Beren watched in rapt panic. He didn't know illusion or misdirection, much less real magic. He did know the stuff of the gods, but not these. These were younger than they, but far older than men. What they could do, he didn't know. This one seemed naught but a great shadow. But he knew not to test its limits unless he had to, for Qwarath alone was already likely too much for him. Absently he gripped his shirt over his chest, holding within the cloth his blessed necklace. 

All of his contemplation happened in but a moment, however. His main focus was on Jocasta. She was a born actress, but this was a losing proposition. 

He had ducked behind further stones, moving silently forward another three strides by a normal man's straight direction. Just at the cusp of the chamber, he hid behind one of the carved thanes. His staff at his back, he slowly slid his axe out for deadly use. Beren steeled himself, hand gripping the haft of his dwarven-crafted weapon. But just before he rose out of his hiding spot, he heard Jocasta's scream at being hit, and to his horror he saw her flying towards the lip of the abyss. 

"No!" He cried out, unable to keep himself quiet. Not caring anymore. He stood now, and a cursory glance to his right showed him both Qwarath and the shadow-figure of its primitive deity staring at him. To his horror, the thanes were no longer such as they had been. Their visages had turned orcish or more likely trollish, and their mouths began to move, drum beats flowing from their stone lips in a rhythmic call to their god. Beren didn't care. He watched Jocasta, frozen.

She clung to the stalactite...and slipped. 

"Beren!" She cried out desperately.  

Qwarath charged him, reaching for him with its apeish arm and roaring a call that Beren swore he understood. As its claw scraped the rock, Beren leaped to the side and did the last thing Qwarath expected, which was to run straight toward the -archtroll. Beren didn't hit him, however. Instead he slid between the arch-troll's bowed legs and then slammed his feet onto the ground, spring boarding himself to do the craziest thing anyone watching could have seen. 

Beren leaped off the side of the precipice with no rope or even hope and dived like a hawk, flying towards Jocasta's plummeting form. There was no wind underground, and yet he felt air rushing up at him as he fell, quicker and quicker. Slowly, he managed to get within arms length of a bewildered Jocasta. Beren pulled her close to him. She yelled something but he couldn't hear. Instead he pulled her close and turned in the air, making sure she was above him. 

Beren was a lot of things, and while heroic was one of them, he didn't throw his life away recklessly. But he found he really had with her. At least, that's what he thought. 

Instead of a stone floor that reduced them to paste, Jocasta and Beren hit something thick and viscous; sticky as well. Like cupping tentacles or strange growths from the rock. Beren and Jocasta hit it with the velocity of a cannon ball, but luckily the material gave as well as it got, bending under their weight and sending them back up a dozen feet, before wobbling back with them along with it. 

Jocasta's head popped out of Beren's arms, blinking. "Did you... just try to die with me!?" 

Beren blinked, looking around at the jagged walls and the strange, thick string they found themselves attached to. There was very little light down here. The room above had been gloomy but they were now a hundred feet down or further. He looked at her, not really knowing how to answer, so he gave the honest one. 

"Yeah?"