"Hey, if we get the king situation straightened out and save the world, the new monarch will owe all of you big time, and I can't imagine there not being some kind of reward in that. What are you guys here for, if not that? How'd you get into adventuring, anyway?"

"Oh, Fazil's the one with the backstory," says Mahdi. "I wanted to be a wizard and I passed all my reading, deciphering, memorization and reasoning tests so my parents figured they'd scrape together the fees, and they did, and I became a wizard, devout of Nethys, moderately good at things, and then - eventually, wizards get to the point where they can't learn anything new just from books - though you still need the books. You have to be using magic in time-sensitive situations under pressure. Medical triage works, or combat, or some people claim they've gotten there with sparring but it takes a lot longer. So I started adventuring."

Everyone looks at Hagan. He has at no point taken off the hood and wraps that cover most of his face. 

"I grew up in a happy home with twelve siblings. Then one princeday, all of them were eaten by the Tarrasque. I chose it as my first favored enemy."

"...what's the Tarrasque?"

"He's being - the Tarrasque is a terrible monstrosity that has on occasion ravaged the continent. Not for thousands of years, though. No one's ever gotten an answer out of him but it's a different one each time, and all of them that - obvious nonsense, if you're local," offers Fazil. "Give her another one, come on, she doesn't know things here -"

"I hatched from an egg," Hagan says. "What kind of forces do you think you'll need, to take the darkspawn?"

"It's all about killing the archdemon, really, that's what you have to do to end the blight. After that you just have to clean up the stragglers, they won't keep pouring from underground. The tricky part is getting to it, with so many darkspawn in the way. I'm not sure I should be the person in charge of strategy for the next big battle, I'm not a general or anything, but I guess I'd say you want a big mass of soldiers to meet the darkspawn and break their lines, somehow, and then a smaller force of elite people to meet the archdemon itself. Including all of our surviving gray wardens, I think we're supposed to be the only people who can actually end blights. I'm betting it's tougher than a dragon, but, y'know, someone's gotta engage it directly. Doesn't have to be you guys if you don't want to die, though, we could definitely use the help just healing the Arl and getting to the Dalish without getting killed by assassins or the darkspawn's advance scouts. And solving whatever problems the Dalish inevitably present us with, I guess."

"What've they got with flight?"

"Honestly not sure anybody in this situation can fly besides the archdemon itself. It can fly. Looks an awful lot like a dragon, last I saw, though it's not one."

"Mahdi can fly, and so can anyone he likes. So you might be able to get by without the big mass of soldiers, though it's always good to have, like, backup plans -"

"Oooh, that'd be useful. Of course we would probably immediately die if we were the only people in an area full of endless waves of darkspawn and a dead archdemon. And they do have bows."

"Yes," says Mahdi solemnly. "We should definitely not charge the dragonlike thing alone. But - it sounds like it would help significantly for us to be there."

"Yeah. I think it would."

Shrug. "All right."

"What do they say about Good adventuring parties?" Fazil asks him.

"That you end up saving the world for a pittance. Which seems true as far as it goes but - odd in emphasis."

"Well. I didn't expect to be extremely grateful for having been whisked off by an evil mage to a land where nobody speaks my language, but - I think I am. Conditional on us not plane shifting into the ocean and immediately drowning on the way back, that would be really depressing. Although I guess it's less of an issue when flying's in the picture."

"Luck can be a strange thing," says Fazil. 

"I have a scroll of teleport for emergencies," Madhi says. "It's above my level so there's some chance, worse under pressure, I'd fail to cast it, and it costs more than we'd earn from ten of these trips so I strongly prefer never to use it, but it exists for situations that'd otherwise constitute immediate death."

Nod. "Well. We'll do our best never to need it. But I think maybe the world has a shot."

They keep watch in turns, again. There's nothing about tonight, or at least the floaty heads have all decided to be invisible.

All right then. More adventuring in the morning?

Yep! They want to stay out here at least five days, to cover their travel costs, and if they're all in good shape they'll go seven.

It's on the morning of the third that things go wrong. They're exploring a section of a temple when suddenly there's a snap, like a plank breaking - but the floor is stone, not wood - and then there's a much much louder snap and they're falling, for one second, two seconds, and then they're drifting towards the ground in complete darkness but at a very gentle pace.

"Daylight," says Fazil.

They're in a cavern. It's bigger than a stadium, bigger than a city center. There are - at least ten of those lionine things, looking up at them, and hundreds of eyeballs, and a couple dozen two-story-tall demons with bewildered expressions and holy symbols -

Below them there is a sudden scramble for weapons. 

- well fuck. 

Exits? Exits anywhere? Can she even see the edges of the cavern? Can she see light coming from anywhere except the daylight spell?

In the corners of the room there are doors. If there's light coming through them it's drowned out by the daylight spell. 

Beneath them the creatures they've intruded on are drawing bows and moving their hands through the gestures of spells. 

"- cleric's feather fall, I think," says Fazil, and the gentle fall cuts out abruptly, and they hit the ground hard as several dozen spells arc into the air and explode over their heads. 

The daylight spell goes out.

She gets a little bit of healing from somewhere. It's not very much.

Maker preserve us, she prays, automatically.

She can't see at all now, but the only possible ways out were those doors, so she'll - if she can cut a path to them then at least the others have a chance, right, even if she has no idea how she'd communicate it without giving away her position - 

She guards with her shield and rams into whatever the first thing between her and the nearest door is.

It snarls back at her and smacks her backwards, hard. 

"Darkvision," says Mahti; this does nothing for her so presumably he was doing it for someone else. Someone grabs her. "Teleport." There's a snatch of light; something caught fire. "Wall of Force. Darkvision," and now she can see. There is this invisible barrier encircling them and a whole lot of critters smashing themselves up against it and two inside.

Well, she can dispatch the two inside before she gives up, that seems like it needs doing. Everything hurts, but she can still swing her sword arm.

"Seventy seconds," Mahti says. 

    "Do you have another one?" Hagan asks him.

"No."

     "Teleport failed?"

"Yes."

      "Can you fly us -"

"Can fly two. They could carry the other two. Half movement speed."

      "We won't make it."

"No."

Fazil is praying. 

      "Fazil," says Hagan, "do you have Sending."

"Yes."

       "Send 'in urgent trouble, ruins of el Amara, six thousand paces one o'clock of the fortress of Tal Dievily'. Can you send it to my father?

Fazil half-laughs. "No one could possibly - not in time - and no, I can't, I've never met your father."

       "Thought it was familiar, you had to be familiar with the person, didn't have to have met them if you knew who they were -"

"Not with that indirection, though, not a relation of someone I know." They're yelling over each other.

      "Send it to the pharaoh."

Fazil gasps for breath, softly, unhappily. "No."

     "Fuck's sake, do it."

"I want to die lawful. And it wouldn't - couldn't - help - they don't, they've never -"

"They will this time."