deck during high seas.'
'I don't even know what that means,' muttered Seren.
Raidon paused, allowing the wisps of his past to evaporate. He said over his shoulder, 'It looks as if the grass thins out ahead. Regardless, I sense this is the quickest way to the Eldest. This is the way we proceed.'
The captain swept off his hat and executed a mock bow, his face just avoiding the top of the grass. 'After you.' Raidon didn't waste breath telling the captain he could return to his ship if he was unhappy with their route. He resumed trudging down the vegetated corridor.
The Cerulean Sign reacted strongly to the grass-but it reacted nearly as strongly to the stone walls of the corridor and even the air. In Xxiphu, few things were not tainted.
As the half-elf promised, the grass thinned out, coinciding with a widening in the corridor. A silver bulb sprouted in the center of the area from a particularly thick piece of grass… actually more like a stem than a blade. The pod was just larger than a man, though its exact dimensions were not fixed, it gradually thickened and thinned, contorting like quicksilver in slow motion. Raidon saw his features distorted in the bulb's undulating body. He concentrated on it to the exclusion of everything else, and the Cerulean Sign cooled.
'Stay clear of the bulb,' Raidon said. 'It's possibly dangerous.'
'Hells, do you really think so?' said Thoster. 'I thought it was just a boil on a halfling's ass.'
Raidon's back muscles twitched, a movement too small for anyone else to notice. The captain's constant wiseacre comments were beginning to wear on him. He knew the privateer was being willfully facetious, but he replied anyway, 'If you value your life, stay clear. I sense this growth is set here as a sentry-it's not a random weed.'
So saying, Raidon began to edge around the expanded space in the corridor, giving the bulb as wide a berth as he could.
Seren moved to emulate him. 'At least the grass is shorter here,' she said.
Thoster chuckled to himself a moment, then followed. The crew member 'volunteers' brought up the rear.
Halfway around the chamber, the Sign's temperature dropped more precipitously.
The monk had the distinct sense through the spellscar that something abominable approached from the direction they were headed. Raidon held up his hand, calling a halt. He looked back to make eye contact with the others and put a finger of his other hand to his lips. He hoped the captain would refrain from his mocking comments, if just this once.
A scraping, belling cacophony issued down the tunnel. It sounded like silvery grass being shoved aside in a wide swathe.
Raidon could just make out a shape lumbering toward them, but the reflective vegetation still hid its exact nature.
Seren began to chant arcane syllables. He heard the captain draw his golemwork blade. Raidon readied himself to slay whatever threatened their progress with the eager length of Angul.
The shape crested the last of the high, silvery blades. It was an aboleth the size of a chariot.
Thoster said, 'Blood!'
The aboleth's five scattered, red eyes rotated in their sockets to focus on the invaders. A mucous haze engulfed Raidon. The smell was overwhelming. He heard Seren gag and cough, losing her spell before she could release it.
Angul flared. The thin coating of slime that had misted across the sword and Raidon burned away in a puff of steam. The words 'Aberrations shall be purged*dropped from Raidon's lips before he realized the sword had got its hooks into him again.
Not that it mattered. The aboleth would be purged.
Raidon leaped. Rather, he tried to. Instead, he fell onto his elbows when his feet failed to leave the ground.
Several dozen silvery blades had wrapped around his calves without his notice.
Thoster called, 'The grass is alive!'
A sharp tug around the monk's ankles pulled him closer to the center of the tunnel, where the mirrorlike pod undulated. He saw that besides himself, Thoster and two of the crew were similarly ensnared. Even as he watched, the sinuous grass transferred one of the screaming crew members to the globe. The pod languidly nodded down on it s stem as if to deliver a blank-faced kiss to the flailing figure being dragged tait.
The moment one of the man's thrashing arms touched the pod, a shiny tide rushed to cover the crew member's entire body, cutting off his screams. Not even a boot or grasping hand protruded a heartbeat later. The pod lazily resumed its former upright position at the end of its stalk, still thickening and thinning, though perhaps slightly larger than it had been. Other than that, there was no evidence that a man's life had just been snuffed out. Raidon used the Blade Cerulean to cut the strands tangling his legs. He snapped to his feet.
'Cut the stalk,' Seren yelled, pointing at the bulb.
Kill the aboleth, Angul urged, pulling him around to face the malevolent watcher.
Raidon charged the aboleth.
It vomited a fist of slime that whined past his head.
His advance was slowed by the rippling grass, which kept tripping him. He managed to avoid most of the blades, but not all. His attack failed several paces short of punching the blade through the aboleth's belly.
Instead, he was forced to use Angul to cut away the sea of entangling, angry blades that writhed around him like a nest of headless hydras.
The aboleth's eyes tracked him. He felt their malign power attempting to burrow into his brain and overwrite it with new thoughts and new goals.
Raidon shook off the influence. His mind was too well schooled to be suborned. Or perhaps it was the Blade Cerulean, who didn't like competitors.
Fending off a tentacle slap with a savage cut from Angul, he advanced once more. He managed to pare away one of the aboleth's tentacles. The creature didn't seem to care that one of its four limbs lay severed and squirming in the grass. It was as if the aboleth had no fear for its own safety.
Not that Angul cared either, for considerations of defense or even caution. By extension, neither did Raidon.
The haze surrounding the creature pulsed, becoming momentarily thick as mud. Then it sleeted everything in glistening slime the color of bilge water and no less smelly. He heard the shouts of his compatriots, caught in the same ooze burst.
Raidon found himself slimed under a layer of hardening muck that sought to immobilize him, making him once again easy prey for the silvery grass.
The monk put his free hand to his chest and summoned energy from the Cerulean Sign. A blaze of pure blue light burst from it. The illumination shattered the hardening shell of slime.
Even as the aboleth tried to blink the afterimage of the cerulean light from its five eyes, Raidon crossed the final distance between them. He slid the entire length of Angul into the aboleth's brain.
The aboleth's death gurgle rattled down the corridor. Raidon pulled Angul free. The blade burned the creature's nasty blood from its length with a sheet of fire.
'Hey, Raidon, some help, eh?'
He turned.
Thoster remained caught in the entangling grass. The privateer was half again as close to the pod as he'd started.
A coating of hardened slime resisted the man's every move. The captain slashed his clicking sword to sever strands of grass, but for every strand he cut, two more twined around him.
Seren had enshrouded herself in a translucent globe of protective spell light. The defensive magic had apparently shielded her from the ooze burst and-so far, at least- resisted the increasingly frantic attempts of the silvery blades to penetrate it. He could hear her chanting the arcane precursors to another spell.
Of the crew, only a single struggling woman remained. Raidon saw it was Mharsan, Thoster's newest first mate.
Blood streaked her legs where the cruel blades cut deep in their attempt to pull her toward a quicksilver embrace.
