Extinction

Valas didn't need any urging. The pressure of the water that filled his lungs was incentive enough. Scrambling over the edge, he scurried down the cavern wall like a spider, his sticky hands and feet allowing him to crawl along the sheer cliff face. Head-down, he hurried toward the water, eyes squinted against the spray. Above him, the waterfall arced out and over, obscuring his view of the tunnel he'd just left, it hit the water below in a thundering roar that grew louder as he descended.

The scout was still a pace or two above the surface of the lake when the urge to breathe overcame him. Expelling the water in his lungs like a vomiting man, he tried to draw air?and nearly drowned.

Sputtering, he at last reached the lake. As his head plunged beneath the cold, choppy surface he drew in a great lungful of water and felt relief.

He continued down, following the wall of stone until the churning water washed the stickiness from his hands and feet. Pushing off from the wall, he swam, allowing the current caused by the waterfall to carry him deeper. The water was cold?and dark. He swam through it for some time without seeing anything, relying on his keen sense of direction to keep him oriented toward the middle of the lake. Pharaun's spell would enable him to keep breathing water for more than a cycle?he could rest on the bottom of the lake, if he needed to?but he hoped it wouldn't take him that long to find some sign of where the aboleth city was.

After he swam, and rested, and swam a while longer, Valas saw a glow in the darkened water ahead. As he made his way toward it, the glow resolved itself into a pattern of tightly clustered, greenish-yellow globes that brightened and dimmed, brightened and dimmed.

Are those the lights of Zanhoriloch? Valas thought as he stroked toward them, only to be disappointed as he drew near enough to see the lights more clearly.

The glowing globes turned out not to be the lights of the aboleth city but a school of luminescent jellyfish. There were hundreds of them, each the size of Valas's palm. They moved together, their tendrils contracting, then pulsing in unison, each pulse pumping up their light from greenish-yellow to yellow.

Valas started to turn away, disappointed, when he spotted a silhouette swimming between him and the jellyfish. The scout froze, not wanting to betray himself with movement. Drifting with the current, he hung in the water, watching.

The silhouette was the same size as a drow and had two arms and two legs, each of which ended in a wide webbed hand or foot. It also had a fluked tail?but no tentacles. Definitely not an aboleth then. . but what race was it?

The creature swam beside the jellyfish, herding them with a staff it held in one hand. The head of the staff emitted crackling bursts of light whose frequency matched the pulsing of the jellyfish. Valas could just barely hear the sound that came from it, a low-pitched thum, thum, thum, like the sound of a muted drum.

Intent upon its glowing flock, the creature hadn't spotted Valas, which left the scout with a decision to make. He could approach and try to communicate, in the hope that the creature would tell him where Zanhoriloch was, or exercise his usual caution and swim away.

He touched his star-shaped talisman, reassuring himself that it was still pinned to his shirt. If necessary, he could always use its magic to escape.

He swam toward the creature.

As he drew nearer he could see that it had skin as dark as a drow's. Its head was bald, and its body glistened in the light of the jellyfish. A layer of greenish slime covered its skin. When Valas was perhaps ten paces from it, the creature must have sensed his presence. It turned with a sudden, whiplike flick of its tail. Seeing its face, Valas gasped. The high cheekbones and pointed jaw gave the creature a distinctively drow appearance. It even had red eyes, but no ears?or at least, only gnarled ridges around holes in its head that looked like the melted remains of ears. The thing's hands?one sculling back and forth, keeping the creature in place; the other holding the staff?had a thumb, but only two fingers, with a wide web of skin between them.

Valas opened his mouth, then remembered he was breathing water and was unable to speak. On a whim, he tried drow sign language instead. He chose a carefully neutral message. He still didn't know if the creature was a friend or foe of either the drow or the aboleths.

This is the lake of the aboleth, is it not? he asked. Is their city nearby?

He didn't expect an answer. The scout who'd told him about Lake Thoroot had said that only a handful of drow had ever ventured that way.

Valas was shocked, then, when the creature replied in sign?albeit a sign that was made clumsy by his awkward, webbed fingers, You seek the aboleth? Are you insane? Go back, before they?