Stardeep_ The Dungeons - Bruce R. Cordell [99]
"Breathe carefully," advised Adrik, who placed a Ibid of his robe over his mouth. His muffled voice came again. "Spores."
Kiril grunted, "I wouldn't have guessed such a garden could survive in these darks. I wonder on what sort of rot this plot grows." The crystal dragonet belled unhelpfully.
She shrugged and walked onto the tunnel catwalk. Some hundreds of paces ahead, the ledge plunged into a smaller tunnel.
Raidon and Adrik followed her. Halfway across, the monk glimpsed a shape moving through the fungalscape. Turning his head, he saw some sort of… humanoid. It was a bulky, hunch-backed humanoid composed of mushroomy flesh partly covered in a bony black carapace. Its head was a puffball suffused with wavering filaments. The creature used daggetlike obsidian claws to slash its way through the fungal garden. Luckily, it was moving away from them. Raidon estimated its size equal to a giant.
The monk monitored the lumbering fungus hulk as they made their way along the ledge. Just as they reached the edge of the cavern, he saw the creature pause, then swivel its bulk. Before its polyp-sprouting face fully turned to regard the ttavelers, they ducked out of the wide cavern into the narrow confines of anothet tunnel.
Raidon doubted the creature could fit into the tunnel if it decided to follow. While the monk was confident of his prowess, he wondered if the techniques he favored against living foes might be useless on beasts composed of animate fungus. Could it even feel pain? Still, flying elbows ctushed vegetable flesh as readily as animal.
Like before, the tunnel walls they traversed were smooth and white, except for the stain of fungus running in a widening stripe along the right wall. The blue, luminescent haze remained as thick as ever in the tunnel. Also…
"Adrik, bring your light closer, will you?" asked Raidon.
The sorcerer stepped over to Raidon with his lighted coin. Embedded in the wall were shells, bones, and teeth. More notable was a complete human figure, fully embedded in the wall and composed of the same white stone.
"What does this mean?" asked Raidon.
The sorcerer shook his head. "Magic, a massive concentration, once burned through here, but it is impossible to say how long ago."
"Did the elves do it when they created Stardeep? Or Sildeyuir?" asked Raidon.
Kiril, who'd paused at Raidon's first words, snorted. "This was here before Sildeyuir or the Traitor's dungeon were called out of the emptiness. Imagine the wizards' chagrin when they discovered the 'emptiness' was not so empty as everyone assumed. Races older than elves roam the worlds, and not all ancient events are recorded in history books."
Adrik brushed his right hand along the forehead of the encased figure.
The air cracked as a fossilized arm suddenly burst from the wall and snatched the sorcerer's wrist. Adrik screamed in concert with a wet grinding sound. The squeezing hand mashed the sorcerer's wrist like a piece of rotten fruit.
More loud cracks, and jagged lines appeared and lengthened on both walls. Pale limbs thrashed within widening fissures.
Raidon snatched the collapsing sorcerer and threw him over his shoulder. The hand gripping the sorcerer's wrist didn't relinquish its grasp but… there was little left for it to hold. Adrik was a familiar weight across the monk's back. Time to push concern from his mind and act in the moment.
"Go!" yelled Raidon as he dashed past Kiril. The swordswoman broke into a run, and Raidon led her down the empty but rapidly filling tunnel. The forms breaking free of the passage walls were-what? Undead? Undead whose flesh had so long rested beneath the earth that rotting skin, organs, and bone had become hard as