J Riff
The Ants are my friends..
Part thirty-seven Aleric returns to the groghouse.
A sweltry wind blew unauspisciously around him as the huge barbarian from the North-east scented the informative night vapours. There was an evil hint, a trace, a whisp of deadly danger on the air on this night and Zorgs mighty forehead wrinkled mightily as he strove to decipher the identity that was hidden, lurking behind the minute waft of night air that had permeated his wilderness-hardened olfactory organs mere moments ago.
A wizard and his zombie familiar? No, that was not it. It was a darker, an older, a more eldritchly-imbued odor which he had detected. He waited, and the scent came again. An ghoul from the forgotten colonnades of lost Lethizuria in Thaugothgula? No. Zorgs' muscles moved irritatedly, clenching and unclenching as he the mulled the mystery of the mysterious guest to this forgotten wasteland where he reposed on a cromlech replenishing the vitality of his mighty thews.
He could see nothing. But something was there. A memory surfaced and the gigantic barbarians' eye's eyes clouded as he remembered - Zthkwakzia! Evil overlord of a subterranean horde of blind, tentacled things with claws that shredded all and sundry before them... even Zorg winced at the memory of the Gwathaxiaxx massacre.
It boded not well, and Zorg sighed as dark shapes twisted and moved in the inkiness of the dark night around him like nothing so much as a spectral wraith of dire dimensions bent on absorbing him like a spell of eternal dark cast by a malignant necromancer, of which Zorg knew a few. And now, his sword pulsed like a thing alive and he knew that battle would be joined, the evil one approacheth and he must again slay and slay again, until all were slain.Or he could, just this once, run away.
A sweltry wind blew unauspisciously around him as the huge barbarian from the North-east scented the informative night vapours. There was an evil hint, a trace, a whisp of deadly danger on the air on this night and Zorgs mighty forehead wrinkled mightily as he strove to decipher the identity that was hidden, lurking behind the minute waft of night air that had permeated his wilderness-hardened olfactory organs mere moments ago.
A wizard and his zombie familiar? No, that was not it. It was a darker, an older, a more eldritchly-imbued odor which he had detected. He waited, and the scent came again. An ghoul from the forgotten colonnades of lost Lethizuria in Thaugothgula? No. Zorgs' muscles moved irritatedly, clenching and unclenching as he the mulled the mystery of the mysterious guest to this forgotten wasteland where he reposed on a cromlech replenishing the vitality of his mighty thews.
He could see nothing. But something was there. A memory surfaced and the gigantic barbarians' eye's eyes clouded as he remembered - Zthkwakzia! Evil overlord of a subterranean horde of blind, tentacled things with claws that shredded all and sundry before them... even Zorg winced at the memory of the Gwathaxiaxx massacre.
It boded not well, and Zorg sighed as dark shapes twisted and moved in the inkiness of the dark night around him like nothing so much as a spectral wraith of dire dimensions bent on absorbing him like a spell of eternal dark cast by a malignant necromancer, of which Zorg knew a few. And now, his sword pulsed like a thing alive and he knew that battle would be joined, the evil one approacheth and he must again slay and slay again, until all were slain.Or he could, just this once, run away.
