To gerg and Anxe, thanks for coming back to the story! I appreciate what an undertaking it must be, reading the entire thing from its humble beginning.
To Anxe: you'll be hearing about Rosetta in the next few updates.
A general note: after this update, there are 20 runs remaining to transcribe. (Which doesn't necessarily mean 20 updates; I average more than one update per run.)
Sagiro’s Story Hour, Part 368
The Croaking Oracle
From the possible places to go next, the Company decides to pay a visit to the Croaking Oracle. Toq has little more to offer, never having been to visit the prophesying toad. “I have heard he is very big… bigger than you, I think. Though as I have said, I find it unsavory that he prefers to eat a live Stribe.”
“I want to thank you,” says Dranko, as they prepare to depart Kessedth. “It took dedication and faith to wait here all this time for us. We really appreciate it.”
“You’re welcome,” says Toq.
“I’d give you a diamond or an emerald, but… wait… I have an idea.” Dranko spends a minute describing a tree. Toq says they have something similar in occasional large caverns, but that they are very rare. Dranko fishes around in his pack for an old wooden holy symbol of Delioch, which Toq accepts with great reverence. Wood is extremely valuable, and on top of that he considers its hand-shaped design to be a reference to Yavin.
“What are you going to tell people, now that we’ve arrived?” asks Dranko.
“I was hoping to go with you,” says Toq, “to see what you will do. I have been waiting a long time; it seems a shame to abandon you so soon.”
“You might die, and we’ll feel terrible,” says Dranko.
“Am I likely to die if I travel with you? That would… change things in my mind.”
After the party assures him that their journey is bound to be filled with horrible perils of every sort, Toq opts to remain behind, and wishes them well. “Follow the main tunnel,” he advises. “I believe it goes directly to Pressing Lake. The whole of the Underdark is riddled with tunnels and passages, old mineshafts, natural fissures, vertical shafts and abandoned burrows, but very few of them lead to anywhere interesting, let alone inhabited. The ones that
do go somewhere interesting, you will know because they have been widened, and worn down by many feet, and there are often ropes and ladders to help travelers. Some have not been maintained well, and I suspect that your path will be rough. The Croaking Oracle, for all his supposed knowledge, does not get many visitors.”
“Could we bring the Oracle some other insects?” asks Kibi.
“There are some tarantulas in the tunnels, but they are very small compared to the Croaking Oracle. I doubt it would be satisfied.”
Though Toq estimated a week of travel to reach Pressing Lake, he was not taking into account that the party would be flying on
phantom steeds. While the tunnel does wind up and down, back and forth, with bridges spanning crevasses, ropes snaking up nearly vertical shafts, and rough patches with tilted floors, the Company finds it all easily navigated.
During the journey they see no other travelers, and the tunnel floors are not nearly as worn as those leading to and from the Temple of Arrival. After many hours have passed the light motes start to dim, indicating that night has fallen many miles above. They stop and make camp in a wide and (relatively) flat section of tunnel, and though Aravis casts
rope trick, most choose to sleep ‘old school’ right on the floor of the passage. Some little blue ant-like creatures scurry about, but they’re harmless and shy away into the corners.
Dranko lights a cigar and blows out a stream of smoke. It forms into the words
extremely dangerous.
“I bet that’s about the Croaking Oracle,” says Ernie.
Dranko agrees. “Since they knew we’d immediately go to the Oracle, they’ve probably set a horrible trap for us.” Everyone understands that by ‘they,’ he means Meledien, Tarsos and Seven Dark Words.
“We could find out by asking the Croaking Oracle,” says Flicker.
Nothing extremely dangerous, or even mildly worrying, occurs overnight. They wake stiff the next morning as the light motes grow bright. All is silent, and no breeze stirs the gently wafting lights. Grey Wolf summons up their
phantom steeds, and after a quick breakfast they’re off down the passage.
By mid-day, or what they assume is mid-day, the tunnel empties abruptly onto the narrow shore of Pressing Lake. It’s immediately evident from whence comes its name; the lake extends out away from them in all directions, but the flat ceiling above it is no more than eight feet above water level. There is a pier of hardened fungus jutting near at hand, and a little boat is tied up there. Next to the pier is a bucket with three khet chips. Visitors to the Croaking Oracle who don’t have
phantom steeds at their disposal must use this little boat to reach it. Morningstar casts
thought capture and finds it difficult, but thinks she detects a though of someone having doubts, and wondering if the Stribe they have tied up is really a dangerous criminal.
Kibi casts
prying eyes and sends them off to scout, with instructions to stay within a mile of him, and to report back if they see anything that’s not water or featureless shoreline. Grey Wolf, with
enhanced senses cast, takes a whiff of the air and smells fish, but no salt. Kibi casts
veil to make them look like rats (though they’ll be rats on flying horses), and Ernie casts
water walk on everyone in case they become unseated while over the water. Finally, Dranko casts a
light spell on the shore, so they’ll have a beacon to return to.
They ride out perpendicular from the shore, figuring that if Pressing Lake is more-or-less a circle, they’ll be heading towards its center. Though the hoofs of their
phantom steeds skim the water, their heads come uncomfortably close to the low stone ceiling as they gallop along. It’s intensely claustrophobic. Ninety minutes into the journey one of Kibi’s
prying eyes returns and reports. It had arrived at an island at the center of the lake, a small stony protrusion from the water, less than a hundred feet across. The ceiling above the island rises, forming a rough dome only 30’ high at its apex. In the middle of the island, squatting in a damp indentation, is an enormous dark green toad. It’s about the size of a baby elephant, with heavy lidded eyes and warty skin. Every few seconds its vocal sac inflates and it lets out a resonant croak. Kibi is relieved to see it is alive, no hole burned in its chest.
Kibi adjusts the party’s course and before too long the island comes into their actual view. But no sooner do they reach the comfortingly high ceiling of the Croaking Oracle’s dome, than something else comes streaking towards them from another direction. It’s a large spinning tornado, tipped sideways to fit betwixt sea and roof, with two glowing green eyes. Its entire form is outlined with an aquamarine aura. Water from pressing lake is being drawn up into its vortex and spewed out in all directions.
It appears that the Evil Trio has left a trap for them after all.
Flicker leaps from his horse (not being much skilled at mounted combat) and sprints along the water’s surface to meet the charging elemental. Dranko does the same, activating his
boots of haste and maneuvering into flanking position. (Thanks to Cranchus’s marble, he is able to land sneak attacks upon elementals.) He whips the creature as Flicker slashes at it. The elemental’s eyes rotate around the outer layer of its tornado body until they become fixed, unwavering, on Dranko. Then two more elementals come whooshing in from the darkness, also rimmed with blue-green light, and these too head straight for Dranko, ignoring several other members of the Company. The three elementals buffet him with powerful tendrils of coruscating air.
Grey Wolf fires off a
chain lightning at the trio of elementals, but their preternatural reflexes allow them to avoid much of the damage. Inverted lightning bolts of darkness are left behind, as light motes are vaporized by the electricity. Morningstar casts
darkbeam at one of the attackers, but it twists out of the way with minimal harm done.
Something new arrives, flying even faster than the elementals, and comes to a halt fifty feet away. It’s difficult to get a good look at through the spray churned up air and water, but it has several flapping wings, and glows with the same aquamarine aura as the elementals. It fires off a thin green beam that strikes Dranko in the chest, and Dranko feels the heavy enervating burden of negative levels.
Kibi entraps this new threat in a solid
forcecage before quickening a
rainbow pattern that draws away one of the air elementals. Ernie quickens
iron bones on himself and rides closer to the melee, then tries to cast
searing light, but he finds it too difficult to cast while riding; it’s all he can do not to topple from the phantom steed. Aravis discovers the same. It’s been too long since they’ve tried to cast from horseback.
Flicker continues flank an elemental with Dranko, and so while his own sword strokes aren’t greatly damaging, he allows Dranko to do massive harm with his whip (despite the negative levels). The elemental bursts into a cloud of quickly-dissipating vapors, its blue-green outline fading to black.
The remaining non-fascinated elemental continues to harass Dranko, though it’s unable to cause him any injury. Grey Wolf, the only one in the Company with tremendous riding skill, has no difficulty staying mounted while burning a hole in the elemental with an
acid orb. The spell also leaves a round black spot in the air where the light motes have been dissolved.
The winged creature vanishes and reappears next to Dranko. Up close it seems to be nothing
but wings, each a dirty beige, hundreds of them, clumped together with no body to explain them. A tail snakes out of the mass of matted feathers, and the whole thing stinks like a carcass left out too long in a hot sun. (The Company has never seen such a horror, and a good thing for them; this newcomer is a Chichimec, one of the most fearsome denizens of the Elemental Plane of Air.) It lashes out with the tail, draining away some of Dranko’s charisma.
Kibi lobs an empowered, maximized
coldfire into the melee around Dranko, knowing his friend will evade its flames. The elemental and the Chichimec are both burned, while another clump of light motes is wiped out. The battlefield has become twilight-dim with the death of so many. Kibi quickens a
magic missile and penetrates the Chichimec’s considerable spell resistance, wounding it further. Its wings flap and twist manically.
Morningstar casts
firestorm, obliterating the remaining two elementals and wiping out so many light-motes that the Company is forced to rely on their backup
mass darkvision to see. The Chichimec is badly seared but continues to flap around Dranko like a huge angry bird. Morningstar quickens a
searing light that is foiled by its spell resistance.
In all this time, the Croaking Oracle has not moved, nor reacted in any way to the raging battle going on all around it. The Company has been careful to avoid catching it in the area of their spells, and the hostile air creatures have been doggedly fixated on Dranko.
Ernie and Aravis hastily dismount. Ernie casts
lion’s roar, emboldening his allies, but the Chichimec is unaffected. Aravis quickens a
true strike and casts a maximized
disintegrate, but the Chichimec resists most of the damage. Flicker and Dranko again launch a barrage of sneak attacks, and while these are effective, the winged monstrosity is largely resistant to their weapons – even Dranko’s +5 whip. Still, his aim and good enough to yank out two of its wings; these retain the aquamarine aura as they float to the ground, then vanish with a faint crackling sound.
Grey Wolf channels a maximized
acid orb through
Bostock. The sword cannot penetrate the flapping wings, but the monster has no resistance to acid, and is horribly burned. More wings drop out of its mass.
Dranko hears a telepathic voice whisper in his mind. “Dranko… Blackhope…”
“Hey, who’s that?” Dranko calls. “Are you the thing I’m killing?”
Either way, the Chichimec erupts in a storm of whirling, bludgeoning wings. Dranko takes massive damage and suffers charisma drain so profound that he nearly loses his capacity for thought. “Hey… stop… stop it… bleaughhgh!” He spits and snorts, which is about all that’s left to him in terms of speaking his mind.
Morningstar fires a
darkbolt, and Ernie follows immediately with
bolt of glory, a divine recourse perfectly suited for ripping apart evil outsiders. Both of these spells pierce the enemy’s resistance, and Ernie’s holy blast finishes it off. The Chichimec explodes in a spray of ichor and smoking feathers, each one individually glowing. One by one the feathers flutter and vanish.
There is one elemental remaining, rendered harmless by Kibi’s
rainbow pattern. Kibi looks at it and scratches his beard. “I have an idea,” he muses.
“Your ideas are stupid!” Dranko blurts. The half-orc is drooling a bit and chewing on his lips.
Kibi ignores him. “We should
polymorph that elemental into a tasty insect snack for the toad.”
“Hey Ernie,” says Flicker. “Nice job finishing off the winged whatever-it-was!”
“Yeah,” says Dranko. “You actually did damage for once! You must be so proud of…”
Grey Wolf casts
restoration on Dranko in mid-sentence, and Dranko’s expression changes from slack-jawed contempt to one of red-faced embarrassment. “Ah… sorry about that.”
Aravia casts
polymorph any object and turns the air elemental into a dog-sized tarantula, after which Kibi lures it nearer to the Croaking Oracle with his sparkling magic lights. The toad still hasn’t moved from its spot at the center of the island; only the occasional bulge of its chin indicates it’s even alive. When the tarantula has crawled close enough, the Oracle’s eyes snap open and a long sticky tongue shoots from its mouth. The ensnared tarantula is jerked violently into the huge toad’s mouth; its neck bulges as it swallows, and just like that the elemental-turned-arachnid is gone.
The Croaking Oracle gives a satisfied croak, and speaks telepathically into each of the Company’s minds. “Questions?”
For a minute or two the party debates the best way to phrase its queries, but that proves too long. Somewhere in the toad’s gut the summoned elemental dies and vanishes. The Oracle croaks, blinks its eyes, and burps. Its body seems to deflate slightly. “Unsatisfied. One question.”
After more discussion, Ernie poses their query. “There was a crown, the Circlet of Yavin, that was going to lead us to a specific place. How do we get to that place?”
The toad closes its eyes and croaks complacently, and the party starts to wonder if it’s decided not to answer at all. But eventually its eyes open again, and it thinks its prophecy to them.
“Hopping, hopping. Five, nine, two.”
They wait for the rest, but that seems to be the entirety of what the Croaking Oracle is willing to share.
“That’s it?” exclaims Dranko.
“It really didn’t like our offering,” says Kibi. “Maybe we should…”
He stops. He feels something. A massive surge of Earth Magic is welling up from somewhere below them, from directly beneath the little island. It comes erupting out of the ground, a volcano of deep-stone power that only he can feel. Earth Magic suffuses everything around them, with the Croaking Oracle in the center of it.
It croaks in alarm, looks around in confusion, croaks several more times, and then words of prophecy flood into the minds of the Company.
One brings many, flame’s design.
One does also, all malign.
One trip started, one trip done.
One loves all, and one hates one.
Three are bringing, now in place.
Three have won the downward race.
Seven haste, and roll the dice,
Spun by fortune’s sacrifice.
Four are needed, ‘fore the end.
One to take the shell and rend.
One for what is in his head.
One to channel what makes dead.
One at last, but not yet known.
One forever dead as stone.
One to drive the spike clean through.
One to die, and hope renew.
One last journey then to make.
One last prison bar to break.
One last thread of fate to pull.
One last circle to come full.
…to be continued…
