The party is surrounded by a pair of lamias to the east and two young, red dragons on the other end of the passageway. The dragons occupy the entirety of the cavern’s width, thick globules of bloody drool splattering against the rock as they gnash their teeth ferociously.
As the dragons turn their heads back and forth, you notice that each of them have a symbol etched into the large scale that marks as the transition point between their neck and head. It’s a symbol that’s very familiar and expected at this point – the Sihedron Rune. You also notice the dragons have raw patches on their scales around their necks and right above their sharply-clawed feet.
The two lamias both hiss in your direction, revealing slender tongues that pierce jagged teeth. Both are wearing long, beige robes stained with various shades of brown, like strained coffee grounds across parchment. In the center of their chest is an inverted triangular shape vaguely resembling an animal’s head. Three sickly saffron-colored depictions of eyes, not unlike the ‘eyes’ on peacock feathers, stare out from their chests.
Fyn recognizes the symbol as a stylized version of a three-headed jackal, the unholy symbol of Lamashtu.
The lamia on the left is hunched over, slithering her tail as she weaves back and forth, keeping her eyes directly on you. Her serrated falchion glints in the torchlight. She reaches her free hand down to the ground, scratching the rock with a single, curved talon to create the dissonant sound like nails on a chalkboard. She smiles and licks the bottoms of her teeth.
Next to her, the other lamia is standing mostly still. Although she has a falchion sheathed at her side, she is holding a swirling orb the color of a tangerine and just as small. She’s rubbing her hands around the smooth edges, massaging it in her hands. The dragons continue to snarl, and the temperature of the passageway feels like it’s getting warmer.
The lamia on the right speaks.
“Ah, look here, Zaelsar. If it isn’t the breeders of all this chaos. And who would have predicted that Conna, the Wise, would be tangled up in their machinations?” She smiles broadly, revealing a silver-plated bicuspid.
The lamia who’s hunched over, Zaelsar, hisses. “Not I, Seleval, not I.”
The first lamia, whose name is Seleval, nods.
“So misinformed, so ignorant. Or maybe they’re just stupid. Yessss. Stupid. They stomp their filthy boots on hallowed ground. Ground that has been kissed by Mother’s lips. Which makes them stupid AND unworthy. Blasphemous miscreants.”
Seleval adjusts her coiled tail, which you notice is plated with several interlocking shards of etched steel.
“But stupidity is not a crime, is it sister?”
Zaelsar shakes her greasy black hair back and forth. “No sister, no.”
“If it were, our misguided allies would surely have been relieved of their organs by now. Those beast-men, clawing at the scraps of false divinity by suppressing their own blood. An interesting path to tread, but not one that holds any substance. Their obsession with that infernal drug is nothing more than a fleeting dream from which they are eternally barred.
And the others, engorged and bloated. Trying the alternate route to ascendency: stockpiling their blood through their self-flagellism. Completely insane, a journey that only ends in death. How can they accept their place amongst the Dead Metal with so much blood inside them?
They all try their best to emulate the master, the Mother’s greatest child. But their ill-conceived creative agency is but a ruse of their own making. A falsehood. They will never achieve solidarity with the Mithral Mage, Ordikon.”
Zaelsar clasps her hand to a rusty brass necklace, shaped like a skeletal hand with a curved serpent in place of a thumb. “Meld our Minds.”
Seleval continues.
“Meld our Minds, indeed, sister. And perhaps we should meld theirs too, voluntarily or not. They shall see the truth in the metal!”
And with that, Seleval whips the orange orb out towards you. As it rolls to a stop, the hallway instantly fills with light as a projection emanates from within.
You see a domed chamber, nearly two hundred feet across. A large pool of bubbling prismatic liquid occupies the center of a raised dais in the middle of the chamber. The spiky flanges of the seven-pointed Sihedron are engraved into the marble floor. Each tip of the enormous rune points at a twenty-five-foot-tall statue facing the pool with its back approximately ten feet from a partially concealed arched opening in the wall directly behind it. Each statue depicts a different figure, but all are imperious and finely detailed.
A group of robed figures hurriedly approach the dais, carrying a woman, splashing blood across the spotless floor. Another figure, a man in a deep green robe, rushes over to meet them, assessing the wound. He gestures across the pool to one of the openings in the circular chamber.
“Quickly now, time is short.”
They follow him with anxious steps. At one point the slippery blood causes one of the people to lose their grip on the woman, and her head slams into the pristine marble. SPLASH.
“Shorter, now,” the man says gravely, quickening his pace with lengthy strides.
Fog rolls in, wiping the image clean before dissipating. Now you see a new room, with the same woman lying on a thick wooden worktable. The man holds an intricate staff made of a golden snake coiled around a silver rod, flipping through the massive tome beside him. Several other people are circled around behind him in silence.
One of the buckets underneath the table begins to overflow with the blood that it has caught. The woman is pale; her gray skin is a stark contrast to the ruby liquid smeared across its surface. Her head is bandaged with a clean white cloth, and the man begins muttering words while placing the staff on her gaping chest wound.
The bloodflow slows considerably as a faint blue light dances between the two halves of parted skin, which are being magically sealed together. There’s a visible weight lifted from the air as the wound finishes sealing, but the man doesn’t share a smile.
“She needs rest. Please.” He indicates to the door, and the others begin to file out. The man purses his lips and furrows his brow. Once everyone has left, he exhales, and you see the wound separate once more.
More fog conceals the projection and you see Seleval twist her hands in opposite directions as if juicing an orange. The fog clears, and we’re in the same room.
The man is rushing now, moving quickly and sporadically. There’s a beating at the door and he looks up but doesn’t stop.
“Enough Ordikon! You mustn’t! It hasn’t been proven! It hasn’t worked!”
“She’s already dead, Ekron.” He shouts back. “We must try everything in our power, and what better time than this? What better time than now, when the Lady passes her judgement?”
The pounding continues, but it’s more muted now as if everything is underwater. The man flips pages, moving books on top of each other, positioning them in a way where he can read several at once. A stack of iron ingots lies toppled next to him on the table. He holds the staff over the woman’s naked body, her chest rising and falling weakly. The man strains as he begins the incantation:
“Veri on uinunud, lõputu uinumine. Tundke enda sees metalli sula elu ja tõusege teenijana selle külma omaks. Kuumutage meelt ja muutuge surnud metalliga üheks!”
Thassilonian Translation: The blood is dormant, an endless slumber. Feel the molten life of the metal within you, and rise as a servant to its cold embrace. Meld your mind and become one with the dead metal.
The iron ingots dissolve like falling sand, leaving nothing left. At the same time, the woman’s toes turn a dull gray. It starts slow but gains momentum as it spreads. The metal creeps up her legs, enveloping her hips and lifeless arms before fully encasing her body.
And woman’s eyes open, icy and blue.
The man pants with exhaustion and smiles.
Darkness returns to the cave as the image blinks out. Seleval holds out her palm and the orb begins to float back to her. But suddenly it stops, dropping to the ground, and the lamia gets a concerned look on her face as the light begins to emanate once more. She rushes to pick it up but not before you see the final sequence of images displayed.
You briefly see a mountainous landscape, capped by fluffy clouds. It’s sunset, and you can almost feel the wind picking up suddenly as the gargantuan form of a red dragon comes into view, beating its wings. It’s flying away from view, but you see the fading sunlight glint off its tail, which is coated in a shiny layer of resplendent metal. The image fades just as the dragon roars, bellowing to the side, revealing a long, slender tooth jutting from its bottom lip.
The lamia hurriedly scoops up the orb and tucks it away.
“Eternal preservation. That is what we can offer to you. It is what Karzoug can offer to you. Make the smart choice, for once. You will not leave these caves with flesh on your bones.”
The two dragons at the other end of the passageway snarl as Zaelsar hisses again.
“But it’s your choice if you wish to embrace the Dead Metal and leave these caves alive.” Her metallic tail scrapes the ground. The sound of giants bellowing continues in the background.
“What will it be?”
Slaying the Sneaky Snakes
Fobias and the rest of the party have no interest in giving into the lamia’s temptations. Dead metal, living metal – what’s the difference? They see this as a last ditch effort to save a semblance of order that Mokmurian curated in Jorgenfist.
Both dragons are ordered to attack and they breathe coiling flames at the party. In the confined space there isn’t much room to maneuver and the situation seems dire. All of them are caught in the dragons’ fire, which isn’t a good start to the fight.
In true kobold fashion, Krask immediately turns and fires off a few shots at the dragons. Interestingly enough, the arrows strike true, but something isn’t quite right. These aren’t real dragons – they’re just illusions! He relays the information to the party.
Trace blasts off a channel, which heals the illusory wounds and burns. Fyn still isn’t entirely convinced that the dragons aren’t real. He sends a magic missile their way and, sure enough, the resulting blow is too shimmery to be a real dragon.
The lamias hiss and dive into the fray. They use an alternating combination of melee attacks with their falchions and spells. When all is said and done, Fobias suffers the worst of it all, getting cut across the eyes. He is blind, underground, in the middle of a terrifying giant clan, facing down a pair of lamias.
With the dragons out of mind, the party focuses their attention on the lamias. The half-snake, half-woman creatures are no match for the undivided attacks of the party. In fact, with Conna in the mix, they go down relatively quickly.
Conna urges them to loot the bodies quickly and they make their way to the central pit. Fighting is all around them, but Conna leads them safely to the ramp that ascends to Jorgenfist’s courtyard. They rush past a trio of dire bears to the top, where chaos awaits them.
Stampeding Judgement
Bodies of stone giants litter the parade grounds while mammoths rampage through the carnage. The Black Tower casts a foreboding shadow across the courtyard. A formidable stone giant is standing next to one of the calmer mammoths when the party emerges from the pit.
He tries to direct the remaining stone giants to attack these enemies instead of their brethren, especially given Conna’s apparent involvement. With his command, two frost giants step out from a northern building. Their bodies emanate billowing clouds of cold and they start running towards the party with their greataxes.
Krask starts firing out towards the approaching frost giants from the edge of the pit. He connects with one arrow, but once again the party finds themselves surrounded. The only difference is that this time they’re on the edge of a gaping pit. They need to re-position themselves or they’re gonna have a bad time.
So what does Barnaby do? Why, what any respectable swashbuckler would do! He dives into the fray next to the stone giant AND a towering mammoth. I’m sure this will end well.
Right away Barnaby takes severe hits from the stone giant (Galenmir) and the mammoth. This prompts Trace to charge up to try and take some of the figurative heat off Barnaby. Meanwhile, Fyn creates a poisonous cloud of fog to encase the two enemies, in a hope of saving Barnaby’s life. Unfortunately, the obscuring qualities of the fog make it more difficult for Barnaby and Co to hit with their attacks.
On the other end of the battlefield, Krask, Richard, and Fobias brace for the Frost Giant assault. Although he can’t see them, Fobias hears the approach and casts a spell which works wonderfully. When the giants run through the area, the shrubbery turns razor-sharp, cutting their ankles and slowing their movement. This gives Krask a few more volleys before the giants are up in their business. Richard steps up to protect his companion
What’s worse, is that the unruly mammoths keep stampeding across the battlefield, trampling everyone in their path. Eventually, Barnaby is forced to use his cloak of invisibility to get out of harm’s way, leaving Trace to fight Galenmir with Conna as backup.
Then, like manna from the heavens, stones rain down from the parapets. Conna’s stone giant allies come through in the clutch! This is where the tide of battle changes, giving Barnaby the perfect moment to reappear and run Galenmir through!
Completely spent and running out of resources, the party does all they can to dispatch the final frost giants. At the same time, the mammoths – no longer captive – burst through the main gates of Jorgenfist and run off towards the southern sunrise.
Is the party equipped to tackle the Black Tower? Are Conna’s agents holding their own below ground? Will Fyn ever take damage again?