Doom Forge: Viridian Gate Online (Chapter 15 - 16)

FIFTEEN: 

Connections

Our footsteps clattered and echoed off the high ceilings as we made our way down one of the many marble hallways in the Keep. Cutter led the way, on high alert for any sign of traps or other nasty surprises. So far nothing, but that didn’t make me feel any better. There was no way a place like this was just unguarded. If a hoard of shambling zombies had flooded out en-masse … well, that would’ve sucked but at least it would’ve made sense. But so far there was no sign of mobs. Not so much as an over-grown sewer rat, which just didn’t make any sense. 

But then, nothing about this place made a lick of sense. 

The sprawling Keep was dusty and clearly it’d been ages since anyone had stepped foot here, but aside from that, everything was immaculate. Bronze sconces decorated the walls, and each one flared to vibrant life as we approached. Instead of burning with preternatural fire, however, each sconce held a crystal orb, which thrummed with warm orange light. Magical lightbulbs. Breathtaking paintings and elaborate tapestries hung from the walls; small alcoves and nooks held cast bronze statues or marble busts perched on fluted marble pillars. It was like walking through a Museum after it had closed for the night. 

The art itself dropped more than a few clues about the owner of the house, who I could only assume was Eitri Spark-Sprayer. Several portraits featured a bear of a man, with shoulders as broad as any Dwarf, his skin a glimmering silver instead of the typical gray of most Murk Elves. He had a mass of platinum-blonde hair which cascaded down past his shoulders and a beard to match, which reached almost to his belt. That beard would be the envy of any Svartalfar, I had no doubt. In many of the paintings he held an enormous blunt hammer, meant more for the forge than for the battlefield—though I wouldn’t want to get smacked with the thing. 

Interestingly, the tapestries were a mix of scenes. 

Some depicted wintery mountain vistas while others showcased the Storme Marshes with their twisted trees, murky bogs, and stilted houses, perched high above the ground like huge water-striders. One painting, prominently displayed over a fireplace in a huge banquet hall on the second level, showed the silver-skinned giant with a broad smile on his bearded face, one arm wrapped around the shoulders of a much shorter man—though short was relative. The other man I recognized at once from my brief time in the Twilight lands: Nangkri the Jade Lord. 

During my quest to assemble the pieces of the Jade Lord Set—and unite the six named Dokkalfar clans in the process—I’d learned that the Nangkri Dynasty had a strong alliance with the Dwarves, once upon a time and way, way back. And that alliance had eventually resulted in the downfall of the Dynasty after they’d accidentally released the ancient dragon, Arzokh the Sky Maiden, during a mining operation. I’d had no idea just how strong that Alliance was, but a glance at those paintings, those tapestries, told me it had deep roots. 

The rooms, and there were so many it was almost hard to keep track of them all, were likewise preserved. Leather lounge chairs, velvet divans, high backed chairs and long banquet tables perfect for entertaining guests. There were mirrors, art, and stained-glass windows positively everywhere flooding the castle with light and vibrant color. We found a number of well-stocked libraries and plush studies, but all the books were of the more mundane variety. There were guest rooms with pillow-topped mattresses and copper, claw-footed tubs. A huge kitchen with a pantry that had seen better days. 

But aside from the food, everything was remarkably well preserved.

There were no mobs. Anywhere. And Cutter didn’t find a single trap either, which once more set warning bells off in my head. But most disconcerting of all? We didn’t find anything that even hinted at the lost tome we’d come to find. It took us hours to search the place—there were five main levels and a host of towers—and hours more to tear through the books in the many libraries, and after all of that we’d come up empty handed. Around 9 AM we took a break in one of the dining halls—a vast room with thirty-foot ceilings, a crystal chandelier, and a fireplace bigger than my old IRL apartment. 

We were eating dried jerky, cheese wheels, and chunks of crusty bread. Not exactly the breakfast of champions, but it still managed to taste like heaven—like all food in V.G.O. We ate in a tense silence. We’d already spent a big chunk of our morning here, and we were still no closer to finding Carl’s book. Which meant we were no closer to getting into Stone Reach or unlocking the secret behind the Doom Forge. I pulled up my interface, checking the time. I had about three hours before the clock-rolled over on my Death-Head timer. And when that happened, I’d get punched in the face with the first in a long line of nasty Debuffs. 

“Well what do we do now?” Abby finally said after finishing off a piece of bread. “I feel like we’ve gone over this place with a fine-toothed comb. But if the book is here, I don’t know where. So do we keep looking or do we cut our losses and head back.”

“We’ve already spent so long, though,” Ari pipped in, a piece of bread, no bigger than a thumb nail in her hands. “It seems like we should probably just finish. Keep going until we find it.”

“Nope,” Abby replied. “That’s the sunk cost fallacy. It’s the idea that you keep dumping time or money or effort into something because you’ve already invested a lot—you need it to work. But there’s no guarantee that if we keep going, we’ll find anything.”

Everyone was quiet for a long beat. 

“But it has to be here,” Carl said, his voice resolute and determined. More so then I’d heard out of him … since ever. “We’re so close. I can feel it. There’s no way my order would send me here unless there was a way to complete the quest.”  

He wasn’t wrong. The links between Eitri and Nangkri were too strong to ignore, but I didn’t know what else to do. I sat silent, deep in thought, staring morosely at the fire blazing in the fireplace. Abby had kindly got it going for us, banishing some of the cold from the air. 

The answer came to me a few minutes later as I watched the flames dance and bob like anguished specters. It was a bolt of pure inspiration. “The smoke stacks,” I said softly, mind whirling. “When we flew in, I saw a whole slew of smoke-stacks. Chimneys. Probably connected to a forge or foundry. Carl,” I said eyeing the Cleric. “You said that Eitri came here to work when he wasn’t down in the Storme Marshes, right?” 

“Right,” he said, excitement flickering to life in his eyes. “But we haven’t found anything that looks like a workshop or forge.” 

I shot him a finger gun. “Right on the head. We’ve found just about everything else. Beds. Dinning halls. Libraries. But not that.” 

“And there’s no way a demigod of the forge wouldn’t have an operational forge inside his own giant Keep,” Ari mused out loud. 

“Exactly. Those smokestacks tell me that his workshop is here. We just missed it somehow.” 

“How, though?” Abby asked. “Seriously. We’ve searched this place from top to bottom. Every level. Every room. Every hallway. Every book. Cutter you didn’t find any sort of secret doors or hidden rooms, did you?” 

“Not a one. If there’s something hidden around this bloody place, it isn’t hidden by mechanical means.” 

“But what about non-mechanical means?” Ari pipped in. “If this Eitri was a demigod, then it’s possible he had access to higher magics.” She shrugged her tiny shoulders. “In the Realm of Order, illusion magic is as common as air. And illusions can’t be detected by most Rogues—I know that from experience. It takes either a powerful Dispel Magic spell or …” She faltered. She took to the air, wings buzzing with manic life as her color turned a brilliant gold. Excitement. “Or by someone like him.” She jabbed a tiny finger straight out at Carl. “Back in the Smoked Pig. You saw right through my glamor.”

“Yeah.” Carl shrugged one shoulder. “One of my Passive Abilities is True Sight. Let’s me detect evil, pierce illusions. That kinda thing.” 

“That has to be it,” I said. “There’s a workshop here somewhere but we missed it because we didn’t know what to look for. Give me a second.” I pressed my eyes shut, recalling the image of the Keep as we approached from the air. The neat row of chimneys had been near the back of the Keep, butting up against the sheer face of a rocky canyon. I ran through the layout of the Keep in my head. That had to be near the kitchen. Had to be. “Come on, I think I know where we need to go.” I pushed my chair back with a screech.

We tore from the banquet hall, took a flight of stairs down, and tore along the main corridor, taking turn after turn until we were back in the kitchen. The room was massive and filled with the standard kitchen affair. An open-faced brick oven. Wooden tables and counters. Racks filled with cast-iron pans, sheet trays, and enormous stock pots. The shelves were full of food stuffs that had seen their best days several hundred years ago. None of that seemed especially suspicious, but an arched stone fireplace against the right wall had caught my eye the first time we’d come through.

There was a metal grate in front—a standard safe guard—and the floor inside the fireplace was covered in age-old black soot and ash. All perfectly normal. The thing that really stood out though, was the sheer height of the archway. Had to be nine feet tall, easy. Big enough for someone like Eitri to walk through without so much as having to stoop. The fireplace was also against the eastern wall, which, hypothetically, was where the smokestacks should’ve been. 

“Here.” I nodded toward the fireplace. “You see anything out of the ordinary, Carl?”

The cleric shuffled forward, a mixture of uncertainty and trepidation marring his movements. He hunched forward, hands on his knees, nose scrunched, eyes squinted. “Huh,” he grunted. “There is a weird symbol right in the middle of the wall. Not very big. Maybe the size of my palm.” He stuck his arm straight out, pointing at bare stone wall. There was no mark. No ward. At least not one that I could see. “Hold on a sec.” He straightened, edged his way around the upright iron grate, and inched forward until his face was less than a foot away from the soot-stained wall.

“Yeah,” right there. He extended a plump, quivering finger, tracing some unseen mark etched into the stone. As his finger moved, golden light blossomed along the fire-blackened stones, revealing a strange rune of swooping curls and angular lines. I’d never seen anything like it before, though that didn’t mean much. I barely qualified as a Runic Scrivener. As Carl finished tracing the final twist, the wall shimmered and groaned. 

The bricks broke apart, turning, shifting, somehow folding in on themselves in a Tetris-like jigsaw puzzle until the wall was simply gone. 

In its place was an arched door way that connected to an enormous room of black stone, red brick, and heavy iron. 

“We sure this ain’t the Doom Forge right here?” Forge asked as he took a few tentative steps into the enormous workshop. It was easy to see why he might ask. 

This place three times the size of the Crafter’s Hall’s smithy, and that was easily the biggest, best-equipped forge the Alliance had in its control. Along the back wall were several stone forges, their smoke stacks rising up and up, along with a brick-lined smelter. Huge wooden quenching barrels were set up near each forge. Racks of raw ore and processed ingots lined another wall. There were metal and wood-topped work stations. Anvils in all shapes and sizes, and more tools than I’d ever seen anywhere. 

There were also several weapon racks and armor stands, though sadly they were empty of finished products. No book to be found, though, I felt now more than ever that we were headed in the right direction. And I thought I saw our next step, straight ahead. 

In the very center of the forge was a strange pockmarked silver disk, four feet in diameter, set directly into the marble stonework so it sat flush with the rest of the floor. A dizzyingly complicated set of runes and glyphs twisted around the circle, spiraling inward. Nobody else seemed to notice the metal ring—far too preoccupied with the expansive workshop and all its goodies—but that was only because I knew they couldn’t see the violet energy radiating up in cold waves of power. Calling to me. I’ve been waiting here, just for you, Jack, it seemed to say. 

My feet carried me forward, almost with a will of their own. The black handprint on my forearm—a gift from a dying Murk Shaman, now covered by my bracer—throbbed with a dull pain. 

I dropped to a knee next to the odd metal ring, forged from Darkshard ore, and reverently traced my fingers over the runes in front of me. Arcane power thrummed, little jolts of energy sizzling up through my fingertips then racing along the length of my arm. I’d seen one of these before, back in the Darkshard mine. The same place I’d first discovered Devil. This was a portal, the making of which I didn’t fully understand. One which opened a semi-permanent rift to the Shadowverse. I continued to run my fingers over the pitted surface, tracing the grooves in the metal. 

The throbbing palm-print, branded on my skin, pulsed in time to the beating of my heart. Wisps of inky shadow leaked out, transforming into a violet mist.

The icy cold in my arm grew in intensity, the throbbing now painful; my Spirit gauge took a sharp nose dive a moment later as I triggered my Shadow Stride ability, pushing that power downward into the ring as though I were trying to pull someone into the Shadowverse with me. But instead of slipping through the gossamer-thin wall between the planes, all of my Umbral power funneled directly into the ring like water into a dry sponge. 

I pulled my hand away as the pain became too much to endure, and as I did a dark portal erupted inside the confines of the ring. It looked almost like a free-standing door, built from pure shadow energy. I couldn’t even begin to fathom why this was portal was here—what use would the Keep’s owner, Eitri, possible have for something like this?—but I knew that the end of our Quest lay on the other side of the shimmering gateway. 

“Guys,” I croaked, feeling a bit light-headed and wobbly from opening the portal. “Guys,” I said again, this time my voice stronger. Surer. 

“Yeah, what is—” Cutter started, but cut off as he caught sight of the portal. “Oh bollocks,” he said, running a hand through his dirty-blond hair. “Shadowverse, eh?” 

“Shadowverse,” I said in somber confirmation. 

“I knew this was too bloody easy.” 

“Wait,” Carl said. “What is that?” 

“Unless I’m completely wrong,” I replied, “this is the way to your book. Time to go find out what’s on the other side …”
 

SIXTEEN: 

The Other Side

It turned out that Void Terrors were on the other side. So. Many. Void Terrors. Enough that I’d put one of the unspent Proficiency Points I’d been hoarding for once I hit level 50 into my Void Terror Skill. I hadn’t found a creature that could rival Devil or Nikko and her pack members—Kong and Mighty Joe—but I wanted to be ready in case I ran across something that would make an excellent addition to the team. Better safe than sorry.  

The Void Terrors waylaid us almost the moment we set foot in the cold colorless world of the Shadowverse. And it seemed this place was making up for not having any Mobs in the main compound by having twice the number shoved down in the warren of craggy stone hallways, which ran below the mansion. We’d been at it for two hours—nearly endless combat with hardly a breather in between bouts. 

“Forge, take point!” I yelled as a fresh wave of hell rushed us from down a twisting corridor. 

This time it was brood of nightmare-inducing creatures called Void Strikers. 

Scuttling, insectoid creatures that looked like a bad mashup between an enormous scorpion and a centaur. Each was the size of a horse, perched on six armored legs covered in cruel barbs, and sported two—yes, two—stinger-tipped tails, which oozed a viscous purple venom. Protruding from their bug-like frames was a humanoid torso protected by heavy chitin as tough as the toughest platemail. The Striker’s had arms sprouting from those torsos, but each limb was capped with wicked claws, powerful enough to take off an arm or leg with ease. A too-human head littered with a host of glassy-black eyes finished the horrifying creatures off. 

Nightmarish only began to cover them and all the other horrors skulking around down here. Still, this wasn’t our first team dive. And after two hours of grinding, we had this down to a science. 

“Abby, dual firewalls,” I barked. “Carl, trigger Focus Aggression. Ari, augment with Transfixing Orb.” In a heartbeat, roaring flames exploded from the floors on my left and right. Those walls were as straight and precise as a surgeon’s incision, tapering inward, forming a natural funnel and choke point where Forge waited with his battle axe raised. Cutter crouched behind the beef-slab Risi, using him as a living shield. Every few seconds he would slip to one side, hurling a conjured dagger at the Terrors frantically trying to get past the flame walls. His blades sliced through their chitinous armor, opening deep wounds that spewed blue-black blood. 

Ari’s wings fluttered with manic life as she moved into position, the blue glow from her body bouncing off the walls. She raised her minute hands. A moment later a trail of orange and purple zipped straight up like a bottle rocket and exploded by the ceiling in a shower of brilliant, strobing light. A hypnotic attack, which distracted any enemy stupid enough to look. Instead of guttering, the strobing light lingered in the air, growing in intensity. The colors shifted from orange to crimson to azure to emerald to violet then back again, washing the room in a never-ending kaleidoscope of light. 

A handful of the Void Strikers stopped dead in their tracks, inhuman eyes raised up, reverently fixated on the beautiful ball of light. Some wasn’t all, though. Transfixing Orb was less effective on higher level mobs and creature’s with increased Intelligence. These things qualified for both. 

Carl—positioned near the rear of the formation, not far from Abby—chanted, a crimson glow built around him in a nimbus of light. His feet shuffled as he waved a wooden rod, capped by a metal ball the size of my fist. His cleric’s scepter, though it looked more like a cheerleader’s baton if you asked me. Never the less, he was an awfully effective spellcaster, and it was oddly nice to have a proper Cleric on the team for once. As he finished his spell, the light around him fizzled and disappeared, reappearing around Forge a moment later. That bloody light looked like the cloak of an ancient god of war. 

The encroaching Void Strikers immediately homed in on the tank, throwing themselves at him with hateful passion—pretty much ignoring everyone else in the process. 

Carl’s chanting changed, Life Tether, activating around him in a shroud of gold. A wrist-thick strand of magic snaked out, connecting to Forge’s back, feeding him a constant supply of HP and Stamina. Meanwhile, Abby hurled fireballs, Amara fired corrosive-tipped arrows from her enchanted bow, and Cutter continued corralling the creatures with his flashing blades. 

Under normal circumstances, I would’ve leapt directly into the thick of things, using my Shadow Stride ability to make it to the back of the enemy formation—taking out their Casters then systematically working my way through the ranks, ensuring they couldn’t mount a proper defense. Unfortunately, since we were already inside the Shadowverse, my most potent ability didn’t work. At all. And my second most potent ability, Night Cyclone, was likewise just as useless. Probably for the same reason. I couldn’t rip a hole in the Material Plane to summon the vortex, because I wasn’t in the Material Plane. 

So instead, I played the role of DPS caster, support fighter, and occasional cleric—casting buffs, auras, and throwing out Dark Shield to intercept nasty ranged spells. 

The Void Strikers had quite a few of those, it seemed. A trio of the monsters loitering near the back hurled shadow bolts of power from their swaying scorpion tails. The attacks were not so different from my own Umbra Bolts, but were far larger—each orb the size of a basketball—and hit like a pro MMA fighter. With a flick of my left hand, I summoned Dark Shield. A churning semi-translucent wall of purple and black took shape in front of Forge a moment before the Umbra attacks hit. The orbs of power exploded on impact, wind and light rushing out, the force of the assault pushing me back a step. 

Sweat broke out across my brow and my arms quivered under the pressure of the spells. 

But the barrier held. 

Once the attack subsided, I dropped the shield and launched a barrage of my own. With a thought and an effort of will, I summoned Umbra Bog—that still worked at least—miring the spell casters at the rear of the attack formation, then hit them with my pound-for-pound most devastating AOE spell: Plague Burst. I seldom used it. True, it caused an absolutely epic amount of damage, but unfortunately it didn’t have the good grace to distinguish between friends and foes like Night Cyclone. And that included me—I was just as susceptible to the poison gas it conjured as anyone else. Suicide by toxic cloud was never pleasant and tremendously embarrassing to boot. 

But this was the perfect set up, since I was out of the direct heat of the fight.

“Burst, burst, burst!” I called out, letting everyone know what was coming just in case they were planning anything reckless down range. My left hand whipped through the air in a complex series of gestures: flick, twirl, snap, fingers splayed out, hand curling into a fist as raw power trickled out of my palm. A moment later, a rancid yellow fog—thick, billowing, and deadly toxic—bled from the air, swirling around the magical Void Strikers. It seeped through the thin joints between their rigid exo-skeletons and clawed at insectoid eyes. It looked a bit like they were melting, thick purple ichor oozing out like puss as they died slowly.

Abby significantly sped that whole dying thing up by casting Rain of Fire, bringing down a torrent of blazing embers right on their heads. They shrieked—a high pitched, undulating warble—then promptly keeled over, reduced to goopy piles of gore. The plague cloud dissipated a few seconds later, the area now safe.

Without their spell support, the last of the Void Strikes crumbled with a single push. Forge charged, axe carving a path forward. Ari—surprisingly effective with her tiny sword—and Cutter followed in his wake, hacking, slashing, and dancing through the now chaotic ranks. A little ranged assistance from Amara, Abby, and myself put the final nail in the coffin. Carl avoided direct conflict, of course, but kept chanting the whole while, wicking away minor injuries, dropping Regen and resist poison buffs, using Focus Aggression to keep most of the heat firmly on Forge. 

Quick. Easy. Effective. Minimal damage on our end. 

Once we were sure all the critters were well and truly dead, we took a few minutes to loot the corpses. 

The Terrors didn’t carry much by way of loot items—no swords, shields, or armor. But killing them delivered a decent amount of EXP and they all carried a handful of coins, mostly silver, though the occasional gold as well. The biggest thing, though, were the crafting ingredients. Shadow Escorn Powder. Void Striker Venom. Umbra Chitin. Bootlace Fungus. I wasn’t a Forager or an Alchemist by any stretch of the imagination, but I’d never heard of anything like this stuff. Which made a certain sense. 

If these were ingredients naturally spawned in the Shadowverse, then only a handful of folks would be able to harvest them. 

It was shortly after we’d finished clearing the corpses when the first of the Deathhead Debuffs sideswiped me from out of nowhere, landing like a lightning bolt of white-hot agony. Frying my nerve endings in an instant. I dropped to the floor, clutching my guts, eyes watering as waves of heat and nausea rolled outward. Suddenly, that lightning strike of pain had morphed into a raging forest fire, rampaging through me, traveling up and down my limbs. I rolled onto my side and dry heaved over and over again. Nothing came out, but by the time I was done, my ribs and back burned from the strain. 

A prompt flashed as the pain finally started to wane and fade like a bad dream: 

                                                                 Debuff Added

Diseased:   As a result of the Death-Head Mode, your body is slowly dying! You’ve   been afflicted with Death Head’s Disease. Attack Damage and Spell Strength   reduced by 15%; Health, Stamina, and Spirit Regeneration reduced by 25%;   duration, until death or quest completion. 

“Death-Head, eh?” Cutter asked, offering me a hand.

“Yeah.” I accepted his hand and let him pull me to my feet. 

It was a stern reminder that the clock was actively ticking against us and that we needed to find this book and we needed to find it yesterday. I dismissed the notice, gave a brief word of explanation to Ari and Carl who were unfamiliar with Death-Head mode and its nasty effects, and then we continued our way into the unending maze of passages. 

For the next half hour, we encountered more pockets of resistance. Scuttling groups of Void Strikers. Prowling, hound-like Void Kurjack. Swarms of tiny, winged Void Zrika, which were almost like crickets—if crickets were malicious, as smart as a pack of caffeinated toddlers, and equipped with claws and poisonous stingers. Big. Small. Feathered. Tentacled. All deadly in their own right and all absolute horror-shows. I was pretty sure poor Carl would be traumatized for the rest of his days. The guy jumped at every shadow. 

Eventually, the rocky cavern-like tunnels came to an end at a set of double doors, which almost exactly mimicked the doors to the keep above—though with a few small differences. First, instead of an enormous golden tree with boughs reaching up, up, up, these doors had an enormous silver tree with sprawling roots reaching down. Inscribed on the stone arch above the door was a verse that looked like it belonged to a poem:

The guardian of shadow and wrath,
slumbers among the fallen leaves.

Our resident Cleric let out a gasp and face-palmed. “Freakin’ figures,” he muttered excitedly. “As above, so below. I shoulda guessed it.”

“Guessed what, Dwarf?” Amara asked, side-eyeing the door as though she didn’t trust it in the least. Good instincts. 

“Yggdrasil,” he replied, waving at the door with the intricate silver tree. Or at least the bottom half of it. “The tree of life—it’s uh, sort of a Dwarven thing. They’re really into it. But it’s always depicted by a huge tree with both the roots and the branches exposed. Supposed to represent Mount Svartalfheim. The Dwarves, they teach that the roots of a mountain are just as deep as its summit is high. Like a mirror, you know? As above, so below. Anyway”—he waved a hand through the air—“the point is, up topside we only saw the branches. Here are the roots. A keep above, a keep below. And the fact that’s in a different realm—one of Shadow—makes even more sense.” He shook his head, a wry grin on his bearded face. 

“And the bit of verse there, friend” Cutter said, pointing at the cursive script running above the door. “What do you take that to mean, eh?” 

“Phft. How should I know?” the cleric offered with a shrug. “What do I look like, some kinda Rhodes Scholar?”  

“You look like a bloody-damned priest,” Cutter shot back. 

“Eh. Fine, I guess, that’s a valid point. But let’s not forget that I’m also the worst priest in the order.” He grimaced. Sniffed. “Boy am I kicking myself for not paying better attention, though.” He frowned and ran a hand down the length of his beard. “But at this point, I figure it doesn’t make much of a difference. In too deep to turn back.” Without saying anything else, he bounded forward, making his way up a short flight of stairs carved directly from the porous rock. When he reached the top, the silver roots slithered and writhed as though they were a brood of snakes disturbed from a long sleep. As the squirming roots finally stopped moving, the doors ghosted outward—opposite of the door above—on silent hinges. 

“Might be, I’m wrong,” Cutter said, “but it seems to me, that this is the way we’re supposed to go.” He moved forward on the balls of his feet, gaze restlessly scanning for any sign of traps or the shadowy, distorted ripples in the air which typically proceeded Void Terror attacks. An overwhelming sense of déjà vu settled over me. When I got to the doors, I noticed a long string of pearly runes etched into the threshold to the strange underworld mansion. I couldn’t make out more than a third of them, but a handful stuck out to me. Containment wards. Likely meant to keep the Void Terrors from the cavern at bay.

That or maybe meant to keep something even worse in …