Book 3: Chapter 43: Flight in the Dark
Today I have come to the conclusion that those who are rich need only risk a portion of their Share and assets to become greater. Those who are poor must risk their very lives if they wish to become more.
- From the diary of Lady Aelayah of House Salahaem.
This world was slowly teaching me, in a manner most crude, of the limits of language and hyperbole. My communion with the rats was both the most intimate of sharings and the most heinous of violations. Familiar feminine laughter, that only I could hear, rang in my ears. It felt as if each peal eviscerated a part of me, and my heart grew heavy as I realized that I had furthered her purpose. Unwittingly, I had fallen into one of her traps.
“Welcome, false priest, to another of my temples,” came a soft whisper, velvety smooth and imbued with divine certainty. It was the voice of Iasis, the mother of monsters. As the laughter faded, I turned my attention to my status. A mix of shock, indignation, and a hint of horror washed over me when I realized my magical reserves were nearly depleted. Damn the witch who dared call herself a goddess. The mingling of magical energies, Chaos and Entropy, had drained more from me than I had intended.
Without warning, the tide of scrabbling creatures surged forth like a wave of living flesh. Furry vermin, emitting shrill squeaks and menacing hisses, surged and swarmed. I pressed my back against the grimy wall of the passage and pushed against them with my spiked shield in a desperate attempt to protect my charge. Around us, the horde of vermin flowed past us, forming a writhing mass painted in hues of dirty browns and muted grays. Most repulsive were their tails. Sinuous, wriggling appendages that seemed to possess a life of their own.
Huddling behind my massive shield, I saw it all unfold through the grill of my visor and borrowed sight. The scene grew more chaotic as the giant rats launched themselves at a colossal slime monster with savage purpose. They tore through its strange, gelatinous flesh with ferocious bites and vicious scratches, feasting upon the bizarre creature in a frenzied hunger. Their feast was not limited to the Quiverings. The rodents also devoured strange white growths and multicolored fungi, ingesting the very essence of burning Chaos. They feasted, and even as they fed, they suffered the creeping Entropic rot that devoured their very flesh like a curse. But such a curse it was, that it twisted them with each new mouthful. Before me, the strange convergence of magics formed the shape of a gift, or a blessing, that made the humble Sewer Rats more.
However, titans do not fall easily. Despite the ferocity of the attack, the slime monster fought with a primal determination, for all life clings fiercely to existence. In this grotesque tableau, the battle was by no means a one-sided affair. The air was thick with the raw, pungent stench of primal violence and struggle. Some rodents were drained dry by barbed pseudopods that sucked the life out of them, others drowned in its mass, absorbed by the slime or simply crushed against hard stone.
The Quiverings slew a vast score of the Sewer Rats, but the rodent's victory was slowly becoming all but certain. For every Sewer Rat slain, there seemed to be five to take its place. And even in death, the vermin were taking their toll, infecting the slime with a black stain of corruption. A dark cloud that was slowly overcoming the creature, growing ever thicker and more vile as the furred creatures continued their onslaught.
Numbers do not lie, and it was clear to me that the Sewer Rats were overcoming the Quiverings’ large Health pool and spell-granted regeneration. Slowly of course.