Into the Pale Dark
You woke up in the wrong room.
Not the barricaded camp where you'd fallen asleep, not the Level 1 hollow that Lessie's thorns had sealed tight against the dark. Somewhere deeper. Somewhere you hadn't been. The Tomb had moved you — or something that came through the Tomb while you slept had decided you belonged further in.
The room was old. Alcoves. Defaced statues with the faces scraped off, whoever they were made invisible by intention, not time. Two doorways. And in the center of the floor, set flush into the stone like a window laid horizontal, a disc — polished smooth, mirror-flat, showing through it a landscape you did not want to see. Dark red sky. Black crags. A horizon crossed by dry lightning. Something that breathed.
Crowley said it was the way forward. That Vindictus was through it. That the arrangement last night had confirmed this.
He didn't say much else.
Moist dropped a Goodberry through to test it. A small winged thing picked it up on the other side, chewed it with evident pleasure, and flapped into the dark. The disc was live. You were going through.
You found the summoning circle room before you left, threading through Level 2's passages — fresh candles burned down to nothing in a chamber full of nothing else that was fresh, the pentagram still faintly glowing. The Blessings had moved you. You could see where this had all been arranged, even if you couldn't see all of it.
Moist went through the portal at a sprint. Audrey Spring Bloom went at a run behind him, invisible and audible and faintly terrified. The rest of you followed.
The 273rd Layer of the Abyss does not look like hell. It looks like somewhere older than hell — a canyon that goes up and up, limestone walls carved by eons of grit-wind, the sky the wrong color at every hour because there are no hours here. The light is wrong. Permanent dusk with no sun behind it.
Vrocks circled far overhead. Their wingspans wouldn't fit the canyon. You were safe from them for exactly that reason and for no other.
In the far distance, at the canyon's end, a fortress. Dark stone. Angular. That was where you were going.
You started walking.
They came from the walls.
Tall, slender, still — so still you almost mistook them for formations in the rock. Then one of them spread open what you'd thought was a cloak. It wasn't a cloak. Fleshy batwings, unfolding from its body, and it was gliding down toward you, and then five more were gliding too, three from in front and three from behind, and Ubys said there's something up there just before the fight was already on.
Volgaloths. Demons of the canyon. Claw and claw and a shrouding wrap that left you blind and breathless if you let it close around you — which one of them managed, around Ubys, for half a round before he was somewhere else.
The combat was bad. The combat was also brief.
KeYs lit his blade and drove fire into the lead one. Falkor drove claws into the same. AC burned through charges on the wand Ubys had passed him, force-missiles pouring into the wings and flesh. Lessie stood her ground with her staff, summoned her hawk spirit, granted advantage to every swing in a ten-foot radius. Moist threw fire and watched it halve. Ubys rang the death-bell twice — not undead, yes it still hurt them — and then called spectral guardians that ate the last of them at the edges.
The hellhound fought hard. It is now at the edge of what it can survive.
Six bodies on the canyon floor.
More on the cliffs above. Watching. Not descending.
You kept moving. The fortress was still there.
Next session: the fortress at the end of the canyon, and whatever waits inside it.