Chapter 29: The Lurker on the Threshold¶
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Prologue: Elroy Jenkins, Pentarch of Valor¶
GATHER round, friends, and pull yourselves a stool — and pour yourselves something with SOME TEETH in it — for what I am about to tell you is the GRIM, GLORIOUS, GHOST-HAUNTED truth of Candlemere Island, and you will not credit a word of it unless I BELLOW it AT you.
We had come a long way to plant our boots on that cursed crust of stone. Through wisp-light and shambling muck. Through diplomacy with the lizardfolk that I am STILL, by the beards of my fathers, rather proud of. And there it stood at the witching hour — FORTY FEET of jagged ruin, broken at the crown, choked at the throat with creeping weed. The moon punched through the cloud like a silver coin through silk. The wind, friends — the WIND whispered Goodbye to us, as though the stone itself had been holding its breath for centuries and chose THAT MOMENT to let it out.
Now — our brother Rust did not come with us. Understand the WHY of it. The lad carries a curse none of us yet knows how to manage, and to drag him cursebound into a place THIS saturated with eldritch dread would have been folly of the FIRST water. So he kept the cart on the shore with Dog, and made sure neither of them went jumping into the Tuskwater. A wiser sentry NO KINGDOM EVER HAD.
What we found beneath that tower, friends, was OLDER than the kingdom by an order of magnitude. Older than Earthfall. Coins from the first stirrings of humanity. Aklo writ into stone by hands that worshipped something they should not have been worshipping. A whispering dread that LATCHED to me and to Master Dravyn and would NOT let go. And waiting in the dark for us — a statue with TEN THOUSAND EYES that opened all at once and reached for us with stony arms wider than a war-cart's wheel.
I'll tell you the truth of it. We almost did not make it out. We were tested in ways that would have broken lesser men. But MAGNIFICENTLY, GLORIOUSLY — we did. And so we tell of it now, in the manner befitting men who have looked an Outer God's idol DEAD in the eye and lived to drink about it.
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I. The Tower at the Witching Hour¶
Late Gozran (Apr), 4711 AR — Candlemere Island, the Tuskwater
The shambling mass had only just deflated. The sap-streaked vines that had clutched at them through the long fight at the southern pier lay tangled and limp at the waterline, and a god-ray of moonlight spilled silver through parting clouds onto the ruin at the island's heart. Four of the five Pentarchs stood at its foot in the small hours of a cloudy, overcast night. The witching hour pressed close.
Above them rose a forty-foot cylinder of jagged stone, its crown broken open to the sky, rubble heaped at its base like the leavings of some long-ago collapse. The lone entrance opened onto an interior choked with stones and creeping weeds. Now and again the wind caught against the rough lip of the tower and seemed to form a single word against their ears: Goodbye. The moon punched through cloud like a silver coin through silk, and was gone again.
Rust Freelox would not be making the descent. The young oracle's curse — a binding none of them yet understood well enough to manage in close quarters — made dragging him into a place this saturated with eldritch dread an act of recklessness ill-suited to the seat of public welfare. He and Dog remained on the shore with the cart, posted to watch the island's edge and make certain, as Elroy put it with a touch of fondness, that neither of them went jumping into the lake. The four who would press onward took an hour to lace their boots, dress their wounds, and bring themselves to full strength before approaching the tower in earnest. Rust topped Dog off from across the bond and his fellows gathered themselves at the ruin's mouth.
Dravyn conjured an orb of pale light to drift at his shoulder, and Elroy slotted his everlight crystal into the face of his shield so that, should the Pentarchy scatter beneath the tower, no one would have to fight in the dark alone. Two pools of light, four shields of courage, and a single staircase winding down into the deep.
Perry surveyed the entrance with a careful eye. Among the rubble, half-buried under fallen stone, a handful of intact crates still lay where someone had set them what might have been centuries ago. Dravyn's hands moved in a brief sigil and the air around the threshold rippled with the soft pulse of his arcana — confirming what their bones had already begun to suspect. The place was haunted. The magic underpinning it was older and higher-ranked than anything the runelord was accustomed to handling.
Grotdor, picking his way around the perimeter with a frontiersman's economy, kicked a pebble loose and caught the wet glint of metal under the rubble. He stooped, dug, and came up with a crimson-bladed kukri whose edge seemed to drink in what little light there was. The weapon had a name carved into the pommel: Thirst. It was Aldori work — agile, finesse, and decidedly unpleasant in temperament. None of them rushed to wield it. Grotdor wrapped it in cloth and stowed it in the party stash for a wielder more chaotic of temperament than any of them.
Elroy, undeterred by the tower's mood, stepped into the rubble-choked interior to investigate a set of swirling symbols inscribed along the inner walls. The dread aura latched onto him at once — and onto Dravyn, who had followed in pursuit of his own arcane sweep. Both men felt the air close around them like a cold hand at the back of the neck. Both attempted to throw it off. Both failed entirely. Dravyn, with a wry grimace, called on the well of fortune he reserved for the worst of moments — and the second attempt fared no better than the first.
The curse did not strike them down. Instead it settled into them — a low, crawling unease, a creeping certainty that something behind them was about to move. Should fear take either of them within the next day, the dread would compound it: enfeebling them in the moment they could least afford. And the binding would not lift while they remained within Candlemere's bounds.
Grotdor and Perry made their own attempts to unwind the inscriptions and learned only that the artificer who had carved them had been working in a tradition the Pentarchy was not equipped to unravel. The runes were beyond their craft. Whoever had labored over these walls had answered to a different, older school.
Then Elroy, of all of them, turned his religious training on the iconography — and, to the quiet horror of the rest of the party, pulled a name out of his dwarven schooling that none of them had wanted to hear. Yog-Sothoth. The Lurker on the Threshold. The Key and the Gate. Greatest of the Outer Gods. An eldritch presence from before there had been nations to fear it. My training in religion comes from my dwarven history, Elroy muttered, half to himself, as the name surfaced. Maybe there's a point in time where the dwarves interacted that just stuck with me during my education.
“They dug too deep.”
— Elroy Jenkins
The shattered crates near the entrance yielded modest spoils when the four broke them open: a handful of gold coin, a shiny rock of no particular value, and a Moderate Potion of Swimming. Perry, who held a hand crossbow that wanted both his hands, tucked the potion into his pouch with the candid acknowledgment that he was the worst swimmer in the company.
A spiral staircase wound down from the broken floor into a darkness that no torch had warmed for a very long time. Elroy posted Grotdor on point, and the kineticist confirmed what the air already implied. There were no traps. Only a suffocating, oppressive silence that had been gathering itself for an age.
They descended.
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II. The Offering Basin¶
The staircase wrapped tight upon itself and opened into a low chamber whose ceiling pressed close enough to make a tall man stoop. Dead leaves and dried nettles had drifted against the southern wall in slow eddies, the work of decades of wind through breaches the four could not yet see. Two further staircases led further down — east and west — and the air was cold, stifling, oppressive in a way that had little to do with temperature.
In the center of the chamber a shallow stone basin had been set into the floor, its lip choked with vines and lichen that had crept in from somewhere damp. Perry's careful sweep found writing along its inner curve — spiky, alien script, in the same Aklo hand as the symbols above. And resting within the lichen, dulled by centuries of neglect, six large silver coins. Each was thick as a hockey-puck's quarter; each was about the size of a hand. None of the four had ever seen coinage of this size or weight.
Elroy brought his dwarven crafting eye to bear on the metalwork. The verdict took a moment to settle and then settled like a thunderclap. The coins were not common silver. They were artifacts of the Age of Destiny — the first stirrings of human civilization on Golarion, three millennia before Starfall, eight thousand years before the present age. Older than virtually anything ever catalogued in the Stolen Lands.
Dravyn, suspicious of any coin that had outlived a civilization, tossed one of his own gold pieces into the basin alongside the silver and traced his sweep again. The silver returned no aura at all. Whatever significance the coins carried was historical, not magical. The runelord's brow eased a fraction.
“What's the worst that could happen, stealing from an elder god?”
— Elroy Jenkins
He pocketed one of the six. The remaining five he left where they lay, for the party stash and a Stormfire Reach scholar's later examination. The air thickened by another half-degree of cold as he straightened. Perry was already at the eastern staircase, hand crossbow at the ready. They followed him down.
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III. The Idol of Many Eyes¶
The eastern stair opened onto a long vaulted hall whose ceiling rose twenty feet above their heads — the first room since the threshold that gave them air enough to draw a full breath. A second staircase climbed away from the southern end of the western wall. At the south end of the hall itself, a stone dais rose, carved with more of the spiky Aklo writing the basin had borne, and from the dais, vaulting toward the ceiling, climbed the statue.
It was a thing of stone orbs and tentacles and teeth, welded together into a hateful abstract form by an artist who had clearly believed in what he was carving. A dozen orbs at least, several of them hollow with fitful yellow flame burning within — flame that should have died out millennia ago and had not. Tentacles wound through the stone like serpents that had been frozen in the middle of striking. The carving was meticulous, dedicated, almost loving. Whatever the artisan had been worshipping, he had labored with conviction.
Grotdor scanned for drafts and found his eye dragged back to the statue, again and again, before he could complete the sweep. Elroy, from a different angle, caught what the kineticist had missed: a thin seam of mortar where there should have been none, behind the dais — a secret door, cobwebbed and dust-choked, that had been waiting for someone to notice it.
He stepped toward it.
That was when the orbs began to grind.
The tentacles writhed. One of the ten thousand eyes opened at the heart of the statue's body, pouring out a column of cold, white light. The brazier-orbs flared. The construct shuddered free of its dais and stepped forward, stone joints cracking against stone, and its first two strikes were already coming for Elroy and Dravyn before any of the four had drawn breath.
The fight that followed nearly broke them.
Elroy planted himself and raised his shield, the everlight crystal flaring with the impact as the first stony tendril cracked against him and turned. He bellowed a taunt that rolled through the vaulted hall like thunder rebounding from a mountainside — You don't have enough eyes to take in this MAGNIFICENCE! — and the construct's terrible attention swung onto him in full. The statue's grip seized him in the next breath; a tendril wound around his waist and dragged him bodily into one of the burning orbs, and the fire bloomed white across his armor and skin in a wave that cooked him from collarbone to thigh. He held the line, but only just. The construct burned him alive a second time before he could break the grip, and the smell of scorched mail and beard-hair filled the chamber.
Perry's analytical mind worked through the construct's defenses with the precision of a watchmaker. He stored a stratagem and worked it through his next two shots, layering acid into the construct's joints and calling his findings across the hall as he learned them. The construct was hardened beyond anything fire could shake; magic and force barely scratched it; precision had nothing to find in a creature with no organs to fail. But cold — cold, the records said, cold would bite. Perry shouted the weakness to the rest of the party as he reloaded.
Dravyn had already loosed a hovering ember of conjured fire against the statue's flank and seen the damage rebuff itself off the stone. He pivoted with a runelord's discipline, drained the bond he had been husbanding through the descent, and quickened himself with a hastening rune that gave him the breath to layer a glaive strike on top of a frost-rune the next round. The cold struck home — barely — and the construct's hardness ate most of it. But the angle Perry had named was the angle Grotdor was waiting to take.
Grotdor stepped forward with the patience of a furnace door. He drew breath, set his stance, and held the kinetic charge until the moment opened. When he loosed the eruption, he switched the gate at the last instant — fire to cold — and the cold answered. It was not a blast; it was an answer. The frost found the statue exactly where its hateful geometry was weakest. A spiderweb of white frost raced across the stone in the heartbeat after the strike, and then the surface of the construct simply shattered — eyes and tendrils and brazier-orbs cracking open in concentric rings outward from the heart of the impact. A third of the statue's stone hide fell away in a single moment. The chamber filled with the sound of grinding rubble and a shriek that was not exactly sound.
The construct staggered. The hateful eye at its heart dimmed.
The Pentarchy did not let it recover. Elroy broke the grab and slashed through the construct's hip, sending a hip's worth of stone tumbling. Dravyn's hands moved across Elroy's burned flank with a healer's tenderness no one outside the party would have credited to him, vitality flooding into the burn-wracked body even as the runelord's other hand finished a frost-rune that bit through the construct's diminishing armor. There, there, Dravyn murmured, half to Elroy, half to himself. Little guy. Big guy. — a strange, weary tenderness from a man who did not often offer tenderness.
And then Grotdor finished it. A wave of fire, broad and clean, washed across the broken construct's chest, and what remained of the idol's stone form cracked into cinders and tumbled into a heap of broken curve and broken horror.
In the silence that followed, no one spoke for a long beat. The brazier-orbs guttered out one by one. Grotdor turned to Elroy with the simple economy that was his manner. He laid a hand on the seared mail and murmured something under his breath — a brewer's prayer that did not name a god — and warmth poured into the wound, knitting the worst of the burns closed for a span of minutes. Perry, methodical as ever, set himself to the work of mending Elroy's battered shield with a craftsman's patience. The Pentarchy took an hour at the foot of the broken dais — a thief from a haunted house with the haunted house's owner dead in the corner. By the time they were ready to move on, they were whole and they were armed.
The cobwebbed seam Elroy had spotted before the fight was still there. They opened it.
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IV. The Forgotten Armory¶
The hidden door swung outward onto a corridor that had not felt a footfall in centuries. Cobwebs hung in the air in sheets so thick that Grotdor had to wave them aside as he led the way; the dust on the floor was as soft and as deep as snow. The corridor ended at a stone door, and beyond the stone door lay a small chamber whose stone shelves were heaped with the relics of an armory long since forgotten.
Most of what had once been weapons was now wreckage. Steel that had not been oiled in a thousand years had taken its own revenge on itself; hafted weapons crumbled when Grotdor brushed them with the back of a glove. But a few items had survived the centuries hidden in their tin tombs.
A small canister of coin, intact enough that the seal held when Perry pried it open. They added it to the party's purse without ceremony.
A wand of bone and dark wood, its head carved into a hand whose fingers ended in too-long claws. Dravyn picked it up, turned it once in his fingers, and named its purpose without consulting any book: a focus for a particular flavor of necromantic compulsion, the sort of thing that could draw a man down into shadows that had not existed a moment before. He set it aside in the party stash with a note for Rust. The young oracle had a flexibility in such matters that none of them shared.
And a leather pouch of glittering powder, half-spilled where its inner wrap had decayed. Perry recognized it at once — a counter for anything that decided it would rather not be seen. He pocketed it. Neither Grotdor nor Elroy had a free hand for a thrown consumable in the heat of a fight, and Perry had long since perfected the art of throwing things.
Elroy, who had been quiet during the sweep, ran his hands along the rear wall of the armory and stopped at a place where the stone felt subtly wrong. His sweep paid out a second time. A second hidden door, cooler air spilling from the seams. The chamber beyond, by feel, was larger than the armory and not nearly so choked.
He set his shoulder to it.
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V. The Chamber of Arches¶
The door opened onto a vaulted chamber whose ceiling rose higher than the idol hall had. A burning metal rod stood in the center of the room, casting a pale, gas-yellow light that did not quite manage to chase the shadows from the alcoves. Six enormous stone arches ringed the chamber — three to the north, three to the south. Three opened onto staircases of their own, one downward and two upward; the other three framed only blank stone, and tiny arcane runes were scribed into the masonry around every one of them.
Dravyn paused at the threshold.
A small thing had been nagging at him since the corridor — an instinct out of the wrath-rune's quiet voice that he did not often heed. He chose, on the strength of it, to sweep the chamber with another arcane pulse before any of them stepped fully inside. The runes around the arches lit up at once, as they should have. Three other shapes also lit up — three forms lurking in the alcoves at the chamber's edge, where the gas-yellow light did not quite reach.
Shadows.
The Pentarchy had time to ready themselves before the things came skittering out. Without Dravyn's pause they would not have. The shadows would have struck from invisibility with a full surprise round against an unprepared party; as it stood, the four set their feet and met the attack on even footing.
The fight was nastier than the idol's brute force. The shadows were incorporeal, slipping in and out of solid stone as if it were so much fog; their strikes drew not blood but vitality, leaving a sickening cold where the cuts should have bled. Worse, one of them caught Elroy in the throat with a glancing claw, and the shadow at his feet — the shadow that had been his since he was a boy on the Brevic frontier — writhed free. It tore itself out from under him with a sound like wet silk parting and stood up beside him as a shape of its own, hateful and clumsy and bound to its parent's malice.
Elroy looked down at the place his shadow should have been. I'm gonna need my shadow repaired after this, he allowed, in a voice that had not lost any of its bombast for being briefly philosophical.
He took the wound and held the line anyway, throwing himself into two strikes meant for Dravyn before the runelord could shake free of the swarm. Grotdor's flames laid waste to the thinned lines of two of the shadows; Dravyn's force-shards punched through the resistance that had blunted everything else, and a frost-rune dispatched another. Perry's analytical eye returned again and again with new fragments of weakness — armor classes, resistances, the precise rank of light that would burn them clean.
The last shadow took a long time to die. Dravyn killed it.
He stepped close, raised his off-hand, and let a vengeful glare carry the rest of his power onto the construct. The shadow's form held against the wrath-rune's pressure for a heartbeat and then crumbled inward, sublimating into nothing. In the same instant, the spawn that had been Elroy's shadow lost its puppet strings and collapsed — folding back where it belonged, sliding under Elroy's boots as if it had merely been napping under a chair.
I stare vengefully into him, Dravyn said to no one in particular. He just goes like this. And then he jumps back into Elroy.
It did. They paused only long enough for Perry to brew a tonic on the spot — a rare alchemical refinement that took the cold weakness out of Elroy's bones for a stretch of hours — and they pushed on. There were more arches to try.
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VI. The Council Chamber¶
The first arch they followed climbed a short staircase to a chamber that, in another era, had clearly served as a meeting room. Stone benches lined the walls in a ring; openings at the east led to further stairs and other doors. The dust here was thicker than in the armory — not the soft accumulation of an undisturbed century but the sediment of millennia, layered and crusted into the corners until it was its own geology.
Perry's sweep registered the place at once for what it was. A site of violence. Old, terrible violence.
Elroy turned a battlefield eye on the masonry and put it together with the kind of clean intuition that did not always announce itself. There were patterns burned into the stone — not the scorching of a blade or the chipping of an arrow, but the radial signature of force pressed into walls from a single point of origin. The geometry of the damage spoke to him; the scale of it confirmed what the geometry suggested.
A high-rank conjuring had been worked inside this chamber, thousands of years before the kingdom of Athanor had been a name. A swarm of falling stones, burning through the air like a hail of small suns, had come down on whoever had stood here. The signature was unmistakable to anyone who had ever read the histories of the great battles. Bones had turned to dust. There were no skeletons in the dust because there had been nothing left of the bodies even at the time — only the shadow-imprint where the people had once stood, and even those shadows were long since pressed into the masonry beyond reading. Whoever had been here when the falling stones came down had been atomized. The Pentarchy did not know who had cast the spell, or who had been on the receiving end of it. They did not know which side, if either, had been the one defending the temple. The witnesses were dust. Even the names of the witnesses were dust.
“I am glad we are here thousands of years after whatever came before.”
— Elroy Jenkins
The four stood for a long moment and let the dust speak as much as it would. Then Perry tugged at Elroy's elbow. There were more stairs at the east. The dungeon continued downward.
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VII. Into the Gibbering Dark¶
The eastern stair was a spiral, tight and steep and choked with the same patient dust. As they descended, the air changed. The cold that had pressed at them since the threshold deepened into something wetter, slicker, more organic. A smell — old, foul, vegetal-but-not-quite — rose to meet them. Beneath the smell, just at the edge of hearing, came something that was not exactly sound. A wet, gibbering whisper that seemed to come from many mouths at once.
The stairs opened onto a low chamber that pooled at its center with a slick of inky black ichor. From the ichor, sludgy forms hauled themselves into rough articulation — clusters of mouths and lazy eyes and broken teeth, slopping forward across the floor like puddles that had decided to walk. The eyes rotated to track the lights at the head of the stair. The mouths chattered against each other, against the air, against the silence.
Perry recalled the things at once, dredging the right name out of his investigator's training without breaking stride. Gibbering mouthers. Aberrant, mindless, hateful. He marked the soft spots of the lead creature — a weakness to bludgeoning, of all things — and shouted it to the rest of the party as he loaded his crossbow.
The lead mouther moved first. A wet, splattering jet of acid arced out of its central cluster of mouths, aimed directly at Dravyn's eyes — and Elroy, who had been waiting precisely for this kind of opportunity, threw himself across the line and took the spit on his shield-arm. The acid hissed and cooked through the mail at his vambrace. He bellowed something obscene about the mouther's parentage and held his stance. Dravyn, who would have been blinded outright by the strike, was merely splashed; he still rolled his head aside on instinct and still fared poorly. The acid found his eyes through the periphery. The world for the runelord went white, then black. Then the mouther bit him — a wet, tearing wound on his thigh that began at once to bleed in a slow steady ooze.
Grotdor took the high ground at the top of the stair and unfurled a wave of fire across the chamber that washed over both of the visible mouthers and sent the kineticist's aura into overflow. The lead mouther shrugged most of it off; some of it stuck. Elroy charged down the stair, raised his shield, and drove his longsword into the mouther's central body cavity with a stroke so clean that it seemed almost ceremonial. The blade carved through quivering flesh and bit deeper than even he had expected — the mouther's gibbering choked into a wet, dying bellow, and a great rope of black ichor spilled out across the floor where the wound opened. The aberration hissed and recoiled. Elroy planted himself and bellowed a taunt that pinned the thing's attention onto him before it could reach for the wizard again.
Dravyn, blind and bleeding but anything but defeated, drew on his arcane senses to track the mouthers by the vibrations of their movement through the air. He loosed an arc of electricity that splashed across both of them; he followed it with a glaive strike of his own, the wrath-rune steadying his hand into a stroke he could not see and should not have made. The blade found wet flesh and bit. The runelord stood blind and bleeding at the heart of his own line and refused to fall.
The lead mouther reared up. From the cluster of its mouths there rose a sound that was not exactly sound — a gibbering that pressed at the edges of thought and tried to slip inside. Three of the Pentarchs steadied themselves against it; Dravyn, already blind, did not steady. His mind clouded for a heartbeat with an alien certainty he could not have voiced. The mouther spat at him a second time. Acid found his eyes a second time. His sight, what little had begun to return, was scoured back to darkness. It grabbed for Elroy and missed, slopping forward in a wave of flesh that recoiled when it could not find purchase.
Perry — last in the order, watching the chamber with the cold patience of a man who had taken the measure of a fight before the fight knew it — stored a stratagem and worked the lead mouther's defenses through it. The shot he had prepared was the shot that needed to land. He fired. The bolt found the seam where the mouther's central body cavity had been parted by Elroy's stroke, and drove in to the fletching, and where the iron point bit, the acid he had laced into the ammunition began at once to eat. The mouther shrieked. A persistent, bubbling burn took hold in the wound; a steady ribbon of black bled down its flank. Perry unloaded the acid, reloaded with a plain bolt, and fired again from the muzzle into the closest cluster of eyes. The bolt punched through with a wet thud. The mouther staggered.
It did not fall.
It did not fall, and there were more shapes shifting in the dark beyond the ichor — slow, sluggish, beginning to articulate.
Elroy still held the line. Dravyn still stood blind at the heart of it. Grotdor's aura was overflowed and gathering itself again. Perry had loaded his next bolt.
The lead mouther's central mass quivered and dragged itself a foot closer.
The torches did not move. The dust did not settle. The night was not yet through with them.
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