Intro (pre-game)

[flametouched]

Nennali looked up. Instinctively, perhaps to make sure the cavern ceiling was still intact, but what she saw gave her pause-- half-shrouded in darkness, many meters above, a great shape had been carved into the stone ceiling. A round, roughly hewn body with eight pointed legs splayed around it. Faceted red gems had been set where its eyes would be, and the torchlight from below glinted dimly off them. For one stomach-wrenching moment she half expected it to move.

But no. It was only stone.

Another rumble, which sounded suspiciously like an earthquake. Smaller pebbles and debris clattered across the uneven floor, some colliding with her boots.

"I suggest we leave, immediately." That was Casse, ever practical. Her voice sounded more hollow than usual.

"Oh, I reckon."

It took Nennali a moment to realize that Pugs had spoken, given that she'd never heard the Dwarf that quiet. She glanced over--the other two were looking to their leader, who stood motionless over the man's corpse, staring down at it with an unreadable expression. Her knuckles had gone grey from the grip on her knives.

Casse shifted, her bright eyes flickering with what Nennali recognized as frustration, but before the Warforged could repeat herself, Lobfist moved. She straightened, tossing her long plait over her shoulder, and spat on the man's chest.

Why waste good water on contempt, Nennali thought as Lobfist strode away towards the entrance, but she held her tongue. Instead she turned back to look at the room one last time.

Kleathi's apprentice had fallen to her knees, and her eyes were wide and staring at nothing. As Nennali approached, she realized the Halfling girl was trembling. Well, she had lost her mentor, and her world had been turned on its head within the span of a few hours.

Nennali stopped a few places away, realizing she couldn't recall the girl's name. So much had happened, and there hadn't exactly been time to get acquainted--what had it been? Jay...something. Jamila. Jellis. Jess--

"Jessamy," she said firmly. The girl started, nearly losing her grip on Kleathi's mace. Her mentor had been tall for a human, and for this girl the weapon more closely resembled a greatclub. "It's dangerous here. Come with us."

Jessamy wavered, clearly still in shock. Before Nennali could speak again, there was a loud crumbling noise, and both of them were pelted with a hail of stone. Without thinking, Nennali lifted her staff and struck a large chunk hurtling towards the girl's head. It glanced off with a reverberating crack, missing her by a mere handsbreadth. Something clattered to the floor next to it, and Nennali looked down to find she was now holding only half a quarterstaff.

Pushing away the twinge of regret--it had such good balance, too--she tossed the broken piece aside and grabbed the girl's wrists, yanking her to her feet. She took the mace from her for good measure.

"Don't worry, I'll carry this."

"Hurry it up!" That was Pugs, back at normal volume. Apparently she'd come back to check on them. "Sling the poor thing over your shoulder if you have to!"

Jessamy seemed to have finally found her momentum, at least, and she scrambled over the fallen debris with them, wordlessly, with tears streaming down her face.

Mourning is a luxury for the living. Her mother's words. Nennali's own reunion with Kleathi had been so short, and strange, and now she was gone--she'd steeled herself knowing she'd long outlive any human, but she hadn't expected this.

Nennali motioned for Jessamy to go before her up the passageway, knowing the girl's stride was much shorter and not wanting to accidentally leave her behind. The door to the cultists' inner sanctum lay half torn from its hinges--Casse knew when subtlety was no longer required. Up ahead she could hear Pugs grumbling a bit to herself about "longlegs" and "always me looking out for everyone".

As Nennali passed through the doorway, there was a terrible sound, like lightning striking much too close. She felt her hair stand on end, and a wave of dread overtook her, freezing her in her tracks despite her better instincts.

She'd known in her gut something had gone very wrong, but this--

She felt felt herself pulled backwards, inexplicably, heard Jessamy’s scream of terror--

--

Nennali struggled to sit up, disoriented. She must have fallen on her back, as it ached, but she had no memory of the impact. She cast around her for whatever had pulled her backwards--but nothing met her eyes.

Something wasn't right.

She couldn't see.

She cupped both hands over her mouth to mask the sound, and whispered into them. For a long, agonizing moment, nothing happened. Then a feeble light flickered into existence between her fingers. She stared at it a moment, almost affronted; her affinity for the arcane was weak at the best of times, but this was especially pathetic.

Her immediate vicinity was...nothing. The rough stone floor of the cavern. She made a second light, this one taking several attempts to manifest, and sent it off to illuminate the rest of her surroundings.

The cavern was empty. Before her where the doors had been was the open mouth of a tunnel, disappearing into darkness. 

The tremors had ceased. In fact, it was very quiet; unsettlingly so. The stone platform where they had confronted the cultists, the enormous stone spider--vanished. As had the corpse of their opponent. Not even the broken pieces of her quarterstaff remained. The cavern had taken on a grayish tinge, as if all the color had been drained from it. 

As she began to get to her feet, a clanging noise shattered the quiet. She looked down to the source: Kleathi's mace. She'd forgotten she was carrying it. She picked it up and tucked it through her belt.

Nennali felt strangely calm, despite every hair on the back of her neck standing up. She moved to the tunnel entrance, glancing down it as far as she could see before it disappeared around a bend. There was no sign of Jessamy or the others. 

Stay, or move. Those were the only decisions before her. She picked the latter. Feeling almost like she was sleepwalking, she started up the incline, all the while turning the last few moments she could remember over and over in her head.

The girl had reached for her, but she'd fallen, and then--

Nothing.

The tunnel stretched on. She didn't remember it being this long. Surely she'd have reached one of the rooms of the complex above by now. But though it dipped several times, it continued steadily upward. The walls, mostly dull grey stone, gave way to equally dull packed earth and tangles of roots. The ground below held some trace of passage, but it was so old she couldn't say whether it was from man or beast...or worse. Even the scent of earth was faint, and somehow...dusty.

Don't think. Just keep moving.

She couldn't say how much time had passed before the tunnel ended. An hour? Several? Half a day? It felt like an age. All the while she saw not a soul, the only sounds her breathing and her footsteps, strangely muffled. One light she sent ahead of her to give her a better view of what lay ahead, the other she 'held' with one hand around it, close to her chest.

Abruptly, the light up ahead vanished. Nennali froze, but heard nothing. Slowly, she took a step backward...and the light flickered back into the visible spectrum again. With some effort, she manipulated it to illuminate the sides of the tunnel, showing that a pile of jumbled earth and stone had blocked off the passage.

A dead end.

She stood still for a moment. Then approached cautiously, pulling off one of her gloves. She moved her bare hand across the surface in front of her, not quite touching it, feeling for drafts of air.

Nothing, nothing...but the air closer to the top felt ever so slightly colder. She wrapped her scarf around her nose and mouth to shield from dust, and pulled the mace from her belt.

She had to back away very quickly, when dislodging a large stone sent more loose earth cascading down from above through the opening. After a moment she sent one of her lights through to inspect the space above; from what she could tell, the collapsed section was perhaps twice her height in length. She continued digging away at the pile, pushing larger solid rocks to the side, tamping down loose dirt with her boots.

It was grueling work with no guarantee of success, but she didn't see any other options. She stopped several times to rest, and drink, refilling her waterskin with a whispered spell. That one came a bit easier than making lights, for some reason.

The feeling of cold was definitely increasing. Despite the physical exertion from digging, she'd begun to shiver a little, and re-wrapped her scarf to cover her head too, to conserve heat. She began to sense she was close to her goal, when the mace hit stone--a large one almost the size of her torso, too big to dig around quickly.

Against her better judgement, and perhaps out of desperation, she kicked it. Solidly, with the flat of her boot--and felt something give slightly.

"Dragon Above, guide me--" she whispered under her breath, and shoved.

It took several tries, but finally the misshapen boulder tumbled down the other slope, grinding to a halt after several meters. Nennali lay on her back in the small tunnel she'd cleared, breathing hard for a moment.

It's dangerous. Don't stay here. Move.

Whether the voice was her own, or came from another, she couldn't say. She scrambled down the incline after the boulder, ducking behind it briefly to re-conjure one of her lights that had gone out. The tunnel continued upward.

She was running now. Boots crunching on a mix of pebbles and dirt, until one of them landed on something flat and hard--hewn stone.

The tunnel was no longer an unevenly shaped arch of packed earth, but squared and set with stone bricks. Burnt out remains of torches set in crumbling sconces upon the walls every twenty meters or so. No light save her own still, but the change was welcome. She slowed her pace to something steadier and less exhausting, but still more than a walk, trying to minimize the sound of her footsteps.

Up ahead, her light flickered across something--an iron gate, the lock and chain long rusted to pieces. It spanned the mouth of the tunnel to the ceiling. Beyond it--more darkness, but faint grey shapes within it. Nennali pressed her back to one wall, letting the light she held close wink out. The other she sent through the bars. It briefly traced the shape of a worn set of stone steps before becoming too dim in the distance to make out.

She let it disappear instead of calling it back, and spent a few long moments letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. The stairs appeared to spiral around a massive pillar, and she could just make out the lengthy shapes of other gates like the one she stood by, further up the spiral.

The Catacombs.

No, that's impossible, we were under the Harbor--

No, that's impossible. The gates are wrong.

Indeed, the shape of the iron bars was different enough from the ones she remembered, but the layout was just familiar enough that it intensified her unease.

Don't stay still for too long.

She reached out to grasp the bars of the gate. They were cold to the touch, as the stone had been. She pulled, and the hinges shrieked, but it moved just enough for her to slip through. The sound made her wince, but despite the volume of the chamber, it didn't echo.

Nothing for it. She headed for the stairs. She could see just enough to make out the parts that had begun to crumble and avoid tripping over them. This stair went much higher than the one at the Catacombs, or perhaps it was her impatience making it seem so. All the gates she passed seemed to lead back down into darkness. Finally, up ahead she made out what seemed to be a bridge made of stone spanning the diameter of the cylindrical room. The stairs evened out onto a platform there, but continued upward after it.

There were two doors, one on either end of the bridge. What seemed to be wood banded with iron, with large pull rings. Both were shut, though on closer inspection one of them was cracked the slightest bit ajar.

Nennali felt a pit in her stomach, and decided not to question it. She headed back to the stairs and continued upward.

After another minute or so, she could see the end--what must be the ground floor, scattered with the shapes of ancient, rotted furniture. Large, arched windows were spaced around it, but the panes, if they were glass, were as blank and grey as everything else, impossible to see through. By now the prickling at the back of her neck felt more like a cold, vise-like grip. It had been nearly three decades since she set foot in the Catacombs, but she still remembered the grand hall, the spiral stairs, the chapel...The windows had been higher up, and not nearly so large, and the doors were all in the wrong places, but the resemblance was there.

She needed to leave immediately.

The larger set of doors she knew must be the entrance--or in her case, the exit. What lay beyond them she couldn't say, but neither could she remain here any longer. As if answering that thought, she heard what sounded like a faint scraping sound from below. Like a rusted gate opening.

She sprang for the doors, and pulled--for one heartrending moment she thought they wouldn't budge. The wood groaned, then sighed, rasping across the stones of the floor, one of the hinges half detached from the frame. The heavy door slid to a stop, caught against a paving stone, but Nennali turned sideways and forced herself through, nearly snagging her belt on the door handle. She pulled in a breath as far as she could--and suddenly she was free, dashing across the courtyard. Past the ruins of an eerily familiar fountain--but no, it had been round, not square--

Hadn't it?

Something urged her not to stop moving. She let instinct guide her--right, then a left, another left, under that awning--the Harbor gate should be--

She stumbled to a stop, disoriented. She stood before the remains of what had once been a tower of some sort, still standing several stories above the gutted buildings around it. But the airship landing was to the north, and she knew she'd turned south when--

She looked to the sky.

It was black as pitch, devoid of stars.

--

"The reason there's so many ruins all over is that cities are doomed to fall, of course."

Nen had looked at Velrath sharply, and the woman had laughed. "What's that face you're making?"

"My mother," Nen had said slowly. "She said the same thing, once."

Velrath had looked at her almost sympathetically. "You're still young. You'll see it happen in your lifetime, I'm sure."

"What do you mean?"

Velrath had looked out over the Harbor, the wind from the sea picking at her short, pale hair. "This city was built on a ruin, and that ruin was built on a ruin from long before that...and someday it will be a ruin again. Perhaps sooner rather than later. It's not a threat, it's simply the way of things. The land will not tolerate it. Not even the gods and their favor can deny that."

Nen had stared at her, unable to understand how she could speak of such destruction nonchalantly. "But what will happen to everyone here? And if that's true, why build the city to begin with? If it's so dangerous."

"Oh, little Nehenni." Velrath had laughed again, in the good-natured way all the older Venomblade did when she asked questions they expected everyone already knew the answers to. Though she knew there was no ill will behind it, it was difficult not to find it condescending sometimes. "Some will survive. Some won't. People don't learn from the mistakes of their ancestors. At least the fools from across the sea certainly don't."

"Why are you all here then?"

"Why do you think?"

Nen had shaken her head, unsure.

"It's a bit hard to ignore, yes?" Here she'd gestured behind herself at the towers of House Cannith in the distance. "And we'd be remiss giving up the trade opportunities." Velrath had shrugged. "Even something transient has value. You might say more. Even if it lives on only in memory, if it existed, it left a mark on the world somehow."

The thought had filled Nen with a deep melancholy she couldn't put words to.

--

It was the same feeling that weighed heavily on her chest now, huddled in the shadow of buildings both utterly alien and achingly familiar. She'd tried to find somewhere safe to rest for a while, but nerves kept her on edge. She kept seeing movement at the edges of her vision, prowling shadows that she couldn't be sure were real or not. The urgency that had bid her to flee earlier had faded to a low buzz of anxiety in her gut.

Stormreach or not, she didn't think she could bear walking these crumbling streets any longer than necessary. She needed to find a way out, get her bearings...and--

What's the point? This is Dolurrh, isn't it? I'm dead. They say the spirit has difficult accepting it at first, and will deny--

The thought that had been dogging the back of her mind finally surfaced. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to regain composure.

And if not?

What are the other possibilities?

If it's futile, then it's futile. At least I tried.

She took a deep breath, then another. The air felt heavy--but it was air. Her hands felt solid. She clasped them together, felt the bones in her fingers one by one. Fingernails. Her skin was slightly dry.

Real. I'm real. What are the other possibilities?

She dredged through years of memories to her studies. To the almanac cataloguing the planar orbits. When and where was the next time Mabar was coterminous with the Material Plane? She couldn't recall. Something about a majority of new moons. But there had been a full moon only two nights before...

No, it didn't make sense. If she'd stepped through to Mabar, she shouldn't be able to see at all, let alone make light, as faint as it had been. And there's no way a manifest zone would have twisted the city so much. If it had been Xoriat, perhaps--

"Maybe I've gone mad after all," she muttered to herself. The sound of her own voice startled her. She waited a moment, listening, to make sure nothing else had heard her.

All was quiet.

--

Kleathi had a knack for fire, especially, and had been complaining about how all the other girls in the dormitory always asked her to light candles for them.

"I'd rather do something useful with magic," she'd said, and Nen had laughed.

"What's useful?" she'd asked.

"Oh, I don't know...forbidden spells! Conjuring blades of light, turning to stone! That sort of thing." Her deep brown eyes were alight with excitement.

"Turning to stone? Is that useful? How would you turn back?"

"Dol Arrah, Nen! Must you always dash my dreams with your practicality? Don't you have any ambition at all?"

"Of course I do, but someone's got to look out for you."

Kleathi had put her hands on her hips and shaken her head. "Well, if you insist--I'm going to tell you a secret. But only because we're friends. You can't tell anyone else."

Nen had simply raised her eyebrows at that, and nodded.

"You remember that time I got assigned to bring the prelate his afternoon tea? Well, he was late, and I was standing around in his study like an idiot waiting for him, and I got curious--"

"You didn't," Nen had admonished, knowing she absolutely had.

"I just wanted a little peek at his books! They hide all the exciting things from us--anyway--shhh! Let me finish!" Kleathi had lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Did you know that a really powerful Cleric can open Gates to other planes? Even Ethereal and Shadow--"


Nen sat up abruptly. She'd been deep in meditation, her forehead resting on one knee, Kleathi's mace across her lap.

The Plane of Shadows. Of course.

But she was an apostate. Perhaps not in the (figurative) eyes of the Flame itself, since it still saw fit to grant her power, but she'd never be welcomed back into the Guardians' ranks, nor did she have any desire to be. Her studies had covered healing wounds and illness, warding, and basic self defense. The sort of advanced magics Kleathi had dreamed about were beyond Nen's reach. But--

She shifted a bit and picked up the mace. It was plain, solid, unadorned save for a small symbol of the Flame etched into the haft near the hilt. The grip was wrapped leather and had clearly been replaced at least once over the years, as the metal of the weapon showed pitting and scarring from use.

 

Was it possible Kleathi had achieved her dream after all?

 

Could the mace have been her divine focus? Was it possible to store a spell, especially one so powerful, in an object like this? Or--

No. Jessamy had seen her die. Even if she'd been mistaken, what were the odds--

But if that were what the cultists were trying to do--

She needed to get to the Harbor.


The problem was, she had no idea which way to go.

Walking the streets of Stormreach's shadow felt like being in a dream, where everything was familiar but none of it made sense. Alleyways twisted and turned, and every time she thought she'd gotten her bearings, she ended up more lost than before. Even finding higher ground was useless; she'd stumbled across the tower again, but upon climbing it found that from above, much of the 'city' was shrouded in a dark mist that made it impossible to make out. Even the fitful wind that tugged at her hair couldn't seem to budge it at all.

The wind.

She turned her head to the dampened but unmistakable smell of salt. Determined to look only where her feet fell, so as not to be distracted, she followed her nose. It still took an agonizing amount of time to make any headway, but the smell slowly but surely grew stronger, and finally at the end of an especially long alley, she saw what looked like the piles of a dock.

Her need for urgency and her desire not to draw more attention than necessary struggled with one another for a moment. She settled for a hasty walk, gripping the mace in her right hand. She was unsure if it would be useful against anything she encountered, but it was better than nothing.

When she emerged from the alley, the sight before her gave her pause. The water beneath the dock was dark and unnaturally smooth and still. No waves or ripples, it undulated very faintly, more like some sort of viscous oil than water. Every nerve in her body screamed not to approach it, so she heeded them, turning the corner and skirting as close to the buildings along the shore as she could.

The shoreline made an abrupt right angle after about fifty paces, then doubled back after a block into a canal. That made no sense, as she should have crossed some sort of bridge over it to get here to begin with, but she couldn't spare the energy to puzzle it out. Not to mention that once she rounded the corner, she did see a bridge...but what was across it made her stop.

It looked like the sea wall across from the Waterworks, despite that the route she'd taken to get here should have made that impossible. On top of that, the massive blocks of stone, each one three times as tall as she was, had been hewn in two. The wall was shattered down the middle, almost looking like it had been struck by lightning, and the jagged wound pulsed with darkness. The 'water' here seemed drawn to it, drawing up the wall in some sort of perverse reversed waterfall.

It was a portal.


Nen stood there for as long as she could stand it. Simply being near it made her feel ill, but she couldn't reach any other conclusion other than this was the result of the ritual they'd tried to halt. This was what Kleathi had died trying to prevent. This--

It was also her only chance of escape.

She took one step forward. Then another. The water, blessedly, ignored her.

What if it simply tears me apart?

What if? What if I ignore it and wander here forever until I become a shade? What then? What was the point of it all?

If the ritual succeeded. The Spinner is free. All cities become ruins in time. Even if it is transient--

She started to run.

--

Regret was a feeling Nen knew intimately, as someone who often struggled with impulse. But this was definitely worse than anything she'd felt before.

The closer she'd gotten to the portal, the stronger the nausea, and as she stumbled through, the abrupt change in terrain sent her sprawling. She lay there for a moment to get the retching under control. The previous transition she blessedly didn't remember, but this felt akin to being put in a small box and shaken violently. She felt around for Kleathi's mace, using it to prop herself up a bit.

She looked around--or attempted to, as her vision swam. Finally, it settled enough for her to start dragging herself away from the portal and its dizzying influence.

She was alive--for now, at least. As the pounding headache she'd decided to develop receded slightly, she began to take in her surroundings.

With growing horror, she realized not much had changed.

Well, she was definitely out of the city; she lay on a rocky incline, dotted by trees which clung precariously to the sparse soil. Everything around her was tinged the same gloomy grey the city had possessed.

Nen voiced an oath under her breath she'd learned from eavesdropping in the Marketplace. She hadn't gone back...but merely traveled elsewhere.

Before she could decide whether it was worth braving the portal again, however, a low rumbling struck her ears. Loose earth and pebbles began clattering down the incline. She scrambled for the nearest tree and hung on grimly. Her stomach hadn't quite settled, and as the ground heaved it was enough of an effort just to keep down the rations she'd eaten back in the tunnel.

When the terrible noise and movement finally subsided, it became clear that the hillside was a fairly new phenomenon. The other side was a sheer twenty-meter drop, larger now than it had been several minutes ago, judging by the fact that the raw face of the earth was still shedding debris. Nen dragged herself to her feet, unsteady, more than ready to brave the shadow-stalked city streets again over this.

There was one small problem.

The portal was gone.

--

She'd seen plenty of wilderness in her travels, but nothing quite like this. Her homeland had seen great upheaval, but much of it was far enough in the past that it had settled into the landscape, become overgrown. Here the not infrequent tremors had scattered fresh wounds everywhere.

The immediate area seemed like some sort of arid scrubland, and her hunter's instincts told her to move quickly and find cover as soon as possible. That was a tall order, considering that what probably had been a level plain was now riddled with cliffs and fissures.

The only blessing, if one could call it that, was the fact that there was no scorching midday sun to worry about. The sky was as dark as ever, and though she was accustomed to being able to see on overcast nights, this was different.

She didn't notice the cliff edge until it was almost too late. She took a step back, unable to see the bottom of the drop-off and not really inclined to find out. Then she thought of the tremors, and backed up another twenty paces or so. She turned to walk parallel to the edge, though that proved easier said than done.

Time passed; it was hard to say how much. She tried to drink sparingly from her water supply, knowing at this rate she needed to conserve as much energy as she could. At some point, she realized that the low rumbling just on the edge of her hearing was not another earthquake; it was too steady, and did not stop.

She was debating turning right back around and heading in the other direction, when she realized what the sound must be. Running water. A great volume of it; she'd only seen a river that size a few times, in the spring when the floodwaters came rushing down the mountains in the north. The air grew slowly but steadily colder as she approached.

The river was wide enough that she could barely see the opposite shore. It disappeared over the edge of the cliff with a roar and a spray of mist. She was reluctant to approach the bank too closely; she could see fissures here from the quakes as well. Instead she stood a moment admiring the raw force of it from a good ways back, before heading upstream.

The sound of the river was somehow comforting after nothing but her breathing and the fitful wind, but it also meant she had to be more cautious. She tried to stay alert for shelter, knowing she would have to rest soon enough.

Something--instinct, perhaps--told her to turn her head.

[stuff goes here]

--

Nen pushed herself to sit up, fighting back a groan of pain. She had no idea how much time she'd lost, or indeed, whether she'd been unconscious or simply too stunned to focus. The memory of the creature spurred her onward.

She was at the bottom of the crevasse. By some miracle she hadn't been buried by debris, but her head and ribs ached fiercely, as did a myriad of other places once she tried to move. She dragged herself to her feet, swaying, leaning against the sheer wall as long as she dared. One step, then another...the ground at the bottom of the fissure was uneven and scattered with all sorts of fallen rocks, and progress was agonizingly slow. But once again, the choice was hardly a choice at all, as staying put meant certain death.

She'd been hoping for a way to climb up, but the crevasse stretched on with not much variation in the sheer walls. She had to stop and rest several times, as much as she knew staying put was dangerous, collapsing and losing consciousness would be even more so.

Before she realized it, the already dim surroundings had darkened further. She looked up and realized there was no sky above, but a rocky ceiling--at some point the crevasse had become a cave. She stopped a moment, nearly ready to retrace her steps, when something caught her eye.

Light.

Her first thought was that it was a trick. It was faint enough that she couldn't gauge the distance, and difficult to focus on. But there was something about it that made her think it didn't belong in the dim grayness. Something she couldn't put a finger on.

She moved closer, cautiously, too worn down to feel any apprehension. The crevasse opened into a slightly larger cave, and she kept to the wall, trying to process what she was seeing.

It took longer than she expected to pick her way over; and longer still to understand the source. What she'd thought was a break in the cave wall was shimmering slightly, the edges strangely undefined. And through it, a faint glow...nestled in a crevice was a cluster of bioluminescent fungi, shedding dim blue light.

Blue.

Numb all over, her pain forgotten, Nen crouched and picked up a stone half the size of her palm, tossing it in a low arc. It passed through the opening without even a flicker, clattering gently across the cave floor on the other side. Then silence.

She took a step, then another.

--

The passage was not so different from the cave she'd just been in; nondescript stone, though here the edges were less jagged. More fungus was scattered here and there, some as high as the ceiling, showing her a tunnel that extended in to directions, disappearing around bends. She turned and looked back the way she'd come.

The portal was in the middle of the floor here, the edges wavering in midair. Through it the cave looked almost flat, unreal, like a painting drained of color. Dazed, Nen could only stare at it, half convinced she'd finally started to expire from thirst, and was imagining things. She took a step backward, reaching out to touch the tunnel wall. It was solid--slightly damp, even.

She kept a hand on it as she moved through the tunnel, one unsteady step at a time. She could hear water, somewhere, faintly. Her hand found it first, a trickle running down the tunnel wall. She cupped a hand against it, until it filled her palm, cold and clear.

She drank just enough to make the thirst bearable, though it was difficult to stop, even knowing the water could be filled with any number of unpleasant things. She pushed herself to move onward, at least until the tunnel branched, and she found a small alcove hidden from sight of the main passage.

It was here she finally sank to her knees, letting the toll of her ordeal overtake her.

--
Her next awakening was a rude one.