[color=1a7b30][h2]Rezello[/h2][/color]
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Spelunking wasn’t something new to Rezello - plenty of monsters and outlaws he had fought in previous adventures had turned caves into their lairs - but tunnels as labyrinthine as the ones their expedition found themselves in now were fairly rare. If these passages were indeed connected to the library, he could only imagine it must’ve been a convenient accident rather than an intentional construction. Either that, or elvish tunneling was more haphazard than he would have expected.

Their slow journey through the underground was halted as Jazdia detected a group of passing devourers. One of them hesitated for a moment, turning towards the party as though it had sensed their presence; Rezello’s grip on his weapon tightened as he readied to strike if it made any hostile actions, but thankfully it continued down the path the rest of its pack had gone down. After waiting a moment for the pack to become sufficiently distant, they continued their trek through the tunnels.

Before long, the branching tunnels opened up into a larger chamber. As Jazdia warned of the remains scattered on the ground within, Rezello stopped to inspect the one nearest him; another armored corpse, its metal shell in the same style as that of the fallen knight they found outside the entrance to the caverns. But something was off. While he could have been another fallen member of the Sten Corps from that contract, there were several more corpses in the chamber than the losses of that mission would have accounted for. And, when Rezello summoned another spark to get a better view of the deceased, it became clear that most of them couldn’t have been knights of Scheel.

Skeletons of various sizes, most unarmored, and what scraps of cloth remained on them was clearly civilian rather than the dress of a resting soldier caught unaware. The arrangement of the dead seemed to indicate a defensive perimeter, clearly the few battle-ready members of this doomed group trying to defend the helpless majority. But what were they doing here in the first place? There had never been a civilian excursion into the forest; at most, the occasional foolhardy treasure-hunters who fell victim to rumors of hidden gold and artifacts in the cursed lands. So why were they here? How did they get in these tunnels?

A hypothesis was starting to form in Rezello’s mind, and he didn’t like its conclusions.