#fenalin

“Oh, right. That seems okay,” Kathmyl said. She felt her face heat up a bit as she watched Fenalin go, though, and tried to keep track of her until she was completely out of sight. Once she was gone, Kathmyl sighed and leaned back, content to watch the sky for the moment.

The bushes held nothing frightening as far as Fenalin could tell, though the low foliage came up to her chin in some places and rose above her head in others, blocking out the approaching daylight. She moved beneath the wide ferns and dense twiggy shrubs and around the tangled tree roots, collecting the driest sticks she could find. Few and far between in this damp, spongy terrain. She had nearly a full armful and was reaching down for another stick she could see when it jerked out of her hand. A snake? A tail? Yelping, she scrambled backward, losing most of her kindling, then gave a proper full-voiced shout as a claw-tipped hand closed over her shoulder. She yanked herself free and whirled around, drawing her staff, but the owner of the claw had already melted back into the brush. Fenalin readied a bolt of flame, gathering the energy at the dragon’s-head tip of her staff, waiting for the slightest movement. There - a rustle. She sent a blast of fire in the direction she’d heard the sound, but there was no pained howl, only charred, curling ferns.

She did not lower her staff. “Come out!”

Another faint rustle, and then something, or perhaps several things, pounced on her from behind, knocking her flat with her cheek in the loam, her staff trapped under her round little body. More clawed hands caught at her and held her still, and she shouted again, as loud as she could, as a musty-smelling cloth sack came down over her head.

“Kathmyl!”

Kathmyl was on her feet before she’d even fully registered why. Had that been a shout? From Fenalin? She was unarmored, but picked up her hammer and shield and moved cautiously towards the edge of camp. Once she was away from the tents, she called out. “Fenalin! Hello, can you hear me?” A pause. Nothing. “Fenalin!” she called again, moving off in the direction the halfling had gone. Still, there was nothing. Kathmyl moved cautiously then. If something had attacked Fenalin, it could still be near by. She really really hoped nothing had attacked Fenalin. Soon, though, she found what she’d been expecting but hoping not to find. There was a big patch of ruined brush, where Fenalin and at least one other thing had probably been struggling, and a path of broken branches leading away. Well at least whatever had taken her wasn’t subtle, and there didn’t seem to be blood. “I’m coming, don’t worry,” she said to herself.

There was no way Fenalin could summon Arazel while being hefted bodily through the bushes. It just wasn’t happening. And she had no idea where her staff was. She couldn’t tell how many of the sharp-clawed creatures had ahold of her at any given moment - it could be any number between two and twelve, judging by the way they appeared to be passing her from hand to hand - but it was more than she could take on without her staff, certainly. Never mind her bound hands and the infernal sack blocking her sight. They hadn’t gagged her, and she’d tried shouting, but received a heavy-handed slap to the side of the head for her trouble. Well. As long as they weren’t kobolds. And if Kathmyl hadn’t caught up to them by now, perhaps she was still safe at camp, enjoying the sunrise.

Abruptly, the rustle of underbrush stopped and Fenalin felt many hands on her at once, shoving her small but corpulent body through some narrow space or other. She wriggled and kicked and tried to make it difficult, but the hands were pulling from below and shoving from above and poking and prodding her stomach until finally she popped free and tumbled downward with a strangled yelp. She didn’t even hit the floor below; more hands caught her and carried her along. The air felt damper here, smelled earthier. Was she underground?

Kathmyl followed the trail as well as she could. It took some time, but eventually she heard some rustling in front of her. Her shield had been raised and she brought her hammer up to match before calling out, “I just want- the halfling woman back. No trouble. Please return her.” She waited, but there was no response, at least not verbally.

Instead, a huge rat creature came careening out of the bushes behind her, barely giving her enough time to get her shield between them. She shoved it away and held her shield high, calling to Bahamut for protection and feeling a barrier rise around her to replace her armor still in the camp. The creature was fast, but Kathmyl was getting better with her hammer, and its next rush in ended prematurely with a thwack to the head. She hadn’t found Fenalin yet, but at least she was pretty sure what had happened to her.

They’re rats? Were-rats, more likely, since even the smallest of them was a good head taller than her. One of the creatures watched her, beady-eyed, through the wooden bars of the enclosure they’d tossed her into before removing the sack from her head. She glared it down, her hands bound at the small of her back. “You may have taken my staff, but don’t think I can’t still set you on fire.”

A snort of derisive laughter. “I know your kind, Pact-bound. Your master’s power stems from your weapon. Without it, you cannot access your magic, and you,” he jabbed a taloned finger through the bars at her, “cannot hurt me.”

Fenalin balled up her fists and turned her back to her guard so that he could see the lick of flame she’d summoned to her hands. She preferred casting fireballs with her staff, of course, but a mere show of power would do for the moment. Sure enough, she heard the were-rat scuttle backward with a snarl.

Kathmyl pushed forward through the brush, and before long she found what seemed to be an entrance to a den. Two of the rat folk were waiting for her, though they fell quickly as she channeled her light through her hammer, and she was left alone facing the hole in the ground. Summoning up what she could to defend herself without any real armor, she took a deep breath and strode in, shield ready.

They came at her from the left and right as soon as she stepped through. Her shield took the hit from the left but the right clashed against her divine barrier, driven back with a hiss both from the rat and the singed fur. Still she stumbled to the side, and had to take a risky swing to keep the other one off of her. She flared her aura to give herself some space, but she had no idea how many of these things there even were. “Fenalin!” she called out, “I’m here!”

Over her shoulder, Fenalin saw the guard turn at the sound of the nearby scuffle and the shout - Kathmyl -  and that was when she sent the blast of flame at him. It was a poorly aimed one, and not particularly large, but it traveled the short distance between her and the guard and caught at his roughspun tunic. While he yelped and beat at the licking flames, she pressed her face close to the bars and shouted down the burrow corridor, “Kathmyl! Can you hear me? Hello?”

“Fenalin! Yes, I’m comin-” Kathmyl was cut off by a sudden blow to her side. There were so many of these things, and her holy barrier was good, but not the same as her armor. The wererats weren’t strong, she could take one down easily, but the sheer numbers had her worried. She tried to make her way towards Fenalin, but before she managed it, she realized she’d been backed up against a wall with several hissing rats approaching quickly. “Fenalin!” she shouted, a little more urgently this time.

Kathmyl needed her, and so she had to get out of this cage. With the screams of her guard loud in her ears, Fenalin concentrated her next burst of flame more carefully, on the viney ropes they had used to bind her wrists. It caught and burned through, singeing her skin, but it didn’t matter because her hands were free and now she could stretch an arm out of her prison and reach, as far as she could, trying to get a grip on her staff where it leaned against the dirt wall just outside. Her fingertips brushed the smooth black haft and it toppled, thankfully towards her. Fenalin grabbed it by the carved dragon’s wing and hauled it in through the bars, leveled it, loosed a blast of hissing, steaming acid that melted the wooden bars more quickly and completely than burning them would have done. She hopped carefully over the stinking puddle on the floor, kicked away the wildly grasping hand of the guard as he made a panicked grab for her ankle, and hurried in the direction from which she’d heard Kathmyl’s voice.

Kathmyl was getting worried, and that was only making things worse. Her barrier was starting to fade, having stood up to numerous blows, and while the wall behind her and the shield in front of her provided broad protection, there were simply too many of them. She made a clumsy swing, slow and hesitant, and suddenly her hammer was smacked from her hand, skidding off through the small crowd that had now gathered around her. She reached for her inner light, trying to call Bahamut to her aid in any way she knew how, but she couldn’t focus, to with the beating and scratching. One of the rats bit her arm, and the last of her protection gave in, allowing its teeth to sink into her. She cried out, and the other took that as their cue to press forward. With one arm in a vice and her shield pressed to her chest, she was on the ground, surrounded within moments.

It took Fenalin only moments to reach the scuffle, but all she could see at first glance was a great writhing pile of rat-men, scrambling over and around each other in a solid mass. Preoccupied with their prey, none of them appeared to notice her as she drew forth from herself the energy for another flame blast, channelling it through her staff this time, enveloping the whole heap in the hot stink of burning fur and a cacophony of agonized screaming. She hoped Kathmyl was protected beneath the bodies of her attackers from the spell’s heat; even as she thought this, the loss of energy left her stumbling against the wall of the burrow, leaning on her staff for support. This had better be all of them; she didn’t have another attack of this size in her.

It wasn’t all of them. More were-rats swarmed up the tunnel behind Fenalin, snarling in fury at the scent of their burning brethren, while the relatively uninjured ones near the bottom of the pile pushed aside the dead or dying ones and charged to meet her. Taking a deep breath, Fenalin raised her staff up vertically with both hands and felt the sudden sharp prick in the handle, the quick drain of her energy as the weapon drank deeply of her blood. As the first set of teeth latched onto her knapsack and claws dug into her arms and legs, she smashed the staff down, sending that energy out from where she stood in all directions with a rolling crash of thunder, fissures gaping suddenly in the tunnel walls, the floor. Rats lost their footing and toppled, and loose dirt and stones began to fall from the destabilized ceiling. Gasping and weakened, relying on her staff to stay on her feet, Fenalin waded through the fallen monsters towards where she suspected Kathmyl to be.

Kathmyl felt choked and crushed as the were-rats piled on to her, and the feeling only got worse when the flames joined the mix. The bodies on top of her took the worst of it, but the fire pulled the air out her lungs and replaced it with scorching heat. She could have sworn it was going to be happening forever, until it just as suddenly stopped. The earthquake was almost worse. If the crack that opened up under her arm had been under her torso instead, she would have said definitely worse, but as it was, she started to struggle to her feet. As her head breached the unfortunate sea of singed fur and flesh, she spotted Fenalin moving towards her, unsteady and using her staff for support. “Fenalin!” she called out, saying it with a feeling of relief for the first time today. Even though she was pulling herself free from dead beasts, she felt herself smile for the first time since she’d left camp.

Kathmyl’s grin was bright and genuine in her dirt-smudged face, but Fenalin could definitely see blood on her arm as she raised it to wave. The ground was still pitching about underfoot, and larger chunks of the tunnel’s ceiling were crashing down on the panicked rats behind them. Fenalin grabbed Kathmyl’s less injured arm and half-leaned on her, dragging them both towards the hole they’d stuffed her down earlier. Her legs trembled, and not because of the unsteady floor. “Whatever possessed you to follow me without your armor?”

Kathmyl’s right arm wasn’t good for much at the moment, but she reached over and wrapped it around Fenalin’s hand which was holding her arm. “Well I had to come quickly. I didn’t know what was wrong. It looks like you could have handled this without me, though.” When they reached the hole, Kathmyl helped push Fenalin through with her shield, and then did her best to crawl out herself, despite her injuries.

“I could have, yes, and then we wouldn’t both be in this mess,” grunted Fenalin, hauling Kathmyl out after her. Even without the extra twenty pounds of chainmail, the dwarf woman was heavy, and Fenalin’s arms were lacking in muscle. The ground still shook beneath them; that spell had a wider range than Fenalin had realized. Perhaps she should have tried it out before now. “How badly are you hurt? Can you make it back to camp?”

“I- I didn’t want to leave you alone,” Kathmyl defended, lamely. “But yes, I think I can make it back. Here, wait a second.” Kathmyl gently laid a hand on Fenalin’s shoulder and closed her eyes. Things still weren’t great, but at least she could focus. Taking a deep breath, she drew in light, and then let it flow towards each of them. She felt her bruises and cuts fade, and even the throbbing in her arm dulled noticeably. “There,” she said with a smile, “now we should be okay, right?”

The deep, careful healing spells Kathmyl used on the stumps of her severed fingers took a while to cast, and targeted just her hands. This one felt like a broad wash of restorative energy that lessened Fenalin’s immediate hurts and and made up somewhat for the blood her staff had taken in exchange for that last powerful spell. Despite the occasional tremor still shaking the ground, Fenalin felt steadier. Or maybe that was just Kathmyl’s hand on her shoulder, or her bright smile. Hadn’t she been about to scold Kathmyl for something? “That should, ah. That should do it, yeah.”

It was still a stumbling, clumsy journey for the the two small creatures, though they followed the trampled path left by Fenalin’s capture. “Kathmyl?” she ventured as they helped one another push gingerly through a tangle of thorny vines. “Perhaps don’t mention this to my brother? I’ve no wish to worry him.”

“Oh, okay. As long as you’re not hurt, I think. You’re not hurt, are you? They didn’t do anything to you?” Fenalin looked okay, but Kathmyl couldn’t help thinking of the scars she’d shown her, crossing her body.

Fenalin had felt the claws on her, but they hadn’t sunk in, or slashed her open anywhere that she could tell. The tooth punctures in Kathmyl’s arm looked much more serious than any of the minor scrapes and bruises Fenalin might have otherwise complained about. “I’m well enough. How’s your arm?” If the dwarf woman had taken the time to strap on her armor, or better yet, stayed in camp, she’d be better off than she was now.

“Um, not great, really. I’m glad you got there when you did, so thank you. I think I’ll dress my arm in my tent when we get back. You’re, you’re welcome to join me if you wish. For- for your wounds.” She almost didn’t add the last bit, but felt her face turning red as she looked at the ground in front of them anyway.