Following is Chapter 10 of the long-awaited sequel to the Skirmisher Publishing LLC fantasy novel Swords of Kos: Necropolis! Herein our heroes are moved by a terrible atrocity and then learn how something very difficult can be made easy by the presence of the right companion ... Join alchemical rogue Paros, Elven barbarian Parthenia, wizard Pumayo, and moon priestess Selene in their Return to the Necropolis! 

Read "Return to the Necropolis: Chapter 9"

In the morning the party packed up all their gear; while they thought it likely that they would once again return to the Anemoi vault for the night, they knew how quickly things could change in the dynamic environment of the dungeon. With the small amount of treasure they had accumulated secure in their backpacks, they locked the tomb behind them and headed back the way they had come. At the large intersection where Paros, Selene, and Parthenia had battled the skeletal hound months earlier, the party turned south and followed the main trunk corridor as it bore to the right and merged into a natural, cavernous, west-bound passageway.

"Wait!" Parthenia hissed, holding up her hand to halt the party. She raised her head a bit and sniffed. "Smells like a campfire ..." Alerted to this, the others all smelled the air as well and noticed a vague, cool scent of burned wood. Their weapons raised, the companions cautiously advanced around the corner ... and then halted, stunned, at the sight of what lay before them. Paros, Parthenia, and Selene had entered the large sinkhole cavern dozens of times, and had spent weeks living under the boughs of the sacred pomegranate tree and eaten its exceptionally large fruit, and used the stalks of asphodel that grew up from the flinty floor for both bedding and sustenance. Pumayo had never before been here but even he was moved by what they saw.

In the middle of the sixty-foot-wide cavern, dimly illuminated by early dawn light coming down the shaft that led up to the hillside nearly two-hundred feet above, the companions could see not the spreading branches of an ancient fruit tree but just a pile of gray ash and charred, woody fragments. Most of the asphodel had been trampled underfoot and just a few bent and broken stalks of it remained standing and, as they moved slowly into the cavern, they could see that many of the large, golden fruit had been stamped on and smashed, their pulpy red seeds crushed and exposed. Paros, Parthenia, and Selene all had a weird, surreal feeling, as if they were looking at a mirage, and were having trouble comprehending the enormity of what they were witnessing.

Faced with such a scene of monstrous, purposeless destruction, the three companions who had visited the cavern before had started to cry without even realizing it. Something laying near the hacked-off stump of the tree caught Parthenia's eye, and she stepped over to see what it was. It was squat, heavy-looking axe, oddly proportioned with an exceptionally thick wooden haft, and a large, broad, rune-covered blade that had a pair of armor-piercing spikes on its back side. It was, in fact, unequivocally a Dwarven waraxe.

"Is there nothing these damned Dwarves will not stoop to?" Paros yelled in rage, tears streaming down his face. "Why would they do this? How could this have possibly helped them?" The others could only shake their heads in mute horror at the spectacle.

Some discussion ensued as to what, indeed, the motivation for this atrocity could have been. Pumayo suggested circumspectly that, as Titan worshippers, the Dwarves might simply have desired to desecrate something associated with one of the Olympian Gods, this chamber having apparently been sacred to fair Persephone, bride of bleak Hades. Selene, however, herself a Titanist, did not appear to take any offense at the suggestion that spiritual cousins of hers might have been responsible for the acts of theft, destruction, and impiety that the party kept discovering throughout the necropolis (just as, of course, a worshipper of Athena would not likely have been offended by aspersions cast in response to actions by a band of brigands devoted to Ares). This sort of behavior did not, indeed, sound like the sort of thing any of them would have thought typical of Dwarves, but if they were Titanic cultists devoted to the propagation of evil and chaos then all bets would be off.

A search of the room did not reveal anything else of note and the party proceeded to fill their waterskins from the water trickling down one side of the thirty-foot-wide shaft and plummeting the last twenty feet to the floor, where it spattered on the rocks and formed a small, shallow pool before seeping into the earth. Two natural passageways other than the one they had come from led out of the cavern, and in single file they entered the low, narrow one that headed off to the west and then quickly twisted off out of site. This led to a small cavern that probably for millennia had been used as a chapel to Persephone, and when they entered it the companions were not overly surprised to see that the statue of the goddess had been defiled. The idol had been knocked off of its pedestal and its head had been smashed off and lay nearby.

The party did not have means at their disposal to repair the statue but vowed to collect some cement from the supply room near the embalming chamber and do what they could to fix it at their next opportunity (although, presumably, it would ultimately need to be re-consecrated by a priest devoted to Persephone). They had actually originally stored their surplus treasure in this area, secreting it in the Anemoi tomb only right before they left the catacombs. For all the good that had done them they might as well have just left it here.

Returning to the sinkhole room, the party headed down the wide natural passageway, which sloped and twisted downward until it dropped off abruptly into a large cavern full of giant scorpions. None of them thought it likely that the marauding Dwarves would be down in this direction but decided it would be best to briefly confirm this assumption and, once they saw that the cave was indeed still full of monstrous vermin they headed back in the direction they had come from. Dark passageways descended further into the depths from the cavern of the scorpions but it did not seem conceivable that their nemeses would have headed into one of them — and, if they had, there was not much the companions would be able to do about it anyway.

Back in the desecrated sinkhole chamber, the party resolved to continue with the plan they had made the night before and leave the catacombs to hunt and gather provisions in the wild and overgrown cemetery above. There were only three of the lead, ram-skull amulets that would allow them to cross over the stream of the Styx, however, and they did not want to divide the party any longer or more irreconcilably than necessary, so they decided to put Pumayo's spellcraft to the test. He had said his magic could carry someone up the shaft to the outside and, once he confirmed this was indeed the case, they decided that Parthenia was the one who would fare best on her own for a short time. She handed her ram-skull amulet to Selene so that the priestess would be able to cross over to the far side of the subterranean stream.

Pumayo stepped toward the middle of the cavern, looked up, and then directed Parthenia to stand at a spot right below the edge of the shaft that began some twenty feet above them.

"I will be able to lift you straight up but not horizontally, so it is important that you be close enough to the edge of the shaft that you will be able to reach over and pull yourself out of it once I get you to the top," Pumayo instructed. "Also, I cannot levitate you if you are unwilling and, if you resist, my efforts will automatically fail."

Parthenia nodded her assent; she was not particularly enthused about being the subject of any arcane spell but understood why she was the most appropriate one to be doing this and stood where Pumayo bade her. The wizard then removed a small leather loop from his pouch — not unlike, Paros thought, the ones he had used to assist in his painstaking climb out of the shaft some months before — and then simulated a lifting motion with it in conjunction with other gestures and the arcane words of the spell. As he did, Parthenia suddenly lifted slowly off the ground and then rose steadily into the air. It took five or six seconds for her to reach the shaft and begin rising up into it and in less than a minute she had reached the top of it. Paros was amazed at how much easier this had been than the prolonged, hazardous climb he had made with ropes and spikes, and he almost felt foolish for not having ensured that a wizard accompany them on their first venture into the place. When she reached the mouth of the shaft, Parthenia reached over toward the rocks at its edge and then dragged herself up and out of the hole. Once she was secure she waved down to her friends and told them she would meet them in front of the temple to Hades. 

Read "Return to the Necropolis: Chapter 11"