I take stock of my supplies and then venture forth.

Your goal of vengeance set in your heart, you know that your first step must be to find a way out of these underground caverns so you may follow through on your vow to yourself. To do that, you will have to be prepared so you look down at yourself and around the area to see if there are any supplies or gear you can use. Your inspection of both yourself and the immediate area, however, don't give you much at all.

You don't have much on your person, it seems. Your chainmail is gone, destroyed by the paladin's attack and the fall, and your tunic is now tattered and bloody to the point there is no point in keeping it on so you tear it away to leave your upper body bare. Your breeches, plain leather riding breeches, are dirty but no worse for the wear and your boots are thankfully the same. Your sword, however, is gone, lost in your final **** strike that had taken the dwarf's hand and you have no other weapon on your person. You have a belt pouch with a few supplies, but nothing more substantial than a few strips of dried meat and some flint to make fire and a whetstone. Other than that, the only other thing you have on you is the gauntlet and you still aren't quite comfortable with counting that as an asset.

Your search of the surrounding area doesn't yield much either. You find little except debris. You do find the chest the gauntlet was once in and a torch or two (which you don't need as the stone of the cavern itself seems to glow with an otherworldly light), but, beyond that, you find nothing useful. You do find something interesting, in a macabre sense, as you come upon a severed dwarven hand and pick the gloved limb up. Despite yourself, you find a deep pleasure in finding the severed limb that had been the result of your dying attack, a twisted sort of triumph rising in your heart. You should be disgusted by that, you know, but you can't find that feeling in you as you move to the chest that had been holding the gauntlet and, without thinking about why you do so, you place the dwarf's hand in it and then pick up the chest.

With the chest containing your gory trophy tucked under your arm, you nod and realize there isn't anything else to find here. That being the case, you instead look around the chamber for the passage out. Luckily, there is only one tunnel that leads out of this underground chamber and you go towards it, following that path out of here with determination and resolve in your stride. You would find a way out of here. You would find those who had betrayed you. You would make them pay for their crime. These things you were sure of. Very sure of.

But, after you followed the twisting turning tunnel for a few hours, you find that determination is not enough to keep you going. Especially as, despite your wound being healed, you still feel slightly light-headed and weak from the blood loss you'd suffered. Moreover, you are thirsty. Almost unbearably so. You were hungry as well and chewed on a few strips of jerky you had, but that only made your thirst more pronounced. Your tongue feels thick and pained in your mouth and you find your throat aches with every breath you take. You are thirsty, so very thirsty...

And so, as the tunnel you follow widens into another chamber, you find your heart swelling at the sight of a large spring. The water shines, looking clean and cool, and you feel your mouth try to water at the sight of it. Oh, how you ache to drink that water and sate your thirst...but then you remember something you were told on the way to the Forbidden Continent. It had been the ranger that had told you, in her haughty way, that you would need to bring your own food and water supplies on the expedition for the southern continents dark magic pervaded everything there...including the water.

You groan as you remember this and try to convince yourself that she was probably wrong. You tell yourself this, but, at the same time, you don't think you can believe that. She would have no reason to lie to you at that point. So she was probably telling the truth...but did that matter when you felt like you were dying of thirst? What was worse: dying of dehydration or risking just a little bit of contamination from the dark magic of th forbidden continent?