I knew the obuilette quite well, seeing as I'd been trapped there for thousands of years guarding the stone. That's me, under the chin of the dragon statue. I'm the Demon. My name is ... heh, you don't think I'm that stupid, now do you?
It was quite a coincidence, seven bands of treasure seekers breaking into the place at the same time. I mean, we're almost a mile beneath the Earth, in a cavern that wasn't even accessible until several millenia of water and erosion did their work. Quite a coincidence indeed. Or if it was some sort of practical joke, quite a masterwork of careful planning.
You can see the wood-elf band sizing up the orcish delver and his particularly nasty ogre. I hoped to watch a bit of elf-splattering, but the quick-talking elves somehow managed to arrange a temporary truce. Not that it would last long after one of them laid hands on the stone.
When God brought me down here to guard the gem so many centuries ago, I told him he ought to give it to the elves. It was, I reminded him, a beautiful stone, and who better among his creations to appreciate beauty? (He's ever so pleased with his gemstones. He spent almost half a creation-day working out the natural laws for crystaline structure.) He glowered at me with that face he uses around defrocked angels and told me they'd all end up killing one another to own it. "That," I pointed out, "would be the fun of it."
He only got grumpier. "Just shut up," he said, "and guard what I tell you to guard."
From the other end of the caverns, the bluecloak wizard was the quickest to get to the inner hallway. Not that it did him much good; you can see the high elves creeping up behind him through the overhead passage. The hill dwarves coming in from the third branch seemed content to watch the fight and then slaughter the survivors.
The wizard was canny enough to hang back while a henchman scouted ahead into the central chamber. You should have seen the look of triumph in his eyes when he realized he was the first to reach it.
That is, before I popped them out with my thumbs and sank my teeth into his skull.
Next one in was the Death Knight. He was a tough warrior, and gave me a workout I hadn't had in millenia. The Elf-Ogre nexus kept their distance, watching he and I wear each other down.
He almost got me while I was distracted with farseeing. The high elves had nailed the wizard from behind, the hill dwarves got impatient, and pretty soon there was a three-way melee going on in the sloping passage. Such entertainment!
I had nearly forgotten about the Deep Dwarves up to this point. They came slowly and carefully down an unoccupied passageway - you can see them here in the upper left. Solid tactics and a disciplined formation. They had given the excursion a lot of thought.
The Death Knight fell back after I smashed his shield, probably hoping I would lay into the ogre. The ogre and his lot fell back too, of course, so I just cackled and menaced the Death Knight back into the corridor. Sure, I was cut up a bit by then, but what's a material body good for if not squirting a little blood on the furniture?
It was a better maneuver than I could have planned. Once in the corridor, he realized he was caught between me and the phalanx of Deep Dwarves now stepping over the still-twitching body of one of the wizard's stray henchmen. Apparently he had brought a fireball along - fairly useless against someone condemned to the Lake of Fire to begin with - but the dwarves were in his range and a perfectly clustered target. A moment of fumbling in his robes and there were dwarf fritters everywhere.
Which moment gave me a perfect shot at his undead neck. No evil deed goes without encore. Not while I'm around.
Ah, the ogre. My material body was pulling to the left a bit after being hacked at, and it just didn't have the oomph to get past his big club. Se la vie. I was almost afraid I was going to beat them all and be stuck down there with the stupid diamond for the next thousand years, so it was with a rush of relief that I hit the floor. I kept breathing long enough to watch them get the gem out, and just before I lost conciousness I saw an elf driving a poinard into the orc's back. Not sure who won that one, but the orcs and elves are going to be mighty peeved at one another after this.
