A good section and one I enjoyed quite a bit, no fixes that I found.  A good bit of thinking with the cold and an interesting twist with the cloak.  Eagerly anticipating more. John Burman aka Fox Marine Kendo Virmir <kendo.virmir@gmail.com> wrote:<blockquote class="replbq" style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; padding-left: 5px;"> I will admit I struggled quite a bit with this part, although I'm fairly satisfied with what I finally managed to put down. Please do not hesitate to inform me if something jumps out as overtly lame. :) Many thanks to everyone who is reading and everyone who has offered comments so far. I have newfound respect for authors of longer works. Wow... this is so hard! But very fulfilling. :) ---- "To Steal a Soul" Part 5 Empty hallways splayed in all directions. Blast it, what sort of mad tower was this? I followed Lady Vale as quickly as I was able, which admittedly wasn't very quick with my short legs. My calves ached and the pads of my feet became sore from slapping against the stone floor. She at least had the decency not to run at full speed. We rounded corner after corner, going this way and that, one perfectly square corridor after another. Ever since cursed to the miserable life of a scout, I had done nothing but follow that blasted waving tail of hers. She slowed and pointed her nose downward. I had thought we were fleeing randomly, but I suddenly realized she was tracking the whole way. I will admit I was impressed. I knew I hadn't killed the lizard man I hit with the fireball. It would only be moments before he roused, and then there'd be a legion of screaming plant-things down our throats. And possibly the black robes. I didn't even have a clue what they were. Blast it, I hoped they could not track like us... Vale stopped and scowled, stooping low to take in more of some odor. "What is it?" I whispered, out of breath. "Blood." Blood? Oh, blast it... "Whose?" She crouched on her haunches, letting her long black tail rest on the floor around her ankles. "It... it might be..." Echoing somewhere down the hallway, a pig squealed. My ears stood on end. Things began to click. A cult of mages. Animal sacrifices. Rufus was a boar morph... Vale took a few steps toward the cry after it died, her mouth gaping, her wide eyes stricken with terror... Then we froze and held our breath, our ears angled forward to pick up some sound-- any sound. Nothing. I heard the blood rushing through my ears, my heart pounding with each pulse. Vale's leather armor creaked as she shivered. Still nothing... By the gods... could they really be sacrificing Keepers? People that were animals? Animals that were people? That's why they didn't need Claudia... I gulped. Scratch. Scratch. We both caught the noise coming from beyond the stone, like a mouse trapped in the wall, only more metallic. Vale began moving towards a simple wooden door and I followed without thinking. My only thought was what I was going to do when we ran into these sick ceremonial daedra/demon worshipers or whatever they were. I nearly lost it. I had to fight to keep the energy swelling in my fists from bursting into flame. I was going to kill them, that was for sure. No, just breathe... I shut my eyes and tried to calm down. If I began throwing spells left and right, our cover would be blown instantly. I'd put Vale in jeopardy. There was no way I was going to do something more stupid than her. Vale slowly opened the creaking door. A single oil lamp hanging from the ceiling bathed the room beyond in a dim glow. A table and chairs stood in one corner of the cold stone chamber and several metal cages lined the walls, each resting on their own table. All were empty except the largest, which was barely big enough to contain the grayish-brown beast within. The ferocious hyena stopped clawing at the bars of his cage and looked up at us. "Vincent?" Vale whispered to the animal from across the room. The hyena's black ears folded and he shook his head up and down vigorously. I never thought I'd actually be relieved to see him alive. Vale ran over to the cage and shook the door a few times, finding it securely fastened. She drew her blade and slashed open the lock with a mighty cleave, sparks flying into the air as metal hit metal. The door fell open and the striped hyena leapt out. Vale's eyes continued to dart around the room from empty cage to empty cage, but Rufus was no where to be seen. The hyena quickly grew into a larger humanoid shape and leapt up to hug a surprised Vale. He was of course clad only in his fur and I imagined the dhole morph was blushing under her own. "By Akkala, am I glad to see you!" He said as his massive arms wrapped around her frame and squeezed her tight. Yeah, ignore the short mage. I would not have believed it, but the most irritating "tough guy" in the world was as terrified as a small child. The uncharacteristic behavior was frightening. They broke him... "They got Rufus... They got Rufus..." He murmured into Vale's shoulder plate. Vale grabbed his shoulders, pushed him away, and looked into his eyes. He was at least a half foot taller than her. "Now listen..." she whispered in a commanding tone. She then began to calmly ask the overexerted hyena-man questions. By then, something else in the room had stolen my attention. It didn't look like anything in particular at first, just a cloth draped over the chair in the corner. But I was drawn to it, and I approached it slowly, cautiously... an odd sense of dread filling my heart. Perhaps it was the unnatural whiteness of the cloth. My heart began to thrash against my chest as the blazing red trim came into view. Crimson flames danced around the edges of the fabric. Long forgotten memories flooded my mind as I ran my claws over those stitched flames, feeling their smoothness under the pads upon my fingertips. By the gods. It was my grandfather's robe... I was stunned. Paralyzed with my mouth gaping. I had not seen the man in thirteen years... The man who had taught me so much in but a few pages of scribbled notes... My mind was flooded with questions. Was he a victim of these travesties? Was he involved? What in blazes was he doing in Galendor? Perhaps this robe merely belonged to someone else? "Wait!" Vale's voice broke my trance. I do not know how long I stood there staring at the robe, but by the time I turned around, the hyena was fully dressed in his leather armor and was strapping his broadsword to his back. Apparently his clothing had been conveniently tossed in the corner of the room. "I'm going to go kill all of those things right now!" he growled. Lady Vale held a claw in his face. "Do you want them to find us?" she fumed in hushed tones. "They're going to skin Rufus!" She slapped him across the muzzle and tried to shake him by the shoulders, but he was too large to budge. "Stop it, Vincent! Where is he? Where did they take him?" He took a few steps back and dug his claws into the sides of his head, shaking it. "I don't know... I don't know..." He shook his head a few times before his eyes fell on me, and he jumped, as if startled from not knowing I was there. I'm not that short, blast it. He strode across the room and crouched, his eyes wide with fear. He was really freaking me out now. "You... Virmir, please, you've got to help him!" He was nearly begging on his hands and knees, and I took a step back, realizing I was still clutching my grandfather's robe in my claws. The fabric draped to the floor and over my toes. It was so smooth and comforting... I just wanted to wrap myself in it. "Vincent," Vale said as she put a claw on his back, "we'll find him... Come on, let's go. We'll need your nose." "R-right," he stammered. He stood and took a deep breath. The two then strode towards the door, the dhole drawing her blade as she slowly opened it. I bunched the white robe up and tried to stuff it into the pack at my hip. There was no way I could leave it. It was too large to fit completely, but the cloth protruding from the top was not distracting. Vale gave us the 'all clear' sign and we followed her into the hallway. Ugh. One more to go. ---- I was convinced the pig was dead. Vale had a great deal of trouble picking up his scent and it seemed we were beginning to go in circles with all the dismal hallways looking the same. Vincent tried his hand at tracking, taking deep sniffs of the air whenever our squad leader did so, but never catching anything she didn't notice first. I don't think he knew what he was doing. What a moron. But his enthusiasm was undying. I don't think he had heard the bone-chilling squeal right before we found him. Neither Vale or I could tell him. So we continued fruitlessly searching the empty halls. Ducking into doorways, dodging the occasional plant creature that roamed the dark-stoned corridors. We were going to find him one way or another... I never would have expected such a display of comradeship from the hyena. Could he not survive without his verbal punching bag? Was there something more to the nagging bickering those two constantly engaged in? I didn't quite understand it. And the structure of the tower was infuriating. It didn't make any sense. It seemed more hallways than anything else, intersecting at odd angles and looping back on one another. The blue glow continued to permeate the bottom few rows of bricks lining either side of the floor. By then I didn't care what any of it possibly meant. I hated to see Rufus go, but we weren't getting anywhere fast. It was time to leave. We had done all that we could... I nearly mustered the courage to demand just that. Then we heard another squeal. All of our ears stood on end. This time it was much closer. We stood in a hallway perpendicular to another. A brown boar dashed past the intersection, its hooves madly clattering on the stone floor. I had never seen Rufus in his fully animal form, but I didn't suppose it could have been anyone else. Go figure. Vincent took a few steps forward. "Rufus!" "Shhhh!" Vale grabbed him and threw him against the wall. A rumbling sound filled the air, as if a stampede were on the pig's wake. I thought it best to join the two against the wall. "He he he he he!!" The shrill laughter echoed down the corridor, an entire symphony of screeching singers. My tail curled between my legs as I watched no less than a score of the vile plant-and-earth monsters surge past the intersection after the pig, screaming all the way. By the gods! They literally kicked up dust as they charged, bellowing their insane war cries with their rusty weapons held high. If any one of them turned to their left as they ran, they would have seen us standing there down the intersecting hall. But they were so fixated on chasing the pig, the entire army charged right past us. I was too paralyzed to move for a full minute afterward. Before I realized it, the two were peaking down the hallway after the surging army. "Let's follow..." Oh, blast it! Trailing an army of insane screaming imps down echoing corridors is not a difficult task. We could have ran directly behind them with our weapons scraping against the walls and they wouldn't have noticed. Still, we kept our distance and followed as quietly as possible. It wasn't long before the square corridors of the underground tower gave way to a long narrow tunnel of jagged stone, much like the one we originally traveled through. Had we left the underground tower completely? Indeed, the blue luminescence disappeared with the hallways, and I was forced to summon a witchlight. How the pig continued on through the darkness was beyond me, but it was evident he had, as the screaming voices of the plant creatures grew more and more distant down the tunnel. We could only follow and hope they did not turn around. Of course, they made so much noise we would have known it long before they arrived, but it was still a jarring thought. And what in blazes were we going to do if we caught up to them? There was no way the three of us could fend off forty of the blasted things! Blast it!! Heedlessly we followed the echoing screams down the corridor. They moved faster than the three of us, so the gap between us grew by the minute. As comforting a thought that was, it also meant that we would be left far behind if the creatures actually caught the boar. Then the noise suddenly stopped. The silence was so unexpected we slowed our paces to a tiptoe as we became aware of the noise our own foot falls made. After a few bends, the tunnel opened up to a small room bathed in a familiar pale cerulean glow... It seemed a dead end at first, but the rock wall ahead contained a circle of blue crystals. Another portal... this one through the wall rather than the floor. Vale recognized the crystals and immediately barged forward. "Wait!" I demanded. I took a look at the crystals as I did before. These ones did not bare cracks like the others, so there was less of a risk of them breaking when we traveled through. Still, we had no idea what was on the other side of the rock... Could this be our ticket out of this subterranean nightmare, or did it lead further in? "Let's wait a few moments for the plant creatures to gain some ground. We don't want to appear right in the middle of them..." "But Rufus needs us!" Vincent snarled at me. I folded my arms. "He needs us alive." I could not get them to wait more than a minute. Blast it, here we go again... When we were ready, I sucked in my breath and the three of us stepped through the liquid stone wall together... ---- I felt the cool breeze flow through my entire body as I did when traveling through the last crystal portal. But this time the experience was doubly strange as I felt as if I were moving forward, yet my feet were still planted on the ground. In but a moment I was thrust out the other end, still standing upright, yet it felt as if I were atop a carriage that had stopped suddenly (or crashed), and fell forward on the ground. Frigid night air welcomed me. The chirping sounds of the forest caressed my ears, and the scent of plant life filled my nostrils. Outside... we were outside! I clutched the sand in my claws and drank in the sounds and smells of nature. The night was freezing and I began to shiver. Certainly the coldest since my arrival in Metamor. It was a marvelous experience after being trapped in those horrible stuffy tunnels for so long. We were outside at last! "He he he he he..." Oh, blast it... They had us utterly surrounded. Their eyes flashed in the moonlight and their earthy draconic muzzles turned upwards in maniacal grins. They formed a semicircle around us, our backs to a now solid stone wall. My hackles rose and my lips curled in a reflexive snarl. I stood and spread my arms wide, spilling the energy I had gathered out into my palms. A brilliant crimson orb appeared in each, bathing the dark forest in a bright orange glow. I wasn't going to die without a fight, blast it... "This way!" I ordered, determining the left flank to be thinner than the right. I charged at the little monsters at full speed, Vale and Vincent on either side, brandishing their swords. Oddly, the creatures did not charge back, but simply stood there. I thrust both of my hands forward and fired both burning spheres like cannonballs. "Eeeeeeee!!!" The explosion tore them apart, throwing their bodies into the air, wrapped in flame. The dhole and hyena morphs cut through the rest, hacking the vile little monsters out of our way. In but a few seconds we had smashed through their line and dashed like mad into the forest beyond. By the gods, I couldn't believe we were still alive... After some five minutes of sprinting, we realized we weren't being followed. "Why aren't... they following us...?" Vale tried to ask in gasps, fighting back her tongue as it tried to roll out of her muzzle. Vincent and I were in no better condition. Our run crumbled into a fast paced, limping walk. "They... didn't get Rufus, did they?" Vale shook her head. "No, I didn't see him." I didn't see him either. The chill began to cut through my panting and I wrapped my cloak more tightly around my body. I wondered if I would grow a winter coat of fur? Being half animal was so strange... I watched my breath snake out of my muzzle in the October night air like a ghost. "Cold..." I realized. "They're plants. It's too cold. They're dying..." The triumphant moment was short lived. Vincent looked around. "But where is Rufus?" We stopped and I looked up at the unfamiliar black outlines of the trees. The stars were mostly hidden by clouds, and the moon peeked in and out from behind them as well. "... And where are we?" -- - Virmir http://virmir.com _______________________________________________ MKGuild mailing list MKGuild@lists.integral.org http://lists.integral.org/listinfo/mkguild </blockquote> <hr size=1>Sick sense of humor? Visit Yahoo! TV's <a href="http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=47093/*http://tv.yahoo.com/collections/222">Comedy with an Edge </a>to see what's on, when.