Episode 3 Part 3 Sneak Peek #8

This is the fail variation of a Strength check. 

You grunt, placing one leg ahead and the other extended behind you, and push. Your palms scrape against wood, your feet slip against stone. Sweat drips down your forehead, stinging your eyes. Muscles strain, your arms aching, your mind empty save for one thought: move the fucking door.

The door groans, but it does not relent. The shroud billows, its dark essence careening towards you. You heart leaps into your throat, panic rising in your gut. Every instinct you have is telling you to flee, but you cannot move. You must close the doors.

You curse, slamming your palms against the stubborn wood again and again, rubbing the skin raw. The shroud approaches, faster now, its dark tendrils reaching for the gap—

The portcullis slams down, metal crashing into stone. A series of clicks clack in your ears as the mechanisms snap into place and a yellow ward springs to life, humming with arcane power around the iron lattice. The shroud crashes into it a moment later, tendrils seeping across the shield. You pause, heart pounding in your chest, thanking whatever mage created the defenses in this tower—

The barrier blackens, thick veins spiralling through it. The magic stutters and fails, consumed by the shroud, and you watch in horror as it passes through both shield and portcullis, slowed but unimpeded. Its form is viscous now, its essence thickening, resembling ooze far more than clouds. It pushes through the gaps in the latticework like meat passing through a grinder, pooling on the ground piece by piece.

You yell and ram your shoulder into the doors in desperation. Pain radiates through your arm but they do not budge. The shroud dribbles through, faster and faster, and reconstitutes itself on the floor. It surges up, filling the threshold, blackening it with its essence and drowning out the light.

Fuck. So much for that.

Cursing, you draw $blade, its silver-white edge catching what light remains in the encroaching darkness. You tread backwards as the shroud oozes through the gap in the doors, separating into thin, vine-like tendrils. Your heart pounds, your breath caught in your throat. Nothing in your training—from the Spire’s countless bestiaries to its tomes on magic to $master’s own extensive experience—has prepared you for this.

How do you fight something you do not understand? How do you fight darkness itself? How do you stop it? This is not like Nalos’ basilisk. There is no blood to spill or head to decapitate. Perhaps it is like a brightwarden’s wards—hundreds of magical threads woven together to create a pulsing barrier, one that can be easily punched through.

What remaining light goes out, plunging the entrance hall into pitch black.

You inhale. Exhale. Nothing but the sound of your breath, nothing but the sound of something slithering across cold stone.

A gust of wind, a hiss in the dark, and flame roars to life, illuminating Aeran’s face. He raises the makeshift torch and lunges across the hall, skidding to a stop at your side. The flames flicker, chasing back the shadows, and you stare ahead in horror at the congealed, pulsing mass that now fills the gap from floor to ceiling. It moves like a spider emerging from a crack, long legs stretching out to spill across the doors. The tendrils ooze, splitting into vein-like patterns to cling to the door. Darkness erupts at the base and a does branches curl and twist across the floor, rupturing the stone.

Aeran hisses and steps forward, raising the torch high. You fall into a natural guard stance, blade angled, feet apart, prepared to lunge. The shroud it lurches across the hall towards you, drawn magnetically to the sound of your breath. Its tendrils enclose you in a circle, threads splitting and breaking away from its form, the strand fuzzing and misting as they rise into the air.

You pause, frozen with indecision. Where do you strike? What do you strike? You can envision yourself hacking away at the tendrils, but it can always divide and create more. Or you could abandon using alassar entirely and lower your blade, plunging your hand into the oozing darkness to see what happens.

Either way, you’re trapped until this thing—beast, being or creation—is dealt with.