Athela had already vaulted over the stone ledge encompassing their solitary refuge amid the rubble and was sliding down a large stone slab leading to the dirt below with a chittering cackle. Hitting the ground running, she lunged on all twelve legs toward the temple as fast as she could—which was pretty damn fast—with Riven and Azmoth scrambling to catch up.
His heart pounded, and his nerves were on edge. Those definitely sounded like human voices, but the screaming and pleas were quickly dying out and had altogether stopped by the ti he’d made it halfway to the cathedral. Had so other group from Earth ended up here? Were there more people from the Elysium core worlds that’d decided to appear? He began summoning blood magic to charge up a lance along his right arm, keeping an eye out on his surroundings as he ran.
Thirty seconds later, his sprint slowed to a crawl, and he began sneaking heel to toe to avoid making noise, with Azmoth doing his best to make as little noise as possible, too, though the larger demon had a tough ti of it given his bulk and the tal fused to his body.
The cathedral’s towering entrance was ajar and always had been to the best of Riven’s knowledge. Once these marble double doors had been neatly fixated into the front, but to move such massive pillars of stone to shut the entrance down would have taken a Herculean effort.
When he finally made it to the daunting, steepled passage at the front of the cathedral, his body pressed up against the marble and he began slinking ahead. Step-by-step, he cautiously moved forward, heart pounding ever harder as he got closer to what he knew to be a very dangerous lair even by standards of the ruins they lived in. He could hear crunching, ripping, and distant muffled shouts for rcy from deeper into the structure.
Coming to a stop at the edge of the ajar door and scowling down at Athela, who was already peering in, he gave his eyes ti to adjust…and what he saw made him very confused.
“We’re already lost, aren’t we?” Athela asked nonchalantly from her perch upside down on the ceiling.
“No. I’m morizing the layout as we go.”
Another scream and distant begging filtered through the underground maze, pushing them forward past many barred or empty rooms until eventually they ca to a much bigger and cylindrical room spanning many dozens of yards across.
It was sothing between a prison and a sacrificial chamber.
The large room slled like iron and viscera. Torches were placed at intervals along the walls, and a large pentagram with runic markings was etched into the ceiling high above. There were nurous cells holding captives along the entirety of the circumference, with the two exceptions being the entrance they now knelt in, keeping to the shadows, and the bloody stone altar on the opposite side of the room.
At the raised altar, two of the smaller satyrs, or goat n, stood at either side as they brutally carved daggers into a screaming woman’s chest. Rope tied to stone circlets held the flailing woman down. There were also three more of the satyrs standing around and chanting as they waved their small glistening daggers around, with the firelight of the tomb’s torches reflecting off the blades. One of them, obviously the leader of the pack, wore a hood.
The victim, who was likely in her forties, wore a ripped, bloodied ss of what had once been a shirt with a fast-food logo on it, and was begging for her life between screams and sobs. Those screams and sobs abruptly cut off, and she began to go into shock as one of the two goat n made a baahhing noise similar to that of a sheep and triumphantly lifted up the heart he’d carved out of the woman.
It was sickening to watch, and as Riven looked around he saw even more bodies.
There was only one other person left alive, a scrawny, shirtless man in his late teens or early twenties with a short blond mohawk in the cell closest to the altar on the left. Other than that, all the other cages were filled with monsters of various sorts. There were a couple undead, a harpy, and two Jabob demons—all of which were below level 3. All of which were screaming, growling, moaning, crying, or rattling the bars. A couple Jabob and ghoul corpses were already piled at the foot of the altar, covered in blood and missing pieces of their bodies at random that mixed with the human corpses.
[Fallen Satyr: Level 5 Demon]
[Fallen Satyr: Level 6 Demon]
[Fallen Satyr: Level 8 Demon]
[Fallen Satyr: Level 3 Demon]
[Fallen Satyr: Level 5 Demon]
[Fallen Satyr: Level 5 Demon]
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