Adventure (Seed) - At One Stride Comes the Dark

 

At One Stride Comes the Dark

There are terrible things beneath the streets of Old Blackmoor. A world exists deeper than the catacombs where the dead reside. The bowels of the earth do not hold this realm though it can be reached all too easily. The great ruined towers of Blackmoor where past generations built upon the foundations of races and beings older than humanity reach down into these dark realms. Tunnels, stairs, pits beslimed with horrific use, descend past the corridors of burial chambers and tombs, down and down till the stone gives way to textures that are smooth and warm with the fires of the oerth and not of this oerth; some passages constrict the body first into a crouch, then a crawl, then to a twisting and wriggling as if a great wyrm had shaped the passage to no bigger than its flesh could fit. Deeper still, whether narrowing tunnel or broad stairs with steps wide and steeper than the breadth a man could lift foot to tread, the passage twists; it twists the souls of men, twists their bodies inside out, twists their minds until each step is a scream, a nightmare that eats at them, gnaws their bones, crawls among their fears, deeper, deeper into the dark.

And when no more can be born to those who have not turned away or lost themselves, body, mind and soul along this narrow twisting way, those who have survived, they step into the darkness, a wall, a pool, a great suffocating cloud deep in the earth and out onto a plain of silver grass and starlight. The land of Evening beyond the deep passages of Old Blackmoor.  A dark road cuts through the silver grass and the guardians of thought line the way. Their bodies seem no more than thin pedestals of black rock; armless with wide eyes and skulls stretched above. But as you approach their bodies seem filled with stars, their eyes filled with light, their bodies glow softly in the semi-darkness.