One of my darlings who I’ll call Vulture for right here was my comrade for this. I brought him into this astral realm to meet an old friend of mine, since they have about the same line of work. The lands surrounding our destination are rocky crags and near vertical mountains. Inhabiting the upper world are mainly avians: a few varieties of harpies, great shrieking birds who act as apex predators, gargoyles which blend into the mountainside and move only to spear passersby, and other things not as easily explained. Some of the mountains sprout tendrils, which are the jaws of plants that nestle in the cracks.

Our destination is a cave entrance nearby where I opened the gateway. No matter where you come from, it’s only accessible by either flight or falling down the mountainside and shattering your body on jutting boulders. Nothing lies outside the cave, no remains of prey, but anything which comes near has clear intuition to stay far away from the entrance.

Very quickly within the cave’s downward descent the light from outside fails to pierce through the darkness, the sort of lightless space where it isn’t like being in a dark cave as much as it is like being blind. The form I currently took had bioluminescent pores, so this dim glow from myself was the only aid to our sight. Other senses were not very helpful: your nose found only the diffused smells of dried flesh and other cave scents, it’s difficult to navigate by hearing when you are constantly mislead by skitters and scratchy movements around you, and the energy in this particular place warped and twisted around in itself far too much to give you an accurate picture of your surroundings.

It wasn’t far into the cave where I led us into a downwards passage of stone stairs, carved with symbols and filament styles of which were long lost to anything living. The passage of stairs is where you really descended into its realm. Here, the small bit of space we could see was swirled with heavy particles and the air felt thick and enclosing. My body illuminated the bones littered on the stairs and Vulture took my example of not looking directly at them. While nothing breathed, there was a sense of waiting, as if we were tiptoeing around things we did not want to regain awareness (that’s exactly what we were doing).

Even after having made this trip many times it was fairly unnerving, and my companion questioned if I was sure we should be there. I replied with, “It’s fine hun, just keep it at a whisper and no loud movements.”

Sometimes there would be sounds of the bones creaking and dragging against the floor. We especially ignored those and didn’t look back. Not looking behind you is a good idea whether you are dealing with spirits or in a spook movie. There were also sounds of scuttling movement just outside the tiny range of my bioluminescence, which we also ignored. The walls of the stairwell rumbled further in and a throbbing could be heard from their essence.

The deeper we traveled, the more we came across skeletons which were completely formed and yet stood motionless, unseeing. We did our best to give them a wider berth while also acting as if we hadn’t seen them at all. The cave, too, increased in its rumbling and became thicker with the energy of what we were looking for.

A group of spirits had followed us from the second we step foot in the darkness but waited until much later to draw closer. They were only ghouls, quite possibly one of the least dangerous things here, so I wasn’t particularly worried. Their eyes glowed yellow and they made sounds like mountain lions and other big cats. Although ghouls typically feed on rotting flesh, that doesn’t mean they’re safe; this particular type would devise traps for prey or slowly kill them through infections, their untiring natures making it easy to follow anything weakened. They hung carcasses from the ceilings or walls of their chosen caves to rot to the perfect eating state, sometimes using trees if living in smaller dens in the upper lands, and their energy hurried the rotting process. A single ghoul might be easy to fend off but even the stronger predators of these lands were in trouble if surrounded by a pack.

It’s never clear how much time you spend on the stairwell. It could be minutes or hours or days, time doesn’t cooperate well in that place. You could tell when you were reaching the bottom because of the insane energy shift, as if you had stepped into a different plane. The real dragon lichs, the ones who were intelligent and whole rather than the simple revenants lying in scattered bones, awaited at the bottom. They took many forms, from skeletons to corpses to masses of meat and muscle to things stranger.

The gatekeeper of the end of the stairs was a dragon lich made of meat. Its neck had twisted as if wringed and broken many times, and thus its head lay limp on the ground and dragged like a tail with travel. Every movement was jerky, the motions of something splintering internally and shifting its broken innards against itself. One of its eyes had bloated to nearly half the size of its head and burst as would a juicy fruit, leaving behind a large membrane and the dragging remains of fluids. Admittedly the gatekeeper is not one of my favorite spirits to interact with, its posture is very unnerving and its energy is not friendly, but I performed the proper rites to be allowed within.

The spirit we came for rested in the central chamber of unknown size. Like the chamber, the spirit itself was so vast and all-encompassing that it was difficult to gain a grip on where it was or its exact size. There are dragon lichs, and then there is this entity that is more ancient than your mind comprehends. It feels like an embodiment of the realm itself, although more accurately the realm is a manifestation of the dragon. I greeted it with an honorary motion and introduced my companion along with our reason for approaching. It responded with a hum of energy that was still so large as to resonate like an earthquake, and a few words meant for myself. “It has been too long since you came to us,” it hissed at the end.

I presented the dragon with a harmful of crystals, glowing with a dark green light and clearly thick with magic and energy. “They’re filled with your preferred necrotic energy and flavored with the pestilence from [],” I said to it along with a necessary phrase of respect. I placed the crystals on the ground and stepped back to where my companion and I could barely see them. When the dragon accepted the offering, it seemed as if the darkness merely swallowed them up.

I spoke for a short time of business then allowed my companion to approach with his own business. While he did so, I gave a bit of privacy by stepping into a different section of the central chamber. In this realm past the steps there were pockets of sickly glowing energy to see by, even if faint. The pack of ghouls had followed even past the stairs so I let them approach now, flexing my limbs for them to sniff and then staying motionless as to not set them into startled violence. A couple gnawed socially at me but their teeth weren’t enough to scratch my exoskeleton and there were no energetic concerns.

The type of ghoul found here was fairly intelligent. Even if they rarely spoke in words and preferred either energetic impressions or more animalistic sounds, they understood and reasoned very well. Since they could understand me fine as opposed to types of ghouls with little cognitive reasoning, I scratched a few of them on the head like you would a cat and coddled them for a bit. One of them frequently croaked out an imitation of human words they had once heard, “Please close the door before leaving.”

One of the dragon lichs watched from nearby and sat closer after a short time. The color of their remaining hide was difficult to make out in the darkness, it seemed dark green but that may have only been from the color of the energy pockets. Their head had a bulbous shape favoring a large lower jaw with fangs like a deep sea fish and bulging eyes to match. Rather than having wings like extra limbs, their wings were attached to the entire length of their body like sails and released a green dust-like substance when opened. “I am from sickness,” they told me while showing an impression of their energy. “I am pestilence.” They had horns curled downwards from their head with dimly lit lanterns hanging from each, but I didn’t ask about them.

One of the things I’m known for when on business trips in the astral is storytime, so I invited the ghouls to rest around me and listen. The new lich stayed as well, cocking their head with endless curiosity and obviously a fan of such tales. I won’t bore you guys with my story here, but before it was finished Vulture approached. My listeners were a bit unhappy with the sudden cut off, of course, the dragon especially did not appreciate it. They shied away from the man walking behind, however: tall and gaunt with white hair and no eyes, wearing elaborate, flowing robes from a dead civilization. While in this form the central lich was easier to focus on, but its energy and voice still echoed from within every space and crevice within the cave.

We exchanged a few words until one of the ghouls hissed a little too loudly. I wondered for a second if the central lich would unleash some godly power and turn them all into dust, but it merely commanded, “Take those scavengers when you leave. They’re overpopulating.” I nodded. Not that I would disobey anyway.