3. Gant - ruins of the under-city.

Gant - ruins of the under-city.

  • DM

    Login: Darkpowder
    Character: Gant

    The ruins of the under-city and the Rise of House Oscura.

    :: They were everywhere; even the youngest had heard the stories of the great campaign against them that most folk do not name. The dark ones, the dwellers in shadows, and a dozen other names used by the under common folk and the surface realm.
    The shadows themselves seem to coalesce and magics issued forth from dark skinned hands from somewhere behind the tide-like flow of warriors, more like demons in their ferocity, speed and total lack of mercy ::

    Gant drifted out of a fitful sleep, once again awaking to utter darkness and a coffin-like claustrophobic moment of realisation that he was in one of the small tunnels left by some incredibly powerful creature in the realm that was once called Arnath. The enclosing feeling no longer bothered him, but the dark was a place of safety at times past – but since they came, no longer.

    Somewhere further down the small tunnel, he saw the crouching figure of Zed, another one of the lost, the hunted and the scavengers. The young woman was curled almost foetal like around the tiniest of flames and kindling and burning cloth she had lit with a lump of flint and a steel striker around her fist. Gant turned his head back to his own meagre possessions, glimpsing them in the dim light of her tiny fire. “Not too long with the fire Zed.” he spoke out quietly down the tunnel no more than three feet across they were sat in like a natural vent or huge water-pipe which the dampness, acrid smoke and the cave smell of decay hang permanently in the air. His “sister” as he called her was no relation of his; but was the only one of the large contingent of Arnath born that he had known for many years. The young folk of Arnath spent their hours since early childhood scavenging and scratching in the dark for everything; and they both had survived long since the battle.

    He had been there, in those short days in Arnath when they came, arriving late to the battle in some forgotten corner of the city. Snatching up dropped throwing axes, stones and broken pieces of furniture he aided from the rear the rapidly doomed defenders as the dark ones advanced like a single tide-like animal. Gants’ battle ended when a figure stepped out of an alcove in a door behind him, a male draped in black robes. The silver runes flashed on the garment as a bolt of lightning streaked out of his fingers tossing a large swordsman near to him into a dismal corner his body smouldering and sparking as the smell of the burning dead rose in the air. Gant had little time to react before the mage started to fade beside him. The young man’s blinding speed allowed him to swing around with a broken piece of table-leg connecting with the mage’s temple the spell crackling around the ghostly figure as it failed. A dark utterance from the figure blowing him down the sloping corridor tumbling away as if a storm had risen up in the dark; this was his last memory before the many long days of hiding and scavenging brought him finally close to the surface.

    Whatever happened to the rest of Gants’ small family he did not know, as he rubbed his dark black beard as he flexed his strong frame through a tunnel opening out into an open chamber; a cool breeze whistling through the small cavern. Seeing Zed drop down lithely from the opening behind him, there was one thing that had to be done. They must find the surface and try to track where the other refugees from the city of exiles had gone. Wits and their survival instincts were all they had left.

    His beard, muscled arms and garments of thick cloth were covered in dust and the stains of the damp caves when he made his way to the surface, occasionally ripped and torn from where the cave exacted its own pain on him in the confined tunnels. “We cannot stay long ‘sister’. We must find our way back to where ever the rest of them went.” Pulling out his dirty bloody rag from a sling bag and holding it between them. He had gathered what he could from some old demolished and abandoned settlements, including a few coin and some old stale food. Breaking the pieces of dry meat and bread in two, he handed half to his “sister”. “What’s mine is yours..” he said in the typical greeting in his monotone undercommon tongue.


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