Yvain felt her heart sink as the the flame of her torch illuminated the face of another dark elf tangled up in the webbing. She sighed, pulling out a small lost and rubbing out the name Vinten with her thumb.. He had been a funny one, useless and foppish but seemingly happy to be away from the vipers nest of the capital. He had been some minor nobility like her, some fifth son of a third aunt, and would entertain the others at mealtime by playing a flute he had carved from a broken piece of bedframe. She sighed. "How many of you lot ran this way?" She asked nobody.

The vast majority of the names on her list were now little more than blackened blobs and she could probably mark her passage through the corridors with thumbprints. Many of them had been the names of men, and not for the first time she insisted to herself that those barely even counted as people. Like all the times before the truism didn't bring her any comfort. She hadn't exactly been close with any of them (that was hard to achieve when you seemed to strike terror into their hearts if you stood up too quickly) but she had consistently found them to be better company than any of her sisters. The silence in the barracks now was deafening enough to send her out into the dungeon itself, a faint hope burning in her breast that some intrepid coward among them had found a hideaway within the twisting corridors of the Everdark.

Her list of names attested to the futility of her search. At this point she was convinced that the few still listed were only so because they had been totally devoured by some other denizen of the dungeon. Even now she could hear the voices of likely culprits echoing through the caverns as she marched on. She didn't stop to take Vinten, didn't dare disturb the web. It was as honorable a resting place as any down here. You live by the spider, you die by the spider. 

As she continued, however, she was startled to find the faces of Delvs she didn't recognize. She followed the trail of bodies to a crude campsite that had clearly been set by her own people. "No way." She said aloud, just to hear a voice, as she started picking through the remnants of the camp. "You actually sent somebody?" She had been sending messages by carrier bat every time she had managed to catch one of the little buggers fluttering back to the shattered remains of a barracks bat coop. She had gotten one reply so far, a vague and rather dismissive message promising to reinforce her position, but if this was her reinforcements than it looked like she was out of luck unless she found some evidence of Delvs that hadn't wound up on the bottom of the dungeons food chain already.