the water with a loud sizzle, throwing up steam all around itself and thrashing to regain its feet.
He was in no mood for gloating; a quick step put him close enough to reach its throat, and he did, shaping the fade into a spear this time, stabbing downwards and punching the blade end through the demon's neck. It stilled.
Releasing a heavy breath, Cyrus left the spear where it was and stepped away. “Is everyone all right?" There was still the matter of the rift to deal with, but it appeared that all of the other demons were down. Vesryn was just removing his bardiche from the last, it seemed.
"Yes, although the same cannot be said for my cloak," Lady Marceline answered, holding it up to show that it had been singed and torn into ribbons. She seemed rather annoyed by this.
“I think so," Stellulam replied, glancing around to make sure that everyone was, indeed, still more or less on their feet. Her leathers sported a rather large scorch mark where the lightning had struck her, but if the effects lingered, she did not show as much. Sheathing her sword, she stepped forward a few paces so she was nearly directly under the rift, raising her right arm towards the greenish tear in space.
The beam of light from the mark looked more solid than they had in the past, and it seemed to cause her no pain to close it, not even when the dull bang signaled the collapse and sealing of the rift.
Astraia was on her feet again, by way of the older elven woman, who was busily checking her and ignoring the others. "I'm fine, Shae." She seemed to ignore Astraia as well. "Shae. I'm fine." Astraia looked to be incredibly embarrassed, her eyes locked on the ground and her hands clenched into balls. Finally Shae relented, returning her mace to her belt.
Zeth surveyed their handiwork. "That was all very impressive. Though I think I've had about enough of this particular cave."
“I suspect that makes all of us."