Role

Chapter 4

Grabbing a handful of sweetmeat she sprung from her perch and
disappeared into the tunnel below, survival her only thought. Three stone
steps took her down into the tunnel and from above came the sound of alarms,
the intruders had been discovered. Whether they would be slain or repelled
was unknown, if slain she could return when things were safe, if repelled
then this passage may soon be a very dangerous place. With this in mind, she
broke out into a run. Within a few yard the tunnel branched and without pause
she chose a random direction, and again, and again. Sometimes a simple fork
and several times a nexus of paths, she did not know what drove her choices,
she simple continued to run, never noticing that each choice took her down
into the darkest recesses of the Underdark.

Her legs ached, her lungs burned, the walls which had felt to close on either
side, suddenly gave way to a feeling of dark expanse and she dropped to her
knees, gasping the damp air. Alone in the darkness, with only the hammering
drumbeat of her heart pounding in her ears, around her the deepest void into
which even her keen eyes could discern nothing. But, as her ragged breathing
and her racing heart begins to still, and as her eyes became ever more
accustomed to the blackness, she began to notice nuances, which until now
she, and perhaps few others, had ever seen. Around her the faintest of
bioluminescence could be seen, lichens and creatures of utter darkness. It
climbed the walls and rose to a dome above her, yet it all seemed to move in
a slow spiral, fading as its tendrils circled to the center of the cavern.
There seemed to be a hole in the darkest of shadows, something beyond the
absence of light that surrounded it. As if it itself was swallowing all
around it, sucking it down into to a place not of the world in which she
knelt. Fascinated she moved closer and she could begin to feel it tugging at
her very being. The air around it wavered and rippled as though a pebble had
been thrown into an atramentous well. Gingerly she reached out a trembling
hand and as her fingers closed around a cold, smooth object, her soul lurched
with negative energy. Visions swam in her mind of legions of the undead,
populating a world of the darkest shadows, vast plains and massive city of
bone rose up into a sky, filled creatures of shadow and death. She screams,
not in terror, not in pain, but in the clutch of ecstasy, and the blackness
consumes the last of her consciousness.