The Tears of Kas̆dael

Jasper collapsed against the chamber’s walls with a groan. His hand felt the back of his head gingerly and quickly recoiled at what he found - a mass of sticky softness intermixed with sharp shards he feared had broken off of his skull. Despite the wild pounding in his head, fuel-feared adrenaline helped him focus enough to cast the newest of his spells, Circle of Forgiveness.

A wave of tingly energy spread in a wave through his body and out in a small circle around him, catching Ihra in its embrace as well. When it reached his head, he could feel a sharp stab of pain as something in his skull readjusted, but the throbbing pain in his head swiftly began to ebb. He cast it one more time to be safe and carefully checked the back. It was still wet and sticky, but the squishiness was gone.

“You alright?” He asked Ihra.

“More or less.” Supporting herself against the wall, Ihra pulled herself up and placed the weight on her left leg gingerly. She winced and quickly shifted her weight to the other leg. “That tingly sensation is some sort of new healing spell, I take it?”

“Yeah, I guess I didn’t get the chance to tell you about it.” His fingers twisted as he cast the spell a third and after waiting a moment for it to take effect, Ihra tested her leg again.

“Much better,” she said, stomping down with satisfaction.

He let a trickle of flames roll down his fingers, he blinked in pain as the world exploded into light again. “Guess this passageway has more of those kethûm crystals.”

Now that it was lit, he could see the hallway was identical to the one above it, right down to the platform the dorēsah had destroyed before falling into the chasm. He crept cautiously up to the edge and stared out. Without the brilliant light provided by the crystals, the flames on his hand were only strong enough to illuminate a few dozen feet of darkness. He could see no sign of more dorēsah waiting to attack them, but then again, he had failed to perceive it the first time too. Damn darkness. What he did see was a white platform nestled against the cliff face perhaps fifty feet above their location. Is that where Tsia and Gūla were?

He glanced at the darkness, debating whether it was worth risking calling out for them, and decided against it. With my luck, I’ll probably call down a whole swarm of the blasted beasts.

Checking his essence, Jasper found enough time had expired that he could cast Spectral Wings again and waved Ihra over. “Do you want to check that platform out, see if they're there?" he asked, pointing out the passage above them.

“And what if there's more dorēsah? The hallway seems to head up; if we follow it, it might connect.”

“This way’s faster,” he pointed out, “and there’s no guarantee it even connects.”

“And the dorēsah?” she repeated her concern.

“There could be monsters down those halls, too. With Spectral Wings, we'll be up there in a flash and we won't have to worry about falling.”

She cast a last, longing look at the passage behind her, but reluctantly agreed. "Fine, do it your way." He cast the spell in quick succession, and two darted into the air. Jasper kept a wary eye to the right as he hugged the cliff as closely as possible, but their flight remained unhindered, and as they reached the platform, a pair greeted them quietly but joyfully.

“Shamsha’s light, I can’t believe you survived that.” Grabbing his hand, Gūla dragged him into the relative safety of the passage. "I thought for sure you'd fallen into the depths."

“I told her you’d be fine,” Tsia commented. “Every time I think you’ve died, you pop out alive and well. At this point, I won’t believe it until you’ve been dead and buried for a couple of days.”

“Thanks for your concern,” Jasper responded wryly.

Tsia grinned back unrepentantly until Ihra gave her a playful smack on the ear. “And what about me? Did I even merit a thought?” Ihra demanded.

Leaving the two to bicker, Jasper turned to Gūla. “Did you find any signs of our missing mage?”

Gūla pointed to the edge of the platform in response, where the pure white stone was splattered with a dark, rusty color. “I think the rope must have given way while she was climbing down but she lucked out. Hit the pavement hard, but she survived.” A sprinkling of blood led away from the edge to the entrance of the hallway, where it abruptly stopped. “Must have taken a potion,” she surmised.

“Did you explore further?”

The ghost of a smile graced the captain’s lips. “Tsia was more worried about you than she let on; she refused to keep moving until you returned.”

“And you agreed?” He questioned, surprised that Djinn had allowed herself to be thwarted in her mission.

“If you'd died, my only hope of getting back to the surface was her wind magic, so yeah, I wasn’t going to argue. But now,” she faced the brilliantly lit passage with a hopeful smile, “maybe we can salvage this mission after all."

The corridor, though its walls were constructed in the same trapezoidal shape as the one above, had one noticeable difference: after the space of about fifty feet, it split off in three directions.

The path directly ahead was easy enough to rule out, as it almost immediately dead-ended into a small chamber. Carved into a perfectly square room, the sole focus of the chamber was the giant stone triangle at its center. A heavy lid, cracked in two pieces, lay on the ground beside it, but it was impossible to tell from the entrance what was in the container. The party spread out as they searched the room, but Jasper headed straight for the triangle.

Its purpose became clear when he saw its contents. The stone triangle was filled almost to the brim with a dark, amber liquid that, whether through age or by nature, was nearly solid to the touch.

A body quite unlike anything he’d seen floated in the liquid. Thin and rather short, the corpse had its arms crossed upon its chest like a mummy. In the dark liquid, he couldn’t tell what color of skin the being had once possessed, but large portions of its body were covered in plumage and its hands, though quite similar to human hands, ended in long, curved claws.

The feet were even stranger, more like a bird’s than that of a man; the impression was only reinforced by the pair of white, feathered wings that were spread behind him, explaining the strange shape of the coffin. The dorēsah's face was the closest thing to human, but with feathers in place of hair and the intensely sharp angle of its cheekbones, it still appeared wholly alien. This must be what the dorēsah looked like before they were cursed.

He stared at the bird-like humanoid a moment longer, feeling an odd touch of pity for the thing. From the gaping wounds in its torso, it was clear the dorēsah’s death had not been a peaceful one, and yet its kin had suffered an even worse fate.

“Sels̆arrat was definitely here,” Gūla interrupted his reverie.

Aside from the triangular coffin, the room was stripped bare, but it was clear that was a recent development. Unlike the halls, which were almost miraculously spotless, a thin layer of dust covered the center of the floor and the broken lid of the sepulcher. Around the edges of the room, however, were patchy sections of floor that were almost dust-free, hinting that something had been removed.

“Does Sels̆arrat have a bag of holding,” he asked.

“One of her most prized possessions,” the Djinn affirmed. “Whatever she found here must have been worth taking.”

Abandoning the empty room, the four returned to the place where the halls had split. The path left sloped slightly downward, perhaps leading to the platform he and Ihra had fallen on. The path to the right, on the other hand, continued in a flat, straight line that ran parallel to the face of the cliff.

“Any guesses as to which way she went?”

Gūla and Tsia shook their heads, but Ihra pointed to the right.

“Did you find something,” the Djinn captain asked.

“I can see another chamber just beyond the reach of the kethûm's light. We should check there before heading down.”

With no other leads, they progressed down the hall. Other than the solitary dorēsah that had attacked them, there had been no signs of other life in the forgotten crypt, but that changed when they stepped into the chamber.

It was a near replica of the previous one, a single austere room whose only decoration was the oddly shaped coffin at its center. But this time the room was not as empty.

The battered corpse of a dorēsah lay just inside the door. Its head lay beside it, severed with almost surgical precision, and one of its wings was nearly shorn through as well. It was a mystery how the beast had gotten there, for the dorēsah’s wingspan was far too wide to fit in the narrow hallway, but it wasn’t the only mystery in the room.

While the rest of the party bent down to examine the fallen dorēsah, Jasper spied a smaller form crumbled against the chamber’s far wall. Fearing it was the mage they were looking for, he hurried over to examine it, but the body was not that of a Moon-kissed.

Instead, the odd hands and feet and the rumpled feathers were a match for the body of the pre-cursed dorēsah, although, unlike the previous body, it wore a beautifully woven tunic of green and red which, despite its vast age, was so perfectly preserved that Jasper could have believed it had been made yesterday.

But the golden chunks of goo trapped within the feathers pointed to a different provenance, and a quick glance at the coffin, which sported a gaping hole in the amber liquid, confirmed what he had feared. While it was still theoretically possible that the bird-man had risen in the distant past, its neatly severed head, cut with the same precision as the dorēsah’s, suggested the deaths had occurred at the same time.

“Your friend isn’t a necromancer of some sort, is she?”

“No, why?” Gūla, who was still examining the slain dorēsah, glanced up with a wrinkled brow.

He pointed to the now empty coffin. “Because this little birdie flew the coop.” The dead beast was quickly forgotten as the others clustered around the second corpse.

“This must be Sels̆arrat’s work too,” she mused. “I don’t know all her spells, but I’m quite certain she can’t raise the dead. Like most Moon-kissed, her magic is primarily moon and healing-based. At least there’s no sign that she was injured,” she concluded with obvious relief.

“That’s nice and all, but I’m a bit more concerned about the dead getting up and joining the fight,” Jasper replied dryly. “If your friend didn’t raise it, then who did? Are more of them about to start leaping out of their coffins?”

“Maybe we should check the other room again,” Ihra blurted out.

There was no further evidence of Sels̆arrat in the room, so the group quickly returned to the original chamber. The amber liquid of the coffin remained undisturbed, and Jasper could detect no sign that the being within contained any life, but that wasn’t enough to reassure him. Returning to the hall, the four were left with only one direction to go - further down into the crypt.

But they had only traveled a few dozen feet down the corridor when signs of a fight emerged from the darkness. This time, the kills had not been made with calm precision. A half dozen of the small birdmen were scattered across the floor, many of their bodies sporting missing limbs, but it was the large pool of blood beneath them that caught their attention, a mixture of green and bright red.

“Great,” Jasper sighed, as he bent down to examine the scene. “Looks like we’ve got more restless dead. There’s no body here, so she must have survived, but it doesn’t look like it was an easy victory.”