Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="(contact)" data-source="post: 1069377" data-attributes="member: 41">79—Lighting strikes twice.“Of course, there is also the dragon,” the charmed hag murmurs.  Her lower-planar nature causes her to revel in secrets and the discovery of them—and take an even greater joy in the betrayal of trust.  Her hands flutter over one another as she bobs her head, gazing first left, then right.  “It is a servant and sometimes lover of the Night,” she whispers conspiratorially. “What sort of dragon?” Taran asks, not daring to believe his luck.  Two dragons in one week?“The fire breathing kind,” she snarls.  “What other kind is there?”“Right.  How big, exactly?” Taran asks.“Big enough to defy easy measure, mortal.”  The hag jabs a fiercely arthritic finger at Taran’s face.  “Speak no more to me, ever, lest I haunt your dreams until the end of all days.”Taran laughs bravely, but says no more.Thelbar attracts the hag’s attention with a hand gesture, and smiles knowingly into her eyes.  “Tell me, revered one, how long are your forging parties usually away from the Night?  When will your absence be missed?”The hag smirks back at the tall mage, repaying his pretend patience with an insincere smile of her own.  She steeples her clawed and knobby hands into a mockery of a civilized contemplation.  “We are never gone more than a few hours.”“Then we do not have much time,” Thelbar says.  The group determines that the dragon must be the first target, with the Yugoloths as a second, should they have the means after dispatching the wyrm.  The hag obligingly describes the layout of the Halls of Fire—Kor’En Eamor’s primary forging area and the counterpart to the frozen halls and cold-forges in the upper levels.Thelbar is able to locate the dragon in his scrying mirror.  It is a huge creature—certainly an adult, although not elderly enough to inspire the sort of awe reserved for the truly terrifying creatures like Klauth, or some of the terrible ancient ones of legend.“We can take it,” Taran reassures the group. A swift raid is planned; Merkatha will lead the hag on foot into the Night’s complex, while the others will teleport in and attack the dragon.  If all goes well, the two groups will meet up outside of the entrance to the Yugoloth’s area, and kill fiends until their sword-arms fall off (or their curing spells run out, whichever comes first).After preparing spells, the party teleports to the dragon’s side.  The rust-scaled wyrm is curled tightly within a huge chamber.  It lies on an eighty-foot square stone island that rises ten feet above the surface of a blazingly hot lava flow where the cavern’s floor should be.  The platform is connected at the cardinal directions to the exit tunnels by four arching stone bridges.The beast itself broods over the Southern approach to the platform, watching for the raiding party’s return, and basking in the radiating heat.  As the heroes appear, the thing snakes its head back and upward as if to get a viewpoint above all possible targets.  But Taran and Gorquen are both flying, and before the dragon can rake these suicidal intruders with its deadly breath, they have managed to place themselves on either side of the beast.Taran lets out an exultant whoop, and carves the dragon solidly along one flank, provoking a rumbling snarl.  But the beast is old and crafty enough to know that the puny humans that hang back are usually the worst of the lot.  It ignores Taran and Gorquen, and bathes Elgin and Thelbar with a stream of white-hot dragonfire, half-hoping that some of their magic items turn out to be hardy enough to survive the blast.But unfortunately for its retirement plans, Elign’s protection from fire spell absorbs the entire gout of flame—neither victim is singed in the slightest.  Thelbar raises his hands and shrivels the back flank of the dragon with a horrid withering spell, while Elgin invokes the protections of Lathander over the group.  The dragon slumps backward onto its suddenly weakened haunches, and a nearly comical expression of confusion crosses its lizard-like features.  As it twitches and struggles to stand, both Taran and Gorquen lay into it; Gorquen at the chest, and Taran at its rear-quartered vitals.  Their unison of action confuses the creature, and it seems unable to defend itself as they draw deeply through its scales and skin, piercing and mortally damaging vital organs.Twelve seconds after their arrival, the dragon lies dead, just as Taran promised.The party turns to the South, and after crossing the stone bridge and traveling several hundred feet along a wide passage, they spot Merkatha and the hag.  (Well, to be precise, they only spot the hag, but assume that she hasn’t just killed Merkatha and devoured the corpse.)Taran signals to form up, and the group enters the area that they believe is the lair of the hags’ lower-planar business associates.  Twenty feet into this spider-web of passageways, the party is surprised by the silent appearance of a four-armed dog-headed fiend wielding titanic axes in each hand and brushing its broad shoulders against the lintel of an already oversized doorway.“You just made a grave mistake, mortals,” it growls in a voice that sounds like a chorus of depraved children speaking simultaneously.  “Well, I must be in the wrong corridor then,” Gorquen says lightly.  “Because I came here to kill yugoloths!”  She leaps forward on the last syllable, and strikes the thing several times about its broad, furry chest, opening long gashes and spilling a bundle of worm-like and writhing guts onto the floor. “That’s my girl,” Taran says proudly to no one in particular.At just that moment, Merkatha chooses to make her presence known—with a grunt and a sharp snapping sound, she runs her twin shortswords through the back of the thing.  Its four greataxes hit the stone just ahead of the corpse.Gorquen and Merkatha move past the dead yugoloth, and down another short hallway into a four-way intersection.  Merkatha starts to signal “all clear,” when she is interrupted by a series of soft poppings—each one heralding the arrival of another yugoloth.  Three more of the axe-wielding fiends appear, along with two inscrutable looking slate gray humanoids with bug-like multifaceted eyes.  Well away from the brawl, a rangy jackal-headed fiend orchestrates his fellows, his gestures obscured by shadows and an oversized cloak.  Gorquen and Merkatha charge forward, hoping to establish a forward front.  (Or rather, they charge forward, trusting that their companions will finish the fiends behind them, making their front the forward one.)  As she cuts into an axe wielder, Gorquen feels a sinister and alien presence in her mind, threatening to untangle the web of her intellect and rob her of all higher function in an instant.  She furrows her brow, concentrating on the Seven Holy Names of Ishlok.  Thankfully, she manages to get to all seven, and shrugs off the feeblemind effect.Down the corridor, Thelbar, Elgin and Taran fan out.  Thelbar disintegrates the nearest grey-hued fiend, while Taran reduces his opponent to significantly larger (but no less dead) component parts.  Elgin moves to a position where he can see Gorquen and Merkatha, and drops a flame strike on the four-armed fiend Gorquen just struck, killing it.Gorquen seizes this opportunity to leap past the remaining fiend and confront the hooded creature at the end of the corridor.  It recoils from her, drawing its furred maw deeper into the recesses of its cloak, but before it can get away, she sweeps it from its feet and buries her sword six inches into its inch-thick skull.Both surviving fiends realize that they are leaderless as well as outmatched, and in an instant they are gone—fled back to where they came from (and already planning to demand a refund from the Night!)“Wait, I see more of them,” Elign says, tuning in to his true seeing spell.  “No, those are hags!  Four of them, and they are approaching through the etheric!”Following Elgin’s pointing hand, Thelbar and Taran can see them as well.  Thelbar wastes no time, and strikes the nearest with a magic missile followed by a quickened magic missile.  For his part, Elgin summons his winged deva associate to his side. “Good,” it says, although it is unclear whether it is expressing excitement for the upcoming fight, or simply reiterating its cosmological point-of-view.  Seeing that the rest of the party is intent on the approaching hags, and that no one means to pick up the conversation thread, the Deva continues on with a holy word, timed to follow Elgin Trezler’s blade barrier, just as the hags are materializing near the group.  Two of the hags are stunned, and left to the tender mercies of the blade barrier, but the other two charge on through the spell-effect.  Thelbar speaks a word, and feebleminds the nearest hag, who reels in confusion and is set upon by Taran, Gorquen and Merkatha.The remaining hag draws two unholy knives, and flipping them into a reverse grip, forces Thelbar against the corridor wall with her elbows and shoulders while she shreds his skin with her blades.  He cries out and slides down the wall, alive but no longer aware.  Taran yells something unintelligible and falls upon the hag, striking her with every ounce of his strength.  After Gorquen also flies to Thelbar’s aid, the hag decides that she’s had enough and returns to the etheric plane.  Her form becomes misty and insubstantial and with a dream-like ease she sails through Thelbar’s bloody form, and into the wall.Elgin is already by Thelbar’s side, and heals him, bringing the mage out of shock.“Okay, we got what we wanted,” Taran says.  “The dragon is dead, and the yugoloths are running back to Hell with their tails between their legs.”“The Grey Waste,” Thelbar corrects him, sipping from a skin of Burduskan frost-wine.“Whatever,” Taran says.  “The point is, let’s not push our luck.  Let’s get the h . . . get the f-ck out of here.”------Kor’En Eamor means “the Throne of All Dwarvenkind.”  Its proper name is so old that it is no longer used by even the keepers of dwarven apocrypha.  If the sages refer to it at all, they call it the First Home, and it is widely believed to be an allegory, a myth, or just a legend, but never is it taken for a real place.  Amongst those who know the truth, however, it has over the millennia gained the name Tell Aq Med, which means “curse of the Aq Med,” in reference to the clan that spawned Hepis, the King who would be God.  The Faerunian humans that live nearby refer to the place simply as the Great Delve.  It seems a fair assumption that the Delve’s other would-be colonists, be they illithid, kuo-toan, orcish, or drow would have their own names for the First Home of the dwarves.Whichever name they call it by, those in the know agree that Kor’En Eamor is its own plane of existence.  Technically, it is its own non-plane, according to Thelbar, but the distinction is lost on his companions.  The party is therefore able to teleport to the very lintel of the doorway connecting the Great Delve with Faerun, but no further.  Again, the distinction is overly fine, because one step later, Taran is filling his lungs with cold, clean, mountain air, and wondering aloud what will be for dinner.</blockquote>

Verification