“By the Hammer of Donner, back! BACK, foul things!” The Hammer in the lean priest’s hands crackled with lightning and glowed with divine power.
The images in black, incorporeal shadows given life, stretched into once-human faces grimacing in warped horror and awe, screamed at the crackling brilliance and retreated as fast as they could from it… only they couldn’t pass through the walls of the building and instead flattened themselves impossibly against it.
“Tail.” Cirruluxul pounced forward, pivoted, and as Hammer Ogviel knelt down, the length of blue-scaled bone and muscle just clearing his head. It slammed into the four shadows, popping two of them instantly as the pale, ghostly light on it allowed mere flesh to pop them.
The two wounded shadows couldn’t get away. Plink, plink, two arrows drove into them, stuck in the wood of the walls, and they evaporated.
I spun around, looking up, my face very unfriendly. “Their master still lives, and has three more in attendance upon him. Sir Horn, Skifners, follow me.” My head was turned toward the end of the hall. “Cirru, if any come boiling down the hall, Fireball them. I will handle the blast on our side.”
“Yes, Mistress,” the dragon said promptly, finding a table and sitting up on it, her long neck allowing her to see down the floor of the second level hallway.
I tapped Sir Horn, raised a finger, and pointed to a door coming up. His Sword and Shield both held Ghost Touch from me, as did those of the brothers. I touched Hargold, pointed, then Bjorn, pointed. Both quietly eased into position in the middle of the hall, in front of those doors.
The large upper bar room was doubtless intended for private parties, and had become the lair of what was probably a Greater Shadow. They had come swarming down to kill us, were caught in a circle of Mass Ghost Touched Shields and Weapons, and had been hacked down with incredible speed, helped by Hammer Ogviel keeping the forward ranks at bay and making them targets for the two lady archers to take down and Force Reserves from me to pick off the toughest while the proud warriors dealt with the rest.
Even the dragon was Ghost Touched, but she made the mistake of biting one and got blasted with negative energy and a crippling drain of her strength left her nearly immobile until my Restoration eased the effect. Mass Force Armor soon girded everyone to help with our defenses, and the startled hordes of shadows still existing up top ran into a lot of glowing Weapons that didn’t care if they were immaterial, they still died plenty quick when three such drove into them.
The potent darkness of the Greater Shadow had plunged the magical lights of the Inn into dimness, but that didn’t bother me in the slightest. Not only did the whole room re-brighten, courtesy of the Energized Sinhalas stone in my armclasp, but Seeking Shards/Thorns could zip around cover, and all hiding behind the bar to surprise me did was guarantee he wasn’t able to attack with any of his shadowy tendrils whatsoever.
My Thorns slammed into the thing, and its hollow shrieks of pain didn’t last very long at all. Its frenzied servants boiled out through the gaps in the door, ran right into two Axes and a Sword poised to take them on, and Shields and a layer of translucent Armor they couldn’t pass through.
I never really got a good look at the thing, but I assumed it wasn’t from a human given its size as it stood up, started to expand, and Holy Force energies ripped it completely apart.
The creaking as the corpses of the slain started to rouse all around us was heard by everyone.
“All corpses are Animating as zombies! Prepare to clean the upper floors! Shields and Spears flank the dragon! Strikers and Axes up top, room by room!” I called out, completely unimpressed by the corpses of what had been hide-armored orcs lurching out of a closet they’d likely been chased into and lost their lives in, gaping and stumbling towards me.
All three of the men who came with me retreated into the room behind me as they opened the doors, allowing the dead men inside to stumble out and be made victims as the other teams pounded up the stairs to confidently begin clearing the place once again.
It was our last iteration of the night, dawn was dimly visible out there. Everyone was ready to rest and retire, but we had to get all this shit done before the morning reset so everything would be restored for us.
Rote undead, even time-lost like these were, weren’t going to stop the lads now. They had too much enthusiasm, and too much to live for.
The copper coin from Cirru’s hoard spun through the air, and landed on the porch outside. A lot of interested eyes breathed and counted to four before it vanished completely, wiped away as if it never was.
The dragon was down three coppers, but each had taken just a little bit longer than the next to disappear.
Conversely, a few of the coins we tossed out there that we discovered on the remains of the corpses didn’t disappear at all, plainly from this time.
“Buck, you’re in charge of the kitchens. Get us a fine meal. Everyone else, pick your rooms, and this time, wash all your clothes as clean as you can, pick some to wear from the closets during the day, give yours time to air out.
“Maintenance today. If things have broken, ripped, or torn, gather them up so I can fix them for you. What you have is what you will have until we are free or die, or can salvage something from the dead.”
Orders were called out, apartments already split up and allocated. The heaped loot we’d found was in a Shield on one of the dining tables, the sole magical object we’d found intact this time.
Cirruluxul snorted as she looked over the coins. “Half are from the till,” she spat with feeling. I glanced over, Sifted out the guilty ones, and then Prestidigitated them back to fill up the spaces in the coin slots with a dismissive wave of my hand.
I sent the two Disks with her small hoard over into one of the corners, the manticore wings draped over them. The Disks winked out, dropping the bags and padded jars to the floor, and the dragon hurriedly paced over and rearranged them to her liking, before stepping carefully onto them and curling up atop them like a great scaled cat in satisfaction.
She didn’t fall asleep, though, because Buck was making a good and cheery breakfast for everyone, and she’d been promised a good forty pounds in meat to work through for herself. Buck had asked her about her cooked and raw preferences, and discovered that she didn’t have any because she’d never really had finely-cooked food, the crap anthroids cooked definitely not an example thereof.
I started going through everything we’d recovered. We didn’t have to worry about till coins coming back with us, they vanished and presumably were reset behind us.
Still, given the variety, power, and numbers of what we’d killed, and what many of those creatures had killed, the tally was adding up nicely.
“A tally in blood and steel, is it not, Mistress?” the dragon asked, doubtless counting each coin with just her eyes and weighing how much was there.
No one had made the slightest move to inquire about or slip anything from her hoard, which rather fascinated her. However, it didn’t stop her desire to add to it.
“Cirru, you may not know this, but if I butcher you down for spell components, hide, and blood, you’re worth about three times as much as your hoard there.” She blinked, and wisely said nothing. “So, our payment to you for all your time and effort is not killing you and selling you off for the gold you are worth to us. When all is said and done, you would likely owe us a great deal of money in a reasonable exchange, but I’m willing to let it slide for now.
“Now, if we luck into circumstances where a great deal of gold is on the table, you will be treated as honorably and fairly as everyone else. If for some reason you think you deserve more, then I will follow your example and appropriate an amount that I think I am worth, as well.”
If her frill could have fallen, it definitely would have at that statement. She’d seen enough of my power to know I could kill her with a wave of my hand, and I forbore doing so only because the odds of us reaching the end were higher with her help than without it.
She had no hope of reaching the end without us, and she knew it.
“When are we?” the dragon asked softly.
“612 After Crowning, if that is a relevant date to you. Quite a few years before you entered the Inn, by my reckoning, if the dates your mother gave were true. I and the others have come over three hundred years into our past now.” She’d also made more than a few trips, if the times were any indication.
“Do you have any idea how far back we have to go?” the dragon asked softly.
“By the coins there and the state of this inn? All the way back to the age of Darkmoor itself, when it was built, and all the catastrophes that lie between this time and that one.”
“What tales do you know of that time?” the dragon asked, staring at me, trying to assess me. “You are like no elf I have ever seen. I cannot tell your bloodline.”
“I know that Darkmoor met its Doom. I know that fire rocked the land, disease and ruin chased the living, and then the ice came down and buried everything. Mortal folk either fled or dug deep to escape a world gone mad and vengeful at what had happened to it, and Darkmoor and the glories it could have risen to vanished in one brief moment of destruction.” I looked around slowly at the rest of the Inn. “I presume that was the moment this Inn lost its owner and all those who lived and worked in the area. It would not surprise me if the disaster that destroyed Darkmoor obliterated this building and all within it in one terrible instant, and yet the next day, the Inn began rebuilding itself right back to the paradigm that you see around us, only there was no one living to change anything.”
I scuffed the dirt on the floor, the texture and tone of it changing only slightly. At times we’d come up to find the door open, at other times closed. “There are the bones of dead fish and snails and things among the dirt in the floor here. At one point, this building was under water, likely buried in ice, too. If we have to go all the way back there, we are going to encounter those conditions, and I have to be ready to deal with them when they occur.
“That becomes particularly important if we end up trapped in here between lunar cycles. I will have to clean the place out and keep us alive while we wait for the Portal to open again and carry us forth.”
Her tail switched nervously. “This does not sound simple,” the dragon hedged.
“I do not know if the enemies we face will become more dangerous, but they will not become less. We seem to be getting dropped at key points where others arrived before us and perished to something powerful that had settled in the Inn.
“That is why we clear it, else all those who come after us would have had to deal with the things we have slain, and who knows how strong things like the undead could have become?
“We may well be the destined force saving all who stumble into here from utter damnation, as opposed to merely death for one another.” I was a bit amused at the implications, but our trip into the past was not going to be short.