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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Haraash Saan" data-source="post: 4090688" data-attributes="member: 46615">There was no joy in Holton’s demise, just a feeling of relief and exhaustion. I cannot recall how long it was before we managed to gather ourselves and move on, but it must have been close to an hour. Strav, as was becoming his hallmark, led the way into the unknown from whence Holton had come. A short corridor led to a massive circular chamber with a sunken floor, perhaps ten feet below the level of the passageway. A stone jetty that maintained the corridors’ level led into the centre of the room. The rooms stretched beyond the range of our torchlight. Continuing to indulge his ceaseless curiosity the black elf moved out to the end of the jetty, away from our flickering flames.“Finally I am away from those infernal lights.” he grumbled to himself.  “I can see a little further.”“How curious.” he muttered “Very curious.”“There are twelve pedestals against the wall, each with what looks like a door on the wall above them. I’ll take a look.”With that he nimbly jumped down onto the sunken floor and strode out of our sight.“This is weird.” We heard Strav call back to us. We had now moved forward to stand at the end of the jetty, but could no longer see any walls. “Well,’ he continued, “those doors I mentioned. They’re not doors but paintings of doors. But the really interesting thing is that there are indentations on the top of each of the pedestals. It looks as if you have to put something in them.”“Let me have a look.” said Morgan impatiently. He too jumped off the jetty, torch in hand.Our eyes followed Morgan as his torch began to illuminate the scenario that Stravarious had been describing.I asked the dwarfs whether they had come here via this room. They responded that they had, but were unsure as to which door they came through. Such was there haste to avoid Holton that they barely took in their surroundings.At this point we spread out, each keen to do our own investigation. I inspected several of the pedestals and saw some writing in Old Gerechian. Each pedestal seemed to be some sort of mechanism for either communicating with other Gerechian temples or a magical doorway to them. That explained how the young priest and the dwarfs had come to be here in Yorath, hundreds of miles from the mountains north of Riverglenn. The indentations Strav had mentioned looked very much like those symbols of power that we had seen on the statues on the upper level of the temple. I reasoned that one had to place the particular item, say the sceptre of Artyom Seth, into the appropriate pedestal, and a doorway would be opened.Morgan, keeper of the sceptre, tried the idea. It almost worked. The sceptre indeed fit into the pedestal, however, no door was produced. I called out for Mortec, hoping that his immense knowledge might be able to aid us. His name just echoed around the immense room but I was surprised to get no answer. I felt concern for the little Gnome, not that I should have after seeing him suck the life (or unlife perhaps) out of Holton, so I sent Argonne off to find him.Morgan decided to ask the mask of Valentin for its thoughts. Even as I write this I feel strange. A mask that thinks?Anyway forgive me. Morgan asked the mask if it knew how to open the doorway. It told him that we needed an incantation spoken by a priest of Gerech while performing the right ceremony to open the door. The only Gerechian priest we knew that had not yet tried to kill us was now dead. Poor Sneefal. Perhaps I had been too harsh on him. It was not his fault that the world was the way it was. But still, he was a Gerechian which means he believed that all that Gerech had done was right.Gerech, god of all that is right and just, or so he was proclaimed. Long ago Gerech decided that he was to be the one god because all the others bickered and fought amongst themselves. There was no order amongst them, nor their followers, so Gerech would deliver order to Anka Seth. So whilst his worshippers warred with those of the other gods, his priests created the Lightstone, the portal that allow Gerech to manifest himself in the world. Thankfully Navorod and Cassovary tainted the creation process of the Lightstone and Gerech was trapped within it. However, his followers were triumphant and began to rule the world with their extreme laws, persecuting those that did not adhere to them. It was more than a thousand years before the Druids finally brought an end to the Convocation of the Gerchians, but in doing so they released the horrors that would become the Dominion. Now all of Anka Seth was in peril due to one god trying to enforce his will upon it.Without a priest it did not look like this was going to provide the exit we had searched for. The dwarfs were not able to return the way they had come so instead would have to come with us to Halfast via the only way we knew, the temple entrance.We spent little more time in the chamber of the doors, as I began to call it. As we were preparing to leave Argonne returned, “Mortec is doin’ somethin’ to that corpse. Rubbing it and oiling it up. He said something about releasing it’s soul.”Soul? Surely that had left when the servant of Geduld had turned into whatever he had been before we killed him. We left the chamber of the doors and found Mortec kneeling over the body.He was muttering something in the gnomish language that he had been teaching me. Mostly it was a ritual of some sort. Here is an example:“Todesmagie I beseech thee. Traverse the void and find this man’s soul. A soul is knowledge and knowledge I seek for thee.” I interrupted him. “Mortec my good little fellow, what is it that you are doing?” “I seek his soul. It must be released from the void to be judged. It will find no peace in the void, I must release it.” he said.It was all cryptic to me. I knew only a little of the workings of religions and much less of souls. From my childhood instruction I knew that each religion offered two afterlives; the first was in heaven by your gods’ side (In my case Pandemonium at Laster’s side) the other in one of the hells (and no one wanted to go to hell now did they). We let Mortec be, telling him that we would explore the doorways and passages that we had passed on our journey from the staircase. The Gnome did not even acknowledge us, so deep into the ritual of soul retrieval he was.</blockquote>

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