Yeah, I'll just assume that.

~Lia~

"On it," I whisper. We all seem to be thinking the same thing: it's too echoey in here. The chamber must be huge, which means it could hide any number of unsavory things. "Is there a rock around- ow! Found one!" My stubbed toe is throbbing, but I ignore it and pick up the rock. Fishing out a pinch of flash powder from one of my myriad pockets, I say the spell and snap my fingers, making the powder spark. The light sinks into the surface of the rock, making it glow with a steady white radiance even after the powder has fizzled out.

I believe everyone is surprised at what the room looks like. It is indeed huge, and if walls could talk, these ones would scream "Arotharian!" as loud as they could. Arothar was an ancient empire devoted to Hextor, god of tyranny. The walls are black stone, carved in gigantic friezes: slaves and overseers, people being convicted in court. The runes describing speech and the scenes themselves are in an ancient form of Common; the language was more heavily influenced by Dwarven in elder times, which makes it hard for elves like me to read the nearly-Dwarven letters. Massive pillars hold up the ceiling, which is veiled in shadow, as is the other end of the room. A few bats, the small harmless kind, flutter through the edges of the light.

I look at Selena and Nellethiel in turn. Both nod, and we start moving. Selena is in the lead, Nellethiel in rear glancing back from time to time, and I in the middle, holding our rock lantern high. Our footsteps echo loudly off the cold, somber stone. The room, dwarfing our circle of light, is giving us all the creeps. Perhaps just the atmosphere of the place, perhaps a magical echo of past evils. I desperately hope it's the former. After about half a minute's walk past carved scenes of twisted justice, the opposite wall comes into sight. The entire expanse, maybe sixty feet wide by who-knows-how-tall, is filled with a gargantuan bas-relief image of the six-armed god Hextor himself. Each hand that I can see (only four are illuminated) holds a different object: a bundle of arrows, a judge's gavel, a whip, a flail dripping with blood.

Suddenly, I stop, causing Nellethiel to nearly run into me. A sudden thought has just occurred to me: what is the point of this gigantic room? I saw no altar or place for one, so it can't be the temple proper. And yet it's too huge, and too elaborate, to have been built for no particular purpose. I voice my thoughts to the other two. We discuss it for a moment, our voices echoing in an eerie manner that makes me seem small and insignificant. And then Nellethiel gasps, pointing to a line of characters along the curve of Hextor's left calf that I hadn't noticed before. I try to read them, and immediately wish I hadn't; just looking at characters in Infernal, the language of devils, makes me feel a little sick. I don't know the language, though, since I obviously never wanted to learn it. I fall back, asking Nellethiel if she could decipher it and could she spare an herb or two to settle my stomach?