Session 234, Part One - The Carnivorous Mandala Beast of Thrag
The Carnivorous Mandala Beast of Thrag
A bipedal bird with luxurious dagger-like feathers lunged from the underbrush, and as its clawed fore-limbs reached for Leon, a blinding disk of mind-warping white and purple appeared in the air behind it, rendering him incapable of recalling any spells. The best he could do was reach for his Dreaming Blade far too slowly as the mandala beast impaled him. The first claw strike was partly blocked by his silksteel mantel, but it was unable to stop the second, or the third. With blinding speed, the mandala beast struck and struck again, then dragged him back into the flailing, wailing bushes.
Quratulain dashed after it, hacking her way in and saw it poised to strike again at the prone, bleeding tiefling; Uriel followed in her wake, thrust at it with his new rapier, but missed. The beast dealt with Leon first, finishing him off with one claw, while lashing out at its attacker with the other. Uriel leapt back out of harm’s way. Calily adopted the stance of the paper wind, and chased into the underbrush to help. “I told you these creatures were dangerous!” she said.
Uru was about to take to the air, to try to find a spot where he could see the mandala beast, when he caught sight of something up in the canopy which he was sure had not been there before: a vaknid! How could he have missed the approach of something so huge? He reported its arrival to Korrigan, and asked for permission to strike; Korrigan gave him the go ahead, distracted and horrified by the report from his defender sword that Leon had been killed. At once, he sent a message to Rumdoom back on the Coaltongue. This situation was dangerous and they would need his support! As he did so, he scooped up Kai and threw him into the sling on his back.
Uru, meanwhile, took a shot at the vaknid, which flinched. Gupta studied it carefully, noting the fact that it did not appear to be hostile, just… observing them? In response to Uru’s attack, the vaknid withdrew, scuttling off across the canopy, unmolested by the ambulatory plant-life. Gupta switched to tiger form to join the fight to free Leon, when suddenly a huge barrier of screaming plants bisected the clearing, trapping Gupta, Korrigan and Uru on the far side. Uriel felt sure that the psychic energy that had raised this barrier had emanated from the mandala beast.
Uru took to the air on Little Jack and hid, watching to ensure that the vaknid had indeed fully withdrawn. It was some distance away already.
Quratulain, Uriel and Calily fought the mandala beast, striking blow after blow. Uriel set it on fire with his gold-dragon-tooth rapier, and the creature screeched in agony and fell writhing to the ground, where it was immediately absorbed into the soil. Uriel tried to trap its soul to stop it reincarnating, but the process was already underway.
Unable to reach Leon through the barrier, Korrigan clutched at the pommel of his defender sword again, and was surprised to learn that Leon was now alive and stable! At this news, Uriel dropped to his knees and tried to heal Leon, but the spell did not work. Something strange was going on; this required careful study.
With the mandala beast gone, Gupta turned back into human form to help Uriel, only to hear a sinister movement in the undergrowth behind her, just audible over the screams of the plant barrier. She turned and drew Lya’s rapier, even as another mandala beast erupted from the bushes and pounced at her. This one was a serpent with wings like a jagged butterfly, sporting a hypnotic disk of reds and greens and blues. Uru shot it immediately and distracted it from Gupta. It turned its gaze skyward and bamboozled Uru with its mandala. He was compelled to flee, but fought for control and did not do so. Gupta took advantage of the situation, and the terrible wound caused by Uru, and plunged her mechanised rapier deep into the beast. It slumped to the ground and immediately began to disintegrate.
“That was the same beast,” said Gupta.
“Regroup!” said Korrigan.
At once, Quratulain began hacking her way through the barrier with her armblades. As she did so, their screams reached a pitch that caused her allies to flinch, but Quratulain did not care. “It’s recharging my batteries!” she cried, happily. Ever since her dalliance with the Father of Thunder she had grown fond of loud noises and lightning.
Uriel used telekinesis to try to move Leon, but Leon arched his back and groaned in response and Uriel lowered him back down to remain in contact with the earth. “It seems to be sustaining him,” he reported. So Korrigan gave orders for the rest of the team to move through the gap Quratulain had created and gather defensively around their fallen comrade until such times as they figured out what to do. The mandala beast might return at any…
Suddenly, thrashing grass bristled beneath their feet, and the entire surface of the earth became a disorienting swirl of black, orange, and silver light from which the screaming tendrils of plant-life grew, their stalks capped with thorn-toothed mouths. Before it could bring them to bear on anyone, Quratulain shrunk it with her lantern blaster, from a huge patch of earth, to a much more modest one, and Uriel ignited it with an empowered fire spell. Again, it fizzled into the earth.
“I wonder if it will still be smaller when it reincarnates?” Quratulain said. (Flash-forward: It wasn’t.)
While they waited for the mandala beast’s inevitable return, Uriel, Gupta and Quratulain tried to figure out what was going on – how to defeat the beast, and how to save Leon. They shared ideas, one revelation building on another: Uriel realised they needed to get Leon off-world to shake him free of the stasis the beast had trapped him in; trouble was that would kill him without Rumdoom to prevent that happening. Fortunately, Rumdoom and Hildegaard arrived at that moment, feather-falling down from the Coaltongue, which circled hundreds of feet up. “Where’s this beast, then?” Rumdoom asked looking around him and brandishing the Stone of Not.
Standing in Wonder, Gupta realised that one way to defeat the beast would be to take it off-world too, to prevent it from reincarnating; the trouble with that was that their best chance of doing so was currently lying close to death.
Quratulain made a quick calculation and was about to share it when the beast leapt out of the undergrowth once again. This time, it had taken the form of a skeletal quadruped – something halfway between a dog and a horse - with razor-sharp bones. It attacked Korrigan, who was left bleeding from several wounds, before Rumdoom leapt at the creature and struck it with the Stone of Not. It vanished!
Had that put an end to the creature? It all depended on whether the power of the Stone –sufficient to obliterate the creature’s physical form – was greater than the magic of Thrag which would otherwise cause its spirit to reincarnate and regrow another body.
In the hiatus, while they waited to see if it returned, Quratulain shared her calculations: “We can slow the beast’s regeneration by scorching the earth beneath it. It won’t be killed permanently, but it will have to decay through natural means.”
“That’s doable,” said Uriel, who began to prepare a spell, as a humungous fungal growth bloomed at the centre of the clearing. Bulbous heads rose up, mouths opened, and tendrils lashed out to draw in victims. Rumdoom swung the stone, but having to fend off tendrils as he did so, missed. Calily threw stinging paper darts at the creature; it responded by going into a frenzy, lashing out at Calily, Quratulain and Rumdoom. Each had to fend off a virulent paralytic poison, and Calily had to shrug off the mind-numbing effects of the beast’s mandala, too.
Korrigan asked Kai if he knew what would happen to Leon if they moved him – assuming Rumdoom could stop him from dying. Kai said, “I think he’ll come back to life, but more slowly than the monster.” Korrigan nodded and took a swig from the Borenbog’s Gourd, to bolster his strength.
Uriel muttered an incantation and scorched the ground beneath the mandala beast. The beast itself also caught fire, and everyone joined forces to kill it. Its fungal sacks deflated, still ablaze, but it did not disintegrate at once now the ground was blackened. A few of them kept an eye on it, while the rest dealt with Leon.
Uriel levitated him, and Rumdoom stopped the initial shock from killing him, declaring this a very bad ending indeed. Then they all went back to the Coaltongue in haste, in case another mandala beast showed up.