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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(contact)" data-source="post: 480446" data-attributes="member: 41">Coldeven 1522:  "Hokaay!  I re-looaded!"That evening, expecting to sleep the untroubled sleep of the vindicator, Heydricus finds himself having a strange dream.  In it, he is watching Halrond, who is dressed in unfamiliar ceremonial robes and leading a ritual service in a part of the temple Heydricus has never been allowed in.  In the dream, Heydricus knows that the ceremony, including its locations and trappings, are very secret, and quite rare.  Somehow, he is permitted, no -- commanded to be present.  While Heydricus is not in the room, he is watching the event, and strangely enough, Halrond and his under-priests are all directing their attention toward a pile of adventuring gear:  Heydricus' gear.Waking from the dream, the huge hero slowly readjusts to his surroundings.  Tau is up and reading, Pris is practicing drawing her feeblemind components from the series of pouches she wears across her chest, and Elijah is staring at him.  "Tea's ready," the hard-bitten ranger says as she gets up and leaves the cave."I need to go to Chendl."  Heydricus states.This causes a brief flurry of objections and arguments.  What about the mines?  What about the possibility that your men are alive?  Heydricus explains that he received a vision from Tritherion in the night.  When a God commands you to jump, you don't say "not now".  (Unless that god is Iuz, and then you say "What?  I'm sorry, I couldn't make that out.  Did you say 'put my priesthood to the sword'?")But weighing the urgency with which he awoke against the possibility that some of his men might survive puts Heydricus in the mood to compromise:  We'll attack Cur'ruth in the morning, and I'll teleport to Chendl this afternoon.Tau quietly suggests that before they go, they consult with Pholtus.  The party puts their heads together and comes up with a list of questions for the Big Guy.  The Liberators are primarily concerned with the lich Martak, and the possibility that they may not find his phylactery.  The fate of the Seven Terrors is a concern, as is the disposition of any remaining constructs.Tau sits comfortably, chants a few paragraphs of the Wintershiven  Civil Code to set the mood, and casts his commune.  He begins with "Once he reforms, does Martak plan to stage an immediate assault here?", to which Pholtus replies,"Tau of Wintershiven, is this how you greet your Lord and Master?"Tau feels the Scolding Voice of Pholtus throughout his whole being, and goes silent.  The other Liberators look at one another, and politely wait for Tau to continue.  After the spell ends, Tau looks up, pale and shaken.  The scholar of Wintershiven, who fought the first real battle of his life last night, reports the following:Martak will reform, but currently does not exist.  He will not reform sooner than three days from now.  His phylactery is within a one-mile radius of the mines, and is hidden well.  The Stonefisters are ready to defend the mines, but fortunately the constructs are not under direct control.  There are less than five constructs remaining.  None of Heydricus' captured followers live, but the Cur'ruth Tenha themselves are in no immediate danger. A mixed bag, if mostly good news.  Many of the party's suspicions were confirmed.  But the last news may very well be the worst.  When asked "Are the spectres in control," the reply from Pholtus was "No, those who command the spectres are."The party prepares themselves, and with Elijah in the lead, reverts to their traditional ToEE approach - sneak in through the back door.  The Tenha-controlled section of the mines is empty of people, as the Aiman promised.  Tau uses his staff to search for undead, and it indicates that while there are undead nearby, they are above the party and to the south - the direction of last night's battle.As they approach the guard room where Elijah spotted the two strange fleshy constructs, the party prepares itself with magic.  Heydricus casts haste and enlarges both himself and Elijah (much to her delight), while Tau blesses the group and Prisantha causes mirror imagesof herself to spring into being.Thus readied, the Liberators of Tenh charge into the guardroom, striking the golems with fire, and unleashing a whirlwind of sword blows down upon . . . the statues.  The 'golems' wither and fall apart under the assault of the heroes, revealing them to be nothing more than fleshy sculptures, placed here as scarecrows to keep curious Tenha from the Iuzian quarters.The door they guard is a thick stone door, but it proves to be no match for Heydricus' magically enhanced strength.  The giant-sized Liberator puts his shoulder to the door, shattering it's hinges and propelling him into the room beyond . . . . . . where he is immediately attacked by a pair of real flesh golems!  Elijah leaps into the room beside him, preventing either Tau or Pris to get much of a look at the battle.  Tau covers their back and readies healing spells, bolstering Elijah, who is struck once and again by huge fleshy fists.Fortunately, these golems don't seem to be made very well, and after a few sword swipes, they fall in pieces to the stone floor.  The party examines the door beyond, this one  only of wood, and Heydricus confidently smiles over his shoulder as he rushes the portal, shattering it into splinters with one mighty blow.What happens next can only be termed a massacre.The party finds themselves at the base of a long stairwell leading up.  They charge up the stairs and emerge in the large circular chamber desecrated and made unholy to Iuz.  (The very same chamber where they suffered their worst defeat in Tenh at the hands of Suel the Artificer.)This time, they are in the material plane, as are all of their foes:  twenty Men of the Stone Fist stand in small groups around the room, a few of which are sharing some sort of unholy intimacy with an Iuzian priest.  A handful of ettins guards the far door.  A lone spectre slips out of the room through the wall.Every head in the place has turned to the sound of the door splintering and footsteps pounding up from where no footsteps should come.  As the Liberators of Tenh emerge into the room, there is a brief pause that is broken first by one, then ten, then ten more cries of rage as every Stonefister in the room charges the heroes.Bad call.With all of the small groups converging on one spot, Tau calms his mind and calls into being a blade barrier. The whirling disk of razor-sharp blades begins at a spot near the center of the room, and spirals outward in a staccato frenzy of sharp smacking sounds, blood-spray and screams of pain. In a gore-spattered instant the spell finally stops expanding near the base of the stairwell, covering the backs of the Stonefisters attacking Heydricus with their companion's viscera.The pathetic ettins, who had the furthest to charge, are hamstrung, two of them falling into the razor-blade whirlwind, and the other two stumbling clear.Clear, that is if you call covered in blood and cringing in front of an enlarged, hasted, Heydricus 'in the clear'.Prisantha slows the combatants on this side of the blade barrier reducing their offensive capability to almost nothing.  Elijah and Heydricus chop and slash into their foes with a zeal that could only be described as Cuthbertian.When Heydricus feels a familiar tingling sensation and suddenly realizes his haste has been dispelled, he looks up across the blade barrier to see the one enemy that didn't charge them.  This fellow is a Stonefister to be sure, of Suloise stock like the rest, but he is dressed in the robes of an Iuzian priest, and he just dispelled Heydricus' haste."Spellcaster!"  Heydricus yells, pointing with his sword toward the back of the room.Prisantha calmly pulls out one of Suel's scrolls, and reads the cloudkill spell the dire Artificer had meant for her.  With a flourish, she directs the cloud of roiling, poisonous gas to congeal around the priest, choking him and the Stonefisters surrounding him, and turning the skin of their corpses black.A pair of Stonefisters raise their hands in surrender, and back away from Heydricus and Elijah, only to walk into the blade barrier.  The surviving Fisters turn tail and flee, albeit at half their normal rate.  The only survivors are those who were prevented by the slow spell from ever getting too near the melee.  As Tau heals Elijah's wounds, the group watches the surviving Stonefisters -- four from an original twenty-one -- run at a comically retarded pace.  In no hurry, the party edges around their own deadly spell-effect areas, and follows the slowed barbarians.The fleeing men lead the Liberators through the top-level of the complex and finally come to ground in a chamber just to the south of the catwalk that Martak burned to death on.  Carefully stepping over the puddle of sticky purified goo, the party is displeased to note that the victims of yesterday's battle have not been moved.The Stonefisters retreat into a corner of a long room that is covered on one side by arrow slits.  While Heydricus and Elijah try to figure out what "Uthul alaha nam Imsh!  Imsh al Skurge alaha!" means, and convince the Fisters to surrender like civilized barb . . . well, give up their weapons, the rest of the group have a look through the arrow slits.As if the morning hadn't been strange enough already, Pris and Tau see another score of Stonefisters trying to build siege weapons.  Siege weapons?  Who ever heard of barbarians laying siege to their own fort?"No matter,"  Prisantha begins as she removes Suel's wand of fireballs from the hem of her dress.  "This will discourage them."And four fireballs later, she is proven right, as the Men of the Fist flee into the rising sun.  As the light gets better (partially due to flaming siege towers) the group can see that the Stonefister tent city is nearly gone, having been burned and sacked during the night.Heydricus finally gets frustrated with his captives, and chases them off, figuring that every minute he spends trying to communicate with them is another minute he can't spend looking at whatever Prisantha is fireballing.As near as anyone can tell, the following occurred during the night:  The two score Stonefisters mustering to attack the party after their midday raid must have split into two drunken groups, fighting one another over the complex.  The 'inside' barbarians versus the 'outside' barbarians, and here come the Liberators of Tenh to kill you all.-----Next: Tau discovers a life altering secret, the Liberators travel back to Curruth only to recieve tragic news, with Frightening Overtones and Heydricus follows his dreams into the presence of a God.</blockquote>

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