Aaron, Drizzt, and Nastya felt their way forward through the darkness.
Like all the other teams of Chosen, they had plunged deep into the lowest reaches of Lolth's Refuge. Judging by how the fall had felt, Aaron thought they must have dropped at least three hundred meters. Beyond that, he could not tell.
By their estimates, Lolth's Refuge covered at least 88,888 square kilometers. No one knew how deep it went.
Like Eleanor's group, Aaron had encountered spiderlike monsters created by Lolth from a mixture of bugbear and derro holy spirits.
Unlike Eleanor and her companions, however, Aaron's trio dispatched the spider monsters with ease.
Instead, it was the shifting Catacomb Webway that nearly made them lose their bearings in the labyrinth.
The Catacomb Webway of Lolth's Refuge changed abruptly from time to time. Some passages suddenly closed, others opened, and still others went from safe to filled with dangers of every intensity and layer upon layer of traps.
Eleanor and the other two women spent three days exploring the entire Catacomb Webway without gaining anything. Charlotte followed their example, trying to identify patterns in its transformations, recording the timing and deducing how Lolth's game worked.
For instance, the first transformation took five minutes. Three hours and thirty-six minutes later, the Webway changed again, this time taking three minutes. Then, five hours and seventeen minutes later, another transformation occurred, lasting one minute and thirty-five seconds.
But Charlotte soon discovered that all those supposed conclusions were utterly fucking useless!
There was no pattern whatsoever to Lolth's changes!
She was just playing. Playing for the sheer hell of it!
Afterward, Eleanor and her companions realized they would have to spend a very long time exploring this refuge in the Phlogiston Sea.
For Aaron's group, however, things were not nearly so troublesome.
Nastya