While Tallis and Justin busied themselves in despoiling the dead, Jim, his curiosity momentarily overcoming his cowardice, investigated one of the side-doors. Fortunately nothing nasty came tearing out to rip everybody into quivering gobbets of meat, but Barsh, Justin and Vallana nevertheless spent some time expanding on what would happen if he opened anaother door and something nasty did come out. They terrified the poor boy so badly that he spent the next several hours huddled in a corner with his robe over his eyes so that he wouldn't have to see his inevitable horrible grisly death approaching.
Everyone settled down to get a bit of rest.
When Vallana came to take over the watch from Barsh, she noticed some furtive movement from further down the hall, and heard the sounds of footsteps rapidly receding. She alerted Barsh and went with him down the hall to investigate. Vallana, with her dark-adapted Dwarvish eyes, was just able to make out what appeared to be a cloaked and hooded figure darting into a side-passage at the far end of the hall, and they roused the others to follow in force in the hope that the person — or thing — would be able to lead them to where the Heart was being held.
They all followed into what appeared to be an abandoned and empty room, bare of anything except a litter of rubble that had fallen out of the ceiling, and showing no sign of the mysterious figure. Everyone began searching for a secret door; it was Tallis who found it by leaning against what she thought was a wall and tumbling straight through the illusionary stonework flat on her face, breaking her lantern in the process and spilling flaming oil everywhere. Justin followed her shouts, tripping over the concealed sill of the passage but rolling gracefully back to his feet.
The others all followed, warned of the sill by Tallis and Justin, and they followed the trail as best they could (bearing in mind that none of the party has any sort of tracking skill at all). They found themselves in a natural cavern, and made their way straight ahead as quickly as they could, bypassing any side-chambers so as to lose as little time as possible. Alas, this allowed a nasty undead sentinel to creep up behind them, and they were attacked by a disgustingly oozy, maggot-swarming corpse that vomited a revolting putrid black slime all over Barsh's face, covering his mouth and nose and threatening to asphyxiate him. Barsh sent himself into a trance, lowering his metabolism in the hope of staying un-asphyxiated long enough for someone to save him. Justin leaped to the attack and would have been served similarly, but that he ducked down behind Barsh and used him as a human shield; not very gallant, perhaps, but effective. Vallana also leaped into the fray, using the crouching Justin as a springboard to leap right over Barsh and crash into the ground at the creature's feet. Then things took a turn for the decidedly unpleasant; with one hand it reached right into Barsh's chest and grabbed his heart, and with the other it did the save to Vallana, pulling their still-beating hearts right out through their skin without a wound! It stuffed Vallana's heart into its mouth and swallowed it.
Justin slashed at the hand still holding Barsh's heart and cut it off, and then he and the still upright, but rather worried Vallana, chopped the thing into tiny pieces. An impromptu autopsy ensued, but no sign of Vallana's heart could be found; checking her vital signs, she was found to be cooling fast, and to have no pulse, a worrying state of affairs for Vallana, but also for Justin who looked ahead to the time when he would inevitably have to try to fight off a ravenous undead heavily-armoured Dwarf warrior. Retrieving Barsh's heart (still beating, though very slowly) he replaced it by the expedient of cracking open the comatose Barsh's chest, dropping the heart into the cavity, and getting Pandora to Heal his "surgery".
The various parts of the creature were still wriggling sluggishly, so they decided to burn them. Justin and Tallis gathered bits of old furniture from the rooms off the hall, and they built a bonfire over the writhing remains which burned furiously, giving off a dense, stinking smoke. This done, they investigated the chamber from whence it had come and found a sarcophagus, apparently carved out of the living rock. There were several inches of black, maggoty goo in the bottom of it, but Justin stirred it about with a stick and dragged out several valuable pieces of gold jewellery before setting fire to the nasty ooze.
Since Vallana appeared to be basically OK (apart from having no pulse, cool, clammy skin and eyes that seemed to be sinking back in their sockets) the party decided to carry on. Someone mentioned that the Heart of the Maiden could probably fix up Vallana a treat, if they could get her to it before she turned into a rampaging heart-gobbling undead monster, so they picked up the pace a bit and jogged on down the passage.
The passage ended in a deep abyss, extending downwards further than they could see by the light of Pandora's fairy-lamp or their impromptu furniture-torches. Listening, they could hear the faint sounds of water falling below. Justin dropped his torch down the crevasse; it bounced off an incline far down and disappeared from view. Looking about, they found iron rings set into the wall of the passage, so Pandora magicked up a rope out of a ball of string, and flew down to check that it was long enough. It was; everyone climbed down without slipping and falling to their doom, and found themselves in a largish chamber, into which was trickling water from cracks in the ceiling.
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