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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jon Potter" data-source="post: 1904021" data-attributes="member: 2323">Vade let out a high-pitched battlecry that sounded at least partly a shriek of despair and drove his shortsword into the thing's filigreed flesh. "Die!" he cried. "Why! Won't! You! Die!" Eacxh word was punctuated by another thrust of his little sword. Tears were streaming down his round cheeks and his eyes blazed with a rage inspired by loss. Morier and Grisham - who both understood the meaning of loss and the need of powerful emotion to be free - did nothing to intervene. The eldritch warrior drank a potion and Grisham grimly joined the halfling in hacking the unwholesome mess into smaller and ever smaller chunks.Ixin, however, had spent most of her life amongst beings whom she detested and had learned to bottle her own emotions deep within her scaled breast. She knew nothing of rage apart from an abstract idea and so she reached out and grabbed Vade's sword arm. Or tried to. The magic of the halfling's ring made him impossible to grab and his arm slipped free of her grasp as if it were greased."Vade," she said and got no sign that he'd heard her. She yelled louder, "Vade!" and he turned to look up at her, his face twisted with heartbreak. "Feln's gone, Vade," she told him and the halfling seemed to wilt at the realization. "We need to check out the rest of this room so that his sacrifice was not in vain.""But the monster..." he started to counter and Morier lifted his greatsword in both hands."Don't worry," the albino told him. "Grisham and I will make sure it doesn't go anywhere." And so saying, he brought the silver blade down in a massive overhead chop that sent gobbets of jellified flesh flying in all directions.Ixin lay her hand on Vade's shoulder and stepped in front of him. "Let me go first," she said. "I've a spell I wish to cast."Unsurprisingly, the results of Ixin's Recent Occupant divination were the same as in the shack above: Tarawyn Alusiil, Archdruid overlaid with Melengar the Black, First Bishop of Aphyx. The target of their search had indeed come this far which was encouraging. What they found at the raised area was not.The rocky outcropping at the rear of the chamber was covered in slime and filth presumably left by the mucky creature that both Grisham and Morier were laying into with powerful double-handed swings of their swords. The footing around the raised area was slightly unsteady for Ixin, but posed no difficulty at all for the nimble halfling. The shattered remains of a small stone cairn which had sat near the wall in the center of the platform lay scattered about. From the remaining portion of the stone box Vade speculated that it originally measured about three feet long by one foot wide and was formed from a single block of granite that was been melded into rock of the platform itself."It'd take some kind of magic to do this," he told Ixin as he checked for some kind of seam between the box and the rest of the cairn. There was none. It was as if the box and the cairn were carved from a single piece of stone although neither showed signs of sculptor's tools."Look here," Ixin urged, pointing toward the wall behind the cairn. "Is that writing?""Could be," Vade replied, holding his little glowing dagger higher to shed more light on the wall. There was definitely something carved there, but it was covered in filth, as if someone had recently made a point of obscuring the lettering. Together he and Ixin scraped aside the muck revealing a lengthy message carved in strange runes."Hey!" Vade exclaimed. "I've seen that writing before. It's druidic!""I thought that the druids kept knowledge of their language strictly secret," Ixin said. "Unless druids on this world are very different from druids on Mid'Gaard.""No. It's a secret all right," Vade said without further explanation. "Let's see if I can't figure out what it says."Karak came out of his paralysis with an oath on his lips: "Let me take the fight to them, my Queen, and I will show you the strength of a dwarven Battleguard of Shaharizod!" Hearing his own voice, he shook himself with a start and got arduously to his feet. Morier and Grisham both stopped what they were doing and looked over at the dwarf."You're up?!" Morier said with a sardonic smile. He and Karak clasped forearms and the dwarf harrumphed."Aye," he said as he looked critically at the scraggly ends of his once luxurious beard. "But my beard'll nae be the same ag'in. What of Feln an' Ledare?""The greenskin's gone," Grisham said bluntly as he wiped sweat off his brow. "The half-elf's-""I'll live," Ledare said gruffly as she too began to get to her feet. Both Morier and Karak offered their hands to aid her in rising and she roughly brushed them both aside. "I said I'm alright!" she growled and pointed at the prurient mass behind the albino. "You should burn that. I can see it even now trying to grow back where you stopped hacking at it."An unwholesome stench like burning feces filled the chamber as Morier's Wand of Burning Hands did its work. It took several applications of cleansing fire, but eventually the thing stopped regenerating and the group was confident that it was well and truly dead. They breathed a collective sigh of relief until Vade and Ixin rejoined them. Neither of them looked very pleased."Uh, guys," Vade said. "I don't think you're gonna like this."Ixin held up the message she had transcribed while Vade translated off the wall. With a gulp, she read it aloud. "Be it known that herein lies the power of corruption incarnate sent to Erlacor by the queen of decay and thus by its entombment shall it remain evermore unfelt in the world. Once more does the cycle run through life and death and life and so it shall continue in its symmetry from this day until the end of all days, unbiased by the Tainted One's influence ""The ancient evil that the treant was talking about," Morier guessed and Ixin nodded her agreement."Except the box's been broken open and whatever was inside is gone," Vade announced. "We're too late."</blockquote>

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