Chapter 1: The Fish and The Falls
Soft clicks of padded steel boots falling in quick succession echoed down the dark undercrofts; the prison of heroes, not so inaccurately named after its architecture. Arching walls lined with skulls of all sizes and shapes, riveted into place with long square nails and cross-stabilized with polished metals flowing with inscriptions of all forms on language and runic script...weapons potentially once of legend, drained of their favor, spirits and magic until being reduced to little more than fancy building components. On a glance, the structure could have passed for carved cobblestone for how the petrified, solid remains were polished flat. Maybe it was just an artistic choice? The line between the two seemed blurred, appearing as either out of the corner of the eye before abruptly changing, almost flowing fluidly from the magic the dungeon subsisted on.
The Stranger rounded the corner, deliberate in their steps as they paced down the hall. The mouths of the carvings of skulls creaked and groaned open, foundation crackling and lightly drifting as they appeared almost to turn and follow them, a glow from hollow eye sockets illuminating the hall faintly as they passed. After escaping a few meters past the skulls, they shuddered back into place, returning to rest and even reversing the flow of dust and debris which had once broken loose, returning to darkness. Fur bristled across the mask as The Stranger scanned along the cells, lifting their right hand high into the air and sharply ringing an impact with their index and middle finger. They slowed their pace and clinked their fingers twice more in a similar manner as they stopped between four cells, standing in the middle of the hall.
Grayscaling overtook the darkness, dully elucidating the features of the architecture to reveal nothing more than plane cobblestone set into black mortar. Their left hand extended towards the bars of one of the doors, requiring a fair amount of strain as their right hand appeared to be locked in place. So short in stature, they could just barely reach the door by standing on the tips of the toes of their metal-plated boots. A single success! Looking up, skulls briefly flickered into existence mere inches from The Stranger's gloved hand, mouths open and keen to bite. Their visage shimmered in and out of existence depending on the angle they were viewed. Spindly-thin necks as if held on the body of a snake carried the ghostly skulls in their pursuit.
The Stranger repeated the touch for each of the doors around them after a brief moment of returning the glowing gaze of the spirits, locked in the effects of what was presumably a spell of some foreign machination. With a small chime of their other hand in the same manner of before, the pale violet light in the eyes of the skulls, which had supposedly been frozen, shifted to the new sound in spite of how The Stranger continued to watch them.
What happened next would have appeared as a reverberating clink of metal, a swirl of glowing amber snakes and then a guttural crunch before a streak of seemingly the same light the snake-like spirits were made from 'unzipped' the local swarm. Three quick chimes! The world fades back to grayscale as The Stranger reappears at the same pace, their cloak having earned a few holes from bites into fabric. In a kneeling position, they crawl enough to tap on another series of cell doors, their locks spinning open, doors coming loose.
Perhaps they heard it before you, but they were already diving back the way they came, giving their first hand another series of chimes as the piercing screech meets your ears. In their progression down the hall, the effect of the first spell's area wore off on one of the heads which had coiled around to let out an alarm before being abruptly silenced by another wave of grayscaling as quickly as it began. Meanwhile, The Stranger groaned and squirmed, a foot twitching and kicking at the dust that lined the floor, their arm held aloft as they otherwise laid suspended a handful of inches above the cobblestone. After a brief moment, they relax. Panting and shivering, they ease themselves to their knees to collect themselves while the heroes hopefully did the same with their newfound freedom.
The doors loose, your senses slowly returning save for a hollow dullness as if something was horribly amiss. A lack of lay-lines, of radiance, of self...this is not a region where power is allowed. A privilege your bodies had long since been denied, and the aid of the small masked figure was hardly enough to give it all back in such an expected instant. If you hoped to find some form of death, you may be disappointed. No gates to white or scorching inferno, just a silence as still as a grave. However, given the sound which had just been issued forth from the nightmarish entity now locked in its own helpless purgatory...silence might not be such a terrible alternative. For the moment, at least, a still semblance of peace has taken this dark dungeon.
