Anoushirvan looked up at the others, then at the hand Luke had laid on his shoulder, before nodding with a sigh. "I will tell you all I can. I hope it is enough."<br/><br/>He ordered a coke and when it came he took a long drink before speaking. "Mount Damavand is where we had to go first. The Terra Incognita?" He paused to make sure he had the word right, then continued. "It is there. The mountain itself wasn't too hard to find. I could show it to you on any map of Iran. But the problem starts when you get there." He gestured with a hand, making a circle. "The army has set up a camp there and the place is off-limits to everyone. I did a little digging before we set out for the mountain but there was hardly anything, and nothing in the official papers. Some of the the..." He looked around nervously and lowered his soft voice further. "...more dissident blogs claim that a new uranium-enriching plant is supposed to go up there, or something to do with a new power source. No one is sure. But the army has the area cordoned off, and the official press will say nothing about it. We only got in because Asai is very pretty..." He bit his lip suddenly and his face saddened. "She did something. Like how I can run fast, she was able to convince others to let her say and do things that others wouldn't be allowed to do. The commanding officer was very taken with her, and when she told him to let us all pass, they just did. On my way back I had to run through their camp as fast as I could." He pointed to a few tatters in his shirt, where streaks had been torn into it. "I do not<em>think</em>they saw my face or else I would have been arrested by now."<br/><br/>"Once you get past the army base, there is a tunnel, like an excavation site. But the soldiers there are strange. They are armed like the regular troops, and seem no different except that each of them wears a golden badge with some sort of weird mark on it. Fereiba said it was the mark of the Cult of the Daevas, the creatures who fight for Ahriman against the Yazata. The regular soldiers don't go there much, but when they do they all salute and obey the soldiers with the badges, even the base commander. Fereiba and Farzad snuck around, beat up some of the cultists, and we wore their uniforms to get inside. The tunnel goes down for a ways. Hours I think. Maybe a day or more. There are side tunnels that lead off to barracks, an armory, and a temple where the cultists pray. They pray in shifts, and even the armory isn't as heavily guarded as the temple. We only got around down there because Arma could see in the dark. Most of the tunnel is straight down at an angle though, and when you get to the portal there is a wide, open cave. The portal is surrounded by a circle of rocks in the center of the cave. When we came there it was guarded by six massive creatures that Christophe called<em>Deevs</em>and maybe twenty or so of the cultist soldiers."<br/><br/>He drank some more soda. "When we beat them, Arma opened the portal for us. On the other side it kind of looks the same but it feels worse. It's hot, the air is green, and you can't breathe it. At least not for long. Gas masks we took off the soldiers helped some, but the masks melted after a while. I think the air messes with your head too. Caves open up in front of you, and then close suddenly. The rocks move and shift around. It's always dark there, and the place becomes a maze once you get away from the portal. The cultist soldiers are out in force, and sometimes they would jump us from the ceiling or from side-passages that weren't there a few minutes before. There were creatures that looked like lions but were all white, and every time one got near we would suddenly be hurt. Fereiba called them creatures of Zrvan, and they weren't the only ones. There were bats that became men and whose bites were toxic." He rubbed his upper arm. "Blobs of...something that fell from the ceiling and then became soldiers on horseback, who would charge us from both sides. Deevs and female creatures called Drujs were everywhere. There were giants as well, some of which created illusions around us that were hard to shake off. Men would jump at us from shadows, and I think they<em>were</em>shadows somehow. There were giant beasts too, but they just seemed to be oversized beasts with no special powers. Sometimes the walls would close all around us, leaving us trapped in rooms filled with these creatures. Sometimes the floor dropped out from under us and we had to backtrack for miles. There was one time when the walls closed up around us and Farzad had to smash a path out for us with his fists and his mace."<br/><br/>He finished his soda and ordered another. "But we finally got to the bottom. Oh, FYI, the toxic air and the heat gets worse the further down you go. We came out on a balcony on this cliff that overlooks Azhi Dahaka's pit. There was this weird set-up there. Okay, right at the edge of the pit there was this circle painted in what looked like blood. And in the middle was this...I don't know. I think he was a guy, but he had the same effect on us that Asai did, where you're just stunned by how hot they are. But at the same time he was frightening too. He was surrounded by torches and people dressed in black, red, and brown robes. They were the ones doing the chanting, and he was the one spreading blood from a bag. When he was done, he started chanting too. Behind the chanters was a ton of the Deevs and Drujs, backed up by some of the cultist soldiers, shadow-men, and Titanspawn creatures. Everyone was singing this one song, over and over. I couldn't understand it, but Christophe said it was a ritual curse for Azhi Dahaka to rise and consume the Yazatas and the world in darkness. Fereiba said the guy leading the whole thing was some guy named Aeshma Daeva, and that he was major-league bad news. She'd lost a lover and a lot of her family to him a while back. When the pit started glowing and this Aeshma guy went into overdrive with the chanting, Christophe said that the seal was going to break, so we charged."<br/><br/>When his second coke came, he drank it at a gulp and shivered, his eyes becoming haunted and withdrawn. "Farzad and Arma just started busting any head they could get to. Fereiba went for Aeshma and I saw him go giant suddenly. He became this gigantic soldier and smashed a huge mace down on Fereiba. We tried to get to her but there were too many guys in between us. Asai did her thing, and a whole bunch of the cultists and other things looked at her and did nothing. But some of the others weren't affected for some reason. Christophe and I tried to guard her, but these guys were brutal. Some of them were strong enough to put Farzad to shame, and some of them keep changing forms. The Deevs were the tricky ones. Christophe and I double-teamed one and he turned into a giant rock on us. Our hits did nothing but we managed to deflect him into some of the others. Awrang went nuts on all the Deevs and Drujs around us, and Asai's<em>huma</em>managed to blind a couple of the cultists. For a minute I thought we'd win, but then it went south.<br/><br/>One of the Drujs broke through to Asai and ripped out her throat. Whatever she was doing to the ones she had stunned broke then, and they tore her up. Guns, spears, swords." He shuddered. "One guy had an axe. I..." He bit his lip. "We couldn't save her. I was the fastest but I couldn't get to her before..." He lowered his head. "There was just blood when I got there. Blood and a few bones. I don't...I can't really tell you much of what happened then. Christophe and I tried to get back what we could of her, and I heard screaming, and then Christophe had a spear in his gut and Awrang was killed. I was knocked down and I remember some soldier with an AK-47 about to ventilate me, then Arma was there. She killed the soldier and we got out, but...the last thing I saw was Farzad's leg ripped off. He was reaching towards us and then he was dragged back into the crowd of Titanspawn. And Fereiba? I don't know. Aeshma Daeva was still there but I didn't see her anywhere." He let out a deep breath. "The rest is as I told you."<br/><br/>OOC: And infodump is done! :) For those who can detect lies, you detect no lies in his words or bearing.<br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>