Jax gaped at the horse-sized hound that had just sunk its flaming fangs into Nat. Erin was still battling something in the next room, and now this monstrosity had leaped up the stairs from the level below. They’d come into Castle Scarwall’s war tower expecting to find someone who might be willing to help them, but now it seemed they might be slaughtered before they got past its entryway. Unsure what else to do, he cast Haste, figuring his friends could use all the help they could get.
Wren pushed past him, ignoring the danger, and slammed her mace into the Nessian Warhound’s side, drawing a yelp of anger and pain. Shadowcount Sial, standing beside her, knew that it was only a matter of time before this hellish hound unleashed a blast of fire on them all. Acting with uncharacteristic chivalry, he cast Resist Energy on Wren, casting defensively to fend off any attacks from the hound. Then he turned to run off into the dining room, out of reach of any blast, but the hound snapped at him as he turned, ripping a smoking hole in his back as he fled.
As the hound whirled around to face Wren
and the Shadowcount, it gave Tomas the opening he needed. He fired three arrows
at point-blank range into the huge hell-beast, and it collapsed with a whine.
But they could hear more snarling from down the stairs, just past the pit that Sial
had conjured to block the top of the stairway, and judging from the size of the
one they’d just killed, his mates might not have much trouble leaping over a
ten-foot wide pit. Nat decided to plug the stairwell with a more daunting obstacle,
and conjured an Elemental Wall of
seething cold energy that ran down the staircase into whatever lay in the dark
at the foot of the stairs.
In the next room, Erin was face-to-face
with one of Scarwall’s skeletal minoraur guards. The first two they’d
encountered in this room had died without laying a bony finger on any of them,
and she was confident that this one would be no challenge. But it swung its
greataxe in a blow that almost knocked her off her feet, then chopped her the
other direction on the backswing, and Erin realized she might have
underestimated their threat. Laori was suddenly standing behind her, casting a
spell, and a shadowy living minotaur suddenly appeared behind the skeletal
guard. It swung its own greataxe into the guard, but it seemed to realize that
the newcomer was only a conjured shadow, and the blow did little damage. But it
gave Erin the distraction she needed. Whispering a prayer to Iomedae, she swung
her obsidian battleaxe, with its magical hatred of undead, and the guard joined
its comrades as a heap of disjointed bones scattered across the floor.
The party had a brief respite, but the
baying of warhounds reminded them that only Nat’s wall of cold was keeping them
at bay – and there was another, unblocked, staircase leading up. Asyra took up
a position at the top of the stairs, to protect against any threats from above
or below, while Shadow stood guard in the doorway to the dining hall, finger at
the ready. There was another door leading out of the guardroom, and Erin moved
towards it, joined by Jax and Laori. Jax listened, and hearing nothing, pulled
the door open.
The once finely-decorated meeting
chamber had fallen into disrepair. A high-backed chair built from a tangle of
bones sat against one wall, backed by a tattered black and red tapestry; its
padded silk cushions were now ratty and spotted with mold. Near it, a desk had
partially collapsed, spilling a pile of objects onto the floor. Laori sent her
shadow minotaur stomping into the room, hoping to trigger any traps or threats
that might be lurking inside, but nothing happened. Jax caught a flash of
silver from among the debris beside the desk, and hurried to investigate. Among
the shattered statuettes and decayed artwork that had once adorned the desk, he
found a pair of mithril candelabra that he quietly slipped into his pack.
Wren joined them. “Risibeth?” she called
out hopefully. “Riiiisibeth!” The dragon, Bellshallam, had told them that
someone named Risibeth, who lived in this tower, might be able to answer some
of their questions about the nature of Scarwall’s curse, but so far they’d seen
no sign of anyone or anything that might be considered helpful.
Erin had spent some time laying hands on
herself, and Laori had been casting healing on the Shadowcount. All this time,
Nat had been maintaining his Elemental
Wall, but he knew he couldn’t keep that up indefinitely. “I’m going to drop
this wall in a second!” he called out, triggering a flurry of activity as his
friends rushed to get into position to receive the warhound they expected to
appear as soon as the stairs were open. As Jax hurried to join them, he
suddenly felt a warm breath on his cheek, as a voice whispered in his ear: “Slay them all and you shall be rewarded …”
He stopped in his tracks and whirled around. For an instant, he saw a misty
shape seated on the throne, but one blink later the image was gone. As everyone
else rushed to take up positions around the stairs, Jax remained in the
doorway, focused on the throne.
While everyone else had been exploring
the warlord’s chamber, Shadow had grown bored with waiting, and had begun to
investigate the dining hall. Moldy paintings lined the walls, each depicting a
battle scene. As Shadow looked at them more closely, he saw that each seemed to
show some famous historic battle, but with Kazavon in a leading role in each
(he assumed it must be Kazavon – it looked just like the ghostly man he’d seen
in the dining hall earlier, with flowing dark hair, a thick mustache, and
piercing blue eyes). In one, Kazavon led an army of dwarves, fighting in some
huge cavern against orcs and dark spider creatures – it must be from the
dwarves’ Quest for Sky, but that had been thousands of years before Kazavon’s
time. Another showed him rallying troops in the Shining Crusade against the
Whispering Tyrant. In another, Kazavon led an army of crusaders against a
demonic horde in a blighted land. “That’s the Worldwound,” Wren said, looking
over his shoulder. She frowned. “But that’s odd. The Worldwound didn’t open
until hundreds of years after Kazavon was killed. How did someone paint this
scene showing Kazavon involved in something that hadn’t even happened yet?”
Shadow was squinting at the signatures on the paintings. Each appeared to be
the work of the same artist – someone named Zev Ravenka.
Their art appreciation lesson was interrupted
by a shrill whistle from the next room. “Get ready!” Nat called. Shadowcount
Sial cast Dispel Magic and the pit at
the top of the stairs vanished. They could still hear the baying of another
warhound, and Nat’s wall was now the only thing stopping it. A moment later it,
too, vanished. Seconds later, they heard the scrabbling of claws on stone
stairs, and another huge Nessian Warhound bounded up the stairs, snarling and
slavering.
He didn’t stand a chance. The entire
party was waiting for him, weapons and spells at the ready, and he found
himself at the vortex of a deadly hail of weapons and magic. Tomas sank an
arrow deep into his chest as Erin chopped at him from the other side with her
battleaxe. Shadow zapped him with Scorching
Rays twisted into electricity and Nat hit him with a Snowball. The room was engulfed in a cloud of steam, and when it
cleared, the warhound lay dead.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t alone. Another
hound was right on his heels, taking the party by surprise. He leaped onto the
body of his litter-mate, and breathed out a cone of flame that engulfed half
the group. Laori, Erin, and Sial managed to avoid the worst of it, but Nat and
Asyra were badly scorched.
Ignoring the pain of her burns, Asyra
stepped up, swinging her spiked chain in a circle above her head, and slammed
it into the hell-pup. Jax stepped forward and stabbed it from behind; Wren
joined him, but her mace missed. Shadowcount Sial stepped back and fired off a Ray of Sickening, but the spell had no
effect. Tomas fired as fast as he could. Most of his arrows missed their mark,
but one sank into the thing’s chest and the next struck it right between its glowing red eyes, and it collapsed onto the bodies of its mates.
Everyone waited expectantly, tensed for
action, the only sound was they could hear was their own panting breathing.
Finally, they began to relax. “Upstairs, or down?” Erin asked. “Up!,” Wren
replied quickly. “I don’t think we want to go into the basement.” Tomas didn’t
point out that, since they were already on the second floor of the castle,
going down would only return them to ground level. Jax led the way up the
stairs, with Erin right behind.
The stairs led into a narrow hall that
curved around to his left. Their lights revealed a pair of doors in the hall,
and at its end another staircase led farther up into darkness. Jax moved quietly down
the hall to take up a protective position at the foot of the stairs as the
others began to file up. Tomas paused at the first door, listening. He heard
nothing, but unlike the doors on the floor below, this one was locked. He
worked on it with his picks for a moment, then backed away when the lock
tripped. Erin took his place, and pushed the door open.
This must have once been the castle’s
war room. The walls were festooned with ancient, crumbling maps of the
surrounding regions, marked with fortifications and troop emplacements. A large
table stood against one wall; its top had been fashioned into a large sandbox
containing a number of wooden tokens apparently representing troop types and
concentrations. A single figure stood beside the table. He’d once been a
half-orc, but the grayish cast to his skin and the milky scales over his eyes
marked him as some sort of zombie. He wore a fine suit of plate mail, marked
with a general’s insignia, and carried an enormous warhammer. He turned as Erin
entered and raised his weapon in eerie silence.
The zombie general swung its hammer at
Asyra. Its motions were oddly mechanical, as if it were a construct programmed
to mimic an accomplished fighter. But its skills and strength were
undiminished. The hammer’s first blow crushed Asyra’s left arm, and the next
her right hip. As the kyton fell to one knee, struggling to stand, the zombie
brought the hammer down two-handed on her skull. There was a sickening crunch,
and then Asyra vanished from this plane.
Nat was still on the stairs, but could hear commotion from above, and heard Shadowcount Sial suddenly start cursing violently in Chelish. Unsure what was happening, and worried of inadvertently placing himself in the thick of it, he hurried up but stopped just outside the door, casting Haste on his friends inside. Jax also heard the sounds of combat behind him, but stayed at the foot of the stairs. There was a cold breeze coming down the staircase (had that been there when he’d first arrived?) and he was worried about something catching them by surprise from above. Erin charged at the zombie, chopping him with her undead-hating battleaxe, backed by Iomedae’s power, and thick, black blood began to flow from its wounds.
Shadowcount Sial bulled his way up the
stairs and into the room. His face was dark with fury, and he was casting even
as he moved. As soon as he could see the zombie general he completed his spell,
and an enormous dire tiger suddenly materialized behind it. The big cat clawed
at the zombie, catching it with both its front claws, then raking it with its
hind claws, sinking its fangs into him as it did. Its claws and teeth seemed to
do almost no damage, but it had the zombie gripped by its powerful paws.
Tomas continued firing at the general,
but he was having to shoot around Erin, and only one of his arrows hit the
target. Laori swung her chain, but as with Asyra’s its barbs did little or no
damage to the thing. But Sial’s dire tiger had shifted the balance
significantly. The general was unable to use its hammer two-handed, and wanted
to escape the tiger’s grasp, so it held the massive weapon in its right hand
and brought it down on the tiger’s skull. A rumble, almost like distant
thunder, reverberated through the room with the blow, but the tiger held on.
Nat finally got up the nerve to enter the room, and flung a Lesser Orb of Light at the zombie. Erin
took advantage of the general’s focus on the tiger, and swung her axe with all
her might. The first blow chopped into his spine; she wrenched the blade free and
swung again, chopping into the base of his neck. Still without uttering a
single sound, the zombie general slumped slowly to the floor.
There was one more door out of this
room, and everyone gathered around it, worried of what it might conceal. Erin
yanked the door open, and everyone let out a collective sigh of relief. The
room was in shambles, but empty. It looked like it had once been an elegant
bedroom, but every single piece of furniture looked like it had been deliberately
smashed; the largest intact object was a section of the bed’s headboard that
had been jammed into an arrow slit in the south wall.
The group’s relief was short-lived.
Laori suddenly let out a shriek of rage and charged into the room. She whirled
her spiked chain and began violently attacking the headboard! Flecks of spittle
flew from her lips as she shrieked incoherent oaths, sending splinters of wood
flying around the room with her chain. The others dashed into the bedroom,
weapons at the ready, but saw nothing that warranted Laori’s fury. Erin pulled
on her Red Mantis mask and activated its See
Invisibility, but still saw nothing. Shadow blasted the headboard with Magic Missiles, just to be safe.
Laori drew back her chain again, then
paused, letting the weapon drop to the floor. Her shoulders heaved as she
panted from the exertion of her attack. “What the hell was that all about?” Erin demanded.
Laori turned. Her face was pale and her
eyes filled with confusion. “I … I don’t know. I was angry about … something.
Something had been done to … someone. It made me furious. But now I have no
idea why. I can’t remember.”
“This place it getting to us,” Tomas
grumbled. “The sooner we get out of here, the better.”
The group filed back out into the narrow
hallway; Jax was still nervously standing watch at the foot of the stairs as
they gathered by the other closed door. It was also locked, and Tomas had some
difficulty picking it, but at last it gave way. Erin pushed the door open; inside
was a narrow room, its walls lined with sagging bookshelves. Several had given
way, spilling their contents of musty books and scrolls onto the floor. A
writing desk and collapsed chair stood along the wall. The surface of the desk
was also cluttered with disintegrating scrolls, save for one scroll that
appeared to be intact.
Shadow went straight for the desk and
unrolled the scroll. Most of its contents were obscured by bloodstains,
seemingly only a few minutes old. He could make out the name ‘Kleestad’,
the word ‘chamberlain’, and a few other words that led him to conclude that the
scroll had once contained information about the castle’s chamberlain, a man
named Kleestad. But as he studied the scroll, his surroundings suddenly seemed
to fade away …
He
was begging for his life. His master, Kazavon, had discovered that he had
betrayed the castle to its enemies. Agonizing pain shot through first one leg
and then the other, and he collapsed to the ground as both of his ankles were
violently broken. But the castle was filled with the sounds of combat, and
Kazavon left him lying there, vowing to deal with him later. He crawled away
through the castle, hiding from attackers and defenders alike, taking refuge in
a cave deep below ground. Days and weeks passed with nothing but worms to eat and
muddy water to drink. At last he made another painful crawl back up into the
castle, past scores of corpses and moaning spirits already beginning to haunt
the halls. He found a brightly gleaming sword amongst the bodies, and took it,
hoping to defend himself during his escape. But as he grasped its hilt, panic
filled him again. This time he knew that it was not just Kazavon he had
betrayed – it was Zon-Kuthon himself. His body twisted and transformed into a
monster, and he fled back into the cavern below with his prize.
For Shadow, it seemed that weeks, or
even months had passed. The others saw him begin to read the scroll, then
scream in agony and fall to the floor, where he convulsed for a few seconds.
When Shadow regained his senses, there was a moment when he knew he would never
walk again: he was a worm, unable – indeed undeserving – to walk upright. But
then that passed like the rest of the vision, and he rose unsteadily to his
feet.
Shadow recounted his vision to the rest
of the group, and they stood in silence as they digested its meaning. “So it
sounds like the sword is somewhere in the basement,” Jax said quietly, glancing
back at the stairs leading down. “And guarded by a worm?” Nat added in a
worried tone.
“So … downstairs?” Jax asked, but Wren
shook her head. “I say we keep going up, keep looking for Risibeth.” Jax
shrugged, and headed up the narrow staircase, with Tomas close behind.
The room at the top was empty and dark.
The glowing coin Jax carried showed no furnishings – at least none surviving –
and a single door leading out. He recalled seeing battlements with ruined siege
weapons on the top of this tower as he flew over, and assumed the door would
lead to them. The chill breeze he’d felt at the bottom of the stairs was definitely
coming from this room; the air was cold, and he could see his breath fog in the
light from his coin.
The silence was broken by a loan moan.
The mist from Jax’s breath swirled as the cold intensified. A spectral, almost
transparent, figure began to materialize out of the darkness. It was followed
by another. And another. And another.
The PCs earned 18,400 XP for the night,
putting them at 256,302 XP, with 295,000 required for Level 14.
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