Safiya casts Premonition. Her skin shimmers with deflective energy.

"Let's hope," she agrees, not sounding very hopeful.

They hardly make it three steps out of the ring of pillars before the ground rumbles beneath their feet. "So much for escaping unnoticed. The earth spirits wake; ready yourself!"

Ciaveth sighs heavily.

"Yaaaaaaay."

There are several more buffing spells she could do, but she's not going to use them just yet. She only has so many of those, and they're short enough that she wants to save them for when she's fighting whatever is inevitably in charge of this place. Instead, she will make do with just stabbing with her (doubly) enchanted weapon, haste, and various protection spells.

(She misses her sword. The rapier's good, but it's still no Sword of Gith.)

These spirits seem to be groggy, or something; they swing their clublike appendages sluggishly, and none of them can seem to get in a solid hit. On the other hand, that might be that she's wearing enchanted armor and hasted and stoneskinned.

They each go down to a few choice stabs of her rapier, and a few Magic Missiles from Safiya's staff. "Hmm. Perhaps the tales of the great fury of Rashemi spirits were exaggerated," Safiya suggests.

"Well now that you've said that out loud, we're going to immediately come across something much, much worse," says Ciaveth in a deadpan. The quip reminds her of Shandra, which still hurts, even after so long after her death, but this is not the sort of problem one solves by not saying the cute quip that reminds her of her dead friend. Comparatively, it's an old pain. She's used to it.

Time to get back to trying to get out of here before she gets some new pains! What's the much worse thing that Safiya absolutely summoned with her words, she's excited to meet it and probably stab it.

She doesn't seem to have oh look it's a giant transparent bear spirit.

"Damnation," Safiya mutters, and hurls a Scorching Ray. "This is entirely coincidental."

"You keep telling yourself that, and we will keep on meeting bear spirits at entirely coincidental times that just so happen to coincide perfectly with proving you wrong."

Stab? Stab.

The bear spirit also goes down pretty easily. It's a bit more of a workout than the barrow guardian elementals were, but not much.

Safiya examines a nearby... campsite? "Who was camping down here? It's hardly the most hospitable location."

Ciaveth is just as confused.

“... it’s very old,” she observes. “See how rusted the cooking pot is? And there’s no sign of packing up the camp...” She looks back towards the place that was once her prison. “Perhaps whoever made that? I can’t imagine it took a single afternoon. But then why did they leave their camping supplies here once they were done...?”

Safiya finds a hefty tome entitled "The City of Judgement", which is heavily foxed and near crumbling. "They brought some light reading, as well."

(The book looks... somehow familiar.)

Ciaveth leans down to inspect it and try to remember where she’s seen this book before. It’s... not clear, it’s not any of the genres of book she took enough interest in to pester her foster father to get for her. And she hasn’t had much time for recreational reading, after, just spell books and magical theory and ancient Illefarn texts about one specific Shadow King related topic in particular.

“... Strange. I suppose that means the prison was never for me, and whoever dumped me in there was just taking advantage of what was already long there.” She looks at the prison again, squinting. She hadn't noticed, before, because she was very busy recovering from impromptu chest surgery and being very angry about her circumstances, but it contains a skeleton. She frowns.

"And the previous occupant died in it. Which I suppose says good things for its ability to hold a prisoner, but. This is... such a strange place to go out of one's way to dump a person. An ancient, forgotten prison in a spirit barrow? I wonder why here, in particular. This seems very deliberate."

"I noticed the skeleton as well. It bears no signs of violence, and - did you notice how it's positioned? Cross-legged, like someone just sat down and waited for death? And you're right - you'd think anyone with the wherewithal to get you into that prison without breaking the wards would be able to set up their own cage." Safiya shakes her head. "Questions, questions... let's get out of here so we can get some answers."

Ciaveth nods. "Yes, let's. Though I think I'll try to take the book before we go, see if it has anything telling."

Does the book crumble immediately upon being touched, even if she is being very gentle?

It's not quite that bad. The barrow isn't exactly a library, but it's protected the book from the worst of the elements.

Bound in blackened leather, the pages of the tome are brittle and cracked. The text is barely legible, faded and written in a spidery hand:

In my dream I saw a city, gray and forbidding, beneath an empty sky. Before its gates came a hideous procession - all the dead of the world, of a hundred worlds, awaiting the judgement of the gods.

And around the gray city loomed the Wall. Its bricks were souls, mortared by a foul green mold. These souls were the Faithless, who had denied the gods in life, or had never truly believed.

I drew nearer the Wall, and at once I heard the screams of those Faithless souls. "Cursed are we," they cried, "who denied the jealous gods, and now are forsaken." And other voices answered them, saying "Remember the Betrayer's Crusade. Remember the Betrayer, who swore to bring down the Wall. Have patience, for the Betrayer may yet return..."

After this, the original text has faded so badly that it is illegible. But someone has scribbled feverishly in the margin: Another reference to the Betrayer's Crusade... though Myrkul's priests deny its existence. The truth is in their vaults... in the whispering scrolls... the Lamentations of the Dead...

Safiya glances over her shoulder. "Myrkul? I suppose that makes sense, with how old the book is. It's still odd to see references to a dead god..."

"Odd, indeed. Hm. Maybe it's not involved after all. I don't see why someone would specifically want to read about... the... afterlife..." She stops, then looks back towards the skeleton. A question forms on her lips, and her expression changes to one of puzzlement.

"..... do you suppose," says Ciaveth slowly, "that the previous occupant was the one who made it? For... themselves? To die in?"

Safiya considers this. "It would explain why the campsite was left intact... and why the skeleton seemed so peaceful. I don't know if we can come to a confident conclusion, but it seems like a reasonable hypothesis."

For some reason, she wants to argue with it being a hypothesis. It's not a hypothesis, it's what happened, like puzzle pieces clicking into place. It makes perfect sense, it matches the feeling of despair and self sacrifice and what the fuck is making her so sure about this? Hypothesis is right, they have a lot of clues but no proof, so why is she so certain that it's what happened?

"Okay, hold on, we can leave the barrow later. I need to figure out how this prison works, something's... not right." 'Not right' barely scrapes the surface of it, this place feels familiar, the book feels familiar, the story feels familiar, she feels like she's remembering a dream except she doesn't remember dreaming. Did the prison trap the guy's soul? Did it rub off on her? Are the spirits around her psychically pushing the last prisoner's life onto her? Are they going to mistake her for the skeleton that died here? Is she?

She marches back over to the pillars and sets about studying them. She reaches out to touch the carved animal runes with a hand, trying to see how much of the prison's magical aura remains. If it's some kind of spiritual bleed through of a recently freed soul that had been trapped, that might make some sense...

There's a specific rune that draws her eye. It's a circle of dancers, surrounding a spiral which looks... somehow malevolent.

When she touches it, a thrill of wild energy surges through her body. The runes grow larger, and brighter, until they're the only thing she can see. Figures sweep past in a torrent of light and sound. Then there are more images, percolating through her mind. A wan but cheerful little boy, trailing in her wake. A woman with a more than passing resemblance to Safiya, explaining her latest arcane discovery, laughing and kissing her. A wall of screaming souls.

The visions pass. The runes are nothing but carvings in stone, and her eyes are clear.

Ciaveth blinks. She looks at Safiya, then back at the carving that brought some kind of vision.

.... This is not a coincidence. Her waking up here was extremely deliberate. Being saved by this person was very deliberate. Not necessarily deliberate on Safiya's part, but she is feeling very manipulated right now. Like she's been dropped into someone else's life somewhere in the middle and expected to pick everything up where they left off.

"Or maybe I actually just need to get out of here as fast as physically possible," she murmurs, faintly. "And teleport to Crossroad Keep and hide in the basement with the giant spider and hope no one finds me and drags me into their latest problems."

"I'd like to bring you to Lienna and find out what's going on before you return to your keep, but I understand the impulse," Safiya says. "Shall we continue onwards and upwards?"

"Yeah. Yeah, let's. I think this prison held more than just a corpse, though."

But yes, getting far away from this place that is probably bleeding the last occupant's soul is high up on her priority list. Brr.

Onwards and upwards! For real, this time!

They run into a couple more barrow guardians and a couple more spirit bears, but then they come to a ramp leading upwards.

When they ascend to the next level, there are two wolves waiting for them. They're not ethereal, but they're clearly not normal wolves either; for one thing they're brightly-colored and glowing, for another thing there's a glint of intelligence in their dark eyes.

"There you are, Red Wizard," the lead wolf says. "We caught your scent on the empty air, and it shook us from our sleep. But you were alone when you went below..."

"I don't know how I got here, sincerely apologize for my trespass, and would really just like to leave without disturbing your den with my presence even more. If this book is yours or belongs to anyone else, uh, present here, I apologize for touching it and would be happy to put it back, it's just very alarming to suddenly wake up here, and I was trying to figure out who was responsible and why they did it."

Gods, this is so annoying. She's absolutely about to be told that she's supposed to go keep the current occupant of the magic cage company, forever, because she smells like them from proximity, or something. She doesn't want to fight the big glowing rainbow wolf, but the big growing rainbow wolf is going to attack her. Honestly, Ciaveth just wants to leave this dank place, find and ruthlessly murder the person responsible for putting her here, have a good meal (she's starting to feel rather hungry, probably from the healing and however long she spent unconscious), and crawl under some decent covers to pretend she doesn't exist for a while. That's it, that's all she wants.

"Something was trapped in the Cavern of Runes. A poison at the heart of our dream, swallowing memories and names. Anything that emerges from there cannot be allowed to walk free. Those were the words of our god, before he sank into slumber."

"Look," says Ciaveth, the anger that had been held in check by her so far very reasonable company and lack of real outlet sliding into focus, "I am a person, not a poison. If your 'god' has a problem with that he can come down here and explain his reasoning himself. I do not want to be here, I was brought here against my will, so I am leaving."

The last part comes as a growl, with a note of finality to it. The growl from her lips changes to something more inhuman, something older and ravenous and from inside her, and she feels like she's been starving for years. Unable to eat, unable to even die, tortured and angry and above all hungry, and there's food right in front of her and it's standing in her way how dare it keep her from what she wants—

All at once, the growl rises to something like a scream, and she feels something bursting out from inside. Like she was hollow all along, and the fragile paper shell holding it in finally ripped, and the monster inside is revealed. It reaches forward, with power that's hers but not. She's so hungry, and the tasty morsel is right there, and she could no more stop this thing than she could stop herself from drinking water pressed against her lips while dehydrated. So she (it?) reaches, snatches the annoying feast in front of her like a starving animal, and forcibly drags it to oblivion. It's her, but it's not. She eats, but she doesn't, for a moment she feels strong and powerful and full, and the next she feels insatiable and still starving and like she needs more.

Her eyes flick to the second wolf. Mmm, that was good, but maybe what she needs is seconds...