Chapter 10 – Part 6

Orphan came into the chamber first. It would have made more sense for one of the darkvision-equipped gnolls or orcs to take point position, but Delegado had asked him to enter, so he did.

The warforged felt nervous because the (relatively) loud bustle of the armed and armored group made too much background noise for him to be as aware of his surroundings as he would have preferred. He threw in a sunrod before he quickly somersaulted in.

The chamber was huge.

The warforged spun in place quickly, and took in the place. He was on a ledge that ran along three sides of what was a huge pentagon. Five stone pillars, built elsewhere and set in place it seemed, not natural rock, held up the vaulted ceiling. The place was maybe 40 feet across and twenty or so feet high. There were stone bumps on the floor, arranged around a central dais with an altar. He was near one of the points, and the wall opposite him had a mural made from small tiles. Most of the tiles were long gone, but it seemed that there had once been a depiction of a huge, bloated thing with large wings, horns, and a rod of some kind.

A worship place, Orphan realized. In a moment his headband filled in the details. A death cult. They worshiped undead here, but this is not the Blood of Vol. A fiend that styled itself Lord of Undead, apart from other fiends. His headband’s information ended there.

Whatever this place was, it was first used millennia ago.

But there was maintenance work. The warforged was a warforged, not a dwarf or one of the snake-headed stone masons of Droaam, but he could tell that this place had been maintained and used sometime more than a decade ago but less than a century.

Or maybe that was off, time acted oddly in the Wastes.

But someone had swept. Not a speck of dust lay on the floor. Someone had lovingly shined the altar.

Someone who may occupy the space to the right of the mural, where a tunnal entrance was poorly hidden.

Chapter 10 – Part 5

Delegado eyed the pivot as Nebly got the secret door open with a flourish. The others there either gaped in amazement (mostly the idiot gnolls), tried to keep their admiration hidden and failed (Grullik), or seethed in jealousy (Orphan). I’m probably the only one here who noticed the last one, Delegado thought.

When two huntsmen went into the wild for an extended period, and came back to a village where one was known and the other not…well, the unknown one of the pair usually resented it.

If the half-orc hadn’t been very quietly laying a trap for a gnome whose skills were just too perfectly convenient, he would have done something about it.

Well, maybe not. Sometimes orcs took displays of emotion as weakness. There was a good chance they hadn’t noticed Orphan’s discomfiture, and Delegado wasn’t going to risk Orphan’s standing by drawing their attention to the insecurity of a night-bland.

Delegado’s set his teeth against a snarl. He’d been watching the pivot deliberately so he had seen what he was looking for. It hadn’t turned as something that hadn’t been opened in millennia. It was too smooth.

Like something that had been opened maybe a week or two ago, after Orphan had killed the hag.