The water rose to swallow the dead city whole, and would not stop. A man came home to his drowned kin, risen and screaming — and watched the one beside him drink them dry.
The floor of the cavern gave way and dropped them all — Sylvie, Draz, Jamal, Heyou, and the Living Fortress they called Bob, and You Bastard with them — stories down into black water. Sylvie and Jamal came up; Heyou and Bob, who did not need air, walked the drowned floor beneath. Sylvie, who did not need it either, felt the old urge to breathe rise in her anyway. She climbed onto Bob's head to keep above the surface, and Heyou came to her and mended her with his hands, and Draz raised healing lily-pads that bore them up. Then a deep rumble ran through the rock, and the water began to rise, and went on rising.
They swam for the exits, Jamal up on You Bastard and hauling Sylvie after him, Draz falling behind with a torch lit against the dark. A spectral dwarf came at them; Draz's arrow passed through and only slowed it, and it shrieked and chilled him and drifted to Heyou, whose deaf-made ears cut the scream to silence. Then Jamal knew the great statue ahead for what it was: the gate of Grithmaar Deep. They had fallen into the outskirts of his own city. Sylvie's Umbral Raven came back together out of nothing and settled at her side. Jamal named the old stone figures as they passed — Tariq The Mason with his trowel, Grithmaar The Founder — and Sylvie opened the doors of a great ceremonial hall, where the water was rising too.
His dead were waiting in it. Undead dwarves — his neighbors, his friends, Ferris and Dunya and Marwin and Farah — came screaming at Sylvie, and faltered when they saw Jamal among the living. The radiance she had drunk from the Warden kept them wary of her. Her first pull at them took nothing, and they clawed at her and shrank back from her light. She threw them off with a Power Push — Idris the warrior among them — and the water surged and drove the party deeper into the hall; Heyou cut down a knot of them at the rear with the Devouring Dagger, and each one breathed out a puff of black umbral smoke as it fell; and a colossus of dead dwarves stacked one atop another closed on Jamal and held him.
Then Sylvie's siphon caught, and held, and she tore the animating umbra out of a dozen of them at once — his people, and a woman he had once loved among them — and mended herself on what she took. And Jamal, who had stood the line at her side, waded up and struck her. Heyou threw himself against the heavy rear doors and forced them shut against the next wave, and the timbers groaned.
The doors bowed and the hall filled fast. Sylvie froze part of the torrent into spikes and caught Heyou with a stray one; then she blew the forward doors open with a shove, and the surge flushed a dead dwarf away down the passage and dropped the water to her shoulders. Jamal found an Undead Captain of the Guard — his father's old friend, his own trainer, flickering between flesh and bone and nothing — and spoke to him in Dwarven and was not known, only mocked, and cut twice with a real blade, and set to fight against summoned practice-ghosts.
Draz came into a drier side hall where a statue of three dwarven women stood for Vigor, Valor, and Trust, and rested a moment at the first of them; and in a scholar's study there he opened a box that let out a choking smoke, and shut it, and carried it off — the Noxious Powders. Then the largest dead dwarf he had ever seen called him to a duel and struck him hard, and Draz climbed the statue and lit an arrow at his torch and set the giant alight; and the burning thing loosed a heavy crossbow bolt that shattered the statue's eye, and called up spectral lieutenants of its own.
Heyou wrestled the broken floodgate back into its frame and Sylvie held it shut with a lock of frozen time, and stopped the worst of the flood — but the water found other ways in, from every passage at once. Jamal dove into the drowned residential quarter after some keepsake of his home, and was set upon in the dark submerged rooms, and understood that to stay was to drown, and swam back up to Sylvie at the doorway. They gathered to Heyou and swam as one for Draz's dry corridor, the raven shooting ahead into the black, and came to the Scholar Statue Chamber for what tools it held — a single move from the exit, the burning giant and his ghosts coming on, and the water still climbing.
Then they turned and made an end of it. Draz took the high ground on a statue's plinth and put trick-shots into the burning giant and the spectral guardians that rose with it; and among them stood a towering figure — a man, though built like a dwarf — swinging the Axe Of Great Value. Draz shot the hand that held it and then the knee beneath it, and scattered the rest with a scald of fireflies, and Jamal ran the limping wielder down and tackled him, and the man shattered into brittle bone and left the axe lying. They took it up, and went out of the drowned city at last — the axe won, the flood behind them, and something broken now between Jamal and Sylvie that the winning did not mend.
The breaking of the dwarven guardians and the taking of the Axe Of Great Value are drawn from the record of Session 18.