One-two-THREE one-two-THREE one-two-step-FOUR onetwothreefourFIVE...
...that was very strange to witness. It was like he walked somewhere except it wasn't anywhere and then he was gone.
She pushes the door open and steps through.
She felt some of this when she stepped into the cave but past these seals she feels it a lot more keenly: a sudden drop in temperature, like she just got past some invisible barrier that was keeping the cold isolated from the outside. Except it's not cold—they were deep enough in that it had already been very cold—but rather something like the absence of a more fundamental kind of warmth, like the feeling of being surrounded by life.
Annika isn't surrounded by life, here. She is surrounded by its distinct lack, and her soul is pushing against its boundaries to try to fill the negative space left by it, and that feels... cold.
Her soul is very well-secured, thank you very much, so she's going to ignore the cold. Her clothes are enough to keep her actually physically warm, and everything else is a matter of skill.
There are more undead here, shambling zombies and skeletons aiming for the adventurers as soon as they notice them. Despite Mother Ga-in's worries about the resting places of souls, it is deeply unclear if anyone's souls are still in there, with the way these creatures don't seem to respond to any stimuli and just mindlessly attack. And they go down easy, as easy as the ones closer to the surface, even if they're more numerous.
The first new thing down here is horongs: small floating purple balls of flame that often hang around haunted sites and cemeteries. No one really has an idea of why they exist or what they are—people have theorised that they might be ghosts, but most scholars and priests agree that they're probably not—and they tend to not be very aggressive—except when they are. But that doesn't mean they're harmless; even when they're not being aggressive, just their presence starts draining the vitality of any living thing around them, and spending too long near one will make you feel cold and lethargic and tired until you either waste away or (more often) are picked off by something more dangerous nearby.
None of this is particularly dangerous, though, and more importantly, none of this is enough to justify the rapid decay of the seals. This is still all downstream from whatever's happening.
They need to keep going.
Okay that's more concerning. Actual ghosts are actually reasonably rare, and the seals used in the burials are most often meant to keep dark influences away from the dead rather than the other day around. The dead are supposed to find their way, on their own, and it usually takes rather a lot to keep them here.
(The image that comes to mind, then, is that of the Lord of Glastheim. If something like that found its way into this cave—or maybe was buried here all along—the whole village might need to be evacuated. She hopes it's not that.)
So they can now try to implement the strategy they planned on earlier. Despite the fact that they can see Taharqi even while he's cloaking, he's still mostly too fast for them to deal with if they're not directly focusing on him.
And Annika's main job is making sure they can't do that. She does this by being right up in their faces and distracting them with inescapable blows, while being able to soak up a lot of damage raw, in addition to having decent self-regeneration. Plus, she's less affected by the psychic aspect of the ghosts' attacks, inhabiting a nearly unshakable meditative state of mind.
Taharqi and Annika both stop to look in the direction the sound came from, once the ghosts are dealt with.
There are more undead, and dead, and spirits. Every now and then, they hear a bell, and they follow its sound. And as they do, these ruins become stranger and stranger.
The ceiling is high—very, very high—their path goes further underground, and the ceiling doesn't follow, until they can't see it anymore. There are trees, petrified somehow, their leaves gone. The buildings get less and less ruined and dilapidated. These lanterns were probably not lit by the living.
It's like a whole village got teleported underground, unchanged, and preserved in stasis, except for all of its inhabitants.
The feeling of negative pressure intensifies the further in they go, and after enough walking she stops and raises a hand.
"What's up?" he reappears to ask. He's trying to project his usual aura of cheer but he's clearly being affected by the spiritual pressures a lot more than Annika is: there's this tension in the corners of his eyes, and a vein in his neck is pulsating, and he's doing his best not to wet his lips too often even though his mouth feels dry.
"There," she says, pointing at a specific point in the darkness. "It's not moving. But it's powerful." Which is obvious, given the givens, but she felt it worth reiterating.