Session 44 (June 19, 2022)
28 Tar-Vaen—early afternoon, about 16 miles out from the cavern
They continue onwards towards the capital. The next 11 miles are uneventful. As the corridor starts to widen out. Ahead, they can see a dullish red-and-mauve light—quite offputting. They discuss what to do.
Noah suggests that they send Iados forward to bluff being one of them and to scout out the situation ahead. Iados heads ahead, with the stealthiest of the rakasta scouts keeping him barely in sight as back-up.
As Iados moves into the area where the reddish-mauve light touches him and pulsates on him, he sees a single creature, seemingly made of various bones, sitting holding a huge axe made of an odd dull metal, sitting at the very tip of the wall in front of him—where the passageway forks left and right. The creature is large, about 10 or so feet tall, and the light is emanating from him.
Iados tries to casually walk past it to the left, as if he belongs here. As Iados moves forward, he feels a heaviness, as if everything in him is being drawn downward toward his feet. His boots got "squishy." The creature looks at him, and the bones of its face rearranged in what seemed like a confused expression - though there was no skin, so Iados wasn’t sure. Iados feels weaker. All the squishiness in his boots has now moved to the toe end.
As he slips past the creature, he approaches a large pile of rocks that block the passageway, almost like an avalanche fell. They’re roughly stacked, with some gaps in between them, but not enough for him to pass through. But he can see over the top of them, where there’s a small gap near the ceiling. He could wriggle through, although a more heavily armored or larger person might not be able to. As he looks through, he can see a yellowish light ahead, and some figures moving around. There are two different groups moving around beyond the wall—a group wearing imperial green that he is pretty sure are members of the Queen-Empress's guard, and another group dressed in white ivory, carrying bone staves, and wearing bone masks over their faces. Iados has never seen that group before, unlike the imperial guard. At this point, he decides to report back to the rest of the group and makes his way back through the sickly reddish-mauve light. By the time he makes it back to the rest of the group, he feels much weaker.
As soon as Iados gives his report, Sister Agnes begins examining him, starting by removing his boots to look at his feet. His boots are filled with blood, which pours out as they are removed. Looking at his pale face and trembling body, Sister Agnes concludes that he was bled severely, although he did not seem to realize it as it was happening. She casts both cure spells and lesser restorations on him, healing the wound damage, and ameliorating but not fully curing the Strength and Constitution loss he suffered.
Sister Agnes suggests that this sounds like a bone golem of some sort—she never studied them in detail, but some of the other students who she trained with did. Even so, she has never heard of this specific type or of powers like the reddish light that bleeds and weakens.
Also, they are certain that if it hurt a hero like Iados this badly, regular scouts or soldiers—even dwarven ones—would surely die. Since the aura covered the entire passageway, this presents quite a challenge. They discuss possible ways to bypass it or dispel it. Eventually, they realize that the effect began to hurt Iados when he was directly illuminated by the golem, so they wonder if a darkness magic could stop it.
Sister Agnes does not have a darkness spell prepared, but of course the lyans of Paranswarm do. They cast darkness on a convenient rock, blocking all light from reaching an area of fifteen feet around the rock. Sister Agnes takes the rock and moves forward, keeping a hand on the right hand wall at all times, to carefully move into the reddish light. She feels no ill effects, although she does feel like something is at first pushing back against her and then later pushing her onwards, and so proceeds until she estimates that she has passed roughly 50 feet beyond the intersection. She then puts down the rock, carefully placing it at a corner between the wall and the floor so she will be able to find it again, and walks forward out of the darkness. The area beyond the darkness appears to be ordinary tunnel—rough-hewn rock with no carvings or decorations. But instead of the dome of darkness she would have expected to see looking back, she sees what looks like a wall of darkness holding back streamers of the reddish light that peak through around the edges. Sister Agnes removes her boots and some of her armor to examine herself, to make sure she has no injuries. She has not been bled, but she does have some light bruising—nothing serious, but likely the result of the force she felt pushing against her as she approached and then pushing behind her as she left the area. She then returns, picks up the token, and uses it to pass back to where the rest of the group waits. She reports that, since creatures of chaos are particularly susceptible to the power of Paranswarm’s darkness, magical darkness is sufficient to hedge out the evil of the golem’s light.
They discuss, and conclude that this may not be sufficient to move the whole army with the digging machines through, simply because of the number of soldiers and amount of equipment relative to the amount of magical darkness they can create. But they have 10 days to figure that out, and this is sufficient to move the entire scouting party across.
As they move the scouting force past, they feel a powerful, pulsing magical energy, though they are not harmed by it, and they hear heavy footsteps. Iados flies up to the top of the magical darkness to look over, and sees that the golem is pacing the area—not entering the darkness, but almost pacing back and forth between invisible lines that it cannot pass. It also gathers in all of the light it has been emitting into a bright sphere in the center of its chest, which it then blasts out through the darkness.
The rest of the group has finished getting clear by this point, and sees the blast of light emerge from the darkness without being harmed by it. Iados notices, however, that the bats and vermin in the area with the golem are now entirely dead, desiccated and decayed.
One of the dwarven wayfinders gives a low whistle. “That blast aged the stone itself. A few more of those, and the whole ceiling might come down.”
They carefully get the whole group through, and then withdraw the darkness, since they don’t (at least currently) want the golem to cause a collapse, which they figure would happen if they left it hemmed in by darkness.
They then proceed down the passageway, looking for a way to loop around to the far side of the cavern. They find that the passage opens out onto a large underground body of water. The rock of the passageway gives way to a sandy beach, and then the area opens up to a wide area, with the far side too far to see by torchlight, and some glistening stalactites hanging down from the ceiling.
One of the dwarven wayfinders decides to scout ahead by swimming, doffing his armor and tying up his beard before diving in, a knife between his teeth. After a while he returns and reports that he found another beach to the north about half a mile, but opening westward. There were boats on that beach, with guards—perhaps 35 humans, some dressed in imperial green and some dressed in bones, plus about 5 drow. The drow were clearly in command, and they had insignia that he did not recognize—although close enough to what he had seen before that he could identify them as cadet house drow, not Lolthian drow, though what rank or status he could not be sure. The odd thing was that they had defaced the badge that would show what house they were from.
Iados and Elyn looked around to see if there were signs that the boats ever came here. There is no mooring equipment or pier, but they do find marks in the sand where the prows of boats have been pulled up in the past.
[End Session 44]
