Session Eleven: The Lost Episode
Compiler's Note: Ihave added the Lost Episode here, in chronological order. To do this properly, I've had to move Session Eleven: Brief Interlude to a later post. So if things look a bit confused, or people are responding to posts that aren't there, that's what happened. Now, on with the story!
(collaboratively written by Dru, Di'Fier, and drnuncheon)
Dru tipped back her tankard of ale, letting a goodly amount of the burning liquid pour down her throat. "So then," she said. "You want to know the truth of what happened at the Asylum that night... " She set down the tankard, looking up at the gathered faces of her fellow guardsmen. "I still get the chills when I think of that night," she said bleakly. She glanced over as the Rusty Lantern's door opened, and her partner's shape, complete with raven on shoulder, was silhoutted briefly, before stepping the rest of the way into the tavern. The elven woman nodded once to him, kicking out an empty chair. "Di'Fier," she said. "I was just getting ready to tell the story of the Asylum."
"Ah, so I guess you all saw the ‘Shipping News'?" The tall mage spun the chair around, resting his arms on the back and leaning it forward on two legs. "Please go ahead."
Taking another steadying drink, Dru continued. "Well, Captain Donnach called us in that night. As you all know, the entire force was out on the streets, due to large amounts of undead rampaging about... we were told that we had a special task to do. This is when we were told that the undead seemed to be converging upon the asylum for some unknown reason. No one knew the status of what was going on inside, or if there were any people still alive, but that is what we were to find out." Dru grinned then, taking another sip of ale. "Despite our rather impressive martial prowess, Captain Donac decided that we needed help. We were Payden," she said, nodding at the grim faced cleric, and," she paused, sighing, "Hallfred." A respectful silence fell over the table for a couple of moments, remembering the dead.
After a moment, Dru continued. "The four of us went immediately to the asylum, fearing for the lives of those inside, especially young Norton, an acolyte from the Temple of Knowledge that we had become friends with." Dru somehow managed to leave out the fact that she had terrorized the young man, and was probably part of the reason for him being in the asylum to begin with.
"Norton really liked Dru." Di'fier added with only a hint of sarcasm.
"As soon as we entered the gate surrounded the asylum, it became obvious that there was something wrong." Dru stopped to take a sip of ale to wet her throat.
"Why was that?" whispered Jaffar.
Dru grinned at him over her tankard. "Because there was a cluster of skeletons standing on the front steps," she said, eliciting chuckles from the rest of the group.
"Skeletons
and sombies. About a dozen of them," Di'Fier corrected.
"They weren't paying that much attention to us, though. It seemed like they were focused on the door, waiting for someone to come out."
"Anyway, we decided that we needed to attack the skeletons to get into the asylum. As all of you know, skeletons are hard to fight with a blade." Dru scowled. "The very nerve. It's unnatural to not be able to skewer something that moves with a sword..."
"Hey," Di'Fier objected. "I yelled for everyone to use maces on them.
I had one. Especially after last time."
Paden nodded. "It should be official Watch equipment."
"With any luck, we won't need them anymore." Dru swilled down more of her drink. "In any case, fight we did. The battle was already going poorly for us, when Payden here did something that I wish I could do..."
"Me too."
"He ordered the skeletons to stand down - that must have been what the News meant by 'dark arts.' It was nothing less than the skeletons bowing to the superior power of a god," she said, nodding once more to Payden. Dru continued. "In fact, Payden was even able to take control of some of the skeletons, and we used them as foot soldiers for a good way through the asylum before they were destroyed."
The Watch-priest allowed himself a small, amused smile. "Retribution is sometimes ironic, and using an enemy's own soldiers to destroy him is justice of a sort. Some priests would have blasted them to ashes, but I feel that my way is more...efficient."
"Once we got into the front door, we had to fight a..." Dru stopped, frowning, and looking at Di'Fier. "I can't remember. It may have been a ghoul... I can't remember if we fought anything on the other side of the door or not..."
"It certainlly smelled like a ghoul, but it wasn't much of a guard. After that we slowly made our way along the main corridor to the center of the building, then flipped a coin and went to the left..."
Dru picked the tale back up. "Eventually, we went into a room. Even before we opened the door, we could hear music inside."
"Noise, more like. But you could tell it was trying to be music." Paden called for refills.
"When we stepped inside, we saw something that I hope that I never have to see again. There were skeletons and zombies...
dancing together. I kid you not. They were dancing. Took absolutely no notice of us. After staring for a couple of moments, we just shut the door on them, leaving them to their fun." The elf smirked at the disbelieving expressions on the others' faces. "I am not lying," she said.
"It was a waltz." Paden set the fresh drinks in front of Dru, Di'Fier, and himself.
"Actually, it was kind of funny," Di'Fier interjected. "If I ever have to deal with the undead again, dancing skeletons and zombies that ignore us are what I want to run into. The best part was the ‘band'. They were terrible. There was even a skeleton trying to play the flute..." He paused to let that sink in. "Think about it."
"Anyway, we moved on, and heard weeping on the other side of another door. I thought that we might actually be able to rescue someone that was still alive, and so was more than willing to burst in. It turned out to be another undead creature...I don't know why it was crying. Probably for the same reason that the others were dancing."
Paden looked into his mug thoughtfully. "It was almost like they were trying to be alive," he said thoughtfully. "Given what you said about their leader..."
Dru shrugged and continued the tale. "Anyway, it leapt at us, and we made pretty short work of it with our swords, as I remember. Then there was an incident in the surgery."
"This was upstairs," Di'Fier filled in. "We decieded to go upstairs first cause we knew there was only one floor above us and who know how many floor below us. So we opened the first door we came to."
"It didn't have anybody or anything in it, so we were just about to shut the door when two scalpels animated themselves and flew across the room at us."
"There were four," Di'Fier interrupted. "We closed the door on two of them. They were still sticking in it when our backup made a sweep of the place after it was all over."
"I batted one away with my sword, sending it winging across the room. They flew back, and got trapped inside of the ribcage of one of our skeleton friends. That was," she added, "One of the more ingenious uses for a skeleton that I've ever seen."
Paden smiled. "It wasn't exactly intentional. They seemed to be attacking whatever was moving, and they weren't bright enough to realize that they couldn't do much to bone."
"Then there was the animal room." The elf shuddered again, taking a long swallow of ale. "It was full of cages, some of them containing animals. Unfortunately for us, most of the animals were out of their cages... and were undead. There were zombie dogs and zombie snakes! Anyway, we did fight them off, destroying all of them. I felt sorry for the dogs, but what happened to the humans was far worse. But that's later in the story."
Dru sighed. "And then there was the undead ogre."
Di'Fier waved his hand. "Wait, wait, that was later. We searched around the floor more. That's when we found the cells and ghouls."
"You're right, I'd forgottten about the ghouls. They were...feasting on something. I don't want to know what it was, or who it had been."
Paden dropped his eyes to his mug. "There wasn't enough left to identify it by that point. We couldn't even ask it who it had been."
"Paden rebuked them, making them cower away from him." Di'Fier took over, filling in the missing details. "We went down the hall, checking the various cells. Most of them were empty, a few of them had very still forms in them. We left them there, assuming that they were either dead or safer in their cells than with us."
Paden sighed. "
We may have been safer leaving them in the cells." He looked levelly at Dru and Di'Fier. "At least one of the people that we thought were chained up was missing when the cleanup crew went in. I think I'd rather believe that it was undead, because the alternative is that those things took him with them when they fled..."
There was a long pause as the assembled Watchmen thought about just what that implied. Finally, Dru broke the silence. "Then we went downstairs. I think that was the worst."
Paden nodded. "The first things we found were huge barrels. When we opened them..." He shuddered. Some things could chill the heart of even a priest of Retribution. "They were saving some of their...food...for later. I think we must have made too much noise, because we could hear something coming down the corridor."
"That was the ogre," Di'Fier confirmed.
"It wasn't very smart," Dru half-chuckled. "It thought that we were new undead. It thought that we were zombies, and was upset that we seemed to be getting ready to go into what it called ‘the skeleton room.' It lead us to the ‘zombie room'. We ended up having to fight it, of course, because it figured out that we weren't zombies..."
"Hey..." Di'Fier said in a deep voice, his face assuming a blank, vapid stare. "Zombies am not
talking!" The Watchmen laughed at his impression, and he shrugged, with a smile. "So we killed it."
"But then there were the shadow creatures. They came through the walls at us, and our swords passed right through them! One of them moved towards me, and I felt my strength being leeched out of me by it." Dru shuddered at the thought. "I thought that it was all over for me then, but then Payden rebuked them. They cowered back, going into their room. I think that we did the only sensible thing at the time... we fled. I was afraid that we would have to face them again, but for the moment, we were trying to get at the source of all of these undead."
"Around the corner, we found another door. On the other side was something that would terrify your most hardened warrior. There was a hovering creature, with tenacles, that seemed to be over a...a
rip of some kind, just hanging there in the air, like the world had been torn open. The creature was making these gibbering noises, that made no sense, and were very distracting...it was fascinating. It-it sounded almost like a language that I could understand, but couldn't quite grasp. I don't know how long I would have stood there if Hallfred hadn't started shaking me.
"It was another creature that our swords seemed to pass through without injuring, but only part of the time. Sometimes, we would be able to hit it, and seemed to be able to hurt it. Finally, the death blow was dealt to it...I can't even remember which one of us did it...and then the gibbering stopped. At least, it did out loud. I could still hear it in my head, and it was very distracting. I think that there were some others affected by that as well," she said, glancing at Di'Fier and Paden.
They both nodded.
"But that left the rift. I couldn't think of any way that we could deal with the rift without killing ourselves, except for one, and that was even a guess. I guess that's more Paden's story, though."
The young acolyte looked uncomfortable as the attention shifted to him. "Ah..." he said, not sure where to begin. "Well, up on the first floor, we had found the office of the person in charge of the asylum, and we'd found a small cache of supplies that we appropriated for official use." He coughed. "Although we failed to leave a receipt. In any case, one of the items was a scroll of dispelling, which Dru asked me to use - I think we all hoped that the rift was something magical, and that the spell would get rid of it."
"I could feel it fighting me as I read the spell from the scroll. The magic almost wasn't strong enough, but I somehow managed to pull it closed and seal the rift behind it." Paden shivered.
It was close...too close, he thought to himself.
I could feel whatever was beyond that tear calling me, reaching for me... He shook himself free of his thughts to find that Dru had continued.
"We were in some catacombs, fighting all sorts of undead that we would have to get through to get to a throne, with some kind of creature sitting on it. We knew, without a doubt, that this enthroned creature was the cause of this entire incident, but we had to hack our way through its minions first.
"A pack of ghouls tried to circle around and flank us, and Paden and Hallfred moved to stop them. We were able to slay the other creatures...wights, I think they were - but I'm still not sure what happened on the other side." Dru looked over at Paden.
Blackbatel closed his eyes a moment, remembering Hallfred. Without opening them, he began to speak in a low voice, reliving the fight in his mind. "We knew we couldn't let the ghouls get around behind us - we'd be surrounded and torn to pieces. Hallfred and I knew that if we could hold them at the narrow point in the corridor, we could keep a line of retreat open for all of us."
"Hallfred was amazing. The ghouls kept tearing at him, and he kept fighting. I don't know how he did it. He cracked one's skull open, wounded another, and then his luck ran out. His muscles froze up and he toppled over."
Dru took a breath. "That was when we heard you scream."
"Yes. I tried to fight them off of him, but one of them clawed me, and I was paralyzed too." Paden's voice was flat, with iron control. "I had to watch as they tore his throat out. I would have been next, if Dru and Di'Fier hadn't finished off their enemies and come charging around the corner."
"Couldn't you have saved him?" rasped Jaffar. "I mean, called on your God? Like you did with the other ghouls?"
Paden shook his head, eyes still closed. "No. I'd called on that power too often. I couldn't channel any more of his power until I rested."
The silence hung heavy over the crowd. Again, Dru was the one to break it. "Between Di'Fier and I, we finished off the rest of the ghouls...although Di'Fier fell victim to the ghoul's touch as well."
"So it was just you?" asked Arinbjorn. "You were lucky. If you'd have been paralyzed, it would have been all over for everybody."
Antone smiled. "Actually, elven blood resists the touch of the ghoul, so Dru was quite safe." Seeing her look, he hastily added, "Aside from the fact that they still could have clawed her to pieces, I mean."
Dru waited until the others were done, then resumed her story. "I finished the last one off, and then gave a paralysis removal potion to Di'Fier. The two of us stood over Payden, after I poured a couple of healing potions down his throat, to protect him while he was immobile.
"And then the thing on the throne finally noticed us, and came around to our side of the pillars. It floated through the air, like an empty robe with two red eyes, and a bent piece of wire that I think was supposed to be a crown.
"I was afraid that it was going to be another battle, and as weakened and injured as we were, with one of our comrades dead and the other paralyzed, I knew that it would be over for us if it came to that. But it stared at us, and said rather plaintively, ‘There was supposed to be an army. This was supposed to be my revenge. What have you done?' And then it very sadly floated off, through a wall, and was gone."
Arinbjorn gaped. "So...it just
left?"
Dru nodded. "It seemed sort of...pathetic, in a way. Not what you'd expect from a lord of the undead. I have to wonder if it wasn't an inmate, before it became...whatever it was."
"I think with the rift gone, its plans were ruined," Di'Fier agreed. "And it's a good thing it left...we were in no shape to fight it."
Jaffar whispered, "Let's hope it never comes back."
Paden Blackbatel sat alone at a small table in the back of the Rusty Lantern. Jaffar's question still echoed in his ears:
Couldn't you have saved him? And his answer:
No...I'd called on that power too often. His answer? No...his lie.
He had been afraid. He had looked into the rift, and known
that was what he touched - every time he channeled his will against the undead. That blackness was what had let him command the skeletons. The cold was what made the ghouls fear him. And it was always there, waiting for him to call on it.
So Paden sat, the other Watchmen leaving him to his thoughts: an endless echo of Jaffar's whispered voice.
Couldn't you have saved him?
