Brother Verdinen was slow to rise every morning, even though it was a small sin in of itself not to get up at dawn and greet the sun god Siddrim when he graced the mortal realm with one more day of light and life. Normally he justified such bad behavior by telling himself that he was up far too late studying the scriptures, but today he had no such excuse. All he could say was that several days on the road had done him no favors, and several nights of sleeping on rocks had been far from restful. By the time he was dressed up and out of his tent to greet the dawn, the Templars and their squires were just finishing their dawn prayers, instantly banishing that fig leaf.

If he never took another trip on behalf of the church, it would suit him fine, he thought, chastising himself for failing to maintain his focus on dawn’s cleansing glory. The truth was that he was exhausted, and today was certainly going to be one of the longest he could remember.

When Brother Verdinen finally finished the slow ritual movements of his prayer dance, he went to the campfire looking forward to breaking his fast but found only squires that were helping their masters to put on their chain mail hauberks and breastplates. Brother Faerbar gave him a knowing look that seemed to go right through him and simply said, “After. No one is going to want to eat before we go inside. Nausea will foul your helmet.”

The priest-candidate tried to hide his annoyance because, however he might outrank the veteran Templar on paper, it was never a good idea to get on the bad side of a well-liked veteran warrior. Paladins had their place - it just wasn’t in the halls of power.

“As you say,” Brother Verdinen agreed quickly, noting the way that Brother Faerbar’s squire kept giving the nearby palace fearful glances like he expected something to come rushing out of it in broad daylight. It seemed quite out of character for a paladin to pick a cowardly squire, but for now, he reserved judgment. After all, he could feel the fear too, however distantly and unlike this boy, he was a grown man.

When they finally set out, there was no one to bar their way, and the doors were not locked. The smell of death and putrefaction that came boiling out of the entrance hit him like a physical force, though, and he gagged, finally understanding what it was that the Paladin had meant with that knowing glance. He’d obviously checked the palace out before the rest of them had woken up, at least to this point. It was a dirty trick not to warn him more thoroughly, Brother Verdinen thought, but he was still grateful on some level that he hadn’t vomited.

“Open every curtain and every window, squires,” Brother Faebar ordered grimly. “Everyone else spread out in groups of three on the ground floor only and look for the hole that the message spoke of. That is where we begin our search!”

As if to further illustrate his point, his sword began to glow dimly at that point as he invested lord Siddrim’s holy light into the ancient blade. It wasn’t a trick that everyone could do, but it was one of the few things that all the great Paladins throughout history had in common, and Verdinen felt pangs of jealousy as half of his men did the same. This was clearly a blessed group, loved by their creator, and he should be grateful for that, but as he watched the cadre splinter and drift off to explore the entrance hall, he couldn’t help but feel exposed. With every passing minute, the dark hall brightened, but that only made his feeling of dread worse, and eventually, the priest candidate was forced to return to the Paladin’s side simply to feel safe again.

He couldn’t help it. This place looked like a butcher’s floor, and each step he made on the stone floor made awful sticky sounds that said everything about where he was, even though he purposefully looked away. They went room by room, and other than the evidence of violence, the place was completely untouched. Nothing had been stolen or defaced. Whatever had done this had neither an axe to grind nor pockets to line. Anyone of that bent would have taken the golden candelabras or the silver dinnerware. Instead, all they had taken were the people that had once populated this beautiful building, and all they had left behind was evidence that they hadn’t gone willingly.

It was a sobering thought; he oscillated back and forth between that and the idea that no matter how many rooms they searched, they couldn’t find a trace of the creatures that had done this. It wasn’t long after that that the floor was pronounced clear, and everyone joined together to descend into the basement. It was there that they immediately found the hole, almost as he’d pictured it days ago. It was like an open wound in the basement’s stone floor.

There were only 17 of them there in that basement, but Brother Faerbar didn’t even pause to delay. He just flared his sword a little brighter and went into the darkness without a word, along with another Templar. The opening was huge and easily big enough for two men to walk abreast, and they went in a few at a time without any preparation or discussion, which struck Verdinen as more than a little rash. Each group that followed waited only long enough to give the pair in front of them enough room to maneuver before joining them in the darkness. So, moment by moment, the once crowded room got emptier and emptier while he stood aside. At first, he’d considered finding an excuse to stay behind, but now that he was almost alone, that sounded like a terrible idea, so he joined the last of the squires and descended into the stinking pit with a silent prayer on his lips.

There was still a blood trail, though it got thinner and less consistent as they went along until it was lost in the darkness along with everything else. After that, the silence quickly became the most chilling part of the whole ordeal. It spoke to the professionalism of the Order of Purgative Flame, and it should have been reassuring. Instead, the crunch of rocks and dirt beneath their feet as they descended lower and lower into the earth made his thoughts race with imagined evils. If the shadows worked through the idle hands of men, then they traveled into their minds on taut and empty silences like this one.

Brother Verdinen was almost tempted to hum a hymn to comfort himself. Only knowledge that the silence was a tactical decision and that making unnecessary noise would earn him a rebuke kept him quiet. Instead, he tried to focus on the surrounding details to keep his flights of fantasy at bay. His vision of this place had been reptilian and slimy, but reality hadn’t borne any of that out. Even so, he couldn’t help but imagine that the rough surface he was walking on was the scales that some titanic snake had sloughed off, mixed with the bones of its victims, and no matter how many times he tried to shake it by reassuring himself that this tunnel had been carved by men, not even touching the tool marks on the wall as they walked could completely shake that fear.

After almost two minutes of walking, they finally paused as they came to a room. Well, it wasn’t a room, really. It was an intersection of five different passages that met in a messy, overlapping intersection without any apparent rhyme or reason. Despite the tool marks he’d seen earlier, the priest-candidate began to doubt that humans had been behind this after all. Just looking at the way that the corridors met gave him a headache. All of them met at uneven angles, and none seemed to be the continuation of the others. It was as if someone was just digging around beneath Fallravea almost completely at random.

The leaders debated the best course of action quietly for a few minutes there, giving Brother Verdinen a chance to push his way closer to the front of the line.

“Well, what’s the plan then,” he said softly after making sure that the man he spoke over wasn’t anyone important. “Clearly, getting lost down here could easily be a factor. Perhaps we should go fetch extra members of the guard and chalk so that we can—”

“We continue ahead, acolyte,” Brother Faerbar said, with just a hint of annoyance in his voice. "The only question is if we make ourselves more vulnerable by exploring the auxiliary branches first or if we move directly down the primary one.”

“I don’t see a difference,” Brother Verdinen hissed back, snatching a torch from one of the nearby squires and looking from one rough-hewn tunnel to the next, looking for drops of blood or other clues that might point such things out but seeing nothing.

“It’s not in the seeing,” the Paladin whispered, tapping his ear. “It’s in the hearing.”

For a moment, the priest-candidate looked at the three tunnels that were roughly ahead of him, letting his gaze drift back and forth as he tried to decide. All three passages looked the same: they were empty, dusty, crooked, and occasionally spattered with blood. It was true that there was the faint sound of water down the one that drifted off to the right, but as he moved the torch back and forth, he saw it flicker slightly when it moved in front of the leftmost tunnel, and his smile of superiority reasserted itself.

“It looks like this one goes back to the surface. Perhaps if we cleared it first, we could—” Brother Verdinen started to say, trying to prove his worth to the veterans. But as he spoke, his words trailed off because the torch began to gyrate and sputter wildly.

“Get back,” the cowardly squire said, “something is coming!” The boy spoke at a normal volume, but the silence had smothered them all for so long that it might as well be a shout, and the idea that a lowly squire could command him to do anything, especially when the passage was clearly empty raised Verdinen’s hackles. He started to turn to rebuke the boy when something moved in the shadows.

No, it wasn’t moving in the shadows. It was the shadows. Almost faster than he could see, the dark, shimmering outline of a snake that was almost as big around as his whole body struck out from the wall of night that began where his torchlight ended, and with a mouth full of jagged obsidian teeth, it bit down on the right forearm holding the torch and yanked him forward hard enough that it pulled him completely off his feet and began to drag him down the tunnel almost as fast as he could run.

He shrieked as everything happened at once, but it was more in surprise and horror than pain. In truth was that the pain of being dragged across the rough stone floor was much worse than the pain of coming from his arm, which was almost numb.

Brother Verdinen forced himself to stop screaming, and for the first time in his life, it wasn’t for appearances either. It was so that he could focus on reciting the words to invoke Siddrim’s holy light.