57—The lengths to which some adventurers will go to avoid paying a toll.
The next morning, the perfect giant is set free, and instructed to stay away from Maermydra if it wants to live to a ripe old age. The party uses a combination of
flying, and
find the path spells to navigate unseen across the underground lake, bypassing a strange spire of alien and liquid architecture rising up from the surface of the water, near the lake’s center.
By the time the adventurers have nearly exhausted the duration of their
fly spells, they have made their way across the lake, and into a series of twisting, rubble-strewn passages. After several miles of this, they are in a narrow passage that opens into the base of a huge, vaguely cylindrical chasm that extends up through the ceiling as high as the eye can see. At the opposite end of the chasm from their position, another passage continues on in the same general direction. In the center of the chasm’s floor an iron chime and mallet are set into the ground.
Taran looks at Kyreel quizzically, and Kyreel points upward. Taran hopefully mimes striking the gong with the mallet, but both Kyreel and Thelbar make a sour face. Thelbar removes a wand from his belt, and in a minute, the group is once again
invisible.
Resigned, Taran takes the point, and flies upwards into the darkness. Some two hundred feet from the bottom, he notices a narrow cave-like opening in the wall. An eight-foot tall humanoid creature clings to the ledge there, looking for all the world like the result of some drug-induced gargoyle/dire bat/cave lizard love-in. As Taran flies closer, he notices a disturbing ghoulish pallor to the things’ flesh, as if its strange features weren’t terrifying enough. He continues upward past another opening in the wall, and finally comes to a stop, hovering directly in front of a much larger cave-mouth. Kyreel tugs on the short length of rope connecting the party, and whispers in Taran’s ear, “Through there, we must go through there.”
“Of course you must.” A startlingly non-human voice speaking perfect common oozes forth from the darkness within the cave. “There is nothing but rabble below or above.
All roads lead to me.”
“And you are?” Taran asks, tugging on the rope leading to Thelbar insistently. Taran feels unseen eyes roam his body. The sensation is terrifying and slightly erotic at the same time.
“It is impolite not to ring, but I see that you wear the pendants of the Spider Queen, and I know that you’ve had such trying times. So I will reduce my normal fee, for pity’s sake.”
“How much?” Taran asks, even as he tells himself, “Wait for it Tar-Ilou. . .
wait for it . . .”
“One hundred gold coins per person, plus a special gift.”
“What sort of gift, exactly?”
“
Wow me.”
Thelbar incants the words to his
quickened haste, then casts a
horrid wilting into the cave opening. The spell sucks the moisture from the air and every living thing within the area of effect, producing an ambient sucking noise and provoking a startled, draconic screech.
“How’s that wow you, fu . . .” Taran starts to ask.
Suddenly, Taran’s mocking question is cut short as a cloud of cloying, inky blackness envelops the group, drawing the warmth from their flesh and leaving a vile, unnatural chill in its place. Instantly shaken and spiritually weakened, the party realizes the caliber of menace they are facing, and begin a panicked attempt to engage the still unseen enemy.
Kyreel casts about for her friends within the dark cloud, and moves to invoke Ishlok, hoping to
dispel the blackness. But as she begins to cast her spell, she is seized by a pair of huge unseen jaws filled with razor-sharp teeth. She looses the thread of her incantation, and the spell fizzles harmlessly, producing no result at all.
But Thelbar is not so near the creature, and has a
dispel magic of his own, followed by a
stoneskin spell. The cloud of darkness disappears, and Kyreel and Taran realize that they are completely surrounded by the serpentine coils of a pitch-black dragon, its onyx scales polished to a mirror-like sheen. The dragon reels its head back in one whip-like motion, and regards Taran and Kyreel with its piercing, predatory gaze. “
You are in my eye,” it hisses.
Both heroes are seized with a panicked and unreasoning fear that seems to well up from the smallest parts of their mind unbidden and irrepressible. Taran scrambles away from the thing, fumbling with his sword-belt, but Kyreel freezes in place for a moment, staring at something reflected in the dragon’s scales.
Thelbar is not so affected, however, and levels a
feeblemind at the serpentine beast. When his spell fails to penetrate the dragon’s natural magic resistance, Thelbar
limited wishes a second
feeblemind at the dragon; he knows that over time, the odds slowly tip in his favor. But the dragon is too strong, and it resists Thelbar’s best spell for a second time!
- Meta-game note: 20s never lie.
As the trio of adventurers adjust to the dragon in their midst, the thing speaks a single word of eldritch power, and opens a small tear in the air, through which it darts, only to emerge from a similar hole within its lair, facing the group. It opens its mouth and releases a vomitous burst of darkness that seems to flow forth in a stream entirely too large for such a serpent. The blackness burns right through armor and burrows deep into the marrow of the bone, causing an exquisite and lingering pain that remains with its victims, and hobbles their endeavors.
As the midnight vapors recede, the group sees a swarm of humanoid creatures flying toward them from beneath their feet.
Kyreel levels her holy sword at the dragon lurking in the recesses of the cave mouth, and invokes a
searing light, but the spell strikes the scaly beast and provokes nothing more than a self-satisfied rumbling. Taran flies toward the thing and slashes at it ineffectually, but his
mirror images soon prove to be useless against the creature and the dragon tears into him with claw and fang, then recoils into the back of the opening.
Thelbar seizes the dragon with a
dimensional anchor, and satisfied that the it will have one less trick up its scales, opens a
confusion spell in the midst of the figures below, and their charge instantly dissipates as gargoyle-things begin lazily drifting in all different directions.
The dragon screeches its displeasure at this event, then launches itself out of its cave and flies directly at Thelbar! For an instant, the flying wizard is completely surrounded by a buffeting, rending, enraged dragon; the beast tears into the mage and lashes him with its tail as it flies down deeper into the chasm. Fortunately, Thelbar’s
stoneskin shields him from the worst of it, and after a moment, he gains his bearings again as Taran fires arrows at the fleeing dragon.
But another group of gargoyle-things is emerging from the nearer opening in the chasm wall, and one of the first group throws off the
confusion effect, and charges upwards. The gargoyles swarm around Thelbar, following the dragon’s lead, and Taran is obliged to
fly at them in order to protect his brother. As he attacks, one of the creatures (the particularly hideous one spotted on their approach to this place) showers Thelbar with a breath-weapon of its own—the life-draining black cloud leaves little doubt which side of the family it received its deadly halitosis from. Taran whirls his swords in an elegant mandala of pain, and manages to distract a few of the winged monstrosities. Kyreel invokes a
holy burst in the center of the flying swarm, and breaks their momentum, sending several of them reeling.
Despite all this, Thelbar keeps his eye on the dragon, and as the creature flies back toward the melee, he sends a
chain feeblemind arcing through the swarm, ending at the dragon. Both the dragon and its child are unaffected, but the rest of the gargoyle-spawn are not so strong of will. Three of the newly infantile creatures fly for whatever safety their miniscule intellects can imagine, but one of them lapses into an unreasoning rage and flies directly at Kyreel, forcing her to focus her attention away from the greater foe.
The dragon wings upward, lashing out at Thelbar as it passes again, but with Taran occupying the rapidly-diminishing swarm of enemies that surround them, Thelbar is free to attack the dragon with both a
fireball and a
lightning bolt.
Unfortunately, both spells fail to take effect.
“Goddess take the Underdark and everything in it!” Thelbar curses. “Must
everything here have spell resistance? What twisted mind created this place?”
Thelbar invokes a
quickened invisibility before the dragon can swoop back at him and moves away from the fight.
The dragon’s blindsight doesn’t reach far enough for it to keep track of the fleeing mage, but being an adaptive sort of nightmare, it seizes on a new target—Taran. The dragon swoops past him, cutting his skin with its claws, missing his throat by mere inches
Kyreel has been watching the back and forth attacks from her vantage point inside the dragon’s cave, and she seizes this moment to act. She disengages from her
feebleminded opponent, and chases after the dragon, determined to take the fight to it, and neutralize its advantage. She has some success, and the dragon cries out in pain or possibly fear—for at that moment, Taran has finished the last remaining gargoyle and turned his attention to the dragon’s spawn. It is an obvious mismatch, and the hideous wyrm proves those sages who claim that dragons have no parental instinct wrong by flying directly toward Taran and attempting to rescue its child from the deadly swordsman.
This proves to be both the first, the greatest and the and last tactical error of its long life, as it is now in a position to be targeted by all three adventurers. Kyreel invokes a
recitation, tipping the odds for her companions, and finishes the spell with a mighty sword blow that nearly severs the dragon’s tail in two.
The spawn flies beneath Taran, and outside of the reach of the burly fighter’s swords, opens huge gashes in his legs and back. Taran ignores this danger for the moment, and miming the intricate footwork he so resolutely practices when on the ground, he slips between the dragon’s claws to strike at its underbelly and neck. Thelbar, ever an optimist, begins the first of a stream of
magic missiles, reasoning perhaps that persistence is the last recourse of the innafectual.
In that moment, realizing its vulnerability, but unwilling to abandon its child, the dragon ceases attacking for a moment to protect itself with a
mirror image spell. But Kyreel just as quickly
dispels the effect, and Taran takes the opportunity to do what he does best; cruelly humiliate his opponent and abandon his tactical advantage in favor of an overzealous application of violence. He turns to the dragon’s spawn and lashes out.
There is no save for half. The child falls down the chasm, spinning out and passing outside of the range of the party’s
darkvision.
The dragon cries out with a truly ear-splitting wail of rage and pain, and as its lifeblood drips from its underside to splatter on the ground below, it flies upward, obviously intending to abandon the fight. Taran curses, but before he can give chase, Thelbar concentrates his will and invokes a
cone of cold at the fleeing beast.
This time, his spell penetrates the creature’s resistance, and the suddenly frost-encrusted beast tumbles into its lair, passing from sight but not yet free of the small terrors that have disrupted its life, killed its child, and intend to kill it as well.
A few seconds later, a resonant metallic sound is heard, as the falling dragon-spawn strikes the mallet and gong that summon its parent, an irony lost on the fleeing and terrified beast.
Kyreel and Taran fly after the dragon, and find it attempting to gather magic items and treasure from its lair in preparation for a long vacation somewhere safe, like Myth Drannor.
Kyreel flies forward, and lays her hands on the thing, discharging a burst of healing energy, hoping that a creature so closely connected with the life-draining negative material plane must be vulnerable to beneficent magic. Her theory goes untested, as a moment later, Taran is upon the beast and drives both blades deep into its serpentine form. For a moment, he looks for all the world like some bizarre animal-tamer, trying to stay upon the back of the writhing dragon, but the creature’s death-throes soon subside, and Taran is left lying still, both of his hands on the sword-hilts buried into the creature’s back.
“I feel like sh-t,” he says to no one in particular, as his friends fly into the cavern and collapse, shaking from the battle and from the lingering effects of the dragon’s life-draining breath.
