With Endo agreeing to cover our rear for a while, we were delighted to see the glow of reinforcements arriving by teleport spell. Clearly sent by Manzorian, we introduced ourselves and were introduced in turn to Dokkin Singebeard, a wizard specialising in transformative and destructive magics, and Aaron Morglay, whose armour and weapons singled him out as a swordsman, although his expression and slow reactions indicated that he was, perhaps, not the sharpest tool in the box. Loyal and protective to a fault, as far as Dokkin was concerned, however.
From our position in the library, Aaron was prepared to try swallowing one of the grey ‘knowledge’ worms. Gulping the thing down in one, he paused, then yelped and grabbed his throat as the creature clearly came to life and gnawed its way through the back of his throat aiming to find a home in his brain.
After perhaps a minute of yelling in agony, Aaron stopped, and his eyes glowed a deep green colour for a second before he began to recite dates of famous battles from history.
Sweeping the rest of the worms (and several interesting looking volumes) into a bag, we set out and starting trying to work out where to go next.
We began by leaving the ziggurat and scaling the outside walls; climbing the five foot high slabs of stone with care until we reached the blasted hole in the top. From here we spent a moment staring at the intricately carved and badly damaged throne, before we stared downwards into the depths of the building, through the hole in the bottom which was still giving off tendrils of greenish mist.
“Aha,” announced Dokkin. “Truly a fine example of a vaporous miasma from the netherplanes if ever I saw one! I would anticipate that the worms’ mystical corruption would increase in effect were the creatures to amass in sufficient numbers. This corruption might coalesce in a manner sufficient to corrupt the local atmosphere.”
We stared at him.
“You mean,” ventured Maynard, “that enough worms might give off green fumes?”
“Precisely,” beamed the mage.
Shrugging, we climbed back down and into the ziggurat once more.
.oOo.
When we had reached the lip of the blasted crater, Igmut passed his floral slippers to Flynne, who clambered spider-like into the chamber beyond. A couple of minutes later he returned to report that there was a large room some 80 feet long and nearly as wide filled to a depth of perhaps 3 feet with writhing and crawling green worms. The room had three exits.
We tied a rope around Dokkin, and then he and Flynne carefully entered the room from above together. From the deep hole we hand lowered the mage into, we saw a sudden orange glow and a loud ‘whump’ noise, followed by a call of “nope. There are simply too many of them. Haul me back up and we’ll try something else.”
.oOo.
Whilst we considered our next options, Igmut recovered his slippers and then went to look down the three exits. We learned that one had a series of coffins in it, another had a long corridor ending in double doors made of bronze, and the third had a green glow from down it, which came from a truly enormous sea of the Kyuss worms.
Dokkin was confident that he could leap us all to the bronze doors, and cast his spell. We strode through the crimson doorway he created, and found ourselves almost on top of the massive doorway. There was then a sudden spate of spellcasting.
As Aaron pulled the doors open, we were greeted with a 40 foot square room containing a fountain which ran with pure and clear water. Sword raised, Aaron stepped into the room, followed by Dokkin who cast a powerful spell of seeing upon himself and strode purposefully into the chamber casting a second piece of magic.
Whatever that spell was supposed to do, it had no obvious effect, but almost immediately a hunched and armoured skeleton appeared, pointing at Aaron. An instant later, as he was still shaking his head from whatever eldritch effect the first undead had used, a second appeared only a handful of feet away slashing with his hand which caused a black blade appear hacking a wound across Aaron’s shoulder.
A third undead appeared within the room, slashing its hand in turn sending a shower of broken rocks shattering from the wall just to Maynard’s left.
Bursting into light, Aaron’s sword started hacking at the neared hunched undead sending gobbets of dried and rotting flesh and green worms showering the area. As he withdrew his sword from each attack, dozens more of the tiny worms began chewing at the undead’s flesh from the inside, somehow knitting it back together.
Under the effects of a spell of hastening which I cast, Flynne started firing and 4 arrows slammed into the armoured undead in the centre of the room, sending it staggering back, but it then pulled the arrows from its dusty and worm-ridden flesh and began to heal.
Maynard and Igmut’s blows both simply scraped off the heavy plate armour, and the two magic missiles which I fired from a wand had no effect as they sputtered and failed on contact with the stunted abominations.
Dokkin waved his hand, and a tremendous blast of electricity arced across the room, playing around two of the stunted worm infested creatures, and slamming with force into the fountain. In a burst of heat the fountain’s contents evaporated with a tremendous stench; the undead simply laughed as the lightning had no effect on them whatsoever. Fresh and wholesome water flooded back into the fountain.
The first undead again tried to cast a spell on Aaron, telling him to ‘drink from the fountain’, but he refused and carried on hacking with his enchanted sunblade. A second dark blade hacked across his shoulder, flung from some 30 feet by another undead, whilst the third clawed at Maynard before sinking its teeth into his shoulder. When the creature drew back we could see that the monk had been left with a large number of the crawling worms writhing on his flesh.
Aaron’s sword swung heavily, and scythed the head off his opponent. Flynne’s arrows punched down the second and slammed on into the third, which was immediately charged by Igmut – the half orc ran across the room and carved his sword across its abdomen, spilling dusty flesh and worms across the floor amidst an ineffective burst of light.
Whilst Maynard punched at the undead to almost no effect, I cast a sound burst spell centred on him and his opponent, which pulped the worms on the monk and (thankfully) didn’t daze either him or Igmut.
Dokkin gestured almost negligently, and a cluster of brightly burning magical orbs slammed into the remaining undead, blasting chunks off its chest; the creature responded with a simple slashing motion, and the mage yelled in pain as his blood spattered the floor of the room.
Aaron turned, sprinted across the room and hacked the creature into two pieces in a single fluid motion.
.oOo.
The room faded, and we were granted a bird’s eye view of the necropolis in the full flush of life, clearly many hundreds of years ago. However, the streets were empty, as every single citizen was crushed into the central square around the shining black ziggurat. As they chanted and bowed to their temple, a sudden burst of dark energy flooded outwards from the spire, and every single inhabitant of Kuluth Marr collapsed in an instant. We could feel the effects of powerful and deeply evil magic in effect, as the faith energies of the many thousands of victims was drawn, together with their souls, towards the spire.
A moment later, a huge figure grew from the spire, a massive human shape made up of millions of worms writhing and crawling over one another. The face of the newly born god looked around at its handiwork in triumph, before suddenly looking concerned and then furious. A second later, the millions of worms were drawn back towards the centre of the spire, and were then sucked into the monolith at its peak. It wailed in fury as it did so, and as it vanished into the runed monolith, the citizens on the ground below began to lurch into unlife.
.oOo.
After the vision faded and we discussed it, we decided to look at the chamber with the coffins in before resting for a few hours. A lightning bolt cleared away enough of the worms to allow us to dash through the large chamber filled with their writhing or charred bodies and reach the room.
Within the square and neatly carved room were arrayed some 50 corpses, each perfectly preserved and lying apparently in state on slabs of the same dark rock that the ziggurat was made of. Thick dust obscured the runic patterns which lined the slabs, but around the walls of the room were names, one for each of the corpses. One I recognised quickly enough as a famous blacksmith from some two thousand years ago.
We peered through a large opening into another near identical room whose preservation magic had clearly lapsed as the bodies were completely dessicated. Yet another exit led out of the far side of the chamber, and Aaron pushed back Dokkin and stepped through.
Another long corridor led away from the rooms filled with corpses. Doors could be seen at the far end, and halfway along was a side passage which clearly led to the lake of worms Igmut had described to us – the green glow was powerful and eerie.
Flynne checked the door, and indicated that there was a noise from behind it. Maynard yanked it open.
“Hello,” came a sibilant voice from within.
