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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Amaroq" data-source="post: 1861264" data-attributes="member: 15470">Issue #16: The Shrine of Gormoth - Episode 3 of 5We arrive at the bottom of the hill just around midnight. As we draw near, the ring on Goldpetal’s finger gives him a sharp shock. Looking up atop the hill, we can see four large braziers, with leaping purple flames, and three figures moving among the towering, ancient stones. Goldpetal puts his fingers to his lips. “Three of them,” he whispers.Telryn whispers, “Wait a moment, while I cast a few spells. This won’t take long.” “That’s a good idea,” whispers Paks. “I’ve something to cast, too.”The mage casts mage armor on himself and bull’s strength on Paks. Paks casts protection from evil on herself. Novalia offers the blessing of Tanil to Paks and Chuck, which they both accept. Novalia says, “Let’s shoot arrows or a magic missile, to disrupt the ritual.”Chuck shakes his head. “We need to see what’s going on first.”Miriel hands out a piece of the enchanted bread to each of us, keeping two for herself. Thus prepared, we begin to sneak up towards the circle of stones.As we draw near, unseen in the shadows, we catch our first glimpse of the Stricken. These strange rat men are twisted and disfigured, with weird bumps in their skin, and extra limbs. One has three arms and two tails, another has a lion claw coming out of his back, and the third has a third leg which has an extra mouth on it. They are each larger than the typical Disease ratmen which we are familiar with. None of them are wearing armor, but each wears a harness-like belt which has things dangling from it; we are not close enough to discern whether the objects are useful, or mere adornment.When we reach the edge of the standing stones, we can see that they are not performing a ritual. The appear to be standing guard, fairly complacently, and we can hear two of them talking in a coarse, guttural language which none of us understand. Goldpetal’s keen eyes note an elf, lying on the stone table in the center of the ring. When he realizes that it is an eviscerated corpse, his purple eyes flare with rage. “Guards,” Paks whispers. “Let’s take them out,” Chuck whispers.Telryn says, “I’ll summon a wolf to attack the furthest one. You archers shoot the other two.” We quickly make our preparations: Telryn readies his spell, Chuck casts magic fang on his viper, and Miriel quietly prays for Madriel to bless us each.  “Everyone, loose your arrows on my signal,” Paks whispers.We fan out into about a quarter-circle, where we each have shots through different gaps at the three disfigured ratmen.Paks draws her bow, and everyone follows suit. When she sees that we are all ready, Paks looses her arrow, and we all fire almost in unison. Telryn begins the arcane chant which will summon the wolf.Paks’ shot wounds the lion-clawed one, and Goldpetal’s arrow further injures it. Chuck’s arrows both miss high. Hands of Fire hurls a javelin, but it ricochets off of one of the standing stones, and falls harmless to the earth. Novalia’s first arrow wounds the three-legged one, but with her second shot, the bowstring catches her on the side of the head, and she is stunned.As the ratmen turn to face us, Paks draws her longsword and charges at the lion-clawed one. Her solid blow cuts it practically in half, and it collapses at her feet. The wolf springs out of the darkness to attack the three-armed ratman. It misses, but Chuck’s next arrow catches it in the chest. Telryn casts another spell, and the twin cyan bolts of his magic missile further wound it.   The ratman turns and claws with all three arms at the wolf, ripping it to pieces. The magically summoned beast dies in a heartbeat.Hands of Fire charges at the three-legged one. He leaps up on the table and smashes it with his great morningstar. Goldpetal steps forward, behind him, and shoots at the third one, but his arrow barely nicks it. The twisted figure attacks Hands of Fire, clawing at him twice, and biting at him with both mouths. One claw hits, but the lizard man shrugs it off. Paks moves around to engage it from the other side, and it is now surrounded.Telryn casts a second magic missile at the three-armed one, and it dies in a blue burst of magical energy, and that frees Chuck to turn his attention to the last ratman. The Vigilant steps towards the three-legged one, and from close range his arrow bites deep into its chest. As it turns to face Paks, seeking an escape, Goldpetal’s scimitar flashes brightly. The masterful weapon cuts deeply into sinew and flesh, and the ratman dies at the druid’s feet.We’ve won the hilltop with almost no injury; while Miriel puts a quick bandage on Hands of Fire’s shoulder, the rest of us we examine the area.Everyone is disgusted to discover what they’ve done to the elf, whose body lies on the rock altar in the center of the circle of standing stones. The elf’s blood has been emptied from his body, and used to fill a blasphemous rune. On the far side of the altar, a stone opening in the ground reveals a dark stairway leading down into the hill. “This seems to be how they opened the passage,” Telryn says, gesturing at the blood-filled rune. Goldpetal is too sorrowful to speak, but a glint of hard anger is visible in his eyes, to those who have learned to read them.“There was dried blood there the last time we were here,” Chuck reminds us. “Now we know why.”Miriel performs some hasty last rites for the elf, with advice from Goldpetal. They don’t know his following, but they invoke Madriel and Denev. Chuck has been studying the ground. “There are tracks of many rat men,” he says, when they have finished. “I can’t tell how many, since, from the evidence of these,” he gestures to the dead ratmen, “I don't know how many legs they might have. Most of them seem to have gone in there.” He points towards the ominous stairway.We gather at the opening or the hill. The stairway leading down is ten feet wide but pitch black. Miriel lights a torch, while Chuck draws his dagger, relying on its pale blue magical glow to light our way. Goldpetal and Hands of Fire step to the front, as they have the best night vision. We descend resolutely into the darkness, leaving behind Goldpetal’s hawk and Telryn’s owl.Thirty feet down, the stairway stops, and becomes a smooth corridor curving to the right. At the bottom of the stairway is a Stricken rat man, impaled on spikes sticking out of the floor. The floor slopes steeply downward, and his blood runs down the hall. As we pass the corpse, Paks slits its throat. “Just in case,” she whispers.The corridor continues spiraling down in ever-widening circles, like a snail or a conch shell. We don’t see any movement, but stay tightly bunched together in case of surprise attack. When we’re about sixty-five feet down, Goldpetal feels the floor shift slightly beneath his feet. A forest of steel spikes shoots up from the floor, and catches most of the group. Goldpetal is stabbed the worst, but Hands of Fire, Paks, and Telryn are all wounded.“Is everyone okay?” Miriel asks. They all nod. “Wounded, but able to continue,” Paks says. We keep moving. After about a hundred feet, the floor suddenly drops out from under the lead group. Goldpetal, Hands of Fire, and Paks disappear with a brief scream and a crunch.Chuck runs up to the edge, and looks down. He sees that they have fallen about twenty feet down, into a pit. Luckily, the ground is level, not spiked, and they are all helping each other up.“Are you all right?” he calls down.“Fine,” grimaces Goldpetal through a clenched jaw.“I think I’ve twisted an ankle,” reports Paks. “Here, I’ll throw you a rope,” Chuck tells her. He pulls out his silk rope and drops it down to them. With Chuck, Telryn, Miriel, and Novalia all helping, we’re able to pull them up fairly easily. Paks is limping.“Do you want me to look at that?” Miriel asks her.“No,” the warrior says, gritting her teeth. “We don’t have time.”“There’s got to be a way past,” Chuck says, looking around the edge of the pit for a lever or passage. “Ah, here it is.”  He finds a little walkway along the side of the hole, which we all use to skirt past it. The passage keeps spiraling downward, into the dark depths. We travel another hundred feet without hitting another trap. Everyone is jumpy and nervous. Telryn has his crossbow at the ready, and Novalia has an arrow knocked, although she keeps it pointed at the ground. Goldpetal begins to ease slightly ahead of the rest of us.Again he steps on some sort of plate in the floor, and suddenly a sweeping blade scythes across the corridor. It cuts him deeply, through the belly, before he leaps back. The blade stops after conducting a semi-circle, and we can see the little alcove it sprung from. Goldpetal slumps against the opposite wall. He is grievously hurt, with the sword cut on top of his previous injuries in the pit and at the spikes. He holds his intestines in with his right arm, and fumbles for his bread with his left hand. As Miriel rushes to his aid, he eats the bread. “Let me look,” she tells him, and pulls his right arm away, hands ready in case his intestines do fall out. She is just in time to witness the magical healing powers of the bread of life, and the long cut in his stomach quickly closes before her eyes.“Do you need more healing?” she asks, but he shakes his head.“No, just a hand up.”She gives him a hand as he stands. “Here,” she says. “Take the spare chunk of bread.” She hands it to him.“I’ll take the lead,” says Chuck, walking up from the back of the group. Goldpetal takes the spare chunk of bread, while the rest of us form up behind Chuck. “Everybody spread out,” Chuck tells us. “Goldpetal, you follow me, about fifteen feet behind me. That way, only one of us falls into the next trap.”We spread out, and then continue on. For two hundred feet, whether through luck or absence, we don’t trip any more traps. The passage continues to spiral ever deeper into the hill, and the oppressing sense of ‘wrongness’ which Paks and Miriel had felt earlier in the day seems to emanate from the darkness ahead of us. Even Chuck can feel it, as though the darkness were a palpable thing which we must push through.Our luck continues to hold when Chuck steps on another floor plate. Massive spikes shoot up from the floor again, but the adroit Vigilant manages to dodge the points: when the trap stops, the spikes are as tall as he is. He has one resting against his back, and another at his chest.“How many of these are there?” he grumbles. We work our way through them – once triggered, there is room between them, and we can weave our way through them without injury.Beyond the spikes, Chuck pulls out his grappling hook and starts throwing it at the floor in front of him. This is noisy, but none of us say anything. With the noise of the previous traps, there is little to be lost, and it is clear to all that he hopes to set off any traps before reaching them.About eighty feet further, the grappling hook does set off a trap. This time, our luck runs out. A jet of flame shoots out of the wall. It is aimed almost head high, and directly at Chuck. It reaches fifty feet back down the corridor, wrapping through the curving spiral, and that hits Goldpetal, Paks, and Hands of Fire as well. Paks is badly burned, and collapses unconscious. Goldpetal is also burned heavily, and quickly eats the other piece of bread.As the healing of the bread of life works on the elf, he steps to Paks’ side. The flame has burned much of the skin off of her head, and she is losing a lot of blood. “Miriel!” he calls, as he tries to stabilize the young warrior. The priestess steps forward. She calls the blessing of Madriel, and beneath her fingers, the skin regenerates. Within a minute, Paks is healed. She regains consciousness, and shows no sign of the burns. “Huh,” she says, as she stands up, “Even my ankle feels better. Thanks.” When she’s ready to continue, we move further on.About twenty feet onward, the corridor begins to straighten out. There's an alcove to the right, and it holds a big metal lever. Chuck illuminates it with the dagger for a moment, then turns to the rest of us.“There’s a lever here. Leave it alone,” Chuck warns. “I bet it re-sets the traps.” We all file past it. When we’re about ten to fifteen feet further along, Telryn, who is in the last row of the group, turns. Before anyone can stop him, he casts a quick spell. We can see the lever, with nobody touching it, pulled to the down position. A loud metallic crunch echoes through the corridor.“Great,” Chuck says. “Now the traps have been re-set.” Miriel glares at Telryn. He looks sheepishly back at her, then he faces the lever and gestures again. Some unseen force acts on the lever, flipping it back to the other side, but nothing happens. “There’s nothing for it but to continue on,” Paks says, though her tone conveys her disgust.As we walk further, Novalia whispers to Telryn, “What was that?”“Mage hand,” he answers. “It’s a spell I know.”</blockquote>

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