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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mahiro Satsu" data-source="post: 304813" data-attributes="member: 4970">Episode X Ooltugula’s Portal part 5from the journal of Velm TrueforgerWhen I regained some sense of my surroundings, we were slipping quietly into a huge chamber just off the river–the former lair of Glamerdrung. Submerged at a depth of nearly thirty feet were strewn the riches of Aerunedar, looted by the Coil two hundred years ago. And perched atop an outcropping of stone was an enormous ziggurat decorated with shiny green mosaics–it was constructed in the shape of a titanic coiled snake, with a fanged maw open and inviting at the apex.We moored the boat and climbed the steps. Within the snake’s mouth, a staircase corkscrewed down into the ziggurat, and descended beneath. Soon we found ourselves in an octagonal chamber inscribed with many runes, six levers upon the walls, and a pewter post at the center. In the top of the post was a space that seemed designed for the strange disk we had taken with the treasures of Selûne’s temple.With the bronze disk in place, coruscating energies passed through the walls of the chamber. Before long we surmised, with Van’s prodding, that the picture on the disk itself was the key to pulling the levers in their correct order. When we had done so there was a flash of light, and a feeling of emptiness beneath the feet, and the lurch that hits one’s guts when falling from a great height. But we found ourselves standing in a nearly identical room. But this one had no pewter post; the disk clanged to the floor.We moved down a tunnel, and found ourselves in a huge limestone cavern. A massive stone bridge had once spanned this cataract, but now the center of the span was collapsed into a small stream below. At the other end stood a forbidding portal carved from white marble.At that moment we clearly heard Lady Tessaril Winter’s voice. “Well met,” she said pleasantly, “Meerschaulk will soon be free. Even if you win through to the end of the path you have begun…you will have lost. Can’t we talk about this, as we used to?” Van gave us a warning as he shook off the effects of charm magic.Then she appeared, across the broken span. Her face was very much like that of Tessaril Winter, but where she had once had the fair and smooth skin of a Cormyrian noble, she now had grayish-green scales. Where she once had blonde hair as fine as spun flax, there now writhed and snapped a mass of hissing snakes. Where once she had a pair of shapely legs, her body now stretched into the form of a massive constrictor snake.“You knew me as Lady Winter,” she hissed, “but my slaves call me Ooltugula. I must congratulate you for sparking the liberation of Eveningstar…be sure to hold close that pride as you perish.” From her snaky shortbow she fired volley after volley of poisoned arrows.Saeita rushed forward to leap the gap, and with a gravelly crackle turned to solid stone before our eyes. Only Van, Caramip and myself remained. I hurled javelins across the gap, and Van’s arrows flew to the mark with stunning precision. We were no longer novices to be manipulated of disposed of at Lady Winter’s leisure. We were Selûne’s Champions.Only now did she realize that it had been a fatal miscalculation to face us like this, even though only half of our number remained. A warbling cry of despair escaped her, and as she turned to flee through the portal Van felled her with a final shot from Stonegroan, the strongbow we had taken from Moradin’s Fane.“Let’s go,” Van said, and I saw before me not the white-haired seventeen year-old who had begged to accompany me two months ago, but a hardened warrior. I knew then that I would follow him into the jaws of ten dragons if he but asked.We climbed down one side of the fallen bridge, and up the other, and opened the marble portal.</blockquote>

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