The slimy, gooey, dark slide broadened as it whisked the horses lower and lower in the fetid dungeon. The pervasive scent of wet rot, decaying plants and long abandoned places got thicker and thicker until it was hard to breathe. The tilted stone slide ended abruptly, in a slick chamber coated with thick, clinging ooze.

Coronet tumbled into an unceremonious heap, fully coated in the dark, clinging slime. A fat globule from the ceiling added insult to injury, as it broke off and hit him right between his eyes. “I hate this place.” He was damp, dirty and bruised. This was not the sort of adventure he’d been wanting. As he came to his senses he looked around for Faithful. The hound was a few feet away, rolling in a puddle of muck. “Faithful!” The hound looked at him with dark eyes, and wagged his tails. Hounds. Coronet shook his head in disgust. At least his pet was no worse for the trip down the slime slide. He glanced around to check on his companions.

_

Fortune slid off the bottom of the slide, and continued sliding on the flat slick floor, right into one of the dirty, ancient stone walls. It too was fully engulfed in slime. She impacted it, shoulder on, and let out a long “Oof.” She shook her head, and scrambled to her feet. That slide had been placed for a reason, to lure them down here. She scanned the room, but there was little more than more slime and ooze, and a few passages leading out into the wet darkness. This place was disgusting. She could hear Coronet complaining already, which was reassuring. If he was complaining, he couldn’t be that badly hurt.

As she went to check on her other party members a terrible scream echoed from a passage on the other side of the room. A Courser in utter agony. She froze.

_

Sovereign managed to feign some level of grace as he made it to the bottom of the disgusting slide, though his brilliant white coat had been muddied to a horrific greenish-brown hue from the knee down. The plant rot and humid air was cloying down here, but he managed only to make a tiny face as he waited for the rest of his party to arrive. 

He couldn’t help but agree with Coronet. “I’d give anything to smell fresh air down here,” he told him. He gave a sympathetic look as the courser’s pet rolled in the muck. He was glad his pet was a fluttering moth. Moths didn’t roll in filth. “We should keep moving, maybe there’s somewhere… cleaner… farther down.” 

The scream stopped him in his tracks, though. “You guys hear that?” He turned to look at his companions and Fortune obviously had. “We need to help them!”

–

Shamrock was a tangle of limbs by the time he made it to the bottom. It took him a solid two minutes just to figure out which way was up, and which was down. How had his leg stretched all the way up there? 

After a moment of strange body-puzzling he finally made it upright and scanned his companions. No one else had fared much better in the slime and dirt department. “I never want to do that again,” he whined to the group at large. Which meant, surely, he would do that again. That’s just how his luck went. 

He was just about to follow after Sovereign when the scream shook him to his core. “I don’t know. That sounds like something really terrible. What if it just gets us too?” 

Deep in his heart, he knew that was the cowardly response. They’d have to go check it out, no matter how dangerous.