LOST TRAILS Chapter 7: The Harrowdale Horror

[Wolfglide of the Fraternity]

"I don't suppose you would be surprised if I were in favor of burning it down," says Klokulf. Destroying a heretic temple sounds quite cathartic, he thinks.

[Adam]

"I appreciate your concern, Raen, but if this place was sacred to a goddess, she seems to have turned her face from it. Were I in her position, I would support anyone who cleanses this place and removes the corruption. In any case, I doubt that the locals will be in much of a hurry to worship here in the future."

He looks around. "Seems like three votes in favor and one against. Any last minute arguments? I can summon a small flaming sphere to get things started."

[RocEter]

"I have no objections." Clive says.

[ewancummins]

Peering through the broken window, standing close to the building with Sir Clive on hand to guard him, Benn conjures a fiery sphere within the temple's interior, on the flagstones between the altar and the pews.
He sets the ball rolling against pews, candles, plaster, curtains, altar cloths--anything in sight that looks like it will ignite.

Flames race up the black cloths hanging over the other stained-glass windows.
Candles melt and topple.
The black canvases against the window interiors fall or burn away completely, and the figures in the colored panes glow with hellish light, even in the midday sun. Red-faced saints and heroes glare down at the party.

Frantic tapping echoes within the temple. It stops as suddenly as it began.

Pews blacken.

A fresco shatters, falling in smoking shards.

After more than a minute has passed in this act of arson, the smoke makes it impossible to steer the ball.

As he steps back, coughing, Benn glimpses child-sized figures leaping and writhing in the red-lit smoke.


He, and the others, hear voices rise over the crackle and hiss of the fire; screams like a mother in birth pangs, tittering laughter, groans, and a rush of incomprehensible syllables that could be words.
Then, above it all a piercing scream:

TEKELI LI!

TEKELI LI!

[ewancummins]

THE SCREAMS and babbling voices diminish.

But now Benn is shouting: ''Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" , turned away from the building with his arms lifted, staring at his companions.
The eyes of the archivist-arsonist burn with fever.
''Tekeli-li!"

A louder voice joins him from the ornamented roof edge. Black slime gouts in an arc from the beak of a stone hippogriff and pours down on Sir Clive!
Teeth or claws grate on the knight's armor as the torrent of slime slides down his left side.
The nasty stuff reforms into a horse-sized crawling mound with long pseudo-pods.

Eyes stare out in all directions.
Fanged mouths chant and gibber and cackle madly.

IA SABOATH!


https://i.pinimg.com/originals/be/fc/f9 ... be4040.jpg

Raen gawks at the Thing only a moment before he extends his arms, fingers splayed, his lips forming the triggering words of one of his 'hung' spells--
''AiiiiiiiiAiiiaiaia! The stones, the cold stones!Kehexekkea! Sorrow!Hahahahaaaaaa..."
Not sorcery, but nonsense.
The wizard stands in place, despite the slowly advancing horror.
Tears appear in his eyes.

[ewancummins]

The creature shoots mouths out on pseudo-pods and seizes Benn, dragging the babbling archivist closer to its central mass.
Tubes spray a stream of brown juice full in Benn's face.
He shrieks.

Alain blasts the daemonic ooze with magical darts, but it does not release its prey.

Sir Clive lays into the monster, but his wild blows bounce or slide off the slimy , ever-shifting form.


Katrin creeps close, prepared for a tentative strike, wary of the Thing's many watchful eyes. A long tentacle uncoils from the creature's base, striking over the grass like an adder and wrapping tightly around her left foot.
Frantically, she kicks off the snared boot and hops backward.

Benn, screaming and swinging his walking stick like a club, tears free of the hungry mouth-hands at the last second, even as the creature forms a huge maw to swallow him entirely.


Klokulf rushes up and hurls the contents of a flask on the unclean being.

As his companions battle the monster, Benn gropes along the wall, holding one hand to his blinded eyes, using the stick to find his way.

All the while the Thing attacks, the voices coming from it continue their hellish chanting and laughing and screaming.

IA IA

in the dark wood

M'GLWFNN!


AhahahahahahaHhHHbwaahahahaha

SUTH OQUAAAAKKAA
IA IA !

iN THE PIT
iN THE piT


G'KARREEE

[ewancummins]

As Benn traces a circle on the ground with his stick, the monster snares him again. It drags him underneath its quivering bulk to a chorus of blasphemies and maniacal laughter.

The man hardly has time to scream before the black ooze-flesh folds over his face!

Sir Clive lifts Mercy and severs two pseudo-pods.

But it forms more limbs, and shooting these toward the knight, grabs him and begins dragging him in as well.

Alain blasts it with volleys of conjured arrows.

Raen calls down a black cloud of shrieking bats, dropping them on the loathsome thing that just ate Benn.


Katrin, ducking and weaving past swaying feelers, stabs. An eye, this time.

A flash of light flies from Klokulf into the midst of the bats.

Alain launches another volley as Sir Clive tears free of the biting arms.
The missiles slam into the unnatural flesh with the wet thud of bloody meat tossed on a butcher's block.

It screams in all its voices at once:
TEKELI-LI!

Shuddering, the abomination rolls away a few feet and spreads into a wide pool of blinking eyes and twitching mouths.
Nearby, Benn lies on his back, staring upward with reddened, tear-filled eyes. His clothes sizzle with whatever noxious fluids the alien entity used to digest its prey.
Pink blisters cover his face and hands.



He seems to be breathing, but he does not respond to the cries of his comrades.

Like the undulating pool of slimy flesh, eyes, and mouths, Benn reeks of rotten meat. Even the furthest member of the party catches the odor, even with the smoke drifting from the broken temple window.

[Lord Skybolt]

On seeing that the thing still lives blasts it with more darts of magic .

[ewancummins]

On seeing that the thing still lives blasts it with more darts of magic .

Raen's conjured bats scatter when Alain shoots.

The crawling pool splatters all over, gobs of it splashing on Sir Clive and Katrin.

Eyes dissolve into pink grease.

Fangs fall from deliquescing mouths, sinking into the earth like cursed seeds.

The rotten meat stench grows intolerable.

Grass, already browned, blackens in a wide patch and a ring of splotches where the thing had been.

Smoke from the Temple drifts over the battlefield--it's thicker now, puffing steadily out the broken window...


END OF CHAPTER