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Karran Kural II
13 Wealsun, 592 CY (Continued)
Greyjek considered the hole in the floor, and then turned back to gaze down to the end of the hallway. The icy lattice that Jarvyk had inspected before still glowed faintly there. He grew curious and asked Ashton to come with him to examine what he suspected was a device embedded in the wall. The magus determined that they icy lattice was indeed possessed of divination magic. He took out a wand and tried to dispel it, but there was no apparent effect. While they experimented with the lattice, Jarvyk held a rope for Ryla to climb down into the tunnel. Below she found a small, ruined chamber with a single door.
Jarvyk set a grappling hook on the iron doors, and everyone descended the rope into the lower chamber. Opening the door revealed a short hallway heading north and south. The path was blocked by a collapse a short distance to the north, but the south held a four way intersection. At the intersection, Ryla could see more ice strands filling the hallway to the east, another collapsed blocked the west, and a door to the south. It was decided that the group would proceed to the south.
Opening this door, Ryla revealed a larger room again filled with the icy strands that criss-crossed the chamber. She also noticed a kelubar demodand. The creature had an obese, roughly humanoid shape almost eight feet in height. It had large bat-like wings folded behind it, and knobbed, rough, leathery skin coated completely by a pale green slime that gave its dark flesh a grotesque hue. Thinking quickly, Ashton fireballed the room to clear up many of the strands, and the fight was joined. The demodand conjured a thick, acidic fog that burned the adventurers and slowed their movements dramatically. Fortunately, Bransen was able to dispel it before it did too much damage.
Entering the room, Cyrus had to contend with the remaining icy strands, which chilled his flesh with a combination of cold and negative energy. The others entered next, mostly avoiding contact with the strands. They began to attack the fiend, and it summoned another acid fog, which was also summarily dispelled. While the warriors closed on the demodand, Bransen used a spell to grow large and another to increase his combat prowess. The creature tried to dispel both effects, only succeeding in undoing the latter, but by that time, it was already too late. Greyjek got a clear line of effect on the fiend and dismissed it from the Prime.
After hacking down the rest of the ice latticework with their weapons, the Silver Phoenixes decided to move on through a door they found to the south. As soon as Ryla stepped into the four-way intersection beyond, horrible black tentacles sprang up. Though the magical tendrils failed to grab her, Jarvyk, Cyrus and Bransen were not so lucky. Fortunately, Greyjek and Ashton were too far back to be caught in the effect. A stinking cloud sprang up overlapping the black tentacles, making it doubly treacherous.
An irritating fight with a fiendish half-orc and a bone naga commenced. Though Ryla was able to dispatch the orc quite handily, the spellcasting undead snake-monster proved more elusive. It cast a mirror image incantation and then it conjured Evard’s black tentacles a few more times in an attempt to hamper pursuit. The spell could find no purchase on Ryla, and she drove ever forward, followed closely by Jarvyk. While Ashton attempted to dispel the tentacles and the stinking cloud to rescue Cyrus before he was crushed to death, Greyjek joined the others by stepping through a dimension door. The mirror images gave the azurin and dwarf problems, but Greyjek’s true sight allowed him to see through the illusion, and he was able to disintegrate the undead abomination.
When the spells faded, they group congregated in the chamber in which the half-orc and bone naga had started. The interior of the room contained a pair of fleshy pillars stretching from the floor of a pit twenty feet below, up to the ceiling, roughly forty feet above. Bransen cast detect magic and was almost blinded by the glow emanating from the pillars. With no immediate way to determine the function of the pillars, the group retired to the small room where they had entered the second level and bunkered down for the day and the rest of the night.
14 Wealsun, 592 CY
After they woke and ate a meager breakfast, the Silver Phoenixes decided to try the eastern corridor that was filled with the icy strands. Ryla stepped forward and began smashing the strands with her longsword, making quite a bit of noise in the process. When she had finished clearing the last of it, a door at the end of the hallway opened to reveal a wizened human standing in a circular room. He was moving impossibly fast and sent a lightning bolt down the hallway, catching most of the party in its line. He followed this up by filling the hallway with necrotic mist, which began to freeze the party and obscured him from view.
Before anyone had time to react to this another pair of powerful lightning bolts filled the hallway, and Ryla fell to the floor. Jarvyk found himself moving very slowly, but seeing that Ryla was somehow still alive, he called upon Clangeddin and healed her with his touch. Her eyes fluttered open as Bransen called down more serious healing for everyone, before moving forward through the mist and into the wizard’s chamber. The perfectly circular room was featureless save for an irregular smear of black ice that covered the center of the floor. Even from a distance the ice seemed filled with distant shapes and shadowy images. Ashton tried to dispel the mist with his wand, and Greyjek stepped back out of the mist and manifested a power to protect him from harm. Ryla rose and moved forward into the room following Bransen.
For their trouble, the wizard leveled an enervating ray at each of them. Jarvyk moved forward as quickly as he could (which wasn’t very quickly), and Cyrus entered the mist, only to be slowed himself. Bransen moved over and healed Ryla, while Ashton continued to try to dispel the mist with his wand, while Greyjek took a more proactive approach and stepped through a dimension door into the room ahead. Ryla stepped forward to attack, smashing through one of the wizard’s mirror images.
Unfortunately, this brought several party members in a line again, and the wizard launched another pair of lightning bolts through them. When no one fell to the assault, he cried, “Why won’t you die?!” Jarvyk, severely wounded by the multiple surges of lightning he had taken, stepped into the room beside Bransen and requested healing. Though some of his most powerful spells had been sapped by the enervation, the “sorcerer” obliged. Ashton had stepped into the room through his own dimension door and rapidly tried to regain his bearings after the magical jaunt. Greyjek closed his eyes so that he could ignore the images and instead tried his luck firing blindly with a disintegrate ray. The blackish green ray struck true, but the wizard resisted the worst of the effect. Ryla swung her longsword twice, but in her enervated state, she could not penetrate the wizard’s defenses. Cyrus was ominously quiet from within the mist.
The wizard cast confusion, which the party universally resisted, and then he tried to disintegrate Bransen, whose uncanny luck prevented the spell from utterly annihilating him. Ashton cast a magic missile, which did the most good by eliminating the remaining images. He was irritated that the missile that struck the actual wizard was thwarted by a shield spell. Still, it was enough for the fighters to engage the wizard on better terms, and after Jarvyk brought Tedryk’s Grace to bear in a brutal stroke, Ryla made the killing blow with her electrified longsword. Cyrus stumbled out of the hallway as the mist cleared, looking groggy, but remarkably alive.
Looting the wizard’s corpse revealed a number of magical trinkets as well as a few spellbooks, which Ashton was glad to take. The black ice in the center of the floor likewise proved to contain divination magic. Ashton had found three pearls in a pouch on the wizard and used one to identify the ice. It was a scrying device, which could be used three times in a day, though it had apparently already been utilized once. Without even thinking about it, the magus activated the device to seek out his father. An hour later, the spell turned up nothing. He tried again, but to no avail. He took another of the pearls, returned to the upper level, and identified the glowing lattice on the wall there. It, too was a scrying device, though it could not seem to get a bead on Primus Maximus either.
The party collected the wizard’s possessions and moved back to the small room for the rest of the day to recuperate from the brutal electrical assault that the enemy wizard had unleashed upon them.