Club Eclair II: Into Moria

[Craiden]

Dear diary,

After defeating the Watcher, we set our sights on the last big menace inside Khazad-dûm, the problem with the fungus which was spreading throughout the lower reaches.

The Elves that had come to Moria on behalf of the Lord Celeborn had discovered another cave in the Foundations of Stone, vey deep down, even past the place where this weird, disfigured creature with the two heads which had given us so many problems dwelled. They thought that the root of the fungus came from here, who or whatever is responsible for it should be in this cave. And we also received a phial of light from the Lady Galadriel's garden to use and cleanse the place.

Who or whatever is responsible was well protected though, as we found out immediately when we entered. Two massive trolls were patrolling a cave. We had actually stumbled upon them before we left Khazad-dûm for Lothlorien on our quest to bring back Bori, but at that time we could not defeat them and left them alone after a couple of unsuccessful attempts, not being aware of the significance of the place. But in our time in the Golden Wood, and the Dark Wood, we have gotten better and have also gotten some new gear and weapons, so this time we managed to defeat these trolls.



It was by no means easy though. The trolls were not alone, as in the cave were smaller groups of orcs, goblins and lesser trolls. But they appeared to be deaf, maybe from all the ground-pounding they do, so we could draw one smaller group of foes at a time towards the entrance where we could defeat them one after the other. Thorcundo made sure he was not seen by any of the trolls, and then shot just one single arrow at one of the groups and then they all stormed right at us and to their doom.

After a while, only the two trolls were left. They were extremely strong however, and sometimes got totally enraged. Then they would pound and stomp the ground, and sickly, yellow patches of goo would seep up from below. Whenever they got into their frenzy, you'd have to move and run all the time, for when you got stuck in one of these puddles, it could mean instant defeat. When the first of them fell, the remaining one became even more angry, but he was also hurt during the battle already and dropped soon after.

At the far side of the cave, a tunnel was leading down. Down and down, and then further down. It was completely dark, except for some purple glowing mushrooms emitting a dim light. We were at the very bottom of the world. There were enemies behind every corner and every turn, grotesquely deformed by the fungus which grew on them, trolls, orcs and these nameless creatures we had encountered in the Foundations of Stone before, the kind of walking goats with the horns and the spikes growing out of their backs.

After a while, we got to some sort of crossroads, from which three tunnels branched off. In front of one of them were some red-glowing mushrooms, while green and blue ones at the other two.

We decided to first follow the "red" tunnel, were we found more infected orcs, goblins and trolls, but the ground was littered with rocky outcrops, or cones, like small volcanoes even. Sometimes they would spit out a cloud of noxious fumes, which made us gag and cough. I was afraid these clouds were full of fungus spores and worried to also be turned into a fungus dwarf. I had never before inhaled as many spores as I did here. But then I remembered that we had brought sample of the fungus and ...flesh... to an Elven scholar in the dwarven base at the Foundations of Stone, and he had determined that only "evil" creatures such as orcs, goblins or trolls, even spiders, will get infectd with this sickness, but not the "good" folk. It eased my mind a bit at least, but not completely. I sure hoped he was right about his conclusion.

Near the end of the tunnel were various chambers, filled knee-deep with green-glowing water. In these chambers stood trolls and orcs, while other creatures made sure they'd stay there. These overseers were of the headless kind, those with with big, toothy mouths were all normal folk have their chest. They snarled at and threatened those standing in the water: "Inside now! Don't move, filthy animal!"

Were we witnessing how the trolls and orcs get infected with the fungus? Maybe... I had thought it would just simply spread by air-borne spores, but it seemed as if they were bathed here to contract the disease which would slowly transform them into horrible abominations. I even had a hunch the trolls and orcs inside these chambers were... scared. But when we attacked the overseers, they nevertheless stormed out of their "bathroom" and tried to defend their tormentors, so we also had to put them out of their misery. I was convinded now that we had finally gotten to the place where the fungus originates from, or at least one of the places, some sort of breeding chamber.

At the end of the tunnel stood a lone, heavily deformed orc. He snarled some threat like we will not stop the Mistresse's plan and he will stop us, but he fell pretty fast. He was, as it turned out, the weakest of the other leader-orcs we found in the tunnels.

As the tunnel ended there, we then went into the one with the green mushrooms at its entrance. We had to clear out even more enemies, volcanoes (which Burnheart liked to call zits), trolls, goblins, goat-people... all the different beasts of Moria seemed to have assembled here. But we got through all of them and then to another larger cave with another three of those "baths". These were however not in use and sealed off with some soft webbing.

And at the end we found another big, heavily deformed and very strong orc. He was bathed in a blue light and had some very nasty tricks up his sleeve. As we fought him, a lot of worms came out of the walls, or even from holes in the ground and crawled at us with surprising speed. And once they reached us, they would explode and spray us with acid that stung pretty bad, so bad that some of us lost their will to continue the battle. This took us by surprise and we had to hastily retreat. We tried to overpower him three or four more times, but without success, he wouldn't budge. He orc's supply of worms seemed rather endless.

But then Hedge, the smartest of us, came up with a plan. Liatri was to lay down traps everywhere to prevent the worms from getting to us, and Hroik, Burnheart and Kuronwen would set up flaming rocks to kill them as quickly as possible. That worked a bit better, even though the worms left acidic puddles everywhere. And that was not the only problem. We still had to destroy this orc. He could hit really hard and was running around fast, attacking us at random. Sometimes you had to run away from him, trying to avoid all the puddles. And then new worms appeared and the traps were already sprung. I don't know how it all ended and how we defeated him, for I was knocked out and lying on the floor for most of the battle. Didn't feel like a victory to me, but nevertheless, we did it, ha!

After winning against the "Worm Orc", as Hedge had named him, we went down and explored a side passage in the same tunnel. After a few battles, we got to another set of bathing chambers and were confronting another powerful orc, one which Hedge would later call the "Bubble Orc".



And this turned out to be probably the most annoying and most diffcult foe we have ever faced. Our tussle with him took many hours, before everything fell into place perfectly and he went down. He must have received his powers from the Dark Lord himself. Sometimes a mere look from him would be enough for you to drop. And not only that, all your freinds near you would aswell. You could feel him looking at you, it was like a shiver down your neck, and then you had to run away quickly until he couldn't see you anymore. If you failed to do this, all around you would fall, and we all failed to run at one time or another, and, even though we sometimes could recover and continue the fight, it also often meant defeat and we had to retreat.

But that was not his only power, he could also heal himself. We hit him hard and wounded him, but then a barely visible, green bubble surrounded him and, by some magics, his wounds closed. But, as we figured out soon enough, only if we continued to attack him. The trick was to stop attacking him, and he also shouldn't bleed anymore. This was a huge challenge, and more often then not we failed. The bubble was hard to see and appeared very fast, so it was hard to react in time. And every time he healed back up and all the progress we had made over the last minutes were nullified.

Each one of us had to do a perfect fight, one single mistake by any one of us would mean another defeat. And mistakes were made, by all of us at one point or another. All of this was pretty frustrating and some in our group seemed to lose their motivation, or even their temper. All the while Hedge kept saying "He's not tough, we just need to do all the dance steps right." Well, that was the understatement of the Third Age, ha! But he patiently repeated this over and over again, lifting our spirits. I don't think we could have gotten through this fight without him.

I was particularly worried that Sagla, who is the most outspoken and blunt member of our group, would sooner or later lose it, but she also remained calm and poised. So we all stuck through it, discussed strategies, how to improve, how to better approach the fight, how to avoid him bleeding. "Run away when he watches you, stop attacking when his bubble is up." It sounds so easy, right? But... it wasn't. We struggled mightily and fought this orc for many hours, until... finally... everything clicked.There was a lot of running back and forth, we hit him with all we've got until the bubble came up, or even stopped before we thought it would come up (you somehow got a sense of the "timing"), just watching him, his wounds stayed open and in fact grew bigger and bigger over time.

But then, near to when he dropped, the orc looked at Thalachon and dazed him, so our mighty elven warrior could not clear off. Hedge, who was standing near him, saw it and ran away from him and survived, while me, Kuronwen, Hroik and Jaytull were taken out from the ensuing splash damage. Still, those still standing fought on frantically, Hroik was rallied back up and then... the "bubble orc" finally keeled over. Didn't even say some final words, maybe he was as surpised by his defeat as we were. He for sure put up a big fight and was by far the most difficult and annoying foe in all of Moria. Funny thing was that our successful fight, where everything fell into place, took only about 15 minutes, while before we had done battles with him that lasted for over an hour.

This tunnel also ended where the "bubble orc" stood, so we went back and entered the last tunnel leading away from the crossroads. We again fought our way through many different enemies, until we got to another orc. Oh, wait! This was not an orc, but one of these goat-men, but much taller. And there were no bathing chambers here, but a huge portal to wherever in the wall behind him. I was afraid that something big would step out of it, something like a Balrog, the "Eclair's Bane" or something. This cave was even darker than the other ones, only lit by the faint glow of a few purple mushrooms. But we could see that this creature stood on some sort of platform, the pit surrounding it covered by webbing on which fungus mucus was spread.



As expected, this creature also knew some nasty tricks we had to figure out. Just like the bubble orc, he would sometimes stare at you. You wouldn't get defeated right away unless you stood too close to your allies, and then it would spread to them and those without proper armor fall. And if you stood on the web, you got stuck and couldn't run away once you felt his gaze.

So what we did was standing around him in a wide circle, not on the web, and as far as possible away fom each other. Only Thorcudo would get close to him, with his thick armor and crouched behind his shield and encouraged by Hedge, while the rest of us shot arrows at him. Wasn't too happy about it, as my bow-skills are pretty bad. Maybe I should take some lessons from Liatri.

After a while, small slugs would appear and move randomly towards one of us. They were surprisingly fast and when they got close to you, you were unable to fight for a while. I got hit by several, and each time some sort of "hole" appeared beneath me and seemed to suck me right in. My vision blurred and I could not lift my arms any longer. Luckily, this lasted only for a few seconds, I then shook my head to lift the fog in front of my eyes and continued the fight. But it was especially concerning when Thor was phased out, for the creature then also lost sight of Thor and started to attack someone else, who then was in grave danger. Liatri and Bohregard were therefore assigned with the task to shoot down these slugs as quickly as possible, but there were quite many and some of them still slipped through their barrage of arrows.

The good thing was that he now apparently was too busy or distracted to eyeing someone closer, and, noticing this, we close-combat fighters moved cautiously in and slashed away at him. But then some ghosts, or images of him, appeared. Four, or six maybe, and they all looked as big and menacing as he did. Sagla, or Thalachon or Boermmy, I don't exactly remember who, would round them all up and when they chased them, they would just run them around in circles. The rest of us focused on the main villain, hoping that when he falls, his ghosts would also disappear.

And that is what happened. When the creature went down under our attacks, the images dispersed. But so did the web, on which several of us were standing, and they fell into the pit and into a pool of green-glowing water. They yelled that there was another tunnel, and we lowered a rope to get back up later and then all of us jumped down.

Following that tunnel, we soon got to another cave, not very big. And this was the end, the deepest place in what the Elves call Moria, the black pit. Maybe the deepest place in all of Arda. We had reached the Heart of Darkness.



In the middle of the cave sat a... well, I have no idea what it was. It was a creature unlike anything I have ever seen. It looked like a giant slug, a massive, plump body, two arms, but no legs, only a thick tail end. It had six eyes, slits that glowed yellow in the dark, and an elongated snout with pointed teeth. The skull cap was split open and you could see the brain. And there were soft, wet patches on its back and chest from which clouds of spores drifted, as if she, or her body, created the fungus spores which had infected the orcs. So this was it, the Fungus Queen, and we were at the center of her hive.

Around her, near the walls, were a lot of eggs and four tall crab-creatures stood there, waving their pincers up and down as if worshipping her, or performing some kind of ritual or magics to help her produce the fungus. When we entered the cave, they stopped what they were doing however and attacked right away. It was not too difficult to defeat them, but the noise had awakened and angered their queen. I heard her deep voice in my head, and she told us that we have no idea what we are dealing with (and she was right about that, ha!), and that our ignorance will be our undoing (about this, she was not right).


Then she lifted her heavy body up in the air, trying to crush us under her weight. But she was slow and clumsy, and we too fast for her, dodging away and slashing at her soft belly and tail. Clouds of spores flew at us and some shrill noise came from her bare brain. And then it got totally dark, and I heard the footsteps of a number of creatures running at us. When my eyes had adjusted a little, I could see fungus orcs and goblins, and... some of the eggs near the walls had split open and hatched her offspring, skinny, not fully developed goat-men, the bones around their soft heads not yet hardened, but they ran up to us and kind of put several of us in some sort of trance.



I saw Liatri was dazed and stopped shooting her arrows and quickly ran over to kill the creature that held sway over her. I heard Hedge screaming. He and Hroik were also affected and I helped Sagla to bring down those controlling them. Then I felt a probing mind myself and couldn't move anymore, but I saw Twostep quickly running up and cutting my captor into pieces.

And then the queen fell, and somehow her body dissolved and seeped into the ground, leaving behing only a final cloud of spores. We had won! To be honest, she was much easier to defeat than the minions who had protected her in this extensive cave system. We then opened the phial of light to cleanse the place. And the light fell onto the ground and the walls, and disappeared into the rock, as he had predicted. I remember well his words: "The darkness will shrink and wither as if the full sun and fresh air were beating upon it from the above world." Well, there was no immediate visible effect, but I believe it worked. I hope. The fungus will not return, nothing bad will ever spawn here again. This creature was what had brought it to Khazad-dûm, and with her gone, the fungus should be gone aswell.

We then went back to the Twenty-first Hall to report the good news, to celebrate and rest. And it was time for everyone to decide what they want to do now.