Dear Diary

Ok, we were going to wait for everyone and Christmas break, but I ran into Wolfie while I was running in the hills on a weekend and, well you know how it is. We decided maybe we could do some walking instead of the running, though he stayed in his wolf shape. So we were walking and the next thing you know, we've walked over into the other world to view the sunset there from the mountainside. We didn't talk and he just curled up on the ground and I slept in my tent. The next morning we were both hungry, so we decided we would visit the city in the sand and look around some and buy a little food in the bazaar. The days were safe and we weren't going to go near the Shalgath or into any of the buildings. What could happen if we just walked around and got the feel of the streets? Breakfast was pastry stuffed with raisins and I fed the fu dog and Wolfie from the bag of pastry that I bought while we just explored a little. Of course you know something happened. The ground just gave way around us and we were wrapped in tentacles. Which is how I saw my first of the Shalgathi. Ick. Imagine if someone cross bred leeches with chambered nautiluses. No shells and they have long, long, twisty tentacles. We had been pulled into a nest of them and I was wrapped about as tight as I could be, my weapons trapped against my body. Wolfie just lay there and his dog was quiet. I could feel his mind reach out to me and he just said "bide." Then I could hear the psychic eavesdropping Wolfie was doing. "Ah hah. We showed the matriarchs. While everyone is sleeping, we've found a meal." "Maybe we can send her back to bring more food? She's got animals, must be a druid of some sort? When she comes back with the ransom, we can eat her and whatever she brings!" "Hah! That's great." Then Wolfie's voice "just a moment, then I'll mind blast them, you curse them, and it will be all over." "On three?" "On three." It went like as if we had planned it and done it a hundred times. His mind blasts stunned them all, my curses fell upon them and as we broke loose from the tentacles, our weapons left nothing but shreds. Wolfie unleased the light he had been attempting to master and I used some hard fire. There was no trace of who had killed these young renegade males or how they had reached their ends. I used a mark to pull us out of the hole, so we left no traces. All the matriarchs would know is that some renegades had come to grief in the day time, far from the wet deeps the Shalgathi crawl from. We were back in the market place when someone approached us. Her child had been pulled into a dark tower when it had run off. She feared it was already dead, and if she could not have rescue, she wanted vengeance. My thought was that if we were just fast enough, maybe she could have both. Wolfie and I plunged into the hole the child had been pulled into, the scent of the shadow vampire and the child strong in wolfie's nose. Without his ability to track, I don't think we could have kept the path or made the speed we did. We fought through several types of shadow vampires and ghouls, dodged traps, and fought with the undead crabs demons lairing with the wraiths in that ruin. Deeper we fought into the maze below the tower, always at the heels of the vampire until we caught it in its inner chamber. It had never had a chance to make a proper feast of the child, and decided to turn and take us so that it could feed at its own pace and in its own way. So it thought. We took it, Wolfie and I working as a team, my blade shield a flurry of blinding light about me, as the shadow vampire spun off fragments and pulled the dead around it back to life to serve as undead zombies and then pulling their skeletons out of the broken zombies to serve it again until the fragments were nothing but dust. Fire and light shattered them as we struck hand to hand. We saved the child, though it wasn't sure at first what we were or if it was saved. I don't think it will run off again. I was glad to help a mother. My mother loved me that fiercely. This was for her memory.

Reflecting, it was fun paying for hot, fresh pastry with the bright shiny pennies I'd stashed by my tent. When I was young, a copper penny was a man's wages for a day. A brass or bronze penny was a man's wages for a week. Now, picking up several pounds of pennies doesn't call for guards and a strong box, just a strong arm. I didn't take the entire stash with me, just a handful in a purse to buy food with. The people here speak the Ancien and the Koine in a mix of sorts. We make each other out pretty well and I meet people who speak the unmixed languages. To buy the pastries wasn't hard. I showed them a penny, they looked at it, tasted it and rolled it against a band of metals. They held up two fingers, I held up five and we settled at seven pastries for two pennies. Then, as the sun warmed the sand and dust between the towers, we walked along, looking and talking, the dog and Wolfie eating from the pastries I passed them as I took a bite here and there. Suddenly it was like walking in a bamboo forest. I've done that, once, when I fought a headhunter. He had only seen me using Kore as a chain, and while we fought he conjured a sudden growth of bamboo. Suddenly I was fighting with cestuses and sickle against his knives, Kore wrapped around my hands rather than swinging. His magic did not save him. But, all around me were green shoots, straight up, like bamboo. Suddenly the ground below us was gone and what looked like tall shoots reaching three times my height into the sky were wrapped around us as we fell into the earth. There, attached to the tentacles that held us were the slimiest creatures I have ever seen. They had bodies like two slugs joined together, a frill of short tentacles, each with an eye, surrounding a gaping beaked mouth and a frill of a score of tentacles each reaching at least thirty or more feet, though each tentacle was probably only a couple of inches across or less. The slug-like bodies were about eight to ten feet (both sections) long by four feet high on a "normal" one, some stretched out further (and not so tall), some compressed almost into balls. The space they had pulled us into was like a crypt, rough hewn stone opening into the sewers from which they had tunneled upwards. We were surrounded by about ten or twelve of them (it was hard to see) with their tentacles interwoven and grasping us jointly in the middle between them. I was so tightly held that I could barely breath and all I could reach was my amulet's magic. The fu dog was held down and Wolfie was held, though not so tightly, the spines that reach out through his fur creating a bit of a distance. ... Well, I'd always wondered what it was like underneath the towers. I've only been under one, so I'm not really sure what they are really like, but as we chased that necromatic shadow vampire we found ourselves in a vaulted basement. The first several levels were nicely finished, open collenades. Further down it became rougher, more like molding storage. I wonder what it was like when the towers were new and what it is like further down where the sewers and the tidal caves meet.