Man, Gregor is gonna hate me before I’m done.
Gregor glumly considered his options. On the one hand: he could stay above-ground. It was dark, windy, uncanny, and there wasn’t anything resembling shelter, but he could sleep up here, sort of. It wouldn’t be a damned hole in the ground.
The problem was, it was a nice hole in the ground. It was circular, and lined with bricks; in fact, it was the first human-built thing he’d seen in a while, honestly. There was even a ladder made out of elf-iron (the part of Gregor that never passed up a chance to make easy money noted idly that there was always a market for the stuff). Judging from the rock he’d thrown in, there was a stone or brick floor below, and it wasn’t far down at all.
It’s an old cellar, he decided. There must have been a house here, once, and this is all that’s left. The air coming from it was clean, with no smell of musk or slime, and there was definitely no miasma of evil. Still, it was a dark hole in the ground, and those weren’t always the best places to be —
Above, the bumpy sky he’d been trying to ignore for the last half hour finally decided to stop rumbling and get on with tonight’s thunderstorming. That decided it for him. There wasn’t a reek of stagnant water, so whatever was down there had drains, at least. He’d have a better chance of getting drier than he would out here. And who knew? There might even be supplies. Even a rusty knife would be a better one than the one he didn’t have now.