Anna's greatsword swung in a wide arc, catching a few lizardmen by surprise and ripping them clean in two. Alerted by the deaths of their comrades, three more crawled out of the darkness and charged the paladin; only to share a similary gruesome fate. The second wave was followed quickly follwed by a third, and then a fourth. After several straight minutes of combat, the flood of greenscales that flowed out and around from the surrounding ruins finally stemmed down to a trickle, before drying up entirely as Anna smashed the final one's skull in with the pommel of her sword.
"Why did they attack us?" Holi said with an extremely nervous look on her face. "We didn't do anything to them beforehand- why would they do that?"
Anna merely shrugged as she took a moment to rest and wipe the purplish blood from her face.
"This is probably their territory," the paladin finally said after her face was clean to the point that it was no longer dripping with the purple ichor. "They see any outsider as a threat and move to kill them on sight. Animals."
"But we don't want to hurt them. Maybe if we try talking to the next one we see-"
"Look," Anna replied with a leveling sigh "Do you know how to speak Draconic? 'Cause I don't. If we try to talk to them, we might as well be speaking infernal for all the good it will do."
Holi let out a sigh of her own. She didn't know how to speak Draconic. Oh well. Maybe the lizard folk would atleast leave them alone now that they could see they weren't the type of individuals who could be easily beaten.
Anna led the way through the decaying roads surrounded by all sorts of collapsed pillars and broken statues. According to local lore, these ruins they were now marching through once housed a powerful civilization. One that ruled over both expanses of land that made up the modern day kingdoms of Halfax and Rime, and had many more holdings beyond the great sea. Rumor had it that some of the ancient civilization's treasures had survived whatever had wiped the people out all those years ago- and the deeper you went into the rotting city, the more likely you were to find something of great value. That alone was enough reason for Anna's order to send her off to investigate; and it was only by chance that Holi had gotten dragged along for the ride. Normally, she never went off with an adventuring party; always staying at the monestary to cure illnesses and patch up artisans who more often than not proved to be just as clumsy as she was. It was only because the local workers had done a better job of not hurting themselves this week that the head priest had finally allowed her to go traveling- and here she was now, traveling through dark, damp, and broken corridors. Not that any of that bothered her right now, for she was far to distracted by the odd apeal the ruins had and the very fact that she was finally seeing the world, which had been a lifelong dream of hers for quite awhile.
Crack. Holi looked down to see that a stone tile beneath her foot had crumbled. The sound was quickly repeated by a few more tiles. The combined sound grew louder and louder, until it was engulfed by the much louder sound of something shattering- that something just so happened to be the floor Holi was standing on. With a drowned out shriek, the half-elf plummeted downwards into the darkness below; falling for several seconds straight, before impacting into a thankfully deep pool of water. After sinking like a stone for a few moments, Holi let go of her shield and mace and struggled upwards towards the surface, thankful that she didn't own any heavy metal armor.
"Gaah," Holi yelled as she broke through the surface, quickly taking in a series of quick breaths. Luckily for her, quite a few rays of light reached down to this level, allowing her eyes to adjust to the new level of brightness easily enough. Not knowing what else to do, Holi started to swimming towards the nearest shoreline. It took her a little while trying to swim in her somewhat heavy robe, but eventually she finally found a small ledge that she could reach and proceeded to pull herself out. As soon as her head cleared the miniture wall, her eyes caught sight of a rather small building with a dome roof. What was most odd about this building was that, other than a few broken windows, it remained almost entirely intact. Completely soaked and forming a small stream behind her with every step, Holi decided to investigate the lucky building to see if she could find anything that might help her dry herself off.
With a small ammount of effort, Holi managed to pull the stone door of the building open, revealing a prettily decorated interior that was taken up almost entirely by a circle of statues. What was most peculiar about these statues was that they all depicted women who looked rather heavy; each one having a rather swollen face, a rounded gut that pushed out against their robes, and large thighs that forced the stone women to take up a wide stance. Holi found the statues to be slightly funny looking, and chuckled to herself.
"Oops, it looks like someone had too much to eat," Holi said as she went up and poked one of the stone stomachs jokingly, before realizing that the statue on the far left was holding a fragment of some sort of crystal in it's left hand. It glowed brightly, and Holi realised it's presence was probably the only reason that she could see right now. Knowing that Anna was here searching for something glowing and magical, she decided to pocket it. However, when she put her hands over it, it glow suddenly intensified tenfold, temporarily blinding the cleric. When the light finally died down, Holi noticed a tingling sensation in her right palm, and looked down to notice that the crystal had burned some sort of blue rune into her hand that she couldn't recognise. The crystal, still in her hand, was glowing a lot less impressively than it had been beforehand, just barely enough to illuminate her immediate surroundings.
Suddenly, there was a deep rumbing from Holi's stomach, and the half-elf bent over in pain. Man, she was hungry. Like, haven't eaten all day hungry. Only problem was, she had no idea where her pack was right now; probably at the bottom of that pool of water along with her weapons.
"Great, now what am I going to do?"
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