Crystals and Visions
The gnolls were searching the cave when the party arrived — moving through it with the systematic frustration of creatures looking for something specific and not finding it. They didn't expect company. The fight came out of that mutual surprise and went quickly once the party had the upper hand, which they gained through a combination of the fire still sitting in their ribs from the dragon deal and the tactical advantage of Arya hitting the gnolls from a direction they hadn't been watching.
When the cave was quiet, Arya walked the perimeter with her hand raised. She'd gotten better at reading residual magic over the last several weeks — partly practice, partly the rune at her neck, which had started behaving as a kind of second sense, warm when it detected nearby arcane work.
It pulsed near the eastern wall.
She looked at the stone and saw it: the shimmer of maintained illusion, the slight wrongness of a surface that was claiming to be solid rock when it was something else. She found the edge and pulled it apart the way you pull a stuck page — carefully, from the corner.
A door. Stone, old, fitted so well into the wall that it would have been invisible without magic to look for.
Beyond it: a chamber.
The chest was in the center of the room, heavy and ornate in the way of things that were meant to be found and then very much regretted. Sarcophagi lined the walls in a ring — six of them, dark stone, undecorated. A crystal roughly the size of a human head sat mounted above the chest on a stone pedestal, faintly luminous.
The party looked at the crystal. At the chest. At the sarcophagi.
"We should think about this," Arya said.
They thought about it for approximately six seconds and then Cylia opened the chest.
The skeletons came out of the sarcophagi. Not slowly — quickly, with the purposeful speed of things that had been prepared rather than awakened. Six of them, in various states of armor, carrying weapons that were old but still sharp.
Cylia killed the nearest one. It fell. She moved to the next. Behind her, the first one started getting back up.
This went on for a while.
They fought in a circle, striking and striking and achieving nothing lasting, while the skeletons reformed with the patient mechanical logic of things that had no survival instinct to exploit because they'd never had survival to begin with. Every time one fell, the crystal above the chest pulsed once. Bright. Like something refilling.
Vinx watched from the doorway, where she'd positioned herself out of the melee to actually observe what was happening. She studied the crystal, the timing of the pulse, the geometry of it.
"The crystal is powering them," she called. "Break it."
Arya turned, raised her hand, and shattered it with a force spell.
The skeletons dropped. All six, simultaneously, and did not get back up. The absence of sound was immediate and complete.
Vinx walked in from the doorway and started checking the chest for anything useful. "That took longer than it needed to," she said.
Nobody had the energy to argue.
That night they made camp at the base of the mountain, inside the entrance of a cave they'd already cleared, with a fire going and the necrotic lines on their skin pulsing their slow reminder. Elaazar kept watch while the others slept, or tried to.
The visions came in the borderland between tired and asleep — not clearly, not like a dream, more like something pressing against the membrane of consciousness from the outside. The necrotic marks had been doing this periodically since the hermit's hut: flashes of imagery, fragments of something coming. Tonight they had a shape to them.
A minotaur. Massive, dark, wreathed in something that wasn't natural shadow. It stood in a cave deeper in the mountain and looked back through the vision with awareness.
Nihion, warm around Elaazar's neck, sent something back through the bond — an image overlaid on the vision, brief and clear: the same minotaur, and the symbol of Bahamut on the cave wall behind it.
Not just a monster. Something bound there. Something that had been placed.
"We know what's next," Elaazar said to the dark, to no one in particular.
Nihion shifted on his neck and said nothing, which was agreement enough.
Next episode: The Keep's gates are damaged. Three guards join the party. And a bell that raises the dead finally gets put to use against the people who made it.