Once again the armies of darkness are sweeping across the world and this time there may be no stopping them. Only by standing together can the heroes of civilization hope to prevail, but at this hour of their greatest trial the mightiest of their nu...
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As they approached the red litten area, they began to see the first signs of life in the Underworld.
There was only typical cave life at first. Bats, beetles, lizards and suchlike. Refugees from the fearsome inhabitants of the illuminated area and feeding on each other, as well as on fungi and the occasional straggly clump of moss or fern, there being just enough light filtering in to support a little plant life. Shaun watched with amusement as Thomas gawped at every creature, giving the others a running commentary on what he knew of their habits and lifestyle, but soon the wizard ran out of words as they got closer to the red light and began to see other forms of life different from anything they'd ever seen before.
Some the three wizards knew from their university education and others were known to the trogs from the tales of cave explorers. Shaun was surprised to find himself listening with interest as they passed comments back just and forth, comparing what they knew and making educated deductions from what they could see of the creatures' anatomy. They saw a pryapatrid. A twelve foot worm covered with a coating of shaggy fur that devoured anything smaller than itself with its powerful jaws. Myconids, a species of mobile and slightly intelligent fungi and, once, the vast, shimmering bulk of a giant slime mould that even the slaver urged them away from. Others, though, were unlike anything they'd ever heard of even in the most outrageous travelers tales. Creatures that seemed to have the same basic body plan as the slavers and that must have been brought with them from their homeworld, Cthill, when they first came to Tharia five thousand years before.
The first one they saw looked a little like a five armed octopus and sat on a rock watching them with its disturbingly dead looking eyes as they went past. As Shaun went closer for a better look, though, it scurried for cover and they noticed that it ran on only four of its tentacles, which had flattened, clublike ends that served as feet. The other tentacle was held straight out in front of it as it ran, but then it stopped and turned to face them and he saw that the fifth tentacle had a small mouth at the end, ringed with a circle of sharp, white teeth.
"Slavers also feed through a tentacle like that," said Thomas to Shaun who was walking beside him. "Maybe it's some kind of ancestral creature. A kind of living fossil, perhaps."
"Maybe," Shaun agreed, having no idea what the wizard was talking about.
Later, they saw specimens of a similar but smaller species behaving in a co-ordinated manner that suggested that they belonged to a colony of some kind. Another creature they saw soon after also bore a close resemblance to cthillians. It was about the size of a small pony and had the same quadrupedal gait as a pony, but its skin was the slimy, mottled purple of a mollusc. It had the same alien, octopus eyes as the slaver and it used a large, powerful head tentacle to pluck bits of vegetation from the ground. The tentacle had a fringe of smaller tentacles at the end surrounding the mouth opening that fed torn leaves into the mouth. Shaun watched in fascination as the food formed a visible bulge as it travelled back along the trunk to the creature's head. It didn't chew its food, it seemed, and Thomas speculated that it ground them up in its stomach with the help of stones it had swallowed in the same way that birds did.
