Living Sands: Lion's Gambit
Aug. 30th, 2005 01:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aithneWe had taken care of two of three pharaohs in Dahshur. But of the three, the most dangerous was left, and he had an artifact of such power that we had no idea how we would counter it.
It turned out that the most dangerous thing of all was not knowing what the enemy wanted...
9 Koiak, Inundation, Year 4 of the Reign of Rameses II (October 25th, 1275 BCE)
We once again rested for the night, healing our wounds from the day before, outside of Dahshur. We've started posting watches at the door, now that we know that there are powers out there that can dispel the guardians of the doorknob. Mayet and I were on third watch, her green dragon (who she has dubbed Tiny) stretched out on its back in the entrance hall, her cat curled up in a circle on his stomach. Tiny looked like nothing so much as a large, winged, scaled dog, snoring merrily away.
(And the others think that hyenas smell? The dragon carries the acrid, eye-burning tang of its breath weapon with it wherever it goes. Ick. It is sort of cute for something the size of a large hut, though.)
Mayet was deep in (thankfully quiet) prayer, and I was sitting and studying my spells, when there was a strange noise outside. It was a sort of fizzing noise, like the sound that lightning bolts make, only very small. Cautiously, Mayet opened the door and looked out.
She pulled her head back in, the color suddenly drained from her cheeks. "We need to wake the others," she said. "Now."
I stuck my head outside to look for myself, and saw a lightning shield, like the one that was over my old house back in Gebelein when Ay had trapped my family. It was getting slowly smaller, and everything it touched fizzed and then fell into ash.
Mayet was right. This was not good.
After we woke everyone, Grrrbek determined that the shield was a sphere, and getting smaller on the bottom as well. We could think of only one thing in the vicinity that could do this--the Staff of Ra. We could get out and away, but if we did that, the town of Dahshur and everyone in it was doomed.
We made tracks towards the center of the shield. We did find the Staff of Ra, standing by itself, magic writhing around it like a live thing. We looked at it closely and determined that if anyone laid a hand on it, the shield would collapse, killing everyone but the person who had grasped it.
Terik, on the other hand, had gone to find where Menkaure had been staying, where the Osiris Temple said that the largest concentration of people with strange eyes, those altered by the staff, were staying. He came back and showed me a grisly trophy--a hyena pelt, a large, scarred one, probably from a female. He told us that Menkaure's rooms were covered the thee pelts, and there was quite a bit of Nile mud on the floor. He'd stopped by the Osirean temple on the way back and given them a sample of the mud, in hopes that they would be able to find the particular place on the Nile this was from.
Isu gave me a long look. Hyenas are becoming scarce in this part of the world, she commented. There are populations farther away, but between here and there is desert that not even we could survive the crossing of now. It used to be smaller, that desert. And every death diminishes the Pack.
Terik also said that it appeared that the hyenas had been sacrificed in order to power something. What, he wasn't able to determine. I trotted back to Menkaure's lair with him and figured out that the sacrifices had been probably used to power the lightning shield that was now around Dahshur.
(That was a horrible room. Full of the smell of blood and terror and death, and I wonder how I could not have known, how I could not have heard them.)
We had a bit over an hour left until the shield was going to collapse entirely. The Osirean rangers came back and said they'd found where the mud had come from, and it was near a recently dug tunnel near the banks of the Nile. The other clerics had been busy, as well, doing Divination spells and determining that there was a gem that belonged inside of the staff that was currently residing in a ruined temple below Dahshur, and that the best way to stop the shield from killing everyone was to find Menkaure. We guessed that the two would be near each other.
I was left behind to guard the staff, Amunet putting up an illusion of it off to one side and me cloaking the real one--and myself--in invisibility. The greyling whispered in my ear, they find hole. They go down. Goldling say elf having a good time.
A little time passed. I started seeing people walking towards the courtyard I was in, and I suddenly realized that everyone in the town was probably going to have figured out where the center was, and come here to try and destroy whatever was causing the shield. A bit nervously, I watched and waited.
Again, the greyling murmured, Little god find man. Little god pounce on man, he say he watching and waiting. There is door, and they go through. A minute or so passed. Gem is here, so are two men hanging from ropes, coming down. Is old temple.
The greyling fell silent. "What?" I asked. The crowd was getting closer. I case a force shield and raised my voice. "I'm sorry, citizens, but you're going to have to stay back. If anyone touches the staff, we all die." The mutters in the crowd were beginning to turn ugly. I flipped through the spells in my mind, realizing that the one spell that would do well in this situation--Enthrall--was one that I hadn't taken today, not anticipating needing to do crowd control.
"Hurry, kids," I muttered. "I've only got this one force shield, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do when it runs out." I could probably scare them, but I really didn't want to kill any of these people. They could have been my neighbors, people scared for their homes and their lives.
Uh oh, the greyling said. Big guy grab doorknob. Big guy go into doorknob. I swore, and then swore again as the staff disappeared from beside me--and the shield disappeared from over our heads. Elf say to tell you tall one have staff. Come down.
I powered down the spells and retrieved a dart that Amunet had left behind, then activated the teleport knife and disappeared. I appeared in a tumble-down room, coughing in the musty dark. The others had evidently just used the Staff of Ra to dispel the door guardians, and we ran inside.
The first body was that of Amun, Terik's girlfriend. The second body, quite nearby, was that of Rosetta, Pepy's child. It appeared that Amun had been holding Rosetta when Menkaure had come upon them.
The third body was that of Xeres. Standing over her was Menkaure, who was cleaning his sword. "Is the curse broken?" I murmured in the form of an augury to Imhotep, receiving Yes in a familiar voice. Mayet asked Hathor, "Will raising her return the curse?" The answer was No.
Standing there, frozen, looking at Menkaure, we realized that he'd accomplished what he'd wanted to do. It was never us he'd been after. It was Xeres.
"No, said Mayet, and "No" again. I'd forgotten that she had the iron wand, the one that sets time back an hour. She pulled it out and activated it.
We were standing in the courtyard, looking at the staff.
We looked at each other, I cast invisibility and a shield around the staff (the second to prevent anyone from tripping over it and killing us all accidentally) and we were off back to the tunnel.
The tunnel dug into the mud was highly unpleasant. Isu complained in whooping whines about the mud sticking to her feet. The mud gave way to worked stone, then a strange door that I was told was an illusion, and then to a room that used to have a vaulted ceiling, the one it'd teleported into before. (Or after, I guess, looking at it from an absolute standpoint.)
Of course Menkaure was there. Of course he'd taken the time to put up a bunch of protective spells. And of course Terik hit him with a sword, blowing one of those protective spells and setting off a spell I'd never seen but recognized as Disintegrate.
Terik became so much dust in much less time than it takes to say it.
We threw spells back and forth, and finally Mayet Flamestriked him, which caused the shaky ceiling to give a quite alarming groan and rumble. Thinking fast. Raam grabbed the gem, called the staff, reunited the two, and put up a shield that gave us a couple of minutes to collect what was left of Terik before opening a dimension door back to the surface.
Menkaure is still down there, buried under tons of mud and rock.
We took the dust that was Terik to the Osirean Temple, and paid them to resurrect him. It would take them some time, however, so we needed to cool our heels in Dahshur for a couple of day. We spent much of the time arguing about what we were going to do next.
11 Koiak, Inundation, Year 4 of the Reign of Rameses II (October 27th, 1275 BCE)
We decided to head down to Pi Rameses and give the Staff of Ra to Rameses. Once again, we piled into the doorknob and Wadjet carried us downriver.
Peribsen had left for parts unknown when the first Prime had finally returned to full health. (He's still a bit rough around the edges but he does look a lot better, his usual disapproving self.) Sekath, however, was still around, and we fell into conversation. I told him that the other side thinks he's the dragon in his staff, and he laughed and said that was well enough. I'd forgotten that the others didn't know about that dragon--I've been seeing it with the greyling for so long that I forget not everyone can do the same.
We took a walk and then told us to stand back. We did, and were glad we'd done so when the staff transformed into an enormous gold dragon. When I say enormous, think a wingspan over a mile wide, a body larger than three pyramids standing side by side, eyes longer than three Unas lying end to end. He was a sight to see, that's for sure, and I remember Imhotep telling me that I would never forget the sight. He was entirely correct.
I did set out in the world to see wonders, after all, and the dragon certainly qualified.
I mentioned at one point that I'd been speaking to Sekath's brother, which earned me a sour look. "Pillow talk, hmph," he muttered.
I grinned at him. "Hey, he's the one living in my head, not the other way around. We talk about things."
"Imhotep's your brother? And you are...?" asked Raam.
"The Hierophant Druid. We can't die," Sekath replied.
"Among other things," I said, and got another gimlet glance.
Sekath snorted. "You know what it's like to have an annoying little brother, Raam. At least you're not talking to yours every night in your head for millennia." But under the complaint, I think, there was a but of good-natured ruefulness. They do still love one another, Imhotep and Sekath, I believe.
I asked him if I was doing what I needed to be doing, and he told me that I was. All right, then. We spent the rest of the afternoon scrying on various of the few foes that we have left. Amunhetet was somewhere in the southlands, investigating something--we knew that he'd been trying to raise a Nubian army, but appears to have gotten distracted. Snefru was evidently on his way towards Pi Rameses. Khaba was in the delta north of here, on a boat, looking for something.
Nitinger was unscryable, as was Menes. Five left, it seems. The ranks of the lions grow thin indeed--but those left are the most powerful.
We decided to try for Khaba. Sometimes, the direct approach is the best--Wadjet searched till he found him, set us down a little ways off, and opened the door. We were arraying ourselves for battle, when from behind us rose a--creature.
Shaped like a dragon, only burning so brightly as to leave images of itself impressed on the eyes even after you closed them, it was for certain that whatever this was was not going to be harmed by fire. "Hellfire dragon!" shouted Pepy. "Hit it with cold!"
(Hellfire? Weird. I don't know, I just toss spells at things.)
The first dragon was soon joined by another, both summoned creatures. We killed them and then went after Khaba, who did my trick of casting a Fly spell on both him and the priest who was beside him. Once the priest went down, we started on Khaba himself--but at that point, the sailors on the ship below launched a volley of arrows up at us--me in particular. I took enough arrows to render me unconscious, and woke a few minutes later, having evidently been dragged out of the river by Isu and brought around by Mayet.
It was about that point, as I was clambering to my feet and wringing out my dress, that our surroundings suddenly changed. We were back in Pi Rameses, gathered in a circle, blinking.
"He wished us away," said Raam, who'd been the closest to Khaba. "A wand, that was, and he wished for us to return where we came from."
We looked at each other. Then, as one, we sighed and turned around to get our bearings and trudge back to the palace. none of us were in any shape to go after him again, and he was probably well away by now.
We would have to go after Khaba another day, as we licked our wounds and planned our next move...
Quotes:
"Is there sunshine where we are?"
"You're in Egypt!"
--Graham, Storm
"I could play bobbing for auguries..."
--Mayet
"Is anyone on speaking terms with Ra? Could we tell him to come get his shit?"
--Sitefnut
"Someone has the left nut of Ra!"
--Mayet
"Lookie, Ninjas!"
--Grrrbek
"But how often do we found ourselves in front of an angry mob?"
"Us? Often."
--Kris, Laura
"This would be a bad place for an earthquake."
"I'm behaving!"
--Pepy, Grrrbek
"Nobody sneeze!"
--Grrrbek
"Just me and Anubis, mano y mano."
"Mano y deity, you mean."
--Pepy, Amunet
"I'm on a 24." *looks around* "I'm FIRST!"
--Derek
"I'm having a dragon burger."
-Grrrbek
"I give Terik 23 points of healing."
"Oh, hell."
"Oh hell?"
"Now I'm just almost dead instead of dead."
--Mayet, Terik
"I'm just running around patching people back together. Some are grateful...some aren't."
--Mayet
It turned out that the most dangerous thing of all was not knowing what the enemy wanted...
9 Koiak, Inundation, Year 4 of the Reign of Rameses II (October 25th, 1275 BCE)
We once again rested for the night, healing our wounds from the day before, outside of Dahshur. We've started posting watches at the door, now that we know that there are powers out there that can dispel the guardians of the doorknob. Mayet and I were on third watch, her green dragon (who she has dubbed Tiny) stretched out on its back in the entrance hall, her cat curled up in a circle on his stomach. Tiny looked like nothing so much as a large, winged, scaled dog, snoring merrily away.
(And the others think that hyenas smell? The dragon carries the acrid, eye-burning tang of its breath weapon with it wherever it goes. Ick. It is sort of cute for something the size of a large hut, though.)
Mayet was deep in (thankfully quiet) prayer, and I was sitting and studying my spells, when there was a strange noise outside. It was a sort of fizzing noise, like the sound that lightning bolts make, only very small. Cautiously, Mayet opened the door and looked out.
She pulled her head back in, the color suddenly drained from her cheeks. "We need to wake the others," she said. "Now."
I stuck my head outside to look for myself, and saw a lightning shield, like the one that was over my old house back in Gebelein when Ay had trapped my family. It was getting slowly smaller, and everything it touched fizzed and then fell into ash.
Mayet was right. This was not good.
After we woke everyone, Grrrbek determined that the shield was a sphere, and getting smaller on the bottom as well. We could think of only one thing in the vicinity that could do this--the Staff of Ra. We could get out and away, but if we did that, the town of Dahshur and everyone in it was doomed.
We made tracks towards the center of the shield. We did find the Staff of Ra, standing by itself, magic writhing around it like a live thing. We looked at it closely and determined that if anyone laid a hand on it, the shield would collapse, killing everyone but the person who had grasped it.
Terik, on the other hand, had gone to find where Menkaure had been staying, where the Osiris Temple said that the largest concentration of people with strange eyes, those altered by the staff, were staying. He came back and showed me a grisly trophy--a hyena pelt, a large, scarred one, probably from a female. He told us that Menkaure's rooms were covered the thee pelts, and there was quite a bit of Nile mud on the floor. He'd stopped by the Osirean temple on the way back and given them a sample of the mud, in hopes that they would be able to find the particular place on the Nile this was from.
Isu gave me a long look. Hyenas are becoming scarce in this part of the world, she commented. There are populations farther away, but between here and there is desert that not even we could survive the crossing of now. It used to be smaller, that desert. And every death diminishes the Pack.
Terik also said that it appeared that the hyenas had been sacrificed in order to power something. What, he wasn't able to determine. I trotted back to Menkaure's lair with him and figured out that the sacrifices had been probably used to power the lightning shield that was now around Dahshur.
(That was a horrible room. Full of the smell of blood and terror and death, and I wonder how I could not have known, how I could not have heard them.)
We had a bit over an hour left until the shield was going to collapse entirely. The Osirean rangers came back and said they'd found where the mud had come from, and it was near a recently dug tunnel near the banks of the Nile. The other clerics had been busy, as well, doing Divination spells and determining that there was a gem that belonged inside of the staff that was currently residing in a ruined temple below Dahshur, and that the best way to stop the shield from killing everyone was to find Menkaure. We guessed that the two would be near each other.
I was left behind to guard the staff, Amunet putting up an illusion of it off to one side and me cloaking the real one--and myself--in invisibility. The greyling whispered in my ear, they find hole. They go down. Goldling say elf having a good time.
A little time passed. I started seeing people walking towards the courtyard I was in, and I suddenly realized that everyone in the town was probably going to have figured out where the center was, and come here to try and destroy whatever was causing the shield. A bit nervously, I watched and waited.
Again, the greyling murmured, Little god find man. Little god pounce on man, he say he watching and waiting. There is door, and they go through. A minute or so passed. Gem is here, so are two men hanging from ropes, coming down. Is old temple.
The greyling fell silent. "What?" I asked. The crowd was getting closer. I case a force shield and raised my voice. "I'm sorry, citizens, but you're going to have to stay back. If anyone touches the staff, we all die." The mutters in the crowd were beginning to turn ugly. I flipped through the spells in my mind, realizing that the one spell that would do well in this situation--Enthrall--was one that I hadn't taken today, not anticipating needing to do crowd control.
"Hurry, kids," I muttered. "I've only got this one force shield, and I'm not sure what I'm going to do when it runs out." I could probably scare them, but I really didn't want to kill any of these people. They could have been my neighbors, people scared for their homes and their lives.
Uh oh, the greyling said. Big guy grab doorknob. Big guy go into doorknob. I swore, and then swore again as the staff disappeared from beside me--and the shield disappeared from over our heads. Elf say to tell you tall one have staff. Come down.
I powered down the spells and retrieved a dart that Amunet had left behind, then activated the teleport knife and disappeared. I appeared in a tumble-down room, coughing in the musty dark. The others had evidently just used the Staff of Ra to dispel the door guardians, and we ran inside.
The first body was that of Amun, Terik's girlfriend. The second body, quite nearby, was that of Rosetta, Pepy's child. It appeared that Amun had been holding Rosetta when Menkaure had come upon them.
The third body was that of Xeres. Standing over her was Menkaure, who was cleaning his sword. "Is the curse broken?" I murmured in the form of an augury to Imhotep, receiving Yes in a familiar voice. Mayet asked Hathor, "Will raising her return the curse?" The answer was No.
Standing there, frozen, looking at Menkaure, we realized that he'd accomplished what he'd wanted to do. It was never us he'd been after. It was Xeres.
"No, said Mayet, and "No" again. I'd forgotten that she had the iron wand, the one that sets time back an hour. She pulled it out and activated it.
We were standing in the courtyard, looking at the staff.
We looked at each other, I cast invisibility and a shield around the staff (the second to prevent anyone from tripping over it and killing us all accidentally) and we were off back to the tunnel.
The tunnel dug into the mud was highly unpleasant. Isu complained in whooping whines about the mud sticking to her feet. The mud gave way to worked stone, then a strange door that I was told was an illusion, and then to a room that used to have a vaulted ceiling, the one it'd teleported into before. (Or after, I guess, looking at it from an absolute standpoint.)
Of course Menkaure was there. Of course he'd taken the time to put up a bunch of protective spells. And of course Terik hit him with a sword, blowing one of those protective spells and setting off a spell I'd never seen but recognized as Disintegrate.
Terik became so much dust in much less time than it takes to say it.
We threw spells back and forth, and finally Mayet Flamestriked him, which caused the shaky ceiling to give a quite alarming groan and rumble. Thinking fast. Raam grabbed the gem, called the staff, reunited the two, and put up a shield that gave us a couple of minutes to collect what was left of Terik before opening a dimension door back to the surface.
Menkaure is still down there, buried under tons of mud and rock.
We took the dust that was Terik to the Osirean Temple, and paid them to resurrect him. It would take them some time, however, so we needed to cool our heels in Dahshur for a couple of day. We spent much of the time arguing about what we were going to do next.
11 Koiak, Inundation, Year 4 of the Reign of Rameses II (October 27th, 1275 BCE)
We decided to head down to Pi Rameses and give the Staff of Ra to Rameses. Once again, we piled into the doorknob and Wadjet carried us downriver.
Peribsen had left for parts unknown when the first Prime had finally returned to full health. (He's still a bit rough around the edges but he does look a lot better, his usual disapproving self.) Sekath, however, was still around, and we fell into conversation. I told him that the other side thinks he's the dragon in his staff, and he laughed and said that was well enough. I'd forgotten that the others didn't know about that dragon--I've been seeing it with the greyling for so long that I forget not everyone can do the same.
We took a walk and then told us to stand back. We did, and were glad we'd done so when the staff transformed into an enormous gold dragon. When I say enormous, think a wingspan over a mile wide, a body larger than three pyramids standing side by side, eyes longer than three Unas lying end to end. He was a sight to see, that's for sure, and I remember Imhotep telling me that I would never forget the sight. He was entirely correct.
I did set out in the world to see wonders, after all, and the dragon certainly qualified.
I mentioned at one point that I'd been speaking to Sekath's brother, which earned me a sour look. "Pillow talk, hmph," he muttered.
I grinned at him. "Hey, he's the one living in my head, not the other way around. We talk about things."
"Imhotep's your brother? And you are...?" asked Raam.
"The Hierophant Druid. We can't die," Sekath replied.
"Among other things," I said, and got another gimlet glance.
Sekath snorted. "You know what it's like to have an annoying little brother, Raam. At least you're not talking to yours every night in your head for millennia." But under the complaint, I think, there was a but of good-natured ruefulness. They do still love one another, Imhotep and Sekath, I believe.
I asked him if I was doing what I needed to be doing, and he told me that I was. All right, then. We spent the rest of the afternoon scrying on various of the few foes that we have left. Amunhetet was somewhere in the southlands, investigating something--we knew that he'd been trying to raise a Nubian army, but appears to have gotten distracted. Snefru was evidently on his way towards Pi Rameses. Khaba was in the delta north of here, on a boat, looking for something.
Nitinger was unscryable, as was Menes. Five left, it seems. The ranks of the lions grow thin indeed--but those left are the most powerful.
We decided to try for Khaba. Sometimes, the direct approach is the best--Wadjet searched till he found him, set us down a little ways off, and opened the door. We were arraying ourselves for battle, when from behind us rose a--creature.
Shaped like a dragon, only burning so brightly as to leave images of itself impressed on the eyes even after you closed them, it was for certain that whatever this was was not going to be harmed by fire. "Hellfire dragon!" shouted Pepy. "Hit it with cold!"
(Hellfire? Weird. I don't know, I just toss spells at things.)
The first dragon was soon joined by another, both summoned creatures. We killed them and then went after Khaba, who did my trick of casting a Fly spell on both him and the priest who was beside him. Once the priest went down, we started on Khaba himself--but at that point, the sailors on the ship below launched a volley of arrows up at us--me in particular. I took enough arrows to render me unconscious, and woke a few minutes later, having evidently been dragged out of the river by Isu and brought around by Mayet.
It was about that point, as I was clambering to my feet and wringing out my dress, that our surroundings suddenly changed. We were back in Pi Rameses, gathered in a circle, blinking.
"He wished us away," said Raam, who'd been the closest to Khaba. "A wand, that was, and he wished for us to return where we came from."
We looked at each other. Then, as one, we sighed and turned around to get our bearings and trudge back to the palace. none of us were in any shape to go after him again, and he was probably well away by now.
We would have to go after Khaba another day, as we licked our wounds and planned our next move...
Quotes:
"Is there sunshine where we are?"
"You're in Egypt!"
--Graham, Storm
"I could play bobbing for auguries..."
--Mayet
"Is anyone on speaking terms with Ra? Could we tell him to come get his shit?"
--Sitefnut
"Someone has the left nut of Ra!"
--Mayet
"Lookie, Ninjas!"
--Grrrbek
"But how often do we found ourselves in front of an angry mob?"
"Us? Often."
--Kris, Laura
"This would be a bad place for an earthquake."
"I'm behaving!"
--Pepy, Grrrbek
"Nobody sneeze!"
--Grrrbek
"Just me and Anubis, mano y mano."
"Mano y deity, you mean."
--Pepy, Amunet
"I'm on a 24." *looks around* "I'm FIRST!"
--Derek
"I'm having a dragon burger."
-Grrrbek
"I give Terik 23 points of healing."
"Oh, hell."
"Oh hell?"
"Now I'm just almost dead instead of dead."
--Mayet, Terik
"I'm just running around patching people back together. Some are grateful...some aren't."
--Mayet
