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Roughly an Hour Ago,
Beneath Vaald
Beneath Vaald
The ancient aqueduct was thankfully somewhat spacious; the ponderous confines stretching for leagues below and around the city, built long before the birth year of even most elves, built during a time when the whole of Delad as a country had been younger and Vaald was smaller.
These days, new sewage tunnels had been erected, smaller, but more efficient, leaving these aqueducts to slowly dry up.
The entrances to the underdark were completely sealed off as soon as they were elected to be abandoned, so that those of lesser intentions could not use them as easy refuge; their length was often reinforced with solid walls of steel encased in stone and plaster, to support the streets above them with little need for maintenance.
Much of the time, the abandoned aqueducts were, in a word, innocuous. The worst they could host was the homeless who managed to pick away at the bricks, and all manner of rodent and insect.
In a twist of irony, three knights of the Order of the Fervent Meridian found themselves investigating the aqueducts.
Moritz Schmidt figured that this was a form of drudgery, all this walking. Not pointless drudgery—there were people to be saved and his own bills to be paid—but it was drudgery nonetheless. And by the Galgan Knot1 was it cold.
It was the dawn of the year's autumn. The blistering heat of summer had finally become little more than an unpleasant footnote in the past, giving way to much more welcome, mild, temperate autumnal weather that left one pleasantly comfortable as they milled about their daily business.
Or at least — That's how it should be.
Moritz and Luisa, along with their assigned leader, Adira, were a good few days into the frigid depths below Vaald. Underground, with the rats and roaches, chasing ghosts that may or may not even exist.
“Suppose we’ll find anything, Lu?” Moritz mused to the female knight behind him, idly tapping the basalt brick wall next to him with the crossguard of his sword.
“I’ve hardly any doubt whomever left those corpses behind did so without reason,” Luisa answered. It was their first time talking for what was probably hours, though she was quickly growing weary of her companion’s same-ish question.
“We’re fresh out of food, too,” Moritz chimed with a slap to the rucksack behind him. Empty canning jars jingled within. "Good on lantern oil, though."
“And you didn’t make a note of this last meal!?” Luisa snapped.
“Didn’t think we’d be down another six hours," he joked, "It’d be the Knot if we ran into something now, on an empty stomach, wouldn’t it be?” Moritz let out a muted laugh, pulling a scoff out of Adira ahead.
Vexed by her partner’s incredulousness, Luisa pulled her travelling cape tighter over her shoulders and adjusted her lamp. There was little to see down in the ruined aqueducts, little to do and not many directions to go. Just endless walking forward or backward through the basalt-lined corridors and over centuries old dried-up muck.
Luisa turned her gaze forward, noting the warm vapor exuding from her companion’s mouths and noses, and pulled on her cloak one more time. Her nose scrunched a little every time she inhaled, the air was sharp in its coldness, and it pained the lungs just to breath in; it smelled, too, not really of aged feces and urine and stale water like she expected, but an odd and unnatural smell, burnt and faintly metallic, similar but also unlike the stifling air that followed the magic of the Drakenforged leader up in the front.
Up ahead, Adira let out a long sigh, choosing not to engage in the unavailing conversation with the two behind her. Her breath visibly trailed out from her nostrils, long and vaporous.
The tunnels ahead were disquieting, gloomy, and carried an unknowable hint of malice. It disturbed her, slightly, that the supporting embrasures doubling as barriers to the aqueducts were dubiously absent, smoothly hewn concrete remains stuck out in places to mark where they had once been.
But the saboteurs of the barriers were mysteriously absent, and little else than the unnatural and rapidly increasing cold gave her a hint of a direction to go in.
Adira’s heart began to grow heavy with displeasure the more she thought of it; just how much longer would she and her companions have to be down here, navigating its smooth and stony innards without any end in sight? Should she call it off, now that their provisions were running empty?
She sighed again, just as they came to a cistern in the Aqueducts, the answer to her looming question silently approaching directly from behind.
- – — –— –— –— –——Δ——– —– —– —– — – -
Vaald,
Three Days Earlier
Vaald,
Three Days Earlier
Every so often, new technologies sprouted from gifted minds of alchemists, artisans, and architects, bringing new ways to move waste and bring fresh water to the increasingly growing city. These systems usually were built ad-hoc, rooted under houses, temples, and buildings alike so that the vital fluids could be supplied more directly. The undercity of Vaald played host to the occasional abandoned aqueduct beneath its streets, unknown and uncharted, left to history and prayed for that the aged permanence of the supports built into them would keep the roads and passageways aloft.
It was fact that these aqueducts rarely ever collapsed. It was a distant and removed idea to most.
“Get in there! Festival’s coming and we’ve got no time for this gnome’s business,” bellowed Moresby commandingly. The guards under his command followed his order without argument. “And make sure you’ve got your wards on!” he added, checking the rune-encrusted metal brooch pinned to the tabard of his armor.
A rumbling had been reported some days earlier, followed by a sudden collapse of a road accompanied by sparse reports that the sudden maw had some form of aura of insanity to it. Guards were sent to investigate the disturbance, orders given to merely investigate and report their findings.
Moresby Crux, or Mor, as he liked to shorten his adopted human name, was a guard veteran of several decades, his appearance putting him on the better side of fifty years old. He was stocky and short accounting for his race, built like an ox despite his feline ears and scruffy, thick hair, a proud former member of the feline Asmerakan tribesmen, though removed from their often frowned upon near-worship of the long deceased King Ragar.
He took a deep breath, feeling a strange tinge of coldness on his skin. After his men, he went down into the yawning hole in the road.
Mor and his troopers found themselves in what seemed to be an intersection for the old aqueducts, possibly a cistern of some sorts, several paths out of the room opened up in every possible direction, stifling, inky darkness looming within each one. The room was cylindrical in construction, and the architecture consisted of masterfully smoothened stone bricks and cements. It was surprisingly clean, save for the rubble and dust from the collapsed street.
Inside rest several corpses laid upon hastily made tables, all once human, their flesh was splayed open to display dried contents. In some places, skin was flayed from muscled like some insane display on human anatomy. Mor reeled at the sight of them, his time as a city guard only barely preparing him for the grisly sight; he clenched his teeth and urged himself to inspect the corpses further, shaking off the chill he was feeling as a figment of his imagination. Some paces away, inadequately prepared for the sweet smell of death and insane visage of the corpses, a different guard failed to stymie his urge to vomit.
Scrying the dead, surveying them for more answers, he found that several pieces of the anatomical architecture were missing in various places of the bodies, torn out with precision very much unlike the gruesomeness that the displays had initially exhibited.
Mor scoffed. By Stieg’s comatose testicles, had the Alien menace made it underneath the city to exact their cruel experiments upon the populace? Vaald was sprawling, massive, ponderous. Vaald was the seat of civilization, more populous than anywhere else in the entirety of Aedrasil. An incursion of the Llangeli scum beneath Delad’s beloved capital would be catastrophic. This had to be investigated further.
“Gods curse the scum!” Mor cried out in indignation at the unseen assailants, eliciting a start out of his other companions. The Lunar Festival approached, and soon the Guard would be busier than next to any other part of the year. “We’ll have to leave this up to the guilds,” he called out to the other guards, “Festival’s about here. A detour to investigate this further just isn’t possible.”
A guardsman cast a furtive glance in his commander-companion’s direction, then returned to staring at a corpse, he spoke out, not quite in objection, but rather in sincere inquisition, “We can’t be spread that thinly, could we be? Uh... Sir.” The voice came from a younger recruit. He was still unaware, still innocent and young, the terrors and complexities of the Vaald’s more heinous hosts had yet to make themselves known to him. Mor shook his head.
“Every last one of us from every station will be needed for the security of the ‘scratches’ last days, and every other celebrator, and temple-goer,” Mor answered, “We are stretched that thin.”
The Guard of the city was often at the mercy of numbers, their stations stretched to limits that could only be supplemented by the commission of guilds. Despite the Deladish ways of proactiveness and peacekeeping, pockets of truly peaceful communities were veritable treasures.
Mor took a last, disconsolate glance at one of the corpses, this one with its face still intact. He swore internally, and looked back to his men, “We can at least personally get these poor sods to a burial grounds where Stieg can properly look after them.”
A chorus of acknowledgements followed. Just then, as if confirming the course of action with an unseen smile, the air seemed to warm up just a little.
1 The Galgan Knot is, for lack of better word, Hell to an Aedrasilan Mortal, where souls on their route to Stieg become lost in a void of eternal darkness and cold, their sins in life make the journey through the Knot much longer or shorter.