Despite how obviously untraveled the path usually was, Daerth insisted they try to get the wagon with their supplies in the woods and out of sight just in case. It took an hour, but they eventually managed to conceal it behind some of the dense brush that grew thickly near the stream. Daerth tied up the horses nearby, as far from the stream as possible while still allowing them to reach it for drinking water, then declared their preparations “good enough”. They left only what additional supplies they had gained from the bard's manor, however, and carried their own gear as they had for the first dungeon.

Eany took the lead, wielding a large branch like a substitute greatsword to break down the brush that often sprung up in her way and taking the furthest point in what she called her “sweeping line”. The rest of the group, at her orders, spread out between her and the stream, all within eyesight of one another, but extending their visibility far from the water that served as their only concrete guide. Eany and Daerth, the two furthest from the stream, couldn't even see it, but relied on the fact that Kwanai and Metcenzerin could to keep them on track.

Eany still almost missed the entrance.

The first Dungeon's doorway had not been subtle – a pair of stone doors with pillars and sinister writings – but this one was a simple wooden hatch, half-hidden by leaves, set at an angle in a natural slope of the forest floor. It did have pillars, which was the only reason Eany did see it, but they were broken and crawling with vines.

“It's here!” she called, and Daerth repeated the message up the line. Metcenzerin marked the trees as he followed their voices to the entrance, leaving them a way to get back if they weren't dropped in a random location again at the end.

“Here we go again,” he muttered as they gathered around the hatch. “Any last thoughts before we dive back into Teru's nonsense?”

“Be careful, and let's try to watch each others' backs this time,” Daerth suggested, flexing his hand. Though it had fully healed over in the last several days, the gash from their first fight still appeared as a fresh scar across his palm.

“Good plan. Simple, straight-forward.” Eany reached into her pack and pulled out her full-face helmet, fully completing her shining silver ensemble for the first time since they'd met. “One last note; let the Paladin go in first.”

Sword drawn, she nodded for Metcenzerin to pull the hatch open. One by one, the group climbed down into the dungeon.

This one was pitch black. Metcenzerin paused near the entrance, where there was still sunlight to see by, to light one of the handful of torches the Judge had included in their supplies. Then he stepped up next to Eany to light the way. The Stitchdoctor and Kwanai followed along behind, and Daerth, bow in hand, brought up the rear.

The tunnel was all dirt, filling the air with the heavy scent of damp soil and decaying vegetation. Plant roots poked down through the ceiling and along the upper part of the walls, and the rare insect could be seen scurrying back into their holes as the torchlight hit them.

“There are no structural supports,” Metcenzerin commented quietly as they walked deeper into the tunnel. “Not even a wooden beam.”

Eany hummed thoughtfully. “Either this is a magical tunnel dug by Teru that won't collapse on us, or it isn't and it might.”

“Encouraging,” muttered Daerth, but Metcenzerin chuckled at the idea.

“Just consider it like this, my hunting friend. This is all a game to Teru. He might find it amusing to stack the deck, to cheat, or to hide the rules from us to gain an unfair advantage, but no gambler who has all those tricks up his sleeve is going to find any satisfaction in flipping the table. If I know how Teru thinks, and at this point I should have a pretty fair idea, he isn't about to go to all the trouble of sorting out the perfect set of opponents with those first tests only to drop the earth on us in his second dungeon.”

“Strangely not as encouraging as you think it is.”

“Eh, you just don't understand how the gods work.”

“I don't think you do, either.”

“Shh!” Eany put out her hand to stop Metcenzerin in his tracks. “Listen.”

It was faint, distant, but definitely not mere ambiance. Daerth narrowed his eyes in careful consideration.

“It has the irregularities of a living creature, but I don't know any animal that makes a clicking sound like that. Could it be more skeletons?”

“I don't hear it at all,” Metcenzerin confessed. “Eany?”

“Alas, I'm not an expert in the undead,” she replied, “but my sword is Rahenian, so we would have that advantage if it did turn out to be skeletons. As for what it actually is, I couldn't say one way or another. There is something living, or rather moving, down here with us, but your guess is as good as mine.”

“I sense putrescence,” Kwanai chimed in with his usual, delightful grimness. “There is, nearby, a source of great decay.”

Daerth let out a sharp, irritated breath and drew an arrow from his quiver. “Lovely.”

They continued more cautiously, but when the tunnel began to widen there appeared to be no sign of living creatures, hostile or otherwise. Metcenzerin paused to light another torch when it became obvious the corridor was turning into a rough tunnel, then handed it to Kwanai as the plaguemancer passed him.

“I don't see anything suspicious,” Eany suggested, standing in the middle of the dirt room as Metcenzerin and Kwanai followed the walls around her. It wasn't a terribly large chamber and the ceiling was low, so it didn't take much looking to take it all in.

The exit was, of course, barred by a metal gate, one that looked very out of place among all the dirt. Beside the gate lay an alcove, almost large enough for a coffin but completely empty. Above it, on a plank of wood set into the wall, were carved the words “Place your bet”.

“Any ideas, Mister Teru-Expert?” asked Daerth with somewhat unnecessary snark. Metcenzerin scowled slightly and tapped his chin in thought.

“I suspect,” he replied slowly and dramatically, “that we're supposed to place a bet.”

“What does that mean here, though?” asked Eany. “What is the wager?”

“That's for Teru to know and Teru alone. My guess is that this is the ante, so to speak. We cannot progress in the dungeon, the game, until we put something in the pot.” Metcenzerin finished his thought, then immediately stepped sideways away from the others. “And one of you has to do it this time,” he snapped, tone changing suddenly. “I lost my flute last time and you're not giving Teru my lute, too.”

“Then what do we...?” began Daerth, but cut himself short as a sudden gleam of inspiration brightened his dark eyes. He switched his arrow to his bow hand and used his free hand to pull one of the strange gold coins from his pocket.

“Aaah.” Metcenzerin tried to hide the fact that he was annoyed the Circleless hunter had thought of it before him. “Good idea.”

Daerth put the coin in the alcove and stepped back. They all waited for a moment, but when nothing happened Metcenzerin shrugged.

“Or not. Any other ideas?”

The Stitchdoctor walked past him and put one of his coins next to Daerth's, then turned his head to fix the others with his hidden but somehow still judgmental gaze. No one else needed to volunteer their odd earnings, however, as at the very moment the Stitchdoctor turned to look at them, a set of bars slammed down across the opening of the alcove and the gate slowly rose.

“So this is a two-coin game, then,” muttered Metcenzerin, falling in beside Eany again as the Silver Paladin advanced through the open gate. “I wonder if that's good or bad... oh! Stop, there's a trap.”

The dirt in front of Eany's feet seemed normal at first, but as they followed Metcenzerin's pointing finger the others slowly detected a faint and odd shimmering, as if the dirt wasn't quite solid.

“Alright,” said the musician confidently. “We just have to jump over it. The dirt on the other side looks real enough.”

He backed up a bit and then, with those few steps of a running start, leapt and landed solidly on the dirt further down the tunnel. “Come on, it's not far.”

Daerth frowned at the path of dirt, finding it a bit hard to judge exactly where the fake dirt ended and the real began. He tensed, ready to make the jump-- and the Stitchdoctor grabbed him just as he lunged forward. The cityman was too small to hinder Daerth's momentum, but he did ruin the jump, sending both of them falling face-first into the fake dirt floor.

And through it, vanishing entirely, but the fake floor did nothing to dampen Daerth's scream of pain.

“Hold on!” cried Eany, and started forward to help, but she, too, had become confused by the subtly shifting ground and tried to take a step onto fake earth. Kwanai instinctively caught her arm just as she started to pitch forward and dragged her backwards out of danger.

“Daerth!” cried Metcenzerin, exasperated but concerned. “Are you alive?”

Unnervingly, it was the Stitchdoctor who replied. “Spikes again. The walls... too high.”

“Hold on, I've got some rope in my pack. Can you both climb?”

A silence that lasted far too long. Then, “... No.”

Metcenzerin closed his eyes. Iylihe, these people are slowly clipping the wings of my soul... “Did you get Daerth killed, Stitchy?”

Another pause. “... I have poor balance.”

“Is. Daerth. Dead?”

“... No. One spike, non-fatal. And he... hit his head.”

Metcenzerin opened his eyes again and looked across the patch of fake ground at Eany and Kwanai. Eany had a coil of rope from her own pack already out and partially unraveled, one end wrapped several times around her hand. Kwanai almost looked amused, but it was hard to tell.

“You'd better get on this side before we haul them up,” Metcenzerin suggested. “If we do it on that side, Stitchy is going to have to try and jump it again, and next time he might end up actually killing someone.”

He drew a line in the dirt where he saw the flickering ending, and Eany nodded in understanding. “Stand back,” she warned, and then made the jump. Thankfully, she made it that time. Kwanai followed almost casually, as if the entire trap was beneath his notice.

They let down the rope carefully. There was no knowing how deep the hole actually was, but it wasn't long before Eany felt the tug when the Stitchdoctor got a hold of it. She let him take control after that, only leaving the one end wrapped firmly around her hand.

“Slowly,” he called up after a minute. “One hasty move... more spikes.”

“I can't believe this,” muttered Metcenzerin, then Eany gave him a look and he hastily moved to help her with the rope.

The Stitchdoctor made a few concerning sounds, like eeek and sharp breaths, as they pulled Daerth up, but he gave no further instructions and Daerth was still in one piece when they finally hauled him up through the fake floor. The Stitchdoctor had fashioned a complex harness for the unconscious hunter, so complicated in fact that it took Metcenzerin a few minutes to finally undo all the specialized and intertwined knots.

The trap's spike had gone through Daerth's side, just above the long red scar where the Stitchdoctor had “fixed” his leg. The Stitchdoctor had already tied a quick bandage around it, but that bandage was dripping with blood. The head injury seemed fairly mild by comparison – it was bleeding but not aggressively – so Eany just dug into her standard Paladin patch kid for cloths to stem the flow of blood.

“Metcenzerin, you hold these in place while Kwanai and I get the doctor up.”

“You know... he might have a point among all the whining,” the musician commented lightly as he moved to obey. “He does seem to get injured a lot. I am undecided, however, whether it indicates a personal lack of awareness and basic self-preservation instincts, or if Teru actually does have it out for him.”

“He doesn't have a patron,” Eany replied gruffly, tense from the effort of pulling the Stitchdoctor up out of the floor-trap. Kwanai wasn't even pretending to help. “There is no one above to guard him from every little rock or pitfall Teru throws at him.”

“That's not how the gods work.” Intentionally or not, his tone slipped into the patronizing spectrum.

“You aren't a paladin, or a priest, or a prophet. How would you know?” Her patronizing response was definitely intentional.

“I was blessed by Iylihe personally. He has been with me since I was born.”

“And I was chosen by Cereth to be his Paladin, and he audibly speaks with me when he needs me to do something. Give it up, Bardboy; I know how gods work.”

Kwanai muttered something vaguely threatening in his own language, but by now Metcenzerin was just convinced that everything sounded hostile in the swamper-tongue. The Stitchdoctor's narrow fingers poked up through the floor like the first rising bones of a skeleton in its grave, grasping the edge, and then the rest of his equally-creepy frame followed.

“The patient?” he rasped urgently, and without waiting for a response went to kneel beside Daerth to check for himself. Then, quick as a bird, he whipped out his needle and surgical thread. Metcenzerin hastily retreated; the Stitchdoctor had sat far too close for comfort, practically leaning against the musician to get at Daerth.

The patient in question began regaining consciousness right in the middle of the Stitchdoctor's ministrations. “Teru's trying to kill me,” he groaned once the fuzziness had worn off a bit.

“That's what I said,” agreed Metcenzerin cheerfully, but once again no one seemed to pick up on his joking tone. Daerth winced as the Stitchdoctor worked on his side, then managed a grumbling,

“This is what I get for taking this job for criminals. Maybe I should have killed--” He cut himself short and bit his lip, wincing again. The Stitchdoctor tied off and cut his thread, then turned his attention to the head injury.

“Clean, bandage, heal,” he reported, or perhaps they were orders? Either way, he quickly acted on his own comments with barely a glance at anyone else.

The ways this man's mind works is a true mystery...

“Careful,” warned the doctor as he rose, tasks complete. “Don't break the stitches. Don't bump. Try not to... exert yourself.”

Daerth attempted to stand and quickly caught himself against the wall as his balance gave out. “Thanks for the advice,” he grumbled. “Here's some for you, too. Don't grab people while they are trying to jump over deadly traps!”

The Stitchdoctor tilted his head, puzzled. “But I have--”

“-- Poor balance, yeah, I know.” Daerth dropped the topic, too much in pain to want to argue.

They continued along more cautiously after that, testing the floor and eyeing the ceiling suspiciously. The corridor, still damp dirt and roots, ended in a dark, heavy wooden door. There was no lock or latch, but several thick planks keeping it barred shut.

“Daerth, you stay back and out of the way until we make sure it's safe,” ordered Eany confidently. “Kwanai, by the Circle, stop being difficult and try to be a help, or I will get cross at you.”

Kwanai just chuckled his low, weird chuckle and ignored her subsequent glare.

The door opened, not into a room, but into a steeply sloped tunnel. The roots quickly ended and the dirt around them became rockier as they descended, and the smell began to turn from moldering soil to a more intense kind of rotting-vegetation smell. And something else decaying.

“We draw near,” Kwanai murmured with a hint of dark glee. “Can you hear them again?”

The question inspired a unanimous pause. The same distant clattering they had heard above was back again, softer and slower and yet also somehow closer.

“I don't like it,” muttered Daerth. “That isn't a natural sound...”

Eany tightened her grip on her sword hilt. “There is no point in turning back now.”

The tunnel walls dove straight down into the rock, leaving all soil and growth behind. The air grew heavier and colder, and Eany wrinkled her nose at the smell as it became more obvious. Decay, Kwanai had called it, but to her it smelled simply of death.

“Careful,” Metcenzerin warned, keeping his voice low and quiet to avoid echoes. “The floor is getting rough here.”

“And not just the floor.” Eany ducked under a low-hanging rock from the uneven roof. With every step, their torchlight fell on rougher, more difficult terrain. The tunnel took to making apparently pointless turns and curves, and branching off into multiple paths only to come back together almost immediately.

Then Daerth made the comment, “It's like an insect tunnel.”

“Why did you have to share that horrifying thought?” asked Metcenzerin with a disgusted groan, but the thought was out there now, and the sounds from below suddenly seemed to sound a lot like hard, thin, but unnervingly large legs tapping against stone.

“They would see us coming long before we see them,” Kwanai mentioned after another long silent moment, and without further warning he snuffed out his torch. “Put out your light and let me be your eyes.”

“Not likely,” grumbled Metcenzerin, but he did glance questioningly at Eany for her thoughts. The Silver Paladin continued forward cautiously, her helmeted head thrust forward as she peered into the darkness.

Then she stopped, looked back at Metcenzerin. “He may be right,” she said, voice low and alert. “There is a faint glimmer up ahead, so we may even have some natural light to guide us.”

“Natural light in a cave?”

“Sometimes you can find light in places you'd never expect. Douse your torch.”

Reluctantly, the musician obeyed and the group was plunged into pitch blackness.