The Valley of Doom

The Valley of Doom lies west in the mountains, and it is a bowl: an oval floor of meadow ringed by sheer cliff, snowcapped peaks above it and a stream hidden somewhere in it. The only road in or out is the goat pass. It sits about thirty-six miles from Draazstone by air and something near ten days from Loshev on the ground, and low in its cliff face stands one of the seven keeps that hold the curse over Idir. Nobody in those mountains offers the valley another name. Mikhail’s notes list it as the Valley of Doom, and the listing was written before anyone in the company had seen the place.

The Floor of It

The grass is green there late into autumn and the game is thin. Collapsed gray-stone buildings lie scattered across the meadow with one small structure still standing among them, and none of it is Mól work. Who raised those buildings, and who lived in them, was never discovered.

The gnoll camp sits north across the valley. On the eastern ridge is the camp Yara’s band was driven out of. Above all of it runs the Goat Trail, which is hard to find even for the men who know where it is, and that difficulty is the reason it gets used. Its branches thread the valley and the mountains around it, and one fork runs toward Draazstone. The trail is held to lie outside the curse, which is why a party working at the keep’s outer door still climbed an hour back up it every evening to sleep.

The Curse That Was Not One

What was known of the valley before anyone went there fits in three lines: somewhere west in the mountains, in a valley or a cave; something that rips flesh and breaks bone; people talk of a place where you find bodies torn to shreds, and no trace of what wrought the horror. No telling of it named a beast, which is why the company arrived expecting a mechanism, and spent an evening arguing over a concussive blast of wind or a ledge that victims were blown off.

At dawn on the trail they got their answer, and it walked. Hyenas came up first and gnolls behind them, and the sack the pack dropped held chewed leather and travelers’ scraps and a few copper pieces. A hyena cut open was well fed in a valley with almost nothing in it to eat. The curse of the Valley of Doom is a gnoll pack eating whoever comes through the pass, and it hunts deliberately: they tracked the company overnight across more than half the road back.

Seen later from the air it is not a pack but a tribe, in the hundreds, with young and old and armed non-combatants in it. That accounts for the bodies on the pass. The keep in the cliff is a separate thing entirely.

The Keep

At the cliff’s base, a single door of rusted red Mól metal at ground level, sealed, without a handle, with two keyholes in it and a fur of spikes so fine that a hand laid on it comes away opened. Hundreds of feet above, visible only from certain angles, a balcony juts from the sheer face with an ornate paneled door carved above it and no stair anywhere near it. The three-dimensional key that came with an old Mól parchment fits the left lock. Both locks are electrified, because Mól metal carries a current, and the door gave to acid, to lye, and to a tarnished ring worn as a conductor.

Behind it is an entry hall nine feet by nine and fifty long, an inner lock like a submarine wheel and spiked like the door, and then three hundred feet of trapped stair: a hidden portcullis, spiked pits, false doors painted onto the stone, and a boulder that runs a re-leveling staircase and is winched back up afterwards by a chain more than a hundred feet long. It was built to kill people walking in and to keep on doing it unattended. The inner door past that runs on a dial of twelve Mól symbols, right, left, right, with more than one answer that opens it.

Above the traps the building opens out. A vast chamber built into the mountain across several levels with no supporting pillar anywhere in it. An antechamber of smashed windows giving onto the outdoor balcony, and on the balcony a nest big enough for three people to sleep in, feathered reddish-gold cresting to platinum, and a belt of potions among old bones that proved to be cat’s grace, spider climb, mage armor, hide from animals, hide from undead and a cure moderate wounds. Further in, a hundred-foot hallway with four heavy reinforced doors, three of them with no handle and no latch. Behind those are the cursed ones, guardians who reform when they are killed and who cannot be released until the master curse breaks, so that opening a door now would only make them suffer for nothing. The fourth door has a lever, and opens on a round room with a rotted bookcase and a stone table carrying a relief map of Idir as it stood some seven hundred years ago, with six of the seven keeps marked on it.

The corridor of sealed doors is identical, down to the layout, to the one under Haudh-Gwenn. The keeps were built to a template, and the wind-crystal that opens doors there is expected to open these.

The Eagle

Al-Sāmiyah nests above the keep and guards it. Giant eagles were once numerous in these mountains and kept the wyverns down by being there; poaching has crashed the eagles and swelled the wyverns. Rakhzan’s crew took three of her eggs out of a nest they had disturbed, and the company spent a day and an argument getting them back to her.

The Ring of Fire

One night, from the keep’s own windows, a vast unfurling of flame lit the sky far behind the gnoll camp: a burning ring with a figure standing at the center of it. Yara set it against the legend of Verex, the Ashen Orc. Others in the company later set it against Orsugo, whose raiders began throwing fire from their hands not long afterwards, and whom Rakhzan had already heard, at his own fire, was somewhere in these mountains. Nobody went to look. The site lay too close to the gnoll camp to be worth it, and the party left the mountains with the question open.

Where It Stands

Koa locked the keep from the outside on the way out, on the reasoning that Al-Sāmiyah could carry somebody up to open it again. Nobody has been back since. A return was planned once, to open the sealed doors with the wind-crystal and take the measure of the cursed ones behind them, because there were no bystanders in that valley to be caught by it. It was set aside, and the tribe has gone on growing in the meantime. A hunt run jointly with Draazstone was floated once and never happened.

What has been learned about the place since was learned somewhere else. The undead of this keep gave up their souls, and a death crystal buried beneath it, drawing on the root-energy of a tree of life, makes them reborn each time they are destroyed. Removing it, destroying it, or setting a crystal of the opposite energy against it would end them; leaving one of them alive may be a way of holding the timing open. And the clock is the trouble. A curse undone alone resets inside a moon, so the breakings have to fall within seconds or minutes of one another, and sunrise reaches this keep twelve hours and twenty-eight minutes after it reaches Haudh-Gwenn. That figure is why the company settled on Wraithblade, Haudh-Gwenn and the Twisted Grove and left this one out.

No keep has been broken. The curse on the Valley of Doom has never lifted, and the red door at the foot of the cliff is shut.