Session 46 – Death’s Door

[avisarr]

Session 46 – Death's Door

The party, in addition to Raj the shapeshifter, departed from Hezra's house. They followed her direction north to the stone quarry in the northern quarter of the city.

The quarry was vast and easy to find. It was a huge pit in the ground, half a mile wide and over mile long. Broad stone steps cut in the side of the quarry wall led down to the bottom some 400 feet below.

The party reached the floor of the quarry and began to walk to the far side. Stony cliffs rose all around them. They could see some sort of fortification built into the far wall.

As the party approached to within about 500 yards, they could see Death's Door. It was a large stone building with a massive iron door. The door itself was a pair of doors covered in a grid of steel tiles, each bearing a glyph of power. The stone architecture was built of thousands of stone bricks, each also bearing a magical glyph. All of these magical glyphs were glowing and humming softly.

As they approached Death's Door, Martin and Ugita began to feel the effects of its power. Death's Door radiated energy that made magic curdled and weaken. The spells in their memory made them susceptible. Each of the men began to get a pounding headache. Their vision blurred. Within 300 yards, Martin and Ugita could barely stand from nausea and weakness.

The party held their position fearing that any closer would kill Martin and Ugita. Rothgar, having no magical ability whatsoever, took the Ring, their third of the key, and approached the door. He touched it lightly to the massive iron door. Instantly, the glyphs covering the stone walls and the iron door start to fade and go out. With a ripple that sweeps them all, the glyphs go dark. As this happened, the party heard a heavy metallic sound as a mechanism deep in the stone walls begins to work. With the rhythmic beat of gears and wheels, the great iron doors slowly begin to pull apart.

With a loud clang, the doors fully open. Dust settled and the party, peering in, saw only darkness beyond the doors. Ugita and Martin felt better now that the Door had been opened and the glyphs had gone dark. The party cautiously approached the entrance.

After thinking about it for a minute, they decide to close Death's Door behind them. The party found themselves in a broad hallway that went straight for some 80 feet and then opened up into a large semi-spherical room. At the center of this room was a circular shaft in the floor. A large shrine of some type was on the far side of the shaft. All about the round chamber were ancient bodies, mostly just skeletons. They seemed to have died in the midst of a great battle.

Upon entering the chamber, the eighteen corpses begin to move. They hoist themselves up on their bony limbs, pick up their rusted blades and advance on the group. The party did battle with these undead creatures, but half way through the battle, the party heard something large coming up the shaft. A monster appeared at the mouth of the shaft and climbed up into the room. It was a large creature. It appeared to be like a huge frog, but instead of a frog's head, it had four long tentacles where the head should have been. These four tentacles lashed out at the party. Although the party was doing well against the undead creatures, this new enemy was much more dangerous. It's thick reptilian skin turned blades easily. Rothgar fired arrows into the creature, but it still kept coming. Before too long, Callister was grabbed by two tentacles and shoved into the creature's maw (or down it's throat, depending on how you look at it). He had been swallowed whole. Within seconds, Grimnoth and Ugita had also been swallowed. Half the party had been swallowed whole by this thing.

Eventually, Martin pulled out the Cherokzul staff and uttered the command word. The Cherokzul staff was a modified variant of the Cherokzul wand, like a wand of wander or chaos item. It created random and marvelous effects. But the effects were very random. The user had no control whatsoever. Martin held the staff tightly and shouted the command word "Cherokzul!"

Suddenly, thousands of large floating spherical globules of silvery liquid appeared. These slowly float about the room, sometimes merging with each other. Gruebal touched one and was sucked into it. He was then spat out from another silvery liquid droplet. The party quickly deduced that these were some sort of fragmented spatial distortions... a bit like teleport bubbles. Touch one and get sucked in, teleported and spat out another one. This didn't exactly help the combat.

Martin decided to use the staff again. "Cherokzul!" A glow enveloped the staff, but immediately leap to Rothgar's armor, then to Martin's spellbook. It kept leaping around the room enveloping one item then another. Finally it settled on Teela's bow. The glow brightened, flared suddenly and then faded. The bow hummed with magical power.

Teela fitted an arrow into the string and drew back, aiming for the tentacled frog beast. She released the string. The arrow streaked across the chamber leaving a trail of fire behind it. It slammed into the frog monster, ripping through its scaled hide with an explosion of flame, exploded out the back side of the creature (leaving a gaping hole) and then hit the fair wall, burning its way fully six feet into the stone wall and living a glowing red tunnel.

The frog behemoth collapsed, its life blood pouring out onto the floor. Those trapped inside it (some wounded from the passage of the flaming arrow) cut their way out of the beast's stomach. They were drenched in blood, ichor and bile and spent several minutes retching from the stench. 

The party cleaned themselves up and surveyed the aftermath of the battle. The silvery teleport bubbles were still hanging in the air all about them.