Well, after the incident yesterday we had no access the ruins. That was seriously... misfortune, but I could do nothing about it. For now.
Earlier this morning Ish, Vrag (after receiving that knife from us he had become quite a bit more interested in exploring the ruins) and I went deeper into the caves.
The tunnel we used with Fish might have been collapsed, but there was still one smaller corridor we could explore.
We were moving slowly. Both Ish and I believed that the armored giant was out there. IT can't have been destroyed that easily. I had asked around, nobody had seen a creature like that before. I almost felt like it had been awaken by our activities, but that was just a theory for now.
This segment of the cave was especially narrow, we passed through several choke points where one couldn't even face forward and had to walk sideways.
And then, out of the blue almost, the space before us opened. The light of our torches was reaching the wall many meters ahead of us. We had entered an enormous cavern.
"Wow! " said Ish.
"That. Big!" were Vrag's words.
I remained silent. What was there to add? The cavern was rather enormous, especially in height, because it was maybe one hundred meters tall.
"Let's just check the place." I eventually suggested "Preferably fast."
"Oka!" replied Vrag.
We split up. Now, alone, I got a better idea of what the place was like. The land was extremely uneven and I had to walk extremely carefully so I wouldn't trip over. The only actual continuation of the cave that I could see was about forty meters above the floor and I had no idea how to reach it, so I decided to consider it not an option. Funnily enough there were quite a few broken bones at the floor there. At least that suggested that I didn't need to worry about attacks from there. I checked the place for anything worth my time. I found a whole one dagger! In the entire pile of undead remains, I found one dagger! Yes, I am a bit sarcastic. My explanation was that only the least intelligent undead (the sub variants that used no weapons) were the only ones to actually be stupid enough to jump. Expect for that and several rock formation I could see nothing of interest.
"Hey, boys!" I heard Ish shouting. "You better have a look at this..."
Her tone worried me a bit, so quickly got to where she was.
"Thought no living things here." said Vrag.
"So did I, so did I..." replied Ish.
We were standing in front of a rather large tunnel, maybe four meters wide. A cobweb was stretching across the entire entrance, not only that, but several layers appeared behind each other.
"That big spider!" exclaimed Vrag.
"Or many small ones..." I noted.
"What do we do now?" Ish eventually asked after about a minute as she was slowly making a small cut in the web. It seemed like a slow, tiresome and inefficient job.
"Well, we found no way continue. Better go back." I said and then got reminded of something "By the way, come here Vrag."
"What?" he asked.
"I hope you'll like that." I showed him the dagger I found "What do you think?"
"Thank. A lot."
And after that we went back.
I did some experiments with magic. More accurately, performing and modifying the only spell I knew. Here are the two most battle oriented variants I made (a bright flash light and heating the environment a bit, I had actually refined that one to an actual spark). First I wanted to increase the chances of the spell actually working. This is why I made it so that three basic constructs were going to be powered simultaneously, but independently. If you wish, you can imagine the spell in its most basic form looking like the head of fork with each of the spells being powered as one of the tips. It's not a great metaphor, especially since how I saw it (including the parts that were not visible for outsiders), the spells shape was more like a circle with three spheres on equal distance from each other on its perimeter and three radiuses. That strangely reminded me of the various pentagrams I saw down below.
After checking if my spells worked (relatively speaking. There was still a notable chance of failure.) I opened one of the books we had lying around, chose the first spell I saw and tried copying it. Some notable features were that the least complex figure was an obtuse triangle. Fail.
I tried again, and again, and again. All fails.
"Frustrated?" asked Ish.
"Yes, quite a lot actually." I replied.
"Don't worry, it'll all be fine. You are gonna be a quite good sorcerer, if you are even half as interested in that as you look. Just no more vomiting, please."
"And what if I can't be of use with that?"
"If you can't, you can't. End of story. Or maybe I will continuously torment you until you can. Depends on my mood."
"Thanks for being by my side."
"Don't worry, Stri."
And we went to sleep.
The next day, Ish and I went outside of the cave for the first time in four days. We wanted to find another entrance to the caves and try exploring from there. Meanwhile Vrag had become notably more interested in looting the undead (initially, as I learned, he had come in the camp to hunt for Okons) and today he went to the cavern we had found, trying to cut through the cobweb.
At the end, all Ish and I did was spend some nice, intimate time together and kill some animals for food. Vrag wasn't successful, either.
I decided to draw maps of the caves based on what I knew. They weren't very accurate, but each chamber I knew of was drawn. At the I planned to keep one for myself, give one to Freyr, I assumed he'd be interested in the place, and give to Vrag/keep it in the camp.
There wasn't much of note this day.