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Dave's broken sword held outstretched from his arm like a dowsing rod, scraping against the stone of the deep underground dungeon. It was, after all, snapped off cleanly at the tip, and thus there was no worries about damaging its cutting edge any further. It made a quiet little spray of sparks that helped light up the floor, and provided good detailing as to where the edges of the inner chambers were, lest he accidentally put too much of his body weight into a hidden mechanism with his hands and accidentally summon a gigantic boulder or somesuch. No, Dave was not in the mood for hidden mechanisms OR giant boulders. The hilt of his sword, stretched out just an inch ish in front of him, bumped into the wall, and Dave rounded the corner until it hit empty space. He swung clumsily forward in the dark, hit the other edge of the wall, and made the reasonable assumption he had found the way deeper.
There were stairs, but there was a treacherous thing to dungeon stairwells, particularly in the dark. You see, combinations of shitty architecture, poor construction, age, and the ravages of weather and beastie alike meant that there was very little consistency to the layout of an individual stairwell even among flights, even among individual stairs! There was a certain artistry to it. You had to start by shuffling your boots or greaves or whatever you had on down one foot at a time, inching it over the edge, applying pressure with your toes until it fell over something. But not too much pressure, or you'd stumble and fall, which was exceptionally bad going down a stone stairwell in the dark. Only just enough pressure to tell where the stair stopped. Then, you turned sideways, edged your foot (now also sideways) off the edge, and began shuffling your way down. Once one foot was on the next lower step, you could (slowly and carefully) ease your next foot down to that same step, maybe with a hand on the wall for balance.
And then you rinsed and repeated, like Dave was doing right now. When you were adventuring and exploring dungeons for as long as he had, you got pretty decent at doing it relatively quickly, an awkward-looking shuffle that mastery of let you easily descend any amount of uneven dungeon stairs, thus preserving your hard-earned torches for a time when they would be more necessary. Another unspoken little pain in the arse of the dungeoneering industry was the fact that damp, cold dungeon air made torches last far less than they otherwise would in the crisp, dry world above. So, you had to save them, and that meant navigating stairs with no torches, which was fun and not at all aggravating, precarious, and obnoxious. But, eventually, he did make it down the stairwell, even navigating a couple of turns, with only two spills easily recovered from and one that thankfully just sent him hurtling down two stairs and onto the floor of the next room. Convenient!
Reaching into his bag, he pulled out one of his torches and scraped his sword against the wall until it produced enough of a shower of sparks that it lit up the end of it. Slowly, Dave pulled himself to his feet and pushed the dwindling torch through the air, letting it cast its orange-yellow light across every surface, a cascade of dancing shadows filling his vision. There it was, in the center of the room, the very thing he was looking for.
He approached the pedestal slowly, tapping his sword along the ground as he did so and remaining low to the ground so that he didn't trigger any pressure plate traps. There was nothing quite like a good pressure plate trap to really fuck up your day, but he managed to reach the pedestal with nary an issue, and reached out to grab the small phial of liquid with his thumb and pointer finger. He bent over, uncorked it with his teeth, and down the hatch the liquid inside went.