Vek scried and found Oaken in a small stone room with a closed wooden door. He looked unconscious, and very very bruised. He’d been through a hell of a fight.
Vek turned away from his scrying mirror and closed the door to his study. He sat on the floor and communed with his goddess. “Wee Jas,” he asked. “Show me where we might find the way to Oaken Stormfire.” Through a crimson mist of swirling tendrils he saw a green door with rusted iron hinges. Above that door was a number: 935. Pulling back, he saw a street sign: Acacia Ave. Pulling back further, he saw a sign welcoming visitors to the town: Ekbir.
The lich stood and walked upstairs. There he found the Knights suiting up. “935 Acacia Avenue, in Ekbir,” he reported. “That’s the place where we all go.”
Kizz nodded. “Good work, Vek. Are we ready?”
Vek said “If this thing is as deadly as Nurn said, we could use an extra sword.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Captain Metus, would you join us?”
Metus, standing by the portcullis, turned to face them. “Me?” He sounded genuinely surprised.
“Yes. We have need of your steel and skill.”
“Both are yours to command, my lord.” He stepped close to the group with pride in his step.
Grumbar was in a bad mood. “It’s not fair. Why did Oaken have to get kidnapped today? I was going to help Horacio bake a cake in the kitchen.”
“Friends come first, Grumbar.”
“I know.” The half-orc sulked as the teleportation spells were prepared, and they flashed away to the coastal town of Ekbir.
Here, they quickly found Acacia Avenue and the door in question, deep in the slums of Ekbir. “Be ready,” Kizz said. She knocked on the door. No one came. She knocked again. Still no answer. She was about to signal Grumbar to kick the door in when the door opened, and a shrewlike old man glared out at them. He stared at Jamison for a while in silence, then spoke.
“What?”
“We’ve come for Oaken Stormfire.”
The man screwed his nose up. “Who?”
“Oaken Stormfire. We know he’s here.”
“You got the wrong place, honey.” He began to close the door. Grumbar blocked it and walked in. The others followed him, all the while ignoring the old man’s cries. They strode in past him and down the stairs. When the last had moved inside, the old man muttered “Welcome, then.” He slammed the door and disappeared, laughing.
“Good, I was beginning to think we’d really come to the wrong place,” Edge muttered.
“Wee Jas never leads me wrongly,” Vek said.
The hallway turned and came to a closed, locked door. Edge attempted to search it for traps. He found none, and tried to pick the lock. He sighed and gave up. Kizzlorn opened the door with a spell. The room beyond was coated in a thick layer of dust, seemingly unused for years. It looked as the basement of a slum might be expected to.
“The first line of defense,” Vek said. “Make it look like there’s nothing here to attack.”
Edge stepped into the room, and a pulse of yellow energy washed over the group. It dispelled the magical effects protecting them. Then, another burst of energy from the same spot, and the air went white with frost. The blast of cold dissipated, leaving those Knights with pulses feeling desperately chilly. “Trap,” Grumbar announced kindly.
“Thank you, Grumbar,” Vek said as he walked into the room. “Now, Edge, let’s check that next door for traps. I don’t trust that there isn’t a monster or something more challenging in h…” Another belt of icy coldness rippled through space around them, and the already chilled Knights were almost frozen solid. It had been six seconds. “The trap, it resets!” Vek yelled. “Run! Outside!”
They barely made it out before the next pulse of magic went off. Jamison was dying. His breath came in plumes of white mist and his lips were blue. His jaw chattered. “H…h…heal…”
Grudgingly, Vek used the power of Wee Jas to heal the living. He truly hated doing that, and it always put him in a bad mood. If he wasn’t strangling the life from something or damning a corpse to the hell of servitude in unlife, it really wasn’t worth casting, as far as the lich was concerned. “New plan,” Vek said. “We open the door in that room from afar, and move into it without stepping on the floor at any point.”
They walked back inside and Kizzlorn cast a spell that opened the door. It soon swung shut again. Surprised, Vek said “All right. NEW new plan.”
Edge suggested something. “Kizz, you open the door. I’ll jump across the room and block it with my body.”
Jamison laughed. “The room must be forty feet across! Can you jump that far?”
“Easily.”
The wizard shrugged. Kizz readied her spell. “Are you okay, Jamison? Best get your battle face on, we’re going to have to fight whatever it is that’s closing that door.”
“I feel terrific. You know what that’s like, Kizz? All today I’ve felt great. I think it’s because Dartan forgave me. It’s like I’ve been confirmed as a creature with a soul. I’m not just a shell that once did evil, and I’m not just a careless child who likes to pull levers. I’ve been forgiven. I feel like I’ve made my peace.”
She laughed. “That’s great, but it’s time to make war. Are you ready?”
“Oh, yes. Lead on.”
She opened the door and Edge took off like a shot. He ran across the hall and leapt into the air. He sailed easily across the room and landed at the door on the other side. There, he began fending off two immense devil creatures who were doing their best to shut the door on him. The halfling was holding more than his own. He dodged, spun, punched kneecaps, and struck vital areas in the blink of an eye.
Vek led the others across the trapped room, which was bursting with cold energy. The Knights with him were safe, though, in Vek’s antimagic shell. No magical effects could touch them there. They reached the door and ran inside to do battle with the devils. Captain Metus now wielded the vorpal sword of Shade, and his worth was plain as an admiral in Sir Vek's service. The devils were soon defeated.
Elsewhere, Oaken raised his head. His vision swam with blurs and odd shapes, but he concentrated and made out someone standing in the doorway to his cell. It was an old man. He dropped a plate of food into the room without courtesy, and spoke. “Your friends are here. Can you hear them?” Oaken listened and believed that he could hear the sounds of combat nearby. It gladdened his heart. “I’m going to go kill them. Maybe look for clues from one of your number before I act.”
“They’ll destroy you,” Oaken murmured.
“No,” the man said as his form melted away to reveal The Cathezar- a seven foot tall woman with the lower body of a giant serpent. She had six arms, and with them gripped lengths of coiling, barbed chain. “I don’t think they will.”
MORE TO COME...
