Dungeon Crawl

Written by Roy Norvell for Advanced Camp 2011.
==Teaser==
Knight Commander Feral’s boots were a surprisingly accurate allegory for her general character; polished, nearly to a fault, and tipped with hardened steel. The sound of her boot heels echoed throughout the marble halls as she made her way down the curving, spiral stairs, to the farthest holding cell in the lowest chamber of the Northern Keep. The men, sitting the cells on either side of her approach, lowered their heads as she passed, silently thanking the gods that they were not her final destination.
She nodded to the two armored guards waiting in front of a cell shaped more like a cage than a room; one of them opened the iron-barred door, and Feral stepped in. Seated in a small wooden chair--the only inanimate object in the otherwise barren room--was an elf wearing some scraps that looked like they might have once been leather armor. Large sections were ripped and torn; it was clear some blades had opened the armor at points, and there was a black, scorched surface on the right side of the torso, as if it had been badly burned.
The elf himself didn’t look too much better off. Dried blood, looking to be from a wound of some sort, formed a rusty crescent over his brow. One of his arms, exposed thanks to his damaged armor, was wrapped tightly with white cloth, but a dull red was beginning to show through. His eyes were glassy, and he was trembling as if from cold all over.
 
“Let’s get on with this, shall we?” began Feral. “I’m a woman with precious little time. Answer my questions honestly, and you will walk from these halls a free man. Waste my time, and you will not be so lucky. My men tell me they found you alone, but you claim to be part of an expedition. A well-funded, well-armed expedition. Is that true?”
 
He nodded.
“Where are the rest of you?”
“D-dead, m’am. All dead.” he replied, shakily.
“All of them?” asked Feral, raising an eyebrow. He nodded, again. “How? Tell me.”
“We...we entered the ruins three days ago. Our contact heard about it from some local peasants who saw it during a trip ‘cross the mountains. S-said there was a cursed place somewhere inside the valley, that rose up out of the ground. We figured it was just some ruins, uncovered by an avalanche, or something. G-got together a group, a party. You know.”
She grinned derisively. “Adventuring."
"U-Uh huh.”
“Go on.”
 
“W-Well, we got inside, and...well, first thing is, it doesn’t make no sense. It looks--well, you know, stone. Black stone, on the outside, but the whole inside’s jungle. Anyways, first 200 yards, the pointman goes down, starts screaming. P-piece of wire took his leg off, at the knee. Poor Arlan.”
 
“Then, we heard the moaning--or, wailing, or something awful. These--things, dead things wearing all white, they started coming after us with swords. We ran, only barely got away. Some of us weren’t so lucky, either.”
 
“So what did you find, in the ruins?”
 
The elf snorted. “What didn’t we find? Orcs, monsters, fire, traps. I was the only one who made it out of that place. The only one. And the rest, they’re long dead.
Feral regarded him a with a long, cool look. Finally, she stood up.
“Guards, this man is clearly a liar and a spy acting against the Northern kingdoms. I sentence him to death, to be carried out at your volition.”
The elf’s shakes became spasms, and his eyes popped wide open. “W-wait, no! I swear, I’m not lying!”
The corner of Feral’s mouth twitched upward.
“Please. Adventuring with a small army? Even if you’re telling the truth, and these ruins are the most dangerous thing in the wide world, why would you continue after half of the events you described to me? What ‘treasure’ could possibly be worth so much death? I have made my decision.” She turned to leave, and he fell forward in his chair, grabbing hold of her leg.
“W-wait, please! It wasn’t just a ruin; i-it was built from black stone, it was wider than we could see in either direction!”
She paused.
“It was s-so tall, it blocked out the sun itself! T-there was a man inside; he told us what it was.”
Feral turned, and the man saw a flicker of something cross her features. Fear? Excitement?
“The Grave of the Gods. The Tomb of Leon Arkheart.” he said, slowly, steadying his voice.
Feral whispered the last words of his sentence for him.
“The Dungeon.”
==Flow==
==What Really Happened==
==Cast==
Category:Games